by Neal Asher
"Vasquez wants to mount another expedition, this time to the second circuit," she said. "I'm sure she won't like being barred from the libraries."
"Nobody goes into the libraries," Lanier said. "They're strictly off limits. And no second expedition. We freeze all activity on the Stone. I want the archaeologists back at the compounds, and the bore-hole studies shut down, too."
Takahashi regarded him dourly. "What happened with Hoffman?" he asked. Lanier didn't look at him; eating lunch together, he thought, was the last amenity in their relationship. But now was the time. As gracefully as he could manage, he asked Carrolson to leave. She gave him a puzzled look, but he barely noticed her going out the door. All his attention was focused on Takahashi.
"I'm going to defuse a very bad situation," Lanier said when they were alone. "I want you to help me with the defusing, and I want you to report it to your bosses."
"Pardon?" Takahashi asked. The mathematician's hand was a little less steady around the glass of orange juice he had been drinking.
"I want you to report it to your superiors, however you've been doing that."
"I don't understand."
"Nor do I," Lanier said, unmoving in his seat. "I'm not informing Gerhardt, though my instincts tell me I should. You will remain free to observe that we are shutting everything down until negotiations have resolved our differences. You will personally investigate and verify that we have found no information about weapons in the libraries."
"Gary, what are you talking about?"
"I know you are an agent for the Soviets."
Takahashi's jaw muscles tightened and he regarded Lanier from under straight, tense brows.
"There's a dance tonight," Lanier said. "Carrolson will expect all of us to attend. And we will. Gerhardt will be there.
He won't be told, because he'd slap you in the bore-hole detention center and ship you back on the next OTV run, in irons, so to speak. I don't want that."
"Out of respect?" Takahashi asked, blinking.
"No," Lanier said. "I don't fall for that old shit about just doing our jobs. You're a goddamned traitor. I don't know where it all began, but it ends here, and I want it to end well. The information you fed back to Earth has damned near started a war. Inform your superiors that everything is cooling off, that we are backing away from the libraries and that in the long run, we may evacuate the Stone. Pull out, let everybody settle their differences. Understood?"
Takahashi said nothing.
"Do you know what's happening on Earth?" Lanier asked.
"No, not precisely," Tagahashi said solemnly. "Perhaps we should explain a few things to each other. To help defuse the situation, as you say. Their stake in this is as big as ours."
"Ours?"
"I am an American, Garry. I did this to protect us as well."
Lanier felt his stomach go sour. He clenched his teeth together and turned his chair away from tagahashi. He fought back an urge to ask Takahashi if there had been a lot of money involved; he did not want to know.
"Right. Here's how we stand."
And he told Takahashi what he had learned on Earth.
He hoped to hell it was what Hoffman had intended.
Late in the afternoon, the sociology group presented another team report in the main compound lecture hall. About twenty team members were in the audience; not many more than sat on the low stage, behind the lectern. Rimskaya stood to one side while Wallace Rainer introduced the first of four sociologists.
Lanier watched and listened from the back, slumped in the seat. Ten minutes into the first presentation, Patricia sat beside him and folded her arms.
The first speaker outlined a brief hypothesis of Stone family groupings. She went into some depth on triad families, chiefly found among the Naderites.
Patricia glanced at Lanier. "Why am I barred from the libraries?" she asked in an undertone.
"Everybody is," he said. "As of today."
"Yes, but why?"
"It's very complicated. I can explain later."
Patricia turned away and sighed. "Okay," she said. "I'll do as much as I can outside. That's still allowed."
He nodded and felt a sharp surge of empathy for her.
The second speaker was Tanya Smith—no relation to Robert Smith—and she briskly elaborated on the previously presented report on the evacuation of the Stone.
Patricia half listened.
"It now seems apparent that a resettlement committee handled applications for corridor migration and coordinated transportation—"
Patricia glanced at Lanier again. His eyes met hers.
It was all crazy, no way to run a railroad, much less a huge research effort.
In its most crucial hour, the human race was represented by a team of blindly searching, hog-tied and gagged intellectuals. Thinking of Takahashi, and how useless all the security had been, Lanier's stomach went sour again.
The plan, of course, had been to allow researchers on the lower levels of security clearance and badge status to do their work as best they could, watched over by a senior member with almost full clearance. Their findings would then be filtered and collated and assembled into final statements, checked with corresponding documents in the libraries. It had to be that way. With so few people cleared to do research in the libraries, and with lifetimes of information stored away, decades would have passed before substantial overviews emerged.
That had been the reasoning, at any rate. Lanier had gone along because he was still, after all, a military man at heart, obeying if not implicitly trusting those beyond Hoffman in the chain of command.
Not that it mattered.
Not that it mattered one goddamn bit, because it was all being shut down anyway. They were going to pack up and go home and Takahashi would (if all went well) report that a good-faith effort was being made to placate the worried Soviets.
But the Soviets would still not be allowed into the libraries. Unless the President was totally mad. Only one hand in Pandora's box at a time.
He had seen some of the material on the Stoners' technological advances. He had experienced the education system used in the library. He had touched on the ways the Stoners had tampered with biology and psychology. (Tampered—did that betray a prejudice? Yes. Some of it had shaken him to his core and contributed to his bouts of being Stoned.) He was uncertain what his own beloved country would do with such power, much less the Soviets.
Patricia sat in on the charade a few more minutes, then left. He stood to follow after her and caught up near the corner of the women's bungalow.
"Just a minute," he said. She halted and half turned, not looking at him but at a potted lime tree growing in a wide space between two buildings. "I don't intend for you to stop your work. Not at all."
"I won't," she said.
"I just wanted to make that clear."
"It's clear." Now she faced him directly, hands slipping into her pockets. "You can't be happy with the way things are going."
His eyes widened, and he drew his head back, feeling a sudden anger at her presumption, obtuseness, whatever it was she rolled up into one short sentence.
"You can't be a happy man, keeping us here, knowing all that."
"I'm not keeping you here."
"You've never talked to me, to any of us that I've seen. You say things but you don't talk with us."
The anger evaporated and left behind an equally sudden pit of lostness, aloneness. "Rank hath its privileges," he said softly.
"I don't think so." Squinting at him. She wanted to challenge, to provoke. "What kind of person are you? You seem kind of ... solid. Frozen. Are you really, or is that just a privilege?"
Lanier lifted a pointed finger and waggled it at her, his face creasing with a grim smile. "You do your job," he said. "I'll do mine."
"You still aren't talking."
"What the hell do you want?" he said in a harsh undertone, stepping closer to her, shoulders hunched forward and chin drawn back almost into his neck, an in
credibly tense and uncomfortable posture, Patricia thought. She was startled by the sudden breakthrough.
"I want somebody else to tell me what to feel," she said.
"Well, I can't do that." Lanier's shoulders corrected themselves and he extended his jaw. "If we start thinking about anything—"
"But the work, the work," Patricia completed, on the edge of mockery. "Jesus, I'm doing the work, Garry. I'm working all the time." There were tears in her eyes, and to her further shock, she saw tears in his. Lanier's hand moved to his face but he held them back and one tear fell to his cheek, then down the furrow at the side of his mouth.
"Okay," he said. He wanted to leave but he couldn't. "So we're both human. Is that what you wanted to know?"
"I'm working," Patricia said, "but inside I'm just bloody. Maybe that's it."
Quickly, he wiped his eyes. "I'm not a snowball," he said defensively. "And it isn't fair to expect anything more from me, right now, than what I'm giving. Do you see that?"
"This is really peculiar," Patricia said, lifting her hands to her face, as if to mimic him. Her fingers went no higher than her cheeks, which were hot. "I'm sorry. But you followed me."
"'I followed you. Shall we leave it at this?"
Patricia nodded, ashamed. "I never thought you were cold."
"Fine," Lanier said. He turned and walked quickly toward the cafeteria.
In her room, she pressed her fists into her eyes, now dry, and tried to mouth the words to a song she had dearly loved as a child. She couldn't quite remember them—or wasn't certain she remembered them correctly. But wherever you go, she ventured to accompany the tune, whatever you do, I'll be watching you...
*19*
Patricia sat in a director's chair on the roof of the women's barracks. She glanced at the date on her watch as those
attending the dance gathered in the science team compound. The war was scheduled to begin in seven days.
Everything was coming down on her too quickly. She could render opinions but she could not convince herself of their accuracy. She could, for example, tell Lanier that the Stone could not have been shunted very far from its original continuum. Stone history and their current reality would not differ substantially. Perhaps not enough to prevent war.
Perhaps the Soviet knowledge that a war was imminent would turn them around, make them back off, prevent the war...
Perhaps the presence of the Stone, and the clear technological advantage that it gave to the Western bloc countries, would push the Soviets over the edge anyway...
Perhaps the Stone simply made an effect and canceled that effect, and would leave hardly a ripple on the immediate future of the Earth...
Carrolson and Lanier entered the compound. Patricia could see them greeting team members as they arrived from the other chambers.
The ragged, bloody feeling inside had passed. She didn't feel angry or sad. She didn't really even feel alive. The only thing that gave her any joy now was sinking into the state, continuing her work, bathing in the brilliance and majesty of the corridor.
She would have to make an appearance, however. She expected it of herself. Patricia had always resisted playing the reclusive genius and avoiding contact with others. Resisting was not the same as denial of the urge's existence; she did want to stay away, to go to her quarters and work. The thought of dancing under the eternal tubelight (the dance was being held in the open) and making small talk—essentially, of going on the social roster, if only for a few hours—frightened her. She wasn't sure she could maintain her temper, the balance that kept her from dissolving into tears of rage and frustration.
She descended the stairs and left the barracks, hands in pockets, forcing her chin higher as she approached the milling crowd.
Two soldiers, two biologists and two engineers had built their own synthesizer and electric guitars out of discarded electronics. The story had been circulating for some weeks that the band was tolerable—perhaps even good. This was their first time in front of an audience, and they seemed coolly professional as they tuned and adjusted the amplifiers.
Loudspeakers of a peculiar design had been cadged by archaeologists working in Alexandria and offered up for the dance as a kind of good-will sacrifice, an atonement for their fussy protectiveness. The speakers had been set up at corners of the rectangular dance area, an unused acre reserved for future buildings. No wires went to the speakers; the music was broadcast to them on a special frequency through a low-power transmitter. The sound coming out of them was somewhat metallic, but they were serviceable. Heineman inspected one casually and said, "I'm not sure what this is. It isn't a loudspeaker."
"It's working, isn't it?" Carrolson said, sticking close to her intended dance partner.
Heineman agreed that it was producing sound from the beamed signal, but went no further than that. The question was never satisfactorily settled.
Beneath the steady tubelight, security team members took turns dancing with the scientists and technicians. The Soviet group stood together to one side, playing wallflowers. Hua Ling, Wu, Chang and Farley joined in energetically, though they had already been informed of the shutdown.
The band switched to older acid rock for a few selections, but that didn't suit the mood and they reluctantly returned to more modern music.
Patricia danced once with Lanier, one of the Japanese waltzes that had become popular in the last few years. At the conclusion, as they held hands at arm's length and bobbed around one another; Larli nodded mysteriously and smiled at Patricia. She felt a flush work up her neck to her face. At the dance's conclusion, he held her close and said, "Not your fault, Patricia. You've done great. A real team member."
They separated and Patricia retreated to the sidelines, confused, her sensation of nullity broken. Had she really expected or wanted approval from Lanier? Apparently; his words pleased her.
Wu asked her to dance and proved to be a capable partner. She then sat out the rest of the festivities. Lanier rejoined her during a break; he had been dancing rather feverishly with a number of partners, Farley and Chang among them.
"Enjoying yourself?" he asked.
She nodded. Then she said, "No, not really."
"Neither am I, if the truth be known."
"You're a good dancer, though," Patricia said.
Lanier shrugged. "Have to stop thinking sometime, right?"
She couldn't agree with that. There was so little time. "I have to talk to you," she said.
"On recreation time?"
"Is here okay?" she asked, simultaneously. The noise was loud enough that they could hardly be overheard.
"As good a place as any, I suppose," Lanier said. He looked around for Takahashi; he was on the opposite side of the dance quad, nowhere near the Russians.
She nodded and again her eyes filled with tears. Because he had said something nice to her, now she would open up and express her worst fears, her darkest opinions. "We tried to calculate how big a snap the corridor's creation would have given the Stone."
"How big?" Lanier asked, keeping an eye on people passing close enough to hear.
"Not very big," she said. "It's a complicated question. But not big at all."
"We're on, then?"
Her throat tightened. "It's possible. Is that why you really wanted me on the Stone? Just to say that?"
He shook his head. "Hoffman wanted you here. She told me I was responsible for you. I just put you to work." He reached into his pocket and brought out an envelope, opening it and withdrawing two letters. "I haven't been able to give you these before. No, amend that. It slipped my mind until now. I brought them back with me on the shuttle."
She took the letters from his hand and looked at them. One was from her parents, the other from Paul. "May I write back?" she asked.
"Say anything you like," he said. "Within reason."
The postmarks were a week old.
A week passed. The day scheduled for Armaggedon passed.
Patficia stayed in her quarter
s, working harder than ever with the resources left to her.
She could not change her initial opinion.
Each day, then, was a victory, with reality showing her how wrong she could be.
*20*
Lanier exited the elevator and took hold of the cable, maneuvering into the cart. The slightly built driver—a woman in air force blue coveralls—moved the cart off its normal route and followed a track into Kirchner's staging and practice area. Lanier had been there only twice before, each time to meet with the admiral. He clung to the cart handgrips and tried to prepare an answer for the questions he knew would be asked.