“The eggs hatch and these things swarm out,” continued Noman. “They’re like scouts for the real Setebos. These things only grow to be about twenty feet long. They find… food… in the soil and then return to the original Setebos, I don’t know quite how they travel so far, Brane Holes probably—this one’s not quite old enough to summon a Hole—and when they report back, the big Setebos thanks them for the information and eats them, absorbing all the evil and terror these… babies… have sucked up from the world.”
“How do you know so much about Setebos and his… lice?” asked Ada.
Noman shook his head as if that were too unimportant to deal with now.
And when are you going to start treating that sweet Hannah with the love and attention she deserves, you male pig? thought Ada.
“Noman had something important to tell us… ask us,” said Daeman. Ada’s friend looked worried.
“I need to take the sonie,” said Noman.
Ada blinked again. “Take it where?”
“Up to the rings,” said Noman.
“For how long?” asked Ada. She was thinking You can’t take the sonie! and she knew that Daeman was thinking the same thing.
“I don’t know,” said Odysseus in that strange accent of his.
“Well,” began Ada, “it’s out of the question that you take the sonie. We need it to escape this place. We need it for hunting. We’ll need it for…”
“I have to take the sonie,” repeated Noman. “It’s the only machine on this continent that can get me up there, and I don’t have time to fly to China or somewhere to find another. And the calibani will have made the Mediterranean Basin unapproachable by now.”
“Well,” said Ada again, hearing the edge of rockhard stubbornness that only rarely powered her voice, “you can’t just take the sonie. We’ll all die.”
“That’s not so important right now,” said the gray-bearded warrior.
Ada started to laugh but ended up only staring, her mouth partially open in amazement. “It’s important to us, Noman. We want to live.”
He shook his head as if Ada had not understood. “No one on this planet is going to live unless I can get up to the rings… and today,” he said. “I need the sonie. If I can, I’ll bring it back or send it back to you. If I can’t… well, it won’t matter.”
Ada wished she had a flechette rifle with her. She glanced at the one that Daeman carried—still unslung, he carried it casually. Noman seemed to have no weapon on him, but Ada had seen how strong this man was.
“I need the sonie,” Noman said again. “Today. Now.”
“No,” said Ada.
Down in the Pit, the many-handed orphan suddenly began a wailing, snorting, coughing sound that ended in a noise that sounded very much like a human laugh.
70
A storm was raging far above them. The rings and stars had long since disappeared and lightning illuminated the vertical walls of water on either side and the obscenely pale slash of the Breach stretching away so far to the east and west that the lightning did not last long enough to show its immensity.
Now, however, the lightning flashes overlapped, thunder exploding and echoing down the hallway of energy-bound water, and, lying on his back snug in his silk-thin sleeping bag and thermskin, Harman could see the waves fifty stories above, rising and thrashing another hundred or so feet as the Atlantic Ocean threw itself into the frenzy of the storm. The whipping, writhing clouds were only a few hundred feet above the towering waves. And while the dark depths on either side stayed calm here more than five hundred feet below the surface, Harman could see the layers of agitation far above him. Also agitated were the funnel-bridges—he didn’t have a good name for the transparent tubes and cones and energy-bound tunnels of water that connected the Atlantic south of the Breach to the Atlantic north of it, and Moira simply called them “conduits.” There was such a funnel-bridge visible two hundred feet above the dry bottom of the Breach, visible when the lightning flashed at least, less than a half mile to the west of where they had camped and another a mile or so behind them to the east. Both water tunnels were broiling with activity, huge quantities of white water surging from one side of the Breach to the other. Harman wondered if more water was forced across the Breach during storms. Certainly there was more water falling on them now—the shifting energy walls kept the high waves from pouring over and drowning them, but the spray drifted down as a constant mist. Harman’s outer clothes were tucked away in his rucksack, which was completely waterproof he’d discovered, as was the thinskin sleeping bag, but he’d left the osmosis mask open on his thermskin cowl and his face was damp. Whenever he licked his lips, he tasted salt.
Lightning struck the floor of the Breach less than a hundred yards from them. The percussion from the thunder shook Harman’s molars.
“Should we move?” he shouted at Moira, who was in her own thermskin—she stripped naked and pulled on the thermskin right in front of him with no sign of embarrassment, almost as if they were lovers, which, he realized with a blush, they had been.
“What?” shouted Moira. His voice had been lost in the crash of wave and roars of thunder.
“SHOULD WE MOVE?”
She slid her sleeping skin closer and leaned over to speak close to his ear. She’d left her face exposed as well and was just lying on the sleeping bag, and the mist had soaked the outer layer of the skintight thermskin, showing every rib and rise of hipbone.
“The only place we can move to be safe,” she said loudly next to his ear, “is underwater. We’d be safe from the lightning there at the bottom of the ocean. Want to adjourn?”
Harman didn’t. The thought of stepping through the forcefield barrier into that almost absolute dark and terrible pressure—even if the magical thermskin would keep him from drowning or being crushed—was more than he wanted to deal with this night. Besides, the storm seemed to be letting up a bit. The waves up there only looked to be sixty or eighty feet tall now.
“No thanks,” he shouted back to Moira. “I’ll risk it here.”
He rubbed his face dry and pulled the film-thin osmosis mask in place. Without the salt sting in his eyes and mouth, it was easier to concentrate.
And Harman had a lot to concentrate on. He was still trying to sort out his new human functions.
Many of these newly acquired—although “identified” would be a better word—functions had been interdicted along with his freefax abilities. For instance, Harman clearly saw how he could trigger access to the logosphere to acquire information or to communicate with anyone anywhere, but those functions had been interrupted by whoever or whatever was running the rings these days.
Other functions worked just fine but did not necessarily add to Harman’s peace of mind. There was a medical monitor function that, when queried, told and showed Harman that his diet of food bars and water would lead to certain vitamin deficiencies if he continued it for more than three months. It also informed him that calcium was building up in his left kidney—resulting in a kidney stone in a year or less—that there were two polyps in his colon since his last Firmary visit, that his muscles were deteriorating because of age—it had, after all, been ten years since his last Firmary tune-up, that a strep virus was failing to set up a colony in his throat because of his genetic-cued defenses, that his blood pressure was too high, and that there was the slightest of shadows on his left lung that should demand immediate attention by Firmary sensors.