“Where are the others?” Mirsky asked.
“Who? The other assassins? You left us with a hellish mess, Comrade General.” Plenev’s voice was thick, his words mushy, frightened and angry at once.
“Pogodin, Garabedian. Annenkovsky,” Mirsky prompted.
“I haven’t seen them since this ... whatever it is,” Pletnev said. “Now leave me alone.”
“You were with them,” Mirsky persisted. ”What happened?”
“What do you mean, what happened?”
“To Vielgorsky, and the other political officers.”
Plemev surveyed the sky suspiciously, looking for crosses.
“They’re dead, Comrade General. I wasn’t there, but Garabethan told me. They were shot.” He turned away from Mirsky, murmuring, “I hope to God these hounds of heaven don’t know.”
More crosses flew overhead, causing heads to turn like a sea of wheat in a wind. Mirsky walked away, hands in pockets, bumping shoulders and ploughing his way through the men, face creased in concentration.
This must have been what it was like for the Stoners when the last holdouts were evacuated, Hoffman thought. Shuttle after shuttle of blunt-nosed craft flying back and forth to the bore hole and the huge tuberider Berenson said was waiting there, loading in groups of twenty from each chamber. She was glad Wallace and Polk were in her group; she had grown to rely on them. Ann was not; she was apparently still in the first chamber, or aboard already.
The woman in black, left behind by Santiago, tended her group of four hundred with all the mastery of a shepherd over a flock. Her dogs were the chromium crosses, which gently and insistently brooked no dissent, at least not dissent in terms of wandering away. Hoffman wondered vaguely if mood-altering devices were being used on them; she felt calm, not at all apprehensive, and clearheaded, even rested.
Better in fact than she had felt in weeks.
About half in her group were Russians. By a kind of mutual consent, the Russians divided from the Americans, though the craft had brought them in mixed. Mirsky, as far as she saw, was not among them; nor were the officers who had taken command in his place.
Hoffman’s time came. The woman asked them to step forward, pointing to each in turn, until twenty had been separated from the larger group. The blunt-arrowhead craft had landed as they were being chosen.
She took a deep breath when her turn came. In a way, this was a relief. All responsibility was gone now. This was a schism with all that had happened before. She found it surprisingly easy to let go.
Sheep-like, she boarded the craft with the others.
Chapter Sixty-one
Patricia and Lanier were given their privacy in a small cubicle at the south end of the terminal, to sleep and have time for Patricia to think. A pictor provided some semblance of familiar surroundings, using the same basic decor as Patricia’s quarters in the Axis City, but Lanier was scarcely comforted; he was angry and confused.
“You don’t have any idea what they’re talking about,” he told her as they sat on opposite ends of the “couch.” “For all we know, they’re out to steal your soul ... And I don’t care what they say, it does sound suspiciously like that, doesn’t it?”
Patricia stared steadily at the illusart window opposite, with its view of pine trees and bright blue sky beyond. ”I suppose they could do that if they wanted,” she said.
“Damned right they could. We don’t know anything about them--they’ve manipulated our view of them ever since we—“
“They’ve tried to educate us. We know a lot more then we did then. What Olmy and Ram Kikura have been saying makes sense.”
Lanier shook his head vigorously. He was having none of that; anger was a slow, smoking coal inside, and he could not damp it. ”They aren’t really giving you a choice.”
“Yes, they are,” Patricia insisted. “They won’t take anything from me I won’t volunteer.”
“Bullshit,” Lanier exploded. He stood and felt wildly for the boundaries of the cubicle, which he knew was no more than three meters on a side. He could not feel them. The illusion was complete, even to the distance between them as he walked across the room. ”Everything’s a sham here. For all we know, nothing we’ve seen is real since we arrived. That would make sense. Why show us more than they have to?”
“They’re not ...” She tried to find the right word. ”Not bad people.”
“You accept that crap about your being the teacher, the precursor?”
“Why not?” Patricia turned to him and held out her hand. He walked back to the couch and took it. ”I’ve seen some of the papers I will write ... “She scrunched her eyes shut and shook her head, putting her other hand to her cheek. ”I probably will never write them ... but someone else who is me will, or has written them. And they really do point to all this. It’s what’s been in my head, unformed, for years now. I’ve known for almost as long that I was the only one, in our time, our world, thinking seriously about such things. So, ego aside, I don’t disbelieve that.” She smiled up at him. ”Judith Hoffman thought I was the only one. You accepted that.”
“You love being a cultural hero? Is that it?” Coming down on her too hard, he thought. Ease up. And why are you angry?
“No,” she said softly. ”I don’t care, actually. There’s not much I do care about now.”
Lanier let go of her hand and backed around the table, rubbing his chin, glancing at her repeatedly from the corners of his eyes. ”You just want to go home.”
She nodded.
“You can’t go home again.”
“I can.”
“How?”
“You know the basics, Garry.”
“I want specifics. How can you find your home?”
“If they teach me how to use a clavicle, I’ll return to the blank section of the corridor we passed through, and I’ll search through a geometry stack. For them, geometry stacks have been garbage area useless, or worse then useless. But that’s where I’ll find a way home.”
“Not very detailed plans, Patricia.”
“They’ll teach me,” she said, regarding him with her large black eyes, not square at all now, not feline, but round and calm.
“And what will they take?”
“Nothing!” She leaned her head back on the couch. “They’ll copy, not take.”
“How can you trust them?”
She didn’t answer.
“You really didn’t need time to think, did you?”
“No,” she admitted.
“Christ.”
She stood and hugged him firmly, touching her cheek to his shoulder.
“I don’t know what we are to each other, but I have to thank you.”
He cradled her head with one hand and stared away at the juncture of wall and ceiling, blinking, lips drawn down at the corners. ”I don’t know either.”
“I was beginning to think I wasn’t human.”
“You ...” He didn’t finish.
“What I’ve been thinking ... in some ways, that makes me more like them than like you. Do you understand that?”
“I suppose it also makes my Mystery appropriate for Korzenowski. He thought similar thoughts, and he had similar goals. He wanted to take his people home.”
Lanier shook his head, rejecting everything.
“They’re not going to hurt me. They’re going to teach me. I have to say yes.”
“They’re blackmailing you.”
She raised her head suddenly, frowning. ”They aren’t,” she said abstractedly. ”No more than I’m blackmailing them. Garry, I just thought of something ... and why didn’t I think of it before? Why are they opening another gate?”
“I don’t know,” Lanier said quickly. Her question seemed completely irrelevant.
“I’ll ask them.”
He laughed. ”You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“That’s why we were brought here, to witness the ceremony ... Well, that’s obviously not the main reason, but it was part of the package.??
?
He thought for a moment, still holding her. Despite everything, despite his doubts and fears and suspicions, he had to admit ...
That was something he would like to see.
“I think we should sleep,” Patricia said.
It was not incidental that they made love, but Lanier realized the act was not necessary to Patricia. She was in sight of her goal; everything else, like the decor and the very bed they lay on, was window dressing.
That made him feel insignificant. And it made him wonder what Patricia had become since her arrival on the Stone.
“Am I human?” she asked as they lay together.
“Probably,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady, and not completely succeeding.
By the time van Hamphuis’s flawship arrived at the position formerly occupied by the Axis City, all gates up and down the Way had been closed and the lanes between them cleared. The situation was unprecedented in the history of the Way.
The Axis City had moved on. Under Corprep Rosen Gardner’s direction, the city’s flaw power stations had been seized from the last holdouts.
Those who had been killed had had their implants carefully retrieved—some 183 citizens so far. The toll disturbed Gardner, but their deaths were not permanent. With the flaw shaft under his control, he had accelerated the Axis City, moving south toward the Thistledown.
The journey had taken sixteen hours; van Hamphuis’s flawship had followed, but there was little the President could do.
In the Thistledown’s sixth chamber, four members of Gardner’s Korzenowski faction had committed the ultimate crime—they had tampered with the Way machinery. The tampering was minor, but the penalty for even minor offenses was discorporation and complete wiping of all personality records. At this point, Gardner knew, there was no turning back.
The flaw did not need to extend beyond the actual northern boundary of the seventh chamber; its present extension, near the chamber’s bore hole, had been purely for convenience during the final stages of the Thistledown’s evacuation and the construction of the Axis City. The machinery was now adjusted to reduce the flaw’s length by twenty kilometers.
Four teams of three citizens apiece then exited to the exterior of the asteroid, riding elevator shafts undiscovered by the recently arrived visitors. These shafts opened directly onto buried Beckmann drive units.
Using these drives, the rotation of the asteroid was slowed, and then reduced to zero. The result at first was fairly minor in all chambers but the fourth, where wave action in the broad expanses of water forced huge globules into the air. There wasn’t time to damp the effects.
Gardner was working on a tight schedule.
Radical Geshels, and the moderates who had never actually committed themselves, were given the opportunity to join Gardner’s factioners. For many, there was no choice—Gardner’s plans had little room for radical neomorphs.
Populations were shufled between the various precincts as quickly as possible, and City Memory was rearranged and sectioned, all in preparation for the next step of Gardner’s plan.
The Axis City was partially unstrung from the flaw, the section containing Axis Nader and Central City first. It was Gardner’s plan to reverse the city, leaving these precincts for the Geshels who wished to travel down the Way at near lightspeed and force out the Jarts. What he needed to complete his plans were the two rotating cylinders of Axes Thoreau and Euclid.
The re-tuning of the gravity gradient between the Thistledown and the Way was extraordinarily delicate. The engineers within the sixth chamber had their hands full, especially when the large mass of Central City and Axis Nader was shunted to one side within the seventh chamber, allowing the remaining precincts to be unstrung.
The entire procedure took five hours. By the time it was done, Axis Nader and Central City had reversed position on the flaw with Axes Thoreau and Euclid. The two pairs of precincts and their related structures were separated by a kilometer, and the pair reserved for the Geshels Central City and Axis Nader—moved slowly north along the flaw.
The visitors had been informed of their choice. Of the roughly two thousand captives, only four decided not to cast their lot with the group planning a return to Earth.
Among them were Joseph Rimskaya and Beryl Wallace.
The other two were Russians: Corporal Rodzbensky and Lieutenant General Pavel Mirsky.
The asteroid was then set into rotation again. Within all the chambers, some damage was unavoidable, but in the fourth chamber, the results were catastrophic. The water globules slowly broke over the basins and land, billions of gallons snapping trees, scouring the forests and forming new rivers as the centrifugal force returned.
The plasma tubes within all chambers were suddenly extinguished.
The atmosphere barrier fields remained in force, but the chambers were plunged into abyssal night for the first time in twelve centuries.
And in the seventh chamber, at the boundary of the Way and the end of the chamber itself, mechanical workers began setting powerful charges to blast the northern end from the asteroid and cauterize the Way.
There was little the President or his followers could do.
Gardner’s organization was masterful, and the dedication of his followers complete. Once again, human history proved that the worst mistake possible in politics was underestimating one’s opponents.
Van Hamphuis had no choice but to accept Gardner’s offer of a settlement and take control of the precincts alloted to the radical Geshels.
Within Central City’s Wald, weightless, assigned to a neomorph Geshel guardian, Pavel Mirsky began to regret his decision. He seemed lost in a Boschian nightmare, and he asked himself if the urge for exploration and new things was worth the strangeness and anxiety.
There were always some disadvantages to completely abandoning one’s past and culture ...
And Mirsky had committed himself to what amounted to the grandest defection of all time.
Chapter Sixty-two
Olmy stood alone by the scaffold, staring at the clavicle. He wished the Engineer could interact with his thoughts, comment on his actions either positively or otherwise, but Korzenowski was stored inactively.
Vasqnez and Lanier were still in their cubicle. For Olmy, the notion of sleeping for eight hours at a time was at once peculiar and attractive. To have a long, blank period in one’s life, every day; to have that time free of thinking and immersed in a kind of other-world nothingness ... Talsit cleansing was much more effective, but he was amused to find a primitive part of himself still longing for simple sleep.
He had never given deep onsideration to the differences between humans of his time and theirs, except insofar as he had to plan for their needs. Even with all the accoutrements and additions and manipulations of his time, the similarities far outweighed the differences.
Yates crossed the smooth green carpet of lawn to the scaffold. His face was grim.
“Our time is limited,” he picted to Olmy. ”The defense station at one point nine ex nine says it’s detecting excessive flaw radiation. The Jarts could be preparing to open a new, very large gate.”
“Gate to a star’s heart?” Olmy asked.
“That’s the supposition. Station personnel are preparing to evacuate.”
The idea had been discussed in upper-level defense circles for decades. It was simple, if drastic: the Way at many points touched on stellar bodies.
Since the Way was essentially a hollow, evacuated tube, opening a circuit of massive gates into the heart of a star would suck up the high-pressure, superheated plasma and distribute it throughout the Way.
Barriers--though constructed of modified Way space-time—would transmit the extreme heat and finally break down, becoming level with the walls.
The Way itself would remain intact, but everything else for billions of kilometers would simply dissolve to component particles in the fury.
“How fast would the plasma front travel?” Olmy asked.
??
?It would only be slowed by turbulence effects. Its final velocity could be about six thousand kilometers per second.”
“Then we’d have about thirty-two hours to evacuate.”
“If they can’t open a gate remotely ...”
The thought of the Jarts’ being able to manipulate Way gates from a distance had sobered defense planners for years. The Jarts had never demonstrated such a capability within the human-controlled sector, but data from Way disturbances had led many gate researchers—including Ry Oyu’s team—to believe they were doing so beyond 2 ex 9.
“I’ve passed word on to Senator Oyu,” Yates continued. “Her father is with his researchers now. She’ll tell him when he’s available.”
Olmy saw Patricia and Lanier emerge from the cubicle in the living quarters on the north side of the terminal shell.
“Will Ser Vasquez agree, do you think?” Yates asked. “You’ve spent much more time with our guests than I.”
Olmy picted a symbol of uncertainty, carrying implications of resigned humor: an incomplete neomorph choosing between two high-fashion body designs.
“I wish I had your calm,” Yates said. ”I could use a Talsit session right now.”
Patricia spotted Olmy and Yates and waved at them, then touched Lanier’s shoulder. Both crossed the grass toward the scaffold.
“I have to see Ser Oyu,” she told Olmy. Lanier seemed haggard, his eyes darting back and forth.
“He’s in conference with his researchers. Senator Oyu will relay any message,” Yates told her.
“Well, I suppose I don’t have to tell him in particular. Olmy ...”
Lanier focused on Olmy, his expression unhappy and resentful.
“I’ve decided. I’ll make the bargain.”
Olmy smiled. ”When would be convenient?” he asked.
“Our time is limited,” Yates said.
Patricia shrugged. ”I suppose now is fine. Any time.”
“I’ll hold you personally responsible,” Lanier said to Olmy, emphatically jabbing his finger at him.