Ilium Page 8

  The ship entered the crackling, roaring, twitching field of the flux tube, found the vertex of the scissors, aligned itself with the upper blade, and then used the tube’s own accelerator properties to hurl the spacecraft-solenoid through the five-kilometer-wide field coils of the superconducting dipole accelerator. As soon as the ship entered the first gate like some clumsy croquet ball passing through the first of several thousand wickets, the blade of the accelerator-scissors began snapping open with a differential angular velocity nearing—and theoretically even surpassing—light speed. They were riding a rippling bullwhip one second and then flicked from the tip of it the next, using as much of that two trillion watts of energy as the scissors-accelerator could grab.

  The ship—and everything in it—went from zero-g to almost 3,000-g’s within two-point-six seconds.

  Jupiter zipped toward, past, and under them in an eyeblink. Mahnmut slowed all his monitors down so that he could appreciate their departure.

  “Wheeehaw!” cried Orphu from the outer hull.

  The ship and submersible strained, creaked, groaned, and whinnied from the g-force, but it was all made of tough stuff—The Dark Lady itself had been built to withstand several million kilograms per square centimeter of pressure in Europa’s deep seas—and so were these moravecs.

  “Holy shit,” said Mahnmut, meaning to send the comment just to Orphu of Io, but managing to broadcast to all three of his colleagues.

  “Indeed,” responded Ri Po.

  Jupiter’s broiling polar lights—the brilliant auroral oval surrounding the gas giant’s north pole, accompanied by Io’s blazing footprint where the flux tube met atmosphere—flashed beneath them and disappeared astern.

  Ganymede, which had been a million kilometers away across the system a few seconds before, zoomed toward them, flicked past, and was lost to sight behind them.

  “Uruk Sulcus,” said Koros III on the common band and for a moment Mahnmut thought the command-moravec was choking or cursing before he noted the slightly sentimental tone to his usually cool voice and realized that Koros must have been referring to some region on Ganymede itself—a half-glimpsed grooved and dirty snowball flashing past—that must be home to the Ganymedan.

  The tiny moon Himalia, which none of the crew had visited—nor cared to—whipped by like a firefly with its hair on fire.

  “We’ve passed through the bow shock front,” reported Ri Po in his flat Callistan accent. “Out of the local pond for the first time, at least for this moravec.”

  Mahnmut glanced at his screens. Ri Po’s readout reported that they were fifty-three Jupiter diameters out now and still accelerating. Mahnmut had to check unused memory banks and see that Jupiter had a diameter of almost 142,000 kilometers before he got a sense of their speed. The ship was arcing above the plane of the ecliptic, but Mahnmut vaguely remembered that the plan was for the sun’s gravity to hook them back down toward Mars, which was on the far side of the sun at the moment. At any rate, navigation wasn’t his concern. His job would begin when they landed in the ocean of Mars, and sailing there seemed simple enough—rich sunlight, warm temperatures, shallow depths with no pressure to speak of, stars to navigate by at night, geo-positioning satellites that they’d drop into orbit so they could navigate during the day, almost no radiation compared to the surface on Europa. No kraken! No ice. No ice! It all seemed too simple.

  Of course, if the post-humans were hostile, there was a good chance that the moravecs would not survive the trip to Mars or the atmospheric entry, and even they did, there was a high probability that they could never return to their homes in Jupiter space, but there was nothing Mahnmut could do about any of that now. His thoughts began to turn back to Sonnet 127.

  “Everyone all right?” asked Koros III.

  Everyone reported in that they were fine. It took more than a few thousand gravities sitting on their respective chests to get this crew down. Morale was high.

  Ri Po began reporting some other navigational and spacefaring facts, but Mahnmut wasn’t really paying attention. He was already caught up in the gravity field of Sonnet 127, the first of the “Dark Lady” sonnets.

  8

  Ardis

  Daeman slept well and dreamt of women.

  He found it slightly amusing, if not odd, that he dreamt of women only when he was not sleeping with one. It was as if he required warm female flesh next to him every night, and his subconscious supplied them when his daily efforts failed. As he awoke, late, in his comfortable room at Ardis Hall, the dream fled in fragments and tatters, but enough remained—along with usual morning erection—to bring back a vague memory of Ada’s body, or someone very much like Ada—warm, white-skinned, perfumed, with full buttocks and round breasts and solid thighs. Daeman looked forward to the weekend’s coming conquest and had little doubt this lovely morning that he would succeed.

  Later, showered, shaved, dressed impeccably in what he considered rural casual—white-and-blue-striped cotton trousers, wool serge vest, pastel jacket, white silk shirt and ruby cravat stone, carrying his favorite wood walking cane and wearing black leather shoes a slight bit more sturdy than his usual formal slipper-pumps—he breakfasted in the sunlit conservatory and learned, to his satisfaction, that Hannah and that Harman person had left early that morning. “Preparing for the evening’s pour” was Ada’s cryptic explanation and Daeman did not have sufficient interest to ask for clarification. He was just glad the man was gone.

  Ada did not bring up conversational absurdities such as books or spaceships, but spent the late morning with him, serving as guide, reacquainting him with Ardis Hall’s many wings and gabled corridors, its elaborate wine cellars and secret passages and ancient attics. He remembered a similar tour on his first visit there and the feckless girl-Ada leading him up a rickety ladder to the rooftop jinker platform and Daeman, alert as ever to such revelations, had half glimpsed a young man’s heaven up her hoisted skirt as she climbed above him: he perfectly remembered the milky thighs and dark, stippled shadows there.

  This morning they climbed the same ladder to the same jinker platform, but this time Ada gestured him ahead, only smiling at his gentlemanly protests that she go first, the smile suggesting some vixen memory of the event he had thought had gone unnoticed by her at the time.

  Ardis Hall was a tall manor and the jinker platform, its mahogany planks still gleaming, thrust out between gables to an overhang sixty feet above the gravel drive where voynix stood like rusted upright scarabs. Daeman stayed back from the unrailed edge, but Ada ignored the exposure and walked right to the brink, gazing wistfully at the long lawn and distant line of forest.

  “Wouldn’t you give anything to have a working jinker?” she said. “Even if just for a few days?”

  “No. Why would I?”

  Ada gestured with her long-fingered hands. “Even with just a child’s jinker you could fly over the forest and river, over those hills to the west, fly on for days and days away from here, away from any faxport.”

  “Why would anyone want to do that?”

  Ada looked at him for a moment. “You’re not curious? About what’s out there?”

  Daeman tapped at his vest as if brushing away crumbs. “Don’t be absurd, my dear. There’s nothing of interest out there . . . pure wilderness . . . no people. Why, everyone I know lives within a few miles of a faxport. Besides, there are Tyrannosaurus rexes out there.”

  “A tyrannosaurus? In our forest?” said Ada. “Nonsense. We’ve never seen one here. Who told you that, cousin?”

  “You did, my dear. The last time I visited, half a Twenty ago.”

  Ada shook her head. “I must have been teasing you.”

  Daeman thought about this, about his years of anxiety over the thought of ever visiting Ardis again, about his tyrannosaurus nightmares over the years, and could only scowl.

  Ada seemed to read his thoughts and smiled slightly. “Did you ever wonder, Cousin Daeman, why the posts decided to keep our population at one million? Why not
one million and one? Or nine hundred thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine? Why one million?”

  Daeman blinked at this, trying to see the connection in her thoughts between talk of a Lost Age child’s jinker and dinosaurs and the human population that had been the same . . . well . . . forever. And he didn’t like her reminding both of them that they were cousins, since old superstitions sometimes inhibited sexual relations between family members. “I find that such idle speculations lead to indigestion, even on such a beautiful day, my dear,” he said. “Shall we return to a more felicitous topic?”

  “Of course,” said Ada, blessing him with the sweetest of smiles. “Why don’t we go down and find some of the other guests before lunch and our trip to the pour site?”

  This time she went first down the ladder.

  Luncheon was served outside on the northern patio by floating servitors and Daeman chatted amiably with some of the young people—it seemed that several more guests had faxed in for the evening’s “pour”—whatever that was to be—and after the meal, many of the guests found couches in the house or comfortable lounge chairs on the shaded lawn in which to recline while draping their turin cloths over their eyes. The usual time under turin was an hour, so Daeman strolled near the edge of the trees, keeping an eye out for butterflies as he walked.

  Ada joined him near the bottom of the hill. “You do not use the turin, Cousin Daeman?”

  “I do not,” he said, hearing that he had sounded more prissy than he had intended. “I’ve accustomed myself to the things after almost a decade, but I don’t indulge. You also abstain, Ada, my dear?”

  “Not always,” said the young woman. She was twirling a peach-colored parasol as she strolled, and the soft light gave her pale complexion a beautiful glow. “I check in on the events now and again, but I seem to be too busy to become as addicted as so many are these days.”

  “Turins do seem to be ubiquitous.”

  Ada paused in the shade of a giant elm with broad, low branches. She lowered and closed the parasol. “Have you tried it?”

  “Oh, yes. It was all the rage halfway between my Twenties. I spent some weeks enjoying the . . . excess of it all.” He could not completely strain out the tone of distaste at the memory. “Since then, no.”

  “Do you object to the violence, cousin?”

  Daeman made a neutral gesture. “I object to its . . . vicariousness.”

  Ada laughed softly. “Precisely Harman’s reason for never indulging. You two have something in common.”

  The thought of this was so unlikely that Daeman’s only response was to flick away dead leaves on the ground with the point of his walking stick.

  Ada looked up at the sun rather than calling up a time function on her palm. “They will be rousing themselves soon. ‘One hour under the cloth equals eight hours of turgid experience.’ “

  “Ah,” said Daeman, wondering if her use of the cliché had been in the form of a double entendre. Her expression, always pleasant but bordering on the mischievous, gave no clue. “This pour thing—will it last long?”

  “It’s scheduled to go most of the night.”

  Daeman blinked in surprise. “Surely we’re not bivouacking down at the river or wherever this event is to be staged?” He wondered if sleeping out under the stars and rings would improve his chances of spending the night with this young woman.

  “There will be provisions for those who want to stay all night at the pour site,” said Ada. “Hannah promises that this will be quite spectacular. But most of us will come back up to the manor sometime after midnight.”

  “Will there be wine and other drinks at the . . . ah . . . pour?” asked Daeman.

  “Most assuredly.”

  It was Daeman’s turn to smile. Let the others stay for this spectacle, he would keep pouring Ada drinks through the evening, follow up on her “turgid” line of suggestive conversation, accompany her home (with luck and proper planning, just the two of them in a small carriole), pour the full force of his not-inconsiderable powers of attention upon her—and, with only an added bit of additional luck, this night he would not have to dream of women.

  By late afternoon, the twenty or so guests at the manor—some babbling about the day’s turin-experienced events, going on and on about Menelaus being shot by a poisoned arrow or somesuch nonsense—were gathered together by helpful servitors and everyone departed for the “pour site” in a caravan of droshkies and carrioles. Voynix pulled the vehicles while other voynix trotted alongside as security, although—Daeman thought—if there were no tyrannosauruses in the woods, he failed to see a reason for security.

  He had maneuvered to be in the lead carriole with their hostess, and Ada pointed out interesting trees, glens, and streams as they rumbled and hummed two or more miles down the dirt path toward the river. Daeman took up more room on their side of the red leather bench than he had to even given his pleasant plumpness, and was rewarded with the feel of Ada’s thigh alongside his for the duration of the voyage.

  Their destination, he saw as they came out on the limestone ridge above the river valley, was not the river, exactly, but a tributary to the main channel, a literal backwater some hundred yards across, where erosion and flooding had created a wide shelf of sand—a sort of beach—on which a tall, rickety structure of logs, branches, ladders, troughs, ramps, and stairways had been constructed. It looked like a crude gallows to Daeman, although he had never seen an actual gallows, of course. Torches rose from the shallow tributary and the rickety contraption itself stood half on sand and half over water. A hundred yards out, blocking this channel from the actual river was a narrow island—overgrown with cycads and horsehair ferns—from which birds and small flying reptiles exploded into flight with a maximum of cries and frenzied flapping. Daeman wondered idly if there were butterflies on the isle.

  On a grassy area above the beach, colorful silken tents, lounge chairs, and long tables of food had been set up. Servitors floated to and fro, sometimes bobbing above the heads of the arriving guests.

  Walking behind Ada from the carriole, Daeman recognized some of the workers on the strange scaffolding: Hannah at the apex, tying on more structural elements, a red bandana tied around her head; the demented man, Harman, shirtless, sweating, showing bizarrely tanned skin, was stoking a contained fire twenty feet below Hannah; other young people, presumably friends of Hannah’s and Ada’s, shuttled back and forth up the wooden ramps and ladders, carrying heavy loads of sand and extra branches for construction and round stones. A raging fire burned in the clay core of the structure and sparks rose into the early evening sky. All of the workers’ actions appeared purposeful, even though Daeman could see no possible purpose to the tall stack of sticks and troughs and clay and sand and flame.

  A servitor floated by and offered him a drink. Daeman accepted and went off in search of a lounge chair in the shade.

  “This is the cupola,” Hannah explained to the assembled guests later that evening. “We’ve been working on it for about a week, floating materials down the river in canoes. Cutting and bending branches to fit.”

  It was after a fine dinner. Sunlight still illuminated the high hills on the near side of the river, but the valley itself was in the shadows and both rings were glowing bright in the darkening sky. Sparks leaped and floated toward the rings and the puff of bellows and roar of furnace were very loud. Daeman took another drink, his eight or tenth of the evening, and lifted a second one for Ada, who shook her head and turned her attention back to Hannah.

  “We’ve woven wood into a basket shape and coated the center of the furnace—the well—with refractory clay. We made this by shovel, mixing dry sand, bentonite, and some water. Then we rolled the claylike goop into balls, wrapped them in wet ferns and leaves to keep them from drying out, and lined the furnace well with the stuff. That’s what keeps the whole wooden cupola structure from catching fire.”

  Daeman had no idea what the woman was going on about. Why build a big, gawky structure of wood and then
set a fire at its center if you don’t want the thing to burn down? This place was an asylum.

  “Mostly,” continued Hannah, “we’ve spent the last few days feeding the fire while putting out all the little fires the cupola furnace started. That’s why we built this thing near the river.”

  “Wonderful,” muttered Daeman and went in search of another drink while Hannah and her friends—even the insufferable Harman—droned on, using nonsensical terms such as “coke bed,” “wind belt,” “tuyere” (which Hannah was explaining meant some little air entrance on their clay-lined furnace, near which the young woman named Emme kept working the wheezing bellows) and “melting zone” and “molding sand” and “taphole” and “slag hole.” It all sounded barbarous and vaguely obscene to Daeman.

  “And now it’s time to see if it works,” announced Hannah, her voice revealing both exhaustion and exaltation.

  Suddenly the guests had to stand back on the sandy river’s edge, Daeman retreating to the grassy sward near the tables, as all the young people—and that damnable Harman—leaped into a frenzy of action. Sparks flew higher. Hannah ran to the top of the so-called cupola while Harman peered into the clay-furnace-contained flames below and shouted for this and that. Emme worked the bellows until she fell over, and was relieved by the thin man named Loes. Daeman half listened to Ada breathlessly explaining even more details to huddled friends. He caught phrases like “blast pipe” and “blast gate” and “chilled slag” (even though the flames were raging hotter and higher than every before) and “blast pressure.” Daeman moved another fifteen or twenty feet further back.

  “Tapping temp of twenty-three hundred degrees!” Harman shouted up to Hannah. The thin woman wiped sweat from her brow, made some adjustment to the cupola far above, and nodded. Daeman stirred his drink and wondered how long it would be before he could get Ada alone in a carriole on the way back to Ardis Hall.

  Suddenly there was a commotion that made Daeman look up from his drink, sure that he would see the whole structure in flames, Hannah and Harman burning like straw figures. Not quite. While Hannah was using a blanket to swat out flames on the ladder below the top of the cupola—waving away helpful servitors and even a voynix that had come in close to protect the humans from harm—Harman and two others had finished poking inside the fiery furnace and had just opened a “taphole,” allowing what looked to be yellow lava to flow down wooden troughs to the beach.