Thistledown (Technology)

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Background

FTL

In the history of humankind, has there ever been anything more audacious? Issuing from Thistledowns seventh chamber, the inside (there is no outside) of n endless immaterial pipe fifty kilometers in diameter, smooth barren surface the color of newly-cast bronze, the Way is a universe turned inside-out, threaded by an axial singularity called the flaw...

And at regular intervals along the surface of the Way, potential openings to other places and times, histories and realities strung like beads...

Legacy by Greg Bear, page 15

For twenty-five years, the Way has beckoned to pioneers, an infinite frontier, filled with inexhaustible mystery--and danger. Though created by the citizens of Thistledown, even before it was opened, the Way was parasitized by intelligences both violent and ingenious, the Jart. With the Jart influence now pushed back beyond the first two billion kilometers of the Way, gates have been opened at a steady pace, and new worlds discovered--

Legacy by Greg Bear, page 16-17

Korenowski lifted a lump of white dough and listened to its soft hiss in his hands. The lumps were remains of a failed attempt six years before to create a gate without the Way; the failure had been quiet, but decisive. Instead of creating a gate, he had created a new form of matter, quite inert, possessing no useful properties that he had found, so far.

Eternity by Greg Bear, page 267

Buried sixty meters within the outer perimiter of the seventh chamber's southern cap were seven generators, connected by seven field-lined shafts of pure vacuum to the sixth chamber machinery. The generators had no moving parts and nothing to do with electrons or magnetic fields; they worked on far more subtle principles, principles developed by Korzenowski based on mathematical reasoning that had primarily begun with Patricia Luisa Vasquez in the late twentieth century.

These seven generators had created the stresses on spacetime that had resulted in the Way. They had not been used for four decades but were still sound; the cauum shafts were still operating and completely free of matter

The Way stretched on forever, or at least into incomprehensible and immeasurable distances. This was what Korenowski had done--making the Thistledown bigger on the inside than the outside, opening up endless potential and adventures and danger, and for that, he had been assassinated shortly after the Way’s opening.

Legacy by Greg Bear, page 20-1

He took four thousand followers--divaricates--and a few humble machines and went off to make Utopia....

Where did he take them? I asked.

Down the Way,� Yanosh said. With the complicity of two apprentice gate openers, he created an illegal passage in a geometry stack....They chose a stack region near the frontier, close to Jart boundaries, They used the conflict of 748 as a cover.

Legacy by Greg Bear, page 22-23

Little or nothing was known about Jart anatomy, psychology, or history. Even less was known about how they had made their own reversed gate just after the Way’s creation, and before it had been opened and attached to Thistledown. The Jarts had begun a furious surprise offensive at the moment of the opening, killing thousands. Ever since the war had been waged unmercifully by both sides, using all the weapon available--including the physics of the Way itself. Those who had built it, and who accessed its many realities strung like beads, could also make large stretches of it inhospitable to anything living.

Legacy by Greg Bear, page 23-24

I studied the secret Dalgesh report, made by three surveyors immediately after Lamarckia’s discovery. Lamarckia was the second planet of a yellow sun, born in a relatively metal-poor galactic region, not correlated with any known place in our own galaxy.

Legacy by Greg Bear, page 27

The flawship began its long, gentle deceleration. Barely four meters from where I sat, the flaw glowed pink, brightening as the clamps spaced within the middle of the ship applied pressure. It was not friction that slowed the ship, but the clamps’ intrusion into a forbidden region of space-time.

Legacy by Greg Bear, page 29

You don't have to find this place again,� Ry Ornis complained. He grimaced ruefully. It's been accessed by amateurs. I can imagine what they did to isolate and pull up the right world-line. They've probably mangled the embryonic gate and reduced our access to at most three or four. So...I have no room for error. if I fumble a few world-lines, it's a one-way trip for you, and Lamarckia is of no use to anybody.

I did not like Ry Ornis much; most gate openers made me nervous. Their talents were on such a different plane, their personalities radically opposed to my own.

Legacy by Greg Bear, page 29

It's not an exact science. Every gate opener has illusions. My illusion is that the more I know about a place, the better I'm able to sniff out its world-lines.

Legacy by Greg Bear, page 30

Most of these lines pour out into empty expanse. So much desolation, measure without interest. Makes us all very lonely. Here a solitary star, there an airless ball of rock. So easy to be attracted by false worlds, dreams of futures not yet accessible, not yet quite real. Ten years, twenty years...Maybe two dozen years. No guarantees. I might drop you before Lenke's immigrants arrive. Wouldn't want that.

Legacy by Greg Bear, page 32

So I spread my carpet here...And dub this gate number thirty-two, of stack region twelve...” Ry Ornis traced a glowing red line on the wall with the sphere of the clavicle.

Stand aside.

I stood aside.

A bump rose from the surface of the Way, five meters wide with a dimple in the middle. Red and green lines danced across its fresh surface, vibrated rapidly, and became the familiar color of fresh bronze. Ry Ornis spread it by backing away, trailing the clavicle behind him. A disk-shaped canopy grew over the new gate.

Legacy by Greg Bear, page 33

The Way, an artifiical universe fifty kilometers in diameter and infinitely long, was created by the human inhabitants of an asteroid starship called Thistledown. They had become bored with their seemingly endless journey between teh stars; the Way, with its potential of openings to other times and other universes, made reaching their destingation unnecessary.

That the Way was destroyed is known; that it never ends in any human space or time is less obvious. Even before its creators completed their project, the Way was discovered and invaded by the nonhuman Jarts, who sought to announce themselves to Deity, what they called Descendant Mind, by absorbing and understanding everyting, everywhere. The Jarts nearly destroyed the Way’s creators, but were held at bay for a time, and for a price.

The Way of All Ghosts, Collected Stories of Greg Bear page 525-6

"Probabilities fluctuated wildly, but always passed through zero, and gate openers, their equipment, and all associated personnel within a few hundred meters of the gate, were swallowed by a null that can only be described in terms of mathematics. It became difficult to remember that they had ever existed; records of their histories were corrupted or altered, even though they lay millions of kilometers from the incident. We were compeled."

--Testimony of Master Gate Opener Ry Ornis, Secret Hearings Conducted by the Infinite Hexamon Nexus, "On the Advisability of Opening Gates into Chaos and Order"

The Way of All Ghosts, Collected Stories of Greg Bear page 526

"She tapped into chaos?" Olmy asked. Some universes accessed through the Way were empty voids, dead, useless but relatively harmless; others were virulent, filled with a bubbling sew of unstable "constants" that reduced the reality of any observer or instrumentality. Only two such gates had ever been opened in the Way; the single forunate aspect of these disasters had been that the gates themselves had quickly closed and could not be reopened.

"Not chaos," Kesler said..."The Opener's Guild tells me Enoch was looking for a domain of enhanced structure, hyper-order. What she found was more dangerous than any chaos. her gate may have opened into a universe of endless fecundity. Not just order: Creativity. Every universe is in a snese a plexus, its parts connected by information links; but Enocha's universe contained no limits to the propagation of information. No finite speed of light, no separation between anything analogous to the Bell continuum...and other physicality."

The Way of All Ghosts, Collected Stories of Greg Bear page 533-4

"Some of our gate openers think they can build a chirque, a ring gate, and seal off the lesion."

"That would cut us off from the rest of the Way." Olmy said.

"Worse. In a few days of weeks it would destroy the Way completely, seal us off in Thistledown forever. Until now, we’ve never been that desperate."

The Way of All Ghosts, Collected Stories of Greg Bear page 535

"Openers don't much care about temporal immortality," Ry Ornis said. "When we open a gate--we glimpse eternity. A hundred gates, a hundred different eternities. Coming back is just an interlude between forevers."

The Way of All Ghosts, Collected Stories of Greg Bear page 538

Clavicles were devices used by gate-opners to create the portals that gave access to toher times, other universes, "outside" the Way. Typically, they were shaped like bicycle handlebars attached to a small sphere.

The Way of All Ghosts, Collected Stories of Greg Bear page 541

At speed, the flawship's forward view of the way became a twisted lens. Stray atoms and ions of gas within the Way piled up before them into a distorting, white-hot atmosphere. Rays of many colors writhed from a skewed vertex of milky brightness; the flaw, itself a slender geometric distortion, now resembled a white-hot piston.

Stray atoms of gas in the Way were becoming a problem, the result of so many gates being opened to bring in raw materials fromthe first exploited worlds.

The flawship's status appeared before Olmy in steady reassuring symbols of blueand green. Their speed: three percent of ca, the speed of light in the Way, slightly less than c in the outside universe. They were now accelerating at more than six gees, down from the maximum they had hit at 4 ex 5. None of this could be felt inside the hull. The display showed their position as 1 ex 7, ten million kilometers beyond the cap of the seventh chamber, still almost three billion kilometers from the Redoubt.

The Way of All Ghosts, Collected Stories of Greg Bear page 545

"What I might have been implying is this: if Issa Danna's gate somehow lifted free of the floor, the wall of the Way, then its constraints would have changed. A free gate can adversely affect local world-lines. Something can enter and leave from any angle. In conditioning we are made to understand that the world-lines of all transported objects passing through such a free gate actually shiver for several years backward. Waves of probability retrogade."

The Way of All Ghosts, Collected Stories of Greg Bear page 547-8

For the past million kilometers, they had passed over a scourged, scrubbed segment of the Way. In driving back the jarts from their strongholds, tens of thousands of Way defenders had died. The Way had been altered by the released energies of the battle and still glowed slightly, shot through with pusling curls and rays, while the flaw in this region transported them with a barely noticeable roughness. The flawship could compensate some, but even with this compensation, they had reduced their speed to a few thousand kiometers an hour.

The Way of All Ghosts, Collected Stories of Greg Bear page 551-2

"The Way is going to be opened again....It is like a drug, that kind of technology, that kind of power. Even the pure of heart cannot hold their convictions forever."

Eternity by Greg Bear page 45

Buried sixty meters within the outer perimeter of the seventh chamber's southern cap were seven generators connected by seven field-lined shafts of pure vacuum to the sixth chamber machinery. The generators had no moving parts and nothing to do with electrons or magnetic fields; they worked on far more subtle principles, principles developed by Korzenowski based on mathematical reasoning that had primarily begun with Patricia Luisa Vaquez in the late twentieth century.

These seven generators had created the stresses on spacetime that had resulted in the Way. They had not been used for four decades but were still sound; the vacuum shafts were still operating adn completely free of matter or time-linked energy, that enigmatic byproduct of interaction between universes.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 271

In two more weeks, the Way generators would be ready for tests. Virtual universes of fractional dimensions--continua with little more than abstract reality--would be created in deliberately unstable configurations. The night sky over Earth would aprkle with their deaths, as particles and radiations unknown in this continuum--or any stable continuum--left their tracks in the protesting void.

In three weeks, if the first tests went well, korzenowski would order the creation of a torus, an independent and stable universe turned in upon itself. He would then dismantle the torus and observe how it faded; the manner of its demise could give clues as to the state adn superspatial location of the Way's sealed terminus.

Over the next few months, they would "fish" for that terminus. A temporary virtual universe the size and shape of the Way, but of finite length, would be generated, would be encouraged to merge with the terminus, adn would create an attractive bridge between the generators and their now-independent progeny.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 272

While the Way intersected an infinite number of points in space and time--and a smaller infinity of points in other universes--each intersection was not in itself [eviternal,] of infinite duration.

Each gate opened would have a finite existence, no greater than the total duration of teh Way's existence as measured internally; no single gate would be in existence longer than the Way itself. The total number of gates that could be opened in teh Way was huge, but not infinite; the Way could not give access to all possible points of intersection.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 336

The Engineer kept his place at the center of the blister, linked to the clavicle, waiting for the final evidence of his success: the lengthening of the Way's central singularity, the flaw, to compensate for the Way's new condition as an adjunct of status space-time.

He knew precisely where the flaw would stop its advance. It would end up just over nineteen centimeters from the locus of his clavicle, pushing through the blister field.

He felt the flaw advancing: to his eyes, it resembled a strange, curved mirror growign larger in front of him. In the clavicle's abstraction, it registered as an enormous dynamically restrained force, all the tension of the Way's existence adn self-contradictions tied up in a calm, yet raging knot. The singularity was in some respect more [real] than the Way itself; but few humans could comprehend that kind of reality.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 350

The bronze pipe, fifty kilometers wide, elongated itself to infinity before him. A mimicry of the tube light within the enclosed Thistledown chambers ran in a pale glowing ribbon down its center. He felt dizzy for a moment, as if he had actually become part of the tortured geodetics describing the Way's unlikely existence....

Korzenowski stepped down from the shuttle hatch and stood a few centimeters above the naked surface of the Way. He removed the environment field segment beneath his feet. Now he was on the surface himself. Removing his slipper, he let his naked foot touch what was neither warm nor cold, what possessed only one quality at this moment and that was solidity. The surface of teh Way was uninterested in the laws of thermodynamics.

Korzenowski bent down and rubbed the palm of his hand on that surface.

He stood up, feeling his foundation--the Mystery of Patricia Vasquz---very strongly now, as if someone were watching over his shoulder. Her creation, too, in a way, he thought. Our offspring, a wonderful monstrosity.

"Nothing is ever pure, except for you," he said to The Way. "You were made by precocious children. We didn't know what you would mean to us. You allowed us to dream fine dreams. Now I've got to kill you."

Eternity by Greg Bear page 358-9

Military

"We lost three expeditions trying to save her people and close the gate. The last was six months ago. Something like life-forms had grown up around the main station, fueled by the lesion. They�ve become huge, unimaginably bizarre. No one can make sense of them. What was left of our last expedition managed to build a barrier about a thousand kilometers south of the lesion. We thought that would give us the luxury of a few years to decide what to do next. But that barrier has been destroyed. We�ve not been able to get close enough since to discover what�s happened. We have defenses in that sector, key defenses to keep the flaw from being used against us...The Jarts were able to send a relativistic projectile along he flaw, hardly more than a gram of rest mass. We couldn�t stop it. It struck Axis City at twelve hundred hours yesterday."

Olmy had been told the details of the attack: a pellet less than a millimeter in diameter, traveling very close to the speed of light. Only the safety and control mechanisms of the sixth chamber machinery had kept the entire Axis City from disintegrating.

The Way of All Ghosts, Greg Bear, Far Horizons page 429-430

The flawship--one of a fleet of more than a hundred--could travel at five thousand kilometers a second. It could disengage from the flaw to allow other traffic to pass--though Heineman confessed he didn�t see how this was done, since the flaw passed right down the center of the ship--and it could also send out smaller craft for landing parties and reconnaissance.

Eon by Greg Bear, page 357

Olmy recognized human armored physical penetrators (unmanned except by partials) and automated seek-and-destroy units, great and small--all nasty and black and seething with field energies. He shuddered. He had always disliked such weapons. They were simple and direct and unstoppable. They destroyed whatever they captured within their fileds, reducing it to component atoms, pulses of heat and gamma rays.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 134

The Jart occupies a small vehicle, weaving through tractor filed obundaries like a dragonfly through walls of reeds. Above, throughout this section of the way--

Very likely in the million kilometers or so of disputed territory at 1.9 ex 9-

Eternity by Greg Bear page 134

"We have immensely powerful offensive weapons stored in Thistledown. They were too ungainly for pure defense; useless in the Way fortresses. No military planner gives up weapons that might someday have a use...So they were kept in the asteroid walls. Ancient, but still effective and deadly."

Eternity by Greg Bear page 222

Kerzenowski floated where the way�s singularity had sonce been...With catlike eyes, he observe dht eocnstruction on the southern cap of the seventh chamber, radiating for kilometers outward fro the bore hole, huge black concentric rings of virtual particle stimulators and their reservoirs of graviton-stabilized tritium metal. These would not be brought into play until after the opening of the Way; the stimulators could be used as weapons, and were capable of strpping the Way clear of matter for a distance of several hundred kilometers, giving the Hexamon its first "beachhead," should it need one. Soon, the traction beam radiation shields would be in palce to focus the backwash of disrupted matter that the stimulators might creature along the same path as the stimulator beams.

Fearsome weapons, fearsome defenses.

Eternity by Gregy Bear page 271-2

Singularity stations are spaced at intervals of about five million kilometers in Jart territory. We�ll encounter flaw defenses and barriers first.

Then we shouldn�t be traveling very fast, should we?

No more than one-fiftieth c. That is maximum velocity for all of our vessels on the flaw; anything traveling faster is automatically destroyed.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 367

The darkness at the flawship�s nose suddenly parted and they stared at a segment of the way perhaps three hundred kilometers long. Blocking the segment was a black radiance, deeply scalloped around its circumference, fully fifty kilometers in diameter. the walls of the Way leading up to thsi formation were brazen, undisturbed.

We will not be allowed to pass, the Jart told Olmy. That is a barrier to protect command individuals.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 380

The idea had been discussed in upper-level defense circles for decades. It was simple, if drastic: the Way at many points touched on stellar bodies. Since the Way was essentially a hollow, evacuated tube, opening a circuit of massive gates into the heart of a star would suck up the high-pressure, superheated plasma and distribute it throughout the Way. Barriers--though constructed of modified Way space-time--would transmit the extreme heat and finally break down, becoming level with the walls. The Way itself would remain intact, but everything else for billions of kilometers would simply dissolve to component particles in the fury.

Eon by Greg Bear page 439-440

Daily Life

I fingered the pink patches at the base of my skull and on my wrist, feeling a new loneliness. Since the death of my father, I had given myself a variety of mental enhancements not condoned by him: tiny devices in my head and neck that sped thoughts, improved memory, gave me certain abilities and knowledge bases and also made direct internal connections to City Memory, to millions of individuals and thousands of libraries. To pass undetected among the Lenk divaricates, wo carried no such implants, I had been stripped of my extra voices and eyes and minds. Within my thoughts there was only my own self now. I felt a peculiar embarrassment: I was naked in a way that had nothing to do with clothing or revealed flesh.

Legacy by Greg Bear, page 28-9

Clavicles were devices used by gate-opners to create the portals that gave access to other times, other universes, "outside" the Way. Typically, they were shaped like bicycle handlebars attached to a small sphere.

The Way of All Ghosts, Greg Bear, Far Horizons page 436

The Frant used an adapted pictor to projet the objects and landscapes around them and camouflage their activity in and aroundt he tent. The two guards, dressed in black, might hear Olmy if he was especially noisy, but they wouldn�t see him.

Eon by Greg Bear, page 119

"Talsit meditation is the process of being surrounded by carriers of Talsit data. His body is cleansed of impurities and his mind of obstacles to clear thought. Talsit data informs, reorganizes, criticizes the mental functions. It is a kind of dreaming."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 224

"You can be taught a command of spoken colloquial and technical Russian in two hours. An additional hour will be required to teach you to read and translate."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 228

"All the decoration are illusions," Patricia said. "There�s a pictor--a kin dof projector--in each room. It makes our minds feel and see the elaborations. The furniture is here in basic shape and funcion, but everything else is projected. They�ve had this technology for a long time, centuries. They�re as used to it as we are to electricity."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 307

"One hundred million humans occupy the city and the Way. Ten million live off-city, along the Way, chiefly traders and coordinators of the five hundred and seventy-one active wells. Ninety million live in the Axis City. Of these, seventy million are in City Memory. Most of those have lived out their legal two incarnations and have retired their bodies to exist as personality patterns in the City Memory environment. Under special circumstances, they may be assigned new bodies, but most often they are content in Memory. Some five million deviant persanlities--those who are incomplete or dranged in such a way they cannot be redeemed, even with extreme methods of therapy--are kept inactive."

"People don�t die?" Carrolson asked.

"Death and dying here usually refer to loss of corporeal states, not mental states. In a word, no, or very rarely," Ram Kikura said. "All of us are equipped with implants." She touched a spot behind her ear, then moved her finger to a spot above the bridge of her nose. "They supplement our reasoning, and should an accident occur, they retain a record of our most recent experiences and personality. The implant is almost indestructable--it is the first thing we recover from the victim of an accident. Every few days, we update our backup in City Memory with records from these implants. That way, a personality can be quickly reconstructed. All we need to do is make a final update and inhabit a new body, and the ressurection is indistinquishable from the original."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 311

"At the risk of shocking you--which may be unavoidable--most people today are not born of man and woman. Their personalities are created by one or moreparents through the mergin of partial personalities in City Memory, with the infusion of what we cal Mystery from at least one individual, usually a parent. The young personality is educated and tested in City Memory, and if it passes certain tests, it �matures,� that is, it earns its first incarnation, most often as a mature young adult. The corupus the personality inhabits may be designed by the parents, or by the individual. If in time the corporeal citizen uses its two incarnations, it then retired to City Memory."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 312

The farthest southern extension of the city was a broad Maltese cross, extended from two cubes mounted one behind the other on the flaw. The cneter of the cross accepted the flaw, whcih then extended through the cubes. Here was the machinery which powered, propelled and guided the city along the singularity. The same effect that could move the city along the flaw, and had propelled the tuberider, also provided mcuh of the city�s energy. Generators within the cubes were spun by turbines whose "blades" intersected the singularity and were subjected to the spatial transform.

Eon by Greg Bear, page 355-6

Four ex six--four million kilometers down the corridor--merely a hop, skip and jump, she thought. And for every thousand kilometers, an advance of one year in time; for every fraction of a millimeter, entry into an alternate universe.

Eon by Greg Bear, page 375

"This is our second biggest gate, five kilometers in diameter," Olmy said. "The largest is seven kilometers wide and leads to the Talsit world at one point three ex seven."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 382

Like a blowtorch describing an arc in the sky, a meteor plummeted toward the distant sea�s surface. Before it struck, a web of pulsed orange rays lanced out from the horizon and shattered the meteor. More beams sought out and destroyed the crazily weaving fragments. Only dust remained to hit the ocean or land.

Eon by Greg Bear, page 383

The Frant world, she explained, served as a resort for humans and several other osxygen-breathing beings in the Way. Because the level of ultraviolet from the bright yellow-dwarf star was higher than humans were used to, an atmospheric shield had been erected over several thousand square kilometers.

Eon by Greg Bear, page 384

"All gates have been tuned to open onto worlds, planets. The Way passes an infinity of possible junctions with other worlds, and we must choose from a large subst of that infinity when we tune at each optimum point. You�ve noticed, perhaps, that our gates are always spaced at distances no less than four hundred kilometers. That�s because of the rhythm of the geometry stacks. Do you understand that rhythm?"

Patricia nodded. "Yes."

"We do not venture into the stacks themselves. They commingle alternate universes and timelines in a way not useful to us. We work between." He axed the air with the edge of his hand. "We work within a range of ten meters, and within that range, there are perhaps a billion vantages. We tune as closely as we can to the location of an object with planetary mass; the clavicle tells us the mass by picting directly to our minds, giving us all the necessary information."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 449-450

"This junction--if it is a junction--has to be beyond one ex fifteen--over a hundred light years down the Way."

"There can�t be any gates there, then," Patricia said.

Yates raised his eyebrows. "Why not?"

"Because that�s beyond the end of our universe, in time. Gates would open onto..." She held up her hands. "Nothing. Null."

"Not necessarily," Ry Oyu said.

Eon by Greg Bear, page 455-6

We now journey down a ghost Way, its local nature altered by the violence of our near light-speed passage. It has no diameter or boundaries as such; objects with mass simply cannot exist beyond a distance of more than twenty thousand kilometers from the course on which we ride. (The flaw, or singularity, vanished three months ago. Simply evaporated in a pulse of newly created particles, some of them unknown even to the Geshels.)

Eon by Greg Bear, page 492

We have distorted way geometry in more than the requisite four dimensions; we have also contracted the fifth dimension, drawing the alternate Ways together. The Way boundaries have become transparent in a wide variety of frequencies, and we can perceive the shape of other Ways. We can select which Way we wish to inspect, using devices similar to the gate-opening clavicles. It is in observing these alternate Ways that Beryl Wallace is now occupied.

We can even see (and in some instances, communicate with) beings in other Ways. So there are an infinite number of world-lines, and because of this one human artifact, an infinite number of connections between them. Our researchers devise schemes to allow us to cross over to other Ways, other super-sets of world-lines, but even with implants I have difficulty understanding what they are discussing.

This much I do know. There are Ways where the beings of thousands of completely different universes hold commerce, exchaning in some cases only information, in other cases actually exchanging different types of space-time. Is it possible to conceive o fthe potential that would exist between two universes of differing qualities? Would that potential be called energy?

Eon by Greg Bear, page 492-3

"The recovery goes as well as could be expected, Ser President...Even the Hexamon�s vast technologies cannot make up for a lack of resources, not when you wish to accomplish such a transformation in mere decades. There is a natural time required for Earth�s wounds to heal, and we cannot accelerate that by much. I estimate that about half the task has been accomplished, if we say that full recovery is a return to economic conditions comparable to thoe preceding the Death." "Doesn�t that depend on how ambitious we are on Earth?" Ras Mishiney asked. "If we wish to bring Terrestrials to a level comparable with the precincts of Thistledown."...

"That could take a century or more," Olmy said.

Eternity by Greg Bear, page 14

They boarded the tractor. The eight-passenger vehicle rode over the sand on a traction field, not treads or tires; it had been manufactured aboard Thistledown and was sleek and beautiful, with a pearly white exterior and a soft, adapatable gray interior that shaped itself to spoken or picted commands.

Eternity by Greg Bear, page 87

For centuries, there had been a law in cybernetic research: �For any program, there is a system such that the program cannot not know its system.� That is, a program, however complicated, even a human mentality, could not always be aware of the system it was running on, if no clues were provided by that system; it could only know the extent to which the system allowed it to run.

But less than a century ago, Hexamon investigators headed by a brilliant team-leader, homorph Doria Fer Taylor, had found mathematical algorithms which allowed programs to completely determine the nature of their systems. Thus, a downloaded mentality could tell whether or not it had been downloaded; Olmy could, in theory, know under any circumstances whether his focus of personality was running in implants or in his organic mind.

In theory, such algorithms, fully developed, could allow a mentality or program to change the nature of its system, to the extent that a system could be changed. Because of the existence of rogues in city memory, such information could have had disastrous consequences. The rogues--even one rogue--could have destroyed city memory and all that was in it. Human mentalities were not disciplined enough to be given such power. the researches had been classified. Olmy had learned of them through his police work, when he had been ordered by the presiding minister to investigate whether any mentalities in remote gate memories--human or otherwise--had independently discovered such power. None had.

Olmy searched his deepest levels of implant memory for the Taylor algorithms. He had often tucked away such items, trusting himself to keep them secure, unable to resist the chance to incorporate them into his personal data file...

Judging from what had happened to Beni and Mar Kellen, as well as the early researchers, the Jart mentality was aware of and fully capable of using the Taylor algorithms. But at the time of its capture, humans had not even known of their existence. Eternity by Greg Bear page 104-5

The miracles at the foundation of Christinaity were almost all duplicated weekly in the Terrestrial Hexamon. Technology had superseded religion.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 109

Politics

The Way stretched on forever, or at least into incomprehensible and immeasurable distances. This was what Korenowski had done--making the Thistledown bigger on the inside than the outside, opening up endless potential and adventures and danger, and for that, he had been assassinated shortly after the Way�s opening.

Legacy by Greg Bear, page 20-1

Little or nothing was known about Jart anatomy, psychology, or history. Even less was known about how they had made their own reversed gate just after the Way�s creation, and before it had been opened and attached to Thistledown. The Jarts had begun a furious surprise offensive at the moment of the opening, killing thousands. Ever since the war had been waged unmercifully by both sides, using all the weapon available--including the physics of the Way itself. Those who had built it, and who accessed its many realities strung like beads, could also make large stretches of it inhospitable to anything living.

Legacy by Greg Bear, page 23-24

What made Brin different--more like Lenk than like any leaders on Thistledown--was his apparent role as the figurehead in a cult of personality. Leaders on Thistledown generally ruled like bureaucratic administrators--hence the unglamorous titles of their higher offices.

Legacy, by Greg Bear, page 282

For the past million kilometers, they had passed over a scourged, scrubbed segment of the Way. In driving back the Jarts from their strongholds, tens of thousands of Way defenders had died. The Way had been altered by the released energies of the battle and still glowed slightly, shot through with pusling curls and rays, while the flaw in this region transported them with a barely noticeable roughness. The flawship could compensate some, but even with this compensation, they had reduced their speed to a few thousand kiometers an hour.

The Way of All Ghosts, Greg Bear, Far Horizons page 448

The Presiding Minister of the Axis City, Ilyin Taur Ingle, stood in the broad observation blister, staring out across the Way through the city�s blue glow at lanes bright with the continuous flow of traffic between the gates. Behind him stood two assigned ghosts and a corporeal representative of the Hexamon Nexus.

Eon by Greg Bear, page 17

"A Frant always wishes to help," Olmy explained. "If it cannot help, it feels pain. I�m afraid you�re quite a trial to my Frant."

"Your Frant? You own him?"

"It. No, I don�t own him. For the time of our assignment, we are duty-wed. Rather like social symbionts. I share its thoughts and it shares mine."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 254

"We�ll enter a dock in Axis Nader."

"How large is the city?"

"Do you mean how extensive, or how many people?"

"Both, I suppose."

"It strentches forty kilometers down the Way, and it has a population of about ninety million--twenty million corporeal, embodied; seventy million stored in City Memory."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 257

"Ser Suli Ram Kikura."

"I�m not acquainted with her." By the time he had finished the statement, Toller had a complete file on Kikura on hand, ready to be picted and interpreted. He scanned the file rapidly, shifting to implant logic, and found nothing he could criticise.

Eon by Greg Bear, page 26

Of the ninety million citizens int he Axis City, corporeal or in City Memory, only fifteen million had important work to do, and of those, only three million worked more than a tenth of their living hours.

Eon by Greg Bear, page 261

"The Hexamon is the totality of human citizens. You might call it the state. The Nexus is the main lawmaking body of this city, and of the Way from the Thistledown and the forbidden territory to mark two ex nine. That is, the two-billion-kilometer point of the Way."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 310

"What are Jarts?"

"Fleas, the Nexus will tell you--parasites, monstrously aggressive and not in the least cooperative. The Way was in place a thousand years before it was finally connected to the Thistledown--Way time, of course, which wasn�t congruent until the linkup. The Jarts entered through a test gate and took up residency before it was opened. They matured in the Way and we had to fling them back. They know how to open gates and they control between two ex nine and, we think, four ex nine. But look, this is all in the Memory and I don�t have much time. I have news about Olmy. You know about the orthodox Naderites and the Geshels?"

"Yes," Patricia said.

"Well, they have two contingency plans should the Jarts overpower us, which seems all too likely now. The Geshels want to mobilize the entire Axis City, grab the flaw and ride it at near-light-speed over the Jart terriotries, and at the same time blow the Thistledown off the end of the Way."

"What? Why?"

"That could seal the Way--cauterize it. And eliminate the danger of the Thistledown�s being reoccupied and having the entire Way controlled by Jarts. The other alternative is to guide the Thistledown to a habitable planet and simply abandon the Way--or close it down, eliminate it. The Axis City could escape by passing through the end of the Way, blowing off the Thistledown and going into orbit around the planet."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 344-5

"You�ll enjoy Timbl, our world," the Frant said. "We�ve been long-time clients of the Hexamon. It�s a very tame gate, long established."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 375

Patricia turned and saw a small, bright meteor pass across a few degrees of the horizon. No beams reached out to destroy it--it was small enough to disintegrate harmlessly on its own.

"We helped the Frants install their Sky Lance," Toller said. "When we opened the gate, they were still in the early atomic age. We arranged for some exchanges of information, set up a client-patron relationship and gave them what they needed to protect their world against the millennial comet sweeps."

"What did you get in return?"

"Oh, they received much more than Sky Lance for what they gave. We opened the Way to them. They�re full partners in three gates now, commerce with three worlds and the normal-space trading systems around them. In return, they leased raw material and information rights to us. But the most valauable commodity they contribute is themselves. You met Olmy�s partner. We find them ideal to work with--resourceful, reliable, unfailingly pleasant. And as far as anyone can tell, they genuinely enjoy working with us."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 387

"The conference is considering the alternatives even now--and have been for over three weeks. We believe the Jarts will break through our barriers in a matter of years, perhaps months. They�ll overrun our most extended gates--we�ll shut them down and withdraw, of course--and eventually, by the end of the decade, they�ll push us back into the thistledown. We�ll have to evacuate, and to keep them frm following us, we�ll have to destroy the Way. That would be an incredible calamity."

"You�re certain about this?"

Toller nodded once. "We cannot hold them for long. They�ve grown quite strong, and they�ve enlisted the help of other worlds--by opening gates all up and down their segment of the Way."

"Couldn�t you do the same?"

"As I said, they�ve occupied the Way for several centuries longer than we have. They�re more familiar with it, in some ways, than we are, even though we created it."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 391

"Thirteen hundred years, and people are still peope," Heineman mused with an edge of bitterness. "Still squabbling."

"True, and not entirely true," Olmy said. "In your day, many people were so severely handicapped by personality disorders or faulty thinking structures that they often acted against their own best interests. If they had clearly defined goals, they could not reason or even intuit the clear paths to attain those goals. Often adversaries had the same goals, even very similar belief systems, yet hated each other bitterly. Now no human has the excuse of ignorance or mental malfunction, or even lack of ability. Incompetence is inexcusable, because it can be remedied. One of Ser Ram Kikura�s services is to guide people in selecting appropriate skills and attitudes for their work. They can assimilate the necessary adjuncts, whether it be a set of memories or even a personality supplement."

"So why do they still disagree?" Heineman asked.

Olmy shook his head. "Know that, and you understand the ultimate root of all conflict in the realm of Star, Fate and Pneuma. In all the universes accesible to us."

"It�s unknowable, then," Lanier said.

"Not at all. It�s all too clear. There can be more than one ultimately desirable goal, and many equally valid ways to achieve those goals. Unfortunately, there are limited resources, and not everyone can follow the paths they want. That is true even for us. Our citizens are for the most part good-hearted, capable and diverse. I say for the most part, because the Axis City system is by no means perfect..."

"What you�re saying is, the gods themselves would have war..." Olmy agreed. "Interesting how the crude myths of our youth come back as eternal truths, no?"

Eon by Greg Bear, page 401-2

Within the pipes, suffused by a faint violet glow, shapes not even remotely human tracted over the landscape.

"Our clients and allies," Olmy said. He pointed to one individual, an eight-legged cylinder with a mane of fuzzy antler-like appendages surrounding its bifurcated, round "head." "Talsit," he said. "Tertiary form. They�re a very old race--their history goes back at least two billion terrestrial years."

Eon by Greg Bear, page 424

The beings clled Talsit were offshoots of a unified biological-mechanical intelligence that had once occupied the fourteen planets of a very old solar system. At one point, the intelligence had been entirely stored in memory banks, with no physically manifested individuals--not unlike the Axis City Memory. But gradually the intelligence had broken down into individuals--a condensation of consciousness within the system--and the individuals had created new forms for their physical manifestation. These had beent he parent species of the Talsit. The parent species, this Talsit seemed to imply, still existed, but were introoverted and isolationist; they had created the talsit to act as mercantile representatives, consultants to younger civilizations. A circuit of gates happened to pen onto one of their worlds, and they had begun trading, first with the Jarts who had opened the gates, and then with humans after the Jarts had been pushed back.

Eon by Greg Bear, page 447-8

It had a large, blue-gray vertical hammer-like head cut through with three horizontal clefts. out of the uppermost cleft protruded shimmering white tubes tipped with black--eyes, perhaps,--and out of the two lower, long black tufts of hair. Behind the oversized head--roughly the size adn shape of a man�s trunk--stretched a long, smooth green horzontal thorax. Bifurcated pale pink tentacles each as thick as Olmy�s wrist and as along as his arm rose in a crest along the back. To the rear, behind the tentacles, was a bristle of short red barbs or feelers. A thick uplifted tail ended with a purple bugle flare. Perhaps strangest of all, seven paris of lower "legs" or supports lined both sides of the body, not legs or limbs in the traditional sense but poles or long sharp-tipped spikes, each the color of obsidian,a dn just as shiny. Below the head, or perhaps emerging from the lower head itself, were two sets of many-joined arms, one set tipped with appendages remarkably like hands, another with pink transflucent palps.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 54

Beni, as a "not quite orthodox" Naderite, had only the legally required memory backups. The Jart records had somehow killed the woman, scrambled her backups, and driven Mar Kellen to the edge of insanity, in less than a second of contact.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 71

Jart sensoria were very different from human equivalents; "eyes" were sensitive to both light and sound, bomining such signals in ways unique in the Hexamon�s experience. This did not cause Olmy�s major difficulty with the memories, however; algorithms had been known for centuries which could interpret nearly all sensory messages. What puzzled him (or rather, at this stage, his partial) most of all was the de-emphasis on individual perceptrion to the advantage of largercultural conditiong. A Jart individual�s personal perspective seemed almost irrelevant; and there was substantial evidence that this Jart at least acted more as a remote sensor than a self-willed individual.

Yet other indications contradicted this. The Jart had a strong, independent motivation routine--what in human terms might be analogous to an ego. There were enormously difficult assocaited complexes of social and hierarchical responses which meshed with this motivation routine, however. The Jart was strong-willed, yet in certain situations--when enmeshed in its social environment--it would be completely docile and obedient, lacking almost any will at all. And it would find no contradiction between these states.

Eternity by Greg Bear, 131-2

The Jart was perceiving objects from multiple and almost independent viewpoints, not in a Picasso-like Cubist fashion, but by processing the visual input through many different routines. It then came to Olmy--and his partial independently concurred-that the Jart was using sensory interpreters adapted from other species. The Jart contained many visual "brains," almost certainly patterned after those of non-Jart species.

Eternity by Greg Bear, 132

Great prism-shaped Jart flawships, moving with majestic slowness over a colonized segment of the Way... and dancing clouds of midge-like attendant machines and vehicles moving frm the flawship to broad curving ramps on the floor of the Way.

Eternity by Greg Bear, 148

Partial: (Replay of capture memories and a string signifying awarness 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< all your kind.

Jart: >What is brother/father status? Is this communication from command oversight?<

Partial: >Borther/father status< not known. Not command oversight. You are captred and under examination.

Jart: >Acknowledge personnel status as captured.<

Eternity by Greg Bear, page 14-150

This Jart was a modified expediter. Expediters carried out orders passed through duty expediters, slightly different in mentality and form. AN expediter might be thought of as a laborer, although their tasks were often non-physical; expediters might just as often be assigned though processing as physical work. Duty expediters designed practical ways of carrying out policy. They decided who should be called up from a pool of expediters, hwo were were stored, Olmy learned, in a kind of city memory, but kept inactive. If physical forms were required for their labor, they were assigned to bodies which might be either mechanical, biological, or a mix of the two.

Another description of another kind of body existed which Olmy was not sure he understood; the translation came across as mathematical form, but was not complete by any means....

Above duty expediters was command. Command made policy and foresaw the results through intense simulation and modeling. Command was always made up of Jarts in their original natural bodies, without augmentation of any kind. They were mortal and allowed to die of old age. They were never downloaded. Olmy puzzled at this bottleneck in an otherwise extremely advanced and amorphous group of beings; why not give what was obviously an important level in the strata more flexibility, and more capabilities than they naturally had?...

Above command and all other ranks of Jarts was command oversight. At first, Olmy could not understnad what role command oversight played.Individuals in this rank were immobile, lacked any bodies, and resided permanently in a kind of memory storage different from that where inactive expediters were kept. Command oversight Jarts--if they could be called Jarts at all--were stripped of all but pure reasoning faculties and rigorously modified for their tasks. Apparently they gathered information from all levels ofthe strata, examined it, made judgements of goals achieved and efficacy of actions,a nd presented "recommendations" to command.

In all of Jart cybernetic technology, as far as Olmy was being informed, there were no artificial programs; all processing was accomplished by jart mentalities which had, at one time or another, occupied natural and original Jart bodies. However far from their natural origins, however duplicated, modified and customized, these mentalities always had a connection with their original memories. It was possible, then, that there were Jarts still active who remembered a time before their occupation of the way, who perhaps remembered the Jart home world. If there had beena single home world...

The Jarts might not be a single species, but a combination of many species--a kind of volvox of beings and cultures.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 177-8

Jarts, far more even than humans, had superseded their physical origins; most had been consumed by their cybernetic structure.

But in all honesty, Olmy could see that had the Infinite Hexamon continued its development, humans might have ended up in a society not qualitively different from that of the Jarts.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 178

"You�re not human?"

"No. We come in many different forms, unlike your people. We are all unified, but..." He grinned.

"Different."...

"Please leave me alone. Let me go home."

"I will not conceal truth from you. Your home is undergoing changes now, to make it more efficient."

Eternity by Greg Bear page 216-7

"It is our duty and destiny to study and preserve the universes, to spread our own kind, the best and most efficient of all intelligences, to serve the ends of knowledge. We are not cruel. Cruelty is a word and concept I learn only from your language. It is wasteful to cause pain and to destroy. It is also wasteful to let other intelligences advance to a point where they will slow our growth by resistance. Wherever we go, we gather and store, we preserve, we study; but we do not allow resistance."

Eternity by Greg Bear page 228

Jarts were voracious conquerors, much more so than humans. While humans desired commerce, Jarts seemed to relish domination and complete subjugation. They were unwilling to share hegemony with non-Jart species, making exceptions only when they had no choice. The Talsit, for example, had traded with Jarts before humans had retaken the first few billion kilometers of the Way. The Jarts must have known that conquering the elusive Talsit was virtually impossible. Talsit were after all representatives of a much older race, even more mysterious--and certainly far more advanced--than Jarts. Eternity by Greg Bear page 233

Command has duty established by >ancient command< Gather and preserve that >descendant command< may complete the last duty. Then there is repose for expediters and all others, and in repose we will become ourselves again, relived of duty, relaxing the >image of strained materials< that is our thought and being. Why is this not what humans do?

Olmy tried to riddle this apparently key passage. It had such a formal air that he surmised it might contain quotes from some ehtical or semi-religious work of literature or indoctrination. The notion of descendant command was particularly intriguing, with its overtones of Jart evolution, transformationa nd transcendance. Oddly, in this idea there was alos the only hint that Jarts and other beings could equitably cooperate an dshare responsibility. There was an implication of vast enterprise behind descendantcommand, of work that surpassed the capabilities of any individual group of beings.

Gather and preserve. That string/image was particularly striking. Olmy searched the background behin dit, opening up layer after layer of complex instruction. The Jarts were collectors, and more than that; they transformed what they collected, hoping to prevent self-destruction of the collected objects, beings, cultures, and planets. Nature was, for them, a process of decay and loss; best to take control of all things, stop the decay and loss, and ultimately present this neatly beriboned pakage to...descendant command.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 234

When the Jarts had first entered the way through a fortuitous test gate, they had quickly understood the principles behind this marvel. They had thought themselves either the creators of this infinite tube-shaped universe, through a rationale Olmy found difficult to follow, or they had postulated that descendant command had sent it to them to help them reach their goals. And the Way could not have been more neatly designed for them; by understanding its principles, as they quickly did, Jarts could open gates to any point in the universe, and even find means to enter other universes. They could travel to the end of time. In this Jart�s memory, they had not done so...Perhaps they felt it was best to leave such things to descendant command, or at least to wait until their task was finished.

As a tool, the Way fit into their plans perfectly. Through the Way, Jarts could wrap up and even present the package in record time.

Olmy barely touched the image connected with this idea: a static, perfecly controlled universe, all energies harnessed, all mysteries removed, unchanging, ready for consumption by descendant command.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 236

"I am not an individual. I am actively stored--"

"Like grain in a barrel?" Rhita asked sarcastically.

"Like a memory in your own head," Typhon said. "I am actively stored in the flaw. We can induce resonances in the flaw and store huge amounts of information--literally worlds of information. Is that clear to you?"

"No, she admitted. "How can there be more than one of you?"

"Because my patterns, my self, can be duplicated endlessly. I can be merged with other selves of differing designs and abilities. Various effectuators can be built for us--machines or ships or more rarely, bodies. I do work when any of my selves are required."

Eternity by Greg Bear page 262-3

"It is no longer healthy for you. There are organisms and biological machines on your world now that travel by air, too small to see. They are raising Gaia to a higher level of efficiency."...

"Can people live anywhere?"

"There are no humans on Gaia. They have been stored for futher study."

Eternity by Greg Bear page 264

And through the Jart, Olmy learned:

A civilized planet is a black planet. No waste and no chance of detection. We hide here and prepare ourselves for service in the Way. There are many planets like this, where expediters in and out of service wait for their assignments. {I} was brought into service on such a world, lovely dark against the stars; {I} do not know what a natural birth is. {We} have been brought into service by duty expediters for as long as {my} memory is informed; at creation {we} are supplied with nowledge necessary to {our} immediate duties. Reassignments bring further knowledge; {we} do not forget out past assignments, but place them in reserve, that they may inform {us} in emergency later.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 279

Mirsky is no longer of your rank and order. He is not human, yet once was; he returns with a message but you do not know how he returns. Mirsky has been awaited by us; yet appears to you; perhaps it has appeared to our kind also, but unknown to you. Mirsky is messenger/expediter from descendant command. Eternity by Greg Bear page 292-3

You fear what I will do to your kind. Harm to your kind was my original instruction, but it is superseded now. News of the appearance of a messenger from descendant command is far more important than our conflicts...

"But how did you break through my barriers?"

Your understanding of certain logorithms is incomplete. A flaw of your kind�s development, perhaps. I have been in control an indefinite but significant number of periods now.

Eternity by Greg Bear page 293

General Analysis

Very impressive. Considering their background, a near future group emerging from a devestated planet, the Infinite Hexamon accomplished things that galactic-level civilizations couldn't dream of. Universe creation is obviously the most impressive facet.