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36.
She came to Green Station. Her shoes gritted on the sandy concrete here (must be near the beach, she thought) and loose papers blew about as she climbed the steel staircase to the overhead platform. The painkillers had her numbed up, and she was feeling little pain, although she felt herself stumbling a bit.
She could smell the sea now. She walked across the concrete platform and leaned out over a parapet. Resembling a California sunset lingering late into the night, orange clouds livened the western horizon. Wide ocean surfaces reflected sunlight up into the sky and bounced light down from clouds. It would all start breaking apart soon, she thought, unless something could be done—but what? What had she and Hedrock schemed to do? What had Hadley said: they were going to save West and East Gotha. But how? She must find Hedrock and ask him.
She looked about on the platform. Two rail lines ran through the station, one for each direction. The One Line went one way, and the Two Line went the other way. Looking about at the surrounding skyscrapers sleeping in their bluish fog, she reflected that no doubt in the corporate board rooms, high rollers were buying and selling Monopol real estate just like in the game. She wondered how often the various rail stations and lines changed hands. Who built and lost empires here?
No sign of Hadley's agents. She looked idly at the boy on the far wooden bench, the young woman teasing lipstick on her mouth in the reflection of a glassed-in metro schedule, the older businessman in black suit squinting into the pages of his Monopol Commerce Journal. She examined each of the thirty or more fellow travelers waiting to go in either direction, and none noticed her.
As she waited, she inhaled deeply and enjoyed the peaceful air of Monopol City, even though it echoed with the frenetic festival beat all around. Up here, it was quieter, actually. So she found as she turned her attention to the distant sea. Even at that, she thought she detected some odd straight lines like fissures in the whorls of distant pink and orange cloud still glowing with lost evening sunlight.
Her body ached from the pain, and her soul ached from all the death and destruction she had witnessed.
Nothing I can do about it. Tedda closed her eyes and inhaled the night air as she leaned across the parapet with arms loosely folded. Smells of loam and grass, maybe even swamp reeds with that pungent iodine whiff, rose up into her nose like life-worshiping incense. The death of the Hadley rule played again and again in her heart. Enjoy it while I can.
She barely heard the train arrive behind her. It stopped, its doors whooshed open, and passengers got on or off. A female announcer said something like "Green Station; Green Station; last turnover before Red and Blue. Passengers are reminded to carry their tickets with them and be ready to show them to any Transit Agent who may ask for proof of purchase. Train boarding now for Blue Station. Blue Station is next."
"Hello," said a man's voice, and she turned. It wasn't Hedrock, but he looked familiar. The smiling blond man in the finely knitted chocolate and maize herringbone suit held a field-gray raincoat draped over both wrists, and rocked lightly on tan leather shoes. "I'm Eduard."
Tedda laughed weakly. She sat leaning over her folded arms. "You must be joking."
He laughed too. "No, I'm not kidding. Don't tell me you've met my sister."
"You aren't joking," Tedda said. She felt a ball of anxiety in her gut.
Seeing her expression, Eduard paled. "Don't tell me something has happened to her."
Tedda made fists, winced at her own pain, and felt tears welling up. "I'm sorry. I don't want to have to tell you this. I held her in my arms as she died."
He lost his humor and looked crushed. "I see." He sat down heavily on one of the glossy, blond wooden benches. He held his head in his hands and sat like that for a few long minutes. She sat beside him, putting her arm around his back. He shook slightly, as if sobbing. Then he appeared to be hardly breathing. She grew alarmed. "Are you okay?"
He was silent for another minute. Then he looked up as if he'd awakened from a long sleep. He looked about as if checking for danger. Then he looked at her. "Are you okay?"
"I was asking you the same question."
"I'm a rule," he said matter-of-factly. "Rules tend to be all right. When we aren't, it usually means we no longer exist."
"I'm afraid I don't understand."
He looked directly in her eyes, with that same direct, cool gray look as his late sister. "You should. You worked for the central fatherland government. You helped create us."
"What?" She was upset at the thought that she might have participated in such questionable experiments and technologies.
"You don't remember," he stated as much as asked.
She sighed. "I'm afraid I can't remember, because I've been drugged. I'm not sure I want to remember."
"You might not," he said dubiously. He had a quality of naďve innocence that made his personality different from the harsher, more direct tactical personality of his soldier sister. "In any case," he said, "I am here to help you."
"Do you know anything about the people who have now twice spread me open like a cow to be butchered, and stuck all kinds of things in me?"
He pursed his lips with sorry recognition. "Your own West Gotha people wired you because they've been tracking you in the hope you'd lead them to Hedrock. Our people were forced to remove the West Gotha hardware. I'm sure it hurts like hell, and I'm sorry."
"You're really East Gotha?"
He nodded. "You are supposed to hate us, but it's time to get over that. You knew that before all this started. You were a leader."
"What do you want to help me with, besides surviving?"
"To get back to West Gotha. To work with Hedrock to save your world."
"How exactly were he and I trying to accomplish this?"
"Do you remember any of your published papers, Doctor?"
"Doctor!"
"You don't remember? You are a quant, a professor of mathematics. You practically invented the femtoworld."
She shook her head. "Does Hedrock know all this?"
He nodded. "He loved you enough to marry you, though he seduced many women during this spying."
"And how do you know him?"
Eduard looked at her wistfully. "I am a rule based on him. My sister was, too."
"I am sorry you lost your sister." Tedda's eyes grew moist and itchy again. She could still see the fading light in Hadley's eyes.
He nodded. "I was able to process through most of my grief a few minutes ago. I will grieve more when there is time."
"Sort of mechanical, are you?"
"Rules can be anything we set them up to be. My sister was a soldier. I am a guide."
"A guide? So you will guide me where I need to go?"
"Yes. And I have a message for you."
They rose. He led her to the One Line train step. She'd already seen a few trains head off toward the Blue Station, Yellow Station, Orange Station, and beyond. "Hedrock says he loves you more than ever, and is determined to stick with your plan even if it means you die together."
She nodded slowly. "I saw some of that passion in your sister's eyes."
His turn to nod: "She was a lot more like Hedrock than I am. She was passionate and fiery. I'm afraid I am rather easy going." The train pulled up, and doors opened. Some passengers got on while others got off. Eduard guided her into a clean, gray-rubber-lined coach where they took seats on orange and yellow padded benches. An attractive 40ish woman sat opposite with large bags from shopping in women's clothing stores. The other passengers were the usual mix of businessmen going home with their suits, coats, umbrellas, and hats; schoolchildren heading home, yawning, far too late; men, women of all walks of life; and not a single soldier or militia person among them. Eduard spoke softly so only Tedda could hear: "You should remember something about rules. There are two main kinds. One is the rule that is attached to a living person from which the rule is spun, and connected by a deep empathic Go-level channel; and the other is the free-floating rule, whose source person has died or never existed. Kind of a samurai rule. My sister and I are connected to Hedrock, so we are the more durable rules. We just vanish if our owner ceases to exist, or if we are killed like my sister was. The other kind, the free-floaters, they also cease to exist if they tried to relocate from one femto-plane to another."
"I don't quite get you," Tedda said.
"I know. Sorry. It means that, since I'm a connected rule, I can go with you to the Gotha worlds. If I were a free-floater, I would simply vanish."
Tedda recalled the way rules vanished, and tilted her face up to signal enlightenment at what he was saying. She could see again the mosaic pieces of Hadley falling like the finest powder and vanishing before they hit the street, leaving just a momentary twinkle here and there. She prodded: "So what else can you tell me?"
Eduard said: "Both East and West Gotha drilled down into this femtoworld."
"Who created it?"
"Your side."
"Meaning."
"West."
"I see." She found this shocking. It went against all her lifelong conditioning to not hate the rule sitting beside her.
"Get over it," he said with surprising firmness, almost with the true Hedrock fire. "The days of Leader Moss and his syndicate are coming to an end."
Leader Moss… Now what did that mean?
"I see you are still grappling with information," he said. "They kept you pumped full of drugs, which must be wearing off. I should warn you, though—some of it may kick in again when we get to West Gotha."
Her lifetime of conditioning kicked in with alarm bells again. "What are you going to do there?"
"Relax. We are going to shut down the huge energy field that Moss and his gang have had running for at least three generations to separate our world into two halves that hate each other for no reason so that the war industry can profiteer. And of course the Moss clan owns much of it on both sides of the wall."
"And how are we going to stop this?"
"You had published papers saying that this intereality project could lead to an uncontrolled reaction that would make the whole earth explode."
"I see. It's coming back to me a little bit." She held her head between stiff fingers and closed her eyes, trying to concentrate. There were vague snippets of thought, images, but nothing coherent. "Tell me more."
"You and a few colleagues invented the intereality principle. That involves taking data basing a million steps further by creating miniature rooms or worlds in which a mix of real and virtual objects can be stored or manipulated. At its simplest, it means taking matter and reducing it vastly in size by removing some of the Go energy underlying everything, thus reducing the distance among baryonic particles (subatomic protons, neutrons, electrons, and their fragments). You could theoretically do a lot of things—like create a miniature city, Monopol City for example, on an overcrowded world. You could perhaps even store a million people on a generation space ship, using a far slower time in the femtoworld, so that they could travel a thousand years but only age a day. The possibilities are limitless. Using subtle quantum properties, you could reduce a group of mining engineers and their equipment on Earth, and relocate them almost instantly to a receiving station on Mars, using deep Go channels. You opened up a whole new universe of possibilities. And then you discovered a serious catch."
"What's that?"
"There is a balance-imbalance principle you discovered, or balimbal. According to this balimbal principle, these artificially reduced worlds are never stable. They will either expand or contract in some time period based on a complicated mix of factors that scientists don't have a handle on yet. So a world like this will either implode and vanish, or else it will cause a runaway chain reaction that could be more powerful than a million hydrogen bombs or like the antimatter bomb that both sides have been working on for years."
"Another way to destroy the world," she said bitterly.
"All for the benefit of the Moss clan," he added.
"So what is the biggest triggering factor?"
"Energy pooling. The problem is that the earliest experiments at your laboratories, in creating a small room or maybe a warehouse, grew into this Monopol world, to which the Bit Cave engineers of West Gotha added another layer of energy by spinning off a game world. The problem is that East and West stole each other's technologies and duplicated each other's research, and they wound up with a number of separate femtoworlds that merged (without human interference) until this whole city and its oceans and deserts and outlying communities were created. According to your own calculations, the tolerance limit is rapidly approaching, and then the whole thing blows. It might blow off a mile-deep layer of the earth and totally destroy mankind."
"But Eduard," she said, "I already see signs of decay. If anything, this world will implode."
He looked startled. "If that's the case—and I can't see it—then we are doomed. Our whole world here is being starved of energy. Isn't that so? They use nuclear reactors to generate the energy it takes to keep these miniature worlds alive. It's like throwing a billion or a trillion balls in the air and juggling."
She could see the picture. "Yes, I suspect you are right. One side or the other has turned down its reactors. For some reason or another, perhaps for safety reasons, this Monorail world is being powered down until it shrinks out of existence. Sad, isn't it?"
He continued her line of thought: "All these lives, all this civilization, this splendid peace, and it's fading like a dream."
The train stopped at Blue Station and they got off. He led her through a series of lesser and lesser streets toward some hidden East Gotha gate upworld. "Funny," she said, "I don't see any more of those cracks in the texture of the world."
"I don't either. I've never seen them. Are you sure you weren't dreaming?"
She shook her head. "I'm afraid maybe it means I am being absorbed here, since I've been here too long."
"Ah, yes. Well, you won't have to worry about that much longer, because I'll have you back home before long."
They stopped at a nondescript door on a back street lit by street lamps and ambient night light. He jangled a bunch of ordinary keys on a little chain, until he found the right key and unlocked the door. Pulling the door open, he gestured for her to go inside. She stepped into a concrete block stairwell much like the one that had brought her here, and which the tankbots had blown up. He flicked on a light switch, and fluorescent light bars popped on above. With her eyes, she followed the succession of crunching, groaning, and popping fluoros up a seemingly endless series of steps. He pointed upward. "Your home is up there. Don't take any right turns, because those will put you into East Gotha space, and you might be arrested by the authorities there. Remember, Hedrock is wanted by both sides." He indicated the stairway with his eyes. "Ready to start climbing?"
"Thank God you are along to protect me."
"Let's get going then."
They started up the plain staircase with its white-painted tubular steel railings.
The stairs turned left, left, left, until she began to tire from climbing. Eventually, gasping for breath, they put their arms around one another's back for support. Tedda's aching spots began to burn, and he gave her some anesthetic salve which she applied while he looked away. Where there were right turns, they hurried past for fear of making a mistake in their fatigue.
Finally, they came to the top flight. There was no place higher to go. A battleship-gray steel door marked only with the stenciled red letter B offered the only way forward. Eduard grasped the handle and turned. It opened, and she stumbled into the hangar housing the Bit Cave. Eduard followed close behind. He said to her: "Tedda, you know that Hedrock must still be alive." She stopped and stared at him, trying to fathom his meaning. He extended his arms outward and explained with a bright expression: "A rule is meant to exist in his or her world of origin. A free-floating rule can travel down to a lower plane without harm, but not upward or upworld. The very fact that I am still alive tells you Hedrock is still alive. And he is probably well, knowing what a slippery character he is."
"Why do I care?" she snapped, resuming her climb.
"Because you love him, and you'll want to find him."
"And why do you care?"
"Because you are our world's only hope."
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