by Greg Bear
During the Death, around the world, Allied and Warsaw Pact military facilities had been targeted repeatedly. Yet due to some vagary in Soviet planning, or wholesale missile failures, Pearl Harbor had been hit by only two warheads. Other bases on the islands had been struck by one warhead, some by none at all. Honolulu had suffered widespread damage from the Pearl Harbor attack; still, as a city, it had not been obliterated.
After the Sundering, as Hexamon investigators—Lanier among them—chose sites from which to begin the Recovery, the islands had offered themselves as a prime location for mid-Pacific support services. The weapons used there had been relatively clean; the radiation, after five years, was not especially dangerous, and could certainly be countered by Hexamon medicines and treatments.
In ten years, the lush growth of Oahu’s jungles and grasslands returned. Cities rose again, feeding both on the Hexamon activity and on trans-Pacific trade between New Zealand, North Australia, and Japan and Indochina.
Because Hexamon communications did not make geographic position crucial to centers of Recovery Government, the Terrestrial Senate had established its capitol on Oahu, at the site of old Honolulu. There had been a hint of power and privilege in this decision, but the Nexus overseers did not attempt to change it; they knew that few terrestrials would participate in such an unpleasant task as leading the Recovery without substantial perquisites.
Kanazawa lived in a long wood-frame and stone house a mile from the fused glass shore of Waikiki. With a moist, warm southerly breeze rustling palm fronds overhead, Karen, Garry and Ram Kikura walked up the pumice path to be greeted by a Nexus security device, a long polished white tube about a meter long and fifteen centimeters wide, floating beside the porch.
“We’re pleased to see you again, Ser Lanier,” the device said in a higher-pitched version of Kanazawa’s voice. “You are all expected. Please enter and excuse the mess. The senator is doing research for a trade bill to be considered next session.”
They walked up the stone steps and entered the porch breezeway. Wicker furniture rested on polished dark wood floors. Papers and folders lay in haphazard piles around the living room; advanced electronic storage media were still something of a luxury on Earth. Ostentation was not Kanazawa’s style; he relied on paper.
“I like this,” Ram Kikura said, fondling Polynesian print fabrics on sofa and chair. “The real thing.”
Kanazawa stepped from his rear office wearing a blue and white Japanese cotton print robe and tabi slippers. “Garry, Karen! I’m delighted to see you again.” He smiled at Ram Kikura. “If I’m not mistaken, this is Earth’s advocate and a former colleague, Ser Suli Ram Kikura?” He offered his hand; Ram Kikura shook it and bowed slightly. “To see all of you here at once worries me, pleased as I am by the visit. Something important is happening in the Nexus, I take it?”
He led them to a back porch and ordered drinks from a mechanical servant. Since his second wife had died ten years before, Kanazawa had not remarried; instead, he had plunged more deeply into his work, establishing a reputation as exceptionally polite, exceptionally capable, but also exceptionally stubborn, even obsessive.
“There’s an advisory about to be issued by the Nexus on Thistledown,” Lanier said.
“I’ve heard nothing about it,” Kanazawa said, tilting his head to one side with curiosity. His broad, rugged face carried a vivid white scar across one cheek where he had received a flash burn while standing on the sail of the U.S.S. Burleigh, his submarine. A similar scar marked the back of his right hand, ending at the shadow of the long jacket sleeve he had worn. The submarine had been sailing north along the coast of California, three days after the inception of the Death; the flash had come from a Spasm re-nuking of San Francisco.
“Chances are, the Old Natives will not be allowed to vote on this issue,” Lanier said.
Kanazawa’s expression did not change, but his voice took on an edge. “Why not?”
“They’ll be excluded by Recovery regulation,” Lanier said. “Unfit for the making of decisions involving the parent Hexamon.” By a peculiar twist of legal language, in the early years of Recovery legislation, the Thistledown and Precinct ruling bodies had become the parental legislatures.
Kanazawa nodded. “Not invoked for eleven years, but still in force. Should it concern me?”
“It concerns all of us, I think,” Lanier said. “It’s a rather long story.”
“I know it is worth my time, coming from you. Tell me.” Lanier told.
41
Thistledown
Korzenowski walked across the sixth chamber terminal to join Mirsky under a transparent skylight. The avatar—Korzenowski found it easiest to think of him that way—stared up across the chamber at the carpet of machinery on the opposite side of the chamber. Clouds moved swiftly over the view, both on their side and the far side; the colors, gray and green and mottled, traversed by the glow of the plasma tube, soothed Korzenowski in a way he found puzzling. He had cut himself loose from all this, yet it continued to fascinate him.
Like Olmy, he now believed that the Hexamon would reopen the Way no matter what obstacles they faced; would he be sorry?
“It’s magnificent,” Mirsky said. “A magnificent achievement.” He smiled at the Engineer. “When I first saw this, it was beyond anything I could imagine. I was dwarfed. I had not been introduced gradually, had not had the time Lanier spent in the Potato—that’s what we called Thistledown. We had not entered peacefully. It felt impossibly alien and disturbing, and fascinating, too. Yet Ser Ram Kikura called it ‘hideous.’”
“Her passions do not lie in machinery; she’s spent her life with huge machines. She takes them for granted. It’s not unusual for Naderites to be blind to their actual environment, in quest of some perfection. We’re a mystical group, all in all; Star, Fate and Pneuma lie deep in us.”
“How long will it take you to complete this diagnostic?” Mirsky asked.
“Three days. There are partials and remotes all over the chamber now. Everything crucial seems in working order.”
“And the weapons?”
Korzenowski stared intently at the view through the skylight. Rain began to fall in gentle patters, mottling the glass; the same water that had cooled and cleansed the machinery in the sixth chamber for centuries. “I did not build them. I know very little about them. I suspect they’re in working order, also. The Hexamon spent much of its history relying on machinery to stay alive; we respect our creations, and by instinct, we build them to last.”
“How long until the re-opening, then?” Mirsky asked.
“The timetable hasn’t changed. Unless Lanier and Ram Kikura succeed in blocking the advisory and the vote, perhaps two weeks; no more than a month.”
“You’ll do it, if they order you to? Open the Way again?”
“I’ll do it,” Korzenowski answered. “It seems to be Fate acting, doesn’t it?”
Mirsky laughed. For the first time, Korzenowski heard a timbre in the avatar’s voice that did not seem entirely human, and it chilled him. “Fate indeed,” Mirsky said. “I have been with beings like gods, and fate puzzles them, too.”
42
Hawaii
“I would be honored to have you stay here,” Kanazawa said. “My hospitality is not what it was when my wife was alive—only mechanical help donated by my constituents, but the kitchen treats my guests and me well.”
“We’d be delighted,” Lanier said. “We leave in the morning to visit Oregon, then fly on to Melbourne and back home, New Zealand…Christchurch. We haven’t much time.”
From the front porch, they saw the sun decline in splendor beyond the palms and beach, setting the slopes of Barber’s Point aflame with a gentler fire than that area and its Naval Air Station had known during the Death. A Japanese graveyard lay just west of the senator’s property, behind fresh-painted white picket fencing; Suli Ram Kikura stood there now, Karen beside her, examining the carved lava pagoda-shaped headstones and crosses.
“There’s something the old Axis City lacked,” Lanier said.
“What’s that?”
“Graveyards.”
“Far too many here,” Kanazawa said quickly. “Many things must be different up there—we have such close ties, and yet, I sometimes think, so little understanding of each other. I wish I were not so afraid of space travel. My only trip was the last time we met. My weeks in the Burleigh cured me of cramped quarters, I suppose. I left the ship when we beached her at Waimanalo, and I swore I would never sit in an iron tube again. I flew up there sedated.”
Lanier smiled sympathetically.
“You’ve worked with them—hell, Garry, you were one of the first to meet them. Surely you understand what motivates them.”
“I can guess.”
“Why suddenly consider us weak partners, when this could affect all of humanity?”
“We are weak partners, Senator.”
“Not as weak or naive as they must think. We can encompass many strange things before breakfast.”
“I think the quote is more like, ‘believe six impossible things before breakfast.’”
“Impossible things! That we have a man returned from the dead, or very nearly…”
“We’ve had lots of those,” Lanier said. “I’ve even helped resurrect people. Mirsky is something much stranger than that.”
Kanazawa turned his back on the twilight. The flames past Barber’s Point had died to purple dream-tones. Sunsets were not as spectacular now as they had been for years after the Death, but in Hawaii, they were still memorable. “All right. Perhaps we are naive. Does she accept such a thing?”
“Karen, or Ram Kikura?”
“Ram Kikura.”
“I think she accepts it one way, and finds it difficult to accept another way…. She accepts that we have to act on what Mirsky says. But she deeply regrets his return. She believes he catalyzed this whole mess, which of course he did; it would have happened anyway, however.”
“Spreading word across the Earth can only increase resentment, however many believe you,” Kanazawa said. “We resent our saviors. We resent having our childhood stolen from us.”
“I’m not sure I understand, Senator. Surely the Death did that.”
“No. The builders of Thistledown—they survived the Death, grew out of it, developed a new civilization. They invented their own marvels, struggled to supremacy, launched their asteroid starships. We cannot do that. They’ve come to us with hands full of marvels, like parents raising children, giving us miracles here and wonders there, sometimes forcing them upon us. They did not let us make our own mistakes—”
“Thank God,” Lanier said dryly. “We’d screwed up badly enough already.”
“Yes, but do you see what I mean?” Kanazawa asked plaintively. “My constituents feel lost when confronted by these saviors; they think of them as angels. A visitor from the precincts or the asteroid is still rare; they are respected and feared. We are left on Earth like backwater bumpkins.”
“If the shoe fits,” Lanier said.
“You’ve grown cynical, Garry.”
“Not without reason, Senator,” Lanier said, smiling wryly. “But I understand what you’re saying. Still, we have to make more of an effort. Earth can’t live in resentment and bitterness and envy like some twisted postbellum South. Maybe a larger issue like this is what we need to spark enthusiasm down here.”
“They will not understand, Garry,” Kanazawa said. “It is beyond their experience. A fairy tale. It’s the stuff myths are made of. Myths don’t play well in politics. You have to disguise them, make them seem down-to-Earth.”
Ram Kikura and Karen came back from the fence, both looking somber. “Mortality is not the only thing that separates some of us,” Kanazawa said in an undertone.
Dinner was served by robots. The four of them sat around the table, Lanier and Karen and Kanazawa feeling slightly giddy with big tumblers of rum after the day’s solemnity and worry. Lanier hadn’t been even mildly drunk in decades; he found more knots loosening, and regarded Karen with eyes of a distant, more youthful self. She was truly a lovely woman; however young she seemed, she had much of the wisdom of age, and that made her even more beautiful. Lanier did not despise youth; he was simply unwilling to let its attractions dominate him.
Working together might be a remedy, he thought; but she was still not as warm to him as he felt toward her, and they behaved as an old married couple might, talking more with others at the table than between themselves.
Ram Kikura was reluctant to try rum. “I’ve heard about alcohol,” she said with a voice of temperance caution. “A narcotic poison.”
“Was Thistledown dry during its voyage?” Kanazawa asked, astonishment creeping into his voice.
“No, not at first,” she answered. “Though alcohol played second fiddle, if that’s still a current idiom. Or third or fourth. Early voyagers were more interested in direct mental stimulations, a problem we carried with us from Earth. The stimulations became more sophisticated, and safer, and we found ways to treat personalities devoted to excess, chemical or neurological…. Alcohol was never a major worry, or a major recreation. Wines, if I remember, were cultivated…”
She seemed to enjoy a chance to talk history, especially when it delayed her decision on the rum. “But when the Way was built, and we had pushed back the Jarts, trade began through the wells. Talsit and other substances became known to us…complex intoxicants, enhancers, augmenters, not to mention the nuances of complete downloading. Alcohol and other chemical intoxicants were like kazoos.” (she emphasized the word, enjoying its alienness) “compared to a symphony orchestra.”
“Primitive treats still have their charm, though,” Kanazawa said.
“I’d hate to make a fool of myself,” Ram Kikura said softly, dipping her finger into the small glass, lifting it to her nose. “Esters and ketones. Very strong.”
“Destroys the brain,” Karen said, on the edge of being tipsy. “Might need to rent another.”
“Alcohol,” Ram Kikura began, pausing, realizing she was about to be sententious, “is still a problem on Earth. Am I right?”
“You are absolutely right,” Kanazawa said. “And a balm for our manifold wounds.”
“I dislike not being in control of myself.”
Karen leaned forward. “Drink it,” she said. “It actually tastes good. You don’t have to drink it all.”
“I know what it tastes like. I’ve had biochrones in city memory.”
“Biochrones?” Kanazawa asked.
“Not as popular now as they once were,” Lanier said. “Simulated full-life experiences. Edited, usually; the more extreme remove your awareness that they’re simulated. You live another life.”
“Jesus,” Kanazawa said, making an astonished, strongly disapproving face. “That’s almost like being…I know. Unfaithful to yourself.”
As they discussed the ethical dilemma of whether or not sex in a biochrone was tantamount, by older Earth standards, to cheating on one’s wedding vows, Ram Kikura brought the rum glass closer. Lanier could see she was attracted to it; she had always felt a connection with the past. When they had first met, she had picted an American flag over her shoulder, proud of her ancient ancestry; here was a bit of the past she knew little about, directly. Biochrone memories, he had heard, were not nearly as vivid as real ones; they couldn’t possibly be, without extraordinary implants, larger than practical in homorphs.
“All right,” she said, steeling herself and picking up the glass. “To being human!” She drank a much larger swallow than Lanier would have recommended. Her eyes widened and she spluttered, choking. Karen pounded her back unhelpfully.
“Ah, Pneuma!” Ram Kikura croaked when she was halfway in control again. “My body hates it!”
“Go slow,” Kanazawa recommended. “If that’s too strong, I have some wine…”
Ram Kikura waved away their attentions, embarrassed by her ineptitude. She wiped away tears and lifted th
e glass again. “What were the toasts?” she asked, still slightly hoarse.
“Down the hatch,” Lanier suggested.
Ram Kikura sipped more moderately. “Makes my throat close up.”
“I don’t understand,” Kanazawa said. “It’s very good rum, Oahu’s best.”
“At least three hours old,” Lanier said. Kanazawa gave him a twinkling look of senatorial disapproval.
“From my district,” he said.
“This half of the world is your district. Surely you don’t drink everything bottled by your constituents!” Karen said.
Ram Kikura sat quiet for a moment, contemplating the effect. “I don’t think I’ll become drunk,” she said. “My implant metabolizers are converting the alcohol to sugars faster than I can drink.”
“What a pity,” Kanazawa said.
“I could fine-tune them…if I will fit into the occasion less sober…”
Kanazawa glanced meaningfully at Lanier. Karen sighed. “You are not a natural party girl, my dear,” she said.
The night sky of Hawaii was a cold blaze, reminding Lanier of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Kanazawa brought a low-powered red laser pointer onto the back lawn. They sat on the grass, eating Brazilian chocolates and sipping aperitifs.
“This is my private planetarium,” the senator said, crouching carefully, kicking out one foot, almost falling over, then settling back on his butt and crossing his legs. “Nothing comparable to actually being up in space, I suppose…. But I’m happy with it.”
He switched on the laser and lifted it. In the moist sea air, the beam cut a straight glowing path hundreds of feet up to the stars, seeming to touch them individually. “I know all the constellations,” he said, “the Japanese and Chinese and the Western. Even some of the Babylonian.”
“It’s beautiful,” Ram Kikura said. She had allowed more than a little of the alcohol to have an effect on her; her eyes were half-lidded and she seemed relaxed, almost sleepy. “The sky is more…human down here. More friendly.”