by Dan Simmons
“No, no,” said Prospero. “Caliban is a creature out of the witch by a monster.”
“I’ve been curious how a giant brain the size of a warehouse with dozens of hands bigger than me manages to mate with a human-sized witch,” said Harman.
“Very carefully,” said Moira—rather predictably, Harman thought.
The woman who looked like young Savi pointed to the Breach. “Are we ready to start?”
“Just another question for Prospero,” said Harman, but when he turned around to speak to the magus, he was gone. “Damn it. I hate it when he does that.”
“He has business to attend to elsewhere.”
“Yes, I’m sure. But I wanted to ask him one last time why he’s sending me across the Atlantic Breach. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m going to die out there. I mean, there’s no food….”
“I’ve packed a dozen food bars for you,” said Moira.
Harman had to laugh. “All right… after a dozen days, then there’s no food. And no water…”
Moira pulled a soft, curved, almost flat shape from the rucksack. The thing looked almost like one of the wineskins from the turin drama—but one that was all but empty. A thin tube ran from it. She handed it to Harman and he noticed how cool to the touch it was.
“A hydrator,” said Moira. “If there’s any humidity in the air at all, this collects it and filters it. If you’re in your thermskin, it collects your sweat and exhalations, scrubs them, and provides drinking water that way. You will not die of thirst out there.”
“I didn’t bring my thermskin,” said Harman.
“I packed it for you. You will need it for hunting.”
“Hunting?”
“Fishing might be a better term,” said Moira. “You can press through the restraining forcefields any time and kill fish underwater. You’ve been underwater in your thermskin before—up on Prospero’s Isle ten months ago—so you know that the skin protects you from pressure and the osmosis mask allows you to breathe.”
“What am I supposed to use for bait to get these fish?”
Moira flashed Savi’s quick smile. “For sharks, killer whales, and many other denizens of the deep out there, your own body will do quite nicely, my Prometheus.”
Harman was not amused. “And what do I use to kill the sharks, killer whales, and other denizens of the deep that I might want to eat… harsh language?”
Moira pulled a handgun from the rucksack and handed it to him.
It was black—darker and stubbier and much less graceful in design than the flechette weapons he was used to—and heavier. But the hand grip, barrel, and trigger were similar enough.
“This fires bullets, not crystal darts,” said Moira. “It’s an explosive device rather than gas-charged as with the weapons you’ve used before… but the principle is obviously the same. There are three boxes of ammunition in your rucksack… six hundred rounds of self-cavitating ammunition. That means that each bullet creates its own vacuum ahead of itself underwater… water does not slow it down. This is the safety—it’s on now—press down on the red dot with your thumb to release the safety. It has more recoil than flechette weapons and is much louder, but you’ll grow used to that.”
Harman hefted the killing device a few times, pointed it at the distant sea, made sure the safety was still on, and set it back in his pack. He’d test it later—once he was out in the Breach. “I wish we could get a few dozen of these weapons to Ardis,” he said softly.
“You can deliver this one to them,” said Moira.
Harman balled his right hand into a fist. He wheeled on Moira. “More than two thousand miles across here,” he said fiercely. “I don’t know how many miles I can hike a day, even if I do catch these goddamned fish and if your hydrator thing keeps working. Twenty miles a day? Thirty? That could be two hundred days of hiking just to get to the east coast of North America. But that kind of progress is only if the land in the Breach is flat … and I’m looking at proxnet and farnet mapping right now. There are fucking mountain ranges out there! And canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon! Boulders, rock crevasses, great furrows where continental drift dragged entire landmasses over the ocean floor, larger gaps where tectonic-plate activity opened up the bottom of the ocean and spewed forth lava. This ocean floor’s always re-creating itself—it’s bigger, rougher, and rockier than it used to be. It’ll take me a year to get across, and once I get there I’ll have almost another thousand miles to cover to get back to Ardis—and that’s through forests and mountains infested with dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, and voynix. You and that mutant cyberspace personality can quantum teleport anywhere you want to go—and take me with you. Or you could command a sonie to fly here from any of your post-human hidey holes where you’ve stashed your toys, and I could be home at Ardis helping Ada in a few hours… less. Instead, you’re sending me to my death out there. And even if I survive, it’ll be many months before I can get back to Ardis and odds are that Ada and everyone I know will be dead—from that Setebos spawn, or the voynix, or the winter, or starvation. Why are you doing this to me?”
Moira did not flinch from his fierce gaze. “Has Prospero ever spoken to you of the logosphere’s predicators?” she asked softly.
“Predicators?” Harman repeated stupidly. He could feel the adrenaline filling his system beginning to drain away toward despair. In a minute, his hands would be shaking. “You mean predictors? No.”
“Predicators,” said Moira. “They are as unique—and often as dangerous—as Prospero himself. Sometimes he trusts them. Sometimes he does not. In this case, he has entrusted your life and perhaps the future of your race to them.”
Moira pulled her hydrator from the rucksack and slung it over her back, shifting the flexible drinking tube so it lay along the side of her cheek. She started down the steep path toward the beach.
Harman remained at the top of the cliff for a minute. Shouldering the rucksack, he shielded his eyes and stared back through the morning glare at the black eiffelbahn tower rising high against the blue sky. The cablecar cables ran off to the east. He could not see the next tower from this vantage point.
Swiveling, he looked out to the west. Large white birds and smaller white birds—gulls and terns, his protein DNA memory storage told him—wheeled and screeched over the lazy blue sea. The Atlantic Breach remained a startling impossibility, its eighty-foot-wide cleft taking on scale now that Moira was halfway down the cliff face.
Harman sighed, tugged the rucksack straps tighter—already feeling the sweat soaking through his tunic where it met the cotton of the small backpack—and began following Moira down the trail toward the beach and the sea.
67
A lot was happening at once.
The Queen Mab—all one thousand one hundred and eighteen feet of her—began her close-encounter aerobraking maneuver, the ship’s curved pusher plate draped across its derriere, both ship and saucer surrounded by flame and streaking plasma.
At the height of the ion-storm around the aerobraking spaceship, Suma IV cut loose the dropship.
Just as with the spacecraft that had first brought Mahnmut and Orphu to Mars, no one had gotten around to naming this dropship—it remained just “the dropship” in their maser and tightbeam conversations. But The Dark Lady was secure in the dropship’s hold, and in his environmental control cubby, Mahnmut kept up a running description of video feeds—both from the dropship’s camera and from the Queen Mab—as the stealth-shielded ovoid of the dropship thrust away from the flame-wreathed larger ship, spun through the upper atmosphere at five times the speed of sound, and finally deployed its stubby high-speed wings when their velocity dropped to a mere Mach 3.
Originally, General Beh bin Adee had planned to drop Earthward with the reconnaissance dropship, but the more imminent threat of the Voice’s asteroid rendezvous made all the Prime Integrators vote that the general remain aboard the Mab. Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo was in the jumpseat of the passenger/cargo compartment behind the main control bli
ster on the upper part of the ship, and behind him—strapped into their web seating, heavy energy weapons locked upright between their black-barbed knees—rode his command: twenty-five rockvec Belt troopers recently defrosted and briefed on the Queen Mab.
Suma IV was an excellent pilot. Mahnmut had to admire the way the Ganymedan guided the dropship down through the upper atmosphere, using thrusters so briefly that the ship seemed to be flying itself, and he had to smile when he remembered his own disastrous plunge with Orphu through Mars’ atmosphere. Of course, his ship had been charred and broken then, but he could still give credit to a real pilot when he flew with one.
The data and radar profile are impressive, tightbeamed Orphu of Io from the hold. What’s the visual look like?
Blue and white, sent Mahnmut. All blue and white. More beautiful even than the photographs. The entire Earth is ocean below us.
All of it? said Orphu and Mahnmut thought it was one of the few times he’d heard his friend sound surprised.
All of it. A water world—blue ocean, a million ripples of reflected sunlight, white clouds—cirrus, high ripples, a mass of stratocumulus coming over the horizon above us… . no, wait. It’s a hurricane, a thousand kilometers across, at least. I can see the eye. White, spinning, powerful, amazing.
Our track is nominal, sent Orphu. Coming right up from Antarctica crossing the South Atlantic toward the northeast.
The Mab’s out of atmosphere and on the other side of the Earth now, sent Mahnmut. The communication sats we seeded are working fine. Mab’s velocity is down to fifteen kilometers per second and falling. She’s climbing back to the polar ring coordinates and decelerating on ion drive. Trajectory is good. She’s headed for the rendezvous point the Voice gave us. No one’s fired on her yet.
Even better, sent Orphu, no one’s fired on us yet, either.
Suma IV allowed atmospheric drag to slow them to less than the speed of sound just as they crossed the bulge of Africa. Their flight plan had called for them to fly over the dried Mediterranean Sea, shooting video and recording data about the odd constructs there, but instruments now told them that there was some sort of energy-damping field extending in a dome up to forty thousand meters above that dried sea. The dropship might fly into that and cease flying altogether. In fact, according to Suma IV, if they flew into that, all the moravecs on board might cease functioning. The Ganymedan banked the dropship east across the Sahara Desert, flying in a wide curve around to the south and east of the waterless Mediterranean.
The feed continued to flow in from the Queen Mab, carried around the blocking mass of the planet by a score of snowflake-size repeater satellites.
The large spacecraft had reached the coordinates beamed to it by the Voice—a small volume of empty space just outside the edge of the orbital ring some two thousand kilometers from the asteroid-city from which the Voice had broadcast its—her—messages. Obviously the Voice did not want a spaceship that was propelled by atomic bombs to come within shockwave proximity of her—its—orbital home.
Besides realtime data the dropship was uplinking, it was getting twenty broadband tightbeams of information flowing in: feeds from the Queen Mab’s many cameras and external sensors, comm bands from the Mab’s bridge, ground data from the various satellites they’d seeded, and multiple feeds from Odysseus. The moravecs had not only rigged the human’s clothing with nanocameras and molecular transmitters, they’d mildly sedated Odysseus during his last sleep period and had started to paint cell-sized imagers on the skin of his forehead and hands, but had discovered to their shock that Odysseus already had nanocameras in the skin there. His ear canals also had been modified—long before he came aboard the Queen Mab they realized, with nanocyte receivers. The moravecs modified all these so they would send every sight and sound back to the ship’s recorders. Other sensors had been installed around his body so that even if Odysseus were to die during the coming rendezvous, data about his surroundings would continue flowing back to the moravecs.
At that moment, Odysseus was standing on the bridge with Prime Integrator Asteague/Che, Retrograde Sinopessen, navigator Cho Li, General Beh bin Adee, and the other command moravecs there.
Suddenly Orphu and Mahnmut perked up as the Queen Mab relayed real-time radio data from the ship’s comm.
“Incoming maser message,” said Cho Li.
“SEND ODYSSEUS ACROSS ALONE,” came the sultry female voice from the asteroid-city. “USE A SHUTTLE WHICH IS NOT ARMED. IF I DETECT WEAPONS ABOARD HIS SHIP OR IF ANYONE ORGANIC OR ROBOTIC ACCOMPANIES ODYSSEUS, I WILL DESTROY YOUR SPACECRAFT.”
“The plot thickens,” said Orphu of Io on the common dropship band.
The moravecs in the dropship watched with only a second’s delay as Retrograde Sinopessen escorted Odysseus down to the number eight launch bay. Since all of the hornets were armed, only one of the three Phobos construction shuttles still aboard the Queen Mab would satisfy the Voice’s requirements.
The construction shuttle was tiny—a remote-handling ovoid with barely room inside to squeeze in one adult human being and no life support beyond air and temperature—and as Retrograde Sinopessen helped the Achaean fighter squirm into the cable and circuit-board cluttered space, the moravec said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
Odysseus stared at the spidery moravec from Amalthea for a long moment. Finally he said in Greek, “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink life to the lees: all times have I enjoyed greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those that loved me and alone; on shore, and when through the scudding drifts the rainy Hyades vexed the dim sea; I am become a name…. Much have I seen and known; cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments, and myself not least, but honored them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, far on the ringing plains of windy Troy…. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life were all too little, and of one to me little remains: but every hour is saved from that eternal silence, something more, a bringer of new things; and vile it were for some three suns to store and hoard myself… close the goddamned door, spider-thing.”
“But that’s …” began Orphu of Io.
“He’s been in the Mab’s library …” began Mahnmut.
“Hush!” commanded Suma IV.
They watched as the shuttle was sealed. Retrograde Sinopessen stayed in the shuttle bay, clinging to a strut so as not to be swept out in space as the bay dumped all its atmosphere, and then the ovoid shuttle moved out into space on silent peroxide thrusters. The egg-shaped thing tumbled, stabilized, aimed its nose at the orbital asteroid-city—only a glowing spark among thousands of other p-ring sparks at this dis-tance—and thrusted away toward the Voice.
“We’re coming up on Jerusalem,” said Suma IV on the intercom.
Mahnmut returned his attention to the dropship’s various video monitors and sensors.
Tell me what you see, old friend, tightbeamed Orphu.
All right… we’re still more than twenty kilometers high. On the unmagnified view, I see the dry Mediterranean Sea about sixty or eighty kilometers to the west, it’s a patchwork of red rock, dark soil, and what looks to be green fields. Then along the coast there’s the huge crater that used to be the Gaza Strip—a sort of impact crater, half-moon-shaped inlet to the dry sea—and then the land rises into mountains and Jerusalem is there, in the heights, on a hill of its own.
What does it look like?
Let me zoom a bit… yes. Suma IV’s doing an overlay with historical satellite photos, and it’s obvious that the suburbs and newer parts of the city are gone… but the Old City, the walled city, is still there. I can see the Damascus Gate… the Western Wall… Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock… and there’s a new structure there, one not in the old satellite photos. Something tall and made out of multifaceted glass and polished stone. The blue beam is coming up from it.
I’m reviewing the data on the blue beam, sent Orphu. Definitely a neutri
no beam sheathed in tachyons. I don’t have a clue as to what function that might have and I bet our best scientists don’t either.
Oh, wait a minute… sent Mahnmut. I’ve zoomed on the Old City and it’s… crawling with life.
People? Humans?
No…
Those headless humpy organic-robotic things?
No, tightbeamed Mahnmut. Would you just let me describe these things at my own speed?
Sorry.
There are thousands—more than thousands—of the clawed, fin-footed amphibian things that you suggested looked like Caliban from The Tempest.
What are they doing? asked Orphu.
Just milling around, essentially, sent Mahnmut. No, wait, there are bodies on David Street near the Jaffa Gate… more bodies on the Tariq el-Wad in the old Jewish section near the Western Wall Plaza…
Human bodies? sent Orphu.
No… those headless humpy organic-robotic things. They’re pretty torn up… a lot of them look eviscerated.
Food for the Caliban monsters? asked Orphu.
I have no idea.
“We’re going to overfly the blue beam,” Suma IV broadcast on the intercom. “Everyone stay strapped in tight—I need to get some of our boom sensors into the beam itself.”
Is this wise? Mahnmut asked Orphu. Nothing about this expedition to Earth is wise, old friend. We don’t have a maggid aboard.
A what? tightbeamed Mahnmut.
Maggid, sent Orphu of Io. In olden days, the old Jews—long before the caliphate wars and the rubicon, I mean, back when humans wore bearskins and T-shirts—the old Jews said that a wise person had a maggid—a sort of spiritual counselor from a different world.
Maybe we’re the maggids, sent Mahnmut. We’re all from another world.
True, sent Orphu. But we’re not very wise. Mahnmut, did I ever tell you that I’m a gnostic?
Spell that, sent Mahnmut.
Orphu of Io did so.
What the hell is a gnostic? asked Mahnmut. He’d had several revelations about his old friend recently—including the fact that Orphu was an expert on James Joyce and Lost Era writers other than Proust—and he wasn’t sure he was ready for more.