The Way (Greg Bear)

The Way is the name of a fictional universe in a trilogy of science fiction novels and one short story by Greg Bear. The first novel was Eon (1985), followed by a sequel, Eternity and a prequel, Legacy. It also includes The Way of All Ghosts, a short story that falls between Legacy and Eon.

Within the universe of The Way, the Thistledown is an asteroid starship built by hollowing out Juno and fitting it with mass-driver (Rail gun) engines and thermonuclear drives. It is built 500 years in the future, as told in Bear's novel, Eon, and is engaged on a multi-generational journey to Epsilon Eridani, around which a habitable planet is known to be circling.

The journey is meant to take 60 years, as the ship can only maintain a velocity of 20% the speed of light. Such velocities were rendered meaningless after the technology of the Thistledown was improved to include inertial dampeners, allowing higher accelerations.

Inhabiting the Thistledown are the best and brightest of Earth, who are quite diverse both culturally and politically. The Thistledown's society includes one transcendent genius - Konrad Korzenowski, whose preference for living in the Thistledown as compared with an outer universe, causes him to experiment with closed-geodesic space time in the Seventh Chamber, 20 years into the Thistledown's voyage. The results of his experiments are shattering in the extreme - he creates a unique pocket universe: The Way.

The eponymous Way is an extension of the 7th Chamber, and was formed in the novels using the machinery of the 6th chamber. This machinery can best be described as a selective inertial damper, developed by engineers within the Thistledown with twofold purpose - to permit the Thistledown to accelerate to the limit of its engines (up to 99% the speed of light) and to selectively dampen inertia within the vessel, e.g. water within waterways, high velocity train systems. The inertial dampening machinery within the sixth chamber is anchored to the structure of the Thistledown, equally spaced around the chamber at the vertices of a regular heptagon. While selective and automatic, the ability of the machinery to selectively access inertial references within their field envelope is both remarkable as well as puzzling, since with this technology it would be possible to successfully begin construction of trans-luminal vessels, including the Thistledown itself. That the inhabitants did not is explained in the novels by the development of an extension of the selective inertial reference frame into a new 'pocket' universe: the Way.

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