Eon (Eon, 2)

  The disk was little more than an enlarged version of the cupolas that had covered the gates just beyond the seventh chamber; except for a webwork of glowing lines, it had no visible lower half, and to Heineman's consternation, no platform or support to rest on. The party simply floated in the space immediately beneath, suspended in an invisible and all-enveloping traction field which was in turn shot through with smaller visible fields. All that separated them from the vacuum—all that lay between them and the walls of the Way, twenty-five kilometers below—was a barrier of subtle energies.

  Lanier saw several homorph and many more neomorph pilots and workers at the edges of the disk, segregated from the entourage. He watched a spindle-shaped neomorph weaving its way through purple traction sheets, followed by boxes from another section of the flawship. On the opposite side, the eight Frants also waited to disembark. Their own Frant had returned to its fellows and had already homogenized with them, rendering Heineman's question academic.

  Lanier reached out for a tenuous purple traction line and twisted around to look at Heineman.

  "How're you feeling? He asked.

  "Lousy," Heineman said.

  "He's a sissy," Carrolson said, a little pale herself.

  "You should love this," Lanier chided him. "You've always been in love with machinery."

  "Yeah, machines!" Heineman growled. "Show me any machines! Everything works without moving parts. It's unnatural."

  The disk began its descent as they spoke. The clusters of passengers excitedly exchanged picts; Patricia floated with arms and legs spread, one hand grasping the same traction line as Lanier.

  She stared down at the terminal, watching the disks enter and exit ports near the base from four directions. Many more disks waited in stacks like so many pancakes, or fanned out in spirals within a holding column.

  The disk descended slowly, giving them plenty of time to inspect the wall traffic around the terminal. Most of the lanes were filled with the cylindrical container-vehicles of many diverse shapes—spheres, eggs, pyramids and some of a blobby appearance, composed of many complex curves. Lanier tried to make sense out of it all, using what the data pillar had taught them, but couldn't—there was apparent order, but no easily discerned purpose. Patricia tracted in his direction.

  "Do you understand all that we're seeing?" he asked her.

  She shook her head. "Not all."

  Ram Kikura broke from a cluster of brightly dressed homorphs and came their way. "We'll pass through the gate in just a few minutes," she said. "You must know, if Olmy and the Nexus allow it, that I can make you very wealthy people."

  "Wealth still means that much?" Carrolson asked dubiously.

  "Information does," Ram Kikura replied. "And I've already picted with four or five powerful information distributors."

  "Send us on tour like circus freaks," Heineman grumbled.

  "Oh, give me some credit, Larry," Ram Kikura said, touching his shoulder. "You won't be abused. I wouldn't stand for it, and even if I turned out to be—what did you call them?—a scheister, Olmy would protect you. You know that."

  "Do we?" Heineman undertoned as she departed.

  "Don't be a grouch," Carrolson scolded.

  "I'm being on my guard," Heineman said testily. "When in Rome, watch out for public restrooms."

  Lanier laughed, then shook his head. "Hell, I don't even know what he means," he confided to Patricia. "But I admire his caution."

  The disk was now level with a broad, low port in the eastern side of the terminal. The surface of the building was coated by a material resembling opalescent milk glass, with bands of brassy orange metal spaced at seemingly random intervals on the horizontal planes.

  "It's beautiful," Farley said. Patricia agreed and then felt her eyes grow warm and moist; she couldn't be sure why. Her throat clutched and she wiped her cheeks as drops broke free.

  "What's wrong?" Lanier said, edging closer to her.

  "It is beautiful," she said, stifling a sob. Involuntarily, Lanier felt his own eyes moistening.

  "We can't forget them, can we?" he asked. "Wherever we go, whatever we see—they're with us. All four billion of them."

  She nodded rapidly. Olmy came up behind them and held an archaic and unexpected handkerchief over her shoulder. She took it, surprised, and thanked him.

  "If you keep this up," he warned in a whisper, "you might be surrounded in a few minutes. We are not used to seeing people cry."

  "Jesus," Carrolson said.

  "Don't judge us on that basis," Olmy said. "Our people feel as strongly, but we differ in how we express ourselves."

  "I'm fine," Patricia said, dabbing ineffectually at her eyes. "You carried this just in case we. . . ?"

  Olmy smiled. "For emergencies."

  Lanier took the handkerchief and finished wiping her face for her, then waved the cloth through the air to catch a few stray drops. "Thank you," he said, returning it to Olmy.

  "Not at all."

  They entered the terminal. Within the hollow structure, beams of light outlined paths for vehicles to take. In the center, still perhaps a kilometer below them, was the gate itself—a vast, smooth-lipped hole leading into a featureless blueness.

  "This is our second biggest gate, five kilometers in diameter," Olmy said. "The largest is seven kilometers wide and leads to the Talsit world at one point three ex seven."

  "We're going down—through this one?" Heineman asked. The disk was already resuming its descent.

  "Yes. There's no danger."

  "Except to my mental health," Heineman said. "Garry, I wish I'd been a house painter."

  They were directly over the gate now, but no detail was visible beyond the blueness. Five smaller disks moved in a squadron below, clearing a path for them. At the rim of the gate, hundreds of cylinders and other vehicles cascaded from the lanes in majestic, controlled fall.

  Light guidelines rearranged to surround their disk in a column. When they had descended to a point where they were approximately level with the edge of the gate, Lanier suddenly made out details in the bottom, directly beneath. The Frant world was actually visible in the blueness, as if distorted in an old painting-on-a-cylinder that could only be seen when placed on a circular mirror. He could make out oceans distant mountains black against an ultramarine sky, the elongated brilliant orb of a sun.

  "Jesus," Carrolson said again. "Look at it."

  "I wish I wasn't," Heineman said. "Do you think Olmy has any Dramamine?"

  The floating clusters of homorph and neomorphs picted bright circles and bursts of color in appreciation. The disk vibrated, and the landscape slid smoothly into proper perspective. The guiding column of light beams vanished and they completed their gate passage, suddenly sweeping low over a dazzling white surface.

  Lanier, Carrolson and Patricia tracted to a lower point of the disk, near the boundary of the webwork lines of force, so that they could see the horizon of the Frant world. To each side, lines of cylinders and other vehicles were spaced between hovering disks disgorging cargo. Lanier turned full circle, surveying the mountains and sea beyond the white-paved gate reception area. He had never seen a sky so intensely blue.

  Like a blowtorch describing an arc in the sky, a meteor plummeted toward the distant sea's surface. Before it struck, a web of pulsed orange rays lanced out from the horizon and shattered the meteor. More beams sought out and destroyed the crazily weaving fragments. Only dust remained to hit the ocean or land.

  "That's the story of their life, in a nutshell," Ram Kikura said, pointing to where the meteor had met its end. "That's why the Frants are Frants." She took Lanier's hand and then reached for Patricia. Olmy gathered the other three around them. "Come. We'll disembark soon. It's a bit heavier here; you'll need belts at first."

  The disk came to its assigned landing area. The transparent fields beneath them rearranged as they approached the white pavement, and the webwork of bright lines reformed into a vortex.

  "The President's advocate and
the Director of the Nexus will go down first," Ram Kikura said. "We follow, and then the Frants, and then the rest."

  Oligand Toller, Hulane Ram Seija and their aides—two fish-shaped neomorphs and three homorphs—drifted toward the center of the vortex and were smoothly deposited on the pavement beneath the disk. Olmy urged his group down, and they tracted along the same path, feet touching ground a few meters from the President's party.

  After months in Thistledown and the Way, Timbl's pull was something of a shock, like suddenly being saddled with heavy bricks. Patricia's knees sagged and her leg muscles protested. Heineman groaned and Carrolson's face looked strained.

  Bus-sized, square, low-slung vehicles rolled up on large white wheels. As each person entered, Frants wrapped lift belts around them to lessen the effect of the heavier gravitation. Neomorphs, practically helpless without traction fields, were given special full-float belts that could be adjusted to fit their wide range of shapes.

  "You should enjoy this," Ram Kikura told them as the bus rolled off the white pavement onto a broad, brick-colored road. "We're going to the beach."

  The Frant world, she explained, served as a resort for humans and several other oxygen-breathing beings in the Way. Because the level of ultraviolet from the bright yellow-dwarf star was higher than humans were used to, an atmospheric shield had been erected over several thousand square kilometers. The resort lay in the shield's shadow.

  "The ocean has few large carnivorous life forms—none that would want to eat humans, anyway—and the environment is clean. It's ideal. The vacation spot of choice for all who can afford to go—which is virtually any corporeal citizen."

  The resort's long, low main building was in an ideal location, fronting a broad white quartz-sand beach on one side of a half-moon harbor. Each room had a patio and transparent doors with a choice of undisguised real scenery or various illusart displays. The furniture, in keeping with the Old Terrestrial motif of the resort, was real and unchangeable.

  They ate lunch, their first meal on the Frant world, in a restaurant decorated in late-twentieth-century style, the food served by homorphs. Mechanical workers were not in evidence. After lunch, they walked to the resort buildings and Ram Kikura inspected their rooms carefully before letting them enter. They still wore their belts, though Lanier felt he was up to doing without. He would only remove his when Heineman did, however, and Heineman seemed content to leave it on.

  Patricia looked around her room, then joined the others on Lanier's patio. Ram Kikura told them they could rest and swim for a few hours, and that she and Olmy would be nearby if they were needed. "They're taking a room for themselves upstairs," Carrolson said in a confidential tone after she had left.

  "I think they're lovers."

  Patricia opened the patio's metal gate. "I'm going to take a walk," she said. She glanced at Lanier. "Unless you think we should stick together all the time."

  "No, We're probably safe enough here. Go ahead."

  Lanier watched her walk down the beach, stiff-legging through the sand past homorphs and even a few belted neomorphs. Nobody paid her much attention. He shook his head, smiling. "Could be Acapulco," he said, "with a few odd balloons drifting around."

  Farley put her arm around him. "I've never been to Acapulco, but I don't think it had a sky that color."

  "Lovebirds," Carrolson sniffed, glanced reproachfully at Heineman. "You never treat me that way."

  "I'm an engineer," Heineman said. "I don't pamper, I just make things run right."

  "You do indeed," Carrolson said.

  "My God, listen to us, we're cheerful," Lanier said.

  "Patricia isn't," Carrolson said. "I've seen her putting on her stern look when she sees you two. I think she's jealous, Garry."

  "Christ." Lanier sat down in a patio chair and stared across the dazzling beach and intense green-blue sea to the knife-sharp horizon. "She's been an enigma since I first met her."

  "Not to me," Farley said. All faces turned to her. "I understand her at least a little," she continued. "I was like her—less brilliant, but inner-directed. Stubborn. My life was miserable until I was twenty-five or twenty-six, and I decided to be more normal—exterior normal, anyway."

  "She'll be twenty-four tomorrow," Carrolson said.

  "That's her birthday?" Farley asked.

  Carrolson nodded. "I've told Olmy and explained about birthday parties. He thinks it's a good idea. Apparently they don't have birthdays here—so few people are actually born, biologically speaking. There are naming days, maturity celebrations—mostly in Axis Nader. I gather that age doesn't mean as much to them as it does to us."

  "So what kind of party will it be?"

  "I suggested we keep it small—ourselves, Olmy, Ram Kikura. He agreed."

  "Lenore, you're a marvel," Lanier said, unconsciously adopting Hoffman's tone of voice. Carrolson curtsied and dimpled her cheeks with her twisting index fingers.

  "We're more than cheerful," Heineman said, staring at her. "We're absolutely nuts."

  Patricia had gone about half a kilometer down the beach when she saw Oligand Toller standing on the sand ahead of her. He wore shorts, revealing blond-haired, well-shaped legs slightly bowed, and a loud Hawaiian-print shirt. "Do you like it?" he asked, modeling for her.

  She gawped, not knowing what to say.

  "Well, I tried," he said, seeming chagrined. "I'd like to talk with you, if you don't mind."

  "I'm not sure—" she said.

  "It might be important. For all of you."

  She stood her ground, head bowed slightly, staring up at him, but said nothing.

  "We can keep on walking," Toller said. "I'd like to explain some things before you meet with the President—if he can make time for us."

  "Let's talk, then," she said, walking past him. He took two running strides to catch up with her.

  "We're not your enemies, Patricia," Toller admonished. "Whatever Olmy may have told you—"

  "Olmy's said nothing against anybody," Patricia said. "This is just my way," she said. "We're—I'm not very happy these days, for obvious reasons."

  "Most understandable," the advocate said, keeping pace with her. None of the other bathers or floating neomorphs seemed to find it unusual for the President's advocate and a woman from centuries in their past to be walking together. They were casually ignored. "I find the resort here wonderful—I come often. Reminds me of what it is to be human. . . do you understand?"

  "To see things that are real," Patricia said.

  "Yes. And to get away from the problems for a while. Well, this is obviously a working vacation, and brief at that—we can't stay more than two local days. But we thought it worthwhile to show you how our system works. We are trying to enlist your support—Patricia? May I call you that?"

  She nodded.

  "Because of the way things have worked out, you people can be very influential. We won't force you into our ways or opinions—that's not how our government works. Modeled on your own, after all."

  They stopped at a natural basalt breakwater pointing out to sea. Patricia turned and saw a small, bright meteor pass across a few degrees of the horizon. No beams reached out to destroy it—it was small enough to disintegrate harmlessly on its own.

  "We helped the Frants install their Sky Lance," Toller said. "When we opened the gate, they were still in the early atomic age. We arranged for some exchanges of information, set up a client–patron relationship and gave them what they needed to protect their world against the millennial comet sweeps."

  "What did you get in return?"

  "Oh, they received much more than Sky Lance for what they gave. We opened the Way to them. They're full partners in three gates now, commerce with three worlds and the normal-space trading systems around them. In return, they leased raw material and information rights to us. But the most valuable commodity they contribute is themselves. You met Olmy's partner. We find them ideal to work with—resourceful, reliable, unfailingly pleasant. And as far as anyone ca
n tell, they genuinely enjoy working with us."

  "Makes them sound like good pets," Patricia said.

  "Yes, there is that aspect," Toller admitted. "But they're at least as intelligent as we are—unsupplemented, of course—and nobody treats them as if they were second-class citizens, or pets. You may have to drop some of your past prejudices to see our situation clearly, Patricia."

  "My prejudices are dropped," she said. "I'm just being. . .” She raised her hands and shook her head. Not once since their meeting had she looked directly at Toller's face.

  "Before we came, every thousand years, Timbl would pass through a sweep of old comets. They'd regularly lose more than half their population. All this ocean is cometary water—gathered across billions of years. Apparently, there was a long lull about a million years ago, and in that time the Frants evolved to their current form and built up basic cultures. Then the sweeps began again. Gradually, the individual Frants became more and more alike, passing information and personality traits on through chemical messengers, then through cultural means. They became a holographic society, the better to absorb the shock of the sweeps. But they had never realized their potential, and weren't about to, until our gate was opened. Now they have some of our own technologies—using high-speed pictors to update each other, or even exchanging partial personalities. All in all, I'm not sure who was the more lucky—the Frants, or ourselves. We might have lost to the Jarts centuries ago if the Frants hadn't helped us."

  Patricia listened intently, filling in what she hadn't had time to research in the data service. "Why can't you establish some sort of client–patron relationship with the Jarts?" she asked.

  "Ah! The Jarts are quite another story. You know, of course, that we found them occupying the Way when we first connected it to the seventh chamber."

  "So I've heard," she said, remembering what the rogue had told her.

  "The Engineer had the misfortune of opening an experimental gate on the Jart home world. Time in the Way was not yet matched with our own time. They were able to spend about three centuries in the incomplete Way, making it their home, even learning to open crude gates. When the Way was connected and opened, there they were—much as they are today. Strong, intelligent, aggressive, absolutely convinced they're destined to populate all universes. We fought a violent war with them and pushed them back in the first decades. Then we opened selected gates and filled the first segment of the Way—down to one ex five—with soil and air. All the time we were building the Axis City, we fought skirmishes with them, pushing them back farther and farther, closing their gates. Finally, they retreated to two ex nine, and we established a barrier at that point. We tried reasoning, making exchanges. They wouldn't have it. We knew we couldn't rid the Way of them—we weren't strong enough."