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  She relayed this to Demetrois. They walked around it, heads inclined, while the Kelt stood a few arms away, weapon ready. Can I open the gate myself? she asked.

  The clavicle responded that there was a possibility the gate could be expanded from this side, but that such an action would undoubtedly alert anybody or anything monitoring the gate, whatever they might be.

  Do you know who opened this gate?

  No, the clavicle said. Gates at this stage of their creation are pretty much all alike.

  She turned to Oresias and Atta and said, “It’s too small to pass through. If I try to open it wider, people on the other side will know we’re here.”

  Oresias considered this for a moment, then he and Atta conferred in low voices. “We’ll think about this overnight,” Oresias said. “Come back to the beecraft. We’ll set up camp.”

  The sun was already below the horizon and the sky over the grassland darkled quickly. Rhita squinted at the lens again, seeing a watery star distorted through it, and nodded at Demetrios. “Let’s go,” she said.

  Camouflage nets were thrown over the beecraft, making them look like grassy hillocks—not a very good disguise, she thought, considering how flat everything was around them, but better than nothing. Oresias and Atta met with the kybernetes of the cargo plane while four large tents were erected. Rhita listened to their plans for the next day from her cot on a pad of grass flattened by a canvas sheet. Flies and moths buzzed around her light in the corner of the tent. She was exhausted; hardly able to keep her eyes open, and yet she could not seem to drift off. Demetrios brought a can of soup from the makeshift galley and she sipped it, asking herself silently, again and again, Why here? Why open a gate here? Who could have followed Patrikia to this Gaia, and who would want to?

  There had been no messages on the teukhos for the past two days. This evening, however, she flipped the switch and saw her grandmother’s words again. She had been no witch, after all; she was still advising Rhita about politics in Alexandria, a world to all intents and purposes lost to her granddaughter now. Rhita read the long message and closed her eyes, somewhat relieved; for a time, she had thought perhaps Patrikia was staring over her shoulder, holding her accountable. Now it was apparent that the sophē had been mortal, after all.

  Exhausted, Rhita turned off the slate, packed it into its goatleather case, and turned down the kerosene lantern. In other parts of the tent, all was quiet. Outside, the day’s gentle wind had settled, and the prairie was wrapped in expansive silence, with thousands of stadia of emptiness all around.

  25

  Thistledown City

  Lanier, feeling a need for simple amusement, rearranged the decor of his guest quarters below the Nexus dome. He walked from room to room in the palatial suite, giving voice instructions. “Polynesian,” he said in the dining hall, currently austere, sharp-edged and classical. The decor projectors searched their period memories and produced a fire-and torch-lit ceremonial chamber, matted with brown and white tapas, set with wooden bowls. The walls were constructed of palm logs and faced with more matting woven of grass and palm leaves.

  “Very good,” he approved. By making fun of such marvels, he felt he could soothe his wizened little ego, or at least put himself in a better mood.

  Once, powerful governors—senators, presiding ministers and even presidents—had lodged in these quarters. The rooms had been empty for centuries after the exodus down the Way, and were now used only for ceremonial occasions.

  Korzenowski had gone off to make arrangements for the full Nexus conference; Mirsky was in his own quarters, similar to these; Lanier had nothing to occupy him but his thoughts. He felt like a fifth wheel. He was old, if that mattered; his understanding had never been adequate to a problem like this. Yet he had not expressed his reservations to anyone yet, and that worried him still more. It meant the administrative dog within him was starting at last to grip the bone being forced between its teeth. He did not want that; he wanted repose, not mind-bending excitement and challenge. He wanted—

  Not to put too fine a point on it, Garry Lanier realized he wanted to be dead.

  His eyes opened a little wider and he sat on the step of the staircase leading into the dining hall (carved from volcanic rock, the projectors perceived). He felt as if his heart had skipped a beat. Always willing to hide his feelings from himself, he had never directly confronted this particular personal truth.

  An end to life and experience. Acquiescence to rest of the final sort. Reassurance that whatever the advances in medicine and technology, for him at least all life could end in darkness and quiet.

  Lanier had lived through more unusual things than he could clearly recall; much of his memory was clouded by simple incomprehension. He might spend a century researching what he had seen, and be only a little wiser; so he would chuck it all and lie back.

  Still, the admission shocked him. He rubbed his hollowing cheeks with his long, thin, still-strong fingers and repeated this interior revelation several times, savoring its bitterness. Whatever he had been, he had never been a quitter, and yet this was nothing if not wanting to quit.

  Heineman had not wanted to quit. He had accepted mortality, but had enjoyed life to the end, and he had survived as much trauma as Lanier; perhaps more. Lenore Carrolson’s spirit was intact; she still had vitality and purpose. And Karen relished life so much she refused to think of dying, postponing that day with Hexamon technology.

  No wonder he and Karen had parted ways. Like Lenore, she had not been blunted by all she had seen, and she had seen as much as he. She had grieved for their daughter as deeply as he—grief made all the more difficult because it was mixed with an impossible hope…that they might someday recover Andia’s implant. Where was his failure, then? The room’s voice announced a visitor at the main entrance. Lanier groaned, hoping for time to chew this over before having to confront his fellows, but that was not to be. He could not deny visitors now. “All right,” he said. He walked to the suite’s main entrance, a five-meter-long, two-meter-wide steel bridge suspended in a hollow sphere of meteoric crystal. A slice of the crystal moved aside from the opposite end of the bridge. Pavel Mirsky stood there, smiling his usual chagrined smile.

  “Am I interrupting?”

  “No,” Lanier said, spooked more by the man’s normality and solidity than by anything else. Why couldn’t he come dressed as a god, at least? A thunderbolt or two flickering in his hair…

  “I do not sleep normally, and I am bored just searching for information…I need company. I hope that is fine with you?”

  Lanier nodded weak assent. Of course he would be bored. Even the Stone’s incredible libraries would seem childish to him…wouldn’t they?

  “I haven’t apologized for imposing on you, have I?”

  “I believe you have,” Lanier said. Surely, his memory can’t be faulty?

  “Perhaps I have.” He smiled again and crossed the bridge, passing Lanier. “These are spacious living areas, yet not, I think, much more luxurious than where common folks lived? Technology finally made equals of leaders and led.”

  “It’s too rich for my tastes.”

  “I agree,” Mirsky said as they crossed the reception rotunda, passing beneath a dome depicting the heavens as viewed from the Thistledown’s northern pole. At the moment, the Moon was visible and full, and its light cast shadows under their feet. “This is a nice effect, though, no?”

  He seemed more like a child now. More spontaneous, playful, yet in control.

  Lanier followed Mirsky into the suite’s small informal sitting room. The Russian tried out a stylish and neutral chair—neutral in that it did not possess traction cushions or any other field effect. He bounced on the centuries-old cushions, still pliant, and shook his head with mock sadness. “I was such a mess when I left this place, this starship,” he said. “I had lost much of my personality, or so I thought…very confused. I remember one thing clearly, however.”

  Lanier cleared his throat. Mirsky’s
long stare was unnerving.

  “My admiration for you. I found you an incredible force. You faced all from the beginning, and did not…crack?”

  Lanier shook his head slowly, not quite denying that he had kept his sanity. “Those were hard times.”

  “The worst. I can hardly believe what I am now came out of those times, those circumstances. But this evening, I feel this urge to talk, and I want to talk more with you. You and I are not much alike, most would say, but I see similarities.”

  “Even now?”

  Mirsky’s face became bland. “You are not enthusiastic. I fear you have come to the end of your rope.”

  Lanier barked a laugh. “Yes,” he said. “How true.” Softly.

  “You know, a man reaches the end of his rope, he falls off.”

  “Hangs himself, actually,” Lanier said. “That’s the clichè.”

  “But a dog, he reaches the end, bites the rope…he’s free.”

  “Old Russian wisdom?”

  “Hardly,” Mirsky said, still bland. He did not quite look at Lanier, not quite away from him. He seemed a kind of pudding into which one could comfortably fall, to live a life of vanilla and sleep. The itch to confess flared.

  Lanier sat opposite him, trying to revivify that fluid body motion of his youth, just to compete with this avatar. Competition not being practical, but—

  “All right,” he said. “I’m tired. I’ve lived too long. You’ve lived out a universe and you’re not bored or tired.”

  “Yes, but I have been bored and tired in ways I cannot see clearly now. Exhausted by failure. We who went down the Way failed miserably, and it cost us in ways…well, it cost dearly. We were scarred. We suffered what I can only call an ego-loss, and that alone was almost enough to bring us to self-extinction. When you exist in a nullity, ego-loss is like loss of blood. We nearly sapped ourselves away.” Mirsky rested his hands on his thighs and splayed his fingers, examining them as if looking for dirt or hangnails. Almost shyly, he asked, “Are you curious about me, what I am now?”

  “We’re all curious,” Lanier said, again softly, gently, as if not to disturb Mirsky’s enchanting blandness.

  “I am back to my old self, mostly. Sometimes I do not control my capabilities, and that is when what I must do exceeds the comprehension of my old self.”

  Lanier raised his brows, not understanding. Mirsky continued without elaboration.

  “But I come to talk about you, and why I came back to you. I owed you a debt. I could not discharge that debt across all of time. In some of my forms, this debt did not bother me, since all my past was tucked away like an old book, unread. But when I knew I would return as my old self, the debt surfaced.”

  “I don’t know of any debt.” Lanier felt the impulse grow, not just confession but a bursting, an exploding. He wanted to hold his head and keep himself together.

  “A simple debt. I need to thank you.”

  Tears came to Lanier’s eyes, unbidden, unwanted.

  “You were decent. You did your work and did not ask for thanks. You are the reason I survived to make our long journey, and come back now. In every situation, there can be a seed crystal of goodness and decency, of sensibility. You were that crystal on the Stone.”

  Lanier leaned his head back on the chair, tears streaming down his cheeks. Had it been in his character, he would have sobbed. He held those spasms in, but felt a release none the less.

  “A simple thanks,” Mirsky reiterated.

  How incredible that in all the time he had worked on the restoration, he remembered no one thanking him. Not even Karen, too close to see the need. He had sacrificed life and time for the people he had administered, yet because of his manner—a confident self-sufficiency—he had never been thanked, or because of some personal flaw could not remember the thanks. Perhaps he had never put himself in a position to be thanked. The release now was like the unwinding of an ancient spring that had pinched his vitals.

  He lifted his head and stared at the Russian’s blurred face, embarrassed and grateful at once. “I was your enemy,” he managed to croak. He touched his face and was surprised to find old skin, soft and yielding.

  Mirsky clucked his tongue, a startling mannerism in an avatar. “To have a decent enemy is a blessing beyond measure,” he said, rising. “I have disturbed your rest. I will go.”

  “No,” Lanier said, lifting his arm. “No. Please. I do need to talk with you.” The fear and envy this man aroused had turned in a moment into a kind of love, a homecoming of feelings he would never have acknowledged four decades ago. With these feelings came a sudden wary, almost painful concern for Karen. What was she doing now? He needed to speak to her, too. His skin…so old!

  “Shall we reminisce? There appears to be time enough now, and may not be later.”

  Mirsky nodded and sat again, leaning forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped. The blandness had gone from him.

  “Maybe we both need memories refreshed,” Lanier said. “I wanted to tell you how tired I was, but I don’t feel very tired now.”

  Mirsky waved his hand nonchalantly. “Old warriors always chew the bull long after.”

  “Chew the fat,” Lanier said, smiling. It seemed very unlikely Mirsky made an unconscious error. “I’d like that.”

  “Tell me what happened after I defected.”

  “First, I’d like to ask a question…A thousand questions.”

  “I cannot answer a thousand questions,” Mirsky said.

  “Then one or two.”

  Mirsky nodded skeptically.

  “Your presentation…there was so much power there. You tell us they’ll take—they are taking—whole galaxies and converting them, destroying them…. Lifeless galaxies?”

  Mirsky grinned. “Wise question. Yes. Stillborn, you might say…Huge, full of too much energy, burning themselves out anyway, or quickly falling into frozen stars at their center…You call them black holes. No life, no order in those galaxies will survive. The Final Mind accelerates and controls their death.”

  Lanier nodded stupidly, caught himself, and licked his dry lips. “With so much power, why not just force us? Send a kind of army of people like yourself, or…something stronger.”

  “Not subtle. Not the right way.”

  “What if you fail?”

  Mirsky shrugged. “Even so.”

  “What will happen…between now and the end of time?” There it was, bald; he had had his interest in the future renewed, and with that came curiosity.

  “I remember only what I need to remember. If I remembered more, I would not be allowed to tell you…not everything.”

  “How long will it be—until the end?”

  “Time means less and less in that region of history,” Mirsky said. “But an estimate—a ballpark figure—is not too misleading. About seventy-five billion years.”

  Lanier blinked, trying to absorb such a span.

  Mirsky shook his head sadly. “Sorry. I am not trying to be evasive, but there can only be so much revelation now. Perhaps later…much later, when humans join the communities…”

  Lanier shivered and nodded. “All right,” he said. “But I’m still curious. Others are probably more curious than I am…The very people you have to convince.”

  Mirsky agreed with a wry expression. “Now, Garry, I have my own questions. Can we talk about what happened after the Geshel precincts left?”

  “Starting from when?”

  “From the return to Earth.”

  Lanier thought, found a starting point, and began his confession, after the need for it had finally passed.

  26

  Gaia

  Birds sang and something else was in the air—something electric. Rhita pulled down her covers and listened to the men moving around in the rest of the tent, grumbling. She rubbed sleep from her eyes; she had been exhausted, strained to the breaking point, she realized now. For a moment she simply hung on to the comfort of her bed, refusing to listen to her instincts. Then something explod
ed not far from the tent and she was on her knees, and on her feet, dressed only in loose-fitting underwear. The air crackled and wind beat the outside of the tent. A few men screamed questions and orders at each other. Demetrios lifted the edge of the tent flap, stared at her, embarrassed, and said almost sternly, “Thunderstorm. It’s going to pour rivers on us any minute.”

  “Just what we needed!” She stepped into her pants, not at all embarrassed to be seen by him. In fact, she found the moment slightly arousing—the appraising look in his eye before his politeness made him look down…

  “It adds to the excitement,” he admitted, back turned. She looped her shirt closed and zipped up her jacket, then bent down to put on her shoes, buckling quickly. In seconds, she was fully dressed. She brushed past Demetrios and skipped by a kybernetes and a soldier, down the covered gap between two sections of the tent, into the outside.

  Oresias and Jamal Atta stood at the edge of the ravine, Oresias with hands on hips, Atta speaking into the mouthpiece of a mobile radio mounted on the back of a soldier. What happened to radio silence? she asked herself. Demetrois came through the tent door behind her, just as big drops of rain splashed on her face and hands and darkened the fabric of her jacket. Atta lifted his hands and shook his head; the last straw, more than any human could bear.

  The two beecraft seemed hunched under the onslaught, blades drooping almost to the level of the grass. Soldiers stood in the hatchways, smoke rising from several long pipes as they casually watched the downpour grow more intense. Oresias handed the soldier the mouthpiece and drew his jacket up over his head, running toward them. Lightning flashed to the south, lighting up the canopy of clouds and the steppe around them with cold, pale brilliance.

  “There’s disaster in Alexandreia,” Oresias shouted over another crack of thunder. He pushed Rhita and Demetrios back through the door into the tent and threw aside his jacket, running his hand like a comb through his wet hair, rubbing water out of his eyes with his knuckles. Atta remained standing in the middle of the storm, raising his arms now and then, shouting or whispering, they couldn’t tell over the noise.