by Dan Simmons
Hephaestus fiddles with more switches, throws a toggle.
Nothing happens.
The god of fire bites his lip, curses into his microphone, and fiddles with the brass device some more. It blinks, whirs, flickers, and falls silent again.
Achilles begins to slide his god-killing blade from its place in his belt.
“Behold!” cries Hephaestus, again using full amplification.
This time the brass device projects a rectangle almost a hundred yards wide into the air above them all, in front of the Demogorgon and the hundreds of hulking forms in the red lava-light and smoke around them. The rectangle shows nothing but static and snow.
“Oh, fuck me,” growls Hephaestus, each word quite audible over his helmet speakers. He hurries to the device and wiggles some metal rods which remind Achilles of the ears of a rabbit.
The huge image above them leaps into clarity. It is a holographic projection, very deep, fully three-dimensional, in living color, striking the eye like a wide window into the actual Hall of the Gods itself. The visuals are accompanied by surround-sound—Achilles can hear the nearby whisper of the hundreds upon hundreds of the waiting gods’ sandals scuffing softly on marble. When Hermes softly breaks wind, it is audible to everyone here.
The Titans, Titanesses, Hours, Charioteers, insectoid Healers, unnamed monstrous shapes—everyone except the Demogorgon—gasp, each in its own inhuman way. Not at Hermes’ indiscretion, but at the immediacy and impact of the still widening and encircling holographic projection. By the time the band of light and motion closes around them here, the illusion of being among the immortals in the Great Hall of the Gods is very powerful. Achilles actually pulls his blade further free, thinking that Zeus on his golden throne and the thousand Olympian gods standing around them must certainly hear the noise in their midst and turn to see them all huddled here in the reek and gloom of Tartarus.
The Olympian gods do not turn. It’s a one-way broadcast.
Zeus—at least fifty feet tall on his throne—leans forward, scowls out at the ranks upon ranks of assembled gods, goddesses, Furies, and Erinyeses, and begins to speak. Achilles can clearly hear the god’s new-found ultimate self-importance in the archaic cadence of each slow syllable:
“You congregated powers of this Olympos, you who share
the glory and the strength of him ye serve,
rejoice! Henceforth I am omnipotent.
All else has been subdued to me; alone
the souls of man, like unextinguished fire,
yet burns towards heaven with fierce reproach, and doubt,
and lamentation, and reluctant prayer,
hurling up insurrection, which might make
our antique empire insecure, though built
on eldest faith, and hell’s coeval, fear;
And though my curses through the pendulous air,
like snow on herbless peaks, fall flake by flake,
and cling to it, though under my wrath’s night
it climbs the crags of life, step after step,
which wound it, as ice wounds unsandaled feet,
it yet remains supreme o’er misery,
aspiring, unrepressed, yet soon to fall:
Zeus stands suddenly and the radiance flowing from him is so brilliant that a thousand immortal gods and one very mortal man in a sweaty chameleon suit—the stealth-suited man is quite visible to Hephaestus’ camera and thus to everyone here in Tartarus—take a hesitant step backward as Zeus continues.
“Pour forth heaven’s wine, Idaean Ganymede,
and let it fill the Daedal cups like fire,
and from the flower-inwoven soil divine
ye all triumphant harmonies arise,
as dew from earth under the twilight stars:
Drink! Be the nectar circling through your veins
the soul of joy, ye ever-living gods,
till exaltation bursts in one wide voice
like music from Elysian winds.
And thou
now attend beside me, veiled in the light
of the desire which makes thee one with me,
as I become God Ascendant, the single God to thee,
the one and true Omnipotent God,
Almighty God, true Lord of all Eternity!”
Hephaestus shuts off the brass and glass projector. The huge, circular window binding Tartarus to the Hall of the Gods on Olympos flicks out of existence and everything returns to cinder, soot, stink, and red gloom. Achilles shifts his feet farther apart, hefts his shield, and holds his god-killing knife out of sight behind that shield. He has no idea what will happen next.
For the longest moments, nothing does happen. Achilles expects shouts, cries, demands that Hephaestus prove that the images and voices had been real, Titans bellowing, the big Healer bugs scuttling around on rocks—but there is no movement, no sound from the hundreds of gigantic figures still gathered around. The air is so thick with smoke, the red-lava glare so filtered by the ash in the air, that Achilles silently thanks the gods—or someone—for the thermskin goggles he’s wearing that allow him to see what’s going on. He sneaks a glance at the Brane Hole that Hephaestus had said Nyx—Goddess Night herself—had opened for him. The Hole’s still there, about two hundred yards away, perhaps fifty feet high. If fighting starts, if the Demogorgon decides to eat both dwarf-god and Achaean hero as a snack, Achilles plans to make a run for that Brane Hole, even though he knows he’ll have to hack his way through giants and beasties every foot of the way. He’s prepared to do so.
The silence stretches. Dark winds howl over misshapen boulders and more misshapen sentient forms. The volcano burbles and belches but the Demogorgon does not make a noise.
Finally, it speaks—“ALL SPIRITS ARE ENSLAVED WHICH SERVE THINGS EVIL. NOW THOU KNOWEST WHETHER ZEUS BE SUCH OR NO.”
“Evil??” roars Kronos the Titan. “My son is mad! He is the usurper of all usurpers.”
Rhea, Zeus’s mother, has an even louder voice. “Zeus rides the wreckage of his own will. He is the scorn of the earth and the bane of Olympos. He needs to suffer the outcast of his own abandonment. He must wither in destined pain and be hanged from hell in his own adamantine chains.”
The Healer-monster speaks and Achilles is shocked to hear that its voice is very feminine. “Zeus reaches too far. He has first mimicked and now mocked the very Fates.”
One of the Immortal Hours booms down from its rocky precipice—“Downfall demands no direr name than this—Zeus Usurper.”
Achilles grabs the nearest shaking boulder, thinking that the volcano behind the Demogorgon is erupting, but it is only the muted rumble from the assembled Beings.
Kronos’ brother, the shaggy Titan Krios, speaks from where he stands amidst a lava flow. “This pretender must sink beneath the wide waves of his own ruin. I myself will ascend to Olympos where once we ruled and drag this empty thing down to hell, even as a vulture and a snake outspent drop, twisted in inexplicable fight.”
“Awful shape!” cries a many-armed Charioteer to the Demogorgon. “Speak!”
“MERCIFUL GOD REIGNS,” echoes the shapeless Demogorgon giant’s voice amid the Tartarus peaks and valleys. “ZEUS IS NOT ALMIGHTY GOD. ZEUS MUST NO LONGER REIGN ON OLYMPOS.”
Achilles had been sure that the veiled Demogorgon was limbless, but somehow the limbless giant raises a robed arm that was not visible a second earlier, extends something like terrible fingers.
The Brane Hole two hundred yards behind Hephaestus rises as if on command, hovers above them all, widens, and begins to drop.
“WORDS ARE QUICK AND WORDS ARE VAIN,” booms the Demogorgon as the burning red and still-widening circle of flame drops down around them all. “THE SINGLE SURE AND FINAL ANSWER MUST BE PAIN.”
Hephaestus grabs Achilles’ arm. The dwarf-god is grinning wildly, insanely, through his beard. “Hang on, kid,” he says.
79
It was a desperate, almost insane, turn of events, but Mahnmut couldn’t have been happier
.
The dropship had hovered very low and dropped Mahnmut’s The Dark Lady submersible into the ocean about fifteen kilometers north of the troublesome critical-singularity coordinates. Suma IV explained that he didn’t want the splash setting off the seven hundred sixty-eight detected black holes—presumably on warheads in the the ancient, sunken sub also detected—and no one gave him an argument.
If Mahnmut had owned a human mouth, he would have been grinning like an idiot. The Dark Lady was designed and built for beneath-theice, black-as-inside-God’s-belly, horrific-pressure exploration and salvage work on Jupiter’s moon Europa, but it worked just fine in Earth’s Atlantic Ocean.
Better than fine.
“I wish you could see this,” Mahnmut said over their private comm. He and Orphu of Io were on their own again. None of the other moravecs had shown any great interest in approaching the seven hundred sixty-eight nascent but close-to-critical black holes and the drop-ship had already flown away on Suma IV’s continued reconnaissance—of the eastern seaboard of North America this time.
“I can ‘see’ the radar, sonar, thermal, and other data,” said Orphu.
“Yes, but it’s not the same. There’s so much light here in Earth’s ocean. Even here below twenty meters depth. Even full Jupiter-glow never illuminated my oceans—if there was a lead, a bare patch, above—deeper than a few meters.”
“I’m sure it’s beautiful,” said Orphu.
“It really is,” burbled Mahnmut, not noticing or caring if his big friend had been speaking ironically. “The sunlight shafts down, illuminating everything in a dappled-green, glowing way. The Lady isn’t sure of what to make of it.”
“She notices the light?”
“Of course,” said Mahnmut. “Her job is to report everything to me, to choose the right data and sensory feeds at the right time, and she’s self-aware enough to note all this difference in light, gravity and beauty here. She likes it, too.”
“Good,” rumbled Orphu of Io. “You’d better not ruin it by telling her why we’re here and what we’re swimming toward.”
“She knows,” said Mahnmut, not letting the big moravec ruin his buoyant mood. He watched as the sonar reported a ridgeline ahead—the ridge the wreck was on—rising to a silty bottom less than eighty meters below the surface. He still couldn’t get over how shallow this part of Earth’s ocean was. There was no spot in the Europan seas less than a thousand meters deep and here a ridgeline brought the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean up to not much more than sixty meters beneath the surface.
“I’ve run the full program of the disarmament protocol Suma IV and Cho Li downloaded to us,” continued Orphu. “Have you had time yet to study the details?”
“Not really.” Mahnmut had the long protocol in his active memory, but he’d been busy overseeing The Dark Lady’s exit from the dropship and the submersible’s adaptation to that beautiful, wonderful environment. His beloved sub was as good as new—better than new. The Phobos ’vec mechanics had done a wonderful job on his boat. And every system that had worked well on Europa before their devastating crash landing in Mars’ Tethys Sea the previous year now worked better than well here in Earth’s gentle sea.
“The good news about the disarming of each black-hole warhead is that it’s theoretically doable,” said Orphu of Io. “We have the tools aboard—including the ten-thousand-degree cutting torch and the focused forcefield generators—and in many of the necessary steps, I can be your arms while you’re my visible-light spectrum eyes. We’ll have to work together on every warhead, but they’re theoretically disarmable.”
“That is good news,” said Mahnmut.
“The bad news is that if we work straight through, without coffee breaks or restroom stops, it’s going to take us a little over nine hours per black hole—not per MRVed warhead, mind you, but for each near-critical black hole.”
“With seven hundred sixty-eight black holes…” began Mahnmut.
“Six thousand nine hundred twelve hours,” said Orphu. “And since we’re on Earth and moravec standard time is real planetary time here, it’s two hundred forty-seven days, twelve hours, if everything goes according to plan and we don’t run into any real problems…”
“Well…” began Mahnmut. “I guess we deal with this factor when we find the wreck and see if we can get to the warheads at all.”
“It’s odd getting direct sonar input,” said Orphu. “It’s not so much like better hearing, it’s more as if my skin had suddenly enlarged to…”
“There it is,” interrupted Mahnmut. “I see it. The wreck.”
Perspectives and visual horizons were different there, of course, on the so-much-larger Earth than the Mars he’d almost gotten used to, even more out of proportion to perceived distances on the tiny Europa, where he had spent all the other standard years of his existence. But sonar readings, deep radar, mass-detection devices, and his own eyes told Mahnmut that the stern of this wreck was about five hundred meters dead ahead, lying on the silty bottom just a little below The Dark Lady’s depth of seventy meters, and that the crumpled boat itself was around fifty-five meters long.
“Good God,” whispered Mahnmut. “Can you see this on radar and sonar?”
“Yes.”
The wreck lay on its belly, bow-down, but the bow itself was invisible beyond the shimmering forcefield that held back the Atlantic Ocean from the dry strip of land that ran from Europe to North America. What made Mahnmut stare in amazement was the wall of light from the Breach wall itself. Here at more than seventy meters depth, where even in Earth’s sunlit oceans the bottom should be inky black, dappled sunlight illuminated the terminus of water and dappled the moss-green hull of the sunken sub itself.
“I can see what killed it,” said Mahnmut. “Does your radar and sonar pick up that blasted bit of hull above what should be the engine room? Just behind where the hull humps up to the long missile compartment?”
“Yes.”
“I think some sort of depth charge or torpedo or missile exploded there,” said Mahnmut. “See how the hull plates are all bent inward there. It cracked the base of the sail and bent it forward as well.”
“What sail?” asked Orphu. “You mean a sail like the triangular one on the felucca we took west up the Valles Marineris?”
“No. I mean that part that sticks up way forward, almost to the force-field wall there. In the early submarine days, they called it a conning tower. After they began building nuclear subs like this boomer in the Twentieth Century, they started calling the conning tower a sail.”
“Why?” asked Orphu of Io.
“I don’t know why,” said Mahnmut. “Or rather, I have it in my memory banks somewhere, but it’s not important. I don’t want to take the time to do a search.”
“What’s a boomer?”
“A boomer is the early Lost Era humans’ pet name for a ballistic missile submarine like this,” said Mahnmut.
“They gave pet names to machines built for the sole purpose of destroying cities, human lives, and the planet?”
“Yes,” said Mahnmut. “This boomer was probably built a century or two before it was sunk here. Perhaps built by one of the major powers then and sold to a smaller group. Something sank it here long before this groove in the Atlantic Ocean was created.”
“Can we get to the black hole warheads?” asked Orphu.
“Hang on. Let’s find out.”
Mahnmut inched The Dark Lady forward. He wanted nothing to do with the forcefield wall and the empty air beyond it so he never moved closer to that forcefield than the missile compartment of the wreck itself. He had The Dark Lady play powerful searchlights all over the wreck even as his instruments probed the interior of the ancient sub.
“This isn’t right,” he murmured aloud on their private line.
“What’s not right?” asked Orphu.
“The sub is overgrown with anemones and other sea life, the interior is rich with life, but it’s as if the sub sank here a century or so ago, not t
he two and a half millennia or so it would have to have gone down.”
“Could someone have been sailing it just a century or so ago?” asked Orphu.
“No. Not unless all our observation data has been wrong. The old-style humans have been almost without technology the last two thousand years down here. Even if someone had found this sub and managed to launch it, who would’ve sunk it?”
“The post-humans?”
“I don’t think so,” said Mahnmut. “The posts wouldn’t have used something so crude as a torpedo or depth charge on this thing. And they wouldn’t have left the black hole warheads here ticking away.”
“But the warheads are here,” said Orphu. “I can see the tops of them on the deep-radar return, with the critical-one black hole containment fields inside. We’d better get to work.”
“Wait,” said Mahnmut. He had sent remote vehicles no larger than his hand into the wreck and now the data was flowing back through microthin umbilicals. One of the remotes had tapped into the command and control center’s AI.
Mahnmut and Orphu listened to the last words of the twenty-six crew members as they prepared to launch the ballistic missiles that would destroy their planet.
When the testimonials and data flow were finished, the two moravecs were silent for a long minute.
“Oh, what a world,” whispered Orphu at last, “that hath such people in it.”
“I’m going to come down and get you ready to go EVA,” said Mahnmut, his voice a dull monotone. “We’ll look at this problem from close up.”
“Can we look into the dry area?” asked Orphu. “The gap?”
“I’m not going near it,” said Mahnmut. “The forcefield might destroy us—the Lady’s instruments can’t even decide what the field is made of—and I promise you that this submersible of ours is no good in air and on dry land. We’re not going near the breach.”
“Did you look at the dropship’s aerial photos of the bow of this wreck?” asked Orphu.
“Sure. I’ve got them on the screen in front of me,” said Mahnmut. “Some serious damage to the bow, but that doesn’t concern us. We can get at the missiles back here.”