by Dan Simmons
“He’s going to die, isn’t he?” asked Hannah, who’d not left the infirmary even to change her bloody clothes. They’d treated her for slashes to her left shoulder and she’d never taken her eyes off Noman as the stitches and antiseptic were applied to her.
“Yes, I think so,” said Petyr. “He won’t survive.”
“Why is he still unconscious?” asked the young woman.
“I think that’s a result of the concussion he received,” said Harman, “not the claw wounds.” Harman wanted to curse at the simple fact that sigling a hundred volumes on neuroanatomy did not teach one how to actually open a skull and relieve pressure on the brain. If they tried it with their current rough instruments and almost nonexistent level of experience as surgeons, Noman would certainly die sooner than if they left things to nature’s way. Either way, Noman-Odysseus was going to die.
Ferman, who was the usual keeper of the infirmary and who had sigled more books on the subject than Harman, looked up from sharpening a saw and cleaver in case they decided to remove the arm. “We’ll have to decide soon about the arm,” he said softly and returned to working his whetstone.
Hannah turned to Petyr. “I heard him mumble a few times while you were carrying him but couldn’t hear what he said. Did it make any sense?”
“Not really. I couldn’t make most of it out. I think it was in the language the other Odysseus used in the turin drama…”
“Greek,” said Harman.
“Whatever,” said Petyr. “The couple of words I could make out in English weren’t important.”
“What were they?” asked Hannah.
“I’m sure he said something that ended in ‘gate.’ And then ‘crash’… I think. He was mumbling, I was panting loudly, and the guards on the wall were shouting. It was when we were approaching the north gate of the palisade, so he must have been saying ‘crash it’ if they don’t open it.”
“That doesn’t make much sense,” said Hannah.
“He was in pain and lapsing into coma,” said Petyr.
“Maybe,” said Harman. He left the infirmary, Ada still holding his arm, and began to pace through the manor house.
About fifty of Ardis’s population of four hundred were eating in the main dining room.
“You should eat,” said Harman, touching Ada’s stomach.
“Are you hungry?”
“Not yet.” In truth, the pain to Harman’s bad leg from the new slashes was bad enough to make him a little nauseated. Or perhaps it was the mental image of Noman lying there bleeding and dying.
“Hannah will be so upset,” whispered Ada.
Harman nodded distractedly. Something was gnawing at the subconscious and he was trying to let it have its way.
They went through the former grand ballroom where dozens of people were still working at long tables, applying bronze arrowheads to wooden shafts, then adding the prepared feathers, crafting spears, or carving bows. Many looked up and nodded as Ada and Harman went by. Harman led the way out back into the overheated blacksmithing annex where three men and two women were hammering bronze sword and knife blades, adding edges and sharpening on large whetstones. In the morning, Harman knew, this room would be insufferably hot as they carried in the molten metal from the next pour to be molded and hammered into shape. He paused to touch a sword blade and hilt that was finished except for the last of the leather to be wrapped around the hilt.
So crude, he thought. So unspeakably crude compared to the craft and artistry not only of Noman’s Circe sword—wherever that came from—but from the weapons in the old turin drama. And how sad that the first pieces of technology we old-style humans pour and cast and worry into a shape after two millennia or more are these rough weapons, their time come round again at last.
Reman came bursting into the blacksmith annex on the way to the main house.
“What is it?” said Ada.
“Voynix,” said Reman, who’d gone out to guard duty after finishing his chores in the kitchen. He was wet from the rain that had been falling since nightfall and his beard was icy. “A lot of voynix. More than I’ve ever seen at once.”
“Out of the woods yet?” asked Harman.
“Massing under the trees. But scores and scores of them.”
Outside, from the ramparts on all parts of the palisades the bells began to sound the alarm. The horns would blow if and when the voynix actually began their attack.
The dining hall emptied as men and women grabbed their coats and weapons and ran to their fighting stations on the walls, in the yard, and at windows, doorways, gables, porches, and balconies in the house itself.
Harman did not move. He let the running shapes flow around him like a river.
“Harman?” whispered Ada.
Turning against the current, he led her back into the infirmary where Noman lay dying. Hannah had pulled on her coat and found a lance, but seemed unable to leave Noman’s side. Petyr was half out the door but returned when Harman and Ada went in to stand by Noman’s bloodied cot.
“He didn’t say crash the gate,” whispered Harman. “He said Golden Gate. The crèche at Golden Gate.”
Outside, the horns began to blow.
26
Daeman knew that he should fax straight back to the Ardis node to report on what he’d seen, even if he had to make the mile-and-a-quarter-walk from the palisaded faxnode pavilion to Ardis Hall in the dark, but he couldn’t. As important as his news about the hole in the sky was, he wasn’t ready to go back.
He faxed to a previously unknown code he’d discovered when they were doing their node survey six months earlier, mapping out the four hundred and nine known nodes—hunting for survivors of the Fall—and looking for unnumbered destinations. This place was hot and in sunlight. The pavilion was on a knoll among palm trees stirring in soft breezes from the sea. Just down the hill began the beach—a white crescent almost encircling a lagoon so clear he could see the sandy bottom forty feet down out where the reef began. There were no people around, either old-style human or post-human, although Daeman had found the overgrown ruins of what had once been a pre–Final Fax city just inland on the north side of the crescent beach.
He’d seen no voynix in the dozen or so times he’d come here to sit and think. On one trip, some huge, legless, flippered saurian thing had risen out of the surf just beyond the reef, then crashed back into the water with a thirty-foot shark in its mouth, but other than that one disconcerting sighting, he’d seen nothing threatening here.
Now he trudged down to the beach, dropped his heavy crossbow onto the sand, and sat down next to it. The sun was hot. He pulled off his bulky backpack, anorak, and shirt. There was something hanging out of the pocket of his anorak and he pulled it out—the turin cloth from the table of skulls. He tossed it away on the sand. Daeman removed his shoes, trousers, and underwear and staggered naked toward the water’s edge, not even glancing toward the jungle’s edge to make sure he was alone.
My mother is dead. The fact hit him like a physical blow and he thought he might be sick again. Dead.
Daeman walked naked toward the surf. He stood at the edge of the lagoon and let the warm waves lap at his feet, move the sand from under his toes. Dead. He would never see his mother or hear her voice again. Never, never, never, never, never.
He sat down heavily on the wet sand. Daeman had thought himself reconciled to this new world where death was a finality; he thought he’d come to terms with this obscenity when he’d faced his own death eight months earlier up there on Prospero’s Isle.
I knew that I had to die someday… but not my mother. Not Marina. That’s not… fair.
Daeman sobbed a laugh at the absurdity of what he was thinking and feeling. Thousands dead since the Fall… he knew there were thousands dead, because he’d been one of Ardis’s envoys to the hundreds of other nodes, he’d seen the graves, even taught some communities how to dig graves and set the bodies in them to rot away…
My mother! Had she suffered? Had Caliban p
layed with her, tormented her, tortured her before slaughtering her?
I know it was Caliban. He killed them all. It doesn’t matter if that’s impossible—it’s true. He killed them all, but only to get to my mother, to set her skull on top of the pyramid of skulls, wisps of her red hair remaining to show me that it was indeed my mother. Caliban. You whoremongering gill-slitted motherfucking sonofabitching asshole-licking freakshit murderous gape-mawed goddamned fucking…
Daeman couldn’t breathe. His chest simply locked up. He opened his mouth as if to retch again, but he couldn’t move air in or out.
Dead. Forever. Dead.
He stood, waded into the sun-warmed water, and then dove, striking out and swimming hard, swimming toward the reef where the waves lifted white and where he’d seen the giant beast with the shark in its jaws, swimming hard, feeling the sting of saltwater in his eyes and on his cheeks…
The swimming allowed him to breathe. He swam a hundred yards to where the lagoon opened onto the sea and then treaded water, feeling the cold currents tugging at him, watching the heavy waves beyond the reef, listening to the wonderful violence of their crashing, almost surrendering then to the undertow beckoning him out, farther, farther—there was no Pacific Breach as there was in the Atlantic, his body might drift for days—and then he turned and swam back into the beach.
He came out of the water oblivous of his nakedness but no longer oblivious to his safety. He lifted his salt-crusted left palm and invoked the farnet function. He was on this island in the South Pacific—Daeman almost laughed at this thought, since nine months ago, before he’d met Harman, he hadn’t known the names of the oceans, hadn’t even known the world was round, hadn’t known the landmasses, didn’t know there was more than one ocean—and what goddamn good had it done him since to know these things? None, as far as he could tell.
But the farnet showed him that there were no old-style humans or voynix around. He walked up the beach to his clothes and dropped onto the anorak, using it as a beach blanket. His tanned legs were covered with sand.
Just as he went to his knees, a gust of wind from the land caught the tumbling turin cloth and blew it over his head, toward the water. Acting on pure reflex, Daeman reached high and caught it. He shook his head and used the borders of the elaborately embroidered cloth to dry his hair.
Daeman flopped onto his back, the wadded cloth still in his hand, and stared up at the flawless blue sky.
She’s dead. I held her skull in my hands. How had he known for sure that this one skull out of a hundred—even with the obscene hint of the strands of short, red hair—had been his mother? He was sure. Perhaps I should have left her there with the others. Not with Goman, whose stubbornness at staying in Paris Crater killed her. No, not with him. Daeman had a clear image of the small, white skull tumbling toward the red-magma eye of the crater.
He closed his eyes, wincing. The pain of this night was a physical thing, lurking behind his eyes like lancets.
He had to get back to Ardis to tell everyone about what he’d seen—about the certainty of Caliban’s return to earth and about the hole in the night sky and about the huge thing that had come through the hole.
He imagined Harman’s or Noman’s or Ada’s or some of the other people’s questions. How can you be certain it was Caliban?
Daeman was certain. He knew. There had been a connection between him and the monster since the two tumbled in near zero-gravity in the great ruined cathedral space of Prospero’s orbital isle. He’d known since the Fall that Caliban was still alive—had probably, somehow, impossibly, certainly, escaped the isle and returned to Earth.
How could you know?
He knew.
How could one creature, smaller than a voynix, kill a hundred of the Paris Crater survivors—most of them men?
Caliban could have used the clone things from the Mediterranean Basin—the calibani that Prospero had created centuries ago to keep the Setebos’ voynix at bay—but Daeman suspected the monster had not. He suspected that Caliban alone had slaughtered his mother and all the others. Sending me a message.
If Caliban wants to send you a message, why didn’t he come to Ardis Hall and kill us all—saving you for last?
Good question. Daeman thought he knew the answer. He’d seen the Caliban-creature play with the eyeless lizard-things he’d caught up from the rank pools in his sewage ponds under the orbital city—play with them and tease them before swallowing them whole. He’d also seen Caliban play with them—Harman, Savi, and him—taunting them before leaping with lightning speed to bite through the old woman’s neck, dragging her under the water to devour. I’m being played with. We all are.
What did you see coming through the hole above Paris Crater?
Another good question. What had he seen? It had been dusty, the air filled with debris from the hurricane winds, and the light from the hole had been all but blinding. A huge, mucousy brain propelling itself on its hands? Daeman could imagine the reaction from the others at Ardis Hall—at any of the survivor communities—when he told them that.
But Harman would not laugh. Harman had been there with Daeman—and with Savi, who had only minutes more to live—when Caliban had cackled and hissed and huffed its odd litany to and about his father-god, Setebos—“Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!” the monster had cried. “Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.” And later, “… Thinketh, though, that Setebos, the many-handed as a cuttlefish, who, making Himself feared through what He does, looks up, first, and perceives he cannot soar to what is quiet and happy in life, but makes this bauble-world to ape yon real. These good things to match those as hips do grapes.”
Daeman and Harman had later decided that the “bauble-world” was Prospero’s orbital isle, but it was Caliban’s god Setebos he was thinking of now—“the many-handed as a cuttlefish.”
How big was this thing you saw come through the hole?
How big indeed? It had seemed to dwarf the smaller buildings. But the light, the wind, the mountain gleaming behind the scuttling thing—Daeman had no idea how large it had been.
I have to go back.
“Oh, Jesus Christ,” moaned Daeman, knowing now that this easy epiphet so many had used since childhood related to some lost god from the Lost Age. “Oh, Jesus Christ.” He didn’t want to go back to Paris Crater tonight. He wanted to stay here in the warmth and sunlight and safety of this beach.
What did the giant cuttlefish thing do when it entered the city of Paris Crater? Was it coming to meet Caliban?
He had to go back and reconnoiter before faxing home to Ardis. But not this second. Not this very minute.
Daeman’s head was aching from the spikes of agony-sorrow behind his eyes. The goddamned sun was far too bright here. First he set his left palm across his eyes—fleshly light, too much—and then he lifted the turin cloth and set it over his face as he’d done many times before. He’d never been very interested in the turin drama—seducing young women and collecting butterflies had been his two interests in life—but he’d gone under the turin more than a few times out of boredom or mild curiosity. Simply out of habit, knowing all the turins were as dead and inoperative as the servitors and electric lights, he aligned the embroidered microcircuits in the cloth with the center of his forehead.
The images and voices and physical impressions flowed in.
Achilles kneels next to the dead body of the Amazon Penthesilea. The Hole has closed—red Mars stretches away east and south along the coast of the Tethys with no sign left of Ilium and the Earth—and most of the captains who had fought the Amazons with Achilles have escaped through it in time. Big and Little Ajax are gone, as are Diomedes, Idomeneus, Stichius, Sthenelus, Euryalus, Teucer—even Odysseus has disappeared. Some of the Achaeans—Euenor, Pretesilaus and his friend Podarces, Menippus—lay dead among the bodies of the defeated Amazons. In the confusion and panic as the Hole closed, even the Myrmidons, Achilles’ most faithful followers, have fled with the others, thinking their hero A
chilles was with them.
Achilles is alone here with the dead. The Martian wind blows down from the steep cliffs at the base of Olympos and howls among scattered, hollow armor, stirring the bloodied pennants on the shafts of spears pinning the dead to the red ground.
The fleet-footed mankiller cradles the body of Penthesilea, lifting her head and shoulders to his knee. He weeps at the sight of what he has done—her pierced breast, her no-longer-bleeding wounds. Five minutes earlier, Achilles had been triumphant in his victory, crying at the dying queen—“I don’t know what riches Priam promised you, foolish girl, but here is your reward! Now the dogs and birds will feed on your white flesh.”
Achilles can only weep more fiercely at the memory of his own words. He cannot take his eyes from her fair brow, her still-pink lips. The Amazon’s golden curls stir to the rising breeze and he watches her eyelashes, waiting for them to flicker, for her eyes to open. His tears fall onto the dust of her cheek and brow, and he takes the hem of his tunic to wipe the mud from her face. Her eyelids do not flicker. Her eyes do not open.
His spearcast passed through her body and pierced her horse as well, so fierce had been the force of his throw.
“You should have married her, son of Peleus, not murdered her.”
Achilles looks up through his tears at the tall form standing between him and the sun.
“Pallas Athena, goddess …” begins the mankiller and then can only choke his words back or sob. He knows that among all the gods, Athena is his most sworn enemy—that it was she who appeared in his tent eight months earlier and murdered his dearest friend, Patroclus, that it is she whom he’d most longed to slaughter as he fought and wounded dozens of other gods in the past months—but Achilles can find no rage in his heart right now, only bottomless sorrow at the death of Penthesilea.
“How very strange,” says the goddess, looming over him in her golden armor, her tall golden lance catching the low sunlight. “Twenty minutes ago you were willing—nay, eager—to leave her body to the birds and dogs. Now you weep for her.”