by Dan Simmons
“That’s quite a reach in speculation,” said Asteague/Che.
“Yes,” said Orphu. “But so is the creature we photographed that looks like a giant brain scuttling around on giant human hands. An improbable evolution in any universe, wouldn’t you say? But Robert Browning had an impressive imagination.”
“Are we going to meet Hamlet down there on Earth?” asked Suma IV with an audible sneer. “Oh,” said Mahnmut. “Oh. Oh, that would be nice.”
“Let’s not get carried away,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
“Orphu, where did you get this whole idea?”
Orphu sighed. Instead of responding verbally, a holographic projector in the comm pod atop the huge Ionian’s pitted and scarred carapace created an image that floated above the chart table.
Six fat books sat in a virtual bookcase. One of the books—Mahnmut saw that it was titled In Search of Lost Time—Volume III—The Guermantes Way—fluttered open to page 445. The image zoomed in on the type on the page.
Mahnmut suddenly realized that Orphu was optically blind—he couldn’t see what he was projecting. It meant that he had to have all of Proust’s six volumes memorized. The idea made Mahnmut want to howl.
Mahnmut read along with the others as the font floated in midair—
“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 original 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 or writer of original talent.”
All the moravecs by the chart table stood in silence, broken only by the ventilator hums, machine sounds, and soft background communication of the moravecs actually flying the Queen Mab at that critical moment as they approached the equatorial and polar rings of Earth.
Finally General Beh bin Adee broke the silence—“What solipsistic nonsense. What metaphysical garbage. What total horse manure.”
Orphu said nothing.
“Perhaps it is horse manure,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “But it’s the most plausible horse manure I’ve heard in the last nine months of surreality. And it’s earned Orphu of Io a ride in the hold of the submersible The Dark Lady when the dropship separates and drops into the Earth’s atmosphere in… two hours and fourteen minutes. Let us all go prepare.”
Orphu and Mahnmut were heading for the elevator—Mahnmut walking in a sort of daze, the huge Orphu floating silently on his repel-lors—when Asteague/Che called out, “Orphu!”
The Ionian swiveled and waited, politely aiming his dead cameras and eye-stalks at the Prime Integrator.
“You were going to tell us who the Voice is that we rendezvous with today.”
“Oh, well …” Mahnmut’s friend sounded embarrassed for the first time. “That’s just a guess.”
“Share it,” said Asteague/Che.
“Well, given my little theory,” said Orphu, “who would demand in a female voice to see our passenger—Odysseus, son of Laertes?”
“Santa Claus?” suggested General bin Adee.
“Not quite,” said Orphu. “Calypso.”
None of the moravecs seemed to recognize the name.
“Or from the universe our other new friends came from,” continued Orphu, “the enchantress also known as Circe.”
62
Harman had drowned but was not dead. In a few minutes he would wish he were dead.
The water—the golden fluid—filling the dodecahedral crystal cabinet was hyperoxygenated. As soon as his lungs completely filled, oxygen began moving through the thin-walled capillaries of his lungs and reentering his bloodstream. It was enough to keep his heart beating—start beating again, one should say, since it had skipped beats and stopped for half a minute during his drowning process—and enough to keep his brain alive… dulled, terrified, seemingly disconnected from his body, but alive. He could not breathe in, his instincts still cried out for air, but his body was getting oxygen.
Opening his eyes was a huge struggle and all it rewarded him with was a swirling vision of a billion golden words and ten billion throbbing images waiting to be born in his brain. He was vaguely aware of the six-sided glass panel of the flooded crystal cabinet and of a blurrier shape beyond which might have been Moira, or perhaps Prospero, or even Ariel, but these things were not important.
He still wanted to breathe air the correct way. If he had not been only semiconscious—tranquilized by the liquid in preparation for the trans-fer—his gag reflex alone would probably have killed him or driven him insane.
But the crystal cabinet reserved other means for driving him insane.
The information began pouring into Harman now. Information, Moira and Prospero had said, from a million old books. Words and thoughts from almost a million long-dead minds, more, because every book contained multitudes of other minds in its arguments, its refutations, its fervent agreements, its furious revisions and rebellions.
Information began to pour in, but it was like nothing Harman had ever felt or experienced before. He had taught himself to read over many decades, becoming the first old-style human being in uncounted centuries to make sense of the squiggles and curves and dots in the old books moldering away on shelves everywhere. But words from a book flow into the mind in a linear fashion at the pace of conversation—Harman had always heard a voice not quite his own reading each word aloud in his own mind after he learned to read. Sigling was a more rapid but less effective way to absorb a book—the nanotech function flowed the data from books down one’s arms into the brain like coal being shoveled into a hopper, without the slow pleasure and context of reading. And after sigling a book, Harman always found that some new data had arrived, but much of the meaning of the book had been lost due to absence of nuance and context. He never heard a voice in his head when sigling and often wondered if it had been designed as a function for old-styles in the Lost Era to absorb tables of dry information, packets of predigested data. Sigling was not the way to read a novel or a Shakespearean play—although the first Shakespearean play Harman had encountered was an amazing and moving piece called Romeo and Juliet. Until Harman had read Romeo and Juliet, he’d not known that such a thing as a “play” existed—his people’s only form of fictional entertainment had been the turin drama about the siege of Troy, and that only for the past decade.
But while reading was a slow, linear flow and sigling was like a sudden tickling of the brain that left a residue of information behind, this crystal cabinet was…
The Maiden caught me in the Wild Where I was dancing merrily She put me into her Cabinet And locked me up with a golden Key
This information Harman was receiving was not entering through his eyes, ears, or any of the other human senses nature had evolved to bring data to the nerves and brain. It was not—strictly speaking—passing into him through touch, although the billion-billion pinpricks of information in the golden liquid passed through each pore of his skin and each cell of
his flesh.
DNA, Harman knew now, likes the standard double helix model. Evolution had chosen the double helix for a variety of reasons to carry its most sacred cargo, but primarily because it was the easiest and most effective way for free energy to flow—forward or back—as that energy determines the folds, joins, forms, and function of such gigantic molecules as proteins, RNA, and DNA. Chemical systems always move toward the state of lowest free energy, and free energy is minimized when two complementary strands of nucleotides pair up like a double Shaker staircase.
But the post-humans who had redesigned the hardware and software of Harman’s branch of the old-style human genome had redesigned a sizeable percentage of the redundant DNA in his decanted species’ bodies. Instead of right-handed twisting B-DNA, the post-humans had set in place left-handed Z-DNA double helixes of the usual size, about two nanometers in diameter. They used these ZDNA molecules as keystones, lifting from them a scaffolding of more complex DNA helixes such as double-crossover molecules, tying these ropes of DX DNA together into leakproof protein cages. Within those billions upon billions of scaffolded protein cages deep within Harman’s bones, muscle fibers, gut tissue, testicles, toes, and hair follicles were biological reception and organizing macromolecules serving still more complex caged clusters of nanoelectronic organic memory storage clusters.
Harman’s entire body—every cell—was eating the Taj Moira’s library of a million volumes.
The Cabinet is formed of Gold And Pearl & Crystal shining bright And within it opens into a World And a little lovely Moony Night
The process hurt. It hurt a lot. Drowned and floating belly-up now like a dead carp in the golden liquid of the crystal cabinet, Harman felt the pain of a leg or arm that had gone to sleep and that was slowly, painfully coming awake again—the limb being pricked by ten thousand sharp, hot needles. But this was not just his leg or his arm. Cells in every part of his body, cells on every surface inside and out, molecules in every cell’s nucleus and every cell’s wall, were awakening to the data flowing the free energy route through the Yan-Shen-Yurke DNA circuits everywhere in the collective organism called Harman.
It hurt beyond Harman’s ability to imagine or contain such hurt. He opened his mouth repeatedly to scream from the pain, but there was no air in his lungs, no air around him, and his vocal cords merely vibrated in the golden liquid in which he’d drowned.
Metallic nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, and more complex nanoelectronic devices everywhere in Harman’s body and brain, elements that had been there since before his birth, felt current, were polarized, rotated, realigned in three dimensions, and began conducting and storing information, each complex DNA bridge out of the trillions waiting in Harman’s cells rotating, realigning, recombining, and securing data across the DNA backbone of his most essential structure.
Harman could see Moira’s face near the glass, her dark Savi-eyes peering in, her crystal-warped expression expressing something—anxiety? Remorse? Sheer curiosity?
Another England there I saw Another London with its Tower Another Thames & other Hills And another pleasant Surrey Bower
Books—Harman realized through the Niagral cascade of pain—were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.
As a child in his crèche, Harman had taken rare sheets of vellum and even more rare markers called pencils and covered the sheets with dots, then spent hours trying to connect all the dots with lines. There always seemed to be another possible line to draw, another two dots to connect, and before he was done the sheet of creamy vellum had become an almost solid smear of graphite. In later years, Harman had wondered if his young mind had been trying to capture and express his perception of the fax portals he had stepped through since he was old enough to walk—old enough to be carried by his mother, actually. Nine million combinations rising from three hundred known faxnode pavilions.
But this connect-the-dots of information to storage macromolecule cages was thousands of times more complex and infinitely more painful.
Another Maiden like herself Translucent lovely shining clear Threefold each in the other closed—O what a trembling fear
O what a smile! a threefold Smile Filled me, that like a flame I burnd I bent to Kiss the lovely Maid And found a Threefold Kiss returnd
Harman knew now that William Blake had made his living as an engraver, and not that popular or successful an engraver at that. [Everything is context.] Blake died on a hot and muggy Sunday evening—August 12, 1827—and on the day of his death, almost no one in the general public knew that the quiet but often angry engraver had been a poet respected by several of his better known contemporaries, including Samuel Coleridge. [Context is to data what water is to a dolphin.] [Dolphins were a species of aquatic animal driven to extinction early in the Twenty-second Century A.D.] William Blake quite literally considered himself a prophet along the lines of Ezekiel or Isaiah, although he held nothing but contempt for the mysticisms, dabblings in the occult, or theosophies so popular in his day. [Ezekiel Mao Kent was the name of the marine biologist who was by the side of Almorenian d’Azure, the last dolphin, who died of cancer in the Bengal Oceanarium on the hot, muggy evening of August 11, 2134 A.D. The N.U.N. Applied Species Committee decided not to replenish the family Delphinidae from stored DNA but, rather, to let the species join all other Delphinidae and other great marine-cetacean mammals in peaceful extinction.]
The data itself, Harman found as he stared, naked, out from the center of his own crystal, was tolerable. It was the constant nerve-web-expanding pain of context that would kill him.
I strove to sieze the inmost Form With ardor fierce & hands of flame But burst the Crystal Cabinet And like a Weeping Babe became
A weeping Babe upon the wild And Weeping Woman pale reclind And in the outward air again I filld with woes the passing Wind
Harman reached the limit of his ability to absorb such pain and complexity. He stirred his limbs in the thick, gold liquid, found that he had less mobility than an embryo, that his fingers had turned to fins, that his muscles had atrophied to weak rags, and that this pain was the true medium and placental fluid of the universe.
I am not a tabula rasa!! he wanted to scream at that bastard Prospero and that ultimate bitch Moira. This would kill him.
Heaven and Hell are born together, Harman thought and knew Blake had thought it first, knowing that Blake had thought it in refutation to Swedenborg’s Calvinistic belief in Predestination:
Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce And dost not know the Garment from the Man
Stop that! Stop it! Please God
Tho thou art Worshiped by the Names Divine Of Jesus & Jehovah: thou art still The Son of Morn in weary Nights decline The lost Travellers Dream under the Hill
Harman screamed despite the fact that there was no air in his lungs to form the scream, no air in his throat to allow the scream, and no air in the tank to conduct the scream. [The naked device, one of six trillion, consists of four double helixes connected in the middle by two unpaired DNA strands. The crossover region can assume two different states—the universe often enjoys assuming a binary form. Rotating the two helixes a half turn on one side of the central bridge junction creates the so-called PX or paranemic crossover state.] Do this three billion times per second and one achieves a purity of torture never dreamt of by the most fanatical designers of the Inquisition’s most ingenious racks, clamps, extractors, and sharp edges.
Harman tried to scream again.
Fifteen seconds had now elapsed since the transfer had begun.
Forty-four minutes and forty-five seconds remained.
63
My name is Thomas Hockenberry. I have a Ph.D. in classical studies. I specialize in studying, writing about, and teaching Homer’s Iliad.
For almost thirty years I was a professor, the last decade a
nd a half at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Then I died. I awoke—or was resurrected—on Mount Olympos—or what the beings posing as gods there called Mount Olympos, although I later discovered it was the great shield volcano on Mars, Olympus Mons. These beings, these gods, or their superior beings—personalities I’ve heard of but know little or nothing about, one of them named Prospero, as in Shakespeare’s The Tempest—reconstructed me to be a scholic, an observer of the Trojan War. I reported for ten years to one of the Muses, recording my daily accounts on speaking stones, for even the gods there are preliterate. I’m recording this on a small, solid-state electronic recorder that I stole from the moravec ship the Queen Mab.
Last year—just nine months ago—everything went to hell and the Trojan War as described in Homer’s Iliad ran off the rails. Since then there has been confusion, an alliance between Achilles and Hector—and thus between all Trojans and Greeks—to wage war against the gods, more confusion, betrayals, a closure of the last Brane Hole that connected present-day Mars to ancient Ilium and that caused the moravec troopers and technicians to flee this Ilium Earth. With Achilles gone—disappeared on the other side of the Brane Hole on a now-distant Mars of the future—the Trojan War resumed, Zeus disappeared, and in his absence the gods and goddesses came down to fight alongside their respective champions. For a while it looked as if Agamemnon and Menelaus’ armies had penetrated Troy. Diomedes was on the verge of capturing the city. Then Hector came out of sulking seclusion—interesting how that part of our recent story parallels Achilles’ long sulk in his tent in the real Iliad—and Priam’s son promptly killed the seemingly invulnerable Diomedes in single combat.
On the next day, I’m told, Hector bested Ajax—Big Ajax, Great Ajax, the Ajax from Salamis. Helen tells me that Ajax begged for his life but Hector slew him without mercy. Menelaus—Helen’s former husband and the aggrieved party who started this goddamned war—died with an arrow in the brain that same day.