by Greg Bear
It seemed unlikely, but it was possible that beyond the security maze the records had been left open and on download status—ready to be transferred. But the console only supported transfer to human minds or implants—there were no connections for transfer to external storage. He could, of course, rig such an interface…But there had to be a reason one did not exist in the first place.
A rapid download of channeled information into an unprepared and unaided brain could, in theory, fatally disrupt someone’s mentality. But what kind of machinery or safety circuit would allow any damage to an unsuspecting investigator? Obviously, unsuspecting investigators were not expected…Only experts.
Prepared experts.
If extreme secrecy was desired, the machinery might be designed to scramble intruder’s minds, but Olmy had never heard of Hexamon agencies taking lethal protective measures against citizens in the entire history of Thistledown and the Way.
Beni’s first encounter, without implants to buffer the flow, might in fact have kicked in some kind of safety circuit…Thus, when Mar Kellen tried the second interface a moment later—not realizing Beni was injured—the safety circuit and the buffer of his more extensive implants might have blunted the flow enough to disrupt but not kill him.
So many mysteries and questions…
In all of his exploits, Olmy had exercised a maximum of caution, commensurate with the time he was allowed to plan and act. Even so, he had been killed twice…
He took risks gladly enough, but he did not seek them. If there was a safe and easy way to accomplish his task, that was the method he used.
Now he was about to break his own rule. He knew he would not go to the Hexamon authorities with Mar Kellen’s discovery. That would have been safe, and theoretically his duty would have been fulfilled. Instead, he told no one and pondered different alternatives, all of them deliriously mad.
Olmy had lived through enough history to realize that at most times, major human events were shaped not by rational acts, but by guesswork and something akin to instinct.
To take proper advantage of this mystery, in the time allotted to him, he would have to act alone. Turning it over to the Hexamon authorities would mean delays, investigations by committee, the usual bureaucratic dance around a controversial asset that could very easily be a debit. He strongly suspected—as Tapi’s work had probably confirmed—that within less than a year the information this discovery contained would be needed desperately.
Total caution was impossible, even inappropriate. Especially when all that he put at risk—for the time being—was himself.
He journeyed again to the fifth chamber, this time through the bore hole, traveling alone on a small private shuttle. He climbed the trail, followed Mar Kellen’s instructions to open the security door, and descended into the asteroid’s thick, ancient walls.
In the Jart’s crypt, he contemplated the creature’s static mind patterns.
The image had changed little since Mar Kellen had first brought up the display for him. He walked around the image, again studying the Jart’s preserved body. It was as ugly as he had suspected a Jart would be—and as strange. Perhaps stranger than anything they had met in the Way, and that had included some very odd beings indeed—some difficult to define as “alive” but for their mental activity. What creature had ever walked on solid sharp-ended poles? How did it eat? It was obviously not designed for speed or flexibility. What function did the tentacles and cluster of spikes serve? How could that narrow body service such a large head?
Olmy sat in the tiny chamber, subduing an old, pale fear of very small places. There was no chair, so he sat on the smooth ancient floor, back against the wall.
Why is it here? A question equally as unaswerable as Who brought it here? or How was it captured?
Why would a Jart allow itself to be captured and have its personality downloaded?
He stood and stretched his muscles and joints. His body still felt young, fully capable. His mind was equipped with sufficient implant memory and processing modules to house several human personalities beside himself; he hadn’t used the excess since he had carried Korzenowski, prior to the Engineer’s reincarnation four decades ago. But it was still available. There were few people on Thistledown or anywhere else who matched Olmy’s potential either physically or mentally.
Given a few weeks, he could probably riddle the buried chambers and discover how to use the equipment properly. But why would he do that?
For the same reasons he had spent the last few years studying all that was known about the psychology of non-human intelligences. The Terrestrial Hexamon, after decades of concentrating on very different problems, was not prepared strategically or tactically to return to the Way.
Yet they would almost certainly do so. He could feel the pressure of history; a familiar pressure.
If Olmy could give them expert advice, the Hexamon might survive its own foolishness. And of all the beings most likely to confront them in the re-opened Way—
The Jarts were the most formidable. Even captured, imprisoned, quiescent for centuries, somehow they could still kill.
It was essential that Olmy extract what information he could from this source, at any personal cost.
With a grin, he realized much of his rationalizing was to hide a basic truth. He did not trust the present leadership. They condescended to the past rather than understanding it. His ingrained sense of soldier’s superiority had finally triumphed over his faith in the rightness of the command structure.
“I’m going rogue, myself,” he confessed to the Jart’s ancient corpse. “Damn it all to hell.”
10
Gaia
Alexandreia was a lot filthier than she remembered from her visits years past; it seemed to wear a cloak of smoke and soot as protection against its many troubles. The fabulous marble causeways were pitted with decay. Many of the statues had been shrouded in great sheets of oilcloth.
The representatives of the bibliophylax, the director and archivist of the Mouseion, hurried her and her luggage off the street before the Mouseion’s famous Eastern Stoa, then put her in a rickety cart, insisting that she ride rather than walk.
The women’s residence hall was a brick and stone two-story block dropped inauspiciously in a dusty, treeless corner of the Mouseion grounds. Rhita’s heart fell when she saw it; Lugotorix, riding beside the driver on the cart, gave a low whistle of contempt.
They pulled into the broken brick and pounded-dirt courtyard. An elderly woman in a black shawl swept dust and sand half-heartedly in the shade of the inset double doorway, giving them barely a glance. The door opened and a blond, matronly young woman about the same age as Rhita stepped out with hands clenched over her head in greeting.
“Welcome! welcome!” she shrilled, clicking her tongue and dropping her hands to lift her long brown robe out of the dust. “You are from Rhodos? From the Hypateion?”
Rhita smiled and nodded at her. The cart jerked to a sudden stop and the driver gave the Kelt some small assistance in dropping her luggage to the curbside. “You can’t stay here, you know,” the woman told the Kelt sharply. “No men here.”
“He’s my bodyguard,” Rhita said.
“My dear, bad as things are for us in the Mouseion, none of us need bodyguards! He’ll have to stay elsewhere. You are Reee-ta Berenikē Vaskayza?”
“Yes.”
The woman hugged her briskly. “I am Jorea Yallos, from Galatia. Your houseguide. You study mathematics?”
“Yes.”
“Fascinating. I study animal husbandry in the school of agriculture. I have been told to show you your quarters and answer your questions.”
Rhita’s hopes fell when Yallos urged her to the upper floor and bustled before her along a dark hallway. “We appreciate your coming here. I’m sorry we can’t do better for you. In the summer, these rooms cool off more quickly at night. In the winter, that’s not what you want. They’re comfortably warm during the day, however.” She withdrew a larg
e iron key and inserted it into the padlock, pocketed both lock and key, and pushed and kicked the thin wooden door open. It scraped sadly over the broken tile floor.
“Are you a daughter of Isis?” Yallos asked.
Rhita entered the room. It was like a cell in a monastery, with a pair of small windows mounted high in the outer wall and a leather bed pushed into one corner. Behind the door, a wobbly stand supported a chamber pot and bowl. Against the right hand wall, a scabrous wooden desk had been propped under a faded mural of the Kanopic Isis with her small, wide-eyed, feathered infant son and protective snake.
“No,” Rhita managed to answer.
“Pity. Dorca, the woman here before you, a lovely helper, she was quite fond of Isis. You can’t redecorate without the women’s council’s permission.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Rhita said. She gestured for Lugotorix to bring in her luggage. He squeezed through the door with traveling case and wooden boxes under both arms, gently lowered them to the floor, and stood to one side, away from the suspicious Yallos.
“He’s a Kelt, isn’t he?”
“From the Parisioi,” Rhita affirmed.
“There are plenty of Kelts in Galatia,” Yallos said. “I’m of Nabataean and Hellenic ancestry, myself.”
Rhita nodded politely.
“We have a group council at the first hour of sunset. If you’d like to join us, you’re welcome. Let me know if you need anything. We women have to stick together here. They don’t much care for us, Kallimakhos and his people. We’re not good for his defense contracts.” Yallos stood in the doorway. “The Kelt has to come with me now. I’ll get him a room in the old baths, where the groundskeepers bed down.”
Lugotorix flicked his slitted eyes from Yallos, whom he clearly loathed, to Rhita. “Go,” she told him. “I’ll be okay here.” She was none too sure of that, however. She already felt homesick and out of place. The Kelt shrugged and followed the houseguide. Rhita suddenly thought of something and called to her in the hall. “Can I have the lock and key?”
“No locks,” Yallos said.
“I need a lock,” Rhita persisted, irritated now and worried for the safety of the Objects.
“Come to the council meeting. We’ll discuss it. Oh…if you’re not a sister of Isis, what are you?”
Rhita made up her answer with surprising speed. “I belong to the sanctuary of Athēnē Lindia.”
Yallos blinked. “Pagan?” she asked.
“Rhodian,” Rhita replied. “It’s my birthright.”
“Oh.”
Rhita shut the door and faced her squalid cell. So much for her reception in the Mouseion. Her grandmother’s shadow obviously did not stretch this far. Was this the queen’s doing, or was Kleopatra even aware of Rhita’s arrival?
She sat for a while, shivering in the gloom. A single electric light over the bed cast a yellow glow over that corner and little else. It was already midday and the room was just beginning to warm. How much risk should she take with the Objects, not to mention her own safety? How much risk would she take before—if—she reached her goal?
Prying at a shutter jammed over one small, deep-set window, she broke an already-short fingernail to the quick. She swore beneath her breath, one green eye bright in her meager success, a thin line of indirect sunlight.
Rhita wiped gritty dust from the desk, used a frayed withy broom to sweep the floor, and opened her trunk to put her clothes away. In the late afternoon, the guides had told her, she would meet with the bibliophylax.
She did not look forward to it.
11
Earth
The Russian—so it was most convenient to think of him, at least for the moment—stood with Lanier on the porch, waiting for the wink of a shuttle’s lights. The night sky was a smear of aluminum dust across solid black, depth upon depth of stars. The air had cleared since the Death, Earth’s natural healing mechanisms removing most atmospheric traces of the conflagration. There were few pollution sources anywhere now, even with the Recovery well along. Hexamon Technology was non-polluting, self-contained.
The first lights they saw were not in the sky, but along the road leading up the side of the valley to the cabin. Lanier pursed his lips and met the Russian’s glance with a shrug. “My wife,” he said. He had hoped to get the Russian away before her arrival.
The rugged All-Terrain Vehicle, modeled after types used by the first investigators on the Stone, ground its tires along the gravel drive to one side of the cabin and stopped, its electrical motors cutting abruptly. Karen swung down from the cabin in the automatic glare of the outdoor floodlights, saw Lanier on the porch and waved at him. He waved back, feeling older just looking at her.
In their life together, he had seen her age a decade or two, grow old along with me, then regress under therapy, the same therapy he had turned down. She looked a youthful forty at most.
“I’ve been in town,” she called out in Chinese as she dragged her duffel from the rear of the ATV. “We’re setting up an artificial social network, so the—” She saw the Russian and stopped on the porch steps, biting her lower lip. She looked over her shoulder at the drive; no other vehicles. Then she queried Lanier with one raised eyebrow.
“This is a visitor. His name is Pavel,” he said.
“We have not met,” the Russian said, stepping forward and extending his hand. “I am Pavel Mirsky.”
Karen smiled politely, but her instincts had been aroused.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, shifting her eyes to her husband. She glanced between them quickly, brow furrowed.
“I’m fine. His name,” Lanier repeated with some deliberate drama, “is Pavel Mirsky.”
“I know the name,” she said. “Wasn’t that the Russian commander on the Stone? Went with the precincts down the Way…didn’t he?” Her eyes fell accusingly on Lanier: What is this? She had seen pictures of Mirsky in the history tapes. The game was up. She recognized him. “You look just like him.”
“I hope I haven’t disturbed you,” the Russian said.
“He’s a son, a look-alike?” she asked Lanier.
He shook his head.
She stood on the top step, hands clasped before her. “You’re sure everything is all right? You’re joking with me.” She climbed up one step, paused again. Then, in Chinese, she asked Lanier, “Who is this man?”
In Chinese, Lanier responded, “He’s a good imitation, if not the real thing. I’m taking him to meet with Korzenowski.”
Karen walked slowly before them, examining the Russian, biting her lower lip. “Where did you come from?”
The Russian looked between them. “I have not explained that yet,” he said. “Better to wait until it all comes out.”
“You can’t be Mirsky,” Karen said. “If you’re trying to hoodwink my husband…All we heard would have to be a lie.”
Surprisingly, Lanier hadn’t considered that possibility. He had not, of course, actually seen Mirsky go down the Way.
“No lies,” the Russian said. “I am pleased to finally meet you. I have always thought your husband a fine man, a true leader, with sound judgment. I congratulate both of you.”
“Why?” Lainer asked.
“On having found each other,” the Russian explained.
“Thank you,” Karen said sharply. “Have you offered our guest any refreshment, Garry?” She carried her duffel into the cabin. Her suspicion had turned into anger.
“We’re expecting the shuttle any minute,” he answered. “We’ve eaten a little, and had a beer.”
The Russian smiled at the mention of the beer. His enjoyment had been obvious.
Karen made various small noises in the kitchen, then continued her interrupted conversation through the screened window opening onto the porch. “We’re going to get twenty or thirty village leaders and political science students from Christchurch and fly them to Axis Thoreau. It’s going to be a kind of conference, all in city memory, to establish social ties it would take years to make
otherwise. They’ll all act as if they were family afterwards, if it goes well. Think of all politicians having family ties with each other, and their constituents? It could be wonderful.” Her tone had changed; now she was ignoring the mystery.
Lanier suddenly felt exhausted. All he wanted was to lie back on the old couch before the cabin’s fireplace and close his eyes.
“Here comes the shuttle,” the Russian said, pointing. A blip of white soared across the opposite side of the valley, then swooped in low, just above the trees. Karen returned to the porch, face strained, and looked up at her husband.
“What in hell are you doing?” she demanded in an undertone. “Where are you going?”
Lanier shook his head. “To the Stone.” Everything was losing its edge of reality. Nothing seemed very probable. “I don’t know when we’ll be back.”
“You shouldn’t go alone. I can’t go with you,” she said. “I have to be in Christchurch tomorrow.” She glanced at Lanier. Karen was no fool, but she was having a difficult time shifting gears. Her expression said that she knew just how odd this really was; and how important it might be. “Maybe you can explain to me after you get to the Stone?”
“I’ll try,” Lanier said.
“I am sorry for the disruption,” the Russian said quietly.
“You shut up,” Karen cried, turning on him. “You’re just a goddamned ghost.”
At that, Lanier smiled. He put his hand on Karen’s shoulder, both to reassure her and stop her from saying more. The gestures come easily enough, he thought. Why not the feeling?
They were off, cushioned in the free-form white interior of the shuttle, flying high above the dark Earth. In the sky, staring out across the black, ridged horizon, where bloom of stars met mountains, Lanier felt free. He hadn’t flown in years, had almost forgotten the feeling. As soon as the shuttle pointed its blunted nose straight up, and the view through the transparency in the hull tilted, his exhilaration changed to an opposite dread.
Space.