46

The Equatorial Ring

Caliban’s lair was dark and moist and warm, hidden as it was amidst the old pipes and septic system beneath the city’s surface, the grotto warmed to tropical temperatures by biotic decay and populated with scuttling eft-things and pompion plants. Caliban cracked thin ice, swam through a pipe in the asteroid’s soil, emerged into a long, narrow grotto, hung his netful of captives by a hook, slashed the net, set the three stunned and unresisting humans on three rocks ten feet above a bubbling pool, and stretched out on a licheny pipe overgrown with ferns. The creature kicked both feet in the slush, and propped his chin on his huge clenched fists to inspect Savi, Harman, and Daeman.

Daeman had pissed himself when the monster seized them. The thermskin absorbed the moisture and dried itself almost immediately, leaving no stain, but his cheeks reddened even through his terror when he thought of it.

There was air in Caliban’s lair, and more gravity than in the city proper, and the creature ripped off their osmosis masks so quickly, his long arm striking forward so rapidly and clawed fingers grasping with such speed that none of the three, even the last, had time to duck or back away. Their rocks rose like slimy columns above the black pool. The air around them smelled foul and thick and sewage-rich. Caliban breathed it in as if it were ambrosial, showing his yellow smile from time to time as if to taunt them. Part of the fishy smell in the grotto came from the creature itself.

Daeman had thought the calibani in the Mediterranean Basin were scary, but knew now that they were shadowy duplicates of the awfulness of this real and original Caliban, if that’s what this thing was. This creature was no larger than the calibani, but was infinitely more obscene in all his toothed and testicled fleshiness. At first glance Caliban seemed ungainly, almost clumsy, but he’d swum through the cold, thin air of the dead city easily enough, using his huge webbed feet and webbed hands as effective paddles. He’d gripped the gathered end of their net in his oversized mouth, the sharp teeth there holding it fast even as Savi, Harman, and Daeman struggled and kicked against the net.

“What do you want with us?” demanded Savi as the three of them were perched on their stones above the underground pond and Caliban lay studying them. Daeman could see that she’d retrieved the gun that had fallen into the net with them and that it was in her hand, but it wasn’t aimed. Shoot it! Daeman thought at the old woman. Kill this thing!

Caliban, sprawled close enough above their stone columns that his breath washed over them, redolent with the same decay as the air itself, hissed, “He creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard. And now a flower drops with a bee inside, and now a fruit to snap at, catch, and crunch.”

“He’s crazy,” whispered Harman over their radio link.

Caliban smiled. “He talks to his own self, howe’er he please, touching that other, whom his dam called God. Because to talk about Him, vexes—ha, could He but know! And time to vex is now.”

“Who is ‘He’?” asked Savi. Her voice was very calm for someone in a stinking grotto and at the mercy of a beast. “Are you speaking of yourself in the third person, Caliban?”

“He is He,” whispered the monster, prone on his mossy pipe, “except when He is Setebos!” At the mention of the name, Caliban sprawled lower, spraddled and splay-footed, putting his arms over his head as if ready to ward off a blow from above. Something small and scaly scuttled and splashed in the fetid pond below them. Yellow vapors rose around them all.

“Who is Setebos?” asked Harman, obviously working to keep his voice as calm as Savi’s. “Is Setebos your master? Will you go get him for us so he can let us go? We’ll talk with him.”

Caliban raised his head, scraped the pipe with his claws fore and aft, and barked at the roof of the grotto. “Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos! Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.”

“The moon?” said Savi. “This Setebos of yours lives on the moon?”

“Thinketh, He made it, with the sun to match,” purred the creature. “But not the stars; the stars came otherwise; only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that: Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon, And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.”

“What is he talking about?” whispered Daeman to Savi on the suit comms. “Is he mad? It sounds like he’s talking about some god.”

“I think he is talking about a god,” Savi whispered back. “His god. Or something real that he views as a god.”

“Who or what created this monster? No God, certainly,” whispered Daeman.

Caliban’s odd, translucent ears twitched and raised at this. “Thinketh, Sycorax, my mother made me, mortal morsel. Thinketh, Prospero, the silent servant of the Quiet, made Himself servant to the servant. Thinketh, though, that Setebos, the many-handed as a cuttlefish, who, making Himself feared through what He does, looks up, first, and perceives he cannot soar to what is quiet and happy in life, but makes this bauble-world to ape yon real, These good things to match those as hips do grapes.”

“This bauble-world,” repeated Savi. “Do you mean the asteroid city here on the e-ring, Caliban?”

Instead of responding, Caliban crawled forward like a scaled cat ready to pounce, his yellow eyes only a yard from their heads. “Thinketh, Himself, do they know Prosper?”

“I know Ariel, the biosphere entity,” said Savi. “Ariel gave us pass to Atlantis and to travel here. It’s all right for us to be here. Ask Ariel.”

Caliban laughed and rolled onto his back, only his claws and webbed feet keeping him from rolling off the slick pipe into the fetid water below. “Thinketh, Himself as Prosper, keeps for his Ariel a tall pouch-bill crane He bids go wade for fish and straight disgorge; also a sea beast, lumpish, which he snared, blinded the eyes of, and brought somewhat tame, and split its toe-webs, and now pens the drudge in a hole o’ the rock and calls him . . . Caliban .”

“What the hell is he talking about?” demanded Daeman on the commline. “The thing is mad. Shoot it, Savi. Shoot it.”

“I think I . . . may . . . understand,” whispered Harman. “Himself is Caliban. He does speak of himself in the third person, Savi. Your logosphere Prospero enslaved him somehow and used Ariel, the biosphere persona, to do it.”

“And Caliban blinded some little sea beast, maybe a lizard like those in the pool below, and called it Caliban,” said Savi. Her voice was odd—distant, almost bemused—as if the yellow-eyed thing reclining and stretching in front of them had mesmerized her. “He plays at being his master, Prospero,” she said softly.

Caliban laughed and scratched his side. Daeman could see gills there, opening and closing like obscene gray mouths above his ribs and just below his armpits. “Himself, peeped late, eyed Prosper at his books careless and lofty, lord now of the isle,” hissed Caliban. “Vexed, stitched a book of broad leaves, arrow-shaped, has peeled a wand and called it by a name; weareth at whiles for an enchanter’s robe the eyed skin of a supple oncelot.”

“Oncelot?” said Harman.

“Shoot it, Savi,” hissed Daeman. “Shoot it now before it kills us.”

“Caliban,” said Savi, voice soothing, “what happened to the post-humans here?”

Caliban began to weep. Mucus ran from his muzzle. “Setebos,” he whispered, looking again toward the roof of the grotto as if someone was listening. “Setebos bid me to give these mankins three sound legs for one, or pluck the other off, and leave them like an egg. Were this no pleasure, mind me mortal, hunting posties one by one, drinking the mash to wash down their flesh, with brain become alive, making and marring clay at will. So He. So He!”