Ilium

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.”

Harman looked dubious but concentrated. An aerial representation of Ardis filled Harman’s oval, then a diagram of the layout of Ardis Hall. A stylized female figure was standing with a group of stylized men and women on the front porch of the manor.

“Ada,” said Daeman. “You were thinking of Ada.”

“Incredible,” said Harman. He stared at the image for a moment. “I’m going to visualize Odysseus,” he said.

The image shifted, changed magnitude, searched, but came up with nothing.

“Farnet doesn’t have a lock on Odysseus, according to Savi,” said Daeman. “But go back to Ada. Look where she is.”

Harman frowned but focused. The stylized cartoon of Ada was in a field a hundred yards or so behind Ardis Hall. There were scores of other human figures represented seated in front and around a void. Ada joined the crowd.

Daeman looked at Harman’s palm image. “I wonder what’s going on there. If Odysseus is in that empty spot, it looks as if the old barbarian’s addressing a crowd.”

“And Ada’s listening to him or watching him perform,” said Harman. He looked away from the palm oval. “What does this have to do with my question, Savi? Who are the calibani ? Why are the voynix trying to kill us? What’s going on?”

“A few centuries before the final fax,” she said, folding her hands together, “the post-humans got too clever by half. Their science was impressive. To all intents and purposes, they’d fled the Earth to their orbital rings during the terrible rubicon epidemic. But they were still masters of the earth. They thought they were masters of the universe.

“The posts had rigged the whole Earth with the limited form of energy-data transmission and retrieval that you call faxing, and now they were experimenting—playing really—with time travel, quantum teleportation, and other dangerous things. A lot of their playing around was predicated on ancient sciences from as far back as the Nineteenth Century—black-hole physics, wormhole theory, quantum mechanics—but what they relied on most was the Twentieth Century discovery that, at its heart, everything is information. Data. Consciousness. Matter. Energy. Everything is information.”

“I don’t understand,” said Harman. He sounded angry.

“Daeman, you’ve shown Harman the farnet function. Why don’t you show him the allnet?”

“Allnet?” repeated Daeman, alarm in his voice.

“You know, four blue triangles above three red circles above four green triangles.”

“No!” said Daeman. He thought off his own palm function. The blue glow winked out.

Savi looked at Harman. “If you want to begin to understand why we’re here tonight, why the post-humans left Earth forever, and why the calibani and voynix are around, visualize four blue triangles above three red circles above four green triangles. It gets easier with practice.”

Harman looked suspiciously at Daeman, but then he closed his eyes and concentrated.

Daeman concentrated on not visualizing those shapes. He forced himself to remember Ada naked as a teenager, to remember the last time he had sex with a girl, to remember his mother scolding him . . .

“My God!” cried Harman.

Daeman looked at the other man. Harman had stood, stumbling out of his chair, and was whirling, moving his head in jerks, staring open-mouthed at everything.

“What do you see?” Savi asked softly. “What do you hear?”

“God . . . God . . .” moaned Harman. “I see . . . Jesus Christ. Everything. Everything. Energy . . . the stars are singing . . . the corn in the fields is speaking, to each other, to the Earth. I see . . . the crawler’s full of little microbes, repairing it, cooling it . . . I see . . . my God, my hand!” Harman was studying his hand with a look of total horror and revelation.

“Enough for the first time,” said Savi. “Think the word ‘off.’ “

“Not . . . yet . . .” gasped Harman. He stumbled against the glass wall of the passenger sphere and clawed at it weakly as if trying to get out. “It’s so . . . so beautiful . . . I can almost . . .”

“Think off!” roared Savi.

Harman blinked, fell against the wall, and turned a pale, staring face in their direction.

“What was that?” he said. “I saw . . . everything. Heard . . . everything. ”

“And understood nothing,” said Savi. “But neither do I when I’m on allnet. Perhaps even the post-humans didn’t understand it all.”

Harman staggered to his chair and collapsed into it. “But where did it come from?”

“Millennia ago,” said Savi, “the real old-style humans had a crude information ecology they called the Internet. Eventually they decided to tame the Internet and created a thing called Oxygen—not the gas, but artificial intelligences floating in and over and above the Internet, directing it, connecting it, tagging it, leading humans through it when they went hunting for people or information.”

“Proxnet?” said Daeman. His hands were shaking and he hadn’t even accessed farnet or allnet tonight.

Savi nodded. “What led to proxnet. Eventually, Oxygen evolved into the noosphere, a logosphere, a planet-wide datasphere. But that wasn’t enough for the post-humans. They connected this super-Internet noosphere with the biosphere, the living components of the Earth. Every plant and animal and erg of energy on the planet, which—when connected to the noosphere—created a complete and total information ecology touching everything on, above, and within the Earth, a sort of sentient omnisphere that lacked only self-awareness and identity. Then the post-humans foolishly gave it that self-awareness—not just designing an overriding artificial intelligence, but allowing it to evolve its own persona. This super-noosphere called itself Prospero. Does that name mean anything to either of you?”

Daeman shook his head and looked at Harman, but even though the older man knew how to read books, he also shook his head.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Savi. “Suddenly the post-humans had an . . . opponent . . . that they couldn’t control. And it wasn’t over yet. The post-humans were using self-evolving programs and projects of other sorts as well, allowing their quantum computers to pursue their own goals. As impossible as it is to believe, they achieved stable wormholes, they achieved time travel, and they transported people—old-style humans as guinea pigs, since they’d never risk their own immortal lives—through timespace gates via quantum teleportation.”

“What does that have to do with the calibani?” persisted Harman, obviously still shaking the images from the allnet out of his head.

Savi smiled. “The Prospero noosphere entity either has an advanced set of irony or none at all. The sentient biosphere, he christened it Ariel—a sort of Earth spirit—and together, Ariel and Prospero created the calibani. They evolved a strain of humanity—not old-style, not post, not eloi—into that monster you saw on the cross tonight.”

“Why?” asked Daeman. He barely choked the single syllable out.

Savi shrugged. “Enforcers. Prospero is a peaceful entity, or so it likes to think. But its calibani are monsters. Killers.”

“Why?” This time it was Harman asking the question.

“To stop the voynix,” said the old woman. “To chase the post-humans off the Earth before they could do more harm. To enforce whatever whim the Prospero and Ariel points of the noosphere trinity wish enforced.”

Daeman tried to understand this. He failed. Finally he said, “Why was the thing on a cross?”

“It wasn’t on the cross,” said Savi. “It was in the cross. Recharging cradle.”

Harman looked so pale that Daeman thought the other man might be ill. “Why did the posts create the voynix?”

“Oh, they didn’t create the voynix,” said Savi. “The voynix came from somewhere else, serving someone else, with their own agenda.”

“I always thought they were machines,” said Daeman. “Like the other servitors.”

“No,” said Savi.

Harman looked out into the night. The rain had stopped and the lightning and thunder had moved over the horizon. A few stars were appearing between cloud tatters. “The calibani keep the voynix out of the Basin here,” he said.

“They’re one of the things that keeps the voynix away,” agreed Savi. She sounded pleased, her voice holding a teacher’s tone, as if one of her students had turned out not to be a total moron.

“But why haven’t the calibani killed us?” asked Harman.

“Our DNA,” said Savi.

“Our what?” said Daeman.

“Never mind, my darlings. Suffice it to say that I borrowed a snippet of each of your hair and that, along with a lock of my own, has saved us all. I made a deal with Ariel, you see. Allow us to pass this once, and I promised to save the soul of the Earth.”

“You’ve met the Ariel Earth-entity?” asked Harman.

“Well, not met him exactly,” said Savi. “But I’ve chatted with him across the noosphere-biosphere interface. We made a deal.”

Daeman knew then that the old woman was truly mad. He caught Harman’s eye and saw the same conclusion there.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Savi. She plumped her pack like a pillow and lay back and closed her eyes. “Get some sleep, my young darlings. You need to be rested tomorrow. Tomorrow, with any luck, we fly up, up, up to the orbitside layer.”

She was asleep and snoring before Harman and Daeman could exchange another worried glance.