by Dan Simmons
“We could not eliminate them,” said Moira, “but we reprogrammed them. Your people knew them as servants for fourteen hundred years.”
“Until they started slaughtering us,” said Harman. He turned his gaze on Prospero. “Which started after you directed Daeman and me on how to destroy your orbital city where you and Caliban were … imprisoned. All that to reclaim just one hologram of yourself, Prospero?”
“More the equivalent of a frontal lobe,” said the magus. “And the voynix would have been activated even if you had not destroyed the controlling elements in my city on the e-ring.”
“Why?”
“Setebos,” said Prospero. “His millennium and a half of being denied—of being kept and fed on alternate Earths and the terraformed Mars—had come to an end. When the Many-Handed opened the first Brane Hole to sniff the air of this Earth, the voynix reacted as programmed.”
“Programmed three thousand years ago,” said Harman. “The old-styles of my people aren’t all from Jewish descent like Savi’s folk.”
Prospero shrugged. “The voynix do not know that. All humans in Savi’s time were Jews, ergo… to the weak mind of all voynix… all humans are Jews. If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. If Crete is an island and England is an island, then…”
“Crete is England,” finished Harman. “But the rubicon virus did not come from a lab in Israel. That’s just another blood libel.”
“No, you are perfectly correct,” said Prospero. “The rubicon was indeed the one great contribution to science that the Islamic world gave the rest of the world in a two-thousand-year stretch of darkness.”
“Eleven billion dead,” said Harman, his voice shaking. “Ninetyseven percent of Earth’s population wiped out.”
Prospero shrugged again. “It was a long war.”
Harman laughed again. “And the virus got almost everyone but the group it was built to kill.”
“Israeli scientists had a long history of nanotech genetic manipulation by then,” said the magus. “They knew that if they did not inoculate their population’s DNA quickly, they could not do it at all.”
“They might have shared it,” said Harman.
“They tried. There was no time. But the DNA for your stock was… stored.”
“But the Global Caliphate didn’t invent time travel,” said Harman, not one hundred percent sure if this was a question or statement.
“No,” agreed Prospero. “A French scientist developed the first working time bubble…”
“Henri Rees Delacourte,” muttered Harman, remembering.
“… to travel back to 1478 A.D. to investigate an odd and interesting manuscript purchased by Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1586,” continued Prospero without a pause. “It seemed a simple enough little trip. But we know now that the manuscript itself—filled with a strange, coded language and featuring wonderful drawings of non-terrestrial plants, star systems, and naked people—was a hoax. And Dr. Delacourte and his home city paid a price for the voyage when the black hole his team was using as a power source escaped its restraining force-field.”
“But the French and the New European Union gave the designs to the Caliphate,” said Harman. “Why?”
Prospero held up his old, vein-mottled hands almost as if he were giving a benediction. “The Palestinian scientists were their friends.”
“I wonder if that rare-book dealer from the early Twentieth Century, Wilfrid Voynich, could have dreamt that he’d have a race of self-replicating monsters named after him,” said Harman.
“Few of us can dream of what our true legacy will be,” said Prospero, his hands still raised as if in blessing.
Moira sighed. “Are you two finished with your little trip down memory lane?”
Harman looked at her.
“And you, my would-be Prometheus… your dingle is dangling. If this is a one-eyed staredown contest, you win. I blinked first.”
Harman looked down. His robe had come open during all the talking. He quickly sashed it shut.
“We’ll be crossing the Pyrenees in the next hour,” said Moira. “Now that Harman has something in his skull other than a pleasure thermometer, we have things to discuss… things to decide. I suggest that Prometheus go up and shower and get dressed. Grandfather here can take a nap. I’ll clear the breakfast dishes.”
65
Achilles is considering the possibility that he made a mistake in maneuvering Zeus into banishing him to the deepest, darkest pit in the hell-world of Tartarus, even though it had seemed like a good idea at the time.
First of all, Achilles can’t quite breathe the air here. While the quantum singularity of his Fate to Die by Paris’s Hand theoretically protects him from death, it doesn’t protect him from rasping, wheezing, and collapsing on the lava-hot black stone as the methane-tainted air fouls and scours his lungs. It’s as if he’s trying to breathe acid.
Secondly, this Tartarus is a nasty place. The terrible air pressure—equivalent to two hundred feet beneath the surface of Earth’s sea—presses in on every square inch of Achilles’ aching body. The heat is terrible. It would have long since killed any merely mortal man, even a hero such as Diomedes or Odysseus, but even demi-god Achilles is suffering, his skin blotched red and white, boils and blisters appearing everywhere on his exposed flesh.
Finally, he is blind and almost deaf. There is a vague reddish glow, but not enough to see by. The pressure here is so great, the atmosphere and cloud cover so thick, that even the small illumination from the pervasive volcanic red gloom is defeated by the rippling atmosphere, by fumes from live volcanic vents, and by the constant curtain-fall of acid rain. The thick, superheated atmosphere presses in on the fleet-footed mankiller’s eardrums until the sounds he can make out all seem like great, muted drumbeats and massive footsteps—heavy throbs to match the throbbing of his pressure-squeezed skull.
Achilles reaches under his leather armor and touches the small mechanical beacon that Hephaestus had given him. He can feel it pulse. At least it hasn’t imploded from the terrible pressure that presses in on Achilles’ eardrums and eyes.
Sometimes in the terrible gloom, Achilles can sense movement of large shapes, but even when the volcanic glow is at its reddest, he can’t make out who or what is passing near him in the terrible night. He senses that the shapes are far too big and too oddly shaped to be human. Whatever they are, the things have ignored him so far.
Fleet-footed Achilles, son of Peleus, leader of the Myrmidons and noblest hero of the Trojan War, demigod in his terrible wrath, lies spread-eagled flat on a pulsing-hot volcanic boulder, blinded and deafened, and uses all of his energy just to keep breathing.
Perhaps, he thinks, I should have come up with a different plan for defeating Zeus and bringing my beloved Penthesilea back to life.
Even the briefest thought of Penthesilea makes him want to weep like a child—but not an Achilles’ child, for the young Achilles had never wept. Not once. The centaur Chiron had taught him how to avoid responding to his emotions—other than anger, rage, jealousy, hunger, thirst, and sex, of course, for those were important in a warrior’s life—but weep for love? The idea would have made the Noble Chiron bark his harsh centaur’s laugh and then hit young Achilles hard with his massive teaching stick. “Love is nothing but lust misspelled,” Chiron would have said—and struck seven-year-old Achilles again, hard, on the temple.
What makes Achilles want to weep all the more here in this unbreathable hell is that he knows somewhere deep behind his surging emotions that he doesn’t give a damn about the dead Amazon twat—she’d come at him with a fucking poisoned spear, for the gods’ sake—and normally his only regret would be that it took so long for the bitch and her horse to die. But here he is, suffering this hell and taking on Father Zeus himself just to get the woman reborn—all because of some chemicals that gash-goddess Aphrodite had poured on the smelly Amazon.
Three huge forms loom out of the fog. They are close enough that Achilles’ strain
ing, tear-filled eyes can make out that they are women—if women grew thirty feet tall, each with tits bigger than his torso. They are naked but painted in many bright colors, visible even through the red filter of this volcanic gloom. Their faces are long and unbelievably ugly. Their hair is either writhing like snakes in the superheated air or is a tangle of serpents. Their voices are distinct only because the booming syllables are unbearably louder than the booming background noise.
“Sister Ione,” booms the first shape looming over him in the gloom, “canst thou tell what form this is spread-eagled across this rock like a starfish?”
“Sister Asia,” answers the second huge form, “I wouldst say it were a mortal man, if mortals could come to this place or survive here, which they cannot. And if I could see it were a man, which I cannot since it lieth upon its belly. It does have pretty hair.”
“Sister Oceanids,” says the third form, “let us see the gender of this starfish.”
A huge hand roughly grips Achilles and rolls him over. Fingers the size of his thighs pluck away his armor, rip off his belt, and roll down his loin cloth.
“Is it male?” asks the first shape, the one her sister had called Asia.
“If you wouldst call it so for so little to show,” says the third shape.
“Whatever it is, it lies fallen and vanquished,” says the female giant called Ione.
Suddenly large shapes in the gloom that Achilles had assumed were looming crags stir, sway, and echo in non-human voices, “Lies fallen and vanquished!”
And invisible voices farther away in the reddish night echo again, “Lies fallen and vanquished!”
The names finally click. Chiron had taught young Achilles his mythology, as well as his theology to honor the living and present gods. Asia and Ione had been Oceanids—daughters of Okeanos—along with their third sister Panthea… the second generation of Titans born after the original mating of Earth and Gaia, Titans who had ruled the heavens and the earth along with Gaia in the ancient times before their third-generation offspring, Zeus, defeated them and cast them all down into Tartarus. Only Okeanos, of all the Titans, had been allowed exile in a kinder, gentler place—locked away in a dimension layer under the quantum sheath of Ilium-Earth. Okeanos could be visited by the gods, but his offspring had been banished to stinking Tartarus: Asia, Ione, Panthea, and all the other Titans, including Okeanos’ brother Kronos who became Zeus’s father, Okeanos’ sister Rhea who became Zeus’s mother, and Okeanos’ three daughters. All the other male offspring from the mating of Earth and Gaia—Koios, Krios, Hyperion, and Iapetos, as well as the other daughters—Theia, Themis, Mnemosyne, golden-wreathed Phoebe, and sweet Tethys—had also been banished here to Tartarus after Zeus’s victory on Olympos thousands of years earlier.
All this Achilles remembers from his lessons at the hoof of Chiron. A fucking lot of good it does me, he thinks.
“Does it speak?” booms Panthea, sounding startled.
“It squeaks,” says Ione.
All three of the giant Oceanids lean closer to listen to Achilles’ attempts at communication. Every attempt is terribly painful for the mankiller, since it means breathing in and trying to use the noxious atmosphere. An observer would have guessed from the resulting sounds—and guessed correctly—that there is an unusual amount of helium remaining in the carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia mix of Tartarus’ soup-thick atmosphere.
“It soundeth like a mouse that hath been squashed flat,” laughs Asia.
“But the squeaks sound vaguely like a squashed mouse’s attempt at civilized language,” booms Ione.
“With a terrible dialect,” agrees Panthea.
“We need to take him to the Demogorgon,” says Asia, looming closer.
Two huge hands roughly lift Achilles, the giant fingers squeezing most of the ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, and helium out of his aching lungs. Now the hero of the Argives is gaping and gasping like a fish out of water.
“The DemOgorgon will want to see this strange creature,” agrees Ione. “Carry him, Sister, carry him to the Demogorgon.”
“Carry him to the Demogorgon!!” echo the giant, insectoid shapes following the three giant women.
“Carry him to the Demogorgon!!” echo larger, less familiar shapes following farther behind.
66
The eiffelbahn ended along the 40th Parallel, on the coast where the nation of Portugal had once existed, just south of Figueira da Foz. Harman knew that less than a couple of hundred miles southeast, the modulated forcefield templates called the Hands of Hercules held the Atlantic Ocean out of the dry Mediterranean Basin, and he knew exactly why the post-humans had drained the Basin and to what purpose they’d used it for almost two millennia. He knew that less than a couple of hundred miles northeast of where the eiffelbahn ended here, there was a sixty-mile-wide circle of the terrain fused into glass where thirty-two hundred years ago the Global Caliphate had fought its determining battle with the N.E.U.—more than three million proto-voynix pouring over and past two hundred thousand doomed human mechanized-infantry knights. Harman knew that…
All in all, he knew, he knew too much. And understood too little.
The three of them—Moira, the solidified Prospero hologram, and Harman still-with-the-headache-of-a-lifetime—were standing on the top platform of the final eiffelbahn tower. Harman was finished with his cablecar ride—perhaps forever.
Behind them were the green hills of former Portugal. Ahead of them was the Atlantic Ocean with the Breach continuing due west from the line of the eiffelbahn route. The day was perfect—temperature perfect, mild breezes, not a cloud in the sky—and sunlight reflected off green at the top of the cliffs, white sand, and broad expanses of blue on either side of the slash of the Atlantic Breach. Harman knew that even from the top of the eiffelbahn tower he could see only sixty miles or so to the west, but the view seemed to go on for a thousand miles, the Breach starting as a hundred-meter-wide avenue with low blue-green berms on either side, but continuing on until it was only a black line intersecting with the distant horizon.
“You can’t seriously expect me to walk to North America,” said Harman.
“We seriously expect you to try,” said Prospero.
“Why?”
Neither the post-human nor the never-human answered him. Moira led the way down the steps to the lower elevator platform. She was carrying a rucksack and some other gear for Harman’s hike. The elevator doors opened and they stepped into the cagelike structure and began humming lower past iron trellises.
“I’ll walk with you for a day or two,” said Moira.
Harman was surprised. “You will? Why?
“I thought you might enjoy the company.”
Harman had no response to this. As they stepped out onto the grassy shelf under the eiffelbahn tower, he said, “You know, just a few hundred miles southeast of us here, in the Med Basin, there are a dozen post-human storage facilities that Savi never knew anything about. She knew about Atlantis and the Three Chairs way of riding lightning to the rings, but that was more or less a cruel post-human joke—she didn’t know about the sonies and actual cargo spacecraft stored at the other stasis bubbles. Or at least these stasis bubbles used to be there…”
“They still are,” said Prospero.
Harman turned to Moira. “Well, walk with me a few days to the Basin rather than send me on a three-month hike across the ocean floor… a hike I’ll probably never complete. We’ll fly a sonie to Ardis or one of the shuttles up the rings to have them turn the power and fax-node links back on.”
Moira shook her head. “I assure you, my young Prometheus, you do not want to walk toward the Mediterranean Basin.”
“Almost one million calibani are loose there,” said Prospero. “They used to be contained to the Basin, but Setebos has released them. They’ve slaughtered the voynix that once guarded Jerusalem, have swarmed across North Africa and the Middle East, and would have covered much of Europe now if Ariel weren’t holding them back.”
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“Ariel!” cried Harman. The thought of the tiny little… sprite … single-handedly holding back a million rampaging calibani—or even one—was totally absurd.
“Ariel can call upon more resources than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Harman, friend of Noman,” said Prospero.
“Hmm,” said Harman, unconvinced. The three walked to the edge of the grassy cliff. A narrow path switchbacked down to the beach. From this close, the Atlantic Breach looked much more real and strangely terrifying. Waves lapped up on either side of the impossible segment cut out of the ocean. “Prospero,” said Harman, “you created the calibani to counter the voynix threat. Why do you allow them to rampage?”
“I no longer control them,” said the old magus.
“Since Setebos arrived?”
The magus smiled. “I lost control of the calibani—and of Caliban himself—many centuries before Setebos.”
“Why did you create the damned things in the first place?”
“Security,” said Prospero. And he smiled again at the irony of the word.
“We… the post-humans,” said Moira, “asked Prospero and his… companion… to create a race of creatures ferocious enough to stop the replicating voynix from flooding into the Mediterranean Basin and compromising our operations there. You see, we used the Basin for…”
“Growing food, cotton, tea, and other materials you needed in the orbital islands,” finished Harman. “I know.” He paused, thinking about what the post had just said. “Companion? Do you mean Ariel?”
“No, not Ariel,” said Moira. “You see, fifteen hundred years ago, the creature we call Sycorax was not yet the…”
“That will do,” interrupted Prospero. The hologram actually sounded embarrassed.
Harman didn’t want to let it go. “But what you told us a year ago is true, isn’t it?” he asked the magus. “Caliban’s mother was Sycorax and its father was Setebos… or was that a lie as well?”