by Dan Simmons
This woman was dressed much as Savi had been the first time he’d seen her—a blue tunic top made of cotton canvas, corded trousers, and high leather boots. She even wore a sort of short wool cape similar to the one he’d seen on Savi when they met, although this cape was a dark yellow rather than the deep red the older woman had worn. However, its complicated, many-folded cut seemed to be the same. The major difference between the two women—besides the vast difference in age—was that the older Savi had been carrying a pistol when they met, the first firearm Harman had ever seen. This version of Savi—Moira, Miranda, Moneta—he knew with absolute certainty, had not been armed when he first met her.
“What has happened since I first slept, Prospero?” asked Moira.
“You want a summary of fourteen centuries in as many sentences, my dear?”
“Yes. Please.” Moira separated the juicy orange into sections and handed a section to Harman, who ate it without tasting it.
“‘The woods decay,’” intoned the magus Prospero, “‘the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.’”
He bowed his balding and gray-haired head a bit.
“‘Tithonus,’” said Moira. “Tennyson before breakfast always makes my bowels ache. Tell me, is the world sane yet, Prospero?”
“No, Miranda.”
“Are my folk all dead or changeling’d then, as you say?” She ate grapes and redolent cheese and drank from a large goblet of ice water the floating servitors continued to refill for her.
“They are dead or changeling’d or both.”
“Are they coming back, Prospero?”
“God knows, my daughter.”
“Don’t give me God, please,” said Moira. “What about Savi’s nine thousand one hundred and thirteen fellow Jews? Have they been retrieved from the neutrino loop?”
“No, my dear. All the Jews and rubicon survivors in this universe remain a blue beam rising from Jerusalem and nothing more.”
“We did not keep our promise then, did we?” asked Moira, pushing her plate away and brushing crumbs and juice from her palms.
“No, daughter.”
“And you, Rapist,” she said, turning to the blinking Harman, “do you have any other purpose in this world than taking advantage of sleeping strangers?”
Harman opened his mouth to speak, thought of nothing to say, and shut his mouth. He felt actively ill.
Moira touched his hand. “Do not reproach yourself, my Prometheus. You had little choice. The air inside the sarcophagus was scented with an aerosol aphrodisiac so potent that Prospero sent it off with one of the original changelings—Aphrodite herself. Lucky for both of us its effects are very temporary.”
Harman felt a surge of relief followed by fury. “You mean I had no choice?”
“Not if you carried the DNA of Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep,” said Moira. “And all males of your race should.”
She turned back to Prospero. “Where is Ferdinand Mark Alonzo? Or rather, what was his fate?”
The magus bowed his head. “Miranda, beloved, three years after you entered the loop-fax sarcophagus, he died of one of the wildcat variants of rubicon that swept through the old population every year as surely as a summer zephyr. He was interred in a crystal sarcophagus next to yours—although all the fax equipment could do was keep his corpse from rotting then, since the Firmary tanks had not yet learned how to deal with rubicon. Before the vats could educate themselves, a score of Caliphate mandroids climbed Mount Everest, evaded the security shields, and began looting the Taj. The first thing they looted was poor Ferdinand Mark Alonzo’s heavy coffin—throwing it over the side.”
“Why didn’t they throw me over as well?” asked Moira. “Or for that matter, finish their looting? I noticed all the agate, jasper, bloodstones, emeralds, lapis, cornelian, and other baubles were still in place on the walls and screen maze.”
“Caliban faxed in and dispatched the twenty Caliphate mandroids for you,” said Prospero. “It took the servitors a month to mop up all the blood.”
Moira’s head came up. “Caliban still lives?”
“Oh, yes. Ask our friend Harman here.”
She glanced at Harman but refocused her attention on the magus. “I’m surprised Caliban didn’t rape me as well.”
Prospero smiled sadly. “Oh, he tried, Miranda my dear, he tried many times, but the sarcophagus would not open to him. Had the world bent to Caliban’s will and member, he would have long since peopled this island earth with little Calibans by you.”
Moira shuddered. Finally she turned to Harman again, ignoring the old man. “I need to know your story and your character and your life,” she said. “Give me your palm.” She set her right elbow on the table and held up one hand, palm toward him.
Confused, Harman did the same, but not touching her.
“No,” said Moira. “Have the old-style humans forgotten the sharing function?”
“They have, actually,” said Prospero. “Our friend Harman here can—or could until the eiffelbahn inhibited his access—call up only the finder, allnet, proxnet, and farnet functions. And those only by visualizing certain geometric shapes.”
“Mother of Heaven,” said Moira. She dropped her hand to the table. “Can they still read?”
“Only Harman and a handful of others he’s taught in the last few months,” said Prospero. “Oh, I forgot to mention that our friend did learn to sigl some months ago.”
“Sigl?” Moira laughed. “That was never meant to be used to understand books. That was an indexing function. It must feel like glancing at a recipe in a cookbook and thinking you’ve actually eaten the dinner. Harman’s people must be the dullest subspecies of homo sapiens ever to receive a patent.”
“Hey,” said Harman. “I’m right here. Don’t talk about me as if I’m not even here. And I may not know this sharing function, but I can learn it quickly. In the meantime, we can talk. I have questions to ask too, you know.”
Moira looked at him. He noticed the rich gray-green of her eyes.
“Yes,” she said at last, “I have been rude. You must have come a long way to waken me—and you took that action against your will—and I am sure you would rather be elsewhere in the world. The least I can do is show you some manners and answer your questions.”
“Can you show me how to do this sharing function you were talking about?” asked Harman. He was determined not to lose his temper with this woman who looked so much like Savi and spoke in her voice. “Or show me how to fax without faxnode pavilions,” he added. “The way Ariel does it.”
“Ah, Ariel,” said Moira. She glanced at Prospero. “The old-styles have forgotten how to freefax?”
“They’ve forgotten almost everything,” said Prospero. “They were made to forget. By your people, Moira. By Vala, by Tirzah, by Rahaba—by all your Urizened Beulahs.”
Moira tapped the flat of her knife against her palm. “Why did you use this person to wake me, Prospero? Has Sycorax consolidated her power and freed your monster Caliban from your control?”
“She has and he is free,” Prospero said softly, “but I felt it was time you woke because Setebos now walks this world.”
“Sycorax, Caliban, and Setebos,” repeated Moira. She drew in a long breath, hissing it between her teeth.
“Between the witch, the demidevil, and the thing of darkness,” Prospero said softly, “they would control the moon and Earth, decide all ebbs and flows, and deal all power to their command.”
Moira nodded and chewed her full lower lip for a moment.
“When does your eiffelbahn car depart again?”
“In one hour,” said the magus. “Will you be on it, Miranda dear? Or will you be sleeping in the fax-coffin of time again, allowing your atoms and memories to be restored in such a meaningless loop forever?”
“I’ll be on your damned car,” said Moira. “And I’ll take from the update banks what I need to know about this brave new world I’m born into yet again. But first, young Prometheus has his questions to ask and then I have a suggestion on what he can do to regain his function status.” She glanced toward the apex of the dome.
“No, Moira,” said Prospero.
“Harman,” she said softly, putting her soft hand on the back of his, “ask your questions now.”
He licked his lips. “Are you really a post-human?”
“Yes, I am. That is what Savi’s people called us before the Final Fax.”
“Why do you look like Savi?”
“Ah…you knew her, then? Well, I will learn her health or fate when I call up the update function. I knew Savi, but more important, Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep was in love with her and she returned no love for him—they were of separate tribes, so to speak. So I took her form, her memories, her voice…everything…before coming here to the Taj.”
“How did you take her form?” asked Harman.
Moira looked at Prospero again. “His people do know nothing, don’t they?” To Harman she said, “We post-humans had reached the point where we had no bodies of our own, my young Prometheus. At least none that you would recognize as bodies. We needed none. There were only a few thousand of us, but we had bred ourselves out of the human gene pool, thanks to the genetic skills of the avatar of the cyberspace logosphere here…”
“You’re welcome,” said Prospero.
“When we wanted to take a human form—always a female human form, I might add, for all of us—we just borrowed one.”
“But how?” said Harman.
Moira sighed. “Are the rings still in the sky?”
“Of course,” said Harman.
“Polar and equatorial both?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think they are, Harman Prometheus? There are more than a million discrete objects up there…what do your people think they are?”
Harman licked his lips again. The air here in the great temple-tomb was very dry. “We know our Firmary, where we were rejuvenated, was up there. Most of us think the other objects up there are the posts—your people’s—homes. And your machines. Cities on orbiting islands like Prospero’s. I was there last year on Prospero’s Isle, Moira. I helped bring it down.”
“You did?” She looked at the magus again. “Well, good for you, young Prometheus. But you’re wrong in thinking that the million orbiting objects, most of them much smaller than Prospero’s Isle, were habitats for my kind or machines serving solely our purposes. There are a dozen or so habitats, of course, and several thousand giant wormhole generators, black hole accumulators, early experiments in our interdimensional travel program, Brane Hole generators…but most of the orbiting objects up there are serving you.”
“Me?”
“Do you know what faxing is?”
“I’ve done it all my life,” said Harman.
“Yes, of course, but do you know what it is?”
Harman took a breath. “We’d never really thought about it, but on our voyages last year Savi and Prospero explained that the faxnode pavilions actually turn our bodies into coded energy and then our bodies, minds, and memories are rebuilt at another node.”
Moira nodded. “But the fax pavilions and nodes are not necessary,” she said. “They were simply ruses to keep you old-style humans from wandering in places you shouldn’t go. This fax form of teleportation was staggeringly heavy on computer memory, even with the most advanced Calabi-Yau DNA and bubble-memory machines. Do you have any idea how much memory is required to store the data on just one human being’s molecules, much less the holistic wavefront of his or her personality and memories?”
“No,” said Harman.
Moira gestured toward the top of the dome, but Harman realized that she was actually gesturing toward the sky beyond and the polar and equatorial rings turning up there now against the dark blue sky. “A million orbital memory banks,” said the woman. “Each one dedicated to one of you old-style humans. And in many of the other clumsy orbital machines, the black-hole-powered teleportation devices themselves—GPS satellites, scanners, reducers, compilators, receivers, and transmitters—somewhere up there above you every night of your life, my Harman Prometheus, was a star with your name on it.”
“Why a million?” asked Harman.
“That was thought to be a viable minimum herd population,” said Moira, “although I suspect there are far fewer of you than that today since we allowed each woman to have only one child. In my day, there were only nine thousand three hundred and fourteen of your subspecies of humans—those with nanogenetic functions installed and active—and a few hundred thousand dying old-old-style humans, those like my beloved Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep, the last of his royal breed.”
“What are the voynix?” asked Harman. “Where did they come from? Why did they act as silent servants for so long and then start attacking my people after Daeman and I destroyed Prospero’s Isle and the Firmary? How do we stop them?”
“So many questions,” sighed Moira. “If you want them all answered, you will need context. To gain context, you need to read these books.”
Harman’s head jerked and he looked up and down at the curving inner dome lined with books. He could not do the mathematics on the square or cubic feet of books here, but he imagined—wildly, blindly—that there must be at least a million volumes on these shelves.
“Which books?” he asked.
“All of these books,” said Moira, lifting her hand from his to gesture in a circle toward everything. “You can, you know.”
“Moira, no,” Prospero said again. “You’ll kill him.”
“Nonsense,” said the woman. “He’s young.”
“He’s ninety-nine years old,” said Prospero, “more than seventy-five years older than Savi’s body was when you cloned it for your own purposes. She had memories then. You carry them now. Harman is no tabula rasa.”
Moira shrugged. “He’s strong. Sane. Look at him.”
“You’ll kill him,” said Prospero. “And with him, one of our best weapons against Setebos and Sycorax.”
Harman was very angry now, but also excited. “What are you talking about?” he demanded, pulling his hand back when Moira threatened to touch it again with hers. “Are you talking about me sigling all these books? It would take months…years. Decades, maybe.”
“Not sigling,” said Moira, “but eating them.”
“Eating them,” repeated Harman, thinking, Was she mad before she entered the time coffin or have the centuries of being replicated there, cell by cell, neuron by neuron, made her mad?
“Eating them,” agreed Moira. “In the sense that the Talmud spoke of eating books—not reading them, but eating them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you know what the Talmud is?” asked Moira.
“No.”
Moira pointed toward the apex of the dome again, some seventy stories above them. “Up there, my young friend, in a tiny little cupola made of the clearest glass, there is a cabinet formed of gold and pearl and crystal and I have the golden key. Within, it opens into a world and a little lovely moony night.”
“Like your sarcophagus?” asked Harman. His heart was pounding.
“Nothing like my sarcophagus,” laughed Moira. “That coffin was just another node on your faxing merry-go-round, replicating me through the centuries until it was time to wake and go to work. I’m talking about a machine that will allow you to read all these books in depth before the eiffelbahn car leaves the Taj station in…” She glanced at her palm. “Fifty-eight minutes.”
“Do not d
o this, Moira,” said Prospero. “He will do us no good in the war against Setebos if he is dead or a drooling moron.”
“Silence, Prospero,” snapped Moira. “Look at him. He’s already a moron. It’s as if his entire race has been lobotomized since Savi’s day. He might as well be dead. This way, if the cabinet works and he survives, he may be able to serve himself and us.” She took Harman’s hand again. “What do you most want in this universe, Harman Prometheus?”
“To go home to see my wife,” said Harman.
Moira sighed. “I can’t guarantee that the crystal cabinet—the knowledge and nuance of all these books that my poor, dead Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo accumulated over his centuries—will allow you to freefax home to your wife…what is her name?”
“Ada.” The two syllables made Harman want to weep. It made him want to weep twice—once for missing her, again for betraying her.
“To Ada,” said Moira. “But I can guarantee that you will not get home alive to see her unless you take this chance.”
Harman stood and stepped out onto the railingless marble ledge three hundred feet above the cold marble floor below. He looked up at the center of the dome almost seven hundred feet above but could see nothing except a sort of haze there where the last of the metal catwalks converged like black and almost invisibly thin spiderwebs.
“Harman, friend of Noman…” began Prospero.
“Shut up,” Harman said to the magus of the logosphere.
To Moira he said, “Let’s go.”
57
“I quantum teleported us here according to your directions,” says Hephaestus, “but where in Hades’ Hell are we?”