by Greg Bear
“I’ll bet I look like a rude,” she said at one point, then glanced at her companions, realizing nobody understood her.
“What’s the word I’m looking for?” she asked Lanier.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he replied, grinning affectionately.
She put her hand on his. Patricia withdrew a little into her seat.
So what is this? she asked herself. A little jealousy? Being unfaithful to Paul? Why should Garry pay any attention to you to at all? He came to find you—out a sense of duty.
She shut off that area of inquiry, seeing no need to invade a territory of great pain and uncertainty and guilt.
They left the maintenance vehicle--and the mayor of Axis Nader--behind, escorted now by the neomorph Minister of Central City and Senator Prescient Oyu. Olmy greeted them at the broad circular entrance to the Hexamon Nexus Chamber.
Within the chamber, there was confusion on all sides; homorphs, neomorphs, some with American flags picted over their shoulders—and at the center, near the podium, two wide and vibrantly living images of the flags of the Republic of China and the United States.
Cheers and music, boisterous and welcoming.
Heineman blinked and Carrolson took his arm as they were pushed along a traction field by Olmy and Ram Kikura.
Prescient Oyu, as beautiful and graceful as any woman Lanier had ever seen, took his arm and Patricia’s, and the Minister of Central City entered beside Farley.
Lanier saw several senators--or were they corpreps?—wearing the Soviet hammer and sickle. And then they were in the center of the Nexus Chamber. The senators and corpreps became quiet and all displays faded.
Director Hulane Ram Seija came to the podium and told the Nexus that their guests would soon be going to the Frant gate, to see the workings of commerce in the Way. And after that, they would be taken by Senator Prescient Oyu to meet with her father, who even now presided over the preliminaries, to a gate opening at I.3 ex 9.
Lanier had been elected spokesperson for the group. Suli Ram Kikura had suggested—against Olmy’s mild objections--that he might use this opportunity to state his case.
He moved unsteadily along a traction field to the podium and received the armillary bands of light.
He looked to all sides—and behind—before starting.
“It’s not an easy thing talking to one’s descendants,” he said. “Though ... I never had children, so I doubt if any of you are even remotely related to me. And of course, there’s the matter of different universes. Discussing these things makes me feel like a Stone Age tribesman seeing his first airplane—or spaceship. We are completely out of our element, and while we have been welcomed here, we cannot call this place home ... “ He caught Patricia’s eye and her brief expression between fear and expectation. Of what?
“But the one place we can call home is now in ruins. This is our tragedy—our mutual tragedy. For you, the history of the Death is remote, but for us it is immediate and very real. We still suffer from our memories, our experiences, and we will grieve for years to come, probably for the rest of our lives.”
What he needed to say came clear to him then, as if he had been thinking about it for days—and perhaps he had, but not consciously.
“Earth is our home—your home, your cradle, as well as my own. It is now a place of death and misery, and it is beyond the power of my friends and colleagues to remedy that ...
“But it is not beyond your power. If you would celebrate us, and celebrate our unlikely presence in this chamber, then would it not be appropriate to help us? Earth needs your help desperately. Perhaps we can rewrite history, and correct it.
“Let us go home together,” he said, feeling his throat catch.
In the first ring of seats, Olmy listened and nodded only once.
Just beyond, in the second ring, Oligand Toiler, the President’s advocate and representative in this session, locked the fingers of his two hands in his lap, his face impassive.
“Let us go home,” Lanier repeated. ”Your ancestors need you.”
Chapter Fifty-six
Pletnev blew out his breath and wiped his red face with a scrap of towel, dropping the ax into a tree stump. A few meters away, a stack of notched logs waited assembly into a cabin.
Pletnev had also made a trough for mixing mud to daub into the cracks between the logs, and cleared a site in the woods near the beach.
Beside him, Garabedian and Annenkovsky stood with arms crossed, faces intently surveying the ground.
“Are you saying,” Pletnev began, after blowing out again, “that he has changed so much we can no longer rely on him?”
“He isn’t concentrating on his command,” Armenkovsky said. ”He holds us back.”
“Holds you back from doing what?”
“For one thing,” Armenkovsky continued, “he treats Vielgorsky’s followers as if they were merely errant children, and not dangerous subversives.”
“Well, perhaps that’s wise. There are too few of us to purge willy-nilly.”
“That is not the only problem,” Annenkovksy said. ”He frequently leaves the compound, takes the train and a truck to the library, and just sits there, looking confused. We think his brain is addled.”
Pletnev looked to Garahedian. ”What do you think, Comrade Major?”
“He is not the same man,” Garahedian said. ”He himself admits it. And he keeps claiming he is dead. Resurrected. It isn’t appropriate.”
“Is he still General Pavel Mirsky?”
“Why ask that? Ask if he is a good leader,” Annenkovsky said. “Any of us could do better.”
“He’s been negotiating with the Americans ... has he negotiated badly?” Pletnev asked.
“No,” Garabedian said. ”Smoothly, if anything.”
“Then I don’t understand what we have to complain about. He’ll return to normal. He’s had a traumatic experience--and a mysterious one. We can’t expect it not to change him some.”
Annenkovsky frowned and shook his head. ”I disagree that he’s negotiated well for us. He’s made many concessions he shouldn’t have.”
“And he’s gained concessions very useful to us,” Pletnev said. ”I know. Because of the agreements, we may be able to move into the cities soon.”
“He is no longer in his right mind!” Annenkovsky said heatedly. “He talks about not being the same person—he does not have the ... the touch a commanding general should have!”
Pletnev looked between the two majors and then glanced up at the plasma tube, squinting. ”What would Vielgorsky and Yazykov and Belozersky have done for us? Nothing. Made things worse. Killed all three of us, more than likely. I say, do not trade the devil you know for the devil you don’t. Mirsky’s a mild son of devil.”
“He’s a lamb, not a devil,” Gambedian said dubiously. ”I regard him as a friend, but ...”
Pletnev raised his eyebrow in query.
“Well, in a crisis, I do not know how he would behave.”
“I think the crises are over,” Pletnev said. ”Now forget this talk. Go. Do not rock the boat. Let me build my cabin in peace.”
Garahedian nodded, stuck his hands in his pockets and turned to walk away.
Annenkovsky stayed for a moment, watching Pletnev trim a notch in a log.
“We were thinking of making you our leader,” Annenkovsky said quietly. “We would not harm General Mirsky.”
“I do not accept,” Pletnev said without looking up.
“What if he goes completely crazy?”
“He won’t,” Pletnev said.
“Where are you?” Mirsky shouted for the dozenth time.
He stood in the middle of the array of library seats and data pillars, fists raised in the air. His cheeks were red and wet and his neck was ribbed with anger and frustration.
“Are you dead, like me? Did they execute you?”
Still no answer.
“You murdered me!”
He clenched his jaw and struggled to contr
ol his breathing.
He knew if he tried to say anything more, the words would come out in mangled fragments. The little signal in his mind—a brief, explanatory warning, You are now using material not native to your personality, was about to drive him over the edge. So much of what he thought and did was punctuated by this message. He had explored those boundaries thoroughly--lying in his sling at night, trying to sleep, realizing he did not need to sleep.
He had the sensation that much of what he remembered about his life consisted of logical reconstructions. The entire left side of his body felt fresh and new, had a different odor, as it were. He realized it wasn’t the body that was new, but the corresponding section of his head.
The first few days, Mirsky had thought all might go well.
He believed he could become used to his status as a Lazarus; he made it seem like a joke, that he was back from the dead, this to gently discredit Pogodin’s testimony that Vielgorsky had blown Mirsky’s brains out. But the joke had not worked..
To the soldiers who had stood guard outside the library, it had seemed as tightly sealed and oppressive as a tomb. And what did you find in a tomb ... ?
His joke had then become a grim evaluation of reality.
Nobody dared flout his rule now; he was a ghost, not the freshly-promoted Colonel suddenly made Lieutenant General, not Pavel Mirsky, but a stranger from the depths of the third chamber city.
Superstition. An incredible force among soldiers.
And so, after a week of rule, of struggling to be what his past demanded he be, he had returned to the library. He had been afraid to come back until now, worried that the three political officers would be there to greet him, shoot him all over again.
Superstition.
He had waited for those inside to leave—first, the Chinese man and woman, and then a single Russian, Corporal Rodhzhensky. Only when the library was empty had he entered.
And he had shouted himself hoarse.
He sat in a chair, hand fumbling at the data pillar controls, lifting the lid and dropping it. Finally, he inserted his fingertips into the five hollows. ”Law,” he demanded. ”Law in a deserted city.”
The library asked more questions, narrowing his search to a manageable subject.
“Murder,” he said.
The materiai was rich and detailed. Murder was an offense punishable by psychological evaluation and retailoring of the personality, if such was called for.
“What if there is nobody to carry out the punishment?”
It is not punishment, the research voice said, it is redemption, a refitting for society.
“What if there’s no law, no police, no judges, or courts or psychologists?”
Suspects can be detained for nineteen days. If that time passes and no judgment is made, or charges specified, suspects are released to the custody of a reintegration counseling clinic.
“And if there’s no clinic?”
Suspects are released on their own recognizance.
“Where will they be released?”
Unless otherwise requested, at the scene of their incarceration.
“Where are they taken after capture?”
If they are captured in a structure of adequate size for an emergency medical facility--He saw a portion of the library, behind a seamless door in the north wall, used as an example: two small, equipment-packed rooms—then they are held under sedation until authorities retrieve them or nineteen days have passed. Medical workers serve as police units in emergency.
He had two more days.
Mirsky returned to the fourth chamber and made a pretence of being the commander for a few hours. He met with Hoffman and Rimskaya to continue discussions about opening the second and third chamber city spaces to “settlers.”
He then sneaked away, picked up an AKV and returned to the third chamber. Five people were in the library, Rodhzhensky again and four NATO people, one of them a United States Marine. Mirsky patiently waited for them to go, and entered the library with rifle in hand.
He had given the political officers one chance. If they were released, they would only come for him again. He would stay in the library for the next two days, waiting patiently...
The library remained deserted for several hours. In that time, he realized that his plan was useless. The library would not stay deserted for long. He had to carry out his executions—murders--in secret, or they would be worse than useless. Unless he destroyed the three political officers even more thoroughly than they had destroyed him, they would be resurrected, and he would be incarcerated for nineteen days, and it would all begin again—a cycle of insanity and violence beyond the dreams even of Gogol.
He walked to the wall behind which the three political officers waited, unconscious, and lowered the rifle to the floor at the northern edge of the array of seats, blinking rapidly.
“I’m not the same person you killed,” he said. ”Why should I take revenge?”
Even if he felt that he was the same person, this could be an excuse.
He could do what he realized he had wanted to do for years.
Perhaps the clarity had been brought on by the destruction of some irrational section of his thinking, releasing another impulse, truer and cleaner.
Mirsky had always wanted the stars, but not at the price of his soul.
And working within a Soviet system--even one such as he would have tried to establish—would always mean working against people like Belozersky, Yazykov and Vielgorsky.
Their faces kept reappearing throughout Russian history: the vicious lackeys and the capable but cruel and slightly askew leader.
He would break from the cycle. He had the chance now. His homeland was gone. His duty was over; he had already died for his men once.
Perhaps if Major General Sosnitsky had survived ... But then, if the Major General were still alive, Mirsky wouldn’t be in this position.
Sosnitsky would be.
He left the library and rode the train to the fourth chamber fort.
There, he gathered supplies into a truck—nobody questioning his intentions, not even Pletnev, who regarded him from some meters away with a look of mild puzzlement.
“They’ll be glad to be rid of me,” Mirsky thought. ”They can get on with their intrigues and cruelties. The political triumvirate will return to take their rightful places. I’ve been an impediment all along ... “ His last duty was to write a message for Garabedian.
Viktor : The three political officers will return. They will be in the third chamber library sometime within the next forty hours. Accept them as your leaders if you wish; I will no longer impede them.
Pavel
He left the message in an envelope in Garabedian’s tent.
Mirsky drove the truck into the woods, heading for the as-yet-unexplored 180 point. There he could be alone, perhaps build a raft and pole across a shallow lake to a tree-covered island, or just explore the thick woods visible fifty kilometers directly overhead.
And he would decide what to do next.
He did not think he would return.
Chapter Fifty-seven
The flawship’s interior, crowded with privileged citizens and dignitaries, was even more free-form than Olmy’s craft.
The surfaces varied from oyster pearl to abalone gray, and there seemed to be no edge or corner; only one spacious, long cabin, wrapped around the three-meter-wide flaw passage and propulsion machinery.
People of a bewildering variety of body styles tracted from point to point in the cabin, exchanging picts or conversing in English or Chinese. Some sipped drinks from free-floating charged globules of fluid, which somehow managed to avoid passersby with both grace and anticipatory intelligence.
Lanier had barely gotten the hang of maneuvering with the traction fields. Farley seemed more adept—a natural gymnast, which caused him some chagrin. He applied himself more diligently to learning the skill. ”This is lovely,” she confessed, spinning slowly next to him, then reaching out and braking agai
nst the gently glowing violet sheet of a field.
Heineman and Carrolson helped each other along between the homorphs and neomorphs, smiling stilly and nodding, hoping that—as Olmy had told them--they would find it almost impossible to do something socially unacceptable.
Anything they did, any mistake they made, would be considered charming.
They were, after all, “quaint.”
Patricia tried to keep to herself, clutching her bag containing slate, processor and multi-meter. She was not in the least successful at being inconspicuous.
Suli Ram Kikura tracted toward Patricia and intercepted the rapid pictings of a man whose skin had the sheen of black hematite. The man apologized in a few simple picts for his assumption that Patricia knew the highest degrees of graphic-speak.
Then, in moderately accomplished English—no doubt picked up in a quick gloss a few minutes before boarding—he launched into a complicated discussion of early terrestrial economics. Kikura had wandered off to smooth over another complication--Lanier was being determinedly, if slowly, pushed into a broad dimple by two lean and striking women.
The women were dressed in full-length leotards with long, alternately stiff and supple fantails of fabric stretched between theft legs and under their arms. They resembled fancy goldfish; there was little he or Farley could do to discourage them.
Patricia listened to the man’s discourse for several minutes before saying, “I’m pretty ignorant about that. My specialty is physics.”
The man stared at her and she could almost hear him switching over to a recently programmed portion of his implant. ”Yes, that’s fascinating. So much of physics was in ferment in your time—” Olmy moved in quickly and picted something Patricia did not understand. The man moved away resentfully, a thin circle of red around his face.
“Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea,” Olmy said, escorting her to where the Frant was engaged in conversation with two neomorphs, one a radiolarian, the other recognizable as the Director of the Nexus, Hulane Ram Seija.
“I suppose we have to get used to it,” Patricia said. Why get used to it? she asked herself. She didn’t plan on staying forever.