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only be cautious and hope he wasn't being followed.
Abraxas had changed greatly in the generation he had been away, but he had had
abundant time in the Blades to catch up on developments. Mass transit, in any
case, was still user-friendly and straightforward. At a public commo carrel a
mnemonic phrase Farley had given him, combined with an alphanumeric group,
gave him reference to a specific public key cryptosystem sequence. Using the
combined data at a street TechPlex booth, he received instructions to board a
people-mover cartridge and tap in a destination at the Metro-Core, where he
rerouted and shot for the city's industrial borderlands.
Fifteen minutes later he was standing before a blank, heavy vehicle door at an
anonymous warehouse. Doubts and fears worked on his resolve, but images of his
wife and child trying to survive the hardships of Aquamarine pushed him on.
He roused himself only to realize that he'd already signaled for entry, and a
moment later the door rose just high enough for him to enter without stooping,
then lowered behind him with a whisper of displaced air. Inside there was
nothing but immeasurable darkness and silence.
The gloom closed around him as the door was secured loudly. Instinctively, his
hand went to the pocket that contained the Optimant dice Farley Swope had
given him, but the Holy Rollers were gone lost during the helipod flight
across the waves to the Matsya or possibly pickpocketed by one of the Exts
onboard the ship. Then a voice spoke to him from the total blackness.
"You nearly took the wrong route at Interchange Sienna, Administrator Mason."
It was true, but Mason did not bother to ask just how the voice knew. Given
synthesis 'wares, the speaker might have been either sex and any age, though
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he sounded male, adult, and somewhat affable.
"Mason, once the lights go up, you'll be part of what you encounter here.
There'll be no turning back."
"There's been no turning back since the Blades," Mason said.
Light sprang forth all around him, and he looked up, gasping for breath and
words. Under a perspective-distorting sky, staircases ran upside down and
aqueducts fed uphill. In place of clouds, faces and animals formed inverse and
intersticed patterns, playing out their progressions, only to be replaced by
subsequent optical sleights.
Mason panned over to the only human figure in sight, a fat-faced and
big-bellied Buddha, head radiating a divine nimbus. He was cooling his feet in
an upside-down aqueduct twenty meters above. The aqueduct's course bent
through several tricky shifts of perspective to pump water back into itself.
"So what do I call you, Gautama?"
"The name is Yatt. If you wish, you may consider this place a campus annex of
the Quantum College."
"What I wish, Yatt, is to talk about Aquamarine. And time's short."
"Or in any case not to be frittered away." Yatt stepped out of the streaming
water and headed for wrongside-down steps. "Follow the guide path through the
grotto and we'll meet you beyond."
The radiant walkway took bizarre dips and climbs through vision-deceiving
stonework and foliage. The forced perspectives made him feel dizzy. What lay
close at hand was solid enough, though he dismissed the more outrageous and
inaccessible eye teasers as holography.
He emerged from a sideways-leaning descent to find himself standing near the
end of the aqueduct where Yatt had been wading, and he saw the Buddha clone
sitting on a bench toweling off his feet. Mason glanced back and saw the far
side of the grotto, where he had started, hanging nearly vertical according to
his perception of up and down. Of the warehouse door there was no sign.
They had gone to the trouble of mounting part of the place on gimbals, he told
himself. That was all it was. They could have spared themselves the effort. He
didn't need to be sold on their knack for cute tricks, especially when the
Quantum College was the only side in the game that would have him.
Yatt indicated their surroundings. "You think you've sussed out our artifices,
yes?"
Mason let his irritation show. "If you've got antigravity, you certainly don't
need me. Go take over the galaxy."
Yatt stood up and came closer. "But we do need you, Mason, as much as you need
us. We can arrange for you to return to Aquamarine, but only in exchange for
your help in facilitating our goals."
"Your goals. Why is Aquamarine important to the Quantum College all of a
sudden?"
"The Quantum College is a paranoid legend, Mason, a modern wish myth with ten
million derivations and not a gram of substance to it, save what we supply. We
are the true face of it."
"It?"
"The quantum universe, Mason." Yatt extended a fat ocher forefinger, his smile
no longer so simplemindedly benign.
The forefinger reached Mason's, but there was no physical contact. A pinpoint
of light grew from the spot and began to dissolve Yatt. Instead of evaporating
into genie smoke or random voxels, however, his substance swirled,
transformed, and ultimately rezzed into stacks and piles of data.
The whirlwinds and gusts that blew closest to Mason pertained to him, carrying [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]