Pumps sucked the air from the elevator cab. The door opened, and he stared down the throat of the beast that had once swallowed him, the Hexamon, the Jarts, and dozens of other races, opening up commerce between separate worlds, separate times, even separate universes.
The scoured bare rock and metal floor of the seventh chamber stretched for almost ten kilometers, gray and cold and dead. Beyond lay the surface of the Way itself, bronze in color, and not at all lifeless. Korzenowski knew that if he drew his eye close to that surface, he would see shots of black and red, a kind of ineffable bubbling activity: the life of space-time itself, vacuum teased and twisted and seduced into throwing up a perverse surface.
The bronze pipe, fifty kilometers wide, elongated itself to infinity before him. A mimicry of the tube light within the enclosed Thistledown chambers ran in a pale glowing ribbon down its center. He felt dizzy for a moment, as if he had actually become part of the tortured geodetics describing the Way’s unlikely existence.
A small personal shuttle awaited him. He boarded, and it flew at a level of several meters over the flatness, crossing the seventh chamber’s boundary, stopping and hovering some thirty kilometers from the southern cap.
Korzenowski stepped down from the shuttle hatch and stood a few centimeters above the naked surface of the Way. He removed the environment field segment beneath his feet. Now he was on the surface itself. Removing his slipper, he let his naked foot touch what was neither warm nor cold, what possessed only one quality at this moment and that was solidity. The surface of the Way was uninterested in the laws of thermodynamics.
Korzenowski bent down and rubbed the palm of his hand on that surface.
He stood up, feeling his foundation—the Mystery of Patricia Vasquez—very strongly now, as if someone were watching over his shoulder. Her creation, too, in a way, he thought. Our offspring, a wonderful monstrosity.
“Nothing is ever pure, except for you,” he said to The Way. “You were made by precocious children. We didn’t know what you would mean to us. You allowed us to dream fine dreams. Now I’ve got to kill you.”
He stood in silence for several minutes on the unresponsive, unreal surface, then returned to the shuttle and the seventh chamber bore hole.
70
The Way
“We’re prisoners,” Rhita told Demetrios on the lake, in the long wooden rowboat. “All of us. The queen is dead, and so is Jamal Atta. They aren’t here.”
“All right,” Demetrios said. “I agree something isn’t right. But what do you mean by prisoners?”
“This is a test, an experiment. The Jarts.”
“I’m not familiar with that word.”
Rhita touched his face with her hands. “Do you feel it, though? That we’re prisoners?”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“Do you remember a Kelt named Lugotorix?”
An ibis flew from the shore and landed on the prow of the boat. It opened its long beak and said, “You can remember now.”
Rhita shuffled back through her past, hiding. Why remember? There was nothing she could do; no way to escape when the legs with which she would run weren’t real. She visited with her mother for a time, sitting in the stone and plaster house near Lindos, talking about inconsequentials. Relaxing in the sun, which was not as warm as it should have been, nor as bright. On the road to the temple to spend a day alone, her shadow preceded her, walking long in the morning sun on the dirt and gravel. She watched it with mild interest, then stopped. It raised its arms; her arms were down. It gestured wildly. It lengthened, crossing the road, up over dry hedges and stone walls, across a dead orchard. The tree branches swayed wherever it touched.
A young man with black hair approached along the road. He stood beside her for a time, watching the shadow lengthen to the island horizon, and then spread across sky and rushing clouds. She glanced at him, not at all curious. He told her, “We are losing you, Rhita Vaskayza. You must not hide. If we cannot hold you, your self will dissolve in its own memories, and we would not wish that. We will have to inactivate you. Wouldn’t you rather continue thinking?”
“No,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”
She ran from the youth, but in thought or memory or wherever she was now, she made a very wrong turn.
Rhita stumbled into the warehouse of all her nightmares.
Before she could be inactivated, she saw the ghosts of all she had killed, flying over the sea’s bloody waters, questions on their lips, knives in their hands: Why did you open the gate?
She had killed Gaia.
But she could not herself die.
Her psyche, her butterfly, lay pinned in a box, examined and prodded by monstrous collectors. She saw hall upon hall, brightly lit, stretching for millions of miles, lined with steel cases, in every case row upon row of humans—infants, old men, crones, girls, young men, mothers-to-be, soldiers, all passing under her inspection with infinite detail, more real than anything in her true life had ever been, squirming on the pins that ran through their hearts. I am with you, she said. I can’t run from you.
But she was running. With no physical body to run with, she chased her self through her own memories, over all the roads of her mind, frantic with grief and fear and guilt. She ran faster and faster, until she seemed to melt and flow like water, the water frantically surging into a cold spray, diffuse and selfless…No center, almost no awareness.
A brief warmth before null.
71
Thistledown
Thistledown, launched thirteen centuries before by its own timeline, had been beyond doubt the greatest single achievement of the human race, made even greater by the creation of the Way. Containing the two finest and largest cities of all humanity, yet never fully populated; containing the greatest weapons ever devised, birthplace of the most accomplished and wide-ranging civilization, center of philosophies encompassing all the human religions, many synthesized into the myth of the Good Man, who exemplified the imperfect but glorious expression of that universal urge to Just Progress, Star, Fate and Pneuma: the universe, history and human spirit; Thistledown, transient and even humble name for such an endeavor.
Farren Siliom contemplated all these things from his apartment. He would not have time to get used to this new body; in a way, he regretted the waste of resources, but preferred to end his life in a physical form.
If Thistledown were to die, he would die with it, rather than explain to its citizens what he had done, and why.
Despite an odd melancholy—something akin to what he had seen in Korzenowski’s face—he did not feel much like a traitor. No doubt, in the scales of cosmic justice, he was a hero; but he didn’t feel that sense of justification, either. He had become nothing more than a small transducer in the circuit of history, a fate experienced most acutely by politicians who believe or hope they are in control.
He knew his place in the Thistledown’s history, though he was far from sure it would be an honored place. With no authorization, only the power of being in a certain office at a certain time, he had ordered—or at least supported—the asteroid starship’s destruction. He had done so for reasons that were inescapable and correct, yet that were still not clear to him. I have been persuaded by Gods. Historians are seldom kind to leaders.
His family was on Earth by now, in a camp in Southeast Asia. His two children, both conceived and born in the natural manner—in accord with his Naderite beliefs, but of course, with a few Hexamon embellishments, since he was not orthodox—those children would grow up more influenced by Earth than the orbiting precincts, he could prophesy; the precincts would more than likely close themselves off as a society, rendering aid and assistance, but turning inward. As such, within a century or two they could cease to be viable, their societies beginning the long process of decay, like a—he borrowed now from Terrestrial experiences, such as Garry Lanier might have had—lamb’s tail bound with cord, cut off from the parent body. Who could have foreseen such a possibility during
the enthusiasm of the Sundering?
Earth would grow on its own, having been given a mighty boost; who could say where it would go, after the Recovery and such strong Hexamon influence?
He had placed remotes and partials in several places around Thistledown, all connected to his sensoria, to allow him to fully experience the moment when—and if—it came. He still reserved a small and probably foolish skepticism. Thistledown had always been. In his life, at least…
He felt a wave of sentiment for the old times in the Way, and it shamed him. But those times had been so much easier to comprehend, even if no less complicated. He had never thought he would be homesick for the awesome reaches of Korzenowski’s creation.
Since the Sundering, it seemed that the Hexamon had never truly known where it was. It had never found home.
72
The Beginning of the Way
Olmy reached out to touch the blunt, mad-mirror terminus of the flaw and felt it draw his fingers along where he applied pressure, and push them back when he applied pressure from the opposite angle. Frictionless, enormously powerful, the flaw had once supplied all the Hexamon’s energy through these transforms of space and time. Korzenowski watched from the blister.
“You can enter the flawships?”
“I can enter at least one of them,” Olmy said. “My imprint is still on this one.” He pointed to the first ship in the row, closest to the flaw, mounted behind the blister that covered the bore hole. The wreckage of the flawship damaged by the Jart intrusion had been removed, replaced by the second ship in line, and a third added. “It took us down the Way and through the closing end, during the Sundering…with Patricia Vasquez and Garry Lanier. We dropped off representatives from Timbl and other worlds…we dropped off Patricia to open her gate in the geometry stacks.” They tracted along the bore hole to float beside the flawship.
“I didn’t remember this was the ship,” Korzenowski said. “They look so much alike.”
Olmy pressed his hand into a circle scribed in the side of the flawship and a hatchway irised open noiselessly. The smell of the interior was clean and metallic, redolent with the blunt odors of unbreathed air and formfit decor. Light spilled from the hatch, gleaming against the dark metal and stone of the bore hole wall opposite. They entered.
Olmy tracted along faint purple field-lines within the ship to the controls. Korzenowski moved to the transparent bow. Behind them, the flawship interior was shadowy and silent, a long cylinder interrupted here and there with rounded shapes of unformed furnishings.
Are there restrictions to your use? the Jart asked.
I don’t think so, Olmy replied. He had once had nearly as high a clearance as a full-rank Hexamon senator, with the added advantages of connections in the defense forces; as far as he knew, his status had not been changed. He did not doubt that the ship would respond to any instruction he gave it. The defense forces would not expect a rogue in their midst, even though Olmy had played that part before. Certainly not a rogue that would steal a flawship and run it down the Way…
With the president’s influence—and a little help from vigilant Tapi, still somewhere aboard Thistledown—they would make it.
Olmy inserted his hands into control dimples and created a large docking field around the flawship. In the dark bore hole, green and purple diffusions played across the raw rock and metal walls. Slowly, the flawship advanced toward the blister.
Korzenowski, in the bow, used his pictor to instruct the blister to accept intrusion. They would pierce the blister and string themselves on the flaw. The flaw would pass through the center of the ship, down a flaw passage that gave the ship its U-shape cross-section. When the ship was strung, the open end of the U would close and the ship’s flaw grips would seize the elongated singularity. At Olmy’s instruction, the grips would bear down at a certain angle, and the flaw would translate the ship forward.
“My partial is sounding the final evacuation alert,” Korzenowski said. “The crimp in the Way will be started in six hours. We should be well down the Way by then.”
Olmy nodded. Tapi might leave a partial of himself to oversee operations, as would others in the defense forces; but there would be no one living left aboard Thistledown.
“Are you tired of life, Ser Engineer?” Olmy asked, apropros of nothing.
“I don’t know,” Korzenowski said. “Tired of not knowing who I am.”
Olmy agreed. “To knowing who we are,” he said, raising an imaginary cup in toast. He pushed the flawship slowly forward, through the blister and onto the long mad-mirror ribbon of the singularity.
73
Thistledown
The last Hexamon archivists and archaeologists withdrew their hundreds of thousands of hastily created partials from the second and third chambers, where they had conducted a final survey of the Thistledown’s cities. For lack of time, the other chambers had been neglected.
The contents of Thistledown’s city memory and the various library centers had been gleaned; all that remained untouched were the hidden information stores, private caches put away over the centuries by individuals who distrusted direct links with the libraries. Who could say how much history would be lost if these private caches were destroyed, never to be discovered or analyzed?
The archivists’ frustration was that the Hexamon, before the Sundering, had had centuries to explore the deserted cities, and had forbidden most such exploration because of the remote possibility of tampering in the sixth chamber. After the Sundering, the archivists had thought they had all the time they needed, never imagining a day such as this…
The defense forces withdrew with the last of the archivists. Only a few suicidal or thrill-seeking individuals remained now—and Farren Siliom, prepared to atone for his decision, however correct it had been.
He sat in the high, undecorated suite overlooking the third chamber city, picting artistic designs around himself, waiting patiently. So far, nobody knew he was here—or where he was. That saved the embarrassment of last-minute rescues, if anyone would be so rude as to interrupt a citizen’s chosen path to extinction.
There were no signs of the coming destruction. Thistledown was stable, the tubelight steady and bright.
74
The Way
“I’m setting acceleration at one G for the first few minutes,” Olmy said. He asked the Jart, Do you know where your people will be?
Singularity stations are spaced at intervals of about five million kilometers in Jart territory. We’ll encounter flaw defenses and barriers first.
Then we shouldn’t be traveling very fast, should we?
No more than one-fiftieth c. That is maximum velocity for all of our vessels on the flaw; anything traveling faster is automatically destroyed.
I presume you’ll have some way of alerting your superiors that we’re not belligerent?
When that time comes, I will perform through you.
Olmy, having at least the illusion he was in control now, did not look forward to losing it again. He explained the situation to Korzenowski.
“We should be a million kilometers down the Way when the kink is initiated,” the Engineer said. He picted his calculations to Olmy, who understood at least the factors of acceleration of Way destruction, their required velocity to outrace the destruction, and how long they might have at their unknown destination to do whatever the Jart thought necessary.
Was this what he had been preparing for these past years?
He had thought he was preparing for war; not for a fool’s run down the Way on a quasi-religious errand for a Trojan Horse Jart. But he knew he had to count his blessings; at least his error would not destroy the Hexamon. His own sacrifice, measured against avoiding even the bare possibility of such a disaster, was inconsequential.
He called up a display of the seventh chamber’s southern cap, now receding slowly behind them. The display showed no activated defenses beyond the deep-Way sensors and sweeping automatic target acquisition fields.
With no sensation of motion—the flawship contained its own inertial damping system—they began to accelerate at one G.
“Here we go,” he said.
Korzenowski could not help modeling again and again the sequence of events happening now in the sixth chamber machinery. Certain control centers would undergo planned failures within minutes. Other mechanisms would try to compensate for the failures. For a short time, they would succeed, but they would be exposed to strains and contradictions in design that would bring about their own, irrevocable failures. The projection nodes would try to shut off long enough to allow robot workers and remotes to correct the imbalance; when no such repairs were made, and the nodes had to switch on again to avoid their own destruction under the Way’s growing instability, the entire carpet of sixth chamber machinery would fail.
The kink in the Way would begin.
Where the kink originated, the Way would quickly become unlivable. Fundamental physical constants would change rapidly; what matter was left in the Way would cease to exist, converting to varieties of radiation not encountered in normal space and time. These radiations would quickly decay to extremely high-energy, photon-like particles, which would leak through the kink and appear in the regions near the Thistledown—and in randomly selected regions for a hundred thousand light years around the sun. Entering normal space, they would assume the character of actual photons, appearing as brilliant displays of Tcherenkov-blue.
Korzenowski shook his head, close to weeping. Unlike Olmy, he had never had himself altered to eliminate such emotional displays. What he felt was a deep sadness that extended into that part of him which was Patricia Vasquez. The Mystery they shared, however tainted by her obsessions, knew what was going to be destroyed, and how important it had been to the Engineer, how integral a part of his existence.