by Greg Bear
“Unbearably. We have lived too long, Max.”
“You’re welcome to come in, if you wish, sir. My partner is under control.”
“Kindly spoken, Max. I will make my report, issue my invitation, and then we will be done for today.” Whitlow grinned. His teeth were mottled ivory perfection. “It is good to know you are well. Refreshes so many memories.”
“Indeed, sir.”
Whitlow drew himself up and his smile crackled and straightened. “We have all been brought here—all.”
Glaucous quickly calculated how many that might be—based on years of speculation and observation. Dozens, certainly, perhaps hundreds.
“I am told little beyond that,” Whitlow said, “but I trust we are now clear how important your territory has become—fortunately for you. We have reports, and so do they.”
“They?” Glaucous asked. Penelope cleared her throat from the other room—listening behind the door.
Whitlow solemnly shook his head. “We have both kissed our Lady’s hem, and our Lady’s hem sweeps close. How much do you already know, young Mr. Glaucous—sly nimrod that you are?”
Glaucous’s small eyes grew wider, though no match for Whitlow’s. “Is it over?” he asked, his throat dry.
“Terminus is a possibility.”
“Are the sum-runners here?”
“I am told, and feel, that a quorum will soon occupy our time. I beg of you, young shikari: do not remove more colleagues. Your thread is mine, and mine is wound inextricably with the Moth’s, our great conveyer. We are united in one fate.”
Whitlow bowed and backed away, never letting Glaucous out of his sight. “Must hurry on. Many hockshops to visit.”
“Indeed, sir.”
“Close and lock the door, Max,” Whitlow said. “Let me hear the dead bolt shot home.”
“Of course,” Glaucous said. “Apologies.” He closed the door, latched it, and listened for the familiar, off-center punk-thump of Whitlow’s step as he hastened to the stairs.
Even then Max’s fingers twitched to do the old man a mischief.
CHAPTER 28
* * *
Wallingford
After four hours of talk in the living room—preceded by a bowl of chicken broth, a glass of milk, and a glass of red wine, all of which Daniel gratefully accepted—Mary pulled her husband aside in the hallway to the kitchen and whispered harshly into his reddening ear, “What in hell are you doing? The man’s sick—he’s been stalking us, he thinks he’s my brother, for God’s sake—my dead brother.”
Fred was clearly chagrined, but could not contain his enthusiasm. “All true—but you should listen to what he’s been saying. I’m writing it down. He may be the most brilliant man I’ve ever met.”
“What’s so brilliant?”
“Fourier transforms—phi of k and r—maximum deviations from zero-energy states of overlapping discretely variable systems…”
“Crazy talk.”
“Is it?” Fred pulled back, indignant. “He’s feeling better, Mary—your soup is pulling him through. He’s had a hard time since he came here.”
“Came here? To our house?”
“Crossed over. He’s relaxed, he’s just getting started explaining to me—this could be something big.”
“He’s talking about alternate worlds, Fred.”
Fred made a wry face. “Nothing new to physics. And that may be crazy, but it’s the math—he’s either read unique stuff or done the work himself, ideas and solutions I’ve never heard of. Some of it’s even more brilliant than Sütõ’s solution for minimum total energy. Consider an infinite lattice of branching and debranching lines, each capable of producing another lattice—you’d think that would be totally intractable, but the secret is, the branches don’t last—they sum to the least energy and greatest probability, the greatest efficiency…He said something so utterly brilliant it was stupid. He said, ‘Dark matter is stuff waiting to happen.’”
Mary observed her husband over tightly folded arms, her lips growing thinner with each passing word.
“He wrote down some equations. Sure, it’s alternate worlds—but it’s also the most efficient states of protein motion and interaction, stacking solutions for sand and salt crystals, perhaps even distributions and probabilities for sparticle production in high-energy accelerators. Mary, if you don’t like it—just please butt out. Go read or bake bread or something. The man’s a gold mine.”
His wife’s eyes went round. “Have you even asked him why he knows so much about us?”
Fred’s nostrils flared. “You won’t like the answer.”
“Try me.”
“He knows what happened before Daniel died—some of the stuff you’ve told me. I didn’t prompt him—he volunteered.”
“That wouldn’t be impossible to learn.”
“Have you told anyone about how you sprayed silver paint all over your terrier when it bit you?”
Mary glared, and tears came to her eyes.
“Right,” Fred said. “He knows about your older brother. He knows what your father was like.”
Mary’s face took on a yearning pain. Worse than not believing was not wanting to believe. “Does he know how Daniel died?”
“That wouldn’t be logical.”
“You must have told somebody,” she said, working up to anger.
“I never told anyone. Take it to the bank, Mary—he knows about you and your family, but not much matches up after he died—after Daniel died, I mean. This Daniel—he didn’t die. And in his world, we never got married. Even if it is a delusion, it’s brilliant. I won’t say I’m convinced—but I do need to listen. Please, Mary.” He gently squeezed her rope-taut forearm. “Maybe he’ll just tie himself in logical knots and we can boot him out, or call the cops and hand him over.”
She seemed to soften, but it might have been exhaustion. “I could ask him some really hard questions. He’d fail, you know that.”
“He gets agitated when you’re around. Sad and energetic. His health isn’t the best.”
Her shoulders sagged. “How much longer?”
“Could go all night. He can sleep on the couch—it would be a luxury compared with what he’s used to. Please, Mary.”
The look she gave him—hurt, puzzled, angry—he mirrored in his own features, but his eyes were fixed, examining. This made it clear to her that Fred was going to be stubborn.
“Find out who he really is,” she murmured. “He’s lying. He’s crazy. And even if he were my brother—you know I wouldn’t talk to him. Daniel was an unbelievable bastard. That’s why John killed him—to save the rest of us. To save me. You remember that, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Fred said too quickly, and patted her shoulder. “But like you keep saying, he can’t be your brother, right? Why don’t you get to bed and let me handle him?”
“I don’t want him under our roof. He scares me, Fred.”
“He’s scaring me too, honey. With how smart he is.”
She climbed the stairs to the upper bedroom, leaving Fred in the hall, staring at the prints he’d made from photographs Mary had taken in Geneva and Brookhaven—where they had lived and where her father had worked, twenty years ago. The remains of a spiderweb draped from one of the prints, shadows of silken lines drifting apart and rejoining in a draft of heater air flowing down the hall.
Fred followed those shadows, separating and coming together in rippling cycles, until his eyes blurred. Then he hurried to continue his talk with the stranger sitting in their living room. But first he stopped in the bathroom and dabbed a fingertip of Mentholatum under each nostril.
Daniel or Charles—whoever he might be—stunk to high heaven.
The evening progressed to morning, and to drinking—soda water for Daniel, Scotch for Fred. Fred was enjoying a half-drunken fever of speculation. “How could you end up in someone else’s body? Did you transfer your soul—is there such a thing as a spirit that can be passed on?”
“I don’t know
,” Daniel said. “It’s never happened to me before.” Not that I’d remember.
“Something to do with these world-lines?” Fred asked, his face flushed. “Could we develop an equation to describe it?”
Daniel watched him closely. “Perhaps,” he said.
“One world-line is severed—cut free—and flies around, and connects up with the closest similar world-line,” Fred said. “Like splicing DNA, or wires in a cable—I don’t know how, just a metaphor. What do you remember from your past?” he asked, frowning sharply at the sudden importance of this question.
Daniel looked around the room and shrugged. “Less and less,” he said. “Some of it is pretty foggy.”
Fred planted his elbows on his knees and slowly spun the glass of Scotch. “Until now, you’ve relied on the memories of varieties of yourself—but you can’t do that anymore. You can’t take all your physical memories with you. This body—it’s not you. You’re coasting on the bump of memories from the transfer, and they’re fading.”
Daniel agreed.
“Exactly,” Fred said, enthused by his own ingenuity. “If any of it’s true—then it logically follows.”
“I’ve been writing things down,” Daniel said.
“My wife—if you are Daniel, I mean—my wife could supply important memories from your past. Not that such an arrangement would make up for all you’ve lost—but it would be better than nothing.”
Daniel lowered his gaze, suddenly worried that this intelligent man would think his way through to the final solution—what must inevitably happen. Fortunately, Fred seemed more interested in theory, not threat—not actual danger.
“How many people have this talent?” Fred asked.
“I’m not the only one.”
Fred’s eyes gleamed. “If other world-lines are being eaten up, destroyed, or changed—maybe people like you are migrating here. Escaping from other, eaten-up world-lines. You could tell how close your own line is to being destroyed by counting the people like you, when they start arriving. If you could find them. I mean, how many would actually confess to displacing other people and taking over?”
“Makes sense,” Daniel said.
“You look dragged out,” Fred said.
“I am.”
“It’s late. We need to talk more about those Mersauvin solutions. Why not stay here? A couch can’t be worse than an abandoned house.”
“Generous offer,” Daniel said.
“Well, I’m intrigued,” Fred said. “We’ll continue tomorrow—after my classes.”
“Let’s sleep on it,” Daniel said. “We’ll get together later.”
FOURTEEN ZEROS
CHAPTER 29
* * *
The Tiers
Their first evening in Tiadba’s niche, the lovemaking was brief, promising—not what Jebrassy had hoped for. They fell back into attitudes of patience—waiting for what, they could not know. The ceil outside the open end of the niche darkened from gray to blue-black. Small lights gleamed in the darkness, beautiful, familiar—unreal.
Eventually, at her gentle prodding, Jebrassy spoke more of his straying—his suspicion that whoever entered him in dreams did not come from the Kalpa, did not stay long, and left little evidence of his nature. “I think he could be from the past.”
She watched him across the pads and coverlets she had arranged for their tryst.
“But I don’t know anything for certain,” Jebrassy said. “He could be from the future—or maybe he’s a messenger from the Chaos.”
“Mine’s from the past,” Tiadba whispered, eyes wide with mystery. “She doesn’t know how we live. But wherever they’re from, I think they know each other.”
Under her direct gaze, Jebrassy burrowed into the coverlets in confusion. In muffled tones he said, “I’ve written a message. If he should take over while I’m here…with you…show it to him.”
Tiadba dug him out and lay next to him, and both looked through the open end of the niche at the velvety black roof of their world.
“How is it possible?” Tiadba asked. “What’s happening out there? Why do they keep us ignorant?”
They left the far tip of the third isle and crossed to the grocery fields. The ceil flushed orange and dimmed to gray at the horizon, signaling the onset of sleep, but the fields were still active with red and black pedes gathering ripe fruit. These pushed along on parallel blurs of dozens of active feet between the tight rows of bushes and low, wide trees. Every few dozen yards pede tenders clucked and whistled, announcing the location of pickup baskets and carts.
A single warden, stubbed glassy vanes thrusting from its smooth gray thorax, hovered between the road and the edge of the closest grove. It hummed to itself and ignored them as they passed—just as Tiadba had predicted.
The pedes climbed arched trellises beside the baskets and dropped their loads with trills and pirrips of satisfaction. The tenders gathered the baskets and rolled the carts to the huts where packers and cooks put them up for the next day’s meals. This way, the ancient breed in the Tiers fed themselves—though the pedes did the sowing and most of the pruning and hauling.
A mile and a half from the distribution center, Jebrassy and Tiadba left the road, now a worn dirt path, and hiked across acres of fallow ruts not yet sowed with a new crop, through the thin forest that surrounded all the farms. A short time later they arrived at an elevated slab piled high with worn farm machines and utensils, broken or outmoded long generations before. (Jebrassy was sure the pedes had not always done the greater share of gathering—these machines, rusted and caked with age, might have once performed such tasks.)
Making sure they weren’t followed, Tiadba gave him a leg up, and he handed her in turn onto the slab. From there, she guided him through crumbling boxes until they came to a bare hole in the middle of the slab—perhaps four miles from the bloc where they both lived. They descended a peculiar ladder way—rungs arranged in a spiral along a deep shaft with an odd bend that, after twenty yards, turned the shaft into a level tunnel, still equipped with rungs but more suited to large pedes than to breeds. It brought them downward and across to a part of the Tiers he had never heard of—a storage area long abandoned, and apparently now used only for such clandestine meetings as these.
Tiadba informed him—her face shining with excitement at the conspiracy of it all—that the wardens never came here. “That grove warden ignored us. Don’t you think that’s odd? We were out where we shouldn’t be, near dusk.”
Jebrassy admitted that was odd.
“Some think they’ve been ordered to stay away. Some think we’re supposed to do what we’re doing.”
Jebrassy did not disagree—out loud. But he was full of disagreeing thoughts. He wanted to be defiant—not to fit into anybody’s plan.
And when they actually arrived at the small round room, lit by three ancient, greenish lights that shined on the circled faces of the chosen marchers—he felt like a fool. A fool for love.
Tiadba was an utterly marvelous glow—no doubt about it. But her stubbornness was more than a match for his own. She thought little about his feelings, but always about the Goal—that is, her Goal. And her Goal, right now, above all things—including his love—was the march. She had literally roped him into this meeting—tied a rope around his waist before they left the middle Tiers, in case he fell as they descended the ladder way, and even now tugged him forward to sit with the group around the perimeter, waiting for the leader—the elderly sama whose name was Grayne.
The circle focused on the waiting dimness at the center.
“She never disappoints,” a young male confided to Jebrassy as he and Tiadba pushed back and huddled shoulder-to-shoulder with the others. Jebrassy wondered if the breed was referring to Tiadba, and was prepared to take offense—but it soon became apparent he referred to Grayne herself, the old female.
They all squatted, then fell back and sat against the wall, and soon Jebrassy felt a cold, ancient oppression—he did not like this place. Wh
atever his enthusiasm for joining a march, all the mystery and concealment struck him as contrived.
“Strange place,” he whispered to Tiadba. She acted as if she hadn’t heard. “There could be chairs, a table.”
“We never leave signs,” Tiadba said, and the young male beside him nodded agreement.
“If the wardens never come here—why worry?”
“It’s the form,” the male said, giving him an irritated nudge. “It’s the way the march is always done.”
“It wouldn’t be my way,” Jebrassy muttered.
“What would you do?” the male asked, his face clouding. He leaned forward to catch a glimpse of Tiadba’s reaction, but she was studiously ignoring the whole exchange—and that irritated Jebrassy even more.
“I’d go out there by myself, or with a group of people I know and trust. Well-trained.”
“And who would lead?”
“I would.”
The male chortled. “Where would you get your equipment?” he asked.
“He doesn’t know anything about the equipment,” Tiadba said.
“Then why bring him? We’re almost ready. This is supposed to be an experienced group.”
“Because Grayne requested it.” Only a partial truth.
The male thought this over, then, with a shrug, asked, “What’s his name?”
“Jebrassy.”
“The fighter?” The young male bumped Jebrassy’s arm again, this time with his elbow. “I’ve seen you. My name’s Denbord.” He pointed to two other males. “That’s Perf and Macht. We’re friends. We wanted to fight—but the march is more important.”
The others, not yet introduced, touched their noses and glanced at one another in accord—fighters were to be pitied, however amusing fights might be.
“Quiet,” Tiadba said. “She’s coming.”
The circle had left a gap near the tunnel entrance. The air was sharp and close. Jebrassy began to sweat.
A small female entered, nearly a foot shorter than Tiadba, elderly and stooped: it was the sama he had met in the market. She moved slowly and carefully, using a staff, and two younger females in gray long-shirts and slippers followed, carrying baskets. Fruit was passed—tropps, not yet ripe but full of juice, and dried chafe for chewing. The group refreshed itself while the old female squatted in the middle of the chamber, the dark eyes in her worn, plain face searching the circle until they came to Tiadba—her lips softening their hard line—and then to Jebrassy. She gave him a firm nod.