by Dan Simmons
When the Ionian rumble died away on the intercom, Mahnmut was silent for a short while, trying to assess the quality of the thing. He had trouble doing so, but he knew it meant a lot to Orphu of Io—the giant moravec’s voice had almost trembled near the end.
“Who is it by?” asked Mahnmut.
“I don’t know,” said Orphu. “Some Twenty-first Century female poet whose name was lost with the rest of the Lost Era. Remember, I encountered this when I was young—before I’d really read Proust or Joyce or any other serious human writer—but this bit of verse cemented Joyce and Proust together for me as two facets of a single consciousness. A singularity of human genius and insight. I never quite got over that perception.”
“It’s rather like the first time I encountered Shakespeare’s sonnets …” began Mahnmut.
“Turn on your video feed relayed from the Queen Mab,” Suma IV ordered all hands aboard.
Mahnmut activated the feed.
Two human beings were copulating wildly on a broad bed of silk sheets and bright woolen tapestries. Their energy and earnestness was astounding to Mahnmut, who had read enough about human sexual intercourse, but who had never thought to look up a video recording of it from the archives.
“What is it?” asked Orphu over the private comm. “I’m getting wild telemetric data—blood pressure levels soaring, dopamine flowing, adrenaline, heartbeat pounding—some fight to the death somewhere?”
“Ah …” said Mahnmut. Then the figures rolled over, still joined and moving rhythmically, almost frenetically, and the moravec saw the man’s face clearly for the first time.
Odysseus. The woman appeared to be the Sycorax person who had greeted their Achaean passenger on the orbital asteroid city. Her breasts and buttocks seemed even larger now, unfettered as they were, although at this particular instant, the woman’s breasts were flattened against Odysseus’ chest.
“Um …” began Mahnmut again.
Suma IV saved him.
“That input isn’t important. Switch to the forward dropship cameras.”
Mahnmut did so. He knew that Orphu was turning to the thermal, radar, and other imaging data he was still capable of receiving.
They were approaching the black-hole-cratered Paris, but just as in the images taken from the Queen Mab, there was no crater visible, only a dome-cathedral seemingly spun of webbed blue-ice.
Suma IV radioed the Mab: “Where is our many-handed friend who built this thing?”
“No Brane Holes visible anywhere we can see from orbit,” replied Asteague/Che at once. “Neither our ship viewers nor the cameras on the satellites we seeded can find it. The thing seems to have finished feasting on Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the other sites for the time being. Perhaps it’s returned home to Paris.”
“It has,” said Orphu on the shared comm. “Check the thermal imaging. Something very big and very ugly is nested right in the center of that blue spiderweb, just beneath the highest part of that dome. There are a lot of thermal vents there—it seems to be heating its nest with warmth from the crater—but it’s there, all right. You can almost see the hundreds of oversized fingers under the warm areas of the glowing brain in the deep-thermal imaging.”
“Well,” said Mahnmut over his private line, “at least it’s your Paris. Proust’s City of…”
Afterward, Mahnmut would never understand how Suma IV reacted so quickly, even while jacked into the dropship’s controls and central computer.
The six bolts of lightning leaped upward from different points around the giant blue dome. Only the dropship’s altitude and its pilot’s instantaneous reflexes saved them.
The dropship shifted from ramjets to scramjets, hurtled sideways in a 75-g bank, dove, rolled, and then climbed toward the north, but the six streaks of billion-volt lightning still missed them only by a few hundred meters. The implosion of air and shock wave of thunder flipped the dropship over twice, but Suma IV never lost control. The wings retracted to fins and the dropship ran for it.
Suma IV banked again, rolled deliberately, triggered full-active stealth, popped flares, and blanketed the air above the Paris blue-ice cathedral-dome with electronic interference.
A dozen fireballs rose from the ice-buried city, hurtling skyward at Mach 3, seeking them, seeking them, accelerating, seeking them. Mahnmut watched the radar track with something more than casual interest and knew that Orphu, with his direct sensory radar feed, must be feeling the plasma-missiles closing on him.
They did not find the dropship. Suma IV already had them scramjetting at Mach 5 and rising above thirty-two thousand meters and climbing into the fringes of space. The fireball-meteors exploded at different altitudes below them, their shock waves overlapping like a dozen violent ripples on pond.
“Why, that fucker …” began Orphu.
“Silence,” snapped Suma IV. The dropship rolled, dove, turned south, expanded its sphere of radar and electronic interference, and climbed again toward space. No fireballs or lightning came up from the city that was falling behind so quickly—six hundred kilometers below and behind already and getting smaller by the second.
“I guess our many-handed brain friend has weapons,” said Mahnmut.
“So do we,” came Mep Ahoo’s voice on the comm. “I think we should nuke him… warm up his nest for him a little bit. Ten million degrees Fahrenheit would do for a start.”
“Quiet!” snapped Suma IV from the cockpit.
Prime Integrator Asteague/Che’s voice came over the common band. “My friends, we… you… have a problem down there.”
“Tell us about it,” rumbled Orphu of Io, still forgetting that he was still on the common radio link.
“No,” said the Prime Integrator, “I am not speaking of the many-handed creature’s attack on you. I’m talking about a more serious problem. And just beneath your current trajectory track. Our sensors might not have picked it up if they had not been following you.”
“More serious?” sent Mahnmut.
“Much more serious,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “And not just one serious problem, I’m afraid… but seven hundred and sixty-eight of them.”
78
“ PROCEED WITH YOUR APPEAL,” booms the Demogorgon.
Hephaestus nudges Achilles to signify that he will do the speaking, makes an awkward bow—a series of iron spheres and one glass bubble bobbling—and says, “Your Demogorgoness, Lord Kronos and other respected Titanisms, Immortal Hours, and… honorable other things. My friend Achilles and I come here today not to appeal, not to ask you for a boon, but to share essential information with all of you. Information you need to know and will want to know. Information which…”
“SPEAK UP, CRIPPLED GOD.”
Hephaestus forces a smile through his beard, grits his teeth hard, and repeats his preamble.
“SPEAK THEN.”
Achilles wonders if Kronos and the other Titans, not to mention the huge, indescribable entities surrounding them, things with odd names like the Immortal Hours and Charioteers, are going to take an active part in this meeting or if the Demogorgon has the floor until it—he—she—it—formally recognizes someone or something else to speak.
Hephaestus then surprises him.
From his bulky backpack—a clumsy iron and canvas frame holding what Achilles imagined must be tanks of air—the god of artifice pulls a brass ovoid studded with glass lenses. He carefully sets the device on the top of a boulder between him and the looming Demogorgon and fusses with various switches and settings. Then the dwarf-god says, shouting and amplifying his helmet speakers to the maximum, “Your Demogorgonoidness, most noble and frightening Hours, your most majestic Titans and Titanesses—Kronos, Rhea, Krios, Koios, Hyperion, Iapetos, Theia, Helios, Selene, Eos, and all others of Titan-persuasion assembled here—your many-armed Healernesses, rudely shaped Charioteers—all honored Beings out there in the fog and ash—rather than make my own case today, the case for removing the pretender Zeus from the throne for attempting to usurp all divi
nity unto himself—asking you to depose him, or at least oppose him, for presumptuously claiming all worlds and universes his own from this day forth to the end of time, I shall allow you to see an actual event. For even as we huddle here on this lava-riddled shitheap of a world, Zeus has called all the Olympian immortals into the Great Hall of the Gods. I left my camera concealed there but broadcasting live to a repeater station in Hellas Basin—the immortal Nyx’s Brane Hole allows us to receive this broadcast with less than a second of delay time. Behold!”
Hephaestus fiddles with more switches, throws a toggle.
Nothing happens.
The god of fire bites his lip, curses into his microphone, and fiddles with the brass device some more. It blinks, whirs, flickers, and falls silent again.
Achilles begins to slide his god-killing blade from its place in his belt.
“Behold!” cries Hephaestus, again using full amplification.
This time the brass device projects a rectangle almost a hundred yards wide into the air above them all, in front of the Demogorgon and the hundreds of hulking forms in the red lava-light and smoke around them. The rectangle shows nothing but static and snow.
“Oh, fuck me,” growls Hephaestus, each word quite audible over his helmet speakers. He hurries to the device and wiggles some metal rods which remind Achilles of the ears of a rabbit.
The huge image above them leaps into clarity. It is a holographic projection, very deep, fully three-dimensional, in living color, striking the eye like a wide window into the actual Hall of the Gods itself. The visuals are accompanied by surround-sound—Achilles can hear the nearby whisper of the hundreds upon hundreds of the waiting gods’ sandals scuffing softly on marble. When Hermes softly breaks wind, it is audible to everyone here.
The Titans, Titanesses, Hours, Charioteers, insectoid Healers, unnamed monstrous shapes—everyone except the Demogorgon—gasp, each in its own inhuman way. Not at Hermes’ indiscretion, but at the immediacy and impact of the still widening and encircling holographic projection. By the time the band of light and motion closes around them here, the illusion of being among the immortals in the Great Hall of the Gods is very powerful. Achilles actually pulls his blade further free, thinking that Zeus on his golden throne and the thousand Olympian gods standing around them must certainly hear the noise in their midst and turn to see them all huddled here in the reek and gloom of Tartarus.
The Olympian gods do not turn. It’s a one-way broadcast.
Zeus—at least fifty feet tall on his throne—leans forward, scowls out at the ranks upon ranks of assembled gods, goddesses, Furies, and Erinyeses, and begins to speak. Achilles can clearly hear the god’s newfound ultimate self-importance in the archaic cadence of each slow syllable:
“You congregated powers of this Olympos, you who share the glory and the strength of him ye serve, rejoice! Henceforth I am omnipotent. All else has been subdued to me; alone the souls of man, like unextinguished fire, yet burns towards heaven with fierce reproach, and doubt, and lamentation, and reluctant prayer, hurling up insurrection, which might make our antique empire insecure, though built on eldest faith, and hell’s coeval, fear; And though my curses through the pendulous air, like snow on herbless peaks, fall flake by flake, and cling to it, though under my wrath’s night it climbs the crags of life, step after step, which wound it, as ice wounds unsandaled feet, it yet remains supreme o’er misery, aspiring, unrepressed, yet soon to fall:
Zeus stands suddenly and the radiance flowing from him is so brilliant that a thousand immortal gods and one very mortal man in a sweaty chameleon suit—the stealth-suited man is quite visible to Hephaestus’ camera and thus to everyone here in Tartarus—take a hesitant step backward as Zeus continues.
“Pour forth heaven’s wine, Idaean Ganymede, and let it fill the Daedal cups like fire, and from the flower-inwoven soil divine ye all triumphant harmonies arise, as dew from earth under the twilight stars: Drink! Be the nectar circling through your veins the soul of joy, ye ever-living gods, till exaltation bursts in one wide voice like music from Elysian winds.
And thou now attend beside me, veiled in the light of the desire which makes thee one with me, as I become God Ascendant, the single God to thee, the one and true Omnipotent God, Almighty God, true Lord of all Eternity!”
Hephaestus shuts off the brass and glass projector. The huge, circular window binding Tartarus to the Hall of the Gods on Olympos flicks out of existence and everything returns to cinder, soot, stink, and red gloom. Achilles shifts his feet farther apart, hefts his shield, and holds his god-killing knife out of sight behind that shield. He has no idea what will happen next.
For the longest moments, nothing does happen. Achilles expects shouts, cries, demands that Hephaestus prove that the images and voices had been real, Titans bellowing, the big Healer bugs scuttling around on rocks—but there is no movement, no sound from the hundreds of gigantic figures still gathered around. The air is so thick with smoke, the red-lava glare so filtered by the ash in the air, that Achilles silently thanks the gods—or someone—for the thermskin goggles he’s wearing that allow him to see what’s going on. He sneaks a glance at the Brane Hole that Hephaestus had said Nyx—Goddess Night herself—had opened for him. The Hole’s still there, about two hundred yards away, perhaps fifty feet high. If fighting starts, if the Demogorgon decides to eat both dwarf-god and Achaean hero as a snack, Achilles plans to make a run for that Brane Hole, even though he knows he’ll have to hack his way through giants and beasties every foot of the way. He’s prepared to do so.
The silence stretches. Dark winds howl over misshapen boulders and more misshapen sentient forms. The volcano burbles and belches but the Demogorgon does not make a noise.
Finally, it speaks—“ALL SPIRITS ARE ENSLAVED WHICH SERVE THINGS EVIL. NOW THOU KNOWEST WHETHER ZEUS BE SUCH OR NO.”
“Evil??” roars Kronos the Titan. “My son is mad! He is the usurper of all usurpers.”
Rhea, Zeus’s mother, has an even louder voice. “Zeus rides the wreckage of his own will. He is the scorn of the earth and the bane of Olympos. He needs to suffer the outcast of his own abandonment. He must wither in destined pain and be hanged from hell in his own adamantine chains.”
The Healer-monster speaks and Achilles is shocked to hear that its voice is very feminine. “Zeus reaches too far. He has first mimicked and now mocked the very Fates.”
One of the Immortal Hours booms down from its rocky precipice—“Downfall demands no direr name than this—Zeus Usurper.”
Achilles grabs the nearest shaking boulder, thinking that the volcano behind the Demogorgon is erupting, but it is only the muted rumble from the assembled Beings.
Kronos’ brother, the shaggy Titan Krios, speaks from where he stands amidst a lava flow. “This pretender must sink beneath the wide waves of his own ruin. I myself will ascend to Olympos where once we ruled and drag this empty thing down to hell, even as a vulture and a snake outspent drop, twisted in inexplicable fight.”
“Awful shape!” cries a many-armed Charioteer to the Demogorgon. “Speak!”
“MERCIFUL GOD REIGNS,” echoes the shapeless Demogorgon giant’s voice amid the Tartarus peaks and valleys. “ZEUS IS NOT ALMIGHTY GOD. ZEUS MUST NO LONGER REIGN ON OLYMPOS.”
Achilles had been sure that the veiled Demogorgon was limbless, but somehow the limbless giant raises a robed arm that was not visible a second earlier, extends something like terrible fingers.
The Brane Hole two hundred yards behind Hephaestus rises as if on command, hovers above them all, widens, and begins to drop.
“WORDS ARE QUICK AND WORDS ARE VAIN,” booms the Demogorgon as the burning red and still-widening circle of flame drops down around them all. “THE SINGLE SURE AND FINAL ANSWER MUST BE PAIN.”
Hephaestus grabs Achilles’ arm. The dwarf-god is grinning wildly, insanely, through his beard. “Hang on, kid,” he says.
79
It was a desperate, almost insane, turn of events, but Mahnmut couldn’t
have been happier.
The dropship had hovered very low and dropped Mahnmut’s The Dark Lady submersible into the ocean about fifteen kilometers north of the troublesome critical-singularity coordinates. Suma IV explained that he didn’t want the splash setting off the seven hundred sixty-eight detected black holes—presumably on warheads in the the ancient, sunken sub also detected—and no one gave him an argument.
If Mahnmut had owned a human mouth, he would have been grinning like an idiot. The Dark Lady was designed and built for beneath-the-ice, black-as-inside-God’s-belly, horrific-pressure exploration and salvage work on Jupiter’s moon Europa, but it worked just fine in Earth’s Atlantic Ocean.
Better than fine.
“I wish you could see this,” Mahnmut said over their private comm. He and Orphu of Io were on their own again. None of the other moravecs had shown any great interest in approaching the seven hundred sixty-eight nascent but close-to-critical black holes and the drop-ship had already flown away on Suma IV’s continued reconnaissance—of the eastern seaboard of North America this time.
“I can ‘see’ the radar, sonar, thermal, and other data,” said Orphu.
“Yes, but it’s not the same. There’s so much light here in Earth’s ocean. Even here below twenty meters depth. Even full Jupiter-glow never illuminated my oceans—if there was a lead, a bare patch, above—deeper than a few meters.”
“I’m sure it’s beautiful,” said Orphu.
“It really is,” burbled Mahnmut, not noticing or caring if his big friend had been speaking ironically. “The sunlight shafts down, illuminating everything in a dappled-green, glowing way. The Lady isn’t sure of what to make of it.”
“She notices the light?”
“Of course,” said Mahnmut. “Her job is to report everything to me, to choose the right data and sensory feeds at the right time, and she’s self-aware enough to note all this difference in light, gravity and beauty here. She likes it, too.”