by Greg Bear
“Yes, I see that,” Karen said. She and Lanier sat back to back on the grass, heads touching. “But when I was a girl, it still seemed immense. Frightening.”
“Yes, I see that,” Ram Kikura said, imitating Karen’s tone and smiling broadly. “I really do.”
“My own planetarium,” Kanazawa repeated. “I can just point the laser and move the beam and watch and nobody knows or cares. Their problems—” He flicked the beam across the entire sky, from cloud-darkened horizon to clear open sea, “—are not my problems.” He sighed overdramatically. “It is good to see you again, Garry, Karen. And it is good to meet someone from the precincts on less than formal terms. We have such distance between us, for being parents and children…”
“Who are the parents,” Karen asked, “and who the children?”
“You are the parents,” Ram Kikura said.
“And the children, too.” Karen bumped her head gently against Lanier’s, and then harder, as if to attract his attention.
“Ow,” he said. “What?”
“Just bumping, you old son of a bitch.” She giggled. “Sorry. Rum talk.”
“Keep bumping,” he said.
Ram Kikura held her hands up. “I would love to see crowds of Earth children now. Healthy children, happy children. I love to watch Hexamon children through my apartment window, in Axis Euclid. You’ve never had more children, Karen…Why?”
“Much too busy,” Karen said. She bit her lower lip.
“How can anyone be too busy to have children?”
“Naturally, or the Hexamon way?” Karen asked. The pain had been blunted by time but she still shied from the center.
“The Hexamon way, I think,” Ram Kikura said. “My son Tapi is an old-fashioned child.” She smiled and shook her head. “He will pass his incarnation exams. He will follow in his father’s footsteps…Olmy’s,” she added.
“I never knew you had a son,” Lanier said.
“Oh, yes. I’m very proud of him. But I did not give birth to him in the very old sense. To have children is important, though, however you have them…whether or not they are raised first in city memory. Allowed to grow like flowers, to make mistakes.”
“And to die,” Lanier mused, his eyes closed. Karen stiffened and leaned forward, breaking their back-to-back contact, and he instantly regretted his words.
“There are graveyards on Thistledown,” he said defensively, avoiding Ram Kikura’s steady gaze. “I’ve seen them. Columbaria, even pretentious tombs. Your people once knew what death was like.”
“Death is failure,” Ram Kikura said, her tone angry.
“Death is completion,” Lanier said.
“Death is a waste and a loss.”
“I’ll go along with that,” Karen said, bumping him again pointedly. “More life.”
“Robert!” Lanier pointed a finger at him. In exchange, Kanazawa pointed the laser beam’s arrow on his chest.
“Garry! What?”
“You decide. You’re a natural man. No implants, nothing but radiation therapy—you’ve even kept your scar—”
“White badge of courage,” Kanazawa said. “Helps me stay in office.”
“Is death completion or waste?”
“We’re far from the subject of the evening, aren’t we?” Kanazawa asked.
“You have Japanese ancestry. They look upon death in a different way. Honorable death. Death at the right time.”
“Do you have Amerindian blood?” Kanazawa asked him.
“No.”
“Well, you look as if you might. When people have to die, they look upon death differently. They dress it up and dance with it and put it in black robes and fear it. I have many disagreements with the Hexamon, but I do not regret their giving us the choice. Those graves—most are from the years just after the Death. Most of my constituents have chosen to live longer. Some hope to live forever. Perhaps they will. Death is not failure, it may even be completion, but only so long as it is not master.”
“Right,” Karen said.
“Have you chosen to live forever?” Lanier asked.
“No,” Kanazawa said.
“Why?”
“That is personal.”
“Sorry,” Karen said. “This is not a pleasant subject…”
“No. It is important,” Kanazawa said. “Not too personal to talk about. Rum talk, even. I cannot forget certain things. Unpleasant memories. I cannot use Talsit or pseudo-Talsit, even if we could get them, wonderful as those treatments are; these memories are a fixed part of me, and have made me what I am now. I fight with them always. In the morning I wake to them. Sometimes they hang over my whole day. You know what I’m talking talk about, don’t you, Garry?”
“Amen,” Lanier said.
“When I die, those memories will be gone. I will be gone, and perhaps someone better will come in my place. He may have knowledge of the history I’ve lived through, but he will be able to lift above them. There will be no waste. What I cannot assimilate, he or she will.”
“Amen,” Lanier repeated in a whisper.
“We will agree to disagree,” Ram Kikura said. “You are a wonderful man, Senator. Your death would be a loss.”
Kanazawa tilted his head to acknowledge her compliment.
“We cannot cry, you know,” Ram Kikura said. “We feel many of the same emotions, but we have…not risen above them. Transcended them. We assimilate and remain ourselves, but…” She shook her head vigorously. “I can’t think straight! Rum thought, rum talk.”
“We are too close to a lot of death to look at individual death objectively,” Kanazawa said. “Karen, do you approve of your husband’s age?”
“No,” she said after a long pause.
“I can’t keep up with her,” Lanier said, trying for a pleasantry.
She looked down from the stars at the dark grass. “It’s not that. I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to sacrifice myself to stay in step with you, either.”
“Lance that boil, doctor,” Lanier said.
“Shut up.” She pushed away from him again and stood up. “We’re talking stupid talk now.”
“Rum talk,” Kanazawa said, swinging the beam across the sky again. “In vino, veritas.”
“This is noble,” Ram Kikura said. “This is human.”
Karen ran for the house. Lanier stood, brushed grass from his pants, and said, “I think I’m going to follow her and then we’ll go to sleep.”
Kanazawa nodded sagely.
Lanier walked back to the house, found the bedroom, and stood in the doorway, watching Karen undress. “I remember the first time you made love to me,” he said. “In the jumpjet. On the tuberider.”
She made a little noise, unhitching her bra.
“It took me many years to really appreciate you. Not until after we were married. After we had worked together.”
“Please shut up,” Karen said, but not angrily.
“You became like one of my arms, one of my legs,” he pursued. “I took you for granted. I thought everything I’d do, you’d do. I loved you so much I forgot you weren’t me.”
“There was work to do.”
“No excuse, even so,” he said. “I think you lost sight of me, too.”
“You’re not the only one with bad memories,” Karen said sharply. “I went back to Hunan. Remember? I saw my town, the farmlands. I smelled death, Garry, waste. Skeletons of infants by the roadside, you couldn’t tell whether they had been there for months or years, from the Death or after, when their parents dropped them there because they couldn’t feed them. We couldn’t get to everybody in time. You are not the only one with memories!”
“I know,” Lanier said, still leaning on the door frame.
“I can handle them. I can love you for a lot longer. I don’t want you to go away from me. I hate that thought.”
“I know.”
“Then come back to me,” she said. “You can still become young. There are centuries left to us. Centuries of work yet t
o do.”
“That’s not my way,” he said. “I wish you could accept that.”
“I wish you could accept my…fears,” she said.
“I’ll try. We’re working together now, Karen.”
She half-shivered, half-shrugged and sat on the bed. He remained standing by the door, still dressed. “What about Mirsky?” she asked. There was a look of patent wonder on her face, forehead smooth, eyes wide, lips drawn down as if in a pout. “Is he going to bring the gods down on us? Is that what he’s really saying? He’s a horrible thing, Garry.”
“I don’t think so.”
She shook her head. “A nightmare.”
“A vision,” Lanier countered. “Let’s wait and see.”
“I am afraid,” she said simply. “Will you allow me that?”
If he came forward now, he knew, and tried to hug her, she would not accept; she would push him away. But he could see that the time might come, and for now, still mildly buzzing with rum, that was enough. “Of course,” he said.
“I’m going to sleep.” She lay back on the guest bed and pulled the covers up.
He watched her for a moment, then shut out the light, turned, and stood alone in the dark and quiet hallway. Out on the grass, he heard Kanazawa and Ram Kikura talking.
“I would be honored if you would share my bed with me this evening,” Kanazawa said.
“I’m not even mildly drunk now, Ser Kanazawa,” Ram Kikura said.
“Nor am I.”
Ram Kikura said nothing for a moment. Then, “I’d like that.”
Lanier contemplated his wife in bed, the quaint comfort of the guest room, and shook his head. Still too many walls between them. He walked to the front porch and lay down on the padded wicker sofa there, plumping an old tattered silk pillow under his head.
In the morning, Lanier walked along the beach before Karen awoke. A kilometer away, he spotted Ram Kikura, walking around a tongue of exhausted surf, tall and slender, surrounded by wheeling gulls. Without gesture, they walked toward each other, and Ram Kikura smiled at him as they closed.
“Am I a brazen hussy?” she asked, turning to match his pace and direction.
Lanier returned her smile. “As brazen as they come,” he said.
“In all my years as Earth’s advocate, I’ve never made love to an Old Native,” she said.
“Was it quaint?” Lanier asked. She scowled at him.
“Some things stay remarkably the same, in basics,” she said. They walked on in silence for a while, watching gulls prance on the wet sand ahead of them, avoiding the slick rising curves of water. “Ser Kanazawa is furious,” she finally said. “He’s angrier than I’ve seen any man in a very long time. He didn’t show it to all of us…He’s going to call a meeting of all of Earth’s senators and corpreps. Through me, they’ll challenge the mens publica vote. I can make a strong argument that the Recovery laws cannot apply in this case.”
“Will you win?” Lanier asked.
She bent down to pick up a glass Japanese float. “I wonder low long this has been here?” she asked. “Do they make these now?”
“I don’t know,” Lanier said. “I suppose they do. Will you win?”
“Probably not,” she said. “The Hexamon isn’t what it used to be.” She held the float up close, examining its tiny starlike bubbles floating in green glass. She returned the float to the sand.
“The president seems to be swinging with the tide,” Lanier said. “He claimed he violently opposes re-opening.”
“He does. But there’s not much he can do if the Nexus supports it. And I fear that like the captain of a troubled ship, he won’t hesitate to cut the Earth loose, if it’s necessary to save what’s left of the Hexamon.”
“But the Jarts—”
“We beat them back once, and we weren’t prepared for them,” Ram Kikura said.
“You sound proud, almost supportive,” Lanier said.
She frowned again, shaking her head. “An advocate needs to understand how the opposition feels. I’m as furious as Kanazawa, myself.” She swung her arms and bent to pick up a crumbling piece of plastic bottle. “How old is this, do you think?”
Lanier didn’t answer. He was thinking of Mirsky, surprised by the refusal of the Nexus to go along with his request. “What chance is there for a negative vote?” he asked.
“None,” she said. “Without a persuaded and informed Earth, and that seems to be an impossibility in the near term.”
“Then why are we here? I thought this was a good idea…I thought we might have an effect.”
Ram Kikura nodded. “We will,” she said. “We’ll hang on their damned heels and slow them down. The tide is coming in, don’t you think?”
The tide was going out, as far as Lanier could tell, but he understood her meaning.
“What will we say in Oregon?” he asked.
“The same thing we’ve said here.”
They turned around to walk back toward the house. When they arrived, the others were up and about, and the robots were serving breakfast. Kanazawa and Ram Kikura were friendly, cordial and no more.
Lanier was thoughtful. He had had a burst of youthful enthusiasm shot down. There was chagrin, but there was also the realization he could still be young and foolish. He could still fight for hopeless causes. Somehow, that made him feel even more alive, even more resolved.
Besides, he suspected Mirsky—or the beings at the end of time—were far more resourceful than even the Hexamon.
They packed their few pieces of luggage. Ram Kikura and Karen spoke with Kanazawa as Lanier carried the small bags to the shuttle. As he entered the shuttle doorway, the automated pilot flashed a red pict before his eyes.
“Speak in English, please,” Lanier said, vaguely irritated.
“Our flight has been held,” the pilot said. “We are to stay here until precinct police arrive.”
Lanier set the bags down, stunned. “Precinct police? Not terrestrial police?”
The pilot did not respond. The interior lighting dimmed. The white interior relaxed and turned an inactive blue.
“Are you still functioning?” Lanier asked. There were no further answers. He looked around the darkened interior, opening and closing his fists. He stepped down from the doorway, face red with anger, and confronted Karen.
“I think we’re being intercepted,” he said. Ram Kikura and Kanazawa came from the house.
“Problems?” the senator asked.
“Precinct police are coming,” Lanier said.
Kanazawa’s face hardened. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
“You probably don’t,” Ram Kikura said. Kanazawa stared at her as if she had struck him. “This is very serious, Garry. How did you—”
Karen looked out to sea. Beyond Barber’s Point, three aircraft flew toward them, sharp white against the billowing gray mid-morning clouds. They banked and approached the house, slowing and hovering, their flight fields knocking bits of gravel and dirt from the senator’s driveway and yard.
“Ser Lanier,” a voice from the craft boomed above them. “Please respond.”
“I’m Garry Lanier.” He stood away from the others.
“Ser Lanier, you and your wife are to return to New Zealand immediately. All Old Natives are being returned to their homelands.”
Ram Kikura stepped out beside him. “Under whose orders, and by what law?” She lowered her voice. “There are no such laws,” she muttered.
“By Revised Recovery Act. Direct presidential authority. Please board your shuttle. Its flight plans have been changed.”
“Don’t go,” Kanazawa said. He lifted his eyes to the three craft and raised a fist. “I am a senator! I demand a meeting with the president and the presiding minister!”
The hovering craft did not reply.
“You won’t board the shuttle,” Ram Kikura said. “We’ll all stay here. They won’t dare use physical force.”
“Garry, they said all Old Natives were being retu
rned—even those with permanent residency on the orbiting bodies?” Karen’s face resembled a child’s, horribly disappointed, disbelieving.
“I don’t know,” Lanier said. “Senator, we can do more in our own territory…unless we’re under house arrest, in which case it doesn’t matter where we are.” He turned to Ram Kikura. “I assume you’ll go back to Thistledown.”
“Assume nothing,” she said tightly. “All rules are off. I certainly didn’t expect this.”
“They do this,” Karen said, her face red, “and they’ll really have a fight on their hands.”
I doubt that, Lanier thought. The fight is probably over right here and now. They feel the need to play dirty.
The three craft held their position, implacable. A light sun shower began to fall. Ram Kikura wiped wet hair from her face. “We shouldn’t just stand here like disobedient children,” Lanier said. “Senator, thank you for listening to us. If we can talk again, I’ll—”
“Please board your shuttle now,” the voice boomed.
Lanier took his wife’s hand. “Good-by,” he said to Kanazawa and Ram Kikura. “Good luck. Let Korzenowski and Olmy know what happened here.”
Ram Kikura nodded.
They boarded the shuttle and the door flowed shut behind them.
43
The Way, Efficient Gaia
A maze of brilliant green lines sketched themselves in parallel around them, breaking pattern to draw a harness or cage about the bubble faster than Rhita could move her eyes to follow. After a brief pause, another array of lines rose from the surface of the Way, far below, originating at a single dazzling vertex near one of the stacked disk towers. The lines connected and the oval bubble descended with alarming rapidity, though again with no sensation.
Rhita felt faint. There was too much stimulation, too much to absorb. “I’m going to be sick,” she told Typhōn. The escort took hold of her left arm—the first time he had touched her. His touch was warm but unconvincing; through her constricting circle of thought and vision, she was faintly repelled. Then she was on her knees and past caring.