by Greg Bear
There was not even time to savor the sensation.
On the flawship, perilously close to the ravening plasma, Lanier closed his eyes and told himself, again and again, that he had carried out his responsibilities and accompanied his charge to the very last.
Still clutching the clavicle, bag strapped to her shoulder, Patricia fell from an altitude of five or six meters into water.
She was not even wet. She lay in the bottom of the floating traction bubble, stunned. The water—a river or canal—carried her several dozen meters from the gate. She looked to one side to see where she was.
That was just as well. An intense, blue-white plume flowed from the gate and blasted the water behind into steam, covering everything with a thick white cloud. Fortunately for her, and for everything within a few hundred meters, the gate was fused permanently shut within millionths of a second.
She lay back in the bubble, partly blinded, with one hand over her eyes, and drifted for several more minutes until she grounded against a sand bar. Her sight had recovered well enough by then.
Standing, she surveyed the territory, heart pounding.
She was on the shore of a broad straight canal, the sluggish water a deep muddy brown. The bank was lined with tall green reeds. The sky was an intense, pale blue, cloudless—and the sun was very bright.
With some qualms, she shut off the traction bubble and took a deep breath. The air was sweet, clean and warm.
She was heavier than she had been since leaving Tunbl. This time, she had no floater belt to buoy her up. The gravity was uncomfortable.
But this was undeniably Earth, and she was not in a nuclear wasteland.
In fact, the scenery was hauntingly familiar. She had seen it all before ... in the Bible classes Rita had insisted she take as a child.
Shading her eyes, Patricia looked to the west.
Across the canal and on a plateau were brilliant plaster-white pyramids, kilometers away but sharp in the clear desert air. She felt a moment of excitement.
It was Egypt. She could travel from Egypt—that would be a minor problem. She could get home from here.
She turned around. On a rickety-looking scaffold emerging from the reeds stood a small, slender brown girl, no more than ten or eleven, naked except for a white cloth tied around her hips. Her hair was done up in many long, close-knotted braids, each tipped with a blue stone.
The girl regarded Patricia with slack-jawed wonder mixed with fear.
“Hello!” Patricia called, trudging up the sandy bank. ”Do you speak English? Can you tell me where I am?”
The girl turned deftly on the scaffold and fled. For a horrible moment, Patricia wondered if she had slipped several mellennia in time ... if in fact she was in ancient Egypt.
Then she heard a distant rumble and looked up. Her relief was so great she almost whooped. There was an airplane, probably a jet, flying high above the desert.
Walking along the edge of the canal, clutching her clavicle and considering whether or not to reactivate the traction bubble—the sun was becoming uncomfortably hot—Patricia found a road and followed it.
Beyond a grove of date palms, she came upon a little, square town made of whitewashed brick, the houses as blocky as benches and about as uniform.
Very few people were about; it was just past high noon, and no doubt they were all resting until the day cooled.
Something bothered her. She hadn’t thought about it before, but now that she remembered ...
Putting the clavicle down on the stone roadbed, shading her eyes with both hands, she looked west again. From this vantage, she could see that the pyramids were surrounded by thick groves of trees, she couldn’t tell what kind. That didn’t seem right. Weren’t the Egyptian pyramids in desert?
And how many large pyramids had there been on Earth?
Three?
She counted eight smooth-surfaced white pyramids in a row, filing off to the horizon.
“Wrong-o,” she said softly to herself.
Chapter Sixty-five
Lanier floated in the flawship’s prow, alone and content to stay that way for a long time. Kilometer after thousands of incommensurable kilometers flowed by, black and gold and indistinct.
What it had all come down to was that he owed more to Earth than he did to Patricia. And he could not help her complete her journey—see her through safely—because it was not his journey to make.
Did she survive? Reach her destination?
Even if she did, in this half-dream, half-nightmare Way of stacked universes, she was as far from him—and as inaccessible—as if she had died.
Olmy tracted behind him, clearing his throat.
“I’m fine,” Lanier said testily.
“That was never at question,” Olmy said. ”I thought you might wish to know our situation. We’re well ahead of the plasma front. The radiation is tolerable—though I’d suggest a thorough physical Talsit session when we arrive.”
“What about the precincts?”
“We’ve communicated with them. As we suspected, they are accelerating toward us now. They’ve agreed to lift their grips and let us pass through them.”
“Can we do that?”
“With some luck, yes,” Olmy said. ”They’ll be at thirty-one percent light-speed.”
“I suppose that will be something to see,” Lanier said.
“I doubt we’ll ‘see’ much of anything,” Olmy said.
“Figure of speech.”
“Yes. There’s food available if you wish it. Ser Yates is equipped to eat and would enjoy your company.”
“How long until we meet the precincts?”
“Twenty-seven minutes,” Olmy said.
Lanier swallowed hard and rotated. ”Sure,” he said. ”I could eat.”
He ate very little, however, glancing nervously about the cabin—at the nonhumans, secluded in their traction bubbles, dormant or disturbingly active (the snake with four heads was doing a quick, jerky ballet in its greenish fluid); at Prescient Oyu, who frankly returned his look; at Yates as he ate, the most human-seeming of them all, the most natural in his habits, and yet an opener of gates.
Olmy was quiet and still. Not far from him, the worker that held Korzenowski’s reconstructed personality—and part of Patricia as well--floated wrapped in traction lines, its image shut off as it continued the long process of final maturation.
Lanier put aside the rest of his uneaten meal and said he would rather wait at the bow. Olmy agreed.
They crowded forward, Lanier beside Olmy and Yates, with the odd U-shaped beast on the opposite side of the flaw passage, still surrounded by its quarantine field. The two Frants relaxed behind them all, curled up with only necks and heads extended.
Ahead, the black and gold became a warmer orange and brown. The flaw pulsed faintly pink, disturbed by their accleration.
“Just a few seconds,” Olmy said.
The Way appeared to balloon outward in all directions.
Lanier felt his hands tingle, and his eyes grow warm. The flaw vibrated and glowed to searing blue. The transparent bow grew darker and darker to compensate. The flaw passage through the middle of the ship vibrated and groaned.
Just a few seconds of life—less--Lanier felt as if he were exploding.
He yelled in pain and surprise and flung out his arms and legs.
Then it was over. He drifted against a net of traction lines, blinking. The Way was black and gold again. The flaw glowed faintly pink.
“There’s no damage,” Olmy said.
“Correction,” Yates said, holding a hand over his eye.
Lanier had struck him with an elbow. He apologized.
“Nothing to be upset over,” Yates said. ”All the more excuse for some Talsit. Quite exciting, actually.”
Behind them, accelerating at four hundred g’s, the linked Axis Nader and Central City met the plasma front with their building shock wave of space-time, beginning the process of convening the Way into an elongated nova.
>
The radiation level outside the flawship increased sharply.
The charges around the perimeter of the seventh chamber were set.
Engineers had gone throughout the Thistledown, making final structural checks and testing the sixth chamber machinery. When the asteroid was blown from the beginning of the Way, the sixth chamber machinery would face an enormous strain—the end of its duties as stabilizer of the Way, and a sudden and violent increase in its policing of destructive forces inside the chambers.
The precincts of Axes Thoreau and Euclid had been moved north a hundred thousand kilometers from the seventh chamber.
Within the twin cylinders, the confusion was enormous.
Most of the Axis citizens—the Naderites, orthodox and otherwise, and a surprising number of homorph Geshels—had been reassigned to new quarters; few were completely familiar with their new precincts. There was a sense of holiday, of triumph, and also a heavy air of anxiety.
By the hundreds, the Earth people filled the processing halls, tended by Geshel doctors and watched over by advocates.
A male homorph—Hoffman said the word and added it to her rapidly growing vocabulary—took skin samples from his group of twenty Earth people. She was seventh in line. For each he had a smile and a few well-chosen words of encouragement. He was handsome, but not to her taste—a little too finely honed, his characteristics not noticeably different from those of a dozen other homorphs. Or perhaps her senses weren’t sophisticated; she was used to the broad varieties of physiognomy from her time, when unavoidable defects—misshapen noses, corpulence, dental misalignments—produced a medieval carnival of features.
When the samples had been stored, he produced a face-shaped cup from his floating toolbox. ”This performs a number of medical analyses,” he told them. ”These tests are also voluntary—but your cooperation will be most helpful.”
They all cooperated, peering into the cup and watching a series of complex patterns for several seconds.
Throughout the proceedings, she felt a sense not of coming misery or servitude, but of camaraderie. So many of the attendants proudly flew projected flags over their left shoulders.
Flags of India, Australia, China, the United States, Japan, the USSR, and other nations. All were willing—eager, even--to speak to their charges in native tongues.
When the medical exams were completed, they were led off to a series of elevators opening on one side of the hall. Ann Blakely, Lanier’s secretary and now Hoffman’s, crossed over from another group.
With her was Doreen Cunningham, former head of security in the science compound.
“Everybody’s so tense,” Cunningham whispered to Hoffman.
“Not me,” Hoffman said. ”I feel like I’m on some kind of holiday. The big folks are taking over now. Oh, Lord.” She had just peered into their elevator. It didn’t have any floor.
Even with explanations and a demonstration from the attendants, it took some coaing to get them to move forward.
They hung on to each other as a group of sixty ascended.
Cunningham kept her eyes closed. Most of the Russians were resigned to the worst, she told Hoffman; their gloomy pessimism kept them pretty much to themselves.
“Somebody told me a few of our people have defected,” Hoffman said, keeping her eyes resolutely on the back of the person in front of her.
The elevator walls were too uniform to show motion, and there was no sensation, unpleasant or otherwise, but she still wasn’t enjoying the trip.
“Four—two Russians and two Americans; that’s what I’ve heard.”
“Anybody know who?”
“Rimskaya,” Cunningham said. ”And Beryl Wallace.”
“Beryl ...” She raised her eyebrows and shook her head. “I wouldn’t expect that from her ... or Rimskaya.” Did she feel they had betrayed her? That was ridiculous. ”What about the Russians?”
“One of them is Mirsky,” Ann said. ”I didn’t recognize the second name.”
Mirsky didn’t surprise her at all. She could read strangers clearly but not the people in her own command. So much for the instincts of a master administrator.
Their quarters were spread through the precincts. More homorphs met them as the groups were further divided and escorted to apartments on different levels.
“You’ll be sharing quarters in parties of three,” their escort told them. ”Space is at a premium now.”
“Roomies?” Cunningham asked Hoffman and Blakely.
“Roomies,” Hoffman said. Blakely nodded.
Their group of twelve dwindled rapidly as attendants shunted them into vacant quarters. They were the last three, escorted by a single female homorph, who picted a Russian flag over her shoulder. Their apartment was at the very end of a long, gently curved cylindrical hallway.
Green numbers beneath the door glowed brightly as they approached.
The rooms were small and very blank. The homorph remained to give them basic instructions on use of the data services. She then wished them well and departed.
“Such a hurry,” Blakely said, shaking her head.
“Since we’re out of the action,” Hoffman said, “or along for the ride, whatever, we might as well settle in.”
Within minutes, they were eagerly discussing the possibilities of decor with an assigned ghost from the library. They had several hours before the Breakout, as it was being called; Hoffman used that time to contact others in the precinct who had been assigned quarters.
Blakely and Cunningham decided on an interim decor which gave some color and shape—and considerably more apparent living space—to the apartment. Hoffman joined them to examine the facilities, and to sample the food provided by an automatic kitchen tucked in one corner.
Citizens and Earth people alike, the assigned ghost informed them, would be able to witness the breakout, almost in its entirety.
Monitors placed throughout the Thistledown would transmit detailed views of the events and their results; everyone had a ringside seat, if they desired one.
No longer hungry, or very interested in playing with the quarters, the three women sat before a continuous document what was happening in the asteroid and the precincts..
The images were almost too real. After a few minutes, Cunningham turned away from the display and began giggling uncontrollably. ”This is ridiculous,” she said, clutching her cheeks and rolling back on the apparent Oriental-pattern carpet.
”It’s terrifying.” Blakely caught the bug next.
“We’re hysterical,” she said, and that sent them both into fresh paroxysms.
”We don’t have any idea what’s going on.”
“Oh, I do,” Hoffman said solemnly, feeling left out.
“What?” Cunningham asked, trying to be serious.
Hoffman rolled one hand into a near-cylinder. She peered through it at them. ”Blow one end off—the end no one ever tried to drill through. The north pole.”
“Jesus,” Cunningham said, her giggles gone as quickly as they had started. ”What would have happened it we had tried to drill through it? Where would the drillers have ended up?”
“Blow the north pole off,” Hoffman resumed, ignoring the unanswerable question, “and knock the Stone off the corridor. And after that—”
“What?” Ann asked, owlish now and also very serious.
“This half of the city leaves the corridor. We become a space station.”
“And the Stone?” Cunningham asked.
“Another moon.”
“And we go back to Earth?” Blakely asked.
Hoffman nodded.
“Damn,” Blskely said. ”It’s a ... I don’t know what it is. A fairy tale. Maybe it’s the day of resurrection. What did they call it? Rapture. Dead people flying up through the freeways. People leaving their cars right through the roofs.”
Embarrassed, Blakely turned back to the projected display.
“That doesn’t make any sense, does it? No freeways, no cars. Only angels coming fro
m the sky.”
Hoffman made a deep, shuddering sigh. ”You’re right,” she said. ”it’s a fairy tale.” Then, abruptly, she broke into laughter, and couldn’t stop until her lungs ached and her face was wet with tears.
An hour before the scheduled breakout, Corprep Rosen Gardner picted a personal message to Hoffman requesting that he be allowed to visit. A few minutes later, he arrived at the apartment door in person—”incarnate,” Hoffman reminded herself. She invited him in. By that time, they had all regained some semblance of control.
Gardner’s political work on behalf of the divided Hexamon and the Naderites was no longer necessary, he explained; he had volunteered to act as Corprep in the New Nexus for the Earth people, and chose Hoffman as the most logical person to speak with. He offered to keep her informed by linking her with his private memory and information service.
Her vacation was over, she thought, not without some regrets. She was on call again.
“I also bring news,” he said, standing before her with his hands behind his back. She was beginning to get a sense of the orthodox Naderite: dedicated, almost chivalric, not unlike some of the political conservatives she had dealt with on Earth. ”We have word of Patricia Luisa Vasquez, and the four who were sent to find her.”
“Yes?”
“Three of the four have returned to our precincts. They are Lawrence Heineman, Karen Farley and Lenore Carrolson. They were kept as captives for a time, I am ashamed to say, by the Geshels in Axis Nader and Central City. They were released just before the Geshel precincts began acceleration. They will join your people shortly.”
“And the others?”
“Patricia Luisa Vasquez was given an opportunity to find her way home,” Set Gardner continued. ”What that means, precisely, I am not sure; the details are sketchy. She and Garry Lanier were detained and sent with the gate opener and his party to one point three ex nine; many in that party, including Lanier, are now on their way back, and have passed through the accelerating precincts safely. They will not return to our sector in time to join with us, however.”