Ilium (19 page)

The night sky was alive with curtains of shimmering, dancing light—bars of blues and yellows and dancing reds.

“What is it?” whispered Ada.

“I don’t know,” Harman responded, also whispering. The light continued to writhe across the uncloudy portions of the sky. Harman lifted off his thermskin cowl. “My God, it’s almost as brilliant without the night-vision. I think I saw something like this once decades ago when I was . . .”

“Servitors,” interrupted Daeman, “what is this light?”

“A form of atmospheric phenomenon associated with charged particles from the sun interacting with Earth’s electromagnetic field,” came the voice from the distant machine. “We no longer have the particulars of the scientific explanation, but it goes under different names, including . . .”

“All right,” said Harman. “That’s enough . . . hey.” He had pulled on his cowl again and was looking at the rock slab in front of them.

There were complex scratchings on the rock. They did not look as if they had been made by the wind or other natural causes.

“What is it?” asked Ada. “It doesn’t look like the symbols in the books.”

“No,” agreed Harman.

“Something from the Burning Man?” said Hannah.

“I don’t remember scratches on the rock near the beer tent,” said Daeman. “But maybe the servitors scratched up the surface moving some of the stuff out after the celebration.”

“Perhaps,” said Harman.

“Should we keep hunting around here?” asked Ada. “Try to find some sign that this woman you’re after was here? Or even that the Burning Man was here? Maybe there are some ashes left.”

“In this wind?” laughed Daeman. “After a year and a half?”

“A pit,” said Ada. “A campfire. We could . . .”

“No,” said Harman. “We’re not going to find anything here. Let’s fax somewhere warm and get some lunch.”

Ada turned her yellow head to look at Harman, but she said nothing.

The two servitors had floated toward them and the voynix loomed just behind them.

“We’re going,” Harman told the closer servitor. “You can use your flashlight beams to illuminate our way back to the fax pavilion.”

It was just after midday in Ulanbat and the usual hundred or so guests were milling at Tobi’s ongoing Second Twenty party on the seventy-ninth floor of the Circles to Heaven. The hanging gardens rustled and sighed from the breeze blowing off the red desert. Daeman was greeted by a host of young men and women who had not noticed his absence over the past few days, but he followed Harman, Hannah, and Ada as they found hot finger food at the long banquet table and had cold wine poured by a servitor. Harman led them away from the crowd to a stone table near the low wall at the edge of the circle. Eight hundred feet below, camel caravans driven by servitors and followed by voynix padded in on the hard-packed Gobi Highway.

“What is it?” said Ada as they sat in the garden shade and ate. “I know something happened back there.”

Harman started to speak, paused, and waited for a servitor to float past. “Do you ever wonder,” he asked, “if that utility servitor is the same one you just saw somewhere else? They all look alike.”

“That’s absurd,” said Daeman. Between bites on a chicken leg, he was licking his fingers and sipping his chilled wine.

“Perhaps,” said Harman.

“What did you see back there in the dark?” asked Hannah. “Those scratches on the rock?”

“They were numbers,” said Harman.

Daeman laughed. “No they
weren’t
. I know numbers. We all know numbers. Those weren’t numbers.”

“They were numbers written out in words.”

“It didn’t look like the jiggles in books,” said Ada. “Words.”

“No,” said Harman. “I think was the kind of writing people used to do by hand. The words were all loopy and connected and worn down some by the wind—I suspect that they were written there way back at the last Burning Man—but I could read them.”

“Words,” laughed Daeman. “A minute ago you said they were numbers.”

“What did they say?” asked Hannah.

Harman looked around him again. “Eight-eight-four-nine,” he said softly.

Ada shook her head. “It sounds like a faxnode code, but it’s way too high. I’ve never heard of a code that started with two eights.”

“There aren’t any,” said Daeman.

Harman shrugged. “Maybe. But when we’re done here, I’m going to try it out at the core node here.”

Ada looked out at the distant horizon. The rings were visible above them, two milky strings crossing in a pale blue sky. “Is that why you kept the four thermskins rather than throwing them in the disposal bin as the servitors told us to do?”

“I didn’t know you noticed that I did,” said Harman. He grinned and drank wine. “I tried to do it on the sly. I guess I’m not very good at secrets. At least the servitors had already faxed away.”

As if on cue, a servitor floated over to replenish their drinks. The little spherical machine floated beyond the wall—eight hundred feet above the red-yellow ground—as its dainty, white-gloved hands poured wine into their glasses.

If Harman hadn’t insisted they change into their thermskins and wear them under their clothes before faxing, they might have died.

“Good God,” cried Daeman, “where are we? What’s going on?”

There was no faxnode pavilion. Code 8849 had brought them straight into darkness and chaos. Wind howled. There was ice underfoot. The four crashed into sharp things with every step they took in the screaming blackness. Even the faxportal had disappeared behind them.

“Ada!” called Harman. “The light!” Their hoods provided night vision, but none of them had their hoods up at the moment and there seemed to be no ambient light to magnify in this absolute blackness.

“I’m trying to get it on . . . there!” The small flashlight she’d borrowed from Tobi poured a thin beam into the night, illuminating an open door rimmed with frost, icicles three feet long, frozen waves of ice under foot. Ada swung the light and three thermskinned faces stared back at her, surprise clearly visible on each face.

“There’s no pavilion,” Harman said aloud.

“Every faxnode has a pavilion,” said Daeman. “There can’t be a portal without a node pavilion. Right?”

“Not in the old days,” said Harman. “There were thousands of private nodes.”

“What’s he talking about?” shouted Daeman. “Let’s get
out
of here!”

Ada had swung the light back into the space they’d faxed into. There was no portal. They were in a small room with shelves and counters and walls, all covered with ice. Unlike all fax pavilions, there was no faxnode code-plate pedestal in the center of the room. And that meant there was no way out, no way back. A million flakes of ice danced in the flashlight beam. Beyond the walls, the wind howled.

“Daeman, what you said earlier seems to be true now,” said Harman.

“What? What did I say earlier?”

“That we’re trapped. Trapped like rats.”

Daeman blinked and the flashlight beam moved on to the frosted walls. The wind howled more loudly.

“It sounds like the wind in the Dry Valley,” said Hannah. “But there were no buildings there. Were there?”

“I don’t think so,” said Harman. “But I suspect we’re still in Antarctica.”

“
Where?”
said Daeman, his teeth chattering. “What’s ant . . . antattica?”

“The cold place we were at this morning,” said Ada. She stepped through the doorway, leaving the others in darkness for a moment. They scrambled to catch up and huddled behind her like goslings. “There’s a hallway here,” said Ada. “Watch your step. The floor is under a foot of ice and snow.”

The frozen hallway led to a frozen kitchen, the frozen kitchen opened onto a frozen living room with overturned couches drifted with snow. Ada ran her flashlight beam across a wall of windows triple-glazed with ice.

“I think I know where we are,” whispered Harman.

“Never mind that,” said Hannah. “How do we get
out
?”

“Wait,” said Ada, lowering the flashlight beam to the icy floor so that everyone’s faces were illuminated by the bounce light from below. “I want to know where you think we are.”

“According to the story I’ve heard, the woman I’m hunting for—the Wandering Jew—had a home, a domi, on Mount Erberus, a volcano in Antarctica.”

“In the Dry Valley?” asked Daeman. The young man kept glancing over his shoulders at the darkness behind him. “God, I’m
freezing
.”

Hannah moved so quickly over the ice toward Daeman that he staggered back and almost slipped. “Silly, you have to put your thermskin hood on,” she said. “We all do. We’re going to get frostbite if we don’t. Plus, we’re losing a lot of body heat through our scalp right now.” She pulled the green cowl of the thermskin free of his shirt and tugged the hood into place over his head.

Everyone hurried to follow suit.

“That’s better,” said Harman. “I can see now. And hear better as well—the suit earphones damp out the wind howl.”

“You were saying before that this woman had a place on a volcano—near the Dry Valley? Close enough for us to walk to the fax pavilion there?”

Harman gestured helplessly. “I don’t know. I’d wondered if that’s how she had shown up at the Burning Man—just walked there—but I don’t know the geography. It might be one mile or a thousand miles from here.”

Daeman looked at the black, iced windows where the wind flexed the shatterproof panes. “I’m not going out there,” he said flatly. “Not for any reason.”

“For once I agree with Daeman,” said Hannah.

“I don’t understand any of this,” said Ada. “You said that this woman lived here long ago—lifetimes ago—centuries and centuries. How could she . . .”

“I don’t know,” said Harman. He borrowed the flashlight from Ada and started walking down the next hallway. He was stopped by what looked to be white bars. While the others watched, he went back into the drifted living room, picked up the heaviest piece of furniture he could pry free of the ice—a heavy table, the legs snapping off as he tugged it free—and walked back to smash the icicles one after the other, battering a path down the snow-filled hallway.

“Where are you going?” called Daeman. “What good is it going to do to go down there. No one’s been there for a million years. We’re just going to freeze when . . .”

Harman kicked open a door at the end of the hallway. Light poured out. So did heat. The other three moved as quickly as they could across the treacherous surface to join him.

Much like the room they had faxed into, this space was windowless and about twenty feet square. But unlike the other room, this one was warm, lighted, and free of snow or ice. And unlike the other room, this one was almost filled with an oval metal machine about fifteen feet long. The thing was floating silently three feet off the concrete floor, and a forcefield shimmered like a glass canopy over its top surface. On that surface were six indentations with a soft black material lining them; each indentation was the length of a human body with two short grips or controllers near where the hands would be.

“It looks like someone was expecting two more of us,” whispered Hannah.

“What
is
it?” said Daeman.

“I think it’s a sonie . . . also called an AFV,” said Harman, his own voice hushed.

“
What?
” said Daeman. “What do those words mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Harman. “But people in the lost ages used to fly around in them.” He touched the forcefield; it parted like quicksilver under his fingers, flowed around his hand, swallowed his wrist.

“Careful!” said Ada, but Harman had already lowered himself first onto his knees and then onto his stomach, then prone and settling into the black material. His head and back rose just slightly above the curved upper surface of the machine.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Comfortable. And warm.”

That settled it for the others. Ada was the first to crawl onto the craft, stretching out on her stomach and grasping the two handlgrips. “Are these controls of some sort?”

“I have no idea,” said Harman as Hannah and Daeman crawled onto the disk and settled into the outer impressions, leaving the two rear-center depressions empty.

“You don’t know how to fly the thing?” asked Ada, a bit more shrilly this time. “From the books? From your reading?”

Harman just shook his head.

“Then what are we
doing
on it?” said Ada.

“Experimenting.” Harman twisted the top off his right handgrip. There was a single red button there. He pressed it.

The wall ahead of them disappeared as if it had been blown out into the antarctic night. Cold wind and flying snow swept around them in a blinding implosion, as if the air in the room had been sucked out and the storm pulled back in in its place.

Harman opened his mouth to say “Hang on!” but before he could speak, the sonie leaped out of the room at an impossible velocity, pressing the bottoms of their boots back against metal and making them each cling wildly to the handgrips.

The forcefield bubble over their heads kept them alive as the sonie, the AFV, the
thing,
flew out from the white volcano with its ice-crusted and shattered buildings clinging to its seaward side. The night-vision lenses in their thermskin hoods showed them the fir forest along the coast gone back to ice and death, the abandoned and drifted-over robotic equipment along the curve of a bay, and then the white sea—the frozen sea.

The sonie leveled off about a thousand feet above that frozen sea and hurtled out away from land.

Harman released one of the handgrips long enough to activate the direction finder on his palm. “Northeast,” he said to the others over their suit comms.

No one replied. Everyone was clinging and shaking too fiercely to comment on the direction the machine was headed while taking them to their deaths.

What Harman did not say aloud was that if the old maps he had studied were accurate, there was nothing out this direction for thousands of miles. Nothing.

Ten minutes of flight and the sonie began losing altitude. They had passed beyond the ice and now were flying over black water scattered with icebergs.

“What’s happening?” said Ada. She hated the quaver in her own voice. “Is this thing out of energy . . . fuel . . . whatever it uses?”