by Dan Simmons
He swung back to Hephaestus. “All right. This bug obeys Zeus. Where is Zeus?”
The god of fire began to laugh and then stopped when he saw Achilles’ eyes blazing out through his helmet’s eyeslits. “You’re serious? Your plan is to bend the God of Thunder, the Father of All Gods to your will?”
“Where is Zeus?”
“No one knows,” repeated Hephaestus. The crippled god walked toward the tall doors, dragging his shorter leg behind. Lightning flashed outside as the dust storm made the forcefield aegis spark in a thousand places. The pillars cut columns of black out of the silver-white light flooding into the Hall of the Healer. “Zeus has been absent these two weeks and more,” shouted the fire god over his shoulder. He tugged at his tangled beard. “Most of us suspect some fucking plot of Hera’s. Maybe she threw her husband down into the hellpit of Tartarus to join his vanished father Kronos and mother Rhea.”
“Can you find him?” Achilles turned his back on the Healer and slid his sword into its loop on his broad girdle. He swung his heavy shield over his back. “Can you take me to him?”
Hephaestus could only stare. “You’d go down into Tartarus to try to bend the God of Gods to your mortal will? There’s only one life form in the pantheon of the original gods besides Zeus who might know where he is. That terrible power also is the only other immortal here on Mars who could send us to Tartarus. You would go to Tartarus if you had to?”
“I’d pass through the teeth of death and back again to bring life back to my Amazon,” Achilles said softly.
“You’d find Tartarus a thousand times worse than death and the shaded halls of Hades, son of Peleus.”
“Take me to this immortal of which you speak,” commanded Achilles. His eyes through the eyeslits of his helmet were not quite sane.
For a long minute the bearded artificer stood hunched over, panting slightly, eyes unfocused, his hand still tugging absently at his tangled beard. Then he said, “So be it,” dragged his bad leg across the polished marble more rapidly than seemed possible, and clasped both huge hands around Achilles’ forearm.
44
Harman hadn’t meant to sleep. As exhausted as he was, he’d agreed only to eat and drink something, warming up an excellent stew and eating it at the table by the window while Prospero sat silently in the overstuffed armchair. The magus was reading out of a huge, worn, leatherbound book.
When Harman turned to talk to Prospero again, to demand in stronger terms that he be returned to Ardis, the old man was gone and so was the book. Harman had sat at the table for some minutes, only half-aware of the jungle rolling by nine hundred feet below the moving, creaking, house-sized cablecar. Then—just to look at the upstairs again, he told himself—he’d dragged himself up the iron spiral staircase, stood looking at the large bed for a minute, and then had collapsed on it face-first.
When he awoke it was night. Moonlight and ringlight flooded through the panes into the strange bedroom, painting velvet and brass in light so rich it appeared to be stripes of white paint. Harman opened the doors and stepped out onto the bedroom terrace.
The air was cool almost a thousand feet above the jungle floor, the breeze constant due to the motion of the cablecar, but he still was struck by the humidity, heat, and organic scents of all the green life below. The top of the jungle canopy was almost unbroken, whitewashed with ring-light and moonlight from the three-quarters moon, and occasional strange sounds wafted up, audible even over the steady hum of the fly-wheels above and the creak of the long cable. Harman took a minute to orient himself by the e-and p-rings.
He was sure that the car had been headed west when they’d left the first tower hours earlier—he’d slept for ten hours, at least—but now there was no doubt that the cablecar was lumbering north-northeast. He could see the moonlight-illuminated tip of one of the eiffelbahn towers just showing over the horizon to the southwest, from the direction he must have come, and another coming closer less than twenty miles to the northeast. Somewhere, while he slept, the car he was traveling in must have changed direction at a tower junction. Harman’s knowledge of geography was all self-taught, gleaned from books he’d taught himself to read—and he was quite sure that until recent months he was the only old-style human on Earth who had any sense of geography, any knowledge that the earth was a globe—but he’d never paid much attention to this arrow-shaped subcontinent south of what used to be called Asia. Still, it didn’t take a cartographer’s knowledge to know that if Prospero had been telling the truth—if his destination was the coast of Europe where the Atlantic Breach began along the 40th Parallel—then he was going the wrong way.
It didn’t matter. Harman had no intention of staying in this odd device the necessary weeks or months it would take to travel all that distance. Ada needed him now.
He paced the length of the balcony, occasionally grabbing the railing when the cablecar-house rocked slightly. It was on his third turn that he noticed an iron-rung ladder running up the side of the structure just beyond the railing. Harman swung out, grasped a rung, and pulled himself onto the ladder. There was nothing beneath him and the ground now but a thousand feet of air and jungle canopy.
The ladder led onto the roof of the cablecar. Harman swung himself up, legs pinioning for a second before he found a handhold and pulled himself onto the flat roof.
He stood carefully, arms extended for balance when the cablecar rocked as it began climbing a ridgeline toward the blinking lights of an eiffelbahn tower now only ten miles or so ahead. Beyond the next tower, a range of mountains had just become visible on the horizon, their snowy peaks almost brilliant in the moonlight and ringlight.
Exhilarated by the night and sense of speed, Harman noticed something. There was a faint shimmering about three feet out from the leading edge of the cable car, a slight blurring of the moon, rings, and vista below. He walked to that edge and extended his hand as far as possible.
There was a forcefield there, not a powerful one—his fingers pressed through it as if pushing through a resistant but permeable membrane, reminding Harman of the entrance to the Firmary on Prospero’s orbital isle—but strong enough to deflect the wind from the blunt and non-aerodynamic side of the cablecar-house. With his fingers beyond the forcefield, he could feel the true force of the wind, enough to bend his hand back. This thing was moving faster than he’d thought.
After a half hour or so of pacing and standing on the roof, listening to the cables hum, watching the next eiffelbahn tower approach, and working out strategies to get back to Ada, Harman went hand over hand down the rung-ladder, jumped onto the balcony, and reentered the house.
Prospero was waiting for him on the first floor. The magus was in the same armchair, his robed legs not up on the ottoman, the large book open on his lap and his staff near his right hand.
“What do you want from me?” asked Harman.
Prospero looked up. “I see, young sir, that you are as disproportionate in your manners as our mutual friend Caliban is in his shape.”
“What do you want of me?” repeated Harman, his hands balling into fists.
“It is time for you to go to war, Harman of Ardis.”
“Go to war?”
“Yes. Time for your kind to fight. Your kind, your kin, your species, your ilk—yourself.”
“What are you talking about? War with whom?”
“With what might be a better phrasing,” said Prospero.
“Are you talking about the voynix? We’re already fighting them. I brought Noman-Odysseus to the Bridge at Machu Picchu primarily to fetch more weapons.”
“Not the voynix, no,” said Prospero. “Nor the calibani, although all these slave-things have been tasked to kill your kin and kind, the minutes of their plot come ’round at last. I am speaking of the Enemy.”
“Setebos?” said Harman.
“Oh, yes.” Prospero placed his aged hand on the broad page of the book, set a long leaf in as a bookmark, closed the book gently, and rose, leaning on his staff.
“Setebos, the many-handed as a cuttlefish, is here at last, on your world and mine.”
“I know that. Daeman saw the thing in Paris Crater. Setebos has woven some blue-ice web over that faxnode and a dozen others, including Chom and…”
“And do you know why the many-handed has come now to Earth?” interrupted Prospero.
“No,” said Harman.
“To feed,” Prospero said softly. “To feed.”
“On us?” Harman felt the cablecar slow, then bump, and he noticed the next eiffelbahn tower surrounding them for a second, the two-story structure of the car fitting into the landing on the thousand-foot level just as it had on the first tower. He felt the car swivel, heard gears grind and clank, and they slid out of the tower on a different heading, traveling more east than north now. “Has Setebos come to feed on us?” he asked again.
Prospero smiled. “Not exactly. Not directly.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means, young Harman human, that Setebos is a ghoul. Our many-handed friend feeds on the residues of fear and pain, the dark energy of sudden terror and rich residue of equally sudden death. This memory of terror lies in the soil of your world—of any warlike sentient creatures’ world—like so much coal or petroleum, all of a lost era’s wild energy sleeping underground.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It means that Setebos, the Devourer of Worlds, that Gourmet of Dark History, has secured some of your faxnodes in blue stasis, yes—to lay his eggs, to send his seed out across your world, to suck the warmth out of these places like a succubus sucking breath from a sleeping soul—but it’s your memory and your history that will fatten him like a many-handed blood tick.”
“I still don’t understand,” said Harman.
“His nest now is in Paris Crater, Chom, and these other provincial places where you humans party and sleep and waste your useless lives away,” said Prospero, “but he will feed at Waterloo, HoTepsa, Stalin-grad, Ground Zero, Kursk, Hiroshima, Saigon, Rwanda, Cape Town, Montreal, Gettysburg, Riyadh, Cambodia, Khanstaq, Chancellorsville, Okinawa, Tarawa, My Lai, Bergen Belsen, Auschwitz, the Somme—do any of these names mean anything to you, Harman?”
“No.”
Prospero sighed. “This is our problem. Until some fragment of your human race regains the memory of your race, you cannot fight Setebos, you cannot understand Setebos. You cannot understand yourselves.”
“Why is that your problem, Prospero?”
The old man sighed again. “If Setebos eats the human pain and memory of this world—an energy resource I call umana—this world will be physically alive but spiritually dead to any sentient being…including me.”
“Spiritually dead?” repeated Harman. He knew the word from his reading and sigling—spirit, spiritual, spirituality—vague ideas having to do with ancient myths of ghosts and religion—it just made no sense coming from this hologram of a logosphere avatar, the too-cute construct of some set of ancient software programs and communication protocols.
“Spiritually dead,” repeated the magus. “Psychically, philosophically, organically dead. On the quantum level, a living world records the most sentient energies its inhabitants experience, Harman of Ardis—love, hate, fear, hope. Like particles of magnetite aligning to a north or south pole. The poles may change, wander, disappear, but the recordings remain. The resulting energy field is as real—although more difficult to measure and locate—as the magnetosphere a planet with a hot spinning core produces, protecting the living inhabitants with its forcefield from the harshest realities of space. So does the memory of pain and suffering protect the future of a sentient race. Does this make sense to you?”
“No,” said Harman.
Prospero shrugged. “Then take my word for it. If you ever want to see Ada alive again, you will have to learn…much. Perhaps too much. But after this learning, you will at least be able to join the fight. There may be no hope—there usually is none when Setebos begins devouring a world’s memory—but at least we can fight.”
“Why do you care?” asked Harman. “What difference does it make to you whether human beings survive? Or their memories?”
Prospero smiled thinly. “What do you take me for? Do you think I am a mere function of old e-mails, the icon of an ancient Internet with a staff and robe?”
“I don’t know what the hell you are,” said Harman. “A hologram.”
Prospero took a step closer and slapped Harman hard across the face.
Harman took a step back, gaping. He raised his hand to his stinging cheek, balled that hand into a fist.
Prospero smiled and held his staff between them. “If you don’t want to wake up on the floor ten minutes from now with the worst headache of your life, don’t think about it.”
“I want to go home to Ada,” Harman said slowly.
“Did you try to find her with your functions?” asked the magus.
Harman blinked. “Yes.”
“And did any of your functions work here on the cablecar, or in the jungle before it?”
“No,” said Harman.
“Nor will they work until you’ve mastered the rest of the functions you command,” said the old man, returning to his chair and carefully lowering himself into it.
“The rest of the functions…” began Harman. “What do you mean?”
“How many functions have you mastered?” asked Prospero.
“Five,” said Harman. One had been known to everyone for ages—the Finder Function, which included a chronometer—but Savi had taught them three others. Then he had discovered the fifth.
“Recite them.”
Harman sighed. “Finder function—proxnet, farnet, allnet, and sigling—reading through one’s palm.”
“And have you mastered the allnet function, Harman of Ardis?”
“Not really.” There was too much information, too much bandwidth, as Savi had said.
“And do you think that old-style humans—the real old-style humans, your undesigned and unmodified ancestors—had five such functions, Harman of Ardis?”
“I…I don’t know.” He’d never thought about it.
“They did not,” Prospero said flatly. “You are the result of four thousand years of gene-tampering and nanotech splicing. How did you discover the sigl function, Harman of Ardis?”
“I…just experimented with mental images, triangles, squares, circles, until one worked,” said Harman.
“That’s what you told Ada and the others,” said Prospero, “but that is a lie. How did you really learn to sigl?”
“I dreamt the sigl function code,” admitted Harman. It had been too strange—too precious—to tell the others.
“Ariel helped you with that dream,” said Prospero, his thin-lipped smile showing again. “We grew impatient. Would you like to guess how many functions each of you—every one of you ‘old-style humans’—has in your cells and blood and brainstuff?”
“More than five functions?” asked Harman.
“One hundred,” said Prospero. “An even hundred.”
“Teach them to me,” said Harman, taking a step toward the magus.
Prospero shook his head. “I cannot. I would not. But you need to learn them nonetheless. On this voyage you will learn them.”
“We’re going the wrong way,” said Harman.
“What?”
“You said the eiffelbahn would take me to the coast of Europe where the Atlantic Breach begins, but we’re heading east now, away from Europe.”
“We will swing north again two towers hence,” said Prospero. “Are you impatient to arrive?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t be,” said the magus. “All the learning will happen during the trip, not after it. Yours will be the sea change of all sea changes. And trust me, you do not want to take the short route—over the old Pakistan passes into the waste called Afghanistan, south along the Mediterranean Basin and across the Sahara Marshes.”
“Why not?” said Harman. He an
d Savi and Daeman had flown east across the Atlantic and then over the Sahara Marshes to Jerusalem, then taken a crawler into the dry Mediterranean Basin. It was a place on Earth he knew. And he wanted to see if the blue tachyon beam still rose from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Savi had said it carried all of the coded information of all her lost contemporaries from fourteen hundred years ago.
“The calibani are loosed,” said Prospero.
“They’ve left the Basin?”
“They are freed of their old restraints, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Or at least upon that part of it.”
“Then where are we going?”
“Patience, Harman of Ardis. Patience. Tomorrow we cross a mountain range I believe you will find most enlightening. Then into Asia—where you may behold the works of the mighty and the dead—and then west and west enough again. The Breach will wait.”
“Too slow,” said Harman, pacing back and forth. “Too long. If the functions don’t work here, I don’t have any way of knowing how Ada is. I need to go. I need to get home.”
“You want to know how your Ada fares?” asked Prospero. He was not smiling. The magus pointed to a red cloth draped over the couch. “Use that. This one time only.”
Harman frowned, went to the cloth, studied it. “A turin cloth?” he said. It was red—all turin cloths were tan. Nor was the microcircuit embroidery the same.
“There are a myriad of turin-cloth receivers,” said Prospero. “Just as there are a myriad of sensory transmitters. Every person can be one.”
Harman shook his head. “I don’t give a damn about the turin drama—Troy, Agamemnon, all that nonsense. I’m not in the mood for amusements.”
“This cloth tells you nothing of Ilium,” said Prospero. “It will show you your Ada’s fate. Try it.”
Trembling, Harman sat back on the couch, adjusted the red cloth over his face, touched the embroidery to his forehead, and closed his eyes.