by Dan Simmons
There.
It was a black metal monolith just aft of the captain’s station. No barnacles, mollusks, coral, or slime had attached themselves to it. The thing was so black that Harman’s lamps had not reflected back from it on his first several passes through that part of the command center.
This was the boat’s central AI, built to interface in a hundred ways with the submarine’s captain and crew. Harman knew that a quantum computer, even from this lost age, even one dead for more than two millennia, would be more alive at one percent capacity than most living things on the planet. Quantum artificial minds died hard and died slowly.
Harman knew that he would not have the codes to access the central AI’s banks, perhaps not even the language to understand the codes he did not know, but he also knew that it didn’t matter. His functions were developed and nanogenetically programmed into his DNA long after this machine had died. It would have no secrets from him.
The thought terrified him.
Harman wanted out of this flooded crypt. He wanted to get away from the radiation that must be pinging through his skin, brain, balls, guts, and eyes even as he stood here, frozen in indecision.
But he had to know.
Harman set his palm atop the black metal monolith.
The submarine was named The Sword of Allah. It had left its port on….
Harman skipped the log entries, dates, reasons for the ancient war—he lingered only long enough to confirm it was after the rubicon release, during the Dementia years when the Global Caliphate was near its end, the democracies of the West and Europe were already dead, the New European Union a fiction of gasping vassal states under the rising Khanate….
None of that mattered. What was in the belly of this submarine, as real as the fetus growing in the womb of his wife Ada, was what mattered.
Harman did pause long enough to listen to a fast-forward of the last testament of The Sword of Allah’s twenty-six crew members. The Mohammed-class ballistic-missile submarine was so automated that it required a crew of only eight, but there had been so many volunteers that twenty-six of the Chosen had been allowed to go on its last mission.
They were all men. They were all devout. They all surrendered their souls to Allah as their doom approached—a cordon of Khanate attack submarines, aircraft, spacecraft, and surface ships as far as Harman could tell. The men knew that they had only minutes to live—that the Earth had only minutes before its destruction.
The captain had given the launch command. The primary AI had seconded it and relayed it.
Why hadn’t the missiles launched? Harman searched the AI to its quantum guts and could find no reason why the missiles had not launched. The human command had been given, the four sets of physical keys had been turned, the AI target-package coordinates and individual launch commands had been confirmed and relayed, the missiles had been denoted in the proper launch sequence, the switches—both virtual and literal—had closed. All of the massive-metal missile hatches had been successively opened by redundant hydraulics—only a thin, blue, fiberglass dome had separated the missile tubes from the ocean, and each of these launch tubes had been filled with nitrogen to equalize the pressure to keep that ocean from rushing in until the actual instant of launch. The forty-eight missiles should have been propelled out of their crèches by the nitrogen gas generators, a twenty-five-hundred-volt charge igniting the nitrogen discharge. The gas itself would have produced more than eighty-six thousand pounds per square inch of pressure in less than a second, sending the missiles hurtling upward within their own rising bubbles of nitrogen until they popped out of the sea like rising corks, and then the solid rocket propellant in each missile would have been ignited the second the missiles hit open air above. There were redundant and double-redundant launch and ignition initiators. The missiles should have roared and flown to their targets. The AI’s launch indicators were all red. In each of the forty-eight missile silos back in the pregnant belly of The Sword of Allah, the sequence had proceeded properly from HOLD to DENOTE to LAUNCH to SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCHED.
But the missiles were all still sitting in their tubes. The dead and decaying AI knew that and communicated something like shame and chagrin through Harman’s tingling palm.
Harman’s heart was pounding so fiercely and he was breathing so raggedly that the osmosis mask had to lower the oxygen input so he wouldn’t hyperventilate.
Forty-eight missiles. Forty-eight warhead-platforms. Each warhead was MRVed and carried sixteen separate reentry vehicles. Seven hundred sixty-eight actual warheads, all armed, primed, safeties off, set to go. They had been targeted at seven hundred and sixty-eight of the world’s remaining cities, ancient monuments, and dwindling rubicon-survivors’ population centers.
But these were no mere thermonuclear warheads such as carried in The Sword of Allah’s torpedoes.
Each of the seven hundred sixty-eight actual warheads still aboard this sub carried a tenuously contained black hole. The human race’s and the Global Caliphate’s ultimate weapon at that point in time—its ultimate detergent, thought Harman with a noise that was part sob, part giggle.
The black holes in themselves were small. Each not much larger than what one of the dead crewmen had described in his urgent and religious farewell speech as “the soccer ball I grew up kicking around the ruins of Karachi.” But when they escaped their containment spheres and dropped on their targets, the result would be much more dramatic than a mere thermonuclear weapon.
The black hole would plunge into the earth, creating a soccer-ball-sized hole in the center of whatever target city it arrived at. But the second it was exposed there would be a plasma implosion a thousand times worse than a thermonuclear explosion. The descending black hole, turning all earth, rock, water, and magma ahead of it into a rising cloud of steam and plasma, would also suck in behind it the people, buildings, vehicles, trees, and actual molecular structure of its target city and hundreds of square miles around it.
The black hole that had created the kilometer-wide hole in the center of Paris Crater had been less than a millimeter wide and unstable—it had eaten itself before reaching the Earth’s core. Harman knew now that eleven million people had died because of that ancient experiment gone wrong.
These black holes were not meant to eat themselves. They were meant to ping-pong back and forth through the earth, reemerging into atmosphere, plunging back through the planet. Seven hundred sixty-eight plasma and ionizing-radiation surrounded spheres of ultimate destruction coring and recoring the Earth’s crust, mantle, magma, and core again and again and again, for months or years, until they all came to rest at the center of this dear, good Earth and began eating the fabric of the planet itself.
The twenty-six crewmen’s voices Harman had listened to had all celebrated this outcome to their mission. They would all be reunited in Paradise. Praise God!
Wanting only to be sick within his constraining osmosis mask, Harman forced himself to keep his hand on the black-monolith AI for another full, endless, eternal minute. There had to be some instructions here for finding some way to disarm these activated blackholes.
Their warhead containment fields had been very powerful, designed to last for centuries if they had to.
They had lasted for more than two and one-half millennia, but they were very unstable. Once one of the black holes escaped, they all would. It did not matter one iota whether they began their voyage to the Earth’s core and beyond from their targets or from this place along the north wall of the Atlantic Breach. The outcome would be the same.
There were no procedures in the AI or anywhere in The Sword of Allah for disarming them. The singularities existed—had for almost two hundred and fifty of Harman’s standard Five Twenties—and in a world where old-style humans’ highest technology consisted of crossbows, there was no way to reset their containment fields.
Harman pulled his hand away.
Later, he had no memory of finding his way out of the submerged parts of the submarine, or
of staggering out through the dry forward torpedo room, through the rent in the hull, out onto the sunny strip of muddy dirt that was the Atlantic Breach.
He did remember peeling off his cowl and osmosis mask, dropping to his hands and knees, and vomiting for long minutes. Long after he’d gotten rid of the little substance in his belly—the food bars were nutritious but left little residue—he continued dry retching.
Then he was too weak even to stay on his hands and knees, so he crawled away from his own vomitus, collapsed, and rolled onto his back, looking up at the long, thin blue strip of sky. The rings were faint but clear, revolving, crossing, moving like the pale hands of some obscene clock mechanism counting down the hours or days or months or years until the warhead containment spheres just yards from Harman decayed to collapse.
He knew that he should get away from the radioactive wreck—crawl west if he had to—but his heart had no will to do so.
Finally, after what must have been hours—the strip of sky was darkening toward evening—Harman activated the function to query his own biomonitors.
As he’d suspected, the dosage he’d received had been lethal. The dizziness he felt now would only grow worse. The vomiting and dry retching would soon return. Blood was already pooling under his skin. Within hours—the process had already begun—the cells in his bowels and guts would begin sloughing off by the billion. Then would come the bloody diarrhea—intermittent at first but then constant as his body began literally to shit his dissolved guts out into the world. Then the bleeding would become primarily internal, cell walls breaking down completely, entire systems collapsing.
He’d live long enough to see and feel all this, he knew. Within a day he’d be too weak even to stagger along between the episodes of diarrhea and vomiting. He’d be prostrate in the Breach, his stillness broken only by involuntary seizures. Harman knew that he wouldn’t even be able to look at the blue sky or stars as he died—the biomonitors already reported the radiation-induced cataracts building on the surface of both his eyes.
Harman had to grin. No wonder Prospero and Moira had given him only a few days’ worth of food bars. They must have known he wouldn’t need even that many.
Why? Why make me Prometheus for the human race with all these functions, all this knowledge, all this promise to give Ada and my species, only to let me die alone here… like this?
Harman was still sane and conscious enough to know that billions of human beings no more elect than himself had hurled similar final thoughts toward the unanswering skies in the hours and minutes before their death.
He was also wise enough now to be able to answer his own question. Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Adam and Eve tasted of the fruit of knowledge in the Garden. All the old creation myths told versions of the same tale, exposed the same terrible truth—steal fire and knowledge from the gods and you become something more than the animals you evolved from, but still something far, far below any real God.
Harman at that second would give anything to rid himself of the twenty-six last personal and religious testaments by the madmen who crewed The Sword of Allah. In those impassioned farewells he felt the full weight of the burden he had been about to bring back to Ada, to Daeman, to Hannah, to his friends, to his species.
He realized that all of the last year—the turin-cloth story of Troy that had been Prospero’s little joke-gift to the old-humans, passed on through Odysseus and Savi, their various mad quests, the deadly masque on Prospero’s Isle up in the e-ring, his escape, the Ardis Manor people’s discovery of how to build weapons, fashion some crude beginnings to society, discover politics, even grope toward some religion…
It had all made them human again.
The human race had returned to Earth after more than fourteen hundred years of coma and indifference.
Harman realized that his and Ada’s child would have been fully human—perhaps the first real human being to be born after all those comfortable, inhuman, watched-over-by-false-post-human gods’ centuries of stasis—confronted by danger and mortality at every turn, forced to invent, pressured to create bonds with other human beings just to survive the voynix and the calibani and Caliban himself and the Setebos thing…
It would have been exciting. It would have been terrifying. It would have been real.
And it all would have led, could have led, might have led, back to The Sword of Allah.
Harman rolled to one side and vomited again. This time the vomitus consisted mostly of blood and mucus.
More rapid than I thought.
Eyes closed against the pain—all the varieties of pain, but most especially against the pain of this new knowledge—Harman felt on his right hip. The pistol was still secure there.
He undid the strap, pulled the weapon free of the stick-tite pad, used his other hand to rack the chamber the way Moira had shown him—chambering one of the shells—clicked off the safety, and held the muzzle to his temple.
75
The Demogorgon fills half of the flame-filled sky. Asia, Panthea, and the silent sister Ione continue to cower. The rocks and ridges and volcanic summits nearby are filling with gigantic, looming shapes—Titans, Hours, monster steeds, monster-monsters, Healer-type giant centipedes, inhuman Charioteers, more Titans, all coming to their positions like jurors showing up for a trial on the steps of a Greek temple. The thermskin goggles allow Achilles to see everything and he almost wishes they didn’t.
The monsters of Tartarus are too monstrous; the Titans too shaggy and titanic; the Charioteers and the things the Demogorgon had called the Hours aren’t really possible to bring into full focus at all. They make Achilles think of the time he cleaved a Trojan’s belly and chest open with a sword stroke and found a small human homunculus staring out at him, blue eyes seeming to blink at him through the shattered ribs and spilled entrails. It had been the only time he’d ever vomited on the battlefield. These Hour and Charioteer things were equally as difficult to look at.
As the Demogorgon waits for the monstrous jurors to sort themselves out and gather, Hephaestus pulls a slim cord from the helmet bubble of his absurd suit and clips the end of the line into the cowl of Achilles’ thermskin.
“Can you hear me now?” asks the crippled dwarf-god. “We have a few minutes to talk.”
“Yes, I hear you, but can’t the Demogorgon also? He did before.”
“No, this is a hardline. That Demogorgon is a lot of things, but not J. Edgar Hoover.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Listen, son of Peleus, we have to coordinate what we’re going to say to this giant rabble and the Demogorgon. A lot depends on it.”
“Don’t call me that,” growls Achilles with a glare that has frozen battlefield enemies in their tracks.
The god Hephaestus actually takes an alarmed step back, accidentally pulling tight the communications cord between them. “Call you what?”
“Son of Peleus. I never want to hear that phrase again.”
The god of artifice holds up his heavily gauntleted hands, palms outward. “Fine. But we still have to talk. We only have a minute or two before this kangaroo court commences.”
“What is a kangaroo?” Achilles is growing tired of this mini-god’s double-talk. The fleet-footed mankiller’s sword is in his hand. He has a strong suspicion that all he has to do to kill this so-called immortal is slash a gash in the bearded fool’s metal suit, and then step back to watch the god of fire choke to death on the acid air. Then again, Hephaestus is an Olympian immortal, even without the big bug’s Healing tanks back on Olympos. So perhaps, as Achilles had, the impudent bearded cripple, exposed to Tartarus’ acid air, would just cough, gag, retch, and sprawl around in pain for an eternity until one of the Oceanids ate him. It is a powerful impulse in Achilles to find out.
He resists the urge.
“Never mind,” says Hephaestus. “What are you going to say to the Demogorgon? Shall I do all the talking for us?”
“No.”
“Well, we need to get
our stories straight. What are you going to ask the Demogorgon and the Titans to do other than kill Zeus?”
“I am not going to ask this Demogorgon thing to kill Zeus,” Achilles says firmly.
The bearded dwarf-god looks surprised behind the glass of his head-bubble. “You’re not? That’s why I thought we were here.”
“I am going to kill Zeus myself,” says Achilles. “And feed his liver to Argus, Odysseus’ dog.”
Hephaestus sighs. “All right. But for me to sit on the throne of Olympos—the deal you offered me and which Nyx agreed to—we still need to convince the Demogorgon to intercede. And the Demogorgon is insane.”
“Insane?” says Achilles. Most of the monstrous shapes seem to be in position now among the ridgelines, cindercones, and lava flows.
“You heard the thing going on about the God supreme, didn’t you?” says Hephaestus.
“I don’t know which god Demogorgon speaks of, if not Zeus.”
“Demogorgon is speaking of some single, supreme god of the entire universe,” says Hephaestus, his already raspy voice rasping even more over the communications line. “One god with a capital ‘G’ and no others at all.”
“That’s absurd,” says Achilles.
“Yes,” agrees the god of fire. “That’s why the Demogorgon’s race exiled him to this prison world of Tartarus.”
“Race?” says Achilles incredulously. “You mean there’s more than one of these Demogorgons?”
“Of course. Nothing living comes in complete sets of one, Achilles. Even you must have learned that. This Demogorgon is as crazy as a Trojan shithouse rat. He worships some single all-powerful capital-G god and sometimes refers to him as ‘the Quiet.’ ”
“The Quiet?” Achilles tries to imagine any god being a silent god. The concept is certainly something out of his experience.
“Yes,” growls Hephaestus over the cowl earphones. “Only this ‘the Quiet’ isn’t all of the single all-powerful capital-G god, but is just one of many manifestations of Him… capital H there.”