Ilium

43 Equatorial Ring

Just before they found the firmary, Daeman had been complaining about being starved. He was starved. He’d never gone so long between meals before. The last thing he’d eaten had been a paltry few bites of the last dried food bar almost ten hours earlier.

“There must be something to eat in this city,” Daeman was saying. The three of them were kick-swimming their way through the dead orbital city. Above them, the glowing panes had given away to clear panels and they saw now how the asteroid and its city were slowly turning. The Earth would appear, move across their field of view above them, its soft light illuminating the empty space, floating bodies, dead plants, and floating kelp. “There has to be something to eat here,” repeated Daeman. “Cans of food, freeze-dried food . . . something. ”

“If there is, it’s centuries old,” said Savi. “And as mummified as the post-humans.”

“If we find any servitors, they’ll feed us,” said Daeman, realizing that the statement was nonsense as soon as he said it.

Harman and the old woman did not bother replying. They floated into a small clearing in the wild kelpfields. The air seemed slightly thicker here, although Daeman did not lift his osmosis mask or thermskin cowl to try to breathe it. Even through the mask he could tell the little bit of cold air smelled foul.

“If we find a faxportal,” said Harman, “we’ll have to use it to get home.” Harman’s body was muscled and taut in his blue thermskin suit, but Daeman could see the beginning of wrinkles and lines around the eyes through the other man’s clear mask. He looked older than he had just a day earlier.

“I don’t know if there are faxportals up here,” said Savi. “And I wouldn’t fax again if I could.”

Harman looked at her. The Earth rotated into view overhead and the soft Earthlight dimly illuminated all of their faces. “Will we have a choice? You said the chairs were a one-way ride.”

Savi’s smile was tired. “My code’s no longer in their faxbanks. Or if it is, it’s for delete purposes only. And I’m afraid the same may be true for both of you after the voynix detected us in Jerusalem. But even if your codes are viable, and even if we somehow located faxnodes here, and even if we somehow learned to operate the machinery—those are no common faxportals, you know—and I stayed behind to fax you home, I don’t think it would work.”

Harman sighed. “We’ll just have to find another way.” He looked around the dark city, frozen corpses, and swaying kelp beds. “This isn’t what I expected in the rings, Savi.”

“No,” said the old woman. “None of us did. Even in my day, we thought the thousands of lights in the sky at night meant millions upon millions of post-humans in thousands of orbital cities.”

“How many cities do you think they had?” asked Harman. “Besides this one?”

Savi shrugged. “Perhaps just one in the polar ring. Perhaps no more. My guess now is that there were only a few thousand post-humans when the holocaust hit them.”

“Then what were all those machines and devices we saw coming up?” asked Daeman. He didn’t really care, but he was trying to take his mind off his empty stomach.

“Particle accelerators of some sort,” said the old woman. “The posts were obsessed with time travel. Those thousands of big accelerators produced thousands of tiny wormholes, which they tweaked into stable wormholes—those were the swirling masses you saw at the end of most of the accelerators.”

“And the giant mirrors?” said Harman.

“Casimir Effect,” said Savi, “reflecting negative energy into the wormholes to keep them from imploding into black holes. If the wormholes were stable, the posts could have traveled through them to any place in space-time where they could position the other end of the wormhole.”

“Other solar systems?” asked Harman.

“I don’t think so. I don’t think the posts ever got around to sending probes out of the system. They seeded the outer system with intelligent, self-evolving robots long before I was born—the posts needed asteroids for building materials—but no starships, robot or otherwise.”

“Where were they going then with these wormholes?” said Harman.

Savi shrugged. “I think it was the quantum work that . . .”

“God damn it!” shouted Daeman. He’d listened to this meaningless drivel long enough. “I’m hungry! I want some food!”

“Wait,” said Harman. “I see something.” He pointed up and ahead of their direction of travel.

“It’s the firmary,” said Savi.

She was right. They’d swum-kicked another exhausting half mile through the underwater light of the dead asteroid city, ignoring the floating gray mummies of the dead post-humans they’d encountered, until they could clearly see the rectangle of clear plastic three hundred feet or so up one of the glowing walls. Inside, stretching for hundreds of yards, were row upon row of familiar healing tanks filled with naked old-style human beings, busy servitors—Daeman almost wept at the familiar sight—and other shapes moving to and fro in the bright hospital light within the room.

“Wait,” gasped Daeman. They’d been swimming and kicking through the thin, toxic air close to the ground, finding stanchions, terraces, dead trees, and other solid objects from which to kick off, but Daeman was exhausted. He’d never worked this hard.

Although visibly impatient to fly her way up to the glowing infirmary, Savi doubled back and floated near the panting Daeman. Harman looked up at the clear-walled room with something like hunger in his eyes.

Savi handed Daeman her bottle and he finished the last of the water without hesitation or asking permission. He was dehydrated and worn out.

“I promised Ada that I’d take her with us,” Harman said softly.

Both Daeman and the old Jew looked at him.

“I was sure we’d be in a spaceship,” said Harman with an embarrassed shrug. “I promised her I’d stop at Ardis Hall and pick her up.”

“She was angry at you anyway,” said Daeman between gasps for air. The osmosis mask never seemed to supply all the oxygen he needed.

“Yes,” said Harman.

Savi pushed aside a chewed gray corpse that floated out of the kelp, its frozen white eyes seeming to stare at them in reproach. “I doubt very much if Ada would be all that thankful to be here right now,” she said. She pointed up at the infirmary. “But you should be, Harman. This was your goal, wasn’t it? To get to the infirmary and negotiate a few more years?”

“Something like that,” said Harman.

She nodded toward the corpse. “It doesn’t look like it’s the posts you’ll be negotiating with.”

“Do you think the firmary is automated?” asked Harman. “That it’s just the servitors who’ve been keeping it running, faxing us up, repairing us for our allotted five Twenties, and then faxing us back to our dull little lives these past few centuries?”

“Why don’t we go up and find out?” said the old woman.

They got into the glowing, glass-sided rectangle through a white square of semipermeable wall just like the one at the airlock.

It was the firmary. It not only had light and air, it somehow had one-tenth Earth gravity. Daeman fell on his hands and knees coming through the wall, unable to adapt so quickly to the light but persistent tug of gravity. The sudden change, plus the welcome sight of the oh-so-familiar servitors, plus his terror in being back in the firmary so soon after the allosaurus episode, made his legs too weak for him to stand even in the swimming-pool g-field.

Savi and Harman walked from tank to tank. Savi had slipped her osmosis mask down and tested the air. “Thin, but there’s a terrible stench,” she said, her voice sounding strange and high-pitched. “They must need air for something here, but it’s too foul to breathe. Keep your masks on.”

Daeman needed no more prompting; he kept the mask in place.

The servitors ignored them, tending to various virtual control panels. Clear pipelines and tubes showed green and red fluid flowing to and from the tanks. Harman stared in each ten-foot-high holding tank. The human bodies in each were, for the most part, almost perfect, but unformed, the flesh too slick, the skulls and groin areas hairless, the eyes white. Only a few of the floating forms were nearly complete, and on these, eyes with color and torpid intelligence blinked out at them.

Daeman walked behind the other two, staying farther away from the tanks. He looked at these proto-humans, remembered his hazy images from his tank time only days earlier, and he shuddered again, backing away from the tanks until he bumped into a counter. A servitor floated around him, ignoring him.

“They’re evidently not programmed to deal with humans outside the tanks,” Savi said. “Although if you interfered with their work enough, they’d probably do something to get you out of the way.”

Suddenly a green light blinked on one of the vats holding a fully rebuilt body—a young woman, with blue eyes and red hair on her head and groin—and the fluid in the tank began bubbling wildly. A second later the body was gone. A few seconds after that, another body materialized in the tank—this one a pale man with staring dead eyes, and a wound on his forehead.

“They have a faxportal in each tank!” cried Daeman. Then he realized, of course they must. That’s how their bodies were brought up here each Twenty, or after each serious injury. Or death. “We could use these faxnodes,” he said.

“You might be able to,” said Savi, her face close to one of the tanks. “Or perhaps not. The fax is coded for the body in the tank. The faxing machinery might not recognize your codes and might just . . . flush you.”

Colored fluids flowed into the tank with the new corpse. Clusters of tiny blue worms appeared from an aperture, swam to the dead man, and burrowed into his battered skull and into his bloated, white flesh.

“Still want your extra tank time?” Savi asked Harman.

Harman only rubbed his chin and squinted down the multiple rows of glowing tanks. Suddenly he pointed. “Holy Christ,” he said.

The three approached slowly, half walking, half floating in the low but no longer negligible gravity. Daeman simply did not believe what he was seeing.

A third of the tanks at this end were filled with fluid but empty of human bodies. But there were bodies—parts of bodies—on every available surface here: the floor, the tables, the tops of servitor consoles, on top of disabled servitors themselves. At first glance, Daeman thought—hoped—that these were more mummified remains of the posts, as horrible as that was, but these were no mummies. Nor were they the remains of post-humans.

The firmary was something’s smorgasbord.

Lying on the long table ahead of them were human body parts—white, pink, red, moist, bloody, fresh. A dozen forms on that table, male and female, seemingly still wet from the tanks, lay eviscerated—organs scooped out, meat gnawed off bloody ribs. A human head lay under the table, blue eyes staring up in what might have been a second of shock as something or someone ate the body to which it had been attached. A small pile of hands lay in front of a tall-backed swivel chair turned away from the table.

Before any of them could speak to each other on the commline, the chair swiveled around. For a second, Daeman thought it was another human body propped up in the chair, but this one was greenish, intact, and breathing. Yellow eyes blinked. Impossibly long forearms and clawed fingers unfolded. A lizardy tongue flicked out over long teeth.

“Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as theyself,” said what Daeman realized had to be the real Caliban. “Thou thoughtest wrong.”

Savi and Harman grabbed Daeman as they kick-flew their way up the length of the firmary, Daeman screaming into the comm the same way he’d screamed on the way up in the chair. They hit the white wall dead on, passed through it without pause—feeling the thermskins clutch them tighter as they hit the freezing near-vacuum outside the firmary—and then kicked strongly off the clear wall as they dove toward the ground three hundred feet below.

Savi and Harman released Daeman’s arms as they paused on a platform sixty feet above the city floor. He had time to notice the floating mummies all around, bits of their throats and bellies bitten away with the same bite radius as the humans inside the firmary, realized that he was about to vomit into his breathing mask, and then the two on either side of him found something solid to kick from and swam toward the darkness ahead.

Daeman tugged up his mask in desperation and vomited into near-vacuum and stinking, cold air. He felt his eardrums bursting and his eyes swelling, but he tugged the mask back in place—smelling his own vomit and fear—and kicked off after Savi and Harman. He didn’t want to run. He just wanted to curl up, float in a tight ball, and throw up again. But even Daeman realized that he didn’t have that choice. Flailing wildly, looking over his shoulder at the glow of the firmary, Daeman swam and ran and kicked for his life.

Caliban caught them in the darkest corner of the city, where the wild-kelp beds swayed to the coriolis of the slowly turning asteroid. All of the glass walls of the city here were clear, showing them the cloud-whitened earth floating by for several minutes and then several minutes of darkness broken only by the cold stars. It was in the darkness that Caliban came.

The three huddled together in the darkness there.

“Did you see him come out of the firmary?” gasped Savi.

“No.”

“I didn’t see anything after we ran,” gasped Harman.

“Was it a calibani?” gasped Daeman, realizing that he was weeping, not caring that he was. He asked the question with his last reservoir of hope.

“No,” said Savi over the comm, her tone dashing Daeman’s last hopes. “It was Caliban himself.”

“Those bodies . . .” began Harman. “Fifth Twenties?”

“It looked like younger ones, too,” whispered Savi. She had the black gun in her hand and was swiveling, peering into the darkness between the strands of swaying kelp.

“Maybe the thing used to harvest just the Fifth Twenties,” whispered Harman over the comm. “But it’s gotten bolder. Impatient. Hungrier.”

“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” hissed Daeman. It was the oldest invocation known to humankind, even if they didn’t know what it meant. His teeth were chattering

“Still hungry?” asked Savi. Perhaps she was attempting to calm Daeman down with some dark approximation of humor. “I’m not,” she said.

“I am,” said Caliban over their radio frequencies. The monster floated out of the kelp, cast his net over the three of them, batted the gun out of Savi’s hand, and gathered them in like fish.