Beyond the Farthest Suns (17 page)

Rasp and Karn now flanked the visitor, studying her with catlike focus.

“Then how can you leave, then return to us?” Olmy asked.

The young woman frowned and held up her hands. “It doesn't speak. It doesn't know. I am so lonely.”

Then she was gone. Plass, Rasp and Karn, and Olmy stood facing each other through empty air.

Olmy startled, suddenly drawn back to the last time he had seen a ghost vanish—the partial of Neya Taur Rinn.

Plass let out her breath with a shudder. “It is always the same,” she said. “My husband says he's lonely. He's going to find a place where he won't be lonely. But there are no such places!”

Karn turned to Rasp. “A false vision, a deception?” she asked her twin.

“There are no deceptions where we are going,” Plass said, and relaxed her hands, rubbed them.

Karn made a face out of her sight.

“No one knows what happened to the gate opened at the Redoubt,” Rasp said, turning away from her own session with the records. Since the appearance of the female specter, the twins had spent most of their time in the pilot cabin. Olmy's presence seemed to afford them some comfort. “None of the masters can even guess.”

Karn sighed, whether in sympathy or shame, Olmy could not tell.

“Can either of you make a guess?” Olmy asked.

Plass floated at the front of the common space around the pale violet bulkhead, arms folded, having found some sort of calm but not looking in the least hopeful.

“A gate is opened on the floor of the Way,” Rasp said flatly, as if reciting an elementary lesson. “That is a constraint in the local continuum of the Way. Four point gates are possible in each ring position. When four are opened, they are supposed to always cling to the wall of the Way. In practice, however, small gates have been known to rise above the floor. They are always closed immediately.”

“What's that got to do with my question?” Olmy asked.

“Oh, nothing, really!” Rasp said, waving her hand in exasperation.

“Perhaps it does,” Karn said, for the moment playing the role of thoughtful one. “Perhaps it's deeply connected.”

“Oh, all
right
, then,” Rasp said, and squinched up her face. “What I might have been implying is this: if Issa Danna's gate somehow lifted free of the floor, the wall of the Way, then its constraints might have changed. A free gate can adversely affect local world-lines. Something can enter and leave from any angle. In conditioning we are made to understand that the world-lines of all transported objects passing through such a free gate actually shiver for several years backward. Waves of probability retro­grade.”

“How many actually went through the gate?” Olmy asked.

“My husband never did,” Plass said, pulling herself into the hatchway. “Issa Danna and his entourage did, however. Maybe others, after the lesion formed … against their will.”

“But you didn't recognize this woman,” Olmy said.

“No,” Plass said.

“Was she extinguished when the gate became a lesion?” Olmy continued. “Was her world-line wiped clean in our domain?”

“My head hurts,” Rasp said.

“I think you might be right,” Karn said. “It makes sense, in a frightening sort of way. She is suspended … And so we have no record of her existence.”

“But the line still exists,” Rasp said. “It echoes back in time even in places where her record has ended.”

“No,” Plass said, shaking her head.

“Why?” Rasp asked.

“She mentioned an
allthing
.”

“I didn't hear that,” Rasp said.

“Neither did I,” Olmy said.

Plass gripped her elbow and squeezed her arms tight around her, pulling her shoulder forward. “We heard different words.” She pointed at Olmy. “But he's the only one she really saw.”

“It looked at you, too,” Rasp said. “Just once.”

“An allthing was an ancient Nordic governmental meeting,” Olmy said, reading from the flawship command entry display, where he had called for a definition.

“That's not what she meant,” Plass said. “My husband used another phrase in the same way. He referred to the Final Mind of the domain. Maybe they mean the same thing.”

“It was just an echo,” Rasp said. “We all heard it differently. We all interacted with it differently depending on … Whatever. That means more than likely it carried random information from a future we'll never reach. It's a ghost that merely babbles … like your husband, perhaps.”

Plass stared at the twins, then grabbed for the hatch frame and stubbornly shook her head. “We're going to hear more about this allthing,” she said. “Deirdre Enoch is still working. Something is still happening there. The Redoubt still exists.”

“Your husband told you this?” Rasp asked with a taunting smile.

“We'll know when we see our own ghosts,” Plass said, with a kick that sent her flying back to her cabin.

Plass calmly read her Bible in the common area as the ship prepared a meal for her. The twins ate on their own schedule, but Olmy matched his meals to Plass's, for the simple reason that he liked to talk to the woman, and did not feel comfortable around the twins. There was about Plass the air of a spent force, something falling near the end of its arc from a truly high and noble trajectory.

Plass seemed to enjoy his company in return and asked about his experiences on Lamarckia.

“It was a beautiful world,” he said. “The most beautiful I've ever seen.”

“It no longer exists, does it?” Plass said.

“Not as I knew it. It adapted the ways of chlorophyll. Now it's something quite different, and at any rate, the gate there has collapsed … No one in the Way will ever go there again.”

“A shame,” Plass said. “It seems a great tragedy of being mortal that we can't go back. My husband, on the other hand … has visited me seven times since I left the Redoubt.” She smiled. “Is it wrong for me to take pleasure in his visits? He isn't happy—but I'm happier when I can see him, listen to him.” She looked away and hunched her shoulders as if expecting a blow. “He doesn't,
can't,
listen to me.”

Olmy nodded. What did not make sense could at least be politely acknowledged.

“In the Redoubt, he says, nothing is lost. I wonder how he knows? Is he there? Does he watch over them? The tragedy of uncontrolled order is that the past is revised—and revisited—as easily as the future. The last time he returned, he was in great pain. He said a new god had cursed him for being a counter-revolutionary­. The Final Mind. He told me that the Eye of the Watcher tracked him throughout all eternity, on all world-lines, and whenever he tried to stand still, he was tortured, made into something different.”

Plass's face took on a shiny, almost sensual expectancy and she watched for Olmy's reaction.

“You denied what the twins were saying,” Olmy reminded her. “About echoes along world-lines.”

“They aren't just
echoes
. We
are
our world-lines, Ser Olmy. These ghosts … are really just altered versions of the originals. They have blurred origins. They come from many different futures. But they have a reality, an independence. I feel this … when he speaks to me.”

Olmy revealed his confusion. “I can't visualize any of that. Order is supposed to be simplicity and peace … Not torture and distortion and coercion. Surely a universe of complete order would be more like heaven, in the Christian sense.” He pointed to the Bible resting lightly in her lap.

Plass shifted and the antique book rose into the air a few centimeters. She reached out to grasp it, then pulled it close again. “Heaven has no permanent change, and certainly no death, as we know death,” she said. “Mortals find that attractive, but they are mistaken. No good thing lasts forever. That sort of existence becomes unbearable. Now imagine a force that demands that something last forever, yet become even more the essence of what it was—a force that will accept nothing less than compliance, but
can't communicate
.”

Olmy shook his head. “I can't.”

“I can't, either, but that is what my husband describes.” Several seconds passed.

Plass tapped the book rhythmically with her finger.

“How long since he last visited you?” Olmy asked.

“Three weeks. Maybe longer. Things seemed quiet just before they told me I could return to the Redoubt.” She closed her eyes. “I believed what Enoch believed, that order ascends, that it ascends forever. I believed that we are made with flaws, in a universe that was itself born flawed. I thought we would be so much more beautiful when—”

Karn and Rasp tracted forward and hovered beside Plass, who greeted them with a small shiver.

“We have ventured a possible answer to this dilemma,” Karn said.

“Our birth geometry, outside the Way, is determined by a vacuum of infinite potential,” Rasp said, nodding with something like glee. “We are forbidden from tapping that energy, so in our domain, space has a shape, and time has direction and a velocity. In the universe Enoch tapped, the energy of the vacuum is available at all times. Time and space and this energy, this potential, are bunched in a tight little knot of incredible density. That is what your husband must call the Final Mind. That our female visitor re-named the allthing.”

Plass shook her head indifferently.

“How amazing that must be!” Karn said. “A universe where order took hold in the first few nanoseconds after creation, controlling all the fires of the initial expansion, all the shape and constants of existence …”

“I wonder what Enoch would have done with such a domain, if she could have controlled it,” Rasp said, hovering over Plass, peering down on her. Plass made as if to swat a fly, and Rasp tracted out of reach with a broad smile. “Ours is a pale candle indeed by comparison.”

“Everything must tend toward a Final Mind. This force blossoms at the end of Time like a flower pushed up from all events, all lives, all thought. It is the ancestor not just of living creatures, but of all the interactions of matter, space, and time, for all things tend toward this blossom.”

Olmy had often thought about this quote from the notes of Korzenowski. The designer of the Way had put together quite an original cosmology, which he had never tried to spread among his fellows. The original was in Korzenowski's library, kept as a Public Treasure, but few visited there now.

Olmy moved across to see Rasp and Karn in their cabin while Plass read her Bible in the common area. The twins had arranged projections of geometric art and mathematical figures around the room, brightly colored and disorienting.

He asked them whether they believed an allthing, a perfectly ordered mind, could exist.

“Goodness, no!” Karn said, giggling.

“You mean,
Godness,
no!” Rasp added. “Not even if we believed in it, which we don't. Energy and impulse, yes; final, perhaps. Mind, no!”

“Whatever you call it—in the lesion, it may already exist, and it's different?”

“Of course it would exist! Not as a mind, that's all. Mind is impossible without neural qualities—communication between separate nodes that either contradict or confirm. If we think correctly, a domain of order would reach completion within the first few nanoseconds of existence, freezing everything. It would grasp and control all the energy of its beginning moment, work through all possible variations in an instant—become a monobloc, still and perfected, timeless. Not eternal, but
eviternal
, frozen forever. Utterly timeless.”

“Our universe, our domain, could spin on for many billions or even trillions more years,” Karn continued. “In our universe, there could very well be a Final Mind, the summing up of all neural processes throughout all time. But Deirdre Enoch found an abomination. If it
were
a mind, think of it! Instantly creating all things, never being contradicted, never
knowing.
Nothing has ever frustrated it, stopped it, trained or tamed it. It would be as immature as a newborn baby, and as sophisticated—”

“And ingenious,” Rasp chimed in.

“—As the very devil,” Karn finished.

“Please,” Rasp finished, her voice suddenly quiet. “Even if such a thing is possible, let it
not
be a mind.”

For the past million kilometers, they had passed over a scourged, scrubbed segment of the Way. In driving back the Jarts from their strongholds, tens of thousands of Way defenders had died. The Way had been altered by the released energies of the battle and still glowed slightly, shot through with pulsing curls and rays, while the flaw in this region transported them with a barely noticeable roughness. The flawship could compensate some, but even with this compensation, they had to reduce their speed to a few thousand kilometers an hour.

The Redoubt lay less than five thousand kilometers ahead. Rasp and Karn removed their clavicles from their boxes and tried as best they could to interpret the state of the Way as they approached. Evidence of immense constructions lined the wall of the Way: highways, bands connecting what might have been linked gates; yet there were no gates. The structures had been leveled to thin lanes of rubble, like lines of powder.

Olmy shook his head, dismayed. “Nothing is the way it was reported to be just a few weeks ago.”

“I detect something unusual, too,” Rasp said. Karn agreed. “Something related to the Jart offensive …”

“Something we weren't told about?” Plass wondered. “A colony that failed?”

“Ours, or Jart?” Olmy asked.

“Neither,” Karn said, looking up from her clavicle. She lifted the device, a small fist-sized sphere mounted on two handles, and rotated the display for Olmy and Plass to see. Olmy had watched gate openers perform before, and knew the workings of the display well enough—though he could never operate a clavicle. “There have never been gates opened here. This is all sham.”