by Neal Asher
"Now I pass its control to you." More instructions in code, and Patricia felt a sudden warmth between herself and the device.
Korzenowski watched from a few meters back. Lanier floated behind him, near the flaw passage.
"I can talk with it now," Patricia said in wonder. "I can tell it things directly..."
"And it can communicate with you. It is active, and you are its master," Yates said. There was a touch of sadness in his voice.
Korzenowski came forward. "I have some thoughts on your search—suggestions for technique," he said.
"I'd love to hear them," Patricia said.
At a steady acceleration of twenty g's, the flawship moved south along the Way.
The plasma front reached the sixty-kilometer sector reserved for the last gate opening, slamming against the barriers, the extreme heat upsetting their subtle geometry. Down came the first barrier, and the little oasis was incinerated; the circuit of wells was fused shut, and the surface of the Way became smooth and undisturbed.
Final messages from gates along the human-controlled length of the Way told of evacuations. Millions of humans decided to remain on the worlds beyond their assigned gates, rather than choose between the separated sections of the Axis City. The last remnants of Way commerce were shut down, and the gates were sealed, preparing both for the
passage of the Geshel precincts and the arrival of the plasma front.
Despite the nearness of the plasma front, Olmy began decelerating. The flawship had two blunt-arrowhead flyers; Prescient Oyu was outfitting one for Patricia's journey.
Patricia went to Lanier and hugged him strongly.
"I appreciate all you've done for me," she said.
Lanier wanted to convince her not to make the attempt, but he didn't try. "You've come to mean a great deal to me," he said.
"Not just a green kid you have to look after?" she asked, smiling.
"Much more than that. I..." He looked away from her, face working through a variety of discomforts, and then shook his head. "You're something, Patricia." He laughed sharply then, through tears. "I'm not sure what, but you're really something."
"Would you like to go with her?" Olmy asked, tracting aft. In each hand, he held a small black sperical monitor.
"What?" Lanier asked.
"She'll need help. I'm going."
Prescient Oyu saw !lmnier's confusion and explained. "You'll create a partial. The monitor will project the partial. It won't be able to report back to you, of course, since we must move on as soon as we release Patricia."
"The partials will die?" Lanier asked.
"They will be destroyed along with the monitors," Olmy said. "But we won't."
Lanier felt an eerie wind through his head. "Yes," he said. "I'd like that very much."
Ramon, reading Tiempos de Los Angeles, Rita fixing a meal for the homecoming. Coming home. Paul, waiting. What
will I tell Paul? "You wouldn't believe..." Or, "I've been unfaithful, Paul, but—" Or just smile at him, and start over again...
Olmy and Lanier—rather, their partials—sat beside Patricia in the flyer. She carried the clavicle in her lap. The screen before her showed the barren, smooth surface of the Way. She held the clavicle grips tightly, feeling the quality of the superspace at each point "beneath" the surface, transmitted through the clavicle.
What she was looking for was far more difficult to find than a particular grain of sand on a beach. She was searching for a universe without the Death, and without herself, also—where the Stone had arrived, but not caused war, and where her alternate had somehow died.
Not finding that (and she was far from sure she could be that precise—though such a place would exist, and would be distinct from all the others), she would settle for a universe where there would be two of her. She would settle for anything that would take her home. She glanced at Lanier's image. He smiled at her, encouraging and uncertain at once.
And suddenly, without any reason, without any certainty of her success, she felt wonderful. Patricia Luisa Vasquez existed in a bubble of joy, independent of all that had gone before, not caring what would come after. She had never experienced anything like it. It had neither confidence nor euphoria in its character; it simply was an appreciation of all she had experienced, and would experience, a fulfillment of the compulsion she had had since childhood not to be normal. Not to live a normal existence, but to subject herself to the most extraordinary experiences she could possibly have. The world being what it was, she had long since decided she would have to create those extraordinary
conditions in her head. And then, the world turned upon itself. The universes had twisted in some incomprehensible fashion and delivered to her an experience drawn from the visions in her head, made even more wonderfully strange and outre by history, by the actions of tens of billions of people, and who could tell how many nonhumans?
Her moment was not solipsistic; she did not feel in the least isolated or unique. But she realized how extraordinary her life was. She had already fulfilled her wildest and most deeply held dreams.
Anything else is gravy, she thought. Even going home.
The flyer landed smoothly on the surface of the Way. In her hands, the clavicle emitted a pleasant, busy hum, telling her that they would have to be several kilometers south. She informed Olmy's partial, and he lifted the flyer up for another short hop.
Overhead, the flawship accelerated south again.
She closed her eyes, letting the clavicle's sensations stream through her. She seemed to see a kind of digest of every cluster of alternate universes, tasting them, being part of them; but she could not grasp them. She could not do anything more with the sensations than guide the clavicle. No detailed knowledge about the other realms was conveyed; only the fact of their existence, and whether or not they fell within the range she was seeking.
The partials would not need a protective field, but she would. Olmy prepared a traction bubble and environment for her. Lanier stayed beside her. How much of him is here? she wondered. What is it like when a partial is destroyed?
Then she turned her full attention to the clavicle. The nose hatch opened and Patricia stepped out onto the surface of the Way, surrounded by the flexible, faintly glowing traction bubble. Lanier and Olmy followed, walking beside her without aid in the high vacuum.
"You have about half an hour," Olmy said, his voice conveyed from the monitor to her torque. "After that, the radiation from the plasma front will be dangerously intense. Will that be time enough?"
"I think so; I hope so." Patricia checked her bag and found everything in place: multi-meter, processor, slates and blocks.
She held the clavicle before her, searching. For ten minutes, she walked back and forth, north and south, the clavicle conveying the enormous stretches of alternate worlds she crossed with each step. She discarded impressions from nearly all of them, trying not to jam her senses.
Within another ten minutes, she had located a line several centimeters long that seemed to harbor the point she was searching for. She kneeled, the traction bubble comfortably flexible beneath her. The clavicle guided itself within this tiny space, her hands merely completing the causal connection.
In five more minutes, she had the search down to fractions of a millimeter. The information from each separate universe was much more complex now; she was indeed close to an alternate Earth, and the time period was approximately correct—within a few years.
"Hurry," Olmy said. "The plasma front is near."
It was very difficult. Her theories proved to be not quite as precise as she had hoped. Within even the smallest segments of the geometry stack, worlds of substantial degrees of difference interwove. She could see now why Korzenowski and his followers had initially regarded the regions of geometry stacking as useless.
The clavicle stopped. She could not tell if she was tuning the region finely enough, but she could spend days searching and not be any closer. She closed her eyes and gave it one final tweak.
<
br /> "I'm ready," she said.
"Then do it," Lanier said. She looked back at the partial and smiled her gratitude.
"Thank you—for everything."
Lanier nodded. "You're most welcome. It's been fascinating."
"Yes ... hasn't it?"
She began the gate dilation. To the north, the corridor was filling with a reddish glow. As the seconds passed, the glow progressed higher through the spectrum—orange, an awesome greenish blue—
The clavicle's whistle was painfully intense. She saw a circle of whirling possibilities at her feet, and then she saw the circle—little more than a meter wide—clarify, presenting a distorted picture of blue skies, something bright tan, large shapes and water—
She did not have the precise location. She would be on land—she could sense that much—but had no idea where on Earth that land would be. Wherever, the traction field would protect her.
Lanier's partial bent through her traction field to give her a parting kiss. His lips felt pliant, warm.
"Go!" Olmy commanded.
She stepped through the gate. It was like sliding down a hill. Everything twisted and spilled around her. She released the clavicle and then grabbed it again with one hand. There was the sound of water, something huge and sharp and white not far away, blinding sun—
Lanier and Olmy faced the oncoming radiation.
It's not like dying, Lanier thought. There's another, complete me escaping even now. But he will never experience these things. I'll never "report" to him.
They were surrounded by an intense brightness that went beyond light or heat. Olmy grimaced and grinned at once, relishing the sensation. He had sent partials to die before and had never known what their sensations were like. Now, he would experience it direcfly—
And the original Olmy would still never know.
"The monitors will last a fraction of a second in the plasma front itserf," he explained Lanier. "We'll spend the briefest moment inside a star..."
Lanier, without pain, without much fear, faced directly north and looked into the heart of the furnace rushing down on them at six thousand kilometers per second.
There was not even time to savor the sensation.
On the flawship, perilously close to the ravening plasma, Lanier closed his eyes and told himself, again and again, that he had carried out his responsibilities and accompanied his charge to the very last.
Still clutching the clavicle, bag strapped to her shoulder, Patricia fell from an altitude of five or six meters into water.
She was not even wet. She lay in the bottom of the floating traction bubble, stunned. The water—a river or canal—carried her several dozen meters from the gate. She looked to one side to see where she was.
That was just as well. An intense, blue-white plume flowed from the gate and blasted the water behind into steam, covering everything with a thick white cloud. Fortunately for her, and for everything within a few hundred meters, the gate was fused permanently shut within millionths of a second.
She lay back in the bubble, partly blinded, with one hand over her eyes, and drifted for several more minutes until she grounded against a sand bar. Her sight had recovered well enough by then.
Standing, she surveyed the territory, heart pounding.
She was on the shore of a broad straight canal, the sluggish water a deep muddy brown. The bank was lined with tall green reeds. The sky was an intense, pale blue, cloudless—and the sun was very bright.
With some qualms, she shut off the traction bubble and took a deep breath. The air was sweet, clean and warm.
She was heavier than she had been since leaving Timbl. This time, she had no floater belt to buoy her up. The gravity was uncomfortable.
But this was undeniably Earth, and she was not in a nuclear wasteland. In fact, the scenery was hauntingly familiar. She had seen it all before ... in the Bible classes Rita had insisted she take as a child.
Shading her eyes, Patricia looked to the west.
Across the canal and on a plateau were brilliant plaster-white pyramids, kilometers away but sharp in the clear desert air. She felt a moment of excitement.
It was Egypt. She could travel from Egypt—that would be a minor problem. She could get home from here.
She turned around. On a rickety-looking scaffold emerging from the reeds stood a small, slender brown girl, no more than ten or eleven, naked except for a white cloth tied around her hips. Her hair was done up in many long, close-knotted braids, each tipped with a blue stone. The girl regarded Patricia with slack-jawed wonder mixed with fear.
"Hello!" Patricia called, trudging up the sandy bank. "Do you speak English? Can you tell me where I am?"
The girl turned deftly on the scaffold and fled. For a horrible moment, Patricia wondered if she had slipped several millennia in time ... if in fact she was in ancient Egypt.
Then she heard a distant rumble and looked up. Her relief was so great she almost whooped. There was an airplane, probably a jet, flying high above the desert.
Walking along the edge of the canal, clutching her clavicle and considering whether or not to reactivate the traction bubble—the sun was becoming uncomfortably hot—Patricia found a road and followed it. Beyond a grove of date palms, she came upon a little, square town made of whitewashed brick, the houses as blocky as benches and about as
uniform. Very few people were about; it was just past high noon, and no doubt they were all resting until the day cooled.
Something bothered her. She hadn't thought about it before, but now that she remembered...
Putting the clavicle down on the stone roadbed, shading her eyes with both hands, she looked west again. From this vantage, she could see that the pyramids were surrounded by thick groves of trees, she couldn't tell what kind. That didn't seem right. Weren't the Egyptian pyramids in desert?
And how many large pyramids had there been on Earth? Three?
She counted eight smooth-surfaced white pyramids in a row, filing off to the horizon.
"Wrong-o," she said softly to herself.
*65*
Lanier floated in the flawship's prow, alone and content to stay that way for a long time. Kilometer after thousands of
incommensurable kilometers flowed by, black and gold and indistinct.
What it had all come down to was that he owed more to Earth than he did to Patricia. And he could not help her complete her journey—see her through safely—because it was not his journey to make.
Did she survive? Reach her destination?
Even if she did, in this half-dream, half-nightmare Way of stacked universes, she was as far from him—and as inaccessible—as if she had died.
Olmy tracted behind him, clearing his throat.
"I'm fine," Lanier said testily.
"That was never at question," Olmy said. "I thought you might wish to know our situation. We're well ahead of the plasma front. The radiation is tolerable—though I'd suggest a thorough physical Talsit session when we arrive."
"What about the precincts?"
"We've communicated with them. As we suspected, they are accelerating toward us now. They've agreed to lift their grips and let us pass through them."
"Can we do that?"
"With some luck, yes," Olmy said. "They'll be at thirty-one percent light-speed."
"I suppose that will be something to see," Lanier said.
"I doubt we'll 'see' much of anything," Olmy said.
"Figure of speech."
"Yes. There's food available if you wish it. Ser Yates is equipped to eat and would enjoy your company."
"How long until we meet the precincts?"
"Twenty-seven minutes," Olmy said.
Lanier swallowed hard and rotated. "Sure," he said. "I could eat."
He ate very little, however, glancing nervously about the cabin—at the nonhumans, secluded in their traction bubbles, dormant or disturbingly active (the snake with four heads was doing a quick, jerky ballet in its greenish fluid); at Prescient Oyu, w
ho frankly returned his look; at Yates as he ate, the most human-seeming of them all, the most
natural in his habits, and yet an opener of gates.
Olmy was quiet and still. Not far from him, the worker that held Korzenowski's reconstructed personality—and part of Patricia as well—floated wrapped in traction lines, its image shut off as it continued the long process of final maturation.
Lanier put aside the rest of his uneaten meal and said he would rather wait at the bow. Olmy agreed.
