by Dan Simmons
He knew it wouldn’t. She would never have given him the gun if it were a threat to her. She had some countermeasure built into the weapon—perhaps she could keep it from firing just by the force of her post-human thoughts, some simple brainwave circuitry built into the firing mechanism—or something equally as foolproof and bulletproof built into her.
“You and the magus went to all that trouble to kidnap me, ship me across India to the Himalayas, just to stick me in the crystal cabinet, drown me, and educate me,” said Harman. These were the most words he’d strung together since they’d begun hiking the Breach, and he realized how banal and redundant they were. “Why did you do that if you don’t want me to prevail against Setebos and the other bad guys?”
Moira did not smile again. “If you’re meant to get to the rings, you’ll find a way up there.”
“ ‘Meant to’ sounds like some sort of Calvinist predestination,” said Harman, stepping over a low lump of desiccated coral. The Breach so far had been surprisingly easy—iron bridges over the few ocean-bottom abysses they’d encountered, paths blasted or lasered into rocky or coral ridges, gentle inclines for the most part and metal cables to help them descend or ascend where the going was steep—so Harman had not had to spend much time watching his feet. But it was hard to see detail in this falling light.
Moira had not responded or visibly reacted to his feeble witticism, so he said, “There are other Firmaries.”
“Prospero told you that before.”
“Yeah, but it’s just sunk in. We old-styles don’t have to die or rebuild medicine from scratch. There are more rejuvenation tanks up there.”
“Yes, of course. The post-humans prepared to serve an old-style population of one million. There are other Firmaries and blue-worm tanks on other orbital isles in both the equatorial and polar rings. Surely this is obvious.”
“Yes, obvious,” said Harman, “but you have to remember that I have all the savvy of a newborn babe.”
“I have not forgotten that,” said Moira.
“I don’t have specific data on where the other Firmaries are,” said Harman. “Can you pinpoint them for me?”
“I’ll point them out for you after we douse the campfire tonight,” Moira said drily.
“No. I mean on a chart of the rings.”
“Do you have a chart of the rings, my young Prometheus? Is that part of what you ate and drank back at the Taj?”
“No,” said Harman, “but you can draw one for us—orbital coordinates, everything.”
“Are you pondering immortality so soon after birth then, Prometheus?”
Am I? wondered Harman. Then he remembered his last thought before the realization that other Firmaries were in mothballs up there in the post-human rings—it had been of Ada, pregnant and injured.
“Why were all the operative fax-in/fax-out healing tanks on Prospero’s isle?” he asked. Even as he asked the question, he’d seen the answer like a memory of a forgotten nightmare.
“Prospero arranged that to keep his captive Caliban fed,” said Moira.
Harman felt his stomach lurch. Part of that was his reaction to having ever felt any friendly or forgiving thoughts toward the logosphere avatar magus. But most of the sudden surge of nausea came from the fact that he’d not eaten anything since two bites of that day’s food bar before dawn that morning, and he’d forgotten even to drink from his hydrator tube in the past few hours. “Why are you stopping?” he asked Moira.
“It’s too dark to walk,” said the post-human. “Let’s build our fire and cook our weenies and roast some marshmallows and sing camp songs. Then you can get a few hours’ sleep and dream of living forever in the bright future of the blue-worm tanks.”
“You know,” said Harman, “you can really be a sarcastic pain in the ass sometimes.”
Moira smiled now. Her smile was Cheshirecatlike, almost the only detail he could see of her in the Breach-trench darkness. “When my many sisters were here,” she said, “before they all flew off to become gods—many of them male gods, which I thought was a demotion—they used to tell me the same thing. Now pull that dried wood and seaweed that we’ve been picking up all day out of your pack and start us a nice fire… that’s a good little old-style.”
69
Mommy! Mommmmeeee! I’m so scared. It’s so cold and dark down here. Mommy! Come help me get out. Mommy, please!
Ada awoke just half an hour after falling asleep in the cold, early hours of the dark winter morning. The child-voice in her mind felt like a small, cold, and unwelcome hand inside her clothes.
Mommy, please. I don’t like it here. It’s cold and dark and I can’t get out. The rock is too hard. I’m hungry. Mommy, please help me get out of here. Mommeeeee.
As exhausted as she was, Ada forced herself out of her bedroll and into the cold air. The survivors—there were forty-eight now one week and five days after their return to the ruins of Ardis—had made tents out of salvaged canvas and Ada now slept with four other women. The cluster of tents and the original lean-to next to the well formed the center of a new palisade, with the sharpened stakes set only a hundred feet out from the center of the tent city and the tumbled ruins of the original Ardis Hall.
Mommeeee… please, Mommy….
The voice was there much of the time now and although Ada had learned to ignore it during most of her waking day, it kept her from sleeping. Tonight—this dark predawn morning—it was much worse than usual.
Ada pulled on her trousers, boots, and heavy sweater and stepped out of the tent, moving as quietly as she could so as not to waken Elle and her other tentmates. There were a few people awake by the center campfire—there always were, all through the night—and sentries out on the new walls, but the area between Ada and the Pit was empty and dark.
It was very dark; thick clouds had blocked the starlight and ringlight and it smelled like snow was on the way. Ada stepped carefully as she made her way to the Pit—some people still preferred sleeping outdoors now that they’d stitched together and lined better bedrolls and sleeping bags. She didn’t want to step on anyone. Just in her fifth month of pregnancy, Ada already felt fat and clumsy.
Mommeeeeeeeeee!
She hated that damned voice. With a real child growing inside her, she couldn’t tolerate the pleading, whining ersatz-child voice coming from that thing in the Pit, even if it was just a mental echo. She wondered if her own baby’s developing neural system could pick up this telepathic invasion. She hoped not.
Mommy, please let me out. It’s dark down here.
They’d decided to have one person standing guard at the Pit at all times, and tonight it was Daeman. She knew the thin, muscular silhouette with its flechette rifle slung over his shoulder even before she could make out his face. He turned to her as she came up to the edge of the Pit.
“Can’t sleep?” he whispered.
“It won’t let me,” she whispered back.
“I know,” said Daeman. “I can always hear it when it targets you with its pleading. Faint, but audible—a sort of tickling at the back of the brain. I hear the thing calling ‘Mommeee’ and just want to unload this magazine of flechettes into it.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” said Ada, staring down at the metal grill welded and bolted into rock above the Pit. The grill was large, heavy, and fine-meshed—they’d taken it from the old cistern near the ruins of Ardis Hall—and the Setebos baby had already grown to the point where it couldn’t get its stalk-wandering hands through the mesh. The Pit itself was only fourteen feet deep, but they’d hacked it and blasted it out of solid rock. And strong as the monstrous thing down there was—the many-eyed, many-handed brain part of it was now more than four feet long and its hands were stronger every day—it wasn’t strong enough to tear the grill’s bolts and welded, sunken rods out of the rock. Not yet.
“A good idea except for the fact that we’d have twenty thousand voynix on us in five minutes if we kill the thing,” whispered Daeman.
Ada
didn’t have to be reminded of this, but hearing it said aloud made the coldness and chill of nausea creep deeper into her. The sonie was up now, in the cloudy dark, doing its slow reconnaissance orbits.
The news was the same every day—the voynix stayed away, in an almost perfect circle with a radius of just under two miles from what could be this last human encampment on Earth—yet the numbers kept growing. Greogi had estimated at least twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand of the dull-silvery things out there in the treeless forests yesterday afternoon. There would be more at first light this morning. There were more each day. It was as certain as the weak, wintry sunrises. It was as certain as the fact that the pleading, whining, insinuating mental voice coming up from the Pit would never stop until it got free.
And then what? wondered Ada.
She could imagine. Just the presence of the thing had cast a pall over the Ardis survivors. It was hard enough just to get through the days—building and expanding their little tents and shacks, salvaging what they could from the ruins, improving their hopeless little log fort, not to mention getting enough to eat—without the Setebos baby’s evil whining in their minds.
Food was a serious issue. All the cattle had been driven away during the massacre and sonie outings had found only their rotting carcasses in distant fields and on the winter forest floor. The voynix had slaughtered them as well. And with the soil frozen and even the hope of gardens or crops or planting months away, and with the canned and preserved goods that had been in the basement of Ardis Manor now merely melted blobs under charred rubble, the forty-eight Ardis survivors depended on the hunters who went out in the sonie every day. There was no game within the four-mile circle of the voynix army, so every day two men or women with flechette guns risked a trip beyond the voynix—a longer trip every day as the deer and larger game fled the area—and every evening, if they were lucky, a mule deer or wild pig would turn on the spit above the central cooking fire. But they hadn’t been that lucky recently—they didn’t have fresh meat every day, and fewer hunts provided them an animal to kill within the increasing radius of their flights, so they preserved what they could with smoking and with the remaining precious salt salvaged from the storehouses, and they munched on their monotonously bad-tasting jerky, and they watched the voynix continue massing, and each day and night their moods grew darker with the Setebos baby constantly sending its white, clammy hands and tendrils of telepathy into their brains. Even while they slept. And like the game they hunted from the sonie, sleep grew increasingly harder to find.
“Another few days,” Daeman said softly, “and I think it will be able to tear its way out of this cage.” He took the burning torch from its niche several feet away and held it out over the Pit. The size of a small calf, its brain surface gleaming with moist, gray mucus, Setebos’ baby was hanging from the grill. Half a dozen of its tendriled hands gripped the dark iron mesh. Eight or ten yellow eyes squinted, blinked, and closed at the sudden flare of light. Two of its feeding mouths pulsed open and Ada stared in fascination at the rows of small, white teeth in each.
“Mommy,” it squeaked. It had been speaking for the last week, but its actual voice was nowhere near as human-sounding or childlike as its telepathic voice
“Yes,” whispered Ada. “We’ll call a general meeting today. Let everyone vote on the time. But we have to make final preparations for departure soon.”
The plan pleased almost none of them, but it was the best they had come up with. While Daeman and a few others stood guard on the baby, they would begin evacuating materials and people to an island they’d scouted about thirty-five miles downriver from Ardis. It was not the paradise isle Daeman had wanted to fax to somewhere on the far side of the world, but this small rocky islet was in the center of the river, the currents ran fast there, and most important, the ground was defensible.
They all assumed that the voynix were faxing in somehow, from somewhere—although daily checks of the Ardis faxnode showed that it was still inoperable. That meant that the voynix could easily follow them, perhaps even fax to the island. But the forty-eight survivors could cluster and set their camp on a grassy depression on the center knob of the isle—hunt and bring in their food via sonie the way they were doing now—and the island was so small that the voynix would have trouble faxing in more than a few hundred at a time. They might be able to kill or drive off that many.
The last men and women to leave Ardis—and Ada fully intended to be the last woman—would kill the Setebos spawn. And then the voynix would flood over this hallowed place like frenzied grasshoppers, but the rest of the survivors would be on the island and safe. Safe for a few hours, Ada guessed.
Could voynix swim? Ada and the others had searched their memories for any instance of seeing one of their slave voynix swimming way back in the ancient history before the sky fell ten months earlier, before Harman and dead Savi and Daeman had destroyed the Firmary along with Prospero’s isle. Before the end of their foolish world of parties and endless faxing and safety. No one could be sure if they had ever seen a voynix swim.
But Ada was sure in her own heart. The voynix could swim. They could walk along the bed of the river under all that water and in all that swift current if they had to. They would get to the humans on their little island once the Setebos baby was dead.
And then the survivors, if there were any, would have to flee again—but to where? Ada’s vote was for the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu since she remembered well Petyr’s description of the voynix massed there being unable to get into the green environmental bubbles clustered on the bridge towers and suspension cables. But the majority of the others had not wanted to go to the Bridge they’d never seen—it was too far away, it would take too long to get there, they’d be caught inside the glass structures high above nothing with voynix all around them.
Ada had told them how Harman, Petyr, Hannah, and Noman/ Odysseus had reached the Bridge in less than an hour, hurtling up into the fringes of space and then tearing back down into the atmosphere above the southern continent. She explained how the sonie still had that flight plan in its memory—how a trip to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu would take only a few minutes longer than the ferry down the river to the rocky island.
But they still did not want to try that. Not yet.
But Ada and Daeman continued to make their plans for that long evacuation.
Suddenly there came a sound from above the dark line of trees to the southwest—a sort of rattling, hissing noise.
Daeman unslung his flechette rifle and held it ready, clicking off the safety. “Voynix!” he shouted.
Ada bit her lip, the Setebos thing at her feet forgotten for a moment, its mental urgings drowned out by real noise. Someone by the central fire was ringing the main alarm bell. People were stumbling out of the big lean-to and the other tents and yelling to wake others.
“I don’t think so,” said Ada, almost shouting so Daeman could hear her over the din. “It didn’t sound right.”
When the bell quit clanging and the shouts died down, she could hear it more clearly now—a metallic, rasping, mechanical noise—not like the sibilant leap and rustle of a thousand voynix attacking.
Then a light became visible—a searchlight stabbing down from the sky, only a few hundred feet up, the shaft and circle of light illuminating bare branches, frozen and fire-blackened grass, the palisade walls and the shocked sentries on the crude ramparts there.
The sonie did not have a spotlight.
“Get the rifles!” Ada shouted at the group milling near the central fire. Some people had weapons. Others grabbed them and readied them.
“Spread out!” shouted Daeman, running toward the clustered crowd and waving his arms. “Take cover!” Ada agreed. Whatever this thing was, if it had hostile intentions, there was no need to help it by clustering up like fat and happy targets.
The humming and rasping grew so loud that it drowned out even the warning bell that someone had redundantly and wildly begun ringing a
gain.
Ada could see it now—something mechanical flying, something much bigger than their sonie but also much slower and more awkward, something not the sleek oval of their sonie but like two lumpy circles with the skittering searchlight stabbing out from the front circle. The thing bobbed and wavered as if it were ready to crash, but it cleared the low palisade walls—a sentry throwing himself to the ground to avoid protuberances on the flying machine—and then skidded roughly across the frozen grass not that far from the Pit, rose into the air again, and then settled heavily.
Daeman and Ada ran toward it, Ada running as well as her five months of pregnancy would allow her to and carrying a torch, and Daeman with the automatic flechette rifle raised and aimed at the dark shapes now clambering out of the landed machine.
The dark shapes were people—eight of them by Ada’s quick count. She saw faces she did not recognize, but the last two out of the machine, the two who had been at the controls near the front of the forward metal circle, were Hannah and Odysseus—or Noman as he’d asked to be called the last few months before he was injured and taken to the Bridge.
And then Ada and Hannah were hugging, both of them weeping but Hannah sobbing almost hysterically. When they paused to look at each other, Hannah gasped, “Ardis Hall? Where is it? Where is everyone? What’s happened? Is Petyr all right?”
“Petyr is dead,” said Ada, feeling the flatness of her own emotional reaction to the words. Too much horror had happened in too short a period of time; she felt that her soul had been bruised. “The voynix attacked in force shortly after you left. They overran the walls, used rocks as missiles. The house burned. Emme is dead. Reman is dead. Peaen is dead …” She went down the list of those old friends who had died in the attack and after.
Hannah—who had always been thin but who looked much thinner in the torchlight—covered her mouth in horror.
“Come,” said Ada, touching Noman’s wrist and putting her arm around Hannah again. “You all look starved. Come to the fire—it will be dawn soon. You can introduce your friends and we’ll get you some food. I want to hear all about everything.”