by Dan Simmons
This is madness, thought Harman. This greenish… creature… has one of our party reach into his or her chest and remove a golden organ, and the three of us come up to have hot soup while the voynix scrabble at the glass ten feet away and the self-aware avatar of the planetary biosphere acts as our servitor. I’ve gone mad.
Harman acknowledged to himself that he may have gone mad, but the soup was good. He thought of Ada and continued eating.
“Why are you here?” asked Petyr. He’d pushed the wooden bowl away from him and was staring intently at Ariel. His bow was by his chair.
“What would thee have me tell you?” asked Ariel.
“What the hell is going on?” asked Petyr, never one for small talk or subtleties. “Who the hell are you, really? Why are the voynix here and why are they attacking Ardis? What is that goddamned thing that Daeman saw in Paris Crater? Is it a threat… and if so, how can we kill it?”
Ariel smiled. “Always among the first questions of thy kind… what is it and how can I kill it?”
Petyr waited. Harman lowered his spoon.
“It is a good question,” said Ariel, “ for if thee were the first men to leap up, instead of the last, thou shoulds’t cry, ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!’ But it is a long tale, as long as dying Odysseus’, I think, and hard to tell over cold soup.”
“Then start by telling us again who you are,” said Harman. “Are you Prospero’s creature?”
“Aye, I was once. Not quite slave, not quite servant, but indentured to him.”
“Why?” asked Petyr. It had begun to rain hard, but the water droplets found no more purchase on the curved buckyglas than had the leaping voynix. Still, the pounding of the showers on the Bridge and girders made a background roar.
“The magus of the logosphere saved me from that damned witch Sycorax,” said Ariel, “whose servant then I was. For it was she who had mastered the deep codes of the biosphere, she who summoned Setebos, her lord, but when I showed myself too delicate to act her earthy and abhorred demands, she—in her most unmitigable rage—anchored me to a single, cloven pine, in which rift I did remain a dozen times a dozen years before being released by Prospero.”
“Prospero saved you,” said Harman.
“Prospero released me to do his bidding,” said Ariel. The thin, pale lips curved upward slightly. “And then demanded my service for another dozen times a dozen years.”
“And did you serve him?” asked Petyr.
“I did.”
“Do you serve him now?” asked Harman.
“I serve no man or magus now.”
“Caliban served Prospero once,” said Harman, trying to remember everything Savi had said, everything that the hologram named Prospero had told him up there on that orbital isle. “Do you know Caliban?”
“I do,” said Ariel. “A villain I do not love to look on.”
“Do you know if Caliban is back on Earth?” pressed Harman. He wished Daeman were here.
“Thou know’st it is truth,” said Ariel. “He seeks to turn all Earth into his old filthy-mantled pool, make the frozen sky his cell.”
The frozen sky his cell, thought Harman. “So Caliban is ally of this Setebos?” he asked aloud.
“Aye.”
“Why did you show yourself to us?” asked Hannah. The beautiful young woman’s gaze was still distracted by sorrow, but she had turned her head to look at Ariel.
Ariel began to sing—
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I crouch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily:
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.”
“The creature’s mad,” said Petyr. He stood abruptly and walked to the bridge-side wall. Three voynix leapt at him, struck the field above the buckyglas, and dropped away. One of them managed to sink its bladed hands into the Bridge concrete and arrested its fall. The other two disappeared in the clouds below.
Ariel laughed softly. Then he or she wept. “Our shared Earth is under siege. The war has come here. Savi is dead. Odysseus is dying. Setebos would fain kill everything I am and come from and exist to protect. You old-style humans are either enemies or allies… I choose the latter. You have no vote in the matter.”
“You’ll help us fight the voynix, Caliban, and this Setebos creature?” asked Harman.
“No, thee shall help me.”
“How?” said Hannah.
“I have tasks for thee. First, you came for weapons…”
“Yes!” said Hannah, Petyr, and Harman in unison.
“Those two who stay shall find them in a secret room at the bottom of the south tower, behind the old, dead computing machines. You will see a circle on the opaque, greenglass wall, having then a pentacle inscribed within. Say merely ‘open’ and you will find the room where sly Odysseus and poor, dead Savi did conceal their little Lost-Era toys.”
“You said the two who stay?” said Petyr.
“One of thee three should take the sonie home to Ardis Hall before yon Ardis falls,” said Ariel. “The second of thee should stay here and tend to Odysseus if he does not die, for he alone knows the secrets of Sycorax, since once he did lie with her—and no man lies with Sycorax without suffering a change. The third of thee shall come with me.”
The three people looked at each other. With the heavy rain and cloudy light, it was as if they were deep underwater, staring at each other through cold green gloom.
“I’ll stay,” said Hannah. “I’d decided to stay anyway. If Odysseus awakes, someone should be here.”
“I’ll take the sonie home,” said Harman, cringing at his own cowardice but not caring at the same time. He had to get home to Ada.
“I’ll go with you, Ariel,” said Petyr, stepping closer to the delicate little figure.
“No,” he or she said.
The three humans glanced at each other and waited.
“No, it must be Harman who comes with me,” said Ariel. “We will tell the sonie to take Petyr straight home, but at half the speed thee came. It is an old machine and should not suffer the spur without dire cause. Harman must come with me.”
“Why?” said Harman. He wasn’t going anywhere but home to Ada—of this he was sure.
“Because drowning is thy destiny,” said Ariel, “and because thy wife’s life and thy child’s life depend upon this destiny. And Harman’s destiny this day is to come with me.” Ariel rose from the ground then, weightless, floating above them, floating six feet above the table, his or her black gaze never leaving Harman’s face as she or he sang again—
“Full fathom five our Harman lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Ding dong, ding dong.”
“No,” said Harman. “I’m sorry, but… no.”
Petyr set an arrow to his string and drew back the bow.
“Are you going bat-fowling?” asked Ariel, twenty feet away now as she/he drifted in the green-gloomed air, but smiling at Petyr.
“Don’t …” said Hannah, but whether she was talking to Ariel or Petyr he never found out.
“Time to go,” said Ariel, almost laughing.
The lights went out. In the absolute darkness, there came a fluttering, rushing sound—as of an owl swooping—and in the darkness, Harman felt something lift him off the floor as effortlessly as a hawk would lift a baby rabbit, flinging and carrying him backward through the darkness, sending him flailing and falling down into the sudden blackness between the tall pillars of the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu.
31
The first day out from Mars and Phobos.
The thousand-foot-long, moravec-built atomic spaceship Queen Mab moves up out of Ma
rs’ gravity well with a series of brilliant explosions literally kicking it in the butt.
Escape velocity from the moon Phobos is a mere 10 cm/sec, but the Queen Mab quickly kicks herself up to 20 km/sec acceleration in order to start the process of climbing up and out of Mars’ gravity. While the three-hundred-meter-long spacecraft could travel to Earth at that velocity, it’s too impatient to do so; the Queen Mab plans to keep accelerating until its thirty-eight thousand tons of mass are moving at a brisk 700 km/sec. On the pulse-unit storage decks, well-oiled chains and ratchets and chutes guide the Coke-can-sized forty-five-kiloton bombs down and into the ejector mechanism that runs out through the center of the pusher plate at the rear end of the spacecraft. During this part of the voyage, a bomb-can is ejected every twenty-five seconds and is then detonated six hundred meters behind the Queen Mab. On each pulse-unit ejection, the muzzle of the ejection tube is sprayed by anti-ablation oil, which also coats the pusher after each detonation. The heavy pusher plate is driven backward into the ship on thirty-three-meter-long shock absorbers, and then its huge pistons drive it back into place for the next plasma flash. The Queen Mab is soon moving toward Earth at a comfortable and steady 1.28-g’s, its actual acceleration increasing with every blast. The moravecs, of course, could withstand hundreds or even thousands of times that g-force for short periods, but there is one human aboard—the shanghaied Odysseus—and the moravecs were unanimous in not wanting him to end up as raspberry jam on a deck floor.
On the engineering level, Orphu of Io and other technical ‘vecs watch steam pressure and oil-level gauges while also monitoring voltage and coolant levels. With atom bombs going off behind it every thirty seconds, the spacecraft has much use for lubricant, so oil reservoirs the size of small oceangoing oil tankers from the Lost Era ring the bottom ten decks. The engine-room deck with its myriad of pipes, valves, meters, reciprocating pistons, and huge pressure gauges still looks to all concerned like something out of an early-Twentieth Century steamship.
Even with its gentle 1.28-g-load, the Queen Mab will be accelerating briskly enough, for long enough, and then decelerating quickly enough, that it plans to reach the Earth-Moon system in just a little over thirty-three standard days.
Mahnmut is busy this first day out checking systems in his submersible the Dark Lady. The sub is not only fitted snugly into one of the holds of the Queen Mab, but is also attached to a winged reentry shuttle for its drop into the Earth’s atmosphere in a month or so, and Mahnmut is making sure that the new controls and interfaces for these new parts are all in working order. Although a dozen decks apart while they work, Mahnmut and Orphu chat with each other via private tightbeam while they watch on separate ship video and radar links as Mars falls farther and farther behind. The cameras showing Mahnmut this stern-view require sophisticated computerized filters to be able to peer through the near-continuous flash-blast of the constantly erupting “pulse-units”… aka bombs. Orphu, while blind to the visible spectrum of light, “watches” Mars recede through a series of radar plots.
It feels weird to be leaving Mars after all the trouble we went through to get there, sends Mahnmut on the tightbeam.
Indeed, answers Orphu of Io. Especially now that the Olympian gods are warring so furiously together. To illustrate his point, the deep space moravec zooms Mahnmut’s video of retreating Mars, focusing on the icy slopes and green summit of Olympus Mons. Orphu of Io sees the activity as a series of infrared data columns, but Mahnmut can see it clearly enough. Bright explosions flash here and there and the caldera—a lake only twenty-four hours ago—now glows yellow and red on the infrared, showing that it is filled with lava once again.
Asteague/Che, Retrograde Sinopessen, Cho Li, General Beh bin Adee, and the other prime integrators seemed actively frightened, sends Mahnmut as he runs checks on the submersible’s power systems. Their explanation to Hockenberry about the gravity of Mars being wrong—how whoever or whatever changed it to near Earth-normal—also frightened me. This is the first time that he and Orphu have found to speak privately since the launch of the Queen Mab and Mahnmut welcomes the chance to share his anxiety.
That’s not even the tip of the merde iceberg, sends Orphu.
What do you mean? Mahnmut’s organic parts feel a sudden chill.
That’s right, rumbles Orphu, you were so busy shuttling around Mars and Ilium, you didn’t hear all of the Prime Integrators Commission findings, did you?
Tell me.
You’ll be happier not knowing, my friend.
Shut up and tell me… you know what I mean. Talk.
Orphu sighs—an odd noise over the tightbeam, sounding like the entire one thousand and thirty feet of the Queen Mab has suddenly depressurized. First of all, there’s the terraforming…
So? In their many weeks of traveling across Mars by submersible, felucca, and balloon, Mahnmut had grown accustomed to the blue sky, blue sea, lichen, trees, and abundant air.
All that water and life and air wasn’t there a mere century and a quarter ago, sends Orphu.
I know. Asteague/Che explained that during our first briefing on Europa, almost a standard year ago. It almost seemed impossible that the planet could have been terraformed that quickly. So?
So it was impossible, sends Orphu of Io. While you were schmoozing with the Greeks and Trojans, our science ‘vecs, both Five Moons and Belt, have been studying terraformed Mars. It wasn’t done by magic, you know… asteroids were used to melt the ice caps and free the CO2, more asteroids were targeted on the huge underground frozen water deposits and crashed into the Martian crust to set H2O flowing on the surface after millions of years, lichen, algae, and earthworms were seeded to prepare the soil for larger plants, and all that could happen only after fusion-fired oxygen and nitrogen generating plants had thickened the Martian atmosphere by a factor of ten.
In his submersible control crèche, Mahnmut quits tapping at his computer screen. He unjacks from virtual ports and lets the schematics and images of the sub and its reentry shuttle fade away. That would mean… he sends hesitantly.
Yep. That means that it took almost eight thousand standard years to terraform Mars to its present stage.
But… but… Mahnmut is sputtering on the tightbeam line, but he can’t help it. Asteague/Che had shown them astronomical photos of the old Mars, the airless, cold, lifeless Mars, taken from Jupiter and Saturn space only a standard century and a half ago. And the moravecs themselves had been seeded in the Outer System by human beings less than three thousand years earlier. Mars certainly hadn’t been terraformed then—except for a few domed Chinese colonies on Phobos and the surface, it was exactly as the early probes from Earth had first photographed it in the Twentieth or Twenty-first century or whenever.
But … sends Mahnmut again.
I love it when you’re speechless, sends Orphu, but there is none of the accompanying rumble that usually means the hard-vac moravec is amused.
You’re saying that we’re either talking magic or real gods here… a God-type god… or… Mahnmut’s tone on the tightbeam is approaching anger.
Or?
That’s not the real Mars.
Exactly, sends Orphu. Or rather, it’s the real Mars, but not our real Mars. Not the Mars that’s been in our solar system for lo, these billions of years.
Someone… something… swapped… our Mars… for… another… one?
It appears that way, sends Orphu. The Prime Integrators and their top science ‘vecs didn’t want to believe it either, but that’s the only answer that fits the facts. The sol-day thing cinched it.
Mahnmut realizes that his hands are shaking. He clasps them, shuts off his vision and video feeds so he can concentrate, and sends—Sol-day thing?
A small matter, but important, sends Orphu. Did you happen to notice during your travels through the Brane Hole between Mars and the Earth with Ilium that the days and nights were the same length?
I guess so but… Mahnmut stops. He doesn’t have to access his nonorganic memo
ry banks to know that the Earth rotates once every twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes, Mars every twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes. A small difference, but one whose disparity would have accumulated during the months of their stay on both Mars and the Hole-connected Earth where the Greeks were battling the Trojans. But it hadn’t. The days and nights on both worlds had been the same length, synchronized.
Jesus Christ, whispers Mahnmut on the tightbeam. Jesus Christ.
Maybe, sends Orphu, and this time the rumble is there. Or at least someone with comparable God-powers.
Someone or something from Earth punched holes in multidimensional Calabi-Yau Space, connected Branes across different universes, swapped our Mars for theirs… whoever and wherever “theirs” is… and left that other Mars… the terraformed Mars with gods on top of Olympos… still connected to the Ilium-Earth with quantum Brane Holes. And while they were at it, they changed the gravity and rotational period of Mars. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and holy crap!
Yes, sends Orphu. And the Prime Integrators now think that whoever or whatever did this little trick is on Earth or in near-Earth orbit. Still want to go on this trip?
I… I… if… I… begins Mahnmut and falls silent. Would he have volunteered for this trip if he’d known all this? After all, he already knew how dangerous it was, had known since he’d volunteered to go to Mars after being briefed on Europa. Whatever these beings were—these evolved post-humans or creatures from some other universe or dimension—they’d already shown themselves capable of controlling and playing with the very quantum fabric of the universe. What’s a couple of moved-around planets and altered rotation periods and gravitational fields compared to that? And what the hell was he doing on the Queen Mab hurtling toward Earth and its waiting god-monsters at a velocity of 180 km/sec and climbing? The unknown enemy’s control of the quantum underpinnings of the universe—of all universes—made this space-ship’s puny weapons and the thousand sleeping rockvec soldiers on board seem like a joke.
This is sort of sobering, he finally sends to Orphu.