Eternity

by Greg Bear

  Rhita drew the gap in the curtains tighter, old nut-shell curtain rings rattling against the cane rod, and returned to her bed, feeling without reason a little more secure. Switching the screen back on, she surveyed the list. She had read or looked through virtually all of the two hundred and seven books listed.

  This time, however, her eyes alighted on a title she had not read. She could have sworn it was newly added. It said simply, “READ ME NOW.” She called it up on the screen.

  The index card preceding the display of the first page told her the volume was three hundred pages in length—about a hundred thousand words—and it was in Hellenic, not English, as all the other books in the cubes were. She halted the display of the index as she saw a flashing cursor next to a description she had not seen before. “Contents and catalog display suppressed until 4/25/49.”

  That had been two days before.

  Rhita pressed the keypad to read the first page.

  Dear Granddaughter,

  You have the name of my mother. Is it all my fancy someday you will meet her? When you were younger you must have thought I was a crazy old woman though I think you loved me. Now you have this, and I can talk to you though I have never gone home, not really. Some say even here that dying is going home.

  Imagine that world I have told you about, and you have read these books, if you are my granddaughter, and I know you are. You have read these books and they must tell you I made nothing up. All is true. There was a place called Earth. I did not come out of a whirlwind.

  I clung to this slate and the few blocks brought with me—all by accident, by chance!—for years when it seemed even to me I must be crazy. Now you are burdened by my quest. But all things are connected, even such far-away things as my world Earth and yours Gaia. My fancy could be important to you and all on Gaia. If there is a gate. And there will be again. They have come and gone on the clavicle like dust-devils. Who would taunt an old woman so?

  On certain days, I will leave you something here to read, like the unrolling of a scroll, to be revealed only that day and after.

  She could not get the machine to display any more of the large file’s contents. The machine had apparently been set to portion it out to her a bit at a time. Rhita turned off the slate and screwed her knuckles into her eyes. She could not get away from Patrikia. She had no life of her own.

  But if there was such a thing as a gate—

  And there was! Who could deny machines that spoke to her mind, or hundreds of books her grandmother could not possibly have imagined, much less written?

  If the gate was real, then there was more of a burden on her shoulders now than just responsibility to her grandmother. All the people on Gaia weighed her down.

  Rhita was beginning to imagine what such a thing as a gate would mean to this world. Not all that she imagined was pleasant. It would bring change, perhaps immense change…

  15

  Thistledown City

  The tracer transferred itself to Olmy’s library terminal and signaled with the black and white pict of a grinning terrier that it had completed its search. Olmy switched on blowers to collect the remnants of a meager cloud of pseudo-Talsit, pushed himself off the couch and stood before the teardrop terminal, concentrating on the tracer’s picted condensation of its findings.

  No relevant file sources in Axis Euclid or Thoreau or copies of library records of Nader and Central City. All file sources classified in Thistledown libraries; classification limit has expired, but no records of access to files since the Sundering. Last access-52 years remote from Axis City, no identification, but likely from noncorporeal in city memory. Thirty-two files containing references to Fifth Chamber Repository.

  By law, all security classifications in libraries and city memory storage were voided after one hundred years without application and approval for renewal. Olmy inquired of the tracer how many applications for extension had been made on the files. The tracer replied Four.

  The files were all older than four hundred years.

  “Records of file authors,” he requested.

  All author records deleted.

  That was highly unusual. Only a president or presiding minister could approve of deletion of authors or originators from file records in libraries or city memory storage; and even then, only for the most pressing reasons. Anonymity was not an approved concept in Hexamon history; too many of the Death’s perpetrators had hidden themselves away from responsibility before and after the holocaust.

  “Description of files.”

  All are brief reports, in words only.

  The time had come. Olmy was surprised to realize his reluctance. The truth might be worse than what he had imagined.

  “Show me the files in chronological order,” he said.

  It was worse.

  When he had finished and stored all the files in implant memory to mull over at leisure, he gave the tracer its reward—the free run of a simulated grassy field on Earth—and released the meager cloud of pseudo-Talsit into the room again.

  His decision was made infinitely more difficult by what the tracer had retrieved.

  Reading between the lines—the whole story was by no means contained in the files, which were adjunct files only, bare scraps left over after some hasty and none-too-thorough purge—Olmy put together his half-educated surmise.

  A living Jart had been captured some five centuries before, under what circumstances there was no knowing. It had died before being returned to Thistledown and its body had been preserved after its mentality was crudely downloaded. Not knowing Jart psychology or physiology, the downloading had been only partly successful. How integrated the Jart mentality was, how true to its original, not even its captors had known. They had even suspected the body; several researchers felt that Jarts, like humans, could adapt their biological forms and even their genetic makeup to fit the circumstances. Hence, the Jart’s physiology had been studied, but the studies were inconclusive; they had not been passed on to military commanders or other researchers.

  At first, the investigations into the downloaded mentality had been conducted in secure but relatively open situations, with perhaps ten or fifteen individual researchers. Nine had died in the process, two irretrievably—their implants hopelessly scrambled. Direct or indirect mental links with the downloaded personality had been forbidden at that point. Research, so encumbered, came almost to a halt.

  Even then, Olmy knew, indirect examination of mentalities had been a highly developed art. He found it difficult to believe that a Jart, fragmented or whole, could injure investigators in such circumstances. And yet, Beni had been killed and Mar Kellen damaged…

  Olmy controlled another hormonal surge. Were he not so altered and augmented, the surge would indicate a condition called fear.

  For centuries, there had been a law in cybernetic research: “For any program, there is a system such that the program cannot not know its system.” That is, a program, however complicated, even a human mentality, could not always be aware of the system it was running on, if no clues were provided by that system; it could only know the extent to which the system allowed it to run.

  But less than a century ago, Hexamon investigators headed by a brilliant team-leader, homorph Doria Fer Taylor, had found mathematical algorithms which allowed programs to completely determine the nature of their systems. Thus, a downloaded mentality could tell whether or not it had been downloaded; Olmy could, in theory, know under any circumstances whether his focus of personality was running in implants or in his organic mind.

  In theory, such algorithms, fully developed, could allow a mentality or program to change the nature of its system, to the extent that a system could be changed. Because of the existence of rogues in city memory, such information could have had disastrous consequences. The rogues—even one rogue—could have destroyed city memory and all that was in it. Human mentalities were not disciplined enough to be given such power. The researches had been classified. Olmy had learned of them throug
h his police work, when he had been ordered by the presiding minister to investigate whether any mentalities in remote gate memories—human or otherwise—had independently discovered such power. None had.

  Olmy searched his deepest levels of implant memory for the Taylor algorithms. He had often tucked away such items, trusting himself to keep them secure, unable to resist the chance to incorporate them into his personal data file. They were still available. He would have to purge them before—if—he ever downloaded into the current city memory.

  Not likely, he thought.

  Judging from what had happened to Beni and Mar Kellen, as well as the early researchers, the Jart mentality was aware of and fully capable of using the Taylor algorithms. But at the time of its capture, humans had not even known of their existence.

  The Jart mentality, still an unknown quantity, had been removed to complete isolation in the fifth chamber, to be studied now and then across some number of decades, apparently less than a century, and then to be forgotten, but for an occasional inquiry as to status. Too valuable to be destroyed, too dangerous to be investigated…

  The investigators had apparently all passed into city memory in their allotted times. Most had been Geshels. Equally apparent, all of them had chosen to go down the Way during the Sundering. That could explain why there had been no further inquiries in the last forty years; it did not explain twelve years of silence before that.

  He called up the complete list of data and looked at the file access dates. Why check on static files if not to see whether somebody else has accessed them?

  The access dates were all between five and thirty years apart over the last century and a half. The name of the accessor had been erased after the fact in each case; a clever trick, but perhaps not clever enough. Olmy requested the string length of the erased void in each access record. In every case, the name had filled fifteen spaces. It seemed probable that only one person had accessed the files for at least one hundred and fifty years, checking to see if the footprints were still hidden, if the dangerous skeleton in the closet was still secure.

  Someone, of course, could have accidentally stumbled on the security door in the fifth chamber, or found out about it as Mar Kellen had. But Mar Kellen had used code cracking techniques developed comparatively recently to open the door.

  In all likelihood, nobody in the Terrestrial Hexamon but Mar Kellen and now Olmy knew anything about the captured Jart.

  Mar Kellen was finding his way to an honorable obscurity.

  That left Olmy.

  16

  Gaia

  The Boulē conference on the Libyan attack on the Brukheion had been discouraging. Jewish militia stationed all around the Nilos delta had already shown their displeasure in demonstrations that bordered on mutiny; the Boulē was now reacting. Kleopatra, attended by her usual midge-cloud of counselors and advisors, had emerged from the session into the glare of lights wielded by an official Boulē recording crew. She had enough vanity to hate bright lights and cameras, and enough sense of duty to smile.

  Her position as queen was shaky indeed. She had long since come to regret the power she had regained for the Ptolemaic Dynasty in the past thirty years; power enough to take blame, yet not enough to assume control. She did not have the power to defy the Boulē completely and take charge of the military; yet she was held responsible by many groups if the Boulē military policy was a failure. Rumors of plots were thick in the air; she almost wished they would come true.

  The day did not improve when her Mouseion spy reported on how Rhita Berenikē Vaskayza was being treated.

  Her Imperial Hypsēlotēs had long since learned to take every possible advantage of a situation. She had suspected for over a decade that the Mouseion’s interests were drawing apart from her own, but not so far apart that they would be openly defiant. The Akademeia Hypateia on Rhodos was a thorn in the bibliophylax’s side; Kleopatra had thought she could provoke an interesting response, then, by allowing Patrikia’s granddaughter to come to the Mouseion. And if this young woman brought better news than Patrikia had…So be it.

  Either way, she was useful.

  But what the spy told his queen was infuriating.

  She listened to the spy’s testimony while seated on a campstool in her private study. Her scar whitened as her jaw muscles tightened. She had not believed that the bibliophylax Kallimakhos would be so willing to flout her authority.

  Kallimakhos had sent Rhita’s chosen didaskalos, a young physics and engineering professor named Demetrios, away on extended sabbatical, against his own expressed wishes. (Demetrios, the spy said, was a fine mathematician as well as a promising inventor, and had looked forward to working with the daughter of the sophē Patrikia.) Kallimakhos had then rudely treated Rhita, ignoring her privileged visitor’s status, forcing her to live separately from the Kelt bodyguard who might very well be necessary for her safety…

  Rhita Vaskayza, the spy said with some professional admiration, was bearing up well under these disgraces. “Is she a royal favorite?” the spy asked.

  “Do you need to know?” Kleopatra asked coldly.

  “No, my Queen. If she is a favorite, however, you have chosen an interesting woman to favor.”

  Kleopatra ignored the familiarity. “It’s time to play the chosen piece,” she said. With a deftly pointed finger, she ordered the spy from the room. A secretary appeared in the doorway. “Bring Rhita Berenikē Vaskayza to me, tomorrow morning. Treat her exceptionally well.” She hummed and stared at the ceiling, thinking what else she could do. Something for her simple satisfaction, without derailing any larger plans. “Send the tax auditors to the Mouseion. I want every administrator and didaskalos on the premises—understand that, only those who are immediately present—audited for tithe performance and royal taxes. With the sole exception of Kallimakhos. Tell him I wish to meet with him within the week. And see to it that any royalties and benefits transferred from palace funds to the Mouseion are delayed for three weeks.”

  “Yes, my Queen.” The secretary touched clasped hands to chin and angled back through the door.

  Kleopatra closed her eyes and stilled her dull anger with a slow breathy moan. She found herself wishing more and more for something apocalyptic, to cut cleanly through the political morass that was her life now. Neither supremely powerful, nor weak enough to be ignored, she had to ply her power like a sailor with a ragged boat on Lake Mareotis.

  “Bring me something distracting and wonderful, Rhita Vaskayza,” she murmured. “Something worthy of your grandmother.”

  The residence hall echoed with women’s voices speaking Hellenic, Aramaic, Aithiopian, and Hebrew. Today was the beginning of classes, yet Rhita had no didaskalos, no assignments, and hence, no classes beyond the basics accorded to all Mouseion students: orientation, language—of which she had no need—and Mouseion history. By the second hour of morning—beginning after sunrise—the hall was nearly empty, and she sat in a dark mood in her cramped room, wondering about the wisdom of coming to Alexandreia at all.

  She heard two pairs of heavy footsteps outside her door and felt a moment of anxiety. There was a rap on the doorframe, and a male voice inquired, “Rhita Berenikē Vaskayza?”

  “Yes,” she said, standing to face whoever might come in.

  “I’m here with your bodyguard,” the man said in polished common Hellenic. “Her Imperial Hypsēlotēs requests your presence by the sixth hour of this day.”

  Rhita opened the door and saw Lugotorix standing behind a tall, bulky Aigyptian in royal livery. The Kelt nodded at Rhita and she blinked. “Now?”

  “Now,” the Aigyptian confirmed.

  Lugotorix helped her gather the cases containing Patrikia’s Objects. She felt faintly ridiculous, having tried the Mouseion at all; but that had been her father’s strategy, at her mother’s suggestion, years back. Best not to approach her Imperial Hypsēlotēs directly, her mother had advised. Especially after the fiasco of the disappearing gates.

  A much larger
motorized wagon waited for her on the cobble road curving past the main archway of the residence hall. Three other Aigyptians, also in royal livery, carefully loaded her cases into the back. The Kelt took a seat beside the driver, and the guards stood on running boards. With a wind-horn roaring, she was driven from the grounds of the Mouseion, west to the palace.

  Leaving the main gate, she looked back and realized, with an intuitive shudder, that her brief sojourn in the Mouseion was at an end.

  17

  Thistledown

  Once, before the age of thirty, life had been bordered by walls of reasonable proportions; Garry Lanier had not had to face a constant barrage of explosive re-evaluations of reality and where he fit in. Since the arrival of the Stone, he had had to come to grips with mind-stretching truths so often, he had once thought nothing would amaze him any more.

  He lay in the bunk prepared for him by Svard, Korzenowski’s assistant. In the dark, on his back, half-covered by a sheet, he sighed and knew that he was not so jaded after all. The Russian’s story had flabbergasted him.

  Mirsky had returned, after traveling beyond the end of time and becoming at least a minor deity.

  He was an avatar, a reincarnated symbol of forces outside even Korzenowski’s comprehension.

  “Jesus,” Lanier said almost automatically. The name had lost considerable power in the past few decades. After all, the miracles at the foundation of Christianity were almost all duplicated weekly in the Terrestrial Hexamon. Technology had superseded religion.