by Dan Simmons
Nearby on the façade were letters—Daeman recognized them as such now after his months with Harman and his own learning the siglfunction.
sagi m yunez yanowski 1991
Daeman had never learned to read, but out of habit he set his thermskinned hand on the cold stone and brought up the mental image of five blue triangles in a row. Nothing. He had to laugh at himself—you couldn’t sigl stone, only books, and only certain books at that. Besides, would the sigl-function work through molecular thermskin? He had no way of knowing.
However, Daeman could read the numerals. One-nine-nine-one. No faxnode code ran that high. Could it be some sort of explanation of the statues? Or some ancient attempt to set the figures more firmly in time, just as the human likenesses had been set in stone? How does one number time? he wondered. Daeman tried for a moment to imagine what one-nine-nine-one might stand for in years… the years since the reign of some ancient king, such as Agamemnon or Priam in the turin drama? Or perhaps it was part of the way the artist of these disturbing statues proclaimed his or her own identity. Was it possible that everyone in the Lost Era identified themselves through numerals rather than names?
Daeman shook his head and left the blue-ice grotto. He was wasting time and the strangeness of these things—these buildings and “statues” that should have remained buried, these thoughts of people unlike those he’d always known, of someone trying to put a numerical value to time itself—were as alien and unsettling to him as the memory of Setebos coming through the Hole, a swollen, disembodied brain being carried by scuttling rats.
If he was to find Caliban and Setebos—or allow them to find him—he’d find them in this dome-cathedral.
It was not a true cathedral, of course—Daeman had only known that word, “cathedral,” for a few months, sigling it in a book of Harman’s from which he’d learned many words and understood almost nothing—but the inside of this huge dome seemed much like Daeman imagined a cathedral to be. But certainly no cathedral like this had ever stood in the city now called Paris Crater.
That was after dark. While the light still lasted, he’d followed the green slash of the Promenade Plantee along the trench of the Avenue Daumesnil until that dead-ended in an ice mass he guessed to be the Operbastel. Although the crevasse had closed overhead, he followed a tunnel that seemed to follow the Rude Lyon up to the juncture that was the Bastille. Here more tunnels and open, narrow crevasses—in one he could extend his arms and touch both ice walls at once—led to his left toward the Seine.
In Daeman’s lifetime and for a hundred Five-Twenty lifetimes before him, the Seine had been dried up and paved with human skulls. No one knew why the skulls were there, only that they always had been—they looked like white and brown paving stones from any of the many bridges one would cross in a droshky, barouche, or carriole—and no one in Daeman’s experience had ever wondered where the water in the river had disappeared to, since the mile-wide Crater itself bisected the old riverbed. Now there were more skulls—skulls recently liberated from living human bodies—lining the walls of the crevasse he was following toward the Île de la Cité and the east rim of the crater.
According to what little legend remained in a culture largely devoid of history, oral or otherwise, Paris Crater was said to have gained its crater more than two millennia ago when post-humans lost control of a tiny black hole they’d created during a demonstration at a place called the Institut de France. The hole had bored its way through the center of the earth several times but the only crater it had left in the planet’s surface was right here between the Invalids Hotel faxnode and the Guarded Lion node. Legends persisted that right where the north rim of the crater was now, a huge building called the Luv—or sometimes “the Lover”—had been sucked down to the center of the earth with the runaway hole, taking with it a lot of old-style human “art.” Since the only “art” that Daeman had ever encountered were these few “statues,” he couldn’t imagine that the loss of the Luv amounted to much if everything in it had been as stupid as the dancing naked men in the Avenue Daumesnil crevasse now behind him.
Daeman couldn’t see anything from the one open crevasse leading to Île St-Louis and Île de la Cité, so he spent the better part of an hour climbing an ice wall—laboriously chipping steps, driving in heavy bolts to loop his rope around, frequently hanging from one or both of his ice hammers to let the sweat run out of his eyes and to allow his pounding heart to slow. One good thing about the incredible exercise of the climb—he was no longer cold.
He came out atop the blue-ice crust over the city right about where the west end of Île de la Cité used to be. The ice was a hundred feet deep here and Daeman had expected to look west across the Crater and see at least the tops of the skyline he was used to—the tall buckylace and bamboo-three domi towers ringing the crater itself, his mother’s tower just across the way, and farther west the thousand-foot-high La putain énorme, the giant naked woman made of iron and polymer. A statue, just a big statue, he thought now, but I never knew the word before.
None of these things were visible. Straight ahead of Daeman, looking west, an enormous dome of organic blue ice rose at least two thousand feet above the level of the old city. Only corners, edges, shadows, and an occasional extruding terrace showed where the ring of once-proud towers had circled the crater. His mother’s tall domi was not visible. Nor was the putain farther west. Besides the huge blue dome itself—both blocking and absorbing what Daeman realized was late-evening light—the area around the crater was now a mass of airy ice towers, flying buttresses, complex tessellations, and blue ice stalagmites rising a hundred stories and more. All these soaring towers and protrusions surrounding the dome were connected through the air by webs of the blue ice that looked delicate but which—Daeman realized—must each be wider across than any of the city’s broad avenues. Everything glittered in the rich, low sunlight, and there appeared to be jolts and jots of light moving within the towers and webs and the dome itself.
Jesus Christ, whispered Daeman.
For all the scrotum-tightening impressiveness of glowing ice towers leaping sixty, eighty, a hundred stories above the lower cap of ice covering the old city, the dome was most impressive of all.
At least two hundred stories tall—Daeman could judge its height and staggering mass only by the glimpses of the old domi towers low on the dome’s flank—the dome stretched more than a mile in radius, from his position here on the Île de la Cité south to the huge garbage dump his mother used to call the Luxembourg Gardens, north past the greensward called boulevard Haussmann, enveloping the domi tower at Gare St-Lazare where his mother’s most recent lover used to live, and then west almost to the Champs de Mars, where the straddle-legged putain was always visible. But not visible this day. The dome blocked even a thousand-foot-tall woman from view.
If I’d faxed in to the Invalid Hotel node, I would have ended up inside the dome, he thought.
The idea made his heart pound more wildly than the ice climb had, but then he had two more terrifying thoughts in rapid succession.
His first thought was—Setebos built this thing across the Crater. That was impossible, but it had to be true. In fact, with the orange sunset glow lessening slightly on the towers and Dome itself, Daeman could now see a red glow coming up through the ice—a red pulsing that could be coming only from the Crater.
His second thought was—I have to go in there.
If Setebos was still here in Paris Crater, there is where he would be waiting. If Caliban was here, the Dome is where he would be.
Hands shaking from the cold—from the cold, he told himself—Daeman went back to the wall of ice, secured the rope around a bamboo-three girder emerging from the blue ice, and lowered himself back into the waiting crevasse.
It was already dark at the bottom of the narrow ice canyon—he could look up and see stars in the paling sky—and the only way forward from Île de la Cité was into one of the many small tunnels opening like eyes in the ice, tunnels in whic
h it would be darker still.
Daeman found one tunnel opening about chest high above the floor of the crevasse and he crawled in, feeling the even deeper cold come up through the ice into his knees and palms. Only the thermskin kept him alive here. Only the osmosis mask kept his breath from freezing in his throat.
Scooting on his knees when he could, his rucksack scraping the lowering ice ceiling above him, his crossbow extended before him, he crawled on his belly toward the red glow in the dome-cathedral ahead.
37
Hockenberry comes to the astrogation bubble to confront Odysseus, perhaps to be beaten up by him, but he stays to get drunk with him.
It has taken Hockenberry more than a week to work up the courage to go talk to the only other human being on board, and by the time he does, the Queen Mab has reached its turn-around point and the moravecs have warned him that there will be twenty-four hours of zero-gravity before the ship rotates stern-first toward the Earth, the bombs begin detonating again, and the 1.28 Earth-gravity will return during the deceleration phase. Mahnmut and Prime Integrator Asteague/Che both came by to make sure that his cubby would be freefall-proofed—i.e., all sharp corners padded, loose things stowed so they wouldn’t float away, velcro slippers and mats provided—but no one warned Hockenberry that a common reaction to zero-g is to get violently seasick.
Hockenberry does. Repeatedly. His inner ear keeps telling him that he is falling out of control and there certainly is no horizon to focus on—his cubby doesn’t have a window or a porthole or anything to peer out of—and while the bathroom facilities were designed to operate in the predominant 1.28-g gravity environment, Hockenberry soon learns how to use the in-flight bags that Mahnmut brings him whenever he announces that he’s beginning to feel sick again.
But six hours of nausea is enough, and eventually the scholic begins to feel better and even starts to enjoy kicking around the padded cubby, floating from his bolted-down couch to his well-secured writing desk. Finally he asks permission to leave his room, permission is granted at once, and then Hockenberry has the time of his life floating down long corridors, kicking down the broad ship’s stairways that look so silly now in a truly three-dimensional world, and pulling his way from one handhold to the next in the wonderfully byzantine engine room. Mahnmut remains his faithful assistant during all this, making sure that Hockenberry doesn’t grab an unfortuitous lever in the engine room or forget that things still have mass here even while they show no weight.
When Hockenberry announces that he wants to visit Odysseus, Mahnmut tells him that the Greek is in the forward astrogation bubble and leads him there. Hockenberry knows that he should send the little moravec away—that this is to be a private apology and conversation, and possible beating, between the two men—but perhaps it is the craven part of the scholic that lets Mahnmut tag along. Surely the moravec won’t let Odysseus tear him limb from limb, whatever right the kidnapped Greek might have to do so.
The astrogation bubble consists of a round table anchored amidst an ocean of stars. There are three chairs connected to the table, but Odysseus merely uses one to anchor himself, hooking his bare foot between the slats. When the Queen Mab spins or pivots—which it seems to be doing a lot of in its twenty-four hours without thrust—the stars swing past in a way that would have sent Hockenberry running for the zero-g bag a few hours earlier, but which now doesn’t bother him. It’s as if he has always existed in freefall. Odysseus must feel the same way, Hockenberry thinks, for the Achaean has emptied three wine gourds of the nine or ten tied to the table by long tethers. He passes one to Hockenberry by propelling it through the air with a flick of his fingers, and even though Hockenberry’s stomach is empty, he can’t refuse the wine offered as a gesture of reconciliation. Besides, it’s excellent.
“The artifactoids ferment it and put it up somewhere here on this godless ship,” says Odysseus. “Drink up, human artifact. Join us, moravec.” This last is to Mahnmut, who has pulled himself down into one of the chairs but who declines the drink with a shake of his metallic head.
Hockenberry apologizes for deceiving Odysseus, for bringing him to the hornet so that the moravecs could shanghai him. Odysseus waves away the apology. “I thought of killing you, son of Duane, but to what purpose? Obviously the gods have ordained that I come on this long voyage, so it is not my place to defy the will of the immortals.”
“You still believe in the gods?” asks Hockenberry, taking a long sip of the powerful wine. “Even after going to war with them?”
The bearded war planner frowns at this, then smiles and scratches his cheek. “Sometimes it may be difficult to believe in one’s friends, Hockenberry, son of Duane, but one must always believe in one’s enemies. Especially if you are privileged to count the gods amongst your enemies.”
They drink a minute in silence. The ship rotates again. Bright sunlight blots out the stars for a moment and then the ship turns into its own shadow once more and the stars reappear.
The powerful wine hits Hockenberry in a wave of warmth. He’s happy to be alive—he raises his hand to his chest, touching not only the QT medallion there but the thin line of disappearing scar under his tunic—and he realizes that after ten years of living amongst the Greeks and Trojans, this is the first time he’s sat down to drink wine and schmooze with one of the serious heroes and major characters of the Iliad. How strange, after teaching the tale to undergraduates for so many years.
For a while the two men talk about the events they’d seen just before leaving Earth and the base of Olympos—the Hole between the worlds closing, the one-sided battle between the Amazons and Achilles’ men. Odysseus is surprised that Hockenberry knows so much about Penthesilea and the other Amazons, and Hockenberry doesn’t find it necessary to tell the warrior that he’d read about them in Virgil. The two men speculate on how quickly the real war will resume and whether the Achaeans and Argives under the leadership of Agamemnon again will finally bring down the walls of Troy.
“Agamemnon may have the brute strength to destroy Ilium,” says Odysseus, his eyes on the turning stars, “but if strength and numbers fail him, I doubt he has the craft.”
“The craft?” repeats Hockenberry. He has been thinking and communicating in this ancient Greek for so long that he rarely has to pause to consider a word, but he does so now. Odysseus has used the word dolos for craft—which could mean “cleverness” in a way that would draw either praise or abuse.
Odysseus nods. “Agamemnon is Agamemnon—all see him for what he is, for he is capable of nothing more. But I am Odysseus, known to the world for every kind of craft.”
Again Hockenberry hears this dolos and realizes that Odysseus is bragging of the very same character trait of cleverness and guile that made Achilles say of him—Hockenberry had been there to hear this during their embassy to Achilles months ago—“I hate that man like the very Gates of Death who… stoops to peddling lies.”
Odysseus had obviously understood Achilles’ implied insult that night, but had chosen not to take offense. Now, after four gourds of wine, the son of Laertes was showing pride in his cleverness. Not for the first time, Hockenberry wonders—Will they be able to bring down Troy without Odysseus’ wooden horse? He thinks of the layers of this word, dolos, and has to smile to himself.
“Why are you grinning, son of Duane? Did I say something funny?”
“No, no, honored Odysseus,” says the scholic. “I was just thinking about Achilles …” He lets his voice drift off before he says something that will anger the other man.
“I dreamt of Achilles last night,” says Odysseus, rotating easily in the air to look at the near-sphere of stars around them. The astrogation bubble looks both ways along the Queen Mab’s hull, but the metal and plastic there mostly reflect the starlight. “I dreamed that I talked to Achilles in Hades.”
“Is the son of Peleus dead then?” asks Hockenberry. He opens another gourd of wine.
Odysseus shrugs. “It was just a dream. Dreams do not accept time a
s a boundary. Whether Achilles breathes now or already shuffles amongst the dead, I do not know, but it’s certain that Hades will someday be his home—as it will be all of ours.”
“Ah,” says Hockenberry. “What did Achilles say to you in the dream?”
Odysseus turns his dark-eyed stare back on the scholic. “He wanted to know about his son, Neoptolemus, about whether the boy had become a champion at Troy.”
“And did you tell him?”
“I told him I did not know, that my own fate has carried me far from the walls of Ilium before Neoptolemus could enter battle there. This did not satisfy the son of Peleus.”
Hockenberry nods. He can imagine Achilles’ petulance.
“I tried to comfort Achilles,” continues Odysseus. “To tell him how the Argives honored him as a god now that he was dead—how living men would always sing of his feats of bravery—but Achilles would have none of it.”
“No?” The wine was not only good, it was wonderful. It sent liquid heat blossoming out from Hockenberry’s belly and made him feel as if he were floating more freely even than zero-g would allow.
“No. He told me to stuff those songs of glory up my ass.”
Hockenberry splutters a sort of laugh. Bubbles and beads of red wine float free. The scholic tries to bat them away, but the red spheres burst and make his fingers sticky.
Odysseus still stares out at the stars. “The shade of Achilles told me last night that he’d rather be a peasant sod buster, his hands covered with calluses not from the sword but from the plow, staring up an oxen’s ass ten hours a day, than to be the greatest hero in Hades, or even the king there, ruling over the breathless dead. Achilles doesn’t like being dead.”
“No,” says Hockenberry, “I could see that he would not.”
Odysseus pirouettes in zero-g, grabs the back of the chair, and looks at the scholic. “I’ve never seen you fight, Hockenberry. Do you fight?”