by Greg Bear
“And?”
“There are divergencies.”
“Thank God,” he said. Hoffman raised a hand.
“Not broad divergencies. The consensus here is, given the information from the library and what we’ve discovered since—from the second ABE and elsewhere—war is a definite possibility. We’ve verified the historical references to Party Secretary Vasiliev. He has restructured the Defense Council just as the library said he would. The Russians are deploying SS45’s on their Kiev-class carriers and Kirov-class guided missile cruisers, and of course the Typhoon and Delta IV supersubs, to match our Sea Dragon program. They do indeed know how to foil our multi-spectra laser communication systems, which puts them in violation of the 1996 Arms Elimination Accords ... not that that is in itself important, since no arms were ever eliminated.”
Lanier nodded.
“We had to get tough to pry the information about the multi-spectra systems out of the Joint Space Force,” Cronberry said. “That’s one reason why the DOD and Joint Chiefs have no rep here.”
“That’s not the worst,” Hoffman continued. ”Congress is beginning inquiries on our budget. We’ve been well within appropriations, so that doesn’t make sense, unless we take into account a push to discredit the library, the Stone, all of us. The President is convinced—been convinced—by several members of his cabinet that the Stone is either fraudulent or irrelevant.”
Lanier’s clenched his jaw tightly, making his cheeks ache.
“Why?”
“I suspect the President is incapable of understanding what you’ve found on the Stone. He’s a solid mid-western liberal, very weak on science and technology. An administrator, no imagination. He’s never been comfortable with space matters, and this is simply beyond him.”
Cronberry pulled a copy of a letter on White House stationery out of her briefcase and handed it to Lanier. It said, in effect, that the President was considering launching an investigation into the way research was being conducted on the Stone. ”That was written after we began passing reports to the White House from the Second ABE imaging team, and after confirmation of the library evidence.”
“We wanted to get the Vice-President up to the Stone by week’s end, but he’s declined the invitation,” Hoffman said.
“What’s the Russian position on the Stone?” Lanier asked.
“They secretly launched their own asteroid belt probe two years ago. That probe returned confirmation to them before or about the same time as ABE. They know that there is indeed a very large asteroid which precisely matches the Stone.”
“Juno?”
“Yes. The imaging match is perfect, allowing for the excavations.”
Lanier hadn’t heard about the confirmation from the second ABE until now. ”So Juno and the Stone really are the same.”
Hoffman passed down a file of ABE and near-Earth surveillance photos.
One ABE picture showed Juno, a sweet-potato-shaped chunk of primordial planetary material covered with craters and rills. The Stone was identical, but lined with excavations and dimpled with the bore-hole depressions.
“God,” Lanier said.
“I don’t think He’s the one to blame,” Hoffman said. “Perhaps your Komrad Korzenowski is.”
“At any rate,” Hague said, “the Russians are going to pull their team out within three weeks, perhaps sooner. They’re upset because we deny them complete access, when we allow the Chinese as far as the seventh chamber. That’s their excuse, and frankly, it’s a good one. I’d be pissed, too. But it doesn’t explain everything.”
“They agreed to those divisions a year ago, when we set up team responsibilities,” Lanier said, frowning.
“Yes, but apparently there have been more leaks,” Hague said.
“Oh, Christ.” Who?
“And,” Hague continued, “they are now claiming that we misled them as to the contents of the libraries.”
“Which we did,” Hoffman said, smiling faintly.
“Can the science team get along without the Russians?” Cronberry asked.
“Yes. They’re mostly working on inner-chamber plasma tube power-supply theory. We can get along without them, but a lot of important research will slow way down, perhaps come to a stop. What about Beijing?”
Cronberry leafed through a folder of personnel papers.
Hague reached across and drew one out. ”Karen Farley is a Chinese citizen, and she’s working for you on theoretical physics, correct?”
“Yes. She’s made herself useful in all sorts of areas.” Oh, please, not Farley—not Wu and Chang—”She and her colleagues are to be withdrawn if the Russians leave.”
“Why the coordination?” Lanier asked.
“The Chinese smell a rat,” Hoffman said. ”Or a rout. If the Russians feel they are being misled and kept out of important decisions, the Chinese have similar grounds for complaint. Their own presence might be more advantageous to us than to them.”
“I can’t believe either group would give up a place on the Stone. I wouldn’t.”
“They won’t,” Hoffman said. ”We have evidence that both the Russians and the Chinese have clandestine operatives in the security team, perhaps men in the science team. And there have been interesting activities in Russian orbital space and on the Moon. Not to mention heightened activity at Yuratam and the Indian Ocean launch site.”
“Invasion from Ear and Moon?”
Hoffman shook her head. ”Look, this is all chickenshit compared to the big question. Has Vasquez come up with anything? What does she have to say about parallel worlds, alternate histories?”
“She hasn’t had time to say much of anything,” Lanier said quietly. “In a few weeks, we might know.”
“I understand the President’s point of view. I find this very hard to believe,” Cronberry said. ”Is it your opinion that the Stone comes from our future?”
“No,” Lanier said. ”The Stone comes from another universe, not precisely our own. That much is certain. There’s one obvious difference.”
“No Stone in the Stone’s past,” Hague said.
“Exactly.”
“And we have no way of knowing how much the Stone is affecting the course of our history.”
“It’s changing things a lot, I’d say,” Hoffman remarked. ”If anything, the Stone has made things worse.” She held up a memory block marked “Plant Physiology Changes under Plasma Tube Conditions.”
“You made this copy yourself?”
She passed it to Cronberry, then to Hague.
Lanier nodded. ”It’s in S-code,” he said. ”It’s a. summary from the best sources, mostly from the third chamber library. Vasquez should be going into the third chamber in a few days.”
“What does it summarize?” Hague asked, hefting it.
“The first two weeks of the war.”
Cronberry flinched.
Hoffman took a slate, programmed it for reading S-code, plugged in the block and skimmed over the material. Her face went ashen. ”I haven’t looked at this before,” she said.
“It’s mostly historical photographic records made by the armed forces on both sides. Some of the stuff toward the end chronicles the Long Winter.”
“So that’s not just theory anymore,” Hague said.
Lanier shook his head.
“How long was ... will ... the winter be?” Cronberry asked, reluctantly accepting the slate from Hoffman.
“One or two years in its major effects.”
Hague took the slate from Cronberry. ”You guarantee this material is from the third chamber library?”
Lanier swallowed before answering, irritated. ”I could hardly have conjured it out of thin air.”
“Of course not,” Hoffman said. ”if the libraries are correct—if our universes coincide in this one way—then we have about sixteen days?”
“One way or another, we’ll know by then,” Lanier said. “Although the knowledge of the events will almost certainly shape the results. If. If they
happen at all.”
“We’re scheduling a meeting with the Russians tomorrow at noon,” Hoffman said. ”Strictly informal. They’ve asked that you be there. Mr. Hague’s department has pushed very hard for State Department and DOD approval of the meeting. If those talks succeed, there will be other meetings below the cabinet level. And if we can convince the President before next week, perhaps a summit will be arranged.” She blinked slowly in his direction, still focusing somewhere over his shoulder—not quite the thousand-yard stare of a battle-weary veteran, but very nearly.
Chapter Thirteen
The third chamber city was the next step.
Having made the trip to the first circuit of wells, and having absorbed as much as she could from the books in the Alexandria library selected for her by Lanier, Patricia felt herself numbing nicely to the whole subject. It was a game, an exercise, no more real than the odd mathematical exercises she had made up as a teenager.
She had ridden the trains beneath Thistledown City so many times in the past two weeks, but the third chamber was the most closely guarded of the first five. The trains had never stopped—until now.
Rupert Takahashi escorted her from the subway station to the ground-level walkways.
Takahashi served the science team in an unusual capacity.
His title of mathematician was hardly sufficient description of what he did; he seemed to move from interest to interest, working with one group on one day and another the next. He was more than a generalist —he was a generalist with a specific purpose, to oversee the mathematical and statistical rigor of the various groups within the science team. That explained how he had come to work with Rimskaya on preliminary corridor theory; they had discussed the topic while Takahashi double-checked Rimskaya’s population studies.
Thistledown City was astonishing, newer than Alexandria by two centuries; it had been built after the Stone’s launch, incorporating designs not thought of until the inhabitants had had long experience with their environment. Here the Stone architects had allowed themselves complete freedom. Treating the chamber as a giant valley, they had strung cables from cap to cap and hung buildings from them in graceful curves.
Taking advantage of the upward slope of the floor, they had built arched structures fully ten kilometers long, bands of steel and processed Stone material interacting in patterns of silver and white, casting soft-edged shadows over the neighborhoods below. Some of the structures rose to the very limits of the chamber’s atmosphere; these were actually thicker at the top than the bottom, like golf tees.
Even empty, Thistledown City seemed alive. It would take only the merest suggestion of people to come to life, Patricia thought; a few hundred citizens, moving from building to building, dressed in outrageous clothes—colorful, flowing garments suited to the curves and vaults and arches, bright colors to contrast with the muted creams, whites and metallics of the city.
The main library was practically hidden beneath a sprawling Annex of one of the smaller golf-tee structures. Takahashi had said it was within easy walking distance, so they strolled across plazas, over pedestrian bridges, alongside service roads that at one time would have teemed with traffic—mostly computer-controlled and unoccupied vehicles. ”All the vehicles are gone,” Takahashi said. ”We only know what they looked like through the records. They must have been put to use in the exodus.”
She tried to imagine tens of millions of Stonets—such a population could easily have been accommodated by Thistledown City alone—tooling off down the corridor in their robot. The library entrance was a solid sheet of a material resembling black marble. As they approached, an amplified voice asked them to halt for identification. They stood for a full two minutes before being cleared to enter.
A broad half-ellipse flowed aside in the black expanse.
Beyond waited the ubiquitous security team in gray and black, passing them through after more ritual. The interior of the library was fully illuminated; no additional strip lighting was necessary. ”No circuit breakers in Thistledown,” Takahashi sad. ”We’re not even sure how the power gets to the lights, much less where it comes from.”
The library proper was smaller in overall volume than its cousin—or ancestor—in Alexandria and had no visible stores of records.
The main floor was a pastel-blue-carpeted plaza beneath a sheet of softly glowing white material which stretched without support for a hundred meters. The plaza was dotted with at least a thousand lime-green padded seats. In front of each seat was a chromium teardrop on a slate-gray pedestal.
The fabrics and materials in the library showed no sign of wear or decay.
Takahashi led her to a seat. Recording and monitoring equipment surrounded the seat, looking out-of-place and obviously rigged by the investigators. ”We use this one normally, but the choice is yours.”
She shook her head, “I don’t like all this stuff,” she said, indicating the equipment. Moving through the ranks of seats, she chose one about twenty meters from the edge of the array and sat.
Takahashi followed. ”You can show yourself the entire Stone from here as it used to be,’ he said. ”Would you like a tour of the cities when they were occupied?” He pushed aside a fabric-covered lid on her seat arm and showed her how to use the simple controls on the panel beneath.
“These are just the basics. There are hundreds of other tricks possible. Feel free to experiment. Think of it as a vacation. It’s no fun to watch, and I have no real business here except to show you the ropes, so I’ll wait outside. Join me when you’re done—say in an hour or so?” She didn’t feel easy about being on the plaza alone, and she had deeply appreciated Lanier’s staying with her in the Alexandria library. Still, she agreed with a nod and settled into the seat, manipulating the controls with one hand. A simple circular graphic display hovered before her, as crisp and clear as something solid.
Takahashi had misinformed her on one point, and her fumbling triggered a tutorial. It corrected her errors and informed her—in only slightly accented American English—how to operate the equipment properly. Then it provided her with call numbers and codes for other types of information.
She called up a student’s basic guide to the second chamber city.
In an instant, Alexandria surrounded her. She appeared to be standing on the portico of an apartment in the lower floors of one of the megas, looking down on the busy streets. The illusion was perfect—even providing her with a memory of what “her” apartment looked like. She could turn her head and look completely behind her if she wished—indeed, she could walk around, even though she knew she was sitting down.
In both her ears— -or somewhere in the middle of her head—a voice explained what she was seeing.
She spent half an hour in Alexandria, observing the clothes the people wore, their faces, their hair styles and expressions and ways of moving. Some of the outfits attracted her. Others were positively puritanical—in a slinky sort of way. One of the most popular styles at the time of the record, for women, was an opaque robe—usually in pink or dusty orange—with hood, capped by a small crimson disk of some feathery material.
Some women wore hexagonal blue designs on their left shoulder blades—(For information on insignia of office and rank, positively and silently vocalize the following code string ... ) —and others red ribbons draped over the right shoulder, terminating in gold beads. Men’s clothing was no less flamboyant, or somber; the distinctions seemed to point up sexual attitudes quite different from those in her time, her world.
She heard them speaking. It was a peculiar speech, resembling Welsh but occasionally understandable as English or French.
(“What language did you—this unit—speak to me, and how did you know?” (Late twenty-first-century English, the earliest accessible without specific code, selected because of your conversation before access to data.) While ethnic populations still retained versions of their mother tongues, many of the languages had mutated into a common tongue—though she was informed sublimin
ally that fashions in language were much more variable over shorter periods of time. Rapid changes were possible because learning had been accelerated by tutorial devices such as those in the library. One could learn any new language or variation in a few hours, or mere minutes.
For the written languages she understood, many of the spellings had been simplified or—-paradoxically—made more complex. Had there been a time when flowery spelling was in vogue?
(This is the famous Nader Plaza, which won awards for architectural excellence before the Thistledown vessel left Earth behind ... ) She listened attentively, completely lost in the experience.
Some men wore kilt-like skirts and unyoked sleeves, others wore business suits that would not have been out of place in twenty-first-century Los Angeles. Shoes seemed to have gone completely out of fashion, perhaps because automated sanitation kept everything spotless.
(What about social deviation? Ghettos and tenements?) The scene shifted dizzily.
(Social unease in Alexandria and the rest of the Stone is not unknown.
(Certain districts have been kept free of constant city maintenance.
(The citizens living in these districts have chosen to avoid all modern conveniences, and shirk any equipment invented after the twentieth century. Their wishes are strictly observed; they are often honored citizens, and they are entitled to their belief that technology led to the Death, and that God wishes us to live with no supports not mentioned in the works of the Gentle Nader and his Apostles of the Mountain.)
She had heard the name Nader mentioned several times, but it took her some time to get around to toggling a different branch of the “footnote” function. As she did so, she asked for explanations of several other things any Stoner would have taken for granted. That triggered an elementary, synopsized history of the Stone, and of the time between the Death and the construction of the Thistledown.
She was more than a little shocked to discover that the Gentle Nader was, in fact, Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate and independent investigator who had made a big stir in the 1960s and 1970s. He was still alive, back on Earth—her Earth, her time—but in the library records his name was always used reverently. He was always “Gentle Nader’ or “the Good Man.” Those who took his name—the Naderites—were a powerful political force, and had been for centuries.