The scoured bare rock and metal floor of the seventh chamber stretched for almost ten kilometers, gray and cold and dead. Beyond lay the surface of the Way itself, bronze in color, and not at all lifeless. Korzenowski knew that if he drew his eye close to that surface, he would see shots of black and red, a kind of ineffable bubbling activity: the life of space-time itself, vacuum teased and twisted and seduced into throwing up a perverse surface.

The bronze pipe, fifty kilometers wide, elongated itself to infinity before him. A mimicry of the tube light within the enclosed Thistledown chambers ran in a pale glowing ribbon down its center. He felt dizzy for a moment, as if he had actually become part of the tortured geodetics describing the Way’s unlikely existence.

A small personal shuttle awaited him. He boarded, and it flew at a level of several meters over the flatness, crossing the seventh chamber’s boundary, stopping and hovering some thirty kilometers from the southern cap.

Korzenowski stepped down from the shuttle hatch and stood a few centimeters above the naked surface of the Way. He removed the environment field segment beneath his feet. Now he was on the surface itself. Removing his slipper, he let his naked foot touch what was neither warm nor cold, what possessed only one quality at this moment and that was solidity. The surface of the Way was uninterested in the laws of thermodynamics.

Korzenowski bent down and rubbed the palm of his hand on that surface.

He stood up, feeling his foundation—the Mystery of Patricia Vasquez—very strongly now, as if someone were watching over his shoulder. Her creation, too, in a way, he thought. Our offspring, a wonderful monstrosity.

“Nothing is ever pure, except for you,” he said to The Way. “You were made by precocious children. We didn’t know what you would mean to us. You allowed us to dream fine dreams. Now I’ve got to kill you.”

He stood in silence for several minutes on the unresponsive, unreal surface, then returned to the shuttle and the seventh chamber bore hole.

70

The Way

“We’re prisoners,” Rhita told Demetrios on the lake, in the long wooden rowboat. “All of us. The queen is dead, and so is Jamal Atta. They aren’t here.”

“All right,” Demetrios said. “I agree something isn’t right. But what do you mean by prisoners?”

“This is a test, an experiment. The Jarts.”

“I’m not familiar with that word.”

Rhita touched his face with her hands. “Do you feel it, though? That we’re prisoners?”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“Do you remember a Kelt named Lugotorix?”

An ibis flew from the shore and landed on the prow of the boat. It opened its long beak and said, “You can remember now.”