by Dan Simmons
When the machine was flying northwest at high speed and serious altitude, Harman said, “Can this take us there?” He gestured with his left hand, his fingers pressing into the elastic forcefield above him.
“Where?” said Savi, still concentrating on the holographic displays in front of her. She raised her eyes. “The p-ring?”
Harman was almost on his back, staring up at the polar ring moving north to south above them—the tens of thousands of individual components burning startlingly bright in the clear, thin air at this altitude. “Yes,” he said.
Savi shook her head. “This is a sonie, not a spacecraft. The p-ring is high. Why would you want to go up there?”
Harman ignored the question. “Do you know where we could find a spacecraft?”
The old woman smiled again. Watching Savi carefully, Ada was noticing the variety of the woman’s expressions—the smiles with real warmth, those with none, and this kind, that suggested something actively cold or ironic.
“Perhaps,” she said, but her tone warned against further questioning.
Hannah asked, “Did you actually meet post-humans?”
“Yes,” said Savi, raising her voice slightly to be heard above the sonie’s hum as they hurtled northward. “I actually met some.”
“What were they like?” Hannah’s voice was slightly wistful.
“First off, they were all women,” said Savi.
Harman blinked at this. “They were?”
“Yes. A lot of us suspected that only a few posts ever came down to earth, but that they used different forms. All female. Perhaps there were no male post-humans. Perhaps they didn’t retain gender as they controlled their own evolution. Who knows?”
“Did they have names?” asked Daeman.
Savi nodded. “The one I knew best . . . well, the one I saw the most . . . was named Moira.”
“What were they like?” Hannah asked again. “Their personalities? Their looks?”
“They preferred floating to walking,” Savi said cryptically. “They liked to throw parties for us old-styles. They tended to speak in delphic riddles.”
There was silence for a minute except for the wind rushing over the polycarbon hull and the forcefield bubble. Finally Ada said, “Did they come down from their rings much?”
Savi shook her head again. “Not much. Very rarely toward the end, in the last years before the final fax. But it was rumored that they had some installations in the Mediterranean Basin.”
“Mediterranean Basin?” said Harman.
Savi smiled and Ada thought it was one of her amused smiles.
“A thousand years before the final fax, the posts drained a sizable sea south of Europe—dammed it up between a rock called Gibraltar and the tip of North Africa—and made it out of bounds for old-styles. A lot of it was turned to farmland—so the posts told us—but I did some trespassing there before being discovered and tossed out, and I found that there were . . . well, cities might be the best description, if something solid state can be called a city.”
“Solid state?” said Hannah.
“Never mind, child.”
Harman was prone again, on his elbows. He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of this Mediterranean Basin. Or Gibraltar. Or . . . what was it? North Africa.”
“I know you’ve discovered a few maps, Harman, and learned how to read them . . . after a fashion,” said Savi. “But they were poor maps. And old. The few books that the post-humans allowed to survive to this postliterate age were vague . . . harmless.”
Harman frowned again. They flew north in silence.
The sonie carried them out of the polar night into afternoon light, away from the dark ocean, and across land at a height they could only guess at and at a speed they could only dream of. The p-ring faded as the sky grew blue and the e-ring became visible to the north.
They crossed land hidden by tall white clouds, then saw high, snow-covered peaks and glacial valleys far below. Savi swooped the sonie lower, east of the peaks, and they flew a few thousand feet above rain forest and green savannahs, still moving so quickly that more peaks appeared like dots above the horizon and then grew into mountains in mere minutes.
“Is this South America?” asked Harman.
“It used to be,” said Savi.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that the continents have changed quite a bit since any of the maps you’ve seen were drawn,” said the old woman. “And they had quite a few more names since then as well. Did the maps you saw show this landmass connected to the one called North America?”
“Yes.”
“No more.” She touched the holographic symbols, twisted the handgrip, and the sonie flew lower. Ada rose up on her elbows, hair against the forcefield bubble, and looked around. Silently, except for the rush of air over their force bubble, the sonie flew just above treetop height—cycads, giant ferns, ancient, leafless trees flicked past. To the west rose the foothills along the line of high peaks. Farther east, rolling grasslands were dotted with more of these primitive trees. Large animals lumbered like mobile boulders near the rivers and lakes. Grazing animals with improbable snouts were streaked with white, brown, tan, red. Ada could identify none of them
Suddenly a herd of these grazing animals stampeded past a hundred feet beneath the sonie, all panicked, fleeing for their lives. After them loped half a dozen birdlike creatures—massive, eight feet tall or taller, Ada guessed, with wild feather plumage flying back from the largest beaks and the ugliest faces Ada had ever seen. The grazing animals were running fast—thirty or forty miles per hour Ada guessed in the seconds before the sonie carried them out of sight—but the birds were moving faster, perhaps sixty miles per hour, four times as fast as any droshky or carriole that Ada or the other three had ever ridden in.
“What . . .” began Hannah.
“Terror Birds,” said Savi. “Phorushacos. After the rubicon, the ARNists had a wild few centuries of such play. It’s sort of fitting, since the real Terror Birds wandered these plains and hills about two million years ago, but that kind of recombinant crap—like your dinosaurs up north—plays havoc with the ecology. The posts promised to clean it all up during the final fax Hiatus, but they didn’t.”
“What’s an ARNist?” asked Ada. The animals—red-beaked Terror Birds and prey alike—were out of sight behind them. Larger herds with larger animals were visible now to the west, being stalked by tigerish-looking things. The sonie swung higher and turned toward the foothills.
Savi sighed as if weary. “RNA artists. Recombinant freelancers. Social rebels and merry pranksters with sequencers and bootleg regen tanks.” She looked over at Ada, then at Harman, then back at Daeman and Hannah. “Never mind, children,” she said.
They flew another fifteen minutes above steaming forests and then turned west into a mountain range. Clouds moved around and between the mountain peaks below them and snow whipped around the sonie, but somehow the forcefield kept the elements at bay.
Savi touched a glowing image; the sonie slowed, circled, and turned west toward the late-afternoon sun. They were very high.
“Oh my,” said Harman.
Ahead of them, two sharp peaks rose on either side of a narrow saddle covered by grassy terraces and truly ancient ruins, stone walls with no roofs. A bridge—also from the Lost Age but obviously not as ancient as the stone ruins—ran from one of the sharp-toothed peaks to the other above the ruins. There was no road beyond the suspension bridge—the roadway ended in a wall of rock at both ends—and the foundations were sunk into rock between the ruins below.
The sonie circled.
“A suspension bridge,” whispered Harman. “I’ve read about them.”
Ada was good at estimating the size of things, and she guessed that the main span of this bridge was almost a mile in length, although the roadbed had broken away in a score of places, showing rusted rebar and empty air. She guessed the two towers—each showing ancient orange paint, but sporting mostly rust—to b
e more than 700 feet tall, the top of each tower rising higher than the mountains at either end. The double-towers were green with what looked to be ivy from a distance, but as the sonie circled closer, Ada could see that the “growth” was artificial—green bubbles and stairways and globs of flexible glasslike material, wrapping around the towers, strung along the heavy suspension cables, even trailing down the support cables and hanging free above the ruined roadway. Clouds moved down from the high peaks and mixed with the fog rising from the deep canyons below the ruins on the hilltop, curling and writhing around the south tower and obscuring the roadway and hanging cables there.
“Does this place have a name?” asked Ada.
“The Golden Gate at Machu Picchu,” said Savi as she touched the controls to bring them closer.
“What does that mean?” asked Daeman.
“I have no idea,” said Savi.
The sonie circled the northern tower—dull orange and scabrous rust-red in the bright sunlight here beyond the clouds—and floated slowly, carefully, to the top of the tower, touching down without a sound.
The forcefield died away. Savi nodded and everyone crawled out, stretched, looked around. The air was cold and very thin.
Daeman wandered over to the rusted edge of the tower top, leaning out to look. Growing up with Paris Crater as his home base, he had no fear of heights.
“I wouldn’t fall if I were you,” said Savi. “There’s no firmary rescue here. You die away from the faxnodes, you stay dead.”
Daeman lurched backward, almost falling in his haste to get back from the edge. “What are you talking about?”
“Just what I said,” said Savi, hoisting her pack to her right shoulder. “There’s no fax to the firmary here. Try to stay alive until you get back.”
Ada looked skyward to where both rings were visible through the high, thin air. “I thought the post-humans could fax us from anywhere if we . . . got into trouble.”
“To the rings,” said Savi, her voice flat. “Where the firmary heals you. To where you ascend after your Fifth Twenty to join the post-humans.”
“Yes,” Ada said weakly.
Savi shook her head. “It’s not the posts who fax you away when something bad happens, rebuilding you. All that’s myth. Or to be less polite—bullshit.”
Harman opened his mouth to speak but it was Daeman who spoke first. “I was just there,” he said, anger in his voice. “In the firmary. In the rings.”
“In the firmary, yes,” said Savi. “But not healed by post-humans. If they’re up there, they don’t care a whit about you. And I don’t think they’re up there anymore.”
The four stood on the rusted tower summit more than five hundred feet above the ruined roadway, eight hundred feet above the grassy saddle and stone ruins. Wind from the higher peaks buffeted them and blew their hair.
“After our last Twenty, we go up to join the posts . . .” began Hannah, her voice small.
Savi laughed and led the way toward an irregular glass globule blobbing up over the west end of the ancient tower top.
There were rooms and anterooms and stairways descending and frozen escalators and smaller rooms off the main chambers. Ada thought it strange that the sky and the orange towers and the hanging cables and glimpses of the jungle and roadway below were not tinted green through the material, nor was the sunlight streaming in turned green—the green glass somehow passed colors accurately.
Savi led them down and around from one green module to the next, from one side of the bifurcated tower to another through thin tubes that should have been swinging in the strong breeze, but weren’t. Some of the chambers extended thirty or forty feet out beyond the tower, and Ada had no clue how the green globule was attached to the concrete and steel.
Some of the rooms were empty. Others had—artifacts. A series of animal skeletons stood silhouetted against the mountain skyline in one room. In another, what appeared to be replicas of machines lined display counters and hung from wires. In yet another, plexiglas cubes held fetuses of a hundred creatures, none of them human but some disturbingly close to human. In another room, faded holograms of starfields and ringfields moved over and through the observers.
“What is this place?” asked Harman.
“A sort of museum,” said Savi. “I think most of the important displays are missing.”
“Created by whom?” asked Hannah.
Savi shrugged. “Not by the posts, I think. I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure that the bridge—or the original of this bridge, it may be a replica—once stood above water near a Lost Age city on what was then the west coast of the continent north of here. Have you heard of such a thing, Harman?”
“No.”
“Perhaps I dreamt it,” said Savi with a rueful laugh. “My memory plays tricks on me after all these centuries of sleep.”
“You mentioned sleeping through the centuries once before,” Daeman said, his tone sounding brusque to Ada. “What are you talking about?”
Savi had led them down a long spiral staircase in the green-glass tube strung between the suspension cables, and now she gestured to a line of what appeared to be crystal coffins. “A form of cryosleep,” she said. “Only not cold—which is silly, because that’s what ‘cryo’ meant originally. Some of these cocoons still work, still freeze molecular motion. Not through cold, but through some microtechnology that draws power from the bridge.”
“From the bridge?” said Ada.
“The whole thing is a solar power receiver,” said Savi. “Or at least the green parts are.”
Ada looked at the dusty crystal coffins and tried to imagine going to sleep in one and waiting . . . what? Years before waking? Decades? Centuries? She shuddered.
Savi was looking at her and Ada blushed. But Savi smiled. One of her sincerely amused smiles, Ada thought.
They climbed to a long green glass cylinder hanging from a frayed and rusted support cable that was thicker than Harman was tall. Ada found herself treading softly, trying to lift her weight by sheer will, afraid that their combined weight would bring the cylinder down, the cable, the whole bridge. Again she caught Savi watching her. This time Ada did not blush but frowned back, tired of the old woman’s scrutiny.
All four of them stopped a minute, alarmed. It appeared that they had walked into a meeting hall filled with people—people standing along the edges of the room, men and women in weird garb, people sitting at desks and standing at control panels, people who did not move or turn their gazes in the direction of the newcomers.
“They’re not real,” said Daeman, walking to the nearest man—dressed in a dusty blue suit with some sort of fabric at his throat—and touching the figure’s face.
The five walked from figure to figure, staring at the men and women dressed in odd clothes, people with strangely patterned hair and unusual personal adornment—tattoos, strange jewelry, dyed hair and skin.
“I read that once servitors came in the shape of human beings . . .” began Harman.
“No,” said Savi. “These aren’t robots. Only mannequins.”
“What?” said Daeman.
Savi explained the word.
“Do you know who they’re supposed to be?” asked Hannah. “Or why they’re here?”
“No,” said Savi. She stood back while the others explored.
At the end of the chamber, set in a glass alcove as if in pride of place, the figure of a man was posed in an ornate wood and leather-slung chair. Even seen sitting, it was obvious that this figure was shorter than most of the other male mannequins in the hall, and dressed in some sort of tan tunic that looked like a short, belted dress made out of rough cotton or wool. The figure’s feet were shod with sandals. The short man could have been comic, but his features—short, curly gray hair, hawk nose, and fierce gray eyes staring out boldly from under heavy brows—were so powerful that Ada found herself approaching the mannequin warily. The man’s forearms were shaped with such muscle and so many scars, the stubby fingers were curled ea
sily but with much strength on the wooden arms of the camp chair—everything about the carved form gave an impression of such coiled strength—of will as well as body—that Ada stopped six feet away from it. The man was visibly older than humans chose to look in this age—somewhere between Harman’s Second Twenty and Savi’s old age. The man’s tunic hung low enough that Ada could see the graying hair on his broad, bronzed chest.
Daeman hurried forward. “I know this man,” he said, pointing. “I’ve seen him before.”
“From the turin drama,” said Hannah.
“Yes, yes,” said Daeman, snapping his fingers in an attempt to remember. “His name is . . .”
“Odysseus,” said the man in the chair. He stood and took a step toward the startled Daeman. “Odysseus, son of Laertes.”
17
Mars
“She’s stabilizing,” said Mahnmut over the hardline to Orphu. “Roll rate down to about one revolution every six seconds. Pitch and yaw are approaching zero.”
“I’m going to try to flatten out the roll,” said Orphu. “Tell me when you have the polar cap in the reticule.”
“Okay, no—it’s drifting. Damn. What a mess.” Mahmut was trying to line up the slash on the video feed with the white blur of the Martian polar cap through a blizzard of tumbling debris and still-glowing plasma.
“Yes,” said Orphu from the hold, “I am a mess.”
“I wasn’t talking about you.”
“I know. But I’m still a mess. I’d give half my Proust library if I had just one of my six eyes back.”