THIRTEEN

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Thistledown

The Thistledown's axis bore hole opened tiny and black in the middle of the vast depression marking the asteroid's south pole. The opposite pole --"north" for a sense of direction only, since the asteroid had no natural magnetic field was now a gaping, rough-edged crater with the seventh chamber opened wide to space. Using ships equipped with traction fields, the Hexamon had long since swept the debris of the Sundering away from the seventh chamber, making it serviceable as a spaceport. Someday, the orbiting precincts would need extensive repair; the seventh chamber dock would be ideal.

For small ships like the shuttle on which the Russian and Lanier rode, the south pole entrance was more practical.

Lanier hardly noticed the darkness swallowing the craft. His mind was still elsewhere. He felt a stronger queasiness, and a flash of anger at his eternal unease. He closed his eyes tight, then opened them suddenly as the shuttle latched onto the rotating interior dock.

"We are here," the Russian said.

The first chamber had changed little. Even the de-rotation and re-rotation Page 134

of the Thistledown had left it relatively unmarred. Of course, there had been little but sandy desert on the first chamber's floor in the first place. As they departed the elevator, a steady, cool breeze fell on them from the face of the chamber's southern cap, a great, demeaning gray wall behind them. Around the axis shimmered the hazy white light of the plasma tube, twenty kilometers above them where they now stood on the "valley" floor.

To each side, the chamber stretched as flat and normal as could be imagined for a dozen kilometers, then with a slow, lazy vault began to creep upward, finally rising in an impossible vertical curve to meet overhead, behind the plasma tube, like some bridge for gods. After a good many years how long had it been since his last visit, ten, twelve?--the

ETERNITY ?S

dimensions of the Thistledown's inner chambers struck Lanier all over again. He remembered the feeling of those awful months before the Death, when he had been swamped by administrative duties, by intrigues on Earth and within the Stone, by mystery and foreknowledge. He had called it being Stoned.

The rush of memories did not cheer him. He found it difficult to believe men had ever dwarfed themselves by such a creation. That was how he felt; small, overpowered. Stoned again.

They were greeted by a tall man, skeletally slender and very bald, an assistant to Korzenowski. "My name is Svard. Set Korzenowski sends Page 135

his regrets that he does not meet you personally." He gave the Russian a quick appraising stare, then he led them toward a tractor. "The Engineer has a research compound in the middle of the valley, and he invites you to join him there."

They boarded the tractor. The eight-passenger vehicle rode over the sand on a traction field, not treads or tires; it had been manufactured aboard Thistledown and was sleek and beautiful, with a pearly white exterior and a soft, adaptable gray interior that shaped itself to spoken or pitted commands.

Svard wore a pictor hidden within his low collar. Lanier had never quite learned the art of picting. "I trust you've had an interesting journey, Mr. Lanier, Mr. Mirsky," Svard said. Lanier nodded abstractedly.

The tractor floated smoothly and swiftly over low scrub and brown and white patches of sand and soil.

"What keeps Ser Korzenowski busy now?" Lanier asked. "We haven't spoken for some time."

"He has been doing research," Svard said.

"For the Hexamon?" Lanier asked.

"In part. Mostly to satisfy his own curiosity."

"Who pays the bills?"

Svard smiled over his shoulder. "Really, Mr. Lanier. You should know that Ser Korzenowski hasmwhat is the old phrase? carte blanche to spend any reasonabl~ amount, either in resources or money. He was given that privilege before his death, and the circumstances did not change with his resurrection."

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"I see," Lanier said.

Directly ahead lay a complex of low, flat buildings, their walls gently curved to merge with the sand. The air above the complex shimmered like a mirage; was it because of rising heat, Lanier wondered, or something else? He squinted through the tractor's transparent nose, trying to define the shimmer.

76 GREG BEAR

The tractor stopped a few dozen meters from the southern most building and eased to the sand with a low sigh. The door flowed open and Mirsky stepped out first, Lanier following, watching the man's reaction closely. The Russian looked around the valley floor, glancing up at the plasma tube. He knows the Stone, Lanier thought, He's been here before.

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, 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 Page 137

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