From the hole emerges a puffing, chugging sort of steam-powered carriole, hidden gyroscopes balancing the metal and wooden mass on its single rubber wheel. The vehicle clears the Hole and comes to a stop precisely in the center of the space the zeks have left clear on the sand. An intricately carved door opens on the vehicle and wooden steps lower and unfold like some carefully contrived puzzle.
Four voynix—two-meter-tall metallic bipeds with barrel chests, no necks, and heads looking like mere humps on their bodies—emerge from the carriole and, using their manipulator hands rather than their cutting-blade hands, begin to assemble a complex apparatus that includes silver tentacles ending in small parabolic projectors. When they are finished, the voynix step back toward the now-silent steam vehicle and freeze into immobility.
A man or a projection of a man shimmers first into visibility and then into apparent solidity there on the sand between the projector’s tentacle-filaments. He is an old man in a blue robe covered with marvelously embroidered astronomical icons. He carries a tall wooden staff to help him walk. His gold-slippered feet are solid enough and his flickering mass heavy enough to make impressions in the sand. His features are precisely the same as the face of the statues on the cliff.
The magus walks to the edge of the limpid sea and waits.
Before long the sea stirs and something huge rises from the water just beyond the line of desultory surf. The thing is large and it comes up slowly, more like an island rising from the sea than like any organic creature such as a whale or dolphin or sea serpent or sea god. Water streams from its folds and fissures as it moves in toward the beach. The zeks step back and to the side, making a larger space for the thing.
In its shaping and color, it is most like a gigantic brain. The tissue is pink—like a living human brain—and the convolutions most resemble the maximized folded surface area of a brain, but there the resemblance to mind matter ends since this thing has multiple pairs of yellow eyes set in the folds between pink tissue and a surfeit of hands: small grasping hands with different numbers of fingers arising from the folds and waving like sea anemones stirred by cold currents, larger hands on longer stalks set on either side of the various inset eyes, and—as becomes more apparent as the house-sized thing emerges from the water and shuffles to the sand—multiple sets of huge hands on its underside and edges to propel it, each grub-white or dead-gray hand the size of a headless horse.
Moving crablike, darting sideways onto the sodden sand, the huge thing scatters LGM farther back and then comes to a stop less than five feet from the blue-robed old man, who—after an initial backing away to give the thing room to find fingerhold on the dry beach—now stands his ground, holding his staff and looking up calmly at the multiple sets of cold yellow eyes.
What have you done with my favorite worshiper? asks the many-handed in a voice without sound.
“He is loosed upon the world again, it pains me to say,” sighs the old man.
Which world? There are too many.
“Earth.”
Which Earth? There are too many.
“My Earth,” said the old man. “The true one.”
The brain with hands makes a sound through holes and apertures in its folds, a mucousy noise like a whale snorting thick seawater. Prosper, where is my priestess? My child?
“Which child?” asks the man. “Dost thou seek after your blue-eyed sow-raven whore, malignant thing, or after the hag-born freckled whelp bastard, never honored with a human shape, that she did litter there on the shore of my world?”
The magus had used the Greek word sus for “raven” and korax for “sow,” obviously enjoying his little pun, just as he had with the “litter.”
Sycorax and Caliban. Where are they?
“The bitch is missing. The lizard-pup is free.”
My Caliban has escaped the rock on which you confined him these long centuries?
“Have I not just said so? You need to trade some of your excess eyes for ears.”
Has he eaten all your puny mortals on that world yet?
“Not all. Not yet.” The magus gestures with his staff toward the stone versions of his own face that look out from atop the cliff behind him. “Have you enjoyed being watched, Many-Handed?”
The brain snorts brine and mucus once again. I’ll allow the green men to labor some more and then send a tsunami to drown all of them at the same time it knocks down your pathetic spy-stone effigies.
“Why not do it now?”
You know I can. The nonvoice somehow conveys a snarl.
“I know you can, malignant thing,” says Prospero. “But drowning this race would be a crime greater than many of your other great crimes. The zeks are close to compassion perfected, loyalty personified, not altered from their former state as you did the gods here on your monstrous whim, but truly creatures that are mine. I new-formed them.”
And for that alone it will give me more pleasure to kill them. What use are such mute, chlorophyllic ciphers? They’re like ambulatory begonias.
“They have no voice,” says the old magus, “but they are far from mute. They communicate with one another through genetically altered packages of data, passed cell to cell by touch. When they must communicate with someone outside their race, one of them volunteers his heart up to touch, dying as an individual but then being absorbed by all the others and thus living on.’Tis a beautiful thing.”
Manesque exire sepulcris, thinks-hisses the many-handed Setebos. All you’ve done is call up the dead men from their graves. You play Medea’s game
Without warning, Setebos pivots on his walking hands and sends a smaller hand from his brainfolds shooting out twenty meters on a snakelike stalk. The gray-grub fist slams into a little green man standing near the surf, penetrates his chest, seizes his floating green heart, and rips it out. The zek’s body falls lifeless to the sand, leaking out all its internal fluids. Another LGM instantly kneels to absorb what it can of the dead zek’s cellular essence.
Setebos retrieves his retractable armstalk, squeezes the heart into a dry husk as one would squeeze moisture out of a sponge, and flings it away. Its heart was as empty and voiceless as its head. There was no message there.
“Not to you,” agrees Prospero. “But the sad message now to me is not to speak so openly to my enemies. Others always suffer.”
Others are meant to suffer. That’s why we create them, you and I.
“Aye, to that end we have the key of both officer and office, to set all hearts in the state to what tune that pleases our ear. But your creations offend all, Setebos—especially Caliban. Your monster child is the ivy that hid my princely trunk and sucked my verdure out on it.”
And so was he born to do.
“Born?” Prospero laughs softly. “Your hag-seed’s bastard oozed into being amidst all the panoply of a true whore-priestess’s charms—toads, beetles, bats, pigs who once were men—and the lizard-boy would have made a sty of mine own Earth had not I taken the traitorous creature in, taught it language, lodged it in my own cell, used it with humane care, and showed to it all the qualities of humankind… for all the good it did me or the world or the lying slave itself.”