Ilium

  “Not ghosts,” said Orphu. “But you saw the quantum readings. Whoever these people are on Olympus, they’ve punched quantum holes all around this world, all centered on or near Olympus. They’re going somewhere. Coming from somewhere else. The quantum reality of this area is so unstable it may actually implode, and take a chunk of our solar system with it.”

  “Do you think that’s what the Device is built to do?” asked Mahnmut. “Implode the quantum fields here before they reach some critical mass?”

  “I don’t know,” said Orphu. “Perhaps.”

  “And do you think that’s what screwed up the Earth and sent the post-humans to their orbital cities fourteen hundred years ago there? Some quantum failure?”

  “No,” said Orphu. “I think that whatever happened on Earth was a result of quantum teleportation success, not failure.”

  “What do you mean?” For a brief second, Mahnmut was not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

  “I think they punched quantum tunnels into one or more of these alternate realities,” said Orphu. “And they let something in.”

  They floated along in silence until sunrise.

  The sun touched the top of the balloon first, painting the orange fabric in unreal light and causing each buckycable to gleam. Then it reached the three Tharsis volcanoes, glinting on ice, moving goldly down the east side of each of the three volcanoes like so much slow magma. Then the sun bathed the breaking clouds in pink and gold and illuminated the Valles Marineris Inland Sea all the way to the eastern horizon like a lapis crack in the world. Olympus Mons caught the sunlight a minute later and Mahnmut watched as the great peak seemed to rise above the western horizon like some advancing galleon with sails of gold and red.

  Then the sun glinted on something closer and higher.

  “Orphu!” sent Mahnmut. “We have company.”

  “One of the chariots?”

  “Still too far away to tell. Even with vision magnification, it’s lost in the sunrise glare.”

  “Anything we can do if it is the chariot people? Have you found any weapons without telling me?”

  “All we have to throw at them is harsh language,” said Mahnmut, still watching the gleaming speck. It was moving very fast and would be on them soon. “Unless you want me to trigger the Device.”

  “It might be a bit early for that,” said Orphu.

  “It seems odd that Koros III came on this mission without weapons.”

  “We don’t know what he would have brought along from the command pod,” said Orphu. “But that reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You remember we were discussing Koros’s secret mission to the asteroid belt a few years ago.”

  “Yes?” The sun was still blazing from the advancing aircraft, but Mahnmut could see that it was a chariot now, its holographic horses in full gallop.

  “What if it wasn’t a spy mission?” said Orphu.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the rock moravecs have one thing we five-moons types never bothered to evolve.”

  “Aggression?” said Mahnmut. “Bellicosity?”

  “Exactly. What if Koros III was sent not as a spy, but as a . . .”

  “Excuse me,” interrupted Mahnmut. “But our guest is here. One large humanoid in a chariot.”

  Sonic booms crashed around Mahnmut, rippling the fabric of the huge balloon above. The chariot continued to decelerate. It circled the balloon once from a distance of a hundred meters.

  “The same man who greeted us in orbit?” asked Orphu. His voice was perfectly calm. Mahnmut looked at the helpless shell lashed to the deck, without so much as an eye to watch what was going on.

  “No,” he said. “That Greek god had a gray beard. This one is younger and clean shaven. He looks to be about three meters tall.” Mahnmut held up his hand, palm outward in the ancient sign for greeting, showing no weapon. “I think he . . .”

  The chariot wheeled closer. The man at the reins held out his right hand, fist closed, and swept the fist from right to left.

  The balloon exploded above them, helium venting as the fabric flamed. Mahnmut grabbed the wooden railing of the gondola to keep from being thrown out as the twisting mass of flaming fabric, buckycarbon cable, and boat-shaped gondola plunged toward the Tharsis Plateau thirteen kilometers below. The little moravec was in negative-g, feet above his head, connected to the gondola only by his fierce grip on the railing as the platform began to tumble in freefall.

  The chariot with its ghostlike horses flew right at and through the flaming balloon fabric above. The man—god—reached out and grabbed the black buckycable in one huge fist. Impossibly, absurdly, instead of ripping his arm out of its socket, the gondola jerked to a stop as the man held several tons in one hand. He whipped the horses with the reins, using his other hand.

  Trailing the pitching gondola and its contents forty meters below and behind it, the chariot turned and flew west toward Olympus Mons.

  36

  The Mediterranean Basin

  Savi drove another hour or so down the red-clay road, steering the crawler deeper into the fields and folds of the Mediterranean Basin. It was dark and raining hard now, with lightning flashing and thunder vibrating the glass-sphere of the passenger shell. Daeman pointed out the crosses with their humanoid shapes in one of the bright flashes. “What are those? People?”

  “Not people,” said Savi. “Calabani.”

  Before she could explain, Daeman said, “We have to stop.”

  Savi did so, turning on the headlights and overhead lights and removing her night-vision glasses. “What’s wrong?” Evidently she could see the distress on Daeman’s face.

  “I’m starving,” he said.

  “I have two food bars in my pack . . .”

  “I’m dying of thirst,” he said.

  “I have a water bottle in the pack. And we can crack the shell and get some fresh, cold rainwater . . .”

  “I have to go to the toilet,” said Daeman. “Bad.”

  “Ah, well,” said Savi. “The crawler has a lot of nice amenities, but no onboard toilet. We could probably all use a rest stop.” She touched two virtual buttons and the forcefield quit keeping rain off the glass and the slice in the side of the bubble slid open. The air was fresh and smelled of wet fields and crops.

  “Outside?” said Daeman, not trying to hide his horror. “In the open?”

  “In the cornfield,” said Savi. “More privacy there.” She reached into her pack and took out a roll of tissues, handing Daeman some.

  He stared at the tissues with shock.

  “I can use a rest stop,” said Harman, accepting some of the flimsy tissues from her. “Come on, Daeman. Men to the right of the crawler. Ladies to the left.” He stepped out through the slice and clambered down the strut ladder. Daeman followed, still holding the tissues like a talisman, and the old woman clambered down behind him with more grace than he’d shown.

  “I’ll have to go to the right as well,” said Savi. “Different row of corn, perhaps, but not too far away.”

  “Why?” began Daeman, but then saw the black gun in her hand. “Oh.”

  She tucked the weapon in her belt and the three walked off the road, across a low ditch, across a muddy stretch of field, and into the high corn. The rain was falling heavily now.

  “We’ll be soaked,” Daeman said. “I didn’t bring my self-drying clothes . . .”

  Savi looked up at the sky as lightning ripped from cloud to cloud and the thunder echoed down the broad basin. “I have both your thermskins in the pack. We get back in the crawler, you can wear those while the other clothes dry.”

  “Anything else in that magical pack that you want to tell us about?” asked Harman.

  Savi shook her head. “A few food bars. Flechette clips. A flashlight and some maps I drew myself. All of our thermskins. Water bottle. An extra sweater I carry around. That’s about it.”

  As eager as Daeman
was to get into the privacy of the cornfield, he paused at the edge of it to peer around. “Is it safe out here?” he asked.

  Savi shrugged. “No voynix.”

  “What about those . . . what did you call them?”

  “Calibani,” said Savi. “Don’t worry about them tonight.”

  He nodded and stepped into the first row of corn. The stalks rose two or three feet higher than his head. Rain pattered heavily on the broad leaves. He stepped back out. “It’s really dark in there.”

  Harman had disappeared into the corn already and Savi was walking the other direction, but she stopped, turned, walked back, and handed Daeman the flashlight. “There’s enough lightning for me to see.”

  Daeman shouldered his way through the high stalks for eight or ten rows, trying to get far enough away from the edge of the field to be completely invisible. Then he walked another eight or nine rows to be safe. He found a row perhaps a bit less muddy than the other rows, looked around, set the flashlight against a cornstalk so the beam cut upward only—reminding him of the blue beam in Jerusalem—and then he dropped his trousers, squatted, and dug a shallow hole with his hands. What did Savi call this? he thought. Camping?

  When he was finished—a terrific relief, despite the barbarous circumstances—he did the best he could with the wet and soggy tissues in his hand, found it not enough, tossed the tissues into the muddy hole, and then felt the bulge in his tunic pocket. He pulled out the thirty inches of folded material that he always carried. His turin cloth. In the light reflecting from the flashlight-illuminated cornstalks above him, he studied the fine linen and the beautiful microcircuit-imprinted embroidery that brought the turin drama directly to one’s brain. Watching the Trojans battle the Achaeans had been an occasional habit of his for years, but after meeting the real Odysseus—if the bearded old man was the real Odysseus, which didn’t seem at all likely—Daeman didn’t retain much interest in the turin drama. Odysseus had not only slept with one of the girls Daeman had planned to seduce, Hannah, but he’d gone home to Ardis Hall with Daeman’s primary target of opportunity, Ada. Still, he held the beautiful linen cloth in his hand as if weighing it.

  To hell with it. Daeman used it—taking an unexpected pleasure in vicariously treating the arrogant Odysseus this way—tossed it in the hole, kicked mud over the hole, hitched up his trousers and set his tunic straight, tried to wash his hands against the rain-slick cornstalks, and then picked up his flashlight and walked the two dozen or so rows out of the field.

  But there was no end to the field. After thirty-five rows or so, he was sure he had gone the wrong direction. He spun around, trying to ascertain the correct direction—all he had to do was follow his muddy footprints back in the opposite direction—but the spinning had disoriented him so that he couldn’t tell which direction he’d been heading. And the footprints were nowhere to be found. The lightning was more intense now, the rain coming down harder.

  “Help!” shouted Daeman. He waited a second, heard no reply, and shouted again. “Help! I’m lost in here!” Thunder drowned out both of his cries.

  He turned again, then again, decided that this had to be the right direction back, and began running through the high corn, bending stalks aside, battering at them with the small flashlight. He forgot to count the rows, but must have gone forty or fifty wet rows before stopping again.

  “Help! I’m in here!” This time no thunder drowned his shouting, but there was still no reply, no noise except for the hard patter of rain on the cornstalks and the squelch of his soggy city shoes.

  He began moving up a row, watching to both sides for light or movement, not thinking of how this movement would just get him further away from the other two. After several minutes he had to pause for breath.

  “Help!” Lightning struck less than a mile away and the thunder moved across the tall corn like a shock wave. Daeman blinked away the afterimages of the flash and noticed that the corn seemed less thick up the row and to his right. It had to be the edge of the field.

  He ran the last fifteen rows or so and burst into the opening.

  It was not the edge of the field where he’d entered, but a clearing, perhaps twenty feet wide and thirty feet deep. In the center of the clearing, rising six or eight feet taller than the corn, was a large metal cross. Daeman ran the beam of the flashlight from the base of the cross up to the top of it.

  The figure was not on the cross, but, rather, nestled in the hollowed-out metal form, its naked torso wedged into the upright column, its bare arms extended in the crossmembers. The flashlight beam jiggled in the downpour as Daeman stared.

  It was not a man—at least like no man Daeman had ever seen. The man-thing was naked and slick, scaled and greenish—not fish-green, but with the green Daeman had always imagined as the color of corpses before the firmary ended such barbarities. The scales were small and numerous and gleamed in the flashlight. The thing was well-muscled, but the muscles were wrong—the arms too long, forearms too lanky, wrists too powerful, knuckles far too large, yellow claws instead of fingernails, thighs too powerful, feet three-toed and oddly splayed. It was a male—the penis and scrotum were obscenely visible and garishly pink beneath the washboard stomach and muscled abdomen, again somehow wrong, like a turtle or shark with almost-human genitalia—but the thick upper torso, snakelike neck, and hairless head were the least human aspects of the creature. Rain ran off the muscles and scales and banded ligaments, dripping across the rough black metal of the cross.

  The eyes were sunken under brows at once apelike and fishlike and the face extruded out more snout or gill-like than nose. Under the snout, the thing’s mouth hung slightly open and Daeman stared at the long yellow teeth—not human, not animal, more fishlike if fish were monsters—and a far-too-long blue-ish tongue that stirred even as Daeman watched. He flicked the flashlight beam higher and almost screamed again.

  The man-thing’s eyes had opened—oblong yellow cat’s-eyes, without a cat’s cool connection to humanity—with tiny black slits in the center. The thing . . . what had Savi called it? A calibani?—stirred in its cross-niche, the hands opened from fists to extended fingers, long claws catching the light, and the legs and torso shifted as if the creature were waking and stretching.

  There were no restraints on it. There was nothing to keep it from leaping down at Daeman this instant.

  Daeman tried to run, but found that he couldn’t turn his back on the thing. It stirred again, its right hand and most of its arm coming free from the cross-niche. Its feet, Daeman now saw, also held yellow claws at the end of the webbed toes.

  There was a crashing and roar behind Daeman—more calibani, already free from their crosses, he was sure—and Daeman whirled to meet their charge, raising the flashlight like a club and losing the light from it.

  His feet slipped, or his legs weakened, and Daeman went to his knees in the mud in the clearing. He felt like crying, but didn’t think he did in the few seconds before the crawler burst from the row of corn, looming like a monstrous spider over Daeman and the cornfield and the cross and the unmoving calibani. The crawler’s eight headlights switched on, blinding him. He threw his forearm across his face, but, he realized later, more to hide his tears than to protect his eyes from the light.

  Dressed in thermskins, the two men reclining on the cracked leather chairs and the old woman lying on the inner curve of the glass sphere, they ate their foodbars, passed around the water bottle, and watched the storm in silence for a while. Daeman had asked Savi to get away from the field and the cross and the creature, so she’d driven a mile or two up the red clay road before pulling to the side and shutting off everything but the crawler’s forcefield and dim virtual panels.

  “What was that thing?” Daeman said at last.

  “One of the calibani,” said Savi. She actually looked comfortable lying on the glass wall, backpack behind her head.

  “I know what you called them,” snapped Daeman. “What are they?”

  Savi sighed. “If I
start explaining one thing, then I have to explain the rest. There’s a lot you eloi don’t know—almost everything, actually.”

  “Why don’t you start with explaining why you call us eloi,” said Harman. His voice was hard.

  “I guess it started as a form of insult,” said Savi. Lightning flashed, illuminating the lines on her face, but the storm had moved on far enough that the thunder came late, from very far away. “Although to be fair, I called my own people that before calling yours the word.”

  “What does it mean?” demanded Harman.

  “It’s a term from a very old story in a very old book,” said Savi. “About a man who travels through time to the far future and finds humankind evolved into two races—one gentle, lazy, purposeless, basking in the sun, the eloi, and the other ugly, monstrous, productive, technological, but hiding in caves and darkness, the morlocks. In the old book, the morlocks provided food, shelter, and clothing for the eloi until the gentle people had fattened up nicely. And then the morlocks ate them.”

  Lightning flashed across the fields again, but it was a pale, receding light. “Is that what our world is like?” asked Daeman. “Us as the eloi and the calibani and voynix as the morlocks? Do they eat us?”

  “I wish it were that simple,” said Savi. She laughed softly, but the noise held no humor.

  “What are the calibani?” said Harman.

  Instead of answering, the old woman said, “Daeman, show Harman one of your palm tricks.”

  Daeman hesitated. “Which one?” he said. “Proxnet or farnet?”

  “We know where we are, darling,” the old woman said sarcastically. “Show him farnet.”

  Daeman scowled, but did so. He told Harman to think of three blue squares in the center of three red circles and suddenly a blue oval was floating over both of their palms. “Think of someone,” Daeman said, feeling strange. He’d never taught anyone anything before, if one didn’t count sexual techniques. “Anyone,” he added. “Just visualize them.”