by Greg Bear
“Does that mean the corridor is full of potential wells?”
“I think so. Only a few have been selected, as it were.” She looked up at the roof of the tent, trying to find a way to explain what she saw in her head. ”The dimples butt up against each other. There could be an infinite number of them. And a well opened in a dimple—potential or already tuned—could lead to another universe.”
Takahashi shook his head. ”This is getting entirely too weird.”
“Yeah,” Patricia said. ”I’d like to hold off on more explanations until Garry returns.”
“He’s coming down any time now. He entered the bore hole a few hours ago,” Carrolson said. She slapped her knee and stood up. ”Which reminds me. We’re having a dance tomorrow in the first chamber. All are invited. It’s not exactly Garry’s homecoming, but it will serve as such. We all need to let down our hair a little bit.”
“I’m a good dancer,” Wu said. ”Foxtrot, twist, swim.”
“Listen to him! You think we thirty years behind the times,” Chang said.
“Forty,” Wu corrected.
“And if we can peel Heineman away from his toy,” Carrolson said, “I’ll teach the old coot a few hot steps.”
Lanier dropped the paper on his desk in the science team compound office and reached for the com button. He hesitated before pressing it.
He thought he had figured out why Hoffman had given him the name.
“Ann,” he said. ”I want to see Rupert Takahashi in the compound as soon as possible.”
He hoped he was doing what Hoffman had hinted he should do: defusing the bomb the Stone had become ...
Lance Corporal Thomas Oldfield, twenty-four, had spent the last six months on the Stone, and he regarded them as the most exciting time of his life, though in fact there wasn’t much overt excitement. Most of the time he stood guard duty in the second chamber, just outside the tunnel to the first chamber.
He spent many of his hours alternately keeping an eye on the road, the zero bridge and near city, and examining the distant curve of the opposite side. He was usually accompanied by at least one colleague, but today a special detail had been ordered to accompany a scientist into the first chamber from the subway terminal in the city, and now he was left alone. He didn’t expect any trouble. In the entire time he had spent on the Stone, nothing untoward had happened. He had never even seen a boojum.
He didn’t believe they existed.
Oldfield whistled to himself as he stepped outside the booth and looked down the length of the bridge. Deserted. ”Fine day, Private,” he said briskly, saluting ceremoniously. ”Yes, sir. Fine day, sir. Always a fine day.” He wondered if technically speaking it had been the very same day since he had arrived. One long-drawn-out day, no intervening night. The weather changed now and then—rain, sometimes mist from the river. Did that serve to divide the time?
He inspected his Apple and tested it behind the booth on a cement block lined with foil ration packages. Each invisible tooth of light blew a foil package off the block. When he was relieved, he would line up the pierced foil packages for the next watch to test their weapons.
It had become a ritual.
He walked around the booth to the door, stopped and—He couldn’t begin to describe what he saw.
He didn’t even think about the Apple. He thought about reports and making a fool of himself.
It stood about seven feet high, skinny, narrow head like a sidewise board with two jutting and unblinking eyes regarding him calmly. Its two long arms emerged from the torso well below where the shoulders should have been and were covered with something similar to the foil ration packets. The legs were short and powerful looking.
Its skin was smooth and reflective—not shiny or slimy, but polished like old wood.
It acknowledged his presence with a polite nod.
He nodded back, and then, under the pressure of all his past training, raised the Apple and said, “Identify yourself.”
But by that time it was gone.
Oldfield had the impression it had entered the tunnel, but he couldn’t be sure.
His face reddened with anger and frustration. He had had his chance.
He had seen a boojum and he hadn’t buzzed it down so others could see it. He had followed the pattern of everyone who had ever claimed officially—or unofficially—to have seen one.
Oldfield had always thought he was made of sterner stuff.
He pounded his fist against the booth and punched the emergency button on the com.
Chapter Eighteen
Lanier met Takahashi in a conference cubicle at the end of the second floor hall. Carrolson had joined Takahashi and the escort, unaware of Lanier’s purpose. That wouldn’t cause any problem, Lanier decided; best to keep up an atmosphere of normality.
He asked for lunch to be brought to his office and they ate quietly before he outlined his new orders. When he was finished, Carrolson shook her head and sighed.
“Vasquez wants to mount another expedition, this time to the second circuit,” she said. ”I’m sure she won’t like being barred from the libraries.”
“Nobody goes into the libraries,” Lanier said. ”They’re strictly off limits. And no second expedition. We freeze all activity on the Stone. I want the archaeologists back at the compounds, and the bore-hole studies shut down, too.” Takahashi regarded him dourly.
“What happened with Hoffman?” he asked. Lanier didn’t look at him; eating lunch together, he thought, was the last amenity in their relationship.
But now was the time. As gracefully as he could manage, he asked Carrolson to leave. She gave him a puzzled look, but he barely noticed her going out the door. All his attention was focused on Takahashi.
“I’m going to defuse a very bad situation,” Lanier said when they were alone. ”I want you to help me with the defusing, and I want you to report it to your bosses.”
“Pardon?” Takahashi asked. The mathematician’s hand was a little less steady around the glass of orange juice he had been drinking.
“I want you to report it to your superiors, however you’ve been doing that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Nor do I,” Lanier said, unmoving in his seat. ”I’m not informing Gerhardt, though my instincts tell me I should. You will remain free to observe that we are shutting everything down until negotiations have resolved our differences. You will personally investigate and verify that we have found no information about weapons in the libraries.”
“Gary, what are you talking about?”
“I know you are an agent for the Soviets.”
Takahashi’s jaw muscles tightened and he regarded Lanier from under straight, tense brows.
“There’s a dance tonight,” Lanier said. ”Carrolson will expect all of us to attend. And we will. Gerhardt will be there. He won’t be told, because he’d slap you in the bore-hole detention center and ship you back on the next OTV run, in imus, so to speak. I don’t want that.”
“Out of respect?” Takahashi asked, blinking.
“No,” Lanier said. ”I don’t fall for that old shit about just doing our jobs. You’re a goddamned traitor. I don’t know where it all began, but it ends here, and I want it to end well. The information you fed back to Earth has damned near started a war. Inform your superiors that everything is cooling off, that we are backing away from the libraries and that in the long run, we may evacuate the Stone. Pull out, let everybody settle their differences. Understood?”
Takahashi said nothing.
“Do you know what’s happening on Earth?” Lanier asked.
“No, not precisely,” Tagahashi said solemnly. ”Then we should explain a few things to each other. To help defuse the situation, as you say. Their stake in this is as big as ours.”
“Ours?”
“I am an American, Garry. I did this to protect us as well.”
Lanier felt his stomach go sour. He clenched his teeth together and turned his chair away from Tag
ahashi. He fought back an urge to ask Takahashi if there had been a lot of money involved; he did not want to know.
“Right. Here’s how we stand.”
And he told Takahashi what he had learned on Earth.
He hoped to hell it was what Hoffman had intended.
Late in the afternoon, the sociology group presented another team report in the main compound lecture hall. About twenty team members were in the audience; not many more than sat on the low stage, behind the lectern. Rimskaya stood to one side while Wallace Rainer introduced the first of four sociologists.
Lanier watched and listened from the back, slumped in the seat.
Ten minutes into the first presentation, Patricia sat beside him and folded her arms.
The first speaker outlined a brief hypothesis of Stone family groupings. She went into some depth on triad families, chiefly found among the Naderites.
Patricia glanced at Lanier. ”Why am I barred from the libraries?” she asked in an undertone.
“Everybody is,” he said. ”As of today.”
“Yes, but why?”
“It’s very complicated. I can explain later.”
Patricia turned away and sighed. ”Okay,” she said. ”I’ll do as much as I can outside. That’s still allowed.”
He nodded and felt a sharp surge of empathy for her.
The second speaker was Tanya Smith—no relation to Robert Smith—and she briskly elaborated on the previously presented report on the evacuation of the Stone.
Patricia half listened.
“It now seems apparent that a resettlement committee handled applications for corridor migration and coordinated transportations.” Patricia glanced at Lanier again. His eyes met hers.
It was all crazy, no way to run a railroad, much less a huge research effort.
In its most crucial hour, the human race was represented by a team of blindly searching, hog-tied and gagged intellectuals.
Thinking of Takahashi, and how useless all the security had been, Lanier’s stomach went sour again.
The plan, of course, had been to allow researchers on the lower levels of security clearance and badge status to do their work as best they could, watched over by a senior member with almost full clearance.
Their findings would then be filtered and collated and assembled into final statements, checked with corresponding documents in the libraries. It had to be that way. With so few people cleared to do research in the libraries, and with lifetimes of information stored away, decades would have passed before substantial overviews emerged.
That had been the reasoning, at any rate. Lanier had gone along because he was still, after all, a military man at heart, obeying if not implicitly trusting those beyond Hoffman in the chain of command.
Not that it mattered.
Not that it mattered one goddamn bit, because it was all being shut down anyway. They were going to pack up and go home and Takahashi would (if all went well) report that a good-faith effort was being made to placate the worried Soviets.
But the Soviets would still not be allowed into the libraries.
Unless the President was totally mad. Only one hand in Pandora’s box at a time.
He had seen some of the material on the Stoners’ technological advances. He had experienced the education system used in the library.
He had touched on the ways the Stoners had tampered with biology and psychology. (Tampered—did that betray a prejudice? Yes. Some of it had shaken him to his core and contributed to his bouts of being Stoned.) He was uncertain what his own beloved country would do with such power, much less the Soviets.
Patricia sat in on the charade a few more minutes, then left.
He stood to follow after her and caught up near the corner of the women’s bungalow.
“Just a minute,” he said. She halted and half turned, not looking at him but at a potted lime tree growing in a wide space between two buildings. ”I don’t intend for you to stop your work. Not at all.”
“I won’t,” she said.
“I just wanted to make that clear.”
“It’s clear.” Now she faced him directly, hands slipping into her pockets. ”You can’t be happy with the way things are going.”
His eyes widened, and he drew his head back, feeling a sudden anger at her presumption, obtuseness, whatever it was she rolled up into one short sentence.
“You can’t be a happy man, keeping us here, knowing all that.”
“I’m not keeping you here.”
“You’ve never talked to me, to any of us that I’ve seen. You say things but you don’t talk with us.”
The anger evaporated and left behind an equally sudden pit of lostness, aloneness. ”Rank hath its privileges,” he said softly.
“I don’t think so.” Squinting at him. She wanted to challenge, to provoke. ”That kind of person are you? You seem kind of ... solid. Frozen. Are you really, or is that just a privilege?”
Lanier lifted a pointed finger and waggled it at her, his face creasing with a grim smile. ”You do your job,” he said. ”I’ll do mine.”
“You still aren’t talking.”
“What the hell do you want?” he said in a harsh undertone, stepping closer to her, shoulders hunched forward and chin drawn back almost into his neck, an incredibly tense and uncomfortable posture, Patricia thought. She was startled by the sudden breakthrough.
“I want somebody else to tell me what to feel,” she said.
“Well, I can’t do that.” Lanier’s shoulders corrected themselves and he extended his jaw. ”If we start thinking about anything—”
“But the work, the work,” Patricia completed, on the edge of mockery. “Jesus, I’m doing the work, lately. I’m working all the time.” There were tears in her eyes, and to her further shock, she saw tears in his.
Lanier’s hand moved to his face but he held them back and one tear fell to his cheek, then down the furrow at the side of his mouth.
“Okay,” he said. He wanted to leave but he couldn’t. ”So we’re both human. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“I’m working,” Patricia said, “but inside I’m just bloody. Maybe that’s it.”
Quickly, he wiped his eyes. ”I’m not a snowball,” he said defensively. “And it isn’t fair to expect anything more from me, right now, than what I’m giving. Do you see that?”
“This is really peculiar,” Patricia said, lifting her hands to her face, as if to mimic him. Her fingers went no higher than her cheeks, which were hot. ”I’m sorry. But you followed me.”
“‘I followed you. Shall we leave it at this?”
Patricia nodded, ashamed. ”I never thought you were cold.”
“Fine,” Lanier said. He turned and walked quickly toward the cafeteria.
In her room, she pressed her fists into her eyes, now dry, and tried to mouth the words to a song she had dearly loved as a child.
She couldn’t quite remember them—or wasn’t certain she remembered them —correctly. But wherever you go, she ventured to accompany the tune, whatever you do, I’ll be watching you ...
Chapter Nineteen
Patricia sat in a director’s chair on the roof of the women’s barracks. She glanced at the date on her watch as those attending the dance gathered in the science team compound.
The war was scheduled to begin in seven days.
Everything was coming down on her too quickly. She could render opinions but she could not convince herself of their accuracy. She could, for example, tell Lanier that the Stone could not have been shunted very far from its original continuum. Stone history and their current reality would not differ substantially. Perhaps not enough to prevent war.
Perhaps the Soviet knowledge that a war was imminent would turn them around, make them back off, prevent the war ...
Perhaps the presence of the Stone, and the clear technological advantage that it gave to the Western bloc countries, would push the Soviets over the edge anyway ...
Perhaps the Stone
simply made an effect and canceled that effect, and would leave hardly a ripple on the immediate future of the Earth ...
Carrolson and Lanier entered the compound. Patricia could see them greeting team members as they arrived from the other chambers.
The ragged, bloody feeling inside had passed. She didn’t feel angry or sad. She didn’t really even feel alive. The only thing that gave her any joy now was sinking into the state, continuing her work, bathing in the brilliance and majesty of the corridor.
She would have to make an appearance, however. She expected it of herself. Patricia had always resisted playing the reclusive genius and avoiding contact with others. Resisting was not the same as denial of the urge’s existence; she did want to stay away, to go to her quarters and work. The thought of dancing under the eternal tubelight (the dance was being held in the open) and making small talk—essentially, of going on the social roster, if only for a few hours—frightened her.
She wasn’t sure she could maintain her temper, the balance that kept her from dissolving into tears of rage and frustration.
She descended the stairs and left the barracks, hands in pockets, forcing her chin higher as she approached the milling crowd.
Two soldiers, two biologists and two engineers had built their own synthesizer and electric guitars out of discarded electronics. The story had been circulating for some weeks that the band was tolerable—perhaps even good. This was their first time in front of an audience, and they seemed coolly professional as they tuned and adjusted the amplifiers.
Loudspeakers of a peculiar design had been cadged by archaeologists working in Alexandria and offered up for the dance as a kind of goodwill sacrifice, an atonement for their fussy protectiveness. The speakers had been set up at corners of the rectangular dance area, an unused acre reserved for future buildings.
No wires went to the speakers; the music was broadcast to them on a special frequency through a low-power transmitter. The sound coming out of them was somewhat metallic, but they were serviceable. Heineman inspected one casually and said, “I’m not sure what this is. It isn’t a loudspeaker.”