There were many more functions—some of them intriguing beyond words—but the concentration necessary to explore them was bringing back Harman’s headache. He shut down that part of his brain for the night.
Immediately more powerful sensory information flowed in. The surge of waves far above. A photoluminescent-phytoplanktonish glow in the upper strata of the Atlantic that looked like an underwater aurora borealis to his tired eyes.
The sky over the ocean was also alive with light—not air-to-sea lightning this time but internal cloud lightning, silent explosions showing the fractal complexity of the churning clouds as lit from within. These pulses and explosions of light were silent—not the slightest hint of thunder reaching his little sleeping bag on the bottom of the Atlantic Breach—so Harman crossed his arms behind his head and just enjoyed the light show, also appreciating the effect of the cloud lightning on the still-churning surface of the ocean.
Patterns. Patterns everywhere. All of nature and the universe dancing at the edge of chaos, reprieved by fractal boundaries and a billion hidden algorithmic protocols hardwired into everything and every interaction, but beautiful nonetheless—oh, so beautiful. He realized that there was at least one function he hadn’t really explored that could sort out most of these patterns for him, far better than mere evolved human senses and sensibilities could, but it would probably be an interdicted function requiring ring-connections, and besides… Harman didn’t need a genetically enhanced function to appreciate the pure beauty of this silent mid-Atlantic show that was being put on just for him.
He lay on the floor of the Breach, hands behind his head, and said a prayer for Ada and his possible son or daughter. (Her functions, when activated, would tell her which it was.) He wished he could be with her now. He prayed to the God he’d never really thought about—to the Quiet God whom Setebos and his lackey Caliban feared above all else according to what the monster had blurted out on Prospero’s Isle—and he prayed only that his beloved Ada would remain well and alive and as happy as the terrible circumstances of these times and their separation across space would allow.
As he fell asleep, Harman heard the rasp and sawing of Moira’s snoring. He smiled as he drifted off. A thousand years of post-human nanocyte and DNA-rearranging cleverness hadn’t cured them from snoring. But, of course, it was Savi’s human body that…
Harman fell asleep in midthought.
71
Achilles wishes he was dead.
The air is so foul and thick here in Tartarus, his lungs burn so fiercely, his eyes are watering and hurting so much, his skin and guts feel like they are ready simultaneously to implode and explode from the pressure, the Oceanids monster-woman is carrying him so rib-shattering tightly in her thigh-fingered fist, and his outlook for the future is so fucking dim, that he wishes that he could just die and get it over with.
But the quantum Fates will not allow him this option. That bitch of a goddess mother of his, that tart Thetis who’d professed love to his father—the man whom he’d always honored as his father, Peleus—and then lain with Zeus like the aquatic roundheels she was, had held him in the Celestial Fire and created a quantum singularity point for his death—to be reached only through the actions of the now dead and cremated Paris of Ilium—and that, as they say, is that.
So he suffers and tries to focus on what is going on outside his tight, rapidly imploding sphere of pain and discomfort.
The three Titan-giant daughters of Okeanos—Asia, Panthea, and Ione—are striding quickly through the poisonous gloom toward a brighter glow that might be a volcanic eruption, Achilles held tight in Asia’s huge, sweaty fist. When Achilles is able to open his burning eyes and catch glimpses of the landscape through his tears—tears from toxic chemicals in the air, not from emotion—he gets blurry views of high, rocky ridges such as the one the three Oceanids are now striding along, thundering volcanoes, deep chasms filled with lava and oddly shaped monsters, an escort of the giant centipede-things that must be related to the Healer on Olympos, occasional glimpses of silhouettes that must be other Titans crashing and bellowing through the gloom, and a sky filled with orange-limned clouds, wild lightning, and other electrical displays.
Suddenly the giantess Titan named Panthea speaks—“Is that the véiled form we seek who sits on that ebony throne?”
Asia, bitch-voice booming like boulders crashing down a rocky slope. (Achilles has not the strength to cover his aching ears with his acid-scalded hands.)—“It is. The veil has fallen.”
Panthea—“I see a mighty darkness filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom dart round, as light from the meridian sun.—But the Demogorgon itself remains ungazed upon and shapeless, neither limb, nor form, nor outline; yet we all three feel it is a living Spirit.”
The Demogorgon speaks then and Achilles buries his face in Asia’s huge, rough palm in a vain effort to muffle the subsonic pain of that all-encroaching voice. “ASK WHAT THOU WOULDST KNOW, OCEANIDS.”
Asia offers up her palm with the writhing Achilles on it. “Canst thou tell us what shape and manner of thing this is we have caught? It seems more starfish than man, and it writhes and squeaks as such.”
The Demogorgon roars again. “IT IS ONLY A MORTAL MAN, ALTHOUGH MADE IMMORTAL BY THE CELESTIAL FIRE’S MISTAKE. IT IS NAMED ACHILLES AND IT IS VERY FAR FROM HOME. NO MORTAL HAS EVER COME TO TARTARUS BEFORE THIS DAY.”
“Ah,” says Asia, seeming to lose interest in her toy and roughly setting Achilles down on a burning-hot boulder.
Achilles feels the heat all around and when he opens his eyes, he can see farther because of the glow of lava and eruption, but is horrified to see that lava flowing past on both sides of his steaming boulder. When he looks up toward the Demogorgon on its throne—the throne a mountain taller than the erupting volcanoes, and the hooded and veiled non-shape on that throne seeming to rise up for miles and miles—the shapelessness of the Demogorgon makes him want to vomit. So he does. None of the Oceanics seems to notice his retching.
Asia asks the huge form, “What else canst thou tell?”
“ALL THINGS THOU DAR’ST DEMAND.”
“Who made the living world?” asks Asia. Achilles has already decided that she is the most talkative, if not the most intelligent, of the three idiot Oceanids.
“GOD.”
“Who made all that it contains?” persists Asia. “Thought? Passion? Reason? Will? Imagination?”
“GOD. ALMIGHTY GOD.”
Achilles decides that this Demogorgon is a spirit-thing of few words. And fewer thoughts in its head, if it has a head. He would give anything if he could rise and pull his sword from his belt, unsling his shield from his back. First he would kill the Demogorgon and then the three Titan sisters… slowly.