Ilium

51 The Equatorial Ring

Prospero sat there in a long, royal-blue robe covered with brightly colored embroidery showing galaxies, suns, comets, and planets. He held a carved staff in one age-motttled right hand and there was a foot-thick book under the palm of his left hand. The carved chair with the broad armrests was not quite a throne, but close enough to impart a sense of magisterial authority reinforced by the magus’s cool stare. The man was mostly bald, but a mane of vestigial white hair poured back over his ears and fell in curls to the blue of his robe. The once-grand head was now perched on an old man’s withered neck, but the face was iron-firm with character, showing coolly indifferent if not actively cruel little eyes, a bold beak of a nose, a forceful declaration of a chin not yet lost in jowls or wattles, and a sorcerer’s thin lips turned up in ancient habits of irony. He was, of course, a hologram.

Daeman had watched Harman burst through the semipermeable membrane and fall to the floor under the unexpected gravity, just as Daeman had done. Then, seeing Daeman sitting in a comfortable chair with his osmosis mask off, Harman had peeled his own mask off, breathed in the fresh air deeply, and then staggered to the other empty chair.

“It’s only one-third Earth gravity,” said Prospero, “but it must seem like Jupiter after a month in near zero-g.”

Neither Harman nor Daeman replied.

The room was circular, about fifteen meters across, and essentially a glassed-in dome from the floor up. Daeman hadn’t seen it while they were approaching the crystal city on the chairs because they’d come in at the asteroid’s south pole and this was the north pole, but he imagined it must look like a long, slender metal stalk with this glowing mushroom at its end. The only light in the room came from the soft glow of a circular virtual control console in the center of the space, behind Prospero, and the earthlight and moonlight and starlight flooding in above and around them. It was bright enough that Daeman could see the careful workings on the magus’s embroidered robe and the hand-oiled carvings on his staff.

“You’re Prospero,” said Harman, his chest rising and falling quickly under the blue thermskin. The fresh air in the room had been a shock to Daeman as well. It was like breathing a rich, thick wine.

Prospero nodded.

“But you’re not real,” continued Harman. The man looked solid. The robe fell in beautiful but dynamic folds and wrinkles in the one-third gravity.

Prospero shrugged. “This is true. I’m nothing more than a recorded echo of a shadow of a shade. But I can see you, hear you, talk with you, and sympathize with your travails. It’s more than some real beings are capable of doing.”

Daeman looked over his shoulder. He was holding the black gun loosely in his lap.

“Will Caliban come here?”

“No,” said Prospero. “My former servant fears me. Fears this speaking memory of me. If the blue-eyed hag who bore him was here on this isle, that damned quantum-witch Sycorax, she’d be on you here in a minute, but Caliban fears me.”

“Prospero,” said Daeman, “we need to get off this rock. Back to Earth. Alive. Can you help us?”

The old man leaned his staff against his chair and held up both mottled hands. “Perhaps.”

“Just perhaps?” said Daeman.

Prospero nodded. “As an echo of a recorded shadow, I can do nothing. But I can give you information. You can act if you will, and if you have the will. Few of your kind do anymore.”

“How do we get out of here?” asked Harman.

Prospero passed his hand over the book and a hologram rose above the center of the circular console behind him. It was the asteroid and the crystal city as seen from some miles out in space, the gold-glassed towers turning slowly beneath the vantage point as the asteroid turned on its axis. Daeman glanced at the bold blue and white of the Earth coming into view outside the windows and realized that the image was synchronized—it was a real-time view from somewhere out there.

“There!” cried Harman, pointing. He tried to jump out of his chair, but the gravity made him stagger and grab the armrest for support. “There,” he said again.

Daeman saw it. On an outside slab of terrace five or six hundred feet up that first tall tower where they’d entered, its metal shell glowing now in Earthlight—a sonie. “We searched the city,” said Daeman. “We never thought that there might be a vehicle parked outside the city.”

“It looks like the sonie we took to Jerusalem,” said Harman, leaning forward the better to see the holographic display.

“It is the same sonie,” said Prospero. He moved his palm again and the image disappeared.

“No,” said Daeman. “Savi told us that sonies couldn’t fly to the orbital rings.”

“She didn’t know they could,” said the old magus. “Ariel freed it from the voynixes’ stones and programmed it to come up here.”

“Ariel?” Daeman stupidly repeated. He was so, so hungry, and so very tired. He sorted through his memory. “Ariel? The avatar of the biosphere below?”

“Something like that,” said Prospero with a smile. “Savi never really met Ariel. All their communications were through the allnet. The old woman always thought that Ariel’s persona was male, when most frequently the sprite chooses a female avatar.”

Who gives a shit? thought Daeman. Aloud, he said, “Can we take the sonie back to Earth?”

“I would think so,” said Prospero. “I think Ariel sent it pre-programmed to return the three of you to Ardis Hall. Another deus ex machina. I’m not happy with the machine being here.”

“Why not?” said Harman, but then he nodded. “Caliban.”

“Yes,” said Prospero. “Even my erstwhile goblin would grind his joints with dry convulsions and shorten up his sinews with aged cramps should he try hard vacuum without a suit or thermskin. But he forgot, and bit through poor Savi’s.”

“There were two more suits he could have had the last month,” said Daeman, his voice so low it fell below the whisper of ventilation. The room left the curve-slice of Earth above and rotated into starlight. There was a half-moon rising above Prospero.

“And he would have, but Caliban is no god,” said the magus. “Savi did not kill the beast with her full salvo of flechettes to its chest, but she hurt it sore. Caliban has been bleeding and recovering, gone deep sometimes to his deepest grotto where he packs the wounds with mud muck and drinks lizard blood for strength.”

“We’ve been drinking and eating the same,” said Daeman.

“Yes,” said Prospero, showing an old man’s yellow smile. “But you don’t enjoy it.”

“How do we get to the sonie?” asked Harman. “And do you have food in here?”

“No, to your second question,” said Prospero. “No one but Caliban has eaten here on this stony isle for the last five hundred years. But yes to your first. There is a membrane on the tower glass high up that will let you pass out to the launch terrace. Your suits may . . . may . . . protect you long enough to charge up the sonie and activate its guidance program. Do you remember how to fly the thing?”

“I think . . . I watched Savi . . . I mean . . .” stammered Harman. He shook his head as if brushing away cobwebs. His eyes looked as weary as Daeman felt. “We’ll have to. We will.”

“You’ll have to pass the firmary and Caliban again to reach the far tower,” said Prospero. The old man’s little eyes moved from Harman to Daeman and the gaze was judicial. “Do you have anything else you must do before you flee this place?”

“No,” said Harman.

“Yes,” said Daeman. He managed to stand and stagger over to the curved window-wall. The reflection there was thin, gaunt, and bearded, but there was something new in its eyes. “We have to destroy the firmary,” he said. “We have to destroy this whole damned place.”