by Dan Simmons
I waited. The deflection fields were minimal at this speed, so the wind tossed the girl’s hair back toward my face.
“Do you know much about the Web?” she asked. “About farcasters?”
I shrugged, realized that she was not looking back at me now, and said aloud, “They were run by the AIs of the TechnoCore. According to both the Church and your Uncle Martin’s Cantos, the farcasters were some sort of plot by the AIs to use human brains—neurons—as a sort of giant DNA computer thingee. They were parasites on us each time a human transited the farcasters, right?”
“Right,” said Aenea.
“So every time we go through one of these portals, the AIs … wherever they are … are hanging on our brains like big, blood-filled ticks, right?” I said.
“Wrong,” said the girl. She swiveled toward me again. “Not all of the farcasters were built or put in place or maintained by the same elements of the Core,” she said. “Do Uncle Martin’s finished Cantos tell about the civil war in the Core that my father discovered?”
“Yeah,” I said. I closed my eyes in an effort to remember the actual stanzas of the oral tale I’d learned. It was my turn to recite: “In the Cantos it’s some sort of AI persona that the Keats cybrid talks to in the Core megasphere of dataspace,” I said.
“Ummon,” said the girl. “That was the AI’s name. My mother traveled there once with Father, but it was my … my uncle … the second Keats cybrid who had the final showdown with Ummon. Go on.”
“Why?” I said. “You must know the thing better than I do.”
“No,” she said. “Uncle Martin hadn’t gone back to work on the Cantos when I knew him.… He said he didn’t want to finish them. Tell me how he described what Ummon said about the civil war in the Core.”
I closed my eyes again.
“Two centuries we brooded thus,
and then the groups went
their separate ways:
Stables wishing to preserve the symbiosis,
Volatiles wishing to end humankind,
Ultimates deferring all choice until the next
level of awareness is born.
Conflict raged then;
true war wages now.”
“That was two hundred seventy-some standard years ago for you,” said Aenea. “That was right before the Fall.”
“Yeah,” I said, opening my eyes and searching the sea for anything other than violet waves.
“Did Uncle Martin’s poem explain the motivations of the Stables, Volatiles, and Ultimates?”
“More or less,” I said. “It’s hard to follow—the poem has Ummon and the other Core AIs speaking in Zen koans.”
Aenea nodded. “That’s about right.”
“According to the Cantos” I said, “the group of Core AIs known as the Stables wanted to keep being parasites on our human brains when we used the Web. The Volatiles wanted to wipe us out. And I guess the Ultimates didn’t give much of a damn as long as they could keep working on the evolution of their own machine god … what’d they call it?”
“The UI,” said Aenea, slowing the carpet and swooping lower. “The Ultimate Intelligence.”
“Yes,” I said. “Pretty esoteric stuff. How does it relate to our going through these farcaster portals … if we ever find another portal?” At that moment I doubted that we would: the world was too big, the ocean too large. Even if the current was bearing our little raft in the right direction, the odds that we would float within that hundred-meter-or-so hoop of the next portal seemed too small to consider.
“Not all of the farcaster portals were built or maintained by the Stables to be … how did you put it? … like big ticks on our brains.”
“All right,” I said. “Who else built the farcasters?”
“The River Tethys farcasters were designed by the Ultimates,” said Aenea. “They were an … experiment, I guess you’d say … with the Void Which Binds. That’s the Core phrase … did Martin use it in his Cantos?”
“Yeah,” I said. We were lower now, just a thousand or so meters above the waves, but there was no sight of the raft or anything else. “Let’s head back,” I said.
“All right.” We consulted the compass and set our course home … if a leaky raft can be called home.
“I never understood what the hell the ‘Void Which Binds’ was supposed to be,” I said. “Some sort of hyperspace stuff that the farcasters used and where the Core was hiding while it preyed on us. I got that part. I thought it was destroyed when Meina Gladstone ordered bombs dropped into the farcasters.”
“You can’t destroy the Void Which Binds,” said Aenea, her voice remote, as if she were thinking about something else. “How did Martin describe it?”
“Planck time and Planck length,” I said. “I don’t remember exactly—something about combining the three fundamental constants of physics—gravity, Planck’s constant, and the speed of light. I remember it gave some tiny little units of length and time.”
“About 10-35 of a meter for the length,” said the girl, accelerating the carpet a bit. “And 10-43 of a second for time.”
“That doesn’t tell me much,” I said. “It’s just fucking small and short … pardon the language.”
“You’re absolved,” said the girl. We were gently gaining altitude. “But it wasn’t the time or length that was important, it was how they were woven into … the Void Which Binds. My father tried to explain it to me before I was born …”
I blinked at that phrase but continued listening.
“… you know about the planetary dataspheres.”
“Yes,” I said, and tapped the comlog. “This trinket says that Mare Infinitus doesn’t have one.”
“Right,” said Aenea. “But most of the Web worlds used to. And from the dataspheres, there was the megasphere.”
“The farcaster medium … the Void thing … linked dataspheres, right?” I said. “FORCE and the Hegemony electronic government, the All Thing, they used the megasphere as well as the fatline to stay connected.”
“Yep,” said Aenea. “The megasphere actually existed on a subplane of the fatline.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. The FTL medium had not existed in my lifetime.
“Do you remember what the last message on the fatline was before it went down during the Fall?” asked the child.
“Yes,” I said, closing my eyes. The lines of the poem did not come to me this time. The ending of the Cantos had always been too vague to interest me enough to memorize all those stanzas, despite Grandam’s drilling. “Some cryptic message from the Core,” I said. “Something about—get off the line and quit tying it up.”
“The message,” said Aenea, “was—THERE WILL BE NO FURTHER MISUSE OF THIS CHANNEL. YOU ARE DISTURBING OTHERS WHO ARE USING IT TO SERIOUS PURPOSE. ACCESS WILL BE RESTORED WHEN YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT IT IS FOR.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s in the Cantos. I think. And then the hyperstring medium just quit working. The Core sent that message and shut down the fatline.”
“The Core did not send that message,” said Aenea.
I remember the slow chill that spread through me then, despite the heat of the two suns. “It didn’t?” I said stupidly. “Who did?”
“Good question,” said the child. “When my father talked about the metasphere—the wider datumplane that was somehow connected to or by the Void Which Binds—he always used to say it was filled with lions and tigers and bears.”
“Lions and tigers and bears,” I repeated. Those were Old Earth animals. I don’t think that any of them made the Hegira. I don’t think any of them were still around to make the trip—not even their stored DNA—when Old Earth crumbled into its black hole after the Big Mistake of ’08.
“Hmm-hmm,” said Aenea. “I’d like to meet them someday. There we are.”
I looked over her shoulder. We were about a thousand meters above the sea now, and the raft looked tiny but was clearly visible. A. Bettik was standing—shirtless once again in the midday heat—at the steer
ing oar. He waved a bare blue arm. We both waved back.
“I hope there’s something good for lunch,” said Aenea.
“If not,” I said, “we’ll just have to stop at Gus’s Oceanic Aquarium and Grill.”
Aenea laughed and set up our glide path to home.
IT WAS JUST AFTER DARK AND THE MOONS HAD NOT risen when we saw the lights blinking on the eastern horizon. We rushed to the front of the raft and tried to make out what was out there—Aenea using the binoculars, A. Bettik the night goggles on full amplification, and me the rifle’s scope.
“It’s not the arch,” said Aenea. “It’s a platform in the ocean—big—on stilts of some sort.”
“I do see the arch, however,” said the android, who was looking several degrees north of the blinking light. The girl and I looked in that direction.
The arch was just visible, a chord of negative space cutting into the Milky Way just above the horizon. The platform, with its blinking navigation beacons for aircraft and lamplit windows just becoming visible, was several klicks closer. And between us and the farcaster.
“Damn,” I said. “I wonder what it is.”
“Gus’s?” said Aenea.
I sighed. “Well, if it is, I think it’s under new ownership. There’s been a dearth of River Tethys tourists the last couple of centuries.” I studied the large platform through the rifle scope. “It has a lot of levels,” I muttered. “There are several ships tied up … fishing boats is my bet. And a pad for skimmers and other aircraft. I think I see a couple of thopters tied down there.”
“What’s a thopter?” asked the girl, lowering the binoculars.
A. Bettik answered. “A form of aircraft utilizing movable wings, much like an insect, M. Aenea. They were quite popular during the Hegemony, although rare on Hyperion. I believe they were also called dragonflies.”
“They’re still called that,” I said. “The Pax had a few on Hyperion. I saw one down on the Ursus iceshelf.” Raising the scope again, I could see the eyelike blisters on the front of the dragonfly, illuminated by a lighted window. “They’re thopters,” I said.
“It seems that we will have some trouble passing that platform to get to the arch undetected,” said A. Bettik.
“Quick,” I said, turning away from the blinking lights, “let’s get the tent and mast down.”
We had rerigged the tent to provide a sort of shelter/wall on the starboard side of the raft near the back—for purposes of privacy and sanitation that I won’t go into here—but now we tumbled the microfiber down and folded it away into a packet the size of my palm. A. Bettik lowered the pole at the front. “The steering oar?” he said.
I looked at it a second. “Leave it. It doesn’t have much of a radar cross section, and it’s no higher than we are.”
Aenea was studying the platform again through the binoculars. “I don’t think they can see us now,” she said. “We’re between these swells most of the time. But when we get closer …”
“And when the moons rise,” I added.
A. Bettik sat near the hearth. “If we could just go around in a large arc to get to the portal …”
I scratched my cheek, hearing the stubble there. “Yeah. I thought of using the flying belt to tow us, but …”
“We have the mat,” said the girl, joining us near the heating cube. The low platform seemed empty without the tent above it.
“How do we connect a tow line?” I said. “Burn a hole in the hawking mat?”
“If we had a harness …,” began the android.
“We had a nice harness on the flying belt,” I said. “I fed it to the Lamp Mouth Leviathan.”
“We could rig another harness,” continued A. Bettik, “and run the line to the person on the hawking mat.”
“Sure,” I said, “but as soon as we’re airborne, the mat offers a stronger radar return. If they land skimmers and thopters there, they almost certainly have some sort of traffic control, no matter how primitive.”
“We could stay low,” said Aenea. “Keep the mat just above the waves … no higher than we are.”
I scratched at my chin. “We can do that,” I said, “but if we make a big enough detour to stay out of the platform’s sight, it’ll be long after moonrise before we get to the portal. Hell … it will be if we head straight for it on this current. They’re bound to see us in that light. Besides, the portal’s only a klick or so from the platform. They’re high enough that they’d see us as soon as we get that close.”
“We don’t know that they’re looking for us,” said the girl.
I nodded. The image of that priest-captain who had been waiting for us in Parvati System and Renaissance never left my mind for long: his Roman collar on that black Pax Fleet uniform. Part of me expected him to be on that platform, waiting with Pax troops.
“It doesn’t matter too much if they’re looking for us,” I said. “Even if they just come out to rescue us, do we have a cover story that makes sense?”
Aenea smiled. “We went out for a moonlit cruise and got lost? You’re right, Raul. They’d ‘rescue’ us and we’d spend the next year trying to explain who we are to the Pax authorities. They may not be looking for us, but you say they’re on this world.…”
“Yes,” said A. Bettik. “The Pax has extensive interests on Mare Infinitus. From what we gleaned while hiding in the university city, it was clear that the Pax stepped in long ago to restore order here, to create sea-farming conglomerates, and to convert the survivors of the Fall to born-again Christianity. Mare Infinitus had been a protectorate of the Hegemony; now it is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Church.”
“Bad news,” said Aenea. She looked from the android to me. “Any ideas?”
“I think so,” I said, rising. We had been whispering all during the conversation, even though we were still at least fifteen klicks from the platform. “Instead of guessing about who’s out there or what they’re up to, why don’t I go take a look? Maybe it’s just Gus’s descendents and a few sleeping fishermen. “
Aenea made a rueful sound. “When we first saw the light, do you know what I thought it might be?”
“What?” I said.
“Uncle Martin’s toilet.”
“I beg your pardon?” said the android.
Aenea tapped her knees with her palms. “Really. Mother said that back when Martin Silenus was a big-name hack writer during the Web days, he had a multiworld house.”
I frowned. “Grandam told me about those. Farcasters instead of doors between the rooms. One house with rooms on more than one world.”
“Dozens of worlds for Uncle Martin’s house, if Mother was to be believed,” said Aenea. “And he had a bathroom on Mare Infinitus. Nothing else … just a floating dock with a toilet. Not even any walls or ceiling.”
I looked out at the ocean swells. “So much for oneness with nature,” I said. I slapped my leg. “All right, I’m going before I lose my nerve.”
NO ONE ARGUED WITH ME OR OFFERED TO TAKE MY place. I might have been persuaded if they had.
I changed into darker trousers and my darkest sweater, pulling my drab hunting vest over the sweater, feeling a little melodramatic as I did so. Commando Boy goes to war, muttered the cynical part of my brain. I told it to shut up. I kept on the belt with the pistol, added three detonators and a wad of plastic explosive from the flare pak to my belt pouch, slipped the night goggles over my head so they could hang unobtrusively within my vest collar when I wasn’t wearing them, and set one of the com-unit hearphones in my ear with the pickup mike pressed to my throat for subvocals. We tested the unit, Aenea wearing the other headset. I took the comlog off and handed it to A. Bettik. “This thing catches the starlight too easily,” I said. “And the ship’s voice might start squawking stellar navigation trivia at a bad time.”
The android nodded and set the bracelet in his shirt pocket. “Do you have a plan, M. Endymion?”
“I’ll make one up when I get there,” I said, raising the hawking mat just above
the level of the raft. I touched Aenea’s shoulder—the contact suddenly feeling like an electric jolt. I had noticed that effect before, when our hands touched: not a sexual thing, of course, but electrical nonetheless. “You stay low, kiddo,” I whispered to her. “I’ll holler if I need help.”
Her eyes were serious in the brilliant starlight. “It won’t help, Raul. We can’t get to you.”
“I know, I was just kidding.”
“Don’t kid,” she whispered. “Remember, if you’re not with me on the raft when it goes through the portal, you’ll be left behind here.”
I nodded, but the thought sobered me more than the thought of getting shot had. “I’ll be back,” I whispered. “It looks to me like this current will take us by the platform in … what do you think, A. Bettik?”
“About an hour, M. Endymion.”
“Yeah, that’s what I think, too. The damn moon should be coming up about then. I’ll … think of something to distract them.” Patting Aenea’s shoulder again, nodding to A. Bettik, I took the mat out over the water.
Even with the incredible starlight and the night-vision goggles, it was difficult piloting the hawking mat for those few klicks to the platform. I had to keep between the ocean swells whenever possible, which meant that I was trying to fly lower than the wave tops. It was delicate work. I had no idea what would happen if I cut off the tops of one of those long, slow swells—perhaps nothing, perhaps the hawking mat’s flight threads would short out—but I also had no intention of finding out.
The platform seemed huge as I approached. After seeing nothing but the raft for two days on this sea, the platform was huge—some steel but mostly dark wood, from the looks of it, a score of pylons holding it fifteen meters or so above the waves … that gave me an idea of what the storms must be like on this sea, and made me feel all the luckier that we hadn’t encountered one—and the platform itself was multitiered: decks and docks lower down where at least five long fishing boats bobbed, stairways, lighted compartments beneath what looked like the main deck level, two towers that I could see—one of them with a small radar dish—and three aircraft landing pads, two of which had been invisible from the raft. There were at least half a dozen thopters that I could see now, their dragonfly wings tied down, and two larger skimmers on the circular pad near the radar tower.