Eternity

Greg Bear

Copyright

Dedication

For David McClintock; friend, fellow admirer of Olaf Stapledon, and above all, bookseller.

Epigraph

Only when space is rolled up like a piece of leather will there be an end to suffering, apart from knowing God.

vetvatara Upaniad, VI 20

Contents

1 Recovered Earth, Independent Territory of New Zealand, A. D. 2046

2 Terrestrial Hexamon, Earth Orbit, Axis Euclid

3 Gala, Island of Rhodos, Greater Alexandreian Oikoumenē, Year of Alexandros 2331-2342

4 Terrestrial Hexamon, Axis Euclid

5 Earth

6 Thistledown

7 Gaia, Near Alexandreia, Year of Alexandros 2345

8 Earth

9 Thistledown

10 Gaia

11 Earth

12 Gaia

13 Thistledown

14 Gaia

15 Thistledown City

16 Gaia

17 Thistledown

18 Gaia, Alexandreia, Lokhias Promontory

19 Thistledown, Fifth Chamber

20 Gaia, Alexandreia, Lokhias Promontory

21 Thistledown, Fifth Chamber

22 Gaia, Alexandreia

23 Thistledown

24 Gaia

25 Thistledown City

26 Gaia

27 Thistledown, Fourth Chamber

28 Earth

29 Thistledown

30 Gaia

31 Gaia

32 Thistledown City

33 Thistledown City

34 Thistledown City Memory

35 Rhita

36 Thistledown

37 The Way

38 Thistledown City

39 The Way

40 The Hawaiian Islands

41 Thistledown

42 Hawaii

43 The Way, Efficient Gaia

44 Thistledown City

45 Thistledown, the Orbiting Precincts, and Earth

46 Thistledown

47 Earth

48 Thistledown

49 Earth

50 Thistledown

51 Thistledown

52 Efficient Gaia

53 Earth, Thistledown

54 Earth

55 Thistledown

56 Earth

57 Halfway

58 Thistledown

59 Thistledown City

60 Earth, Christchurch

61 Thistledown City

62 Thistledown

63 Earth

64 The Way

65 Thistledown City

66 The Seventh Chamber

67 The Way

68 Between

69 The Beginning of the Way

70 The Way

71 Thistledown

72 The Beginning of the Way

73 Thistledown

74 The Way

75 Axis Euclid

76 Earth

77 Thistledown City

78 The Way

79 Axis Euclid

80 The Way

81 Home

82 In the Flaw

83 Timbl

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the end, there is cruelty and death alone over the land. Not in a single ray of light or grain of sand will you find solace, for all is dark, and the cold gaze of God’s indifferent, heavy-lidded eyes falls on all with equal disdain. Only in your inner strength is there salvation; you must live just as a tree must live, or the cockroaches and fleas that flourish in the land and ruin of Earth. And so you live, and feel the sting of knowing you live. You eat whatever comes to hand, and if what you eat was once a brother or sister, so be it; God does not care. Nobody cares. You whore, and if you whore with man or woman, nobody cares; for when all are hungry, all are whores, even those who use the whores. And disease flourishes when all are whores, for germs must live, and spread across the land and ruin of Earth.

Some say we will climb back to the sky on our own. Some say we all should have died; should have died, for penance. But that was not to be. For by time’s freak and history’s whim, the angels come from the Stone, to march over the land and offer what solace the land cannot; to push back the clouds and smoke and let sun pass through, to sow our crops and harvest our food, then to pass the plows on to us. You marvel at this, and do not curse the angels in the madness of your guilt; for they are a glory like a dream, and you do not truly believe.

They minister to your disease, and in time you join them to minister unto others. Medicine becomes religion; help the sole commandment; healing the greatest gift to God one can imagine.

They bring miracles from out of the Stone. They stay among us, but are not of us, and a few grumble, but the few are ignored as the chaff is ignored. What the few grumble about is division and dissatisfaction, for we are never happy. And never content, and never satisfied. But the angels do not listen.

And then from the Bible Lands and points east, from the Lands of the Book and out of the People of the Book comes rebellion. For their lands have not been scorched and they can still find strength in the soil, and they are ingenious and know the Law of Tree and Flea. Because they are Chosen of God, they fight these angels who are not angels, but devils to them; they fight and they are subdued by miracles and made pacific. And the People of the Book sleep the sleep of the pacific, building and working but not fighting. So it is in the land where humankind first opened its eyes.

And then in the land sunk in evil at the tip of the Heart of Darkness, like white dregs in a black bottle, from this land comes speakers of Afrikaans and English in their fine uniforms, driving ahead of them their slave armies, to despoil all the untouched Southern Lands of the Earth. They fight and they are subdued by miracles and made pacific, in their way. And they sleep the sleep of the pacific, building and working and not fighting. So it is at the bottom of the amphora of Africa.

Light and learning begin again above the soil, for strength returns to the soil, and to the flesh. All this we owe to the angels. And if they are only men, only our own children come back clothed in light, what is that to our gladness and gratitude?

They lift us from the Law of Tree and Flea, and make us human again.

—Gershom Raphael, The Book of the Death, Sura 4, Book 1.

1

Recovered Earth, Independent Territory of New Zealand, A. D. 2046

The New Murchison Station cemetery held only thirty graves. Flat grassland surrounded the fenced-in plot, and around and through the grassland a narrow runoff creek curled protectively, its low washing whisper steady above the cool dry wind. The wind made the blades of grass hiss and shiver. Snow-ribboned mountains shawled in gray cloud glowered over the plain. The sun was an hour above the Two Thumb Range to the east, its light bright but not warm. Despite the wind, Garry Lanier was sweating.

He helped shoulder the coffin through the leaning white picket fence to the new-dug grave, marked by a casually lumpy mound of black earth, his face a mask to hide the effort and the sharp twinges of pain.

Six friends served as pallbearers. The coffin was only a finely shaped and precisely planed pine box, but Lawrence Heineman had weighed a good ninety kilos when he died. The widow, Lenore Carrolson, followed two steps behind, face lifted, puzzled eyes staring at something just above the end of the coffin. Her once gray-blond hair was now silver-white.

Larry had looked much younger than Lenore, who seemed frail and phantasmal now in her ninetieth year. He had been given a new body after his heart attack, thirty-four years before; it was not age or disease that had killed him, but a rockfall at a campsite in the mountains twenty kilometers away.

They laid him in the earth and the pallbearers pulled away the thick black ropes. The coffin leaned and creaked in the dirt. Lanier imagined Heineman was finding his grave an uneasy bed, and then dismissed this artless fancy; it was not good to reshape death.

A priest of the New Church of Rome spoke Latin over the grave. Lanier was the first to drop a spade of damp-smelling dirt into the hole. Ashes to ashes. The ground is wet here. The coffin will rot.

Lanier rubbed his shoulder as he stood with Karen, his wife of almost four decades. Her eyes darted around the faces of their distant neighbors, searching for something to ease her own sense of displacement. Lanier tried to look at the mourners with her eyes and found only sadness and a nervous humility. He touched her elbow but she was having none of his reassurances. Karen felt as if she didn’t belong. She loved Lenore Carrolson like a mother, and yet they hadn’t talked in two years.

Up there, in the sky, among the orbiting precincts, the Hexamon conducted its business, yet had sent no representative from those august heavenly bodies; and indeed, considering how Larry had come to feel about the Hexamon, that gesture would have been inappropriate.

How things had changed…

Divisions. Separations. Disasters. Not all the work they had done in the Recovery could wipe away these differences. They had had such expectations for the Recovery. Karen still had high hopes, still worked on her various projects. Those around her did not share many of her hopes.

She was still of the Faith, believing in the future, in the Hexamon’s efforts.

Lanier had lost the Faith twenty years ago.

Now they laid a significant part of their past in the damp Earth, with no hope of a second resurrection. Heineman had not expected to die by accident, but he had chosen this death nonetheless. Lanier had made a similar choice. Someday, he knew, the earth would absorb him, too, and that still seemed proper, though not without its terror. He would die. No second chances. He—and Heineman, and Lenore—had accepted the opportunities offered by the Hexamon up to a certain point, and then had demurred.

Karen had not demurred. If it had been her under the rock slide, rather than Larry, she would not be dead now; stored in her implant, she would await her due resurrection, in a body newly grown for her on one of the precincts, and brought to Earth. She would soon be as young or younger than she was now. And as the years passed, she would not grow any older than she wished, nor would her body change in any but accepted ways. That set her apart from these people. It set her apart from her husband.

Like Karen, their daughter Andia had carried an implant, and Lanier had not protested, something that had shamed him a little at the time; but watching her grow and change had been an extraordinary enough experience, and he realized he was far readier to accept his death than this beautiful child’s. He had not overruled Karen’s plans, and the Hexamon had come down to bless the child of one of their faithful servants, to give his own daughter a gift he did not himself accept because it was not (could not be) made available to all the Old Natives of Earth.

Then, irony had stepped in and left a permanent mark on their lives. Twenty years ago, Andia’s airplane had crashed in the eastern Pacific and she had never been found. Their daughter’s chances for a return to life lay in the silt at the bottom of some vast deep, a tiny marble, untraceable even with Hexamon technology.

The tears in his eyes were not for Larry. He wiped them and drew his face into stiff formality to greet the priest, a pious young hypocrite Lanier had never liked. “Good wine comes in strange glass,” Larry had once said.

He came into a wisdom I envy.

In the first flush of wonder, working with the Hexamon, all had been dazzled; Heineman had after all accepted his second body gladly enough, and Lenore had accepted youth treatments to keep up with her husband. She had later dropped the treatments, but now she seemed no more than a well-preserved seventy…

Most Old Natives did not have access to implants; even the Terrestrial Hexamon could not supply everybody on Earth with the necessary devices; and if they could have, Earth cultures were not ready for even proximate immortality.

Lanier had resisted implants, yet accepted Hexamon medicine; he did not know to this day whether or not that had been hypocrisy. Such medicine had been made available to most but not all Old Natives, scattered around a ruined Earth; the Hexamon had stretched its resources to accomplish that much.

He had rationalized that to do the work he was doing, he needed to be healthy and fit, and to be healthy and fit while doing that work—going into the deadlands, living amidst death and disease and radiation—he needed the privilege of the Hexamon’s medicine.

Lanier could read Karen’s reaction. Such a waste. All these people, dropping out, giving up. She thought they were behaving irresponsibly. Perhaps they were, but they—like himself, and like Karen—had given much of their lives to the Recovery and to the Faith. They had earned their beliefs, however irresponsible in her eyes.

The debt they all owed to the orbiting precincts was incalculable. But love and loyalty could not be earned by indebtedness.

Lanier followed the mourners to the tiny church a few hundred meters away. Karen stayed behind, near the graves. She was weeping, but he could not go to comfort her.

He shook his head once, sharply, and glanced up at the sky.

No one had thought it would ever be this way.

He still could hardly believe it himself.

In the single-story meeting room of the church, while three younger women set out sandwiches and punch, Lanier waited for his wife to join the wake. Groups of two or three gathered in the room, ill at ease, to step forward as one and pay their respects to the widow, who took it all with a distant smile.

She lost her first family in the Death, he remembered. She and Larry, after their retirement from the Recovery ten years ago, had behaved like youngsters, hiking around South Island, taking up various hobbies, occasionally going to Australia for extended walkabouts, once even sailing to Borneo. They had been or had seemed carefree, and Lanier envied them that.

“Your wife takes this hard,” a red-faced young man named Fremont said, approaching Lanier alone. Fremont ran the re-opened Irishman Creek Station; his half-wild merinos sometimes spread all the way to Twizel, and he was not considered the best of citizens. His station mark was an encircled kea, odd for a man who made his living from sheep; still, he had once been reputed to say, “I’m no less independent than my sheep. I go where I will, and so do they.”

“We all loved him,” Lanier said. Why he should suddenly open up to this red-faced half-stranger, he did not know, but with his eye on the door, waiting for Karen, his mouth said, “He was a smart man. Simple, though. He knew his limits. I…”

Fremont cocked a bushy eyebrow.

“We were on the Stone together,” Lanier said.

“So I’ve heard. You were all confused with the angels.”

Lanier shook his head. “He hated that.”

“He did good work here and all over,” Fremont said. Everybody’s decent at a funeral. Karen came in through the door. Fremont, who could not have been more than thirty-five, glanced in her direction and then turned back to Lanier, speculation in his eyes. Lanier compared himself with this young and vigorous man: his own hair was solid gray, hands large and brown and gnarled, body slightly bent.

Karen seemed no older than Fremont.

2

Terrestrial Hexamon, Earth Orbit, Axis Euclid

“Let’s talk,” Suli Ram Kikura suggested, turning off her collar pictor and folding up in a chair behind Olmy. He stood by her apartment window—a real window, looking through the Axis Euclid’s interior wall at the cylindrical space that had once surrounded the Way’s central singularity. Now it revealed swimming aeronauts with gauzy, bat-like wings, floating amusement parks, citizens tracting on causeways formed by faint purple fields—and a small arc of darkness to the left, near-Earth space visible beyond the interior wall.

The colors and activity reminded him of a French painting from the early twentieth century, a park scene suddenly bereft of gravity, strolling couples and children of orthodox Naderites scattered crazily every which way. The view changed constantly as the axis’s body rotated around the hollow at its center, a streaming display of Hexamon life and society, of which Olmy no longer seemed a part.

“I’m listening,” he said, though he did not look at her.

“You haven’t visited Tapi in months.” Tapi was their son, created from their mixed mysteries in Euclid’s city memory. Such conception had only returned to favor the past ten years; before that, when orthodox Naderites had dominated Euclid’s precinct government, natural births and ex utero births had been the order of the day, and the hell with centuries of Hexamon tradition. Hence, the children playing in the Flaw Park beyond Ram Kikura’s window.

Olmy blinked, guilty about avoiding his son. The point was always quickly reached with Suli Ram Kikura. “He’s doing fine.”

“He needs us both. A partial on demand is no replacement for a father. He’s up for his incorporation tests in a few months and he needs—”

“Yes, yes.” Olmy almost wished they had never had Tapi. The weight of responsibility now, with his researches also heavy on him, was too much. He simply did not have time.

“I don’t know whether to be mad at you or not,” she said. “You’re facing something difficult. I suppose a few years ago I could have guessed what it is…” Her voice was rich and even, well-controlled, but she could not hide concern mixed with irritation at his quiet obtuseness. “I value you enough to ask what’s bothering you.”

Value. They had been primary lovers for more decades than he cared to count. (seventy-four years, his implant memory stores reminded him, unbidden), and they had lived through—and taken part in—some of the Hexamon’s most turbulent and spectacular history. He had never seriously courted any woman but Ram Kikura; he had always known that wherever he went, whomever else he established a brief liaison with, he would always return to her. She was his match—a homorph, neither Naderite nor Geshel in her politics, lifelong advocate, one-time senior corprep for Earth in the Nexus, champion of the unfortunate, the ignored and the ignorant. With no other would he have made a Tapi.

“I’ve been studying. That’s all.”

“Yes, but you won’t tell me what you’ve been studying. Whatever it is, it’s changing you.”

“I’m just looking ahead.”

“You don’t know something I’m not privy to, do you? Coming out of retirement? The trip to Earth—”

He said nothing and she pulled back, lips tightly pressed together. “All right. Something secret. Something to do with the re-opening.”

“Nobody seriously plans that,” Olmy said, an edge of petulance in his voice unseemly in a man over five centuries old. Only Ram Kikura could get through his armor and provoke such a response.

“Not even Korzenowski agrees with you.”

“With me? I’ve never said I support re-opening.”

“It is absurd,” she said. Now they had both probed beneath armor. “Whatever our problems, or shortages, to abandon the Earth—”

“That’s even less likely,” he said softly.

“—And re-open the Way…. That goes against everything we’ve worked for the past forty years.”

“I’ve never said I wanted it,” he reiterated.

Her look of scorn was a shock to him. Never had their distance been so great that either could have felt intellectual contempt for the other. Their relationship had always been a mix of passion and dignity, even in the years of their worst dispute…which this showed signs of equaling or surpassing, though he refused to admit disagreement.

“Nobody wants it, but it sure would be exciting, wouldn’t it? To be gainfully employed again, to have a mission, to return to our youth and years of greatest power. To open commerce with the Talsit again. Such wonders in store!”

Olmy lifted one shoulder slightly, a bare admission that there was some truth in what she said.

“Our job here isn’t finished. We have our entire history to reclaim. Surely that’s labor enough.”

“I’ve never known our kind to be moderate,” Olmy said.

“You feel the call of duty, don’t you? You’re preparing for what you think will happen.” Suli Ram Kikura uncurled and stood, taking him by the arm more in anger than affection. “Have we never truly thought alike? Has our love always been just an attraction of opposites? You opposed me on the Old Natives’ rights to individuality—”

“Anything else would have damaged the Recovery.” Her bringing the subject up after thirty-eight years, and his quick response, showed clearly that the embers of that dispute had not died.

“We agreed to differ,” she said, facing him.

As Earth’s advocate in the years after the Sundering and in the early stages of the Recovery, Ram Kikura had opposed Hexamon efforts to use Talsit and other mental therapies on Old Natives. She had cited contemporary Terrestrial law and taken the issue to the Hexamon courts, arguing that Old Natives had the right to avoid mental health checkups and corrective therapy.

Eventually, her court challenge had been denied under special Recovery Act legislation.

That had been resolved thirty-eight years before. Now, approximately forty percent of Earth’s survivors received one or another kind of therapy. The campaign to administer treatment had been masterful. Sometimes it had overstepped its bounds, but it had worked. Mental illness and dysfunction were virtually eradicated.

Ram Kikura had gone on to other issues, other problems. They had stayed lovers, but their relationship had been strained from that point on.

The umbilicus between them was very tough. Disagreements alone—even this—would not cut it. Ram Kikura could not, and in any event would not cry or show the weaknesses of an Old Native, and Olmy had given up those abilities centuries ago. Her face was sufficiently evocative without tears; he could read the special character of a Hexamon citizen there, emotions withheld but somehow communicated, sadness and loss foremost.

“You’ve changed during the past four years,” she said. “I can’t define it…but whatever you’re doing, however you’re preparing, it diminishes the part of you that I love.”

His eyes narrowed.

“You won’t talk about it. Not even with me.”

He shook his head slowly, feeling just another degree of withering inside, another degree of withdrawal.

“Where is my Olmy?” Ram Kikura asked softly. “What have you done with him?”

“Ser Olmy! Your return is most welcome. How was your journey?” President Kies Farren Siliom stood on a broad transparent platform, the wide orb of the Earth coming into view beneath him as Axis Euclid rotated. Five hundred square meters of stressed and ion-anchored glass and two layers of traction field lay between the president’s conference chamber and open space; he seemed to stand on a stretch of open nothingness.

Farren Siliom’s dress—white African cotton pants and a tufted black sleeveless shirt of Thistledown altered linen—emphasized his responsibility for two worlds: Recovered Earth, the Eastern hemisphere of which rolled into morning beneath their feet, and the orbiting bodies: Axes Euclid and Thoreau and the asteroid starship Thistledown.

Olmy stood to one side of the apparent void in the outer shell of the precinct. The Earth passed out of view. He picted formal greetings to Farren Siliom, then said aloud, “My trip was smooth, Ser President.”

He had waited patiently for three days to be admitted, using the time for the awkward visit to Suli Ram Kikura. Countless times before, he had waited on presiding ministers and lesser officials, fully aware, as centuries passed, that he had developed the old soldier’s attitude of superiority over his masters, of respectful condescension to the hierarchy.

“And your son?”

“I haven’t seen him in some time, Ser President. I understand he is doing well.”

“A whole crop of children coming up for their incorporation exams soon,” Farren Siliom said. “They’ll be needing bodies and occupations, all of them, if they pass as easily as I’m sure your son will. More strain on limited resources.”

“Yes, Ser.”

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