by Dan Simmons
Ada let Petyr support the girl’s weight while she snatched up the heavy flechette pistol. A solid volley of rocks came flying out of the darkness, but the humans crouched behind Loes’s and Oelleo’s shields. Petyr grabbed the fallen Laman’s shield and added it to the defensive barricade. One of the larger stones smashed Oelleo’s left arm through the wood and leather shield, and the woman—the absent Daeman’s close friend—threw back her head and screamed with the pain.
There were scores—hundreds—of voynix around them now, scrabbling, leaping, killing the wounded humans on the ground, with more rushing toward Ardis Hall.
“We’re cut off!” cried Petyr. Behind them, the flames in the trenches had lost much of their intensity and the voynix were leaping across without problem. The ground was littered with more human bodies than voynix corpses.
“We have to try!” shouted Ada. One arm around the unconscious girl, firing the flechette pistol with her right hand, she yelled for Oelleo to raise her shield with her right arm and to set it next to Loes’s. Behind that flimsy barricade, the five of them ran toward the house.
More voynix saw them coming and leaped to join the twenty or thirty blocking the way. Some of the creatures had crystal flechette darts lodged in their carapaces and leather humps; the light from the flames caught the crystal and danced in red and green flashes. A voynix grabbed Oelleo’s shield, pulled her off her feet, and cut her throat with a powerful slash of its left arm. Another pulled the girl away from Ada, who set the muzzle of the flechette pistol against the thing’s hump and squeezed the trigger four times. The blast blew out the front of the voynix’s carapace and it collapsed on top of the unconscious girl in a flood of its own blue-white blood-fluid, but Ada could hear the pistol click on an empty chamber as a dozen more voynix leapt closer.
Petyr, Loes, and Ada were kneeling now, trying to protect the fallen girl with the shield, Loes firing with the one remaining flechette gun, Petyr holding out the shortened, broken spear against the next attack, but there were scores of voynix converging.
Harman, Ada had time to think. She realized that she said his name with a mixture of total love and total anger. Why wasn’t he here? Why had he insisted on going away on her last day of life? Now the child growing in her belly was as doomed as Ada was, and Harman was not here to protect either of them. At that second she loved Harman beyond words and hated him at the same time. I’m sorry, she thought—not to Harman, not to herself, but to the fetus inside her. The closest voynix leaped at her and she threw her empty flechette pistol at its metal cara-pace.
The voynix flew backward, smashed to bits. Ada blinked. The five voynix on either side either fell or were flung backward. The dozen voynix around them crouched, raising their arms, as a withering hail of flechette fire rained down on them from the sonie. There were at least eight humans on the disk, overloading it, firing wildly.
Greogi brought the machine lower, chest height—Foolish! thought Ada. The voynix could leap on it, drag it down. If they lost the sonie, Ardis was lost.
“Hurry!” shouted Greogi.
Loes shielded them with his body as Petyr and Ada extricated the unconscious redheaded girl from the voynix carcass and tossed her into the center of the crowded sonie. Hands pulled Ada up. Petyr crawled on. Rocks were pelting around them. Three voynix leaped, higher than the heads of the people on the sonie, but someone—the young woman named Peaen—fired a flechette rifle and two of them were knocked aside. The last one landed on the front of the disk, directly in front of Greogi. The bald pilot stabbed the thing in the chest. The voynix pulled the sword with it when it fell away.
Loes turned and jumped aboard. The sonie wobbled from the weight, staggered, dropped, hit the frozen earth. Voynix were rushing from all sides now and they seemed much larger than usual from Ada’s perspective lying on the bloodied surface of the downed sonie.
Greogi did something with the virtual controls and the sonie bobbed, then rose vertically. Voynix leaped at them but those with rifles in the outer niches blasted them away.
“We’re almost out of flechettes!” shouted Stoman from the rear.
“Are you all right?” asked Petyr, leaning over Ada.
“Yes,” she managed. She’d been trying to stem the girl’s bleeding, but it was internal. Ada couldn’t find a pulse on the girl’s throat. “I don’t think…” she began.
The rocks hit the underside and edges of the sonie like a sudden hailstorm. One caught Peaen in the chest and knocked her backward, across the girl’s body. Another caught Petyr behind the ear, snapping his head forward.
“Petyr!” cried Ada, rising to her knees to grab him.
He lifted his face, looked at her quizzically, smiled slightly, and fell backward off the sonie, dropping into the scuttling mass of voynix fifty feet below.
“Hang on!” cried Greogi.
They circled high once, flew around Ardis Hall. Ada leaned out to see the voynix at every door, scuttling over the porch, beginning to climb every wall, smashing at every shuttered window. The Hall was surrounded by a giant rectangle of flame, and the burning cupola and barracks added to the light. Ada was never good at numbers and estimating, but she guessed that there were a thousand voynix inside the walls down there, all converging on the main house.
“I’m out of flechettes,” cried the man at the right front of the sonie. Ada recognized him—Boman—he’d cooked breakfast for her yesterday.
Greogi looked up, his face white behind streaks of blood and mud. “We should fly to the faxnode pavilion,” he said. “Ardis is lost.”
Ada shook her head. “You go if you want. I’m staying. Let me out there.” She pointed at the ancient jinker platform up between the gables and skylights on the roof. She remembered the day when she was a young teenager, leading her “cousin” Daeman up the ladders to show him that platform—he’d peeked up her skirt and discovered that she didn’t wear underwear. She’d done it deliberately, knowing what a lecherous boy-man her older cousin was in those days.
“Let me out,” she said again. Men and women—hunched shadows like lean and leaning gargoyles—were firing down from the gables, broad gutters, and the jinker platform itself, firing flechettes and bolts and arrows into the growing mob of skittering voynix below. Ada realized that it was like trying to stop an ocean’s tide by throwing pebbles at it.
Greogi hovered the sonie over the crowded platform. Ada jumped out and they lowered the girl’s body to her—Ada couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead. Then they handed her the unconscious but moaning Peaen. Ada lowered both bodies to the platform. Boman jumped down just long enough to throw four heavy bags of flechette magazines into the sonie and clamber back aboard. Then the machine pivoted silently on its axis and dived away, Greogi’s hands working the virtual controls gracefully, his face rapt with attention, reminding Ada of her mother’s focus when she used to play the piano in the front parlor.
Ada staggered to the edge of the jinker platform. She was very dizzy, and if someone in the dark hadn’t steadied her, she would have fallen. The dark figure who’d saved her moved away, back to the edge of the platform, and continued firing a flechette rifle with its heavy thunk-thunk-thunk. A rock flew up out of the darkness and the man or woman fell backward off the jinker platform, the body sliding down the steep roof and dropping away. Ada never saw who it was who had saved her.
Now she stood at the edge of the platform and looked down with a detachment almost approaching disinterest. It was as if what she was watching now was part of the turin-cloth drama—something vulgar and unreal she would view on a rainy autumn afternoon to pass the time away.
The voynix were climbing straight up the outside walls of Ardis Hall. Some of the window shutters had been smashed inward and the creatures were scrabbling in. Light from the front doors spilled down the voynix-crowded front steps and told Ada that the main doors had been breached—there must be no human defenders left alive in the front hall or foyer. The voynix moved with impossible insect-speed. The
y’d be up here on the roof in seconds, not minutes. Part of the west wing of Ada’s home was on fire, but the voynix were going to reach her long before the flames would.
Ada turned, groping in the dark along the jinker platform, feeling wet bodies there, searching for the flechette rifle her savior had dropped. She had no intention of dying with empty hands.
36
Daeman had expected it to be cold when he faxed to the Paris Crater node, but not this cold.
The air inside the Guarded Lion fax pavilion was too cold to breathe. The pavilion itself was sheathed in cords of thick, blue ice, the strands overlapping and attached to the circular faxnode structure like tendons wrapped tight to a bone.
It had taken him more than thirteen hours to fax to the other twenty-nine nodes and warn them of the coming of Setebos and the blue ice. Rumors had preceded him—people from other warned nodes had faxed in ahead of him, filled with panic—and everyone had questions. He’d told them what he knew and then faxed on as quickly as possible, but there were always more questions—where was it safe? All of the node communities had voynix gathering. Several had suffered small raiding attacks, but few had experienced the kind of serious attack that Ardis had fought off the night before Daeman left. Where to go? they all wanted to know. Where was safe? Daeman told them about what he knew of Setebos, Caliban’s many-handed god, and about the blue ice, and then he faxed on—although twice he’d had to brandish his crossbow to get away.
Chom, seen from its hilltop fax pavilion half a mile away, was a dead, blue bubble of ice. The Circles at Ulanbat were now completely enclosed in the strange blue strands and Daeman had faxed away at once before the cold seized him there, tapping in the code for Paris Crater, not knowing what to expect there.
Now he knew. Blue cold. The Guarded Lion faxnode buried in Setebos’ strange ice. Daeman hurriedly pulled up his thermskin hood and fixed the osmosis mask in place—and even then the air was so cold that it burned his lungs. He slung the crossbow over a shoulder already burdened with his heavy rucksack and considered his options.
No one—not even himself—would blame him for turning back now, faxing back to Ardis and reporting what he’d seen and heard. He’d completed his work. This fax pavilion was entombed in blue ice. The largest opening of the dozen or so visible was not more than thirty inches across and it curved away in an ice tunnel that might well lead nowhere. And if he did enter this ice-labyrinth that Setebos had created over the bones of a dead city, what if he didn’t get back? They might need him at Ardis. They certainly needed the information he’d gathered in the past thirteen hours.
Daeman sighed, unslung his pack and crossbow, crouched by the largest opening—it was low, near the floor—shoved the pack in ahead of him, nudged it forward with the cocked crossbow, and began crawling on the ice, feeling the deep-space cold through his thermskinned hands and knees.
The shuffling along was tiring and eventually painful. Less than a hundred yards in, the tunnel forked; Daeman took the left branch because there seemed to be more sunlight in it. Fifty yards beyond that, the tunnel dipped slightly, widened considerably, and then continued almost straight up.
Daeman sat back—feeling the cold reaching his butt through his clothing and thermskin—and then took a water bottle from his backpack. He was exhausted and dehydrated after his hours of faxing and the anxious confrontations with frightened people. He’d rationed his water, but he still had half this bottle left. It didn’t matter though, because the water was firmly frozen. He set the bottle inside his tunic, next to the molecular thermskin, and looked at the ice wall.
It wasn’t perfectly smooth—none of the blue ice was. All of it was striated, and here some of the striations ran horizontally or diagonally in such a way that he thought he might find fingerholds or footholds on it. But it continued rising for at least a hundred feet, angling slowly away from the vertical until it pitched out of sight above. But the sunlight seemed stronger up there.
He withdrew from his pack the two ice hammers he’d had Reman forge for him the long day before this one. Until he’d sigled the word from one of Harman’s old books, Daeman had never heard the word “hammer.” If he had heard the word before the Fall, the idea of such a tool would have bored him silly. Human beings did not use tools. Now his life depended upon these things.
The twin hammers were each about fourteen inches long, with one side of the ice hammer straight and sharp, the other curved and serrated. Reman had helped him tightly wrap the handles with cross-hatched leather—something he could find a grip with even through his thermskin gloves. The points had been sharpened as well as Hannah’s grindstone at Ardis had permitted.
Standing, craning his head back, setting the osmosis mask more firmly in place over his mouth and nose, Daeman shouldered his pack again, made sure the crossbow strap was firmly secure over his left shoulder—the heavy weapon lying diagonally over the pack on his back—and then he raised one of the hammers, slammed it into the ice, slammed it again, and pulled himself four feet up the wall. The tunnel was not much wider than the main chimney at Ardis, so Daeman braced himself across it with a straight leg while he set his left knee on the ice wall to rest there a minute. Then he raised the second hammer as high as he could reach and slammed it into the ice, pulling himself until he was hanging there from one hammer, supporting his weight on the other. Next time, he thought, I’m going to rig some sharp spikes for my boots.
Panting, laughing at the idea of ever doing this a second time, his breath icing the air even through the filtering osmosis mask, his pack threatening to pull him off his precarious perch, Daeman hacked and chipped toeholds, lifted himself, wedged the tips of his boots in, slammed the right hammer in higher, pulled himself up, hacked footholds with the left. After another twenty feet gained, he hung from both hammers embedded in the ice and leaned back to look up the ice chimney. So far so good, he thought. Only ten or fifteen more moves like that and I’ll reach the bend a hundred feet up. Another part of his mind whispered, And find that it’s a dead end. An even darker part of his mind muttered, Or you’ll fall and die. He shook all of the voices out of his head. His arms and legs were beginning to shake from the tension and fatigue. Next stop, he’d chip in a deeper foothold so he could rest more easily. If he had to come back down the ice chimney, he had the rope in his ruck-sack. Soon he’d find out if he’d packed enough.
Above the ice chimney, the tunnel leveled out for sixty feet or so, forked twice more, and then opened up to a canyon-wide crevasse in the blue ice. Daeman packed away the ice hammers with shaking hands and unlimbered his crossbow. When he reached the opening into the wide crevasse, he looked up and saw bright afternoon sunlight and blue sky. The crevasse stretched away to his right and left, the striated floor sometimes dropping away thirty, forty feet and more, the bottom of the gap connected only by ice bridges, the walls riddled with stalactites and stalagmites and spanned here and there above him by bridges of thick ice. Sections of buildings emerged from the icy blue matrix and then were swallowed again; he could see protruding segments of masonry, broken windows and windows blind with frost, bamboo-three towers and buckyfiber additions to the older, Lost Era buildings below, all equal now in the grip of the blue ice. Daeman realized that he was on the rue de Rambouillet near the Guarded Lion faxnode, but six stories above the street he’d walked down and ridden on in voynix-pulled droshkies and carrioles his whole life.
Ahead, to the northwest, the floor of the crevasse descended slowly until it was almost down at the original street level. Daeman fell twice on the slippery slope, but he’d taken one of the ice hammers out of the pack and both times he arrested his fall with the curved iron claw.
Lower now, the light bright and the air still burning his lungs, at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot crevasse whose ice walls were made of countless strands of what Daeman began more and more to think were some sort of living tissue, he saw a second crevasse-tunnel crossing his on the diagonal and he recognized it at once. Avenue Daumes
nil. He knew this area well—he’d played here as a child, seduced girls here as a teenager, taken his mother for countless walks here as an adult.
If he followed the other crevasse to his right, the southeast, it would take him away from the crater and the city center, out toward the forest called Bois de Vincennes. But he didn’t want to head away from the center of Paris Crater—he’d seen the Hole appear to the northwest, very near his mother’s domi tower right on the Crater. To go that way, he would have to head up the Avenue Daumesnil crevasse toward the bamboo-three marketplace called the Oprabastel just opposite an ancient heap of overgrown rubble called the Bastille. He’d had rock fights there as a boy, with the few children from his domi tower flinging rocks and clods at those boys from the west, kids that his neighborhood group had always insultingly called the “radioactive bastillites” for some reason known to no one, adults or children.
The blue ice seemed thicker and more ominous in the direction of the Oprabastel, but Daeman realized he had no choice. He’d caught that first glimpse of Setebos in that direction, back toward the Crater.
The trench he was in angled around to the east again before intersecting Avenue Daumesnil. This larger crevasse was too deep to enter directly, so Daeman crossed it on an ice bridge. Looking down, he saw the bamboo-three and everplas-sealed ruins of the street and avenue he’d known his whole life, but the trench continued lower than that, revealing layers of ruins of some old steel-and-masonry city beneath the Paris Crater he was familiar with. He had the horrible image of the gray-and-pink brain Setebos scrabbling in the earth with its many hands, uncovering the bones of the city under the city. What was he hunting for? And then an even more horrible thought occurred to Daeman. What could he be burying?