by Dan Simmons
In another minute, he could see the pale, almost spectral, genderless figure of Ariel glowing slightly ten feet or so from him across the jungle floor.
“Take me back,” growled Harman.
“Take thee back where?”
“To the Bridge. Or to Ardis. But do it now.”
“I cannot.” The genderless voice was maddening, insulting.
“You will,” growled Harman. “You will right now. However you got me here, undo it, take me back. Now.”
“Or what consequence ensues?” asked the glowing figure in the jungle dark. Ariel’s voice sounded mildly amused.
“Or I’ll kill you,” Harman said flatly. He realized that he meant it. He would strangle this green-white flop of a thing, choke the life out of it, and spit on the corpse. And then you’ll be left lost in an unknown jungle warned the last sensible part of Harman’s mind. He ignored it.
“Oh, my,” said Ariel, feigning terror, “I shall be pinched to death.”
Harman leaped, arms extended. The little figure—not much more than four feet tall—caught him in midleap and threw him thirty feet through ripping fronds and tearing vines into the jungle.
It took Harman a minute or two to get his breath back and another minute to get to his knees. He realized at once that if Ariel had done that to him elsewhere—say, on the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu where they’d been a minute before—it would have broken his back. Now he stood again on deep humus, willed his vision to see through the encroaching darkness, and shoved and tore his way back through vines and thick vegetation to the small clearing where Ariel waited.
The sprite was no longer alone.
“O look,” Ariel said in happy, conversational tones, “here is more of us!”
Harman paused. He could see better now by the starlight filtering down into this little clearing in the jungle and what he saw made him stare.
There were at least fifty or sixty other shapes in the clearing and under the trees and amidst the ferns and vines beyond. They were not human, but neither were they voynix or calibani or any other bipedal form that Harman had seen in his ninety-nine years and nine months of life. These humanoid shapes were like rough sketches of people—short, not much taller than little Ariel, and, like Ariel, with transparent skin and organs floating in greenish liquid. But where Ariel had lips, cheeks, a nose, and the eyes of a young man or woman, with physical features and muscles one associated with the human body, these short, green forms had neither mouths nor human eyes—they looked back at Harman in the starlight from black dots in their faces that could have been lumps of coal—and from their boneless-looking frames to their three-fingered hands, the forms seemed to lack all identity.
“I don’t believe you’ve met my fellow ministers,” Ariel said softly, gesturing with a feminine turn of hand toward the mob of shapes in the shadows. “Instruments to this lower world, they were belched up before your kind was born. They have different names—his Prosperousness doth fain to call them this and that, as takes his pleasure—but they are more like me than not, descended from chlorophyll and the motes set there in the forest to measure it in time before post-humans. They are the zeks—helpers and workers and prisoners all, and who of us is not all these things?”
Harman stared at the greenish shapes. They stared unblinking back.
“Seize him,” lisped Ariel.
Four of the zeks came forward—they moved with a smooth grace that Harman wouldn’t have expected from such gingerbread shapes—and before he could run or fight, two of them seized him with three-fingered grips of iron. The third zek leaned in close, unbreathing, until its featureless chest touched the tunic above Harman’s chest, and the fourth seized Harman’s hand—just as Ariel had seized Hannah’s only a short while before—and thrust it through the yielding green-skin membrane of the third zek’s chest. Harman felt the soft heart-organ in his hand, almost coming to him like a pet, and then the unspoken words echoed in his brain—do not irritate ariel he will kill you on a whim. come with us and make no effort to resist. it is to your benefit and to your lady’s ada’s to come with us now.
“How do you know about Ada?” Harman shouted aloud.
come
That was the last word transmitted through Harman’s pulsing hand into his aching skull before his hand was wrenched free, the zek’s soft heart still in it, shriveling, dying, and then the zek itself pitched over backward, falling silently to the jungle floor, there to shrivel and desiccate and die. Ariel and the other zeks ignored the corpse of the communicator as Ariel turned and led the way down the slightest of trails along the dark jungle floor.
The zeks on either side of Harman still clung to his arm, but lightly now, and Harman made no effort to resist, only to keep up as the line of forms moved through the dark wood.
* * *
Harman’s mind was racing faster than his feet as he stumbled to keep up through the dark jungle. At times, when the foliage overhead was too thick, he couldn’t see anything—not even his legs or feet beneath him in the near absolute darkness—so he let the zeks guide him as if he were blind and concentrated on thinking. He knew that if he was ever going to see Ada and Ardis Hall again, he’d have to be a lot smarter in the coming hours than he’d been in the last many months.
First question—where was he? It had been a stormy morning when he’d been at the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu, but it felt very late here in this jungle. He tried to remember his self-taught geography, but the maps and spheres blurred in his mind now—words like Asia and Europe meaning almost nothing. But the darkness here suggested that Ariel hadn’t just whisked him to some jungle on the same southern continent that held the Bridge. He couldn’t walk back to Machu Picchu and Hannah and Petyr and the sonie.
Which led to the second question—how had Ariel brought him here? There had been no visible faxnode pavilion in the Golden Gate green globules. If there had been—if Savi had ever suggested a fax connection to the Bridge—he certainly wouldn’t have flown the sonie there to get the weapons and ammunition and try to get Odysseus to the healing crèche. No … Ariel had used some other means to transport him through space to this dark, rot-smelling, muggy, insect-filled place.
Since he was being dragged through the darkness not ten paces behind the biosphere avatar—or so Prospero had once identified Ariel—Harman realized he could just ask these questions. The worst the pale sprite—his/her body visibly glowing in starlight as they crossed the occasional small opening in the jungle—could do was not answer.
Ariel answered both questions, the second one first.
“I shall have thy company for only a few hours more,” said the small form. “Then I must deliver thee to my master, not long after we hear the strain of the strutting chanticleer—if strutting chanticleer there were in this wretched place.”
“Your master Prospero?” asked Harman.
Ariel did not answer.
“So what is the name of this wretched place?” Harman asked.
The sprite laughed, a sound like the tinkling of small bells, but not altogether a pleasant noise. “They should call this wood Ariel’s Nursery, for here ten times two hundred years ago, I came to be—rising into consciousness from a billion little sensor-transponders the old-old-style hu-mans—your very ilk, guest—called motes. Trees were talking to their human masters and to each other, chatting in the mossy old net that had become the nascent noosphere, gabbling on about temperatures and birds’ nests and hatchlings and pounds per square inch of osmotic pressure and trying to quantify photosynthesis the way a rheumy clerk counts his beads and bangles and thinks them treasure. The zeks—my beloved instruments of action, too many stolen from me for wasteful duty on the red world by that monster-magus master—rose likewise, yea, but not here, honored guest, not here, no.”
Harman understood almost none of that, but Ariel was talking—babbling—and he knew that if he could keep the creature engaged in conversation, he’d learn something important sooner or later.
; “Prospero, your master, called you the avatar of the biosphere when I spoke to him, your master, nine months ago on his orbital isle,” said Harman.
“Aye,” said Ariel, laughing again, “and I call Prospero, whom you call my master, Tom Shit.” Ariel looked back at him, the small, greenish-white face glowing like some phosphorescent tropical plant as they plunged into a section of trail in total darkness under the encroaching leaves. “Harman, husband of Ada, friend of Noman, thou art, to mine eyes, a man of sin, a man whose destiny has import, in this lower world at least, less for what is in’t than for its pallid shape. Thou, ‘mongst all men, being most unfit to live—much less to live your full Five Twenty so like one of brother Caliban’s long-baked meals—since time and tides of time hath made you mad. And even with such valour, you know, men hang and drown their proper selves.”
Harman understood none of this and despite his asking many more questions, Ariel did not reply or speak again until dawn some three hours and many miles later.
An hour after Harman was sure that he had no energy left, they allowed him to stop and lean against a huge boulder to catch his breath. As the light came up, he realized that it was no boulder.
The boulder was actually a wall, the wall was part of a large building with levels set back as it rose, and the building was something that he guessed from his sigling was called a temple. Then Harman realized what his hands were touching and what his eyes were seeing.
Every inch of the large temple was carved. Some of the carvings were large—as wide as the length of Harman’s arm—but most were small enough that he could cover them with the palm of his hand.
In the carvings—each one becoming more clear as the tropical sunrise bled light through the jungle overhead—men and women were making love—having sex—as were men and more than one woman, men and men, women and women, women and men and what looked to be horses, men and elephants, women and bulls, women and women and monkeys and men and men and men….
Harman could only stare. He’d never seen anything like this in his ninety-nine years. On one level of carvings just at eye height, he could see a man with his head between a woman’s legs while another man, straddling the first, offered his erect penis to the straining woman’s open mouth, while behind her, a second woman wearing some sort of artificial penis was entering the first woman from behind while the first woman, servicing the two men and the woman behind her, was reaching her arm out to an animal Harman recognized from the turin drama as a horse, masturbating the excited stallion. Her other free hand was massaging the genitals of a human male figure standing next to the horse.
Harman stepped away from the temple wall, looking up at the vine-encrusted stone structure. There were thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of variations on this theme, showing Harman aspects of sex he’d never imagined, could never have imagined. Just some of the elephant images alone…. The human figures were stylized, faces and breasts oval, eyes almond-shaped, the women’s and men’s mouths curling in pleased and decadent smiles.
“What is this place?” he asked.
Ariel sang in a falsetto—
“Above, half seen, in the lofty gloom,
Strange works of a long dead people loom,
What did they mean to those who now are dust,
These rioting figures of love and lust?”
Harman tried again. “What is this place?”
For once Ariel answered simply. “Khajuraho.” The word meant nothing to Harman.
The biosphere sprite gestured, two of the little, green, largely transparent zeks touched Harman’s arm, and the procession moved away from the temple, following a barely discernible path through the jungle. Looking back, Harman caught a final glimpse of the stone building—buildings he realized now, there was more than one temple there, all of them carved with erotic friezes—and he noticed again how the jungle had all but reclaimed the structures. The coupling figures were bound about by vines, partially obscured by grass, and tightly constricted by roots and green feelers.
Then the place called Khajuraho disappeared in the green growth and Harman concentrated on plodding along behind Ariel.
As the sunlight illuminated the wild density of the jungle around them—ten thousand shades of green, most of which Harman had never imagined—all he could think of was how to get back to Ardis and Ada, or at least back to the Bridge before Petyr flew off in the sonie. He didn’t want to wait three days for Petyr’s return to pick up Hannah and the restored—if that crèche could restore life and health—Noman/Odysseus.
“Ariel?” he said suddenly to the small form that seemed to be floating at the front of the line of zeks ahead of him.
“Ay, sir?” The androgynous quality of the otherwise pleasant voice disturbed Harman.
“How did you transport me from the Golden Gate to this jungle?”
“Did I not do my spriting gently enough, O Man?”
“Yes,” said Harman, fearing that the pale figure was going to launch into more nonsense babble. “But how?”
“How dost thou travel from place to place, when you are not lying abelly in your sonie saucer?”
“We fax,” said Harman. “But there was no fax pavilion at the Golden Gate… no faxnode.”
Ariel floated higher, brushing branches and sending a shower of droplets down onto the zeks and Harman. “Did your friend Daeman go to a fax pavilion when the allosaurus ate him ten months ago?”
Harman stopped in his tracks. The zeks still holding his arms stopped with him, not yet pulling him on.
Of course, thought Harman. It had been in front of him all his life. He’d seen it all his life—but he’d been blind. When someone faxed up to the rings on any of his or her normal four Twenties of life, you went to the nearest fax pavilion. When someone wanted to fax anywhere, you went to the nearest faxnode pavilion. But when someone was injured—or killed, devoured as Daeman had been, torn apart in some freak accident—the rings faxed you up.
Harman had been there, on Prospero’s Isle, in the Firmary tanks where naked bodies arrived, were fixed by the bubbling nutrient and blue worms, and were faxed back. Harman and Daeman had done the faxing themselves, on Prospero’s instructions, destroying the servitors and setting the virtual dials and levers to fax as many of the bodies-under-repair home as they could.
Humans could be faxed without going to a fax pavilion, without starting from one of the three-hundred-some known faxnodes. Harman had seen this his entire life—almost one hundred years—but had never seen what he could see. The thought was too entrenched that the post-humans were calling you home when you were injured or killed before your Fifth Twenty. Faxnodes were science; going to the Firmary for emergency repair was something like religion.
But the Firmary on Prospero’s Isle had machinery that could fax anyone from anywhere without relying on nodes and pavilions.
And Harman and Daeman had destroyed the Firmary and Prospero’s Isle.
The zeks tugged at Harman’s arms to get him moving again, but gently. Harman did not move quite yet. The intensity of his thoughts made him dizzy; if the zeks had not been clutching him, he might have fallen to the jungle floor.
Prospero’s Isle was destroyed—he and all the old-style humans had watched the pieces burn through the night sky for months—but Ariel could still fax—a sort of free-fax, independent from nodes, portals, and pavilions. Something up on the rings—or on Earth itself—found the sprite, coded him, and faxed him, and today Harman with him, from the Bridge to here, wherever here and Khajuraho were. On the opposite side of the Earth if nothing else.
Harman might yet be able to fax home to Ada, if he could only get Ariel to reveal the secret of this free-faxing.
The zeks pulled again, gently but insistently. Ariel was far ahead, floating toward a patch of bright sunlight in the jungle. Harman did not want to get the zeks in trouble. Nor did he want to lose sight of Ariel—the sprite was his fax-ticket home.
Harman rushed, stumbling, to catch up with the avatar
of Earth’s biosphere.
When they first emerged into the clearing the sun was so bright that Harman squinted and covered his eyes, not seeing the structure looming above him for several seconds. When he did see it, he froze in his tracks.
The thing—structure—it wasn’t quite a building—was gigantic, rising up for what Harman estimated—and his estimates on the size of things had always been uncannily good—for at least a thousand feet. Perhaps a little more. It had no skin; that is, the entire structure was a lacy, open-latticework skeleton of dark metal girders, rising inward from a huge square base that connected via semicircular metal arches at treetop level, then continuing to curve inward until it became a pure spire, its dark knob of a summit far, far above. A phrase that the metal-working Hannah had once described came to his mind—wrought iron. Harman felt sure that the trusses, arches, girders, and open latticework he was staring at here in the hot, jungle sun were all made of some sort of iron.
“What is it?” he breathed. The zeks had released him and stepped back into the shade of the jungle, as if afraid to go closer to the base of the incredible tower. Harman realized that nothing grew on the acre or more at the base of the tower except for low, perfectly manicured grass. It was as if the strength of the structure itself was keeping the jungle at bay.
“It’s seven thousand tons,” said Ariel in a voice much more masculine than any the biosphere sprite had used before. “Two and a half million rivets. Four thousand three hundred and eleven years old—or at least the original of this was. There are more than fourteen thousand of these in Khan Ho Tep’s eiffelbahn.”
“Eiffelbahn…” repeated Harman. “I don’t…”
“Come,” snapped Ariel. His voice was powerfully masculine now, deep, threatening, not to be disobeyed.