by Dan Simmons
All of it? said Orphu and Mahnmut thought it was one of the few times he’d heard his friend sound surprised.
All of it. A water world—blue ocean, a million ripples of reflected sunlight, white clouds—cirrus, high ripples, a mass of stratocumulus coming over the horizon above us…. no, wait. It’s a hurricane, a thousand kilometers across,at least. I can see the eye. White, spinning, powerful, amazing.
Our track is nominal, sent Orphu. Coming right up from Antarctica crossing the South Atlantic toward the northeast.
The Mab’s out of atmosphere and on the other side of the Earth now, sent Mahnmut. The communication sats we seeded are working fine. Mab’s velocity is down to fifteen kilometers per second and falling. She’s climbing back to the polar ring coordinates and decelerating on ion drive. Trajectory is good. She’s headed for the rendezvous point the Voice gave us. No one’s fired on her yet.
Even better, sent Orphu, no one’s fired on us yet, either.
Suma IV allowed atmospheric drag to slow them to less than the speed of sound just as they crossed the bulge of Africa. Their flight plan had called for them to fly over the dried Mediterranean Sea, shooting video and recording data about the odd constructs there, but instruments now told them that there was some sort of energy-damping field extending in a dome up to forty thousand meters above that dried sea. The dropship might fly into that and cease flying altogether. In fact, according to Suma IV, if they flew into that, all the moravecs on board might cease functioning. The Ganymedan banked the dropship east across the Sahara Desert, flying in a wide curve around to the south and east of the waterless Mediterranean.
The feed continued to flow in from the Queen Mab, carried around the blocking mass of the planet by a score of snowflake-size repeater satellites.
The large spacecraft had reached the coordinates beamed to it by the Voice—a small volume of empty space just outside the edge of the orbital ring some two thousand kilometers from the asteroid-city from which the Voice had broadcast its—her—messages. Obviously the Voice did not want a spaceship that was propelled by atomic bombs to come within shockwave proximity of her—its—orbital home.
Besides realtime data the dropship was uplinking, it was getting twenty broadband tightbeams of information flowing in: feeds from the Queen Mab’s many cameras and external sensors, comm bands from the Mab’s bridge, ground data from the various satellites they’d seeded, and multiple feeds from Odysseus. The moravecs had not only rigged the human’s clothing with nanocameras and molecular transmitters, they’d mildly sedated Odysseus during his last sleep period and had started to paint cell-sized imagers on the skin of his forehead and hands, but had discovered to their shock that Odysseus already had nanocameras in the skin there. His ear canals also had been modified—long before he came aboard the Queen Mab they realized, with nanocyte receivers. The moravecs modified all these so they would send every sight and sound back to the ship’s recorders. Other sensors had been installed around his body so that even if Odysseus were to die during the coming rendezvous, data about his surroundings would continue flowing back to the moravecs.
At that moment, Odysseus was standing on the bridge with Prime Integrator Asteague/Che, Retrograde Sinopessen, navigator Cho Li, General Beh bin Adee, and the other command moravecs there.
Suddenly Orphu and Mahnmut perked up as the Queen Mab relayed real-time radio data from the ship’s comm.
“Incoming maser message,” said Cho Li.
“SEND ODYSSEUS ACROSS ALONE,” came the sultry female voice from the asteroid-city. “USE A SHUTTLE WHICH IS NOT ARMED. IF I DETECT WEAPONS ABOARD HIS SHIP OR IF ANYONE ORGANIC OR ROBOTIC ACCOMPANIES ODYSSEUS, I WILL DESTROY YOUR SPACECRAFT.”
“The plot thickens,” said Orphu of Io on the common dropship band.
The moravecs in the dropship watched with only a second’s delay as Retrograde Sinopessen escorted Odysseus down to the number eight launch bay. Since all of the hornets were armed, only one of the three Phobos construction shuttles still aboard the Queen Mab would satisfy the Voice’s requirements.
The construction shuttle was tiny—a remote-handling ovoid with barely room inside to squeeze in one adult human being and no life support beyond air and temperature—and as Retrograde Sinopessen helped the Achaean fighter squirm into the cable and circuit-board cluttered space, the moravec said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
Odysseus stared at the spidery moravec from Amalthea for a long moment. Finally he said in Greek, “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink life to the lees: all times have I enjoyed greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those that loved me and alone; on shore, and when through the scudding drifts the rainy Hyades vexed the dim sea; I am become a name…. Much have I seen and known; cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments, and myself not least, but honored them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, far on the ringing plains of windy Troy…. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust un-burnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life were all too little, and of one to me little remains: but every hour is saved from that eternal silence, something more, a bringer of new things; and vile it were for some three suns to store and hoard myself…close the goddamned door, spider-thing.”
“But that’s…” began Orphu of Io.
“He’s been in the Mab’s library…” began Mahnmut.
“Hush!” commanded Suma IV.
They watched as the shuttle was sealed. Retrograde Sinopessen stayed in the shuttle bay, clinging to a strut so as not to be swept out in space as the bay dumped all its atmosphere, and then the ovoid shuttle moved out into space on silent peroxide thrusters. The egg-shaped thing tumbled, stabilized, aimed its nose at the orbital asteroid-city—only a glowing spark among thousands of other p-ring sparks at this distance—and thrusted away toward the Voice.
“We’re coming up on Jerusalem,” said Suma IV on the intercom.
Mahnmut returned his attention to the dropship’s various video monitors and sensors.
Tell me what you see, old friend, tightbeamed Orphu.
All right…we’re still more than twenty kilometers high. On the unmagnified view, I see the dry Mediterranean Sea about sixty or eighty kilometers to the west, it’s a patchwork of red rock, dark soil, and what looks to be green fields. Then along the coast there’s the huge crater that used to be the Gaza Strip—a sort of impact crater, half-moon-shaped inlet to the dry sea—and then the land rises into mountains and Jerusalem is there, in the heights, on a hill of its own.
What does it look like?
Let me zoom a bit…yes. Suma IV’s doing an overlay with historical satellite photos, and it’s obvious that the suburbs and newer parts of the city are gone…but the Old City, the walled city, is still there. I can see the Damascus Gate…the Western Wall…Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock…and there’s a new structure there, one not in the old satellite photos. Something tall and made out of multifaceted glass and polished stone. The blue beam is coming up from it.
I’m reviewing the data on the blue beam, sent Orphu. Definitely a neutrino beam sheathed in tachyons. I don’t have a clue as to what function that might have and I bet our best scientists don’t either.
Oh, wait a minute… sent Mahnmut. I’ve zoomed on the Old City and it’s…crawling with life.
People? Humans?
No…
Those headless humpy organic-robotic things?
No, tightbeamed Mahnmut. Would you just let me describe these things at my own speed?
Sorry.
There are thousands—more than thousands—of the clawed, fin-footed amphibian things that you suggested looked like Caliban from The Tempest.
What are they doing? asked Orphu.
Just milling around, essentially, sent Mahnmut. No, wait, there are bodies on David Street near the Jaffa Gate…more bodies on the Tariq el-Wad in the old Jewish section near the Western Wall Plaza…
Human bodies? sent Orphu.
<
br /> No…those headless humpy organic-robotic things. They’re pretty torn up…a lot of them look eviscerated.
Food for the Caliban monsters? asked Orphu.
I have no idea.
“We’re going to overfly the blue beam,” Suma IV broadcast on the intercom. “Everyone stay strapped in tight—I need to get some of our boom sensors into the beam itself.”
Is this wise? Mahnmut asked Orphu.
Nothing about this expedition to Earth is wise, old friend. We don’t have a maggid aboard.
A what? tightbeamed Mahnmut.
Maggid, sent Orphu of Io. In olden days, the old Jews—long before the caliphate wars and the rubicon, I mean, back when humans wore bearskins and T-shirts—the old Jews said that a wise person had a maggid—a sort of spiritual counselor from a different world.
Maybe we’re the maggids, sent Mahnmut. We’re all from another world.
True, sent Orphu. But we’re not very wise. Mahnmut, did I ever tell you that I’m a gnostic?
Spell that, sent Mahnmut.
Orphu of Io did so.
What the hell is a gnostic? asked Mahnmut. He’d had several revelations about his old friend recently—including the fact that Orphu was an expert on James Joyce and Lost Era writers other than Proust—and he wasn’t sure he was ready for more.
It doesn’t matter what a gnostic is, sent Orphu, but a hundred years before the Christians burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in Venice, they burned a gnostic, a Sufi magus named Solomon Molkho in Mantua. Solomon Molkho taught that when the change occurred, the Dragon would be destroyed without weapons and everything on Earth and in the heavens would be changed.
“Dragons? Magus?” Mahnmut said aloud.
“What?” said Suma IV from the cockpit bubble.
“Say again?” commed Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo from his jumpseat in the troop transport module.
“Please say that again,” came Prime Integrator Asteague/Che’s British-accented voice from the Queen Mab, telling Mahnmut that the mother ship was monitoring their intercom chatter as well as their official transmissions. But not, he fervently hoped, tapping into their tight-beam conversations.
Never mind, sent Mahnmut. I’ll ask about the dragon and the maguses and such another time.
On the intercom, Mahnmut said, “Sorry…nothing…just thinking out loud.”
“Let’s maintain radio discipline,” snapped Suma IV.
“Yes…uh…sir,” said Mahnmut.
Down in the hold, Orphu of Io rumbled in the subsonic.
Odysseus’ construction shuttle slowly approached the brightly lit glass city girdling the asteroid. Sensors from the shuttle confirmed that the underlying asteroid was roughly potato-shaped and about twenty kilometers long by almost eleven kilometers in diameter. Every square meter of the asteroid’s nickel-iron surface was covered by the crystal city, with the steel, glass, and buckycarbon towers and bubbles rising to a maximum height of half a kilometer. Sensors showed that the entire structure was pressurized at sea-level Earth normal, that the molecules of air inevitably leaking out through the glass suggested Earth-norm oxygen-nitrogen-carbon-dioxide mix atmosphere, and that the internal temperatures would be comfortable for a human who had lived around the Mediterranean Sea before the late Lost Era climate changes…someone from Odysseus’ era, for instance.
On the bridge of the Queen Mab a thousand kilometers away and holding, all of the command ’vecs monitored their sensors and screens more intently as an invisible tentacle of forcefield energy reached out from the crystal asteroid city, grabbed the construction shuttle, and pulled it in toward an airlock-like opening high on the tallest glass tower.
“Shut down the shuttle’s thrusters and autopilot,” commanded Cho Li.
Retrograde Sinopessen monitored Odysseus’ biotelemetry and said, “Our human friend is fine. Excited…heart rate up a bit and adrenaline levels rising…he can see out that little window…but otherwise healthy.”
Holographic images flickered above consoles and the chart table as the shuttle was drawn closer and then pulled into the dark rectangle of the airlock. A glass door slid shut. Sensors on the shuttle registered a forcefield differential pushing it “down”—substituting for gravity to within 0.68 Earth standard—and then the sensors recorded atmosphere rushing into the large airlock chamber. It was as breathable as the air at Ilium.
“Radio, maser, and quantum telemetric data is quite clear,” reported Cho Li. “The glass of the city wall does not block it.”
“He’s not in the city yet,” grumbled General Beh bin Adee. “He’s just in the airlock. Don’t be surprised if the Voice cuts off transmissions as soon as Odysseus is inside.”
They watched on the subjective skin cameras—and so did everyone aboard the dropship some fifty thousand kilometers away—as Odysseus uncoiled from the small space, stretched, and began walking toward an interior door. Although wearing soft shipsuit clothing, the human had insisted over all the moravecs’ protests on bringing his round shield and short sword. The shield was raised now and the sword was ready as the bearded man approached the brightly illuminated door.
“Unless anyone has any further need to study Jerusalem or the neutrino beam, I’ll set course for Europe now,” Suma IV said over the intercom.
No one protested, although Mahnmut was busy describing the colors of the Old City of Jerusalem to Ophu—the reds of the late afternoon sun on the ancient buildings, the gold gleaming of the mosque, the clay-colored streets and dark gray shadows of the alleys, the shocking, sudden green of olive groves here and there, and everywhere the slick, wet, slimy green of the amphibian creatures.
The dropship accelerated to Mach 3 and headed northeast toward the old capital of Dimashq in what had once been called Syria or the Kahn Ho Tep Province of Nyainqêntanglha Shan West, Suma IV keeping a distance between the aircraft and the dome of nullifying energy over the dried-up Mediterranean. As they covered the length of old Syria and banked sharply left to head west along the Anatolian Peninsula over the bones of old Turkey, the ship fully stealthed and doing a silent Mach 2.8 at an altitude of thirty-four thousand meters, Mahnmut suddenly said, “Can we slow down and orbit near the Aegean coast south of the Hellespont?”
“We can,” replied Suma IV over the intercom, “but we’re behind schedule for our survey of the blue-ice city in France. Is there something along the coast up here that’s worth our detour and time?”
“The site of Troy,” said Mahnmut. “Ilium.”
The dropship began decelerating and losing altitude. When it reached the crawling pace of three hundred kilometers per hour—and with the brown and green of the emptied Mediterranean approaching fast and the water of the Hellespont to the north—Suma IV retracted the stubby delta wings and unfolded the hundred-meter-long, multiplaned gossamer wings with their slowly turning propellers.
Mahnmut softly sang on the intercom—
“They say that Achilles in the darkness stirred…
And Priam and his fifty sons
Wake all amazed and hear the guns,
And shake for Troy again.”
Who’s that? sent Orphu. I don’t recognize that verse.
Rupert Brooke, Mahnmut replied on the tightbeam. World War I–era British poet. He wrote that on his way to Gallipoli…but he never got to Gallipoli. Died of disease along the way.
“I say,” boomed General Beh bin Adee on the common band, “I can’t say much for your radio discipline, little Europan, but that’s a cracking good poem.”
On the crystal city in polar orbit, the airlock door slid up and Odysseus entered into the city proper. It was filled with sunlight, trees, vines, tropical birds, streams, a waterfall tumbling from a tall outcropping of lichen-covered stone, old ruins, and small wildlife. Odysseus saw a red deer quit munching grass, raise its head, look at the human approaching behind his shield with sword raised, and then walk calmly away.
“Sensors indicate a humanoid form is approaching—not yet visible through the fol
iage,” Cho Li radioed to the dropship.
Odysseus heard the footsteps before he saw her—bare feet on packed soil and smooth rock. He lowered his shield and slid his sword into the loop on his broad belt as she came into sight.
The woman was beautiful beyond words. Even the inhuman moravecs in their steel and plastic shells, with organic hearts thumping next to their hydraulic hearts, organic brains and glands nestling next to plastic pumps and nanocyte servomechanisms—even the moravecs one thousand kilometers away staring at their holograms recognized how incredibly beautiful the woman was.
Her skin was a tanned brown, her hair long and dark but streaked with blond, the curls flowing down over her bare shoulders. She wore only the slightest two-piece outfit of glittering but flimsy silk that emphasized her full, heavy breasts and broad hips. Her feet were bare but there were gold bracelets around her slim ankles and a riot of bracelets on each wrist, silver and gold clasps on her smooth upper arms.
As she came closer, Odysseus and the staring moravecs in space and the staring moravecs circling above ancient Troy saw that the woman’s eyebrows arched in a sensuous curve over her amazingly green eyes, that her lashes were long and dark, and that what had looked like makeup around those amazing eyes from three meters away resolved into normal shadows and skin tones as she approached to within a meter of the stunned Odysseus. Her lips were soft, full, and very red.
In perfect Greek of Odysseus’ era, in a voice as soft as a breeze through palms or the rustle of perfectly tuned wind chimes, the beautiful woman said, “Welcome, Odysseus. I have been waiting for you for many years. My name is Sycorax.”
68
On the second evening of his hike through the Atlantic Breach with Moira, Harman found himself thinking of many things.
Something about walking between the two high walls of water—the Atlantic was more than five hundred feet deep here, on their second day of walking, now almost seventy miles out from the coast—was absolutely mesmerizing. A bundle of protein memory stored in modified DNA helixes somewhere near his spine pedantically tugged at Harman’s consciousness and wanted to fill in the details—(the word mesmerizing is based upon Franz Anton Mesmer, born May 23, 1734, in Iznang, Swabia, died March 5, 1815, in Meersburg, Swabia—German physician whose system of therapeutics known as mesmerism, in which he affected sympathetic control of his patients’ consciousness, was the forerunner of the later practice of hypnotism…)—but Harman’s mind, lost in labyrinths of thought, batted away the interruption. He was getting better at shutting down the nonessential voices roaring in and around his mind, but his head still hurt like a son of a bitch.