Olympos

by Dan Simmons

  “Sister Oceanids,” says the third form, “let us see the gender of this starfish.”

  A huge hand roughly grips Achilles and rolls him over. Fingers the size of his thighs pluck away his armor, rip off his belt, and roll down his loin cloth.

  “Is it male?” asks the first shape, the one her sister had called Asia.

  “If you wouldst call it so for so little to show,” says the third shape.

  “Whatever it is, it lies fallen and vanquished,” says the female giant called Ione.

  Suddenly large shapes in the gloom that Achilles had assumed were looming crags stir, sway, and echo in non-human voices, “Lies fallen and vanquished!”

  And invisible voices farther away in the reddish night echo again, “Lies fallen and vanquished!”

  The names finally click. Chiron had taught young Achilles his mythology, as well as his theology to honor the living and present gods. Asia and Ione had been Oceanids—daughters of Okeanos—along with their third sister Panthea…the second generation of Titans born after the original mating of Earth and Gaia, Titans who had ruled the heavens and the earth along with Gaia in the ancient times before their third-generation offspring, Zeus, defeated them and cast them all down into Tartarus. Only Okeanos, of all the Titans, had been allowed exile in a kinder, gentler place—locked away in a dimension layer under the quantum sheath of Ilium-Earth. Okeanos could be visited by the gods, but his offspring had been banished to stinking Tartarus: Asia, Ione, Panthea, and all the other Titans, including Okeanos’ brother Kronos who became Zeus’s father, Okeanos’ sister Rhea who became Zeus’s mother, and Okeanos’ three daughters. All the other male offspring from the mating of Earth and Gaia—Koios, Krios, Hyperion, and Iapetos, as well as the other daughters—Theia, Themis, Mnemosyne, golden-wreathed Phoebe, and sweet Tethys—had also been banished here to Tartarus after Zeus’s victory on Olympos thousands of years earlier.

  All this Achilles remembers from his lessons at the hoof of Chiron. A fucking lot of good it does me, he thinks.

  “Does it speak?” booms Panthea, sounding startled.

  “It squeaks,” says Ione.

  All three of the giant Oceanids lean closer to listen to Achilles’ attempts at communication. Every attempt is terribly painful for the mankiller, since it means breathing in and trying to use the noxious atmosphere. An observer would have guessed from the resulting sounds—and guessed correctly—that there is an unusual amount of helium remaining in the carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia mix of Tartarus’ soup-thick atmosphere.

  “It soundeth like a mouse that hath been squashed flat,” laughs Asia.

  “But the squeaks sound vaguely like a squashed mouse’s attempt at civilized language,” booms Ione.

  “With a terrible dialect,” agrees Panthea.

  “We need to take him to the Demogorgon,” says Asia, looming closer.

  Two huge hands roughly lift Achilles, the giant fingers squeezing most of the ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, and helium out of his aching lungs. Now the hero of the Argives is gaping and gasping like a fish out of water.

  “The Demagorgon will want to see this strange creature,” agrees Ione. “Carry him, Sister, carry him to the Demogorgon.”

  “Carry him to the Demogorgon!!” echo the giant, insectoid shapes following the three giant women.

  “Carry him to the Demogorgon!!” echo larger, less familiar shapes following farther behind.

  66

  The eiffelbahn ended along the 40th Parallel, on the coast where the nation of Portugal had once existed, just south of Figueira da Foz. Harman knew that less than a couple of hundred miles southeast, the modulated forcefield templates called the Hands of Hercules held the Atlantic Ocean out of the dry Mediterranean Basin, and he knew exactly why the post-humans had drained the Basin and to what purpose they’d used it for almost two millennia. He knew that less than a couple of hundred miles northeast of where the eiffelbahn ended here, there was a sixty-mile-wide circle of the terrain fused into glass where thirty-two hundred years ago the Global Caliphate had fought its determining battle with the N.E.U.—more than three million proto-voynix pouring over and past two hundred thousand doomed human mechanized-infantry knights. Harman knew that…

  All in all, he knew, he knew too much. And understood too little.

  The three of them—Moira, the solidified Prospero hologram, and Harman still-with-the-headache-of-a-lifetime—were standing on the top platform of the final eiffelbahn tower. Harman was finished with his cablecar ride—perhaps forever.

  Behind them were the green hills of former Portugal. Ahead of them was the Atlantic Ocean with the Breach continuing due west from the line of the eiffelbahn route. The day was perfect—temperature perfect, mild breezes, not a cloud in the sky—and sunlight reflected off green at the top of the cliffs, white sand, and broad expanses of blue on either side of the slash of the Atlantic Breach. Harman knew that even from the top of the eiffelbahn tower he could see only sixty miles or so to the west, but the view seemed to go on for a thousand miles, the Breach starting as a hundred-meter-wide avenue with low blue-green berms on either side, but continuing on until it was only a black line intersecting with the distant horizon.

  “You can’t seriously expect me to walk to North America,” said Harman.

  “We seriously expect you to try,” said Prospero.

  “Why?”

  Neither the post-human nor the never-human answered him. Moira led the way down the steps to the lower elevator platform. She was carrying a rucksack and some other gear for Harman’s hike. The elevator doors opened and they stepped into the cagelike structure and began humming lower past iron trellises.

  “I’ll walk with you for a day or two,” said Moira.

  Harman was surprised. “You will? Why?

  “I thought you might enjoy the company.”

  Harman had no response to this. As they stepped out onto the grassy shelf under the eiffelbahn tower, he said, “You know, just a few hundred miles southeast of us here, in the Med Basin, there are a dozen post-human storage facilities that Savi never knew anything about. She knew about Atlantis and the Three Chairs way of riding lightning to the rings, but that was more or less a cruel post-human joke—she didn’t know about the sonies and actual cargo spacecraft stored at the other stasis bubbles. Or at least these stasis bubbles used to be there…”

  “They still are,” said Prospero.

  Harman turned to Moira. “Well, walk with me a few days to the Basin rather than send me on a three-month hike across the ocean floor…a hike I’ll probably never complete. We’ll fly a sonie to Ardis or one of the shuttles up the rings to have them turn the power and fax-node links back on.”

  Moira shook her head. “I assure you, my young Prometheus, you do not want to walk toward the Mediterranean Basin.”

  “Almost one million calibani are loose there,” said Prospero. “They used to be contained to the Basin, but Setebos has released them. They’ve slaughtered the voynix that once guarded Jerusalem, have swarmed across North Africa and the Middle East, and would have covered much of Europe now if Ariel weren’t holding them back.”

  “Ariel!” cried Harman. The thought of the tiny little…sprite…single-handedly holding back a million rampaging calibani—or even one—was totally absurd.

  “Ariel can call upon more resources than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Harman, friend of Noman,” said Prospero.

  “Hmm,” said Harman, unconvinced. The three walked to the edge of the grassy cliff. A narrow path switchbacked down to the beach. From this close, the Atlantic Breach looked much more real and strangely terrifying. Waves lapped up on either side of the impossible segment cut out of the ocean. “Prospero,” said Harman, “you created the calibani to counter the voynix threat. Why do you allow them to rampage?”

  “I no longer control them,” said the old magus.

  “Since Setebos arrived?”

  The magus smiled. “I lost control of the calibani—and of Cal
iban himself—many centuries before Setebos.”

  “Why did you create the damned things in the first place?”

  “Security,” said Prospero. And he smiled again at the irony of the word.

  “We…the post-humans,” said Moira, “asked Prospero and his…companion…to create a race of creatures ferocious enough to stop the replicating voynix from flooding into the Mediterranean Basin and compromising our operations there. You see, we used the Basin for…”

  “Growing food, cotton, tea, and other materials you needed in the orbital islands,” finished Harman. “I know.” He paused, thinking about what the post had just said. “Companion? Do you mean Ariel?”

  “No, not Ariel,” said Moira. “You see, fifteen hundred years ago, the creature we call Sycorax was not yet the…”

  “That will do,” interrupted Prospero. The hologram actually sounded embarrassed.

  Harman didn’t want to let it go. “But what you told us a year ago is true, isn’t it?” he asked the magus. “Caliban’s mother was Sycorax and its father was Setebos…or was that a lie as well?”

  “No, no,” said Prospero. “Caliban is a creature out of the witch by a monster.”

  “I’ve been curious how a giant brain the size of a warehouse with dozens of hands bigger than me manages to mate with a human-sized witch,” said Harman.

  “Very carefully,” said Moira—rather predictably, Harman thought. The woman who looked like young Savi pointed to the Breach. “Are we ready to start?”

  “Just another question for Prospero,” said Harman, but when he turned around to speak to the magus, he was gone. “Damn it. I hate it when he does that.”

  “He has business to attend to elsewhere.”

  “Yes, I’m sure. But I wanted to ask him one last time why he’s sending me across the Atlantic Breach. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m going to die out there. I mean, there’s no food….”

  “I’ve packed a dozen food bars for you,” said Moira.

  Harman had to laugh. “All right…after a dozen days, then there’s no food. And no water…”

  Moira pulled a soft, curved, almost flat shape from the rucksack. The thing looked almost like one of the wineskins from the turin drama—but one that was all but empty. A thin tube ran from it. She handed it to Harman and he noticed how cool to the touch it was.

  “A hydrator,” said Moira. “If there’s any humidity in the air at all, this collects it and filters it. If you’re in your thermskin, it collects your sweat and exhalations, scrubs them, and provides drinking water that way. You will not die of thirst out there.”

  “I didn’t bring my thermskin,” said Harman.

  “I packed it for you. You will need it for hunting.”

  “Hunting?”

  “Fishing might be a better term,” said Moira. “You can press through the restraining forcefields any time and kill fish underwater. You’ve been underwater in your thermskin before—up on Prospero’s Isle ten months ago—so you know that the skin protects you from pressure and the osmosis mask allows you to breathe.”

  “What am I supposed to use for bait to get these fish?”

  Moira flashed Savi’s quick smile. “For sharks, killer whales, and many other denizens of the deep out there, your own body will do quite nicely, my Prometheus.”

  Harman was not amused. “And what do I use to kill the sharks, killer whales, and other denizens of the deep that I might want to eat…harsh language?”

  Moira pulled a handgun from the rucksack and handed it to him.

  It was black—darker and stubbier and much less graceful in design than the flechette weapons he was used to—and heavier. But the hand grip, barrel, and trigger were similar enough.

  “This fires bullets, not crystal darts,” said Moira. “It’s an explosive device rather than gas-charged as with the weapons you’ve used before…but the principle is obviously the same. There are three boxes of ammunition in your rucksack…six hundred rounds of self-cavitating ammunition. That means that each bullet creates its own vacuum ahead of itself underwater…water does not slow it down. This is the safety—it’s on now—press down on the red dot with your thumb to release the safety. It has more recoil than flechette weapons and is much louder, but you’ll grow used to that.”

  Harman hefted the killing device a few times, pointed it at the distant sea, made sure the safety was still on, and set it back in his pack. He’d test it later—once he was out in the Breach. “I wish we could get a few dozen of these weapons to Ardis,” he said softly.

  “You can deliver this one to them,” said Moira.

  Harman balled his right hand into a fist. He wheeled on Moira. “More than two thousand miles across here,” he said fiercely. “I don’t know how many miles I can hike a day, even if I do catch these god-damned fish and if your hydrator thing keeps working. Twenty miles a day? Thirty? That could be two hundred days of hiking just to get to the east coast of North America. But that kind of progress is only if the land in the Breach is flat…and I’m looking at proxnet and farnet mapping right now. There are fucking mountain ranges out there! And canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon! Boulders, rock crevasses, great furrows where continental drift dragged entire landmasses over the ocean floor, larger gaps where tectonic-plate activity opened up the bottom of the ocean and spewed forth lava. This ocean floor’s always re-creating itself—it’s bigger, rougher, and rockier than it used to be. It’ll take me a year to get across, and once I get there I’ll have almost another thousand miles to cover to get back to Ardis—and that’s through forests and mountains infested with dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, and voynix. You and that mutant cyberspace personality can quantum teleport anywhere you want to go—and take me with you. Or you could command a sonie to fly here from any of your post-human hidey holes where you’ve stashed your toys, and I could be home at Ardis helping Ada in a few hours…less. Instead, you’re sending me to my death out there. And even if I survive, it’ll be many months before I can get back to Ardis and odds are that Ada and everyone I know will be dead—from that Setebos spawn, or the voynix, or the winter, or starvation. Why are you doing this to me?”

  Moira did not flinch from his fierce gaze. “Has Prospero ever spoken to you of the logosphere’s predicators?” she asked softly.

  “Predicators?” Harman repeated stupidly. He could feel the adrenaline filling his system beginning to drain away toward despair. In a minute, his hands would be shaking. “You mean predictors? No.”

  “Predicators,” said Moira. “They are as unique—and often as dangerous—as Prospero himself. Sometimes he trusts them. Sometimes he does not. In this case, he has entrusted your life and perhaps the future of your race to them.”

  Moira pulled her hydrator from the rucksack and slung it over her back, shifting the flexible drinking tube so it lay along the side of her cheek. She started down the steep path toward the beach.

  Harman remained at the top of the cliff for a minute. Shouldering the rucksack, he shielded his eyes and stared back through the morning glare at the black eiffelbahn tower rising high against the blue sky. The cablecar cables ran off to the east. He could not see the next tower from this vantage point.

  Swiveling, he looked out to the west. Large white birds and smaller white birds—gulls and terns, his protein DNA memory storage told him—wheeled and screeched over the lazy blue sea. The Atlantic Breach remained a startling impossibility, its eighty-foot-wide cleft taking on scale now that Moira was halfway down the cliff face.

  Harman sighed, tugged the rucksack straps tighter—already feeling the sweat soaking through his tunic where it met the cotton of the small backpack—and began following Moira down the trail toward the beach and the sea.

  67

  A lot was happening at once.

  The Queen Mab—all one thousand one hundred and eighteen feet of her—began her close-encounter aerobraking maneuver, the ship’s curved pusher plate draped across its derriere, both ship and saucer surrounded by flame an
d streaking plasma.

  At the height of the ion-storm around the aerobraking spaceship, Suma IV cut loose the dropship.

  Just as with the spacecraft that had first brought Mahnmut and Orphu to Mars, no one had gotten around to naming this dropship—it remained just “the dropship” in their maser and tightbeam conversations. But The Dark Lady was secure in the dropship’s hold, and in his environmental control cubby, Mahnmut kept up a running description of video feeds—both from the dropship’s camera and from the Queen Mab—as the stealth-shielded ovoid of the dropship thrust away from the flame-wreathed larger ship, spun through the upper atmosphere at five times the speed of sound, and finally deployed its stubby high-speed wings when their velocity dropped to a mere Mach 3.

  Originally, General Beh bin Adee had planned to drop Earthward with the reconnaissance dropship, but the more imminent threat of the Voice’s asteroid rendezvous made all the Prime Integrators vote that the general remain aboard the Mab. Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo was in the jumpseat of the passenger/cargo compartment behind the main control blister on the upper part of the ship, and behind him—strapped into their web seating, heavy energy weapons locked upright between their black-barbed knees—rode his command: twenty-five rockvec Belt troopers recently defrosted and briefed on the Queen Mab.

  Suma IV was an excellent pilot. Mahnmut had to admire the way the Ganymedan guided the dropship down through the upper atmosphere, using thrusters so briefly that the ship seemed to be flying itself, and he had to smile when he remembered his own disastrous plunge with Orphu through Mars’ atmosphere. Of course, his ship had been charred and broken then, but he could still give credit to a real pilot when he flew with one.

  The data and radar profile are impressive, tightbeamed Orphu of Io from the hold. What’s the visual look like?

  Blue and white, sent Mahnmut. All blue and white. More beautiful even than the photographs. The entire Earth is ocean below us.