Eternity

by Greg Bear

“Yes,” Oresias said.

  “Our strategos, he wishes a word with you—you are Oresias?”

  “Yes.”

  “You command with this arabios Jamal Atta?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why are you here?” The bald-headed rider leaned forward with an expression of intense, solicitous interest. Then he leaned back, shaking his sword vigorously. “No. You tell the strategos, with the arabios, all together!”

  Oresias climbed down from the hatch and followed the trio across the grass, around the beecraft, to where Atta conversed with the man in the wool coat.

  Rhita still had half her attention on the clavicle display. The circles spinning around the cross had become a blur; that, the clavicle told her, was an indication of the strength of the gate. A great deal of energy was being expended. She could not see the swale or the gate directly.

  “Something’s happening,” she told Demetrios. He knelt beside her, hair dripping rain. They all resembled drowned cats. He held out his hand, and she released the clavicle to clasp it, then pull it down to touch a handle. His eyes grew large.

  “God!” he said. “It’s a nightmare.”

  “I guess the Tatars don’t see anything unusual,” Rhita surmised. “But it’s getting wider, stronger.”

  “Why?”

  “Something’s going to come through,” she said.

  “Maybe more people like your grandmother,” Lugotorix said. He laid the machine pistol behind the winch housing, out of sight but quick to hand; not, however, immediately in hand, in case they were searched.

  Rhita shook her head, feeling hot, almost feverish.

  They are not human, the clavicle told her. They do not use human methods on the gate.

  Demetrios stared at her, having heard the message as well, but not knowing what to make of it.

  How soon? she asked.

  The gate is open. When they will pass through cannot be known.

  27

  Thistledown, Fourth Chamber

  There was no time to worry about the Jart’s almost total cooperation with his partial; Olmy could hardly keep up with the flow of information they were exchanging. Some risk was involved; a particularly subtle corrosive or worm could be embedded in the Jart’s flood of information, and might even make it past Olmy’s filters and other defenses, but that was a risk Olmy was willing to take.

  The exchange was not one-way. Olmy’s partial was providing the Jart with selected information about humans.

  Physically, Olmy sat on a rock by a narrow streamlet, tubelight filtering through a haze of pollen that dusted the quiet pool near his feet. Mentally, he explored the labyrinth of Jart social strata, convinced by now that the Jart’s information was accurate and not made-up. It was too convincing, too true to what little humans had learned about their long-time adversaries in the Way.

  This Jart was a modified expediter. Expediters carried out orders passed through duty expediters, slightly different in mentality and form. An expediter might be thought of as a laborer, although their tasks were often non-physical; expediters might just as often be assigned thought processing as physical work. Duty expediters designed practical ways of carrying out policy. They decided who should be called up from a pool of expediters, who were stored, Olmy learned, in a kind of city memory, but kept inactive. If physical forms were required for their labor, they were assigned to bodies which might be either mechanical, biological, or a mix of the two.

  Another description of another kind of body existed which Olmy was not sure he understood: the translation came across as mathematical form, but was not complete by any means.

  The Jart was not above holding back key information. Neither was Olmy.

  Above duty expediters was command. Command made policy and foresaw the results through intense simulation and modeling. Command was always made up of Jarts in their original natural bodies, without augmentation of any kind. They were mortal and allowed to die of old age. They were never downloaded. Olmy puzzled at this bottleneck in an otherwise extremely advanced and amorphous group of beings; why not give what was obviously an important level in the strata more flexibility, and more capabilities than they naturally had? He made a note to have his partial ask the Jart about this.

  Above command and all other ranks of Jarts was command oversight. At first, Olmy could not understand what role command oversight played. Individuals in this rank were immobile, lacked any bodies, and resided permanently in a kind of memory storage different from that where inactive expediters were kept. Command oversight Jarts—if they could be called Jarts at all—were stripped of all but pure reasoning faculties and rigorously modified for their tasks. Apparently they gathered information from all levels of the strata, examined it, made judgments of goals achieved and efficacy of actions, and presented “recommendations” to command.

  In all of Jart cybernetic technology, as far as Olmy was being informed, there were no artificial programs; all processing was accomplished by Jart mentalities which had, at one time or another, occupied natural and original Jart bodies. However far from their natural origins, however duplicated, modified and customized, these mentalities always had a connection with their original memories. It was possible, then, that there were Jarts still active who remembered a time before their occupation of the Way, who perhaps remembered the Jart home world.

  If there had been a single home world…

  The Jarts might not be a single species, but a combination of many speicies—a kind of volvox of beings and cultures.

  The only level within the strata allowed to breed naturally was command. No impression of what command looked like came through in the information; Olmy was beginning to realize that understanding Jart physiology was much less important than humans had once thought.

  Jarts, far more even than humans, had superseded their physical origins; most had been consumed by their cybernetic structures.

  But in all honesty, Olmy could see that had the Infinite Hexamon continued its development, humans might have ended up in a society not qualitatively different from that of the Jarts. They might yet; neo-Geshels were pushing the Terrestrial Hexamon to return to the old ways.

  Did freedom or individuality mean anything at all in such a culture? Another note, another question.

  In all the information, Olmy found nothing that could be considered directly strategic: nothing about the Jart activities in the Way, about their trading partners (if any) or their ultimate goals (again, if any). He decided it would be best not to press for this information until he saw fit to provide the Jart with similar insight.

  It was a kind of dance, this exchange of information. The moves had started out awkwardly, rapidly become fast and furious, and might soon slow to a measured back-and-forth rhythm.

  For the time being, there was almost total cooperation. Olmy doubted that would last; the Jart had its mission, after all, and probably suspected that a greal deal of time had passed.

  Vigilance was the order of the hour.

  28

  Earth

  There was no physical sensation when the shuttle lifted off from the landing field at Christchurch. Karen Farley Lanier closed her eyes briefly and listened to the exclamations of the delegates, many of whom had never flown until the last few weeks, much less traveled in space. They would spend seven hours in transit before docking with the Stone—Thistledown, she corrected herself. Only the Old Natives referred to the orbiting asteroid as the Stone.

  Still slender, her blond hair graying into sunlit ash, Karen seemed mature, but nowhere in age near her sixty-eight years. She might have been a well-preserved forty. Pride in her appearance and fitness had been part of her bulwark against the Death; if she could maintain her strength and youth, she felt more subconsciously than otherwise, then the Earth could regain her vitality. Sometimes she accused herself of self-serving vanity, but what did she have to be vain about, or for that matter, who could she be vain for? Her husband hadn’t complimented her on her looks in at least five y
ears; they hadn’t made love for three years; she had neither time nor inclination for affairs.

  Life had made her almost completely self-contained, a kind of emotional analog to the homorph Olmy.

  The atmosphere in the shuttle was electric with excitement. The delegates sat glued to the ports, eyes wide. After an hour and a half, the novelty passed sufficiently for some of the delegates to turn away from the view of stars and Earth. Karen looked around the broad, dimly-lighted white interior of the cabin. As with almost all Hexamon shuttles, the furnishings resembled ingeniously molded soft white bread dough: couches arranged almost casually for maximum efficiency, all capable of customizing themselves to fit their occupants’ bodies; opacity where no windows were needed, transparent ports where passengers wished to see out; pools of light where a delegate read a small stack of papers (archaic in this setting!), and shadow where another slept.

  This Hexamon shuttle was much larger than most, easily capable of carrying several hundred passengers. There were forty-five aboard now, forty-one men and women from around the Earth, as well as herself. It was going to be a grand experiment—a by-your-bootstraps knitting of these individuals into a single family, teaching them to see that their problems were not separate but intimately linked, and to see their companions not as competition, but as helpers.

  The introduction at Christchurch had gone smoothly enough; Karen had blended in, despite her rank as Chief Earth Coordinator, and had been accepted by most of the group as a peer.

  A number of delegates had attached themselves to her in an attempt to form a proto-ruling-class. One such was a middle-aged Mainland Chinese woman whose community, near Karen’s home province of Hunan, had not known the touch of the Terrestrial Hexamon until just five years ago. Another was a badly scarred, very proud Ukrainian, representing a group of Independents who had held off the would-be-salvagers of their villages and towns for nearly twenty years after the Death. Yet a third was a North American from Mexico City. Mexico City had survived the bombs only to succumb to lethal radiation, and had been repopulated by Latinos from Central America and refugees from the border cities…

  Karen appreciated their confidence in her but she subtly discouraged the hierarchy they were unconsciously forming. She did not desire eminence or power, only success. Theirs was a unique opportunity. The circumstances had to be handled carefully.

  Their faces bore the mark of Earth’s agony, even though some had been born after the Death. Few of these people had received pseudo-Talsit mental therapy, having kept their sanity and abilities even in the worst of times; they were incredibly tough and resilient. They had been hand-selected by Hexamon sociologists who had spent months searching the Recovery census—completed only in the past four years—for just their kind. “We call them high primes,” Suli Ram Kikura, the project coordinator, had told Karen. “Strong naturals with little or no previous tampering.”

  Most of them were natural leaders, having come to power without Hexamon help. They seemed at ease together, though few had dealt with each other as leaders before. Their communities were far enough apart that the borders did not touch, and there had been little commerce between them; but with the completion of the Hexamon social structure over the next ten years, their peoples would certainly interact, and the experience they received aboard the Stone would make them all—it was hoped—a kind of seed, broadcast over the Recovered Earth.

  Ser Ram Kikura’s prejudice against the Hexamon’s extensive psychological meddling still showed; it made her the perfect coordinator for this project, an attempt to let Earth stand on its own feet.

  Some citizens of the Terrestrial Hexamon seemed to feel the Hexamon would not remain stable for the indefinite future. The shortage of materials necessary for the maintenance of society aboard the Stone, the shifts in deeply held attitudes, the repercussions of dealing with their own origins on the post-Death Earth—all were taking their toll on Hexamon stability.

  If Earth had to survive a crisis among its saviors, it would have to be weaned…

  Karen spoke Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish, having brushed up on her Russian with Hexamon devices, and having learned Spanish the same way. That was enough to communicate directly with most of the delegates. Those few whose language she didn’t speak—including three whose dialects had arisen since the Death—could usually communicate with others in the group through a shared second language. No outside human or machine translators diluted this early stage of their interaction; they were being taught to rely on each other. Before the week was out, they would all speak each other’s languages—having acquired them within the third chamber’s city memory—and many more, besides.

  For the first time in years, Karen felt on the edge of fulfillment. She had suffered as much as Garry during the last four decades, traveling around the ravaged Earth, seeing more death, destruction and seemingly unending agony than she thought she could stand. Losing their daughter. Her breath still took a hitch at that memory. But she had dealt with her grief in a very different manner, not internalizing it as world-guilt, but finally rejecting it, setting her personality aside as a separate thing, and dealing with her work as a nurse might. She did not succeed entirely—she had her own hidden scars—but she had not declined into a permanent funk.

  She forced the thoughts back again, a little surprised they had gotten loose. Karen had long ago learned when and how to block off the area of her mind having to do with her husband; she usually managed not to think much about Garry when they were separated, concentrating on the delicate tasks at hand. But their last meeting…Garry, nervous, perhaps even frightened, though doing his best not to show it, escorting a man who could not possibly be on Earth…

  She glanced out the shuttle window at stars, temporarily ignoring the steady, polite conversation of three delegates sitting beside her. Was Garry aboard the Stone, with the impossible Russian? She had, in her own stubborn way, come close to resolving the mystery by deciding that someone had played a trick on her husband; that Mirsky had never gone down the Way. But the more she thought about it—and she could not help thinking about it now, with little else to do—the more she realized how unlikely this was.

  She felt a flush of anger. Something was going to happen. Something momentous. She resented the mystery of Mirsky’s return, feared it might drive Garry deeper into his funk by making him face cosmic imponderables even farther outside his control than Earth’s pain.

  She frowned and turned away from the stars. Unlike Lanier, Karen felt little dismay at the changes in her life. She accepted change easily enough; spaceflight, the Stone, the opportunities offered by the Hexamon. But Mirsky’s return slipped from her understanding like a fish through her fingers.

  “Ser Lanier,” the Chinese delegate called, smiling broadly and inclining her head as she sat beside Karen on the free-form couch. Her face was wreathed in fine sun-wrinkles; she was small and round, matronly, probably ten years younger than Karen. “You seem pensive. Are you worried about this conference?”

  “No,” Karen said, smiling reassurance. “Personal difficulties.”

  “Your mind should be at rest,” the delegate said. “All will go well. We are friends already, even those whom I worried about.”

  “I know,” Karen said. “It’s nothing, really. Don’t trouble yourself.” He’s doing it to me again, she thought. I cannot get away from him. She closed her eyes and forced herself to sleep.

  29

  Thistledown

  Korzenowski’s partial located Olmy in the fourth chamber forests of Northspin Island two days after Lanier’s arrival. Downloaded into a cross-shaped tracking probe, the partial searched the fourth chamber with infrared sensors and located seven hundred and fifty humans. Most were in groups of three or more; only seventy were solitary, and only two, across half a day of activity, showed signs of deliberately avoiding company. The partial analyzed the heat signatures of both of these possibilities and settled on the one most likely to be a self-contained hom
orph.

  Under any other circumstance, this kind of search would have been unthinkable, a gross invasion of privacy. But Korzenowski knew the importance of having Olmy speak with Mirsky. And he needed Olmy for the upcoming Nexus debate on the reopening of the Way. The Engineer could no longer completely oppose that project; Mirsky’s arguments were too persuasive, however bizarre. How could one deny the requests of gods, even if they existed only at the end of time?

  It was not the partial personality’s duty to analyze these problems. It flew above the valley floor to hover near Olmy’s campsite, and then projected an image of Korzenowski with the appropriate picts revealing its status as an assigned ghost.

  From Olmy’s point of view, Korzenowski seemed to walk out of the forest, his face wreathed in a smile, his eyes catlike, piercing. “Good day, Ser Olmy,” the ghost said.

  Olmy pulled himself away from the flow of Jart information and hid his all-too-human irritation at being found. “You’ve gone to considerable trouble,” he picted.

  “Something extraordinary has happened,” the ghost informed him. “Your presence in the third chamber is required.”

  Olmy stood by the tent, unsure of his emotional state for the moment, neither moving nor picting nor speaking.

  “A decision is to be made regarding the Way. Your presence is requested by my original.”

  “Is this a Nexus summons?”

  “Not formally. Do you remember Pavel Mirsky?”

  “We never met,” Olmy said. “I know who he was.”

  “He has returned,” the ghost said, rapidly picting the few salient details.

  Olmy’s face seemed to contort with pain. He shuddered, then his shoulders sagged and the tension left him. He pushed aside the Jart information, refocusing on his humanity and on his relationship with Korzenowski, once his mentor, the man who had shaped much of his life—or rather, lives. The fact of Mirsky’s reappearance then assumed its proper color—deeply bizarre, more than puzzling: entrancing. He did not doubt the ghost’s message. Even had someone besides Korzenowski summoned him, this news alone would suffice to bring him out of the forest and away from his meditations.