by Dan Simmons
Harman said nothing as Moira brought out orange juice in a crystal glass, black coffee in a white thermidor, and a poached egg with a bit of salmon on the side. She poured the coffee into his cup. Harman lowered his head slightly to allow the heat from the coffee to rise against his face.
“Come here often?” asked Moira.
Prospero came into the room and stood in the brilliant and despicable morning light that was streaming in through the glass doors. “Ah, Harman…or should we call you New Man? It is a pleasure to see you awake and ambulatory.”
“Shut up,” said Harman, ignoring the food, sipping the coffee gingerly. He knew now that Prospero was a hologram, but a physical one—a logosphere avatar forming himself from microsecond to microsecond with matter being beamed down from one of the mass-fax-accumulators in orbit. He also knew that if he tried to strike or attack the old magus, the matter would turn to untouchable projection faster than any human reflexes.
“You knew that my chances of surviving the crystal cabinet were about one in a hundred,” said Harman, not even looking at Prospero. The light there was too bright.
“A little better than that, I think,” said the magus, mercifully drawing the heavy drapes.
Moira pulled a chair over and sat at the table with Harman. She was wearing a red tunic, but otherwise showed the same hardy adventure clothing she had been wearing in the Taj.
Harman looked unblinkingly at her. “You knew the young Savi. You attended the Final Fax Party in the New York Archipelago at the flooded Empire State Building, and you told her friends you hadn’t seen her, but you’d actually visited Savi at her home in Antarctica just two days before.”
“How on earth do you know that?” asked Moira.
“Savi’s friend Petra wrote a short essay about their attempt—mostly hers and her lover Pinchas’—to find Savi. It was printed and bound up right before the Final Fax. Somehow it found its way into your friend Ferdinand Mark Alonzo’s library.”
“But how would Petra have known that I visited Savi before the New York Archipelago party?”
“I think she and Pinchas found something Savi had written when they went through her Mount Erebus apartments,” said Harman. The coffee did not come back up on him, but it didn’t help his throbbing headache much either.
“So you know everything about everything now, do you?” asked Moira.
Harman laughed and regretted it almost immediately. He put down the coffee cup and held his right temple. “No,” he said at last, “I know just enough to know that I don’t know much of anything about anything. Besides, there are forty-one other libraries sprinkled around the Earth whose crystal cabinets I haven’t visited yet.”
“That would kill you,” said Prospero.
Harman wouldn’t have minded at that moment if someone had killed him. The headache put a pulsing corona around everything and everyone he tried to look at. He sipped more coffee and hoped that the nausea wouldn’t come back. The cablecar creaked along, although he knew that it was traveling at more than two hundred miles per hour. Its slight swaying back and forth did nothing to keep his stomach settled. “Would you like to hear all about Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel? Born in Dijon on December 15, 1832 A.D. Graduated from the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in 1855. Before coming up with the idea for his tower at the 1889 Centennial Exposition, he’d already designed the movable dome of the observatory at Nice and the framework for the Statue of Liberty in New York. He…”
“Stop it,” snapped Moira. “No one likes a showoff.”
“Where the hell are we?” asked Harman. He managed to get to his feet and shove back the drapes. They were passing through a beautiful wooded valley, the car moving along more than seven hundred feet above a winding river. Ancient ruins—a castle of some sort—were just visible along a ridgeline.
“We’ve just passed Cahors,” said Prospero. “We should be swinging south toward Lourdes at the next tower switching station.”
Harman rubbed his eyes but opened the glass door and stepped out. The forcefield deployed along the leading edge of the flat-sided cablecar kept him from being blown off the balcony. “What’s the matter?” he asked back through the open door. “Don’t you want to head north and visit your friend’s blue-ice cathedral?”
Moira looked startled. “How could you possibly know about that? There was no book in the Taj with that…”
“No,” agreed Harman, “but my friend Daeman saw the beginnings of that—the arrival of Setebos. I know from the books what the Many-Handed would do after he arrived in Paris Crater. So he’s still here…on Earth, I mean?”
“Yes,” said Prospero. “And he is no friend of ours.”
Harman shrugged. “You two brought him here the first time. Him and the others.”
“It was not our intention,” said Moira.
Harman had to laugh at that, no matter how much it made his head throb. “No, right,” said Harman. “You open an interdimensional door into darkness, leave it open, and then say ’It was not our intention’ when something really vile comes through.”
“You’ve learned much,” said Prospero, “but you still do not understand all that you will have to if…”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Harman. “I’d listen to you more closely, Prospero, if I didn’t know that you’re mostly one of those things that came through the door. The post-humans spend a thousand years trying to contact Alien Others—changing the quantum setup of the entire solar system in the process—and get a many-handed brain and a retread cybervirus from a Shakespearean play instead.”
The old magus smiled at this. Moira shook her head in irritation, poured some coffee into a second cup, and drank without comment.
“Even if we wanted to drop by and say hello to Setebos,” said Prospero, “we could not. Paris Crater has no tower—has not had one since before the rubicon virus.”
“Yeah,” said Harman. He went back in, but stood looking out while he lifted his own cup and sipped coffee. “Why can’t I freefax?” he asked sharply.
“What?” said Moira.
“Why can’t I freefax? I know how to summon the function now without the training wheels symbol triggers, but it didn’t work when I got up. I want to jump back to Ardis.”
“Setebos shut down the planetary fax system,” said Prospero. “That includes freefaxing as well as the faxnode pavilions.”
Harman nodded and rubbed his cheek and chin. A week and a half of stubble, almost a real beard, rasped under his fingers. “So you two, and presumably Ariel, can still quantum teleport, but I’m stuck on this stupid cablecar until we get to the Atlantic Breach? You really expect me to walk across the ocean floor to North America? Ada will be dead of old age before I get to Ardis.”
“The nanotechnology that grants your people functions,” said Prospero, his old voice sounding sad, “did not prepare you for quantum teleportation.”
“No, but you can QT me home,” said Harman, looming over the old man where he now sat on the couch. “Touch me and QT. It’s that simple.”
“No, not that simple,” said Prospero. “And you’re literate enough now that you must know that you cannot compel either Moira or me to submit to threats or intimidation.”
Harman had accessed orbital clocks when he’d awakened and he knew he’d been unconscious for most of nine days. It made him want to smash the pot, cups, and table with his fist. “We’re on the eiffelbahn Route Eleven,” he said. “After we left Mount Everest, we must have followed the Hah Xil Shan Route up right past the Tarim Pendi Bubble. I could have found sonies there, weapons, crawlers, levitation harnesses, impact armor—everything Ada and our people need for their survival.”
“There were…detours,” said Prospero. “You would not have been safe if you had left the tower to explore the Tarim Pendi Bubble.”
“Safe!” snorted Harman. “Yes, we must live in a safe world, mustn’t we, magus and Moira?”
“You were more mature before the crystal cabinet,” said Moira with
much disdain.
Harman didn’t argue the point. He set down his cup, leaned forward with both hands on the table, stared Moira in the eye, and said, “I know the voynix were sent forward through time by the Global Caliphate to kill Jews, but why did you posts store the nine thousand one hundred and fourteen of them and beam them into space? Why not just take them up to the Rings with you—or some other safe place? I mean, you’d already found the otherdimensional Mars and terraformed it. Why turn those people into neutrinos?”
“Nine thousand one hundred and thirteen,” corrected Moira. “Savi was left behind.”
Harman waited for an answer to his question.
Moira set down her coffee cup. Her eyes, just like Savi’s, showed every rush of anger she felt. “We told Savi’s people that they were being stored in the neutrino loop for a few thousand years while we cleaned up the untidiness on Earth,” she said softly. “They interpreted that to mean the RNA constructs everywhere left over from Dementia Times—dinosaurs and Terror Birds and cycad forests—but we also meant such little things as the voynix, Setebos, the witch in her city up in orbit…”
“But you didn’t clean up the voynix,” interrupted Harman. “The things were activated and built their Third Temple on the Mosque of the Dome…”
“We could not eliminate them,” said Moira, “but we reprogrammed them. Your people knew them as servants for fourteen hundred years.”
“Until they started slaughtering us,” said Harman. He turned his gaze on Prospero. “Which started after you directed Daeman and me on how to destroy your orbital city where you and Caliban were…imprisoned. All that to reclaim just one hologram of yourself, Prospero?”
“More the equivalent of a frontal lobe,” said the magus. “And the voynix would have been activated even if you had not destroyed the controlling elements in my city on the e-ring.”
“Why?”
“Setebos,” said Prospero. “His millennium and a half of being denied—of being kept and fed on alternate Earths and the terraformed Mars—had come to an end. When the Many-Handed opened the first Brane Hole to sniff the air of this Earth, the voynix reacted as programmed.”
“Programmed three thousand years ago,” said Harman. “The old-styles of my people aren’t all from Jewish descent like Savi’s folk.”
Prospero shrugged. “The voynix do not know that. All humans in Savi’s time were Jews, ergo…to the weak mind of all voynix…all humans are Jews. If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. If Crete is an island and England is an island, then…”
“Crete is England,” finished Harman. “But the rubicon virus did not come from a lab in Israel. That’s just another blood libel.”
“No, you are perfectly correct,” said Prospero. “The rubicon was indeed the one great contribution to science that the Islamic world gave the rest of the world in a two-thousand-year stretch of darkness.”
“Eleven billion dead,” said Harman, his voice shaking. “Ninety-seven percent of Earth’s population wiped out.”
Prospero shrugged again. “It was a long war.”
Harman laughed again. “And the virus got almost everyone but the group it was built to kill.”
“Israeli scientists had a long history of nanotech genetic manipulation by then,” said the magus. “They knew that if they did not inoculate their population’s DNA quickly, they could not do it at all.”
“They might have shared it,” said Harman.
“They tried. There was no time. But the DNA for your stock was…stored.”
“But the Global Caliphate didn’t invent time travel,” said Harman, not one hundred percent sure if this was a question or statement.
“No,” agreed Prospero. “A French scientist developed the first working time bubble…”
“Henri Rees Delacourte,” muttered Harman, remembering.
“…to travel back to 1478 A.D. to investigate an odd and interesting manuscript purchased by Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1586,” continued Prospero without a pause. “It seemed a simple enough little trip. But we know now that the manuscript itself—filled with a strange, coded language and featuring wonderful drawings of non-terrestrial plants, star systems, and naked people—was a hoax. And Dr. Delacourte and his home city paid a price for the voyage when the black hole his team was using as a power source escaped its restraining force-field.”
“But the French and the New European Union gave the designs to the Caliphate,” said Harman. “Why?”
Prospero held up his old, vein-mottled hands almost as if he were giving a benediction. “The Palestinian scientists were their friends.”
“I wonder if that rare-book dealer from the early Twentieth Century, Wilfrid Voynich, could have dreamt that he’d have a race of self-replicating monsters named after him,” said Harman.
“Few of us can dream of what our true legacy will be,” said Prospero, his hands still raised as if in blessing.
Moira sighed. “Are you two finished with your little trip down memory lane?”
Harman looked at her.
“And you, my would-be Prometheus…your dingle is dangling. If this is a one-eyed staredown contest, you win. I blinked first.”
Harman looked down. His robe had come open during all the talking. He quickly sashed it shut.
“We’ll be crossing the Pyrenees in the next hour,” said Moira. “Now that Harman has something in his skull other than a pleasure thermometer, we have things to discuss…things to decide. I suggest that Prometheus go up and shower and get dressed. Grandfather here can take a nap. I’ll clear the breakfast dishes.”
65
Achilles is considering the possibility that he made a mistake in maneuvering Zeus into banishing him to the deepest, darkest pit in the hell-world of Tartarus, even though it had seemed like a good idea at the time.
First of all, Achilles can’t quite breathe the air here. While the quantum singularity of his Fate to Die by Paris’s Hand theoretically protects him from death, it doesn’t protect him from rasping, wheezing, and collapsing on the lava-hot black stone as the methane-tainted air fouls and scours his lungs. It’s as if he’s trying to breathe acid.
Secondly, this Tartarus is a nasty place. The terrible air pressure—equivalent to two hundred feet beneath the surface of Earth’s sea—presses in on every square inch of Achilles’ aching body. The heat is terrible. It would have long since killed any merely mortal man, even a hero such as Diomedes or Odysseus, but even demi-god Achilles is suffering, his skin blotched red and white, boils and blisters appearing everywhere on his exposed flesh.
Finally, he is blind and almost deaf. There is a vague reddish glow, but not enough to see by. The pressure here is so great, the atmosphere and cloud cover so thick, that even the small illumination from the pervasive volcanic red gloom is defeated by the rippling atmosphere, by fumes from live volcanic vents, and by the constant curtain-fall of acid rain. The thick, superheated atmosphere presses in on the fleet-footed mankiller’s eardrums until the sounds he can make out all seem like great, muted drumbeats and massive footsteps—heavy throbs to match the throbbing of his pressure-squeezed skull.
Achilles reaches under his leather armor and touches the small mechanical beacon that Hephaestus had given him. He can feel it pulse. At least it hasn’t imploded from the terrible pressure that presses in on Achilles’ eardrums and eyes.
Sometimes in the terrible gloom, Achilles can sense movement of large shapes, but even when the volcanic glow is at its reddest, he can’t make out who or what is passing near him in the terrible night. He senses that the shapes are far too big and too oddly shaped to be human. Whatever they are, the things have ignored him so far.
Fleet-footed Achilles, son of Peleus, leader of the Myrmidons and noblest hero of the Trojan War, demigod in his terrible wrath, lies spread-eagled flat on a pulsing-hot volcanic boulder, blinded and deafened, and uses all of his energy just to keep breathing.
Perhaps, he thinks, I should have come up with a diffe
rent plan for defeating Zeus and bringing my beloved Penthesilea back to life.
Even the briefest thought of Penthesilea makes him want to weep like a child—but not an Achilles’ child, for the young Achilles had never wept. Not once. The centaur Chiron had taught him how to avoid responding to his emotions—other than anger, rage, jealousy, hunger, thirst, and sex, of course, for those were important in a warrior’s life—but weep for love? The idea would have made the Noble Chiron bark his harsh centaur’s laugh and then hit young Achilles hard with his massive teaching stick. “Love is nothing but lust misspelled,” Chiron would have said—and struck seven-year-old Achilles again, hard, on the temple.
What makes Achilles want to weep all the more here in this unbreathable hell is that he knows somewhere deep behind his surging emotions that he doesn’t give a damn about the dead Amazon twat—she’d come at him with a fucking poisoned spear, for the gods’ sake—and normally his only regret would be that it took so long for the bitch and her horse to die. But here he is, suffering this hell and taking on Father Zeus himself just to get the woman reborn—all because of some chemicals that gash-goddess Aphrodite had poured on the smelly Amazon.
Three huge forms loom out of the fog. They are close enough that Achilles’ straining, tear-filled eyes can make out that they are women—if women grew thirty feet tall, each with tits bigger than his torso. They are naked but painted in many bright colors, visible even through the red filter of this volcanic gloom. Their faces are long and unbelievably ugly. Their hair is either writhing like snakes in the superheated air or is a tangle of serpents. Their voices are distinct only because the booming syllables are unbearably louder than the booming background noise.
“Sister Ione,” booms the first shape looming over him in the gloom, “canst thou tell what form this is spread-eagled across this rock like a starfish?”
“Sister Asia,” answers the second huge form, “I wouldst say it were a mortal man, if mortals could come to this place or survive here, which they cannot. And if I could see it were a man, which I cannot since it lieth upon its belly. It does have pretty hair.”