“Of course it does,” booms Odysseus. “What would the world be without the agon—the agonistics of one man against another—to show everyone the order of precedence among men, just as no two other things on earth are alike? How could any of us alive know quality if competition and personal combat did not let all the world know who embodies excellence and who merely manages mediocrity? What games do you excel in, son of Duane?”
“I went out for track my freshman year at college,” says Hockenberry. “I didn’t make the team.”
“Well, I have to admit that I’m not half bad in the world of games where men compete,” says Odysseus. “I know how to handle a well-carved, fine-polished bow and will be the first among my comrades to hit my man in a moving mass of enemies, even with my friends jostling against me, everyone trying to take aim at once. One reason I was willing to follow Achilles and Hector into a war with the gods was my eagerness to test my prowess as an archer against Apollo’s skill—although in my heart, I knew this was folly. Whenever mortal man rivals the gods in archery—look at poor Eurytus of Oechalia—that man can bet he’ll die a sudden death, not pass away from old age within the halls of his own home. And I don’t think I’d go up against the Lord of the Silver Bow unless I had my best bow with me, and I never take it to war when I sail off in the black ships. That bow is on the wall of my great hall even now. Iphitus gave me that bow as a sign of friendship when we first met—the bow belonged to his father, the archer Eurytus himself. I liked Iphitus a lot, and I’m sorry I gave him only a sword and rough-hewn spear in exchange for the finest bow on earth. Heracles murdered Iphitus before I really had time to get to know the man.
“As for spears, I can fling a lance as far as the next man can shoot an arrow. And you’ve seen me box and wrestle. As for sprinting—yes, you saw me beat Ajax, and I can run for hours without vomiting up my breakfast, but in the short sprint, many runners will leave me behind in the dust unless Athena intervenes on my behalf.”
“I could have qualified for track,” says Hockenberry, almost muttering to himself now. “Long distance was my thing. But there was this guy named Brad Muldorff—the Duck we used to call him—who squeezed me out for the last position on the team.”
“Failing tastes of bile and dog vomit,” says Odysseus. “Shame on any man who gets used to that taste.” He gulps some wine, throwing his head back to swallow, then wipes droplets from his brown beard. “I dream of talking to dead Achilles in the shaded halls of Hades, but it’s my son Telemachus whom I really want to know about. If the gods are going to send me dreams, why not dreams of my son? He was a boy when I left—timid and untested—and I’d like to know if he’s turned into a man or become one of those pantywaists who hang around better men’s halls, seeking a rich wife, buggering boys, and playing the lyre all day.”
“We never had any children,” says Hockenberry. He rubs his forehead. “I don’t think we did. Memories of my real life are mixed up and murky. I’m like a sunken ship that someone refloated for their own reasons, but didn’t bother to pump all the water out—just enough to make it float. Too many compartments are still flooded.”
Odysseus looks at the scholic, obviously not understanding and obviously not interested enough to ask a question.
Hockenberry looks back at the Greek captain-king, his gaze suddenly focused and intense. “I mean, answer me this if you can…I mean, what does it mean to be a man?”
“To be a man?” repeats Odysseus. He opens the last two gourds of wine and hands Hockenberry one.
“Yess…excuse me, yes. To be a man. To become a man. In my country, the only rite of passage is when you get the car keys…or get laid for the first time.”
Odysseus nods. “Getting laid for the first time is important.”
“But certainly that can’t be it, son of Laertes! What does it take to be a man—or a human being, for that matter?”
This should be good, Mahnmut sends to Orphu on the tightbeam. I’ve wondered this myself more than a few times—and not just when I’m trying to understand Shakespeare’s sonnets.
We’ve all wondered it, replies Orphu. All of us obsessed with things human. Which is to say, all of us moravecs, since our programming and designed DNA lead us back to studying and trying to understand our creators.
“Being a man?” repeats Odysseus, his voice serious, almost distracted. “Right now I have to piss. Do you have to piss, Hockenberry?”
“I mean,” continues the scholic, “maybe it has something to do with consistency.” He has to try the word twice before getting it right. “Consistency. I mean, look at your Olympics versus ours. Just look at that!”
“That other moravec told me how to piss in that latrine in the room, it has some sort of vacuum that sucks it in even in this floating time, but I find it damned hard not to send blobs everywhere, don’t you, Hockenberry?”
“Twelve hundred years you ancient Greeks kept your Games going,” says Hockenberry. “Five days of games, every four years, for twelve hundred years, until some pissant Christian emperor of Rome abolished them. Twelve hundred years! Through drought and famine, pestilence and plague. Every four years, the wars would be brought to a halt, and your athletes would travel from all over their world to Olympia, to pay homage to the gods and to compete in the chariot races, footraces, wrestling, discus, and javelin, and pankration—that weird mixture of wrestling and kickboxing that I’ve never seen and I bet you haven’t either. Twelve hundred years, son of Laertes! When my own people brought the Games back, they couldn’t keep them going for much more than a hundred years without three of them being canceled for war, countries refusing to show up because they were pissed off by this or that slight or offense, and we even had terrorists kill Jewish athletes…”
“Pissed off, yes,” says Odysseus, releasing the gourd on its tether and spinning around, ready to kick back to his cubby. “Have to piss. Be right back.”
“Maybe the only thing that’s really consistent is what Homer said—‘Dear to us ever is the banquet and the harp and the dance and changes of raiment and the warm bath and love, and sleep.’”
“Who’s Homer?” asks Odysseus, pausing in midair at the irised door to the astrogation bubble.
“No one you’d know,” says Hockenberry, drinking more wine. “But you know what…”
He stops. Odysseus is gone.
Mahnmut goes out through the medical deck airlock, tethers himself even though he has reaction-thruster fuel in his backpack, and follows catwalks, ladders, and ship lines around and up the Queen Mab. He finds Orphu of Io welding a patch on the cargo bay doors in which The Dark Lady is stored, cradled under the folding wings of the reentry shuttle.
“That could have been more enlightening,” says Mahnmut on their private radio frequency.
“Most conversations share that particular quality,” says Orphu. “Even ours.”
“But we’re not usually drunk during our conversations.”
“Since moravecs don’t ingest alcohol for stimulative or depressive purposes, you are technically correct,” says Orphu, his shell, legs, and sensors brightly illuminated by the shower of sparks from his welding. “But we’ve discussed things while you’ve been hypoxic, drugged with fatigue toxins, and—as the humans would say—scared shitless, so Odysseus’ and Hockenberry’s disjointed conversation did not sound unfamiliar to my ears…if I had ears.”
“What would Proust say about what it takes to be human…or a man, for that matter?” asks Mahnmut.
“Ah, Proust, that tiresome fellow,” says Orphu. “I was reading him again just this morning.”
“You once tried to explain to me his steps to truth,” says Mahnmut. “But first you said he had three steps, then four, then three, then back to four. I don’t think you ever told me what they were, either. In fact, I think you lost track of what you were talking about.”
“Just testing you,” says Orphu with a rumble. “Seeing if you were listening.”
“So you say,” says Mahnmut. “I
think you were having a moravec moment.”
“It wouldn’t be the first,” says Orphu of Io. Data overload from both their organic brains and cybernetic memory banks was an increasing problem as moravecs moved into their second or third century.
“Well,” says Mahnmut, “I doubt if Proust’s ideas about the essence of being human connect too well with Odysseus’.”
Four of Orphu’s multiply jointed arms are busy with the welding, but he shrugs two others. “You remember that he tried friendship—even as a lover—as being one of those paths,” says the Ionian. “So he has that in common with both Odysseus and our scholic in there. But Proust’s narrator discovers that his own calling to truth is writing, examining the nuances wrapped within the other nuances of his life.”
“But he’d rejected art earlier as a path to the deepest humanity,” says Mahnmut. “I thought you told me that he decided that art wasn’t the way to truth after all.”
“He discovers that real art is an actual form of creation,” says Orphu. “Here, listen to this passage from an early section of The Guermantes Way—
“ ‘People of taste tell us nowadays that Renoir is a great eighteenth-century painter. But in so saying they forget the element of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even at the height of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original painter or the orginal writer proceeds on the lines of the oculist. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by their prose is not always pleasant. When it is at an end the practitioner says to us: “Now look!” And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we formerly saw, because they are Renoirs, those Renoirs we persistently refused to see as women. The carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky; we feel tempted to go for a walk in the forest which is identical with the one which when we first saw it looked like anything in the world except a forest, like for instance a tapestry of innumerable hues, but lacking precisely the hues peculiar to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe which has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter of original talent.’ And he goes on to explain how writers do the same thing, Mahnmut—bring new universes into existence.”
“Surely he doesn’t mean that in a literal sense,” says Mahnmut. “Not bringing real universes into existence.”
“I think he is speaking literally,” replies Orphu, his tone on the radio band as serious as Mahnmut has ever heard it. “Have you been following the quantum flux sensor readings that Asteague/Che has been putting on the common band?”
“No, not really. Quantum theory bores me.”
“This isn’t theory,” says Orphu. “Every day we’ve been making this Mars-Earth transit, the quantum instability between the two worlds, within our entire solar system, has grown larger. The Earth is at the center of this flux. It’s as if all of its space-time probability matrices have entered some vortex, some region of self-induced chaos.”
“What does that have to do with Proust?”
Orphu shuts off the welding torch. The large patch-plate on the cargo-bay doors is perfectly joined. “Somebody or something is screwing around with worlds, perhaps with entire universes. Break down the math of the quantum data flowing in, and it’s as if different quantum Calabi-Yau spaces have somehow attempted to coexist on one Brane. It’s almost as if new worlds are trying to come into existence—as if they’ve been willed into existence by some singular genius, just as Proust suggests.”
Somewhere on the Queen Mab, invisible thrusters fire and the long, inelegant-but-beautiful black buckycarbon and steel spacecraft rotates and tumbles. Mahnmut grabs a clutch-bar, his feet flying out away from the ship, as three hundred meters of atomic spacecraft twist and tumble like a circus acrobat. Sunlight slides across the two moravecs and then sets behind the bulky pusher plates at the stern. Mahnmut readjusts his polarized filters, sees the stars again, and knows that while Orphu can’t see them on the visible spectrum, he’s listening to their radio squawks and screeches. That themonuclear choir, the Ionian once had called it.
“Orphu, my friend,” Mahnmut says, “are you getting religious on me?”
The Ionian rumbles in the subsonic. “If I am—and if Proust is right and real universes are created when those rare, almost unique genius-level minds concentrate on creating them—I don’t think I want to meet the creators of this current reality. There’s something malignant at work here.”
“I don’t see why this…” begins Mahnmut and then pauses, listening to the common band. “What’s a twelve-oh-one alarm?”
“The mass of the Mab has just decreased by sixty-four kilograms,” says Orphu.
“Waste and urine dump?”
“Not quite. Our friend Hockenberry has just quantum teleported away.”
Mahnmut’s first thought is—Hockenberry’s in no condition to QT anywhere—we should have stopped him. Friends don’t let friends teleport drunk—but he decides not to share this with Orphu.
A second later, Orphu says, “Do you hear that?”
“No, what?”
“I’ve been monitoring the radio bands. We just brought the high-gain antenna around to aim it at Earth—or actually, the polar orbital ring around Earth—and it’s just picked up a modulated radio broadcast being masered right at us.”
“What does it say?” Mahnmut feels his organic heart beginning to pump faster. He doesn’t override the adrenaline, but lets it pump.
“It’s definitely from the polar ring,” says Orphu, “about thirty-five thousand kilometers above Earth. The message is in a woman’s voice. And it just says, over and over—‘Bring Odysseus to me.’”
38
Daeman entered the blue-ice dome-cathedral to an echoing susurration of whispers and chants.
“Thinketh, He made it, with the fire to match, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, that floats and feeds! Thinketh, He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye by moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue, that pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm, and says a plain word when she finds her prize, but will not eat the ants; the ants themselves that built a wall of seeds and settled stalks about their hole—He made all these and more, made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?”
Daeman recognized the voice at once—Caliban. The sibilant whispers echoed off blue-ice wall and blue-ice tunnel, seeming to come from everywhere, reassuringly distant, terrifyingly close. And somehow that single Caliban voice was a chorus, a choir, a multitude of voices in terrible harmony. More frightened than he thought he’d be—much, much more frightened than he’d hoped he would be—Daeman bent his head low and moved forward out of the ice tunnel onto the ice mezzanine.
After an hour’s crawling, often backtracking as some blue-ice tunnel narrowed and closed at a dead end, sometimes emerging into corridors ten yards across only to come up against a wall or vertical shaft far too high to climb, sometimes crawling on his belly so that his back scraped the ice ceiling, shoving his pack ahead of him along with the crossbow, Daeman had emerged into what he thought of as the center of the ice-dome cathedral.
Daeman had none of the ancient words to describe this space he had stepped out into, standing as he was on one of what looked to be hundreds of shadowy ice-mezzanines in the inner, curved wall of the vast structure, but if he had sigled the words, he would have fumbled through them now—spires, dome, arches, flying buttresses, apse, nave, basilica, choir loft, porch, chapel, rose window, alcove, pillar, altar. They all would have applied to one or more parts of what he was looking at now, and he would have needed more words. Many more words.
As best as Daeman could estimate, the interior of this space was just a little over a mile across and about two thousand feet from the red-glowing floor to the bl
ue-ice apex of the dome. As he’d guessed earlier from the outside, Setebos had covered over the entire crater at the heart of Paris Crater and the vast circle now glowed red, pulsing as if from some huge heartbeat. Daeman had no idea whether this was due to some natural volcanic activity in the crater, some magma rising from miles below where the black hole had once torn at the heart of the Earth, or whether Setebos was somehow summoning and using that heat and light. The rest of the dome glowed in shades of colors Daeman could not describe—from all the varieties of red at the base, through iridescent and then subtle oranges along the periphery of the crater and lower reaches of the dome, veins of red branching up through orange-yellow buttresses and stalagmites and then the hotter colors fading into the cool glow of the immense blue pillars. The blue-ice walls, columns, tendons, and towers were shot through with pulses of green light and yellow sparks, ordered columns of red pulses moving along hidden channels like surges of electricity, open sparks connecting brachiated sections of the cathedral like dendrites firing.
The shell of the dome was thin enough in places that the last evening light from outside illuminated rose circles on the west side. The highest point on the ceiling was as thin as glass and showed an oval of darkening sky and an only slightly blurred view of the emerging stars. Most curious though, low on the inner walls of the dome were hundreds of cross-shaped impressions, each about six feet high. They circled the space, and by leaning out from his rough mezzanine slab, Daeman could see more of these cross-niches below him, indented as if burned into the blue-ice. They seemed to be made of metal and were empty, their steel interiors reflecting the red glow from the center of the crater.
The red-hued floor of the crater itself was not empty. Everywhere rose thorned stalagmites and craggy spires, with some rising all the way to the ceiling—creating neat rows of blue-ice pillars—while others remained freestanding. Nor was the floor of the crater smooth; everywhere were smaller craters and raised fumaroles. Gases, steam, and smoke curled out of most of these and Daeman caught the stink of sulfur on the tepid, overheated air currents. In the center of the red-glowing circle was a raised and raw-rimmed crater ringed with blue-ice stairways and lesser fumaroles. This crater above the crater appeared to be filled almost to the rim with round, white stones, until Daeman realized that the stones were the tops of human skulls—tens of thousands of human skulls, most lying beneath the mass that almost filled the crater. This raised crater looked very much like a nest and the impression was reinforced by the thing that filled it—gray brain tissue, convoluted ridges, multiple pairs of eyes, mouths, and orifices opening and shutting in no unison, a score of huge hands beneath it—these hands occasionally rearranging the huge form’s mass on its nest, settling it more comfortably—and he saw other hands, each larger than the room Daeman occupied at Ardis Hall, that had emerged from the brain on stalks and were pulling themselves and their trailing tentacles across the glowing floor. Some of the hands were close enough that Daeman could see a myriad of curved, barbed, black hair spikes or hooks emerging from the ends of those huge fingers. Each barb—some sort of evolved hair?—was longer than the killing knife that Daeman wore on his belt, and the fingers used the filaments to sink into the blue-ice. The hands could climb anywhere, pull themselves along any surface—masonry, ice, or steel—by sinking those black, hooked blades into whatever lay underhand.