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quickly, a blur of hilly terrain, small lakes and outcroppings of what looked
like granite.
"The line ends at the sixth chamber. We'll be met by Joseph Rimskaya and some
of the Chinese team at the terminal annex."
"Rimskaya? I had a teacher with that name at UCLA."
"Rimskaya is why you're here. He recommended you."
"But he left the university to join the Bureau of Math and
Statistics."
"And he met the Advisor while working in Washington," Lanier added.
Rimskaya had been her professor in a special math seminar.
She hadn't liked him much; he was a tall, blocky man with a wiry red heard,
loud and assertive, a political science professor and expert in statistics and
information theory. A rigorous mathematician but not, in her opinion, in
possession of the insight necessary for truly valuable research, Rimskaya had
always seemed the perfect academician to her: rigid, demanding, an
unimaginative taskmaster.
"Why is he here?"
"Because the Advisor finds him useful."
"His specialty was statistical theories of population behavior.
He belongs in sociology."
"That's right," Lanier said.
"How--" Lanier appeared irritated. "Think, Patricia. Where did the
Stoners go? Why did they go there, how did they get there?"
"I don't know," she answered quietly.
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"We don't know, either. Not yet. Rimskaya is head of the sociology group.
They might be able to tell us."
"This is such an ass-backwards way of teaching."
"i'll be patient if you will," Lanier said.
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Patricia was silent for a moment. "No guarantees," she said. "I wish you'd
stop seeming so peeved at me when I just ask straightforward questions."
Lanier raised his eyebrows and nodded. "Please don't take it personally."
So he's under strain, she thought. Well, so am I. Only he's had time to get
used to it. If you can ever get used to something like the library . . or
the Stone itself. Then again, there's almost certainly more.. .
She had the sudden vision of a maze of chalkboards waiting for her in the
seventh chamber, filled with wandering mathematicians working on some grand,
unified problem. Over them all, on a huge video screen, the Advisor watched
patiently, like God. Lanier was her avatar.
"Rimskaya's half Russian,' Lanier continued. "His grandmother was a widower
and an immigrant and her name was applied onthe U.S. entry papers to her son,
as well. He speaks Russian like a native.
Sometimes he acts as interpreter between the Russians and us."
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The train's hum increased in pitch and they plunged into the fourth chamber's
northern cap.
The fifth chamber was darker than the previous sections she had visited. A
canopy of flat gray clouds painted the cylinder's upper atmosphere, cutting
out half the robe light. Beneath the clouds was a
Wagnerian landscape of barren mountains, resembling ragged lumps of anthracite
mixed with dark-rainbowed hematite. Between the mountains were rusty abyssal
valleys, cut by waterfalls feeding into quicksilver rivers. The mountains
toward the middle of the chamber floor were startling in their
contortions--arches, giant rugged cubes, broken-tipped pyramids and causeways
of irregular slab steps.
"What in hell was this?" she asked.
"A kind of open pit mine, we think. Our two geologist,s--you met
Robert Smith, he's one--speculate that when the chambers were hollowed out,
the fifth wasn't finished off.
They left it for raw material. And the Stoners used it. These are the
scars."
"Perfect for fans of old horror movies," Patricia said.
"Can't you just see Castle Dracula here?"
They said nothing throughout the short trip down the next tunnel into the
sixth chamber. As the train's hum decreased in pitch and the tunnel dark
brightened, Lanier stood and said, "End of the line."
The lower terminal was a cavernous construct of unpainted slabs of reddish
concrete and mottled gray-and-black asteroid rock. The platform was marked
with faint lines, as though long winding queues had once formed there.
"This was a worker's station once," Lanier said. "When they modified the
sixth chamber, this served as a debartcadon point. Six hundred years ago,
perhaps."
"How long has the Stone been deserted?"
"Five centuries."
They walked up a ramp into a building constructed mostly of thick transparent
panels, giving an excellent view of the sixth chamber.
The valley floor was layered with gigantic inert mechanical forms, cylinders
and cubes and stacks of circular plates laid on edge, resembling a monstrous
circuit board. Just outside the terminal building, a row of spherical tanks
marched off to a distant wall. The wall was at least a hundred meters high,
and the tanks half that in diameter. Below this level of the terminal,
between the spheres and a parallel row of cylinders resting on their sides,
was an immense gully filled with glistening water. The channel was lined with
pipe ends and cyclopian pumping apparatus. Over it all, thick black clouds
floated in clumps, dropping curtains of rain and flurries of show. Somewhere
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was a constant pulsing, less heard then felt, like the infra-sound beats of
moving mountains or the grinding of distant sea bottoms.
Looking up at an angle, between decks of clouds, she could dimly see the
opposite floor of the chamber, bumped and ridged with a carpet of mysterious
mechanism.
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"No moving parts in the whole chamber except for large pumps, and not many of
those," Lanier said. "The builders relied upon a built-in weather cycle.
Rain falls, picks up heat, flows down channels into shallow ponds, evaporates,
carries heat up, and the atmospheric maintenance systems drain it off, we're
still not sure how."
"What does it all do?"
"When the Stone was first designed, the sixth chamber was going to be another
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