by Dan Simmons
Savi’s dreams had turned malignant and cold. She decided not to dream any longer. Sitting in the carpeted ice cavern in the heart of her iceberg, she popped stayawakes and drank mug after mug of black coffee. She pored over her notes and ancient computer records, checking her information, attacking but then confirming her conclusions. Things looked bad.
But she had a secret weapon. Literally. The pistol was black and ugly in the way that only mass-tooled artifacts of the postindustrial century could be ugly, but it worked. She had fired it on the shoulder of Mt. Erebus and she fired it again on the night-dark surface of her iceberg. The weapon roared when fired, and the first time she had squeezed the trigger, Savi had dropped the thing and not fired it again for some weeks. But now she rather enjoyed carrying the black weight of the pistol. It was reassuring. And she had boxes of extra cartridges.
With two weeks and one day left before final fax, she decided that it was time to bring her friends—especially Pinchas and Petra—into her plans. Leaving her caverns heated and lighted, thinking that this might be a good place for her cadre to fly to for their secret conferences, she went up into the howling dark and followed the guide cables to her sonie. The sonie was gone.
Savi tasted bile and fear, but fought both back. Her mistake. She had formatted the vehicle for three weeks’ use, not thinking that she would be gone that long, and it had simply flown itself back for recycle at one of the supply stations at the end of that time.
Savi went back down into the blue-glow ice to think. Despite her newfound aversion to faxing, she decided that she did not have the patience to wait for a new sonie to be fabricated and flown here. She activated her fax function and imaged Mantua.
Nothing happened.
For a full moment, Savi could not even think. Then, in a panic unprecedented in her two centuries of life, she tried to access farnet and prox. No response. Silence.
Shaking badly, holding the black pistol on her lap, she sat on her beautiful Persian carpet and tried to think.
A shadow moved in one of the ice corridors behind her. Hobnailed boots crunched on ice.
Sari whirled. “Oates?” she called. And again, “Oates?”
DESPITE the summer heat and humidity—Mantua was surrounded by lakes and canals—some of the old-styles liked the city and gathered there now and then. With fourteen days until final fax, Pinchas and Petra and four of their friends were dining in the warm open air of the Piazza Erbe. The white tablecloth was spread with agnoli, tortelli di zucca, insalata di cappone, risotto, and costoletta d’agnello al timo. Everyone had enjoyed their frog soup and was drinking freely from the bottles of fresh, bubbly lambrusco. It was about eleven P.M. and the day’s heat had all but dissipated from the cobblestones. A cooling breeze stirred the linen canopies above them. A half moon rose high, frequently eclipsed by the p-ring. Doves cooed in the nearby towers.
Graf leaned over the page of vellum. He was a dark man with a well-groomed beard—one of the few old-style men to sport facial hair—and when he frowned as he was doing now, he could have been mistaken for one of the long-dead Gonzagas whose frescoed images still graced the walls of the nearby Ducal Palace.
“Can you read it?” asked Penta.
“Of course I can read it,” said Graf. “It’s understanding it that may pose a problem.”
“We were pretty sure that it was in pre-rubicon English,” said Pinchas.
Graf stroked his beard and nodded. “Most of it is.”
“For heaven’s sake,” said Hannah, Graf’s current partner. “Read it out loud.”
Graf shrugged, said, “It’s more of a list than a note,” and read it aloud.
1) Voynix = Voynich Ms.?
2) P’s don’t fax. 20th C. fax machines worked from origs.
3) Moira? Atlantis?
4) Jews. Rubicon. Tel Aviv.
5) We’re fucking eloi.
6) Kaddosh. Haram esh-Sharif.
7) Itbah al-Yahud.
“I give up,” said Stephen, who had faxed in from Helsinki with his partner Frome. “I was never worth a damn at riddles. What does it all mean?”
Graf shrugged.
“‘We’re fucking eloi,’” quoted Hannah. “Is ‘fucking’ a verb or adjective in that sentence?”
“More to the point,” said Pinchas, “what are eloi?”
Graf knew the answer to that. He told them about H. G. Wells’s time travel tale.
“Great,” said Frome. “Either way it translates, Savi’s sentence isn’t very flattering to the rest of us. Maybe it just means that Savi’s lovers have been too passive.”
Pinchas and Petra exchanged glances. Even Graf blinked and looked up from the vellum.
Not aware of the reactions, Frome continued, “And if we’re all eloi, who are the Morlocks? The posts?”
Petra had to smile. “I haven’t noticed the posts eating any of us over the past couple of centuries.”
“Besides,” said Graf, “the posts are vegetarians.”
“What does ‘Voynich Ms.’ mean?” asked Pinchas.
Everyone was silent for a minute. Finally Graf said, “I’ll check it.” He raised his palm but Petra put her small fingers around his wrist, stopping him.
“I think we shouldn’t call up any functions related to Savi’s note unless we have to,” she said softly, glancing to make sure that none of the servitors or voynix were close enough to hear. “Is there another way to research that phrase?”
“I have a physical library back in Berlin,” said Graf. “I’ll check there later tonight.”
“Wasn’t ‘Ms.’ an honorific for females back in pre-rubicon days?” asked Frome. “Some sort of honorary degree for not getting married or something?”
“Something like that,” said Graf. “But it could also stand for ‘manuscript.’”
“Anyone have any idea why Savi might have been writing about the post named Moira or about Atlantis?” asked Pinchas.
The other five sipped their lambrusco or nibbled at food. No one ventured a thought. Finally Hannah said, “I’ve never been to Atlantis.”
It turned out that none of them had. It was not a place that old-style humans were likely to visit.
“I would guess that ‘P’s don’t fax’ means that posts don’t fax,” said Petra, “but why would she write that down? We all know that.”
“But the part that follows is interesting,” said Pinchas. “What was it exactly, Graf?”
“20th C. fax machines worked from origs,” read the scholar.
“Origs?” said Stephen.
“I think it’s short for ‘originals,’” said Pinchas. “I’ve heard about fax machines. They were a way to send written documents digitally before the first internet existed. Way before the first successful quantum faxing borrowed the language.”
“I think they still used them after the internet evolved,” said Graf. “But the original mechanical fax devices just copied from an original, physical-on-paper written source. After the fax duplicate was sent electronically, the original document still existed. But so what?”
“Maybe Savi’s saying that the posts keep an original of all of us somewhere,” said Petra. “Bodies frozen like Popsicles, thawed out and lobotomized for their pleasure. Maybe they use the original us as slave labor up there or something. Sex slaves.”
There was uneasy laughter around the table.
“Good,” said Hannah, “that makes me feel better about the final fax. I was afraid that I’d stay a neutrino forever. They say that they’ll take us out of transmission mode in ten thousand years or so, when they’ve got the Earth fixed the way they want it, but who knows? This way, if the neutrino stream is lost out there, they can just defrost the original me. I wouldn’t mind being a sex slave…except that all of the posts are female and I don’t lean that way.”
Rather than laughter, this brought on a silence. Finally Pinchas said, “I thought that I was reasonably fluent in pre-rubicon English, but I didn’t recognize lines six and seven in Savi�
��s note.”
Graf nodded. “Part of it is in Hebrew,” he said softly. “‘Kaddosh’—I think it would translate here as ‘holy.’ Maybe. ‘Haram esh-Sharif’ and ‘Itbah al-Yahud’ are Arabic. Haram esh-Sharif is a site in Jerusalem. The Temple Mount. Where the Dome of the Rock used to stand.”
“Wasn’t the Dome of the Rock blown up during the dementia?” said Frome.
Graf nodded. “Before that, the First and Second Temples stood on that site. In fact, we’re approaching the date called Tisha B’Av when the Jews traditionally lamented those events. A lot of sad things happened on that date.”
Petra took the vellum from the scholar and frowned at the writing she could not understand. “Perhaps that’s why Savi wrote this about—what was it? ‘Jews. Rubicon. Tel Aviv’?”
“Yes,” said Graf. “I think the first cases of rubicon were reported on or around the date of Tisha B’Av. In fact, a lot of people believed that the virus first escaped from…”
“Oh, Jesus,” interrupted Hannah. “That old blood libel. Even I’ve heard the myth about the rubicon virus escaping from some biowar lab in Tel Aviv. That lie was a product of the dementia years.”
Graf shrugged. “How do we know that? We weren’t alive then and the posthumans sure as hell don’t talk about it. And it is true that all of us—all nine thousand some—are descended from Jews.”
“We’re all sterile, too,” said Hannah bitterly. “So what? A few of the Jews had the rare gene that offered protection from rubicon, but the by-product was that their descendents are all mules. Even the transcription doohickies can’t fix that. And we’re all descended from some African hominid as well, even the posts, but that doesn’t mean that we remember anything about African tribal culture. The Jews were just that…a tribe. A primitive culture. A forgotten tribe.”
“Not completely forgotten,” said Graf, staring at Hannah. The couple carried some weight of anger separate from the burden of the current argument.
“Perhaps the Jew-connection could be a motive,” said Pinchas. “A reason, I mean.”
Everyone looked at him. The linen strips above them rustled in a rising wind. Clouds had covered the moon and rings.
“A motive for what?” asked Petra, ignoring his softer word choice. “Mass murder? Is the final fax a new, improved version of Auschwitz?” Everyone at the table understood the allusion. Even in the post-rubicon, post-historical, post-literate world, certain words held their power.
“Sure, sure,” said Frome with an attempt at a laugh, “the six or seven hundred million posts are all—what was the name of the Jews’ enemy?”
“Their enemies were legion,” Graf said softly.
“Arabs,” said Frome as if he had not heard. “All the posts are Arabs. Or maybe your whatchamacallems, Petra—Nazis. All the posts have swastikas and flatscans of Hitler up there in their millions of orbital bunkers.”
Hannah did not smile. “Who knows? No old-style has ever been up there. They could have anything in the rings.”
Petra was shaking her head. “None of this makes any sense. Even if Savi was clinically paranoid, she must have known that the posts could have eliminated us any time in the last three centuries. We’re completely at their mercy every time we fax. If they wanted to…to kill us…they didn’t have to give us a date for the final fax.”
“Unless they wanted to torture us as well,” said Hannah.
The five others nodded at this and quit talking while servitors cleared their dishes and brought coffee, gelato, and tartufo.
Pinchas cleared his throat. “That last part—‘Itbah al-Yahud’—you say that it’s also in Arabic?”
“Yes,” said Graf. “It means ‘Kill the Jews.’”
IT was impossible, but the lights and heaters were failing in Savi’s iceberg grottoes.
They did not fail at once, but one by one the glowglobes and halogen sticks faded and died and on every day that passed, the pinpoint heaters put out less and less heat. Not everything failed. She still had enough light to see by and enough heat to survive, but while struggling to stay awake and alert, Savi had to deal with encroaching darkness and deepening cold. She wondered if the grid was down and the world was ending out there in the world.
Savi slept in short, treacherous catnaps. Usually she still dreamed of manhauling, but more frequently now she dreamt of being in the tent with Bowers and Scott. Oates was gone. When she startled awake, the cold was still around her as in the dream, but she could also still hear the wind howl, smell the smoke and blubber, and share the absolute exhaustion of the defeated explorers. When she was fully awake, the wind still howled down her caverns and corridors. And she was still exhausted.
And there was someone in the iceberg with her.
At first she was sure that it was hallucinations, but the footsteps were more audible now, the corner-of-the-eye glimpses of movement more frequent. Savi would have thought that voynix were visiting except for the fact that voynix neither moved nor made sound. She often wondered about the voynix, those intruders that the posts referred to only as “chronosynthetic artifacts” or “temporal incongruities,” but these half-glimpsed figures—always lurking in the shadows, disappearing around the curve of the next ice corridor—were short and canvas-wrapped rather than tall and blind and carapaced.
But there was definitely something frozen in the ice. Savi found it with thirteen days left until final fax. Something dark but solid, visible about two yards beneath the ice wall in the corridor she had carved down the natural fissure. She could see the shape of it in her flashlight beam.
Savi was burning new tunnels daily now—the big-bore burner still worked well—but she hesitated before burning in to the dark object. It was roughly pyramidal and roughly half the size of her lost sonie. But the shape was rumpled, almost random. It disturbed her.
On November 12, 1912, at the approach of the next Antarctic high summer, a search party sent out to determine the fate of Scott’s polar party found their tent. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, a veteran polar explorer who had almost accompanied Scott to the pole, was with Atkinson and Dimitri when they found the Scott death tent, a “mere mound” with three feet of bamboo centerpole sticking up from the snow. They burrowed down.
“Bowers and Wilson were sleeping in their bags,” wrote Cherry-Garrard in his diary. Savi had a copy of this diary with her. “Scott had thrown back the flaps of his bag at the end. His left hand was stretched over Wilson, his lifelong friend. Beneath the head of his bag, between the bag and floor-cloth, was the green wallet in which he carried his diary. The brown books of diary were inside; and on the floor-cloth were some letters.”
And later:
“We never moved them. We took the bamboos of the tent away, and the tent itself covered them. And over them we built the cairn.”
The tent had been almost two hundred miles south from the Barrier Edge separating iceshelf from sea in 1912. But the ice had been moving out toward McMurdo Sound and the Ross Sea every minute since the day Atkinson and Cherry-Garrard had collapsed the tent on the three bodies.
Savi laughed aloud at what she was thinking. It was absurd. Even without access to a math function, she knew that the tent must have reached the Barrier Edge many centuries earlier. However deep it had been buried by accumulating ice and snow, it was long gone—carried north through the South Polar Sea and then to oblivion. She laughed again.
Somewhere deep in the ice tunnels, a man laughed as if in answer.
PINCHAS and Petra had other things than Savi’s whereabouts to ponder. The two weeks before final fax blurred into a gauntlet of farewell parties to avoid, friends to see, real farewells to tender, places to visit before the end, and emotions to sort. They did not quit waiting for Savi to reappear—nor did they give up their amateur sleuthing over Savi’s cryptic notes—but they had little luck on either front. “Curiosity,” as Petra said only half ironically, “doesn’t seem to be an eloi trait.” Perhaps it had been the “fucking eloi” line that had hurt Pinchas a
nd her and made them less eager to find their former lover.
Graf called them the day after the Mantua dinner. His physical library turned up nothing on “Voynich ms” and so—he confessed to them—he had turned to farnet archives. There was nothing there either. But no jackbooted posts had shown up at his door demanding to know why he was interested in these terms. The only reaction. Graf said, had been a sincere apology from the librarian construct for not finding his reference.
With seven days until final fax, Pinchas took Petra on one last sonie flight across the North American Preserve. They picnicked in the Adirondaks, snapped photos of dinosaurs in the Midwest swamplands, put down to swim in a predator-free area of the Central Inland Sea, and had dinner near the Three Heads.
The days were very long so they had time to climb Harney Peak from its base. Both were in excellent physical condition, but both were panting a bit as they reached the rocky summit of the mountain. The view was very nice. The sun was close to the horizon far to the west. The three surviving heads of Mt. Rushmore were visible just a few miles to the northeast. Farther to the east, the Badlands burned white, deep black shadows lengthened between the ridges, and the dark green sea gleamed beyond it all.
Pinchas removed bottles of water and some oranges from his pack. Knowing that twilight would linger long after sunset this time of the summer, not worried about the descent, they took their time enjoying the oranges and watching the light deepen to a general golden glow.
“You know why I wanted to come here?” said Pinchas.
Petra nodded. “Center of the universe. Black Elk spoke. Savi brought you here before. Me too.”
Pinchas looked up at the rings moving majestically south and east above the deep blue South Dakota sky. “Yes,” he said. “Of course, Black Elk said that wherever you go to find a true vision can be the center of the universe.”
