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It doesn't hold pleasant memories for him.
Svard bent low to exit the tractor and rose gracefully to his full height,
large eyes blinking. "This way. Set Korzenowski is in his private quarters.''
Lanier savored the extra spring in his step. The Stone's spin imparted a pull
of six-tenths of Earth's gravity on the floor of each chamber, one of the few
qualities of the Thistledown that had always been pleasant to him. He
remembered, decades ago before the Death exercising in the first chamber,
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swinging vigorously on parallel bars . . . That reminded him of his once
excellent physical conditioning. He had been a gymnast in college.
A hundred meters to the east of the main complex, a smaller anonymous blister
of white rose a few meters out of the sand. Svard escorted them along a gravel
path and picted a greeting to the dome's receptor as they approached. A green
icon of an outspread hand floated before each of them. "He wants us to come
right in," Svard said. A square door in the wall curled aside, and Konrad
Korzenowski emerged, dressed in a simple dark blue caftan.
Lanier had not seen him in person in over thirty years. He had changed little
in that time; a simple, spare frame, round face topped by a short crop of
pepper-gray hair, a sharp, long nose and penetrating dark eyes. The eyes were
more haunted--and haunting--than when they had first met. Having absorbed part
of Patricia Vasquez's mystery, that part of the human personality which could
not be synthesized, Korzenowski had seemed to carry an ineffable aspect of the
mathematician. His look had been enough to Spock Lanier. Patricia was still
discernible in the
Engineer's makeup, if anything, more pronounced. What does he feel, with part
of her making up his core?
On Earth before the Death, heart-transplants had been commonplace before the
perfection of prostheses. How does one feel about carrying a transplanted part
of someone's soul?
"Good to see you again, Ser Lanier," Korzenowski said, shaking his hand. He
hardly glanced at Mirsky, treating him less as a guest and more perhaps as an
unresolved curiosity. He beckoned them enter and take seats. The free-form
white interior of Korzenowski's quarters was cluttered with white and gray
cylinders of all sizes, draped with lumps of
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what looked like white bread dough. He pulled a few of these aside--as he
lifted them, they elongated in his hands, hissing faintlymand ordered the
floor to form chairs, which shaped themselves rapidly. The Russian sat and
folded his arms, appearing at ease. The trace of apprehension he had exhibited
outdoors was gone.
Svard made his farewells, picted something rapidly to the Engineer, and
departed. Korzenowski folded his arms decisively, echoing Mirsky's gesture,
and stood before Lanier and the Russian. The Engineer's expression had become
stern, irritated.
"We have a genuine puzzle here, Ser Lanier," he said, regarding the
Russian, "Is this truly Pavel Mirsky, or a clever imitation?" He looked
sharply at Lanier. "Do you know?"
"No," Lanier said.
"What's your intuition?"
Lanier didn't answer for a moment, a little Startled. "I can't really say.
If I have any intuition, it's fogged by all the impossibilities."
"I know for a fact that Pavel Mirsky went down the Way in one half of the Axis
City, and that the Way closed up behind him, and all who accompanied him. I
know there has been no gate opened to this Earth since. If this is Pavel
Mirsky, he's returned to us by some avenue we can't begin to guess at."
The Russian shifted a little in his seat, folded his hands in his lap, and
nodded agreement, content to be spoken of as if he were not there.
"He seems self-satisfied," Korzenowski said, rubbing his chin speculatively.
"Cat with a canary feather. I hope he pardons a candid examination.
Our instruments tell us that he is solid and human, down to his atomic
structure. He is not a ghost in the old or new sense, and he is not a
projection of any kind familiar to us." Korzenowski uttered these observations
as if going through a string of obvious truths simply to get them out of the
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way. "His genetic structure is that of Pavel Mirsky, as recorded in the
medical records of the third chamber city. Are you Lieutenant
General Pavel Mirsky?''
The Russian glanced between them. "The simplest answer is yes. I
think it is close to the truth."
"Do you come here of your own free will?"
"With the same qualifications, yes."
"How did you come here?"
"That's more complicated," the Russian said.
"Do we have time to listen, Ser Lanier?"
"I do," Lanier said.
"I would like Ser Olmy to be here," Mirsky said.
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� GREG BEAR
"Unfortunately, Set Olmy does not answer his messages. I suspect he is on
Thistledown, but I don't know where. I've sent a partial to locate him and
tell him the circumstances. He may or may not join us. I'd like to hear your
story as soon as possible." Korzenowski sat and pulled one of the white lumps
into his lap, kneading it between his hands.
Mirsky stared at the spotless floor for a moment, then sighed. "I will begin.
Telling it all with words would be painfully slow and clumsy. May
I borrow one of your projectors?"
"Certainly." Korzenowski ordered a traction beam to lower the nearest
projector. "Do you require an interface?"
"I. don't think so," Mirsky said. "I'm somewhat more than I appear."
He touched the teardrop-shaped device with a single finger. "Pardon me if I
don't completely reveal myself to your apparatus."
"Quite all right," Korzenowski said, with absurd cordiality. Lanier's body
hair tingled again. "Do begin."
The quarters interior vanished, replaced by something difficult for
Lanier to comprehend at firstma condensed representation of the Way, the Axis
City, Mirsky's first few days in the forested Wald of the Central
City, the journey down the Way, accelerating along the flaw .
The projected information spun and dazzled. All sense of present time ended.
Mirsky told his story in his own way. Korzenowski and Lanier lived it.
Call it escape or the grandest defection of all tim~ Running from the horrid
past, my own death, the death of my nation, the near-death of my planet. If
you can refer to as "running" the flight of half a city, filled with many tens
of millions of souls and perhaps a dozen million corporeal human beings, down
an infinite tunnel in space-time, fleeing through the fury of a star's heart
on the rail of an elongated "knot," an umbilicus of impossibilities...
The tunnel itself an immense tapeworn curling through the guts of the real
universe, pores opening onto other universes equally real but not our own,
other times real and equally real... Those pores cauterized by our passage,
the tunnel itself changing or having changed because of our flight, warping
and expanding from the moment it was made with the prior knowledge of our
escape; how do you explain this to an unaugmented human being?
You cannot.
I had to change to know all this, and change I did, many times across decades
and centuries of flight. I became many people, and sometimes one of me would
hardly know another until they could mesh with each other,
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