by Dan Simmons
The identical faces all look out to sea.
The first head was erected almost an Earth-measured century and a half ago, at the base of Olympus Mons near where the surf of the Tethys Sea rolls in, and since then the little green men have placed another head every kilometer of the way, traveling east, around the great mushroom-shaped peninsula called Tempe Terra, then curving back south and into the estuary of Kasei Valles, then southeast along the marshes of Lunae Planum, then to both sides of the huge estuary and sea-within-a-sea of Chryse Planitia, then on both cliff-faced shores of the broad estuary of Valles Marineris, and finally—in just the last eight months—northeast along the steep cliffs of Arabia Terra toward the northernmost archipelagoes of Deuteronilus and Protonilus Mensae.
But this day all work on the heads has ceased and more than a hundred feluccas have carried the LGM—meter-tall green photosynthesizing hominids with transparent flesh, no mouth or ears and coal-black eyes—to a point on the broad beaches of Tempe Terra some two hundred kilometers across the curve of water from Olympus Mons. From here the island volcano of Alba Patera can be seen far out in the sea to the west and the incredible massif of Olympus Mons rises up over the shoulder of the world far to the southwest.
The stone heads line a cliff face here some several hundred meters back from the water, but the beach is broad and flat and it is here that all seven thousand three hundred and three zeks have gathered, creating a solid mass of green along the beach except for an empty semicircle of sand some fifty-one meters across. For several Martian hours, the little green men stand silent and motionless, their black coal-button eyes trained on the empty sand. Feluccas and barges bob slightly to the very low Tethys surf. The only sound is wind blowing in from the west, occasionally lifting sand and pelting it against transparent green skin or whistling very slightly among the low gorse plants beyond the beach and below the cliffs.
Suddenly the air smells of ozone—although the zeks have no noses to pick up this scent—and repeated thunderclaps explode close above the beach. Although the LGM have no ears, they feel these explosions of sound through their incredibly sensitive skin.
Two meters above the beach, there suddenly appears a three-dimensional red rhomboid about fifteen meters wide. This rhomboid widens but then grows pinched at the waist, until it resembles two red candy kisses. At the points of these kisses, a tiny sphere emerges and then grows into a three-dimensional green oval, which appears to have swallowed the original red rhomboid. The oval and rhomboid begin to spin in opposite directions until sand is thrown a hundred meters into the air.
The LGM stand in the growing storm and stare impassively.
The three-dimensional oval and rhomboid spin themselves into a sphere, completing the original shape’s flop-transition mirror rephrasing. A circle ten meters across appears in midair and seems to sink into the sand until a Brane Hole cuts a slice out of space and time. Because this Brane Hole is newborn, its protective world-sheet is still visible, petals and layers of eleven-dimensional energy protecting the sand, the air, Mars, and the universe from this deliberate degeneration of space-time fabric.
From the hole emerges a puffing, chugging sort of steam-powered carriole, hidden gyroscopes balancing the metal and wooden mass on its single rubber wheel. The vehicle clears the Hole and comes to a stop precisely in the center of the space the zeks have left clear on the sand. An intricately carved door opens on the vehicle and wooden steps lower and unfold like some carefully contrived puzzle.
Four voynix—two-meter-tall metallic bipeds with barrel chests, no necks, and heads looking like mere humps on their bodies—emerge from the carriole and, using their manipulator hands rather than their cutting-blade hands, begin to assemble a complex apparatus that includes silver tentacles ending in small parabolic projectors. When they are finished, the voynix step back toward the now-silent steam vehicle and freeze into immobility.
A man or a projection of a man shimmers first into visiblity and then into apparent solidity there on the sand between the projector’s tentacle-filaments. He is an old man in a blue robe covered with marvelously embroidered astronomical icons. He carries a tall wooden staff to help him walk. His gold-slippered feet are solid enough and his flickering mass heavy enough to make impressions in the sand. His features are precisely the same as the face of the statues on the cliff.
The magus walks to the edge of the limpid sea and waits.
Before long the sea stirs and something huge rises from the water just beyond the line of desultory surf. The thing is large and it comes up slowly, more like an island rising from the sea than like any organic creature such as a whale or dolphin or sea serpent or sea god. Water streams from its folds and fissures as it moves in toward the beach. The zeks step back and to the side, making a larger space for the thing.
In its shaping and color, it is most like a gigantic brain. The tissue is pink—like a living human brain—and the convolutions most resemble the maximized folded surface area of a brain, but there the resemblance to mind matter ends since this thing has multiple pairs of yellow eyes set in the folds between pink tissue and a surfeit of hands: small grasping hands with different numbers of fingers arising from the folds and waving like sea anemones stirred by cold currents, larger hands on longer stalks set on either side of the various inset eyes, and—as becomes more apparent as the house-sized thing emerges from the water and shuffles to the sand—multiple sets of huge hands on its underside and edges to propel it, each grub-white or dead-gray hand the size of a headless horse.
Moving crablike, darting sideways onto the sodden sand, the huge thing scatters LGM farther back and then comes to a stop less than five feet from the blue-robed old man, who—after an initial backing away to give the thing room to find fingerhold on the dry beach—now stands his ground, holding his staff and looking up calmly at the multiple sets of cold yellow eyes.
What have you done with my favorite worshiper? asks the many-handed in a voice without sound.
“He is loosed upon the world again, it pains me to say,” sighs the old man.
Which world? There are too many.
“Earth.”
Which Earth? There are too many.
“My Earth,” said the old man. “The true one.”
The brain with hands makes a sound through holes and apertures in its folds, a mucousy noise like a whale snorting thick seawater. Prosper, where is my priestess? My child?
“Which child?” asks the man. “Dost thou seek after your blue-eyed sow-raven whore, malignant thing, or after the hag-born freckled whelp bastard, never honored with a human shape, that she did litter there on the shore of my world?”
The magus had used the Greek word sus for “raven” and korax for “sow,” obviously enjoying his little pun, just as he had with the “litter.”
Sycorax and Caliban. Where are they?
“The bitch is missing. The lizard-pup is free.”
My Caliban has escaped the rock on which you confined him these long centuries?
“Have I not just said so? You need to trade some of your excess eyes for ears.”
Has he eaten all your puny mortals on that world yet?
“Not all. Not yet.” The magus gestures with his staff toward the stone versions of his own face that look out from atop the cliff behind him. “Have you enjoyed being watched, Many-Handed?”
The brain snorts brine and mucus once again. I’ll allow the green men to labor some more and then send a tsunami to drown all of them at the same time it knocks down your pathetic spy-stone effigies.
“Why not do it now?”
You know I can. The nonvoice somehow conveys a snarl.
“I know you can, malignant thing,” says Prospero. “But drowning this race would be a crime greater than many of your other great crimes. The zeks are close to compassion perfected, loyalty personified, not altered from their former state as you did the gods here on your monstrous whim, but truly creatures that are mine. I new-formed them.”
And for that alone it will give me more pleasure to kill them. What use are such mute, chlorophyllic ciphers? They’re like ambulatory begonias.
“They have no voice,” says the old magus, “but they are far from mute. They communicate with one another through genetically altered packages of data, passed cell to cell by touch. When they must communicate with someone outside their race, one of them volunteers his heart up to touch, dying as an individual but then being absorbed by all the others and thus living on.’Tis a beautiful thing.”
Manesque exire sepulcris, thinks-hisses the many-handed Setebos. All you’ve done is call up the dead men from their graves. You play Medea’s game
Without warning, Setebos pivots on his walking hands and sends a smaller hand from his brainfolds shooting out twenty meters on a snakelike stalk. The gray-grub fist slams into a little green man standing near the surf, penetrates his chest, seizes his floating green heart, and rips it out. The zek’s body falls lifeless to the sand, leaking out all its internal fluids. Another LGM instantly kneels to absorb what it can of the dead zek’s cellular essence.
Setebos retrieves his retractable armstalk, squeezes the heart into a dry husk as one would squeeze moisture out of a sponge, and flings it away. Its heart was as empty and voiceless as its head. There was no message there.
“Not to you,” agrees Prospero. “But the sad message now to me is not to speak so openly to my enemies. Others always suffer.”
Others are meant to suffer. That’s why we create them, you and I.
“Aye, to that end we have the key of both officer and office, to set all hearts in the state to what tune that pleases our ear. But your creations offend all, Setebos—especially Caliban. Your monster child is the ivy that hid my princely trunk and sucked my verdure out on it.”
And so was he born to do.
“Born?” Prospero laughs softly. “Your hag-seed’s bastard oozed into being amidst all the panoply of a true whore-priestess’s charms—toads, beetles, bats, pigs who once were men—and the lizard-boy would have made a sty of mine own Earth had not I taken the traitorous creature in, taught it language, lodged it in my own cell, used it with humane care, and showed to it all the qualities of humankind…for all the good it did me or the world or the lying slave itself.”
All the qualities of humankind, snorts Setebos. It moves five paces forward on its huge walking hands until its shadow falls over the old man. I taught him power. You taught him pain.
“When it did, like your own foul race, forget his own meaning and begin to gabble like a thing most brutish, I deservedly confined it into a rock where I kept it company in a form of myself.”
You exiled Caliban to that orbital rock and sent one of your holograms there so that you could bait and torture him for centuries, lying magus.
“Torture? No. But when it disobeyed, I racked the foul amphibian with cramps, filled his bones with ache, and made him roar so as to make the other beasts of that now-fallen orbital isle tremble at his din. And I shall do so again when I capture him.”
Too late. Setebos snorts. His unblinking eyes all turn to look down at the old man in the blue robe. Fingers twitch and sway. You said yourself that my son, with whom I am well pleased, is loosed upon your world. I knew this, of course. I will be there soon to join him. Together, along with the thousands of little calibani you were so obliging as to create when you still dwelt among the post-humans there and thought that doomed world good, father and son-grandson will soon scour your green orb into a more pleasing place.
“A swamp, you mean,” says Prospero. “Filled with foul smells, fouler creatures, all forms of blackness, and all infections that fetch up from bogs, fens, flats, and the stink from Prosper’s fall.”
Yes. The huge, pink-brain thing seems to dance up and down on its long fingerlegs, swaying as if to unheard music or pleasing screams.
“Then Prosper must not fall,” whispers the old man. “Must not fall.”
You will, magus. You are but a shadow of a rumor of a hint of a noosphere—a personification of a centerless, soulless pulse of useless information, senseless mumbles from a race long fallen into dotage and decay, a cyber-sewn fart in the wind. You will fall and so shall your useless bio-whore, Ariel.
Prospero lifts his staff as if to strike the monster. Then he lowers it and leans on it as though suddenly drained of all energy. “Ariel is still our Earth’s good and faithful servant. She shall never serve you or your monster son or your blue-eyed witch.”
She will serve us by dying.
“Ariel is Earth, monster,” breathes Prospero. “My darling grew into full consciousness from the noosphere interweaving itself with the self-aware biosphere. Would you kill a whole world to feed your rage and vanity?”
Oh, yes.
Setebos leaps forward on its giant fingertips and seizes up the old man in five hands, lifting him close to two of its sets of eyes. Where is Sycorax?
“She rots.”
Circe is dead? Setebos’ daughter and concubine cannot die.
“She rots.”
Where? How?
“Age and envy did turn her into a hoop, and I rolled her into the form of a fish, which now rots from the head down.”
The many-handed makes its mucus-snort and tears Prospero’s legs off, casting them into the sea. Then the thing rips away the magus’s arms, feeding them into a maw that opens from the deepest orifice of its folds. Finally, it pulls the old man’s entrails out, slurping them up as it would a long noodle.
“Does this amuse you?” asks Prospero’s head before that, too, is crunched by gray finger-thumbs and fed into the many-handed’s maw.
Silver tentacles on the beach flicker and the parabolic suckers at the end shine. Prospero flicks back into solidity farther away on the beach.
“You are a dull thing, Setebos. Ever angry, ever hungry, but tiresome and dull.”
I will find your true corporeal self, Prospero. Trust this. On your Earth or in its crust or under its sea or on its orbit, I will find the organic mass that once was you and I will chew on you slowly. There is no doubt of this.
“Dull,” says the magus. He looks weary and sad. “Whatever the fate of your clay-made gods and my zeks here on Mars—and my beloved men and women on the Earth of Ilium—you and I will meet again soon. On Earth this time. And this, our long war, will soon and finally end for the better or for the worse.”
Yes. The many-handed thing spits bloody shreds out onto the sand, pivots on its under-hands, and scuttles back into the sea until all that can be seen of it is a bloody spouting from its half-submerged tophole.
Prospero sighs. He nods to the voynix, crosses to the nearest LGM, and hugs one of the little green men.
“As much as I want to speak with you and hear your thoughts, my beloveds, my old heart can bear to see no more of your kind die today. So until I venture here again, in happier times, I pray thee, corragio! Have courage! Corragio!
The voynix come forward and flick off the projector. The magus vanishes. The voynix carefully fold up the silver tentacles, carry the projecting machine to the steam carriole, and disappear up its steps into its red-lighted interior. The steps fold up. The steam engine chugs more loudly.
The carriole puffs around in a lumbering, sand-spitting circle on the beach, the zeks silently stepping aside, and then the unwieldy machine lumbers through the Brane Hole and disappears.
A few seconds later, the Brane Hole itself shrinks, shrivels back into its eleven-dimensional world sheet of pure colored energy, shrinks again, and flicks out of existence.
For a while, the only sound or movement comes from the lethargic waves sliding into the red beach. Then the LGM disperse to their feluccas and barges and set sail back to their stone heads yet to be carved and raised.
21
Even as she spurred her horse forward and lifted Athena’s spear for the killing throw, Penthesilea realized that she’d overlooked two things that might seal her fate.
First of all—incredibly—sh
e realized that Athena had never told her, nor had she asked the goddess, which heel of the mankiller’s was mortal. Penthesilea had assumed it was the right heel—that had been her image of Peleus pulling the baby from the Celestial Fire—but Athena had not specified, saying only that one of Achilles’ heels was mortal.
Penthesilea had imagined the difficulty of striking the hero’s heel, even with Athena’s charmed spear—feeling safe in assuming that Achilles would not be running away from her—but she’d instructed her Amazon comrades to strike down as many Achaeans to the rear of Achilles as possible. Penthesilea planned to throw at the fleet-footed mankiller’s heel the instant he turned to see who was wounded and who was dead, as any loyal captain would do. But to make this strategy work, Penthesilea had to hold back on her part of the attack, allowing her sisters to strike down these others so that Achilles would be made to turn. It went against Penthesilea’s warrior nature not to lead, not to be the first to make killing contact, and even though her sisters understood this attack plan was necessary for the mankiller to be brought down, it caused the Amazon queen to flush with shame as the line of horses closed with the line of men as Penthesilea’s huge steed hung a few seconds behind the others.
Then she realized her second mistake. The wind was blowing in from behind Achilles, not toward him. Part of Penthesilea’s plan depended upon the confusing effect of Aphrodite’s perfume, but the muscled male idiot had to smell it for the plan to work. Unless the wind changed—or unless Penthesilea closed the distance until she was literally on top of the blond Achaean warrior—the magical scent would not be a factor.