Eon

by Greg Bear

  “I know. I turned on the lights before letting you in. This place is just like a hotel room. That’s what it’s supposed to be, I guess. Quaint. Back to basics. That’s what the President said.”

  “You don’t sound right,” Lanier said. ”Something’s wrong.”

  “I can’t stop thinking. I’ve been in the state—that’s what I call it, deep thinking—I’ve been here for twelve hours now. I’m in it now. I can just barely talk to you, you know.”

  “Thinking about what?”

  “Going home. It all comes down to that.”

  “Olmy said—”

  “Garry, I’m losing touch. I’m going to end up like that rogue, all distorted and unreal. I can’t stop thinking. The President’s advocate said ... Garry, I need help. I need something distracting.”

  “What?” Lanier asked. She extended one arm and spread her hand, gesturing with her fingers. He gripped the hand.

  “I’m human, aren’t I? I’m real. I’m not just some toy or program.”

  “You’re real,” Lanier affirmed. ’I’m touching you.”

  “I can’t be sure of that now. You wouldn’t believe what’s in my head. I’m seeing ... I mean; it’s not artificial, not an adjunct or anything. It’s from inside me, all the calculations, theorizing. I’m seeing universes bunched up like Bible leaves, and I know the page numbers. Olmy didn’t believe me, not completely. But I still think I’m right. They have these gate-opening devices, some big, some small. If I could get one of those, I could take all of us home right now. Back to where everything is all right. I know the page number.”

  “Patricia—”

  “Let me talk!” she said fiercely. ”Back to where there is no nuclear war. Where my father reads Tempos de Los Angeles. Where Paul waits for me. So I’m thinking, but not just about those things. The President said they could send the Axis City down the corridor, the Way, at relativistic speeds. Relativistic. Wipe out their enemies. It would work. But ...”

  “Slow down, Patricia.”

  “I can’t, Garry. I need touch. I need Paul, but he’s still dead until I find him.” She gripped his hand tighter. ”You’ll help. Please.”

  “How?”

  She scrunched her eyes up as if facing into a wind and forced an uncertain smile. ”The Way would expand like a bugle. If there was a large relativistic object traveling the singularity. It would balloon. It would shut gates, just fuse them closed.”

  “How can I help? I’ll get Carrolson—“

  “No, please. Just you. I’ve been making notes.” She held up her slate. The screen was covered with figures that made absolutely no sense to Lanier. ”I have the proof. Let me go to the point in the stack geometry ... and I can take us out. But I can’t stop this.”

  “Patricia, you said I could help.”

  “Make love to me,” she said abruptly.

  Lanier stared at her in shock.

  “I’m just a thought right now. Give me a body.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, angry—doubly angry because he felt a sympathetic response.

  She flinched. ”Paul’s dead. It won’t be cheating on him. When I open the gate, he’ll be alive again, but right now he’s nowhere. I know you’ve been staying with Farley... And Hoffman ...”

  She had almost said the wrong thing, almost brought up the question of his responsibility for her, and both of them knew it. ”I am jealous, and I’m not,” she said. ”I like Karen. I like all of you. I’ve felt apart from you, different, but I’ve wanted to be ... with all of you. I’ve wanted you to like me.”

  “I will not take advantage when you’re vulnerable,” Lanier said.

  “Advantage? I need you. I’d be taking advantage of you. I am taking advantage, I know, but—I just know what would help. I’m not a little girl. Right now, I have thoughts in my head even these people haven’t come up with. Olmy knows that. But if I think any more, I’m going to loose all of it. Snap.”

  She clicked the fingers of her free hand.

  “I’m probably not very good in bed,” she said.

  “Patricia,” Lanier said, trying to remove his hand from hers, yet not wanting to.

  She stepped closer to him and laid her hand on his stomach.

  “I’ll be unfair if I have to be. Body’s a tiger, brain’s a dragon. Fed one to keep the other.”

  “You’ll drive me over the edge, too,” Lanier said quietly.

  She lowered her hand to his erection. “I’m not just an awkward little genius.”

  “No,” he said.

  Patricia leaned her head back, feeling him, and smiled ecstatically, eyes closed. There was no more resistance left in Lanier. She let go of his hand and he reached up to unbutton her blouse.

  When they were naked, they held each other tightly. Lanier kneeled to kiss her breasts. His eyes moistened at the feel of her nipples between his lips. Her breasts were medium size, very slightly pendulous, one noticeably larger than the other, the skin between them freckled a darker brown. Their size and shape did not matter. Lanier felt a sudden clean flow of passion, taking away all conflicting emotions. She led him to the bedroom and lay beside him as they kissed, nested shallowly together. He took hold of her hips and angled them and slipped deep inside, the muscles of his stomach and buttocks tight, compulsive. Then they rolled over, Patricia on top, and she slid against him, eyes closed but relaxed, as if she were making a gentle wish. She raised herself up and Lanier watched their connected motion without his usual isolation, knowing instead a completion and wholeness that made no sense. There had been not a hint of this between them—simply of duty, working together. He had had that with others.

  And now he was in bed with Hoffman’s little Chicana genius. He had been dismayed on first seeing her, he realized only now; his respect for Hoffman’s judgment had hidden that initial reaction to Patricia’s apparent fragility. He was inside that fragility, taking pleasure from her, all in the name of duty and that was a laugh. Part of his dismay had been attraction.

  Patricia moved of her own volition to the expected climax. With Paul, she had found herself to be a natural at lovemaking. She could feel the state subsiding, storing itself away rather than dissipating. Her thoughts became pellucid. Here was a focus.

  She came and, after a short respite, continued moving.

  Lanier’s hips arched once, then he fell back, and then again, higher, and he groaned against her lowered shoulder, and then her cheek, and opened his mouth in a stifled, quiet, hoarse scream. With the thrusting and release he felt everything loosen, years of tension he hadn’t even consciously known about.

  They lay together, silent, for long, damp minutes, listening to the grinding breakers beyond the glass doors.

  “Thank you,” Patricia said.

  “Jesus.j” Lanier said, and he smiled at her. ”Better?”

  She nodded and burrowed her nose into his shoulder. ”That was very dangerous,” she said. ”I apologize.”

  Lanier turned her face toward him and clutched her head between his shoulder and his cheek. ”We’re both odd birds,” he said. ”You know that?”

  “Men.” She nestled into his shoulder, eyes shut tight. ”You shouldn’t sleep here tonight. I’ll be okay. You should sleep with Karen tonight.”

  He examined her face carefully. ”All right,” he said.

  She opened her eyes--wide and square—and stared up at him. Now she seemed less a cat than some strange inversion of the neomorphs they had seen the past few days. They were human within, with strange exteriors. But there was something inside Patricia Luisa Vasquez--something that had perhaps been there all along—which was not precisely human.

  Only gods or extraterrestrials.

  “You’re looking at me funny,” she said.

  “Sorry. Just thinking how upside down everything is.”

  “No regrets?” she asked, stretching, eyes reduced to slits.

  “No regrets.”

  As he left her room, he felt his skin prickle. Looking d
own at his arms, he realized that of all the things he had seen in the past few days, none had given him gooseflesh ...

  Until now.

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  While day had not yet come to the resort, Olmy led the five of them to a waiting bus. Carrolson called them puppy-buses, because of their large white tires. The air was still and cool, and the stars gleamed clearly and steadily in the powdery blue-blackness.

  Patricia was quiet, showing no sign of what had happened between her and Lanier the night before. Nor did Farley betray any awareness; Lanier had returned to their room to find her asleep. Sleep had come with much more difficulty for him; not since his adolescence had he put himself in such a situation.

  Ram Kikura ran across a stretch of blue-green grass and boarded the bus a few minutes later.

  “The President is unable to join us,” she said.

  “How disappointing,” Carrolson said, not sounding terribly sincere. “Troubles?”

  “I don’t know. Ser Toiler, the President and the Presiding Mininter’s partial are meeting now. You go on ahead; I’ll stay here and follow the situation.”

  The bua’s Frant driver looked back at Olmy, who nodded.

  They rolled smoothly across the lawn to a road paved with fine gravel, then to a whitetop highway that circled the resort and aimed toward the dawn, now deep red on the inland horizon.

  Patricia smelled something sweet, quite unlike the rich sharp smell of the Tunbl ocean; a breeze was blowing over fields of low-lying thick yellow stalks growing outside the resort boundaries. In the fields, Frant farmers in red, many-pocketed aprons, accompanied by small automatic tractors, were already at work.

  “They’re harvesting biological personality elements,” Olmy explained. “Tailored plantimals replicate complex biological structures, right down to preassigned memories. A cottage industry, you might call it—very advantageous.”

  “For humans or Frants?” Lanier asked.

  “The plantimals can be adapted for most organics,” Olmy said. “Installation of genetic codes is not difficult for carbon-based forms.”

  Lanier had meant whether the industry was more advantageous to humans or Frants, but decided not to restate his question. The bus took the white road through the fields and crossed the densely populated coastal plain. For dozens of kilometers in both directions along the coast, and for at least ten kilometers inland, the plain was covered with Frant villages.

  As many as ten villages occupied tracts of land barely three kilometers square. Each village consisted of several nested circles of low-roofed rectangular houses. At the center was a stupa-like structure, often as much as fifty meters tall, draped with many-colored banners. As the sun brightened, the inland-facing banners on the stupas changed color, waving slowly in the gentle breezes like despondent rainbows.

  “How advanced are the Frants, compared with your people?” Carrolson asked.

  “More basic, but not primitive,” Olmy said. ”Their grasp of technology and science—I assume that’s what you’re referring to—is extensive. Do not be misled by styles of philosophies, or even by gentleness. Frants are resourceful. We rely on them a great deal.”

  Beyond the fields and villages, the road spiraled around a low mountain crested with sky-pointing prisms of translucent gray rock. At the top of the mountain, resting on a plateau formed by the prisms, a squat white-and-copper-banded dome rose some sixty meters higher, ballooning at its base into a broad pavilion. The bus drove under the outlying skirt of the pavilion and stopped.

  Olmy led them toward the well-kept but obviously ancient bronze, black iron and white enamel works beneath the hollow dome. Standing beside a five-meter-wide horseshoe-shaped mount was a muscular, apparently middle-aged man, naked from the waist up, a tool kit hanging from his broad belt. His skin had a deep brown color, with a faint rainbow sheen. Three Frants stood at other points around the equipment, talking among themselves in low tones as they worked with polishing cloths. Above them all towered a huge cage of crisscrossing black iron bars, like a misplaced Victorian bridge.

  “It’s a telescope,” Heineman said. ”It’s beautiful!”

  “It is indeed a telescope,” the brown man said, smiling. “The last the Frants built before our gate opened.”

  “This is Ser Rennslaer Yates, secondary gate opener,” Olmy explained, introducing them around. ”He will accompany us to one point three ex nine.”

  Yates unhitched his tool kit. ”This meeting has been long expected. Ser Olmy has kindly kept me informed about all of you. The Frants indulge me by letting me tinker with their historical treasures.” He pointed with one hand to the telescope and the dome and pavilion, then donned a blue cloth shirt and closed it by pressing along a seam.

  “There’s not much need for gate openers now. The primary can do most of the work very well without us.” He approached Patricia.

  “Olmy’s told me a fair amount about you. You’ve made some impressive discoveries.” Patricia smiled but said nothing. Her eyes, however, were bright and square: cat with a secret. Lanier felt a surge--pride? Something else?—as he realized how much she had improved since last night.

  “I’d love to tinker with that,” Heineman said wistfully.

  “Perhaps someday you will. Or one like it. Frants are not much for preserving their past, I’m afraid.” He patted the telescope mount. ”I will not be back here for some time,” he said sadly. To Heineman and Carrolson, he confided, “I’d ask them to keep up the work, but they’ll be reassigned--wander off and homogenize, as Frants do—and it will start decaying all over again. In its day, you know, this instrument and fourteen others like it were kept busy from dusk to dawn, searching for the comet sweeps.” He waved his hand, bidding them to follow him beyond the rim of the pavilion and across a narrow, flat field.

  At the lip of the steep precipice, they looked across the flatlands and the sea beyond. ”The Frants were already moving into the space age when we arrived. They had built thousands of missiles with nuclear warheads--fantastic, ingenious and very jumbled technologies; jerry-rigged could you call them? It had been over nine centuries since the last major impacts, and they were waiting.

  “If this instrument or any of the others had sighted comets, then trajectories would have been computed by thousands of Frants linking minds. Years it might have taken them, but otherwise they had only primitive computers. The villages would have been moved, placed in safer areas. Every village on the planet in motion! They were saved from that. Still, this”—raising his hand to the dome—”was a noble instrument.”

  He shook his head. ”Ser Olmy! Lead on. I am done here.” He hugged each of the Frants and touched their hands in the homogenizing gesture, though for a human it was purely a formality.

  They were about to board the truck when one of the Frants, standing in the sunlight at the edge of the pavilion, whistled and pointed toward the coast. Sweeping inland, three tiny white points were approaching the telescope. Olmy frowned.

  “Mr. Lanier, please take your people back to the telescope. Ser Yates, could you stay close to them?” Yates agreed and followed them back to the center of the pavilion.

  “What’s happening?”

  “I don’t know,” Olmy said. ”We weren’t scheduled to be met by gate police.”

  The three white points grew rapidly to full-sized, blunt-arrowhead craft. The craft circled the telescope and settled on the flat field to the north. The nose hatch of one craft opened, and out stepped Oligand Toiler, four gate district representatives and a Frant marked with the green sash of diplomatic authority. Toiler walked quickly toward Olmy, eyes directly on his.

  “There are difficulties in the Axis City,” he said. ’I’m instructed to cut off your visit and return all of you to the Axis City--immediately.”

  “Please explain,” Olmy requested. ”What are the difficulties?”

  “Korzenowski factioners and orthodox Naderites have taken illegal authority and cut communications between the precincts. Th
e President has adjourned the Jart conference and left Tunbl and is now on his way back to deal with it. We must leave now.”

  “Wouldn’t it be best to keep everyone here?” Olmy asked. “Until the situation becomes more clear.”

  “It is very clear. The secessionists are trying to force the issue.” Toiler resorted now to tight-beam picts. The color of his message was an agitated red-edged purple: “Our guests are key figures in this dispute. You know that, Sir Olmy.”

  Olmy did not pict. “I understand, Sir Toiler. But you miss my point. Ser Yates is now ranking human on Tunbl, if the President has left.”

  Toiler sized the situation up quickly. ”You refuse to release them? I am operating under authority of the President.”

  “I don’t refuse to release all of them,” Olmy said. ”Only two will remain with us. You may take the others.”

  Lanier began to protest, but Olmy shot him a glance that demanded silence.

  Toiler backed a step away. ”I could order the gate authority to arrest all of you.”

  “No bluffing, please, Ser Advocate,” Yates warned. ”Even an inactive gate opener is obeyed by gate authority. Who is the other you wish to stay with us?” he asked Olmy.

  “Mr. Lanier,” Olmy said.

  “Are you with the secessionists?” Toiler asked him, clearly angry now.

  Olmy did not answer.

  “We will keep Patricia Luisa Vasquez and Garry Lanier,” he said. “You may take the others.”

  “We refuse to be separated,” Lanier said, stepping forward despite Heineman’s hand on his arm.

  “You have no choice,” Olmy said. ”We’re past the point of euphemisms and diplomatic games, Mr. Lanier. I choose you in order that you may assist us with Miss Vasquez. The others will be safe.”

  “We guarantee the safety of all,” Toiler said. ”Except those who go with you, Ser Olmy.”

  “Ser Ram Kikura is their advocate. She will accompany these three, wherever you take them—and watch out for them,” Olmy instructed.

  Mechanical workers emerged from the craft and rolled or floated to surround Farley, Carrolson and Heineman. ”Gary,” Farley said, her voice strained.