by Dan Simmons
“Ah, Proust, that tiresome fellow,” says Orphu. “I was reading him again just this morning.”
“You once tried to explain to me his steps to truth,” says Mahnmut. “But first you said he had three steps, then four, then three, then back to four. I don’t think you ever told me what they were, either. In fact, I think you lost track of what you were talking about.”
“Just testing you,” says Orphu with a rumble. “Seeing if you were listening.”
“So you say,” says Mahnmut. “I think you were having a moravec moment.”
“It wouldn’t be the first,” says Orphu of Io. Data overload from both their organic brains and cybernetic memory banks was an increasing problem as moravecs moved into their second or third century.
“Well,” says Mahnmut, “I doubt if Proust’s ideas about the essence of being human connect too well with Odysseus’.”
Four of Orphu’s multiply jointed arms are busy with the welding, but he shrugs two others. “You remember that he tried friendship—even as a lover—as being one of those paths,” says the Ionian. “So he has that in common with both Odysseus and our scholic in there. But Proust’s narrator discovers that his own calling to truth is writing, examining the nuances wrapped within the other nuances of his life.”
“But he’d rejected art earlier as a path to the deepest humanity,” says Mahnmut. “I thought you told me that he decided that art wasn’t the way to truth after all.”
“He discovers that real art is an actual form of creation,” says Orphu. “Here, listen to this passage from an early section of The Guermantes Way—
“ ‘People of taste tell us nowadays that Renoir is a great eighteenth-century painter. But in so saying they forget the element of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even at the height of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original painter or the orginal writer proceeds on the lines of the oculist. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by their prose is not always pleasant. When it is at an end the practitioner says to us: “Now look!” And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we formerly saw, because they are Renoirs, those Renoirs we persistently refused to see as women. The carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky; we feel tempted to go for a walk in the forest which is identical with the one which when we first saw it looked like anything in the world except a forest, like for instance a tapestry of innumerable hues, but lacking precisely the hues peculiar to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe which has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter of original talent.’ And he goes on to explain how writers do the same thing, Mahnmut—bring new universes into existence.”
“Surely he doesn’t mean that in a literal sense,” says Mahnmut. “Not bringing real universes into existence.”
“I think he is speaking literally,” replies Orphu, his tone on the radio band as serious as Mahnmut has ever heard it. “Have you been following the quantum flux sensor readings that Asteague/Che has been putting on the common band?”
“No, not really. Quantum theory bores me.”
“This isn’t theory,” says Orphu. “Every day we’ve been making this Mars-Earth transit, the quantum instability between the two worlds, within our entire solar system, has grown larger. The Earth is at the center of this flux. It’s as if all of its space-time probability matrices have entered some vortex, some region of self-induced chaos.”
“What does that have to do with Proust?”
Orphu shuts off the welding torch. The large patch-plate on the cargo-bay doors is perfectly joined. “Somebody or something is screwing around with worlds, perhaps with entire universes. Break down the math of the quantum data flowing in, and it’s as if different quantum Calabi-Yau spaces have somehow attempted to coexist on one Brane. It’s almost as if new worlds are trying to come into existence—as if they’ve been willed into existence by some singular genius, just as Proust suggests.”
Somewhere on the Queen Mab, invisible thrusters fire and the long, inelegant-but-beautiful black buckycarbon and steel spacecraft rotates and tumbles. Mahnmut grabs a clutch-bar, his feet flying out away from the ship, as three hundred meters of atomic spacecraft twist and tumble like a circus acrobat. Sunlight slides across the two moravecs and then sets behind the bulky pusher plates at the stern. Mahnmut readjusts his polarized filters, sees the stars again, and knows that while Orphu can’t see them on the visible spectrum, he’s listening to their radio squawks and screeches. That themonuclear choir, the Ionian once had called it.
“Orphu, my friend,” Mahnmut says, “are you getting religious on me?”
The Ionian rumbles in the subsonic. “If I am—and if Proust is right and real universes are created when those rare, almost unique genius-level minds concentrate on creating them—I don’t think I want to meet the creators of this current reality. There’s something malignant at work here.”
“I don’t see why this …” begins Mahnmut and then pauses, listening to the common band. “What’s a twelve-oh-one alarm?”
“The mass of the Mab has just decreased by sixty-four kilograms,” says Orphu.
“Waste and urine dump?”
“Not quite. Our friend Hockenberry has just quantum teleported away.”
Mahnmut’s first thought is—Hockenberry’s in no condition to QT anywhere—we should have stopped him. Friends don’t let friends teleport drunk—but he decides not to share this with Orphu.
A second later, Orphu says, “Do you hear that?”
“No, what?”
“I’ve been monitoring the radio bands. We just brought the high-gain antenna around to aim it at Earth—or actually, the polar orbital ring around Earth—and it’s just picked up a modulated radio broadcast being masered right at us.”
“What does it say?” Mahnmut feels his organic heart beginning to pump faster. He doesn’t override the adrenaline, but lets it pump.
“It’s definitely from the polar ring,” says Orphu, “about thirty-five thousand kilometers above Earth. The message is in a woman’s voice. And it just says, over and over—‘Bring Odysseus to me.’ ”
38
Daeman entered the blue-ice dome-cathedral to an echoing susurration of whispers and chants.
“Thinketh, He made it, with the fire to match, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, that floats and feeds! Thinketh, He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye by moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue, that pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm, and says a plain word when she finds her prize, but will not eat the ants; the ants themselves that built a wall of seeds and settled stalks about their hole—He made all these and more, made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?”
Daeman recognized the voice at once—Caliban. The sibilant whispers echoed off blue-ice wall and blue-ice tunnel, seeming to come from everywhere, reassuringly distant, terrifyingly close. And somehow that single Caliban voice was a chorus, a choir, a multitude of voices in terrible harmony. More frightened than he thought he’d be—much, much more frightened than he’d hoped he would be—Daeman bent his head low and moved forward out of the ice tunnel onto the ice mezzanine.
After an hour’s crawling, often backtracking as some blue-ice tunnel narrowed and closed at a dead end, sometimes emerging into corridors ten yards across only to come up against a wall or vertical shaft far too high to climb, sometimes crawling on his belly so that his back scraped the ice ceiling, shoving his pack ahead of him along with the crossbow, Daeman had emerged into what he thought of as the center of the ice-dome cathedral.
Daeman had none of the ancient words to describe this space he had stepped out into, standing as he was on one of what looked to be hundreds of shad
owy ice-mezzanines in the inner, curved wall of the vast structure, but if he had sigled the words, he would have fumbled through them now—spires, dome, arches, flying buttresses, apse, nave, basilica, choir loft, porch, chapel, rose window, alcove, pillar, altar. They all would have applied to one or more parts of what he was looking at now, and he would have needed more words. Many more words.
As best as Daeman could estimate, the interior of this space was just a little over a mile across and about two thousand feet from the red-glowing floor to the blue-ice apex of the dome. As he’d guessed earlier from the outside, Setebos had covered over the entire crater at the heart of Paris Crater and the vast circle now glowed red, pulsing as if from some huge heartbeat. Daeman had no idea whether this was due to some natural volcanic activity in the crater, some magma rising from miles below where the black hole had once torn at the heart of the Earth, or whether Setebos was somehow summoning and using that heat and light. The rest of the dome glowed in shades of colors Daeman could not describe—from all the varieties of red at the base, through iridescent and then subtle oranges along the periphery of the crater and lower reaches of the dome, veins of red branching up through orange-yellow buttresses and stalagmites and then the hotter colors fading into the cool glow of the immense blue pillars. The blue-ice walls, columns, tendons, and towers were shot through with pulses of green light and yellow sparks, ordered columns of red pulses moving along hidden channels like surges of electricity, open sparks connecting brachiated sections of the cathedral like dendrites firing.
The shell of the dome was thin enough in places that the last evening light from outside illuminated rose circles on the west side. The highest point on the ceiling was as thin as glass and showed an oval of darkening sky and an only slightly blurred view of the emerging stars. Most curious though, low on the inner walls of the dome were hundreds of cross-shaped impressions, each about six feet high. They circled the space, and by leaning out from his rough mezzanine slab, Daeman could see more of these cross-niches below him, indented as if burned into the blue-ice. They seemed to be made of metal and were empty, their steel interiors reflecting the red glow from the center of the crater.
The red-hued floor of the crater itself was not empty. Everywhere rose thorned stalagmites and craggy spires, with some rising all the way to the ceiling—creating neat rows of blue-ice pillars—while others remained freestanding. Nor was the floor of the crater smooth; everywhere were smaller craters and raised fumaroles. Gases, steam, and smoke curled out of most of these and Daeman caught the stink of sulfur on the tepid, overheated air currents. In the center of the red-glowing circle was a raised and raw-rimmed crater ringed with blue-ice stairways and lesser fumaroles. This crater above the crater appeared to be filled almost to the rim with round, white stones, until Daeman realized that the stones were the tops of human skulls—tens of thousands of human skulls, most lying beneath the mass that almost filled the crater. This raised crater looked very much like a nest and the impression was reinforced by the thing that filled it—gray brain tissue, convoluted ridges, multiple pairs of eyes, mouths, and orifices opening and shutting in no unison, a score of huge hands beneath it—these hands occasionally rearranging the huge form’s mass on its nest, settling it more comfortably—and he saw other hands, each larger than the room Daeman occupied at Ardis Hall, that had emerged from the brain on stalks and were pulling themselves and their trailing tentacles across the glowing floor. Some of the hands were close enough that Daeman could see a myriad of curved, barbed, black hair spikes or hooks emerging from the ends of those huge fingers. Each barb—some sort of evolved hair?—was longer than the killing knife that Daeman wore on his belt, and the fingers used the filaments to sink into the blue-ice. The hands could climb anywhere, pull themselves along any surface—masonry, ice, or steel—by sinking those black, hooked blades into whatever lay underhand.
The brain-shape of Setebos itself was much larger than Daeman remembered from its emergence through the Hole in the sky less than two days before—if that thing had been a hundred feet along its axis, it was now at least a hundred yards long and thirty yards high in the center, where the convoluted tissue was separated by a deep, glowing groove. It filled its nest and whenever it resettled its bulk, there came the crunch of skulls like the snapping and settling of straw.
“Thinketh, such glory shows nor right nor wrong in Him, nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord. ‘Saith, He is terrible: watch His feats in proof!”
Caliban’s sibilant hiss slid off the dome in some show of perfect acoustics, echoed off fumaroles and ziggurats, echoed again down the labyrinth of ice tunnels, and seemed to come at Daeman from front, back, and side—a murderous whisper.
As Daeman’s eyes adjusted to the red-glow gloom and the scale of the vast hollowed-out dome, he could see smaller objects moving now—scuttling around the base of Setebos’ nest, scurrying on all fours up the blue-ice steps to the base of the brain-shape and then trudging back down on hind legs only, carrying large oval pods that glowed with a sick and slick milkiness.
For a minute, Daeman thought they were voynix—he’d seen the remains of dozens of voynix during his long crawl in through the ice-maze, not voynix frozen in the ice as he’d encountered in the outside crevasse, but gutted remains of voynix, a hollowed-out carapace here, a torn ped or lacerated leather hump there, a set of claw-hands lying alone—but now looking through the stream and fog from the fumaroles, he could see that these attending shapes were not voynix. They had the form of Caliban.
Calibani, thought Daeman. He’d encountered them in the Mediterranean Basin with Savi and Harman almost a year earlier, and he realized now the significance of the cross shapes in the wall of the dome. Recharging cradles, Savi had called the hollowed-out crosses, and Daeman himself had stumbled across a single naked calibani lolling in one such vertical cross, arms spread, and he’d thought it dead until the yellow cat’s-eyes had flickered open.
Savi had told them that Prospero and the unmet biosphere entity named Ariel had evolved a strain of humanity into the calibani in order to stop the voynix from invading the Mediterranean Basin and other areas Prospero wanted to keep private. Daeman thought now that this was either a lie or Savi’s own mistake—the calibani weren’t evolved from any human strain, but rather cloned from the original and much more terrible Caliban, as Prospero had admitted up on his orbital isle—but at the time, Harman had asked the old Jewish woman why the post-humans had created the voynix in the first place if they—or Prospero—then had to create some other form of monster to contain them.
“Oh, they didn’t create the voynix,” the old woman had said. “The voynix came from somewhere else, serving someone else, with their own agenda.”
Daeman did not understand then and he understood less now. These calibani he watched scuttling like obscenely pink ants across the crater floor, carrying those milky eggs, were clearly not serving Prospero—they served Setebos.
Then who brought the voynix to Earth? he wondered. Why are the voynix attacking Ardis and the other old-style human communities if they’re not serving Setebos? Who do the voynix serve?
All Daeman knew for sure right now was that the coming of Setebos to Paris Crater had been a disaster for the voynix here—those not frozen in the rapidly expanding blue-ice had been caught and shelled like tasty crabs. Shelled by whom? Or by what? Two answers came to mind, and neither one was reassuring—the voynix had been crunched open either by the teeth and claws of the calibani or by Setebos’ own hands.
Daeman realized now that what he’d thought were gray-pink ridges running along the floor of the crater were actually more arm-stalks emanating from Setebos. The fleshy stalks disappeared into openings in the dome wall and…
Daeman whirled around, raising his crossbow, finger on the trigger. There had been a sliding sound in the ice tunnel behind him. One of Setebos’ hands, three times my size, squeezing through the tunnel behind me.
Daeman crouched there waiting, arms fin
ally shaking from holding the weight of the raised crossbow, but no silent hand emerged. But the corridor of ice hissed and slithered to echoed noises.
The hands are in the walls and probably outside in the crevasses by now, thought Daeman, trying to slow his hammering heart. It’s dark in the tunnels and outside. What do I do if I run into one or more of the hands in there? He’d seen the pulsing feeding orifice in the palms of the hands below—a group of calibani had been feeding them large chunks of raw red meat, either voynix or human.
Finally he lay back on his belly on the blue-ice balcony, feeling the cold of the ice—a substance he now believed to be living tissue extruded by Setebos himself—flow up through his thermskin.
I can get out of here now. I’ve seen enough.
Lying there on his belly, the silly crossbow ahead of him, keeping his head down as a group of calibani scuttled across the crater floor on all fours not a hundred yards below and in front of him, Daeman waited for strength to return to his cowardly arms and legs so he could get the hell out of this unholy cathedral.
I need to report back to Ardis, came the reasonable voice in his mind. I’ve done all I can here.
No, you haven’t, answered the honest part of Daeman’s mind—the part that would get him killed someday. You have to see what those slick, gray egg shapes are.
The calibani had stowed some of those gray pods in a steaming fumarole not a hundred yards from him, below and to the right of his low mezzanine.
I can’t possibly climb down there. It’s too far.
Liar. It’s less than a hundred feet. You still have most of your rope and the spikes. And the ice hammers. Then it would just be a fast sprint out to look at the pod-shapes—grab one to bring back if you can—and then back to your balcony here and out.
That’s crazy. I’d be exposed the whole time I was on the crater floor. Those calibani were between me and that nest. If I’d been out there when they appeared, they would have grabbed me. Eaten me there or taken me to Setebos.