Ilium (20 page)

“I don’t know,” said Harman.

The sonie leveled off a mere hundred feet above the water. “Look,” called Hannah. She raised a hand from its grip to point ahead of them.

Suddenly the back of something huge, alive, barnacled with age, flesh corrugated-tough, broke the cold sea, its mammal heat radiating like throbbing blood in their night-vision-enhanced sight. A spout of water shot high toward them and Harman smelled fish on the fresh air that the forcefield allowed through.

“What . . .” began Daeman.

“I think it’s called . . . a whale, I think that’s how to pronounce it . . . but I thought it was extinct millennia ago,” said Harman.

“Maybe the post-humans brought it back,” Ada said over their suit intercoms.

“Maybe.”

They hurtled farther out to sea, always east-northeast, and after a few more minutes of the sonie holding its altitude, the four passengers began relaxing a bit, adapting, as humans have done since time immemorial, to a strange new situation. Harman had rolled on his side and was looking up at the brilliant stars becoming visible between scattered clouds when Ada startled him by shouting, “Look! Ahead!”

A large iceberg had become visible over the dark horizon and the sonie was hurtling straight toward it. The machine had flown over or past other icebergs, but none this broad—it stretched sideways for miles like a gleaming blue-white wall in their night vision—and none this tall—it was apparent that the top of the monstrous thing was higher than their current altitude.

“What can we do?” asked Ada.

Harman shook his head. He had no idea how fast the sonie was going—none of them had ever traveled faster than a voynix-pulled droshky—but it was fast enough, he knew, that the impact would destroy them.

“Do you have other controls on your handgrip?” asked Hannah. Her voice was strangely calm.

“No,” said Harman.

“We could jump,” said Daeman from behind and to the left of Harman. The sonie tilted a bit as Daeman got to his knees and elbows, his head just within the forcefield bubble.

“No,” said Harman, putting the force of command in the syllable. “You wouldn’t last thirty seconds in that sea, even if you survived the fall . . . which you wouldn’t. Get down.”

Daeman dropped to his belly again.

The sonie did not slow or change course. The face of the iceberg—Harman guessed that the thing was at least two miles across—rushed at them and grew taller. Harman estimated that it rose at least three hundred feet above the water. They would strike it two-thirds of the way down its cold face.

“There’s nothing we can do?” said Ada, making it more a statement than a question.

Harman pulled his hood off and looked at her. The cold air was not so bad within their forcefield cockpit. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He reached across with his right hand to take her left hand. She swept her thermskin hood off to show him her eyes. She and Harman interlaced fingers for a few seconds.

A few hundred yards before fiery collision, the sonie slowed again and gained altitude. It whisked over the top edge of the iceberg with ten feet to spare and banked to the right until it was flying south above the icy surface. It slowed more, hovered, and settled onto the surface, snow hissing under its heated underside.

Harman and the others lay where they were for a silent moment, hanging on to the handgrips, not sharing their thoughts.

The forecefield bubble disappeared and suddenly the terrible cold and wind burned at Harman’s face. He pulled his hood down in a hurry, glancing at Ada as she did the same.

“We should get off this thing before it decides to take us somewhere else,” Hannah said softly on the comm.

They scrambled off. The wind shoved them off balance, relented, shoved at them again. Spindrift pelted their outer clothing and hoods.

“What now?” whispered Ada.

As if in answer, a double row of red infrared beacons winked on, outlining a ten-foot-wide path from the sonie for a hundred yards to . . . nothing.

They walked together, holding each other upright in the wind. If the beacon lights had not burned so brightly in their night vision, they would have turned their backs to the wind and been lost in seconds—lost until they stepped off the edge of the iceberg somewhere to their right.

The path ended in a hole in the iceberg’s surface. Steps had been hacked out of the ice and disappeared toward another red glow far below.

“Shall we?” said Hannah.

“What choice do we have?” asked Daeman.

The steps were slippery under their street boots, but some sort of climbing rope had been attached to the right wall with metal spikes and loops, and the four clung to the line while descending. Harman had counted forty steps when the stairway ended in a wall of ice. No, the steps continued to their right and down—fifty steps this time—then left and down again for fifty more, the whole descent illuminated by spaced infrared cold-flares set into the ice.

At the bottom of the steps, a corridor led deep into the iceberg, the way illuminated now by green and blue cold-flares as well as red. At places they came to junctions, but one choice was always dark, the other illuminated. Once they climbed along a slowly ascending corridor; another time they descended for a hundred feet or more. The bends and junctions and choices became too labyrinthine to keep track.

“Someone’s expecting us,” whispered Hannah.

“I’m counting on it,” said Ada.

They emerged into a broad hall, perhaps a hundred feet across at the widest, the ice ceiling thirty feet above, various other entrances dotting the walls and connected by ice stairways, the floor graded to different levels. Heaters on pedestrals glowed orange and there were a variety of light sources spiked into the walls, floors, and ceilings. On one of the low platforms lay what looked to be furry animal hides, cushions, and a low table with bowls of food and pitchers and goblets of drink. The four gathered around the table but looked dubiously at its contents.

“It’s all right,” said a woman’s voice behind them. “It’s not poisoned.”

She had emerged from a high ice door near the platform and now she descended a zigzag of stairs toward them. Harman had time to notice the woman’s hair—gray-white, an almost unheard-of choice except for a few eccentrics—and her face: lined with wrinkles just as Daeman had said. This woman was
old
in a way none of them—except for Daeman at the last Burning Man—had ever seen, and the effect unsettled even Harman with his ninety and nine years.

Other than the obvious age, the woman was attractive enough. Her stride was strong and she wore a commonplace blue tunic top, cord trousers, and solid boots, the one dash of eccentricity being the red wool cape over her shoulders. The cape’s cut was complicated, never quite resolving itself into simple folds. As she stepped onto the platform a few feet from them, Harman noticed the dark metal object in her right hand.

As if noticing the device for the first time herself, she raised it toward them. “Do any of you know what this is?”

“No,” said Daeman, Ada, and Hannah in a soft chorus.

“Yes,” said Harman. “It’s some sort of Lost Age weapon.”

The other three looked at him. They had seen weapons in the turin-cloth drama—swords, spears, shields, bows and arrows—but nothing so machinelike as this blunt black thing.

“Correct,” said the woman. “This is called a gun and it only does one thing—it kills.”

Daeman took a step toward the old woman. “Are you going to kill us? Did you bring us all this way to kill us?”

The old woman smiled and set the weapon on the table, next to a bowl of oranges. “Hello, Daeman,” she said. “It’s nice to see you again, although I’m not sure you’d remember me from our last meeting. You were in a pretty advanced state of inebriation.”

“I remember you, Savi,” said Daeman, his tone cool.

“And all of you,” continued the old woman, “Hannah, Ada, Harman . . . welcome. You were very persistent in following clues, Harman.” She sat on the furs, gestured, and one after the other, the four sat around the low table with her. Savi picked up an orange, offered it, and began peeling it with a sharp fingernail when the others declined.

“We haven’t met,” said Harman. “How do you know my name . . . our names?”

“You’ve left quite a wake behind you—what is your people’s honorific these days? Harman
Uhr
.”

“Wake?”

“Hiking far from faxnodes so the voynix have to follow you. Learning to read. Seeking out the few remaining libraries in the world . . . including Ada
Uhr
’s.” She nodded in Ada’s direction and the young woman nodded in return.

“How do you know that voynix followed me anywhere?” asked Harman.

“The voynix monitor anyone unusual,” said Savi. She separated the orange into segments, put two segments on four linen cloths, and offered them around. All four accepted them this time. “I monitor
you,
” she finished, looking at Harman.

“Why?” Harman looked at the slices and set the cloth down on the table. “Why spy on me? And how?”

“Two different questions, my young friend.”

Harman had to smile at this. No one who knew him had called him young in a very long time. “Then answer the first,” he said. “Why spy on me?”

Savi finished the second slice of orange and licked her fingers. Harman noticed Ada studying the older woman with fascination, looking at her wrinkled fingers and age-mottled hands. If Savi noticed the inspection, she ignored it. “Harman . . . may I drop the
Uhr
?” She did not wait for an answer, but went on, “Harman, right now you are the only human being on Earth, out of a population of more than three hundred thousand souls . . . the only human being other than
me
. . . who can read a written language. Or who wants to.”

“But . . .” began Harman.

“Three hundred thousand people?” interrupted Hannah. “There are a million of us. There have
always
been a million of us.”

Savi smiled but shook her head. “My dear, who told you that there a million living human beings on the Earth today?”

“Why . . . no one . . . I mean, everyone knows . . .”

“Precisely,” said Savi. “Everyone knows. But there is no mechanism to count the population.”

“But when someone ascends to the rings . . .” continued Hannah, showing her confusion.

“Another child is allowed to be born,” finished Savi. “Yes. So I have noticed during the last millennium or so. But there is no population of a million of you. Far fewer.”

“Why would the posts lie to us?” asked Daeman.

Savi raised one eyebrow. “The posts. Ah, yes . . . the posts. Have you spoken to a post-human recently, Daeman
Uhr
?”

Daeman must have considered that question rhetorical; he did not answer.

“I have spoken to post-humans,” Savi said quietly.

This carried the others into silence. They waited silently. Such an idea was—at least to Harman and Ada—literally breathtaking.

“But that was a long time ago,” the old woman said, speaking so softly that the other leaned closer to hear. “A
long,
long time ago. Before the final fax.” Her eyes, a startling gray-blue a second before, now looked clouded, distracted.

Harman shook his head. “I was the one who heard the story about you—the Wandering Jew, the last of your Lost Age—but I don’t understand. How can you live beyond your Fifth Twenty?”

Ada blinked at Harman’s rudeness, but Savi did not seem to mind. “First of all, this hundred-year life span is a relatively recent addition to humankind, my dears. It is something the posts came up with only after the final fax. Only after they botched everything—our future, the Earth’s future—in that disastrous final fax. Only centuries after my nine thousand one hundred and thirteen post-rubicon fellow humans were faxed into the neutrino stream—never to be returned,
although the posts promised them they would be
—only after that . . . genocide . . . did your precious post-humans rebuild the core population of your ancestors and come up with this idea of one hundred years and a theoretical herd population of a million people . . .”

Savi stopped and took a breath. She was obviously agitated. She took another breath and gestured to the pitchers on the table. “I have tea here, if you are interested. Or a very strong wine. I am going to take some wine.” She did so, pouring with slightly shaking hands. She gestured to their goblets. Daeman shook his head. Hannah and Ada took tea. Harman accepted a goblet of red wine.

“Harman,” she began again, more composed now, “you asked two questions before I digressed from my answer. First, why have I noticed you. Second, how have I survived for so long.

“The answer to your first question is that I am interested in what the voynix are interested in and alarmed by, and they are interested in and alarmed by your behavior over the past decades . . .”

“But why would the voynix notice or care about me . . . “ began Harman.

Savi held up one finger. “To your second question, I can say that I stay alive over these past centuries by sleeping much of the time and by hiding when I am awake. When I move, it is either by sonie—you enjoyed a ride in one today—or through walking, hiking between the faxnode pavilions.”

“I don’t understand,” said Ada. “How can you hike between faxnodes?”

Savi stood. The others stood with her. “I understand it’s been a busy day for you, my young friends, but much lies ahead if you choose to follow me. If not, the sonie will return you to the nearest faxnode pavilion . . . in what used to be Africa, I believe. It is your choice.” She looked at Daeman. “Each of you must choose.”

Hannah drank the last of her tea and set the goblet down. “And what are you going to show us if we follow you, Savi
Uhr
?”

“Many things, my child. But first of all, I will show you how to fly and to visit places you’ve never heard of . . . places you’ve never dreamt of.”

The four looked at each other. Harman and Ada nodded to each other, agreeing that they would follow the woman. Hannah said, “Yes, count me in.”

Daeman seemed to be pondering the choice for a silent moment. Then he said, “I’ll go. But before I go, I want some of that strong wine after all.”