by Dan Simmons
Thinking of death and thinking of Shakespeare, not yet decided on which play to stage first, Harman encountered these interesting lines stored deep in his DNA. It was Claudio speaking, Claudio from Measure for Measure, as the character confronted his own execution:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod, and the dilated spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice; To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendant world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling—‘tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathèd worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death.
Harman realized that he was sobbing—curled, cold, and sobbing—but not sobbing in fear of death or at the imminence of his own loss of everything and everyone, but weaping gratitude that he came from a race that could spawn a man who could write those words, think those thoughts. It almost—almost—made up for the human thought that had conceived, designed, launched, and crewed the submarine behind him with its seven hundred sixty-eight black holes waiting to devour all futures for everyone.
Suddenly Harman laughed aloud. His mind had made its own leap to John Keat’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and he saw—he was not shown, but he saw on his own—the young Keats’s nod in Shakespeare’s direction with the lines to the singing bird—
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—To thy high requiem become a sod.
“Three cheers for the alliance of Claudio’s kneaded clod and Johnny’s earless sod!” cried Harman. The sudden attempt to speak made him cough again and when he peered at his hand in ringlight, he saw that he had coughed up red blood and three teeth.
Harman moaned, curled again in his womb of sand, shook, and had to smile again. His restless brain could no more quit poking at Shakespeare than his tongue could quit probing the three holes in his gums where his teeth had been. It was the couplet from Cymbeline that made Harman smile—
Golden lads and girls all must As chimney-sweepers come to dust.
He’d just gotten the pun. What kind of species of genius is it, wondered Harman, that can put such a childish, playful pun in such a sad dirge?
With that last thought, Harman slipped sideways into a cold sleep, insensate to the cold rain that had begun to fall on him.
He awoke.
That was the first marvel. He opened his blood-caked eyes onto a gray, cold gloomy predawn morning with the still-dark seawalls of the Breach rising five hundred feet or more on either side. But he had slept and now he waked.
The second marvel was that he could move, eventually, and after a fashion. It took Harman fifteen minutes to get to his hands and knees, but once there he crawled to the nearest boulder rising out of the sand and in another ten minutes managed to get to his feet and not quite fall again.
Now he was ready to walk west again, but he did not know which way was west.
He was completely turned around. The long Breach stretched away from side to side, but there was no clue to which way was east and which was west. Shaking, shivering, aching in ways he could never have imagined he could ache, Harman staggered in circles, hunting for his own footprints from the night before, but much of the seabed there was rock and the rain that had almost frozen him to death had wiped away any traces of prints of his bare feet.
Swaying, Harman took four steps in one direction. Convinced he was heading back toward the submarine, he wheeled and took eight steps in the other direction.
No use. Clouds hung low and solid above the Breach opening. He had no sense of east or west. Harman couldn’t bear the thought of walking back toward the submarine with all that evil lying in its belly, of losing the distance he had made so laboriously yesterday toward Ada and Ardis.
He staggered to the wall of the Breach—he did not know now whether it was the north or south wall—and stared at his reflection in the slowly thickening predawn glow.
Some creature that was not Harman stared back. His naked body already looked skeletal. There were patches of blood pooled under the skin everywhere—on his sunken cheeks, his chest, under the skin of his forearms, on his shaking legs, even a huge mottle on his lower belly. When he coughed again, two more teeth were expelled. It looked in the water’s mirror as if he had been weeping tears of blood. As if in an attempt to tidy himself, he brushed his hair to one side.
Harman stared at his fist for a long, empty moment. A huge swatch of hair had come away in his hand. It was as if he were holding a small dead creature made up completely of hair. He dropped it, brushed at his head again. More hair came loose. Harman looked at his reflection and saw the walking dead, already one-third bald.
Warmth touched his back.
Harman whirled and almost fell.
It was the sun—rising directly in the aperture of the Breach behind him. The sun, rising perfectly in the keyhole of the Breach, its golden rays bathing him in warmth in the few seconds before the clouds swallowed the orange sphere. What were the chances that the sun would rise directly down the Breach on this particular morning—as if he were a Druid waiting at Stonehenge for the equinox sunrise?
Harman felt so light-headed that he knew he’d forget which direction the sun had risen from if he did not act immediately. Aiming in the opposite direction of the warmth on his back, he began staggering west again.
By midday—the clouds parted between rain showers and gave hints of sunlight—Harman’s mind no longer felt connected to his staggering body. He was taking twice as many steps as he had to, staggering from the north wall of the Breach to the south wall, having to set his hands lightly against the buzz-jolt of the forcefield itself to set himself moving again down the endless trough.
He was wondering as he walked at what the future might be—or might have been—for his people. Not just the survivors of Ardis, but for all the old-style humans who might have survived the vicious voynix attacks. Now that the old world was gone forever, what form of government, of religion, of society, culture, politics, might they have created?
A protein memory module nestled deep in Harman’s encoded DNA—a memory that would not die until long after most of the other cells in Harman’s body had died and come apart—offered him this fragment from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks—“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.”
Harman laughed aloud and the single bark of a laugh cost him another front tooth. Morbid symptoms, indeed. The slightest scan of the context of that fragment told Harman that this Gramsci had been an intellectual promoting revolution, socialism, and communism—the last two theories having died and rotted away less than halfway through the Lost Era, abandoned for the naïve bullshit they were—but the problem of interregnums certainly had remained and now here it was again.
He realized that Ada had been leading her people toward some sort of crude Athenian democracy in the weeks and months before Harman had stupidly left his expecting beloved. They had never discussed it, but he was aware of her recognition that the four hundred people in the Ardis community then—this was before the slaughter by voynix he’d seen via the red turin cloth on the eiffelbahn—turned to her for leadership, and she hated that role, even as she fell into it naturally. By deferring things to constant votes, Ada was obviously trying to establish the basis for a future democracy should Ardis survive.
But if the red turin had given him true images—and Harman believed it had—Ardis as a real community had not survived. Four hundred people made up a community. Fifty-four ragged, starved survivors did not.
The radiation seemed to have sheared off much of the lining of Harman’s throat, and every time he swallowed now, he coughed up blood. This was a distraction. He tried to slow the pace of his swallowing to once every tenth step h
e took. His right hand, chin, and chest, he knew, were smeared with blood.
It would have been interesting seeing what social and political structures his race would have evolved. Perhaps the population, even before the voynix attacks, had—at a mere one hundred thousand men and women—never been sufficient to generate real dynamics such as politics or religious ceremonies or armies or social hierarchies.
But Harman didn’t believe this. He saw in his many protein memory banks the examples of Athens, Sparta, and the Greek entities long before Athens and Sparta ascended. The turin drama—what he now clearly saw as Homer’s Iliad—had borrowed its heroes from kingdoms as small as Odysseus’ isle of Ithaca.
Thinking of the turin drama, he remembered the altar quickly glimpsed on their trip to Paris Crater a year ago, just after Daeman was eaten by a dinosaur—it had been dedicated to one of the Olympian gods, although he forgot right then which one. The post-humans had served, at least for the last millennium and a half, as his people’s substitute for gods or a God, but what shapes and ceremonies would the future need for belief take?
The future.
Harman paused, panting, leaned against a shoulder-high black rock jutting out of the north wall of the Breach, and tried to think about the future.
His legs were shaking violently. It was as if his leg muscles were dissolving as he watched.
Panting, forcing breaths through his closing, bleeding throat, Harman stared ahead and blinked.
The sun was perched just above the cleft of the Breach. For a terrible second, Harman thought that it was still sunrise and that he had walked the wrong direction after all, but then he realized that he had been walking in a stupor all day. The sun had descended from the clouds and was preparing to set at the end of the long hallway of the Breach.
Harman took two more steps forward and fell on his face.
This time he could not rise. It took all of his energy to prop himself up on his right elbow to watch the sunset.
His mind was very clear. He no longer thought about Shakespeare or Keats or religions or heaven or death or politics or democracy. Harman thought about his friends. He saw Hannah laughing on the day of the metal pour by the river—remembered the specifics of her youthful energy and the glee of her friends as they poured the first bronze artifact created in how many thousand years? He saw Petyr sparring with Odysseus during the days the bearded Greek warrior would hold forth with his long statements of philosophy and odd question-and-answer periods on the grassy hill behind Ardis. There had been much energy and joy in those sessions.
Harman remembered Savi’s husky, cynical voice, and her huskier laugh. He perfectly recalled their cheering and shouting when Savi had driven Daeman and him out of Jerusalem in the crawler, with thousands of voynix chasing to no avail. And he saw his friend Daeman’s face as if through two lenses—the pudgy, self-absorbed boy-man from when Harman first met him, and the lean, serious version—a man to be trusted with one’s life—whom he’d last seen a few weeks ago on the day Harman left Ardis in the sonie.
And, as the sun entered the Breach so perfectly that its outer curves just touched the Breach wall—Harman smiled to think of a hissing steam sound rising and actually thought he heard one through his failing ears—Harman thought of Ada.
He thought of her eyes and smile and soft voice. He remembered her laugh and touch and the last time they had been together in bed. Harman allowed himself to remember how, when they turned away from one another as sleep came on, they also soon would curve against the other for warmth—Ada against his back, her right arm around him, himself later in the night against Ada’s back and perfect backside, a bit of excitement stirring in him even as he drifted off to sleep, his left arm around her, his left hand cupping her breast.
Harman realized that his eyelids were so caked with blood that he could not really blink, could not really shut his eyes. The setting sun—the bottom of it already below the Breach horizon—was burning red and orange echoes into his retina. It didn’t matter. He knew that after this sunset, he would never need to use his eyes again. So he concentrated on holding his beloved Ada in his mind and heart and on watching the last half of the sun’s disk disappear directly to his west.
Something moved and blocked the last of the sunset.
For several seconds, Harman’s dying mind could not process that information. Something had moved into his field of vision and blocked his view of the last of the sunset.
Still propped on his right elbow, he used the back of his left hand to rub some of the caked blood from his eyes.
Something was standing in the Breach not twenty feet west of Harman. It must have come through the Breach wall of water there on the north side. The thing was about the size of an eight—or nine-year-old child and was shaped more or less like a human child, but it wore a strange suit of metal and plastic. Harman saw a black visor where the little boy’s eyes should be.
On the verge of death, as the brain shuts down from lack of oxygen, an unsummoned protein memory molecule prompted him, hallucinations are not uncommon. Thus the frequent tales from resuscitated victims of a “long tunnel” ending in a “bright light” and…
Fuck that, thought Harman. He was staring down a long tunnel toward a bright light, although only the top rim of the sun remained, and both walls of the Breach were alive with light—silver, bright, mirrored surfaces with millions of facets of dancing light.
But the boy in the plastic and metal red-and-black suit was real.
And as Harman stared, something larger and stranger forced itself out through the north wall of the Breach.
The forcefield is semipermeable only to human beings and what they wear, thought Harman.
But this second apparition was nowhere near human. It was about twice the size of the largest droshky, but looked more like a giant, robotic crab monster with its big pincer claws and many metal legs and its huge, pitted carapace now pouring water off it in loud rivulets.
No one told me that the last minutes before death would be so visually amusing, thought Harman.
The little boy figure stepped closer. It spoke in English, its voice soft and rather boylike, perhaps sounding much like Harman’s future son might sound. “Sir,” it said, “can you use some assistance?”
87
It was just after sunrise and fifty thousand voynix were attacking from all directions. Ada paused to look back at the Pit where the shredded corpse of the Setebos spawn still lay.
Daeman touched her arm. “Don’t feel bad. We had to kill it sooner or later.”
She shook her head. “I don’t feel the least bit sorry,” she said. To Greogi and Hannah she shouted, “Get the sky-raft up!”
Too late. More than half the survivors had panicked at the scuttling roar of the voynix attack—the creatures were still invisible in the forest but the two-mile radius must have been cut in half by now. They’d be at Ardis in less than a minute.
“No! No!” shouted Ada as thirty people, in their panic, tried to fit aboard the slowly lifting sky-raft. Hannah was at the controls, trying to keep it at a steady three-foot hover, but more people were trying to clamber aboard.
“Take it up!” shouted Daeman. “Hannah! Take it up now!”
Too late. The heavy machine let out a mechanical whine, dipped to its right, and crashed to the ground, sending people flying.
Ada and Daeman ran to the fallen machine. Hannah looked up with a stricken face. “It won’t start again. Something’s broken.”
“Never mind,” Ada said, her voice calm. “It would never have made even one trip to the island.” She squeezed Hannah’s shoulder and raised her voice—“Everyone to the walls! Now!! Bring every weapon in the compound. Our best chance is to break their first charge.”
She turned and ran to the west wall and a minute later the others began to do the same, choosing empty spots in the now-circular palisade. Everyone followed Ada’s example of carrying at least two flechette rifles and a crossbow along with a heavy canvas bag of
magazines and bolts.
Ada settled herself into a firing niche and discovered that Daeman was still beside her. “Good,” he said.
She nodded, although she had no idea what he was really saying to her.
Working very carefully, in no rush, Ada slapped in a fresh magazine, clicked off the safety, and aimed the rifle at the treeline no more than two hundred yards away.
The rushing, hissing, clacking noise made by the approaching voynix grew deafening and Ada found she had to resist the urge to drop her rifle and cover her ears. Her heart was pounding and she was feeling slightly nauseated, almost the way she’d felt earlier in her pregnancy, but she did not feel afraid. Not yet.
“All those years of the turin drama,” she said, not realizing that she was speaking aloud.
“What?” said Daeman, leaning closer to hear.
She shook her head. “I was just thinking about the turin drama. According to Harman, Odysseus said that he and Savi started that—distributing the turin cloths ten years ago, I mean. Maybe the idea was to teach us how to die with courage.”
“I’d rather they’d given us something to teach us how to win a fight against fifty thousand fucking voynix,” said Daeman. He clicked back the activation bolt on his rifle.
Ada laughed.
The little noise was drowned out by the roar as the voynix broke free of the forest—some leaping from tree branches even as others scuttled beneath the leapers—a gray wall of carapaces and claws rushing at them at fifty or sixty miles an hour. There were so many of them this time that Ada had trouble making out individual voynix bodies in the rising and falling mass. She looked over her shoulder and saw the same nightmare coming at them from all sides as the tens of thousands of voynix narrowed the radius at full speed.
No one yelled Fire! but suddenly everyone was shooting. Ada grinned in the grip of a sort of ferocious terror as the flechette rifle emptied its first magazine in a series of hard stutters against her shoulder. She let the ammunition clip drop free and slapped a fresh one in.