Greg Bear Eon 2 Eternity

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TWENTY-FOUR
Gaia
Elamite Bagdad was a ruin slowly being rebuilt by the Mesopotamian
Nekhemites, who had moved west in armored, mechanized hordes and sacked the
city twenty years before, while the Oikoumen concerned itself with one of the
endless Libyan incursions on its own borders. The
Nekhemites had proved themselves barely able to control the effete but
efficient people they had so piously slaughtered in the name of their
faceless, demanding god; they had then turned to Kleopatra, one of the few
queens left on Gala, and requested that she be a "bride to Nekhem."
The request was so ludicrous and so opportune that it could not be denied;
henceforward, her Imperial Hypslots was worshiped in effigy in
Bagdad,, and Oikoumen money and technical assistance flowed into the ancient
city. In return, the Nekhemites guarded the frontiers of the Hun-nos
Republic and Nordic Rhus.
Jamal Atta thought it very.unlikely they would face any trouble in
Bagdad,, and indeed, .after three hours of flight from DamaskS, the turbaned
and red-robed attendants at the new aerodromos gave them all the fuel they
needed, and maps of the Kazakh, Kirghiz and Uzbeki territories of Nordic Rhus.
As they departed sad Bagdad,, the Kelt bent over to investigate the floor and
held up something, grinning foolishly. Tiny plastic statues of Kleopatra
mating with Nekhem had been tossed through the beecraft doors along with their
supplies.
The Kelt gave her his find. Rhita fingered it thoughtfully, fascinated by its
crude vigor. Inelegant, ignorant, vicious and cruel beyond her experience, yet
honest and full of life, the Nekhemites might someday own all
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130 � GREG BEAR
the middle lands of the old world. She hoped they had deposed Nekhem by that
time. He was an ugly god.
From Bagdad,, they crossed the land of the Nekhem and picked up a tailwind,
which brought them in two hours to Raki, Raghae of old, once again on Oikoumen
territory. Raki was an isolated city on an island of peace heavily fortified
on all its borders. There, Oresias learned from a military field inspector
that no news had been heard from Alexandreia, and that their air transport
escorts an aerial tanker and an old cargo plane that would be abandoned were
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ready to accompany them from that point.
They now began their incursion into truly dangerous territory. Fifteen hundred
years before, the Persians and the Oikoumen in Europe had been swept to the
west and then driven to the seas the Priddeneian Sea and the Middle Sea by the
Alanoi and Hunnoi, working their nomadic peoples and subject Teutonic tribes
into a vast mobile nation of warriors.
An empire had been set up from the shores of Galleia and Kimbria to the great
walls of Chin, the greatest the world had ever known--and the most fragile. In
fifty years, that empire had vanished like a dream of blood and smoke, and the
Skythians and Nordic Rhus had moved into the void. The Alanoi and Avars had
finally held their ground east of the
Kaspian, and the Hunnoi north and east of them. For a thousand years, these
territories had been in flux, but had kept their basic shapes, until the
arrival of the Aigaian Turkmenoi, pirates and ravagers of Hellas.
The Turkmenoi had carved their own niche, transferring their piratie
tendencies to the Kaspian, and it was over that slender mountainous territory
between the Altaic republics that the beecraft now flew. The
Turkmenoi recognized no one as their betters or their masters. They isolated
themselves and tried to hold back the incursions of the outside world. There
would be no mercy for gullcraft should they be forced down; but it was
unlikely the Turkmenoi could muster such weapons.
Rhita looked at the hundreds of miles of broad naked mountains passing below,
and felt lonelier than ever before. She realized the variability of human
thought and human history, the contradictions of cultures, as unmappable as
these rocky passes and pinnacles, and it seemed that humans would never share
a single truth. That meant either there was no single truth, or humans would
kill themselves trying to find it Either way, thinking about it
depressed her.
Her exhilaration of a few hours before had faded into dark unease. She was
tired; sleep on the beecraft was not refreshing, accompanied as it was by the
unending roar of the jets. Her stomach was touchy again; she did
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E T ER N I T Y � 131
not feel it was safe to eat any more, yet she was hungry. She complained about
nothing, but the flight was dragging on and on . . .
They refueled in the air near the northeastena border of Turkmenia.
That process was interesting, what little she could see of it. The tanker
veered away from their group and flew back to Raghae, leaving them with the
cargo plane as escort. So far, despite her unease, she had to admit the
expedition was going well.
Against her will, her thoughts wandered to home. She had never had opinions
one way or the other about the Oikoumen; it had always been there; it seemed
to be immortal. Within her lifetime, there had never been disaster broad
enough to affect her world. Still, Rhodos had been peaceful for only eighty
years. As a youngster, she had swum in huge rain-filled pockmarks in the
hills, shell-holes from bombardments older than almost anyone alive. But if
the queen herself was in peril
The entire Oikoumen could change its character. There might not be a home she
could safely return to. Rhita squirmed on her seat, thinking of war,
rebellion, death.
The mountains below gave way to ochre flatlaads, with raw, rounded
naked-looking hills and rocky promontories. The ochre became patchy green, and
long ribbons of green bordered shallow streambcds. "We've passed over the
southern extremes of the Hunnos and Alanos republics,"
Oresias said, returning from the front cabin.
They swooped close to ground level for twenty minutes. Atta seemed especially
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forlorn, shaking his head and pounding his hands despairingly on his knees,
waiting for the Nordic Rhus Uzbek and Kazakh watchtowers to sense them. But
defenses never appeared; they apparently had passed through, either unseen or
a blip too small to be credible.
"One hour," Oresias said. The jets droned and wind rushed by, whistling
through cracks in the beecraft hull. She tried to sleep again, but could only
close her eyes, not bring on oblivion. She ached all over from tension and
trying to hide how. uncomfortable she was. The men sat still as statues,
stoic, faces dull, rocking back and forth in unison as the beecraft maneuvered
or hit a pocket of air.
How could she be so uneasy, and yet so bored? She might die, and not be
excited when death caught her .... Would death--she imagined a large black
serpent with skulls for teeth--recoil from such a cool, calm victim? Was it
against death's principles to eat the uncaring?
Looking out the window. Squinting in the sunlight. Using the can in the back
again and voiding it, watering the steppes. Sitting, strapping herself in.
"How close?" Oresias asked, bending over her. She had managed to
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132 � GREG BEAR
fall asleep somehow, dreaming of turtles flying. She rubbed her eyes and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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