Eon

by Greg Bear

  “You named it?”

  Lanier shook his head. ”No.”

  “We’re going all the way to the seventh chamber today?”

  “If you’re up to it.”

  “How long do we stay here?”

  “A few hours at most. I want you to get a look at the library before we continue.”

  “A library?”

  “Indeed,” Lanier replied. ”One of the highlights.”

  She settled back in her seat, eyes wide. ”Is the city deserted?”

  “Most of us think it is. We’ve had scattered reports, but I put it up to nerves. Boojums, the security team calls them. Ghosts. We’ve never found a live Stoner.”

  “You’ve found dead ones?”

  “Quite a number. There are mausoleums in this chamber, and in the fourth chamber. The main cemetery in Alexandria is at two-six degrees and ten kilometers. Do you understand the coordinate system?”

  “I think so,” Patricia said. ”Measure from the axis for angle, then distance from the cap. But what’s zero, and which cap?”

  “This is the zero bridge, and we measure from the south cap.”

  “This isn’t an initiation, then; you weren’t telling me a story. Humans built the Stone.”

  “They did,” Lanier said.

  “Where did they go?”

  Lanier smiled and waggled a finger.

  “I know,” Patricia said, sighing. ”Wait and see for myself.” She stepped down from the track and stretched, then rubbed her eyes. ”I’m impressed.”

  “The first time I saw Alexandria, I felt kind of at home,” Lanier said. “I was raised in New York, moved to LA when I was fifteen-lived in big cities all my life, practically. But this really impressed me, even so. We could move twenty million people into just this chamber and still not be crowded.”

  “Is that why the Stone is important—as real estate?”

  “No,” Lanier said. ”We don’t plan on selling condos. We have fifteen archaeologists on the team, and they’d kill anyone who even suggested it. They hold briefings every few days—I’m sure you’ll attend several soon. They’re working around the clock, and have been since we brought them up here three years ago. They haven’t let us touch anything since that time, except when one of the security team commanders or myself has overruled them. And even then, we needed damned good excuses.”

  Patricia nodded to the three guards, who returned the greeting cordially, one tipping the visor on his cap. A radio in the guard house beeped and crackled. The senior officer answered. Patricia couldn’t catch the guttural message, but the guard replied in what sounded like Russian.

  “I could have sworn they were all clean-cut American soldiers,” Patricia said.

  “They are. There are Russians working with Hua Ling in the southern cap bore hole.”

  “The marines speak Russian?”

  “This one does, obviously. And three or four other languages. Cream of the crop.”

  “Is there anybody up here who isn’t brilliant?”

  “No common grunts, if that’s what you mean. We can’t afford them. Everyone has to do double and triple duty.” He sat in the driver’s seat again. ”When you’re ready, we’ll cross the bridge and drive to the library.”

  “Anytime,” Patricia said, resuming her seat.

  Lanier advanced the tractor and the gates swung wide for them, then closed after.

  They crossed the four-lane bridge, tires chattering and whanging on the asphalt. Patricia reached into her pants pocket to pull out the slate.

  Using its ten-key shorthand board, she typed: Weather—or rather, the absence of it. Sky is quite clear. Perspective really startling. Land appears flat nearby, then just above the horizon (looking north) seems to curve, the curve getting more radical up the side of the valley. The chamber overhead has lots of detail, visible through slight haze.

  She played back what she had keyed in, hunting for errors.

  She had learned to type on a slate in high school, but that had been many years ago, and she preferred writing by hand.

  Paper, however, was obviously an expensive commodity on the Stone, to be used sparingly.

  She continued to type as they passed down a broad thoroughfare.

  Street about fifty meters wide, divided down the middle by what might have been grass at one time, and trees. Two lanes each side. None of the plants look healthy.

  Gardening systems deteriorating—not working at all? Shop windows on street level, nearly all broken. Lobbies of businesses, agencies, open to the air. One window—humanoid mannequin.

  Long-necked. Poised, but nude.

  She spotted a sign above what might have once been a jewelry store.

  “Kesar’s,” she read. Latin alphabet—and on the other side of the sign, as they moved on, she saw that the same name had been spelled out in Cyrillic. Some shops had Oriental ideograms—Chinese and Japanese.

  Others were in Laotian and the modified Vietnamese-Roman alphabet.

  “Lord,” she breathed. ”I could be back in LA.”

  There was something peculiar about the shops, the designs, even a few window displays. She squinted, trying to resolve the discrepancies.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. Lanier slowed the truck.

  “This is all supposed to be quaint, isn’t it? I mean, like back home, where we have shopping malls built to make us think we’re in Old England. This is supposed to be old-fashioned.”

  “As good an observation as any I’ve heard,” Lanier said, shrugging. “I’ve never really paid this area much attention.”

  “Garry, I’m very confused, if the Stone was built a thousand years ago, how does all this fit in?”

  Lanier swung around a gentle curve and brought the truck to a stop in the middle of the street. He pointed to a large, umber-toned building on the northern edge of the greenspace. ”That’s one of the libraries—one of two we’re investigating now. All the others are closed off.”

  Patricia clutched her lower lip between her teeth. ”Should I be nervous?” she asked.

  “Probably. I would be.”

  “I mean, it’s as if—” She shook her head. ”Why should I go in there? I’m a mathematician. I’m not an engineer or a historian.”

  “Believe me, nobody enters the libraries on whim. You’re uniquely qualified. You’ve been working in an area with no practical value—until now.”

  “I’m going to stop asking questions,” Patricia said, sighing. ”I don’t even know the right questions to ask.”

  Electronic sensors had been placed around the building.

  Chain link fences topped by wicked-looking razor-wire curls enforced the gentle suggestions of sensors and cameras. Four guards stood before the entrance, carrying Apples antipersonnel lasers—and looking very serious. As Lanier and Vasquez approached, an amplified voice boomed out, “Mr. Lanier. Stop and allow scan. Who’s that with you?”

  “Patricia Vasquez,” he said. ”Index under science team, reference memo from General Gerhardt.”

  “Yessir. Advance and present ID.”

  They left the truck and walked to the gate. ”We brought the razor wire and sensors up from Earth two years ago,” Lanier told her. ”When we began to realize what we had, in there.”

  They presented their IDs and laid their hands on a plate carried by a woman in black and gray. After being cleared, they entered the enclosure.

  The ground-floor windows had been broken here, as well.

  No signs or maps were evident within, but it had the definite feel of a library—though once again, it seemed artificially quaint. The interior was dark and deserted.

  “The outside guards can’t enter the library, only special security—black-and-gray uniforms. There’s one person on duty inside at all times, with a video monitor.”

  “Very fancy,” Patricia said.

  “Necessary.”

  A strip of fluorescent lighting hanging from the ceiling on a bolted track flashed on. More strips glowed in sequence
, making a path of light across the ground floor and up a flight of steps near the center of the building.

  “We have portable generators at four locations in Alexandria,’’ Lanier said as they walked down the path. The floor was bare and dusty, with a few well-cleared tracks in the dust.

  “Most of the city’s power nets aren’t functioning. We haven’t tracked down the power supplies yet, but they’re probably not discrete plants. The Stone itself seems to carry a reserve of power, with concentrations in supercooled batteries.”

  Patricia’s brow wrinkled. ”Batteries?”

  “Like the hundred-meter cells in Arizona and the Greater African Conservatory.”

  “Oh.” She wasn’t much on practical physics, but she didn’t want Lanier to know that.

  “The electrical system is pretty conventional, otherwise. Control and information channels are optical, more so than back on Earth. The buildings are dark because most of the circuit breakers—or whatever served that function—have been tripped, and nobody’s going to reset them until we know more about fire hazards.”

  “Why are the windows broken?” Patricia asked as they continued climbing.

  “Glass gets brittle with age, slumps. Pressure surges in the atmosphere crack the windows.”

  “Weather?”

  “Of a sort. There are high- and low-pressure systems in the chambers, updrafts and coriolis, downdrafts near the caps. Even storms. Snow in some of the chambers, infrequently. Most of it seems controlled, but we don’t know whether the controls are built-in, static, or whether machines are still hard at work someplace.”

  In the shadowy halls beyond the light strips on the second floor, she saw man-sized metallic cylinders arranged in rows, marching off into obscurity.

  “We’ve been pulling data out of these storage banks for a year,” Lanier said. ”The programming languages weren’t familiar to us, so we’ve only had success producing readable copy and useful images for about six months. As it turns out, the library in the next chamber is even larger, so we’re concentrating on it, now. But ... I still prefer this. There’s an extensive hard-copy center on the fourth floor. That’s where I did my early research, and where you’ll be doing some of yours.”

  “I feel like I’m on the Mary Celeste.”

  “The comparison’s been made,” Lanier said. ”At any rate, here or anywhere else, the rule is, don’t disturb anything you can’t put back exactly the way it was. The archaeologists are just finishing their gross surveys and they’re still touchy. We have to break the rule now and then—repairing necessary equipment, tinkering with the computers—but no excess meddling is allowed. If the Stone is a Mary Celeste, we can’t afford not to know why.”

  On the fourth floor, they entered a large room filled with reading cubicles, each with a viewer and a flat gray panel mounted in a small desk. One of the desks had been equipped with a recently imported Tensor lamp connected to the new power supply. Lanier pulled out a chair for her. She sat.

  “I’ll be back in a moment,” he said. He walked to the opposite side of the room, passed through a door and left her alone. She fingered the viewer on the desk—was it for video, microfilm? ’She couldn’t tell.

  The screen was flat and black as ebony, no more than a quarter of an inch thick.

  There was something unusual about the chair. A small cylinder was mounted horizontally in the middle of the seat, fitting with some discomfort between her buttocks. There might have been cushions at one time, covering the cylinder—or perhaps the chair created its own cushion when powered up.

  Patricia glanced nervously at the rows of empty cubicles, trying to imagine those who had last used them. When Lanier returned, she was very glad to see him. Her hands were trembling.

  “Spooky,” she said, smiling weakly.

  He held out a small book bound in milky plastic. She thumbed through the pages. The paper was thin and tough.

  The language was English, though the typeface was unusual—too many serifs. She opened to the title page.

  “Tom Sawyer,” she read, “by Samuel Langhome Clemens, Mark Twain.”

  The publication date was 2110. She closed the book and put it down, swallowing hard.

  “Well?” Lanier asked softly.

  She looked up at him, frowning. Then a kind of understanding passed between them. She opened her mouth to speak and shut it again.

  “You’ve wondered why I’m so tired looking,” Lanier said. “Do you understand, now?”

  “Because of this ... library.”

  “Partly,” he said.

  “It’s from the future. The Stone is from our future.”

  “We’re not certain of that,” he said.

  “But that’s why I’m here ... to help you figure out how.”

  “There are other puzzles, equally mystifying, and perhaps they all tie together.”

  She opened the book again. ”Published by Greater Georgia General, in cooperation with Harpers of the Pacific.”

  He reached down and took the book from her hands.

  “That’s enough for now. We’ll go outside. You can rest for a bit, or we can spend a couple of hours at the security base.”

  “No,” she said. ”I want to go on.” She closed her eyes for a few seconds. He left to reshelve the book, then returned and walked ahead of her to the ground floor.

  “The subway entrance is two blocks from here,” he said. “We can walk it. Exercise clears the head.”

  She followed him across one corner of the park, looking at without really seeing the buildings and their signs in the various languages of Earth, knowing she was past the point of assimilation.

  They passed beneath a half-moon arch and walked down a double-back incline into the subway station.

  “You said the Stone wasn’t from the future,” Patricia commented.

  “From our future,” Lanier corrected. ”It may not be from our universe.”

  Her skin felt warm. She blinked rapidly, not sure whether she was going to cry or laugh. ”Damn.”

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  They stood on a broad platform, near a wall ornamented with large, flat, rose-colored crystals arranged in irregular tesselations.

  Direction signs hung from the ceiling, letters scabbed and peeling: “Nexus Central, Line 5 This side for 54 Alexandria ... San Juan Ortega, Line 6, 20 minutes.” More of the ebony-black flat display screens hung near the signs, all blank.

  Patricia felt a small tremor of dizziness. Was she really where she was, or suffering through a work-induced dream? ”You’re getting Stoned,” Lanier said. ”Watch yourself.”

  “I am. Yeah. Watching myself getting Stoned.”

  “Depression is usually the next step. Disorientation, fantasies, depression. That’s what I went through.”

  “Oh?”

  She looked down at the white tiles beneath her feet. ”Should be a train coming in the next five, ten minutes,” Lanier said. He put his hands in his pockets and joined her in regarding the floor.

  “I’m doing fine,” Patricia said. She didn’t believe herself, but on the other hand, she had felt worse before exams than she did now.

  She’d hold up. She had to. “I’m just wondering if there are better ways to indoctrinate newcomers. This seems pretty haphazard.”

  “We tried other ways.”

  “Didn’t work?”

  “No better, some worse.”

  A puff of air advanced out of the train tunnel. Patricia thought to peer over the edge of the platform to see what kind of mechanism the subway cars rode on. The floor of the channel was featureless, no rails or guides of any sort.

  Out of the tunnel hissed a giant aluminum millipede, its nose windowless and crossed by a radiance of green lines.

  It stopped with neck-jarring suddenness and hummed softly as its doors slid open. A marine guard stood in the lead car, bolstered pistol and laser rifle prominent.

  “Mr. Lanier,” he greeted, saluting smartly.

  “Charli
e, this is Patricia Vasquez. Another green badge. Patricia, this is Corporal Charles Wurtz. You’ll probably be seeing a lot of each other. Charlie is our main man on the zero.”

  “Keep all the boojums from bumming a lift,” Charlie said, grinning and shaking Patricia’s hand.

  Lanier beckoned for her to enter first. The interior, examined for basics, was like any reasonably new rapid transit system vehicle. The plastic seats and metal fixtures were in good repair.

  The cars had obviously not been designed for crowding—no handstraps or rails for standing passengers—and the arrangements were spacious, with lots of leg room.

  And no advertising. Indeed, within the car there were no signs at all.

  “Like an old BART in San Francisco,” Patricia said. She hadn’t ridden on the BART or the LA Metro in years.

  They settled back in their seats. There was no sensation of motion until she looked out the large round windows spaced at irregular intervals along the sides of the car. The station was a passing blur.

  Then there was only darkness relieved by flashing white vertical bars.

  “It just doesn’t look that much like the future,” she said.

  “It’s recognizable. I always thought the future would be so different, it wouldn’t be recognizable. Particularly a thousand years in the future. But there are buildings, subways. I mean, why not matter transmitters?”

  “Alexandria and this rail system are a lot older than other parts of the Stone. When you get around and see things in more detail, you’ll notice big differences between our technology and this. Besides ...” He paused. ”There’s history to consider. Delays. Handicaps. And holdovers.”

  “Which I’ll know about soon enough.”

  “Right,” Lanier said. ”Did you feel any motion just now? Acceleration?”

  She frowned. ”No. But maybe we started out slowly—”

  “The trains accelerate at four g’s.”

  “Wait.” She turned to a window and looked at the passing bars of white, then frowned. ”Alexandria ... I mean, it wasn’t designed right.”

  Lanier regarded her patiently. She was supposed to be brilliant, but in many ways she was so young. Struggling to maintain her decorum as if she were a schoolgirl.

  “The Stone has to accelerate and decelerate, right? Just like this train. But I don’t feel any motion now, and ... the chambers should have angled floors, to compensate for the thrust, for the wash of water in the lakes and ponds—higher walls on one side. Acceleration slosh. Angled walkways to compensate.”