Olympos

by Dan Simmons

  Harman was in the front parlor where the wide window doors had been unshuttered, allowing a view down the south lawn to the lower palisade. There was no sunrise—the morning was too cloudy—and it had begun to snow. Ada had seen snow before in her life, but only once here at Ardis Hall, when she was very young. About a dozen men and women, including Daeman—who looked oddly flushed—were standing by the windows, watching the snow fall and talking softly.

  Ada gave Daeman a quick hug and moved close to Harman, slipping her arm around him. “How is Ody…” she began.

  “Noman’s still alive, but only barely,” Harman said softly. “He’s lost too much blood. His breathing is becoming more and more difficult. Loes thinks that he’ll die within the next hour or two. We’re trying to decide what to do.” He touched her lower back. “Ada, Daeman has brought us some terrible news about his mother.”

  Ada looked at her friend, wondering if his mother had simply refused to come to Ardis. She and Daeman had visited Marina twice in the past eight months, and neither time had they come close to convincing the older woman.

  “She’s dead,” said Daeman. “Caliban killed her and everyone else in the domi tower.”

  Ada bit her knuckle until it almost bled and then said, “Oh, Daeman, I am so, so sorry…” And then, realizing what he’d said, she whispered, “Caliban?” She had convinced herself from Harman’s stories about Prospero’s Isle that the creature had died up there. “Caliban?” she repeated stupidly. Her dream was still with her like a weight on her neck. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” said Daeman.

  Ada put her arms around him, but Daeman’s body was as tight and rigid as a rock. He patted her shoulder almost absently. Ada wondered if he was in shock.

  The group resumed discussing the night’s defense of Ardis Hall.

  The voynix had attacked just before midnight—at least a hundred of them, perhaps a hundred and fifty; it was hard to tell in the dark and rain—and they had rushed at least three out of the four sides of the palisade perimeter. It was the largest and certainly the most coordinated attack the voynix had ever carried out against Ardis.

  The defenders had killed them until just before dawn—first setting the huge braziers alight, burning the precious kerosene and naphtha saved for that purpose, illuminating the walls and fields beyond the walls—and then showering volley upon volley of aimed bow-and-crossbow fire onto the rushing forms.

  Arrows and bolts didn’t always penetrate a voynix’s carapace or leathery hood—more often than not they didn’t—so the defenders expended a huge percentage of their arrows and bolts. Dozens of the voynix had fallen—Loes reported that his team had counted fifty-three voynix corpses in the fields and woods at first light.

  Some of the things had gotten to the walls and leapt to the ramparts—voynix could jump thirty feet and more from a standing start, like huge grasshoppers—but the mass of pikes and reserve fighters with swords had stopped any from getting to the house. Eight of Ardis’s people had been hurt, but only two seriously: a woman named Kirik with a badly broken arm, and Laman, a friend of Petyr’s, with four fingers lopped off—not by a voynix’s blades, but from a fellow defender’s ill-timed swing of a sword.

  What had turned the tide was the sonie.

  Harman launched the oval disk from the ancient jinker platform high on Ardis Hall’s gabled rooftop. He flew it from its center-forward niche. The flying machine had six shallow, cushioned indentations for people lying prone, but Petyr, Loes, Reman, and Hannah had knelt in their niches, shooting down from the sonie, the three men wielding all of Ardis’s flechette rifles and Hannah firing the finest crossbow she’d ever crafted.

  Harman couldn’t go lower than about sixty feet because of the voynix’s amazing leaping abilities. But that was close enough. Even in the dark and the rain, even with the voynix scuttling as fast as cockroaches and leaping like giant grasshoppers on a griddle, the sustained flechette and crossbow fire dropped the creatures in their tracks. Harman flew the sonie in among the tall trees at the bottom and top of the hill, the defenders on the palisade ramparts shot flaming arrows and catapult-launched balls of burning, hissing naphtha to illuminate the night. The voynix scattered, regrouped, and attacked six more times before finally disappearing, some toward the river far down the hill from Ardis and the rest into the hills to the north.

  “But why did they stop attacking?” asked the young woman named Peaen. “Why’d they leave?”

  “What do you mean?” said Petyr. “We killed a third of them.”

  Harman crossed his arms and glared out at the softly falling snow. “I know what Peaen means. It’s a good question. Why did they break off the attack? We’ve never seen a voynix react to pain. They die…but they don’t complain about it. Why didn’t they all keep coming until they overran us or died?”

  “Because someone or something recalled them,” Daeman said.

  Ada glanced at him. Daeman’s face was almost slack, his voice dull, his eyes not quite focused on anything. For the last nine months, Daeman’s energy and determination had deepened and visibly increased daily. Now he was listless, seemingly indifferent to the conversation and the people around him. Ada felt sure that his mother’s death had almost undone him—perhaps it would yet do so.

  “If the voynix were recalled, who recalled them?” asked Hannah.

  No one spoke.

  “Daeman,” Harman said, “please tell your story again, for Ada. And add any detail you left out the first time.” More men and women had gathered in the long room. Everyone looked tired. No one spoke or asked questions as Daeman gave his story again, his voice a dull monotone.

  He told of the slaughter at his mother’s domi, the stack of skulls, the presence of the turin cloth on the table—the only thing not splattered with blood—and how he activated it later when he’d faxed somewhere else; he didn’t specify where exactly. He told of the appearance of the hole above the city of Paris Crater and about his glimpse of something large emerging from it—something that seemed to scuttle about on impossible sets of giant hands.

  He explained how he had faxed away to regain his composure, then faxed to the Ardis node—the guards at the small fort there told him of the movement of voynix they’d glimpsed all night, the torches were lit and every man was at the walls, and about the sounds of fighting and flashes of torches and naphtha they’d seen from the direction of Ardis Hall. Daeman had been tempted to start toward Ardis on foot but the men at the barricades there at the fax pavilion were positive it’d be certain death to try that walk in the dark—they’d counted more than seventy voynix slipping past across meadows and into the woods, headed toward the great house.

  Daeman explained how he’d left the turin cloth with Casman and Greogi, the two captains of the guard there, and directed one of them to fax to Chom or somewhere safe with the turin if the voynix overran the fax pavilion before he got back.

  “We plan to fax out if those bastards attack us,” said Greogi. “We’ve made plans on who goes when and in which order, while others provide covering fire until it’s their turn. We’re not planning to die to protect this pavilion.”

  Daeman had nodded and faxed back to Paris Crater.

  He told the others now that if he had chosen the closer-in Invalid Hotel node to the more distant Guarded Lion, he would have died. All the center of Paris Crater had been transformed. The hole in space was still there—weak sunlight streaming out—but the center of the city itself had been encased in a webbed glacier of blue ice.

  “Blue ice?” interrupted Ada. “It was that cold?”

  “Very cold near the stuff,” said Daeman. “But not so bad just a few yards away. Just chilly and raining, It wasn’t really ice, I don’t think. Just something chill and crystalline—cold but organic, like spiderwebs rising out of icebergs—and the blocks and webs of the stuff covered the old domi towers and boulevards all around the crater in the heart of Paris Crater.”

  “Did you see that…thing…you saw c
ome through the hole?” asked Emme.

  “No. I couldn’t get close enough. There were more voynix than I’d ever seen before. The Guarded Lion building itself—it used to be some sort of transport center, you know, with rails running in and out and landing pads on the roof—was alive with voynix.” Daeman looked at Harman. “It reminded me of Jerusalem last year.”

  “That many?” said Harman.

  “That many. And there was something else. Two things that I haven’t talked about yet.”

  Everyone waited. Outside, the snow fell. There was a moan from the infirmary, and Hannah slipped away to check on Noman-Odysseus again.

  “There’s a blue light shining from Paris Crater now,” said Daeman.

  “A blue light?” asked the woman named Loes.

  Only Harman, Ada, and Petyr registered comprehension—Harman because he’d been there in Jerusalem with Daeman and Savi nine months earlier; Ada and Petyr because they’d heard the stories.

  “Does it shoot skyward like the one we saw in Jerusalem?” asked Harman.

  “Yes.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” asked the redheaded woman named Oelleo.

  Harman answered. “We saw a similar beam in Jerusalem last year—a city near the drained Mediterranean Basin. Savi, the old woman with us, said that the beam was made of…what was it, Daeman? Tachyons?”

  “I think so.”

  “Tachyons,” continued Harman. “And that it contained the captured codes of all of her race from before the Final Fax. That beam was the Final Fax.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Reman. He looked very tired.

  Daeman shook his head. “Neither do I. I don’t know if the beam came with the creature I saw come through the hole, or if the beam somehow brought that thing to Paris Crater. But there’s more news—and it’s worse.”

  “How could it be?” asked Peaen with a laugh.

  Daeman did not smile. “I had to get out of Paris Crater quickly—the Guarded Lion node would be death by now, voynix everywhere—and I knew it wouldn’t be light here yet, so I faxed to Bellinbad, then Ulanbat, then Chom, then Drid, then Loman’s Place, then Kiev, then Fuego, then Devi, then Satle Heights, then to Mantua, finally to Cape Town Tower.”

  “To warn them all,” said Ada.

  “Yes.”

  “Why is that bad news?” asked Harman.

  “Because the holes have opened at both Chom and Ulanbat,” said Daeman. “The community cores there are webbed with blue ice. The blue beams rise from both of those survivor colonies. Setebos has been there.”

  28

  The forty or so people in the room simply stared at each other. Then there was a babble-chorus of questions. Daeman and Harman explained what Caliban on the orbital isle had said about his god, Setebos, the “many-handed like a cuttlefish.”

  They asked about Ulanbat and Chom. Chom he’d seen only from a distance—a growing web of blue ice. In Ulanbat, he told them, he’d faxed to the seventy-ninth floor of the Circles of Heaven and seen from the ring terrace there that the hole was a mile out over the Gobi Desert, the web of ice-stuff connecting the low outbuildings to the bottom levels of the Circles. The seventy-ninth floor seemed to be above the ice—for now.

  “Did you see any people there?” asked Ada.

  “No.”

  “Voynix?” asked Reman.

  “Hundreds. Scuttling in and under and around the ice web. But not in the Circles.”

  “Then where are the people?” asked Emme in a small voice. “We know Ulanbat had weapons—we bartered them for their rice and textiles.”

  “They must have faxed out when the hole appeared,” said Petyr. It sounded obvious to Ada that the young man was putting more certainty in his voice than he felt.

  “If they faxed out,” said Peaen, “I mean the people in both Ulanbat and Chom, why haven’t they shown up here as refugees? Those three node cities—Paris Crater, Chom, Ulanbat—still house tens of thousands of old-style humans like us. Where are they? Where did they go?” She looked at Greogi and Casman, who’d just come in from their overnight guard duty at the fax pavilion. “Greogi, Cas, have people been faxing in overnight? Fleeing something?”

  Greogi shook his head. “The only traffic was Daeman Uhr here—late last night and then again this morning.”

  Ada stepped into the middle of the circle. “Look…we’ll meet to talk about this later. Right now you’re all exhausted. Most of you were up all night. A lot of people hadn’t eaten when all this started. Stoman, Cal, Boman, Elle, Anna, and Uru have been cooking up a huge breakfast. Those of you who need to go on guard duty—you’re first in line in the dining hall. Make sure you get plenty of coffee. The rest of you should also eat before you catch some sleep. Reman wanted me to mention that the iron pour will be at ten a.m. We’ll all get together in the old ballroom at three p.m. for a full community meeting.”

  People milled, stirred, buzzed with conversation, but left to get their breakfasts and to go about their duties.

  Harman walked toward the infirmary, caught Ada’s and Daeman’s eye, nodded in that direction. The two joined him as the last of the crowd dispersed.

  Ada quietly told Siris and Tom, who’d been working as medical attendants, applying first aid to the wounded and watching over Noman during the night, that they should go get something to eat. The two slipped out, leaving Hannah sitting next to the bed and Daeman, Ada, and Harman standing.

  “This is like old times,” said Harman, referring to when the five of them had traveled together, and then with Savi, nine months earlier. They’d rarely had time to be alone together since then.

  “Except that Odysseus is dying,” said Hannah, her voice flat and ragged. She was holding the unconscious man’s left hand and squeezing it so tightly that all the interlaced fingers, his and hers, were white.

  Harman stepped closer and studied the unconscious man. His band-ages—just replaced an hour earlier—were soaked through with blood. His lips were as white as his fingertips and his eyes no longer moved beneath their closed eyelids. Noman’s mouth was open slightly and the breath that rattled there was swift, shallow, and unsure.

  “I’m going to take him to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu,” said Harman.

  Everyone stared at him. Finally Hannah said, “You mean when he…dies? To bury him?”

  “No. Now. To save him.”

  Ada gripped Harman’s upper arm so fiercely that he almost flinched away. “What are you talking about?”

  “What Petyr said—Noman’s last words before losing consciousness near the wall yesterday evening—I think he was trying to tell him to take him back to the crèche at Golden Gate.”

  “What crèche?” said Daeman. “I only remember the crystal coffins.”

  “Cryotemporal sarcophagi,” said Hannah, enunciating each syllable with care. “I remember them in the museum there. I remember Savi talking about them. It’s where she slept some of the centuries away. It’s where she said she found Odysseus sleeping three weeks before we met here.”

  “But Savi didn’t always tell the truth,” said Harman. “Perhaps she never did. Odysseus has admitted that he and Savi had known each other for a long, long time—that it was the two of them who distributed the turin cloths almost eleven years ago.”

  Ada held up the turin cloth that Daeman had left behind in the other room.

  “And Prospero told us…up there…that there was more to this Odysseus than we could understand. And on a couple of occasions, after a lot of wine, Odysseus has mentioned his crèche at the Golden Gate—joked about returning to it.”

  “He must have meant the crystal coffins…the sarcophagi,” said Ada.

  “I don’t think so,” said Harman, pacing back and forth past the empty beds. All of the other victims of last night’s fighting had decided to recuperate in their rooms in Ardis Hall or the outlying barracks. Only Noman was still here this morning. “I think there was another thing there at Golden Gate, a sort of healing crèche.”
>
  “Blue worms,” whispered Daeman. His pale face grew even paler. Hannah was so shocked at the image—her cells remembered her hours in the worm-filled tanks up there in the Firmary on Prospero’s orbital isle even if her mind did not—that she released Odysseus’ hand.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Harman said quickly. “We didn’t see anything that resembled the Firmary healing tanks when we were at the Golden Gate. No blue worms. No orange fluid. I think the crèche is something else.”

  “You’re just guessing,” Ada said flatly, almost harshly.

  “Yes. I’m just guessing.” He rubbed his cheeks. He was so very tired. “But I think that if Noman…Odysseus…survives the sonie flight, there might be a chance for him at the Golden Gate.”

  “You can’t do that,” said Ada. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “We need the sonie here. To fight the voynix if they come back tonight. When they come back tonight.”

  “I’ll be back before dark,” said Harman.

  Hannah stood. “How can that be? When we flew from the Golden Gate with Savi it took more than a day of flying.”

  “It can fly faster than that,” said Harman. “Savi was flying slowly so as not to scare us.”

  “How much faster?” asked Daeman.

  Harman hesitated a few seconds. “Much faster,” he said at last. “The sonie tells me that it can get to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu in thirty-eight minutes.”

  “Thirty-eight minutes!” cried Ada, who had also been on that long, long flight up with Savi.

  “The sonie told you?” said Hannah. She was upset. “When did the sonie tell you? I thought the machine couldn’t answer questions about destinations.”

  “It hasn’t until this morning,” said Harman. “Just after the fighting. I had a few minutes alone up on the jinker platform with the sonie and I figured out how to interface my palm functions with its display.”

  “How did you discover that?” asked Ada. “You’ve been trying to find some function interface for months.”