by Dan Simmons
“Since that first day we saw him at the Bridge.”
“You were under the turin cloth back when it worked, Hannah. You know that that Odysseus was married. We heard him speak to the other Achaeans about his wife, Penelope. His teenage son, Telemachus. The language they spoke was strange, but somehow we always understood it under the turin.”
“Yes.” Hannah looked down.
Down in the Pit, the Setebos baby began to scurry back and forth on its many pink hands. Five tendrils snaked up the side of the pit and other hands wrapped around the grill, pulling the metal until it seemed to bend. The thing’s many yellow eyes were very bright.
Daeman was on his way back from the forest and headed toward the noon gathering when he saw the ghost. He was carrying a heavy canvas bag filled with firewood on his back and wishing that he’d been on sentry duty or hunting detail that day instead of having to chop and haul wood when a woman stepped out of the forest only a dozen yards from him.
At first he saw her only in his peripheral vision—enough to know that it was a human being, female, and therefore part of the Ardis community rather than a voynix—and for a few seconds he kept walking, flechette rifle in his right hand but pointed downward, eyes lowered as he hitched up the heavy pack on his back, but when he turned her way to call a greeting, he froze.
It was Savi.
He straightened up and the huge load of wood in his makeshift canvas rucksack almost toppled him over backward. It would not have been an overreaction. He could only stare.
It was Savi—but not the gray-haired, older Savi he’d watched being murdered and dragged off by Caliban in the caverns under Prospero’s hellhole of an orbital isle almost a year earlier—this was a younger, paler, more beautiful Savi.
A resurrected Savi? No.
A ghost was Daeman’s dual stab of thought and fear. His era of old-style humans did not even believe in ghosts, did not truly have the concept of ghosts; he’d never heard of ghosts outside mentions in the turin drama or heard a ghost story until he started sigling the ancient books in Ardis Manor the previous autumn.
But this had to be a ghost.
The young Savi did not seem completely substantial. There was something—shimmery—about her as she saw him, turned, and began walking straight toward him. Daeman realized that he could see through her, more even than he’d been able to see through the hologram of Prospero up on the orbital isle.
Yet somehow he knew that this was no hologram. This was…something…real, real and alive, even as he noticed the soft, pale glow her entire body gave off and the fact that her feet did not seem to be touching the ground with any weight as she strode through the high, brown grass toward him. She was wearing a thermskin and nothing else. Daeman knew from experience that thermskins—not as thick as a coat of paint—made one feel more naked than naked, and that’s how she looked now as she began walking in his direction. Naked. The thermskin was a pale blue but showed every muscle working as she walked, emphasized rather than hid the slight bobble to her breasts. Deaman had grown used to Savi in thermskins, but where there had been slightly sagging breasts, slack buttocks, and floppy thigh muscles with the older Savi, this apparition showed high breasts, a flat stomach, and powerful, young muscles.
He freed his arms from the straps, dropped the load of firewood, and gripped his flechette rifle with both hands. Daeman could see the new inner palisade more than two hundred yards away and even a dark head moving above the line of logs, but no one else was in sight. He and the ghost were alone in this wintry field at the edge of the forest.
“Hello, Daeman.”
It was Savi’s voice. Younger, even more vibrant with life than the mesmerizing voice he remembered, but definitely Savi’s.
Daeman said nothing until she stopped within arm’s reach. Her very solidity seemed to flicker—one second complete, the next transparent and insubstantial. When she was substantial, he could see even the areolae around her slightly raised nipples. The young Savi, he realized, had been very beautiful.
She looked him up and down with those familiar dark eyes he remembered so well. “You look well, Daeman. You’ve lost a lot of weight. Gained muscle.”
Still he did not speak. Everyone who went out into the forest carried one of the high-decibel whistles they’d dug from the ruins. His was on a lanyard around his neck. He had only to raise it and blow it and a dozen armed men or women would be running his way in less than a minute.
Savi smiled. “You’re right. I’m not Savi. We’ve never met. I know you only from Prospero’s descriptions and video recordings.”
“Who are you?” he asked. His voice sounded hoarse, tight, tense, even to himself.
The apparition shrugged as if her identity were of little importance. “My name is Moira.”
The name meant nothing to Daeman. Savi had never mentioned anyone named Moira. Neither had Prospero. For a wild second he wondered if Caliban could be a shapeshifter.
“What are you?” he said at last.
“Ah!” The syllable was launched in Savi’s husky laugh. “A wonderfully intelligent question. Not ‘Why do you look like my dead friend Savi?’ but ‘What are you?’ Prospero was correct. You were never as stupid as you seemed, even a year ago.”
Daeman touched the whistle on his chest and waited.
“I’m a post-human,” said the Savi apparition.
“There are no more post-humans,” Daeman said. With his left hand, he raised the whistle slightly.
“There were no more post-humans,” said the shimmering woman. “Now there are. One. Me.”
“What do you want here?”
She slowly extended her hand and touched his right forearm. Daeman expected her hand to pass through him but her touch was as solid and real as that of any of the Ardis survivors. He could feel the pressure of her long fingers through his jacket. He could also feel an almost electrical tingle there.
“I want to come with you to watch the discussion and then the vote on whether Noman can borrow your sonie,” she said softly.
How in the hell does she know about that? he wondered. Aloud, he said, “If you show up, there probably won’t be a discussion and vote. Even Odys…Noman…will want to know who you are, where you’re from, what you want.”
She shrugged again. “Perhaps. But none of the others will see me. I will be visible only to you. This is a little trick Prospero built into my sisters when they went off to become gods and I decided to keep it for myself. It comes in handy from time to time.”
He fingered the whistle with his left hand, slipped the index finger of his right hand into the trigger guard of the flechette rifle, and looked at her as she shifted slightly from full focus to transparency back to full focus again. There was too much in what she just said to allow him even to frame the proper questions right now. His intuition was that the best thing he could do was keep her around. He couldn’t explain even to himself why that made sense. “Why would you want to come to the discussion?” he asked.
“I am interested in the outcome.”
“Why?”
She smiled. “Daeman, if I can be invisible to the other fifty-five people there, including Noman, I could certainly have remained unseen by you. But I want you to know I’m there. We will talk about things after the discussion and after the vote.”
“Talk about what things?” Daeman had seen the dead, brown, mummified corpses of what Savi, Harman, and he had thought were the last of the post-humans up in the thin, stale air of Prospero’s dying realm. All female. Most of them chewed on by Caliban centuries ago. Daeman had no clue if this apparition was what she claimed to be. To him, she more resembled the goddesses from the turin drama he had watched only on occasion—Athena perhaps, or a much younger Hera. Not as beautiful as the glimpses he’d had of Aphrodite. Suddenly he remembered that almost a year ago, in Paris Crater, there had been word of street altars being set up to the gods from the Trojan War turin drama.
But everyone in Paris Crater now was dead, including his mother
. Murdered and eaten by Caliban. The city buried in that blue-ice gunk by Setebos. If the people of his home city had ever prayed to the turin gods and goddesses, it had done them no good. If this was a goddess from the drama, he was sure that she would do him no good.
“We can talk about where your friend Harman is,” said the spectral figure who called herself Moira.
“Where is he? How is he?” Daeman realized that he’d shouted.
She smiled. “We can talk after the vote.”
“At least tell me why this vote is so important that you’ve come from…wherever you’ve come from to watch it,” demanded Daeman, his voice sounding as hard as he’d become inside over the past year.
Moira nodded. “I came to hear it because it is important.”
“Why? To whom? How?”
She said nothing. Her smile had disappeared.
Daeman released the whistle. “Is it important that we give Noman the sonie or important that we don’t loan it to him?”
“I just want to watch,” said the Savi-ghost who called herself Moira. “Not vote.”
“I didn’t ask that.”
“I know,” said the thing with Savi’s voice.
The bell for the conclave rang. People were gathering around the central lean-to, tent, and cooking area.
Daeman was in no hurry to rush to it. He knew it might be less of a threat to lead a live voynix into their camp. He also knew he had a very short time in which to make his decision. “If you can view the meeting without being seen by anyone, why did you reveal yourself to me?” he asked, his voice low.
“I told you,” said the young woman, “this was my choice. Or perhaps I’m like a vampire—I can only enter a place the first time if I am invited in.”
Daeman didn’t know what a vampire was but he didn’t think that was important right now. “No,” he said. “I’m not going to invite you into our safe area unless you give me a compelling reason to do so.”
Moira sighed. “Prospero and Harman also said you were stubborn, but I couldn’t imagine they meant this stubborn.”
“You talk as if you’ve seen Harman,” said Daeman. “Tell me something about him—how he is, where he is—something that will make me believe you’ve met him.”
Moira continued to gaze at him and Daeman felt that the air around their locked gazes should be sizzling.
The bell quit ringing. The meeting had begun.
Daeman stood motionless, silent.
“All right,” said Moira, smiling slightly again. “Your friend Harman has a scar through his pubic hair, just above his penis. I didn’t ask him how he received it but it must have been since his last Twenty. The healing tanks on Prospero’s Isle would never have left it there.”
Daeman did not blink. “I’ve never seen Harman naked,” he said. “You’ll have to tell me something else.”
Moira laughed easily. “You lie. When Prospero and I gave Harman the thermskin he is wearing now, he said that he knew exactly how to get into one—they’re tricky to pull on, you know—and that you and he had worn them for weeks up on the Isle. He said that once you had to strip in front of Savi to pull your thermskins on. You’ve seen him naked and it’s a noticeable scar.”
“Why is Harman wearing a thermskin now?” asked Daeman. “Where is he?”
“Take me to the meeting,” said Moira. “I promise I will tell you about Harman afterward.”
“You should talk to Ada about him,” said Daeman. “They’re…married.” The strange word did not come easily to Daeman.
Moira smiled. “I will tell you and you can tell Ada if you think it is appropriate. Shall we go?” She held out her left arm, crooked, as if he were going to take it to escort her into a formal dining room.
He took her arm.
“…so that’s the beginning and end of my request,” Noman/Odysseus was saying as he saw Daeman enter the circle of fifty-four people. Most were sitting on sleeping pads or blankets. Some were standing. Daeman stood apart, behind the standing survivors.
“You want to borrow our sonie—the one thing offering us a chance of survival here,” said Boman, “and you won’t tell us why you want it or how long you might keep it.”
“That is correct,” said Noman. “I might need it for only a few hours—I could program it to return on its own. It’s possible that the sonie might not return at all.”
“We’d all die,” said one of the Hughes Town survivors, a woman named Stefe.
Noman did not reply.
“Tell us why you need it,” said Siris.
“No, that’s a private matter,” said Noman.
Some of the sitting, kneeling, and standing people chuckled, as if the bearded Greek had made a joke. But Noman did not smile. He was as serious as his demeanor.
“Go find another sonie!” cried Kaman, their would-be military expert. He’d told others that he had never trusted the real Odysseus in the turin drama he’d watched every day for ten years before the Fall and was prepared to trust this older version even less.
“I would find another if I could,” said Noman, his voice level, unagitated. “But the nearest ones I know about are thousands of miles from here. It would take too long for the cobbled-together sky-raft I built to get there, if the thing could get there at all. I need to use the sonie today. Now.”
“Why?” asked Laman, absently rubbing his still-bandaged right hand with its missing fingers.
Noman remained silent.
Ada, who had remained standing near the barrel-chested Greek after her opening of the meeting and her introduction, said softly, “Noman, can you tell us how it might benefit us if we let you borrow the sonie?”
“If I succeed in what I want to do, it’s possible that the faxnodes will begin working again,” he said. “In just a few hours. A few days at most.”
There was an audible intake of breath among the crowd.
“It’s more possible,” he continued, “that they won’t.”
“So that’s your reason for using our sonie?” asked Greogi. “To get the fax pavilions working again?”
“No,” said Noman. “It’s just a possible side effect of my trip. Not even a probable one.”
“Would your…borrowing of the sonie…help us in some other way?” asked Ada. It was clear that she was more sympathetic to Noman’s request than the majority of those frowning among the ragged clump of listeners.
Noman shrugged.
Everyone was so silent for the next moment that Daeman could hear two sentries calling to each other more than a quarter of a mile away to the south. He turned—the spectral Moira was still standing near him, her arms crossed across her thermskinned breasts. Incredible as it was, no one who had looked up to watch the two of them approach the group—including Ada, Noman, and Boman, who had been staring at him since he passed through the palisade gate—evidently had been able to see her.
Noman held out his blunt, powerful hands, fingers splayed as if reaching for them all—or perhaps pushing them all away. “You want to hear that I will perform some miracle for you all,” he said, his tone low but his powerful, rhetoric-trained voice still echoing off the palisade. “There is no such miracle. If you stay here with the sonie, you’ll be killed sooner or later. Even if you evacuate to this island downriver you’re thinking of fleeing to, the voynix will follow you there. They can still fax, and not just through the faxnodes you know about. There are tens of thousands of voynix surrounding you now, massed within two miles of here—while all over the Earth, the last few thousand human survivors are either fleeing or holed up in caves or towers or the ruins of their old communities. The voynix are killing them. You have the advantage that the voynix won’t attack while this Setebos…thing…in the pit is your captive. But within days, if not hours, that Setebos-louse will be strong enough to rip its way out of the pit and into your minds. Trust me, you don’t want to experience that. And, in the end, the voynix will come anyway.”
“All the more reason to keep the sonie to ourselves!
” shouted the man named Caul.
Noman turned his hands palms-up. “Perhaps. But soon there will be no place on this Earth for you to flee. Do you think you’re the only ones with a Finder Function? Your functions have ceased to work—the voynix’s and the calibanis’ finder functions haven’t. They’ll find you. Even Setebos will find you when he’s finished gorging himself on your planet’s history.”
“You don’t seem to offer us any chance,” said Tom, the quiet medic.
“I am not,” said Noman, his voice rising now. “It is not for me to offer you a chance, although my trip may accidentally afford you one if I am successful. But the odds of my success are low—I won’t lie to you. You deserve the truth. But if something important does not change, sonie or no sonie, the odds of your success—of your survival—are zero.”
Daeman, who had sworn he would stay quiet during the discussion, heard himself shouting. “Can we go to the rings, Noman? The sonie would take us there—six at a time. It brought me home from Prospero’s Isle on the e-ring. Would we be safe in the orbital rings?”
All faces turned toward him. Not a single gaze moved to where the shimmering Moira stood not six feet to his right.
“No,” said Noman. “You would not be safe in the rings.”
The dark-haired woman named Edide stood suddenly. She seemed to be sobbing and laughing at the same time. “You’re not giving us a fucking chance!”
For the first time—maddeningly, infuriatingly—Odysseus/Noman smiled, his teeth white against his mostly gray beard. “It’s not for me to give you a chance,” he said harshly. “The Fates will either choose to do that or decline to do that. It is up to you today to give me a chance…or not.”
Ada stepped forward. “Let’s vote. I think that no one should abstain in this vote, since everything may depend on it. Those in favor of allowing Odysseus…I’m sorry, I mean Noman…to borrow our sonie, please hold up your right hand. Those opposed, keep your hands down.”
77
The city and battlefield of Troy—ancient Ilium—wasn’t much to look at from five thousand meters up.