Ilium

by Dan Simmons

  Ada had swung the light back into the space they’d faxed into. There was no portal. They were in a small room with shelves and counters and walls, all covered with ice. Unlike all fax pavilions, there was no faxnode code-plate pedestal in the center of the room. And that meant there was no way out, no way back. A million flakes of ice danced in the flashlight beam. Beyond the walls, the wind howled.

  “Daeman, what you said earlier seems to be true now,” said Harman.

  “What? What did I say earlier?”

  “That we’re trapped. Trapped like rats.”

  Daeman blinked and the flashlight beam moved on to the frosted walls. The wind howled more loudly.

  “It sounds like the wind in the Dry Valley,” said Hannah. “But there were no buildings there. Were there?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Harman. “But I suspect we’re still in Antarctica.”

  “Where?” said Daeman, his teeth chattering. “What’s ant . . . antattica?”

  “The cold place we were at this morning,” said Ada. She stepped through the doorway, leaving the others in darkness for a moment. They scrambled to catch up and huddled behind her like goslings. “There’s a hallway here,” said Ada. “Watch your step. The floor is under a foot of ice and snow.”

  The frozen hallway led to a frozen kitchen, the frozen kitchen opened onto a frozen living room with overturned couches drifted with snow. Ada ran her flashlight beam across a wall of windows triple-glazed with ice.

  “I think I know where we are,” whispered Harman.

  “Never mind that,” said Hannah. “How do we get out?”

  “Wait,” said Ada, lowering the flashlight beam to the icy floor so that everyone’s faces were illuminated by the bounce light from below. “I want to know where you think we are.”

  “According to the story I’ve heard, the woman I’m hunting for—the Wandering Jew—had a home, a domi, on Mount Erberus, a volcano in Antarctica.”

  “In the Dry Valley?” asked Daeman. The young man kept glancing over his shoulders at the darkness behind him. “God, I’m freezing.”

  Hannah moved so quickly over the ice toward Daeman that he staggered back and almost slipped. “Silly, you have to put your thermskin hood on,” she said. “We all do. We’re going to get frostbite if we don’t. Plus, we’re losing a lot of body heat through our scalp right now.” She pulled the green cowl of the thermskin free of his shirt and tugged the hood into place over his head.

  Everyone hurried to follow suit.

  “That’s better,” said Harman. “I can see now. And hear better as well—the suit earphones damp out the wind howl.”

  “You were saying before that this woman had a place on a volcano—near the Dry Valley? Close enough for us to walk to the fax pavilion there?”

  Harman gestured helplessly. “I don’t know. I’d wondered if that’s how she had shown up at the Burning Man—just walked there—but I don’t know the geography. It might be one mile or a thousand miles from here.”

  Daeman looked at the black, iced windows where the wind flexed the shatterproof panes. “I’m not going out there,” he said flatly. “Not for any reason.”

  “For once I agree with Daeman,” said Hannah.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” said Ada. “You said that this woman lived here long ago—lifetimes ago—centuries and centuries. How could she . . .”

  “I don’t know,” said Harman. He borrowed the flashlight from Ada and started walking down the next hallway. He was stopped by what looked to be white bars. While the others watched, he went back into the drifted living room, picked up the heaviest piece of furniture he could pry free of the ice—a heavy table, the legs snapping off as he tugged it free—and walked back to smash the icicles one after the other, battering a path down the snow-filled hallway.

  “Where are you going?” called Daeman. “What good is it going to do to go down there. No one’s been there for a million years. We’re just going to freeze when . . .”

  Harman kicked open a door at the end of the hallway. Light poured out. So did heat. The other three moved as quickly as they could across the treacherous surface to join him.

  Much like the room they had faxed into, this space was windowless and about twenty feet square. But unlike the other room, this one was warm, lighted, and free of snow or ice. And unlike the other room, this one was almost filled with an oval metal machine about fifteen feet long. The thing was floating silently three feet off the concrete floor, and a forcefield shimmered like a glass canopy over its top surface. On that surface were six indentations with a soft black material lining them; each indentation was the length of a human body with two short grips or controllers near where the hands would be.

  “It looks like someone was expecting two more of us,” whispered Hannah.

  “What is it?” said Daeman.

  “I think it’s a sonie . . . also called an AFV,” said Harman, his own voice hushed.

  “What?” said Daeman. “What do those words mean?”

  “I don’t know,” said Harman. “But people in the lost ages used to fly around in them.” He touched the forcefield; it parted like quicksilver under his fingers, flowed around his hand, swallowed his wrist.

  “Careful!” said Ada, but Harman had already lowered himself first onto his knees and then onto his stomach, then prone and settling into the black material. His head and back rose just slightly above the curved upper surface of the machine.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “Comfortable. And warm.”

  That settled it for the others. Ada was the first to crawl onto the craft, stretching out on her stomach and grasping the two handlgrips. “Are these controls of some sort?”

  “I have no idea,” said Harman as Hannah and Daeman crawled onto the disk and settled into the outer impressions, leaving the two rear-center depressions empty.

  “You don’t know how to fly the thing?” asked Ada, a bit more shrilly this time. “From the books? From your reading?”

  Harman just shook his head.

  “Then what are we doing on it?” said Ada.

  “Experimenting.” Harman twisted the top off his right handgrip. There was a single red button there. He pressed it.

  The wall ahead of them disappeared as if it had been blown out into the antarctic night. Cold wind and flying snow swept around them in a blinding implosion, as if the air in the room had been sucked out and the storm pulled back in in its place.

  Harman opened his mouth to say “Hang on!” but before he could speak, the sonie leaped out of the room at an impossible velocity, pressing the bottoms of their boots back against metal and making them each cling wildly to the handgrips.

  The forcefield bubble over their heads kept them alive as the sonie, the AFV, the thing, flew out from the white volcano with its ice-crusted and shattered buildings clinging to its seaward side. The night-vision lenses in their thermskin hoods showed them the fir forest along the coast gone back to ice and death, the abandoned and drifted-over robotic equipment along the curve of a bay, and then the white sea—the frozen sea.

  The sonie leveled off about a thousand feet above that frozen sea and hurtled out away from land.

  Harman released one of the handgrips long enough to activate the direction finder on his palm. “Northeast,” he said to the others over their suit comms.

  No one replied. Everyone was clinging and shaking too fiercely to comment on the direction the machine was headed while taking them to their deaths.

  What Harman did not say aloud was that if the old maps he had studied were accurate, there was nothing out this direction for thousands of miles. Nothing.

  Ten minutes of flight and the sonie began losing altitude. They had passed beyond the ice and now were flying over black water scattered with icebergs.

  “What’s happening?” said Ada. She hated the quaver in her own voice. “Is this thing out of energy . . . fuel . . . whatever it uses?”

  “I don’t know,” said Harman.
>
  The sonie leveled off a mere hundred feet above the water. “Look,” called Hannah. She raised a hand from its grip to point ahead of them.

  Suddenly the back of something huge, alive, barnacled with age, flesh corrugated-tough, broke the cold sea, its mammal heat radiating like throbbing blood in their night-vision-enhanced sight. A spout of water shot high toward them and Harman smelled fish on the fresh air that the forcefield allowed through.

  “What . . .” began Daeman.

  “I think it’s called . . . a whale, I think that’s how to pronounce it . . . but I thought it was extinct millennia ago,” said Harman.

  “Maybe the post-humans brought it back,” Ada said over their suit intercoms.

  “Maybe.”

  They hurtled farther out to sea, always east-northeast, and after a few more minutes of the sonie holding its altitude, the four passengers began relaxing a bit, adapting, as humans have done since time immemorial, to a strange new situation. Harman had rolled on his side and was looking up at the brilliant stars becoming visible between scattered clouds when Ada startled him by shouting, “Look! Ahead!”

  A large iceberg had become visible over the dark horizon and the sonie was hurtling straight toward it. The machine had flown over or past other icebergs, but none this broad—it stretched sideways for miles like a gleaming blue-white wall in their night vision—and none this tall—it was apparent that the top of the monstrous thing was higher than their current altitude.

  “What can we do?” asked Ada.

  Harman shook his head. He had no idea how fast the sonie was going—none of them had ever traveled faster than a voynix-pulled droshky—but it was fast enough, he knew, that the impact would destroy them.

  “Do you have other controls on your handgrip?” asked Hannah. Her voice was strangely calm.

  “No,” said Harman.

  “We could jump,” said Daeman from behind and to the left of Harman. The sonie tilted a bit as Daeman got to his knees and elbows, his head just within the forcefield bubble.

  “No,” said Harman, putting the force of command in the syllable. “You wouldn’t last thirty seconds in that sea, even if you survived the fall . . . which you wouldn’t. Get down.”

  Daeman dropped to his belly again.

  The sonie did not slow or change course. The face of the iceberg—Harman guessed that the thing was at least two miles across—rushed at them and grew taller. Harman estimated that it rose at least three hundred feet above the water. They would strike it two-thirds of the way down its cold face.

  “There’s nothing we can do?” said Ada, making it more a statement than a question.

  Harman pulled his hood off and looked at her. The cold air was not so bad within their forcefield cockpit. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He reached across with his right hand to take her left hand. She swept her thermskin hood off to show him her eyes. She and Harman interlaced fingers for a few seconds.

  A few hundred yards before fiery collision, the sonie slowed again and gained altitude. It whisked over the top edge of the iceberg with ten feet to spare and banked to the right until it was flying south above the icy surface. It slowed more, hovered, and settled onto the surface, snow hissing under its heated underside.

  Harman and the others lay where they were for a silent moment, hanging on to the handgrips, not sharing their thoughts.

  The forecefield bubble disappeared and suddenly the terrible cold and wind burned at Harman’s face. He pulled his hood down in a hurry, glancing at Ada as she did the same.

  “We should get off this thing before it decides to take us somewhere else,” Hannah said softly on the comm.

  They scrambled off. The wind shoved them off balance, relented, shoved at them again. Spindrift pelted their outer clothing and hoods.

  “What now?” whispered Ada.

  As if in answer, a double row of red infrared beacons winked on, outlining a ten-foot-wide path from the sonie for a hundred yards to . . . nothing.

  They walked together, holding each other upright in the wind. If the beacon lights had not burned so brightly in their night vision, they would have turned their backs to the wind and been lost in seconds—lost until they stepped off the edge of the iceberg somewhere to their right.

  The path ended in a hole in the iceberg’s surface. Steps had been hacked out of the ice and disappeared toward another red glow far below.

  “Shall we?” said Hannah.

  “What choice do we have?” asked Daeman.

  The steps were slippery under their street boots, but some sort of climbing rope had been attached to the right wall with metal spikes and loops, and the four clung to the line while descending. Harman had counted forty steps when the stairway ended in a wall of ice. No, the steps continued to their right and down—fifty steps this time—then left and down again for fifty more, the whole descent illuminated by spaced infrared cold-flares set into the ice.

  At the bottom of the steps, a corridor led deep into the iceberg, the way illuminated now by green and blue cold-flares as well as red. At places they came to junctions, but one choice was always dark, the other illuminated. Once they climbed along a slowly ascending corridor; another time they descended for a hundred feet or more. The bends and junctions and choices became too labyrinthine to keep track.

  “Someone’s expecting us,” whispered Hannah.

  “I’m counting on it,” said Ada.

  They emerged into a broad hall, perhaps a hundred feet across at the widest, the ice ceiling thirty feet above, various other entrances dotting the walls and connected by ice stairways, the floor graded to different levels. Heaters on pedestrals glowed orange and there were a variety of light sources spiked into the walls, floors, and ceilings. On one of the low platforms lay what looked to be furry animal hides, cushions, and a low table with bowls of food and pitchers and goblets of drink. The four gathered around the table but looked dubiously at its contents.

  “It’s all right,” said a woman’s voice behind them. “It’s not poisoned.”

  She had emerged from a high ice door near the platform and now she descended a zigzag of stairs toward them. Harman had time to notice the woman’s hair—gray-white, an almost unheard-of choice except for a few eccentrics—and her face: lined with wrinkles just as Daeman had said. This woman was old in a way none of them—except for Daeman at the last Burning Man—had ever seen, and the effect unsettled even Harman with his ninety and nine years.

  Other than the obvious age, the woman was attractive enough. Her stride was strong and she wore a commonplace blue tunic top, cord trousers, and solid boots, the one dash of eccentricity being the red wool cape over her shoulders. The cape’s cut was complicated, never quite resolving itself into simple folds. As she stepped onto the platform a few feet from them, Harman noticed the dark metal object in her right hand.

  As if noticing the device for the first time herself, she raised it toward them. “Do any of you know what this is?”

  “No,” said Daeman, Ada, and Hannah in a soft chorus.

  “Yes,” said Harman. “It’s some sort of Lost Age weapon.”

  The other three looked at him. They had seen weapons in the turin-cloth drama—swords, spears, shields, bows and arrows—but nothing so machinelike as this blunt black thing.

  “Correct,” said the woman. “This is called a gun and it only does one thing—it kills.”

  Daeman took a step toward the old woman. “Are you going to kill us? Did you bring us all this way to kill us?”

  The old woman smiled and set the weapon on the table, next to a bowl of oranges. “Hello, Daeman,” she said. “It’s nice to see you again, although I’m not sure you’d remember me from our last meeting. You were in a pretty advanced state of inebriation.”

  “I remember you, Savi,” said Daeman, his tone cool.

  “And all of you,” continued the old woman, “Hannah, Ada, Harman . . . welcome. You were very persistent in following clues, Harman.” She
sat on the furs, gestured, and one after the other, the four sat around the low table with her. Savi picked up an orange, offered it, and began peeling it with a sharp fingernail when the others declined.

  “We haven’t met,” said Harman. “How do you know my name . . . our names?”

  “You’ve left quite a wake behind you—what is your people’s honorific these days? Harman Uhr.”

  “Wake?”

  “Hiking far from faxnodes so the voynix have to follow you. Learning to read. Seeking out the few remaining libraries in the world . . . including Ada Uhr’s.” She nodded in Ada’s direction and the young woman nodded in return.

  “How do you know that voynix followed me anywhere?” asked Harman.

  “The voynix monitor anyone unusual,” said Savi. She separated the orange into segments, put two segments on four linen cloths, and offered them around. All four accepted them this time. “I monitor you,” she finished, looking at Harman.

  “Why?” Harman looked at the slices and set the cloth down on the table. “Why spy on me? And how?”

  “Two different questions, my young friend.”

  Harman had to smile at this. No one who knew him had called him young in a very long time. “Then answer the first,” he said. “Why spy on me?”

  Savi finished the second slice of orange and licked her fingers. Harman noticed Ada studying the older woman with fascination, looking at her wrinkled fingers and age-mottled hands. If Savi noticed the inspection, she ignored it. “Harman . . . may I drop the Uhr?” She did not wait for an answer, but went on, “Harman, right now you are the only human being on Earth, out of a population of more than three hundred thousand souls . . . the only human being other than me . . . who can read a written language. Or who wants to.”

  “But . . .” began Harman.

  “Three hundred thousand people?” interrupted Hannah. “There are a million of us. There have always been a million of us.”

  Savi smiled but shook her head. “My dear, who told you that there a million living human beings on the Earth today?”

  “Why . . . no one . . . I mean, everyone knows . . .”