by Dan Simmons
“Enough with the capitals,” says Achilles. “So the Demogorgon does believe in more than one god.”
“No,” insists the god of fire and artifice. “This big God just has many faces or avatars or forms, sort of like Zeus when he wants to screw a mortal woman. You remember once Zeus turned into a swan to…”
“What the fuck does all this have to do with the hearing that’s going to start in about thirty fucking seconds?” shouts Achilles over his thermskin microphones.
Hephaestus claps his hands over his glass bubble where his ears should be. “Hush,” hisses the dwarf-god over the intercom. “Listen, this has everything to do with our argument to convince the Demogorgon to release the Titans and the others here to attack Zeus, wipe out the current Olympians, and install me as the new king on Olympos.”
“But you just said the Demogorgon is a prisoner here.”
“I did. But Nyx—Night—opened the Brane Hole from Olympos to here. We can go back that way unless it closes before this goddamned hearing, trial, town meeting, whatever it is, gets under way. Besides, I think the Demogorgon can leave whenever it wants to.”
“What kind of prison is it that allows you to leave whenever you want to?” asks Achilles. He’s beginning to think that it’s the bearded dwarf-god who’s the lunatic here.
“You have to know a little about the Demogorgon’s race,” says the bubble-head on top of the iron-bubbled body. “Which is all anyone knows about them… very little. This Demogorgon is imprisoning himself here because he was told to. He can quantum teleport anywhere, any time… if he thinks it’s important enough to. We just have to convince him it’s important enough to.”
“But we have the Brane Hole,” says Achilles. “And what is Nyx getting out of this? You told me at Odysseus’ home before I woke Zeus that Night would open the Hole and I believed you, but why? What’s in it for her?”
“Survival,” says Hephaestus and looks around. All the monstrous shapes seem to be in position. The court is in session. Everyone is waiting for the Demogorgon to speak.
Achilles can see this as well. “What do you mean, survival?” he hisses over the interphone. “You told me yourself that Nyx is the one goddess whom Zeus fears. Her and her goddamned Fates. He can’t hurt her.”
The glass bubble moves back and forth as Hephaestus shakes his head. “Not Zeus. Prospero and Sycorax and… the people… the beings who helped create Zeus, me, the other gods, even the Titans. And I don’t mean Ouranos god of the sky mating with Gaia, mother Earth. Before them.”
Achilles tries to wrap his mind around this concept of someone other than Earth and Night creating the Titans and the gods. He can’t.
“They trapped a creature named Setebos on Mars and your Ilium-Earth for ten years,” continues Hephaestus.
“Who did?” says Achilles. He is totally confused by now. “What is a Setebos? And what relevance can this have to what we have to say to the Demogorgon in one minute?”
“Achilles, you must know enough of our history to know how Zeus and the other young Olympians defeated his father Kronos and the other Titans, even though the Titans were more powerful?”
“I do,” says Achilles, feeling like a child again, being tutored by Chiron, the centaur who raised him. “Zeus won the war between the gods and the Titans by enlisting the aid of terrible creatures against whom the Titans were powerless.”
“And which was the most terrible of these terrible creatures?” asks the bearded dwarf-god through the intercom. His teacherly tone makes Achilles want to gut him on the spot.
“The hundred-armed,” he answers, exerting the last of his patience. The Demogorgon will be speaking any second and none of this gibberish has helped Achilles know what to say. “The monstrous many-handed thing which you gods called Briareous,” he adds, “but which early men called Aigaion.”
“The thing called Briareous and Aigaion is really named Setebos,” hisses Hephaestus. “For ten years this creature has been distracted from its hungry intentions, left to feed on your puny human war between Trojans and Achaeans. But now it is loose again and the quantum underpinnings of the entire solar system are coming unhinged. Nyx is worried that they’ll destroy not only their Earth, but the new Mars and her entire dark dimension. Brane Holes connect everything. They’re being too reckless, this Sycorax and Setebos, Prospero and their ilk. The Fates predict total quantum destruction if someone or something does not intercede. Nyx would prefer me—the crippled dwarf—on the throne of Olympos rather than risk such total quantum meltdown.”
Since Achilles has not the least fucking clue as to what the dwarf-god is babbling about, he remains silent.
The Demogorgon seems to be clearing his non-throat to silence the last of the murmurs and movements in the crowd of Titans, Hours, Charioteers, Healers, and other malformed shapes.
“The best news,” hisses Hephaestus over his intercom, whispering now as if the huge shapeless and veiled mass above them can hear them despite the comm cord, “is that the Demogorgon and his god—the Quiet—eat Seteboses for snacks.”
“The Demogorgon is not the insane one here,” Achilles whispers back. “It’s you who’s crazy as a Trojan shithouse rat.”
“Nonetheless, will you let me speak for us?” Hephaestus whispers, urgency in every syllable.
“Yes,” says Achilles. “But if you say something I don’t agree with, I’m going to hack your cute little suit into separate iron balls and then cut your real balls off and feed them to you through that glass bowl.”
“Fair enough,” says Hephaestus and jerks the comm line free.
“YOU MAY BEGIN YOUR APPEAL,” booms the Demogorgon.
76
They decided to vote on whether Noman could borrow the sonie. The meeting was scheduled for noon, when the minimum number of sentries were posted and the bulk of the day’s necessary chores were done, so that most of the Ardis survivors—including the six newcomers and Hannah, bringing their number up to fifty-five—could attend, but already the nature of Odysseus/Noman’s request had got out to even the farthest-posted sentry and already the consensus was dead set against it.
Hannah and Ada spent the rest of the morning catching up with events. The younger woman was all but inconsolable over the loss of their friends and Ardis Hall itself, but Ada reminded her that the Hall could be rebuilt—at least some crude version of it.
“Do you think we’ll live to see that?” asked Hannah.
Ada had no answer. She squeezed Hannah’s hand.
They talked about Harman, about the details of his odd disappearance from the Golden Gate with the thing called Ariel and about Ada’s sense that Harman was still alive somewhere.
They talked about small things—how food was being prepared these days and Ada’s hopes to enlarge the camp before the voynix began massing as they had.
“Do you know why this Setebos baby keeps them away?” asked Hannah.
“None of us have a real clue,” said Ada. She led the young sculptor to the Pit. The Setebos-thing—Noman had called it a form of louse—was at the bottom, hands and tendrils curled under it, but its yellow eyes stared up with an inhuman indifference much worse than mere malevolence.
Hannah grabbed her temples. “Oh my… oh God… it’s clawing at my mind, wanting to get in.”
“It does that,” Ada said softly. She had carried a flechette rifle to the Pit and now she aimed it casually at the mass of blue-gray tissue and pink hands a few yards below.
“What if it… takes over?” asked Hannah.
“Begins to control us, you mean?” said Ada. “Turns us against one another?”
“Yes.”
Ada shrugged. “We half expect that to begin every day, every night. We’ve discussed it. So far, we all can vaguely hear this Setebos baby calling to us—like a bad smell in the background—but when it comes strongly, as it just did with you, it’s just one person at a time. If the rest of us hear it and feel it, it’s like an… I don’t know… an echo.”
“So you think that if it takes control,” said Hannah, “you think it’ll be one of you at a time.”
Ada shrugged again. “Something like that.”
Hannah looked at the heavy flechette rifle in Ada’s hand. “But if the thing starts controlling you right now, you could kill me—kill a lot of us—before…”
“Yes,” said Ada. “We’ve discussed that as well.”
“Did you come up with some plan?”
“Yes,” Ada said again, very quietly, as she stood above the Pit. “We’re going to kill this abomination before it comes to that.”
Hannah nodded. “But you’ll have to get all your people out of here before you can do that. I see why you don’t want to loan Odysseus the sonie.”
Ada had to sigh. “Do you know why he wants it, Hannah?”
“No. He won’t tell me. There’s so much he won’t tell me.”
“Yet you love him.”
“Since that first day we saw him at the Bridge.”
“You were under the turin cloth back when it worked, Hannah. You know that that Odysseus was married. We heard him speak to the other Achaeans about his wife, Penelope. His teenage son, Telemachus. The language they spoke was strange, but somehow we always understood it under the turin.”
“Yes.” Hannah looked down.
Down in the Pit, the Setebos baby began to scurry back and forth on its many pink hands. Five tendrils snaked up the side of the pit and other hands wrapped around the grill, pulling the metal until it seemed to bend. The thing’s many yellow eyes were very bright.
Daeman was on his way back from the forest and headed toward the noon gathering when he saw the ghost. He was carrying a heavy canvas bag filled with firewood on his back and wishing that he’d been on sentry duty or hunting detail that day instead of having to chop and haul wood when a woman stepped out of the forest only a dozen yards from him.
At first he saw her only in his peripheral vision—enough to know that it was a human being, female, and therefore part of the Ardis community rather than a voynix—and for a few seconds he kept walking, flechette rifle in his right hand but pointed downward, eyes lowered as he hitched up the heavy pack on his back, but when he turned her way to call a greeting, he froze.
It was Savi.
He straightened up and the huge load of wood in his makeshift canvas rucksack almost toppled him over backward. It would not have been an overreaction. He could only stare.
It was Savi—but not the gray-haired, older Savi he’d watched being murdered and dragged off by Caliban in the caverns under Prospero’s hellhole of an orbital isle almost a year earlier—this was a younger, paler, more beautiful Savi.
A resurrected Savi? No.
A ghost was Daeman’s dual stab of thought and fear. His era of old-style humans did not even believe in ghosts, did not truly have the concept of ghosts; he’d never heard of ghosts outside mentions in the turin drama or heard a ghost story until he started sigling the ancient books in Ardis Manor the previous autumn.
But this had to be a ghost.
The young Savi did not seem completely substantial. There was something—shimmery—about her as she saw him, turned, and began walking straight toward him. Daeman realized that he could see through her, more even than he’d been able to see through the hologram of Prospero up on the orbital isle.
Yet somehow he knew that this was no hologram. This was… something… real, real and alive, even as he noticed the soft, pale glow her entire body gave off and the fact that her feet did not seem to be touching the ground with any weight as she strode through the high, brown grass toward him. She was wearing a thermskin and nothing else. Daeman knew from experience that thermskins—not as thick as a coat of paint—made one feel more naked than naked, and that’s how she looked now as she began walking in his direction. Naked. The thermskin was a pale blue but showed every muscle working as she walked, emphasized rather than hid the slight bobble to her breasts. Deaman had grown used to Savi in thermskins, but where there had been slightly sagging breasts, slack buttocks, and floppy thigh muscles with the older Savi, this apparition showed high breasts, a flat stomach, and powerful, young muscles.
He freed his arms from the straps, dropped the load of firewood, and gripped his flechette rifle with both hands. Daeman could see the new inner palisade more than two hundred yards away and even a dark head moving above the line of logs, but no one else was in sight. He and the ghost were alone in this wintry field at the edge of the forest.
“Hello, Daeman.”
It was Savi’s voice. Younger, even more vibrant with life than the mesmerizing voice he remembered, but definitely Savi’s.
Daeman said nothing until she stopped within arm’s reach. Her very solidity seemed to flicker—one second complete, the next transparent and insubstantial. When she was substantial, he could see even the areolae around her slightly raised nipples. The young Savi, he realized, had been very beautiful.
She looked him up and down with those familiar dark eyes he remembered so well. “You look well, Daeman. You’ve lost a lot of weight. Gained muscle.”
Still he did not speak. Everyone who went out into the forest carried one of the high-decibel whistles they’d dug from the ruins. His was on a lanyard around his neck. He had only to raise it and blow it and a dozen armed men or women would be running his way in less than a minute.
Savi smiled. “You’re right. I’m not Savi. We’ve never met. I know you only from Prospero’s descriptions and video recordings.”
“Who are you?” he asked. His voice sounded hoarse, tight, tense, even to himself.
The apparition shrugged as if her identity were of little importance. “My name is Moira.”
The name meant nothing to Daeman. Savi had never mentioned anyone named Moira. Neither had Prospero. For a wild second he wondered if Caliban could be a shapeshifter.
“What are you?” he said at last.
“Ah!” The syllable was launched in Savi’s husky laugh. “A wonderfully intelligent question. Not ‘Why do you look like my dead friend Savi?’ but ‘What are you?’ Prospero was correct. You were never as stupid as you seemed, even a year ago.”
Daeman touched the whistle on his chest and waited.
“I’m a post-human,” said the Savi apparition.
“There are no more post-humans,” Daeman said. With his left hand, he raised the whistle slightly.
“There were no more post-humans,” said the shimmering woman. “Now there are. One. Me.”
“What do you want here?”
She slowly extended her hand and touched his right forearm. Daeman expected her hand to pass through him but her touch was as solid and real as that of any of the Ardis survivors. He could feel the pressure of her long fingers through his jacket. He could also feel an almost electrical tingle there.
“I want to come with you to watch the discussion and then the vote on whether Noman can borrow your sonie,” she said softly.
How in the hell does she know about that? he wondered. Aloud, he said, “If you show up, there probably won’t be a discussion and vote. Even Odys … Noman… will want to know who you are, where you’re from, what you want.”
She shrugged again. “Perhaps. But none of the others will see me. I will be visible only to you. This is a little trick Prospero built into my sisters when they went off to become gods and I decided to keep it for myself. It comes in handy from time to time.”
He fingered the whistle with his left hand, slipped the index finger of his right hand into the trigger guard of the flechette rifle, and looked at her as she shifted slightly from full focus to transparency back to full focus again. There was too much in what she just said to allow him even to frame the proper questions right now. His intuition was that the best thing he could do was keep her around. He couldn’t explain even to himself why that made sense. “Why would you want to come to the discussion?” he asked.
“I am interested in the outcome.”
“Why?”
She smiled. “Daeman, if I can be invisible to the other fifty-five people there, including Noman, I could certainly have remained unseen by you. But I want you to know I’m there. We will talk about things after the discussion and after the vote.”
“Talk about what things?” Daeman had seen the dead, brown, mummified corpses of what Savi, Harman, and he had thought were the last of the post-humans up in the thin, stale air of Prospero’s dying realm. All female. Most of them chewed on by Caliban centuries ago. Daeman had no clue if this apparition was what she claimed to be. To him, she more resembled the goddesses from the turin drama he had watched only on occasion—Athena perhaps, or a much younger Hera. Not as beautiful as the glimpses he’d had of Aphrodite. Suddenly he remembered that almost a year ago, in Paris Crater, there had been word of street altars being set up to the gods from the Trojan War turin drama.
But everyone in Paris Crater now was dead, including his mother. Murdered and eaten by Caliban. The city buried in that blue-ice gunk by Setebos. If the people of his home city had ever prayed to the turin gods and goddesses, it had done them no good. If this was a goddess from the drama, he was sure that she would do him no good.
“We can talk about where your friend Harman is,” said the spectral figure who called herself Moira.
“Where is he? How is he?” Daeman realized that he’d shouted.
She smiled. “We can talk after the vote.”
“At least tell me why this vote is so important that you’ve come from… wherever you’ve come from to watch it,” demanded Daeman, his voice sounding as hard as he’d become inside over the past year.
Moira nodded. “I came to hear it because it is important.”
“Why? To whom? How?”
She said nothing. Her smile had disappeared.
Daeman released the whistle. “Is it important that we give Noman the sonie or important that we don’t loan it to him?”
“I just want to watch,” said the Savi-ghost who called herself Moira. “Not vote.”