by Dan Simmons
“Have you gone back to Ardis to bury those who fell?” asked Ada. Her voice was steady except for the rasp and cough.
Greogi glanced at Daeman and then looked away, out over the edge of the tall rock summit on which they all huddled. “Can’t,” he said, voice full. “We tried. Voynix wait for us. Ambush.”
“Were you able to get any more stores from Ardis Hall?” asked the injured woman.
Greogi shook his head. “Nothing important. It’s gone, Ada. Gone.”
Ada only nodded. More than two thousand years of her family history and pride, burned down and gone forever. She was not thinking of Ardis Hall now, but of her surviving people injured, cold, and stranded on this miserable Starved Rock. “What have you been doing for food and water?”
“We’ve caught rainwater on plastic tarps and have been able to zip away on the sonie for some fast hunting,” said Greogi, obviously glad to change the subject from those who had died. “Mostly rabbits, but we got an elk yesterday evening. We’re still picking flechettes out of it.”
“Why haven’t the voynix finished us off?” asked Ada. Her voice sounded only mildly curious.
“Now that,” said Daeman, “is a good question.” He had his own theory about it, but it was too early to share it.
“It’s not that they’re afraid of us,” said Greogi. “There must be two or three thousand of the damned things down there in the woods and we don’t have enough flechette ammunition to kill more than a few hundred. They can come up the rock anytime they want. They just haven’t.”
“You’ve tried the faxnode,” said Ada. It wasn’t really a question.
“The voynix ambushed us there,” said Greogi. He squinted up at the blue sky. This was the first sunny day they’d had and everyone was trying to dry clothes and blankets, laying them out like signal sheets on the flat acre of rock that was the summit of Starved Rock, but it was still a bitter winter, worse than any in Ardis-dwellers’ memory, and everyone was shivering in the thin sunlight.
“We’ve done tests,” said Daeman. “We can stack twelve people in the sonie—twice what it’s designed for—but more than that and the machine’s AI refuses to fly. And it handles like a pig with twelve.”
“How many of us did you say made it up here?” asked Ada. “Only fifty?”
“Fifty-three,” said Greogi. “Nine of those—including you until this morning—were too sick or injured to travel.”
“Eight now,” Ada said firmly. “That would be five trips on the sonie to evacuate everyone—assuming that the voynix don’t attack as soon as we start the evacuation and also assuming we had somewhere to go.”
“Yes, assuming we had somewhere to go,” said Greogi.
When Ada had fallen asleep again—sleep, Tom assured them, not the semicoma she’d been in—Daeman took his own rucksack, carrying it gingerly away from his body, and walked to the edge of Starved Rock’s summit. He could see the voynix down there, their leathery humps and headless, silvery bodies moving between the trees. Occasionally a group of them would move—seemingly with purpose—across the broad meadow on the south side of Starved Rock. None of them looked up.
Greogi, Boman, and the dark-haired woman Edide came over to see what he was doing.
“Thinking of jumping?” asked Boman.
“No,” said Daeman, “but I’m curious about whether you have any rope up here…enough to lower me to just out of reach of the voynix?”
“We have about a hundred feet of rope,” said Greogi. “But that leaves you seventy or eighty feet above the bastards—not that that would slow them down if they want to scramble up and grab you. Why the hell do you want to go down among ’em?”
Daeman squatted, set the rucksack on the rock, and pulled the Setebos egg out. The others squatted to stare at it.
Even before they could ask, Daeman told them where he’d gotten it.
“Why?” asked Edide.
Daeman had to shrug at that. “It was one of those ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’ things.”
“I always end up paying for those,” said the small, dark-haired woman. Daeman thought that she might have seen four Twenties. It was hard to tell because of the Firmary rejuvenations, of course, but older old-style humans tended to have a greater sense of confidence than the younger ones.
Daeman lodged the glowing, slightly pulsing silver-white egg in a crevice in the rock so that it wouldn’t roll away and said, “Touch it.”
Boman tried first. He set his palm flat on the curved shell as if welcoming the warmth they could all feel flowing from it, but the blond man pulled his hand away quickly—as if he’d been shocked or nipped. “What the hell?”
“Yeah,” said Daeman. “I feel it too when I touch it. It’s like the thing sucks some energy out of you—is pulling something out of your heart. Or soul.”
Greogi and Edide tried touching it—they both pulled their hands away quickly and then moved farther from it.
“Destroy it,” said Edide.
“What if Setebos comes looking for it?” said Greogi. “Mothers do that, you know, when you steal their eggs. They take it personally. Especially when the mother is a monster-sized brain with yellow eyes and dozens of hands.”
“I thought of that,” said Daeman. He fell silent.
“And?” said Edide. Even in the few months he’d known her at Ardis Hall, she’d always seemed like a practical, competent person. It was one of the reasons he’d chosen her as part of his fax-to-three-hundred-nodes warning expedition. “Do you want me to destroy it?” she asked, standing and pulling on leather gloves. “We’ll see how far I can hurl the damned thing and whether I can hit a voynix.”
Daeman chewed his lip.
“We damned sure don’t want it hatching up here on the top of Starved Rock,” said Boman. The man actually had his crossbow out and was aiming it at the milky egg. “Even a little Setebos-thing, from your description of what the mommy-daddy thing did at Paris Crater, might kill us all up here.”
“Wait,” said Daeman. “It hasn’t hatched yet. The cold may not be enough to kill it here—to make it nonviable—but it may be slowing its gestation…or whatever the hell you call the hatching period with a monster’s egg. I want to try something with it before we destroy it.”
They used the sonie. Greogi drove. Boman and Edide knelt in the rear niches, flechette rifles ready. The forcefield was off.
Voynix stirred in the shadows under the trees at the far end of the meadow, less than a hundred yards away. They hovered a hundred feet above the meadow, out of voynix leaping range. “Are you sure?” said Greogi. “They’re faster than we are.”
Not quite sure that he could speak properly, Daeman nodded.
The sonie swooped down. Daeman jumped out. The sonie went up vertically, like a silver-disk elevator.
Daeman had a fully loaded flechette rifle hitched over his shoulder, but it was the rucksack he removed, sliding the Setebos egg part of the way out, taking care not to touch it with his bare hands. Even in the bright sunlight the thing glowed like radioactive milk.
As if offering them a gift, Daeman began walking toward the voynix at the far end of the meadow. The things were obviously watching him via the infrared sensors in their metallic chests. Several of them pivoted to keep him centered in their sensor range. More voynix moved out of the forest shadows to stand at the edge of the meadow.
Daeman glanced up, seeing the sonie sixty feet above him, seeing Boman’s and Edide’s flechette rifles raised and ready, but also knowing that a voynix running moved at more than sixty miles per hour. The things could be on him before the sonie could drop and hover and if there were enough of the creatures in the charge, no amount of covering fire would save him.
Daeman walked on with the glowing Setebos egg half out of his ruck-sack, like some Twenty present peeking out of its gift wrapping. Once the egg shifted—Daeman was so shocked at the internal movement and brighter glow that he almost dropped the thing, but hung on through the torn and dir
ty fabric of his rucksack—but after fumbling for a minute, he continued walking. He was close enough to the massed voynix now that he could almost smell the old-leather and rust stench of the things.
Daeman was ashamed to realize that his legs and arms were shaking slightly. I just wasn’t smart enough to think of another way, he thought. But there wasn’t another way. Not with the serious condition that so many of the Ardis survivors were in—not with starvation and dehydration looming.
He was less than fifty feet from the cluster of thirty or more voynix now. Daeman lifted the Setebos egg like a talisman and walked straight toward them.
At thirty feet, the voynix began to fade back into the forest.
Daeman picked up his pace, almost running now. Voynix on all sides were moving away.
Afraid that he might stumble and smash the egg—he had the sickening mental image of the egg splitting and a small Setebos brain scuttling out on its dozens of baby-hands and stalks, then the thing leaping for his face—he still forced himself to run toward the retreating voynix.
The voynix dropped to all fours and loped away—hundreds of them fleeing out in all directions like frightened grazers freeing predators on some prehistoric plain—and Daeman ran until he could run no more.
He dropped to his knees, hugging the rucksack to his chest, feeling the Setebos egg stirring and shifting, feeling energy flowing from him toward the evil thing until he pushed it away from himself, setting it on the ground like the toxic thing it was.
Greogi landed the sonie. “My God,” said the bald pilot. “My God.”
Daeman nodded. “Take me back to the base of Starved Rock. I’ll wait there with the egg while you ferry down those who can walk the mile or so to the faxnode pavilion. I’ll lead that procession. You can load the weak and wounded and follow us by air.”
“What…” began Edide and fell silent. She shook her head.
“Yeah,” said Daeman. “I remembered the bodies of the voynix frozen in the blue ice at Paris Crater. They had all been frozen in the act of running away from Setebos.”
He sat on the edge of the sonie, the rucksack on his lap, as they floated back to Starved Rock a comfortable six feet above the ground. There were no voynix in the trees or meadows.
“Where are we going to fax to?” asked Boman.
“I don’t know,” said Daeman. He felt very tired. “I’ll figure that out as we walk there down the road from Ardis.”
48
You’ll need a thermskin,” said Prospero.
“Why?” Harman’s voice was distracted. He was staring out the glass doors at the beautiful triple-dome and marble arches of the Taj Moira. The cablecar house had clicked into place in the southeast eiffelbahn tower—one of four set at the corners of the giant square of cantilevered marble that held this magnificent building above the summit of Chomolungma. Harman had estimated the eiffelbahn tower to be about one thousand feet tall and the apex of the onion-domed white building was half again taller.
“The altitude here is eight thousand eight hundred forty-eight meters,” said the magus. “More vacuum than air. The temperature out there in the sunlight is thirty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. That gentle breeze is blowing at fifty knots. There’s a blue thermskin in the wardrobe next to the bed. Go up and put it on. You’ll need your outer clothes and boots. Call down when you have your osmosis mask in place—I need to lower the pressure in the car here before we open the mezzanine door.”
They took the elevator down from the thousand-foot-level platform. Harman looked at the tower struts, arches, and girders as they passed them on the way down and had to smile. The secret of the whiteness of this tower was as prosaic as white paint over the same dark iron and steel as the other eiffelbahn structures. He could feel the elevator and the entire tower shaking to the howling winds and realized that the paint must be scoured away in months or weeks here rather than years; he tried to imagine the kind of painting crew that would be always at work up here, then gave it up as a silly effort.
He was obeying the magus now because it got him out of the prison of the cablecar. Somehow here in this insane temple or palace or tomb or whatever it was on this insanely tall mountain, he would find a way back to Ada. If Ariel could fax without faxnode pavilions, so could he. Somehow.
Harman followed Prospero from the elevator at the base of the tower across the wide expanse of red sandstone and white marble leading to the front door of the domed building. The wind threatened to blow him off his feet but for some reason there was no ice on the exposed sandstone and marble.
“Don’t maguses feel the cold or need air?” he shouted at the old man in the trailing blue robe.
“Not in the least,” said the magus. The jet-stream-strong wind was blowing his robe to one side and sending his fringe of long, gray hair trailing sideways from his mostly bald skull. “One of the perquisites of old age,” he cried over the wind howl.
Harman veered to his right, arms extended for balance against the wind, and walked toward the low marble railing—not more than two feet high—that ran around the huge square of sandstone and marble like a low bench around a skating rink.
“Where are you going?” called Prospero. “Be careful there!”
Harman reached the edge and looked over.
Later, studying maps, Harman realized that he must have been looking north from this mountain called Chomolungma or Chu-mu-lang-ma Feng or Qomolangma Feng or HoTepma Chini-ka-Rauza or Everest, depending upon the age and origin of the map, and that when he stood at the railing he was staring out for hundreds of miles—and six miles straight down—into lands that had once been called Khan’s Ninth Kingdom or Tibet or China.
It was the down part that struck Harman viscerally.
The Taj Moira was essentially a sandstone-marble city block stuck on the summit of the Goddess Mother of the World like a tray embedded on a sharp stone, like a piece of paper slammed down onto a spike. As an engineering feet, the buckycarbon cantilevering was impressive to the point of impossibility—a god-child’s form of showing off.
Harman stood by the two-foot-high, ten-inch-wide marble “railing” and stared straight down for more than twenty-nine thousand feet with the full force of the jet stream at his back, trying to shove him off into the endless empty air. Later, maps would tell him that he had been looking at other mountains with names and the east and west Rongbuk Glaciers with the brown plains of China far beyond toward the curve of the earth, but none of that mattered now. Shoved by the strong arms of the howling wind, windmilling his arms to keep his balance, Harman was looking six miles straight down—from an overhang!
He dropped to his hands and knees and began crawling back toward the temple-tomb and the waiting magus. Thirty feet in front of the huge doorway, a small, sharp boulder—no more than five feet tall—rose from the marble squares, ending in a thirty-inch pyramid of ice. With Prospero watching—arms crossed and a small smile on his face—Harman wrapped his arms around the decorative boulder and used its imperfections to pull himself back to his feet. He continued to lean on the boulder, arms wrapped around it, his chin resting on the icy point, afraid that if he looked back over his shoulder at the distant low wall and vertiginous drop, the urge to run toward that wall and leap would be overpowering. He closed his eyes.
“Are you going to stay there all day?” asked the magus.
“I might,” said Harman, eyes still closed. After another minute, he shouted over the rising wind, “What is this rock anyway? Some sort of symbol? A monument?”
“It’s the summit of Chomolungma,” said Prospero. The magus turned and walked into the open, elegantly arched entrance of the structure he’d called Rongbok Pumori Chu-mu-lang-ma Feng Dudh Kosi Lhotse-Nuptse Khumbu aga Ghat-Mandir Khan Ho Tep Rauza. Harman saw that a semipermeable membrane was guarding that entrance—it had rippled as the magus passed through, another sign that Harman wasn’t dealing with just a hologram this time.
Several minutes later, still hugging his boulder-summit,
the eyepieces and osmosis mask of his thermskin hood almost completely frosted over because of the pelting snow squalls that struck his body like icy missiles, Harman considered the fact that it was probably warm inside that building, warm beyond that semipermeable forcefield.
He did not crawl the last thirty feet to the door, but he walked hunched over, face lowered, palms down and extended, ready to crawl.
Inside the single huge room under the dome, marble steps rose to a series of mezzanines—each in turn connected to the next mezzanine by another marble staircase—that lined the interior of the inward curving dome for a hundred levels, a hundred stories, until mist and distance above obscured the apex of the dome itself. What had appeared like tiny apertures in the dome from the cablecar during the approach and from the eiffelbahn tower—hardly more than decorative elements in the white marble—now proved to be hundreds of perspex windows that sent shafts of light down to illuminate the rich-bound books with slowly moving squares and rectangles and trapezoids of brightness.
“How long do you think it would take you to sigl all that?” asked Prospero, leaning on his staff and turning in a circle to take in the many mezzanines of books.
Harman opened his mouth to speak and then shut it. Weeks? Months? Even moving from book to book, just setting his palm in place long enough to see the golden words move down his fingers and arms, it might take years to sigl this library. Finally he said, “You told me that the functions didn’t work in and around the eiffelbahn. Have the rules changed?”
“We shall see,” said the magus. He moved deeper into the dome, his staff tapping the white marble and the sound echoing up and around the acoustically perfect dome.
Harman realized that it was warm in this place. He pulled back the thermskin hood and gloves.
The interior of the domed building was broken into discrete spaces, if not actual rooms, by a maze of white marble screens that rose only eight feet high and were not a complete barrier to sight because of their latticeworked, filigreed construction and countless elegant oval, heart-and leaf-shaped openings. Harman noticed that the walls around the base of the dome up to a height of forty feet or so, where the first mezzanine began, were completely covered with carved designs of flowers, vines, elaborate and impossible plants, all brightened by the presence of inlaid jewels. So were the marble screens. Harman set his hand against one of the marble partitions as Prospero led the way through the maze—and it was a real maze—and he realized that anywhere he could set his hand, it would cover two or three of the designs at once, that there would always be several precious stones under his fingers. Some of the flower designs were less than an inch square and looked to contain fifty or sixty tiny inlays.