by Dan Simmons
“It’s just curious,” said Ada, although her voice lacked conviction. “It’s probably never . . .”
The voynix was five feet from Odysseus when the man swept his sword from his belt, activated the humming blade with his thumb, and swung the sword with both hands, slicing down and across the voynix’s presumably impenetrable chest shell and left arm. For a second, the voynix just stood there, apparently as shocked at Odysseus’ behavior as the four humans were, but then the top half of the creature’s body slid, tilted, and fell to the ground, arms spasming. The lower half of the voynix’s torso and its legs continued standing for several more seconds before tumbling over into the grass.
For a minute there was no sound except for the wind in the tall grass. Then Harman shouted, “Why in the hell did you do that?” Blue fluid, as thick as blood, was everywhere.
Odysseus pointed at the voynix’s right arm, still attached to the lower torso. As he wiped his sword on the grass, he said, “It had its killing blades extended.”
It was true. As the four gathered around the fallen voynix, each could see the blades—used for defending humans against such threats as dinosaurs—extended where the manipulator pads usually were.
“I don’t understand,” said Ada.
“It didn’t recognize you,” said Hannah, taking another step away from the bearded man. “Maybe it thought you were a threat to us.”
“No,” said Odysseus, sliding his short sword back into its scabbard.
Daeman was staring with appalled fascination at the cross section of the voynix—soft white organs, a profusion of blue tubules, clusters of what looked to be pink grapes, certainly not the clockwork mechanism and gears he’d always imagined to be the interior of a service voynix. The speed of the violence and now the white gore visible had almost made Daeman lose control of his anxious bowels.
“Come on,” he’d said, and started walking quickly toward Ardis Hall. The others had mistaken this for leadership and followed.
It was after Daeman had used the toilet, taken time to shower, shaved, ordered the nearest Ardis servitor to fetch him clean new clothes, and then wandered into the kitchen hunting for something to eat that he realized that it was insane to go any further with Harman and the crazy old woman. To what purpose?
Ardis Hall, despite Ada’s absence—or perhaps because of it—had filled with friends faxed in to visit and party. The servitors kept them happy with food and drink. Young people—including several beautiful young women Daeman knew from other parties, other places, from his happy life before Harman and all this nonsense—were playing lawnball-and-hoop games on the broad, sloping lawn. The evening was lovely, shadows long on the grass, laughter in the air like the sound of chimes, and dinner being prepared by servitors at the long table under the giant elm tree.
Daeman realized that he could stay here and have a proper meal and a good night’s sleep, or—better yet—summon a voynix for the short carriole ride to the fax portal and sleep in his own bed in Paris Crater this night after a late dinner prepared by his mother. Daeman missed his mother; he’d been completely out of touch with her for more than two days. He looked at the voynix in the curved driveway at the side of the large house and felt a pang of anxiety—Odysseus’ destruction of that voynix had been unwarranted and insane. One didn’t damage or destroy vonixes, any more than one would set fire to a droshky or trash one’s own domi. It didn’t make any sense, and it was another reason he should get away from these people at once.
As he came out onto the drive, he saw Harman and Ada speaking softly but urgently to one side. Farther down the hilly lawn, he could see Hannah introducing Odysseus to several curious guests. The voynix were staying far away from the bearded man, but Daeman had no idea whether that was by coincidence or design. Did voynix communicate with one another? And if so, how? Daeman had never heard one utter a sound.
He gestured to a voynix to bring a carriole around just as Ada and Harman’s conversation came to an end—Ada stalking into the house, Harman turning on his heel and heading back across the drive toward the fields and the waiting sonie. Harman walked up to Daeman and the older man’s expression was so grim that Daeman took a half-step back.
“Are you coming with us?”
“I . . . ah . . . no,” stammered Daeman. The voynix trotted up with the single-wheeled carriole behind it, upholstery gleaming in the evening light, gyroscopes humming.
Harman turned without saying another word and walked off into the field behind the house.
Daeman climbed into the conveyance, said “Fax portal” to the voynix, and sat back as the carriole hummed around the driveway, white shells crunching under the wheel. One of the young women on the lawn—Oelleo, he thought her name was—cried a good-bye to him. The carriole rolled down toward the road with the silent voynix trotting between its stays.
“Stop,” said Daeman. The voynix halted in its tracks, still holding the cart shafts. The internal gyro hummed softly to itself.
Daeman looked back behind Ardis Hall but Harman was already out of sight through the trees. For no reason in particular, he tried to remember where he had met Oelleo—at a party in Bellinbad two summers ago? At Verna’s Fourth Twenty in Chom only a few months before? At one of his own sleepover parties in Paris Crater?
He couldn’t remember. Had he slept with Oelleo? He had an image of the girl naked, but that could have been from one of the swimming parties or one of the living art displays that had been in vogue last winter. He couldn’t remember if he’d gone to bed with the woman. There were so many.
Daeman tried to remember Tobi’s Second Twenty celebration in Ulanbat only three days ago. It was a blur—a smear of laughter and sex and drink blending into all the other parties near all the other faxnodes. But when he tried to remember the Dry Valley in . . . what was it called? Antarctica? . . . or the iceberg, or the Golden Gate Bridge above Machu Picchu, or even the stupid redwood forest . . . everything was clear, distinct, sharp.
Daeman climbed down from the carriole and began walking toward the fields. This is crazy, he thought. Crazy, crazy, crazy. Halfway to the treeline, he broke into a lumbering, clumsy run.
He was out of breath and sweating heavily by the time he reached the far side of the field. The sonie was gone, only a depression in the high grass near a stone wall where it had been.
“God damn it,” said Daeman, looking up at the evening sky, empty except for the turning equatorial-ring and polar-ring. “Damn it.” He sat down heavily on the moss-slick stone wall. The sun was setting behind him. For some reason, he felt like crying.
The sonie came in low over the trees to the north, swooped, and hovered ten feet off the ground.
“I thought you might change your mind,” called down Savi. “Want a ride?”
Daeman stood.
They had flown east into darkness, climbing high enough that the stars and the orbital rings illuminated the tops of clouds already glowing from lightning rippling like visible peristalsis through milky interiors. They stopped near the coast that night and slept in a strange treehouse made up of separate little domi-houses connected by platforms and winding staircases. The place had plumbing, but no servitors or voynix, and there were no other people or dwellings nearby.
“Do you have many places like this where you stay?” Harman asked Savi.
“Yes,” said the old woman. “Away from your three hundred faxnodes, most of the Earth is empty, you know. At least empty of people. I have favorite places here and there.”
They were sitting outside on a sort of dining platform halfway up the tall tree. Below them, fireflies winked on and off in a grassy glade that held an array of huge, ancient, rusted machines that had been mostly reclaimed by the grass and ferns and hillside. Ringlight fell down between the leaves and painted the high grass a soft white. The storms they’d flown over had not reached this far east yet, and the night was warm and clear. Although there were no servitors here, there were freezers with food, and Savi had supervised the co
oking of noodles, meat, and fish. Daeman was almost getting used to this odd idea of fixing the food one ate.
Suddenly Harman asked Savi, “Do you know why the post-humans left the Earth and haven’t come back?”
Daeman remembered the strange data-vision he’d suffered in the redwood clearing earlier that day. Just the memory made him a bit nauseated.
“Yes,” said Savi, “I think I do.”
“Are you going to tell us?” asked Harman.
“Not right now,” said the old woman. She rose and walked up the winding stairs to a lighted domi ten meters higher up the trunk.
Harman and Daeman looked at each other in the soft light, but they had nothing to say to each other and eventually went off to their own domis to sleep.
They followed the Breach across the Atlantic at high speed, swooped south before reaching land, and paralleled something that Savi called the Hands of Hercules.
“Amazing,” said Harman, rising almost to his knees to look to their left as they flew south.
Daeman had to agree. Between a big, slab-sided mountain on the north—which Savi called Gibraltar—and a lower mountain some nine miles to the south, the ocean simply stopped, held out of the deep basin stretching away to the east by a series of huge golden human hands rising from the seabed. Each hand was over five hundred feet tall and the splayed fingers held back the wall of the Atlantic from the dry Mediterranean Basin dropping like a deepening valley into clouds and fogs to the east.
“Why the hands?” asked Daeman as they reached land on the south side of the fog-shrouded Basin and turned east again. “Why didn’t the post-humans just use forcefields to hold back the sea, the way they did in the Breach?”
The old woman shook her head. “The Hands of Hercules were here before I was born and the posts never told us why they did it that way. I’ve always suspected it was just a whim on their part.”
“A whim,” repeated Harman. It seemed to trouble him.
“Are you sure we can’t just fly straight across the Basin?” asked Daeman.
“I’m sure,” said Savi. “The sonie would drop out of the sky like a stone.”
Through the late afternoon they flew across swamps, lakes, fern forests, and broad rivers above a land that Savi called the Northern Sahara. Soon the swamps dwindled and died and the land became drier, rockier. Herds of huge striped beasts—not dinosaurs, but as large as dinosaurs—moved by the hundreds across grasslands and rocky uplands.
“What are those?” asked Daeman.
Savi shook her head. “I have no idea.”
“If Odysseus were here, he’d probably want to kill one and have it for dinner,” said Harman.
Savi grunted.
It was late afternoon again when they lost altitude, circled a strange, walled city set on highlands only twenty-five miles from the Mediterranean Basin, and landed on a rocky plain just west of the city.
“What is this place?” asked Daeman. He’d never seen walls or buildings so old, and even from a distance it was unsettling.
“It’s called Jerusalem,” said Savi.
“I thought we were going down into the Basin to look for spaceships,” said Harman.
The old woman got out of the sonie and stretched. She looked very tired, but then, Daeman though, she had been driving the sonie for two straight days. “We are,” she said. “We’ll get transport here. And there’s something I want you to see at sunset.”
This sounded ominous to Daeman, but he followed her and Harman across the rocky plain, over rubble of what once might have been suburbs or newer sections of the old walled city but which now was a rising plain paved with stones pounded and ground fine as pebbles. She led them up to and though a gate in the wall, keeping up a mostly meaningless narration as they walked. The air was dry and cooling, the low sunlight rich on the ancient buildings.
“This was called the Jaffa Gate,” she said, as if that might mean something to them. “This is David Street, and it used to separate the Christian Quarter from the Armenian Quarter.”
Harman glanced at Daeman. It was obvious to Daeman that even the learned old man, so proud of his useless ability to read, had never heard the words “Christian” or “Armenian.” But Savi was babbling on, pointing out something called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the tumbled ruins to their left, and neither man interrupted her with a question until Daeman asked, “Aren’t there any voynix or servitors here?”
“Not now,” said Savi. “But when my friends Pinchas and Petra were here in the last minutes before the final fax fourteen hundred years ago, there were tens of thousands of voynix suddenly active near the Western Wall. I have no idea why.” She stopped walking and looked at each of them. “You understand, don’t you, that the voynix popped out of the temporalclastic cloud two centuries before the final fax, but they were immobile—rust and iron statues—not the obedient servants you have now? That’s important to remember.”
“All right,” said Harman, but his voice carried a hint of being patronizing. She was babbling. “But you said you were in an iceberg down near Antarctica when the final fax came,” continued Harman. “How do you know where your friends were and what the voynix were doing?”
“Farnet, proxnet, and allnet records,” said the old woman. She turned and led them further east down the steet.
Harman glanced at Daeman again, as if to share his concern about her nonsense-talk, but Daeman felt a rush of something—pride? superiority?—as he realized that he knew exactly what she meant when she talked about farnet and proxnet. He looked at his own palm and keyed the finder function, but the glow was blank. What would happen, he wondered, if he visualized the four blue rectangles above three red circles above four green triangles to summon the full-data function the way she’d taught him in the forest glen yesterday?
Savi stopped and spoke as if she’d read his mind. “You don’t want to invoke the allnet function here, Daeman. You wouldn’t be virtually immersed in energy-microclimate interactions like you were in the forest . . . not here in Jerusalem. You’d be dealing with five thousand years of pain, terror, and virulent anti-Semitism.”
“Anti-Semitism?” repeated Harman.
“Hatred of Jews,” said Savi.
Harman and Daeman looked at each other with quizzical expressions. The idea made no sense.
Daeman was beginning to be sorry that he’d changed his mind and come along. He was hungry. The sun was setting behind them. He didn’t know where he was going to sleep this night, but he suspected that it would be uncomfortable.
“Come,” said Savi and led them another block, through stone doorways, down a narrow alley, and out into a space dominated by a tall, blank wall.
“Is this what we came to see?” said Daeman, disappointed. It was a dead end—a courtyard bound around by lower walls, stone buildings, and this one big wall with some sort of round metallic structure just visible atop it. There was no way to get up there from here.
“Patience,” said Savi. She squinted at the disappearing sun. “And today’s Tisha b’Av, just as it was on the day of the final fax.”
Looking as if he was tired of repeating nonsense syllables, Harman said, “Tisha b’Av?”
“The Ninth of Av,” said Savi. “A day of lamentation. Both the First and Second Temples were destroyed on Tisha b’Av, and I think the voynix built this blasphemous Third Temple on the Ninth of Av on the day of the final fax.” She pointed to the black metal half-dome beyond the wall.
Suddenly there was a rumble so deep that Daeman’s bones and teeth rattled. Both he and Harman took a frightened step back, the air filled with ozone and static so thick that the hair on Daeman’s head rose and rippled like tall grass in a high wind, and—with an explosive crash faster and louder than a lightning strike—a solid shaft of pure blue, blindingly brilliant light some sixty feet across shot up from the metal half-dome, pierced the evening sky, and disappeared arrow-straight into space, barely missing the orbital e-ring in its eternal rotation to the east.<
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29
Candor Chasma
For eight Martian days and eight Martian nights, the dust storm raised waves ten meters high, howled through the rigging, and pounded the little felucca northward toward the leeward shore and death for all hands, including the two moravecs.
The little green men aboard were competent sailors, but they ceased to function at night and now were inert much of the day when the dust clouds overhead blotted out the sun. To Mahnmut, when the LGM found their dark corners beneath decks and curled up in niches to keep from rolling around, it was like sailing in a ship of the dead, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where the ship arrives crewed only by corpses.
The felucca’s sails were made of a tough, lightweight polymer rather than canvas, but the ferocity of the wind out of the southeast and the particles and pebbles being blasted at them tore the sheets to shreds. The deck was no longer a safe place to be, and, during a brief interval of sunlight, twenty LGM helped Mahnmut cut a hole in the mid-deck and lower Orphu to the deck below, where Mahnmut constructed a wood and tarp shelter for the Ionian and tucked him away from the pelting wind. Mahnmut himself sensed the airborne grit getting into his seams and works when he spent too much time helping the LGM abovedecks, so he hunkered down on the lower deck near Orphu when he could, making sure his friend was roped and bolted into place as the felucca pitched forty degrees to each side and the water—now mixed with the blowing red sand and as red as blood—forced its way through every crack. A dozen of the forty little green men aboard manned handpumps every hour they were conscious, pumping out the bilge and lower decks, and Mahnmut worked alone on a pump through the long nights.
They had used the wind to good advantage before the sails, rigging, and sea anchor were all damaged, working hard, tacking hard, sailing into the wind, waves crashing over the bow, to get deeper into the central inland sea, obviously all worried about the kilometer-high cliffs behind them to the north, and covering hundreds of kilometers in the first two days of the storm. They were somewhere now between Coprates Chasma and the islands of Melas Chasma, with the huge flooded-canyon complex of Candor Chasma ahead somewhere on their starboard side.