by Dan Simmons
They couldn’t hear him—the roaring was already too loud—so Harman didn’t add the “I’ve been through it before…once” disclaimer that he was thinking. Hannah had been aboard when this same sonie had brought Daeman, Harman, and her down from Prospero’s disintegrating orbital isle, but she hadn’t been fully conscious and had no real memory of the event.
Harman decided that closing his eyes as the sonie hurtled Earthward again within its womb of plasma was the best choice for him as well.
What the hell am I doing? Doubts filled him again. He was no leader—what did he think he was doing taking this sonie and two trusting lives and risking them this way? He’d never flown the sonie this way, why did he think it was going to make the trip successfully? And even if it did, how could he justify taking the sonie away from Ardis Hall at the community’s time of maximum danger? Daeman’s report of the Setebos creature’s entombing of Paris Crater and the other faxnode communities should have taken top priority, not this running off to the Golden Gate and Machu Picchu just to save Odysseus. How dare Harman leave Ada when she was pregnant and depending upon him? Noman was almost certainly going to die anyway, why risk several hundred lives—perhaps tens of thousands if their warning didn’t get out to the other communities—on this almost surely hopeless attempt to save the wounded old man?
Old man. As the wind shrieked and the sonie bucked, Harman held on for dear life and grimaced. He was the old man of the group, less than two months to go before his Fifth and Final Twenty. Harman realized that he was still expecting to disappear when his final birthday rolled around, and then be faxed up to the rings even if there were no healing tanks left there to receive him. And who knows that won’t be the case? he thought. Harman believed himself to be the oldest man on Earth, with the possible exception of Odysseus-Noman, who could be any age. But Noman probably would be dead in minutes or hours anyway. So might we all, thought Harman.
What the hell was he thinking, having a child with a woman only seven years beyond her First Twenty? What right did he have to urge others to return to the idea of Lost Era–type families? Who was he to say that the new reality demanded that fathers of children be known to the mother and to others and that the man should stay with the woman and children? What did the old man named Harman really know about the old idea of family—about duty—about anything, and who was he to lead anyone? The only thing unique about himself, Harman realized, was that he’d taught himself to read. He’d been the only person on Earth who could do that for many years. Big deal. Now everyone who wanted it had the sigl function and many others at Ardis had also learned how to decode the words and sounds from the squiggles in the old books.
I’m not so special after all.
The plasma shield around the sonie faded and the spinning ceased, but tongues of flame still licked past on either side.
If the sonie is destroyed—or just runs out of fuel, energy, whatever it runs on—Ardis is doomed. No one will ever know what happened to us—we’ll simply disappear and Ardis will be without its only flying machine. The voynix will attack again or Setebos would show up, and without the sonie to fly between the Hall and the faxnode pavilion, there will be no retreat for Ada and the others. I’ve endangered their only hope of escape.
The stars disappeared, the sky grew deep blue, then pale blue, and then they were entering a high cloud layer as the sonie bled off velocity.
If I get Noman into some sort of crèche, I’m heading straight back, thought Harman. I’m going to stay with Ada and let Daeman or Petyr or Hannah and the younger people make the decisions and go on their voyages. I have a baby to think of. That last thought was more terrifying than the violent leaping and bucking of the sonie.
For long minutes, the descending flying machine was wrapped in clouds that flowed over the sonie’s still-humming forcefield like whirling smoke, first mixing with the snow flying by and then just rushing by like the rising souls of all those billions of humans who had lived and died before Harman’s century on the still-shrouded Earth. Then the sonie broke out of the cloud cover about three thousand feet above the steep peaks and once again, Harman looked down on the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu.
The plateau was high, steep, green, and terraced, bordered by jagged peaks and deep, greener canyons. The ancient bridge, its rusted towers more than seven hundred feet tall, was almost-but-not-quite connected to the two jagged mountains on either side of the terraced plateau, which showed outlines of even more ancient ruins. What had once been buildings on the plateau were just stone outlines against the green now. At places on the huge bridge itself, paint that must once have been orange glowed like patches of lichen, but rust had turned most of the structure a deep, dried-blood red. The suspended roadbed had fallen away here and there, some suspension cables had collapsed, but the Golden Gate was most visibly still a bridge…but a bridge that started nowhere and went nowhere.
The first time Harman had seen the ruined structure from a distance, he’d thought the huge towers and heavy horizontal connecting cables were wrapped about with bright green ivy, but he knew now that these green bubbles, hanging vines, and connecting tubules were the actual habitation structures, probably added centuries after the bridge itself was built. Savi had said, perhaps not all in jest, that the green buckyglas globes and globs and spiraling strands were the only thing holding the older structure up.
Harman, Hannah, and Petyr all rose to their elbows to stare as the sonie slowed, leveled off briefly, and then began a long, descending turn that would bring them to the plateau and bridge from the south. The view was even more dynamic than the first time Harman had seen it since the clouds were lower now, rain was falling on the boundary peaks, and lightning was flashing behind the higher mountains to the west even while itinerant beams of sunlight shafted down through gaps in the flying clouds to illuminate the bridge, roadbed, green buckyglas helixes, and the plateau itself. Scudding clouds dragged black curtains of rain between the sonie and the bridge, obscuring their view for a minute, but then quickly moved past them toward the east as more tatters of clouds and shafts of sunlight kept the entire scene in apparent motion.
No, not just apparent motion, Harman realized…things were moving on the hill and bridge. Thousands of things were moving. At first Harman thought it was an optical trick of the quickly moving clouds and shifting light, but as the sonie swooped toward the north tower to land, he realized that he was looking at thousands of voynix—perhaps tens of thousands. The eyeless, gray-bodied, leather-humped creatures covered the old ruins and green summit and swarmed up the bridge towers, jostled against each other on the broken roadbed, and skittered and scuttled like six-foot-tall cockroaches along the rusted suspension cables. There were a score of the things on the flat north tower where Savi had landed them last time and where the sonie seemed intent upon landing now.
“Manual or automatic approach?” asked the sonie.
“Manual!” shouted Harman. The holographic virtual controls blinked into existence and he twisted the omni controller to turn the sonie away from the north tower just a few seconds and fifty feet before they would have landed amongst the voynix. Two of the voynix actually leaped at them, one of them coming within ten feet of the sonie before silently falling more than seventy stories to the rocks below. The dozen or so remaining voynix on the flat tower top followed the sonie with their eyeless, infrared gazes and dozens more streamed up the scabrous towers to the tops, their bladed fingers and sharp-edged peds cutting into cement as they clambered.
“We can’t land,” said Harman. The bridge and hillsides and even the surrounding peaks were alive with the scuttling things.
“There aren’t any voynix on the green bubbles,” called Petyr. He was up and on his knees, his bow in his left hand and an arrow notched. The forcefield had flicked off and the air was both chill and humid. The smell of rain and rotting vegetation was very strong.
“We can’t land on the green bubbles,” said Harman, circling the sonie about a hundred f
eet out from the suspension cables. “There’s no way in. We have to turn back.” He swung the sonie back north and began to gain altitude.
“Wait!” called Hannah. “Stop.”
Harman leveled off and set the sonie in a gentle, banking circle pattern. To the west, lightning flickered between the low clouds and high peaks.
“When we were here ten months ago, I explored the place while you and Ada were out hunting Terror Birds with Odysseus,” said Hannah. “One of the bubbles…on the south tower…had other sonies in it, like a sort of…I don’t know. What was that word we sigled from the gray-bound book? ‘Garage?’”
“Other sonies!” cried Petyr. Harman also wanted to shout aloud. More flying machines could decide the fate of everyone at Ardis Hall. He wondered why Odysseus had never mentioned the extra sonies when he came back with the flechette guns after his solo return trip to the Bridge some months ago.
“No, not sonies…I mean, not complete sonies,” Hannah said hurriedly, “but parts of them. Shells. Machine parts.”
Harman shook his head, feeling his eagerness deflate. “What does this have to do with…” he began.
“It looked like a place where they could land,” said Hannah.
Harman banked the sonie past the south tower, taking care to stay far out. There were over a hundred voynix atop the towers, but none on the scores of green bubbles that clustered and twisted around the bridge tower like grapes of various sizes. “There’s no opening anywhere,” called back Harman. “And so many bubbles…you’d never remember which one you were in from out here.” He remembered from their first visit that although the glass of the buckyglas globules was clear and color-free while inside looking out, the bubbles were opaque to an outside viewer.
Lightning flashed. It began to rain on them and the forcefield flickered up again. The voynix on the tops of the tower and the hundreds more clinging to the vertical tower itself turned their eyeless bodies to follow their circling.
“I can remember,” said Hannah from the rear niche. She was also on her knees, holding the unconscious Odysseus’ hand in hers. “I have a good visual memory…I’ll just retrace my steps from that afternoon I was there, look at the landscape from different angles, and figure out which bubble I was in.” She glanced around and then closed her eyes for a minute.
“There,” said Hannah, pointing to a green bubble protruding about sixty feet out from the south tower, two-thirds of the way up the orangered monolith. It was just one of hundreds of green-glass bumps on that tower.
Harman flew lower.
“No opening,” he said as he twisted the virtual omnicontroller, bringing the sonie to a hover about seventy-five feet out from the bubble. “Savi landed us on the top of the north tower.”
“But it makes sense that they would have flown the sonies into that…garage,” said Hannah. “The bottom of it was flat, and a different substance than most of the green globes.”
“You two told me once that Savi said it was a museum,” said Petyr, “and I’ve sigled that word since then. They probably brought the sonie parts in piece by piece.”
Hannah shook her head. Harman thought, not for the first time, that the pleasant young woman could be stubborn when she wanted to be.
“Let’s go closer,” she said.
“The voynix…” began Harman.
“They aren’t out on the bubble, so they’d have to leap from the tower,” argued Hannah. “We can get all the way to the bubble and they can’t reach us by jumping.”
“They can be out on the green stuff in a minute…” began Petyr.
“I don’t think they can,” said Hannah. “Something’s keeping them off the glass.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Petyr.
“Wait,” said Harman. “Maybe it does.” He told them both about the crawler they’d been in when Savi drove Daeman and him into the Mediterranean Basin ten months earlier. “The top of the machine was like this glass,” he said, “tinted from the outside but clear when looking out. But nothing stuck to it. Not rain, not even voynix when they tried to jump on the crawler in Jerusalem. Savi said that the glass had some sort of forcefield just above the glass material that made it frictionless. I can’t remember if she said it was buckyglas, though.”
“Let’s go closer,” said Hannah.
Twenty feet from the bubble and Harman saw the way to get in. It was subtle, and if he hadn’t been to Prospero’s Isle, where both the airlock to the orbital city and the entrance to the Firmary worked with this same technology, he never would have noticed it. A barely visible rectangle on the edge of the elongated bubble was a slightly lighter green than the rest of the buckyglas. He told the other two about what Savi had called “semipermeable membranes” on Prospero’s airlock and Firmary.
“What if this isn’t one of those semiwhatsit membranes,” said Petyr. “Just a trick of the light?”
“I guess we crash,” said Harman. He nudged the omnicontroller and the sonie slid forward.
“If you couch him there, he shall die,” said a voice from the darkness. Then Ariel stepped into the light.
The semipermeable molecular membrane had been quite permeable enough, the rectangle had solidified behind them, Harman had landed the sonie on the metal deck amongst the cannibalized parts of the machine’s own kind, and the three of them had wasted no time getting Odysseus-Noman onto the stretcher and out of the garage. Hannah had grabbed the front of the stretcher, Harman had taken the rear, Petyr provided security, and they were into the green-bubble helix maze at once, traversing corridors, climbing unmoving escalators, and heading for the bubble filled with crystal coffins where Savi had said both she and Odysseus had slept their long cryosleeps.
Within minutes, Harman was impressed not only with Hannah’s memory—she never hesitated when they came to a junction of bubble corridors or stairs—but with her strength. The thin young woman wasn’t even breathing hard, but Harman would have welcomed a break. Odysseus-Noman wasn’t that tall, but he was heavy. Harman caught himself glancing at the unconscious man’s chest to make sure he was still breathing. He was…but only just.
When they reached the main bubble helix rising around the bridge tower, all three of them hesitated and Petyr raised his readied bow.
Scores of voynix were hanging from the bridge metal, apparently looking down at them with their eyeless carapaces.
“They can’t see us,” said Hannah. “The bubble’s dark from the outside.”
“No, I think they can see us,” said Harman. “Savi said their hood receptors see three hundred and sixty degrees in the infrared…the range of light that’s more heat than vision, our eyes don’t see into it…and I have the feeling they’re looking at us right through the opaque buckyglas.”
They advanced down the curved corridor another thirty paces and the voynix shifted their clinging postures to follow their advance. Suddenly half a dozen of the heavy creatures leaped down onto the glass.
Petyr raised his nocked bow and Harman was sure that the voynix would come crashing through the buckyglas, but there was only the softest of thumps as each voynix struck the millimeter-thin forcefield and slid off, falling away. The humans happened to be in a stretch of the bubble corridor where the floor was almost transparent—an unnerving experience, but at least Harman and Hannah had seen it before and trusted the near-transparent floor to hold them. Petyr kept glancing at his feet as if he were going to fall any second.
They passed through the largest room—museum, Savi had called it—and entered the long bubble with the crystal coffins. Here the buckyglas was almost opaque and very green. It reminded Harman of the time—could it only have been a year and a half ago—when he had walked miles out into the Atlantic Breach and peered in through towering walls of water on each side to see huge fish swimming higher than his head. The light had been dim and green like this.
Hannah set down the stretcher, Harman hurried to lower it with her, and she looked around. “Which cryo-crèche?”
There were eight crystal coffins in the long room, all empty and gleaming dully in the low light. Tall boxes of humming machines were connected to each coffin and virtual lights blinked green, red, and amber above metal surfaces.
“I have no idea,” said Harman. Savi had talked to Daeman and him about her sleeping for centuries in one or more of these cryo-crèches, but that conversation had taken place more than ten months ago while they were entering the Mediterranean Basin in the crawler and he didn’t remember the details well. Perhaps there had been no details to remember.
“Let’s just try this closest one,” said Harman. He took hold of the unconscious Odysseus under the man’s bandaged arms, waited for Petyr and Hannah to find a grip, and they started lifting him into the coffin closest to a spiral staircase that Harman remembered going up into another bubble corridor.
“If you couch him there, he shall die,” said a soft, androgynous voice from the darkness.
All three hurried to lower Odysseus back onto the stretcher. Petyr raised his bow. Harman and Hannah set their hands to their sword hilts. The figure emerged from the darkness beyond the monitoring machines.
Harman instantly knew that this was the Ariel of whom Savi and Prospero had spoken, but he did not know how he knew this. The figure was short—barely five feet tall—and not-quite-human. He or she had greenish-white skin that was not really skin—Harman could see right through the outer layer to the interior, where sparkling lights seemed to float in emerald fluid—and a perfectly formed face so androgynous that it reminded Harman of pictures of angels he had sigled from some of Ardis Hall’s oldest books. He or she had long slender arms and normal hands except for the length and grace of the fingers, and appeared to be wearing soft green slippers. At first Harman thought that the Ariel figure was wearing clothes—or not so much clothes as a series of pale, leaf-embroidered vines running round and round its slim form and sewn into a tight bodysuit—but then he realized that pattern lay in the creature’s skin rather than atop it. There was still no sign of gender.