by Dan Simmons
The huge ship had ceased setting off its Coke-can-sized atomic bombs upon passing the orbit of Earth’s moon—they wanted to announce their arrival but not antagonize anyone or anything in the equatorial or polar rings into firing on them—and now the Mab was decelerating toward orbit under a mild one-eighth gravity using only its auxiliary ion-drive engines extended on short booms. Mahnmut thought that the blue glow “beneath” them was a pleasant alternative to the periodic smash and glare of the bombs.
The little Europan had to take care out in vacuum under deceleration, making sure that he was attached to the ship at all times, staying on the catwalks that ringed the ship, watching his step on the ladders that were everywhere on the thousand-foot-long spacecraft, but he knew that if he did something stupid Orphu of Io would come after him and save him. Mahnmut might be comfortable in full vacuum for only a dozen hours or so before having to replenish air and other requirements and he’d rarely practiced using the little peroxide thrusters built into his back, but this outside world of extreme cold, terrible heat, raging radiation, and hard vacuum was Orphu’s natural environment.
“So what do we do?” Mahnmut asked his huge friend.
“I think it’s imperative that we bring the dropship and The Dark Lady down,” said Orphu. “As soon as possible.”
“We?” said Mahnmut. “We?” The plan had been for Suma IV to pilot the dropship with General Beh bin Adee and thirty of his troopers—the rockvec soldiers under the direct command of Centurian Leader Mep Ahoo—in the dropship passenger nacelle, while Mahnmut waited in The Dark Lady down in the dropship’s hold. When and if the time came to use the submersible, Suma IV and any other required personnel would climb down into The Dark Lady via an access shaft. Despite Mahnmut’s misgivings about being separated from his old friend, there had never been any planning to include the huge, optically blind Ionian in the dropship part of the mission. Orphu was to remain with the Queen Mab as external systems engineer.
“So what is this ‘we’?” Mahnmut asked again.
“I’ve decided that I’m indispensable to this mission,” rumbled Orphu. “Besides, you still have that comfortable little niche for me in the sub’s hold—air and energy umbilicals, comm links, radar, and other sensor feeds—I could vacation there and be happy.”
Mahnmut shook his head, realized he was doing it in front of a blind moravec, realized then that Orphu’s radar and infrared sensors would pick up the movement, and shook his head again. “Why should we insist on going down? Trying to land on Earth could jeopardize the rendezvous with the broadcasting asteroid-city on the p-ring.”
“Bugger the broadcasting asteroid-city on the p-ring,” growled Orphu of Io. “The important thing right now is to get down to that planet as fast as we can.”
“Why?”
“Why?” repeated Orphu. “Why? You’re the one with the eyes, little friend. Didn’t you see those telescope images that you described to me?”
“The burned village, you mean?”
“Yes, the burned village, I mean,” rumbled Orphu. “And the other thirty or forty human settlements around the world that seemed to be under attack by headless creatures that seem to specialize in slaughtering old-style human beings—old-style humans, Mahnmut, the kind that designed our ancestors.”
“Since when has this turned into a rescue mission?” asked Mahnmut. The Earth was a big, bright, blue sphere now, growing by the minute. The e—and p-rings were beautiful.
“Since we saw the photos showing human beings being slaughtered,” said Orphu and Mahnmut recognized the near-subsonic tones in his friend’s voice. Those rumbles meant either that Orphu was very amused or very, very serious—and Mahnmut knew that he wasn’t amused at the moment.
“I thought the idea was to save our Five Moons, the Belt, and the solar system from total quantum collapse,” said Mahnmut.
Orphu growled low tones. “We’ll do that tomorrow. Today we have a chance to help people down there.”
“How?” said Mahnmut. “We don’t know the context. We have no idea what’s going on down there. For all we know, those headless metallic creatures are just killer robots that humans have built to kill each other. We’d be meddling in local wars that are none of our business.”
“Do you believe that, Mahnmut?”
Mahnmut hesitated. He looked far, far down to where the ion engines out on their booms lanced blue beams in the direction of the growing blue and white sphere.
“No,” he said at last. “No, I don’t believe that. I think something new is going on down there, just as it is on Mars and on Ilium-Earth and everywhere we look.”
“I do, too,” said Orphu of Io. “Let’s go in and convince Asteague/Che and the rest of the Prime Integrators that they have to launch the dropship and submersible when we go around the backside of the Earth. With me aboard.”
“Just how do you plan to convince them to do this?” asked Mahnmut.
This time, the Ionian’s deep rumble was more in the amused spectrum of bone-rattling subsonics. “I’ll make them an offer they can’t refuse.”
52
Harman tried to get as far away from the crystal coffin as he could. He would have returned to the eiffelbahn car but the winds outside were roaring—easily over a hundred miles per hour, enough to sweep him off the marble tabletop surrounding the Taj Moira—so he climbed through the spiraling levels of books instead.
The walkways were narrow and soon very high, each one a little farther out over the low-walled maze far below as the inside walls of the curved dome pressed the bookshelves and walkways farther in, and Harman would have been disturbed by the dizzying height beneath his feet on the open-iron catwalks if he hadn’t been so eager to put distance between himself and the sleeping woman.
The books had no titles. They were of uniform size. Harman estimated that there were hundreds of thousand of volumes in this huge structure. He pulled one out and opened it at random. The letters were small and printed in pre-rubicon English, older than any book or writing he’d yet encountered, and it took him minutes to sound out and guess at the first couple of sentences he encountered. He slid the book back in and set his palm on the spine, visualizing five blue triangles in a row.
It did not sigl. No golden words flowed down his hand and arm to settle in his memory. Either the sigl function did not work in this place or these ancient books were impervious to sigling.
“There’s a way you can read them all,” said Prospero.
Harman jumped backward. He’d not heard the magus approaching across the noisy catwalk. He was just suddenly there, not an arm’s length away.
“How can I read them all?” said Harman.
“The eiffelbahn car will be leaving in two hours,” said the magus. “If you’re not on it, it will be a while until the next one stops here at Taj Moira—eleven years, to be precise. So if you’re going to read all these books, you had best start at once.”
“I’m ready to go now,” said Harman. “It’s just too damned windy out for me to get to the car.”
“I’ll have one of the servitors rig a line when we are ready to leave,” said Prospero.
“Servitor? There are working servitors here?”
“Of course. Do you think the mechanisms of the Taj or the eiffelbahn repair themselves?” The magus chuckled. “Well, of course, in a way they do repair themselves, since most of the servitors are nanotech, part of the structures themselves and too small for you to detect.”
“All of our servitors at Ardis and the other communities quit working,” said Harman. “Just… crashed. And the power went out.”
“Of course,” said Prospero. “There are consequences to your destruction of the Firmary and my orbital isle. But the orbital and planetary power grid and other mechanisms are still intact. Even the Firmary could be replaced if you so choose.”
Harman was stunned to hear this. He turned and leaned on the iron railing, taking deep breaths, ignoring the long drop to the marble floor far below. When
he and Daeman—with this magus’s instructions—had directed the huge “wormhole collector” into Prospero’s Isle nine months ago, it had been to destroy the terrible banquet table where Caliban had been feasting for centuries on the bodies and bones of Final Twenty old-style humans in the Firmary. Since that day, since the destruction of the Firmary and the knowledge that one would be faxed there after any serious injury and on every twentieth birthday, mortality had lain heavily on everyone’s spirit. Death and aging had become a reality for everyone. If Prospero was telling the truth now, virtual youth and immortality was once again an option. Harman didn’t know what he thought of this new option, but just the thought of choosing made him sick to his stomach.
“There’s another Firmary?” he said. He had spoken softly but his voice still echoed under the gigantic dome.
“Of course. There’s another on Sycorax’s orbital isle. It merely needs to be activated, as do the orbital power projectors and automated fax systems.”
“Sycorax?” said Harman. “The witch you said was Caliban’s mother?”
“Yes.”
Harman started to ask how they might get up to the orbital rings to activate the Firmary, power, and emergency fax system, but then he remembered that Savi’s sonie they kept at Ardis could fly to the rings. Harman took long breaths.
“Harman, friend of Noman,” said Prospero, “you need to listen to me now. You can leave this place when the eiffelbahn commences to run again in one hour and fifty-four minutes. Or you can go outside and leap to your death on the Khombu Glacier. All choices are yours. But it is as certain that night shall follow day that you shall never see your Ada again, nor return home to what is left of Ardis Hall, nor see your friends Daeman, Hannah, and the others survive this war with the voynix and calibani, nor ever again see a green Earth not turned blue and dead by Setebos’ hunger, if you do not waken Moira.”
Harman stepped away from the magus and balled both hands into fists. Prospero was leaning on his staff as if it was a walking stick, but Harman knew that one motion by Prospero with that staff would send him flying over the rail to his death on the jewel-encrusted marble walls hundreds of feet below. “There has to be another way to waken her,” he said through clenched teeth.
“There is not.”
Harman pounded the iron railing. “None of this makes any goddamned sense.”
“Do not infest your mind with beating on the strangeness of this business,” said Prospero, his words echoing under the high vault. “At picked leisure, which shall be shortly, Moira will resolve you of every one of these happened accidents. But first you must wake her.”
Harman shook his head. “I don’t believe that I’m descended from this Ahman Whatshisname Khan Ho Tep,” he said. “How could I be? We old-styles were created by the posts centuries after Savi’s people disappeared in the Final Fax and…”
Prospero smiled. “Precisely. Where do you think your DNA templates and stored bodies were taken from, friend of Noman? Moira can explain it all to you and more. She is a post-human, the last of her kind. She knows how you can read all these books before our eiffelbahn car leaves this station. She may well know how you can defeat the voynix—or the calibani—or perhaps even defeat Caliban and his lord, Setebos himself. But you will have to decide soon whether your Ada’s life is worth one small infidelity. We now have one hour and forty-five minutes before the eiffelbahn starts running again. Fourteen hundred years of sleep and more cannot be shaken off in an instant. Moira will need some time to awaken, to eat, to understand our situation, before she will be ready to travel with us.”
“She’d go with us?” Harman said stupidly. “On the eiffelbahn? Back to Ardis?”
“Almost certainly,” said Prospero.
Harman gripped the railing so tightly that his knuckles turned first bright red, then white. Finally he released the iron and turned to the waiting magus. “All right. But you wait here. Or better yet, go back to the car. Out of sight. I’ll do this thing, but I have to be alone.”
Prospero simply winked out of existence. Harman stood on the high railing for a minute, breathing in the musty leather smell of ancient books, and then he hurried down the nearest flight of steps.
53
It was a ragtag, motley group of forty-five freezing men and women that made the seven-mile walk from Starved Rock to the fax pavilion.
Daeman led the way, carrying the pack with its glowing, occasionally squirming white Setebos Egg, and Ada walked by his side despite her concussion and cracked ribs. The first few miles through the forest were the worst—the terrain was rough and rocky, the visibility was poor, it had started snowing again, and everyone was braced for the attack of unseen voynix. When thirty minutes passed, then forty-five minutes, and then an hour with no attack—no sign of the voynix at all—everyone began to relax a little.
A hundred feet above them, Greogi, Tom, and the eight seriously injured survivors of Ardis filled the sonie. Greogi would flit ahead, circle high over the forest, and then come back, swooping low just long enough to shout information.
“Voynix ahead about half a mile, but they’re retreating—staying away from you and the egg.”
Through the pounding headache and the duller ache from her wrist and broken ribs—every breath pained her—Ada found little comfort that the voynix were only a half mile away. She’d seen them run at full speed, watched them leap into and out of trees. The creatures could be on them in a minute. The group had about twenty-five flechette rifles or pistols with them, but not many extra magazines of ammunition. Because of her broken right wrist and taped-up ribs, Ada didn’t carry a weapon, which made her feel all the more exposed as she walked up front with Daeman, Edide, Boman, and a few of the others. The drifts were a foot or more deep here in the woods and Ada barely had the energy to kick her way through the clinging wet snow.
Even after they got out of the rockiest, thickest part of the forest, still heading southeast to intercept the road between Ardis and the fax pavilion, the group traveled with excruciating slowness because of those who were ambulatory but more seriously injured or sick, including some who’d been victims of hypothermia the last two nights. Siris, their other medic, was walking with them and she shuttled back and forth constantly, making sure that the ill and injured were getting help and reminding the leaders to slow their pace.
“I don’t understand,” said Ada as they came out into a wide meadow that she remembered from a hundred summer hikes.
“What’s that?” asked Daeman. He carried the rucksack with the glowing egg in it ahead of him at arm’s length, as if it smelled bad. In truth, as Ada had noticed, it did smell bad—a mixture of rotten fish and something sewerish. But it was still glowing and it vibrated from time to time, so presumably the little Setebos inside was still alive.
“Why do the voynix stay away while we have this thing?” said Ada.
“They must be afraid of it,” said Daeman. He slipped the rucksack from his right hand to his left. He was carrying a crossbow in his free hand.
“Yes, of course,” said Ada, speaking more sharply than she’d meant to. The throbbing in her head, ribs, and arms was making her short-tempered. “I mean, what is the connection between that… thing… in Paris Crater and the voynix?”
“I don’t know,” said Daeman.
“The voynix have been around… forever,” said Ada. “This Setebos monster just arrived a week ago.”
“I know,” said Daeman. “But I feel that somehow they’re connected. Maybe they always have been.”
Ada nodded, winced from the pain of nodding, and trod on. There was very little talking in the rough ranks of the forty-five men and women as they trudged through another patch of thick woods, crossed a familiar stream that was now mostly frozen over, and headed down a steep hill of frozen high grass and weeds.
The sonie swooped low. “Another quarter mile to the road,” Greogi called down. “The voynix have moved farther south. Two miles at least.”
When they re
ached the road there was a stir among the survivors, urgent whispers, people clapping one another on the back. Ada looked west toward Ardis Hall. The covered bridge was in sight just before the turn in the road that ran up to the manor house, but there was no sight of the great hall, of course, not even a plume of black smoke. For a minute she thought she was going to be sick to her stomach. Black spots danced in front of her eyes. She paused, put her hands on her knees, and lowered her head.
“Are you all right, Ada?” It was Laman speaking. The bearded man wore only rags, including one wrapped around his right hand where he had lost four fingers during the battle with the voynix at Ardis.
“Yes,” said Ada. She rose, smiled at Laman, and hurried to keep up with the small group at the front of the shuffling pack.
It was less than a mile to the fax pavilion now and all looked familiar, except for the unusual snow. There was not the slightest sign of voynix. The sonie circled above, disappeared in wider circles, and then swept back, Greogi giving them a thumbs-up as he dipped the machine low and then flew on ahead.
“Where are we going to fax, Daeman?” asked Ada. She heard the flatness and lack of affect in her own voice but was too tired and hurting to put any energy in her tone.
“I don’t know,” said the lean, muscled man who had once been the pudgy aesthete who’d tried to seduce her. “At least I don’t know where to go for the long run. Chom, Ulanbat, Paris Crater, Bellinbad, and the rest of the more populated nodes have probably been covered with blue ice by Setebos. But I do know an unpopulated node I stop by from time to time—it’s in the tropics. Warm. Nothing but an abandoned little town, but it’s on the ocean—some ocean, somewhere—and has a lagoon. I haven’t seen many animals there other than lizards and a few wild pigs, but they don’t seem to be afraid of people. We could fish, hunt, make more weapons, take care of our injured… lay low until we come up with a plan.”