by Dan Simmons
“I don’t know. Very good, I think, or I would not suggest you go through this…unpleasantness.”
“Have you done it?”
“Undergone the crystal cabinet transfer?” said Moira. “No. I had no reason to.”
“Who has?” demanded Harman. “How many lived? How many died?”
“All of the Chief Librarians have experienced the crystal cabinet transfer,” said Moira. “All the many generations of the Keepers of the Taj. All the linear descendents of the original Khan Ho Tep.”
“Including your beloved Ferdinand Mark Alonzo?”
“Yes.”
“And how many of these Keepers of the Taj survived the cabinet transfer?” asked Harman. He was still wearing the thermskin, but his exposed hands and face felt the terrible chill in the air up there near the top of the dome. He concentrated on not shivering.
Harman was afraid that if Moira merely shrugged, he’d just walk away forever. And he didn’t want to do that—not yet. Not until he knew more. This awkward crystal cabinet with its glowing gold liquid might kill him…but it might also return him to Ada sooner.
Moira did not shrug. She looked him in the eye—she had Savi’s eyes—and said, “I don’t know how many died. Sometimes the flow of information is simply too much—for lesser minds. I do not believe you have a lesser mind, Prometheus.”
“Don’t call me that again.” Harman’s freezing hands were tightened into fists.
“All right.”
“How long does it take?” he asked.
“The transfer itself? Less than an hour.”
“That long?” said Harman. “The eiffelbahn car leaves in forty-five minutes.”
“We’ll make it,” said Moira. Harman hesitated.
“The medium fluid is warm,” said Moira as if reading his mind. It was more likely, he realized, she was reading his shivers and shaking.
That may have decided the issue for Harman. He had peeled off the thermskin, embarrassed to be naked in front of this stranger with whom he had had a strange sort of sex less than two hours earlier. And it was cold.
He had quickly clambered up the side of the dodecahedron, using the short rungs for hand and footholds, feeling how cold the metal was against the bare soles of his feet.
It had been a relief when he lowered himself through the open panel and actually dropped into the golden liquid. As she’d promised, the fluid was warm. It had no scent and the few drops that landed on his lips had no taste.
And then Ariel had levitated from the shadows and closed and locked the panel above Harman’s head.
And then Moira had touched some control on the vertical and virtual control panel where she stood.
And then a pump chugged to life again somewhere in the base of the crystal cabinet and more fluid began to fill the closed container.
Harman had screamed at them then—screamed at them to let him out—and then, when both post-human and biosphere non-human ignored him, Harman had pounded and kicked, trying to open the panel, trying to shatter the crystal. The fluid continued to rise. For some seconds Harman found the last inch of air at the top facet of the dodecahedron and he breathed it in deeply, still pounding on the overhead panels. And then the fluid rose until there was no more inch of air, no more air bubbles except those escaping from Harman’s lips and nose.
He held his breath for as long as he could. He wished that his last thought could have been of Ada and his love for Ada—and his sorrow for having betrayed Ada—but although he thought of her, his last thoughts while holding his breath until his lungs were afire were a confused jumble of terror and fury and regret.
And then he could hold his breath no more and—still pounding on the unyielding crystal panel above him—he exhaled, coughed, gagged, cursed, gagged more, breathed in the thickening fluid, felt darkness flowing over his mind even as overwhelming panic continued to fill his body with useless adrenaline, and then his lungs held no air at all, but Harman did not know this. Heavier without air in his lungs, his body no longer kicking, moving, or breathing, Harman sank to the center of the dodecahedron.
61
There had been a flurry of activity and tightbeamed conversation on the bridge of the Queen Mab as another masered message came in from the Voice on the asteroid city on polar Earth orbit, but it was only a repeat of the previous rendezvous coordinates and after five minutes confirming this and with no other message following, the principal moravecs met back at the chart table.
“Where were we?” said Orphu of Io.
“You were about to present your Theory of Everything,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
“And you said you knew who the Voice is,” said Cho Li. “Who or what is it?”
“I don’t know who the Voice is,” answered Orphu, vocalizing in soft rumbles rather than tightbeaming or transmitting on the standard in-ship comm channels. “But I have a pretty good guess.”
“Tell us,” said General Beh bin Adee. The Belt moravec’s tone did not suggest a polite request so much as a direct order.
“I’d rather explain my entire…Theory of Everything…first and then tell you about the Voice,” said Orphu. “It’ll make more sense in context.”
“Proceed,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
Mahnmut heard his friend take in a full breath of O-two, even though the Ionian had weeks or months of reserve in his tanks. He wanted to tightbeam his friend the question—Are you sure you want to go ahead with this explanation?—but since Mahnmut himself had no clue as to what Orphu was going to say, he remained silent. But he was nervous for his friend.
“First of all,” said Orphu of Io, “you haven’t released the information yet, but I’m pretty sure you’ve identified most of the million or so satellites that make up Earth’s polar and equatorial rings that we’re so quickly approaching…and I bet that most of the objects aren’t asteroids or habitations.”
“That is correct,” said Asteague/Che.
“Some of them we know to be early post-human attempts at creating and corralling black holes,” continued Orphu. “Huge devices like the wormhole accumulator that you showed us crashing into that other orbital asteroid city nine months ago. But how many of those are there? A few thousand?”
“Fewer than two thousand,” confirmed Asteague/Che.
“It’s my bet that the bulk of the rest of the million…things…that the post-humans put in orbit are data storage devices. I don’t know what kind—DNA, maybe, although that would require constant life support, so they’re probably bubble memory combined with some sort of advanced quantum computer with some complicated post-human memory storage that we moravecs haven’t discovered yet.”
Orphu paused and there was a silence that seemed to stretch on for hours to Mahnmut. The various Prime Integrators and moravec leaders were not looking at one another, but Mahnmut guessed that they had a private tightbeam channel and that they were conferring.
Asteague/Che finally broke the silence—which had probably lasted only seconds in real time.
“They are mostly storage devices,” said the Prime Integrator. “We’re not sure of their nature, but they appear to be some sort of advanced magnetic bubble-memory quantum wavefront storage units.”
“And each unit is essentially independent,” said Orphu. “Its own hard disk, so to speak.”
“Yes,” said Asteague/Che.
“And most of the rest of the satellites in the rings—probably no more than ten thousand or so—are basic power transmitters and some sort of modulated tachyon waveform transmitters.”
“Six thousand four hundred and eight power transmitters,” said the navigator Cho Li. “Precisely three thousand tachyon wave transmitters.”
“How do you know this, Orphu of Io?” asked Suma IV, the powerful Ganymedan. “Have you hacked into our Integrator comm channels or files?”
Orphu held two of his multisegmented forward manipulator arms out, flat palms up. “No, no,” he said. “I don’t have enough programming kn
owledge to hack into my sister’s diary…if I had a sister or if she had a diary.”
“Then how…” began Retrograde Sinopessen.
“It just makes sense,” said Orphu. “I have an abiding interest in human beings and their literature. Over the centuries, I’ve paid attention to those observations of Earth, the post-humans’ rings, and the data about the few humans left on the planet that the Five Moons Consortium has made public knowledge.”
“The Consortium has never released public information on the memory storage devices in orbit,” said Suma IV.
“No,” agreed Orphu, “but it makes sense that’s what those things are. All evidence fourteen centuries ago when they left the surface of the Earth was that there were only a few thousand post-human entities in existence, isn’t that right?”
“That is correct,” said Asteague/Che.
“Our moravec experts at the time weren’t even sure these post-humans had bodies…not bodies as we think of them,” said Orphu, “so they sure didn’t need to build a million cities in orbit.”
“That does not lead to the conclusion that the majority of the objects that are in Earth orbit are memory devices,” said General Beh bin Adee.
Mahnmut found himself wondering what the punishment on this ship was for espionage.
“It does when you look at what the old-style humans have been doing on Earth for almost a millennium and a half,” said Orphu of Io. “And what they haven’t been doing.”
“What do you mean, ‘haven’t been doing?’” asked Mahnmut. He’d planned to stay silent during this conversation, but his curiosity was too great.
“First of all, they haven’t been breeding like human beings breed,” said Orphu. “There were fewer than ten thousand of them for several centuries. Then that neutrino beam—guided by modulated tachyons, I understand from the astronomers’ online publications—shot up from Jerusalem fourteen hundred years ago, a beam aimed at nowhere in deep space, and then, suddenly, there seemed to be no humans left. None.”
“Only briefly,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
“Yes, but still…” said Orphu. He seemed to lose track of what he was going to say, but then said, “And then, less than a century later, there were about one million old-style humans scattered around the planet. Evidently not descendants of those ten thousand or so who disappeared. No buildup of population…just wham, bang, thank-you-ma’am…one million people out of nowhere.”
“And what did that tell you?” asked Asteague/Che. The formidable little Europan seemed privately amused, rather as a teacher might be when a student suddenly showed unexpected promise.
“It told me that these old-styles weren’t born to begin with,” said Orphu of Io. “They were decanted.”
“Virgin birth?” asked Cho Li, the Callistan’s odd voice dripping sarcasm.
“Of a sort,” said Orphu, his easy, rumbling tones suggesting that he’d taken no offense at the sarcasm. “I think the post-humans have and had a million or so human memories and personalities and data on bodies stored in those orbital memory devices—who knows? Perhaps one satellite per human being—and they restocked the herd. Which leads to the explanation of why the population appears to have peaked at one million every few centuries, dropped to a few thousand, then jumped back to a million as if by magic.”
“Why?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. As with Mahnmut, the rockvec soldier sounded honestly curious.
“Minimum herd population,” said Orphu. “The post-humans seem to have allowed the old-styles to breed only to half of replacement numbers…that is, one baby per woman. And then only when there had been a death. And I’ve read the conjecture that the old-styles live exactly one Earth century and then disappear. Enough to keep the herd going given climate changes or whatever, not so many they could overbreed or wander off the reservation, but the population drops rapidly. Then, every thousand years or so, they restock the herd to its maximum size of one million old-styles. Because women have only one child, the population begins dropping until the next restocking.”
“Where did you read that old-style humans lived precisely a century?” asked Cho Li. He sounded shocked.
“In The Scientific Ganymedan,” said Orphu. “I’ve had a broadcast subscription for more than eight centuries.”
Prime Integrator Asteague/Che held up his very humanoid hand. “You’ll have to pardon me, Orphu of Io, but while I congratulate you on your deductions about the purpose of the orbital devices and about the precise longevity we’ve observed of the remaining hundred thousand old-style human beings—at least until recent months, during which time there’s been quite a drop-off in population due to these attacks by creatures unknown—you said that you could tell us why there are Greek gods on Mars, who the Voice is, how Mars was so miraculously terraformed, and what is causing the current quantum instability on both Earth and Mars.”
“I’m getting to that,” said Orphu. “Do you want me to condense it and put the whole Theory of Everything into a high-speed tightbeam squirt? That’d take less than a second.”
“No, no need for that,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “But perhaps speak more rapidly. We have less than three hours before we have to launch the dropship—or not—during the aerobraking maneuver.”
Orphu of Io rumbled on the subsonic levels in a way that Mahnmut had long interpreted as laughter.
“The old-style humans are clustered around some three hundred localized habitation centers on five continents of Earth, correct?” said the Ionian.
“Correct,” said Cho Li.
“And the populations around these nodes vary,” said Orphu, “yet our telescopes have never picked up any signs of transport—no major roads in use, no aircraft, no ships—not even quaint sailing ships like the one Mahnmut and I traveled the length of Mars’ Valles Marineris in—not even an occasional hot air balloon. So we assumed that the old-style humans were quantum teleporting, even though our moravec scientists could never perfect that mode of travel.”
“It was a reasonable assumption,” said Suma IV.
“Reasonable,” agreed Orphu of Io, “but wrong. We know now because of the quantum data left by the so-called Olympian gods on Mars and on the otherdimensional Earth where the battle for Troy is still being fought what real quantum teleportation looks like. We know its footprint, and what the old-style humans were doing to get from Point A to Point B ain’t it.”
“If the old-style humans aren’t quantum teleporting,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo, “then how have they been moving instantaneously from one place to the other on Earth for more than fourteen hundred years?”
“The old-fashioned idea of teleportation,” said Orphu. “Storing all the data of a human being’s body and mind and personality in code, breaking down the matter into energy, beaming it, then reassembling it elsewhere, just as in the old TV broadcast series from the Lost Era—Star Truck.”
“Trek,” corrected General Beh bin Adee.
“Aha!” said Orphu of Io. “Another fan.”
The General clacked barbed killing claws in embarrassment or irritation.
“Our scientists long since determined that storing such incredible amounts of data would be impossible,” said Cho Li. “It would require more terabytes of storage space than there are atoms in the universe.”
“Evidently the post-humans found a way to build that memory storage,” said Orphu, “because the old-style humans have been teleporting their butts off for centuries. Not true quantum-level teleportation of the kind our friend Hockenberry or the Olympian gods carry off, but the crude mechanical ripping apart of molecules and reassembling of them somewhere else.”
“Why would they do that for the old-style humans?” asked Mahnmut. “Why such an incredible engineering project for a few hundred thousand people whom they treat almost like pets…like creatures in a zoo? We’ve seen no signs of new human engineering, city building, or creativity for more than that millennium and a half.”
“Maybe th
e teleportation itself has something to do with that cultural retardation,” said Orphu. “Maybe not. But I’m convinced that’s what we’re looking at down there. It’s a case of ‘Beam me up, Scooty.’”
“Scotty,” corrected Retrograde Sinopessen.
“Thank you,” said Orphu. To Mahnmut he tightbeamed, That makes four of us.
“You may well be correct that the old-style humans have been using a crude form of matter replication-transmission rather than true quantum teleportation,” said Asteague/Che, “but that doesn’t explain Mars or…”
“No, but the post-humans’ obsession with reaching another dimensional universe does,” said Orphu, not even noticing in his excitement and pleasure of the telling that he was interrupting the most important Prime Integrator in all the Five Moons Consortium.
“How do you know the posts were obsessed with getting to another dimensional universe?” asked General Beh bin Adee.
“Are you kidding?” said Orphu. Mahnmut had to think that the stern Asteroid Belt rockvec general had not been asked that question many times in his life or military career.
“Just look at the junk the post-humans left behind in orbit,” continued Orphu, oblivious to the military moravec’s taken-abackness. “They have wormhole accumulators, black hole accelerators—all early attempts at ripping through space and time, taking shortcuts out into this universe…or to another one.”
“Black holes and wormholes don’t work,” the Callistan Cho Li said flatly. “At least not as transport devices.”
“Yeah, we know that now and that’s what the post-humans found out more than fifteen hundred years ago,” agreed Orphu. “Then, when they had these incredible memory-storage satellites in orbit, plus the crude matter-replication teleportation portals for the old-style humans—who, I would wager, they were using as guinea pigs in all this experimentation—only then did the post-humans start messing around with Brane Holes and quantum teleportation.”
“Our scientists and engineers have been…messing around, as you put it…with quantum teleportation and the generation of Calabi-Yau universe Membrane Holes for many centuries,” said Retrograde Sinopessen. The Amalthean was so agitated that he was almost dancing on his long, spidery, silver legs. “With no luck,” he added.