by Dan Simmons
“I didn’t ask that.”
“I know,” said the thing with Savi’s voice.
The bell for the conclave rang. People were gathering around the central lean-to, tent, and cooking area.
Daeman was in no hurry to rush to it. He knew it might be less of a threat to lead a live voynix into their camp. He also knew he had a very short time in which to make his decision. “If you can view the meeting without being seen by anyone, why did you reveal yourself to me?” he asked, his voice low.
“I told you,” said the young woman, “this was my choice. Or perhaps I’m like a vampire—I can only enter a place the first time if I am invited in.”
Daeman didn’t know what a vampire was but he didn’t think that was important right now. “No,” he said. “I’m not going to invite you into our safe area unless you give me a compelling reason to do so.”
Moira sighed. “Prospero and Harman also said you were stubborn, but I couldn’t imagine they meant this stubborn.”
“You talk as if you’ve seen Harman,” said Daeman. “Tell me something about him—how he is, where he is—something that will make me believe you’ve met him.”
Moira continued to gaze at him and Daeman felt that the air around their locked gazes should be sizzling.
The bell quit ringing. The meeting had begun.
Daeman stood motionless, silent.
“All right,” said Moira, smiling slightly again. “Your friend Harman has a scar through his pubic hair, just above his penis. I didn’t ask him how he received it but it must have been since his last Twenty. The healing tanks on Prospero’s Isle would never have left it there.”
Daeman did not blink. “I’ve never seen Harman naked,” he said. “You’ll have to tell me something else.”
Moira laughed easily. “You lie. When Prospero and I gave Harman the thermskin he is wearing now, he said that he knew exactly how to get into one—they’re tricky to pull on, you know—and that you and he had worn them for weeks up on the Isle. He said that once you had to strip in front of Savi to pull your thermskins on. You’ve seen him naked and it’s a noticeable scar.”
“Why is Harman wearing a thermskin now?” asked Daeman. “Where is he?”
“Take me to the meeting,” said Moira. “I promise I will tell you about Harman afterward.”
“You should talk to Ada about him,” said Daeman. “They’re… married.” The strange word did not come easily to Daeman.
Moira smiled. “I will tell you and you can tell Ada if you think it is appropriate. Shall we go?” She held out her left arm, crooked, as if he were going to take it to escort her into a formal dining room.
He took her arm.
“… so that’s the beginning and end of my request,” Noman/Odysseus was saying as he saw Daeman enter the circle of fifty-four people. Most were sitting on sleeping pads or blankets. Some were standing. Daeman stood apart, behind the standing survivors.
“You want to borrow our sonie—the one thing offering us a chance of survival here,” said Boman, “and you won’t tell us why you want it or how long you might keep it.”
“That is correct,” said Noman. “I might need it for only a few hours—I could program it to return on its own. It’s possible that the sonie might not return at all.”
“We’d all die,” said one of the Hughes Town survivors, a woman named Stefe.
Noman did not reply.
“Tell us why you need it,” said Siris.
“No, that’s a private matter,” said Noman.
Some of the sitting, kneeling, and standing people chuckled, as if the bearded Greek had made a joke. But Noman did not smile. He was as serious as his demeanor.
“Go find another sonie!” cried Kaman, their would-be military expert. He’d told others that he had never trusted the real Odysseus in the turin drama he’d watched every day for ten years before the Fall and was prepared to trust this older version even less.
“I would find another if I could,” said Noman, his voice level, unagitated. “But the nearest ones I know about are thousands of miles from here. It would take too long for the cobbled-together sky-raft I built to get there, if the thing could get there at all. I need to use the sonie today. Now.”
“Why?” asked Laman, absently rubbing his still-bandaged right hand with its missing fingers.
Noman remained silent.
Ada, who had remained standing near the barrel-chested Greek after her opening of the meeting and her introduction, said softly, “Noman, can you tell us how it might benefit us if we let you borrow the sonie?”
“If I succeed in what I want to do, it’s possible that the faxnodes will begin working again,” he said. “In just a few hours. A few days at most.”
There was an audible intake of breath among the crowd.
“It’s more possible,” he continued, “that they won’t.”
“So that’s your reason for using our sonie?” asked Greogi. “To get the fax pavilions working again?”
“No,” said Noman. “It’s just a possible side effect of my trip. Not even a probable one.”
“Would your… borrowing of the sonie… help us in some other way?” asked Ada. It was clear that she was more sympathetic to Noman’s request than the majority of those frowning among the ragged clump of listeners.
Noman shrugged.
Everyone was so silent for the next moment that Daeman could hear two sentries calling to each other more than a quarter of a mile away to the south. He turned—the spectral Moira was still standing near him, her arms crossed across her thermskinned breasts. Incredible as it was, no one who had looked up to watch the two of them approach the group—including Ada, Noman, and Boman, who had been staring at him since he passed through the palisade gate—evidently had been able to see her.
Noman held out his blunt, powerful hands, fingers splayed as if reaching for them all—or perhaps pushing them all away. “You want to hear that I will perform some miracle for you all,” he said, his tone low but his powerful, rhetoric-trained voice still echoing off the palisade. “There is no such miracle. If you stay here with the sonie, you’ll be killed sooner or later. Even if you evacuate to this island downriver you’re thinking of fleeing to, the voynix will follow you there. They can still fax, and not just through the faxnodes you know about. There are tens of thousands of voynix surrounding you now, massed within two miles of here—while all over the Earth, the last few thousand human survivors are either fleeing or holed up in caves or towers or the ruins of their old communities. The voynix are killing them. You have the advantage that the voynix won’t attack while this Setebos… thing … in the pit is your captive. But within days, if not hours, that Setebos-louse will be strong enough to rip its way out of the pit and into your minds. Trust me, you don’t want to experience that. And, in the end, the voynix will come anyway.”
“All the more reason to keep the sonie to ourselves!” shouted the man named Caul.
Noman turned his hands palms-up. “Perhaps. But soon there will be no place on this Earth for you to flee. Do you think you’re the only ones with a Finder Function? Your functions have ceased to work—the voynix’s and the calibanis’ finder functions haven’t. They’ll find you. Even Setebos will find you when he’s finished gorging himself on your planet’s history.”
“You don’t seem to offer us any chance,” said Tom, the quiet medic.
“I am not,” said Noman, his voice rising now. “It is not for me to offer you a chance, although my trip may accidentally afford you one if I am successful. But the odds of my success are low—I won’t lie to you. You deserve the truth. But if something important does not change, sonie or no sonie, the odds of your success—of your survival—are zero.”
Daeman, who had sworn he would stay quiet during the discussion, heard himself shouting. “Can we go to the rings, Noman? The sonie would take us there—six at a time. It brought me home from Prospero’s Isle on the e-ring. Would we be safe in the orbital rings?”
All faces turned toward him. Not a single gaze moved to where the shimmering Moira stood not six feet to his right.
“No,” said Noman. “You would not be safe in the rings.”
The dark-haired woman named Edide stood suddenly. She seemed to be sobbing and laughing at the same time. “You’re not giving us a fucking chance!”
For the first time—maddeningly, infuriatingly—Odysseus/Noman smiled, his teeth white against his mostly gray beard. “It’s not for me to give you a chance,” he said harshly. “The Fates will either choose to do that or decline to do that. It is up to you today to give me a chance… or not.”
Ada stepped forward. “Let’s vote. I think that no one should abstain in this vote, since everything may depend on it. Those in favor of allowing Odysseus… I’m sorry, I mean Noman… to borrow our sonie, please hold up your right hand. Those opposed, keep your hands down.”
77
The city and battlefield of Troy—ancient Ilium—wasn’t much to look at from five thousand meters up.
“That’s it?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo from the troop carrier deck. “That’s where we were with the Greeks and Trojans fighting? That shrubby hill and bit of land?”
“Six thousand years ago,” said Mahnmut from his control room of The Dark Lady in the dropship’s cargo bay.
“And in another universe,” said Orphu from his corner of The Dark Lady’s own cargo bay.
“It doesn’t look like much,” said Suma IV from the controls of the dropship. “Can we move on?”
“One more circle, please,” said Mahnmut. “Can we go lower? Fly over the plain between the ridge and the sea? Or the beach?”
“No,” said Suma IV. “Use your optics to magnify. I don’t choose to run that close to the interdiction field dome over the dried-up Mediterranean Sea or get that low.”
“I was thinking of getting a little closer to allow Orphu’s radar and thermal imaging to get better signals,” said Mahnmut.
“I’m fine,” rumbled the intercom voice from the hold.
The dropship orbited again at five thousand meters, the westernmost part of its circle above the ruins on the hilltop and still more than a kilometer from where the Mediterranean Basin began. Mahnmut zoomed his image from the primary camera feed, shut off other inputs, and looked down with a strange sense of sadness.
The rubble of the ruins of the ancient stones where Ilium had once stood lay on a ridge running westward toward the curve of Aegean shore—it was never really a bay, just a bend where ancient ships had tied up to stakes and stone anchors. And where Agamemnon and all the Greek heroes had beached their hundreds of black ships.
To the west then, the Aegean and Mediterranean had stretched forever—the wine-dark sea—but now, through the slight shimmer of the post-human-created interdiction field that would cut all the dropship’s power in a millisecond if they flew into it, there stretched away only more dirt, more rock, distant green fields—the dry Mediterranean Basin. Also easily visible to the west were ancient islands that once rose from the sea—islands that Achilles had conquered before assaulting Troy: Imbros, Lemnos, and Tenedos, visible now only as steep, forest-covered hills with rocky bases meeting the sandy bottom of the Basin.
Between the now-dry Aegean and the ridge holding the ruins of Troy, Mahnmut could see a kilometer and a half or so of alluvial plain. It was a forest of scrub trees now, but the little moravec could easily see this plain as it was when he had been there with Odysseus, Achilles, Hector, and all the other warriors—about three curving miles of shallow sea fringed with marshes and sandy alluvial flats, the man-crowded beach, the sand dunes that had soaked up so much blood in the years of fighting there, the thousands of bright tents above the beach, then the wide plain between the beach and the city—wooded now, but stripped bare of all trees then after a decade of foraging for firewood for cooking fires and corpse fires.
To the north there was water still visible: the strait once called the Dardanelles, the Hellespont, dammed up by glowing forcefield hands of the same sort as between Gibraltar and Africa on the west end of the drained Mediterranean.
As if he were studying the same area with his radar and other instruments, Orphu said over their private circuit—“The post-humans must have built some huge drainage system underground or this entire area would be flooded now.”
“Yes,” sent Mahnmut, not really interested in the engineering or physics of the thing. He was thinking of Lord Byron and of Alexander the Great and of all the others who had made their pilgrimage to Ilium, Troy, this strangely sacred site.
No stone there is without a name. The words seemed just to appear in Mahnmut’s mind. Who had written that? Lucan? Perhaps. Probably.
On the hilltop now, only a few gray-white scars of disturbed rock showed, a tumble of stones, all without a name. Mahnmut realized that he was looking at the ruins of ruins—some of those scrapes and scars probably dated back to the Troy-fanatic and amateur archaeologist Schlie-mann’s careless digs and brutal excavations from when he first started digging in 1870—more than three thousand years ago on this true Earth.
It was noplace special now. The last name it had held on any human map was Hisarlik. Rocks, scrub trees, an alluvial plain, a high ridge looking north to the Dardanelles and west to the Aegean.
But in Mahnmut’s mind’s eye he could see precisely where the armies had clashed on the Plains of Scamander and the Plain of Simois. He could see where the walls and topless towers of Ilium had held their high place there, where the long ridge dropped down toward the sea. He could still make out a thicketed ridge in between the city and the sea—the Greeks had called it Thicket Ridge even then, but the priests and priestesses in the temples of Troy often referred to it as Mryine’s Mounded Tomb—and he remembered how he had watched Zeus’s face rise in the south as an atomic mushroom cloud not so many months ago.
Six thousand years ago.
As the dropship completed its last, high circling, Mahnmut could make out where the great Scaean Gate had held back the screaming Greeks—there had been no large wooden horse in the Iliad Mahnmut had seen firsthand, and the great, main lane inside past the marketplace and central fountains all leading to Priam’s palace, destroyed in the bombing more than ten months ago in Mahnmut’s time, and just northeast of the palace the great Temple to Athena. Where only rocks waited now and scrub trees grew, Mahnmut from Europa could see where the busy Dardanian Gate had been and the main watchtower and well just north of it where once Helen had…
“There’s nothing here,” said their pilot, Suma IV, over the intercom. “I’m leaving now.”
“Yes,” said Mahnmut.
“Yes,” rumbled Orphu over the same commline.
They flew north, retracting the slow-flight wings and breaking the sound barrier again. The echo of the sonic boom went unheard on both sides of the empty Dardanelles.
“Are you excited?” Mahnmut asked his friend over their private line. “We’ll be seeing Paris in a few minutes.”
“A crater where the center of Paris used to be,” answered Orphu. “I think that black hole millennia ago took out Proust’s apartment.”
“Still and all,” said Mahnmut, “it’s where he wrote. And for a while a fellow named James Joyce as well, if I remember correctly.” Orphu rumbled. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that you were obsessed with Joyce as well as Proust?” persisted Mahnmut. “It never came up.”
“But why those two as your primary focus, Orphu?”
“Why Shakespeare, Mahnmut? Why his sonnets rather than his plays? Why the Dark Lady and the Young Man rather than, say, Hamlet?”
“No, answer my question,” said Mahnmut. “Please.” There was a silence. Mahnmut listened to the ramjet engines behind and above them, the hiss of the oxygen flowing through umbilicals and ventilators, the static emptiness of the main comm lines.
Finally Orphu said, “Remember my spiel up in the Mab about how great human artists—singularities of genius—could bring new re
alities into existence? Or at least allow us to cross universal Branes to them?”
“How could I forget? None of us knew if you were serious.”
“I was serious,” rumbled Orphu. “My interest in human beings focused on their Twentieth through Twenty-second centuries, counting from Christ. I decided long ago that Proust and Joyce had been the consciousnesses that had helped midwife those centuries into being.”
“Not a positive recommendation, if I remember history correctly,”
Mahnmut said softly. “No. I mean, yes.” They flew in silence for a few more minutes. “Would you like to hear a poem I ran across when I was a little pup of a moravec, fresh from the growth bins and factory latices?” Mahnmut tried to imagine a newborn Orphu of Io. He gave up the effort. “Yes,” he said. “Tell me.” Mahnmut had never heard his friend rumble poetry before. It was an oddly pleasant sound—
Still Born
I.
Little Rudy Bloom, ruddy-cheeked in his mother’s womb Red light permeating his sleepy, unfocused watchings Molly clicking long knitting needles as she weaves red wool for him Feeling his small feet move against the inside of her Tiny fetus dreams consume him, preparing him for the smell of blankets
II.
A man gently pats his lips with a red napkin Eyes focused on a sea of clouds drifting behind high brick chimneys Submerged in the sudden memory of hawthorn stalks rubbing together in a storm Reaching small hands out towards fluttering pink petals The scents of days long past curl into the low wings of his nostrils
III.
Eleven days. Eleven times the lifespan of a tiny creature emerging from a cocoon Eleven hush-stained mornings of warmth and shadow creeping across floorboards Eleven thousand heartbeats before night fell and the ducks abandoned the far pond Eleven indicated by the long and short hands when she held him to her breast Eleven days they watched his pink body sleeping in ruddy wool
IV.
Fragments of the novel were bound in his imagination But loose pages drifted through the dark channels of his mind Some were blank, others contained nothing but footnotes Tediously he had suffered the contractions of his imagination But once in ink, the memories never survived the night