by Greg Bear
“We’re moving the city south as fast as we can and still keep up the evacuation,” Kesler said. “The Jarts are drawing close to the lesion now. We’re not sure what they can do with it. Maybe nothing—but we can’t afford to take the chance.”
Olmy shook his head in puzzlement. “You’ve just told me nothing can be done. Why call me here when we’re helpless?”
“I didn’t say nothing could be done,” Kesler said, eyes glittering. “Some of our gate openers think they can build a cirque—a ring gate—and seal off the lesion.”
“That would cut us off from the rest of the Way,” Olmy said.
“Worse. In a few days or weeks it would destroy the Way completely, bottle us up in Thistledown forever. Until now, we’ve never been that desperate.” He smiled, lips twisted by pain. “Frankly, you were not my choice. I’m no longer sure that you can be relied upon, and this matter is far too complicated to allow anyone to act alone.”
Neya had not told him the truth, then. “Who chose me?” Olmy asked.
“A gate opener. You made an impression on him when he escorted you down the Way some decades ago. He was the one who opened the gate to Lamarckia.”
“Frederik Ry Ornis?”
Kesler nodded. “From what I’m told, he’s become the most powerful opener in the guild. A senior master.”
Olmy took a deep breath. “I’m not what I appear to be, Yanosh. I’m an old man who’s seen his women and friends die. I miss my sons. You should have left me on Lamarckia.”
Kesler closed his eyes. The blue jacket around his lower body adjusted slightly, and his face tightened. “The Olmy I knew would never have turned down a chance like this.”
“I’ve seen too many things already,” Olmy said.
Yanosh moved forward. “We both have. This … is beyond me,” he said quietly. “The lesion … The gate openers tell me it’s the strangest place in creation. All the boundaries of physics have collapsed. Time and causality have new meanings. Heaven and hell have married. Only those in the Redoubt have seen all that’s happened there—if they still exist in any way we can understand. They haven’t communicated with us since the lesion formed.”
Olmy listened intently, something slowly stirring to life, a small speck of ember glowing brighter.
“It may be over, Olmy,” Yanosh said. “We’re ready to close off the Way, pinch it, seal the lesion within its own small bubble … dispose of it. All of it. The whole grand experiment may be at an end.”
“Tell me more,” Olmy said, folding his arms.
“Three citizens escaped from the Redoubt, from Enoch’s small colony, before the lesion became too large. One died, his mind scrambled beyond retrieval. The second has been confined for study, as best we’re able. What afflicts him—or it—is something we can never cure. The third survived relatively unharmed. She’s become … unconventional, more than a little obsessed by the mystical, but I’m told she’s still rational. If you accept, she will accompany you.” Yanosh’s tone indicated he was not going to allow Olmy to decline. “We have two other volunteers, both apprentice gate openers, both failed by the guild. All have been chosen by Frederik Ry Ornis. He will explain why.”
Olmy shook his head. “A mystic, failed openers … What would I do with such a team?”
Yanosh smiled grimly. “Kill them if it goes wrong. And kill yourself. If you can’t close off the Way, and if the lesion remains, you will not be allowed to come back. The third expedition I sent never even reached the Redoubt. They were absorbed by the lesion.” Another grimace of pain. “Do you believe in ghosts, Olmy?”
“What kind?”
“Real ghosts?”
“No,” Olmy said.
“I think I do. Some members of our rescue expeditions came back. Several versions of them. We think we destroyed them.”
“Versions?”
“Copies of some sort. They were sent back—echoed—along their own world-lines in a way no one understands. They returned to their loved ones, their relatives, their friends. If more return, everything we call real could be in jeopardy. It’s been very difficult keeping this secret.”
Olmy raised an eyebrow skeptically. He wondered if Yanosh was himself still rational. “I’ve served my time. More than my time. Why should I go active?”
“Damn it, Olmy, if not for love of Thistledown—if you’re beyond that, then because you want to die,” Kesler grunted, his face betraying quiet disgust behind the pain, “You’ve wanted to die since I brought you back from Lamarckia. This time, if you make it to the Redoubt, you’re likely to have your wish granted.
“Think of it as a gift from me to you, or to what you once were.”
3
“If you were enhanced, this would go a lot faster,” Jarr Flynch said, pointing to Olmy’s head.
Frederik Ry Ornis smiled a gray, simple smile.
The three of them walked side by side down a long, empty hall, approaching a secure room deep in the old Thistledown Defense Tactical College building in Alexandria.
Ry Ornis had aged not at all physically. In appearance he was still the same long-limbed, mantis-like figure, but his gawkiness had been replaced by an eerie grace, and his youthful, eccentric volubility by a wry spareness of language.
Olmy dismissed Flynch’s comment with a wave of his hand. “I’ve gone through the important files,” he said. “I think I know them well enough. I have questions about the choice of people to go with me. The apprentice gate openers … They’ve been rejected by the guild. Why?”
Flynch shrugged. “They’re flamboyant.”
Olmy glanced at the master opener. “Ry Ornis was as flamboyant as they come.”
“The guild has changed,” Ry Ornis said. “It demands more now.”
Flynch agreed. “In the time since I’ve been a teacher in the guild, that’s certainly true. They tolerate very little … creativity. The defection of Enoch’s pupils scared them. The lesion terrified all of us. Rasp and Karn are young, innovative. Nobody denies they’re brilliant, but they’ve refused to settle in and play their roles. So … the guild denied them final certification.”
“Why choose them for this job?” Olmy asked.
“Ry Ornis did the choosing,” Flynch said.
“We’ve discussed this,” Ry Ornis said.
“Not to my satisfaction. When do I meet them?”
“No meeting has been authorized with Rasp and Karn until you’re on the flawship. They’re still in emergency conditioning.” Flynch glanced at Ry Ornis. “The training has been a little rough on them.”
Olmy felt less and less sure that he wanted anything more to do with the guild, or with Ry Ornis’s chosen openers. “The files only tell half a story,” he said. “Deirdre Enoch never became an opener—she never even tried to qualify. She was just a teacher. How could she become so important to the guild?”
Flynch shook his head. “Like me, she was never qualified to be an opener, but also like me, as a teacher, she was considered one of the best. She became a leader to some apprentice openers—a philosopher and mentor.”
“A prophet,” Ry Ornis said softly.
“Training for the guild is grueling,” Flynch continued. “Some say it’s become torture. The mathematical conditioning alone is enough to produce a drop-out rate of over ninety per cent. Deirdre Enoch worked as a counselor in mental balance, compensation, and she was good … In the last twenty years, she worked with many who went on to become very powerful in Way Maintenance. She kept up her contacts. She convinced a lot of her students—”
“That human nature is corrupt,” Olmy ventured sourly.
Flynch shook his head. “That the laws of our universe are inadequate. Incomplete. That there is a way to become better human beings, and of course, better openers. Disorder, competition, and death corrupt us, she thought.”
“She knew high
-level theory, speculations circulated privately among master openers,” Ry Ornis said. “She heard about domains where the rules were very different.”
“She heard about a gate into complete order?”
“It had been discussed, on a theoretical basis. None had ever been attempted. No limits have been found to the variety of domains—of universes. She speculated that a well-tuned gate could access almost any domain a good opener could conceive of.”
Olmy scowled. “She expected order to balance out competition and death? Order versus disorder, a fight to the finish?”
Ry Ornis made a whispery sigh, and Flynch nodded. “There’s a reason none of this is in the files,” Flynch said. “It’s been very embarrassing to the guild. No opener will talk about it, or admit they knew anyone involved in making the decision. I’m impressed that you even know what questions to ask. But it’s better that you ask Ry Ornis—”
Olmy focused on Flynch. “I’d rather ask you. You say you and Enoch occupied similar positions.”
Flynch gestured for them to turn to the left. The lights came on before them, and at the end of a much shorter hall, a door stood open. “Deirdre Enoch read extensively in the old religious texts. As did her followers. I believe they lost themselves in a dream,” he said. “They thought that anyone who bathed in a stream of pure order, as it were—in a domain of unbridled creation without destruction—would be enhanced. Armored. Annealed. That’s my opinion as to what they might have been thinking. She might have told them such things.”
“A fountain of youth?” Olmy ventured.
“Openers don’t much care about temporal immortality,” Ry Ornis said. “When we open a gate—we glimpse eternity. A hundred gates, a hundred different eternities. Coming back is just an interlude between forevers. Those who listened to Enoch thought they would end up more skilled, more brilliant. Less corrupted by competitive evolution.” He smiled, a remarkably unpleasant expression on his skeletal face. “Free of original sin.”
Olmy’s scowl faded. He glanced at Flynch, who had turned away from Ry Ornis. Something between them, a coolness. “All right. I can see that.”
“Really?” Flynch shook his head dubiously.
Perhaps the master opener could tell even more. But it did not seem wise at this point to push the matter.
A bell chimed and they entered the conference room.
Already seated within was the only surviving and whole escapee from the Redoubt: Gena Plass. As a radical Geshel, Plass had designed her body and appearance decades ago, opting for a solid frame, close to her natural physique. Her face she had tuned to show strength as well as classic beauty, but she had allowed it to age, and the experience of her time with the expedition, the trauma at the lesion, had not been erased. She maintained a look of proud dignity, but seemed more than a little perplexed.
Olmy noted that she carried a small book, an antique printed on paper—a Christian Bible.
Flynch made introductions. They sat around the table. “Let’s start with what we know,” he continued, and ordered up visual records made by the retreating flawship that had carried Plass from the Redoubt. Olmy studied the images hovering over the table: the great pipeline of the Way, protection fields fluorescing brilliantly as they were breached, debris caught in whirling clouds around the circumference—the flaw itself, running down the center of the Way like a wire heated to blinding blue-white. Plass refused to look. Olmy watched her from the corner of his eye. For an instant, something seemed to swirl around her—a wisp of shadow, smoothly transparent, like a small slice of twilight. The others did not see or ignored what they saw, but Plass’s eyes locked on Olmy’s and her lips tightened.
“I’m pleased you’ve both agreed to come,” Ry Ornis said as the images came to an end.
Plass looked at the opener, and then back at Olmy. “I can’t stay here. That’s why I’m going back. I don’t belong in Thistledown.”
“Ser Plass is haunted,” Flynch said. “Ser Olmy has been told about some of these visitors.”
“My husband,” she said, swallowing. “Just my husband, so far. Nobody else.”
“Is he still there?” Olmy asked. “In the Redoubt?”
Bitterly, she said, “They haven’t told you much that’s useful, have they? As if they want us to fail.”
“He’s dead?”
“He’s not in the Redoubt and I don’t know if you could call it death,” Plass said. “May I tell you what this really means? What we’ve actually done?” She stared around the table, eyes wide.
Ry Ornis lifted his hand and nodded.
“I have diaries from before the launch of Thistledown, from my family,” she said. “As far back as my ancestors can remember, my family was special … They claimed to have direct access to the world of the spiritual. They all saw ghosts. The old-fashioned kind, not the ones we use now for servants. Some described the ghosts in their journals. Or rather, ghost.” She reached up and pinched her chin hard, leaving pale marks. “I think they all saw the ghost of my husband. I recognize that now. Everyone on my world-line, back to centuries before I was born, was haunted by the same figure. Now I see him, too.”
“I have difficulty believing in that sort of ghost,” Olmy said.
Plass looked up at the ceiling and clutched her Bible. “Whatever it is that we tapped into—a domain of pure order, or something else very, very clever—it’s suffused into the Way, into the Thistledown. It’s like a caterpillar crawling up our lives, grabbing hold of events and adapting, spreading backward, maybe even forward in time. The ones who think they are in power try to keep us quiet, and I try to cooperate … but when my husband returns, he has things to tell me. Frightening things. Do the others hear … reports? Messages from the Redoubt?”
Ry Ornis shook his head, but Olmy doubted this meant simple denial.
“What happened when the gate became a lesion?” Olmy asked.
Plass grew pale. “My husband was at the gate with Enoch’s master opener, Tom Issa Danna.”
“One of our finest,” Ry Ornis said.
“Enoch’s gate into order was the second they opened. The first was a well to an established supply world where we could bring up raw materials.”
“Standard practice for all far-flung stations,” Flynch said.
“I wasn’t there when they opened the second gate,” Plass continued, her eyes darting between Flynch and Olmy. She seemed to have little sympathy for either. “I was at a support facility about a kilometer from the gate, and two kilometers from the Redoubt. There was already an atmosphere and a cushion of sand and soil around the site. My husband and I had started a quick-growth garden. An orchard. I was in the orchard when I heard they had opened the second gate. My husband was with Issa Danna. Ser Enoch came by on a tractor and said the opening was a complete success. We were celebrating, a small group of researchers, opening bottles of champagne.
“Two hours later, we got reports of something going wrong. We came out of our bungalows—a scout from the main flawship was just landing. Enoch had returned to the new gate to join Issa Danna. My husband must have been right there with them.”
“What did you see?” Olmy asked.
“Nothing, at first. We watched them on the monitors inside the bungalows. Issa Danna and his assistants were working, talking, laughing. Issa Danna was so confident. The second gate looked normal—a well, a cupola. But over the next few hours, we heard the people around the new gate behaving oddly. They sounded drunk, all of them. Something had come out of the gate, something intoxicating. They spoke about a shadow. They were laughing about seeing a shadow.”
She looked up at Olmy, and Olmy realized that before this experience, she must have been a very lovely woman. Some of that beauty still shined through.
“We saw that some kind of veil covered the gate. Then the assistant openers in the bungalows, students of Issa Danna, became upset and
said that the gate was out of control. They were feeling it in their clavicles, slaved to the master’s clavicle.”
Clavicles were used by gate-openers to create the portals that gave access to other times, other universes, “outside” the Way. Typically, they were shaped like bicycle handlebars attached to a small sphere.
“How many openers were there?” Olmy asked.
“Two masters and seven apprentices,” Plass said.
Olmy turned to Ry Ornis. Ornis held up his hand, urging patience.
“A small truck came out of the gate site. Its tires wobbled and all the people clinging to it were shouting and laughing. Then everyone around the truck—the bungalows were almost empty now—began to shout, and an assistant grabbed me—I was the closest to her—and said we had to get onto the scout and return to the flawship. She—her name was Jara—said she had never felt anything like this. She said they must have made a mistake and opened a gate into chaos. I had never heard about such a thing—but she seemed to think if we didn’t leave now, we’d all die. Four people. Two men and me and Jara. We were the only ones who made it into the scout ship. Shadows covered everything around us. Everybody was drunk, laughing, screaming.”
Plass paused and took several breaths to calm herself. “We flew up to the flawship. The rest is on the record. The Redoubt was the last thing I saw, surrounded by something like ink in water, swirling. A storm…
“Two of the others on the flawship, the men, pushed through the veil around the truck and Jara helped them get into the scout. As for Jara … Nobody remembers her now but me.”
Flynch said, “There were only two people aboard the scout when it reached the flawship. You, and the figure we haven’t identified. There was no other man, and there has never been an assistant opener named Jara.”
“They were real,” Plass quietly insisted.