He’d seen no voynix in the dozen or so times he’d come here to sit and think. On one trip, some huge, legless, flippered saurian thing had risen out of the surf just beyond the reef, then crashed back into the water with a thirty-foot shark in its mouth, but other than that one disconcerting sighting, he’d seen nothing threatening here.
Now he trudged down to the beach, dropped his heavy crossbow onto the sand, and sat down next to it. The sun was hot. He pulled off his bulky backpack, anorak, and shirt. There was something hanging out of the pocket of his anorak and he pulled it out—the turin cloth from the table of skulls. He tossed it away on the sand. Daeman removed his shoes, trousers, and underwear and staggered naked toward the water’s edge, not even glancing toward the jungle’s edge to make sure he was alone.
My mother is dead. The fact hit him like a physical blow and he thought he might be sick again. Dead.
Daeman walked naked toward the surf. He stood at the edge of the lagoon and let the warm waves lap at his feet, move the sand from under his toes. Dead. He would never see his mother or hear her voice again. Never, never, never, never, never.
He sat down heavily on the wet sand. Daeman had thought himself reconciled to this new world where death was a finality; he thought he’d come to terms with this obscenity when he’d faced his own death eight months earlier up there on Prospero’s Isle.
I knew that I had to die someday… but not my mother. Not Marina. That’s not… fair.
Daeman sobbed a laugh at the absurdity of what he was thinking and feeling. Thousands dead since the Fall… he knew there were thousands dead, because he’d been one of Ardis’s envoys to the hundreds of other nodes, he’d seen the graves, even taught some communities how to dig graves and set the bodies in them to rot away…
My mother! Had she suffered? Had Caliban played with her, tormented her, tortured her before slaughtering her?
I know it was Caliban. He killed them all. It doesn’t matter if that’s impossible—it’s true. He killed them all, but only to get to my mother, to set her skull on top of the pyramid of skulls, wisps of her red hair remaining to show me that it was indeed my mother. Caliban. You whoremongering gill-slitted motherfucking sonofabitching asshole-licking freakshit murderous gape-mawed goddamned fucking…
Daeman couldn’t breathe. His chest simply locked up. He opened his mouth as if to retch again, but he couldn’t move air in or out.
Dead. Forever. Dead.
He stood, waded into the sun-warmed water, and then dove, striking out and swimming hard, swimming toward the reef where the waves lifted white and where he’d seen the giant beast with the shark in its jaws, swimming hard, feeling the sting of saltwater in his eyes and on his cheeks…
The swimming allowed him to breathe. He swam a hundred yards to where the lagoon opened onto the sea and then treaded water, feeling the cold currents tugging at him, watching the heavy waves beyond the reef, listening to the wonderful violence of their crashing, almost surrendering then to the undertow beckoning him out, farther, farther—there was no Pacific Breach as there was in the Atlantic, his body might drift for days—and then he turned and swam back into the beach.
He came out of the water oblivous of his nakedness but no longer oblivious to his safety. He lifted his salt-crusted left palm and invoked the farnet function. He was on this island in the South Pacific—Daeman almost laughed at this thought, since nine months ago, before he’d met Harman, he hadn’t known the names of the oceans, hadn’t even known the world was round, hadn’t known the landmasses, didn’t know there was more than one ocean—and what goddamn good had it done him since to know these things? None, as far as he could tell.
But the farnet showed him that there were no old-style humans or voynix around. He walked up the beach to his clothes and dropped onto the anorak, using it as a beach blanket. His tanned legs were covered with sand.
Just as he went to his knees, a gust of wind from the land caught the tumbling turin cloth and blew it over his head, toward the water. Acting on pure reflex, Daeman reached high and caught it. He shook his head and used the borders of the elaborately embroidered cloth to dry his hair.
Daeman flopped onto his back, the wadded cloth still in his hand, and stared up at the flawless blue sky.
She’s dead. I held her skull in my hands. How had he known for sure that this one skull out of a hundred—even with the obscene hint of the strands of short, red hair—had been his mother? He was sure. Perhaps I should have left her there with the others. Not with Goman, whose stubbornness at staying in Paris Crater killed her. No, not with him. Daeman had a clear image of the small, white skull tumbling toward the red-magma eye of the crater.
He closed his eyes, wincing. The pain of this night was a physical thing, lurking behind his eyes like lancets.
He had to get back to Ardis to tell everyone about what he’d seen—about the certainty of Caliban’s return to earth and about the hole in the night sky and about the huge thing that had come through the hole.
He imagined Harman’s or Noman’s or Ada’s or some of the other people’s questions. How can you be certain it was Caliban?
Daeman was certain. He knew. There had been a connection between him and the monster since the two tumbled in near zero-gravity in the great ruined cathedral space of Prospero’s orbital isle. He’d known since the Fall that Caliban was still alive—had probably, somehow, impossibly, certainly, escaped the isle and returned to Earth.
How could you know?
He knew.
How could one creature, smaller than a voynix, kill a hundred of the Paris Crater survivors—most of them men?
Caliban could have used the clone things from the Mediterranean Basin—the calibani that Prospero had created centuries ago to keep the Setebos’ voynix at bay—but Daeman suspected the monster had not. He suspected that Caliban alone had slaughtered his mother and all the others. Sending me a message.
If Caliban wants to send you a message, why didn’t he come to Ardis Hall and kill us all—saving you for last?
Good question. Daeman thought he knew the answer. He’d seen the Caliban-creature play with the eyeless lizard-things he’d caught up from the rank pools in his sewage ponds under the orbital city—play with them and tease them before swallowing them whole. He’d also seen Caliban play with them—Harman, Savi, and him—taunting them before leaping with lightning speed to bite through the old woman’s neck, dragging her under the water to devour. I’m being played with. We all are.
What did you see coming through the hole above Paris Crater?
Another good question. What had he seen? It had been dusty, the air filled with debris from the hurricane winds, and the light from the hole had been all but blinding. A huge, mucousy brain propelling itself on its hands? Daeman could imagine the reaction from the others at Ardis Hall—at any of the survivor communities—when he told them that.