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Heart and soul."
"His father's son, more than his mother's."
Lanier kissed the top of her head. Twilight was blending into night. He looked
up expectantly and shivered. "What magic is the old wizard going to work this
evening?"
"I'll bring out the blankets," Karen said. "And the heater."
For a moment, standing alone in the yard with the stars coming out above him,
Lanier did not know whether it was good or horrible to be
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alive. He could not stop the gooseflesh from rising on his arms. This is real,
he reminded himself. I'm awake.
Soon, Korzenowksimand perhaps a part of Patricia Vasquez would be playing with
the ghosts of universes. Karen returned and they prepared a place on the
grass.
"I wouldn't miss this for anything," she said softly. "They're bastards, but
they're brilliant bastards."
Lanier nodded, clutching her hand.
"I love you," he said, tears coming to his eyes.
She lay her head against his shoulder.
Early the next morning, on his notepad, Lanier wrote: We saw thepoint of
Thistledown low to the northwest, soft and ill-defined. The night was warm and
my from bones did not ache; my mind is more clear than it's been in recent
memory, shockingly clear. I had my Karen lying next to me. We were among the
few on Earth who knew what to expect this evening---or did we?
We owe them so much, these determined angels, our distant children. A
lump came to my throat, simply watching the Thistledown--the Stone--ascend a
few degrees. I feared for them. What if they made a mistake and destroyed
themselves? What if Mirsky's gods at the end of time decide to intervene?
Where are we then?
Straight beams of clear white light fanned out from the Stone and crossed
three quarters of the sky, reaching tens of thousands of kilometers into
space, pointing away from Earth. I do not know what they were; not light
alone, surely, for lasers or some similar phenomenon could only be reflected
by dust, and there is not so much dust in space. We sat almost as ignorant as
savages. The lines of light faded abruptly, and for a moment there was nothing
but the stars and the Stone, brighter now, higher in the northwest. I thought
perhaps Korzenowski had thrown a rough sketch across the heavens, and this was
all we would see.
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But from the point of the Stone, across the entire night sky, there unfurled a
gorgeous curtain of violet and blue, taking seconds to reach from horizon to
horizon. Within the curtain glowed indistinct patches of red,' it took us
several seconds to see, within the unfocused patches, images of the crescent
moon, somehow lensed to two or three dozen locations.
The curtain then shredded, like rotten fabric washed apart by a river current.
Where it had been, there now curled lazy arms of green, the tentacles of a
monstrous jellyfish spiraling and vibrating. There was an organic ugliness in
this that made me want to turn away; I was witnessing
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some unnatural birth, with the attendant gore and mystery; space being
distorted or used in ways it is not accustomed to.
Then all dimmed and the stars returned, clear and sharp, undisturbed.
F~tatever happened now, could not be seen by ua
FIFTY
Thistledown
Korzenowski looked down on the sixth chamber through the blister covering the
northern cap bore hole, fingers working restlessly on a small die of
nickel-iron. Beside him, the president floated with arms folded, in ceremonial
robe and cap resembling a Mandarin lord. He had come from a special Nexus
session to observe the second and third series of tests;
now they waited to see how the sixth chamber machinery would react.
A small plume of smoke rose from the third quarter; already, aircraft hovered
around the damage site.
"You know what that is?" Farren Siliom inquired.
"Fire in an inertial control radiation duct," Korzenowski said, paying the
president little attention. His eyes were on the key points in the sixth
chamber, points where any kind of pseudo-spatial backscatter could blow out
huge sections of the valley floor. "It's a minor problem."
"The tests are still successful?"
"Successful," Korzenowski acknowledged.
"How much longer before we make the connection?"
"Nine days," Korzenowski said, giving himself some leeway. "The machinery
needs time to reach equilibrium. We need to let the looped virtual universe
dissolve. Then the path will be clear and we can reconnect.''
The president pieted a symbol of unenthusiastic acceptance. "Neither I
nor the presiding minister are comfortable with this," he tight-beamed at
Korzenowski. "We're all forced to do things we'd rather not do, eh?"
Korzenowski glanced at the president with cat-square eyes. You've made the
whole process Draconian as a kind of revenge, he thought. "At
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least we'll be going home," he said flatly. "Back to a life we may have been
ill-advised to leave in the first place."
Farren Siliom did not respond to this unconcealed self-criticism.
Korzenowski had been the inspiration for just that action.
The web had become too tangled to ever separate single strands.
FIFTY-ONE
Thistledown
What is Pavel Mirsky?
Olmy stopped his exercises on the barren quarters floor and immediately swung
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up a second level of barriers; the question had come unbidden, and not through
his partial or the established feed; it was not a stray thought or a wandering
echo.
For several minutes, he stood rigid in the middle of the floor, face blank,
trying desperately to locate the source of the query. It was not repeated; but
as he checked each connection between his implants and natural mind, he
realized repetition would not have been necessary. Information had been drawn
smoothly and with very few traces of entry from his original, natural memory.
The barriers had been breached, yet seemed intact.
The room was bleak enough to serve as a tomb. For an instant, he contemplated
blowing up his heart and the implants, but realized he could not. The
voluntary connections had been severed. Now, only if hidden detectors in the
implants were disturbed would he die. Where was the partial? Had everything
been absorbed--including the secrets of his safeguards?
Is Pavel Mirsky a human like yourself, or is he command from another concern?
Olmy locked down his thoughts, hoping against hope that not all had been lost.
He did not have the slightest idea what had happened, or how extensive the
breach was.
I am finding much hidden information that provides missing color and form, the
voice continued. It felt very similar to his own internal voice.
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That told Olmy that his natural subpersonalities, what the Hexamon
psychologists called "functionary agents," had been suborned.
Olmy felt like the captain of a ship whose crew has been suddenly and
inexplicably possessed by demons. The "bridge" had been peaceful until just
now; but peering below decks told a quite different story.
You are not command nor are you duty expediter. ,/Ire you command oversight in
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