Leaving his crossbow lying where it fell for now, Daeman got to his hands and knees, and then to his feet—only because he did not want to further smear his hands in the gore on the terrace floor—and he walked into the dining room again, circling the long table, finally climbing to take down his mother’s skull. His hands were shaking. He did not feel like weeping.
Humans had only just recently learned how to bury their fellow humans. Seven had died at Ardis in the past eight months, six from voynix, one from some mysterious illness that had carried the young woman away in one feverish night. Daeman hadn’t known it was possible for old-style humans to contract illness or disease.
Should I take her back with me? Have some burial service out by the wall where Noman and Harman had directed us to create the cemetery for our dead?
No. Marina had always loved her domis here in Paris Crater better than anyplace else in the faxable world.
But I can’t leave her here with these other skulls, thought Daeman, feeling wave after wave of indescribable emotion surge through him. One of these other skulls is that bastard Goman.
He carried the skull back out onto the terrace. The rain had grown much more fierce, the wind had dropped off, and Daeman stood a long minute at the railing, letting the raindrops wet his face and further clean the skull. Then he dropped the skull over the edge of the railing and watched it fall toward the red eye below until the tiny white speck was gone.
He lifted the crossbow and started to leave—back through the dining room, the common area, the inner hall—then he paused.
It hadn’t been a sound. The pounding of the rain was so loud that he couldn’t have heard an allosaurus if it was ten feet behind him. He’d forgotten something. What?
Daeman went back into the dining room, trying to avoid the accusatory stares of the dozens of skulls—What could I have done? he asked silently. Died with us, they silently responded—and swept up the turin cloth.
He—it—had left the cloth here for some purpose. It and the table were the only things in the domi complex not smeared and spattered with human blood. Daeman stuffed the cloth into the side pocket of his anorak and went out of that place.
It was dark in the stairway down to the esplanade and even darker in the enclosed stairway for fifteen stories beneath the esplanade. Daeman did not even raise his crossbow to the ready. If it—he—was waiting for him here, so be it. It would be a contest of teeth and fingernails and rages.
Nothing waited there.
Daeman was halfway back to the Invalid Hotel fax pavilion, walking stolidly down the center of the boulevard in the pounding rain, when there came a crackling and crashing behind him.
He turned, went to one knee, and raised the heavy weapon to his shoulder. This was not its sound. It was silent on its horn-padded and yellow-taloned webbed feet.
Daeman raised his face and stared, jaw going slack. A spinning had appeared in the direction of the crater, somewhere between him and his mother’s domi tower. The thing was some hundreds of meters across and spinning rapidly. A form of lightning crackled around it like a crown of electrical thorns and rays of random light stabbed out from the sphere. The wet air was filled with rumbles that made the pavements shake. Shifting fractal designs filled the sphere until the sphere became a circle and the circle sank, ripping a building apart as it settled to the earth and then partially beneath the earth.
Sunlight flooded out of the circle now, but it was not any sunlight as ever seen from Earth. The circle stopped sinking with only one-fourth of it wedged into the ground like some giant portal. It was only two blocks away, filling the sky to the east. Air rushed toward it from behind Daeman at near-hurricane speeds, almost knocking him down in its loud, wailing rush.
There was a daylit world visible through that still vibrating three-quarters circle—a world of a tepidly lapping blue sea, red soil, rocks, and a mountain—no, a volcano, rising to impossible heights in front of an off-blue sky. Something very large and pink and gray and moist emerged from that tepid sea and appeared to scuttle toward the open hole on centipede-fast feet that looked like giant hands to Daeman’s eyes. Then the air in front of that view was filled with debris and dust as the winds raged, mixed, were absorbed, and died away.
Daeman stood there another minute, peering through the obscuring dust, holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the diffused but still blinding sunlight streaming from the hole. The buildings of Paris Crater west of the hole—and the iron-armature thighs and emptied belly of the Enormous Whore—glinted in the cold, alien sunlight and then disappeared in the dust cloud broiling out of the hole. Other parts of the city remained invisible and wet, wrapped in night.
There came voynix scrabblings—urgent, many-clawed—from streets to the north and south.
Two voynix exploded out of a dark doorway on Daeman’s boulevard and rushed him on all fours, killing blades clattering.
He tracked them with his crossbow sight, led them, fired the first bolt into the leathery hood of the second voynix—it fell—and then fired his second bolt into the chest of the leading one. It fell but kept pulling itself closer.
Daeman carefully pulled two barbed, iron bolts from the pouch slung over his shoulder, reloaded, recocked, and shot both bolts into the thing’s nerve-center hump at a distance of ten feet. It quit crawling.
More scrabblings to the west and south. The reddish daylight from the hole was revealing everything on the street here. Daeman’s concealment of darkness was gone. Something bellowed from that rising dust cloud—making a sound like nothing Daeman had ever heard—deeper, more malignant, the incomprehensible growls sounding like some terrible language being bellowed in reverse.
Not hurrying, Daeman reloaded again, looked one last time over his shoulder at the red mountain visible through the hole in Paris Crater’s sky and cityscape, and then he jogged west—not in panic—toward Invalid Hotel.
25
Noman was dying.
Harman went in and out of the small room on the first floor of Ardis Hall that had been converted into a makeshift—and largely useless—infirmary. There were books in there from which they could sigl anatomy charts and instructions for simple surgery, mending broken bones, etc., but no one but Noman had been proficient in dealing with serious wounds. Two of those buried in the new cemetery near the northwest corner of the palisade had died after days of pain in this same infirmary.
Ada stayed with Harman, had been by his side since he’d staggered through the north gate more than an hour earlier, often touching his arm or taking his hand as if reassuring herself he was really there. Harman had been treated for his wounds on the cot next to where Noman lay now—Harman’s wounds had been deep scratches, requiring a painful few stitches and an even more painful administration of their crude, homemade versions of antiseptic—including raw alcohol. But the unconscious Noman’s terrible wounds to his arm and scalp were too serious to be treated with only these few inadequate measures. They’d cleaned him as best they could, applied stitches to his scalp, used their antiseptics on the open wounds—Noman did not even return to consciousness when the alcohol was poured on—but the arm was too mauled, connected to his torso only by ragged strings of ligament, tissue, and shattered bone. They had stapled and bandaged, but already the bandages were soaked through with blood.
“He’s going to die, isn’t he?” asked Hannah, who’d not left the infirmary even to change her bloody clothes. They’d treated her for slashes to her left shoulder and she’d never taken her eyes off Noman as the stitches and antiseptic were applied to her.
“Yes, I think so,” said Petyr. “He won’t survive.”
“Why is he still unconscious?” asked the young woman.
“I think that’s a result of the concussion he received,” said Harman, “not the claw wounds.” Harman wanted to curse at the simple fact that sigling a hundred volumes on neuroanatomy did not teach one how to actually open a skull and relieve pressure on the brain. If they tried it with their curre
nt rough instruments and almost nonexistent level of experience as surgeons, Noman would certainly die sooner than if they left things to nature’s way. Either way, Noman-Odysseus was going to die.
Ferman, who was the usual keeper of the infirmary and who had sigled more books on the subject than Harman, looked up from sharpening a saw and cleaver in case they decided to remove the arm. “We’ll have to decide soon about the arm,” he said softly and returned to working his whetstone.
Hannah turned to Petyr. “I heard him mumble a few times while you were carrying him but couldn’t hear what he said. Did it make any sense?”
“Not really. I couldn’t make most of it out. I think it was in the language the other Odysseus used in the turin drama…”
“Greek,” said Harman.
“Whatever,” said Petyr. “The couple of words I could make out in English weren’t important.”
“What were they?” asked Hannah.
“I’m sure he said something that ended in ‘gate.’ And then ‘crash’…I think. He was mumbling, I was panting loudly, and the guards on the wall were shouting. It was when we were approaching the north gate of the palisade, so he must have been saying ‘crash it’ if they don’t open it.”
“That doesn’t make much sense,” said Hannah.
“He was in pain and lapsing into coma,” said Petyr.
“Maybe,” said Harman. He left the infirmary, Ada still holding his arm, and began to pace through the manor house.
About fifty of Ardis’s population of four hundred were eating in the main dining room.
“You should eat,” said Harman, touching Ada’s stomach.
“Are you hungry?”
“Not yet.” In truth, the pain to Harman’s bad leg from the new slashes was bad enough to make him a little nauseated. Or perhaps it was the mental image of Noman lying there bleeding and dying.
“Hannah will be so upset,” whispered Ada.
Harman nodded distractedly. Something was gnawing at the subconscious and he was trying to let it have its way.
They went through the former grand ballroom where dozens of people were still working at long tables, applying bronze arrowheads to wooden shafts, then adding the prepared feathers, crafting spears, or carving bows. Many looked up and nodded as Ada and Harman went by. Harman led the way out back into the overheated blacksmithing annex where three men and two women were hammering bronze sword and knife blades, adding edges and sharpening on large whet-stones. In the morning, Harman knew, this room would be insufferably hot as they carried in the molten metal from the next pour to be molded and hammered into shape. He paused to touch a sword blade and hilt that was finished except for the last of the leather to be wrapped around the hilt.
So crude, he thought. So unspeakably crude compared to the craft and artistry not only of Noman’s Circe sword—wherever that came from—but from the weapons in the old turin drama. And how sad that the first pieces of technology we old-style humans pour and cast and worry into a shape after two millennia or more are these rough weapons, their time come round again at last.
Reman came bursting into the blacksmith annex on the way to the main house.
“What is it?” said Ada.
“Voynix,” said Reman, who’d gone out to guard duty after finishing his chores in the kitchen. He was wet from the rain that had been falling since nightfall and his beard was icy. “A lot of voynix. More than I’ve ever seen at once.”
“Out of the woods yet?” asked Harman.
“Massing under the trees. But scores and scores of them.”
Outside, from the ramparts on all parts of the palisades the bells began to sound the alarm. The horns would blow if and when the voynix actually began their attack.
The dining hall emptied as men and women grabbed their coats and weapons and ran to their fighting stations on the walls, in the yard, and at windows, doorways, gables, porches, and balconies in the house itself.
Harman did not move. He let the running shapes flow around him like a river.
“Harman?” whispered Ada.
Turning against the current, he led her back into the infirmary where Noman lay dying. Hannah had pulled on her coat and found a lance, but seemed unable to leave Noman’s side. Petyr was half out the door but returned when Harman and Ada went in to stand by Noman’s bloodied cot.
“He didn’t say crash the gate,” whispered Harman. “He said Golden Gate. The crèche at Golden Gate.”
Outside, the horns began to blow.
26
Daeman knew that he should fax straight back to the Ardis node to report on what he’d seen, even if he had to make the mile-and-a-quarter-walk from the palisaded faxnode pavilion to Ardis Hall in the dark, but he couldn’t. As important as his news about the hole in the sky was, he wasn’t ready to go back.
He faxed to a previously unknown code he’d discovered when they were doing their node survey six months earlier, mapping out the four hundred and nine known nodes—hunting for survivors of the Fall—and looking for unnumbered destinations. This place was hot and in sunlight. The pavilion was on a knoll among palm trees stirring in soft breezes from the sea. Just down the hill began the beach—a white crescent almost encircling a lagoon so clear he could see the sandy bottom forty feet down out where the reef began. There were no people around, either old-style human or post-human, although Daeman had found the overgrown ruins of what had once been a pre–Final Fax city just inland on the north side of the crescent beach.
He’d seen no voynix in the dozen or so times he’d come here to sit and think. On one trip, some huge, legless, flippered saurian thing had risen out of the surf just beyond the reef, then crashed back into the water with a thirty-foot shark in its mouth, but other than that one disconcerting sighting, he’d seen nothing threatening here.
Now he trudged down to the beach, dropped his heavy crossbow onto the sand, and sat down next to it. The sun was hot. He pulled off his bulky backpack, anorak, and shirt. There was something hanging out of the pocket of his anorak and he pulled it out—the turin cloth from the table of skulls. He tossed it away on the sand. Daeman removed his shoes, trousers, and underwear and staggered naked toward the water’s edge, not even glancing toward the jungle’s edge to make sure he was alone.
My mother is dead. The fact hit him like a physical blow and he thought he might be sick again. Dead.
Daeman walked naked toward the surf. He stood at the edge of the lagoon and let the warm waves lap at his feet, move the sand from under his toes. Dead. He would never see his mother or hear her voice again. Never, never, never, never, never.
He sat down heavily on the wet sand. Daeman had thought himself reconciled to this new world where death was a finality; he thought he’d come to terms with this obscenity when he’d faced his own death eight months earlier up there on Prospero’s Isle.
I knew that I had to die someday…but not my mother. Not Marina. That’s not…fair.
Daeman sobbed a laugh at the absurdity of what he was thinking and feeling. Thousands dead since the Fall…he knew there were thousands dead, because he’d been one of Ardis’s envoys to the hundreds of other nodes, he’d seen the graves, even taught some communities how to dig graves and set the bodies in them to rot away…
My mother! Had she suffered? Had Caliban played with her, tormented her, tortured her before slaughtering her?
I know it was Caliban. He killed them all. It doesn’t matter if that’s impossible—it’s true. He killed them all, but only to get to my mother, to set her skull on top of the pyramid of skulls, wisps of her red hair remaining to show me that it was indeed my mother. Caliban. You whoremongering gill-slitted motherfucking son of a bitching asshole-licking freakshit murderous gape-mawed goddamned fucking…
Daeman couldn’t breathe. His chest simply locked up. He opened his mouth as if to retch again, but he couldn’t move air in or out.
Dead. Forever. Dead.
He stood, waded into the sun-warmed water, and then dove,
striking out and swimming hard, swimming toward the reef where the waves lifted white and where he’d seen the giant beast with the shark in its jaws, swimming hard, feeling the sting of saltwater in his eyes and on his cheeks…
The swimming allowed him to breathe. He swam a hundred yards to where the lagoon opened onto the sea and then treaded water, feeling the cold currents tugging at him, watching the heavy waves beyond the reef, listening to the wonderful violence of their crashing, almost surrendering then to the undertow beckoning him out, farther, farther—there was no Pacific Breach as there was in the Atlantic, his body might drift for days—and then he turned and swam back into the beach.
He came out of the water oblivous of his nakedness but no longer oblivious to his safety. He lifted his salt-crusted left palm and invoked the farnet function. He was on this island in the South Pacific—Daeman almost laughed at this thought, since nine months ago, before he’d met Harman, he hadn’t known the names of the oceans, hadn’t even known the world was round, hadn’t known the landmasses, didn’t know there was more than one ocean—and what goddamn good had it done him since to know these things? None, as far as he could tell.
But the farnet showed him that there were no old-style humans or voynix around. He walked up the beach to his clothes and dropped onto the anorak, using it as a beach blanket. His tanned legs were covered with sand.
Just as he went to his knees, a gust of wind from the land caught the tumbling turin cloth and blew it over his head, toward the water. Acting on pure reflex, Daeman reached high and caught it. He shook his head and used the borders of the elaborately embroidered cloth to dry his hair.
Daeman flopped onto his back, the wadded cloth still in his hand, and stared up at the flawless blue sky.
She’s dead. I held her skull in my hands. How had he known for sure that this one skull out of a hundred—even with the obscene hint of the strands of short, red hair—had been his mother? He was sure. Perhaps I should have left her there with the others. Not with Goman, whose stubbornness at staying in Paris Crater killed her. No, not with him. Daeman had a clear image of the small, white skull tumbling toward the redmagma eye of the crater.