by Neal Asher
He walked back and forth, noticing a distinctly unpleasant sensation of inexperience behind his eyes. Then he circumnavigated the banks of chairs and approached the black wall, still closed and featureless. Frowning, he called out, "Hello!" Nobody responded. "Hello! Where is everybody?"
Perhaps he had been left aione. The others may have exited the library after shooting him. But there had been the white, curling mist—and he remembered the three officers with their heads jerked back, jaws slack.
"Pogodin!" he called. "Pogodin, where are you?"
Again, no answer. He crossed the dark corner of the library to the little doorway that led to the observation booth. The door was open. He climbed the stairs and entered the booth.
Pogodin stretched on three chairs, breathing steadily, apparently sleeping. Mirsky shook his shoulder gently. "Pogodin," he said. "Time to leave now."
Pogodin's eyes opened and he regarded Mirsky with surprise. "They shot you," he said. "They took half your head away. I saw it."
"I've been dreaming," Mirsky said. "Very odd dreams. Did you see what happened to Vielgorsky—to Belozersky and Yazykov?"
"No," Pogodin said. "Just mist all over me, itching. And now this." His eyes widened and he sat up, lips quivering. "I want to leave," he said.
"Good idea. Let's find out what happened." Mirsky preceded Pogodin down the stairs to the black wall. "Open," he said.
The half-moon doorway irised open silently.
Annenkovsky stood at parade rest with his back toward Mirsky and the door, holding his rifle by the barrel with the stock on the paving.
"Excuse me, Major," Mirsky said. Annenkovsky tensed and swung around on one foot, lifting his rifle and fumbling it.
"Careful," Mirsky cautioned.
"Comrade Colonel—I mean, General—"
"Where are the others?" Mirsky asked, looking at the troops in the quadrangle.
"Others?"
"The politicai officers."
"They haven't come out. Excuse me, General, but we must go to our camp right away—we must contact them by radio and—"
"How long have I been gone?"
"Nine days, General."
"Who's in charge?" Mirsky asked. Pogodin stepped up just behind him.
"Major Garabedian and Lieutenant Colonel Pletnev for the moment, sir."
"Then take me to them. What are the NATO troops doing here?"
"Sir..." Annenkovksy seemed ready to faint. "There has been a lot of tension. Nobody knew what happened in there. What did happen?"
"Good question," Mirsky said. "Maybe we'll find out later. For now, I'm fine—Pogodin is fine—and we need to go to the camp ... in the fourth chamber?"
"Yes, sir."
"Let's go. And why are our men stationed here?"
"Waiting for you, General."
"Then they'll come back with us."
"Yes, sir."
In the train, Mirsky closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall. I am dead, he thought. I can feel it—parts of me missing, replaced—fill dirt in gaping trenches. That means I'm a new person; I'm dead, come alive again. New, but stuck with the old responsibilities.
He opened his eyes and looked at Annenkovsky. The major regarded him with an almost fearful expression, which he quickly wiped away and replaced with a wan smile.
*54*
"Let's sum it up, then," Lanier said. They had gathered again in Patricia's quarters, to hear her story about the rogue and reach an agreement on their common behavior. "We're guests, but not exactly. We're protected, which means our condition bears some resemblance to being prisoners."
"Our data services are censored," Farley said.
"We can't go back to the Stone," Heineman said.
"And—if what Patricia has learned is true—we're about to become celebrities," Carrolson said.
"Did the rogue say whether anyone expected the Stone to return to Earth?" Lanier asked.
"No," Patricia said. "But I don't think so. If I'm right, they thought it would simply continue through space, too small to be noticed, and never end up anywhere in particular—because of the snap when they opened the corridor."
"So what's our position on all this?" Lanier asked. "Larry, Lenore?"
"What does it matter, what we want? What can we do?" Heineman asked, spreading his arms.
"Think, Larry," Carrolson said, putting a hand on his knee. "We're celebrities. They can't just ignore our wishes."
"Oh, no!" Heineman said. "They can just brainwash us. They're not even human anymore, some of them!"
"They're human," Patricia said. "Just because they can choose what shape they want to be, or what talents or abilities they'll have, doesn't mean they're no longer our descendants."
"Lord," Heineman said, shaking his head. "This is beyond me."
"No, it isn't," Carrolson insisted. "If I can handle it, you can." She pinched his knee.
"If we put forward a united front, we'll get more concessions,'' Lanier said. "if we're celebrities, or even curiosities, we could have some control over how we're treated—and not so incidentally, how of people on the Stone are treated."
"So what are we going to demand?" Carrolson asked.
"First, we insist that our data services be uncensored," Patricia suggested.
"I haven't even used mine," Heinernan said.
"We make every attempt to get permission to communicate with the Stone." Lanier looked around the room. "Are we agreed to that?"
They were.
"We make sure that we travel in a group; we should never be separated," he continued. "If we are, we protest—"
"Hunger strike?" Farley said.
"Whatever works. It seems obvious to me that our hosts are not ogres, and it's not likely we'll be mistreated—dazzled a bit, perhaps, subjected to all kinds of future shock, but ... We can handle that. We all survived our time on the Stone, so we can survive this. Right?"
"Right," Farley said, regarding Lanier with an expression of something more than respect for authority. Patricia glanced between them and put on what Lanier thought of as her sharp cheery look—a smile with an edge, her square eyes intense.
Carrolson inspected all three intently.
"Olmy's in the lounge," Patricia said. "He has Ram Kikura with him. I told him to wait until we were finished but they want to talk to us."
"So are we united?" Lanier asked.
"Of course," Heineman said softly.
Olmy and Ram Kikura entered Patricia's quarters and sat in the middle of the group, legs crossed. Ram Kikura smiled happily; to Lanier, she looked hardly more than Patricia's age, though she had to be much older.
Lanier presented their demands. To his surprise, Olmy agreed to almost everything, excluding only communication with the Thistledown. "That I cannot grant you right now. Perhaps later. We can allow you uncensored access to data, but that will require some education," he said. "Full access to data is very complicated, a great responsibility. There is potential for abuse. For a start, would you accept the help of a pedagog? Ram Kikura could assign a ghost—a partial personality based on her own. This pedagog will perform searches for you, as well as instruct. Our younger citizens use them all the time."
"It will let us research anything?" Patricia asked.
"That is a difficult request," Ram Kikura said. "Not even a citizen has access to everything in City Memory. There is much that could be dangerous for the untrained—"
"Like what?" Heineman asked.
"Programs that alter personality, or merge different personalities. Psyche enhancement. Various high-level fictions and theoretical programs. You may wish to explore these later, but for now a pedagog will protect you from inadvertently ... let's say, getting in over your head."
"Or under," Carrolson said.
"Are we still being kept pure?" Patricia asked.
"To a certain extent," Olmy admitted. "But the tests have been performed—"
"They have?" Heineman betrayed his shock.
"Yes. While y
ou slept."
"I think we should have been advised what was happening,'' Lanier said, frowning.
"You were. Your sleep personas guided our inquiries, and we did nothing they did not agree with."
"Jesus," Carrolson said. "What in the hell are sleep personas?"
Ram Kikura raised her hands. "Perhaps now you see why your legal status is that of children, or at best adolescents. You are simply unprepared for full exposure to all the Axis City has to offer. Please don't be offended. I'm here to help whenever possible—not to hinder or frustrate you. I'm also here to protect, and I will do that over whatever objections you may have."
"Is that what advocates do?" Heineman asked. "I mean, are they lawyers, or what?"
"An advocate is both a guide and a legal representative," Ram Kikura said. "We advise on courses of action, based on researches our assigned ghosts perform in City Memory and elsewhere. We have many advantages—access to private memory collections, for example. While we cannot divulge the contents of those collections, we can act on what we learn—within limits. Some advocates—myself included—offer what in your time might have been called psychological counseling."
"Basically," Olmy said, "Ser Ram Kikura will provide another layer of protection—against abuse from higher authorities.
Do you have any other questions?"
"Yes," Carrolson said, looking to Lanier. He nodded and she continued. "What's going to happen to our people on the Stone—in the Thistledown?"
"We don't know yet," Olmy said. "That decision hasn't been made."
"Will they be treated properly?" Farley asked. "Americans and others?"
"I can guarantee they won't be harmed," Olmy said.
"Do you have any idea when we can communicate with them?" Lanier asked.
Olmy tapped his index fingers together before his chest and said nothing.
"Well?"
"As I said, that question has not been decided. There is no immediate answer."
"We'd like to know as soon as you learn," Lanier said.
"You will," Olmy assured them. "You have been protected and isolated. That will change somewhat now that your presence is no longer secret. You recognize your potential popularity; there will be ceremonies and tours. You'll probably be quite worn out by the attention."
"I'm sure," Lanier said dubiously. "Now, Ser Olmy, just between the seven of us—if you're just one person, as you seem to be, and there's nobody peering over your shoulder—what stake do you have in us?"
"Mr. Lanier," Olmy said, "you know as well as I that now is not the time to be perfectly frank. Frustrating as it may be, you simply do not understand, and if I were to try to explain, I would only confuse you. I will explain, eventually, but first you must experience our city, our cultures. Since you are now free to use the data services—"
"Relatively free," Lanier said.
"Yes, free with protections ... You may wish to spend the next twenty-four hours 'boning up,' if that's the right idiom."
"Do we face any other restrictions?"
"Yes," Olmy said. "You cannot leave these living areas. Not until your schedule has been made up and the Nexus has arranged for your ... let's call it a debut. And before that happens, we suggest you become fully informed about the Axis City and learn at least a little of the ways we live."
He looked from face to face, his eyebrows raised to solicit any more questions, but none were asked. Lanier clasped his hands behind his neck and leaned back on the couch.
Ram Kikura programmed the pictors from where she stood. "There is now a pedagog, based on my personality," she said. "You may use the data services from any of your apartments and the pedagog will help you. It would be best to begin with the city and Way description ... agreed?"
The seven of them watched in silence as the Axis City was projected before them in hypnotic detail. They seemed to approach the city from out of the north, swooping along very close to the singularity—the flaw—and passing through several dark shields.
Their point of view then fell to very near the wall of the Way, until they seemed to hover a few hundred meters over the flowing lanes of traffic. Heineman twitched when he saw rushing tank-like cylinders conveyed along multiple tracks below them, each cylinder equipped with a circle of brilliant forward-facing searchlights on the nose and three bands of running lights along the side. In the distance, a four-kilometer-wide gate terminal accepted thousands of the cylinders from all directions. (A visual appendix briefly showed them the interior of the terminal—maze of multilevel switching yards, cylinders being rerouted, guided into sheds to be loaded or unloaded, the contents being transferred to different containers for their trips into the gate. The gate itself was much wider than the ones they had encountered—a stepped hole at least two kilometers wide, resembling an open-pit mine but more regular and much more crowded with machinery.)
The Axis City was awesome from any angle, but from near the surface of the Way, it was overwhelming. The pictor highlighted the northernmost parts of the city and explained their functions, then their point of view moved south.
The farthest southern extension of the city was a broad Maltese cross, extended from two cubes mounted one behind the other on the flaw. The center of the cross accepted the flaw, which then extended through the cubes. Here was the machinery which powered, propelled and guided the city along the singularity. The same effect that could move the city along the flaw, and had propelled the tuberider, also provided much of the city's energy. Generators within the cubes were spun by turbines whose "blades" intersected the singularity and were subjected to the spatial transform.
(Where does the energy ultimately come from? Patricia asked herself. Did the question even have meaning?)
Beyond the two cubes was a wineglass-shaped buffer, the broad end placed flush against the first spinning cylinder, Axis Nader, where their quarters were located. Axis Nader was the oldest section of the city. After the final transfer of the orthodox Naderites from the Thistledown, they had been moved into Axis Nader, which became a kind of Naderite ghetto.
The then-expanding populations of neomorphs had moved north to Central City and the other rotating cylinders, newer and therefore more desirable in terms of real estate. Axis Nader rotated to produce a centrifugal force at its outermost levels about equal to the force in the Way. Its population was still largely orthodox Naderites, which, it went without saying, were almost entirely homorphic.
Beyond Axis Nader was Central City. The geometry of Central City's architecture was dazzling by itself. Lanier's curiosity triggered a graphic breakdown of the shape, beginning with a cube. Each face of the cube supported a squat pyramid, the "steps" rotated slightly with respect to each other, creating a half-spiral. The overall shape could fit within a sphere about ten kilometers across and was rather like a Tower of Babel, as conceived by the twentieth-century artist M. C. Escher if he had collaborated with architect Paolo Soleri; in all respects, Central City was the showpiece of Axis City. The "twisted pyramid" motif seemed to be universal; it was also the shape of the gate terminals.
Beyond Central City was Axis Euclid, which contained a mixed population of neomorphs and homorphs of both Geshel and Naderite sympathies. Axis Thoreau and Axis Euclid counter-rotated to offset the rotation of Axis Nader, which was slightly larger than either of them.
The projected point of view returned to the Maltese cross at the southern end of the city. Within the center of the cross they found themselves in a docking facility, witnessing the outfitting of a much larger, much more sophisticated version of their own destroyed tuberider. Called a flawship, the craft was about a hundred meters long, shaped like an ocarina pinched in the middle. The two segments of the spindle were almost featureless, one shiny gray-black, the other blue-violet.
Facts and figures accompanied the display. The flawship—one of a fleet of more than a hundred—could travel at five thousand kilometers a second. It could disengage from the flaw to allow other traffic to pass—though Heineman confes
sed he didn't see how this was done, since the flaw passed right down the center of the ship—and it could also send out smaller craft for landing parties and reconnaissance.
Near the surface of the Way, the immense disks they had seen on their approach provided transportation for cargo and passengers on less extensive trips. The picted tour ended with a gold-and-silver armillary sphere whirling before them.
"Ser Olmy," Lanier said.
"Yes?"
"Are we guests, or prisoners?"
"Neither, actually," Olmy said. "Depending on who you ask—and how honestly they answer—you are assets, or you are liabilities. Please remember that. We have three receptions planned," he said. "One before the Hexamon Nexus, the second on the Frant homeworld, Timbl, where we may be able to meet with the President, and the third at one point three ex nine, where a new gate is to be opened."
