Alia said, “You’re Leropa.”
“And you’re Alia. I’ve been waiting to meet you,” said the undying.
Chapter 36
It took Ruud Makaay and his people only a few weeks to set up a prototype test rig of the stabilizer technology. He summoned us all to Prudhoe Bay, on the Arctic coast of Alaska, for a trial demonstration.
I was impressed with the speed with which we had got to this point. But then Makaay had insisted from the beginning that EI was going to use off-the-shelf technology wherever possible. Even the moles weren’t entirely new: in the dying days of the oil industry, smart mechanical critters much like our moles had gone burrowing into the earth and beneath the seabeds all over the planet in search of the last reserves. Similarly the big condensation and liquefaction plants we were planning to set up would, in principle, have been immediately comprehensible to a Victorian engineer: “Gaslight-era technology,” Makaay said. It was just the scale of what we would be attempting that was new—the scale, and the intrinsic smartness of the system.
As well as its technical goals this trial demonstration would be a “bonding session” for us, the project’s champions, Makaay said. And, more seriously, it would give us a chance to rehearse, he said, to begin developing the case we were going to have to make to the world’s serious power brokers if our project was ever to get off the ground.
But for now we were still in development mode, and Makaay was keeping the press out. It was all a question of perception. In advanced engineering, you expected failure; you learned as much from failures as from successes—indeed if you never suffered a failure you probably weren’t pushing the envelope ambitiously enough. But Makaay, after half a lifetime spent trying to sell the unsellable, knew that the public, media, and politicians rarely understood these truths. So, for now, only the core team would be present.
Plus one potential ally, he told me.
“The Edith Barnette? You’re serious? She must be eighty if she’s a day.”
Barnette had been vice president in the momentous Amin administration. She had been deeply unpopular at the time, and had taken much of the flak for the pain of Amin’s mighty economic restructuring; she never followed Amin to take the White House herself. But historians had come to recognize Barnette as a key architect of the whole Stewardship program, and as a driving force in getting the necessary policies through Congress and into international governance. Of course all that was a long time ago.
“She has no formal power, of course. But she has contacts all over the Hill, and in the UN, and of course the Stewardship councils.” Makaay smiled, his VR image flawless. “In my world, Michael, opinion is currency, worth far more than gold—far more even than conventional political power. And if we can get Barnette on our side we will go a long way to swinging the debate our way, believe me.”
“But what if we fail?”
“If it isn’t a showstopper Barnette will forgive us. She’s one of the few of her breed smart enough to do so. And she’s always had her heart in the right place, Michael. She understands what we’re trying to do here—or she will by the end of the big day.”
Even though Barnette would be there, personally I would much rather have stayed home. I had had my fill of traveling, and had no desire to haul my weary ass all the way up to Alaska, the roof of the world. But Shelley talked me into making the journey. We had to trust Makaay’s instincts, she said again. Otherwise why work with him?
So I acceded; I traveled to Alaska.
But as I slogged through my long journey, a whole series of more or less dreadful plane hops, I kept in mind my other agenda, the mysterious and spooky business of Morag. The whole issue was upsetting, and was isolating me from my family and friends, but I couldn’t wish it away. I had a deep gut instinct that my strange contact with Morag was just as important as anything else in my life. I was determined not to let it drop—though I had no real idea how I was going to pursue it. Somehow, I knew, Morag would come to me.
It turned out I was one hundred percent right.
The plane flew in over a vast brown plain, and the ocean was a steel sheet across which waves rippled tiredly. There was not a speck of blue or green to be seen on land or sea.
Prudhoe Bay was one of a series of oil fields spread along the northern coast of Alaska: the North Slope, as the locals call it. The complex of drilling facilities stretched for about two hundred kilometers along the coast. There were scores of drilling pads, marching off across the land. In each pad you could see the central rig facility, a gaunt dinosaur-skeleton of rusted iron, surrounded by small boxy buildings. The ground between the pads was cut through by straight-line roads, now disused, the tarmac crumbling and coated with mud. It was a very strange sight from the air, an alien forest of iron and tarmac.
I was stunned by the scale of it. Once, I knew, this had been the largest single industrial facility on Earth. The rigs had sucked up oil from kilometers down, and as in those days the sea coast had been ice-bound for most of the year, the oil had been sent south through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline across more than a thousand kilometers. It was a complicated irony that the Warming, by causing the final retreat of the sea ice, had opened up the north Alaska ports all year round; if only the Warming had come a little earlier they wouldn’t have had to go to all the trouble of building that thousand-kilometer pipeline—but the oil shipped through that immense pipe had itself contributed to the Warming.
Now, of course, the rigs were obsolescent, but the rumps of the old oil companies still owned these facilities, and were loath to abandon decades of infrastructural investment. And so the area had become a kind of adventure playground for large-scale industrial experimentation: that was why the EI engineers had chosen to come here for their trials. Plus it was American soil, which made a big difference in permissions, administrative support, and other bureaucracy. Makaay told me it was a lot easier to attract visitors to American territory than abroad, even to a place as remote as this.
I landed at an airstrip outside a small town called, unpromisingly, Deadhorse.
My automated cab from the airport gave me a profoundly irritating commentary, as if it imagined it was a tourist bus in Manhattan. Once, the cab told me, the hotel I was heading for had been the only accommodation available to visitors. But now that the oil industry had imploded there was plenty of accommodation to be had on the old drilling pads. There were even theme parks, where you could play at being a rigger, with grubby jeans and a hard hat.
Outside the town, the ground was churned-up mud where nothing grew. Once this area had been a vast swathe of tundra, like Siberia. But as the permafrost melted, the delicate tundra ecosystem had just melted away, too, and just as in Siberia the people had gone, the subsistence-hunter types who had endured here for millennia.
Deadhorse turned out to be barely a town at all; grim, functional, it was like an industrial yard. Many of the small, boxy buildings were abandoned altogether, their roofs collapsed, concrete walls cracked. As we drove in through this decay and abandonment along a thin strip of silvertop, the light was failing, the day ending. It felt as if the walls of the world were closing in around me.
The hotel was basic, just a series of two-story blocks. There were long corridors of rooms that stretched on and on, like a prison, and the flat heavy light of the fluorescent strips embedded in the ceilings washed out any color, any vitality.
The automated reception facility told me a fault had developed with the systems in my room, where an oversensitive chemical toilet had developed a habit of spitting unwelcome waste back out at its unlucky user. An animist had been summoned from Fairbanks to administer therapy, but wouldn’t be here until the morning. In the meantime I could take a chance with the angst-ridden toilet, or switch to a room with a shared bathroom.
The hell with it. I took the switch.
My room was just a box. It was clean and reasonably bright, with a little alcove where you could make coffee. But everything was old, the pipes rusted, the p
laster and skirting boards crudely repaired, and dirt and grease had accumulated in cracks in the walls.
I threw my clothes into the small cupboard, and headed down the corridor to find the shared john. The toilet was none too clean, the shower just a nozzle over a stained bath. The water looked clear, but smelled suspiciously of chlorine.
Back in my room, I used the very basic VR facilities to contact my party.
Everybody was here in Alaska, Tom and Sonia, Ruud Makaay and his people, Shelley and some of her colleagues, even Vander Guthrie. I was too tired to do any business that evening, but would have enjoyed company, I guess. I longed to see Tom again, a deep cell-level impulse. But he knew I’d been with Rosa “telling ghost stories,” as he put it, and he was pissed with me, and I didn’t feel up to any more rows. Meanwhile Shelley was finalizing details for the demonstration due the next day. Everybody else was working, or had crashed out. A bit wistfully, we all promised to meet up in the morning.
I rolled into bed and watched some news. There was actually a relevant item: more instances of localized hydrate release around the Arctic Circle, more water spouts and clouds of lethal gases. I guessed it was local interest up here.
I was dog tired, my eyes felt like they were coated with sand, but I found it hard to rest. My muscles ached from all the long hours of sitting around on planes, and I felt tense, full of energy that needed burning off. And though it was close to midnight the sun was still up; this was Arctic midsummer. The light that leaked around the edge of my curtains was bright, not quite like daylight, enough to throw off my body clock.
I just lay still, eyes closed. I tried to talk myself into sleeping. I felt myself drift inward, away from the poky reality of that dismal Alaskan hotel. But as my conscious mind receded I only seemed to uncover a deeper layer of anxiety, like a beach exposed by a low tide.
I needed the john.
I pushed my way out of bed, pulled on my pants, and fumbled my way in the dark to the door.
The light in the corridor was briefly dazzling. I stumbled along one wall. The only sound was the padding of my feet. There was an odd quality about the light. It was a dead and colorless glow, lacking any of the photosynthetic goodness of sunlight. Barefoot, shambling along alone, I felt like a convict.
The corridor seemed to stretch on, longer than I remembered. I wondered if I had come the wrong way, if I was somehow getting lost. But I kept on, figuring I had to get somewhere eventually.
At last I came to the bathroom. I pushed my way inside, used the facility, came back out. Again the corridor stretched away to either side of me, infinitely long, identical whichever way you looked. For a second I had to think which way I had come. My thinking seemed stuck in my head like glue in a pipe. I turned right. I figured that was the way. I began stumbling back down the corridor.
Then I saw her.
She was a slim figure, far off down the corridor. I heard her voice. She was speaking rapidly, just as she had at the Reef. But the thick-painted walls jumbled up her voice into whispers and echoes.
I ran, of course. I felt absurd running in my bare feet, with my pajama pants flapping around my legs, my belly heaving under my vest. But I ran anyhow, as I had run before, as I knew I always would run after her.
I kept my eyes fixed on Morag. I had the feeling she wanted me to reach her. She was just standing there. But though I ran as hard as I could, I didn’t get any closer. I felt no fear: none of that awful sucking banal cold of evil that Rosa had described. She was there for me. But I couldn’t reach her, no matter how hard I struggled to run down that endless corridor. She looked helpless, her hands spread.
She turned away from me and stepped into a room.
I tried to count, to remember which door she had chosen. Twenty, twenty-five down? I counted off the doors as I passed.
But a wall loomed before me.
I had to stop. I stood there panting, staring at the wall blankly. It was just a hotel wall; it had small arrowed signs pointing me to reception, and to a fire exit. It had seemed to come out of nowhere, materializing like a VR and cutting off the corridor.
I turned and looked back. The corridor didn’t seem so long now. I could even see the bathroom door I’d left open.
I knew I wouldn’t see Morag again that night. I stumbled back down the corridor, looking for my room. I longed to call Tom, but I knew I must not.
In the morning I was up early. I checked at the hotel reception for any records of last night. There were a few surveillance cameras dotted around the building, but none in the rooms, and only one to cover the length of that corridor.
After some electronic arm-twisting I persuaded the hotel’s sentience to show me images. I saw myself stumbling, running, staggering down that corridor. I had been half-asleep; I looked almost drunk. But there was no clear image of Morag. The cameras’ fields of view never quite stretched far enough, and the sound pickups were overwhelmed by noisy air-conditioning fans. Perhaps there was a shadow—a fleeting shape, a glimpse of ankle, a trace of voice on the audio recording. That was all.
Once again Morag had come and gone leaving scarcely a trace.
Chapter 37
The day after Alia landed on Earth, Leropa arranged to meet her in a township built out of a ruined Conurbation that she referred to by an old number, “11729.” It was apparently a place of great historical significance. Alia knew nothing of this, and didn’t ask. Buried at the heart of the solar system, she was beginning to choke on age and mystery.
When morning came, Alia flew alone in Reath’s shuttle. The little craft confidently skimmed north, and circular-plan cities fled endlessly beneath the shuttle’s prow. The sky was a washed-out blue, and in the day no stars were visible. There was no Moon in the sky either. Alia wasn’t sure if the Moon, so familiar from her viewings of Michael Poole’s time, had ever been visible in the daytime. And now, of course, the Moon was gone, detached as an accident of mankind’s endless wars. She wondered if Michael Poole could have got used to a sky without a Moon.
At last something altogether more grand began to loom over the horizon.
It was a framework, an open skeletal structure. It was pyramidal—no, tetrahedral, Alia saw, with three mighty legs plunging toward the ground. It was colored blue-gray, though its true shade may have been masked by the mist of distance. Streaks of cloud curled languidly around the apex of that immense tripod, but its base was still hidden by the horizon—the whole must have been kilometers tall.
As the shuttle swept closer this structure loomed ever taller in Alia’s sky, until at last her shuttle was flying through the vast open space cradled by the framework. At the heart of the triangular floor over which the tetrahedron loomed was a city: Conurbation 11729 itself. This city retained some of the ancient domed architecture, but the domes had been worn by time, cut through and patched up, over and over.
The shuttle descended. On the ground Leropa was waiting to meet her.
“So,” Leropa said, “you are the young Elect who has caused so much trouble.”
“I’m sorry,” Alia stammered. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“And I’m grateful that you, the Transcendence, is giving me time.”
“Oh, you don’t need to be grateful. The Transcendence can’t help but devote its attention to you. Don’t you understand that? Perhaps your tuition hasn’t been as thorough as I imagined. Child, you are already part of the Transcendence. So your doubts and questions are its doubts. Do you see?”
“I think so—”
“And so the Transcendence must deal with you, to set its own mind at ease.” Leropa closed her eyes, and nodded, as Alia had seen Reath bow his head when naming the Transcendence.
Leropa’s face was very strange, small, round, her nose and cheekbones so shallow she was all but featureless, like a crater eroded to smoothness by great age. Her lips seemed without a drop of blood, and her eyes were gray orbs dry as stones. Alia wondered how old this person was�
��if she could still be called a person at all. In Leropa’s presence Alia felt transient, transparent. Leropa smiled at her; it was a cold grimace, inflicted on the muscles of her face by an act of will.
Together they walked through the great circular courtyards of the domes. From the ground the domes were peculiarly dull to look at: they were simply too big to be taken in, for Alia could only see to a dome’s horizon, and could make out nothing of its true scope. But over it all the great struts of the tripod, from here a vivid electric blue, swept up until they penetrated the sky.
Alia grew increasingly uncomfortable in Earth’s heavy gravity. She kept trying to break into a run, forgetting the economy of walking—and besides her body, no longer truly bipedal, was not designed for walking. After a time she settled on a compromise, taking some of her weight on her curled fists as she loped along.
Leropa smiled at Alia as she knuckle-walked through the ruins of Earth.
Leropa spoke, in a voice like dry leaves rustling. The tetrahedron was a ruin, too, of a sort, she said. It dated from the time after the fall of the Coalition. A religious group called Wignerians or Friends, having arisen illegally in the military colonies at the center of the Galaxy, had emerged as a unifying force in the aftermath of political collapse. In its glory days it returned here, to Earth, where it had erected the mightiest of all cathedrals over the ruined capital of the Coalition that had once banned it. In the end the Friends’ creed had become the most powerful and magnificent of all mankind’s religions; it converted a Galaxy, revealed and explored the depths of humanity’s soul, and now it was quite vanished.
Leropa said now, “At the heart of the religion of the Wignerians was a belief that all of history is contingent—that all possible world lines will be gathered together at the end of time, where history will be resolved in favor of the good, and all pain wiped away.”
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