Greg Bear Eon 2 Eternity

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she was not scared, but should be. The flight's mixed exhilaration and boredom
still had a grip on her, like a drug.
"Check with your clavicle, please," Oresias told her softly as they re-boarded
the beecraft. "I want to know whether our goal is still there."
She pulled the box from its rack and opened it, touching the handlebars with
one finger. The brilliantly colored world spun before her again, and the cross
reappeared in the same position, unchanged.
"Still there," she affirmed. Oresias strapped hirnseff into his seat, leaned
his head back and closed his eyes.
In a few minutes, the beecraft were refueled and ready for the flight again.
Atta came aboard at the last and angrily slammed the sliding hatch shut. "What
about our aerial tanker?" he muttered. "What about the return leg?"
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125
� GREG BEAR
TWENTY-THREE
Thistledown
Olmy arrived in the fourth chamber an hour after hiking to the abandoned
station in the fifth chamber. The train crossed over a broad expanse of
shimmering, silvery water and dropped him off at a rest station on Northspin
Island, in the first quarter, near the northern cap. Avoiding the few other
hikers, he rented a tractor, drove ten kilometers to a distant trail head, and
walked into the dense coniferous forests.
Within his implant memories, isolated from his primary personality, the
freshly created partial conducted its more cautious investigation of the Jart
mentality.
Three hours later, he stood beneath a thousand-year-old redwood, a light mist
drifting from spinward, his feet sinking into ancient loam.
Whatever isolation and abstraction he had felt before, after his months of
research on nonhuman psychology, was nothing compared to his sense of
self-exile now. He kept thinking of Tapi, perhaps even now working through his
incarnation exams. He did not think he would see his son for some time, if
ever; or Suli Ram Kikura. It seemed unlikely their paths would cross.
He felt the redwood's thick, tough bark and wondered if he should feel a
kinship with this old tree. In truth, he felt a kinship with nothing, not even
his fellows, and that disturbed him. It was barely possible his implant
regulators were not working properly, and that he was experiencing an
unhealthy mental state. Just to be sure, he ran a test string through his
primary mind and through the regulatory implants.
No inappropriate states, the results told him.
Merely extreme stress and danger.
All of these trees had survived the re-rotation after the Sundering.
They had lasted through temporary weightlessness, floods, chaotic weather, and
years of neglect, and now they seemed to thrive. Why couldn't he feel simple
encouragement from their example?
Why can't I feel anything at all?
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ET E R N I TY � 127
A scheduled status report emerged from behind the barriers. His partial sent a
string of information indicating successful penetration of the S art's
cultural and personal memory stores. In addition, the partial had exchanged
cautious "greetings."
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Olmy sat back against a tree and took a deep breath. A kind of dialogue was
happening a lot sooner than he had expected. The Jart, for the moment, was
finding some advantage or other in cooperation. He might soon be able to tell
how much of the Jart's ostensible memories were real and how much
manufactured; it seemed unlikely the Jart would willingly give up actual
information about its kind. But then, everything about this situation was
unlikely
. . . and Olmy still had no idea what a Jart's psychology was like, what it
was capable or not capable of doing.
When the partial transferred its findings to Olmy, for a time, as he sat with
eyes open, he saw both the forest and
Great prism-shaped Jart fiawships, moving with majestic slowness over a
colonized segment of the Way
(again in several visual layers, but these more ordered, less frantic)
and dancing clouds of midge-like attendant machines and vehicles moving from
the fiawship to broad curving ramps on the floor of the Way
With a start, replaying the memory, Olmy realized that beneath the nearest
ramp was an inverted image of the exterior of a planet. He tried to
reinterpret but could not; it seemed that at least in this case, Sart gates
were not circular holes, but slashes in the Way several kilometers wide.
There was always the possibility that all the information he had received this
far was deception, that the Jart itself was a ruse; one way to find out would
be to ask Korzenowski about the possibility of elongated gates in the Way.
Even if they were possible, other details might be distorted . . .
Another memory:
mingling with other beings
(Jarts? Clients of the Jarts?)
in a thick green liquid, much smaller silver worms passing between them,
occasionally wrapping around one individual or another and cinching tight
enough to crease flesh. Some of the
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�
GREG BEAR
beings reser,.bled the Jart body in the fifth chamber memory store's second
room; others were flat white specked black carpets with undulating fringes,
flying through the liquid, or trilaterally symmetric watarfish" with flexible
mandibles or fingers on the end of each arm, or thick shapeless extrusions
from colorless tubes . . .
All seemed to have some remote and nightmarish sea floor as a common origin,
and none of them did anything Olmy could even begin to understand.
There were other images, too many to experience for the moment.
Storing these findings without examination, he moved on to the exchanged
"greeting."
Partial: (Replay of capture memories and a string signaling awareness of the
Jart's existence and status.)
Jart: > I am beyond reach of duty? Where is duty expediter label?
Partial: You are >beyond reach of
Jart: > What is brother/father status? Is this communication from command
oversight?
Partial: >Brother/father status
captured and under examination.
Jart: >Acknowledge personal status as captured.
The partial then sent a long list of questions. Those were being processed
now. At least, for the time being, he had an illusion of progress.
The partial passed along another string:
Jart: >Cooperation and transfer of status information? Replacement of command
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oversight and command?
This seemed to be a kind of surrender. Olmy marked the phrases "duty
expediter," "command oversight" and the isolated "command," wondering if they
were levels in Jart society. The partial had agreed to the condition offered
by the Jart, subject to further explanation. The limits and methods were being
worked out now, with the barriers still up and not likely to be lowered except
for the transfer of more findings and status checks.
Olmy dug his hand into the loam and stared up at the tree branches
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ETERNITY � 129
overhead. All of his defenses were on alert. It was possible the Jart was
simply preparing for another assault.
Somehow, he didn't think it was that simple. Having failed to immediately kill
or subdue Olmy, the Jart was apparently taking a different tack.
Where it would lead, Olmy had no idea. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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