by Dan Simmons
It was my turn to smile. Grandam had told me that old story. “Where’s the Cowardly Lion?” I said.
Aenea’s smile went away. “That’s me,” she said very quietly. “I’m the cowardly one.”
None of us slept any more that night. We loaded up and went down to the raft when the first hint of dawn touched the red hills beyond the city.
51
Because of Raphael’s relatively low velocity at the translation point in Sol Draconi System, she has less speed to kill while spinning down into God’s Grove space. The deceleration is mild—never more than twenty-five-g’s—and lasts only three hours. Rhadamanth Nemes lies in her padded resurrection creche and waits.
When the ship slides into its orbit around the planet, Nemes opens her coffin door and kicks off to the wardrobe cubby to suit up. Before leaving the command pod for the dropship tube, she checks the creche monitors and makes a direct connection to ship’s operations. The other three creches are functioning normally, programmed for the nominal three-day revival period. By the time de Soya and his men are awake, Nemes knows, this issue will have been settled. Using the microfilament connection to the ship’s main computer, she sets the same programming directives and recording overrides she had used in Sol Draconi System. The ship acknowledges the coming dropship roll program and prepares to forget it.
Before kicking up the tube to the dropship air lock, Nemes taps the combination for her private locker. Besides a few changes of clothes and some false personal items—holos of “family” and some forged letters from her fictional brother—the only thing in the locker is an extra belt with the usual pouches. Someone examining those pouches would find only a playing-card computer of the kind available at any convenience store for eight or ten florins, a spool of thread, three vials of pills, and a packet of tampons. She slides the belt around her waist and heads for the dropship.
Even from orbit at thirty thousand kilometers, God’s Grove—where it is visible at all through the heavy cloud layers—reveals itself as the damaged world it is. Rather than being divided into discrete continents and oceans, the planet has technically evolved as a single landmass with thousands of long salty-sea “lochs” raking across the landscape like claw marks on a green baize billiard table. Besides the sea-lochs and countless fingerlakes following the fault lines through the verdant landmasses, there are now thousands of brown slash marks where the Ouster invasion—what the humans still think of as the Ouster invasion—had lanced and relanced the peaceful land almost three hundred years ago.
As the dropship hurtles through atmosphere entry and ionization, ripping into solid atmosphere with a triple sonic boom, Nemes looks down at the landscape coming into sight from beneath the extensive cloud masses. Most of the two-hundred-meter-tall recombinant redwood and sequoia forests that had originally attracted the Brotherhood of the Muir to this world are gone, burned away in the planetwide forest fire that had brought on the nuclear winter. Large segments of the northern and southern hemispheres still glare white from the snowfall and glaciation, which only now is beginning to abate as the cloud cover recedes from a thousand-klick band on either side of the equator. It is precisely this recovering equatorial region that is Nemes’s destination.
Taking over manual control of the lifting-body dropship, Nemes clips in her filament jack. She rifles through the planetary maps she has downloaded from Raphael’s main library: there it is … the River Tethys had once run some 160 klicks, primarily west to east, around the roots of God’s Grove World-tree and past the Muir Museum. Nemes sees that most of the Tethys Tour had been in a giant semicircular arc as the river winds around a small bite of the northern circumference of Worldtree. The Templars had fancied themselves the ecological conscience of the Hegemony—always inserting their unsolicited opinion into any terraforming effort in the Web or Outback—and the Worldtree had been the symbol of their arrogance. Indeed, the tree had been unique in the known universe: with a trunk diameter of more than eighty kilometers and a branch diameter of more than five hundred klicks, equal to the base of Mars’s legendary Olympus Mons, the single living organism had thrust its upper branches into the fringes of space.
It is gone now, of course, shattered and burned by the “Ouster” fleet that slagged the entire planet just before the Fall. Instead of the glorious, living Tree, there is now only the World-stump, a heap of ash and carbon looking like the eroded remains of an ancient shield volcano. With the Templars gone—killed or fled in their erg-powered treeships on the day of the attack—God’s Grove has lain fallow for more than two and a half centuries. Nemes knows that the Pax would have recolonized the world long ago if the Core had not ordered them to desist: the AIs have their own long-term plan for God’s Grove, and it does not involve missionaries and human colonies.
Nemes finds the upriver farcaster portal—looking tiny compared to the ashy slopes of the Worldstump to the south—and hovers above it. Secondary growth has come up along the river and on the eroded ash slopes there, looking like mere weeds compared to the old forests but still boasting trees twenty meters and more in height, and Nemes can see the occasional tangle of thick undergrowth where the sunlight strikes the gullies. Not a good place for an ambush. Nemes lands the dropship on the north bank of the river and walks to the farcaster arch.
Discarding an access panel, she finds an interface module and peels off the human flesh on her right hand and wrist. Carefully storing the skin for her return to Raphael, she jacks directly into the module and reviews the data. This portal has not been activated since the Fall. Aenea’s group has not yet passed this way.
Nemes returns to the dropship and flies downriver, trying to find the perfect spot. It should be a place where they cannot escape by land—enough forest growth to conceal her and her traps, but not so much as to give Aenea and her companions cover—and, finally, a place where Nemes can clean up the mess after it is all over. She would prefer a rocky surface: something easy to hose down before returning to Raphael
She finds the perfect spot only fifteen klicks downriver. The Tethys enters a rocky gorge at this point, a series of rapids created by the Ouster slagging and subsequent avalanches. New trees have grown up along the ash slopes by the entrance to this stretch of rapids and along the narrow ravines feeding into it. The narrow canyon itself is bordered by tumbled boulders and by great slabs of black lava that had flowed downhill during the Ouster slagging and formed into terraces as they cooled. The rough terrain makes a portage impossible, and anyone piloting a raft toward these rapids will be intent upon guiding their craft into white water and will have little time to watch the rocks or riverbanks.
She lands the dropship a klick to the south, pulls a vacuum-locked specimen bag from the EVA locker, tucks it into her belt, conceals the dropship under branches, and jogs quickly back to the river.
Nemes removes the spool of thread from her kit, tosses away the thread, and extrudes several hundred meters of invisible monofilament. She runs this back and forth across the river above the rapids like an unseen spider’s web, spreading clear, saplike polycarbon goo on the landward side of objects where she loops the wire, both to give her a visual reference and to prevent the monofilament from slicing through trees and boulders wherever it touches them. Even if someone were hiking the boulders and lava fields here, the goo would show up only as a faint line of sap or as lichen on the rocks. The monofilament web would slice through Raphael in a dozen places if someone tried to drive the spacecraft through here now.
When she has woven the monofilament trap, Nemes moves upriver along the only flat shelf of land, opens her pill case, and spreads several hundred miniclaymores on the ground and in the trees there. The chameleon-polymered microexplosives immediately blend in color and texture with the surface on which they have fallen. Each claymore will leap toward the walking or running target before it explodes, and its blast is shaped to burrow inward. The claymores are triggered by the proximity of pulse, carbon-dioxide exhalations, and body heat, as well as by
the pressure of a footstep within ten meters.
Nemes assesses the terrain. This flat area is the only section of riverbank near the rapids where a person on foot can retreat, and with the claymores scattered there, nothing on foot will survive. Nemes jogs back to the boulder field and activates the claymores’ sensors with a coded pulse.
To prevent someone from swimming back upriver, she breaks open the tampon casings and seeds the river bottom with ceramic-encased earwig eggs. These lie on the river bottom looking exactly like the water-worn pebbles around them. When one or more living beings pass above them, they activate themselves. If someone then tries to return upriver, the gnat-sized earwigs will burst through their ceramic eggs and scream through water or air to bore into their target’s skull, exploding into a mass of wiry filaments only after making contact with brain tissue.
Waiting on a boulder ten meters above the rapids, Rhadamanth Nemes lies back to wait. The two items left in her belt are the playing-card computer and the specimen bag.
The “computer” is the most advanced item she has brought on this hunting trip. Called the “sphinx trap” by those entities that created it for her, named after the Sphinx Tomb on Hyperion, which had been designed by the same species of AIs, the card is capable of creating its own five-meter bubble of antientropic or hyperentropic tides. The energy needed to create this bubble could power a crowded planet such as Renaissance Vector for a decade, but Nemes needs only three minutes of temporal displacement. Fingering the flat card, Nemes thinks that it should be called the Shrike trap.
The short woman with the skinless hand looks upriver. Any time now. Even though the portal is fifteen klicks away, she will have some warning: Nemes is sensitive to the farcaster distortion. She expects the Shrike to be with them and anticipates that it will treat her as an adversary. Indeed, she would be disappointed if the Shrike were not there and adversarial.
Rhadamanth Nemes fingers the last item on her belt. The specimen bag is just what it appears to be—a vacuum-locked EVA specimen bag. In it she will transport the girl’s head back to the Raphael, where she will store it in the secret locker behind the fusion-drive access panel. Her masters want proof.
Smiling slightly, Nemes lies back on the black lava, shifts her position so the afternoon sun warms her face, covers her eyes with her wrist, and allows herself to take a brief nap. Everything is ready.
52
I admit that I expected the Shrike to be gone when we reached the riverfront street of Mashhad on Qom-Riyadh just before dawn of that last, fateful day. It was not gone.
We all stopped in our tracks at the sight of the three-meter-tall chrome-and-blade sculpture on our little raft. The thing was standing just as I had last seen it the night before. I had backed away warily then, rifle raised, and now I took another wary step closer, rifle raised.
“Easy,” said Aenea, her hand on my forearm.
“What the hell does it want?” I said, slipping off the safety on the rifle. I levered the first plasma cartridge into the firing chamber.
“I don’t know,” said Aenea. “But your weapon won’t hurt it.”
I licked my lips and looked down at the child. I wanted to tell her that a plasma bolt would hurt anything not wrapped in twenty centimeters of Web-era impact armor. Aenea looked pale and drawn. There were dark circles under her eyes. I said nothing.
“Well,” I said, lowering the rifle a bit, “we can’t get on the raft while that thing’s there.”
Aenea squeezed my arm and released it. “We have to.” She started walking toward the concrete pier.
I looked at A. Bettik, who seemed no happier at this idea than I was; then we both jogged to keep up with the girl.
Close up, the Shrike was even more terrifying than when seen from a distance. I used the word “sculpture” earlier, and there was something sculpted about the creature—if one can imagine a sculpture done in chromed spikes, razor wire, blades, thorns, and smooth metal carapace. It was large—more than a meter taller than I, and I am not short. The actual form of the thing was complicated—solid legs with joints sheathed in thorn-studded bands; a flat foot with curved blades where the toes should be and a long spoon-shaped blade at the heel, which might be a perfect utensil for disemboweling; a complicated upper carapace of smooth chromed shell interspersed with bands of razor wire; arms that were too long, too jointed, and too many—there was an extra pair tucked under the longer, upper set of arms; and four huge bladed hands hanging limply by the thing’s side.
The skull was mostly smooth and strangely elongated, with a steam-shovel jaw set in with row upon row of metal teeth. There was a curved blade on the creature’s forehead and another high up on the armored skull. The eyes were large, deep-set, and dull red.
“You want to get on the raft with that … thing?” I whispered to Aenea as we stood four meters away on the pier. The Shrike had not turned its head to watch us as we approached, and its eyes seemed as dead as glass reflectors, but the urge to back away from the thing and then turn and run was very strong.
“We have to get on the raft,” the girl whispered back. “We have to get out of here today. Today is the last day.”
Without really taking my eye off the monster, I glanced at the sky and buildings behind us. With the night’s wild dust storm, one would have expected the sky to be pinker with more sand in the air, but the storm seemed to have cleared the air a bit. While reddish clouds still stirred on the last desert breeze, the sky above was bluer than it had been the day before. Sunlight was just touching the tops of the taller buildings now.
“Maybe we could find a working EMV and travel in style,” I whispered, the rifle raised. “Something without this type of hood ornament.” The joke sounded lame even to my ear, but it took most of the bravado I had that morning to attempt any joke at all.
“Come on,” whispered Aenea, and went down the iron ladder off the pier and onto the battered raft. I hurried to keep up with her, one hand keeping the rifle trained on the chrome nightmare, the other grasping the old ladder. A. Bettik followed us without a word.
I had not paid attention to how battered and flimsy the raft seemed. The abbreviated logs were torn and splintered in places, water came over the forward third and lapped around the Shrike’s huge feet, and the tent was filled with red sand from the night’s storm. The steering-oar assembly looked as if it would give way any second, and the gear we had left aboard had an abandoned look to it. We dropped our packs into the tent and stood indecisively, watching the back of the Shrike and waiting for movement—three mice who had crawled onto the sleeping cat’s carpet.
The Shrike did not turn. Its back was no more reassuring than its front, with the exception that its dull-red eyes no longer were watching us.
Aenea sighed and walked up to the thing. She raised one small hand but did not actually touch that spiked and razor-wired shoulder. Turning back to us, she said, “It’s all right. Let’s go.”
“How can it be all right?” I whispered fiercely at her. I don’t know why I was whispering … but for some reason it was next to impossible to speak normally around that thing.
“If it was going to kill us today, we would be dead already,” the girl said flatly. She walked to the port side, her face still pale and shoulders drooping, and picked up one of the poles. “Cast off the lines, please,” she said to A. Bettik. “We have to go.”
The android did not flinch as he walked within monster-arm’s length of the Shrike to untie the forward line and curl it into a loop. I untied our stern line with one hand while holding the rifle with the other.
The raft rode lower with the mass of the creature on the front end, and water lapped across the boards almost back to the tent. Several of the front and port-side logs were hanging loose.
“We need to work on the raft,” I said, taking the steering oar in hand and laying the rifle at my feet.
“Not on this world,” said Aenea, still straining against the pole to move us out into the center current. “Aft
er we go through the portal.”
“Do you know where we’re headed?” I said.
She shook her head. Her hair seemed dull this morning. “I just know that this is the last day.”
She had said that a few minutes earlier, and I had felt the same stab of alarm then as I did now. “Are you sure, kiddo?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t know where we’re going?”
“No. Not exactly.”
“What do you know? I mean …”
She smiled wanly. “I know what you mean, Raul. I know that if we survive the next few hours, we hunt for the building I’ve seen in my dreams.”
“What does it look like?”
Aenea opened her mouth to speak but then just rested against the pole a moment. We were moving quickly now in the center of the river. The tall downtown buildings gave way to small parks and walkways on either bank. “I’ll know the building when I see it.” She laid the pole down and walked closer, pulling at my sleeve. I bent to hear her whisper. “Raul, if I don’t … make it … and you do … please get home to tell Uncle Martin about what I said. About the lions and tigers and bears … and what the Core is up to.”
I grabbed her by her thin shoulder. “Don’t talk like that. We’re all going to make it. You tell Martin when we see him.”
Aenea nodded without conviction and went back to the pole. The Shrike continued to stare ahead, water lapping at its feet and the morning light beginning to glint on its thorns and razor surfaces.
I HAD EXPECTED US TO MOVE INTO OPEN DESERT beyond the city of Mashhad, but once again my expectations were mistaken. The riverside parks and walkways grew more luxuriant with trees—everblues, deciduous Old Earth varieties, and a proliferation of yellow and green palms. Soon the city buildings were behind us and the wide, straight river was passing through a rich forest. It was still early morning, but the heat of the rising sun was very powerful.