“Like time, you mean?”
“Not necessarily. It’s perpendicular to everything, that’s all.Time is a dimension, not necessarily the fourth one. Do you see?”
Reese shook his head.
“It would be easier to show you the math,”Verb went on,“but for sure you wouldn’t understand that. Parts of it I don’t understand. But I can see it sometimes, like a flickering just at the corner of my eyes, like I could almost see curves and angles where the desert out there is intersecting with fourth-dimensional space...I mean, if you had to use a word, it would be...synchronicity.”
Sometimes, Reese thought, she looked like an old man, or maybe the words coming out of her just made it seem that way. She’s twelve? he asked himself.At first she sounded merely brilliant, precocious, but then he began to see hints of an alien, frightening perspective that twisted his understanding of reality. He didn’t know whether to just let her talk, or make a real attempt to understand her.
“Coincidence,” he said.
“Pavel—he’s one of the Russians—he gave me this book when I was eight. Tertium Organum, by this Russian, Ouspensky, from the early nineteen hundreds. He quotes Hinton in there, saying,‘the laws of our universe are the surface tensions of a higher universe.’ I just read that, and I mean, there it was, you know? I mean, that’s like a gauge field theory, except it comes out of philosophy, and everything just clicked.”
“You’re losing me,” Reese said.
“Okay, an example. In a vacuum you get spontaneous pair production, a particle and an antiparticle. Like an electron and a positron. Virtual quanta, they’re called. Happens at random, they annihilate each other, and that’s it. But what if it’s not random? What if there’s a pattern, but it’s fourth-dimensional? What if you could quantify that pattern? Then chance is working for you, making random antimatter, but it’s not random to you anymore. It’s all the antimatter you need, free energy.”
“What about conservation laws?”
“I’m a conservation lawyer,” she said. Reese attempted a smile, but her humor only made him more uncomfortable.“It’s like potential and kinetic energy,” she said,“everything evens out when you annihilate the stuff again.”
Reese badly wanted to go somewhere and think this out. Did Morgan know whatVerb had found up here? Dian’s taped messages hadn’t really talked about the antimatter, but Morgan had obviously seen the implications.Why else risk millions on a flimsy one-shot mission, plant weird circuitry in Kane’s skull,rush the project into such a tight schedule?What had Morgan said? Something about Aeroflot wanting Mars as well?
Of course the Russians would want in. If their espionage was even mediocre they would know, and they had probably decoded and translated the same radio messages Morgan had gotten. So how far ahead of the Russians were they? Months? Days? Hours?
Reese took the diskette out from under his shirt, where he’d been hiding it since they landed.“What I heard is that your transporter needs information. It has to know exactly where it’s supposed to send something.”
“How did—”
He waved his hand at her.“Never mind how. I told you, the leak has already happened.The information is out there. Now. This is the map from the telescope on Deimos. It has the state vectors for every celestial object within a five-parsec radius, accurate within a couple of kilometers.”
Verb took the diskette, turned it so the light glinted dully on its black surface.“What do you want me to do with it?”
“Send me to Barnard’s Star.”
Kane could feel the lingering caress of the Valium in his veins, the long half-life of the drug still whispering assurances to his jangled nerves. He sat up in bed, relishing the pain in his chest, pushing back the skin of his face with both hands until his eyes burned and his cheekbones ached.
The air was charged with information.A faint, hazy loop of melody seemed to be coming from somewhere to his left, high voices in a minor key, without words that he could decipher. He turned his head and the music moved with him.
He was still confused, weak and disoriented. But his sense of purpose had reawakened, and for the first time since North Africa he felt he had a simple, straightforward series of actions to perform.The first was to find this woman, Dian, and make her tell him what she knew. Then he had to find the...the...
He shook his head.The magic sword.The grail.The object, whatever it was.That was the Pattern.The woman would make it all clearer.
Reese was gone.The others were asleep or sedated, except for a young Japanese woman in a chair by the door.A guard, Kane thought. He slumped down in the bed and carefully took the pistol out of the mattress and hid it in the back waistband of his trousers, pulling his hi-pari closed over it and tying the belt in a loose knot.Then he swung his legs over the side of the cot and sat up.
“Ohayo gozaimasu,” the woman said.
“Yeah,” Kane said.“Good morning.” So, he wondered, how’s it going to be? Is Curtis going to drop the pretenses and hold us under guard, or is he going to be subtle? “Do you think I could get something to eat? I’m starving.”
“Sure.You’re Kane, right?”
“Right.”
“I’m Hanai.” She was thin, with the sort of round face that was more prized by Eastern aesthetics than Western. Kane returned her short, stiff bow, conscious of the pistol moving against his waist.“Let me get somebody else in here and we’ll find you some food.” She punched a four-digit number on the wall phone and said,“I’m taking Kane to breakfast.” She got some sort of answer and hung up.“Come on,” she said to Kane.
He followed her into a hallway, admiring the graceful economy of her walk but unable to duplicate it. She led him into a wide, circular dining room supported by arching precast members along the walls.At one time it had been meant as some sort of communal gathering place; obviously the need no longer existed.The space had been broken down with Japanese screens or telescoping plastic baffles, isolating the areas around individual widescreen-video monitors mounted into the walls. Most of them were in use, filling the air with the clash of old-fashioned orchestrated cartoon music, synthesizers, droning voices.
The stucco walls between the columns, what Kane could see of them through the tangle of dividers, alternated neutral colors with bright oranges, yellows, and blues, the paint now chipped and beginning to fade. The ceiling was rendered in a Maxfield Parrish cloudscape, depressing Kane with its transparent and rather pathetic nostalgia for Earth.
“Communal kitchen through there,” Hanai said.“There’s usually plenty of eggs and vegetables.The good stuff people tend to keep at home.”
Kane nodded.After nine months of solitary, introverted free fall, he found himself intimidated by the social normalcy of the three occupied tables in the middle of the room, by the seven or eight colonists drinking coffee and juice, lingering over their eggs and toast. He would have to walk past them, to pretend he belonged here, when in fact he felt hideously out of place.
I didn’t ask for this, he thought. He walked into the kitchen, aware of eyes following him across the room, and put together a bowl of cereal, fruit, and goat’s milk.Then he went back and sat down across from Hanai at an unused table.
She didn’t say anything as he began to eat. He was having trouble reading her attitude; she was polite enough, but at the same time she seemed intent on demonstrating the imposition he was putting on both her and the colony.
Between bites he asked,“Do you know a woman named Dian?”