Ilium (4 page)

Klaxons sounded. Lights blinked in Mahnmut’s virtual vision. For a second he thought—
the kraken!
—but the kraken would never come to the surface or enter an open lead.

Mahnmut stored the sonnet and his notes, wiped the e-note from his squirt queue, and opened external sensors.

The Dark Lady
was five klicks away from Chaos Central and in the remote control region of the submarine pens. Mahnmut turned the ship over to Central and studied the ice cliffs ahead of him.

From the outside, Conamara Chaos Central looked like most of the rest of the surface of Europa—a jumble of pressure ridges thrusting ice cliffs up two or three hundred meters, the mass of ice blocking the maze of open leads and black lenticulae—but then the signs of habitation became visible: the black maw of the sub pens opening, the elevators on the cliff face moving, more windows visible on the face of the ice, navigation lights pulsing and blinking atop surface modules and habitation nodes and antennae, and—far above where the cliff ended against black sky—several interlunar shuttles storm-lashed to the landing pad there.

Spacecraft here at Chaos Central
. Very unusual. Even as Mahnmut finished the docking, set his ship’s functions on standby, and began separating himself from the submersible’s systems, he was thinking—
What the hell have they called me here for?

Docking completed, Mahnmut went through the trauma of limiting his senses and control to the awkward confines of his more or less humanoid body and left the ship, walking into blue-lighted ice and taking the high-speed elevator up to the habitation nodes so far above.

5

A meal for a dozen people at the table under the lantern-lit tree: venison and wild boar from the forest, trout from the river below, beef from the cattle herds pastured between Ardis and the farcaster pad, red and white wines from Ardis vineyards, fresh corn, squash, salad and peas from the garden, and caviar faxed in from somewhere or the other.

“Whose birthday is it and which Twenty?” asked Daeman as servitors passed food to the dozen diners at the long table.

“It’s my birthday, but not my Twenty,” replied the handsome, curly-haired man named Harman.

“Pardon me?” Daeman smiled but did not understand. He accepted some squash and passed the bowl to the lady next to him.

“Harman is celebrating his annual birthday,” said Ada from her place at the head of the table. Daeman was physically stirred by how beautiful she looked in her tan and black silk gown.

Daeman shook his head, still not understanding. Annual birthdays were not noted, much less celebrated. “So you’re not really celebrating a birth Twenty tonight,” he said to Harman, nodding at the floating house servitor to replenish his wineglass.

“But I
am
celebrating my birthday,” Harman repeated with a smile. “My ninety-ninth.”

Daeman froze in shock and then looked around quickly, realizing that it must be some kind of joke peculiar to this crowd of provincials—but certainly a joke in bad taste. One did not joke about one’s ninety-ninth year. Daeman smiled thinly and waited for the punch line.

“Harman means it,” Ada said lightly. The other guests were silent. Night birds called from the forest.

“I’m . . . sorry,” Daeman managed to say.

Harman shook his head. “I’m looking forward to the year. I have a lot of things to do.”

“Harman walked a hundred miles of the Atlantic Breach last year,” said Hannah, Ada’s young friend with the short hair.

Daeman was sure that he was being joked with now. “One can’t walk the Atlantic Breach.”

“But I did.” Harman was eating corn on the cob. “I only did a reconnaissance—just, as Hannah says, a hundred miles in and then back to the North American coast—but it certainly wasn’t difficult.”

Daeman smiled again to show that he was a good sport. “But how could you
get
to the Atlantic Breach, Harman
Uhr
? There are no faxnodes near it.” He had no idea where the Atlantic Breach
was,
or even what constituted North America, and he wasn’t quite sure about the location of the Atlantic Ocean, but he was certain that none of the 317 faxnodes were near the Breach. He had faxed through each of those nodes more than once and had never glimpsed the legendary Breach.

Harman put down the corn. “I walked, Daeman
Uhr
. From the North American eastern coast, the Breach runs directly along the fortieth parallel all the way to what the Lost Age humans called Europe—Spain was the last nation-state where the Breach comes ashore, I think. The ruins of the old city of Philadelphia—you might know it as Node 124, Loman
Uhr’s
estate—is just a few hours’ walk from the Breach. If I’d had any courage—and packed enough food—I could have hiked all the way to Spain.”

Daeman nodded and smiled and had absolutely no idea what this man was babbling about. First the obscenity of bragging of his ninety-ninth year, then all this talk of parallels and Lost Age cities and walking. No one walked more than a few hundred yards. Why should they? Everything of human interest lay near a faxnode and those few distant oddities—such as Ada’s Ardis—could be reached by carriole or droshky. Daeman knew Loman, of course—he had recently celebrated Ono’s Third Twenty at the extensive Loman estate—but all the rest of Harman’s soliloquy was gibberish. The man had obviously gone mad in his final days. Well, the final firmary fax and Ascension would soon take care of that.

Daeman looked at Ada, their hostess, in hopes that she would intervene to change the topic, but Ada was smiling as if agreeing with everything Harman had said. Daeman looked down the table for help, but the other guests had been listening politely—even with apparent interest—as if such babble were part of their regular provincial dining repartee.

“The trout is quite good, isn’t it?” he said to the woman on his left. “Was yours good?”

A woman across the table, a heavyset redhead probably deep into her third Twenty, set her most prominent chin on her small fist and said to Harman, “What was it like? In the Breach, I mean?”

The curly-haired, deeply tanned man demurred, but others along the table—including the young blonde woman about whose trout Daeman had inquired and who had rudely ignored the query—all clamored for Harman to talk. He finally acquiesced with a graceful motion of his hand.

“If you’ve never seen the Breach, it’s a fascinating sight just from the shore. It’s about eighty yards wide—a cleft going east as far as one can see, becoming more and more narrow toward the horizon, until it seems just a slice of brightness inset along the line where ocean meets sky.

“Walking into it is . . . slightly strange. The sand along the beach is not wet where the Breach ends. No surf rolls back into it. At first, all of one’s attention is focused on one or the other of the edges—walking in to wading depth, you notice the abrupt shear of water, like a glass wall separating the walker from the curl and roll of tide. You have to touch the barrier—no one could resist. Spongy, invisible, very slightly yielding to heavy pressure, cool from the water on the other side, but impenetrable. You walk deeper on dry sand—over the centuries the sea bottom has felt only the moisture of rain, and so the sand and dirt are solid, the remaining sea creatures and plants there dried out, desiccated almost to the point of appearing fossilized.

“Within a dozen yards, the sheared walls of water on both sides rise far over your head. Shadows move within. You see small fish swimming near the barrier between air and sea, then the shadow of a shark, then the pale glow of jellied, floating things you can’t quite identify. Sometimes the sea creatures approach the Breach barrier, touch it with their cold heads, and then turn away quickly, as if alarmed. A mile or so out and the water is so far over your head that the sky above grows darker. A dozen or so miles out and the walls of water on either side rise more than a thousand feet above you. The stars come out in the slice of sky you can see, even in daylight.”

“No!” said a thin, sandy-haired man far down the table. Daeman remembered his name—Loes. “You’re joking.”

“No,” said Harman, “I’m not.” He smiled again. “I walked for about four days. Slept during the night. Turned back when I was out of food.”

“How did you know whether it was night or day?” asked Ada’s friend, the athletic young woman named Hannah.

“The sky is black and the stars are out in the daytime sky,” said Harman, “but the slices of ocean on either side hold the full band of light, from bright blue far above, to murky black along the bottom at the level of the Breach walkway.”

“Did you find anything exotic?” asked Ada.

“Some sunken ships. Ancient. Lost Age and earlier. And one that might be . . . newer.” He smiled again. “I went to explore one of them—a huge, rusted hulk emerging from the north wall of the Breach, tilted on its side. I entered through a hole in the hull, climbed ladders, made my way north along tilted floors using a small lantern I’d brought along, until suddenly in one large space—I think it was called a hold—there was the Breach barrier, from the ceiling to the tilted floor, a wall of water, alive with fish. I set my face against the cold, invisible wall and could see barnacles, mollusks, sea snakes, and life-forms encrusting every surface, feeding on one another, while on my side—dryness, old rust, the only living things consisting of me and a small white land crab that had obviously migrated, as I had, from the shore.”

A wind came up and rustled the leaves in the tall tree above them. Lanterns swayed and their rich light played across the silk and cotton clothing and hairdos and and hands and warmly lighted faces around the table. Everyone was rapt. Even Daeman found himself interested, despite the fact that it was all nonsense. Torches in braziers along the walkway flickered and crackled in the sudden breeze.

“What about the voynix?” asked a woman sitting next to Loes. Daeman could not remember her name.
Emme,
perhaps? “Are there more or fewer than on land? Sentinels or motile?”

“No voynix.”

Everyone at the table seemed to take a breath. Daeman felt the same sudden surge of shock he’d experienced when Harman had announced that it was his ninety-ninth year. He felt a surge of vertigo. Pehaps the wine had been stronger than he’d thought.

“No voynix,” repeated Ada in a tone not so much of wonder but of wistfulness. She raised her glass of wine. “A toast,” she said. Servitors floated closer to fill glasses. Everyone raised his or her own glass. Daeman blinked away the dizziness and forced a pleasant, sociable smile into place.

Ada did not announce a toast, but everyone—even, after a moment, Daeman—drank the wine as if she had.

The wind had come up by the end of the meal, clouds moving in to obscure the p- and e-rings, and the air smelled of ozone and of the curtains of rain dragging across the dark hills to the west, so the party moved inside and then broke up as couples wandered off to their rooms or to various wings and rooms for entertainment. Servitors produced chamber music in the south conservatory, the glassed-in swimming pool to the rear of the manor attracted a few people, and there was a midnight buffet laid out in the curved bay of the second-floor observation porch. Some couples went to their private rooms to make love, while others found a quiet place to unfold their turins and to go to Troy.

Daeman followed Ada, who had led Hannah and the man named Harman to the third-story library. If Daeman’s plan of seducing Ada before the weekend was over was to succeed, he had to spend every free minute with her. Seduction, he knew, was both science and art—a blend of skill, discipline, proximity, and opportunity. Mostly proximity.

Standing and walking near her, Daeman could feel the warmth of her skin through the tan and black silk she wore. Her lower lip, he noticed again after a decade, was maddeningly full, red, and meant for biting. When she raised her arm to show Harman and Hannah the height of shelves in the library, Daeman watched the subtle, soft shift of her right breast under its thin sheath of silk.

He had been in a library before, but never one this large. The room must have been more than a hundred feet long and half that high, with a mezzanine running around three walls and sliding ladders on both levels to give access to the higher and more remote volumes. There were alcoves, cubbies, tables with large books opened on them, seating areas here and there, and even shelves of books over the huge bay window on the far wall. Daeman knew that the physical books stored here must have been treated with non-decomposative nanochemicals many, many centuries before, probably millennia ago—these useless artifacts were made of leather and paper and ink, for heaven’s sake—but the mahogany-paneled room with its pools of source lighting, ancient leather furniture, and brooding walls of books still smelled of age and decay to Daeman’s sensitive snout. He could not imagine why Ada and the other family members maintained this mausoleum at Ardis Hall, or why Harman and Hannah wanted to see it tonight.

The curly-haired man who claimed to be in his last year and who claimed to have walked into the Atlantic Breach stopped in wonder. “It’s wonderful, Ada.” He climbed a ladder, slid it along a row of shelves, and reached a hand out to touch a thick leather volume.

Daeman laughed. “Do you think the reading function has returned, Harman
Uhr
?”

The man smiled, but seemed so confident that for a second Daeman half expected to see the golden rush of symbols down his arm as the reading function signaled the content. Daeman had never seen the lost function in action, of course, but had heard it described by his grandmother and other old folks describing what their great-great-grandparents had enjoyed.

No words flowed. Harman pulled his hand back. “Don’t you wish you had the reading function, Daeman
Uhr
?”

Daeman heard himself laughing yet again on this odd evening and was acutely aware of both of the young women looking at him with expressions somewhere between bemusement and curiosity.

“No, of course not,” he said at last. “Why should I? What could these old things tell me that could have any pertinence to our lives today?”

Harman climbed higher on the ladder. “Aren’t you curious why the post-humans are no longer seen on Earth and where they went?”

“Not at all. They went home to their cities in the rings. Everyone knows that.”

“Why?” asked Harman. “After many millennia of molding our affairs here, watching over us, why did they leave?”

“Nonsense,” said Daeman, perhaps a bit more gruffly than he had intended. “The posts are still watching over us. From above.”

Harman nodded as if enlightened and shuffled his ladder a few yards along its brass track. The man’s head was almost touching the underside of the library mezzanine now. “How about the voynix?”