by Greg Bear
How nice just to fly in the thin film of air, and avoid the larger issues. Flying was like a marvelous kind of sleep, above the hard reality of waking, but below the greater blackness of death…
Across the aisle, the Russian stared straight ahead, not bothering to examine the view, as if he had seen it all so often it could not affect him one way or the other. The Russian did not look thoughtful. He did not look concerned. There was no way to know what all this meant to him, or how he felt about the meeting with Korzenowski…or about returning to the Stone.
If he was Mirsky, his return to Thistledown should hold a true emotional charge. The last time he had entered the Stone, it had been through a fury of projectiles and laser beams, as part of the Russian invasion force, just before, perhaps as prelude to, the Death.
Lanier realized that if this was Mirsky, then from that fateful moment until he came to the valley, he had not seen Earth again.
The flight, smooth and quiet, seemingly effortless, did not reduce Lanier’s sense of unreality. If he is Mirsky, where has he been since—what has he seen?
12
Gaia
The Mouseion had expanded considerably into the Neapolis and Brukheion—the Hellenic quarter—since ancient times, and had even set a foot—the school of medicine—into the Aigyptian district. The buildings of the school of medicine, the Erasistrateion, abutted the smaller, less reputable Library of Domestic Oikoumenē Studies, the one-time Serapeion. The university, research center and library—actually, seven buildings spread around the original library—occupied a square about four stadia on a side in the middle of the city. Scattered throughout the older marble and granite and limestone buildings were new, boxy iron and glass centers for the study of science and mechanics. On top of the steep hill of the former Paneion, the university had installed, five centuries before, a huge stone observatory. It was more a relic than a functioning center of astronomical research, but its grandeur was impressive.
Rhita’s neck ached from twisting back and forth. Her carriage rolled with an irregular rhythm over the cobbled and slated paths, between feathery trees and stately date palms. The sun dipped in the west, throwing an orange light across the city, just as she had seen it the day before on entering the Great Harbor. Smoke drifted in thin dark ribbons from a tall brick stack appended to one science building. Students in white and yellow academic robes—mostly male—passed them on the path, eyeing Rhita curiously. She returned their stares frankly, calmly, though feeling none too calm inside. She didn’t like this place much—not now, perhaps not ever—and that bothered her. This was the center of culture and science in the Western World, after all. There was much for her to learn in Alexandreia—if the circumstances had been such that she could just study.
The oldest intact building in the entire Mouseion, the original central library, now housed the administrative offices and academic quarters. Once it had been ornate and lovely; now it looked a little bedraggled, though still magnificent, three stories of marble and onyx, decorated with gold-leaf-covered bosses and thousand-year-old grotesques from the time of the Second Occupation, during the Third Parsa Uprising. Sheets of paler marble had been added less than fifty years before to repair time-damaged walls. Thus far, none of the Libyan rockets falling on the delta had struck the Mouseion grounds.
The path led through an archway into the courtyard, polished granite and onyx paving stones arranged in a checkerboard cross with exotic plantings from Aithiopia and the Southern Great Sea occupying the corners, and an Arsakid Parsa stone lion fountain adorning the center.
The cart lurched to a stop and she stepped down. A young, small man in a black tunic and Teutonic-style leggings—a popular street fashion in the city now—came forward, a large toothy grin on his narrow brown face. “I am very pleased to meet the granddaughter of the sophē Patrikia,” he said, dipping forward slightly and passing his hand over his head in salute. “My name is Seleukos, and I am from Nikaea near Hippo. I am assistant to the bibliophylax. Welcome to the Library.”
“Thank you,” Rhita said. He dipped again and beckoned her to follow. She closed her eyes briefly, checking on the status of the clavicle—it had not been moved or approached—and then walked after the young man.
The ground-floor office of the bibliophylax was not large for his station. Three male secretaries worked busily at a triangle of desks in one corner, beneath the light of an open window. Beside them, a press reaching to the ceiling overflowed with stacks of papers. A large electric graphomekhanos hummed and clunked on a heavy wooden stand beside the press. The bibliophylax himself worked behind a four-part Ioudeian hand-carved cedar screen, beneath the largest window in the room, in the opposite corner. The young man ushered her politely behind the screen.
The bibliophylax raised his shaven head and surveyed her coolly, then smiled the merest hint of a smile. He stood and passed his hand over his head. Rhita did likewise, and took a withy-cane seat at his request.
“I trust everything is in order with your quarters?” he asked. She nodded, reluctant to quibble about small things. “It is an honor to have you here.” He pulled forward a file—a finger’s-width of papers pressed between two paper-board sheets—and pulled out a long document. She recognized it as the transcript of her Akademeia studies and appended progress report. “You are a distinguished student indeed, especially in the area of mathematics and physics, I see. And you have chosen a similar curriculum here. Our professors have much to offer you. We are, after all, a much larger institution than the Akademeia, and we draw our teachers from around the Oikoumenē, and even outside.”
“I look forward to beginning my studies.”
“One thing interests me. You made an unusual request, even before you arrived,” the bibliophylax observed. “Besides your appointment to the office of the mekhanikos Zeus Ammōn Demetrios, unusual in itself, you wish a private audience with the Imperial Hypsēlotēs. Can you tell me the purpose of your visit to her?”
Before Rhita could speak, the bibliophylax raised a hand and said, “It is our business, because we look after the welfare of all students in the Mouseion.”
She closed her mouth, waited for a moment, and then said, “I bring a private message from my grandmother.”
“She’s deceased,” the bibliophylax observed, deadpan.
“Through my father. A message the sophē felt the queen would be interested in.” She paused, her lips set in a grim line. She could feel opposition radiating from the bibliophylax, even a professional kind of hatred. “A private message.”
“Of course.” His face soured slightly, and he flipped through more papers. “I have reviewed your course requests, and they are all in order. You are seeking a fifth in mathematics, and a third in physics, as well as a second in science of city leadership. Can you handle such an academic load without strain?”
“It’s similar to my load at the Akademeia.”
“Ah, but Mouseion professors will not be awed by your ancestry. They might treat you less leniently.”
“I was not treated leniently on Rhodos,” Rhita said, keeping her irritation in check. She wanted to laugh at the man, kick her slippers off and show him the bottom of her foot—but she stayed outwardly composed, though her stomach twisted.
“No, I am sure you weren’t,” the bibliophylax said. His small black eyes dared her to say something more.
“I do have one problem,” she said, facing his stare.
“Oh?”
“My manservant. He is with me for protection, at the direct request of my father, yet we have been separated—”
“No servants or guards are allowed in the Mouseion. Not even for royalty.”
As it happened, there were no royal youths studying in the Mouseion; the queen was childless, and most of the rest of the royal family had long since retired to Kypros for safety.
“Please feel free to consult this office at any time,” the bibliophylax concluded abruptly, closing her file and slipping it into a small square withy basket on the left
hand corner of his desk. He smiled and passed his hand over his head, dismissing her.
When she returned to her quarters, she sat in the cool of the room for an hour, trying to regain her composure. The Objects had not been disturbed, but could she count on complete privacy and security for much longer? She did not trust the bibliophylax; the only hope she had was that the queen had already taken up her case, and was protecting her. Whatever, she hoped her audience would be soon.
She suspected, once she told the queen what she knew—and demonstrated its truth to her—that she would not long remain a student in the Mouseion. She would no longer be allowed the luxury of scholarship and studies.
Discouraged, she left her room to attend the meeting of the women’s council. The least she hoped to accomplish there was to get the lock back.
Is everybody here my enemy? she wondered.
13
Thistledown
The Thistledown’s axis bore hole opened tiny and black in the middle of the vast depression marking the asteroid’s south pole. The opposite pole—“north” for a sense of direction only, since the asteroid had no natural magnetic field—was now a gaping, rough-edged crater with the seventh chamber opened wide to space. Using ships equipped with traction fields, the Hexamon had long since swept the debris of the Sundering away from the seventh chamber, making it serviceable as a spaceport. Someday, the orbiting precincts would need extensive repair; the seventh chamber dock would be ideal.
For small ships like the shuttle on which the Russian and Lanier rode, the south pole entrance was more practical.
Lanier hardly noticed the darkness swallowing the craft. His mind was still elsewhere. He felt a stronger queasiness, and a flash of anger at his eternal unease. He closed his eyes tight, then opened them suddenly as the shuttle latched onto the rotating interior dock.
“We are here,” the Russian said.
The first chamber had changed little. Even the de-rotation and re-rotation of the Thistledown had left it relatively unmarred. Of course, there had been little but sandy desert on the first chamber’s floor in the first place. As they departed the elevator, a steady, cool breeze fell on them from the face of the chamber’s southern cap, a great, demeaning gray wall behind them. Around the axis shimmered the hazy white light of the plasma tube, twenty kilometers above them where they now stood on the “valley” floor.
To each side, the chamber stretched as flat and normal as could be imagined for a dozen kilometers, then with a slow, lazy vault began to creep upward, finally rising in an impossible vertical curve to meet overhead, behind the plasma tube, like some bridge for gods. After a good many years—how long had it been since his last visit, ten, twelve?—the dimensions of the Thistledown’s inner chambers struck Lanier all over again. He remembered the feeling of those awful months before the Death, when he had been swamped by administrative duties, by intrigues on Earth and within the Stone, by mystery and foreknowledge. He had called it being Stoned.
The rush of memories did not cheer him. He found it difficult to believe men had ever dwarfed themselves by such a creation. That was how he felt; small, overpowered. Stoned again.
They were greeted by a tall man, skeletally slender and very bald, an assistant to Korzenowski. “My name is Svard. Ser Korzenowski sends his regrets that he does not meet you personally.” He gave the Russian a quick appraising stare, then he led them toward a tractor. “The Engineer has a research compound in the middle of the valley, and he invites you to join him there.”
They boarded the tractor. The eight-passenger vehicle rode over the sand on a traction field, not treads or tires; it had been manufactured aboard Thistledown and was sleek and beautiful, with a pearly white exterior and a soft, adaptable gray interior that shaped itself to spoken or picted commands.
Svard wore a pictor hidden within his low collar. Lanier had never quite learned the art of picting. “I trust you’ve had an interesting journey, Mr. Lanier, Mr. Mirsky,” Svard said. Lanier nodded abstractedly. The tractor floated smoothly and swiftly over low scrub and brown and white patches of sand and soil.
“What keeps Ser Korzenowski busy now?” Lanier asked. “We haven’t spoken for some time.”
“He has been doing research,” Svard said.
“For the Hexamon?” Lanier asked.
“In part. Mostly to satisfy his own curiosity.”
“Who pays the bills?”
Svard smiled over his shoulder. “Really, Mr. Lanier. You should know that Ser Korzenowski has—what is the old phrase?—carte blanche to spend any reasonable amount, either in resources or money. He was given that privilege before his death, and the circumstances did not change with his resurrection.”
“I see,” Lanier said.
Directly ahead lay a complex of low, flat buildings, their walls gently curved to merge with the sand. The air above the complex shimmered like a mirage; was it because of rising heat, Lanier wondered, or something else? He squinted through the tractor’s transparent nose, trying to define the shimmer.
The tractor stopped a few dozen meters from the southernmost building and eased to the sand with a low sigh. The door flowed open and Mirsky stepped out first, Lanier following, watching the man’s reaction closely. The Russian looked around the valley floor, glancing up at the plasma tube. He knows the Stone, Lanier thought. He’s been here before. It doesn’t hold pleasant memories for him.
Svard bent low to exit the tractor and rose gracefully to his full height, large eyes blinking. “This way. Ser Korzenowski is in his private quarters.”
Lanier savored the extra spring in his step. The Stone’s spin imparted a pull of six-tenths of Earth’s gravity on the floor of each chamber, one of the few qualities of the Thistledown that had always been pleasant to him. He remembered, decades ago—before the Death—exercising in the first chamber, swinging vigorously on parallel bars…That reminded him of his once excellent physical conditioning. He had been a gymnast in college.
A hundred meters to the east of the main complex, a smaller anonymous blister of white rose a few meters out of the sand. Svard escorted them along a gravel path and picted a greeting to the dome’s receptor as they approached. A green icon of an outspread hand floated before each of them. “He wants us to come right in,” Svard said. A square door in the wall curled aside, and Konrad Korzenowski emerged, dressed in a simple dark blue caftan.
Lanier had not seen him in person in over thirty years. He had changed little in that time; a simple, spare frame, round face topped by a short crop of pepper-gray hair, a sharp, long nose and penetrating dark eyes. The eyes were more haunted—and haunting—than when they had first met. Having absorbed part of Patricia Vasquez’s mystery, that part of the human personality which could not be synthesized, Korzenowski had seemed to carry an ineffable aspect of the mathematician. His look had been enough to spook Lanier. Patricia was still discernible in the Engineer’s makeup, if anything, more pronounced. What does he feel, with part of her making up his core?
On Earth before the Death, heart-transplants had been commonplace before the perfection of prostheses. How does one feel about carrying a transplanted part of someone’s soul?
“Good to see you again, Ser Lanier,” Korzenowski said, shaking his hand. He hardly glanced at Mirsky, treating him less as a guest and more perhaps as an unresolved curiosity. He beckoned them enter and take seats. The free-form white interior of Korzenowski’s quarters was cluttered with white and gray cylinders of all sizes, draped with lumps of what looked like white bread dough. He pulled a few of these aside—as he lifted them, they elongated in his hands, hissing faintly—and ordered the floor to form chairs, which shaped themselves rapidly. The Russian sat and folded his arms, appearing at ease. The trace of apprehension he had exhibited outdoors was gone.
Svard made his farewells, picted something rapidly to the Engineer, and departed. Korzenowski folded his arms decisively, echoing Mirsky’s gesture, and stood before Lanier and the Russian. The Engineer’s expressi
on had become stern, irritated.
“We have a genuine puzzle here, Ser Lanier,” he said, regarding the Russian. “Is this truly Pavel Mirsky, or a clever imitation?” He looked sharply at Lanier. “Do you know?”
“No,” Lanier said.
“What’s your intuition?”
Lanier didn’t answer for a moment, a little startled. “I can’t really say. If I have any intuition, it’s fogged by all the impossibilities.”
“I know for a fact that Pavel Mirsky went down the Way in one half of the Axis City, and that the Way closed up behind him, and all who accompanied him. I know there has been no gate opened to this Earth since. If this is Pavel Mirsky, he’s returned to us by some avenue we can’t begin to guess at.”
The Russian shifted a little in his seat, folded his hands in his lap, and nodded agreement, content to be spoken of as if he were not there.
“He seems self-satisfied,” Korzenowski said, rubbing his chin speculatively. “Cat with a canary feather. I hope he pardons a candid examination. Our instruments tell us that he is solid and human, down to his atomic structure. He is not a ghost in the old or new sense, and he is not a projection of any kind familiar to us.” Korzenowski uttered these observations as if going through a string of obvious truths simply to get them out of the way. “His genetic structure is that of Pavel Mirsky, as recorded in the medical records of the third chamber city. Are you Lieutenant General Pavel Mirsky?”
The Russian glanced between them. “The simplest answer is yes. I think it is close to the truth.”
“Do you come here of your own free will?”
“With the same qualifications, yes.”
“How did you come here?”
“That’s more complicated,” the Russian said.
“Do we have time to listen, Ser Lanier?”
“I do,” Lanier said.
“I would like Ser Olmy to be here,” Mirsky said.