Eternity

by Greg Bear

  Within his implant memories, isolated from his primary personality, the freshly created partial conducted its more cautious investigation of the Jart mentality.

  Three hours later, he stood beneath a thousand-year-old redwood, a light mist drifting from spinward, his feet sinking into ancient loam.

  Whatever isolation and abstraction he had felt before, after his months of research on nonhuman psychology, was nothing compared to his sense of self-exile now. He kept thinking of Tapi, perhaps even now working through his incarnation exams. He did not think he would see his son for some time, if ever; or Suli Ram Kikura. It seemed unlikely their paths would cross.

  He felt the redwood’s thick, tough bark and wondered if he should feel a kinship with this old tree. In truth, he felt a kinship with nothing, not even his fellows, and that disturbed him. It was barely possible his implant regulators were not working properly, and that he was experiencing an unhealthy mental state. Just to be sure, he ran a test string through his primary mind and through the regulatory implants.

  No inappropriate states, the results told him.

  Merely extreme stress and danger.

  All of these trees had survived the re-rotation after the Sundering. They had lasted through temporary weightlessness, floods, chaotic weather, and years of neglect, and now they seemed to thrive. Why couldn’t he feel simple encouragement from their example?

  Why can’t I feel anything at all?

  A scheduled status report emerged from behind the barriers. His partial sent a string of information indicating successful penetration of the Jart’s cultural and personal memory stores. In addition, the partial had exchanged cautious “greetings.”

  Olmy sat back against a tree and took a deep breath. A kind of dialogue was happening a lot sooner than he had expected. The Jart, for the moment, was finding some advantage or other in cooperation. He might soon be able to tell how much of the Jart’s ostensible memories were real and how much manufactured; it seemed unlikely the Jart would willingly give up actual information about its kind. But then, everything about this situation was unlikely…and Olmy still had no idea what a Jart’s psychology was like, what it was capable or not capable of doing.

  When the partial transferred its findings to Olmy, for a time, as he sat with eyes open, he saw both the forest and

  Great prism-shaped Jart flawships, moving with majestic slowness over a colonized segment of the Way

  (again in several visual layers, but these more ordered, less frantic)

  and dancing clouds of midge-like attendant machines and vehicles moving from the flawship to broad curving ramps on the floor of the Way.

  With a start, replaying the memory, Olmy realized that beneath the nearest ramp was an inverted image of the exterior of a planet. He tried to reinterpret but could not; it seemed that at least in this case, Jart gates were not circular holes, but slashes in the Way several kilometers wide. There was always the possibility that all the information he had received this far was deception, that the Jart itself was a ruse; one way to find out would be to ask Korzenowski about the possibility of elongated gates in the Way. Even if they were possible, other details might be distorted…

  Another memory:

  mingling with other beings

  (Jarts? Clients of the Jarts?)

  in a thick green liquid, much smaller silver worms passing between them, occasionally wrapping around one individual or another and cinching tight enough to crease flesh. Some of the beings resembled the Jart body in the fifth chamber memory store’s second room; others were flat white specked black carpets with undulating fringes, flying through the liquid, or trilaterally symmetric “starfish” with flexible mandibles or fingers on the end of each arm, or thick shapeless extrusions from colorless tubes…

  All seemed to have some remote and nightmarish sea floor as a common origin, and none of them did anything Olmy could even begin to understand.

  There were other images, too many to experience for the moment. Storing these findings without examination, he moved on to the exchanged “greeting.”

  Partial: (Replay of capture memories and a string signifying awareness of the Jart’s existence and status.) Jart: >I am beyond reach of duty? Where is duty expediter label?< Partial: You are >beyond reach of< all your kind. Jart: >What is brother/father status? Is this communication from command oversight?< Partial: >Brother/father status< not known. Not command oversight. You are captured and under examination. Jart: >Acknowledge personal status as captured.<

  The partial then sent a long list of questions. Those were being processed now. At least, for the time being, he had an illusion of progress.

  The partial passed along another string:

  Jart: >Cooperation and transfer of status information? Replacement of command oversight and command?<

  This seemed to be a kind of surrender. Olmy marked the phrases “duty expediter,” “command oversight” and the isolated “command,” wondering if they were levels in Jart society. The partial had agreed to the condition offered by the Jart, subject to further explanation. The limits and methods were being worked out now, with the barriers still up and not likely to be lowered except for the transfer of more findings and status checks.

  Olmy dug his hand into the loam and stared up at the tree branches overhead. All of his defenses were on alert. It was possible the Jart was simply preparing for another assault.

  Somehow, he didn’t think it was that simple. Having failed to immediately kill or subdue Olmy, the Jart was apparently taking a different tack. Where it would lead, Olmy had no idea.

  But a detailed exchange was beginning.

  24

  Gaia

  Elamite Bagdade was a ruin slowly being rebuilt by the Mesopotamian Nekhemites, who had moved west in armored, mechanized hordes and sacked the city twenty years before, while the Oikoumenē concerned itself with one of the endless Libyan incursions on its own borders. The Nekhemites had proved themselves barely able to control the effete but efficient people they had so piously slaughtered in the name of their faceless, demanding god; they had then turned to Kleopatra, one of the few queens left on Gaia, and requested that she be a “bride to Nekhem.” The request was so ludicrous and so opportune that it could not be denied; henceforward, her Imperial Hypsēlotēs was worshiped in effigy in Bagdade, and Oikoumenē money and technical assistance flowed into the ancient city. In return, the Nekhemites guarded the frontiers of the Hunnos Republic and Nordic Rhus.

  Jamal Atta thought it very unlikely they would face any trouble in Bagdade, and indeed, after three hours of flight from Damaske, the turbaned and red-robed attendants at the new aerodromos gave them all the fuel they needed, and maps of the Kazakh, Kirghiz and Uzbeki territories of Nordic Rhus. As they departed sad Bagdade, the Kelt bent over to investigate the floor and held up something, grinning foolishly. Tiny plastic statues of Kleopatra mating with Nekhem had been tossed through the beecraft doors along with their supplies.

  The Kelt gave her his find. Rhita fingered it thoughtfully, fascinated by its crude vigor. Inelegant, ignorant, vicious and cruel beyond her experience, yet honest and full of life, the Nekhemites might someday own all the middle lands of the old world. She hoped they had deposed Nekhem by that time. He was an ugly god.

  From Bagdade, they crossed the land of the Nekhem and picked up a tailwind, which brought them in two hours to Raki, Raghae of old, once again on Oikoumenē territory. Raki was an isolated city on an island of peace heavily fortified on all its borders. There, Oresias learned from a military field inspector that no news had been heard from Alexandreia, and that their air transport escorts—an aerial tanker and an old cargo plane that would be abandoned—were ready to accompany them from that point.

  They now began their incursion into truly dangerous territory. Fifteen hundred years before, the Persians and the Oikoumenē in Europe had been swept to the west and then driven to the seas—the Priddeneian Sea and the Middle Sea—by the Alanoi and Hunnoi, working their nomadi
c peoples and subject Teutonic tribes into a vast mobile nation of warriors. An empire had been set up from the shores of Galleia and Kimbria to the great walls of Chin, the greatest the world had ever known—and the most fragile. In fifty years, that empire had vanished like a dream of blood and smoke, and the Skythians and Nordic Rhus had moved into the void. The Alanoi and Avars had finally held their ground east of the Kaspian, and the Hunnoi north and east of them. For a thousand years, these territories had been in flux, but had kept their basic shapes, until the arrival of the Aigaian Turkmenoi, pirates and ravagers of Hellas.

  The Turkmenoi had carved their own niche, transferring their piratic tendencies to the Kaspian, and it was over that slender mountainous territory between the Altaic republics that the beecraft now flew. The Turkmenoi recognized no one as their betters or their masters. They isolated themselves and tried to hold back the incursions of the outside world. There would be no mercy for gullcraft should they be forced down; but it was unlikely the Turkmenoi could muster such weapons.

  Rhita looked at the hundreds of miles of broad naked mountains passing below, and felt lonelier than ever before. She realized the variability of human thought and human history, the contradictions of cultures, as unmappable as these rocky passes and pinnacles, and it seemed that humans would never share a single truth. That meant either there was no single truth, or humans would kill themselves trying to find it…. Either way, thinking about it depressed her.

  Her exhilaration of a few hours before had faded into dark unease. She was tired; sleep on the beecraft was not refreshing, accompanied as it was by the unending roar of the jets. Her stomach was touchy again; she did not feel it was safe to eat any more, yet she was hungry. She complained about nothing, but the flight was dragging on and on…

  They refueled in the air near the northeastern border of Turkmenia. That process was interesting, what little she could see of it. The tanker veered away from their group and flew back to Raghae, leaving them with the cargo plane as escort. So far, despite her unease, she had to admit the expedition was going well.

  Against her will, her thoughts wandered to home. She had never had opinions one way or the other about the Oikoumenē it had always been there; it seemed to be immortal. Within her lifetime, there had never been disaster broad enough to affect her world. Still, Rhodos had been peaceful for only eighty years. As a youngster, she had swum in huge rain-filled pockmarks in the hills, shell-holes from bombardments older than almost anyone alive. But if the queen herself was in peril…

  The entire Oikoumenē could change its character. There might not be a home she could safely return to. Rhita squirmed on her seat, thinking of war, rebellion, death.

  The mountains below gave way to ochre flatlands, with raw, rounded naked-looking hills and rocky promontories. The ochre became patchy green, and long ribbons of green bordered shallow streambeds. “We’ve passed over the southern extremes of the Hunnos and Alanos republics,” Oresias said, returning from the front cabin.

  They swooped close to ground level for twenty minutes. Atta seemed especially forlorn, shaking his head and pounding his hands despairingly on his knees, waiting for the Nordic Rhus Uzbek and Kazakh watchtowers to sense them. But defenses never appeared; they apparently had passed through, either unseen or a blip too small to be credible.

  “One hour,” Oresias said. The jets droned and wind rushed by, whistling through cracks in the beecraft hull. She tried to sleep again, but could only close her eyes, not bring on oblivion. She ached all over from tension and trying to hide how uncomfortable she was. The men sat still as statues, stoic, faces dull, rocking back and forth in unison as the beecraft maneuvered or hit a pocket of air.

  How could she be so uneasy, and yet so bored? She might die, and not be excited when death caught her…. Would death—she imagined a large black serpent with skulls for teeth—recoil from such a cool, calm victim? Was it against death’s principles to eat the uncaring?

  Looking out the window. Squinting in the sunlight. Using the can in the back again and voiding it, watering the steppes. Sitting, strapping herself in.

  “How close?” Oresias asked, bending over her. She had managed to fall asleep somehow, dreaming of turtles flying. She rubbed her eyes and gripped the clavicle. The globe seemed much larger now, and the sweep across the surface much shorter, with more and more strange symbols and abstract shapes flashing by, unexplained. Then she was in the swale, and the cross was still there, vibrant red.

  “Let me sit up front,” she said. They made way for her to the kybernetes’ cabin, and the assistant gave her his seat. She clutched the clavicle, feeling its responses, and looked out over the endless grasslands. “Down, please,” she said.

  “How far?” the kybernetes asked.

  “Slow down, and descend to…a hundred arms? Less?”

  She looked back at Oresias. Demetrios had crowded in the hatch behind him, eyes wide, face still pale.

  “Fifty arms,” Oresias said. “Will we see it?” he asked her.

  “I don’t know. It might not be large…but I’ll know when we’re there.”

  The two beecraft slowed and descended, while the cargo plane and tanker began to make wide turns over the landscape, flying above them every few minutes as they searched. Rhita concentrated on the prairie, trying to match the terrain with what she felt in the clavicle…an exercise not really necessary, as it turned out.

  “Here,” she said. “Stop here.” The clavicle had simply told her, in no way she could specify, that they were over the site. The beecraft overshot and she guided them back, until both craft were within a hundred and fifty arms of each other, and the site lay beneath them, recognizable now: a grassy fertile swale around a small muddy streambed. She could not see the gate with her eyes, but the clavicle told her its precise position.

  “Let’s land,” Oresias instructed the kybernetes. The kybernetes spoke with his counterparts on the other beecraft, and they descended the last fifty arms, touching down with a gentle bump on the grass, their blades causing rippling waves to spread and clash between them.

  “Stop your engines,” Atta instructed from behind Oresias. “We want silence. We’ve come here like a horde of drunken demons. No sense overdoing it.”

  “Is there a place for the gullcraft?” Oresias asked Rhita. She was confused for a moment—how could she know?—when she remembered that the clavicle could tell her. In the clavicle’s display, she flew over the simplified landscape and searched for a flat, undimpled area several stadia in length for the plane to land. “Northeast a few hundred arms,” she said. “It looks smooth, though there’s probably a few holes…might be rough.”

  “From which direction?” Oresias asked.

  “They should fly in from the south. They’ll see it—it’s quite broad.”

  “Wish them luck,” Oresias instructed the kybernetes as he relayed her message. “Is it safe to go out?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Rhita said, though she trembled. Not seeing the gate with her eyes disturbed her. She could not tell anything about it except its position.

  Perhaps it’s nothing at all.

  The doors were pushed open and a sweet, clean cool breeze blew into the stuffy interior. Grass-smell like a horse barn. Tang of something else, wet soil perhaps.

  From horizon to horizon, the prairie steppe rolled with dominant confidence, ignoring them, ignoring all humans, concerned only with its dreaming fecundity. Its surface provided some of the richest land on Gaia, where water was available. To the west, a clean orange-yellow sun was within half an hour of falling below the horizon. The sky was cloudless and pure, the blue of Athene’s hemline spread over her domain, with a few bright stars or perhaps planets twinkling in the expanse, drops of glitter from Aphrodite’s makeup box.

  The cargo plane made its descent to ground a couple of stadia distant, followed by the tanker, their motors obscenely loud in this calm, this aloofness.

  They stood, all the expedition, beneath the still blade
s of the beecraft, looking down the gentle slope into the swale. They had arrived at their destination without real difficulty. Nobody, judging from their expressions, expected the absence of trouble to continue. Atta kept glancing at the horizon all around, one heavy eyebrow lifted doubtfully.

  The Kelt stood beside Rhita with his weapon ready. The other palace guards followed a few moments after, expressionless, alert. Birds returned to the grass, tiny feather bullets shy and curious.

  Rhita lifted her clavicle. “It’s there,” she said. She swallowed. “I’ll go down and look at it. Nobody comes with me…except him.” She indicated the Kelt. It would deeply insult her bodyguard to keep him away when she walked into danger.

  Demetrios stepped forward, still pale from his ordeal on the beecraft. “I’d like to go with you,” he said. “I’m here to make an opinion about what we’re seeing…I’m useless if I just stand here.”

  Rhita was too tired and nervous to object. “Just Lugotorix and you, then,” she said, hoping there wouldn’t be any more brave men volunteering. There weren’t. Oresias and Atta stood at the edge of the swale, arms folded, surrounded by the beecraft crew and kybernetes and the other expedition members, while Rhita, the Kelt and Demetrios walked down the gentle slope to the muddy streambed.

  Not of her own volition, Rhita lifted the clavicle into a better position and carried it before her. She saw the gate in the display as a red circle now, barely five arms ahead of them. “Is it close?” Demetrios asked.

  Rhita pointed. “Right there.” She could finally make it out with her eye, an almost invisible lens floating about eight arms above the ground, slightly darker than the sky around it. It seemed quiescent, but still it terrified her.

  The clavicle told her things she barely understood, and she had to ask it silently for a repeat. Not using words, it informed her again that this was an incomplete gate, requiring very little energy to maintain; a test gate, through which probes might be dropped and samples taken. It was not large enough for anything wider than a hand to pass through, and it was not at this moment open for passage anyway.