by Дэн Симмонс
Fireworks exploded above the river and cast baroque shadows on the rusted farcaster arch.
Endymion turned his attention away from the waving Spectrum Helix family and concentrated on staying in the strongest current as he paddled toward the farcaster.
Gyges stood, stretched languidly, and prepared to phase-shift.
Suddenly the thing was next to him, centimeters away, at least three meters tall, towering over him.
Impossible, thought Gyges. I would have sensed the phase-shift distortions.
Exploding skyrockets spilled bloodred light on the chrome carapace. Metal teeth and chrome spikes twisted the expanding flowers of yellow, white, and red across quicksilver planes.
Gyges caught an instant’s look at his own reflection, distorted and startled, and then he phase-shifted.
It took less than a microsecond for the shift. Somehow one of the creature’s four clawed hands made it into the field before it completely formed. Bladed fingers dug through synflesh and muscle, seeking one of Gyges’s hearts.
Gyges paid no heed to the attack but attacked in return, swinging his silvered, phase-shifted arm like a horizontal guillotine. It could have cut through whiskered carbon alloy as if it were wet cardboard. It did not cut through the tall form in front of him. Sparks and thunder exploded as his arm bounced away, fingers numbed, metal radius and ulna shattered. The clawed hand within him pulled out ropes of intestine, kilometers of microfiber optics.
Gyges realized that he had been opened from navel to breastbone. It did not matter. He could still function.
Gyges clenched his right hand into a sharpened bludgeon and thrust it forward into gleaming red eyes. It was a killing blow. But the great steam-shovel jaws opened, closed, faster than phase-shifting, and Gyges’s right arm suddenly ended above the wrist.
Gyges threw himself at the apparition, trying to merge fields, attempting to get his own teeth within tearing distance. Two huge hands seized him, the bladed fingers sinking through shift field and flesh to hold him tight. The chrome skull in front of him slashed forward: needle-spikes pierced Gyges’s right eye and penetrated the right frontal lobe of his brain.
Gyges screamed then—not out of pain, although he felt something similar for the first time in his short life—but out of pure, relentless rage. His teeth snapped and clacked like steel rendering blades as he sought the creature’s throat, but he continued being held at three-arms’ length.
Then the monster ripped out both of Gyges’s hearts and threw them far out over the water. A nanosecond later, it lunged forward, biting through Gyges’s throat and severing his carbon-alloy spinal cord with a single snap of long teeth.
Gyges’s head was severed from his body. He tried to shift to telemetric control of the fighting body, peering through blood and fluid out of his remaining eye and broadcasting over the common band, but the transmitter in his skull had been pierced and the receiver in his spleen had been ripped away. The world spun—first the corona of the emerging sun around the second moon, then skyrockets, then the color-dappled surface of the river, then the sky again, then darkness. With fading coherence, Gyges realized that his head had been thrown far out into the river. His last retinal image before being submerged in darkness was of his own headless and uselessly spasming body being hugged to the carapace of the creature and being impaled there on spikes and thorns. Then, with a flash, the Shrike phase-shifted out of even fast-time existence and Gyges’s head struck the water and sank beneath the dark waves.
Rhadamanth Nemes arrived five minutes later. She shifted down. The riverbank was empty except for the headless corpse of her sibling. The windcycle wagon and its red-robed family were gone. No boats were visible on this section of river. The sun was beginning to emerge from behind the second moon.
Gyges is here, she sent on the common band. Briareus and Scylla were still with the troops in the city. The sleeping Pax trooper had been found and released from his handcuffs. None of the citizens queried would say whose home it was.
Scylla was urging Colonel Vinara to drop the matter.
Nemes felt the discomfort as she left the shift field. All of her ribs—bone and permasteel—were either fractured or bent.
Several of her internal organs had been pulped. Her left hand would not function. She had been unconscious for almost twenty standard minutes. Unconscious! She had not lost consciousness for one second in the four years she had lain in the solidified rock of God’s Grove. And all this damage had been done through the impenetrable shift field.
It did not matter. She would allow her body to repair itself during the days of inactivity after leaving this Core-forsaken world. Nemes knelt next to her sibling’s corpse. It had been clawed, decapitated, and eviscerated—almost deboned. It was still twitching, the broken fingers struggling to get a grip on an absent enemy.
Nemes shuddered—not out of sympathy for Gyges or revulsion at the damage done, she was professionally evaluating the Shrike’s attack pattern and felt admiration if anything—but out of sheer frustration that she had missed this confrontation. The attack in the tunnel had been too fast for her to react—she had been in mid-phase shift—which she would have thought impossible.
I’ll find him, she sent and shifted up.
The air grew thick and sludgelike. Nemes went down the bank, forced her way through the thick resistance of the water’s surface, and walked out along the riverbed, calling on the common band and probing with deep radar.
She found Gyges’s head almost a klick downstream. The current was strong here.
Freshwater crustaceans had already eaten the lips and the remaining eye and were probing in the eye sockets. Nemes brushed them away and took the head back to the bank of the canal-river.
Gyges’s common-band transmitter was smashed and his vocal cords were gone. Nemes extruded a fiber-optic filament and made the connection directly to his memory center. His skull had been smashed on the left side and brain matter and bits of DNA-processing gel were spilling out.
She did not ask him questions. She phased down and downloaded the memory, squirting it to her remaining two siblings as she received it.
Shrike, sent Scylla.
No shit, Sherlock, sent Briareus.
Silence, ordered Nemes. Finish up with those idiots. I’ll clean things up here and be waiting in the dropship.
The Gyges head—blind, leaking—trying to speak, using what remained of its tongue to shape sibilant and glottal syllables. Nemes held it close to her ear.
“Ss—pp-le-ssss.” Please. “Ss—he—puh.” Help. “Ssssttp—m-eh” Me.
Nemes lowered the head and studied the body on the splattered bank. Many organs were missing.
Scores of meters of microfiber were spilled in the weeds and mud, some trailing away in the current. Gray intestines and neural gelpaks were split and scattered. Bits of bone caught the growing light as the sun emerged from Twice Darkness. Neither the dropship nor the old archangel’s doc-in-the-boxes could help the vatborn. And Gyges might take standard months to heal himself.
Nemes set the head down while she wrapped the body in its own microfilaments, weighting it outside and in with stones. Making sure that the river was still free of ships, she tossed the headless corpse far out into the current. She had seen that the river was alive with tough and indiscriminate scavengers. Even so, there were parts of her sibling that they would not find appetizing.
She lifted Gyges’s head. The tongue was still clucking. Using the eye sockets as grips for her thumb and forefinger, she threw the head far out over the river in an easy underhand toss. It went under with barely a ripple.
Nemes jogged to the farcaster arch, ripped a hidden access plate free from the rusting and supposedly impenetrable exterior, and extruded a filament from her wrist. She jacked in.
I don’t understand, came Briareus’s code on the common band. It opened to nowhere.
Not to nowhere, sent Nemes, reeling in the filament. Just to nowhere in the old Web. Nowhere the Core has built a farcaster.
That’s impossible, sent Scylla. There are no farcasters except for those the Core has built.
Nemes sighed. Her siblings were idiots. Shut up and return to the dropship, she sent. We have to report this in person. Councillor Albedo will want to download personally. Nemes phase-shifted and jogged back to the dropship through air gone thick and sepia with slow-stirred time.
12
I did not forget that there was a panic button. The problem is simple—when there is real panic, one does not immediately think of buttons. The kayak was falling into an endless depth of air broken only by clouds that rose tens of thousands of meters from the bruise-purple depths to the milky ceiling of more clouds thousands of meters above me. I had dropped my paddle and watched it tumble away in freefall. The kayak and I were dropping faster than the paddle for reasons of aerodynamics and terminal velocity that were beyond my powers to calculate at that particular moment.
Great oval surges of water from the river I had left behind were falling ahead and behind me, separating and shaping themselves into ovoid spheres I had seen in zero-g, but then being whipped apart by the wind. It was as if I were falling in my own localized rainstorm. The flechette pistol I had liberated from the sleeping trooper in Dem Loa’s bedroom was wedged between the outside of my thigh and the curved inner seal of the cockpit skirt.
My arms were raised as if I were a bird preparing to take flight. My fists were clenched in terror. After my original scream, I found my jaws locked shut, my molars grinding.
The fall went on and on.
I had caught a glimpse of the farcaster arch above and behind me, although “arch” was no longer the proper word: the huge device floating unsupported was a metal ring, a torus, a rusty doughnut. For a fleeting second I saw the sky of Vitus-Gray-Balianus B through the glowing ring, and then the image faded and only clouds showed through the receding hoop. It was the only substantial thing in the entire skyscape of clouds and I had already fallen more than a thousand meters below it. In a giddy, panicked moment of fantasy, I imagined that if I were a bird I could fly back up to the farcaster ring, perch on its broad lower arc, and wait for…
Wait for what? I gripped the sides of the kayak as it rotated, turning me almost upside down as it plummeted bow first toward the purple depths klicks and klicks below.
That is when I remembered the panic button.
Don’t touch it, whatever you do, Aenea had said when we floated the kayak in Hannibal. I mean, don’t touch it until you absolutely have to.
The kayak spun on its longitudinal axis again, almost shaking me out. My butt was no longer touching the padded cushion on the bottom of the hull. I was floating free inside the cramped cockpit, within a freefalling constellation of water, tumbling paddle, and plunging kayak. I decided that this qualified as an “absolutely have to” time. I flipped up the plastic cover and depressed the red button with my thumb.
Panels popped open in front of the cockpit, near the bow, and behind me. I ducked as lines and masses of fabric billowed out. The kayak righted itself and then braked so hard that I was almost thrown out. I clung fiercely to the sides of the fiberglass boat as it rocked wildly. The shapeless mass over my head seemed to be forming itself into something more complicated than a parachute.
Even in the middle of my adrenaline rush and molar-grinding panic, I recognized the fabric: memory cloth that A. Bettik and I had bought at the Indian Market near Taliesin West. The solar-powered, piezoelectric material was almost transparent, ultralight, ultrastrong, and could remember up to a dozen preset configurations; we had considered buying more and using it to replace the canvas over the main architects’ studio since the old cover sagged, rotted, and had to be repaired and replaced regularly. But Mr. Wright had insisted on keeping the old canvas. He preferred the buttery light. A. Bettik had taken the dozen or so meters of memory cloth down to his workshop and I had thought no more of it. Until now. The fall was stopped. Now the kayak hung under a delta-shaped parasail, supported by a dozen nylon risers that rose from strategic positions along the upper hull. The boat and I were still descending, but in a gradual swoop now rather than a headlong fall. I looked up—the memory cloth was clear enough to see through—but the farcaster ring was too far behind me and hidden by clouds. The winds and air currents were carrying me away from the farcaster.
I suppose that I should have been grateful to my friends, the girl and the android, for somehow foreseeing this and preparing the kayak appropriately, but my first thought was an overwhelming Goddamn you! This was too much. Being dropped into a world of clouds and air, with no ground, was too damned much. If Aenea had known that I was being ’cast here, why didn’t she…
No ground? I leaned over the edge of the kayak and looked below. Perhaps the plan was for me to float gently down to some unseen surface.
No. There were kilometers of empty air beneath me, and below that, the lower layers were purple and black, a darkness relieved only by fierce slashes of lightning. The pressure down there must be terrible. Which brought up another point: if this was a Jovian world—Whirl or Jupiter or one of the others—how was it that I was breathing oxygen? As far as I knew, all of the gas giants that humanity had encountered were made up of unfriendly gases—methane, ammonia, helium, carbon monoxide, phosphine, hydrogen cyanide, other nasties, with trace amounts of water. I had never heard of a gas giant with breathable oxygen-nitrogen mix, but I was breathing. The air was thinner here than on the other worlds I had traveled through, and it stank a bit of ammonia, but I was definitely breathing air. Then it must not be a gas giant. Where the hell was I? I lifted my wrist and spoke to the comlog, “Where the hell am I?” There was a hesitation and for a moment I thought the thing had been broken on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B. Then it spoke in the ship’s supercilious voice, “Unknown, M. Endymion. I have some data, but it is incomplete.”
“Tell me.”
There followed a rapid-fire listing of temperatures in Kelvin, atmospheric pressure in millibars, estimated mean density in grams per centimeter cubed, probable escape velocity in kilometers per second, and perceived magnetic field in gauss, followed by a long list of atmospheric gases and element ratios.
“Escape velocity of fifty-four point two klicks per second,” I said. “That’s gas-giant territory, isn’t it?”
“Most assuredly,” said the ship’s voice.
“Jovian baseline is fifty-nine point five kilometers per second.”
“But the atmosphere isn’t like a gas giant’s?” I could see the stratocumulus ahead of me building, like a nature holo run at accelerated speeds. The towering cloud must have reached ten klicks above me, its base disappearing in the purple depths below. Lightning flickered at its base. The sunlight on its far side seemed rich and low: evening light. “The atmosphere is unlike anything in my records,” said the comlog. “Carbon monoxide, ethane, acetylene, and other hydrocarbons violating Solmev equilibrium values can be easily explained by Jovian-style molecular kinetic energy and solar radiation breaking down methane, and the presence of carbon monoxide is a standard result of methane and water vapor mixing at deep layers where the temperature exceeds twelve hundred degrees Kelvin, but the oxygen and nitrogen levels…”
“Yes?” I prompted.
“Indicate life,” said the comlog.
I turned completely around, inspecting the clouds and sky as if something were sneaking up on me. “Life on the surface?” I said.
“Doubtful,” came the flat voice. “If this world follows Jovian-Whirl norms, the pressure at the so-called surface would be under seventy million Old Earth atmospheres with a temperature of some twenty-five thousand degrees Kelvin.”
“How high are we?” I said.
“Uncertain,” said the instrument, “but with the current atmospheric pressure of point seven six Old Earth standard, on a standard Jovian world I would estimate that we were above the troposphere and tropopause, actually in the lower reaches of the stratosphere.”
“Wouldn’t it be colde
r that high? That’s almost outer space.”
“Not on a gas giant,” said the comlog in its insufferable professorial voice. “The greenhouse effect creates a thermal inversion layer, heating layers of the stratosphere to almost human-optimum temperatures. Although the difference of a few thousand meters may show pronounced temperature increases or drops.”
“A few thousand meters,” I said softly. “How much air is above and below us?”
“Unknown,” said the comlog again, “but extrapolation would suggest that equatorial radius from the center of this world to its upper atmosphere would be approximately seventy thousand kilometers with this oxygen-nitrogen-carbon-dioxide layer extending for some three to eight thousand kilometers approximately two thirds of the distance from the planet’s hypothetical center.”
“A three- to eight-thousand-klick layer,” I repeated stupidly. “Some fifty thousand klicks above the surface…”
“Approximately,” said the comlog, “although it should be noted that at near-core pressures, molecular hydrogen becomes a metal…”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s enough for now.” I felt like I was going to be sick over the side of the kayak.
“I should point out the anomaly that the interesting coloration in the nearby stratocumulus suggests the presence of ammonium monosulfide or polysulfides, although at apotropospheric altitudes, one would assume only the presence of ammonia cirrus clouds with true water clouds not forming until depths reach some ten standard atmospheres because of…”
“Enough,” I said.
“I only point this out because of the interesting atmospheric paradox involving…”
“Shut up,” I said.
It got cold after the sun went down. The sunset itself I shall remember until I die.
High, high above me, glimpses of what might be blue sky had darkened to a Hyperion-like deep lapis and then deepened further to dark purple. The clouds all around me grew brighter as the sky far above and the depths far below both grew darker. I say clouds, but the generic term is laughably unequal to conveying the power and grandeur of what I watched. I grew up in a nomadic shepherd caravan on the treeless moors between Hyperion’s Great South Sea and the Pinion Plateau: I know clouds.
