by Dan Simmons
They sat by the fire until the winter sun rose, exchanging information as unemotionally as they could under the circumstances. Laman cooked a rich morning stew and they had that and tin cups of almost the last of the thick, rich coffee they’d found in one of the only partially burned storehouses.
The five new people, three men and two women, were named Beman, Elian, Stefe, Iyayi, and Susan. Elian was the leader, a completely bald man who carried the authority of age and who might have been almost as old as Harman. All were bandaged or had been slightly wounded and as the others talked, Tom and Siris tended to their injuries with what medical supplies were left.
Ada very quickly filled in her young friend Hannah—who somehow did not seem so young any more—and the silent Noman on the saga of the Ardis Massacre, the days and nights on Starved Rock, the nonfunctioning faxnode, the massing of the voynix, and the hatching and containment of the Setebos baby.
“I felt the thing in my mind even before we landed,” Noman said softly. While Hannah began her tale, the barrel-chested and gray-bearded Greek, clad only in his rough tunic even in the freezing weather, walked over to the Pit and stared down at its captive.
“Odysseus came out of his recovery crèche three days after Ariel took Harman away,” said the dark-haired young woman with the lustrous eyes. “The voynix continued to try to get in, but Odysseus reassured me that they couldn’t as long as the zero-friction field was on. We ate, slept …” Hannah lowered her eyes here for a minute and Ada knew that the two had done more than sleep. “We expected Petyr to return for us as he’d promised, but after a week Odysseus began work trying to assemble the fragments of sonies and other flying machines we’d seen in the garage—hangar—whatever one should call it. I did most of the welding. Odysseus did the circuitboard and propulsion system work. When we ran out of parts we needed, I scavenged through the rest of the Golden Gate bubbles and secret rooms.
“He got the thing to hover and fly a little bit within the hangar—it’s made up mostly of two servitor-type flying machines called skyrafts, not made for long-distance travel—but we had trouble with the guidance and control systems. Finally Odysseus had to dismantle part of a lesser AI that operated some of the Bridge kitchen, leaving the cooking and recipe parts but lobotomizing it to handle navigation and attitude for the raft. It’s not happy flying that clumsy machine—it keeps wanting to cook us breakfast and suggest recipes.”
Ada and some of the others laughed at this. There were more than a dozen people listening, including Greogi, one-handed Laman, Ella, Edide, Boman, and the two medics. The five injured newcomers were now eating their hot stew and listening in silence. The snow that Ada had smelled hours earlier now came down lightly but did not stick to the ground. Sunlight actually peeked through the scudding clouds.
“Finally, when we felt sure that Ariel wasn’t bringing Harman back and that Petyr or none of the rest of you were returning for us, we filled the raft with supplies—we brought more weapons that I found in another secret room—opened the hangar doors, and headed north, hoping that the repellors would keep us airborne and the crude navigation system would get us to the general vicinity of Ardis.”
“Was this yesterday?” asked Ada.
“It was nine days ago,” said Hannah.
Seeing Ada’s shocked reaction, the younger woman went on. “This thing flies slowly, Ada, fifty or sixty miles per hour at top speed. And it had problems. We lost most of the food supplies when we actually went down in the sea where Odysseus says the Isthmus of Panama used to be. Lucky for us, he’d added the flotation bags to the raft so that it could act like a real raft for a few hours while we jettisoned weight and Odysseus hammered the flight systems into working again.”
“Did you have Elian and the others with you then?” asked Boman.
Hannah shook her head, sipped more coffee, and huddled over the warm tin cup as if it was giving her necessary heat. “We had to stop along the coast once we crossed the Isthmus Sea,” she said. “There was a faxnode community there—you’ve been to it, I think, Ada: Hughes Town. There was that tall plascrete skyscraper there with all the ivy.”
“I went to a Three Twenty party there once,” said Ada, remembering the view of the sea from a terrace high atop that tower. She’d been young, not quite fifteen. It had been around the time she’d first met her pudgy “cousin” Daeman and she remembered an awakening sense of sensuality from those days.
Elian cleared his throat. The man had livid scars on his face, forearms, and hands, and his clothing was more a mass of torn rags than anything else, but he carried himself with strong authority. “There were more than two hundred of us in the node community when the voynix attacked a month ago,” he said in a soft but deep voice. “We had no weapons. But the primary Hughes Town Tower was too tall for them to leap onto easily, something about the outside surface of the tower made it hard for them to cling and climb there, and the overhanging terraces made defense easier than any other place else we could retreat to. We barricaded the stairways—the power for the elevators had gone off back during the Fall of the Skies, of course—and used whatever we could find for weapons: servitor tools, iron bars, crude bows and arrows made of metal cables and leaf springs from barouches and droshkies—anything. The voynix got most of us, half a dozen or so of us made it to the fax pavilion and faxed away for help before the fax quit working, and the five others and I were on the penthouse of the Hughes Town Tower with five hundred voynix occupying everything. We’d been out of food for five days and out of water for two when we saw Noman’s and Hannah’s sky-raft lumbering in over the gulf.”
“We had to jettison more of the food and medical supplies and even most of the guns and flechette ammunition to make up for the extra weight,” Hannah said sheepishly. “And we had to land three more times to work on it. But it finally got us here.”
“How did its navigation system know how to find Ardis?” asked Casman. The thin, bearded Ardis survivor had always been interested in machinery.
Hannah laughed. “It didn’t. It could barely find what Odysseus calls North America. He guided us here—Odysseus—following first one big river he calls the Mississippi, and then our own Ardis River, which he called the Leanoka or Ohio. And then we saw your fire.”
“You flew on at night?” asked Ada.
“We had to. There were too many dinosaurs and sabertooths down in the forests south of here to risk landing for very long. We all took turns helping fly the thing while Odysseus caught naps. But he’s been awake for most of seventy-two hours.”
“He looks… well again,” said Ada.
Hannah nodded. “The recovery crèche healed most of the wounds the voynix inflicted on him. We were right to bring him back to the Bridge. He would have died otherwise.”
Ada was silent a minute, thinking of how that decision had taken Harman from her.
As if reading her friend’s mind, Hannah said, “We looked for Harman, Ada. Even though Odysseus was sure that Ariel had quantum teleported him somewhere—that’s like faxing, only more powerful somehow, it’s what the gods did in the turin drama—even though Odysseus was sure that the Ariel-thing had QT’d him far away, we flew down and searched the old Machu Picchu ruins below the Golden Gate and even looked along the nearby rivers and waterfalls and valleys. There was no sign of Harman.”
“He’s still alive,” Ada said simply. She touched her swollen belly as she said this. She always did—it was not only a part of her connection to Harman, but it seemed to confirm that her intuitive feeling was accurate. It was almost as if Ada’s unborn child knew that Harman still lived… somewhere.
“Yes,” said Hannah.
“Did you see any other faxnode communities?” asked Loes. “Any other survivors?”
Hannah shook her head. Ada noticed that her young friend’s always-short hair had grown out some. “We stopped at two other nodes between Hughes Town and Ardis,” said Hannah. “Small-population nodes—Live Oak and Hulmanica. They’d both been sacked b
y voynix—there were voynix carcasses and human bones left, nothing more.”
“How many people do you think died there?” Ada asked softly.
Hannah shrugged and sipped the last of her coffee. “No more than forty or fifty total,” she said with the unemotional lack of affect common to all the Ardis survivors. “Nothing like the disaster here.” Hannah looked around. “I can feel something scrabbling at my mind like a bad memory.”
“That’s the little Setebos,” said Ada. “It wants to get in our minds and out of its Pit.” She always thought of the thing’s hole as “the Pit” with a capital “P.”
“Aren’t you afraid that its mother—father—whatever that thing in Paris Crater was that Daeman saw, will come for it?”
Ada looked over to where Daeman was standing by the Pit, speaking earnestly to Noman. “The big Setebos hasn’t showed up yet,” she said. “We’re more worried about what the little one will do.” She described to them all how the many-handed thing seemed to suck energy out of the earth where someone had died horribly.
Hannah shivered even though the sunlight was stronger now. “We saw the voynix in the woods with our searchlight,” she said softly. “Countless numbers of them. Row upon row of them. Just standing there under the trees and along the ridgelines, the closest about two miles out, I think. What are you going to do?”
Ada told her about the plan for the island.
Elian cleared his throat again. “Excuse me,” he said. “It’s not my business and I know I don’t get a vote here, but it seems to me that a rocky island like that would put you in our position in the tower. The voynix would keep coming—and you have so many more around you here—and you’d die off one by one. Someplace like the Bridge that Hannah told us about seems to make more sense.”
Ada nodded. She didn’t want to argue strategies quite yet—too many of the listening Ardis survivors sitting around this circle would vote for the island. “You do get a vote here, Elian,” she said instead. “Every one of you does. You’re part of our community now—any refugee we find will be—and you get as much of a vote as I do. Thank you for your opinion. We’re all going to discuss this at the noon meal and even the sentries will vote by proxy. I think you should get some sleep before then.”
Elian, Beman, the blond Iyayi—who somehow had remained beautiful despite her scratches and rags—and the short, silent woman named Susan and the big, bearded man named Stefe nodded and moved off with Tom and Siris to find empty bedrolls under canvas somewhere.
“You should sleep, too,” Ada said, touching Hannah’s forearm.
“What happened to your wrist, Ada?”
Ada looked down at the rough plaster cast and grubby bandage. “I broke it during the fight here. It’s nothing. I’m interested that the voynix disappeared from the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu. It makes me think we’re fighting a finite number of the things… if they have to redeploy, I mean.”
“A finite number,” agreed Hannah. “But Odysseus thinks there are more than a million voynix, and fewer than a hundred thousand of us humans.” She thought a second and added, “A hundred thousand of us before the slaughters began.”
“Does Noman have any idea why the voynix are killing us?” asked Ada, holding Hannah’s strong hand now.
“I think he does, but he hasn’t told me,” said Hannah. “There’s a lot he keeps to himself.”
That’s the understatement of the Twenty, thought Ada. Aloud she said, “You look exhausted, my dear. You really should get some sleep.”
“When Odysseus does,” said Hannah, meeting Ada’s gaze with something like the bashfulness, defiance, and pride of a young lover.
Ada nodded again.
Daeman stepped up to the fire. “Ada, could we see you a minute?”
Touching Hannah’s shoulder, Ada rose awkwardly and followed Daeman back to the Pit where Noman stood. The man they’d once called Odysseus was not much taller than Ada, but he was so solid and muscular that he emanated power. Ada could see the curly gray hairs on his chest through the open tunic.
“Admiring our pet?” asked Ada.
Noman did not smile. He scratched his beard, looked down into the Pit at the strangely quiescent baby, and then returned his dark-eyed gaze to Ada. “You’ll have to kill it,” he said.
“We plan to.”
“I mean quickly,” said Noman/Odysseus. “These things aren’t so much babies of the real Setebos as lice.”
“Lice?” Ada said. “I can hear its thoughts…”
“And you’ll hear them more and more loudly until the thing comes up out of there—it probably could already if it wanted to—and sucks the energy and souls right out of your bodies.”
Ada blinked and looked down into the Pit. The baby’s twohemisphered brain-back was just a gray glow down there. It was on the floor of the Pit now, tendrils and hands reeled in, its motile hands tucked under its mucousy body, its many eyes closed.
“The eggs hatch and these things swarm out,” continued Noman. “They’re like scouts for the real Setebos. These things only grow to be about twenty feet long. They find… food… in the soil and then return to the original Setebos, I don’t know quite how they travel so far, Brane Holes probably—this one’s not quite old enough to summon a Hole—and when they report back, the big Setebos thanks them for the information and eats them, absorbing all the evil and terror these… babies… have sucked up from the world.”
“How do you know so much about Setebos and his… lice?” asked Ada.
Noman shook his head as if that were too unimportant to deal with now.
And when are you going to start treating that sweet Hannah with the love and attention she deserves, you male pig? thought Ada.
“Noman had something important to tell us… ask us,” said Daeman. Ada’s friend looked worried.
“I need to take the sonie,” said Noman.
Ada blinked again. “Take it where?”
“Up to the rings,” said Noman.
“For how long?” asked Ada. She was thinking You can’t take the sonie! and she knew that Daeman was thinking the same thing.
“I don’t know,” said Odysseus in that strange accent of his.
“Well,” began Ada, “it’s out of the question that you take the sonie. We need it to escape this place. We need it for hunting. We’ll need it for…”
“I have to take the sonie,” repeated Noman. “It’s the only machine on this continent that can get me up there, and I don’t have time to fly to China or somewhere to find another. And the calibani will have made the Mediterranean Basin unapproachable by now.”
“Well,” said Ada again, hearing the edge of rockhard stubbornness that only rarely powered her voice, “you can’t just take the sonie. We’ll all die.”
“That’s not so important right now,” said the gray-bearded warrior.
Ada started to laugh but ended up only staring, her mouth partially open in amazement. “It’s important to us, Noman. We want to live.”
He shook his head as if Ada had not understood. “No one on this planet is going to live unless I can get up to the rings… and today,” he said. “I need the sonie. If I can, I’ll bring it back or send it back to you. If I can’t… well, it won’t matter.”
Ada wished she had a flechette rifle with her. She glanced at the one that Daeman carried—still unslung, he carried it casually. Noman seemed to have no weapon on him, but Ada had seen how strong this man was.
“I need the sonie,” Noman said again. “Today. Now.”
“No,” said Ada.
Down in the Pit, the many-handed orphan suddenly began a wailing, snorting, coughing sound that ended in a noise that sounded very much like a human laugh.
70
A storm was raging far above them. The rings and stars had long since disappeared and lightning illuminated the vertical walls of water on either side and the obscenely pale slash of the Breach stretching away so far to the east and west that the lightning did not last long enough t
o show its immensity.
Now, however, the lightning flashes overlapped, thunder exploding and echoing down the hallway of energy-bound water, and, lying on his back snug in his silk-thin sleeping bag and thermskin, Harman could see the waves fifty stories above, rising and thrashing another hundred or so feet as the Atlantic Ocean threw itself into the frenzy of the storm. The whipping, writhing clouds were only a few hundred feet above the towering waves. And while the dark depths on either side stayed calm here more than five hundred feet below the surface, Harman could see the layers of agitation far above him. Also agitated were the funnel-bridges—he didn’t have a good name for the transparent tubes and cones and energy-bound tunnels of water that connected the Atlantic south of the Breach to the Atlantic north of it, and Moira simply called them “conduits.” There was such a funnel-bridge visible two hundred feet above the dry bottom of the Breach, visible when the lightning flashed at least, less than a half mile to the west of where they had camped and another a mile or so behind them to the east. Both water tunnels were broiling with activity, huge quantities of white water surging from one side of the Breach to the other. Harman wondered if more water was forced across the Breach during storms. Certainly there was more water falling on them now—the shifting energy walls kept the high waves from pouring over and drowning them, but the spray drifted down as a constant mist. Harman’s outer clothes were tucked away in his rucksack, which was completely waterproof he’d discovered, as was the thinskin sleeping bag, but he’d left the osmosis mask open on his thermskin cowl and his face was damp. Whenever he licked his lips, he tasted salt.
Lightning struck the floor of the Breach less than a hundred yards from them. The percussion from the thunder shook Harman’s molars.
“Should we move?” he shouted at Moira, who was in her own thermskin—she stripped naked and pulled on the thermskin right in front of him with no sign of embarrassment, almost as if they were lovers, which, he realized with a blush, they had been.