Daeman had none of the ancient words to describe this space he had stepped out into, standing as he was on one of what looked to be hundreds of shadowy ice-mezzanines in the inner, curved wall of the vast structure, but if he had sigled the words, he would have fumbled through them now—spires, dome, arches, flying buttresses, apse, nave, basilica, choir loft, porch, chapel, rose window, alcove, pillar, altar. They all would have applied to one or more parts of what he was looking at now, and he would have needed more words. Many more words.
As best as Daeman could estimate, the interior of this space was just a little over a mile across and about two thousand feet from the red-glowing floor to the blue-ice apex of the dome. As he’d guessed earlier from the outside, Setebos had covered over the entire crater at the heart of Paris Crater and the vast circle now glowed red, pulsing as if from some huge heartbeat. Daeman had no idea whether this was due to some natural volcanic activity in the crater, some magma rising from miles below where the black hole had once torn at the heart of the Earth, or whether Setebos was somehow summoning and using that heat and light. The rest of the dome glowed in shades of colors Daeman could not describe—from all the varieties of red at the base, through iridescent and then subtle oranges along the periphery of the crater and lower reaches of the dome, veins of red branching up through orange-yellow buttresses and stalagmites and then the hotter colors fading into the cool glow of the immense blue pillars. The blue-ice walls, columns, tendons, and towers were shot through with pulses of green light and yellow sparks, ordered columns of red pulses moving along hidden channels like surges of electricity, open sparks connecting brachiated sections of the cathedral like dendrites firing.
The shell of the dome was thin enough in places that the last evening light from outside illuminated rose circles on the west side. The highest point on the ceiling was as thin as glass and showed an oval of darkening sky and an only slightly blurred view of the emerging stars. Most curious though, low on the inner walls of the dome were hundreds of cross-shaped impressions, each about six feet high. They circled the space, and by leaning out from his rough mezzanine slab, Daeman could see more of these cross-niches below him, indented as if burned into the blue-ice. They seemed to be made of metal and were empty, their steel interiors reflecting the red glow from the center of the crater.
The red-hued floor of the crater itself was not empty. Everywhere rose thorned stalagmites and craggy spires, with some rising all the way to the ceiling—creating neat rows of blue-ice pillars—while others remained freestanding. Nor was the floor of the crater smooth; everywhere were smaller craters and raised fumaroles. Gases, steam, and smoke curled out of most of these and Daeman caught the stink of sulfur on the tepid, overheated air currents. In the center of the red-glowing circle was a raised and raw-rimmed crater ringed with blue-ice stairways and lesser fumaroles. This crater above the crater appeared to be filled almost to the rim with round, white stones, until Daeman realized that the stones were the tops of human skulls—tens of thousands of human skulls, most lying beneath the mass that almost filled the crater. This raised crater looked very much like a nest and the impression was reinforced by the thing that filled it—gray brain tissue, convoluted ridges, multiple pairs of eyes, mouths, and orifices opening and shutting in no unison, a score of huge hands beneath it—these hands occasionally rearranging the huge form’s mass on its nest, settling it more comfortably—and he saw other hands, each larger than the room Daeman occupied at Ardis Hall, that had emerged from the brain on stalks and were pulling themselves and their trailing tentacles across the glowing floor. Some of the hands were close enough that Daeman could see a myriad of curved, barbed, black hair spikes or hooks emerging from the ends of those huge fingers. Each barb—some sort of evolved hair?—was longer than the killing knife that Daeman wore on his belt, and the fingers used the filaments to sink into the blue-ice. The hands could climb anywhere, pull themselves along any surface—masonry, ice, or steel—by sinking those black, hooked blades into whatever lay underhand.
The brain-shape of Setebos itself was much larger than Daeman remembered from its emergence through the Hole in the sky less than two days before—if that thing had been a hundred feet along its axis, it was now at least a hundred yards long and thirty yards high in the center, where the convoluted tissue was separated by a deep, glowing groove. It filled its nest and whenever it resettled its bulk, there came the crunch of skulls like the snapping and settling of straw.
“Thinketh, such glory shows nor right nor wrong in Him, nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord. ‘Saith, He is terrible: watch His feats in proof!”
Caliban’s sibilant hiss slid off the dome in some show of perfect acoustics, echoed off fumaroles and ziggurats, echoed again down the labyrinth of ice tunnels, and seemed to come at Daeman from front, back, and side—a murderous whisper.
As Daeman’s eyes adjusted to the red-glow gloom and the scale of the vast hollowed-out dome, he could see smaller objects moving now—scuttling around the base of Setebos’ nest, scurrying on all fours up the blue-ice steps to the base of the brain-shape and then trudging back down on hind legs only, carrying large oval pods that glowed with a sick and slick milkiness.
For a minute, Daeman thought they were voynix—he’d seen the remains of dozens of voynix during his long crawl in through the ice-maze, not voynix frozen in the ice as he’d encountered in the outside crevasse, but gutted remains of voynix, a hollowed-out carapace here, a torn ped or lacerated leather hump there, a set of claw-hands lying alone—but now looking through the stream and fog from the fumaroles, he could see that these attending shapes were not voynix. They had the form of Caliban.
Calibani, thought Daeman. He’d encountered them in the Mediterranean Basin with Savi and Harman almost a year earlier, and he realized now the significance of the cross shapes in the wall of the dome. Recharging cradles, Savi had called the hollowed-out crosses, and Daeman himself had stumbled across a single naked calibani lolling in one such vertical cross, arms spread, and he’d thought it dead until the yellow cat’s-eyes had flickered open.
Savi had told them that Prospero and the unmet biosphere entity named Ariel had evolved a strain of humanity into the calibani in order to stop the voynix from invading the Mediterranean Basin and other areas Prospero wanted to keep private. Daeman thought now that this was either a lie or Savi’s own mistake—the calibani weren’t evolved from any human strain, but rather cloned from the original and much more terrible Caliban, as Prospero had admitted up on his orbital isle—but at the time, Harman had asked the old Jewish woman why the post-humans had created the voynix in the first place if they—or Prospero—then had to create some other form of monster to contain them.
“Oh, they didn’t create the voynix,” the old woman had said. “The voynix came from somewhere else, serving someone else, with their own agenda.”
Daeman did not understand then and he understood less now. These calibani he watched scuttling like obscenely pink ants across the crater floor, carrying those milky eggs, were clearly not serving Prospero—they served Setebos.
Then who brought the voynix to Earth? he wondered. Why are the voynix attacking Ardis and the other old-style human communities if they’re not serving Setebos? Who do the voynix serve?