“She tapped into chaos?” Olmy asked. Some universes accessed through the Way were empty voids, dead, useless but relatively harmless; others were virulent, filled with a bubbling stew of unstable “constants” that reduced the reality of any observer or instrumentality. Only two such gates had ever been opened in the Way; the single fortunate aspect of these disasters had been that the gates themselves had quickly closed and could not be reopened.
“Not chaos,” Kesler said, swallowing and bowing his head at more discomfort. “This damn suit… could be doing a better job.”
“You should be resting,” Olmy said.
“No time. The Opener’s Guild tells me Enoch was looking for a domain of enhanced structure, hyper-order. What she found was more dangerous than any chaos. Her gate may have opened into a universe of endless fecundity. Not just order: Creativity. Every universe is in a sense a plexus, its parts connected by information links; but Enoch’s universe contained no limits to the propagation of information. No finite speed of light, no separation between anything analogous to the Bell continuum… and other physicality.”
Olmy frowned, trying to make sense of this. “My knowledge of Way physics is shaky…”
“Ask your beloved Konrad Korzenoswki,” Kesler snapped.
Olmy did not react to this provocation.
Kesler apologized under his breath. He floated slowly back across the chamber, his face a mask of pain, a pathetic parody of restlessness. “We lost three expeditions trying to save her people and close the gate. The last was six months ago. Something like life-forms had grown up around the main station, fueled by the lesion. They’ve became huge, unimaginably bizarre. No one can make sense of them. What was left of our last expedition managed to build a barrier about a thousand kilometers south of the lesion. We thought that would give us the luxury of a few years to decide what to do next. But that barrier has been destroyed. We’ve not been able to get close enough since to discover what’s happened. We have defenses in that sector, key defenses that keep the flaw from being used against us.” He looked down through the transparent floor at the segment of the Way twenty-four kilometers below.
“The Jarts were able to send a relativistic projectile along the flaw, hardly more than a gram of rest mass. We couldn’t stop it. It struck Axis City at twelve hundred hours yesterday.”
Olmy had been told the details of the attack: A pellet less than a millimeter in diameter, traveling very close to the speed of light. Only the safety and control mechanisms of the sixth chamber machinery had kept the entire Axis City from disintegrating. The original of Neya Taur Rinn had been conducting business on behalf of her boss, Yanosh, in Axis Prime while her partial had visited Olmy.
“We’re moving the city south as fast as we can and still keep up the evacuation,” Kesler said. “The Jarts are drawing close to the lesion now. We’re not sure what they can do with it. Maybe nothing—but we can’t afford to take the chance.”
Olmy shook his head in puzzlement. “You’ve just told me nothing can be done. Why call me here when we’re helpless?”
“I didn’t say nothing could be done,” Kesler responded, eyes glittering. “Some of our gate openers think they can build a cirque, a ring gate, and seal off the lesion.”
“That would cut us off from the rest of the Way,” Olmy said.
“Worse. In a few days of weeks it would destroy the Way completely, seal us off in Thistledown forever. Until now, we’ve never been that desperate.” He smiled, lips twisted by pain. “Frankly, you were not my choice. I’m no longer sure that you can be relied upon, and this matter is far too complicated to allow anyone to act alone.”
Neya had not told him the truth, then. “Who chose me?” Olmy asked.
“A gate opener. You made an impression on him when he escorted you down the Way some decades ago. He was the one who opened the gate to Lamarckia.”
“Frederik Ry Ornis?”
Kesler nodded. “From what I’m told, he’s become the most powerful opener in the guild. A senior master.”
Olmy took a deep breath. “I’m not what I appear to be, Yanosh. I’m an old man who’s seen women and his friends die. I miss my sons. You should have left me on Lamarckia.”
Kesler closed his eyes. The blue jacket around his lower body adjusted slightly, and his face tightened. “The Olmy I knew would never have turned down a chance like this.”
“I’ve seen too many things already,” Olmy said.
Yanosh moved forward. “We both have. This… is beyond me,” he said quietly. “The lesion… The gate openers tell me it’s the strangest place in creation. All the boundaries of physics have collapsed. Time and causality have new meanings. Heaven and hell have married. Only those in the Redoubt have seen all that’s happened there—if they still exist in any way we can understand. They haven’t communicated with us since the lesion formed.”
Olmy listened intently, something slowly stirring to life, a small speck of ember glowing brighter.
“It may be over, Olmy,” Yanosh said. “The whole grand experiment may be at an end. We’re ready to close off the Way, pinch it, seal the lesion within its own small bubble… dispose of it.”
“Tell me more,” Olmy said, folding his arms.
“Three citizens escaped from the Redoubt, from Enoch’s small colony, before the lesion became too large. One died, his mind scrambled beyond retrieval. The second has been confined for study, as best we’re able. What afflicts him—or it—is something we can never cure. The third survived relatively unharmed. She’s become … unconventional, more than a little obsessed by the mystical, but I’m told she’s still rational. If you accept, she will accompany you.” Yanosh’s tone indicated he was not going to allow Olmy to decline. “We have two other volunteers, both apprentice gate openers, both failed by the guild. All have been chosen by Frederik Ry Ornis. He will explain why.”
Olmy shook his head. “A mystic, failed openers… What would I do with such a team?”
Yanosh smiled grimly. “Kill them if it goes wrong. And kill yourself. If you can’t close off the Way, and if the lesion remains, you will not be allowed to come back. The third expedition I sent never even reached the Redoubt. But they were absorbed by the lesion.” Another grimace of pain. “Do you believe in ghosts, Olmy?”
“What kind?”
“Real ghosts?”
“No,” Olmy said.
“I think I do. Some members of our rescue expeditions came back. Several versions of them. We think we destroyed them.”
“Versions?”
“Copies of some sort. They were sent back—echoed—along their own world-lines in a way no one understands. They returned to their loved ones, their relatives, their friends. If more return, everything we call real could be in jeopardy. It’s been very difficult keeping this secret.”
Olmy raised an eyebrow skeptically. He wondered if Yanosh was himself still rational. “I’ve served my time. More than my time. Why should I go active?”
“Damn it, Olmy, if not for love of Thistledown—if you’re beyond that, then because you want to die,” Kesler grunted, his face betraying quiet disgust behind the pain, “You’ve wanted to die since I brought you back from Lamarckia. This time, if you make it to the Redoubt, you’re likely to have your wish granted.
“Think of it as a gift from me to you, or to what you once were.”
3
“If you were enhanced, this would go a lot faster,” Jarr Flynch said, pointing to Olmy’s head. Frederik Ry Ornis smiled. The three of them walked side by side down a long, empty hall, approaching a secure room deep in the old Thistledown Defense Tactical College building in Alexandria.
Ry Ornis had aged not at all physically. In appearance he was still the same long-limbed, mantis-like figure, but his gawkiness had been replaced by an eerie grace, and his youthful, eccentric volubility by a wry spareness of language.
Olmy dismissed Flynch’s comment with a wave of his hand. “I’ve gone through the important file
s,” he said. “I think I know them well enough. I have questions about the choice of people to go with me. The apprentice gate openers… They’ve been rejected by the guild. Why?”
Flynch smiled. “They’re flamboyant.”
Olmy glanced at the master opener. “Ry Ornis was as flamboyant as they come.”
“The guild has changed,” Ry Ornis said. “It demands more now.”
Flynch agreed. “In the time since I’ve been a teacher in the guild, that’s certainly true. They tolerate very little… creativity. The defection of Enoch’s pupils scared them. The lesion terrified all of us. Rasp and Karn are young, innovative. Nobody denies they’re brilliant, but they’ve refused to settle in and play their roles. So… the guild denied them final certification.”
“Why choose them for this job?” Olmy asked.
“Ry Ornis did the choosing,” Flynch said.
“We’ve discussed this,” Ry Ornis said.
“Not to my satisfaction. When do I meet them?”
“No meeting has been authorized with Rasp and Karn until you’re on the flawship. They’re still in emergency conditioning.” Flynch glanced at Ry Ornis. “The training has been a little rough on them.”
Olmy felt less and less sure that he wanted anything to do with the guild, or with Ry Ornis’s chosen openers. “The files only tell half a story,” he said. “Deirdre Enoch never became an opener—she never even tried to qualify. She was just a teacher. How could she become so important to the guild?”
Flynch shook his head. “Like me, she was never qualified to be an opener, but also like me, as a teacher, she was considered one of the best. She became a leader to some apprentice openers. Philosopher.”
“Prophet,” Ry Ornis said softly.
“Training for the guild is grueling,” Flynch continued. “Some say it’s become torture. The mathematical conditioning alone is enough to produce a drop-out rate of over ninety per cent. Deirdre Enoch worked as a counselor in mental balance, compensation, and she was good… In the last twenty years, she worked with many who went on to become very powerful in Way Maintenance. She kept up her contacts. She convinced a lot of her students—"
“That human nature is corrupt,” Olmy ventured sourly.
Flynch shook his head. “That the laws of our universe are inadequate. Incomplete. That there is a way to become better human beings, and of course, better openers. Disorder, competition, and death corrupt us, she thought.”
“She knew high-level theory, speculations circulated privately among master openers,” Ry Ornis said. “She heard about domains where the rules were very different.”
“She heard about a gate into complete order?”
“It had been discussed, on a theoretical basis. None had ever been attempted. No limits have been found to the variety of domains—of universes. She speculated that a well-tuned gate could access almost any domain a good opener could conceive of.”
Olmy scowled. “She expected order to balance out competition and death? Order versus disorder, a fight to the finish?”
Ry Ornis made a small noise, and Flynch nodded. “There’s a reason none of this is in the files,” Flynch said. “No opener will talk about it, or admit they knew anybody involved in making the decision. It’s been very embarrassing to the guild. I’m impressed that you know what questions to ask. But it’s better that you ask Ry Ornis—"
Olmy focused on Flynch. “You say you and Enoch occupied similar positions. I’d rather ask you.”
Flynch gestured for them to turn to the left. The lights came on before them, and at the end of a much shorter hall, a door stood open. “Deirdre Enoch read extensively in the old religious texts. As did her followers. I believe they lost themselves in a dream,” he said. “They thought that anyone who bathed in a stream of pure order, as it were—in a domain of unbridled creation without destruction—would be enhanced. Armored. Annealed. That’s my opinion… what they might have been thinking. She might have told them such things.”
“A fountain of youth?” Olmy ventured, still scowling.
“Openers don’t much care about temporal immortality,” Ry Ornis said. “When we open a gate—we glimpse eternity. A hundred gates, a hundred different eternities. Coming back is just an interlude between forevers. Those who listened to Enoch thought they would end up more skilled, more brilliant. Less corrupted by competitive evolution.” He smiled, a remarkably unpleasant expression on his skeletal face. “Free of original sin.”
Olmy’s scowl faded. He glanced at Flynch, who had turned away from Ry Ornis. Something between them, a coolness. “All right. I can see that.”
“Really?” Flynch shook his head dubiously.
Perhaps the master opener could tell even more. But it did not seem wise at this point to push the matter.
A bell chimed and they entered the conference room.
Already seated within was the only surviving and whole escapee from the Redoubt: Gena Plass. As a radical Geshel, she had designed her own body and appearance decades ago, opting for a solid frame, close to her natural physique. Her face she had tuned to show strength as well as classic beauty, but she had allowed it to age, and the experience of her time with the expedition, the trauma at the lesion, had not been erased. Olmy noted that she carried a small book with her, an antique printed on paper—a Bible.
Flynch made introductions. Plass looked proud and more than a little confused. They sat around the table.
“Let’s start with what we know,” Flynch said. He ordered up visual records made by the retreating flawship that had carried Plass.
Olmy looked at the images hovering over the table: the great pipeline of the Way, sheets of field fluorescing brilliantly as they were breached, debris caught in whirling clouds along the circumference, the flaw itself, running along the center of the Way like a wire heated to blinding blue-white.
Plass did not look. Olmy watched her reaction closely. For a moment, something seemed to swirl around her, a wisp of shadow, smoothly transparent, like a small slice of twilight. The others did not see or ignored what they saw, but Plass’s eyes locked on Olmy’s and her lips tightened.
“I’m pleased you’ve both agreed to come,” Ry Ornis said as the images came to an end.
Plass looked at the opener, and then back at Olmy. She studied Olmy’s face closely. “I can’t stay here. That’s why I’m going back. I don’t belong in Thistledown.”
“Ser Plass is haunted,” Flynch said. “Ser Olmy has been told about some of these visitors.”
“My husband,” she said, swallowing. “Just my husband, so far. Nobody else.”
“Is he still there?” Olmy asked. “In the Redoubt?”
Bitterly, she said, “They haven’t told you much that’s useful, have they? As if they want us to fail.”
“He’s dead?”
“He’s not in the Redoubt and I don’t know if you could call it death,” Plass said. “May I tell you what this really means? What we’ve actually done?” She stared around the table, eyes wide.
Ry Ornis lifted his hand tolerantly.
“I have diaries from before the launch of Thistledown, from my family,” she said. “As far back as my ancestors can remember, my family was special… They had access to the world of the spiritual. They all saw ghosts. The old-fashioned kind, not the ones we use now for servants. Some described the ghosts in their journals.” She reached up and pinched her lower lip, released it, pinched it again. “I think some of the ghosts my husband. I recognize that now. Everyone on my world-line, back to before I was born, haunted by the same figure. My husband. Now I see him, too.”
“I have a hard time visualizing this sort of ghost,” Olmy said.
Plass looked up at the ceiling and clutched her Bible. “Whatever it is that we tapped into—a domain of pure order, something else clever—it’s suffused into the Way, into the Thistledown. It’s like a caterpillar crawling up our lives, grabbing hold of events and… crawling, spreading backward, maybe even forward in
time. They try to keep us quiet. I cooperate… but my husband tells me things when he returns. Do the others hear… reports? Messages from the Redoubt?”
Ry Ornis shook his head, but Olmy doubted this meant simple denial.
“What happened when the gate became a lesion?” Olmy asked.
Plass grew pale. “My husband was at the gate with Enoch’s master opener, Tom Issa Danna.”
“One of our finest,” Ry Ornis said.
“Enoch’s gate into order was the second they had opened. The first was a well to an established supply world where we could bring up raw materials.”
“Standard practice for all far-flung stations,” Flynch said.
“I wasn’t there when they opened the second gate,” Plass continued, her eyes darting between Flynch and Olmy. She seemed to have little sympathy for either. “I was at a support facility about a kilometer from the gate, and two kilometers from the Redoubt. There was already an atmospheric envelope and a cushion of sand and soil around the site. My husband and I had started a quick-growth garden. An orchard. We heard they had opened the second gate. My husband was with Issa Danna. Ser Enoch came by on a tractor and said it was a complete success. We were celebrating, a small group of researchers, opening bottles of champagne. We got reports of something going wrong two hours later. We came out of our bungalows—a scout from the main flawship was just landing. Enoch had returned to the new gate to join Issa Danna. My husband must have been right there with them.”
“What did you see?”
“Nothing at first. We watched them on the monitors inside the bungalows. Issa Danna and his assistants were working, talking, laughing. Issa Danna was so confident. He radiated his genius. The second gate looked normal—a well, a cupola. But in a little while, a few hours, we saw that the people around the new gate sounded drunk. All of them. Something had come out of the gate, something intoxicating. They spoke about a shadow.”