by Neal Asher
"Five centuries."
They walked up a ramp into a building constructed mostly of thick transparent panels, giving an excellent view of the sixth chamber.
The valley floor was layered with gigantic inert mechanical forms, cylinders and cubes and stacks of circular plates laid on edge, resembling a monstrous circuit board. Just outside the terminal building, a row of spherical tanks marched off to a distant wall. The wall was at least a hundred meters high, and the tanks half that in diameter. Below this level of the terminal, between the spheres and a parallel row of cylinders resting on their sides, was an immense gully
filled with glistening water. The channel was lined with pipe ends and cyclopian pumping apparatus. Over it all, thick black clouds floated in clumps, dropping curtains of rain and flurries of show. Somewhere was a constant pulsing, less heard then felt, like the infra-sound beats of moving mountains or the grinding of distant sea bottoms.
Looking up at an angle, between decks of clouds, she could dimly see the opposite floor of the chamber, bumped and ridged with a carpet of mysterious mechanism.
"No moving parts in the whole chamber except for large pumps, and not many of those," Lanier said. "The builders relied upon a built-in weather cycle. Rain falls, picks up heat, flows down channels into shallow ponds, evaporates, carries heat up, and the atmospheric maintenance systems drain it off, we're still not sure how."
"What does it all do?"
"When the Stone was first designed, the sixth chamber was going to be another city, but the builders had specified that the Stone could only accelerate at three percent g. Just before the Stone was outfitted and before the completion of the major excavation they found a way to allow the Stone to accelerate to the limit of its power. The method was
complex and expensive, but it gave the Stone a versatility the builders couldn't pass up. So the sixth chamber was equipped with selective inertial damping machinery, which makes up a small fraction of what is here now." He nodded at the vista through the glass. "That's why none of the chamber floors are inclined, and none of the ponds or rivers are equipped with slop barriers. They don't need them. The sixth chamber can selectively damp the effects of inertia on any object in the Stone. On a large scale, it overcomes acceleration and deceleration of the entire ship. On a small scale, it prevents inertial effects in the trains. It's self-regulating, though we haven't found any 'brain' yet."
The rain hit the transparent roof and ran down the forty-five degree slope over the stairwell. Lanier paused to look at the heads and rivulets of water.
"Since that time, the machinery has been modified and expanded. It once covered about three square kilometers, and the rest of the sixth chamber was used for industry and research, things that couldn't be done in the cities. Now, it maintains the seventh chamber as well."
Four people, all clad in yellow rain gear, marched along the edge of the channel beyond the terminal. They had parked their track a few meters away, on a raised roadbed.
"Our reception committee," Lanier said. They walked to the head of the staircase. Cold air pooled in the stairwell, and Patricia shivered as an outside gust blew some of it over them. Rain sang softly overhead. Between the rivulets on the glass, through a trench-like break in the clouds, Patricia saw the opposite northern cap. All the other caps had been virtually blank, featureless. This one was furrowed by a row of rectangular boxes, spaced at equal intervals like a steep flight of stairs, on the face of each box was an elliptical design. The boxes, she estimated, were at least a kilometer wide, and the ellipses half that along their major axis.
The first of the four to reach the top of the stairs doffed his rain cap. Patricia looked down to see her former professor, his face ruddy and bearded, eyes small and suspicious as if from some long-harbored hurt. Rimskaya was just as she remembered him. He returned her stare defensively, then nodded to Lanier. Behind him, a tall, even-featured blond woman and two Chinese, a man and a woman wearing green caps, removed their gear and shook water off onto the floor.
Rimskaya approached Patricia, his every gesture conveying aloofness, if not disgust. "Miss Vasquez," he said. "I hope you are up to this. I hope you do not make me seem like a fool for choosing you."
She opened and shut her mouth like a carp, then laughed too loudly. "Professor, I hope so, too!"
"Don't mind him," said the blond woman, her voice pleasant and deep, with a faint British accent. "He's said nothing but good about you for four months now." She clutched her own cap under her arm and held out her hand. Patricia shook it. Her grip was firm and warm. "I'm Karen Farley, this is Wu Gi Me, and Chang i Hsing." Chang smiled broadly at Patricia, her straight black bangs hanging down over her eyebrows, the latest Chinese fashion. "We're from Beijing Technological University."
Rimskaya still studied Patricia. His gray eyes narrowed. "You are healthy, no space sickness, no emotional distress?"
"I'm fine, Professor," she said.
"Good. Then you—" he indicated Farley, Wu and Chang "—you take care of her. I'm going to the first chamber to rest.
I'll be gone a week, perhaps longer." He held his hand out to Lanier and they shook once, firmly. "I am tired," Rimskaya said, "not least because I have no idea what this all signifies. I have never been an imaginative man, and this place..." He shuddered. "Perhaps it will suit you better, Miss Vasquez." He bowed stiffly to his colleagues, then picked up his gear and walked toward the ramp leading to the train platform.
Patricia looked after him, nonplussed.
"I envy him ... a bit," said Wu in perfect California English. He was about her height, just on the edge of plumpness, with a stiff crew cut and a childlike face. "I have read some of your papers recently, Miss Vasquez."
"Patricia, please."
"They are quite beyond me, I'm afraid. Chang and I are electrical engineers. Karen is a physicist."
"Theoretical physics, i've been very impay-tient to meet you," Farley said.
"'impay-shent,'" Lanier corrected.
"Yes." Farley grinned at Patricia's puzzlement. "I'm a Chinese citizen also. I can fool most people most of the time.
Correct me, please, when I blunder."
Patricia looked between them owlishly. She felt a bit strung-out, not yet ready to meet new people and stretch her sociability.
"We're escorting Patricia to the seventh chamber," Lanier said. "But she may want to rest here awhile."
"No." Patricia shook her head firmly. "I'm going for the big picture today."
"That's a woman," Farley said. "Suicidal doggedness. Something I admire. Chang has it. Gi Me—we call him Lucky—Gi Me's a lazy fellow, though."
"Both she and Professor Rimskaya are slave drivers," Chang said. Her English accent was markedly less proficient than Wu's and Farley's. She produced two packets of rain gear from a pouch in her own coat and gave them to Lanier and Patricia. They suited up quickly and left the shelter of the annex.
The air smelled of clean rain, ozone and metal. The rain had slowed to a drizzle and the snow had stopped. Water slid in sheets from sloping metal walls below the elevated road, collecting in gutters and washing to a catch basin meters below. Patricia peered into the basin and saw the smooth funnel of water descending into darkness.
The truck on the roadbed was a replica of the vehicle which had taken them across the first chamber. Farley offered Patricia the shotgun seat again, and the others climbed into the back, pushing aside boxes of fabric-wrapped scientific gear. Farley edged the truck forward, then brought it up to speed.
The roadbed expanded into a broad flat ribbon, winding through complexes of tanks and gray shapes hidden behind a rapidly spreading fog. Wu leaned between the two seats. "This stuff that looks like asphalt—it isn't. It's asteroid rock, all the metals removed, ground up and mixed with a plant-based oil. Very tough, no cracks. We wonder who's going to patent it."
Somehow, Patricia found the dreariness invigorating. There was a bluish quality about the fog that made her feel as if she were within a sa
pphire. The rain resumed, and the drum of water on the track's roof—combined with a gentle surge of warm air from the heater—made everything seem secure, no more strenuous than watching an entertainment on a video.
She snapped herself out of that feeling quickly. Lanier was watching her. She angled her face toward him and then looked away. How could they consider her so important? In the face of this monumental mystery, what could she possibly do?
The size alone was enough to paralyze thought. Looking up through gaps in the cloud cover to the opposite side, she could just as well have been looking from the window of a shuttle reentering the atmosphere.
The truck followed the gently curving highway and crossed the sixth chamber in twenty minutes. The familiar arch and tunnel entrance loomed ahead. Farley switched on the lights as the tunnel enveloped them.
After the stormy sixth chamber, the clarity and brightness of the unhindered plasma tube light was welcome.
"You can almost hear the birds singing," Patricia commented.
"I wish," Farley said. They descended the ramp. Ahead stretched an arrow-straight road, about half as broad as the sixth chamber highway and made of the same material. To each side of the road, sandy hummocks topped with stiff yellow grass dotted the floor for several kilometers. A short hike away were stands of !ow, scrawny trees. To the west, up the curve of the chamber floor, Patricia saw small lakes and what looked like a river emerging from one of the cap tunnels. A few fleecy clouds clung to the cap. The landscape was equally homogenous and bland right up to the limits of the tube light both east and west. The plasma tube itself emerged from the center of the cap in a straight, unobscured beacon.
Patricia could feel the anticipation building in the cabin, centering on her. They were waiting for her reaction.
Reaction to what? if anything, this chamber was less impressive than the first. Her shoulders tensed. So what was she supposed to say?
Lanier reached between the seats to touch her arm. "What do you see?" he asked.
"Sand, grass, lakes, trees. A river. Some clouds."
"Look straight ahead."
She looked. The air was clear. Visibility was at least thirty kilometers. The northern cap seemed to be obscured, not nearly as obvious as the looming gray presence in the other chambers. She looked up and squinted, trying to make out the end of the plasma tube.
It didn't end. It went on, certainly more than thirty kilometers, getting dimmer and thinner until it almost merged with the horizon.
Of course, on a non-curved surface—as the cylinders were, viewed parallel to the axis—the horizon was much higher. Given unlimited distance, the horizon would begin at a true vanishing point in the perspective...
"This chamber's longer," she said.
"Yes," Wu agreed cautiously. Chang nodded, grinning as if at some joke, her hands folded demurely in her lap.
"Now, let me get this straight. We've traveled about two hundred and twenty kilometers into the Stone, which is about two hundred and ninety kilometers long. So this chamber could be, maybe, fifty kilometers across." Her hands were trembling. "But it isn't."
"Look closely," Lanier said.
"It's an optical illusion. I can't see the northern cap."
"No," Farley said, all too sympathetic.
"So?" Patricia looked around the cab. The others kept their faces impassive, except for Chang's secretive smile. "What the hell am I supposed to see?"
"You tell us," Lanier said.
She figured furiously in her head, looking up at the opposite side of the chamber, trying to calculate distances in the strange perspective of the huge cylinders. "Stop the truck."
Farley brought the vehicle to a halt and Patricia descended from the cab to stand on the roadway. Then she clambered up a ladder to a platform on top of the cab and looked down the straight line of the road. The road went to its own vanishing point—no cap, no barrier. Above, the rest of the landscape did much the same.
"It's bigger," she said. Farley and Lanier stood by the truck, looking up at her. Wu and Chang joined them. "It's bigger than the asteroid. It goes beyond the end. Is that what you're trying to tell me?"
"We don't tell," Lanier said. "We show. It's the only way."
"You're trying to tell me it doesn't stop, it goes right on out the other end?" She heard the touch of panic and high-pitched fascination in her own voice.
The Stanford professor, six years before, had been wrong. Someone besides extraterrestrials and gods could appreciate her work. She now knew why she had been brought up from Vandenberg, carried to the Stone by shuttle and OTV.
The asteroid was longer on the inside than it was on the outside.
The seventh chamber went on forever.
*5*
Patricia had just checked her watch—nine hours. She lay on the cot, listening to the gentle sound of tent canvas clapping in the breeze.
In at least this region of the seventh chamber, there was little need for solid-walled buildings. The weather was dry and mild, the air temperature warm. She stared up at the awning stretched between aluminum poles, at the smoky outline of the plasma tube through the cloth.
I am here. This is real.
"You bet your life," she whispered. Inside the tent, a complex of partitions and tarp floors covering about a hundred
square meters, Farley and Chang were speaking Chinese in muted tones.
The first few hours in the chamber, while they had arranged a cubicle in the tent for her and prepared for a cookout, Patricia had been hyperactive, darting about like a moth, asking questions that sometimes made little sense. Lanier had watched her glumly for a while; she had felt she was somehow disappointing him. But later he had joined the
others in laughing at her—with her—and had produced a surprise bottle of champagne. "To christen your new self," he had said.
On the first round, they had tried to find something more fitting in the way of names for what everyone had, heretofore, referred to simply as the "seventh chamber," or "the corridor."
"Spaghetti world," Farley had suggested. No, Wu countered—more like macaroni world, hollow in the middle. Chang tossed in pipe world. "Tube" and "tunnel" had already been appropriated for other parts of the Stone; the words and shapes seemed to echo against each other, a sexually charged confusion of fittings-within-fittings.
A couple of glasses of champagne and Patricia had become desperately drowsy. They had barely set up a cot under the awning before she was sound asleep.
She stretched and propped her head on her elbow, looking across the scrub and sand, and up at the enormous cylinder of land stretching into the haze. Farley came out of the tent and sat beside the cot.
"Dreaming?"
"No," Patricia said. "Musing."
"When Garry gave us the grand tour, a year and a half ago, I thought I'd go crazy. What's your opinion of the indoctrination? I mean, it's really just beginning for you, but..." She trailed off, regarding Patricia with very blue eyes. Farley was perhaps ten years older than she, and there was humor evident in the lines around her lips and eyes. She had a demanding directness in her manner—almost a female version of Lanier, Patricia thought.
"Seeing is not quite believing," she answered. "So just hearing about it certainly wouldn't be enough."
"After a while, we tend to become complacent," Farley said, staring down the gray-green road. "It worries me sometimes. When new people arrive and see what we see every day, we're shaken back into realizing how strange it really is. Sometimes I feel like a beetle crawling through a fusion power plant. I can feel a certain amount, see a
certain amount, but I sure as hell don't understand everything." She sighed. "I'm not sure Garry approves, but I think you should be warned about the boojums."
"He mentioned them. What are they?"
"Some of us have seen boojums. Spooks. I haven't, and none of our group have. The consensus is they're psychological, a sign of the strain. There haven't been any really clear sightings, photographs or anything.
So be wary of what you see. And be doubly wary—no one has proven that the Stone or the corridor is completely deserted. We're
just too few to adequately explore and police all the chambers. So if you see anything, report it, but don't believe it." She smiled. "Does that make sense?"
"No," Patricia said, swinging her legs over the side of the cot. "Do I have a work schedule, some idea of what I'm supposed to be doing, when?"
"Garry will tell you all about that in a half hour or so. He's sleeping now. Exhaled. I mean, exhausted. We're all a bit worried about him, you know."
"You and the others—you have green badges, but do you have third level clearance?"
"Heavens, no." Farley laughed, tossing her long blond hair back over her shoulders. "We're Chinese. We're lucky to have gotten this far. We're here by courtesy and because our governments happen to be friendly this decade. All the same, we're much better off than the poor Russians. They get to study the bore holes and the plasma tubes, and very little else. Everyone perceives plasma physics to be their specialty, so they're stuck on the axis. Americans have no conception what fine archaeologists they have. Now, as for their sociology..." She shook her head ruefully. "I'm a born and bred Marxist, but I'm not sure the Stoners would fit strict Leninist dogma."