"Somebody told me a few of our people have defected," Hoffman said, keeping her eyes resolutely on the back of the person in front of her. The elevator walls were too uniform to show motion, and there was no sensation, unpleasant or otherwise, but she still wasn't enjoying the trip.
"Four—two Russians and two Americans; that's what I've heard," Ann said.
"Anybody know who?"
"Rimskaya," Cunningham said. "And Beryl Wallace."
"Beryl. . .” She raised her eyebrows and shook her head.
"I wouldn't expect that from her. . . or Rimskaya." Did she feel they had betrayed her? That was ridiculous. "What about the Russians?"
"One of them is Mirsky," Ann said. "I didn't recognize the second name."
Mirsky didn't surprise her at all. She could read strangers clearly but not the people in her own command. So much for the instincts of a master administrator.
Their quarters were spread through the precincts. More homorphs met them as the groups were further divided and escorted to apartments on different levels.
"You'll be sharing quarters in parties of three," their escort told them. "Space is at a premium now."
"Roomies?" Cunningham asked Hoffman and Blakely.
"Roomies," Hoffman said. Blakely nodded.
Their group of twelve dwindled rapidly as attendants shunted them into vacant quarters. They were the last three, escorted by a single female homorph, who picted a Russian flag over her shoulder. Their apartment was at the very end of a long, gently curved cylindrical hallway. Green numbers beneath the door glowed brightly as they approached.
The rooms were small and very blank. The homorph remained to give them basic instructions on use of the data services. She then wished them well and departed.
"Such a hurry," Blakely said, shaking her head.
"Since we're out of the action," Hoffman said, "or along for the ride, whatever, we might as well settle in."
Within minutes, they were eagerly discussing the possibilities of decor with an assigned ghost from the library. They had several hours before the Breakout, as it was being called; Hoffman used that time to contact others in the precinct who had been assigned quarters.
Blakely and Cunningham decided on an interim decor which gave some color and shape—and considerably more apparent living space—to the apartment. Hoffman joined them to examine the facilities, and to sample the food provided by an automatic kitchen tucked in one corner.
Citizens and Earth people alike, the assigned ghost informed them, would be able to witness the breakout, almost in its entirety. Monitors placed throughout the Thistledown would transmit detailed views of the events and their results; everyone had a ringside seat, if they desired one.
No longer hungry, or very interested in playing with the quarters, the three women sat before a continuous documentary of what was happening in the asteroid and the precincts.
The images were almost too real. After a few minutes, Cunningham turned away from the display and began giggling uncontrollably. "This is ridiculous," she said, clutching her cheeks and rolling back on the apparent Oriental-pattern carpet. "It's terrifying." Blakely caught the bug next.
"We're hysterical," she said, and that sent them both into fresh paroxysms. "We don't have any idea what's going on."
"Oh, I do," Hoffman said solemnly, feeling left out.
"What?" Cunningham asked, trying to be serious.
Hoffman rolled one hand into a near-cylinder. She peered through it at them. "Blow one end off—the end no one ever tried to drill through. The north pole."
"Jesus," Cunningham said, her giggles gone as quickly as they had started. "What would have happened it we had tried to drill through it? Where would the drillers have ended up?"
"Blow the north pole off," Hoffman resumed, ignoring the unanswerable question, "and knock the Stone off the corridor. And after that—"
"What?" Ann asked, owlish now and also very serious.
"This half of the city leaves the corridor. We become a space station."
"And the Stone?" Cunningham asked.
"Another moon."
"And we go back to Earth?" Blakely asked.
Hoffman nodded.
"Damn," Blakely said. "It's a. . . I don't know what it is. A fairy tale. Maybe it's the day of resurrection. What did they call it? Rapture. Dead people flying up through the freeways. People leaving their cars right through the roofs." Embarrassed, Blakely turned back to the projected display. "That doesn't make any sense, does it? No freeways, no cars. Only angels coming from the sky."
Hoffman made a deep, shuddering sigh. "You're right," she said. "It's a fairy tale." Then, abruptly, she broke into laughter, and couldn't stop until her lungs ached and her face was wet with tears.
An hour before the scheduled breakout, Corprep Rosen Gardner picted a personal message to Hoffman requesting that he be allowed to visit. A few minutes later, he arrived at the apartment door in person—"incarnate," Hoffman reminded herself. She invited him in. By that time, they had all regained some semblance of control.
Gardner's political work on behalf of the divided Hexamon and the Naderites was no longer necessary, he explained; he had volunteered to act as Corprep in the New Nexus for the Earth people, and chose Hoffman as the most logical person to speak with. He offered to keep her informed by linking her with his private memory and information service.
Her vacation was over, she thought, not without some regrets. She was on call again.
"I also bring news," he said, standing before her with his hands behind his back. She was beginning to get a sense of the orthodox Naderites—dedicated, almost chivalric, not unlike some of the political conservatives she had dealt with on Earth. "We have word of Patricia Luisa Vasquez, and the four who were sent to find her."
"Yes?"
"Three of the four have returned to our precincts. They are Lawrence Heineman, Karen Farley and Lenore Carrolson. They were kept as captives for a time, I am ashamed to say, by the Geshels in Axis Nader and Central City. They were released just before the Geshel precincts began acceleration. They will join your people shortly."
"And the others?"
"Patricia Luisa Vasquez was given an opportunity to find her way home," Ser Gardner continued. "What that means, precisely, I am not sure; the details are sketchy. She and Garry Lanier were detained and sent with the gate opener and his party to one point three ex nine; many in that party, including Lanier, are now on their way back, and have passed through the accelerating precincts safely. They will not return to our sector in time to join with us, however."
She had no idea what a "gate opener" was and didn't feel it was appropriate to ask. She could look it up later. "Are they going to leave the corridor?"
"I do not know," Gardner said. "Their leader, Ser Olmy, has been informed of the timetable. He believes they can escape the sealing of the Way. They have been delayed by stopping at several reopened gates to drop off nonhuman clients."
Hoffman absorbed the news quietly, slapping her left hand lightly against her thigh. She had assumed the four searchers and Vasquez had died or been irretrievably lost in the shuffle. For the time being, she had managed to forget about them. Now she once again had something to worry about, with little knowledge of the perils involved, or their chances for success.
"Our zero hour will be in forty-three minutes," Corprep Gardner said. "By the way, I thought I would inform you that numbers of Hexamon citizens have been solicited by a small group of your people. There is a 'wild party' going on in the quarters of Axis Thoreau. Some of your female personnel are bartering sexual favors, for what commodities I don't know. I have placed that party off limits to my people."
Hoffman looked at him, startled, not sure how to respond. "That's wise," she finally managed. "I don't know who would corrupt whom the most."
In the stone:
From end to end of the seven chambers: darkness and quiet. In the first chamber, clouds had built up since the re-rotation; rain threatened
in the darkness.
In the bore holes, the absolute silence of vacuum, and no activity but the occasional flight of a tiny monitor.
In the second chamber, a faint whistle of wind as the atmosphere regained its equilibrium. More windows had broken out, and some buildings—including a mega—had collapsed despite the efforts of the engineers.
In the third chamber, much the same, though no buildings had collapsed. The scattered glows of still-active illusart windows in Thistledown City resembled a swarm of fireflies.
In the fourth chamber, the washed-out forests and unleashed waters had finally made their peace with each other. The compounds formerly occupied by Eastern and Western bloc personnel had been washed away, their debris carried down to the lakes or jammed up against trees near the shorelines.
Those who had died to invade or defend the Stone—the Potato—the Thistledown—still lay in their graves, unseeing, their patterns flown, personalities vanished, Mysteries made even more mysterious.
The fifth chamber: as dark and hollow as a vast cavern in the Earth, with only the eternal sound of waterfalls and rivers.
The sixth chamber, vigilant, the only chamber besides the seventh still illuminated by a plasma tube, although that was uncertain and unreliable.
The plasma tube flickered and was extinguished. No matter. All the preparations had been made, and now only monitors patrolled the Thistledown's vastness.
The seventh chamber. A wind blew gently down from the cap, rustling the copses of scrub forest; it lazed through the abandoned tent with a faint whistle, flapping the canvas. A section of the tent sagged where a pole had drifted loose during the de-rotation. Surprisingly little else had been disturbed.
The detonators waited patiently beside their charges.
The joined precincts of Axes Thoreau and Euclid were too far down the Way to be visible from this point without the aid of a high-powered telescope. The Way seemed empty, infinite, eternal and serene: the greatest thing ever created by human beings.
Outside the Thistledown, black space and stars and Moon and poor battered, burned, winter-besieged Earth, where few if any were even thinking of the asteroid or the possibility of rescue. How could there be rescue from such total misery and death? History had passed them by.
The asteroid's overhauled Beckmann drive engines prepared for their part in the drama, stockpiling reaction mass to be slung out and dematerialized in the combined beams. They would reduce the kick of the separation, and the combined kick and counter-thrust would maneuver the Thistledown into a circular orbit around the Earth, at an altitude of some ten thousand kilometers.
The precincts of Axes Thoreau and Euclid began their acceleration, in an apparent suicide run to smash themselves against the seventh chamber cap. Within, twenty-nine million human beings—corporeal and otherwise—did the various things humans do while waiting to see if they will live or die.
Behind the precincts, half a million kilometers down the Way, a tiny defense flawship was decelerating drastically, the flaw ahead of it brightening to violet and blue. It had to slow to Earth orbital velocity by the time it followed the linked precincts out the end of the Way—if it managed that feat at all.
The charges buried in the walls of the seventh chamber synchronized.
The grips of Axes Thoreau and Euclid were withdrawn, and the huge cylinders coasted south toward the seventh chamber cap at just a little over forty thousand kilometers per hour, or eleven kilometers per second.
The detonators reached their appointed microsecond.
Within the seventh chamber, there was a noise beyond human description. Billions of tons of rock and metal rushed in toward the axis from the seven charge points, and immense fissures shot outward to the vacuum of space.
Around the northern pole of the asteroid, dust and debris spread out in a wide circular fan, followed by a white glow more brilliant than the sun. The glow faded to red and purple. A seventy-kilometer-wide monk's cap of rock was propelled away from the asteroid. The asteroid withdrew much more slowly from its severed end, and for the briefest moment, between them, there was a hole in space, filled with the light of the plasma tube, showing an infinite perspective—
Out of which flew the linked precincts of Axes Euclid and Thoreau, barely missing the asteroid itself, shunting aside debris with conical traction fields. Through the fading glow and spinning chunks of rock and metal, the precincts passed out of range of the Thistledown's Beckmann drives. The drives then fired to maneuver the Thistledown into orbit.
The Way was now an independent entity. The hole in space began to heal, wrapped in a thousand varieties of darkness—violet and sea green, carmine and indigo—venting winds mightier than a thousand hurricanes into the vacuum.
Closing.
Sealing itself off forever from this universe.
Olmy sat back and closed his eyes. Yates was more animated, rubbing his hands together. Senator Oyu appeared as cool as ever, but Lanier noticed her eye movements were frequent and jerky.
If Prescient Oyu was even slightly nervous, and Olmy resigned, then Lanier figured he had every right to be terrified.
"Are we going to make it?" he asked.
"Just barely," Olmy said, eyes still shut.
Lanier faced the bow.
The brightness of the seven coordinated blasts had reduced the bow to opacity. Now it cleared and gave them a view of the Way's beginning. Within a glowing circle of molten asteroidal debris and frozen streaks of rushing water vapor was a circle of blackness.
The circle was shrinking, being taken over by an iridescent nullity that hurt the eyes: the new terminus of the Way.
And then, within the diminishing black circle, Lanier saw a dull white crescent. He blinked.
The Moon.
The flawship twirled in the outrushing atmosphere. The iridescent nullity had almost completed its task; it seemed to take them forever to approach the rapidly shrinking blackness and crescent Moon.
Chunks of soil rose from the walls and shimmied up the fresh, nacreous boundary. The boundary eclipsed the Moon.
"Oh, God," Lanier said. He clasped his hands and closed his eyes.
Epilog - Four Beginnings
One - 6 P.D.
And all the king's horses, and all the king's men. . .
The phrase occurred to Heineman often as he piloted a blunt-arrowhead flyer from point to devastated point around the globe. What the Death itself had not incinerated or poisoned, the Long Winter had ravaged; it had seemed for a time that even the ingenuity, technology and power of the New Hexamon itself could not make the situation right.
Yet, as Lenore—his wife of four years—reminded him during his worst, most discouraged moments, "They managed to climb back up even without our help—our presence has to make things move faster."
But even hope and the prospects of a brighter future could not take the edge off, or reduce the bitter gall of what he saw in the course of a single day's surveying.
India, Africa, Australia and New Zealand and much of South America had emerged from the Death with minor damage. North America, Russia and Europe had been practically sterilized. China had lost a quarter of its population in the nuclear exchange; another two-thirds had died of starvation during the Long Winter, which was subsiding only now, with help from the orbiting precinct. Southeast Asia had crumbled into anarchy and revolution and genocide; the destruction there was almost as complete.
Ashes, barren plains, snow-covered valleys and hills soon to become glaciers; scudding gray, snow-thick clouds casting black shadows over fallow earth; continents given over to bacteria and cockroaches and ants, and among these new ecologies, a few scattered animals who had once called themselves human beings, who had once lived in comfortable houses and known the basics of electrical wiring and taken newspapers and subscribed to provincial points of view about reality. . .
Who had once had time for the luxury of thought.
It was heartbreaking. Heineman came to think of his kind—the eng
ineers and scientists and technicians of the Earth—as the very tools of Satan himself. His latent Christianity returned with a vengeance. He knew he severely tried Lenore's patience, but from his meandering visions of apocalypse and angels and resurrection he could at least take some solace, find meaning, and search for destiny and God's plan. If he had once been an agent of Satan, now—without switching occupations—he was an agent of the angels, of those who would transform Earth into paradise. . . .
Lenore tried, again and again, to point out that engineers were as much responsible for saving the Earth as for destroying it. Without the orbital platforms and the whole paraphernalia of space-based defense, the Earth would have been wiped utterly clean of life; the NATO and Soviet platforms managed to destroy some forty percent of all missiles.
Not enough, not enough. . .
And how many children, how many animals, how many innocent and—
But, Lenore would counter, no one born with a mouth and a need is innocent. . . .
She was often right, of course.
The masters he served now were not perfect, hardly angelic. They were intelligent, powerful, reasonable; their leaders lacked the ignorant erratic blindness of Earth's leaders. But they still differed with each other, sometimes strongly.
So Heineman, with his wife, flew the skies of Earth and charted the damage, and hoped for a day when grasses would grow and flowers bloom, when snows would recede and the air would be clear of radioactivity. He worked hard for that day.
And he was faithful to his new masters, for he was born again in more ways than one. On his first day back on Earth, he had suffered a fatal heart attack.
Larry Heineman was on his second body. Lenore assured him it was better than his first.
He had his doubts, but it certainly felt better.
New Zealand dusk, with another spectacular sunset in the offing. Overhead, the large beacon of the Thistledown rose clear and unobscured, and not far away, the speeding point of the orbiting precincts crossed the sky in the opposite direction.