by Greg Bear
Olmy shook his head, too stunned to answer.
“Come look at this. I didn’t find it until after she was gone, after we’d…Yes. Come.” He stepped toward the wall opposite the doorway. The wall separated in five L-shaped segments and withdrew silently, smoothly. They entered a large dark chamber, cool air eddying around them.
“Show yourself, you bastard.” Lights came on in a circle high overhead. A block of transparent crystal lay in the center of the octagonal chamber, occupied by a creature unlike anything Olmy had ever seen. It had a large, blue-gray vertical hammer-like head cut through with three horizontal clefts. Out of the uppermost cleft protruded shimmering white tubes tipped with black—eyes, perhaps—and out of the two lower, long black tufts of hair. Behind the oversized head—roughly the size and shape of a man’s trunk—stretched a long, smooth green horizontal thorax. Bifurcated pale pink tentacles each as thick as Olmy’s wrist and as long as his arm rose in a crest along the back. To the rear, behind the tentacles, was a bristle of short red barbs or feelers. A thick uplifted tail ended with a purple bugle flare. Perhaps strangest of all, seven pairs of lower “legs” or supports lined both sides of the body, not legs or limbs in the traditional sense but poles or long sharp-tipped spikes, each the color of obsidian, and just as shiny. Below the head, or perhaps emerging from the lower head itself, were two sets of many-jointed arms, one set tipped with appendages remarkably like hands, another with pink translucent palps.
Despite his years of experience dealing with non-humans, Olmy shuddered. As he stepped closer, against his strongest instincts, he frowned, appreciating a deeper truth about the creature; that this body was not alive, merely preserved so that it would not decay. There was something undignified, disordered about its awkwardness that told him it must be dead.
“Beautiful, no?” Mar Kellen circled the transparent block. The creature, fully extended, would have been about four meters long from vertical head to uplifted tail. “Our ancestral defenders, perhaps people we knew…people who trained us…they caught a Jart, and he or she or it is stored right here. But why not spread the news? This sort of thing would have been sensational, invaluable…”
Olmy knew what he meant. With the weapons possessed by both sides, battles were infrequent and cataclysmic. The Jarts had never responded to diplomatic overtures; in truth, after a few decades of the war, humans had stopped making them. Neither side could ever be certain what its enemies looked like. Decoys and deceptions had been used by both sides; information of any sort was suspect. To capture a Jart—even a dying or dead Jart—and understand something of its thinking…
That would have been special, indeed. Why keep it so secret, even down the ages? What had they discovered about their prize that required such caution?
Mar Kellen shrugged, his pictor casting a stray, context-free blue symbol on the ceiling. “Unless it’s not real. Maybe it’s a failed simulation….” He tapped the console. “But I suspect it’s real. Our simulations weren’t worth much. Though we never encountered Jarts face to face. Nobody ever has, we were told, and returned to tell the tale. But this…was kept secret from us all. Whatever, it must be worth something, Ser Olmy.”
The old soldier pointed out a white plate to one side of the block. “There are other ways of examining it. I tried them after Beni—my mate—after she died. I wouldn’t touch the direct feed for months. But this is less dangerous. Puts the damned thing on display, an analog of its mental activity. I suppose experts could read the signs back then. I can’t.”
Olmy watched the plate. A luminous cylinder formed above the plate. Like a geometric flower, it blossomed and extruded a haze of spinning lines. The lines danced hypnotically. The lower portion of the cylinder splayed out and assumed a tessellated variety of colors; black against gray, blood red against green, white against green, red against black, and so on, fixed and unmoving.
“Tame so far, hm?” the old soldier asked.
Olmy glanced at him, then back at the display. He could not begin to riddle what was being shown. “This is a diagram of the being’s mind?”
“It’s a Jart,” Mar Kellen said, agitated. “It must be. This shows the Jart’s mind and its memories. I’ve spent hours here, watching it. Sometimes, I’ve said to myself, ‘This is what killed Beni…’ Then I’ve had to leave or risk going mad.”
Olmy contemplated the pattern, fascinated. He had touched the very edge of the being’s personality; not enough to determined whether it was whole or a partial, damaged or intact, or even to guess whether it had been in active memory or inactive. But here was an unparalleled opportunity—and an impenetrable mystery.
Olmy felt his body stabilize a hormonal surge.
“Gives one a chill, doesn’t it?” Mar Kellen asked. “Too many mysteries.”
“Indeed.” He approached the preserved body, letting his own mind and implant processors mull over the problem. “You’ve shown this to nobody else?”
Mar Kellen shook his head. “I’ve been out of touch. Beni was…” His eyes met Olmy’s, half-lidded, face wrinkling in pain. “Healing me. Bringing me back.”
Olmy turned away from the old soldier’s anguish.
He had gone in harm’s way more often than he could remember. He had tried his courage with perverse regularity. Not even pure Talsit—something he hadn’t enjoyed in four years—could relax the hard little knot of desire for challenges. Yet he did not so much relish danger as experience. There had been very little extraordinary experience in the last few decades. He, too, had finally wearied of Earth, with its quagmire of needs and excess of misery.
But never in all of his lives had he felt the kind of fear he did now. Whatever lay within the memory storage—almost certainly a Jart personality, if Mar Kellen’s suppositions were correct—had been strong enough to kill Mar Kellen’s mate and damage Mar Kellen.
“Don’t thank me,” Mar Kellen said, smile gone. “Now that I’ve brought you here, I’m…” He picted a fury of red and yellow symbols, personal symbols, meaningless to Olmy but structured in an old Naderite prayer-form. “I don’t want anything, really. I don’t even care about advantages. There isn’t much I do care about, now. I killed her, bringing her down here….”
Olmy broke from his reverie. “You’ve found something very important,” he said. “I’m not quite sure what it is, yet….”
“I’m not curious any more. If it’s important, I leave it to you. I’ve really lived too long,” Mar Kellen said softly, his face glowing by the light of the Jart patterns. He blinked slowly, then licked his lips and glanced at Olmy. “Haven’t you?”
7
Gaia, Near Alexandreia, Year of Alexandros 2345
Rhita stood on the aft deck of the steam ferry Ioannes, plying the waters between Rhodos and Alexandreia. To keep away the winter sea chill, she wore an Akademeia brown cape and a butter-colored Rhodian wool gown. Her eyes soft-focused on the ocean and the ferry’s broad, churning wake. She was accompanied by a lone gull perched a few arms away on the dark oak railing, beak open, curiously turning its head back and forth. The somber gray sky brooded over a calm ocean the sullen color of iron. Behind her, large motor wagons from Rhodos, Kōs and Knidos hunkered in the shadow of the covered main deck.
At twenty-one years, she felt even more mature than she had at eighteeen, and that made her very mature indeed. At least her keen sense of fun had not yet deserted her; she had a healthy awareness of her own capacity for foolishness, and regretted finding little time to indulge it now.
Her hair had kept its luminous reddish-brown shade of childhood, but now she cut it shorter. Little changed were her large, quizzical green eyes, pale skin, and her stature. She had not grown beyond middle height, though her shoulders had broadened somewhat. She had inherited her father’s quiet physical strength, as well as long-fingered hands and long legs.
Rhita had visited Alexandreia only twice, both times before she was ten years old. Her mother, Berenikē, had thought it best to keep her only child cl
ose to the Hypateion and away from the cosmopolitan seductions of the Oikoumenē’s central city.
Berenikē had been an avid disciple of Patrikia, and had married Rhamōn, the sophē’s youngest son, more out of duty than love. She had loved her daughter fiercely, seeing in her a young image of Patrikia herself. In looks, however, Rhita resembled her mother more than her grandmother.
Now, with her mother dead a year, and Patrikia dead almost nine years, and her father still locked in a struggle for control of the Akademeia—in competition with theocratic elements her grandmother had openly despised—it had seemed best for her to take her talents and learning to the place where they might do the most good. If the Akademeia declined, at least she would be elsewhere, perhaps to establish a new Hypateion.
These worries were not foremost in her mind, however. They made her feel almost comfortable and secure when compared with her major concern.
For sixty years, Patrikia had searched for an elusive opening into a place she had called the Way. This gate had proven elusive, appearing at various times in various parts of the world only long enough to entice, never to be precisely located. Patrikia had died without finding it.
Rhita now knew precisely where the gateway was. It had stayed in one fixed position for at least three years. Such knowledge did not comfort her. She had become accustomed to her role, though hardly less resentful.
Knowing about the gateway had robbed her of her own life. Her grandmother, she thought, had imposed an almost impossible burden on a young girl by setting the instrument to recognize her touch, and hers alone.
Perhaps Patrikia had been a little crazy that year before she died. Crazy or not, she had given her granddaughter a terrible responsibility.
Everything else—her petition to study at the Mouseion, her personal life, everything—was subordinate to her knowledge.
She had not even told her father.
Rhita had hoped for a quiet life, but with a sigh, watching the seabird preen a wing, she knew that was not possible, not in this world. Even without the Objects, life at the Akademeia was going to be rough. All that she loved and was familiar with lay over the blue-black sea behind her.
She carried the clavicle and life-support machine in a large locked trunk; in a smaller suitcase, she also carried her grandmother’s “slate,” an electronic tablet for reading and writing upon. These were guarded by Lugotorix, her Keltic bodyguard, in her cabin. Lugotorix was unarmed, bowing to the sophē’s abhorrence of weapons and warfare, but hardly less lethal for all that. Rhamōn, for all the Hypateion’s pacifist philosophy, was a practical man, on occasion surprisingly resourceful and worldly. Lugotorix’s service was being paid for in goods more valuable than money; his two brothers now studied at the Akademeia. With such an education, they might overcome the prejudices that had handicapped those of Keltic descent since the uprising of century twenty-one.
Rhita felt a steady, unobtrusive connection with the clavicle; if anything happened to it, she would know, and she would probably be able to find it, wherever it was taken. With Lugotorix standing guard, few would try to take it; but not even the Kelt knew what he was protecting.
In good time, Rhita would petition Queen Kleopatra for an audience. She would present her evidence.
What happened after that, she did not care to dwell upon.
Having had enough sea air for the time—it was thick with cinders as the smoke shifted on the changing wind—Rhita returned to her small, stuffy cabin, sending the hulking, quiet black-haired Kelt to his own cabin for a rest. She removed her clothes and put on a simple Hindi cotton nightshirt. Crawling between the short bunk’s thin blankets, she switched on a feeble electric lamp and removed from her suitcase the smaller wooden teukhos, the book-box containing her grandmother’s slate and the cubes of music and literature, including her own diaries.
Nothing like the slate existed on this Earth, though in a few years the Oikoumenē mathematicians and mekhanikoi promised to create great electronic calculating machines. Patrikia had provided some of them with the theory of such machines, in meetings conducted just before her death.
Rhita realized her responsibility in caring for these Objects. In a real sense, she carried the fate of the Rhodian Akademeia with her; the Objects were proof of Patrikia’s truth-telling. Without them—if, for example, the ferry were to sink in the sea and the Objects were lost—there would be no proof, and in time Patrikia’s story would be considered myth, or worse, a lie. But whatever the danger, wherever she went, Rhamōn had ordered that Rhita was to have these objects with her always.
Rhita had read her grandmother’s notes many times, comparing the history of her Earth with the history of Gaia. She took comfort in the notes on the slate, as she might have taken comfort from reading familiar fairy stories.
The modern Earth her grandmother described was such a fabulous, if horrifying place—a world that had burned itself alive with its own genius and madness.
One cube held several complete histories of Earth. Rhita had read these carefully, coming to know the other world’s story almost as well as the story of Gaia. She knew that on Earth, Megas Alexandros had tried to conquer Hindustan and had only partly succeeded, as he had on Gaia. But on Earth, Alexandros had not fallen from an overturned ferry into the swollen river Hydaspes, had not contracted pneumonia and been forced to lie sick for a month, to fully recover and live to a ripe old age. On Earth, the Great World-Master had been forced to turn back by his troops, had fallen sick in another location and died young in Babylōn…And there, Patrikia had told her, was the juncture where their two worlds had separated.
Rhita often thought of writing fantastic novels of that other Earth, what her grandmother would have called romances. Perhaps in time she would; she favored literature when she wasn’t deep in her studies of physics and math.
But who could imagine a world in which the Oikoumenē had fragmented among the loyal Successors? Wars between the Successors, the transformation of Alexandros’s empire into competing kingdoms; Egypt dominated by Ptolemaios’s dynasty, Syria by the Seleukids, and eventually, with the rise of Latine, all of the Middle Pontos coming under the control of Rhoma…
Rhoma, in Rhita’s world, was a small, troubled city in strife-torn Italia—hardly the successor of Hellas! Yet on Earth, Rhoma had risen to destroy Karkhēdōn—Carthago in the Latin language—ending that trading empire’s history a century and a half before the birth of the little-known Ioudaian Messiah Jeshua, or Jesus. Karkhēdōn would never have gone on to colonize the New World, and Nea Karkhēdōn would never have rebelled from its mother country and asserted itself on the Atlantian Ocean, to become, along with the Libyans and Nordic Rhus, one of the enemies of the Oikoumenē…
On Gaia, Ptolemaios Six Sōtēr the Third had defeated the tribes of Latinē, including the Rhomans, in Y.A. 84, thereby guaranteeing that the Ptolemies would be rewarded with perpetual stewardship of Aigyptos and Asia.
On Gaia, there were nuclear power plants, huge experimental things built in the Kyrēnaikē west of the Nilos. There were jet gullcraft and even rockets putting satellites but not men into orbit; but there were no atomic bombs, no continent-shattering missile barrages, no death-ray battle-stations in orbit around the world. Many of these wonders were part of the secret lore of the Akademeia; Patrikia had learned hard lessons in her encounters with Kleopatra’s grandfather.
Gaia, despite its troubles, seemed a more secure and livable place to Rhita. Why, then, go hunting Earth? Why ask for that kind of trouble?
She wasn’t sure. In time, perhaps, she would understand her own compulsions, her own loyalties. Until then, she simply did what destiny had bid her do from childhood; what her grandmother had, without words, asked of her.
Rhita “scrolled” through the slate texts recorded by her grandmother, and came to the description of the Way, reading it through for perhaps the hundredth time. Here was a world even more fabulous and strange than Earth. Who in the Oikoumenē, or in all this world, could under
stand or believe such things? Had Patrikia dreamed at least these wonders, made them up out of her nightmares? Humans without human form, a man who had survived death several times, a cosmos shaped like a water-pipe and immensely long…
In time, she napped. Soon, the dinner bell rang, and she dressed again, leaving her cabin once more in Lugotorix’s charge. He ate alone from a pail provided by the ship’s galley.
Rhita ate with her fellow passengers, mostly Tyrians and Ioudaians, in the cramped dining hall above the main deck, ignoring the licentious stare of a richly-dressed Tyrian trader.
She would miss the Hypateion and its easy equality of the sexes, as well.
The skies over Alexandreia were clear, as they almost always were.
The ferry smoked past the four-hundred-arm-high Pharos Lighthouse at dawn the next morning. Rhita stood bundled against the cold at the stern. This Pharos was the fourth of its kind, the tallest of all, an iron, stone and concrete monster built a hundred and sixty years before. The crowded buildings on the low hills of Alexandreia glowed pink in the morning light, dusky green in the shadows. The marble and granite palace buildings on the Lokhias promontory were an orange blaze above the placid gray-blue Royal Harbor. The great caissons, sunk into the harbor floor northeast of the promontory to hold the harbor water back from subsided palace buildings, studded the shore like ivory game pieces, linked by lines of piled stone and masonry.
To Rhita, it hardly seemed real, this most famous of the world’s cities, the center of human culture and learning—Oikoumenē culture, at least.
The ferry docked in the Great Harbor and disgorged its motor wagons across a broad steel tongue. Greasy smoke and escaping steam wafted from the wagon deck to the passenger ramp where Rhita and the Kelt lugged their bags.