by Dan Simmons
This younger Savi was not thin. Her muscles had not atrophied with the age of centuries. Her hair—everywhere—was dark—not the black he’d first thought, not the jet black of Ada’s beautiful hair, but very dark brown. The clouds had dissipated off the north face of Chomolungma and in the reflected bright light from the emerging sun, some of this woman’s hair glowed coppery red. Harman could see the tiny pores in her skin. Her nipples, he noticed, were more brown than pink. The set of her chin had Savi’s center crease and firmness, but the wrinkles he remembered on her brow and around her mouth and the corners of her eyes were not yet there.
Who is she? he wondered for the fiftieth time.
It doesn’t matter who she really is, Harman’s mind screamed at itself. If Prospero is telling the truth, she’s the woman you have to have sex with so she’ll wake up and teach you the things you have to learn to get home.
Harman leaned forward until his weight was partially on the sleeping woman. She was lying on her back with her arms at her side, palms down against the cushioned material, legs already slightly apart. Feeling every inch the violator, Harman used his right knee to move her left leg farther to the side, then his left knee to open her right leg. She could not have been more open and vulnerable to him.
And he could not have been less physically excited.
Harman raised his weight on his hands until he was doing a push-up above the supine form. He forced his head up and out of the only slightly buzzing forcefield and drew in great gulps of the freezing air there. When he lowered his head into the sarcophagus’ energy field again, he felt like a drowning man going under for the third time.
Harman laid his weight upon the sleeping woman. She did not budge or stir. Her eyelashes were long and dark, but there was not the slightest flutter or sense of her eyes moving under their lids as he’d seen Ada’s do so many times when he lay awake watching her sleeping next to him in the moonlight. Ada.
He closed his eyes and remembered her—not injured and unconscious on Starved Rock as Prospero’s red turin cloth had shown, but the way she had been during their eight months together at Ardis Hall. He remembered waking up next to her in the night just to watch her sleep.
He remembered the clean soap and female scent of her next to him in the night in their room with the bay window in the ancient Ardis manor.
Harman felt himself start to stir.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about now. Just remember.
He allowed himself to remember that first time with Ada, just nine months three weeks and two days ago now. They had been traveling with Savi, Daeman, and Hannah and had just met the reawakened Odysseus at the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu. They each had separate sleeping cubbies that night—the round, green spheres clinging to the orange tower of the ancient bridge like grapes on a vine, these hanging beneath the horizontal support strut some seven hundred feet and more above the ruins far below.
After everyone had gone to his or her own sleeping domi—everyone taken aback that the floors were as transparent as the crystal floor of this crypt—No, don’t think about that now—Harman had slipped out of his room and knocked on Ada’s door. She’d let him in and he’d noticed how lustrous her dark eyes were that night.
He’d actually gone to her room to talk to her about something, not to make love to her that night. Or so he thought at the time. He’d already hurt Ada’s feelings once—in Paris Crater it was, he remembered now, at Daeman’s mother’s place, Marina’s domi high on the bamboo-three towers at the edge of the red-eyed crater. And Ada had risked her life—or at least a fax to the orbital Firmary—by climbing from her balcony to his, teetering over a thousand miles of black hole crater to join him on his balcony that night. And he’d said no. He’d said “Let’s wait.” And she had, although certainly no man had ever turned down or turned away beautiful black-haired Ada from Ardis Hall before.
But that night in the clear-sided sphere-domi hanging from the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu, with the mountains he later guessed to be the rocky Andes rising around them and the haunted ruins a thousand feet below, he’d come to talk to her about… what? Oh, yes—he’d come to her room to persuade her to remain behind at Ardis Hall with Hannah and Odysseus while he and Daeman went on with Savi to that legendary place called Atlantis where there might be a spaceship waiting to take them to the rings. He’d been very convincing. And he’d lied through his teeth. He told young Ada that it would be better if she were to introduce Odysseus to everyone at Ardis Hall, that he and Daeman would certainly be gone just a few days. In truth, he’d been frightened that Savi would lead them into terrible danger—and she had, at forfeit of her own life—and even then Harman did not want Ada in harm’s way. Even then, he felt that it would be his own flesh and soul sundered if harm came to her.
She’d been wearing the thinnest of short, silk sleeping gowns when she’d ordered the cubby door to iris open on the night she became his. The moonlight had been pale on her arms and eyelashes while he spoke so earnestly to her about staying at Ardis Hall with this stranger Odysseus.
And then he’d kissed her. No—he’d only kissed Ada on the cheek at the end of their conversation, the way a father or friend might kiss a child. It had been she who first kissed him—a full, open, lingering kiss, her arms going around him and pulling him closer as they stood there in the moonlight and starlight. He remembered feeling her young breasts against his chest through the thin silk of her blue nightgown.
He remembered carrying her to the small bed that lay against the curved, clear wall of the cubby. She’d helped him off with his clothes, both of them in a clumsy yet elegant hurry now.
Had the storm swept down out of the higher mountains and struck just as they began to make love on that narrow bed? Not long after, certainly. He did remember the moonlight on Ada’s upturned face and the moonlight illuminating her nipples as he cupped each breast and raised it to his lips.
But he remembered the wall of wind hitting the bridge, rocking the cubbie dangerously, sensuously, just as they began to rock and move themselves, Ada under him, her legs rising around his hips, her right hand slipping down and finding him, guiding him…
No one guided him now as he stiffened and rose against the sex of this woman in the crystal crèche. This won’t work, he thought through the surge of his own memories and renewed desire. She’ll be dry. I’ll have to…
But the rest of that thought was lost as he realized that she was not dry against his tentative probes, but soft and opening and even moist, as if she had lain there waiting for him all these years.
Ada had been ready for him—wet with excitement, her lips as warm as her warm sex, her arms insistent around him, her fingers arched on his bare back as he moved gently into her and with her. They had kissed until the kissing alone would have made Harman—he of the Four Twenties and nineteen years that very week, the oldest of the old that Ada knew or had ever known—almost swoon with a teenaged boy’s lust and excitement.
They’d moved as the cubbie rocked to the wild gusts of wind—gently at first, forever it seemed, and then with increasing passion and less restraint as Ada urged him to lose restraint, as Ada opened to him and urged him deeper, kissing him and holding him within the powerful circle of her arms and squeezing legs and raking fingernails.
And when he’d come, Harman had throbbed in her for what seemed like long moments. And Ada had responded with a series of internal throbs that felt like tremors rising from some infinitely deep epicenter until he felt as if it was her small hand clenching the core of him tighter, releasing, then clenching again, rather than her entire body.
Harman throbbed inside the woman who looked like Savi and couldn’t be. He did not linger but pulled out immediately, his heart pounding with guilt and something like horror even as he was filled with his love for Ada and his memories of Ada.
He rolled aside and lay panting and miserable next to the woman’s body on the metallic-silken cushions. The warm air stirred around them, trying to
lull him to sleep. Harman felt at that moment that he could sleep—could sleep for a millennium and a half just as this stranger had—sleep through all the danger to his world and to his friends and to his single, perfect, betrayed beloved.
Some small movement brought him up out of the fringes of his dozing.
He opened his eyes and his heart almost stopped as he realized that the woman’s eyes were open. She had turned her head and was staring at him with a cool intelligence—an almost impossible level of awareness after being asleep so long.
“Who are you?” asked the young woman in dead Savi’s voice.
55
In the end, it wasn’t just Orphu’s eloquence but a myriad of factors that decided the moravecs to launch the atmospheric dropship carrying The Dark Lady.
The moravec meeting on the bridge happened much sooner than the two hours Asteague/Che had suggested. Events were occurring too quickly. Twenty minutes after their conference outside on the hull of the Queen Mab, Mahnmut and Orphu were back on the ship’s bridge conferring verbally in full Earth-standard sea-level atmosphere and gravity with the Callistan Cho Li, Prime Integrator Asteague/Che, General Beh bin Adee and his lieutenant Mep Ahoo, the ominous Suma IV, an agitated Retrograde Sinopessen, and half a dozen other moravec integrators and military rockvecs.
“This is the transmission we received eight minutes ago,” said the navigator Cho Li. Almost everyone had heard it, but he played it back via tightbeam anyway.
The maser broadcast coordinates were the same as the previous transmission—from the Phobos-sized asteroid in Earth’s polar ring—but there was no female human voice this time, only a string of rendezvous coordinates and delta-v rates.
“The lady wants us to bring Odysseus straight to her house,” said Orphu, “and not fool around swinging around the other side of the Earth on the way.”
“Can we do that?” asked Mahnmut. “Brake straight to her high polar orbit, I mean?”
“We can if we use the fission bombs again for a high-g deceleration the next nine hours,” said Asteague/Che. “But we don’t want to do that for a variety of reasons.”
“Excuse me,” said Mahnmut. “I’m just a submersible driver, no navigator or engineer, but I don’t see how we’re going to drop our speed anyway given the weak deceleration we’re getting from the ion-drive engines. Did we have something special in store for the last bit of braking?”
“Aerobraking,” said the many-limbed bulky little Callistan, Cho Li.
Mahnmut laughed at the image of the Queen Mab—all three hundred nine meters of bulky, girdered, crane-festooned, nonaerodynmic bulk of her—aerobraking through the Earth’s atmosphere and then realized that Cho Li hadn’t been joking.
“You can aerobrake this thing?” he said at last.
Retrograde Sinopessen skittered forward on his spidery silver legs. “Of course. We had always planned to aerobrake. The sixty-meter-wide pusher plate with its ablative coating retracts and morphs slightly to serve very nicely as a heat shield. The plasma field around us during the maneuver should not be prohibitive—we can even maser comm through it if we so choose. Our original plans were for a mild aerobraking maneuver at an altitude of one hundred and forty-five kilometers above Earth sea level with several passes to regulate our orbit—the difficult part will be passing through the busy artificial p—and e-rings, since they have nothing comparable to the debris-cleared F-ring Cassini Gap around Saturn—but those computations were easy enough. We just have to dodge like a sumbitch. Now, since we seem to have been ordered to make a command appearance at the lady’s asteroid-city on the p-ring, we plan to dip to thirty-seven kilometers and burn off velocity much more quickly, establishing the proper elliptical orbit for rendezvous on the first attempt.”
Orphu whistled.
Mahnmut tried to visualize it. “We’ll be dropping to within a hundred-some thousand feet of the surface? We’ll be able to see individual faces on the humans below.”
“Not quite,” said Asteague/Che. “But it will be more dramatic than we had planned. We’ll definitely leave a streak in their sky. But the old-style humans down there are probably too distracted right now to notice a streak in their sky.”
“What do you mean?” asked Orphu of Io.
Asteague/Che transmitted the most recent series of photographs. Mahnmut described the elements that Orphu could not get through the accompanying datametrics.
More images of slaughter. Human communities destroyed, human bodies left out for carrion crows. Infrared imagery showed hot buildings and cold corpses and the motion of equally cold humped and headless creatures who were doing the killing. Fires burned where homes and modest cities had been on the night side of the planet. All over the planet, the old-style humans seemed to be under attack by the gray-metallic headless creatures which the moravec experts could not identify. And on four continents, the blue-ice structures were multiplying and growing and now images appeared of a single, huge creature looking like a human brain with eyes, only the brain the size of a warehouse, then video—vertical images looking almost straight down on the thing scuttling on what looked like gigantic hands with more stalklike arms protruding like ganglia. Obscene proboscises extruded from feeding orifices and seemed to be drinking or feeding from the earth itself.
“I see the data,” said Orphu, “but I’m having trouble visualizing the creature. It can’t possibly be that ugly.”
“We’re looking at it,” said General Beh bin Adee, “and we’re having trouble believing what we’re seeing. And it is that ugly.”
“Is there any theory,” asked Mahnmut, “about what that thing is or where it’s from?”
“It’s associated with the blue-ice sites, originally seen at the former city of Paris and the largest blue-ice complex,” said Cho Li. “But that’s not what you mean. We simply don’t know its origins.”
“Have moravecs ever seen an image of anything like that in all our centuries of observing the Earth through telescopes from Jupiter space or Saturn space?” asked Orphu.
“No.” Asteague/Che and Suma IV spoke at the same time.
“The brain-hands-creature doesn’t travel alone,” said Retrograde Sinopessen, bringing up another series of holographic images and flat-plate projections. “These things are with it at every one of the eighteen sites we’ve seen the brain.”
“Humans?” asked Orphu. The data was confusing.
“Not quite,” said Mahnmut. He described the scales, fangs, overly long arms, and webbed feet of the forms in the images.
“And according to the datametrics, there are hundreds of those things,” said Orphu of Io.
“Thousands,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “We’ve looked at images taken simultaneously at sites thousands of kilometers apart and counted at least thirty-two hundred of the amphibian-looking forms.”
“Caliban,” said Mahnmut.
“What?” Asteague/Che’s softly inflected voice sounded puzzled.
“On Mars, Prime Integrator,” said the little Europan. “The Little Green Men talked about Prospero and Caliban… from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The stone heads, you remember, were supposed to be images of Prospero. They warned us about Caliban. The thing looks and sounds like some versions of Caliban in the staging of that play over the centuries on Earth.”
None of the moravecs had anything to say about that.
“There are eleven new Brane Holes on Earth since we began measuring this spike of quantum activity two weeks ago,” Beh bin Adee said at last. “As far as we can tell, the brain-creature has generated—or at least is using—all of them for transport purposes. It and the scaled, amphibious-looking things you call Caliban. And there is a pattern to where they appear.”
More holographic images misted into solidity above the chart table and Mahnmut described them on tightbeam, but Orphu had already absorbed the accompanying data.
“All battlegrounds or sites of ancient historical human massacres or atrocities,” said Orphu.
“P
recisely,” said General Beh bin Adee. “You notice that the city of Paris was the first Brane quantum opening. We know that more than twenty-five hundred years ago, during the EU Empire’s Black Hole Exchange with the Global Islamic Surinate, more than fourteen million people died in and around Paris.”
“And the other Brane Hole sites here fit that category,” said Mahnmut. “Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Waterloo, HoTepsa, Stalingrad, Cape Town, Montreal, Gettysburg, Khanstaq, Okinawa, the Somme, New Wellington—all bloodied historical sites from millennia ago.”
“Do we have some sort of Calabi-Yau traveling intermemBrane tourist Brain here?” asked Orphu.
“Or something worse,” said Cho Li. “The neutrino and tachyon beams rising from the spots this… thing… visits carry some sort of complex coded information. The beams are interdimensional, not directional in our universe. We just can’t tap into the beams to decode the messages or content.”
“I think the brain is a ghoul,” said Orphu of Io.
“Ghoul?” asked Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
Orphu explained the term. “I think it’s sucking up some sort of dark energy from those places,” said the big Ionian.
“That hardly seems likely,” chirped Retrograde Sinopessen. “I know of no recordable… energy… left behind by the mere event of violent action. That is metaphysics… nonsense… not science.”
Orphu shrugged four of his multiple articulated arms.
“Do you think the large brain creature might be something the post-humans or old-styles designed and biofactured during the dementia years after rubicon?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “And the Caliban-creature and headless robotic killer things as well? All artifacts from wildcat RNA engineers? Like some of the anachronistic plant and animal life reintroduced to the planet?”
“Not the big thing,” said the tall Ganymedan, Suma IV. “We would have seen it before this. The brain creature with the hands came through Brane Holes from another universe just a few days ago. We don’t know where the Caliban things came from, or the humpbacked creatures that are decimating the old-style humans. They might well be artifacts of genetic manipulation. We have to remember that the post-humans designed themselves right out of the human gene pool more than fifteen hundred standard years ago.”