Prayers to Broken Stones

by Dan Simmons

  When the Los Angeles spun back up to a quantum state, I went with her. Four months later I was content to pull my shift with the construction crew, plug into my usual stims, and sleep my R-and-R away. Then Singh came to me. “You’re going down,” he said. I did not understand. “In the past eleven years the groundlings have turned your screw-up with Osho into a goddamned legend,” said Singh. “There’s an entire cultural mythos built around your little roll in the hay with that colonial girl.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked. I was irritated and frightened. “Are you throwing me off the Ship?”

  Singh grunted and brushed idly at his right eyebrow. The gold bracelet on his wrist caught the light. “Did you know that your groundside girlfriend was a member of their original Shipmaster’s family?” he asked. “Sort of the local equivalent of royalty.”

  “Siri?” I said stupidly.

  “She told the story of your … what shall we call it … your love affair to everyone she could. Poems have been written about it. There was a play performed every year on one of those floating islands of theirs. Evidently there’s an entire cult that’s sprung up. You seem to be at the center of a romantic legend that’s caught the imagination of most of the yokels on the planet.”

  “Are you throwing me off the Ship?”

  “Don’t be stupid, Aspic,” growled Singh. “You’ll spend your three weeks of leave groundside. The Hegemony needs this planet. The Ambassador says that we need the cooperation of the groundlings until the farcaster’s operational and we get some occupation troops through. If this half-assed, star-crossed-lovers myth can smooth things for us during the next few trips, fine. The experts say you’ll do the Hegemony more good down there than up here. We’ll see.”

  “Siri?” I said again.

  “Get your gear,” ordered Singh. “You’re going down.”

  The world was waiting. Crowds were cheering. Siri was waving. We left the harbor in a yellow catamaran and sailed south-southeast, bound for the Archipelago and her family isle.

  “Hello, Merin.” Siri floats in the darkness of her tomb. The holo is not perfect; a haziness mars the edges. But it is Siri—Siri as I last saw her, gray hair shorn rather than cut, head high, face sharpened with shadows. “Hello, Merin my love.”

  “Hello, Siri,” I say. The tomb door is closed.

  “I am sorry I cannot share our Sixth Reunion, Merin. I looked forward to it.” Siri pauses and looks down at her hands. The image flickers slightly as dust motes float through her form. “I had carefully planned what to say here,” she goes on. “How to say it. Arguments to be pled. Instructions to be given. But I know now how useless that would have been. Either I have said it already and you have heard or there is nothing left to say and silence would best suit the moment.”

  Siri’s voice had grown even more beautiful with age. There is a fullness and calmness there which can come only from knowing pain. Siri moves her hands and they disappear beyond the border of the projection. “Merin my love, how strange our days apart and together have been. How beautifully absurd the myth that bound us. My days were but heartbeats to you. I hated you for that. You were the mirror that would not lie. If you could have seen your face at the beginning of each Reunion! The least you could have done was to hide your shock … that, at least, you could have done for me.

  “But through your clumsy naïveté there has always been … what? … something, Merin. There is something there that belies the callowness and thoughtless egotism which you wear so well. A caring, perhaps. A respect for caring, if nothing else.

  “Therein lay the slim basis for so much hope through these long years, Merin. Even through your Hive-born and Ship-bred shallowness there was that sense of caring. I believe … no, I know that you sometimes cared for me. If you could care for me, you could care for our world. In our brief hours of sharing, you might find an understanding. Therein lay our hope. Therein lay the only possible source of our salvation.

  “I confess that I did not plan this when I stole your silly flying carpet. I don’t know now what I was thinking and planning when I let you lead me from the Festival that first time. Of kidnapping you, perhaps. Of delaying and seducing you until Uncle Gresham could use any information you might have. Perhaps I dreamed even then of your joining us, of both of us swimming free with the Sea Folk and protecting the Covenant together. Then Bertol ruined everything …

  “I miss you, Merin. Tonight I will go down to the harbor and watch the stars awhile and think of you. It will not be the first time I have done that.

  “I’m sorry that I will not be waiting for you this time, Merin. But our world will be waiting. The seas that I listen to tonight will greet you with the same song. Preserving that song is not such an impossible idea, my love. They can’t have this world without controlling the isles and the Sea Folk control the isles.

  “I’ve kept this diary since I was thirteen. It has hundreds of entries. By the time you see this, they will all have been erased except the few that follow. Our love was not all myth and machination. We were good friends and some of our times together were sweet, were they not?

  “Stay well, Merin. Stay well.”

  I shut off the comlog and sit in silence for a minute. The crowd sounds are barely audible through the thick walls of the tomb. I take a breath and thumb the diskey.

  Siri appears. She is in her late forties. I know immediately the day and place she recorded this image. I remember the cloak she wears, the eelstone pendant at her neck, and the strand of hair which has escaped her barrette and even now falls across her cheek. I remember everything about that day. It was the last day of our Third Reunion and we were with friends on the heights above South Tern. Donel was ten and we were trying to convince him to slide on the snowfield with us. He was crying. Siri turned away from us even before the skimmer settled. When Magritte stepped out we knew from Siri’s face that something had happened.

  The same face stares at me now. She brushes absently at the unruly strand of hair. Her eyes are red but her voice is controlled. “Merin, they killed our son today. Alón was twenty-one and they killed him. You were so confused today, Merin. ‘How could such a mistake have happened?’ you kept repeating. You did not really know our son but I could see the loss in your face when we heard. Merin, it was not an accident. If nothing else survives, no other record, if you never understand why I allowed a sentimental myth to rule my life, let this be known—it was not an accident that killed Alón. He was with the Separatists when the Council police arrived. Even then he could have escaped. We had prepared an alibi together. The police would have believed his story. He chose to stay.

  “Today, Merin, you were impressed with what I said to the crowd … the mob … at the embassy. Know this, Shipman—when I said, ‘Now is not the time to show your anger and your hatred,’ that is precisely what I meant. No more, no less. Today is not the time. But the day will come. It will surely come. The Covenant was not taken lightly in those final days, Merin. It is not taken lightly now. Those who have forgotten will be surprised when the day comes but it will surely come.

  The image fades to another and in the split second of overlap the face of a 26-year-old Siri appears superimposed on the older woman’s features. “Merin, I am pregnant. I’m so glad. You’ve been gone five weeks now and I miss you. Ten years you’ll be gone. More than that. Merin, why didn’t you think to invite me to go with you? I could not have gone, but I would have loved it if you had just invited me. But I’m pregnant, Merin. The doctors say that it will be a boy. I will tell him about you, my love. Perhaps someday you and he will sail in the Archipelago and listen to the songs of the Sea Folk as you and I have done these past few weeks. Perhaps you’ll understand them by then. Merin, I miss you. Please hurry back.”

  The holographic image shimmers and shifts. The 16-year-old girl is red-faced. Her long hair cascades over bare shoulders and a white nightgown. She speaks in a rush, racing tears. “Shipman Merin Aspic, I’m sorry about your friend—I
really am—but you left without even saying good-bye. I had such plans about how you would help us … how you and I … you didn’t even say good-bye. I don’t care what happens to you. I hope you go back to your stinking, crowded Hegemony hives and rot for all I care. In fact, Merin Aspic, I wouldn’t want to see you again even if they paid me. Good-bye.”

  She turns her back before the projection fades. It is dark in the tomb now but the audio continues for a second. There is a soft chuckle and Siri’s voice—I cannot tell the age—comes one last time. “Adieu, Merin, Adieu.”

  “Adieu,” I say and thumb the diskey off.

  The crowd parts as I emerge blinking from the tomb. My poor timing has ruined the drama of the event and now the smile on my face incites angry whispers. Loudspeakers carry the rhetoric of the official ceremony even to our hilltop. “… beginning a new era of cooperation,” echoes the rich voice of the Ambassador.

  I set the box on the grass and remove the hawking mat. The crowd presses forward to see as I unroll the carpet. The tapestry is faded but the flight threads gleam like new copper. I sit in the center of the mat and slide the heavy box on behind me.

  “… and more will follow until space and time will cease to be obstacles.”

  The crowd moves back as I tap the flight design and the hawking mat rises four meters into the air. Now I can see beyond the roof of the tomb. The islands are returning to form the Equatorial Archipelago. I can see them, hundreds of them, borne up out of the hungry south by gentle winds.

  “So it is with great pleasure that I close this circuit and welcome you, the colony of Maui-Covenant, into the community of the Hegemony of Man.”

  The thin thread of the ceremonial com-laser pulses to the zenith. There is a spattering of applause and the band begins playing. I squint skyward just in time to see a new star being born. Part of me knows to the microsecond what has just occurred.

  For a few microseconds the farcaster had been functional. For a few microseconds time and space had ceased to be obstacles. Then the massive tidal pull of the artificial singularity triggered the thermite charge I had placed on the outer containment sphere. That tiny explosion had not been visible but a second later the expanding Schwarzschild radius is eating its shell, swallowing thirty-six thousand tons of fragile dodecahedron, and growing quickly to gobble several thousand kilometers of space around it. And that is visible—magnificently visible—as a miniature nova flares whitely in the clear blue sky.

  The band stops playing. People scream and run for cover. There is no reason to. There is a burst of X-rays tunneling out as the farcaster continues to collapse into itself, but not enough to cause harm through Maui-Covenant’s generous atmosphere. A second streak of plasma becomes visible as the Los Angeles puts more distance between itself and the rapidly decaying little black hole. The winds rise and the seas are choppier. There will be strange tides tonight.

  I want to say something profound but I can think of nothing. Besides, the crowd is in no mood to listen. I tell myself that I can hear some cheers mixed in with the screams and shouts.

  I tap at the flight designs and the hawking mat speeds out over the cliff and above the harbor. A Thomas Hawk lazing on mid-day thermals flaps in panic at my approach.

  “Let them come!” I shout at the fleeing hawk. “Let them come! I’ll be thirty-five and not alone and let them come if they dare!” I drop my fist and laugh. The wind is blowing my hair and cooling the sweat on my chest and arms.

  Cooler now, I take a sighting and set my course for the most distant of the isles. I look forward to meeting the others. Even more, I look forward to talking to the Sea Folk and telling them that it is time for the Shark to come at last to the seas of Maui-Covenant.

  Later, when the battles are won and the world is theirs, I will tell them about her. I will sing to them of Siri.

  Introduction to “Metastasis”

  It’s odd to think that within the walls of concentration camps such as Auschwitz and even in camps such as Treblinka and Sobibor where extermination of human beings was the only official activity, wives of the commandants kept gardens, children of the high-ranking German officers attended classes and competed at sports, musicians played Mozart and Bach and Mahler at dinner parties, wives worried about their figures while their husbands checked for receding hairlines … all the banal preoccupations which constitute the human condition that we share today.

  While all around them, humans were being starved and beaten and gassed and fed to the ovens. The ash that had been human flesh an hour before now lightly dusted the roses in the gardens. Barbed wire separated the boys’ soccer fields from the killing fields. The music of Mozart carried to the barracks where former musicians and composers and conductors lay shivering with the other human skeletons there.

  In the commandant’s comfortable home, the administrator checked his hairline in the mirror and the administrator’s wife looked in her mirror, pirouetted, pouted, and decided that she would have one less torte for dessert that night.

  Did the mirrors reflect human beings? Of course they did. People can adapt to almost anything.

  During the days of the Black Death in the 13th Century, when entire villages were wiped out, when the death carts rumbled through the streets at night with the cry “Bring out your dead!” until there was no one left to bury them, there was much preoccupation with the macabre, many flirtations with death—skull-masked revelers danced nightly in the burial catacombs of Paris—but overall, the small wheel of daily life creaked along as usual.

  Are we doing the same today?

  I always flinch when I hear someone use the word decimate to mean “wipe out,” as in, “The Sioux decimated Custer’s men.”

  The word actually comes from the Latin and the action it implies from the Romans. When someone in an occupied province defied the Roman governor or killed a Roman soldier, the Romans would hold a lottery and kill every tenth person. (Decimate as in Decimat(us) past participle of decimare.)

  The Jews weren’t decimated in Poland and Europe; they were almost wiped out.

  The people of 13th Century Europe weren’t decimated; a fourth to half of the entire population was wiped out. And the plague returned—again and again. The people could not see the plague bacillus so in a sense it did not exist for them. They saw only the results piled high in the death carts each night, staring eyes and exposed teeth illuminated by the light of torches.

  We’re not being decimated by cancer in the latter part of the 20th Century—the odds are worse than that. The lottery calls one in six. Or perhaps it’s already one in five. (It’s been getting worse for a long time.)

  Meanwhile, we grow our gardens, play our games, listen to our music, and look in our mirrors.

  We just try not to see too much.

  Metastasis

  On the day Louis Steig received a call from his sister saying that their mother had collapsed and been admitted to a Denver hospital with a diagnosis of cancer, he promptly jumped into his Camaro, headed for Denver at high speed, hit a patch of black ice on the Boulder Turnpike, flipped his car seven times, and ended up in a coma from a fractured skull and a severe concussion. He was unconscious for nine days. When he awoke he was told that a minute sliver of bone had actually penetrated the left frontal lobe of his brain. He remained hospitalized for eighteen more days—not even in the same hospital as his mother—and when he left it was with a headache worse than anything he had ever imagined, blurred vision, word from the doctors that there was a serious chance that some brain damage had been suffered, and news from his sister that their mother’s cancer was terminal and in its final stages.

  The worst had not yet begun.

  It was three more days before Louis was able to visit his mother. His headaches remained and his vision retained a slightly blurred quality—as with a television channel poorly tuned—but the bouts of blinding pain and uncontrolled vomiting had passed. His sister Lee drove and his fiancée Debbie accompanied him on the twenty mile ride from Bo
ulder to Denver General Hospital.

  “She sleeps most of the time but it’s mostly the drugs,” said Lee. “They keep her heavily sedated. She probably won’t recognize you even if she is awake.”

  “I understand,” said Louis.

  “The doctors say that she must have felt the lump … understood what the pain meant … for at least a year. If she had only … It would have meant losing her breast even then, probably both of them, but they might have been able to …” Lee took a deep breath. “I was with her all morning. I just can’t … can’t go back up there again today, Louis. I hope you understand.”

  “Yes,” said Louis.

  “Do you want me to go in with you?” asked Debbie.

  “No,” said Louis.

  Louis sat holding his mother’s hand for almost an hour. It seemed to him that the sleeping woman on the bed was a stranger. Even through the slight blurring of his sight, he knew that she looked twenty years older than the person he had known; her skin was gray and sallow, her hands were heavily veined and bruised from IVs, her arms lacked any muscle tone, and her body under the hospital gown looked shrunken and concave. A bad smell surrounded her. Louis stayed thirty minutes beyond the end of visiting hours and left only when his headaches threatened to return in full force. His mother remained asleep. Louis squeezed the rough hand, kissed her on the forehead, and rose to go.