Bear, Greg - Legacy

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Legacy
by Greg Bear
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Copyright (c)1995 by Greg Bear
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Science Fiction
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NOTICE: This work is copyrighted. It is licensed only for use by the original purchaser.
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_For Bertha Merriman_
_A pioneer who lived in a tougher time..._
_With love from a grandchild_
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*PROLOGUE: JOURNEY YEAR 753*
I stood on the lip of the southern borehole, clutching a service line, and, for the first
time in my life, stared beyond the mass of Thistledown at the stars. They spread through deep
space as many and sharp as a cloud of crystal snow blown against black onyx. The uncharted
constellations spun with a stately haste, betraying the asteroid's rotation around its long axis.
The worksuit performed its tasks silently, and for a time I seemed a point of crystal
myself, at the center of the crystal empyrean, at peace. I looked for patterns in the stars, but
before I could find any, my companion interrupted me.
"Olmy." She pulled herself carefully along the line and floated beside me.
"Just a moment," I said.
"We're done here. Parties await us, Olmy. Celebrations and diversions ... but you're a
bonded man, aren't you?"
I shook my head, annoyed. "Hard to believe that something as huge as Thistledown can shrink
to nothing," I said.
Her expression, surveying the stars, was half-worry, half-distaste. Kerria Ap Kane had been
my partner in Way Defense since basic, a good friend if not exactly a soulmate. I had so few
soulmates. Not even my bond...
"Give me a minute, Kerria."
"I want to get back." She shrugged. "All right. A minute. But why look outward?"
Kerria would never have understood. To her, the asteroid starship was all and everything, a
world of infinite social opportunities: work, friends, even dying for Way Defense if it came to
that. The stars were outside, "far south," and meant nothing; only the confined infinity of the
Way aroused wonder in her soul.
"It's pretty," she said flatly. "Do you think we'll ever get to Van Brugh?"
Van Brugh's star, still a hundred light-years distant, had been the original goal of
Thistledown. For most of the ship's population of Naderites -- my family included -- it was the
point of all our existences, a holy destination, and had been for seven hundred years' journey
time.
"Can we see it from here, do you think?"
"No," I said. "It's visible from midline this year."
"Too bad," Kerria said. She clucked her tongue restlessly.
The ten-kilometer-wide crater at Thistledown's southern pole had once deflected and
directed the pulses of the Beckmann drive motors. The motors had not been fired in four centuries.
I took one last look beyond the lip of the borehole, my eyes tracking outward along the
honeycombed curve of the dimple at the center of the crater. Huge black many-limbed robots sat in
the dimple around the lip of the borehole, having arranged themselves for our inspection hours
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earlier.
"All right," I said to the massed robots. "Go home." I aimed the command transponder and
the machines backed away, hooks and claws grabbing the spinning slope, returning to their duties
on the asteroid's surface.
We turned and pulled ourselves along the line down the borehole, toward the tuberider, an
oblate grayness resting lightly against the dark rock and metal wall. Beyond the tuberider lay the
massive prime dock, a cylinder within the borehole designed to counterrotate and allow easier
access to cargo vehicles. Tens of kilometers north glowed a small bright dot, the opening to the
first chamber. We climbed into the tuberider, pressurized the cramped cabin, and collapsed our
worksuits.
Kerria beamed a signal at the borehole mouth. Two massive shutters swung from the walls and
came together like black-lipped jaws, sealing this end of Thistledown and blanking the stars.
"All clean and clear," she said. "Agreed?"
"All clear and clean," I said.
"Do the generals actually think the Jarts will get outside the Way and swing up our
backside?" Kerria asked cheerfully.
"They surprised us once," I said. "They might do it again."
Kerria gave me a dubious grin. "Shall I drop you off at the sixth chamber?" she asked,
lifting the vehicle away from the wall.
"I need to do some things in Thistledown City first."
"Ever the mystery man," Kerria said.
She had no idea.
We sped north down the tunnel. The kilometers to the end of the borehole passed rapidly.
The entrance to the first chamber yawned wide, and we flew into brilliant tubelight.
Fifty kilometers in diameter and thirty deep, the first chamber seemed to my recent
interstellar perspective to be little more than the inside of a big, squat drum. Its true size was
emphasized by the slowness with which our tuberider crossed to the borehole in the chamber's
northern cap.
Clouds decked the chamber floor, twenty-five kilometers below. The atmosphere in the
chamber rose to a height of twenty kilometers, a sea of fluid lining the drum. I saw a small storm
gathering on the floor overhead. No storm could touch us at the axis, riding as we were in almost
perfect vacuum.
The first chamber was kept nearly deserted as a precaution against any breach of the
comparatively thin walls of the asteroid at the southern end.
We traveled down the middle of the tube light, a translucent pipe of glowing plasma five
kilometers wide and thirty long, generated at the chamber's northern and southern caps. We could
see rapid pulses of light from our position along the axis, but on the chamber's floor, the tube
presented a steady, yellow-white glow, day and night. So it was in all of the first six chambers.
The seventh chamber, of course, was different.
The borehole seemed a pinprick in the gray, gently curved wall of asteroid rock ahead of
us. "Shall I go manual and thread us in?" Kerria asked, grinning at me.
I smiled back but gave no answer. She was good enough to do it. She had piloted flawships
and numerous other craft up and down the Way with expert ease.
"I'd rather relax," she said, peeved by my silence. "You would refuse to be impressed." She
folded her arms back behind her head. "Besides, it's been a long day. I might miss."
"You never miss," I said.
"Damn right I don't."
Inspections were mandated by Hexamon law twice yearly. Way Defense had upped that to four
times yearly, with special emphasis on sixth chamber security, inspection of reserve batteries in
the ship's cold outer walls, and maintenance of the southern borehole and external monitors. This
time, Kerria and I had drawn inspection duty for the far south. We then had liberty for thirty
days, and Kerria thought herself lucky: The Way's twenty-fifth anniversary celebration was just
beginning.
But I had an unpleasant task ahead: betrayal, separation, putting an end to connections I
no longer believed in but was not willing to mock.
The cap loomed, filling our forward view, and the second borehole suddenly swallowed us.
Kilometers away, the opening to the second chamber city, Alexandria, made another brilliant dot
against the tunnel's unlighted blackness.
"Elevator, or shall I swoop down and drop you off somewhere?"
"Elevator," I said.
"My," Kerria said with a cluck. "Glum?"
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"You sound like a chicken," I said.
"You've never seen a live chicken. How can you be glum with so much liberty ahead?"
"Even so."
We passed into the second chamber, the same size as the first, but filled with
Thistledown's oldest city. Alexandria covered two-thirds of the second chamber floor, thirty-one-
hundred square kilometers of glorious white and gold and bronze and green towers arrayed in
spirals and stepped ranks, walls of blunt-faced black and gold cubes, ornately inscribed spheres
rising from massive cradles themselves rich with colors and populations. Between the city and the
southern cap stretched a blue-green "river," a kilometer wide and several meters deep, flowing
beneath the graceful suspension bridges spaced at the floor's four quarters. In Thistledown's
original designs, the parks along the capside bank did not exist; in their place had risen a
"slosh" barrier one hundred meters higher than the opposite shore to mitigate the effects of the
ship's acceleration. But in the early days of Thistledown's construction, that problem had been
solved by the inertial damping machinery in the sixth chamber. The same machinery, centuries
later, had allowed Konrad Korzenowski to contemplate creating the Way. The chamber floor was flat,
not banked; the park and the river formed bands of green and blue around the chamber's southern
end.
Parks and forests covered the open spaces between neighborhoods. In plots scattered around
the city, robots labored to finish structures destined to absorb the slowly growing population.
Thistledown was ever young.
After seven centuries, the asteroid's inhabitants numbered seventy-five million. She had
begun her voyage with five million.
Kerria clucked again and shook her head. We passed over Alexandria and into the third
borehole. Near the northern opening, she slowed the vehicle and sidled up against a raised
entrance. A transfer passage reached across to the door of the tuberider and I disembarked. I
waved to Kerria and stepped into the green and silver elevator. The air smelled of moisture and
people, the clean but unmistakably human perfume of the city where I had lived two years of my
youth.
"See you in a few days?" Kerria said, looking after me with some concern.
"Yeah."
"Cheers!"
I leaned my head to one side and said good-bye to her.
On the way down, I told my uniform to become civilian, standard day dress style one, mildly
formal. I wanted to avoid attracting attention as a member of Way Defense, not all that common in
the Naderite community.
The elevator took nine minutes to reach the chamber floor. I stepped out and walked down
the short corridor into the chamber proper.
I crossed the Shahrazad bridge, listening to the whisper of the slender Fa River and the
wind-blown rustle of thousands of long red ribbons blowing from the wires in the gentle breeze
from the southern cap. Some neighborhood had chosen this decoration for the bridge, this month; in
another month it might be crawling with tiny glowing robots.
Thistledown City had been built in the first two centuries after the starship's departure.
With its chamber-spanning catenary cables, reaching from cap to cap and hung with slender white
buildings, it seemed to dwarf Alexandria. It was obviously a Geshel showplace -- and yet, in the
worst conflicts between Geshels and Naderites on the starship, after the opening of the Way, many
conservative and radical Naderites had been forced to move from their homes in Alexandria to new
quarters in Thistledown City. There were still strong Naderite neighborhoods near the southern
cap. New construction was under way here as well, with arches being erected parallel to the caps,
the greatest planned to be ten kilometers long.
A short walk took me to the tall cylindrical building where I had spent my early childhood.
Through round hallways filled with sourceless illumination, my shadow forming and dissolving in
random arcs around me, I returned to our old apartment.
My parents were away in Alexandria, to escape the celebrations -- I had known that before
coming here. I entered the apartment and sealed the door, then turned to the memory plaques in the
living center.
For twenty-four years, I had kept one important secret, known to me and perhaps one other --
the man or woman or being who had placed the old friend in this particular building, not
anticipating that an inquisitive child might come upon him, almost by accident. I had come here to
check up on a friend who had died before I was born, in his perfect hiding place, and make certain
he was still hidden and undisturbed.
I -- and no more than that one other, I was convinced -- knew the last resting place of the
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great Konrad Korzenowski -- the tomb not of his body but of what remained of his personality after
his assassination by radical Naderites.
I connected with the building's memory, used a mouse agent to bypass personal sentries, as
I had decades ago and at least once a year since, and dropped into the encrypted memory store.
_Hello,_ I said.
The presence stirred. Even without a body, it seemed to smile. It was no longer human, half
its character having been destroyed, but it could still interact and share warm memories. What
remained of the great Korzenowski was vulnerably friendly. All of its caution removed, all of its
self-protections destroyed, it could only be one thing -- a giving and occasionally brilliant
friend, ideal for a lonely young child unsure of himself. I kept this secret for one reason:
damaged personalities could not be repaired, by Naderite law. If what remained of Korzenowski were
to be discovered, it would be erased completely.
_Hello, Olmy,_ it answered. _How is the Way?_
An hour later, I cabbed across the city to the mixed Geshel and Naderite "progressive"
neighborhoods, favored by students and Way Defense members. There, in my small apartment, I linked
with city memory, sent my planned locations for the next few days to the corps commanders, and
removed my mutable uniform for purely civilian garb appropriate to the celebration: sky-blue
pants, Earth-brown vest, pale green jacket, and light boots.
I returned to the train station.
As I joined the throng waiting on the platform, I looked for familiar faces and found none.
Four years in service guarding against the Jarts on the extreme frontiers of the Way, four billion
kilometers north of Thistledown, had given my Geshel acquaintances from university time to change
not just partners and philosophies, but body patterns as well. If any of my student friends were
in the crowd, I probably would not recognize them. I did not expect to find many Way Defenders
here.
Except for raccoon stripes of pale blue around my eyes, I was still physically the same as
I had been four years before. Arrogant, full of my own thoughts, headstrong and sometimes
insensitive, judged brilliant by many of my peers and moody by many more -- attractive to women in
that strange way women are attracted to those who might hurt them -- the only child of the most
mannered and gracious of parents, praised frequently and punished seldom, I had reached my
thirtieth year convinced of my courage from a minimum of testing, yet even more convinced there
would be greater tests in store. I had abandoned the faith of my father and, in truth, had never
understood the faith of my mother.
Thistledown, immense as it was, did not seem capable of containing my ambition. I did not
think I was young, and certainly did not feel inexperienced. After all, I had served four years in
Way Defense. I had participated in what seemed at the time to be important actions against the
Jarts...
Yet now, caught up in crowds celebrating the silver anniversary of Thistledown's wedding
with the Way, I seemed an anonymous bubble in a flowing stream, smaller than I had felt among the
stars. What I was about to do dismayed me.
Music and pictures flowed over the largely Geshel crowd, narrative voices telling the
details we all knew, Naderites and Geshels alike, by heart. Twenty-five years before, Korzenowski
and his assistants had completed, connected, and opened the Way. From my childhood, the Way had
beckoned, the only place -- if _place_ it could be called -- likely to provide the tests I craved.
"_In the history of humankind, has there ever been anything more audacious? Issuing from
Thistledown's seventh chamber, the inside (there is no 'outside') of an endless immaterial pipe
fifty kilometers in diameter, smooth barren surface the color of newly-cast bronze, the Way is a
universe turned inside-out, threaded by an axial singularity called the flaw... _
"_And at regular intervals along the surface of the Way, potential openings to other places
and times, histories and realities strung like beads..._"
My parents -- and most of my friends during my early youth -- were devoted Naderites, of
that semi-orthodox persuasion known as Voyagers. They believed it was simple destiny for humankind
to have carved seven chambers out of the asteroid Juno, attached Beckmann drive motors, and
converted the huge planetesimal into a starship, christened Thistledown. They believed -- as did
all but the extreme Naderites -- that it was right and just to transport millions across the vast
between the stars to settle fresh new worlds. Our family had lived for centuries in Alexandria, in
the second and third chambers; we had all been born on Thistledown. We knew no other existence.
They simply did not believe in the creation of the Way. That, virtually all Naderites
agreed, had been an abomination of the Korzenowski and the overly ambitious Geshels.
By releasing the bond between myself and the woman chosen for me in my youth at Ripen, I
would finally end my life as a Naderite.
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The trains arrived with a flourish as sheets of red and white arced over the train station.
The crowd roared like a monstrous but happy animal, and pushed me across the platform to the doors
spread wide to receive us. I was lost in a sea of faces smiling, grimacing, laughing, or just
intent on keeping upright in the jostle.
We packed into the trains so closely we could scarcely move. A young woman jammed against
me; she glanced up at me, face flushed, smiling happily but a little scared. She wore Geshel
fashion, but by the cut of her hair I saw she was from a Naderite family: rebelling, cutting
loose, joining the Geshel crowds on this least holy of celebrations -- perhaps not caring in the
least what the celebration was about.
"What's your name?" she asked, nibbling her lower lip, as if expecting some rebuff.
"Olmy," I said.
"You're lovely ... with the mask. Did you do it yourself?"
I smiled down at her. She was perhaps five years younger than I, years past Ripen, an adult
by any measure, Naderite or Geshel, but out of her place. She rubbed against me in the jostle,
half deliberate. I felt little attraction to her, but some concern.
"You're going to see the Way? Visit Axis City?" I asked, bending to whisper in her ear.
"Yes!" she answered, eyes dancing. "And you?"
"Eventually. Family meeting you there?"
She flushed crimson. "No," she said.
"Bond meeting you there?"
"No."
"I'd think again," I said. "Geshels can get pretty wild when they party. The Way makes them
drunk."
She drew back, blinking. "It's my hair, isn't it?" she said, lips flicking down suddenly.
She fought to get away from me, pushing through the thick pack, glancing over her shoulder
resentfully.
For the young -- and at thirty, in a culture where one could live to be centuries, I could
not think of myself as anything but very young -- to be a Geshel was infinitely more exciting than
being a Naderite. We all lived within a miracle of technology, and it seemed the soul of
Thistledown had grown tired of confinement. The Geshels, who embraced the most extreme
technologies and changes, offered the glamour of infinite adventure down the Way, contrasted with
the weary certainty of centuries more in space, traveling with Thistledown in search of unknown
planets around a single distant star.
Truly, we had outstripped the goals of our ancestors. To many of us, it seemed irrational
to cling to an outmoded philosophy.
Yet something tugged at me, a lost sense of comfort and certainty...
The train passed through the asteroid rock beneath Thistledown City, more news of the
celebration projected over the faces of the passengers. Stylized songs and histories flowed over
and around us:
"_For twenty-five years, the Way has beckoned to pioneers, an infinite frontier, filled
with inexhaustible mystery -- and danger. Though created by the citizens of Thistledown, even
before it was opened, the Way was parasitized by intelligences both violent and ingenious, the
Jarts. With the Jart influence now pushed back beyond the first two billion kilometers of the Way,
gates have been opened at a steady pace, and new worlds discovered -- _"
I pressed through the crowd and left the train in the fourth chamber. The open-air platform
held only a few sightseers, mostly Naderites, fleeing to the countryside of forests and waterways
and deserts and mountains to escape the celebration. But even here the sky that filled the
cylindrical chamber flashed with bright colors. The yellow-white tubelight that spanned the
chamber's axis had been transformed into a pulsing work of art.
"They're overstepping it," grumbled an older Naderite man on the platform, dignified in his
gray and blue robes. His wife nodded agreement. Twenty kilometers above us, the tubelight sparkled
and glittered green and red. Snakelike lines of intense white writhed within the glow.
Forests rose on all sides of the station and resort buildings. From the floor, the
chamber's immensity revealed itself with deceptive gradualness. For five kilometers on each side,
as one stared along a parallel to the flat gray walls of asteroid rock and metal capping the
cylinder, the landscape appeared flat, as it might have seemed on Earth. But the cylinder's curve
lofted the land into a bridge that met high overhead, fifty kilometers away, lakes and forest and
mountains suspended in a haze of atmosphere, transected by the unusual gaiety of the tubelight.
In the early days, the chambers had been called "squirrel cages"; though immense, they were
roughly of the same proportions. The entire ship spun around its long axis, centrifugal force
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pressing things to the chamber floors with an acceleration of six-tenths' Earth's gravity.
My heart felt dull as lead. The station platform was just a few kilometers from the Vishnu
Forest, where my bond would be waiting for me.
I walked, glad for the delay and the exercise.
Uleysa Ram Donnell stood alone by the outside rail beneath the pavilion where we had once
jointly celebrated our Ripen. We had been ten then. She leaned against the wooden railing, backed
by the giant trunks of redwood trees as old as Thistledown, a small black figure on the deserted
dance floor. The high white dome shielded her from the rainbow flows of the tubelight. I walked up
the steps slowly, and she watched with arms folded, face going quickly from pleasure at seeing me
to concern. We had spent enough time together to prepare for being man and wife; we knew each
other well enough to sense moods.
We embraced under the high white pine dome. "You've been neglectful," she said. "I've
missed you." Uleysa was as tall as I and after we kissed, she regarded me at a level, large black
eyes steady and a little narrowed by lids drawn with unspoken suspicion. Her face was lovely,
clearly marked by intelligence and concern, nose gently arced, chin rounded and slightly
withdrawn.
Our bond was special to our parents. They hoped for a strong Naderite union leading into
city and perhaps even shipwide politics; her parents had spoken of our becoming Hexamon
representatives, joint administers, part of the resurgence in Naderite leadership...
"You've changed," Uleysa said. "Your postings -- " For a moment I saw something like little-
girl panic in her eyes.
I said what I had to say, not proudly and not too quickly. My numbness grew into a kind of
shock.
"Where will you go?" she asked. "What will you do?"
"Another life," I said.
"Do I bore you so much?"
"You have never _bored_ me," I said with some anger. "The flaws are mine."
"Yes," she said, eyes slitted, teeth clenched. "I think they must be... _all_ yours."
I wanted to kiss her, to thank her for the time we had had, the growing up, but I should
have done that before I spoke. She pushed me away, held out her hands, and shook her head quickly.
I walked from beneath that dome feeling at once miserable and free.
Back on still another crowded train to the sixth chamber, I simply felt empty.
Uleysa had not cried. I had not expected her to. She was strong and proud and would have no
difficulty finding another bond. But we both knew one thing: I had betrayed her and the plans of
our families.
I intended to sink myself wholeheartedly into the celebrations. Getting off the train in
the sixth chamber, standing in the Korzenowski Center with other celebrants waiting to be carried
by construction cars to the seventh, I watched patters of rain fall from thick clouds onto the
transparent roof.
It almost always rained in the sixth chamber. The carpets of machinery that covered most of
the chamber, transferring and shaping forces that were beyond my own comprehension, created heat
that needed to be drained away, and this ancient method had proved best.
I thought of Uleysa's face, her narrowed eyes, and an unexpected stab of grief hit me. My
awareness of where I was, and who I was, curled inward like a snail's horns. Implants did not stop
me from having negative emotions ... And I did not try to blank them. Uleysa had no affect
controls. I deserved my own share of suffering.
Someone touched me, and I thought for a moment I was blocking a line into the cars. But the
cars had not yet arrived. I turned and saw Yanosh Ap Kesler. "You look all beaten up," he said.
"Without the bruises."
I smiled grimly. "It's my own fault," I said.
He wore around his neck the pictor then becoming fashionable, though he did not speak in
picts with me. Otherwise his dress was of the style called atonic, mildly conservative, blue and
beige midwaist, black leggings, charcoal gray slippers, all fabrics flat, lacking image inlays.
"Yes, well, I've been trying to reach you for two days now."
"I've been on duty," I said. Yanosh was an old friend. We had met as youths at the Naderite
Union College in Alexandria; I had performed favors, not too difficult, that obscured some of his
less discreet escapades. All in all he had been a better judge of circumstance and character and
had risen in his career much more rapidly than I. But I was in no real mood for companionship,
even his.
"That's how I traced you. I convinced someone I needed to learn your whereabouts...
_desperately._"
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"Rank hath its privileges," I said.
He frowned and half twisted his upper body before turning to shoot back at me, "Stop being
so damned opaque. Where are you going?"
"To the seventh chamber."
"Axis City?"
"Eventually."
"Join me. No need to wait in line."
Four months before, Yanosh had been elected as third administer for the seventh chamber and
the Way. He had come to this center of power and activity from a background similar to mine. Son
of devout Naderites, he had gravitated to the Geshels shortly after the opening of the Way, as so
many others had.
We all respected the philosophy of the Good Man, crusader and wary critic of the technology
that had brought on the Death, but that had been ten centuries before.
"More privilege?" I asked.
"Just friendship," Yanosh said.
"You haven't spoken to me in a year."
"You haven't exactly made yourself accessible," Yanosh said.
"I might prefer crowds now."
"It's important," Yanosh said. He took my arm. I hung back, but he tightened his grip.
Rather than be dragged, I relented and walked beside him. He palmed his way through a security
door and we walked down a chill hallway to a maintenance shaft. Lights formed a line down a long,
wide tunnel, vanishing north into darkness.
"What could be so important?"
"You can listen to something incredible, as a favor," Yanosh said. "And maybe I can save
your career." He whistled and a small sleek cab with Nexus markings came out of the shadows,
floating a few centimeters above the gritty black floor.
"You're being investigated by the Naderites," Yanosh told me as the cab traversed the
tunnel in the wall between the sixth and seventh chambers.
"Why?" I asked, smiling ironically. "I'm in Way Defense. I've just cut myself off from the
last Naderite ritual in my life -- "
"I know," he said. "Poor Uleysa. If I were you, I'd have tried to convince her to come with
me. She's a fine woman."
"I wouldn't do that to her," I said, staring through the window at the flashing maintenance
lights. Lumbering dark robots moved aside to allow our quick passage. "She tolerated my lapses.
She didn't agree with them."
"Still, she might have appreciated being tempted. Should I look her up and console her?"
Yanosh asked. "It's about time I found a family triad."
I shrugged, but some tic of my expression amused him.
"Much as I need to renew my connections with the Voyagers now, I wouldn't be so rude," he
said. "The Naderites are going to push for control of the Nexus in a few weeks. They'll probably
get it. The cost of pushing back the Jarts is drawing grumbles even among the hardiest Geshel
administers. If Naderites take over, the Nexus changes its face -- and all us juniors get drudge
work for a decade. My administer's career is hanging by a few thin threads. And, I might add, the
Way could be in peril."
I stared at him, genuinely shocked. "They couldn't put together the coalition to do that."
"Never underestimate the people who made us."
The cab emerged on a straight highway beneath brilliant pearly light, tan and snow-colored
sand on either side. We were five kilometers spin-ward from the public access to the seventh
chamber. Behind us, the gray heights of the seventh chamber's southern cap receded, an immense
cliff wall.
Ahead, there was no cap ... No end.
The Way stretched on forever, or at least into incomprehensible and immeasurable distances.
This was what Korzenowski had done -- making the Thistledown bigger on the inside than the
outside, opening up endless potential and adventure and danger, and for that, he had been
assassinated shortly after the Way's opening.
He could not have known about the Jarts.
"It's a matter of economic stability, to be sure," Yanosh said. "But some high passions
have been engaged in the past twenty-five years."
"There are gates being opened. Naderites are signing up to immigrate."
"Politics isn't a rational art," Yanosh said, "even on Thistledown. We have too much of
Earth in us."
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I looked up. In the center of the tubelight that flowed from the southern cap, a thin line
made itself visible more as an uncanny absence. The creation of the Way had by some metaphysical
necessity I only half understood made a singularity that ran the length of Korzenowski's pipe-
shaped universe: the flaw. Threaded on the flaw, sixty kilometers from the southern cap's
borehole, a suspended city was being built a section at a time.
Spinward, a new section lay on the empty white sand, covered by robots like ants on a huge
sugar cake; it would become the remaining half of Axis Nader, a concession to those forces that
did not even believe in the Way. Three previously threaded sections or precincts of the Axis City
already floated over us, white and steel and gray, great cylindrical monuments studded with towers
that reached a kilometer and more from their main bodies. The city gleamed, startlingly clear seen
through the thinner atmosphere that covered the floor of this section of the Way.
At the end of the highway, sixty kilometers from the southern cap, a private cable hung
from the city overhead. The cab stopped beside the cable's gondola.
"What do they think I've done?" I asked Yanosh.
"I don't know. Nobody does. It's something not even the First Administer of Alexandria is
willing to talk about."
"I'm a small soldier in a very big army," I said. "A lowly rank seven. Not worth the fuss."
"That's what the sensible folk are saying ... this month. Secret allegations too dire to be
spoken, among extremists who are not supposed to have a voice even with the radicals..." He turned
to me as the door to the gondola opened. "Make any sense?"
It did, but I could never tell him, or anyone else for that matter. Korzenowski, in theory,
could be revived if Geshels changed the laws. He could become a very powerful symbol. Perhaps the
only other who knew had had a change of heart, or had been indiscreet.
"No," I said.
"We'll talk more in my office."
Yanosh's office opened to an outer wall of the finished first precinct of Axis Nader. Nexus
offices clustered like quartz crystals in this external neighborhood.
"Let me counter one absurdity by relating another," Yanosh said. "This one's more important
by far, actually. Have you heard of Jaime Carr Lenk?" He perched on the edge of his narrow
workboard. Details of Axis City construction flashed in display around and behind him.
"He headed a group of radical Naderites, calling themselves divaricates. He disappeared," I
said.
"We know where he's gone," Yanosh said. "He took four thousand followers -- divaricates --
and a few humble machines and went off to make Utopia."
I wondered if Yanosh was joking. He loved stories of human folly. "Where?" I asked.
"Wrong first question," Yanosh said. He studied my face intently.
The limits of Thistledown were well known. Hiding places could be found ... But not for so
many. Then the enormity of this disappearance struck me: first, the sheer numbers, four thousand
citizens, and next, the fact that their disappearance had gone unnoticed and unpublicized. I
became at once intensely interested and wary.
"_How,_ then?" I asked.
"Their devotion to Lenk was complete. They even adopted his name and gave him honorifics,
like Nader himself. Each carefully laid a trail of deception. Individually, or as a family or
group, they claimed to be off on a knowledge retreat, in one chamber or another, in one city or
another, under the laws of the coalition, not to be pursued or questioned by Nexus agencies until
they returned to secular life. As well, Lenk chose whole families, husbands with their wives,
children with parents, triad groupings together ... No loose fragments. They vanished and left
nary a ripple, five years ago. Only Lenk himself was reported missing. The others..." Yanosh
shrugged.
"Where did he take them?" I asked.
"Down the Way," Yanosh said. "With the complicity of two apprentice gate openers, he
created an illegal passage in a geometry stack."
"No one knew?" My amazement grew to incredulity. I was relieved not to have to think about
my other predicament ... if it was a predicament, and not a false alarm.
Yanosh shrugged again. "We've been distracted, needless to say, but that's a weak excuse.
They chose a stack region near the frontier, close to Jart boundaries. They used the conflict of
748 as a cover. Slipped in behind defense forces ... Disguised themselves as a support unit.
Nobody detected them. They had help -- and we're still investigating.
"Lenk had connections, apparently," Yanosh said. "Somebody told him about Lamarckia."
"Lamarckia?" The name sounded exotic.
"A closely held secret."
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"The Nexus?" I asked, mocking dismay. "Keeping secrets?"
Yanosh hardly blinked. "An extraordinary world was discovered by the first gate prospectors
about twelve years ago. Very terrestrial. They named it Lamarckia. There was little time to
explore, so after making a brief survey, they closed the gate, marked a node, and saved it for
future study. All such discoveries have been kept secret, to prevent just such occurrences as
this."
"How do we know about Lenk, after all this time?" I asked.
"One of the immigrants returned," Yanosh said. "He stole one of two clavicles in Lenk's
possession and came back through a tangle of world-lines in the stack. A defense flawship found
him more than half-dead in a depleted pressure suit. It brought him here."
Yanosh stared through the transparent floor at the immense cranes and webs of cables and
flowing strings of purple and green tracting fields lifting pieces of the new precinct from the
floor of the Way. "Some say we may never be able to return to Lamarckia, because of what they've
done," he said. "Others I trust more say it may be difficult, but not impossible. The gate openers
are disturbed that a clavicle could fall into Jart hands -- if they have hands. We could lose
control of that region at any time. The Nexus has agreed to send a mid-rank gate opener to check
out the damage. They've asked for a single investigator to accompany him. Your name came up. I
wasn't the one who brought it up."
"Oh?" I smiled, disbelieving. He did not return my smile.
"It may be the most beautiful world we've yet found. Some Geshels privately speculated
Lamarckia might become our refuge if we lost the war." He lifted an eyebrow critically. "It's the
most Earthlike of the ten worlds we've had time to open."
"Why didn't we develop it?"
"Could we have held it if we did?" Yanosh asked. "The Jarts pushed us beyond that stack,
and we pushed them. Back and forth three times since its discovery."
Little or nothing was known about Jart anatomy, psychology, or history. Even less was known
about how they had made their own _reversed_ gate just after the Way's creation, and before it had
been opened and attached to _Thistledown._
The Jarts had begun a furious surprise offensive at the moment of the opening, killing
thousands. Ever since, the war had been waged unmercifully by both sides, using all the weapons
available -- including the physics of the Way itself. Those who had built it, and who accessed its
many realities strung like beads, could also make large stretches of it inhospitable to anything
living.
Yanosh looked at me squarely, intense green eyes challenging. "The Nexus would like someone
to cross to Lamarckia and retrieve the remaining clavicle. While that someone is there, he might
as well investigate the planet more thoroughly. We know little -- a slim surveyor's report.
Lamarckia appears to be a paradise, but its biology is unusual. We need to learn what damage Lenk
has done."
"You didn't suggest me immediately?"
Yanosh smiled.
I shook my head dubiously. "My reputation is that of a stubborn but capable renegade. I
doubt my division commanders would recommend me."
"They asked me about you, and I said you could do it -- might even relish something like
this. But frankly, this isn't an assignment I'd give to an old friend."
Yanosh suspected I was bored as a simple soldier and needed a chance to excel; he knew
without my telling him that my personality chafed in Way Defense. The Jart situation had settled
for the time being into a drawn-out stalemate. Being brought into a Nexus action -- and a
difficult action at that -- was a guarantee of rapid advancement, if I succeeded.
Yanosh knew I had once had some social connections with divaricates. My mother and father
had known a number of them; I had once met Jaime Car Lenk fifteen years before. I knew their ways.
"Lamarckia has been dropped into my lap by the Geshel leaders in the Nexus," Yanosh said.
"It's my own kind of trial by fire. And a test. If you agree and succeed, we both benefit ... So I
said I would ask, but I did not specifically back you."
"And the immigrants?"
"Bringing them back will be politically difficult. Divaricates are peculiar in their
attitude toward the Way. They abhor it, but they think they can use it. They have always spoken of
a homeland away from Thistledown and the Geshels. A new, fresh Earth. But in truth, for the time
being the Geshels are still in power in the Nexus, and we're more interested in the planet than in
the people. If they've interfered, and it seems inevitable that they would -- being who they are --
then we'll bring them back, and Lenk will stand trial. It would give the radicals a bad stain on
their record."
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"That's grim," I said.
Yanosh did not disagree. "It's a grand assignment for somebody," he said. "An entire
planet, yours to explore. Not that it's going to be easy. I have to admit, in some ways, it suits
you, Olmy."
I wondered if I was being too sensitive about my secret. I had not spent the last five
years just soldiering; and Yanosh, or the people behind him, were not the first outside of Way
Defense to find me useful. This, however, was well beyond my proven capabilities.
"Are there other reasons I've been chosen?" I asked.
"Whatever you've done to displease the Naderites, this gets you out of the political war
zone. The mission could be a kind of oubliette, actually, a tight little closet where nobody can
reach you, until we sort out the political situation. Whatever it is you're involved in..."
"I've never been other than loyal to the Hexamon," I said.
"The Nexus appreciates loyalty as well."
"You make fine distinctions," I said. "Power comes and goes. I render unto the caesars."
Yanosh looked away, eyelids lowered with sudden weariness. "You've become an enigma to most
of our friends. Where _do_ your loyalties lie -- with Geshels, or with Naderites?"
"Korzenowski was a Naderite," I said, "and he built the Way."
"He paid for his presumption," Yanosh said.
"Where do _yours_ lie?"
"You didn't answer my question."
"Fortunately for us all, we don't have to reveal our loyalties to serve in defense, or in
the Nexus. I've served Geshel ends for years."
"But Uleysa..." Yanosh raised an eyebrow, significant of so many things unsaid, all that
had happened since we last met. Throughout our friendship, there had been moments -- quite a few
of them -- when Yanosh's perceptiveness irritated me.
"A mistake," I said. "Not political. Personal. But if the Nexus wants something done -- why
send just one?"
Yanosh's look intensified, as if he would see through me. "Your face. Your eyes. You've
never tried to blend in, have you?"
"I've never had to."
"It's more than that." He shook his head. "Never mind." He sighed. "I wish I had been born
before the Hexamon opened the Way. Things were much simpler."
"And more boring. I wonder how much confidence you have in me."
"To tell the truth, I was maneuvered into agreeing to interview you," Yanosh said. "By
skilled tacticians whose motives are never clear. I think you can do the job, of course; I don't
think it's _my_ hide they're after. And if you agree, you'll take considerable pressure off me."
"Somebody values Lamarckia."
"The Presiding Minister herself," Yanosh said. "So I hear. She wants to know more about
Lamarckia, but can't push a major expedition through the Nexus just now. Jarts must be our main
concern. In a way, you're a chip in a massive gamble. The Presiding Minister will gamble that they
can place you on Lamarckia, alone, to gather information and make judgments. When she convinces
the Nexus that a larger team should be sent, their mission will go all the more smoothly. They
connect with you, you fill them in, and together, we all lay a stronger claim on Lamarckia."
"I see," I said.
"I believe she'll win the gamble, even if the Naderites take control of the Nexus. Her
arguments are unassailable. In a few weeks or months, if the geometry stack cooperates, you'll
have lots of company."
"And if they can't get Nexus approval, and the gate can't be opened?"
"You'll have to find Lenk's second clavicle and open your own gate."
"That does sound like an oubliette," I said.
"Nobody believes the mission will be safe or easy."
To me, that sounded like a challenge, as much as Yanosh's flickering enthusiasm. "Perfect,"
I said. In that small office, with its spectacular view, crowded with perspectives of progress on
Axis City, I smiled at my old friend. "Of course, I'm interested," I said.
"Interest isn't enough, I fear," Yanosh said, pulling back and folding his hands. "I need
an answer. Soon."
My first instinct was to refuse the assignment. Despite recent setbacks and confusions, I
did have my plans, and they had a certain elegance. I also had my responsibilities ... Which made
me far more important and valuable than I seemed, than even Yanosh or anyone in the Nexus could
know.
But I was acutely aware of my lack of experience. My time spent in Way Defense had largely
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