by Dan Simmons
The monster and its cloud of companions floated closer, rising until the sunlight passed through its body on its way to light my kayak and parasail. I revised its size upward—it must be at least a klick long and a third that in width when it expanded to its widest. The living discs floated to each side of me now. I could see that they were spinning as well as curling like mantas.
I tugged out the flechette pistol Alem had given me and clicked off its safety. If the monster attacked, I would fire half the magazine of slivers into its pale side, hoping that it was as thin as it was transparent. Maybe there was a chance that I could spill whatever lift gases allowed it to float in this band of oxygen atmosphere.
At that moment, the thing’s hydralike filaments flashed out in all directions, some missing my parasail by mere meters, and I realized that I could never kill or sink the monster before it destroyed my sail with one thrash of one tentacle. I waited, half expecting to be pulled into the cuttlefish’s maw—if it had a maw—at any second.
Nothing happened. My kayak floated in the direction I thought of as westward, the parasail rising on thermals and descending on colder downdrafts, the clouds towering around me, and the cuttlefish and its companions—I thought of them as parasites for no good reason—stood off a few hundred meters to the “north” and a hundred meters or so above me. I wondered if the thing was following me out of curiosity or hunger. I wondered if the green platelets drifting around me might attack at any moment.
Capable of doing nothing else, I laid the useless flechette pistol on my lap, nibbled on the last of my biscuits from my pack, and sipped from my water bottle. I had less than another day’s supply of water. I cursed myself for not trying to catch rainwater during the night’s terrible storm, although I had no idea if this world’s water was potable.
The long morning grew into a long afternoon. Several times the drifting parasail took me into a cloud tower and I raised my face to the dripping fog, licking droplets from my lips and chin. The water tasted like water. Each time I emerged from the fog, I expected the cuttlefish to have departed, but each time it remained on station to my right and above me. Once, just after the halo that was the sun above had passed the zenith, the kayak was blown into a particularly rough patch of climbing cloud, and the parasail almost folded in the violent updraft. But it stabilized itself and when I emerged from the cloud that time, I was some kilometers higher. The air was thinner and colder. The cuttlefish had followed me up.
Perhaps it’s not hungry yet. Perhaps it feeds after dark. I reassured myself with a series of these thoughts.
I kept scanning the empty sky between clouds for another farcaster ring, but none appeared. It seemed folly to expect to find one—the air currents blew me generally westward but the vagaries of the jet stream sent me klicks north and south. How could I thread such a small needle after a day and night and day of blowing around like this? It did not seem likely. But still I searched the sky.
In midafternoon I realized that there were other living things visible far below to the south. More cuttlefish moving about the base of an immense cloud tower, the sunlight piercing the depths enough to illuminate their clear bodies against the black of the broiling depths beneath them. There must be scores—no, hundreds—of the pulsing, swimming things along the base of that one cloud. I was too far away to make out the platelet parasites around them, but a sense of diffused light there—like dust floating—suggested their presence by the thousands or millions. I wondered if the monsters usually kept to the lower atmospheric levels and this one—still keeping pace with me within feeding-filament range—had ventured up out of curiosity.
My muscles were cramping. I pulled myself out of the cockpit and tried stretching along the top of the kayak’s hull, hanging on to the parasail risers to keep my balance. It was dangerous, but I had to stretch. I lay on my back and pedaled an imaginary bicycle with my raised legs. I did push-ups, clinging to the rim of the cockpit for balance. When I had worked most of the cramps out, I crawled back into the cockpit and half dozed.
Perhaps it is odd to admit, but my mind wandered all that afternoon, even while the alien cuttlefish swam alongside within swallowing range and alien platelet creatures danced and hovered within meters of the kayak and parasail. The human mind gets used to strangeness very quickly if it does not exhibit interesting behavior.
I began thinking about the past few days and the past months and the past years. I thought of Aenea—of leaving her behind—and of all the other people I had left behind: A. Bettik and the others at Taliesin West, the old poet on Hyperion, Dem Loa and Dem Ria and their family on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, Father Glaucus in the frozen air tunnels of Sol Draconi Septem, Cuchiat and Chiaku and Cuchtu and Chichticu and the other Chitchatuk on that same world—Aenea had been sure that Father Glaucus and our Chitchatuk friends had been murdered after we left that world, although she had never explained how she could know that—and I thought about others I had left behind, working my way back to my last sight of Grandam and the Clan members waving as I left for Home Guard service many years ago. And always my thoughts returned to leaving Aenea.
I’ve left too many people. And let too many people do my work and fighting for me. From now on I will fight for myself If I ever find the girl again, I will stay with Aenea forever. The resolution burned like anger through me, fueled by the hopelessness of finding another farcaster ring in this endless cloud-scape.
YOU KNOW
THE ONE WHO TEACHES
SHE HAS TOUCHED
YOU (!?!?)
The words were not carried by sound nor heard by my ears. Rather, they were like blows to the inside of my skull. I literally reeled, gripping the sides of the kayak to keep from falling out.
HAVE YOU
BEEN TOUCHED/CHANGED
LEARNING
TO HEAR/SEE/WALK
FROM
THE ONE WHO
TEACHES (????)
Every word was a migraine blow. Each struck with the force of brain hemorrhage. The words were shouted inside my skull in my own voice. Perhaps I was going mad.
Wiping away tears, I peered at the giant cuttlefish and its swarm of green-platelet parasites. The larger organism pulsed, contracted, extended coiling filaments, and swam through the chilly air. I could not believe that these words were coming from that creature. It was too biological. And I did not believe in telepathy. I looked at the swarming discs, but their behavior showed no more sense of higher consciousness than dust motes in a shaft of light—less than the synchronized shifting of a school of fish or the flocking of bats. Feeling foolish, I shouted, “Who are you? Who is speaking?”
I squinted in preparation for the blast of words against my brain, but there was no response from the giant organism or its companions.
“Who spoke?” I shouted into a rising wind. There was no answering sound except for the slap of the risers against the canvas of the parasail.
The kayak slewed to the right, righted itself, and slewed again. I swiveled to my left, half expecting to see another cuttlefish monster attacking me, but instead saw something infinitely more malevolent approaching.
While I had been focusing on the alien creature to the north, a billowing, black cumulus had all but surrounded me to the south. Wind-tattered streamers of black whirled out from the heat-driven storm cloud and roiled under me like ebony rivers. I could see lightning flashing in the depths below and surging spheres of ball lightning being spit from the black column of storm. Closer, much closer, hanging from the river of black cloud flowing above me, curled a dozen or more tornadoes, their funnel clouds striking toward me like scorpion tails. Each funnel was the size of the cuttlefish monster or larger—vertical kilometers of whirling madness—and each was spawning its own cluster of smaller tornadoes. There was no way that my flimsy parasail could withstand even a close miss by one of these vortexes—and there was no way that the funnels were going to miss me.
I stood up in the pitching, rolling cockpit, holding my place in the
boat only by grasping a riser with my left hand. With my right hand I made a fist, raised it, and shook it toward the tornadoes, toward the roiling storm beyond them, and toward the invisible sky beyond. “Well, goddamn you then!” I shouted. My words were lost in the wind howl. My vest flapped around me. A gust nearly blew me into the maelstrom. Leaning far out over the hull of the kayak, bracing myself into the wind like a ski jumper I had seen once on the Iceshelf caught in a moment of mad, poised balance before the inevitable descent, I shook my fist again and screamed, “Do your worst, goddamn you. I defy you gods!”
As if in answer, one of the tornado funnels came sidewinding closer, the lowest tip of its whirling cone stabbing downward as if seeking a hard surface to destroy. It missed me by a distance of hundreds of meters, but the vacuum of its passing whirled the kayak and parasail around like a toy boat in a draining bathtub. Relieved of the opposition of the wind, I fell forward onto the slippery kayak hull and would have slid into oblivion if my scrabbling hands had not found a riser to grip. My feet were fully out of the cockpit at that moment.
There was a hailstorm traveling with the passing funnel. Ice pellets—some the size of my fist—smashed through the parasail, pounded the kayak with a noise like flechette clouds slamming home, and hit me in the leg, shoulder, and lower back. The pain almost made me release my grip. That mattered little, I realized as I clung to the pitching, dipping kayak, because the sail had been torn in a hundred places. Only its canopy had saved me from being shot to bits by the hail, but now the delta-shaped foil had been riddled. It lost lift as suddenly as it had first gained it and the kayak pitched forward toward the darkness so many thousands of klicks below. Tornadoes filled the sky around me. I gripped the now-useless riser where it entered the battered hull and hung on, determined to complete that one act—hanging on—until the boat, furled sail, and I were all crushed by pressure or shredded by the winds. I realized that I was screaming again, but the sound was different in my ears—almost gleeful.
I had fallen less than a kilometer, the kayak and me gaining speed far beyond Hyperion’s or Old Earth’s terminal velocity, when the cuttlefish—forgotten behind and above me—made its lunge. It must have moved with blinding speed, propelling itself through the air like a squid jetting after its prey. The first I knew that it was hungry and determined not to lose its dinner was when the long feeding tendrils surged around me like so many huge tentacles coiling and probing and wrapping.
If the thing had tugged me to an immediate stop at the speeds the boat and I were falling, both kayak and I would have been snapped into small pieces. But the cuttlefish fell with us, surrounding the boat, sail, risers, and me with the smallest of its tendrils—each still two to five meters thick—and then it braked itself against the fall, jetting ammonia-smelling gases like a dropship on final approach. Then it began ascending again, up toward the storm where tornadoes still raged and the central stratocumulus rotated with its own black intensity. Only half-conscious, I realized that the cuttlefish was flying into that roiling cloud even as it reeled the bashed kayak and me toward an opening in its immense transparent body.
Well, I thought groggily, I’ve found its mouth.
Risers and shreds of parasail lay around me and over me like an oversized shroud. The kayak seemed to be draped in drab bunting as the cuttlefish pulled us in closer. I tried to turn, thought of crawling back toward the cockpit and finding the flechette gun, of cutting my way out of the thing.
The flechette gun was gone, of course, shaken out of the cockpit in all the violent tumbling and the fall. Also gone were the cockpit cushions and my backpack with the clothes, food, water, and flashlight laser. Everything was gone.
I tried to chuckle but the sound was not quite successful as the tendrils pulled the kayak and its clinging passenger the last fifty meters to the gaping orifice on the underside of the cuttlefish’s body. I could see the internal organs more clearly now—pulsing and absorbing, moving in peristaltic waves, some of them filled with the green platelet creatures. As I was pulled closer, there came an almost overwhelming stench of cleaning fluid—ammonia, I realized—that made my eyes water and throat burn.
I thought of Aenea. It was not a prolonged or eloquent thought—just a mental glimpse of how she had looked on her sixteenth birthday, all short hair, sweat, and sunburn from her desert meditations—and I formed the single message, Sorry, kiddo. I did my best to get to the ship and bring it to you. Sorry.
Then the long feeding tendrils curled and folded and pulled the boat and me up into a lipless mouth that I realized must be thirty or forty meters across. I thought of the fiberglass and ultranylon parasail fabric and the carbon-fiber risers that were entering with me and had time for a last thought—I hope some of this gives you a bellyache.
And then I was pulled into the ammonia and fish smell, was vaguely aware that the air here in the creature’s gut was not really breathable, decided to jump from the kayak rather than be digested, but lost consciousness before I could act or frame another coherent thought.
Without my knowledge or observation, the cuttlefish continued to rise through cloud blacker than a moonless night, its lipless mouth closing and disappearing on its seamless flesh, the kayak and sail and me nothing more than a shadow in the fluid contents of its lower tract.
13
erizo Isozaki was not surprised when the Swiss Guard came for him.
The Corps Helvetica colonel and eight troopers in full orange-and-blue dress uniforms with energy lances and deathwands arrived at the Torus Mercantilus unannounced, demanded to see CEO Isozaki in his private office, and presented him with an encrypted diskey ordering him to dress formally and appear before His Holiness, Pope Urban XVI. Immediately.
The colonel stayed in sight of Isozaki as the CEO stepped into his personal apartment, quickly showered, and dressed in his most formal white shirt, gray vest, red cravat, the double-breasted black demisuit with the gold buttons on the side, and black velvet cape.
“May I phone my associates and issue business instructions in case I should miss meetings scheduled for later today?” he asked the colonel as they stepped out of the lift into the main reception hall where the troopers made a sort of gold and blue corridor between the workstations.
“No,” said the Swiss Guard officer.
A Pax Fleet ramscout was docked where Isozaki’s personal ship was usually berthed. The Pax crew gave the Mercantilus CEO the briefest of nods, instructed him to strap into his acceleration couch, and then they were boosting in-system with two torchships visible on the tactical holo display as they dropped into escort position.
They are treating me as a prisoner, not an honored guest, thought Isozaki. His face revealed nothing, of course, but a wave of something like relief followed the pulse of fear and dread in him. He had been expecting this since his illicit meeting with Councillor Albedo. And he had slept almost not at all since that painful and traumatic rendezvous. Isozaki knew that there was no reason for Albedo not to reveal the fact of the Mercantilus’s attempts to contact the TechnoCore, but he hoped that they would believe that it was his attempt and his alone. Silently, Isozaki gave thanks to whatever gods that wanted to listen that his friend and associate, Anna Pelli Cognani, was out of Pacem’s system, visiting Renaissance Vector for a major trade fair there.
From his couch between the Swiss Guard colonel and one of the troopers, Isozaki could see the tactical holo in front of the pilot’s position. The sphere of moving light and color with its solid bars of code was highly technical, but Isozaki had been a pilot before these boys were born. He could see that they were not accelerating toward the world of Pacem, but toward a destination near the trailing Trojan point, directly in the middle of the swarm of Pax Fleet asteroid bases and system-defense forts.
A Holy Office orbital prison, thought Isozaki. Worse than Castel Sant’Angelo where the virtual pain machines were said to run all hours of the day and night. In one of the orbital dungeons, no one could hear you scream. He was sure t
hat the command to attend a papal audience was mere irony, a way to get him out of the Pax Mercantilus without protest. Isozaki would have bet anything that within days—perhaps hours—his formal suit and cape would be bloody, sweat-soaked rags.
He was wrong on all counts. The ramscout decelerated above the plane of the ecliptic and he realized their destination: Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s “summer retreat.”
The diskey viewer in the CEO’s couch worked and he called up an exterior view as the ramscout left its escorting torchships and dropped toward the massive, potato-shaped asteroid. More than forty klicks long and twenty-five across, Castel Gandolfo was a little world of its own, its sky blue, its oxygen-rich atmosphere held in by class-twenty containment fields wrapped with infinite redundancies, the hillsides and terraces green with grass and crops, the sculpted mountains forested and running with streams and small animals. Isozaki saw the ancient Italian village pass below and knew that the peaceful vision was deceptive: surrounding Pax bases could destroy any ship or fleet in existence, while the interior of asteroid Castel Gandolfo was honeycombed with garrisons holding more than ten thousand Swiss Guard and elite Pax troopers.
The ramscout morphed wings and flew the final ten kilometers on silent electric pulse jets. Isozaki saw the Swiss Guard troopers in full battle dress rise to escort the ship the final five klicks. Rich sunlight glinted off their dynamic-flow armor and transparent face shields as they encircled the ramscout and approached the castle at dead-slow speeds. Isozaki saw several of the troopers aim probes at the ship: confirming with deep radar and infrared what the encrypted manifest readouts had told them about the number and identity of passengers and crew.
