Ilium

40 Equatorial Ring

Daeman screamed all the way up.

Savi and Harman could have been screaming as well—should have been screaming—but Daeman could hear only his own screams. As soon as their chairs took off vertically and then began to pitch over as they rotated around their axis of lightning—Daeman facedown 10,000 feet above the green Mediterranean Basin and screaming all the way—two great restrictions began to push in on him: one the pressure of acceleration, but the other a constant, all-over pressing-in that had to be some kind of a forcefield. It not only held him tight on the red cushions of his hurtling chair, but it pressed against his face, chest, into his mouth, into his lungs.

Daeman still screamed.

The three chairs continued to rotate counterclockwise around the thick bolt of white energy, and suddenly Daeman was facing up at the stars and rings. He continued to scream, knowing that the chair would continue rotating, that this time he would fall out, and that now the fall would be from tens of thousands of feet higher.

He didn’t fall, but he screamed down at the Earth as they flew higher. Their trajectory seemed almost flat now, almost parallel to the surface of the planet so far below. It was night over Central Asia, but towering cumulus stretching hundreds of miles was lighted from within, quick flickers of lightning illuminating the red landmass glimpsed between the pearly cloud cover. Daeman didn’t know it was central Asia. The chairs rotated around again, showing him the stars and rings and a quite visible thin layer of atmosphere—below them now!—and the sun seemed to rise again in the west, prisming across that meniscus of atmosphere in bright red and yellow streamers.

They were out of 99 percent of the atmosphere now, but Daeman didn’t know that. The forcefield fed him air, kept him from being torn apart by g-forces, and allowed a pocket of air into which he could scream. He was getting hoarse by the time he realized that they were approaching the e-ring.

The ring wasn’t what he’d always imagined, but he was too busy clutching the arms of his chair and screaming to notice this. Daeman had always visualized the posts’ e- and p-rings as being made up of thousands of glowing glass castles through which one could see the post-humans partying and doing whatever post-humans do. It wasn’t that way at all.

Most of the glowing objects they were rising toward so quickly, the wiggling, writhing thread of lightning still pitching up and away from them as they rode it higher, were complex structures of struts and cables and long glass tubes, more like antennae than orbital houses. At the end of some these structures were glowing globes of energy, each with pulsing black spheres at their center. Other structures supported giant mirrors—each stretching miles across, Daeman realized through his screaming—which were reflecting or beaming blue or yellow or dull-white shafts of energy to still other mirrors. Gleaming rings and spheres, looking to be made of the same energy-matter and exotic materials as Atlantis, fired lasers and pulsed attitude thrusters in studied bursts that opened and spread in glowing cones of particles. None of the spheres or rings or structures looked like they could be homes for post-humans.

The Earth’s horizon became noticeably curved, then curved further, like a bow being slowly bent. The sun set again in the west and the sky exploded with stars only slightly less bright than the glowing ring structures above. Far below Daeman—hundreds of miles, at least—he could see a range of snow-topped mountains glowing in the starlight and ringlight. Farther to the west, near the sharp-curved limb of the world, an ocean gleamed. Suddenly the rotation of the chairs slowed and Daeman craned his neck and looked up.

Set amidst the moving gantry-structures and mirrors moved a mountain with a glowing city wrapped around it.

Daeman paused in his screaming as the chairs tilted forward more wildly and the forcefield pressed him down into the cushions and straight-backed chair more fiercely, and in that second of pause he noticed that the torquing shaft of energy along which they were sliding ended in that glowing city on the giant slab of rock.

This city was not made of energy-stuff. It seemed to be made of glass, and each of the hundred thousand glass panes and facets was illuminated from within. It looked like a giant Japanese lantern to Daeman. Just as he realized that their twisting triangle of chairs was going to crash into one of the tallest circular spires on the near end of that orbiting mountain, his chair pitched completely over and the forcefield squeezed the breath out of him as they decelerated hard enough to make his vision go from red to black and back to red again.

They hadn’t slowed enough. Daeman screamed a final time, his voice completely hoarse now, and then they slammed into the building that must have been a hundred stories tall.

There was no crash of breaking glass, no fatal sudden stop. The building wall warped and absorbed them and funneled them down a long glowing cone, as if they’d dived into yielding yellow rubber, and then the funnel spat them out into a room with six glowing white walls. The shaft of energy disappeared. The chairs flew different directions. The forcefields went off.

Daeman shouted a final time, slid across a hard floor, bounced off an even harder wall, then ricocheted to the ceiling and back to the floor. Then he saw only blackness.

He was falling.

Daeman jerked to consciousness as his body and brain told him he was tumbling, falling. From the chair? To the Earth? He opened his mouth to scream again but closed it as he realized that he was floating in midair with Savi holding one of his arms and Harman the other.

Floating? Falling! He writhed and wriggled, but Savi and Harman—who were also floating in the white room—tumbled in the air with him, still holding him by the arms.

“It’s all right,” said Savi. “We’re in zero-g.”

“In what?” gasped Daeman.

“Zero gravity. No weight. Here, put this on.” She handed him one of the crawler’s osmosis masks. Someone had already pulled his thermskin cowl over his face and the smartsuit had extended its gloves over his hands. Now Daeman struggled in confusion, but the old woman and the older man tugged the clear osmosis mask into place over his nose and mouth.

“It’s meant as an emergency rebreather in case of fire or toxic gases,” said Savi. “But it’ll work in vacuum for a few hours.”

“Vacuum?” repeated Daeman.

“The posts’ city has lost gravity and a lot of its air,” said Harman. “We’ve already been through the wall while you were unconscious. There’s enough air to swim through, but not quite thick enough to breathe.”

Enough air to swim through? Already been through the wall? thought Daeman through his headache. They’re both crazy now. “How do you lose gravity?” he said aloud.

“I think they used forcefields to give them some gravity on this asteroid,” said Savi. “This rock isn’t big enough to generate much of its own, and the city inside shows some signs of being oriented toward the ground.”

Daeman didn’t ask what an asteroid was. He didn’t particularly care. “Can we get back down?” he said, but immediately added, “I’m not sitting on one of those chairs again.”

Savi’s smile was visible through her osmosis mask. She’d taken off her outer clothing to let her thermskin work more efficiently—she was wearing a peach color—and the suit, no thicker than a coat of paint, showed how scrawny and bony the old woman really was. Harman was also wearing only his blue thermskin. Daeman looked down and realized they’d stripped him of his real clothes so that his green thermskin showed how pudgy he was. With the thermskin and osmosis mask in place, Daeman heard the others’ voices through his cowl earpatches, and heard the slight echo of his own voice rasping in the built-in microphones.

“Those chairs aren’t going anywhere for a while,” said Savi. She nodded toward where bits of the broken chairs and the red cushions floated.

“I can’t believe that the posts traveled regularly to the rings on those things,” said Harman. The slight quaver in the older man’s voice let Daeman know that he wasn’t the only one who had hated that ride.

“Maybe they were all roller-coaster fans,” said Savi.

“What’s a . . .” began Daeman.

“Never mind,” said the old woman. She lifted the backpack she’d had on her lap during the whole ride up and said, “Ready to go through the wall and meet the posts?”

Going through the wall wasn’t hard at all. Passing through it felt to Daeman like pushing through some sort of yielding membrane, or perhaps like swimming through a warm waterfall.

Swimming. In air. Even after thirty minutes of doing it, it felt passing strange to Daeman. At first he flailed around with both arms and legs kicking almost at random, the antics moving him hardly at all and invariably sending him tumbling head over heels, but then he learned the trick of kicking off from one solid object to the next, even for distances of a hundred feet or more, using his legs to propel him and his cupped palms to make slight midcourse corrections.

All of the buildings seemed connected through their interiors, and what looked like bright internal lighting as they’d approached turned out to be an illusion. The windows glowed warmly, but it was the windows that were emitting the light. The vast interiors—the first space they entered after emerging from the white wall was three or four hundred feet across and at least a thousand feet high, with open terraces rising on three sides of the columnar space—were all dimly lighted by the orange glow from the distant wall windows, giving Daeman a sense of moving deep underwater. To add to that illusion of being underwater, various untended plants had grown forty and fifty feet high and were swaying to the slight breezes like tall stands of kelp.

Daeman could feel the thinness of the atmosphere as he tried to swim through what was left of the air. And while the thermskin covered all exposed skin and conserved all of his body heat, he could still sense the freezing cold beyond the molecular layer. He could see its effects as well, since the inner panels of glass were covered by a thin film of ice and occasional clusters of free-floating ice crystals caught the light like dust in shafts of cathedral light.

They came across the first bodies after only five minutes of kicking and swimming through the connected asteroid buildings.

The surface below had been covered with grass, terrestrial plants, trees, plants and flowers which Daeman had never seen on earth, but all of these had died except for the swaying kelp towers. While the surface had been parklike, open balconies on metal columns and dining and gathering areas festooned on walls and window surfaces showed how small the forcefield gravity must have been. The post-humans must have been able to push off from the “ground” and soar a hundred or more vertical feet before needing another open platform or aerial stepping-stone to push again. Many of these platforms still held hoarfrosted tables, overturned chairs, bulbous couches, and freestanding tapestries.

And bodies.

Savi kicked her way up to a terrace almost a hundred feet across. At one time it obviously stood beside and looked down on a thin waterfall tumbling from a balcony four or five hundred feet higher on the permcrete wall, but now the waterfall was frozen into a fragile latticework of ice and the eating area held only floating bodies.

Female bodies. All female, although the gray objects looked more like leathery mummies than anything either male or female.

There was little decomposition as such, but the effects of extreme cold and decreasing air pressure had freeze-dried the corpses over years or decades or centuries. When Daeman floated closer to the first cluster of bodies—all free-floating in the zero-g, but tangled in the mesh of what had once been some sort of decorative net between the dining area and the waterfall—he decided it had been centuries, not just decades, since these women had breathed and walked and flown in what Savi said had probably been one-tenth gravity and laughed and done whatever else post-humans had done before . . . before what? The women’s eyes were still intact, although frozen and clouded white in the gray leathery faces, and Daeman looked into the milky stares of the half dozen or so of the bodies as if there might be some answer there. When none was forthcoming, he cleared his throat and said into his osmosis mask microphone, “What do you think killed them?”

“I was wondering the same thing,” said Harman, floating near a separate cluster of bodies. The blue of his suit was almost shocking in the dim, funereal light and set against the gray skin of the corpses. “Sudden depressurization?”

“No,” said Savi. Her face was only inches from the face of one of the dead women. “There’s no hemorrhaging behind the eyes or signs of asphyxia or burst eardrums the way there would be if there had been a cataclysmic loss of atmosphere. And look at this.”

The other two floated closer. Savi shoved three gloved fingers into a ragged hole in the corpse’s leathery neck. The fingers disappeared to the knuckle. Disgusted, Daeman kick-floated backward, but not before noticing that the other corpses also had such ragged wounds on their necks, thighs, and rib cages.

“Scavengers?” said Harman.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Savi, floating from corpse to corpse, inspecting each wound. “Nor the effects of decomposition. I don’t think there was much in the way of viable bacteria here even before the air began leaking out and the cold set in. Maybe post-humans didn’t even have bacteria in their guts.”

“How could that be?” asked Daeman.

Savi just shook her head. She floated to two bodies tangled in chairs on the next platform. These corpses showed wider wounds in the belly. Rags of loose, torn clothing floated in the thin, cold air. “Something chewed a hole into their bellies,” whispered Savi.

“What?” Daeman heard how hollow his voice sounded on the thermskin comm.

“I think all these people—posts—died of wounds,” said Savi. “Something chewed their throats and bellies and hearts out.”

“What?” Daeman asked again.

Instead of answering, Savi removed the black gun from her pack and slapped it onto the stiktite patch on the thigh of her thermskin suit. She pointed down the open mall of the interior city to where it curved a half mile or so straight ahead. “Something’s moving there,” she said.

Without waiting to see if the two men would follow, Savi kicked off and floated in that direction.