Mahnmut could hardly contain his excitement. Everything in the sonnet and in the entire sonnet cycle now clicked into place. Little was left of this “marriage of true minds” type of love—little except anger, accusations, incriminations, lying, and further infidelity—all of which would be played out by Sonnet 126, by which time “the Young Man” and ideal love itself would be abandoned for the slutty pleasures of “the Dark Lady.” Mahnmut shifted consciousness to the virtual and began encoding an e-note squirt to his faithful interlocutor of the last dozen e-years, Orphu of Io.
Klaxons sounded. Lights blinked in Mahnmut’s virtual vision. For a second he thought—the kraken!—but the kraken would never come to the surface or enter an open lead.
Mahnmut stored the sonnet and his notes, wiped the e-note from his squirt queue, and opened external sensors.
The Dark Lady was five klicks away from Chaos Central and in the remote control region of the submarine pens. Mahnmut turned the ship over to Central and studied the ice cliffs ahead of him.
From the outside, Conamara Chaos Central looked like most of the rest of the surface of Europa—a jumble of pressure ridges thrusting ice cliffs up two or three hundred meters, the mass of ice blocking the maze of open leads and black lenticulae—but then the signs of habitation became visible: the black maw of the sub pens opening, the elevators on the cliff face moving, more windows visible on the face of the ice, navigation lights pulsing and blinking atop surface modules and habitation nodes and antennae, and—far above where the cliff ended against black sky—several interlunar shuttles storm-lashed to the landing pad there.
Spacecraft here at Chaos Central . Very unusual. Even as Mahnmut finished the docking, set his ship’s functions on standby, and began separating himself from the submersible’s systems, he was thinking—What the hell have they called me here for?
Docking completed, Mahnmut went through the trauma of limiting his senses and control to the awkward confines of his more or less humanoid body and left the ship, walking into blue-lighted ice and taking the high-speed elevator up to the habitation nodes so far above.
5
Ardis Hall
A meal for a dozen people at the table under the lantern-lit tree: venison and wild boar from the forest, trout from the river below, beef from the cattle herds pastured between Ardis and the farcaster pad, red and white wines from Ardis vineyards, fresh corn, squash, salad and peas from the garden, and caviar faxed in from somewhere or the other.
“Whose birthday is it and which Twenty?” asked Daeman as servitors passed food to the dozen diners at the long table.
“It’s my birthday, but not my Twenty,” replied the handsome, curly-haired man named Harman.
“Pardon me?” Daeman smiled but did not understand. He accepted some squash and passed the bowl to the lady next to him.
“Harman is celebrating his annual birthday,” said Ada from her place at the head of the table. Daeman was physically stirred by how beautiful she looked in her tan and black silk gown.
Daeman shook his head, still not understanding. Annual birthdays were not noted, much less celebrated. “So you’re not really celebrating a birth Twenty tonight,” he said to Harman, nodding at the floating house servitor to replenish his wineglass.
“But I am celebrating my birthday,” Harman repeated with a smile. “My ninety-ninth.”
Daeman froze in shock and then looked around quickly, realizing that it must be some kind of joke peculiar to this crowd of provincials—but certainly a joke in bad taste. One did not joke about one’s ninety-ninth year. Daeman smiled thinly and waited for the punch line.
“Harman means it,” Ada said lightly. The other guests were silent. Night birds called from the forest.
“I’m . . . sorry,” Daeman managed to say.
Harman shook his head. “I’m looking forward to the year. I have a lot of things to do.”
“Harman walked a hundred miles of the Atlantic Breach last year,” said Hannah, Ada’s young friend with the short hair.
Daeman was sure that he was being joked with now. “One can’t walk the Atlantic Breach.”
“But I did.” Harman was eating corn on the cob. “I only did a reconnaissance—just, as Hannah says, a hundred miles in and then back to the North American coast—but it certainly wasn’t difficult.”
Daeman smiled again to show that he was a good sport. “But how could you get to the Atlantic Breach, Harman Uhr ? There are no faxnodes near it.” He had no idea where the Atlantic Breach was, or even what constituted North America, and he wasn’t quite sure about the location of the Atlantic Ocean, but he was certain that none of the 317 faxnodes were near the Breach. He had faxed through each of those nodes more than once and had never glimpsed the legendary Breach.
Harman put down the corn. “I walked, Daeman Uhr. From the North American eastern coast, the Breach runs directly along the fortieth parallel all the way to what the Lost Age humans called Europe—Spain was the last nation-state where the Breach comes ashore, I think. The ruins of the old city of Philadelphia—you might know it as Node 124, Loman Uhr’s estate—is just a few hours’ walk from the Breach. If I’d had any courage—and packed enough food—I could have hiked all the way to Spain.”
Daeman nodded and smiled and had absolutely no idea what this man was babbling about. First the obscenity of bragging of his ninety-ninth year, then all this talk of parallels and Lost Age cities and walking. No one walked more than a few hundred yards. Why should they? Everything of human interest lay near a faxnode and those few distant oddities—such as Ada’s Ardis—could be reached by carriole or droshky. Daeman knew Loman, of course—he had recently celebrated Ono’s Third Twenty at the extensive Loman estate—but all the rest of Harman’s soliloquy was gibberish. The man had obviously gone mad in his final days. Well, the final firmary fax and Ascension would soon take care of that.
Daeman looked at Ada, their hostess, in hopes that she would intervene to change the topic, but Ada was smiling as if agreeing with everything Harman had said. Daeman looked down the table for help, but the other guests had been listening politely—even with apparent interest—as if such babble were part of their regular provincial dining repartee.
“The trout is quite good, isn’t it?” he said to the woman on his left. “Was yours good?”
A woman across the table, a heavyset redhead probably deep into her third Twenty, set her most prominent chin on her small fist and said to Harman, “What was it like? In the Breach, I mean?”
The curly-haired, deeply tanned man demurred, but others along the table—including the young blonde woman about whose trout Daeman had inquired and who had rudely ignored the query—all clamored for Harman to talk. He finally acquiesced with a graceful motion of his hand.
“If you’ve never seen the Breach, it’s a fascinating sight just from the shore. It’s about eighty yards wide—a cleft going east as far as one can see, becoming more and more narrow toward the horizon, until it seems just a slice of brightness inset along the line where ocean meets sky.
“Walking into it is . . . slightly strange. The sand along the beach is not wet where the Breach ends. No surf rolls back into it. At first, all of one’s attention is focused on one or the other of the edges—walking in to wading depth, you notice the abrupt shear of water, like a glass wall separating the walker from the curl and roll of tide. You have to touch the barrier—no one could resist. Spongy, invisible, very slightly yielding to heavy pressure, cool from the water on the other side, but impenetrable. You walk deeper on dry sand—over the centuries the sea bottom has felt only the moisture of rain, and so the sand and dirt are solid, the remaining sea creatures and plants there dried out, desiccated almost to the point of appearing fossilized.