by Neal Asher
*16*
Vasquez continued her tour of the third chamber city by way of the library simulation. She discovered she could wander at will through the record, taking any route she chose, although she was still unable to enter private spaces.
Mostly, she used the tours to relax between long periods of heavy brainwork. She also made tours on foot; the independence she felt, going from place to place in the Stone with a pocket map or slate and memory blocks—no one questioning her about her intentions—was exhilarating. She could almost shut out the dark thoughts—but not quite.
She rode the trains from the sixth to the third chamber at least once every twenty-four hours. Occasionally, she used the second chamber library, sometimes staying over and sleeping on the cot in the darkened reading room. That wasn't her favorite place to sleep—she much preferred the tent in the seventh chamber, near people—but it was the
most private. Not even Takahashi used the second chamber library often.
The libraries were the two foci of her work. As the problems moved from point to point on their routes through her mind, she occupied herself with gathering more information than she actually needed, and reveled in the intellectual luxury.
When she asked for reference materials having to do with Stone design, the library displayed its solid-looking and convincing black sphere surrounded by an outward-facing circle of spikes. A pleasant voice would announce: "There is no current access to that material. Please consult an active librarian."
Early on, she sensed a pattern, and it proved very frustrating, virtually all material dealing with the theory and construction of the sixth chamber was inaccessible. There was no material on the seventh chamber and the corridor—the response for her queries in that area was simply, "Not in records," accompanied by a black bar.
While fuming over these rebuffs, it occurred to her that she might go back through the records and look up her own papers—even future papers to see if she had a counterpart, and if that counterpart had made a mark in the Stone's universe.
But she had an almost superstitious reluctance to probe that deeply. When she finally did come across her own name, it was by accident.
The only real clues to the sixth chamber were in the Alexandria library, bound into a seventy-five-volume set of basic instruction manuals that looked as if it had been printed for handymen and engineers as a collector's edition, or a testimonial for retirees.
It was in the forty-fifth volume, a hefty tome of two thousand pages containing theory of early sixth chamber machinery and inertial damping, that she found her name in a footnote.
In the dark reading room, with the desk lamps and strip lighting providing the only illumination, she stared at the reference, her back stiffening.
"Patricia Luisa Vasquez," she read, as if the sounds were magic, "Theory of n-Spatial Geodesics as Applied to Newtonian Physics with a Special Discourse on p-SimPlon Worm Lines." She had never written a paper with that title—not yet, at any rate.
It would be published in 2023, in an issue of the Post-Death Journal of Accepted Physics.
She would survive the Death.
And contribute, at least in this small way, to the construction of the Stone.
She found the article in the Thistledown City library, where it was apparently regarded as too archaic to be interdicted. She read it, palms damp, and found much of it very difficult. Weaving her way through the unfamiliar symbols and obscure terminology, trying to get the gist of what her counterpart would write, eighteen years from now—or had written, centuries past—a ghost of an explanation occurred to her.
In the Stone's revised original plans, the sole purpose of the sixth chamber machinery had been to damp the momentum of selected objects within the Stone, in directions roughly parallel to the axis. This function had eliminated the need for banked channels of rivers, special architecture for buildings, even for a different design in the chambers themselves.
At the beginning of the Stone's construction, an upward limit had been placed on the Stone's acceleration and deceleration of 3 percent g. With the sixth chamber machinery, there was no need to limit the acceleration at all. The Stone's chambers became part of a controlled and separate reference frame, independent of outside influence.
Chapters in the manuals explained how the damping system did not operate universally; if it had, the Stone's rotation would have been useless, and everything within the chambers would have floated around weightless. The damping was highly selective.
And that was super-science. The implications were astonishing. What the sixth chamber machinery did, in effect, was alter the mass-space-time character of everything in the Stone.
That was little short of being able to manipulate space and time in such a way as to create the corridor.
Yet the Stone did not travel faster than light, and it did not possess artificial gravity—not in the first six chambers, at any rate. Those achievements could also have been expected in light of the theory of inertial damping. Why hadn't the Stone's engineers and physicists been able to close the conceptual loop?
She returned to the Alexandria library and skimmed the manuals, but in themselves they provided no answer, concerned as they were with theory and maintenance of specific Stone machinery.
On her cot in the reading room, she buried her face in her palms, squeezing the bridge of her nose and rubbing her eyes. Her brain felt tight. Too much concentration. Too little time, trying to force the queued problems, trying to emerge with answers ahead of schedule.
She had to have a break. She stood and followed the strip lighting to the lower floor, emerging in the tubelight and sitting on a bench surrounding a treeless concrete planter.
She tried to shut out all conscious thought, to get back into the state, but she couldn't.
Thoughts of Paul and her family kept interposing.
"I am losing myself," she murmured, shaking her head. She was becoming nothing but a series of thoughts floating in gray void, a cerebral point. Overworking.
Then—a gap in the void.
She had once studied fraction spaces—individual dimensions operating without counterparts, and dimensions of less than unit numbers. Time without space; length without breadth, depth or time. Probability without extension. Half-spaces, quarter-spaces, spaces composed of irrational fractions. All to be handled by fractional transforms and fractal geometric analysis. She had even begun to chart the geodesics of higher fractional spaces, and the way these geodesics might project in five- and four-space.
She dropped her head between her knees. Her thoughts were zagging. No order, no discipline.
The corridor—just an extension of the sixth chamber machinery, designed for inertial damping.
On a journey of centuries, the Stoners had changed their minds, or perhaps lost sight of the original goals. A world unto itself, the Stone had impressed upon succeeding generations its own character, until it seemed perfectly natural to live in rotating cylinders, hollowed out of asteroid rock. In time, perhaps even the asteroid had seemed to fade out of immediate awareness, leaving only life within cylinders.
Squeezed and confined across centuries, or by the perceptions of the Stone, the Stoners' genius erupted. They became nothing short of godlike, making their own universe, and shaping it in the image of the world they were most familiar with.
When they found a way out of the Stone without compromising the ultimate mission—
When they found they could create an incredible extension of their world—
Would any of the Stoners have been able to resist the temptation? (Yes ... the orthodox Naderites, and they had stayed behind for a century.)
So the sixth chamber engineers, headed by the enigmatic Konrad Korzenowski, had created the corridor, imbued it with certain properties, played with its potentials. They had created the wells and found some way to fill the corridor with air and soil, with landscapes equal if not superior to the valley floors of their everyday lives.
Her body relaxed.
She sat up. Some of the symbols in her as-yet-unwritten article made sense to her now; she could riddle their meaning. Her mind unfogged and she seemed to see all the problems interacting at once, like workers in a skyscraper with glass walls and floors.
The Stoners had created the corridor to relieve cramped conditions, confinement of the mind if not any real confinement of their personal space. (The records made it clear that the Stone had never become overcrowded.)
But the corridor—and this came to her abruptly, without precedent—the corridor carried a certain unexpected liability, a side effect they might not have been aware of at first...
Or never became aware of.
By creating the corridor, they had knocked the Stone out of its own continuum. The image that came to mind—all too irritatingly specific, since she wasn't at all sure it was accurate—was that of the corridor as a length of whip, and the Stone as the tip. With the creation of the whip, and its inevitable uncoiling in superspace, the tip had been snapped out of one universe—
And into hers.
Four hours later, she woke up, her body stiff and her mouth tasting like mud. She lifted her aching back from the bench and blinked in the tubelight. Her head ached abominably.
But she was on to something.
Discovering they had made it impossible to fulfill the Stone's original mission, in time all the Stoners had migrated.
She stood and brushed down her jumpsuit. Now she had to go back and put foundations beneath all the hypothetical air castles she had built.
And find some aspirin.
*17*
Lanier had kept the paper unread in his pocket on the shuttle and OTV, dreading that moment when he would have to know and have to act against a colleague, even a friend.
The OTV had docked with the Stone and he had disembarked, made a brief report to Roberta Pickney and the staging area communications team, and passed on his recommendation to Kirchner that Stone external security should be especially watchful.
As for internal security—
It wasn't really supposed to be his job. Had Gerhardt already received the same information awaiting him in the folded paper? How had Hoffman come across the name, and why had she given it to him?
He received reports from the various team leaders by way of a messenger bearing a slate. He floated in a small anteroom adjacent to the staging area, wrapped in one of the mesh cylindrical slings that served as bunks for axis-bound workers; he read, and absorbed, and realized he was only delaying the inevitable.
Boarding the zero elevator, accompanied by a taciturn marine guard, he removed the paper from his pocket and unfolded it.
"As soon as possible, I'd like to take a truck to the second well circuit," Patricia said. Tagahashi held open the tent flap for her and she entered. Carrolson and Farley napped in one corner of the central room; Wu and Chang worked over slates and processors in another. Takahashi followed her inside.
"On a mental roll?" he asked. Carrolson and Farley grumbled awake simultaneously and blinked at the intrusion and noise.
"We have to make space-time spot checks," Patricia said. Her face was drawn and there were pastel purple smudges of fatigue under her eyes. "I've asked Mr. Heineman to help. There's a directional beacon on the airplane and we can pick up that signal with some security team equipment, feed it into a frequency analyzer, find out if we're moving faster or slower in time by comparing our readings as the plane passes overhead."
"You've reached some conclusions?" Carrolson asked, sitting up on her cot.
"I think so," Patricia said. "But nothing's definite without evidence. I've made some predictions and if they're corroborated, then I might hypothesize."
"Want to tell us about the predictions?" Takahashi asked, sitting beside Carrolson on the cot.
Patricia shrugged. "Okay. The corridor could be dimpled. Each dimple is a fluctuation in the corridor's space-time, marking some point of potential entry into another universe. The dimples should reflect a minor change in geometric constants like pi; maybe in physical constants as well. Wherever there's a dimple—or a potential for a dimple—we may also find time fluctuations."
"Does that mean the corridor is full of potential wells?"
"I think so. Only a few have been selected, as it were." She looked up at the roof of the tent, trying to find a way to explain what she saw in her head. "The dimples butt up against each other. There could be an infinite number of them. And a well opened in a dimple—potential or already tuned—could lead to another universe."
Takahashi shook his head. "This is getting entirely too weird."
"Yeah," Patricia said. "I'd like to hold off on more explanations until Garry returns."
"He's coming down any time now. He entered the bore hole a few hours ago," Carrolson said. She slapped her knee and stood up. "Which reminds me. We're having a dance tomorrow in the first chamber. All are invited. It's not exactly Garry's homecoming, but it will serve as such. We all need to let down our hair a little bit."
"I'm a good dancer," Wu said. "Foxtrot, twist, swim."
"Listen to him! You think we thirty years behind the times," Chang said.
"Forty," Wu corrected.
"And if we can peel Heineman away from his toy," Carrolson said, "I'll teach the old coot a few hot steps."
Lanier dropped the paper on his desk in the science team compound office and reached for the com button. He hesitated before pressing it.
He thought he had figured out why Hoffman had given him the name. "Ann," he said. "I want to see Rupert Takahashi in the compound as soon as possible."
He hoped he was doing what Hoffman had hinted he should do: defusing the bomb the Stone had become...
Lance Corporal Thomas Oldfield, twenty-four, had spent the last six months on the Stone, and he regarded them as the most exciting time of his life, though in fact there wasn't much overt excitement. Most of the time he stood guard duty in the second chamber, just outside the tunnel to the first chamber. He spent many of his hours alternately keeping an eye on the road, the zero bridge and near city, and examining the distant curve of the opposite side. He was usually accompanied by at least one colleague, but today a special detail had been ordered to accompany a scientist into the first chamber from the subway terminal in the city, and now he was left alone. He didn't expect any trouble. In the entire time he had spent on the Stone, nothing untoward had happened. He had never even seen a boojum.
He didn't believe they existed.
Oldfield whistled to himself as he stepped outside the booth and looked down the length of the bridge. Deserted. "Fine day, Private," he said briskly, saluting ceremoniously. "Yes, sir. Fine day, sir. Always a fine day."
He wondered if technically speaking it had been the very same day since he had arrived. One long-drawn-out day, no intervening night. The weather changed now and then—rain, sometimes mist from the river. Did that serve to divide the time?
He inspected his Apple and tested it behind the booth on a cement block lined with foil ration packages. Each invisible tooth of light blew a foil package off the block. When he was relieved, he would line up the pierced foil packages for the next watch to test their weapons. It had become a ritual.
He walked around the booth to the door, stopped and turned.
He couldn't begin to describe what he saw.
He didn't even think about the Apple. He thought about reports and making a fool of himself.
It stood about seven feet high, skinny, narrow head like a sidewise board with two jutting and unblinking eyes regarding him calmly. Its two long arms emerged from the torso well below where the shoulders should have been and were covered with something similar to the foil ration packets. The legs were short and powerful looking. Its skin was smooth and reflective—not shiny or slimy, but polished like old wood.
It acknowledged his presence with a polite nod.
He nodded back, and then, under the pressure of all his past training, raised the Apple and said, "Identify yourself.
"
But by that time it was gone.
Oldfield had the impression it had entered the tunnel, but he couldn't be sure.
His face reddened with anger and frustration. He had had his chance. He had seen a boojum and he hadn't buzzed it down so others could see it. He had followed the pattern of everyone who had ever claimed officially or unofficially—to have seen one.
Oldfield had always thought he was made of sterner stuff. He pounded his fist against the booth and punched the emergency button on the com.
*18*
Lanier met Takahashi in a conference cubicle at the end of the second floor hall. Carrolson had joined Takahashi and the escort, unaware of Lanier's purpose. That wouldn't cause any problem, Lanier decided; best to keep up an atmosphere of normality. He asked for lunch to be brought to his office and they ate quietly before he outlined his new orders. When he was finished, Carrolson shook her head and sighed.