by Neal Asher
On his fifth day in the 180 woods, he found signs that he was not alone. A Russian ration packet and an American plastic container revealed that one or more Russian soldiers had found their way here. The discovery didn't bother him. There was room enough for virtually everybody, and in privacy besides.
On the seventh day, he met a Russian at the edge of a grassy clearing. He did not recognize him, but the soldier knew Mirsky and quickly faded back into the woods.
On the eighth day, they saw each other again across a narrow lake, and the soldier did not run away.
"You're alone, aren't you?" the soldier asked.
"Until now," Mirsky said.
"But you're the commander," the soldier said resentfully.
"No more," Mirsky said. "What's the fishing like here?"
"Not so good. You notice there are mosquitos and flies everywhere, but they don't bite?"
"Yes, I've noticed."
"I wonder why?"
"Good design," Mirsky suggested.
"I wonder if it ever snows."
"I think it does, once every year or so," MirSky said. "But it doesn't get very cold. Not like Moscow."
"I would like for it to snow," the soldier said. Mirsky agreed, and they met at one end of the lake and walked through the woods together, in search of a better fishing spot.
"The Americans would say we were Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer," the soldier observed as they dipped their threadlines into a stream. "You know, the Americans aren't as bad as they were on Earth. I thought about defecting before I decided to leave for the woods."
"Why didn't you?" Mirsky asked.
"I didn't want to be around anybody. But I'm not sorry you're here, General." The soldier bobbed the tip of his pole, hoping to entice a trout. "Restores my faith in humanity. Even a general wants to get away from it all."
The soldier, who never told Mirsky his name, had left the compound weeks ago, before Mirsky's death in the library. He knew nothing of what had happened, and Mirsky did not tell him.
He was beginning to feel like a normal human being again and not a freak or a ghost. Having the time to sit and admire a drop of water on a leaf, or the way water rippled outward from a fish rising for an insect, was wonderful. It no longer mattered who he was, simply that he was.
Two more days passed, and Mirsky began to wonder if anybody would come searching for them. High-power telescopes could spot them easily, and with infrared sensors, it wouldn't matter whether they were hidden under trees or not. By now, he suspected, the Zampolits were free again, consolidating their position of power—if Pletnev and the others hadn't acted on his warning.
He was only faintly curious about what had happened.
What he missed most of all was night. He would have given anything to spend a few hours in pitch darkness, to be able to close his eyes and see nothing, not even the faint brown glow of shadowy forest light through his eyelids. He also missed the stars and moon.
"Do you think anybody we know on Earth is alive?" the soldier asked one morning as they cooked trout in a flat press of stripped branches over a small fire.
"No," Mirsky said.
The soldier bobbed his head, and then shook it in wonder. "You think not?"
"It's not very probable," Mirsky said.
"Not even in the high command?"
"Maybe. But I never really knew any of them."
"Mmm," the soldier said. Then, as if it was relevant, he said, "You knew Sosnitsky."
"Not really."
"He was a good man, I think," the soldier said, removing the trout and filleting it expertly with his shroud-cutting knife. He handed half to Mirsky and threw the head and bones into the bushes.
Mirsky nodded and ate his fish, skin and all, chewing thoughtfully until he spotted a silvery glint in the trees behind the soldier. His chewing stopped. The soldier saw him staring and turned his head.
A long metal object floated between the trees and stopped a few meters away. Mirsky's eyes widened; it resembled a chromium Russian Orthodox barred cross, with a heavy teardrop on its lower extremity. At the junction of the angled bar and the horizontal post of the cross was an intense glowing red spot.
The soldier stood. "Is it American?" he asked.
"I don't think so," Mirsky said, also standing.
"Gentlemen," a female voice said, speaking English. "Do not be alarmed. We intend you no hurt. Our detectors tell us there is a corporeal individual here who has undergone supplementary surgery."
"It is American," the soldier said, backing away and preparing to run.
"What are you?" Mirsky asked, also in English.
"You are the one who has received supplementary surgery?"
"I think so," Mirsky said. "Yes."
The soldier made a peculiar grunt deep in his throat and crashed off through the trees.
"I'm the one, don't bother about him."
A woman dressed in black walked slowly between the trees. Mirsky thought for a moment that she had to be American, because of the uniform—but be noticed the style was quite different. And her hair—shorn to fuzz at the sides, with a sweep of crown hair cascading behind her head—was certainly not American. It took him some seconds to see she had no nostrils, and her ears were small and round. She stood beside the chromium cross and held up her hand.
"You're not a citizen of the Axis City, are you?" she asked. "Not an Orthodox Naderite?"
"No," Mirsky said. "I'm a Russian. Who are you?"
She touched the bar of the cross and flashes of light passed through the air between them. "Will you accompany me? We are gathering all the occupants of these chambers. No harm will come to you."
"Do I have any choice?" he asked, still calm. Could a man who had died once already feel any fear?
"I'm sorry, no," the woman said, smiling pleasantly.
Judith Hoffman had just completed a marathon nine-hour session on the restructuring of the legal system for the NATO personnel on the Stone. Beryl Wallace had insisted she return to the women's bungalow afterward. Hoffman had fallen asleep in her room immediately, so exhausted that it took her some time to crawl up to awareness, and a few seconds more to realize what had awakened her. The comline alarm was chiming. She hit her switch. "Hoffman," she said, her tongue thick and unwieldy.
"Joseph Rimskaya in the fourth chamber. Judith, we're having a rash of boojum sightings—I've seen two myself."
"So?"
"They're metal, cross-shaped, zipping over our compound and over the Russian territories, too. We've followed some of them with our trackers. There must be twenty or thirty of them in this chamber alone. They're all over."
Hoffman gritted her teeth and rubbed her eyes before glancing at her watch. She had been asleep less than an hour. "You're at the zero compound in the fourth chamber now?"
"That I am."
"I'm on my way."
She shut off the comline just as she received another call. This time, Ann cut in and was dickering with the voice on the other end as Hoffman answered.
"Judith, I'm sorry," Ann said hastily. "Beryl told me to let you sleep and I was away for just a second—"
"Miss Hoffman, this is Colonel Berenson in 'the seventh chamber—"
"Please, Colonel," Ann cut in.
"This is an emergency—"
"Ann, let him talk," Hoffman said.
"Miss Hoffman, our sensors are picking up dozens—maybe hundreds—of objects, large and small. Some have entered the bore hole, almost certainly, and are in the sixth chamber by now—"
"They're in the fourth chamber, at least," Hoffman said. "Colonel, coordinate with Rimskaya. He's made sightings, too. I'll be in fourth chamber on the next train."
She packed her small emergency case and ran down the hall, stumbling and almost falling at the head of the stairs. She grabbed a railing until her dizzy fatigue passed, then pumped down the stairs as fast as she could without breaking her neck. Ann met her at the bottom with a mug of water and stimulant tablets.
; "Shit, what are these?" Hoffman asked downing them.
"Hyper-caffeine," Ann said. "Lanier used them all the time."
Hoffman slugged back two pills and the water.
"What is it this time?" Ann asked, her face pale. "Not another attack?"
"Not from outside, honey," Hoffman said. "Where are Wallace and Polk?"
"Second chamber."
"Tell them to be in fourth chamber, zero compound; tell them to meet me there or at the zero train."
Hoffman ran from the bungalow, shouting for a truck to take her to the second, chamber. General Gerhardt ran on his stubby legs from the cafeteria, radio in hand, calling for marines, and waved for her to follow him. Doreen Cunningham met them at the security fence and pointed wordlessly to two trucks idling beyond the ramparts.
They were climbing into the nearest truck when the science compound alarms went off. Hoffman stepped away from the truck hatch and jerked her head back instinctively. Overhead, a barred silvery cross drifted at leisure. The heavy lobe on its end gave it a sinister and silly appearance at the same time. It reminded Hoffman of some outlandish
weapon in an eighties martial arts movie.
"That's not Russian, is it?" she asked, still slightly addled from interrupted sleep.
"No way, ma'am," Gerhardt said, hand shielding his eyes from the tubelight. The cross circled the compound, then rose to a needle-point speck against the plasma tube and vanished. "It's a real one. A boojum."
With sunset, the sky dimmed to midnight blue overhead. Where the final flat reddened edge of the sun was being swallowed by the ocean, a dark brown shadow line of cloud began, twisting and veering from the horizon to zenith, where it broke down into frothy streaks, the edge of each streak catching an electric purple gleam. Farley and Carrolson had retired an hour earlier; Frant world days were about forty hours long. Lanier was thinking steadily and was not ready for sleep. He watched the sunset from the patio, Heineman by his side. Patricia had not yet come out of her room after the conversation with Toller.
Barefoot, dressed in shorts and a long-sleeve blue jacket, Olmy walked across the sand a few meters away, spotted them and approached. "Mr. Heineman, Mr. Lanier," he said, and they greeted him with nods, for all the world like upper-class gentlemen lacking only pipes, formal wear and evening drinks to complete the picture. "Enjoying our stay
here?"
"Very much," Lanier said. "The first real weather I've seen in a couple of months."
"A year, myself," Heineman said.
"Much longer for me," Olmy said. "I haven't had duty on an outside world in"—he seemed to look inward—"fifteen years. And I haven't visited this world in fifty."
"They keep you busy, Mr. Olmy?" Heineman asked, squinting at him.
"Very. How is Patricia? I understand Ser Toller had a talk with her, and she's been in her room since."
"Yes," Lanier said. "I'm going to check up on her in a few minutes. See if she'll eat some food."
"She has been under strain for some time now, hasn't she?"
"Ever since she came to the Stone—the Thistledown," Lanier said. "We put an awful lot of responsibility on her shoulders—too much, really."
"You thought she might riddle the mystery of the Thistledown?"
"We thought she might tell us whether what was in the libraries would also hold true for our world. As it turned out—"
"It did, and it didn't," Olmy finished for him.
Lanier stared at him, then nodded again, looking back at the declining twilight. "She's been acting strangely—even considering the circumstances."
Olmy leaned on the patio rail. "After we arrived in the Axis City, she and I had a very long and interesting conversation. She was eager to learn about the city, about us, and she was eager to fit in. She especially wanted to learn about gate opening. That's one of the reasons we're attending a gate-opening soon. Had she told you about her ultimate plans?"
"I don't think so," Lanier said. Heineman leaned forward, meeting Olmy's gaze earnestly.
"Before she was captured, she was going to the library to do some final work. She had a hypothesis that she could proceed down the Way and find a place between the gates, in what we call the geometry stack regions. It fascinated me that she knew about such regions—that she had calculated their existence, because to understand the rudiments of Way theory is not necessarily to understand all the implications. She believed that she might be able to construct a gate opening device and probe the geometry stacks."
"What are geometry stacks?" Heineman asked, his voice froggy. He cleared his throat and glanced at Lanier.
"Gate regions are placed in specific rhythm along the Way. They open onto clearly defined locations in universes slightly different from our origin. Each gate opening, heading down the Way, will advance in time by approximately half a year in each universe. Patricia understood this very early, from what she tells me. But it took her some time to realize that the infinity of alternate worlds must be bunched by the existence of such clearly marked gate regions. The bunching occurs in the regions of stack geometry, and the distortion caused by the bunching leads to gross displacement of some universes, both in superspace and in Way time."
"I'm not following you," Lanier said softly.
"She believed she could open a gate into an alternate universe, an alternate Earth, where the Death did not take place, yet where things were very little different from her world. She understood that gate-opening devices are tunable to a certain extent. It is her theory that with one of our devices, she can open a precise path to an alternate and hospitable Earth."
"Can she?" Lanier asked.
Olmy didn't say anything for a moment. "We will consult with two gate openers. One is here on Timbl, the other is the prime opener, Ser Ry Oyu, father of Senator Prescient Oyu, and he awaits us at one point three ex nine."
"Is that another reason why we've been removed from the Axis City?"
Olmy smiled and nodde. "My reasons for bringing Patricia back with me were quite sound. But your arrival has caused no end of trouble. One visitor we might have been able to keep secret—though that seems doubtful now. Five visitors, impossible. The President hopes to make you assets rather than liabilities."
"Thirteen hundred years, and people are still people," Heineman mused with an edge of bitterness. "Still squabbling."
"True, and not entirely true," Olmy said. "In your day, many people were so severely handicapped by personality disorders or faulty thinking structures that they often acted against their own best interests. If they had clearly defined goals, they could not reason or even intuit the clear paths to attain those goals. Often adversaries had the same goals, even very similar belief systems, yet hated each other bitterly. Now, no human has the excuse of ignorance or mental malfunction, or even lack of ability. Incompetence is inexcusable, because it can be remedied. One of Ser Ram Kikura's services is to guide people in selecting appropriate skills and attitudes for their work. They can assimilate the necessary adjuncts, whether it be a set of memories or even a personality supplement."
"So why do they still disagree?" Heineman asked.
Olmy shook his head. "Know that, and you understand the ultimate root of all conflict in the realm of Star, Fate and Pneuma. In all the universes accessible to us."
"It's unknowable, then," Lanier said.
"Not at all. It's all too clear. There can be more than one ultimately desirable goal, and many equally valid ways to achieve those goals. Unfortunately, there are limited resources, and not everyone can follow the paths they want. That is true even for us. Our citizens are for the most part good-hearted, capable and diverse. I say for the most part, because the Axis City system is by no means perfect..."
"What you're saying is, the gods themselves would have war..."
Olmy agreed. "Interesting how the crude myths of our youth come back as eternal truths, no?"
Lanier knocked on Patricia's door and called her name. A few minutes, and several more knocks later, Pat
ricia opened the door and motioned for him to come in. Her hair had been mussed into twisted strands. She wore the same clothing she had worn at the beach.
"Just checking to see how you're feeling," Lanier said, standing awkwardly in the main room, not sure whether to fold his arms or let his hands hang down at his sides.
"I'm thinking," Patricia said, turning to look at him. Her eyes were plaintive. "How long has it been?"
"Since you left the beach?"
"Yes. How long?"
"Twelve hours. It's dark outside."
