by Dan Simmons
“You need to create a Brane Hole back to the beach near Ilium,” I say.
General Beh bin Adee moves his black-thorned arms in a way that might suggest a question. “Why?” he says.
“Because the Greeks are being slaughtered to a man by the Trojans and they don’t deserve to be wiped out that way. I want to help them escape.”
“No,” says the general. “I meant why do you think we have the ability to create Brane Holes at will?”
“Because I saw you do it once. You created all those Holes that you jumped through from the Asteroid Belt to Mars, then accidentally to Ilium-Earth. More than ten months ago. I was there, remember?”
“Our technology is not adequate to the effort of creating Brane Holes to different universes,” says Cho Li.
“But you did it, goddammit.” I can hear the whine in my voice.
“No, we did not,” says Asteague/Che. “What we actually did at the time was…it is hard to describe and I am not a scientist or engineer, although we have many…what we did at the time was interdict the so-called gods’ Brane Hole connections and tunnel some of our own into the quantum matrix they had created.”
“Well,” I say, “do it again. Tens of thousands of human lives depend on it. And while you’re at it, you can bring back the few million Greeks and others in the Europe of Ilium-Earth who were disappeared—shot into space in a blue beam.”
“We don’t know how to do that, either,” says Asteague/Che.
Well then, what the fuck good are you? I’m tempted to ask. I don’t.
“But you’re safe here, Dr. Hockenberry,” continues the Prime Integrator.
Again, I want to shout at these plastic-metal things, but I realize that he—it—is correct. I am safe here on the Queen Mab. Safe from the Trojans at least. And perhaps the luscious babe boinking Odysseus has a sister….
“I need to go back,” I hear myself saying. Go back where, you idiot? To the Greeks’ Last Stand? Sounds like a baklava shop in L.A.
“You’ll be killed,” says General Beh bin Adee. The large, dark, humanoid soldier-thing doesn’t sound the least bit upset at the prospect.
“Not if you can help me.”
The moravecs seem to be communicating silently with one another again. I can see one of the holographic window-monitors far across the bridge is tuned to Odysseus and the exotic woman still going at it like rabbits. The woman is on top now and I can see that she’s even more beautiful and desirable than my first glimpse had suggested. I concentrate on not getting an erection in front of these moravecs. If they notice, and they tend to notice a lot about us humans, they might take it wrong.
“We will help you if we can,” Asteague/Che says at last. “What do you desire?”
“I need to go somewhere without being seen,” I say and begin describing the lost Hades Helmet and my old morphing bracelet to them.
“The morphing technology—at least as it applies to living organisms—is beyond our technological capabilities,” says Retrograde…Sinopessen…I remember it now. “It manipulates reality on a quantum level we do not yet fully understand. We are far away from being able to create machines to alter that form of probability collapse.”
“And we have no clue as to how this Hades Helmet proffered true invisibility,” adds Cho Li. “Although if it is consistent with the Olympians’—or those powers behind the Olympians—other technologies, it probably involves a minor quantum shift through time rather than space.”
“Can you whomp up something like that for me?” I ask. I realize that there’s no compelling reason for these busy moravecs to do anything for me.
“No,” says Asteague/Che.
“We could adapt some chameleon cloth for him,” says General Beh bin Adee.
“Great,” I say. “What’s chameleon cloth?”
“An active-stealth camouflage polymer,” says the general. “Primitive but effective if one does not move too quickly between widely varying backgrounds. Roughly the same material that your Mars ship was coated in, only more breathable and invisible to the infrared. The eyepieces are nanocytic, so there would be no interruption of the chameleon adaptation.”
“The gods saw us and shot our Mars ship out of orbit,” I say.
“Well, yes….” says General Beh bin Adee. “There is that to consider.”
“This chameleon cloth is the best you can do?”
“On short notice,” says Asteague/Che.
“Then I’ll take it. How long will it take your people…I mean your…moravecs…to fit me out in this chameleon suit and show me how to use it?”
“I ordered the environmental engineering department to begin work on such a suit the second we began discussing it,” says the Prime Integrator. “We had your vital measurements on record. They should bring the finished product within three minutes.”
“Wonderful,” I say, wondering if it is. Where exactly am I going? How can I convince those where I’m going to help the Greeks escape? Where could the Greeks escape to? Their families and servants and friends and slaves have all been sucked up into the blue beam rising from Delphi. As if in anticipation of getting out of here, I begin playing with the gold medallion hanging around my neck, fingering the sliding circle that activates it.
“By the way,” says Cho Li, “your quantum teleportation medallion does not work.”
“What!?” I rip myself out of the straps and float in place. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Our inspection when you were on the ship earlier has shown the disk to be effectively functionless,” says the navigator.
“You’re full of shit. You guys told me earlier that it just couldn’t be replicated for your use, that it was keyed to my DNA or something.”
Prime Integrator Asteague/Che makes a self-conscious noise that sounds amazingly like a human male clearing his throat in embarrassment. “It is true that there is some…communication…between the medallion around your neck and your cells and DNA, Dr. Hockenberry. But the medallion itself has no quantum function. It does not QT you through Calabi-Yau space.”
“That’s nuts,” I say again, trying to curb my language. I still need these moravecs’ help and lizard suit to get out of here. “I got here, didn’t I? All the way from the universe of the Ilium-Earth.”
“Yes,” says Cho Li. “You did. With no help whatsoever from that hollow gold medallion hanging around your neck. It is a mystery.”
A soldier moravec with the chameleon outfit appears from the open elevator-shaft doorway. The garment looks like nothing special. Actually, it reminds me of an oversized version of a so-called leisure suit I was foolish enough to own in the 1970s. It even had the same stupid, pointy collars and monkey-puke-green sheen to it.
“The collars extend into a full cowl,” says Asteague/Che as if reading my mind. “The suit itself has no color. This green is merely a default setting so we can find the material.”
I take the suit from the ’vec soldier and make the mistake of trying to pull it on. Within seconds, I’m tumbling out of control, spinning around my own axis in zero-g, hanging on to the useless garment as if I’m waving a flag, but achieving nothing else.
General Beh bin Adee and his trooper grab me, secure me—they seem to know just where to lodge their feet on the consoles to keep themselves from acting with an equal and opposite reaction—and then they unceremoniously stuff me into the chameleon outfit. Then they attach one of the chair straps to my suit, velcroing me to some patch I can’t see. It keeps me in place.
I pull the collars up into a cowl and pull the cowl completely over my head.
It’s not nearly as comfortable as just putting on the Hades Helmet and disappearing. For one thing, it is tremendously hot in this lizard suit. For a second thing, the nanowhatsits that allow me to see through the material in front of my eyes don’t quite achieve cricital focus. An hour peering out of this thing and I’ll have the worst headache of my life.
“How is it?” asks Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
“Great,” I lie. “Can you see me?”
“Yes,” says Asteague/Che, “but only via gravitational radar and other bands of the nonvisible-light spectrum. To all visual intents and purposes, you have blended in with the background. With General bin Adee, actually. Will the personages where you are traveling be using gravitational radar, enhanced negative thermal imaging, or other such techniques?”
Would they? I have no clue. Aloud, I say, “There’s one problem.”
“Yes? Perhaps we can fix it.” The Prime Integrator sounds solicitous, even actively concerned. My wife used to love James Mason.
“I have to twist the QT medallion to QT,” I say, wondering how muffled my voice sounds to them. Sweat is rolling down my temple, cheeks, and rib cage by now. “I can’t twist it without opening the suit and…”
“The chameleon cloth is tailored to be very loose,” interrupts Beh bin Adee. The military ’vec always sounds slightly disgusted with me. “You can pull your arm inside the suit to touch the medallion. Both arms if you need to.”
“Oh, yeah,” I say, pulling my right arm out of the suit arm and into the suit, and with that as my final contribution to our conversation, I twist the medallion and quantum teleport away from the Queen Mab.
Does too work! I’m tempted to shout as I flick into solidity at the place in space/time that I’d envisioned. But then I remember that I forgot to ask the moravecs for a weapon. And some food and water. And maybe some impact armor.
But it wouldn’t be a good time for me to shout anything.
I’ve appeared in the Great Hall of the Gods on Mount Olympos and all the gods seem to be here—all except Hera, whose smaller throne is wreathed in black funereal ribbon. Zeus looks to be fifty feet tall where he sits on his own gold throne.
All of the other gods seem to be here—more even than I’d seen at their last large conclave, which I’d crashed in my infinitely more comfortable Hades Helmet. I don’t even know many of these gods, can’t identify them even after ten years of reporting to Olympos daily with my voice stones and action reports. There are hundreds upon hundreds of gods here, easily more than a thousand.
And all of them are silent. Waiting for Zeus to address them.
Trying not to breathe loudly or faint from the stifling heat in this god-damned lizard suit, hoping that none of these Olympian Immortals is using deep gravitational radar or enhanced negative thermal imaging, I stand perfectly still, almost cheek to jowl with the mob of gods and goddesses, nymphs, Furies, Erinyeses, and demigods, and wait to hear what Zeus is going to say.
74
Even before Harman stepped through the gash in the hull into the bow of the derelict ship, he had a pretty good idea what the thing was. The DNA-bound protein data packets in his body had a thousand references of thousands of types of seagoing craft across ten thousand years of human history. Harman couldn’t make a perfect match based only upon the damaged bow, the debris field around the bow, and by looking at the breached sheaths of elastic sonar-stealth material encasing the morphable smart-steel of the hull itself, but it was fairly obvious that he was stepping into a submarine from some century late in the Lost Era: possibly something from after the rubicon release but before the first post-humans had been genetically brought into being. Dementia times.
Once inside, making his way down an only slightly canted corridor and breathing through his osmosis mask even though this part of the sunken ship was dry, he was sure it was a submarine.
Harman was standing in a room that was listing only about ten degrees from vertical but the ancient impact with the ocean bottom here only two hundred feet beneath the surface of the sea—long before there was an Atlantic Breach—had crumpled metal and tumbled half a dozen long canisters off their racks. Harman wouldn’t need the pistol he was carrying. Nothing lived in this hulk. He pressed the pistol against the stick-tite patch on his right hip and extended a bit of thermskin elastic over it, securing it as surely as if he were wearing one of the holsters he’d seen in books via the crystal cabinet.
He cupped his right palm against the rounded edge of one of these tumbled canisters, curious to find if his data-seeking function would work through the molecule-thin thermskin gloves.
It did.
Harman was standing in the torpedo room of a Mohammed-class warship submarine. The AI in the guidance system of this particular torpedo—“torpedo” being neither a word nor concept he had ever encountered until that millisecond—had gone dead more than two thousand years earlier, but there was enough residual memory in the dead microcircuits for Harman to understand that his palm was inches above a nuclear warhead tucked into the end of a thirty-four-thousand-pound high-speed, self-cavitating, hunt-until-it-kills-something torpedo. This particular torpedo warhead—“warhead” being another term he had never encountered until that instant—was a simple fusion weapon, packing only 475 kilotons, the equivalent of 950 million pounds of TNT detonating. The blast from the pearl-sized sphere a few inches beneath his palm would reach tens of millions of degrees within a millionth of a second. Harman could almost feel the lethal neutron and gamma rays crouching there, invisible dragon-eels of death, ready to leap in all directions at the speed of light to kill and infect every bit of human nerve or tissue they would encounter, tearing through them like bullets through butter.
He snatched his hand away and rubbed it against his thigh as if cleaning something filthy from his palm.
This entire submarine was a single instrument designed for killing human beings. His briefest encounter with the warhead’s dead guidance AI had told him that the torpedo warheads were all but irrelevant to the machine and crew’s real mission. But to understand what that mission was, he would have to pass out of the torpedo room, up the canted deck, through the wardroom and mess room, up a ladder and down a corridor past the sonar shack and integrated comm room, and then up another ladder into the command and control center.
But everything beyond the near half of the torpedo room was under water.
The beams of light from his chest lamps showed him where the north wall of the Breach began not fifteen feet ahead. The submarine had been lying here along this ocean ridge two hundred feet beneath the surface and fully filled with water for many centuries before whatever created the Breach had sucked the ocean out of these forward compartments, but nothing lived here anymore, not so much as a dried barnacle remained from the myriad of undersea life forms that must have thrived here for centuries, and there were no signs of human bones or other remnants of the crew. The forcefield that held back the Atlantic Ocean did not physically slice through the morphable metal of the submarine’s hull or metal structure—Harman’s lamps picked up the solid, uninterrupted line of deck overhead—but he could visualize the complete oval-slice of ocean inside the hull of the ship. The north wall of the Breach forcefield held back the sea in every open space, but a step beyond that…Harman could imagine the pressure down here at two hundred feet and see the wall of darkness ahead, his lamplights reflecting off it as if from a dark-burnished but still mirrored surface.
Suddenly Harman was filled with a sick and terrible terror. He had to clutch at the despised torpedo to keep himself from reeling, from falling onto the corroded plates of the deck. He wanted to run from this ancient warship out into the air and sunlight, to rip off his osmosis mask, and to be sick if he had to in order to get rid of this poison that had suddenly filled his body and mind.
It was a mere torpedo he was leaning against, designed for destroying other ships, a harbor at most, yet its thermonuclear yield was three times the full explosive power dropped on Hiroshima—another word and image that had just entered Harman’s reeling mind—capable of destroying everything in a hundred-square-mile area.
Harman—always fair at judging distances and sizes even in his era that demanded no such skills—saw in his mind’s eye a ten-by-ten-mile area in the heart of Paris Crater, or with Ardis Hall at the center of its bull’s-eye. At Ardis, such a blast would not onl
y vaporize the manor house and the new outbuildings in a microsecond, but blast away the hard-built palisades and roll its fireball to carry away the faxnode pavilion a mile and a quarter down the road less than a second later, turning the river at the base of the hills into steam and the forest into ash and fireball in an expanding circle of instant destruction ranging farther north than the Starved Rock he’d seen in his turin-cloth glimpse of Ada and the others.
Harman activated dormant biofeedback functions—too late—and received the message he dreaded. The torpedo room was filled with latent radiation. The damaged torpedo fusion warheads should have dropped beneath lethal leakage levels long ago, but in the process of doing so they must have irradiated everything in the forward part of the submarine.
No—the sensors told him that the radiation was worse straight ahead, aft of the torpedo room—the direction in which he would have to go if he wanted to learn more about this instrument of death. Perhaps the fusion reactor that had driven this obscene boat had been slowly leaking all these centuries. It was a radioactive hell ahead of him.
Harman knew just enough about his new biometric functions to realize that he could query the data monitors. He did so now, but only with the simplest question possible—Will the thermskin adequately shield me from this radioactivity?
The answer came back in his mind’s own voice and was unequivocal—No.
It was insane to go forward. He also didn’t have the courage to go forward through that black wall of water, into the maelstrom of radiation, through the rest of the submerged torpedo room, up through the dark and cold of the wardroom and mess room where ancient Geiger counters would have gone wild, needles pinned off their own dials, and then up again and down a corridor past the sonar and comm rooms, and then up another ladder that impossible, terrifying, bone-chilling, cell-killing distance into the submerged command and control center.