“What you’re saying is, we all want to go back to the womb. No?”
Tapi agreed with smiling reluctance. “I wouldn’t put it so baldly.”
Olmy studied the jagged curve with a combination of pride and the familiar sinking feeling. “I think it’s very good. That’s not a simple parental compliment, either.”
“You think it will predict?”
“Within limits.”
“I…may be acting foolishly, but I thought there was strong predictive value here, too. So I’ve made my decision on primary vocation. I’m training for Hexamon defense.”
Olmy regarded the boy’s image with more pride, and an even stronger sensation of sorrow. “Like father, like son.”
“I’ve studied your history, Father. It’s admirable. But there are ways I think I can improve on the pattern.” Tapi’s image burst into an enthusiasm of colors and then reshaped itself, dressed in defense force black. “I will try to aim for higher office toward the latter stages of my career. Within one or two centuries of active duty, normal time. I wonder why you never made the move toward leadership roles.”
“If you’ve studied your father closely enough, you’ll know.”
“The old ways. Old disciplines. Once a soldier, always a soldier. The best and highest expression.”
Olmy nodded; those were honest sentiments.
“But your abilities…you’ve tended in recent years to feel less regard for your superiors. You say to yourself this is because their abilities have declined…But I think it may be suppressed and diverted expression of your own desires to shape history.”
That’s my son, Olmy thought. Quick and to the point. And doubtless right on the mark. “Leaving partials with you is like leaving lambs to guard the lion.”
“Thank you, Ser.”
“You’re probably correct on all counts. But if you enter that hierarchy, you’ll have to suppress and divert your own cocky compulsions, too. The most difficult road to leadership is through the defense forces.”
“Yes, Father. That would instill discipline and self-control.”
Unless it shapes you in a mold you’re reluctant to break, Olmy thought.
“Do you approve of re-opening?”
No escape, not even in crèche.
“I observe and I serve.”
Tapi smiled. “I’ve missed you, Father. Not even correct partials shine like the original.”
“I have…apologies to make,” Olmy said. “For past and future actions. I’m going to be very involved in work from here on, more so than in the past.”
“You’re working for the defense forces again?”
“No. This is personal. But I may not be able to meet with you any more often than I have in the past few years…maybe less often. I want you to know that I am proud of you, and appreciate your growth and maturity. Your mother and I are both exceptionally pleased.”
“Proud of mirror images,” Tapi said with a hint of self-deprecation.
“Not at all,” Olmy said. “You’re more complex and organized than either of us. You’re the best of both of us. My absence is not disapproval, and it is not…what I would choose.”
Tapi listened, smiling.
“My consent for incarnation is on record,” Olmy said. “I’ve assumed responsibility in the Hexamon for your actions. Your mother has done the same.”
Tapi was suddenly solemn. “Thank you. For your confidence.”
“You are no longer our creation,” Olmy said, following the long-established ritual. “Now you make yourself. I’ll recommend a commission in the defense forces. And I’ll try to visit you…” Honesty, he thought, would be the best policy. “But that’s probably not going to be often.”
“I will do you honor,” Tapi said.
“I have no doubt.” Olmy glanced around the decor. “Now, I’m interested in these Mersauvin structures. Let’s quiet this place down a bit and I’d like you to show me how you reached your conclusions.”
Tapi set about eagerly to do just that.
Olmy departed from Axis Euclid within six hours, one of three passengers in a shuttle to Thistledown.
He didn’t feel like conversing. The other passengers were too self-absorbed to pay him much attention.
5
Earth
Lanier sat on the edge of the bed to put on his hiking boots. He allowed himself a small grimace as he bent over to tie the laces. It was nine o’clock in the morning and a brief squall had passed over the mountains, dropping a freshet of rain and casting a sweet draft of wind from the sea. The bedroom was still chill. His breath condensed in front of his face. Standing, stamping his boots on the worn rug to settle them, testing the tightness on his ankles, he frowned again at a different kind of ache, another memory he could not blank.
Donning his jacket by the broad window in the living room, he looked over a few hedges and tall ferns at the green and craggy hills beyond. He knew his route through those hills; he had not walked there for years, but today seemed like a good day to reacquaint himself. He sought no panacea, no rigorous exercise to bring back a youth he had rejected; merely a diversion from his thoughts, which of late had been particularly bitter.
Three months had passed since Heineman’s funeral.
Karen had not said goodbye before leaving on an errand to Christchurch. She had taken the new Hexamon five-wheel truck; the roads were still rugged in the wet, and the old truck was not always up to country barely fit for horses. Someday, he thought, he would become ill in this house, and it would be a half hour or more until an emergency vehicle would reach them, and then, like Heineman, he would be dead.
One way to rid himself of the bad memories.
“Toll, toll, pay the toll,” he sang softly, his voice husky with the cold. He coughed; age not disease. He was healthy enough. Years more would likely pass, too many, before the memory blotter came and sucked his cares away.
He had done so little in his decades of service, as far as he could tell. The Earth after forty years was still a gaping wound, despite its official name; on its way to recovery, to be sure, but a place of constant reminders of death and human stupidity.
Why did the past come back to him so vividly now, of all times? To distract him from the frustrations of his widening rift with Karen? She had been positively stony since the funeral.
Twenty-nine years ago. A nameless town deep in the forests of southeastern Canada, a cold and snowy trap for three hundred men, women, and children. The men emerged from their solid, low-slung log cabins, emaciated beyond even Lanier’s experience, to confront the sky-travelers. Lanier and his partners, two Hexamon operatives, a man and woman, were well-fed and healthy, of course. They walked resolutely across the snowy field between their craft and the nearest hut, addressing the men in French and English.
“Where are your women?” the female operative asked. “Your children?”
The men stared at them, eyes elfin with starvation, ethereally beautiful, faces white, hair gray and patchy. One man staggered forward, jaw slack, arms out, and hugged Lanier with all his strength. Like being squeezed by a sick child. Lanier, close to tears, supported the man, whose yellowed eyes shone with something like adoration, or perhaps just relief and joy.
A rifle shot rang out and the female operative spun back across the snow, her chest a well of gore.
“No! No!” cried another of the men, but more shots clipped bark from trees, splashed snow, sang off the hull of the craft. A single middle-aged man with a thick black beard, less emaciated than the others, carrying a rifle that seemed even more nourished and fleshy than he, stood in the town’s lone road, cursing loudly, “Eleven years! Eleven! Where have you gods been these eleven awful years?”
The male operative, whose name he could no longer recall, knocked the man over with a hot flash of ball lightning spun from their only weapon. Lanier stood over the wounded operative, quickly assessing her condition. She would not survive unless they retrieved the marble of downloaded personality from
the back of her neck; Lanier bent down and felt her pulse, letting her eyes flutter shut, allowing her to enter the first stage of death. Ignoring everything around him, he took out a folding scalpel and sliced open the woman’s neck just below the skull, feeling with his fingers for the black marble, pulling it from its socket, slipping it into a small plastic bag, as he had been trained.
While he did this, the town’s men slowly and methodically stomped the rifleman to death. The male operative tried to pull them away, but however weak they were, he was one and they were dozens. The man who had hugged Lanier kept his silence during the operation, frightened out of his wits at this outrage, and then got down on his ragged knees and pleaded with Lanier not to destroy their town.
The women and children emerged from the log huts, more dead than alive.
The people of this makeshift town had survived eleven winters. even the hard first two winters, but they would not have survived this one.
“For whom the bridge tolls,” he muttered. My wife is vital and young. I am old. We make our decisions and we pay the tolls.
He stood still in the hallway for a moment, eyes tight shut, trying to force the fog out of his head. Woolgathering, his grandfather had called it. Appropriate in New Zealand. This wool was thick with brambles. however.
We did not save everybody. Not even all the strong and capable. The Death was too universal even for angels from heaven to spread succor to all.
He had not worried about such things for decades, and it irritated him that these thoughts came to him now like pale substitutes for guilt, a guilt he did not believe he should feel. I did my job. God knows I devoted thirty years to the Recovery.
And so had Karen, but she did not look like a worn-out rag.
Picking up his stick, he opened the door. Gray clouds still skated overhead. If he could catch pneumonia the old man’s friend he might deliberately try to do so. But among the benefits conferred upon all Old Natives by the Terrestrial Hexamon was freedom from most disease. Their resources in that regard had been ample; every man, woman and child on Earth carried organisms that policed their bodies against any possible outside invaders.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the front porch door’s storm-glass pane, face strong but deeply lined, the lines around his mouth curved down, clefts on each side of his nose, eyes sad, upper eyelids drooping, making him appear worldly-wise. It was with a mix of satisfaction and perverse disgust that he realized he felt older than he looked.
Lanier regretted his vow to scale the first leg of the high switchback before resting. At the second bend of the mountain trail, doubled over, hands gripping his trembling knees, he sucked in jagged volumes of air and puffed them out, sweat dripping from his brow. He hadn’t done much hiking or even exercise for years, and unless he truly wanted to end this life, to overexert on his first long hike was a foolish luxury. The miracles of Hexamon medicine could only do what he had allowed them to do; that is, keep him reasonably vigorous for his age and disease-free and unaffected by excess radiation, of which he had an abiding horror.
His breath coming back to him, the pain in control now, he looked down from the precipice trail at the valley floor three hundred meters below. Flocks of sheep—maybe they belonged to Fremont, the young owner of Irishman Creek Station—flowed across the mottled green and sun-yellow grasslands, echoed by great rain-heavy gray and white clouds crossing their own intense, dust-blue pastures. Overhead, an eagle soared, the first he had seen this season. The wind this high was cold and bracing even in the November springtime; a thousand and more meters up the mountain there were still patches of snow, dotted with the inevitable filamentary scarlet fungi the shepherds and farmers called Christsblood.
He finally allowed himself to sit on a rock. His shins ached. His calf muscles threatened to knot. For the first time in months, maybe years, he actually felt pretty good, justified somehow for existing.
The wind called his name. Startled, he turned around, looking for a hiker or shepherd on the trail below or above, but saw no one. Satisfied the sound had been an illusion, he pulled a goat-cheese sandwich from his backpack, unwrapped it and began to eat.
The wind called him again, this time more clearly, closer. He stood and glanced up the trail, frowning. The call had come from that direction, he was sure of it. Stuffing the sandwich back in its wrapper, he marched around the second bend and a hundred yards up the trail, boots grinding into the pebbly surface and sliding on succulent grass still damp with dew. He was alone on the trail.
Singing to keep his rhythm, he paused to catch his breath and let the clean air pass into his blood, clear his mind of cobwebs gathered from months of sitting indoors.
He needed to riddle his situation.
While pitying his fellow humans, he had also come to hate them. It seemed that in their agony, more often than not they flailed about in a way that made things worse. Sometimes, those who had been treated cruelly—losing homes, family, cities, nations—had reacted by treating other survivors even more cruelly.
Lanier’s favorite reading of late had been the twentieth-century philosophēr and novelist Arthur Koestler, who had thought humankind fatally flawed in design. Lanier had few doubts.
He had seen men, women, and even children subjected to deep psychological probing and treatment, plucking out their demons, leaving them better adjusted and better able to effectively confront the reality around them. Lanier had simply stayed quiet in the dispute over such “healing.” The treatments had cut decades off the Recovery, yet he still could not decide whether he approved. Were human beings such weak, ill-designed machines that so few could heal themselves, self-diagnose, self-critique? Obviously. He had become a pessimist, perhaps even a cynic, but there was a part of himself that hated cynics; therefore, Q.E.D., he was not fond of himself.
A wide mantle of cloud drifted over the land, a circular hole precisely in its middle. He resumed his seat on the boulder by the trail and squinted at the brilliance of the broad beacon of sunlight crossing the valley. So full of warmth, so hypnotic, that kilometer-wide patch; if he simply let his mind rest, sunlight on grass might answer all his questions. He felt vague, sleepy, ready to set all his burdens down, lie back, let the sun dissolve him like warm butter.
A few hundred meters up the trail, a man dressed in black and gray and carrying a hiking stick descended toward him. Lanier wondered if this was the voice in the wind; he wasn’t sure whether he appreciated company or not. If the man was a shepherd, fine, he could get along with rustics; but if he was a daytripper from Christchurch…
Perhaps the other hiker would ignore him.
“Hello,” the man greeted him, boots crunching in the gravel behind Lanier. Lanier turned. The hiker stood before the brilliant leading edge of the cloud bank. His hair was dark, cut short; he was just under six feet tall, young-looking, broad-shouldered, upper arms heavy with muscle. He reminded Lanier of a young bull.
“Hi,” Lanier said.
“I’ve been waiting for you to come up here and lead me down,” the man said, as if they were friends of long standing. Lanier identified his mild accent: Russian.
Lanier frowned at him. “Do I know you?” he asked.
“Perhaps.” The man smiled. “Our acquaintance was brief, many years ago.” Lanier’s mind refused to dredge up where he had seen the man before. Puzzles irritated him.
“Memory fails me, I’m afraid.” He turned away.
“We were enemies once,” the man said, seeming to enjoy the exchange. He did not come any closer, however, holding his stick in front of him. Lanier glanced back at him again. He wasn’t warmly dressed and carried no backpack. He couldn’t have been on the mountain for long.
“You’re one of the Russians that invaded Thistledown?” Lanier asked. His question, asked of a man so obviously young, was not stupid, though it might have been once. The hiker didn’t appear to be over forty; still, he might have undergone youth therapy on one of the orbiting bodies or in the Hexamon Earth stations
.
“Yes.”
“What brings you all the way out here?”
“There’s some work to do, important work. I need your help.”
Lanier held out his hand. “I’m retired.” The stranger helped him to his feet. “Those days were very long ago. What’s your name?”
“I’m disappointed you don’t remember me,” the man said petulantly. “Mirsky. Pavel Mirsky.”
Lanier laughed. “Good try,” he said. “Mirsky’s the other side of heaven by now. He rode the Geshel precincts and the Way sealed up behind him. But I appreciate your joke.”
“No joke, friend.”
Lanier searched the man’s features carefully. By God, he did resemble Mirsky.
“Did Patricia Vasquez ever find her way home?” the man asked.
“Who knows? I’m not in the mood for guessing games. And what the hell do you care?” Lanier surprised himself with his vehemence.
“I would like to find her again.”
“Fat bloody chance.”
“With your help.”
“Your joke is in lousy taste.”
“Garry, it is no joke. I am back.” He stepped closer. The resemblance to Mirsky was uncanny. “I’ve been waiting up here for you to come, someone who recognizes me, and can take me to the right people. You have been important in the Recovery, no?”
“I was,” Lanier said. “You could be his brother.” His exact twin, actually.
“You should take me up to Thistledown. I must speak with Korzenowski and Olmy. They are still alive, are they not?”
Konrad Korzenowski had designed the Way, once attached to the seventh internal chamber of the asteroid starship Thistledown. Thistledown and two sections of the Axis City were still in a ten-thousand-kilometer orbit around the Earth, one polar “cap” removed, exposing the seventh chamber. The Thistledown had been blown from the end of the Way to allow the escape of the Naderite portions of the Axis City, forty years ago. The Way had briefly opened into empty space: it had almost immediately sealed itself, closing its infinity off from this universe forever. Those who had elected to stay within the Way—Pavel Mirsky among them—were more distant than the souls of the dead, if the dead had souls.