Ilium

38 Atlantis and Earth Orbit

“I don’t understand why the post-humans called this place we’re headed ‘Atlantis,’ “ said Harman.

Savi, at the crawler controls, said, “I can’t say that I ever understood the vast majority of the posts’ actions.”

Daeman looked up from munching slowly on his third of the only remaining food bar. “What’s odd about the name ‘Atlantis’?”

“On the Lost Age maps,” said Harman, “the Atlantic Ocean is the big body of water west of here, beyond the Hands of Hercules. We’re in the basin of what used to be the Mediterranean Sea. It’s not in the Atlantic.”

“It’s not?” said Daeman.

“No.”

“So?” said Daeman.

Harman shrugged and fell quiet, but Savi said, “It’s possible the posts were being whimsical when they named their base here. But I seem to recall that a pre–Lost Age writer named Plato had talked about a city or kingdom called Atlantis in these regions, back when there was water here.”

“Plato,” mused Harman. “I’ve run across references to him in books I’ve read. And an odd drawing I saw once. A dog.”

Savi nodded. “A lot of the meaning of Lost Age iconography has been lost forever.”

“What’s a dog?” asked Harman. He sipped from Savi’s water bottle. The third of the food bar hadn’t been enough to satisfy his hunger, but there was no more food in the crawler.

“A small mammal that used to be very common, kept as a pet,” said Savi. “I don’t know why the posts allowed them to go extinct. Perhaps the rubicon virus targeted dogs as well.”

“Like horses?” said Daeman. He’d thought the huge, scary animals in the turin drama had been pure fantasy until recently.

“Smaller and hairier than horses,” said Savi. “But equally extinct.”

“Why would the posts bring back dinosaurs,” Daeman asked with a real shudder, “and not those wonderful turin horses and these dog things?”

“As I said,” repeated Savi, “much of the posts’ behavior was hard to understand.”

They had awakened shortly after dawn and driven north-northwest all day, rumbling down the red-clay road through fields rich with every sort of crop Daeman was familiar with and many he’d never seen. Twice they’d come to shallow rivers and once a deep, empty permcrete canal, all of which the crawler had crossed easily with its huge wheels and wildly articulated struts.

There were servitors in the fields, and the commonplace look of them reassured Daeman until he realized that many of these servitors were huge—some twelve or fifteen feet tall and half that broad, much larger than the machines he was used to—and as they drove deeper into the Basin, both the crops and servitors continued to look more alien.

The crawler was lumbering between tall green walls of what Savi said was sugarcane, the road not quite wide enough for the crawler and green stalks crunching under the six wheels, when Harman noticed the gray-green humanoid things slipping through the fields on either side. The forms moved so fluidly and quickly that they did not disturb the close-packed cane, flowing like ghost-corpses passing through the tall stalks.

“Calibani,” said Savi. “I don’t think they’ll attack.”

“I thought you said you fixed it so they wouldn’t,” said Daeman. “You know, that D-and-A stuff from the hair you stole from Harman and me.”

Savi smiled. “Deals with Ariel are never certain. But I suspect that if the calibani were going to stop us, they would have done it last night.”

“Won’t the forcefield around the sphere hold them off?” asked Daeman.

The old woman shrugged. “Calibani are more clever than voynix. They might surprise us.”

Daeman shuddered and watched the fields, catching only glimpses of the pale figures. The crawler moved out of the lane between the sugarcane fields and climbed a low hill. The road ran on through broad fields of winter wheat, stalks no taller than fifteen or sixteen inches, entire fields rippling in the breeze from the west. The calibani, at least a dozen on each side of the road, came out of the canefields behind them and loped along through the wheat, keeping a distance of sixty yards or so. Out in the open, they ran on all fours.

“I don’t like the looks of them,” said Daeman.

“You’d probably like the looks of Caliban even less,” said Savi.

“I thought these were calibani,” said Daeman. The old woman never seemed to make sense for long.

Savi smiled, steering the crawler across and over a row of six pipes carrying something from west to east or east to west. “It’s said that the calibani are cloned from the single Caliban, the third element of the Gaiaic Trinity, along with Ariel and Prospero.”

“It’s said,” mocked Daeman. “Everything’s gossip with you. Don’t you know anything from firsthand knowledge? These old stories are absurd.”

“Some are,” agreed Savi. “And even though I’ve been alive 1,500 years or more, that doesn’t mean I’ve been around all that time. So I have to report secondhand things I hear and read.”

“What do you mean, you haven’t been around all that time?” asked Harman. He sounded very interested.

Savi laughed, but not, Daeman thought, with much amusement in her voice. “I’m better nano-engineered for repair than you eloi,” she said. “But nobody lives forever. Or for fourteen hundred years. Or even a thousand. I spend most of my time like Dracula, sleeping in the long-term cryo crèches in places like the Golden Gate Bridge. I pop out from time to time, try to see what’s going on, try to find a way to get my friends out of the blue beam. Then back into the cold.”

Harman leaned forward. “How many years have you been . . . awake?”

“Fewer than three hundred,” said Savi. “And even that’s enough to tire a body out. And a mind. And a spirit.”

“Who’s Dracula?” asked Daeman.

Savi, not answering, kept driving the crawler north by northwest.

She’d told them the site they were headed for was about three hundred miles from the shoreline where they’d entered the Basin from the land that had been called Israel—a word Daeman had never heard. But the phrase “three hundred miles” meant little to Harman and nothing at all to Daeman, since trips by voynix-pulled carriole or droshky were never longer than a mile or two. Anything farther than that, and Daeman would fax. Anyone would fax.

Still, they had covered half that distance by midday, but then the red-clay road ended, the terrain grew rough, and the crawler had to move much more slowly, sometimes detouring for miles before returning to its course. Savi kept that course by using a small instrument from her pack and checking distances on a hand-drawn, much-folded map.

“Why don’t you use the palm finding-function?” Daeman asked.

“Farnet and allnet work here in the Basin,” said Savi, “but proxnet doesn’t, and the place we’re heading is in no net databank. I’m using a map and an ancient thing called a compass. Works, though.”

“How does it work?” asked Harman.

“Magic,” said Savi.

That was answer enough for Daeman.

They continued to descend, the Basin topography falling away above and behind them, the orderly rows of crops replaced now by boulder fields, gulleys, and occasional stands of bamboo or high ferns. The calibani were no longer visible, but it began to rain shortly after they reached the rough areas, and the creatures might have been just beyond the curtains of falling water.

The crawler passed odd artifacts—the hulls of numerous ships made of wood and steel, a city of tumbled Ionian columns, ancient plastic objects gleaming in gray sediment, the bleached bones of numerous sea creatures, and several huge, rusted tanks that Savi called “submarines.”

In the afternoon the rain lifted some and the three saw a high mesa appear to the northeast. It was high and broad and rolling rather than peaked, more mountain than mesa, green on top, ridged on the sides with steep, rilled cliffs.

“Is that where we’re going?” asked Daeman.

“No,” said Savi. “That’s Cyprus. I lost my virginity there one thousand, four hundred and eight-two years ago next Tuesday.”

Daeman exchanged covert glances with Harman. Both men had the good sense not to say anything.

By late afternoon the terrain became lower and marshier and fields of crops began appearing on either side of a rough, red-clay road again. Oddly formed servitors were working in the fields, but none looked up to watch the crawler trundle past. Most of the machines didn’t appear to have eyes. Once their way was blocked by a river at least two hundred yards across. Savi sealed the slice-door, shutting off the fresh air they’d been enjoying, made sure the sphere forcefield was activated, and rolled the crawler down the bank. The water was deep—forty feet or more near the center of the channel—and even the crawler’s searchlights had trouble cutting through the silt and gloom. The current was stronger than Daeman would have imagined for such a wide, deep river, and the crawler was buffeted around violently enough that Savi had to work the virtual controls and fight the machine back onto the proper course. Daeman guessed that a machine with smaller wheels, less flexible struts, or less motor power would have been carried away to the west.

When they emerged on the north shore, the machine throwing mud thirty feet behind them and water rushing off the spider-struts like a waterfall, Harman said, “I didn’t know the crawler could be driven underwater.”

“Neither did I,” said Savi. She took a bearing north by northwest and drove on.

The first energy constructs appeared shortly after that and Harman was the first to notice them.

The first device was shimmering and shifting thirty yards to the left of the clay road, in an opening beyond a stand of bamboo. Savi stopped so they could get out and see, although Daeman was leery of getting away from the crawler even though they’d seen no calibani for several hours. But Harman wanted to see it and Daeman didn’t want to stay in the sphere alone, so he ended up following the two down the strut ladder and across the field toward the glowing object. It felt strange to Daeman to be walking again after so many hours sitting.

The first energy construct was small—about twenty feet long by eight or ten high, yellow and orange with moving green veins, roughly spherical with pseudopods growing out of the top, bottom, and ends, the forms blobbing into shapes of their own, and then being reabsorbed by the central mass. The thing floated about four feet off the ground and Daeman would get no closer than twenty paces, even as Savi and Harman walked right up to it.

“What is it?” asked Harman, his head and shoulders disappearing for a minute behind the slowly flowing thing.

“We’re in the suburbs of Atlantis,” said Savi, “even though we’re still sixty miles or so away. The posts built their ground stations out of this material.”

“What material?” said Harman. He stretched his hand toward the yellow ovoid. “Can I touch it?”

“Some of the shapes shock. Some don’t. None kill. Go ahead and try it. It won’t melt your hand.”

Harman set his fingers against the curve of the shiny shape. His hand disappeared inside. When he quickly pulled it out, molten blobs of yellow and orange dripped off his fingers and then flew back to the shape. “Cold,” he said. “Very cold.” He flexed his fingers and winced.

“It’s essentially one large molecule,” said Savi. “Although how that’s possible, I don’t know.”

“What’s a molecule?” called Daeman. He’d taken a few steps backward when Harman’s hand disappeared, and had to raise his voice to be heard now. He also kept checking over his shoulder. Savi had the gun in her belt, but the bamboo forest was too close for Daeman’s comfort. It was almost dark.

“Molecules are the little things that everything else is made of,” said Savi. “You can’t see them without special lenses.”

“I can see that one easily enough,” said Daeman. Sometimes, he thought, talking to Savi was like talking to a young child, although Daeman had never spent time around a young child.

The three walked back to the crawler. Rich evening sunlight prismed off the passenger sphere and made the high, articulated struts glow. The tops of stratocumulus far to their east, toward the hill called Cyprus, caught the golden light.

“Atlantis is made up mostly of this macro-molecular frozen energy,” said the old woman. “It’s part of the quantum screwing around that the posts were always up to. There is real material mixed in—something the Lost Age scientists called ‘exotic matter’—but I don’t know the ratio, or how it works. I just know that it makes their cities—stations—whatever they are, sort of shapeshifters, phasing in and out of our quantum reality.”

“I don’t understand,” said Harman, freeing Daeman of the necessity of saying it.

“You’ll see for yourself soon enough. We should be able to see the city when we get over that large rise on the horizon. And be there about the time it gets dark.”

They climbed into the crawler and took their seats. But before Savi could shift the big machine into gear, Harman said, “You’ve been here before.” He didn’t pose it as a question.

“Yes.”

“But you said before that you’ve never been to the orbital rings. Was that your reason for coming before?”

“Yes,” said Savi. “I still think the answer to freeing my friends from the neutrino beam lies up there.” She flicked her head toward the e- and p-rings bright in the twilight sky above.

“But you didn’t succeed before,” said Harman. “Why?”

Savi swiveled in her chair and looked at him. “I’ll tell you why and how I failed, if you’ll tell me why you really want to go up there. Why you’ve spent years trying to find a way up to the rings.”

Harman returned her gaze for a minute and then looked away. “I’m curious,” he said.

“No,” said Savi. She waited.

He looked back at her and Daeman realized that the older man’s face showed the most emotion Daeman had seen from him. “You’re right,” snapped Harman. “It’s not some sort of idle curiosity. I want to find the firmary.”

“So you can live longer,” Savi said softly.

Harman balled his fists. “Yes . So I can live longer. So I can continue to exist beyond this fucking Final Twenty. Because I’m greedy for life. Because I want Ada to have my child and I want to be around to see it grow up, even though fathers don’t do things like that. Because I’m a greedy bastard—greedy for life. Are you satisfied?”

“Yes,” said Savi. She looked at Daeman. “And what are your reasons for coming on this trip, Daeman Uhr?”

Daeman shrugged. “I’d jump home in a second if there was a fax portal nearby.”

“There isn’t,” said Savi. “Sorry.”

He ignored the sarcasm and said, “Why did you bring us, old woman? You know the way here. You know how to find the crawler. Why bring us?”

“Fair question,” she said. “The last time I came to Atlantis, I came on foot. From the north. It was a century and a half ago, and I brought two eloi with me—I’m sorry, that’s an insulting term—I brought two young women with me. They were curious.”

“What happened?” said Harman.

“They died.”

“How?” asked Daeman. “The calibani?”

“No. The calibani killed and ate the man and woman who came with me the time before that, almost three centuries ago. I didn’t know how to contact the Ariel biosphere then, nor about the DNA.”

“Why do you always come in threes?” asked Harman. Daeman thought it an odd question. He was ready to ask for more details about all these dead traveling companions. Did she mean permanently dead? Or just firmary-repair dead?

Savi laughed. “You ask good questions, Harman Uhr. You’ll see soon. You’ll see why I’ve come with two others after that first solo visit of mine to Atlantis more than a millennium ago. And not just to Atlantis—but to some of their other stations. In the Himalayas. Easter Island. One actually at the south pole. Those were fun trips, since a sonie can’t get within three hundred miles of any of them.”

She’d lost Daeman. He wanted to hear more about the killing and eating.

“But you’ve never found a spaceship, a shuttle, to get you up there?” said Harman. “After all these tries?”

“There are no spaceships,” said Savi. She activated the virtual controls, slammed the crawler in gear, and guided them north by northwest as the sunset spilled red across the entire western sky.

The city of the post-humans spread for miles across the dry seabed, with glowing energy towers rising and falling a thousand feet high. The crawler trundled between energy obelisks, floating spheres, red energy stairways going nowhere, blue ramps that appeared and disappeared, blue pyramids folding into themselves, a giant green torus that moved back and forth along pulsing yellow rods, and countless colored cubes and cones.

When Savi stopped and slid the door slice open, even Harman seemed hesitant to get out. Savi had made sure they were wearing their thermskins and now she pulled three osmosis masks from the crawler’s tool locker.

It was almost dark now, the stars joining the rotating rings in the purple-black sky above them. The glow from the energy city illuminated seabed and farm fields for five miles in each direction. Savi led them to a red stairway and then up—the macromolecular steps holding their weight, although Daeman thought it felt like walking on giant sponges.

A hundred feet above the seabed floor, the staircase ended at a black platform made out of a dull, dark metal that reflected no light. In the center of the square platform were three ancient-looking wooden chairs with high backs and red seat cushions. The chairs were equidistantly spaced around a black hole in the black platform, about ten feet apart, facing outward.

“Sit,” said Savi.

“Is this a joke?” said Daeman.

Savi shook her head and sat in the chair facing west. Harman took his seat. Daeman walked around the black platform again, returned to the single empty chair. “What happens next?” he asked. “We have to wait here for something?” He looked at the tall yellow tower thrusting up hundreds of feet nearby, the energy-material rearranging itself like a rectangular yellow cloud.

“Sit and you’ll find out,” said Savi.

Daeman took his seat gingerly. The back of the chair and the thick arms were elaborately carved. There was a white circle on the left arm of the chair and a red circle on the right arm. He touched neither.

“When I count to three,” said Savi, “depress the white button. That’s the one on your left if you’re colorblind, Daeman.”

“I’m not colorblind, goddammit.”

“All right,” said the old woman. “One, two . . .”

“Wait, wait!” said Daeman. “What’s going to happen to me if I press the white circle?”

“Absolutely nothing,” said Savi. “But we have to press it at the same time. I learned this when I came here alone. Ready? One, two, three.”

They all pressed their white circles.

Daeman leaped out of his chair and ran to the edge of the black platform and then the red platform thirty paces beyond that before turning to look back. The blast of energy behind his chair had been deafening.

“Holy crap,” he shouted, but the two still in their chairs could not hear him.

It was like lightning, he thought. A searing blast of jagged energy, just a yard or so across, emanating from the black hole in the middle of the chair-triangle and rising up into the dark sky. Rising higher, higher . . . then curving to the west like some impossible, white-hot thread, arching west until the end of it disappeared from sight above, but the thread visible and also moving, as if the lightning were connected to . . .

It was connected, Daeman realized with a flood of fear that almost made him void his bowels. Connected to the moving e-ring thousands of miles above. Connected to one of the stars, one of the moving lights, now crossing from west to east in that ring.

“Come back!” Savi was shouting above the crackle and roar of the lightning thread.

It took Daeman several minutes to come back—to walk to that empty wooden chair, shielding his eyes, his shadow and the chair’s shadow thrown out fifty feet across the black and red rooftop by the blinding, crackling light. He could never explain later, even to himself, how or why he returned to that chair, or why he did what he did next.

“On the count of three, depress the red circle,” shouted Savi. The old woman’s gray hair was standing on end, whipping around her head like short snakes. She had to scream above the energy roar to be heard. “One, two . . .”

I absolutely can’t do this was Daeman’s litany to himself. I absolutely won’t do this.

“Three!” shouted Savi. She pressed her red circle. Harman pressed his red circle.

No! thought Daeman. But pressed down hard on his red circle.

The three wooden chairs shot skyward, rotating around the crackling, shifting, chord of lighting, shooting upward so quickly that a sonic boom echoed across the seabed floor, shaking the crawler on its springs. A second later, less than a second later, the three chairs were out of sight overhead as the thread of pure white energy twisted and writhed and arched to follow the hurtling points of light on the equatorial orbital ring.