Cordelia reached over and tugged at her father’s arm. “Can we wait in the castle? I’m so tired.” She wouldn’t look Gisela in the eye.
“Of course, my darling!” Prospero leant down and kissed her forehead. He pulled a rolled-up parchment out of his robe and tossed it into the air. It unfurled into a doorway, hovering above the ocean beside the pier, leading into a sunlit scape. Gisela could see vast, overgrown gardens, stone buildings, winged horses in the air. It was a good thing they’d compressed their accommodation more efficiently than their bodies, or they would have tied up the gamma ray link for about a decade.
Cordelia stepped through the doorway, holding Prospero’s hand, trying to pull him through. Trying, Gisela finally realized, to shut him up before he could embarrass her further.
Without success. With one foot still on the pier, Prospero turned to Gisela. “Why am I needed? I’m here to be your Homer, your Virgil, your Dante, your Dickens! I’m here to extract the mythic essence of this glorious, tragic endeavor! I’m here to grant you a gift infinitely greater than the immortality you seek!”
Gisela didn’t bother pointing out, yet again, that she had every expectation of a much shorter life inside the hole than out. “What’s that?”
“I’m here to make you legendary!” Prospero stepped off the pier, and the doorway contracted behind him.
Gisela stared out across the ocean, unseeing for a moment, then sat down slowly and let her feet dangle in the icy water.
Certain things were beginning to make sense.
“Be nice,” Gisela pleaded. “For Cordelia’s sake.”
Timon feigned wounded puzzlement. “What makes you think I won’t be nice? I’m always nice.” He morphed briefly from his usual angular icon—all rib-like frames and jointed rods—into a button-eyed teddy bear.
Gisela groaned softly. “Listen. If I’m right—if she’s thinking of migrating to Cartan—it will be the hardest decision she’s ever had to make. If she could just walk away from Athena, she would have done it by now—instead of going to all the trouble of making her father beheve that it was his idea to come here.”
“What makes you so sure it wasn’t?”
“Prospero has no interest in reality; the only way he could have heard of the Dive would be Cordelia bringing it to his attention. She must have chosen Cartan because it’s far enough from Earth to make a clean break—and the Dive gave her the excuse she needed, a fit subject for her father’s ‘talents’ to dangle in front of him. But until she’s ready to tell him that she’s not going back, we mustn’t alienate him. We mustn’t make things harder for her than they already are.”
Timon rolled his eyes into his anodized skull. “All right! I’ll play along! I suppose there is a chance you might be reading her correctly. But if you’re mistaken…”
Prospero chose that moment to make his entrance, robes billowing, daughter in tow. They were in a scape created for the occasion, to Prospero’s specifications: a room shaped like two truncated square pyramids joined at their bases, paneled in white, with a twenty-M view of Chandrasekhar through a trapezoidal window. Gisela had never seen this style before; Timon had christened it “Athenian Astrokitsch.”
The five members of the Dive team were seated around a semi-circular table. Prospero stood before them while Gisela made the introductions: Sachio, Tiet, Vikram, Timon. She’d spoken to them all, making the case for Cordelia, but Timon’s half-hearted concession was the closest thing she’d received to a guarantee. Cordelia shrank into a corner of the room, eyes downcast.
Prospero began soberly. “For nigh on a thousand years, we, the descendants of the flesh, have lived our lives wrapped in dreams of heroic deeds long past. But we have dreamed in vain of a new Odyssey to inspire us, new heroes to stand beside the old, new ways to retell the eternal myths. Three more days, and your journey would have been wasted, lost to us forever.” He smiled proudly. “But I have arrived in time to pluck your tale from the very jaws of gravity!”
Tiet said, “Nothing was at risk of being lost. Information about the
Dive is being broadcast to every polis, stored in every library.” Tiet’s icon was like a supple jeweled statue carved from ebony.
Prospero waved a hand dismissively. “A stream of technical jargon. In Athena, it might as well have been the murmuring of the waves.”
Tiet raised an eyebrow. “If your vocabulary is impoverished, augment it—don’t expect us to impoverish our own. Would you give an account of classical Greece without mentioning the name of a single city-state?”
“No. But those are universal terms, part of our common heritage—”
“They’re terms that have no meaning outside a tiny region of space, and a brief period of time. Unlike the terms needed to describe the Dive, which are apphcable to every quartic femtometre of spacetime.”
Prospero replied, a little stiffly, “Be that as it may, in Athena we prefer poetry to equations. And I have come to honor your journey in language that will resonate down the corridors of the imagination for millennia.” Sachio said, “So you believe you’re better qualified to portray the Dive than the participants?” Sachio appeared as an owl, perched inside the head of a flesher-shaped wrought-iron cage full of starlings.
“I am a narratologist.”
“You have some kind of specialized training?”
Prospero nodded proudly. “Though in truth, it is a vocation. When ancient fleshers gathered around their campfires, I was the one telling stories long into the night, of how the gods fought among themselves, and even mortal warriors were raised up into the sky to make the constellations.”
Timon replied, deadpan, “And I was the one sitting opposite, telling you what a load of drivel you were spouting.” Gisela was about to turn on him, to excoriate him for breaking his promise, when she realized that he’d spoken to her alone, routing the data outside the scape. She shot him a poisonous glance.
Sachio’s owl blinked with puzzlement. “But you find the Dive itself incomprehensible. So how are you suited to explain it to others?”
Prospero shook his head. “I have come to create enigmas, not explanations. I have come to shape the story of your descent into a form that will live on long after your libraries have turned to dust.”
“Shape it how?” Vikram was as anatomically correct as a Da Vinci sketch, when he chose to be, but he lacked the tell-tale signs of a physiological simulation: no sweat, no dead skin, no shed hair. “You mean change things?”
“To extract the mythic essence, mere detail must become subservient to a deeper truth.”
Timon said, “I think that was a yes.”
Vikram frowned amiably. “So what exactly will you change?” He spread his arms, and stretched them to encompass his fellow team members. “If we’re to be improved upon, do tell us how.”
Prospero said cautiously, “Five is a poor number, for a start. Seven, perhaps, or twelve.”
“Whew.” Vikram grinned. “Shadowy extras only; no one’s for the chop.”
“And the name of your vessel…”
“Cartan Null? What’s wrong with that? Cartan was a great flesher mathematician, who clarified the meaning and consequences of Einstein’s work. ‘Null’ because it’s built of null geodesics: the paths followed by light rays.”
“Posterity,” Prospero declared, “will like it better as ‘The Falling City’—its essence unencumbered by your infelicitous words.”
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