by Dan Simmons
“What is it?” asked Harman, his head and shoulders disappearing for a minute behind the slowly flowing thing.
“We’re in the suburbs of Atlantis,” said Savi, “even though we’re still sixty miles or so away. The posts built their ground stations out of this material.”
“What material?” said Harman. He stretched his hand toward the yellow ovoid. “Can I touch it?”
“Some of the shapes shock. Some don’t. None kill. Go ahead and try it. It won’t melt your hand.”
Harman set his fingers against the curve of the shiny shape. His hand disappeared inside. When he quickly pulled it out, molten blobs of yellow and orange dripped off his fingers and then flew back to the shape. “Cold,” he said. “Very cold.” He flexed his fingers and winced.
“It’s essentially one large molecule,” said Savi. “Although how that’s possible, I don’t know.”
“What’s a molecule?” called Daeman. He’d taken a few steps backward when Harman’s hand disappeared, and had to raise his voice to be heard now. He also kept checking over his shoulder. Savi had the gun in her belt, but the bamboo forest was too close for Daeman’s comfort. It was almost dark.
“Molecules are the little things that everything else is made of,” said Savi. “You can’t see them without special lenses.”
“I can see that one easily enough,” said Daeman. Sometimes, he thought, talking to Siri was like talking to a young child, although Daeman had never spent time around a young child.
The three walked back to the crawler. Rich evening sunlight prismed off the passenger sphere and made the high, articulated struts glow. The tops of stratocumulus far to their east, toward the hill called Cyprus, caught the golden light.
“Atlantis is made up mostly of this macro-molecular frozen energy,” said the old woman. “It’s part of the quantum screwing around that the posts were always up to. There is real material mixed in—something the Lost Age scientists called ‘exotic matter’—but I don’t know the ratio, or how it works. I just know that it makes their cities—stations—whatever they are, sort of shapeshifters, phasing in and out of our quantum reality.”
“I don’t understand,” said Harman, freeing Daeman of the necessity of saying it.
“You’ll see for yourself soon enough. We should be able to see the city when we get over that large rise on the horizon. And be there about the time it gets dark.”
They climbed into the crawler and took their seats. But before Savi could shift the big machine into gear, Harman said, “You’ve been here before.” He didn’t pose it as a question.
“Yes.”
“But you said before that you’ve never been to the orbital rings. Was that your reason for coming before?”
“Yes,” said Savi. “I still think the answer to freeing my friends from the neutrino beam lies up there.” She flicked her head toward the e- and p-rings bright in the twilight sky above.
“But you didn’t succeed before,” said Harman. “Why?”
Savi swiveled in her chair and looked at him. “I’ll tell you why and how I failed, if you’ll tell me why you really want to go up there. Why you’ve spent years trying to find a way up to the rings.”
Harman returned her gaze for a minute and then looked away. “I’m curious,” he said.
“No,” said Savi. She waited.
He looked back at her and Daeman realized that the older man’s face showed the most emotion Daeman had seen from him. “You’re right,” snapped Harman. “It’s not some sort of idle curiosity. I want to find the firmary.”
“So you can live longer,” Savi said softly.
Harman balled his fists. “Yes. So I can live longer. So I can continue to exist beyond this fucking Final Twenty. Because I’m greedy for life. Because I want Ada to have my child and I want to be around to see it grow up, even though fathers don’t do things like that. Because I’m a greedy bastard—greedy for life. Are you satisfied?”
“Yes,” said Savi. She looked at Daeman. “And what are your reasons for coming on this trip, Daeman Uhr?”
Daeman shrugged. “I’d jump home in a second if there was a fax portal nearby.”
“There isn’t,” said Savi. “Sorry.”
He ignored the sarcasm and said, “Why did you bring us, old woman? You know the way here. You know how to find the crawler. Why bring us?”
“Fair question,” she said. “The last time I came to Atlantis, I came on foot. From the north. It was a century and a half ago, and I brought two eloi with me—I’m sorry, that’s an insulting term—I brought two young women with me. They were curious.”
“What happened?” said Harman.
“They died.”
“How?” asked Daeman. “The calibani?”
“No. The calibani killed and ate the man and woman who came with me the time before that, almost three centuries ago. I didn’t know how to contact the Ariel biosphere then, nor about the DNA.”
“Why do you always come in threes?” asked Harman. Daeman thought it an odd question. He was ready to ask for more details about all these dead traveling companions. Did she mean permanently dead? Or just firmary-repair dead?
Savi laughed. “You ask good questions, Harman Uhr. You’ll see soon. You’ll see why I’ve come with two others after that first solo visit of mine to Atlantis more than a millennium ago. And not just to Atlantis—but to some of their other stations. In the Himalayas. Easter Island. One actually at the south pole. Those were fun trips, since a sonie can’t get within three hundred miles of any of them.”
She’d lost Daeman. He wanted to hear more about the killing and eating.
“But you’ve never found a spaceship, a shuttle, to get you up there?” said Harman. “After all these tries?”
“There are no spaceships,” said Savi. She activated the virtual controls, slammed the crawler in gear, and guided them north by northwest as the sunset spilled red across the entire western sky.
The city of the post-humans spread for miles across the dry seabed, with glowing energy towers rising and falling a thousand feet high. The crawler trundled between energy obelisks, floating spheres, red energy stairways going nowhere, blue ramps that appeared and disappeared, blue pyramids folding into themselves, a giant green torus that moved back and forth along pulsing yellow rods, and countless colored cubes and cones.
When Savi stopped and slid the door slice open, even Harman seemed hesitant to get out. Savi had made sure they were wearing their thermskins and now she pulled three osmosis masks from the crawler’s tool locker.
It was almost dark now, the stars joining the rotating rings in the purple-black sky above them. The glow from the energy city illuminated seabed and farm fields for five miles in each direction. Savi led them to a red stairway and then up—the macromolecular steps holding their weight, although Daeman thought it felt like walking on giant sponges.
A hundred feet above the seabed floor, the staircase ended at a black platform made out of a dull, dark metal that reflected no light. In the center of the square platform were three ancient-looking wooden chairs with high backs and red seat cushions. The chairs were equidistantly spaced around a black hole in the black platform, about ten feet apart, facing outward.
“Sit,” said Savi.
“Is this a joke?” said Daeman.
Savi shook her head and sat in the chair facing west. Harman took his seat. Daeman walked around the black platform again, returned to the single empty chair. “What happens next?” he asked. “We have to wait here for something?” He looked at the tall yellow tower thrusting up hundreds of feet nearby, the energy-material rearranging itself like a rectangular yellow cloud.
“Sit and you’ll find out,” said Savi.
Daeman took his seat gingerly. The back of the chair and the thick arms were elaborately carved. There was a white circle on the left arm of the chair and a red circle on the right arm. He touched neither.
“When I count to three,” said Savi, “depress the white bu
tton. That’s the one on your left if you’re colorblind, Daeman.”
“I’m not colorblind, goddammit.”
“All right,” said the old woman. “One, two . . .”
“Wait, wait!” said Daeman. “What’s going to happen to me if I press the white circle?”
“Absolutely nothing,” said Savi. “But we have to press it at the same time. I learned this when I came here alone. Ready? One, two, three.”
They all pressed their white circles.
Daeman leaped out of his chair and ran to the edge of the black platform and then the red platform thirty paces beyond that before turning to look back. The blast of energy behind his chair had been deafening.
“Holy crap,” he shouted, but the two still in their chairs could not hear him.
It was like lightning, he thought. A searing blast of jagged energy, just a yard or so across, emanating from the black hole in the middle of the chair-triangle and rising up into the dark sky. Rising higher, higher . . . then curving to the west like some impossible, white-hot thread, arching west until the end of it disappeared from sight above, but the thread visible and also moving, as if the lightning were connected to . . .
It was connected, Daeman realized with a flood of fear that almost made him void his bowels. Connected to the moving e-ring thousands of miles above. Connected to one of the stars, one of the moving lights, now crossing from west to east in that ring.
“Come back!” Savi was shouting above the crackle and roar of the lightning thread.
It took Daeman several minutes to come back—to walk to that empty wooden chair, shielding his eyes, his shadow and the chair’s shadow thrown out fifty feet across the black and red rooftop by the blinding, crackling light. He could never explain later, even to himself, how or why he returned to that chair, or why he did what he did next.
“On the count of three, depress the red circle,” shouted Savi. The old woman’s gray hair was standing on end, whipping around her head like short snakes. She had to scream above the energy roar to be heard. “One, two . . .”
I absolutely can’t do this was Daeman’s litany to himself. I absolutely won’t do this.
“Three!” shouted Savi. She pressed her red circle. Harman pressed his red circle.
No! thought Daeman. But pressed down hard on his red circle.
The three wooden chairs shot skyward, rotating around the crackling, shifting, chord of lighting, shooting upward so quickly that a sonic boom echoed across the seabed floor, shaking the crawler on its springs. A second later, less than a second later, the three chairs were out of sight overhead as the thread of pure white energy twisted and writhed and arched to follow the hurtling points of light on the equatorial orbital ring.
39
Olympos, Ilium and Olympos
The little robot fascinates me and I’m tempted to stay in the Great Hall of the Gods and find out what’s going on, but I’m leery of getting closer because the gods might hear me in this vast, hushed space. The dialogue between the gods and the robot has shifted to ancient Greek now—at least the gods, including Zeus, are speaking in the common language I’ve grown used to here—but I’m far enough way that I can catch only fragments of it.
“. . . little automatons . . . toys . . . from the Great Inland Sea . . . should be destroyed . . .”
Rather than try to creep closer, I remember why I’m here—Aphrodite’s comb—and the importance of my getting back to the Trojan women. The fate of hundreds of thousands of people below may depend on what I do next, so I tiptoe backward, away from the gods and the odd machines, and find my way down the long side corridor to the little suite of rooms where I first met the Goddess of Love just a few days ago. Can it just be a few days ago? Much has happened since then, to say the least.
There are voices—gods’ voices—echoing from elsewhere in the Great Hall, and I slip into Aphrodite’s pied-à-terre with my pulse pounding in my throat. The place is as I remember it from a few days ago—windowless, lighted by only a few tripod braziers, with only the couch and a few other pieces of furniture, including a softly glowing blue screen on the marble desk. I’d thought at the time that the screen was like a computer screen, and I cross to it now to look. It’s true—the glowing blue rectangle is separate from the desktop, hovering an inch or two above the marble surface, and while there’s no Microsoft Windows menu on it, a single white circle floats there as if inviting me to touch it and activate the screen.
I leave it alone.
Near the couch is where I remember some of Aphrodite’s personal items on a small round table, although I’m only hoping that there’s a comb among them. There’s not. I see a silver brooch and some silver cylinders—divine lipsticks?—and an elaborately carved silver mirror lying facedown, but no comb.
Damn it. I have no idea where Aphrodite’s home is among the estates scattered around on the broad green summit of Olympos, and I certainly can’t ask one of the gods for directions. I’d gambled and lost on Helen’s challenge to bring back the comb. But the important thing was to show them that I have the ability to travel to Olympos and back, and speed is of the essence. I have no idea how long the Trojan women will wait.
I grab the mirror without looking at it carefully, envision the basement room in Ilium’s Temple of Athena, and twist the QT medallion.
There are seven women there when I flick into existence, not the five women I’d left in the basement room a few minutes before. All of the women take a step back when I arrive, but one of them shrieks wildly and throws her hands over her face. I still have time to see that face and I recognize it—this is Cassandra, King Priam’s loveliest daughter.
“Did you bring us the comb, Hock-en-bear-eeee, as proof of your ability to travel to and from Olympos as do the gods?” asks Hecuba.
“I didn’t have time to search for it,” I say. “I brought this instead.” I hand the mirror to the nearest woman, Laodice, Hecuba’s daughter.
Helen says, “The carving on the silver handle and the back of the mirror is similar to what I remember of the goddess’s comb, but . . .”
She stops speaking as Laodice gasps and almost drops the mirror. The mirror is picked up by the priestess, Theano, who looks into it, goes white, and hands it to Andromache. Hector’s wife looks into and blushes. Cassandra grabs it from Andromache, lifts it, stares into it, and screams again.
Hecuba grabs the mirror away and frowns at Cassandra. I can tell immediately that there is no love lost between these two women, and I remember why—Cassandra, given the power of prophecy by Apollo, had urged King Priam to have Hecuba’s baby, Paris, killed upon birth. From her childhood onward, Cassandra has foreseen the disaster resulting from Helen’s capture and the ensuing war. But, according to tradition, Apollo’s gift of prophecy to the girl was accompanied by the curse that no one would ever believe her.
Now Hecuba is staring into the mirror, mouth slack.
“What is it?” I ask. There must be something wrong with the mirror.
Helen takes the mirror from Hector’s mother and hands it to me. “Do you see, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”
I look into the glass. My reflection is . . . odd. I’m me there, but also not me. My chin is stronger, my nose smaller, my eyes bolder, my cheekbones higher, my teeth whiter . . .
“Is this what you’ve all seen?” I ask. “This idealized reflection of yourself?”
“Yes,” says Helen. “Aphrodite’s looking glass shows only beauty. We have looked upon ourselves as goddesses.”
I can’t imagine that Helen could be any more beautiful than she already is, but I nod and touch the surface of the mirror. It’s not glass. It feels soft, resilient, rather like an LCD screen on a laptop computer. Perhaps that’s what it is and inside the carved backing might be powerful microchips and video morphing programs running algorithms of symmetry, idealized proportions, and other elements of perceived human beauty.
“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” says Helen, “let me introduce two others we’ve brought here
this morning to judge whether you speak the truth. This younger woman is Cassandra, daughter of Priam. This older woman is Herophile, ‘beloved of Hera,’ the oldest of the Sibyls and priestess of Apollo Smithneus. It was Herophile who interpreted Hecuba’s dream lo those many years ago.”
“What dream is that?” I ask.
Hecuba, who, it appears, will not look at Herophile or Cassandra, says, “When I was pregnant with my second child, Paris, I dreamed that I gave birth to a burning brand that spread its fire to all of Ilium, burning it to the ground. And that child became a rampaging Erinyes—a child of Kronos, some say, the daughter of Phorkys say others, the offspring of Hades and Persephone say still others—but, all acknowledge, most likely the daughter of deadly Night. This Erinyes of flame had no wings, but it resembled the Harpies. The smell of its breath was sulfurous. A poisonous slaver poured from its eyes. Its voice was like the lowing of terrified cattle. It bore in its belt a whip of brass-studded thongs. It carried a torch in one hand and a serpent in the other, and its home was in the Underworld, and it was born to avenge all and any slights against mothers. Its approach was heralded by all the dogs of Ilium barking as if in pain.”
“Wow,” I say. “That’s quite a dream.”
“I perceived the Erinyes to be the child later named Paris,” says the old hag named Herophile. “Cassandra also saw this, and recommended that the baby boy be killed the moment he emerged from the womb.” The old priestess gave Hecuba a scalding look. “Our advice was ignored.”
Helen literally steps between the women. “Everyone here, Hock-en-bear-eeee, has had visions of Troy being put to the torch. But we do not know which of our visions arise merely from anxiety for ourselves, our children, and our husbands, and which visions are gifts of true sight from the gods. So must we judge yours. Cassandra has questions for you.”
I turn to look at the younger woman. She is blonde and anorectic, but somehow still stunningly beautiful. Cassandra’s fingernails are bitten short and bloody, and her fingers are always twitching and intertwining. She can’t stand still. Her eyes are as red-rimmed as her nails. Looking at her reminds me of photos I’ve seen of gorgeous movie starlets in rehab for coke addiction.