by Dan Simmons
Her home, the great manor of Ardis Hall, two thousand years of her family’s pride, was all but gone—only soot-blackened timbers and the stone remnants of the many fireplaces left—but there was a surprising amount to salvage elsewhere.
There were also the rotting bodies of their friends—at least bits and pieces of them—left in the fields.
Ada conferred with Daeman and a few others and they agreed that the first priority was creating a fire and shelter—first a rough lean-to and warm place for the ill and injured to be treated and brought to before the short winter day was over, a shelter large enough for all of them to make it through the night without freezing. While Ardis Hall was lost to them, segments of several of the barracks, sheds, and other outbuildings erected in the last nine months before the sky fell were partially intact. They might have crowded into one of these shacks, but they were too near the forest, too hard to defend, and too far from the well that had been right outside Ardis Hall.
They found heaps of kindling and dry wood and used what Ada thought was too many matches from their dwindling supply to start a large fire. Greogi landed the sonie and they unloaded the unconscious and semiconscious injured and made them as comfortable as they could on makeshift cots and bedrolls near the fire. A work detail kept carrying more firewood from the various ruins—no one wanted to go as far as the shadowy forest and Ada had forbidden such adventures for that day. The sonie took off and orbited in a mile-wide circle, the exhausted Greogi at the controls and Boman with his rifle, both men watching for voynix. One of the barracks—the one Odysseus built by hand for his followers months before—yielded a treasure trove of blankets and rolls of canvas, all smelling of smoke but usable, and in another tumbled but only partially burned shed near Hannah’s burned-out cupola, Caul found shovels, picks, crowbars, hoes, hammers, nails, spikes, nylon rope, carabiners, and other former servitor tools that might now save their lives. With the unscorched wood from the barracks and logs scavenged from large parts of the former palisade, a work party began erecting a structure part tent, part log cabin around the deep water well next to the still-smoldering ruins of Ardis—a temporary shelter good enough for that night and a few more nights at least. Boman had more elaborate plans for a permanent lodge with a tower, gun slits, and close-in palisade, but Ada told him to help build the survival lean-to first and plan the castle later.
There still was no sign of the voynix, but it was only afternoon and night would be coming quickly enough, so Ada and Daeman assigned Kaman and ten of his best marksmen to set up a perimeter defense. Other men and women with flechette weapons—they’d counted twenty-four working weapons and one that seemed defective, with fewer than one hundred and twenty magazines of crystal flechettes—were detailed to provide guard closer to the fire and lean-to.
It took a little more than three hours to get the basic structure hammered together and raised—walls only about six feet high, made from palisade logs, a cobbled-together arched roof made of wood planks from the barracks, and a canvas roof. It was important to put something between the wounded and the cold ground, but there was no time to fit a floor, so multiple layers of canvas were laid down atop straw brought in from the former hay barn near the north wall. The cattle themselves had disappeared—killed by voynix or simply run off. No one was going into the forest hunting for them that particular afternoon and the circling sonie had its own duties to perform.
By late afternoon, the temporary lean-to was completed. Ada, who had been working on new buckets and ropes for the well and leading burial parties with picks and shovels digging shallow graves in the frozen earth, returned to inspect the structure and found it large enough for at least forty-five people to crowd in close together to sleep, the others presumably on guard duty outside, and for all fifty-three of them to crowd into for meals if necessary, although it would be crowded. Three of the walls were of wood, but the fourth wall—facing the well and two fires now burning—was only canvas, with most of it open to the heat. Laman and Edide had scrounged metal and ceramic from Ardis Hall to build a stovepipe, if not an actual chimney, for the lean-to, but that modification would have to wait for the next day. There was no glass for windows, only small openings at different heights on each of the wood walls with sliding wood slats and covering canvas. Daeman agreed they could retreat to the lean-to and lay down a withering field of flechette fire from those slits, but one look at the canvas roof and the canvas fourth wall told everyone there that the voynix could not be held off long once they leaped to the attack.
But the Setebos Egg seemed to be keeping the voynix at bay.
It was almost dark when Daeman took Ada, Tom, and Laman away from the warmth of the fires to the ashes of Hannah’s cupola to open his rucksack and show them the hatching egg. The thing was glowing even more brightly, shedding a sick, milky light, and there were tiny cracks everywhere in the shell, but no openings yet.
“How long until it hatches?” asked Ada.
“How the hell should I know?” said Daeman. “All I know is that the little Setebos inside is still alive and trying to get out. You can hear the squeals and chewing sounds if you put your ear to the shell.”
“No thanks,” said Ada.
“What happens when it hatches?” asked Laman, who had been in favor of destroying the egg from the beginning.
Daeman shrugged.
“What exactly did you have in mind when you stole the thing from Setebos’ nest in the Paris Crater blue-ice cathedral?” asked the medic Tom, who’d heard the whole story.
“I don’t know,” said Daeman. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. At least we could find out what sort of creature this Setebos is.”
“What if Mommy comes looking for her baby?” asked Laman. It was not the first time that Daeman had been asked this.
He shrugged again. “We can kill it right after it hatches if we have to,” he said softly, looking at the growing winter darkness under the trees beyond the ruins of the old palisade.
“Can we?” said Laman. He put his left hand on the many-fissured eggshell and then pulled it away quickly as if the surface were hot. All those who had touched the egg had remarked on the unpleasantness of the experience, as if something on the inside of the shell were sucking energy through their palm.
Before Daeman could answer again, Ada said, “Daeman, if you hadn’t brought that thing back with you, most of us would probably be dead now. It’s kept the voynix away this long. Maybe it will after it hatches as well.”
“If it—or its mama-poppa—doesn’t eat us in our sleep,” said Laman, cradling his mangled right hand.
Later, just after dark, Siris came and whispered to Ada that Sherman, one of their more seriously wounded, had died. Ada nodded, rounded up two others—Edide and a still-portly man named Rallum—and they quietly carried the body out beyond the edge of the fire, setting it under lumber and stones near the tumbled barracks so that they could properly bury Sherman in the morning. The wind was cold.
Ada did a four-hour shift of guard duty in the dark with a loaded flechette rifle, the warming fire a distant glow and the nearest other sentry fifty yards away, her concussion causing her head to pound so fiercely she really couldn’t have seen a voynix or Setebos if it had sat on her lap. Her broken wrist required her to prop the weapon on her forearm. Then, when Caul relieved her from duty, she stumbled back to the crowded, snore-filled lean-to and fell into a deep sleep stirred only by terrible nightmares.
Daeman awakened her just before dawn, bending to whisper in her ear, “The egg has hatched.”
Ada sat up in the dark, feeling the press and breathing of bodies all around her, and for a moment she knew she was still in the nightmare. She wanted Harman to touch her shoulder and wake her into sunlight. She wanted his arm around her, not this freezing dark and press of strange bodies and flickering, fading firelight through canvas.
“It hatched,” repeated Daeman. His voice was very low. “I didn’t want to wake you, but we have to decide what to d
o.”
“Yes,” Ada whispered back. She’d slept in her clothes and now she slipped out of her nest of damp blankets and carefully picked her way over sleeping forms, following Daeman out through the canvas, past the low but still-tended fire, south, away from the lean-to toward another, much smaller fire.
“I slept out here away from the others,” said Daeman, speaking in a more normal tone as they got farther away from the main lean-to. His voice was still soft but each syllable roared in Ada’s aching head. Far overhead, the e-and p-rings whirled as they always whirled, turning and crossing in front of the stars and a fingernail moon. Ada saw something move up there and for a minute her heart pounded before she realized it was the sonie, orbiting silently in the night.
“Who’s flying the sonie?” she asked dully.
“Oko.”
“I didn’t know she knew how to fly it.”
“Greogi taught her yesterday,” said Daeman. They were approaching the smaller campfire and Ada saw the silhouette of another man standing there.
“Good morning, Ada Uhr,” said Tom.
Ada had to smile at the formal honorific. It had not been used much in recent months. “Good morning, Tom,” she whispered. “Where is this thing?”
Daeman pulled a long piece of wood out of the fire and extended it into the darkness like a torch.
Ada stepped back.
Daeman and Tom had obviously piled up palisade logs on three sides to cage the…thing…in the triangular space. But it was scurrying to and fro in that space, obviously ready and soon capable of climbing the two-foot-high flimsy wooden barricades.
Ada took the torch from Tom and crouched lower to study the Setebos thing in the flickering light.
Its multiple yellow eyes blinked and closed at the glare. The little Setebos—if that is what it was—was about a foot long, already larger in mass and length than a regular human brain, Ada thought, but still with the disgustingly pink wrinkles and folds and appearance of a living, disembodied brain. She could see the gray strip between the two hemispheres, a mucousy membrane covering it, and a slight pulsing, as if the whole thing was breathing. But this pink brain also had pulsating mouths—or orifices of some kind—and a myriad of tiny, pink baby hands beneath it and protruding from orifices. It scrabbled back and forth on those pudgy little pink fingers that looked like a mass of wriggling worms to Ada.
The yellow eyes opened, stayed open, and locked on Ada’s face. One of the orifices opened and screeching, scratching sounds came out.
“Is it trying to talk?” Ada whispered to both men.
“I have no idea,” said Daeman. “But it’s only a few minutes old. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s talking to us by the time it’s an hour old.”
“We shouldn’t let it get an hour old,” Tom said softly but firmly. “We should kill the thing now. Blow it apart with flechettes and then burn its corpse and scatter the ashes.”
Ada looked at Tom in surprise. The self-trained medic had always been the least violent and most life-affirming person she’d known at Ardis.
“At the very least,” said Daeman, watching the thing successfully trying to climb the low wooden barrier, “it needs a leash.”
Wearing heavy canvas-and-wool gloves they’d designed at Ardis early in the winter for work with livestock, Daeman leaned forward and plunged a sharp, thin spike that he’d curved to form a hook into the solid band of fibers—corpus callosum, Ada remembered it was called—connecting the two hemispheres of the little Setebos’s brain. Then, moving quickly, Daeman tugged to make sure the hook was secure, snapped a carabiner to it, and rigged twenty feet of nylon rope to the carabiner.
The little creature screamed and howled so loudly that Ada looked over her shoulder at the main camp, sure that everyone would come boiling out of the lean-to. No one stirred except one sentry near the fire who looked over her way sleepily and then went back to contemplating the flames.
The little Setebos writhed and rolled, running against the wooden barriers and finally clambering over them like a crab. Daeman tugged it up short on six feet of leash.
More tiny hands emerged from their folded state in the pink brain’s orifices and pulled themselves along on elastic stalks a yard or more long. The hands leaped at the nylon rope and tugged at it wildly, other hands exploring the hook and carabiner, trying to pull them free. The hook held. Daeman was pulled forward for a second but then jerked the scrabbling creature back onto the frozen grass of its cage.
“Strong little bastard,” he whispered.
“Let it wander,” said Ada. “Let’s see where it goes. What it does.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. Not far, but let’s see what it wants.”
Tom kicked the low post-wall down and the Setebos baby scurried out, the baby fingers under it working in unison, blurring like some obscene centipede’s legs.
Daeman allowed himself to be tugged along behind it, keeping the leash short. Ada and Tom walked beside Daeman, ready to move quickly if the creature turned toward them. It moved too quickly and too purposefully for any of the humans not to sense the danger from it. Tom’s flechette rifle was being held at the ready and Daeman had another rifle strapped over his shoulder.
The thing didn’t head for the campfire or the lean-to. It tugged them twenty yards into the darkness of the west lawn. Then it scurried down into one of the former defensive trenches—a flame trench Ada had helped to dig—and seemed to squat on its spraddled hands.
Two new orifices opened at either ends of the little creature and stalks without hands, pulsing proboscises, emerged, wavered, and suddenly attached themselves to the ground. There came a sound that was a mixture of a pig rooting and a baby suckling.
“What the hell?” said Tom. He had the rifle aimed, the plastic-metal stock set firmly against his shoulder. The first shot, Ada knew, would slam several thousand crystal-barbed flechettes into the pulsing pink monstrosity at a velocity greater than the speed of sound.
Ada started shivering. Her constant, pulsing headache turned to a wave of nausea.
“I know this spot,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “It’s where Reman and Emme died during the voynix attack…they burned to death here.”
The Setebos spawn continued loudly rooting and suckling.
“Then it’s…” began Daeman and stopped.
“Eating,” finished Ada.
Tom put his finger on the trigger. “Let me kill it, Ada Uhr. Please.”
“Yes,” said Ada. “But not yet. I have no doubt that the voynix will return as soon as this thing dies. And it’s still dark. And we’re nowhere near ready. Let’s go back to your camp.”
They walked back to the campfire together, Daeman tugging the reluctant and finger-dragging Setebos thing along behind them.
60
Harman drowned.
His last thoughts before the water filled his lungs were—That bitch Moira lied to me—and then he gagged and choked and drowned in the swirling golden liquid.
The crystal dodecahedron had filled only to within a foot of its multifaceted top while Harman had been watching the golden liquid flow into it. Savi-Moira-Miranda had called the rich golden fluid the “medium” by which he would sigl—although that had not been her term—the Taj’s gigantic collection of books. Harman had stripped down to his thermskin layer.
“That has to come off, too,” said Moira. Ariel had stepped back into the shadows and now only the young woman stood in the bright light from the cupola windows with him. The guitar was on a nearby table-top.
“Why?” said Harman.
“Your skin has to be in contact with the medium,” said Moira. “The transfer can’t work through a bonded molecular layer like a thermskin.”
“What transfer?” Harman had asked, licking his lips. He was very nervous. His heart was pounding.
Moira gestured toward the seemingly infinite rows of shelved books lining the hundred curved stories of inner dome-wall widening out below them.
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“How do I know that there’s anything in those old books that will help me get back to Ada?” said Harman.
“You don’t.”
“You and Prospero could send me home right now if you wanted,” said Harman, turning away from the filling crystal tank. “Why don’t you do that so we can skip all this nonsense?”
“It’s not that easy,” said Moira.
“The hell it isn’t,” shouted Harman.
The young woman went on as if Harman had not spoken. “First of all, you know from the turin and from what Prospero told you that all of the planet’s faxnodes and fax pavilions have been shut off.”
“By whom?” said Harman, turning back to look at the crystal cabinet again. The golden fluid was swirling to within a foot of the top, but it had stopped filling. Moira had opened a panel on the top—one of the multifaceted glass faces—and he could see the short metal rungs that would allow him to climb up to that opening.
“By Setebos or his allies,” said Moira.
“What allies? Who are they? Just tell me what I need to know.”
Moira shook her head. “My young Prometheus, you’ve been told things for the better part of a year now. Hearing things means nothing unless you have the context in which to place the information. It is time for you to gain that context.”
“Why do you keep calling me Prometheus?” he barked at her. “Everyone seems to have ten names around here…Prometheus, I don’t know that name. Why do you call me that?”
Moira smiled. “I guarantee that you will understand that at least, after the crystal cabinet.”
Harman took a deep breath. One more smug smile out of this woman, he realized, and he might hit her in the face. “Prospero said that this thing could kill me,” he said. He looked at the cabinet rather than the post-human thing in Savi’s human form.
Moira nodded. “It could. I do not believe it will.”
“What are my chances?” said Harman. His voice sounded plaintive and weak to his own ears.