“Why didn't we develop it?”
“Could we have held it if we did?” Yanosh asked. “The Jarts pushed us beyond that stack, and we pushed them. Back and forth three times since its discovery.”
Little or nothing was known about Jart anatomy, psychology, or history. Even less was known about how they had made their own reversed gate just after the Way's creation, and before it had been opened and attached to Thistledown.
The Jarts had begun a furious surprise offensive at the moment of the opening, killing thousands. Ever since, the war had been waged unmercifully by both sides, using all the weapons available—including the physics of the Way itself. Those who had built it, and who accessed its many realities strung like beads, could also make large stretches of it inhospitable to anything living.
Yanosh looked at me squarely, intense green eyes challenging. “The Nexus would like someone to cross to Lamarckia and retrieve the remaining clavicle. While that someone is there, he might as well investigate the planet more thoroughly. We know little—a slim surveyor's report. Lamarckia appears to be a paradise, but its biology is unusual. We need to learn what damage Lenk has done.”
“You didn't suggest me immediately?”
Yanosh smiled.
I shook my head dubiously. “My reputation is that of a stubborn but capable renegade. I doubt my division commanders would recommend me.”
“They asked me about you, and I said you could do it—might even relish something like this. But frankly, this isn't an assignment I'd give to an old friend.”
Yanosh suspected I was bored as a simple soldier and needed a chance to excel; he knew without my telling him that my personality chafed in Way Defense. The Jart situation had settled for the time being into a drawn-out stalemate. Being brought into a Nexus action—and a difficult action at that—was a guarantee of rapid advancement, if I succeeded.
Yanosh knew I had once had some social connections with divaricates. My mother and father had known a number of them; I had once met Jaime Car Lenk fifteen years before. I knew their ways.
“Lamarckia has been dropped into my lap by the Geshel leaders in the Nexus,” Yanosh said. “It's my own kind of trial by fire. And a test. If you agree and succeed, we both benefit ... So I said I would ask, but I did not specifically back you.”
“And the immigrants?”
“Bringing them back will be politically difficult. Divaricates are peculiar in their attitude toward the Way. They abhor it, but they think they can use it. They have always spoken of a homeland away from Thistledown and the Geshels. A new, fresh Earth. But in truth, for the time being the Geshels are still in power in the Nexus, and we're more interested in the planet than in the people. If they've interfered, and it seems inevitable that they would—being who they are—then we'll bring them back, and Lenk will stand trial. It would give the radicals a bad stain on their record.”
“That's grim,” I said.
Yanosh did not disagree. “It's a grand assignment for somebody,” he said. “An entire planet, yours to explore. Not that it's going to be easy. I have to admit, in some ways, it suits you, Olmy.”
I wondered if I was being too sensitive about my secret. I had not spent the last five years just soldiering; and Yanosh, or the people behind him, were not the first outside of Way Defense to find me useful. This, however, was well beyond my proven capabilities.
“Are there other reasons I've been chosen?” I asked.
“Whatever you've done to displease the Naderites, this gets you out of the political war zone. The mission could be a kind of oubliette, actually, a tight little closet where nobody can reach you, until we sort out the political situation. Whatever it is you're involved in...”
“I've never been other than loyal to the Hexamon,” I said.
“The Nexus appreciates loyalty as well.”
“You make fine distinctions,” I said. “Power comes and goes. I render unto the caesars.”
Yanosh looked away, eyelids lowered with sudden weariness. “You've become an enigma to most of our friends. Where do your loyalties lie—with Geshels, or with Naderites?”
“Korzenowski was a Naderite,” I said, “and he built the Way.”
“He paid for his presumption,” Yanosh said.
“Where do yours lie?”
“You didn't answer my question.”
“Fortunately for us all, we don't have to reveal our loyalties to serve in defense, or in the Nexus. I've served Geshel ends for years.”
“But Uleysa...” Yanosh raised an eyebrow, significant of so many things unsaid, all that had happened since we last met. Throughout our friendship, there had been moments—quite a few of them—when Yanosh's perceptiveness irritated me.
“A mistake,” I said. “Not political. Personal. But if the Nexus wants something done—why send just one?”
Yanosh's look intensified, as if he would see through me. “Your face. Your eyes. You've never tried to blend in, have you?”
“I've never had to.”
“It's more than that.” He shook his head. “Never mind.” He sighed. “I wish I had been born before the Hexamon opened the Way. Things were much simpler.”
“And more boring. I wonder how much confidence you have in me.”
“To tell the truth, I was maneuvered into agreeing to interview you,” Yanosh said. “By skilled tacticians whose motives are never clear. I think you can do the job, of course; I don't think it's my hide they're after. And if you agree, you'll take considerable pressure off me.”
“Somebody values Lamarckia.”
“The Presiding Minister herself,” Yanosh said. “So I hear. She wants to know more about Lamarckia, but can't push a major expedition through the Nexus just now. Jarts must be our main concern. In a way, you're a chip in a massive gamble. The Presiding Minister will gamble that they can place you on Lamarckia, alone, to gather information and make judgments. When she convinces the Nexus that a larger team should be sent, their mission will go all the more smoothly. They connect with you, you fill them in, and together, we all lay a stronger claim on Lamarckia.”
“I see,” I said.
“I believe she'll win the gamble, even if the Naderites take control of the Nexus. Her arguments are unassailable. In a few weeks or months, if the geometry stack cooperates, you'll have lots of company.”
“And if they can't get Nexus approval, and the gate can't be opened?”
“You'll have to find Lenk's second clavicle and open your own gate.”
“That does sound like an oubliette,” I said.
“Nobody believes the mission will be safe or easy.”
To me, that sounded like a challenge, as much as Yanosh's flickering enthusiasm. “Perfect,” I said. In that small office, with its spectacular view, crowded with perspectives of progress on Axis City, I smiled at my old friend. “Of course, I'm interested,” I said.
“Interest isn't enough, I fear,” Yanosh said, pulling back and folding his hands. “I need an answer. Soon.”
My first instinct was to refuse the assignment. Despite recent setbacks and confusions, I did have my plans, and they had a certain elegance. I also had my responsibilities ... Which made me far more important and valuable than I seemed, than even Yanosh or anyone in the Nexus could know.
But I was acutely aware of my lack of experience. My time spent in Way Defense had largely been wasted. I will be nothing unless I am tested and tempered. The counterargument sounded much more compelling: You'll certainly be nothing if you're dead, or lost and forgotten on a worm closed off from the Way.
The voice of reason was about to prevail. But another voice leaped ahead and answered for me, the voice my father had warned me about and my mother deplored.
“I'll go,” I said.
Yanosh gave me a shrewd look, then leaned forward and grabbed my shoulder firmly. “Grand impetuosity. It's what I expected.”
I had become more than a little cynical, with my torn loyalties. I did not know who I was any
longer. Getting away—completely away—seemed a real solution. My secret would keep, perhaps be in less peril if I was gone.
This is the way history sometimes works. Simple connections, simple decisions, with untold consequences.
I studied the secret Dalgesh report, made by three surveyors immediately after Lamarckia's discovery. Lamarckia was the second planet of a yellow sun, born in a relatively metal-poor galactic region, not correlated with any known place in our own galaxy. The surveyors had barely had two days to do their work before the gate was closed, and so their findings were incomplete. They had left three monitors on the largest continent but had launched no satellites. The photos and recordings showed a world at once familiar and extraordinary.
I was particularly interested in Jaime Carr Lenk's logistics planning. The Good Lenk had selectively abandoned divaricate restrictions to make the immigration possible. There were no tested and confirmed native foodstuffs on Lamarckia, and of course no support for machines beyond what the immigrants themselves could transport. The expedition had carried six months’ food and personal water purification systems. They also took selected traditional seed stock—grains, some fruit and lumber trees, a few herbs and ornamentals. Though Lamarckia lacked the complex terrestrial ecosystem to make farming easy, these monoculture crops had been designed by humans to need nothing more than human-supplied chemicals. In effect, humans were their essential ecosystem. The chemicals, the immigrants believed, could be found or synthesized on Lamarckia.
The immigrants took no animals. For machines, they transported three small factories for making tools and electronics, and twenty multipurpose tractors, all capable of self-repair.
In one way, Lenk had stuck to his divaricate beliefs: The immigrants had refused to take nutriphores, highly efficient artificial organics that could easily have fed them indefinitely. Nutriphores, however, had not existed in Nader's time; and the Good Man had been highly suspicious of genetic engineering.
Yanosh accompanied me to the chambers in Axis Nader where the informer now resided. His name was Darrow Jan Fima. He was a small, worried man, dressed in simple dun-colored clothes. Now that he had regained his health—in decidedly advanced medical conditions not favored by divaricates—he was eager to tell his story again, to provide all the details he knew.
He told Yanosh and me of Moonrise, the village and ferry landing near his point of exit—the most likely place for the emergence of a new gate; of the towns and travel routes by river and sea, the short history of the Lenk immigrants—privations, arguments over the planning of this one-way voyage, rivalries between quickly split factions, the unavoidable politics of any group of people of that size ... And more about Lamarckia's biology, what little Lenk's immigrants had come to understand.
At the last, contrite, weeping, perhaps only half-rational, the informer had told us of the Adventists, an opposition group formed to resist Lenk's rule. They had never been very effective; they waited for the Hexamon to send people to bring them back to Thistledown. In each village, he said, they had placed an operative to prepare the way for the Hexamon. Rumors of Hexamon investigators had acquired the status of folk myth. But nobody had come.
Darrow Jan Fima had argued with his fellow Adventists, broken ranks, pretended to serve Lenk, worked his way over a year into Lenk's inner council...
And stolen the clavicle.
“Why did you take so long?” the informer asked plaintively. “I had to lie, to do so many evil things.” Finally, he whispered his confession to the sins of his people. “We have sullied the many mothers of life.”
Then, smiling as if about to give me a gift, “Lamarckia is not a bad place to die...”
I did not believe that. He had left, after all.
I began my training. Yanosh accorded me all the resources I needed. And I made appointments to have all my supplements removed.
That would have pleased my mother, but of course she would not know.
The spindle-shaped silver flawship coursed down the center of the Way at three hundred kilometers per second. I sat in one of two well-padded white seats in the ship's nose blister and stared ahead into a funnel-shaped brightness that seemed full of eerie promise. I was caught between numbness, exaltation, and simple terror.
I fingered the pink patches at the base of my skull and on my wrist, feeling a new loneliness. Since the death of my father, I had given myself a variety of mental enhancements not condoned by him: tiny devices in my head and neck that sped thoughts, improved memory, gave me certain abilities and knowledge bases, and also made direct internal connections to City Memory, to millions of individuals and thousands of libraries.
To pass undetected among the Lenk divaricates, who carried no such implants, I had been stripped of my extra voices and eyes and minds. Within my thoughts there was only my own self now. I felt a peculiar embarrassment: I was naked in a way that had nothing to do with clothing or revealed flesh.
The flawship began its long, gentle deceleration. Barely four meters from where I sat, the flaw glowed pink, brightening as the clamps spaced within the middle of the ship applied pressure. It was not friction that slowed the ship, but the clamps’ intrusion into a forbidden region of space-time.
“Greetings, Ser Olmy Ap Sennon.” Gate opener Frederik Ry Ornis, tall and thin as a praying mantis, stretched and bent himself into the blister beside me, slid his trunk into the seat and let its plush white cushions enfold his hips and chest. “How long since you've hugged the flaw?”
Whatever my concessions to progressive Geshel fashions and technologies, I had at least kept my natural body plan. Ry Ornis was of the new breed that explored more radical shapes.
“A few years. And never this far north,” I said.
“Not many of us have been this far,” Ry Ornis said with a rueful look. “Not recently. The Jarts are less than a million kilometers from here.” He stretched a long, five-jointed finger and pointed elegantly ahead.
Gate openers such as Ry Ornis had acquired immense power and prestige. Part of me envied him.
“One hour until we go down to the wall,” Ry Ornis said. “I'm not looking forward to this.”
“Why?” I asked.
Ry Ornis gave me a dour glance. “Anxious to begin your first mission?” he asked.
“I suppose,” I said, grinning.
“Ready to show your loyalty to the Hexamon Nexus ... Ripe for adventure?”
My grin faded at his sardonic tone. I shrugged against the green and purple glow of the tracting fields.
“You don't have to find this place again,” Ry Ornis complained. He grimaced ruefully. “It's been accessed by amateurs. I can imagine what they did to isolate and pull up the right world-line. They've probably mangled the embryonic gate and reduced our accesses to at most three or four. So ... I have no room for error. If I fumble a few world-lines, it's a one-way trip for you, and Lamarckia is of no use to anybody.”
I did not like Ry Ornis much; most gate openers made me nervous. Their talents were on such a different plane, their personalities radically opposed to my own.
The minutes stretched. Ry Ornis seemed mesmerized by the endless spectacle outside the blister. He leaned across the gap between our seats. “Frankly, the council members and administers have too much on their minds. If Lamarckia was really important, don't you think they'd have expended more effort than sending just you?”
My emotions burst forth in a wry laugh. “The thought's occurred to me,” I admitted.
“Why did you agree to do this?”
“It suits me,” I said. “Why did you?”
Ry Ornis grimaced again, his face contorting like a circus mask. “Among the gate openers, advancement comes at the expense of obedience. Is it the same in Way Defense?”
“I don't know,” I said, not entirely truthful. “I'm only a seven.”
Ry Ornis stared at me. “Even so,” he said.
“Can you get me to Lamarckia?”
“Blunt questions deserve blunt answ
ers,” he said. He took a deep breath. “Unfortunately, I don't know.” The flawship had slowed to a few thousand kilometers an hour; soon it would come to a complete stop. “It's not an exact science. Every gate opener has illusions. My illusion is that the more I know about a place, the better I'm able to sniff out its world-lines.”
“In some ways, it resembles Earth,” I said.
“I've read the Dalgesh report. I know the size and rough characteristics. I'm asking for a personal opinion. What makes it so interesting?”
I didn't understand what he was getting at. “There are humans on it now...”
“The story about our being able to sniff out humanoid life is quite wrong. That's not what a gate opener looks for. We look for interest.”
“What do you think is interesting?” I asked.
Ry Ornis leaned his head to one side. The tracting fields had withdrawn. We were moving at less than a hundred kilometers an hour and the flaw no longer glowed. “Lamarckia defies all we've learned of evolution and the origins of life.”
“The informer seems to think it does. He called it a ‘New Mother.’ He thought the immigrants would destroy it.”
“Now that's interest.” Ry Ornis nodded approval. “Big events mark world-lines. If Lenk's people are going to reshape the history of a planet ... I'll get you there,” he said.
The flawship pilot pulled herself forward and poked her head between us. “Enjoying the view?” she asked.
“Immensely,” I said.
“We're both nervous,” Ry Ornis said.
The pilot bent her lips and cocked her head with an expression of regret. “Well, this won't reassure you. The Jarts know we're here—no surprise—and we have maybe thirty minutes before they investigate. The borders here are flexible.” She gave us an appraising look. “Not a top-priority mission, I take it?”
I lifted myself from the seat and went aft. Ry Ornis followed, staring at the pilot with feigned affront. “Some of us might disagree,” he said haughtily.
I found that a clownish response. Perhaps I deserve no better than him. We are, after all, the agents of a measured response—a gamble. Not top-priority.