“Hey! Wait one pus-dripping minute! What would be big enough to hold—?”

Ctesibius talked over him, trampling the end of the question. “Fortunately there was an extensive and unoccupied system of hypocycloid curves of a long-abandoned evacuated-tube railgun-launched intercontinental train network—all the cities of the Melusine were lowered into the extensive volume for the duration of the raid drill—”

“Unoccupied my cankered cloaca-hole!” shouted Menelaus. “You mean the world is empty because everyone moved into my depthtrain system? My rail yards? My storage bays?”

Ctesibius continued, as if he were unwilling to notice or acknowledge that a lesser being like Montrose could be speaking while he spoke: “—had previously deduced the existence of an extensive body of self-replicating Von Neumann lattices, apparently without end—and therefore began growing a stalactite of logic crystal toward the inner core in A.D. 10401, roughly one hundred years ago. The lava displacement caused by the stalactite growth increased volcanic pressure worldwide, making it easier for you, Menelaus Montrose, to attempt worldwide climate adjustment. The Nobilissimus anticipated that you would employ widespread volcanism to terraform the climate via gas venting to alter the composition in the atmosphere. Your behavior made the stalactite growth easier, and sped the growth—”

At this point, Menelaus was distracted by the sight of Soorm climbing out of the central cistern, with the slender body of the Melusine girl, Alalloel of Lree, tucked under one huge arm. Soorm did not wait for a break in the conversation, but merely bellowed across the chamber. “Judge! I found her where the flooded section meets an underground river. Not a stream—a river bigger than the Ebro. And you will not believe—”

Ctesibius, just as rude as Soorm, raised his voice and kept talking: “—Melusine occupying cities and arcologies cubic miles wide inside the cool core of the stalactite. Would you care to hear the figures for the displacement volume? More significant is the memory volume. Being made of logic crystal, the Great Stalactite can hold emulations of the entire Melusine population who have achieved the rank of Glorified—”

Alalloel was not dead (as Menelaus first thought) but she did look annoyed as Soorm yanked her out from under his arm and held her up. “These scars on her back hide spinal ports. She was nerve-linking to her whales. They came back from the dead. Most of their internal organs are brain mass. Brain Whales. And these whales have wings, and the wings are covered with eyes—”

Ctesibius said, “The core-ward growing Great Stalactite is the second largest single coherent man-made object in history. You are right to fear it—”

Soorm said, “The real her is housed in the Melusine body in her mind-body group—”

Ctesibius said, “The first and largest, of course, is the mock-up of the Hyades Instrumentality, which is finally in position. You have run out of time. All things are ended!”

Soorm said, “The Iron Ghosts I met at the bottom of the Mariana Trench have been reincarnated.” He turned to Scipio and spoke in Latin: “This girl is a Cetus, preserved as an Iron Ghost from the old days. Your days.”

Scipio said, “A Cetacean. The ones who broke the Cryonarchic power by blockading the continents. The creatures we never learned how to fight.” And he said in English to Montrose: “They serve only their creator, and have no pity nor understanding of human beings. These are the most loyal and most effective servants Exarchel has ever commanded.”

Menelaus was more curious about Ctesibius, at the moment, than about Alalloel the Cetacean. “Run out of time, why? Why is the Bell coming here?”

Ctesibius smiled a thin, cruel smile. Menelaus thought he definitively liked moping Savants better than happy ones. Ctesibius said archly, “To answer your second question, the reason why you spend your life, for all your intelligence, grunting—huhn?—is merely because you cross wits with a man who is in every way your superior. The Bell is no longer coming. It is here. The Nobilissimus is here.”

12

Signs in the Heavens, Figures in the Earth

1. Signs in Heaven

There was a deafening noise overhead.

Blades made of what seemed to be plasma taken from the surface of the sun pierced and penetrated the golden ceiling of the vast chamber like awls. There were four, one at each corner, and they stabbed down through the roof ten or twelve feet. There was no dust or debris: the awls did not merely burn through the armor, metal, and bedrock of the roof material, but evaporated anything made of matter that was touched. The four blades were four noonday suns, one at each corner, and everyone, including Menelaus, cowered or hid his eyes.

Blinded, Menelaus did not actually see the moment when the entire ceiling of the chamber was torn free like the lid of a shoe box and flung away; but he heard the noise, or at least, he heard the beginning of the noise. After that, his ears were numb with the shock of sound, and all he heard was a distant humming or the ringing of chimes.

More light fell on his face, but also drops of rain. The air was hot and close, despite the arctic winter it should have been. There was a tropical warmth to the atmosphere, but also the closeness and weight of a lowering storm. The flashing of lightning in forks and sheets was continuous.

Menelaus squinted and looked up.

The outside of the Bell was dark, and its passage had stirred up thunderheads which hung, black as anvils, like the wake of spray before a rearing ship’s prow, boiling to either side of the astronomically titanic machine and trailing like the hems of tattered robes behind. Lightning bolts flicked between the foot of the Bell and the Earth, eye-dazzling. Despite his numbed ears, Menelaus could still sense the deafening thunderclaps in his bones.

Other lightning bolts flickered between points on the outer surface two thousand feet high and points three thousand, or between the first mile up and the second, as the friction of the motion through the atmosphere built up and discharged vast static voltages.

And the Tower went up and up like a dark road leading to the emptiness between the stars. Through a gap in the storm clouds, Menelaus could see what looked like a small moon in crescent phase at the vanishing point of that road, made of the same impossibly tough, dark substance as the Bell. This was its maneuvering anchor, somewhere at or near geosynchronous orbit, an object larger than the asteroid Vesta, or, for comparison, roughly ten times the size of 1036 Ganymed—a moon of Earth that Menelaus had never seen. It was large enough to be pulled into a spherical shape by its own mass. Menelaus saw a drive antenna, tens of thousands of feet long, ribbed by ring after ring of accelerators; bat-vanes of heat dissipaters, coming like a comet’s tail from the asteroid; and he recognized the characteristic contour of a low-speed, high-impulse ionic drive.

The foot of the Bell was not directly overhead, but was perhaps half a mile to one side. The nine-mile-diameter mouth hung overhead, and clouds, landscapes, and continents of buildings, mechanisms, factories, and energy systems of a vertical world could be seen, at an angle, through the vast opening. It was like a window gaping into another universe, one whose mountains were squares and rectangles of darkness and light and whose rivers were vertical lines straight as yardsticks and whose hills were sideways hemispheres bright and round as shields.

Issuing from one metal shore of the mouth of the Bell was a roughly conical cloud or swarm of machines, which hovered without any visible wings or supports. Each machine was shaped like a jellyfish of synthetic material, and their many arms were serpentines.