Legacy (Eon, 1) Read online

  “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 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.”

  “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.”

  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 fronti
er, 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.”

  “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.”