“One,” I say, “you’re using up all our goddamned time talking. Two, I only have one Hades Helmet and I don’t want to be caught because the gods see a robot walking with invisible me. Three . . . good-bye.”
I pull the Hades Helmet cowl down over my head, twist the medallion, and go.
I QT right into the Great Hall of the Gods.
It looks like they’re all here except for Athena and Apollo, whom I suppose are floating in the healing tanks with green worms in their eyes and armpits about now. In the few seconds I have before the baklava hits the fan, I see that the gods are armored and armed for war—the hall is resplendent with gold breastplates, shining spears, tall helmets with feathered plumes, and polished, god-sized shields. I see Zeus standing by his blazing chariot, Poseidon in dark armor, Hermes and Hephaestus armed to the teeth, Ares carrying Apollo’s silver bow, Hera in gleaming bronze and gold, and Aphrodite pointing my way . . .
Shit.
“SCHOLIC HOCKENBERRY!” belows Zeus himself, looking right at me across the crowded hall. “FREEZE!”
It’s not just Zeusian advice. Every muscle and tendon and ligament and cell in my body freezes. I feel the cold stop my heart. Brownian motion ceases in me. My hand doesn’t make it an inch toward the QT medallion before I’m a statue.
“Take the Hades Helmet, the QT device, and everything else from him,” commands Zeus.
Ares and Hephaestus spring forward and strip me naked in front of gods and goddesses. The leather helmet is tossed to a glowering Hades, and, dressed as he is in black chitinous armor of exotic design, he looks like a terrible, glowering beetle. Zeus steps forward and grabs up my QT medallion from the floor, staring at it and glowering as if he’s going to crush it in his giant fist. They two gods finish ripping my clothes off and don’t even leave me my wristwatch or underpants.
“Unfreeze,” says Zeus. I collapse onto the marble floor and pant, holding my chest. My heart aches so much as it begins beating again that I’m sure I’m having a coronary. It’s everything I can do just not to piss myself in front of everyone.
“Take him away,” says Zeus, turning his back on me.
The eight-foot-tall Ares, god of war, grabs me by the hair and drags me away.
55
The Equatorial Ring
“Thinketh, Himself,” hissed Caliban’s voice from the shadows of the firmary, “would teach the reasoning couple what ‘must’ means! Doth as he likes, or wherefore Lord? So He.”
“Where the hell’s that voice coming from?” snapped Harman. The firmary was mostly dark, light coming from the glowing tanks that were emptying one by one, and Daeman roamed from the semipermeable wall to the cannibal table, trying to find the source of the whispers.
“I don’t know,” said Daeman at last. “Air vent. Some entrance we haven’t found. But if he comes into the light, I’ll kill him.”
“You may shoot him,” said the Prospero hologram standing against the counter near the healing tank controls, “but it is not certain that you will kill him. Caliban—a devil, a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick; on whom my pains humanely taken—all, all lost, quite lost!”
For two days and nights, forty-seven and a half hours, one hundred forty-four revolutions of the asteroid from Earthlight to starlight, the two men had overseen the faxing out of the healing tanks until only a dozen or so bodies were left. They knew now how to call up external holos of the linear accelerator accelerating in a most linear fashion directly toward them. They could see the huge thing now, approaching wormhole first, visible and awful in the clear overhead firmary panels, thrusters burning blue behind. Prospero and the virtual readouts assured them that they had almost ninety minutes left before impact, but instinct and their vision told them otherwise, so both men quit looking up.
Caliban was somewhere near. Daeman kept his thermskin mask down for the light-augmenting lenses, but also used Savi’s flashlight, playing it under the cannibal table, light glinting on white bones there.
They’d thought the trip from the domed control room was the worst—the long swim-kick through kelp and half-light, waiting for Caliban to attack at any minute—but although twice something green-gray moved in the shadows, and twice Daeman had fired Savi’s gun at the movement, once the shadow-thing swam away, and the next time it tumbled out, dead, flechettes glinting in its gray flesh. A post-human corpse in the kelp. But now, after forty-seven and a half hours more without sleep and eating only rancid lizard flesh, there was no worst. This last hour was the worst. At least they’d stopped by the entrance to the grotto, pounded the ice-skim with their boots and gun butt, until they could refill their single bottle with spheroids of vile, scummed, much-lusted-after water. At least they’d done that. But now the water was gone and neither man could leave his post and leave the firmary to go for more. Besides, they’d taken plastic sheets from the tops of the tanks and nailed them up over the semipermeable entrance membrane so that they’d be warned by the ripping if and when Caliban entered the firmary that way, so they couldn’t easily go out that way if they wanted. Now both men’s tongues were swollen and their heads ached abominably from thirst and fatigue and the bad air and fear.
They’d had little problem with the dozen firmary servitors. Several were allowed to continue to work at their tasks of faxing out the healed bodies, while others—whose duties got in the men’s way—were incapacitated. Daeman had fired the gun at one, but that was a mistake. The flechettes tore paint and metal fragments from the servitor, and shattered one manipulator arm and ripped off an eye, but did not destroy it. Harman solved the problem by finding a heavy piece of pipe in the tank farm, wrenching it free—allowing liquid oxygen to steam into the already cold air—and bashing the servitor into immobility. The remaining servitors went into retirement the same way.
Prospero arrived when they powered up the holographic comm sphere atop the control panel, and the magus made sure their adjustments were correct on the tank voidings. First, they shut off the incoming faxnodes. Then they immediately faxed the arriving Twenty-somethings back to their Earthly nodes before any repair was started. Prospero said that there was no way to hurry the work of the blue worms and the orange fluid, so they left those tanks to cycle. The humans floating naked who were near the end of their healing were faxed back early. Of the six hundred and sixty-nine tanks in the firmary, all but thirty-eight were empty now—thirty-six of those were extensive repairs and two were regular Twenties who had faxed in and begun normal repair just before Harman and Daeman had managed to shut off the fax computers.
“Also, it pleaseth Setebos to work,” hissed the unseen Caliban’s voice.
“Shut up!” shouted Daeman. He moved between the glowing tanks, trying not to float in the low but appreciable gravity there. Shadows danced everywhere but none of them were solid enough to shoot.
“Falls to make something: piled yon pile of turfs, and squared and stuck there squares of soft white chalk,” whispered Caliban from the dark. “And, with a fish tooth, scratched a moon on each, and set up endwise certain spikes of tree, and crowned the whole with a sloth’s skull atop, found dead i’ the woods, too hard for one to kill. No use at all i’ the work, for work’s sole sake; Shall someday knock it down again: so He.”
Harman laughed.
“What?” Daeman walked and floated back to the virtual controls where the holosphere allowed Prospero to stand. Parts and pieces of servitors were everywhere underfoot, mimicking the cannibal table farther back in the shadows.