“A crater where the center of Paris used to be,” answered Orphu. “I think that black hole millennia ago took out Proust’s apartment.”

“Still and all,” said Mahnmut, “it’s where he wrote. And for a while a fellow named James Joyce as well, if I remember correctly.” Orphu rumbled. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that you were obsessed with Joyce as well as Proust?” persisted Mahnmut. “It never came up.”

“But why those two as your primary focus, Orphu?”

“Why Shakespeare, Mahnmut? Why his sonnets rather than his plays? Why the Dark Lady and the Young Man rather than, say, Hamlet?”

“No, answer my question,” said Mahnmut. “Please.” There was a silence. Mahnmut listened to the ramjet engines behind and above them, the hiss of the oxygen flowing through umbilicals and ventilators, the static emptiness of the main comm lines.

Finally Orphu said, “Remember my spiel up in the Mab about how great human artists—singularities of genius—could bring new realities into existence? Or at least allow us to cross universal Branes to them?”

“How could I forget? None of us knew if you were serious.”

“I was serious,” rumbled Orphu. “My interest in human beings focused on their Twentieth through Twenty-second centuries, counting from Christ. I decided long ago that Proust and Joyce had been the consciousnesses that had helped midwife those centuries into being.”

“Not a positive recommendation, if I remember history correctly,”

Mahnmut said softly. “No. I mean, yes.” They flew in silence for a few more minutes. “Would you like to hear a poem I ran across when I was a little pup of a moravec, fresh from the growth bins and factory latices?” Mahnmut tried to imagine a newborn Orphu of Io. He gave up the effort. “Yes,” he said. “Tell me.” Mahnmut had never heard his friend rumble poetry before. It was an oddly pleasant sound—

Still Born

I.

Little Rudy Bloom, ruddy-cheeked in his mother’s womb Red light permeating his sleepy, unfocused watchings Molly clicking long knitting needles as she weaves red wool for him Feeling his small feet move against the inside of her Tiny fetus dreams consume him, preparing him for the smell of blankets

II.

A man gently pats his lips with a red napkin Eyes focused on a sea of clouds drifting behind high brick chimneys Submerged in the sudden memory of hawthorn stalks rubbing together in a storm Reaching small hands out towards fluttering pink petals The scents of days long past curl into the low wings of his nostrils

III.

Eleven days. Eleven times the lifespan of a tiny creature emerging from a cocoon Eleven hush-stained mornings of warmth and shadow creeping across floorboards Eleven thousand heartbeats before night fell and the ducks abandoned the far pond Eleven indicated by the long and short hands when she held him to her breast Eleven days they watched his pink body sleeping in ruddy wool

IV.

Fragments of the novel were bound in his imagination But loose pages drifted through the dark channels of his mind Some were blank, others contained nothing but footnotes Tediously he had suffered the contractions of his imagination But once in ink, the memories never survived the night

When the Ionian rumble died away on the intercom, Mahnmut was silent for a short while, trying to assess the quality of the thing. He had trouble doing so, but he knew it meant a lot to Orphu of Io—the giant moravec’s voice had almost trembled near the end.

“Who is it by?” asked Mahnmut.

“I don’t know,” said Orphu. “Some Twenty-first Century female poet whose name was lost with the rest of the Lost Era. Remember, I encountered this when I was young—before I’d really read Proust or Joyce or any other serious human writer—but this bit of verse cemented Joyce and Proust together for me as two facets of a single consciousness. A singularity of human genius and insight. I never quite got over that perception.”

“It’s rather like the first time I encountered Shakespeare’s sonnets …” began Mahnmut.

“Turn on your video feed relayed from the Queen Mab,” Suma IV ordered all hands aboard.

Mahnmut activated the feed.

Two human beings were copulating wildly on a broad bed of silk sheets and bright woolen tapestries. Their energy and earnestness was astounding to Mahnmut, who had read enough about human sexual intercourse, but who had never thought to look up a video recording of it from the archives.

“What is it?” asked Orphu over the private comm. “I’m getting wild telemetric data—blood pressure levels soaring, dopamine flowing, adrenaline, heartbeat pounding—some fight to the death somewhere?”

“Ah …” said Mahnmut. Then the figures rolled over, still joined and moving rhythmically, almost frenetically, and the moravec saw the man’s face clearly for the first time.

Odysseus. The woman appeared to be the Sycorax person who had greeted their Achaean passenger on the orbital asteroid city. Her breasts and buttocks seemed even larger now, unfettered as they were, although at this particular instant, the woman’s breasts were flattened against Odysseus’ chest.

“Um …” began Mahnmut again.

Suma IV saved him.

“That input isn’t important. Switch to the forward dropship cameras.”

Mahnmut did so. He knew that Orphu was turning to the thermal, radar, and other imaging data he was still capable of receiving.

They were approaching the black-hole-cratered Paris, but just as in the images taken from the Queen Mab, there was no crater visible, only a dome-cathedral seemingly spun of webbed blue-ice.

Suma IV radioed the Mab: “Where is our many-handed friend who built this thing?”

“No Brane Holes visible anywhere we can see from orbit,” replied Asteague/Che at once. “Neither our ship viewers nor the cameras on the satellites we seeded can find it. The thing seems to have finished feasting on Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the other sites for the time being. Perhaps it’s returned home to Paris.”

“It has,” said Orphu on the shared comm. “Check the thermal imaging. Something very big and very ugly is nested right in the center of that blue spiderweb, just beneath the highest part of that dome. There are a lot of thermal vents there—it seems to be heating its nest with warmth from the crater—but it’s there, all right. You can almost see the hundreds of oversized fingers under the warm areas of the glowing brain in the deep-thermal imaging.”

“Well,” said Mahnmut over his private line, “at least it’s your Paris. Proust’s City of…”

Afterward, Mahnmut would never understand how Suma IV reacted so quickly, even while jacked into the dropship’s controls and central computer.

The six bolts of lightning leaped upward from different points around the giant blue dome. Only the dropship’s altitude and its pilot’s instantaneous reflexes saved them.

The dropship shifted from ramjets to scramjets, hurtled sideways in a 75-g bank, dove, rolled, and then climbed toward the north, but the six streaks of billion-volt lightning still missed them only by a few hundred meters. The implosion of air and shock wave of thunder flipped the dropship over twice, but Suma IV never lost control. The wings retracted to fins and the dropship ran for it.

Suma IV banked again, rolled deliberately, triggered full-active stealth, popped flares, and blanketed the air above the Paris blue-ice cathedral-dome with electronic interference.

A dozen fireballs rose from the ice-buried city, hurtling skyward at Mach 3, seeking them, seeking them, accelerating, seeking them. Mahnmut watched the radar track with something more than casual interest and knew that Orphu, with his direct sensory radar feed, must be feeling the plasma-missiles closing on him.

They did not find the dropship. Suma IV already had them scramjetting at Mach 5 and rising above thirty-two thousand meters and climbing into the fringes of space. The fireball-meteors exploded at different altitudes below them, their shock waves overlapping like a dozen violent ripples on pond.