by Dan Simmons
“How will Harman, Hannah, and Odysseus-Noman find us?” asked Ada.
Daeman was silent for a minute and Ada could almost hear him thinking—We don’t even know if Harman is alive. Petyr said that he disappeared with Ariel. But what he finally said was, “No problem there. Some of us will fax back here regularly. And we can leave some sort of permanent note at Ardis Hall with the faxnode code for our tropical hideout. Harman can read. I don’t think the voynix can.”
Ada smiled wanly. “The voynix can do a lot of things none of us ever imagined they were capable of.”
“Yeah,” said Daeman. And then they were silent until they reached the fax pavilion.
The fax pavilion looked pretty much as Daeman had seen it forty-eight hours earlier. The stockade had been breached. There was dried human blood everywhere, but the voynix or wild animals had carried off the bodies of those Ardisites who’d fought to the death trying to defend the pavilion. But the pavilion structure itself was still intact, the faxnode column still rising in the center of the open, circular structure.
The band of humans stood awkwardly at the edge of the pavilion floor, looking over their shoulders at the dark forest. The sonie landed and the injured were helped out or carried.
“Nothing for five miles,” said Greogi. “It’s weird. The few voynix I saw were fleeing south as if you were in pursuit of them.”
Daeman looked at the milkily glowing egg in his backpack and sighed. “We’re not pursuing them,” he said. “We just want to get the hell out of here.” He told Greogi and the others of his plan.
There was a brief spate of argument. Some of the survivors wanted to fax to familiar locations and to see if friends and loved ones were alive. Caul was sure that the Loman Estate node wouldn’t have been invaded by this Setebos thing Daeman had told them about. Caul’s mother was there.
“All right, look!” Daeman called over the rising voices. “We don’t know where Setebos might be by now. The monster turned the huge city of Paris Crater into a castle of blue-ice strands in less than twenty-four hours. It’s been more than forty-eight hours since I got back and I was the last person to fax in. Here’s my suggestion…”
Ada noticed that the babbling stopped. People were listening. They accepted Daeman as a leader just as they had once accepted her leadership… and Harman’s. She had to stifle a sudden urge to weep.
“Let’s decide now if we’re going to stick together for a while or not,” said Daeman, his deep voice easily carrying to the edge of the crowd. “We can vote and…”
“What does ‘vote’ mean?” asked Boman.
Daeman explained the concept.
“So if just one more than half of us… votes… to stay together,” said Oko, “then we all have to do what the others want?”
“Just for a while,” said Daeman. “Let’s say… a week. We’re safer together than traveling apart. And we have people injured, sick, who can’t defend themselves. If people all fax different directions right now, how are we ever going to find each other again? Do we let those who want to strike off alone carry the flechette rifles and crossbows, or do those stay with the larger group who wants to stick together?”
“What do we do in that week… if we agree to go with you to this tropical paradise?” asked Tom.
“Just what I said,” answered Daeman. “Recuperate. Find or build some more weapons. Build some sort of defensive perimeter there… I remember a little island just beyond the reef. We could make some little boats, set up our homes and defenses on the island…”
“Do you think voynix can’t swim?” called Stoman.
Everyone laughed nervously but Ada glanced at Daeman. It had been gallows humor—a phrase she’d learned sigling the old books in Ardis Hall’s library—but it had broken the tension.
Daeman laughed easily. “I have no idea if voynix can swim, but if they can’t, that island would be the perfect place for us.”
“Until we breed so many children that we won’t fit on it anymore,” said Tom.
People laughed more easily this time.
“And we’ll send reconaissance teams out from the faxnode there,” said Daeman. “Starting the first day we arrive. That way, we’ll have some idea of what’s going on in the world and which nodes are safe to fax to. And after a week, anyone who wants to leave can. I just think it’s better for all of us if we stay together until our sick people are better and until we all get a chance to eat and sleep.”
“Let’s vote,” said Caul.
They did, hesitantly, with more laughter at the thought of raising their hands to decide such a serious issue. The vote was forty-three to seven to stay together, with three of the most seriously injured not voting because they were unconscious.
“All right,” said Daeman. He approached the faxpad.
“Wait a minute,” said Greogi. “What do we do with the sonie? It won’t fax and if we leave it here, the voynix will get it. It’s saved our lives more than once.”
“Oh, shit,” said Daeman. “I didn’t think about that.” He ran his hand over his dirty, blood-streaked face, and Ada saw how pale and tired he was under the thin veneer of energy he’d been projecting.
“I have an idea about that,” said Ada.
The crowd looked at her, their faces friendly, and waited.
“Most of you know that Savi showed some of us how to use new functions last year… proxnet, farnet, and allnet. Some of you have even tried them yourselves. When we get to Daeman’s tropical paradise, we call up the farnet function, see where the place is, and then someone faxes back here to fetch the sonie and fly it to our island. Harman, Hannah, Petyr, and Noman got to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu in less than an hour, so it shouldn’t take too long to fly to paradise.”
There was some chuckling, much nodding.
“I have an even better idea,” said Greogi. “The rest of you fax off to paradise. I’ll stay here and guard the sonie. One of you fax back with the directions and I’ll fly it there today.”
“I’ll stay with you,” said Laman, holding up a flechette rifle in his good left hand. “You’ll need someone to shoot voynix if they come back. And to keep you awake during the flight south.”
Daeman smiled tiredly. “All right?” he asked the group.
People shuffled forward, eager to fax.
“Wait,” said Daeman. “We don’t know what’s waiting for us there, so six of you with rifles—Caul, Kaman, Elle, Boman, Casman, Edide—you come with me to the pavilion node and we’ll fax through first. If everything’s good there, one of us will be back in two minutes or less. Then we should bring the wounded and sick through. Tom, Siris, could you please organize the stretcher teams? Then Greogi will supervise half a dozen of you back there with rifles to keep watch while the rest fax though. Okay?”
Everyone nodded impatiently. The rifle team walked to the star inlaid on the fax pavilion floor while Daeman poised his hand over the keypad. “Let’s go,” he said and tapped in the code for his uninhabited node.
Nothing happened. The usual puff of air and visual flicker as people faxed out of existence simply did not happen.
“One at a time,” said Daeman, although faxnodes could easily handle six people faxing at a time. “Caul. Stand on the star.”
Caul did, shifting his rifle nervously. Daeman faxed in the code again.
Nothing. The wind made a noise as it blew snow into the open pavilion.
“Maybe that faxnode doesn’t work anymore,” called a woman named Seaes from the crowd.
“I’ll try Loman’s Estate,” said Daeman and tapped in the familiar code.
It did not work.
“Holy Jesus Christ Shit,” cried the burly Kaman. He pushed forward. “Maybe you’re doing it wrong. Let me.”
Half a dozen people had a try. Three dozen familiar faxnode codes were tried. Nothing worked. Not Paris Crater. Not Chom or Bellinbad or the many Circles of Heaven code for Ulanbat. Nothing worked.
Finally everyone stood in silence, stunned, speechless, t
heir faces turned to masks of terror and hopelessness. Nothing in the past year, none of the nightmares of the last months—not the Fall of the Meteors, not the failing of electricity and the fall of the servitors, not the early attacks of voynix nor the news from Paris Crater, not even the Ardis Hall Massacre or the hopeless situation on Starved Rock had struck these men and women with such a sense of hopelessness.
The faxnodes no longer worked. The world as they had known it since they were born no longer existed. There was nowhere to flee, nothing to do now but wait and die. Wait for the voynix to return or for the cold to kill them or for disease and starvation to finish them off one by one.
Ada stepped up onto the small base around the faxpad column so that she could be seen as well as be heard.
“We’re going back to Ardis Hall,” she said. Her voice was strong, brooking no argument. “It’s only a little more than a mile up the road. We can be there in less than an hour, even in our condition. Greogi and Tom will bring those to sick to walk.”
“What the fuck is at Ardis Hall?” asked a short woman whom Ada did not recognize. “What’s there except corpses and carrion and ashes and voynix?”
“Not everything burned,” Ada said loudly. She had no idea if everything had burned or not; she’d been unconscious when they’d flown her away from the flaming ruins. But Daeman and Greogi had described unburned sections of the compound. “Not everything burned,” she said again. “There are logs there. Remnants of the tents and barracks. If nothing else, we’ll pull down the stockade wall and build cabins out of the wood. And there will be artifacts—things that didn’t burn in the ruins. Guns, maybe. Things we left behind.”
“Like the voynix,” said a scarred man named Elos.
“Maybe so,” said Ada, “but the voynix are everywhere. And they’re afraid of this Setebos Egg that Daeman’s carrying. As long as we have it, the voynix will stay away. And where would you rather face them, Elos? In the darkness of the forest at night, or sitting around a big fire at Ardis, in a warm hut, while your friends help stand watch?”
There was silence but it was an angry silence. Some still tried tapping at the faxpad, then pounding the column in frustration.
“Why don’t we just stay here at the pavilion?” said Elle. “It has a roof already. We can close in the sides, build a fire. The stockade is smaller here and would be easier to rebuild. And if the fax starts working again, we could get out fast.”
Ada nodded. “That makes sense, my friend. But what about water? The stream is almost a quarter of a mile from the pavilion here. Someone would always have to be fetching water, risking exposure or voynix attack to get it. And there’s no place to store it here, nor room enough for all of us under this pavilion roof. And this valley is cold. Ardis gets more sunlight, we’ll have more building material to use there, and Ardis Hall had a well under it. We can build our new Ardis Hall around the well so we’ll never have to go outside for water.”
People shifted their weight from foot to foot but no one had anything to say. The thought of walking back down that frozen road, away from the salvation of the fax pavilion, seemed too difficult to contemplate.
“I’m going now,” said Ada. “It will be dark in a few hours. I want a big fire roaring before ringlight sets in.”
She walked out of the pavilion and headed west down the road. Daeman followed. Then Boman and Edide. Then Tom, Siris, Kaman, and most of the others. Greogi supervised loading the sick back into the sonie.
Daeman hurried to catch up to her and leaned close to whisper to her. “I have good news and bad news,” he said.
“What’s the good news?” Ada asked tiredly. Her head was pounding so ferociously that she had to keep her eyes closed, opening them only once in a while to stay on the frozen dirt road.
“Everyone’s coming,” he said.
“And the bad news?” asked Ada. She was thinking—I will not cry. I will not cry.
“This goddamned Setebos Egg is starting to hatch,” said Daeman.
54
As Harman took off his clothes in the crystal crypt beneath the marble mass of the Taj Moira, he realized just how damned cold it was in that glass room. It also must have been cold in the huge Taj chamber above, but the thermskin he’d put on in the eiffelbahn car had kept him from noticing. Now he hesitated at the foot of the clear coffin with the thermskin peeled half down his torso, his regular clothes in a tumble at his feet and goosebumps rising on his bare arms and chest.
This is wrong. This is absolutely, totally wrong.
Other than a lifetime awe of the post-humans in their orbital rings and the almost spiritual belief everyone had that they would rise to the rings and spend eternity with the posts after their Final Fax, Harman and his people knew nothing of religion. The closest they had come to understanding religious awe and ceremony had come from the glimpses they’d received of the Greek gods through the turin-cloth drama.
But now Harman felt that he was about to commit something like sin.
Ada’s life—the life of everyone I know and care for—may depend on me waking this post-human woman.
“By having sex with a dead or comatose stranger?” he whispered aloud. “This is wrong. This is crazy.”
Harman glanced over his shoulder and up the stairway, but, as he’d promised, Prospero was nowhere to be seen. Harman shucked out of the rest of his thermskin. The air was freezing cold. He looked down at himself and almost laughed at how contracted, cold, and shrunken he was.
What if this is all the crazy old magus’s idea of a joke? And who was to say whether Prospero was lurking around under some invisibility cloak or other contrivance of his magusy ways?
Harman stood at the foot of the crystal coffin and shook. The cold was part of it. The unpleasantness of what he was about to do a greater part. Even the idea that he was descended from this Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep made him queasy.
He remembered Ada injured, unconscious, atop that place called Starved Rock with the pitifully few other survivors of the massacre at Ardis.
Who’s to say that was real? Certainly Prospero could make a turin cloth transmit false images.
But he had to proceed as if the vision had been real. He had to proceed as if Prospero’s emotional statement to him that he had to learn, to change, to enter this fight against Setebos and the voynix and the calibani, or all would be lost, was true.
But what can one man who’s had his Five Twenties do? Harman asked himself.
As if to answer that, Harman crawled up over the edge of the massive crèche. He lowered himself carefully into the end of the thing, not touching the naked woman’s bare feet. The semipermeable forcefield made it feel as if he were slipping into a warm bath through a tingling resistance. Now only his head and shoulders were out of the warmth.
The coffin was long and wide, easily wide enough for him to lie down next to the sleeping female without touching her. The cushioned material she was lying on had looked like silk, but it felt more like some soft, metallic fiber under Harman’s knees. Now that he was mostly in the containment of the time crèche, he could feel surges and pulses of whatever energy field kept this Savi-lookalike young and perhaps asleep.
If I lower my head below the forcefield, thought Harman, maybe it’ll put me into a fifteen-hundred-year sleep as well and solve all my problems. Especially the problem of what to do next here.
He did crouch lower, putting his face below the level of the tingling forcefield the way a timid swimmer might enter the water. He was now on his hands and knees over the woman’s legs. The air was much warmer here in the crèche and he felt the vibration of energy from the sarcophagus machinery humming throughout his body, but it didn’t put him to sleep.
Now what? he thought. There must have been some time in Harman’s life where he had felt this awkward, but he couldn’t recall it.
As with the absence of the concept of sin in Harman’s world, so was there little incidence or thought of the idea of rape. There were no la
ws nor anyone to enforce laws in this now-vanished world of the old-style humans, but neither had there been aggression between the sexes or intimacy without permission by both parties. There had been no laws, no police, no prisons—none of the words Harman had sigled in the last eight months—but there had been a sort of informal shunning in their tight little communities of parties and cotillions and faxes to this event and that. No one had wanted to be left out.
And there had been enough sex for anyone who wanted it. And almost everyone had wanted it.
Harman had wanted it often enough in his almost-Five-Twenties. It was just in the last decade or so since he’d taught himself to read the strange squiggles in books that he had quit the fax-somewhere/bed-someone rhythm of life. He’d gained the odd idea that there was, or could be, or might be, someone special for him, someone with whom—for both of them—sexual intercourse should be an exclusive and shared special experience, separate from all the easy liaisons and physical friendships that made up the old-style human world.
It had been an odd thought. One that would have made no sense to almost anyone he would have told—but he told no one. And perhaps it was Ada’s youth, she was only seven-and-First-Twenty when they first made love and fell in love, which allowed her to share his odd and romantic notions of exclusiveness. They’d even held their own “wedding” ceremony at Ardis Hall, and while the four hundred others had mostly humored them, accepting this excuse for yet another party, a few—Petyr, Daeman, Hannah, a few others—had understood that it meant much more.
Thinking about this is not helping you do what Prospero says you have to do, Harman.
He was kneeling naked above a woman who had been sleeping—according to the lying logosphere avatar who called himself Prospero—for almost a millennium and a half. And he was surprised to find that he was not ready for sex?
Why did she look so much like Savi? Savi had been perhaps the most interesting person Harman had ever met—bold, mysterious, ancient, from another age, never quite honest, shrouded in ways that almost no old-style human from Harman’s age could ever be—but he’d never been attracted to her as a woman. He remembered her thin body in its skintight thermskin on Prospero’s orbital isle.