by Dan Simmons
The speck seemed to leap forward until it replaced the entire Earth hologram. It was a roughly dumbbell-shaped city of metal girders, opaque orange glass and light: tall glass towers, glass bubbles, glass domes, convoluted glass spires and arches. Mahnmut summarized it all in his tightbeam descriptions to Orphu.
“This is one of the larger artificial objects in Earth orbit,” said Retrograde Sinopessen. “About twenty kilometers long, roughly the size of their Lost Era city of Manhattan before it was flooded. It seems to be built around a stone and heavy metal core—probably a captured aster-oid—that gives—or gave—a little gravity to the inhabitants.”
“How much?” asked Orphu or Io.
“Roughly ten centimeters per second,” said the Almathean. “Enough that a human—or unmodified post-human—wouldn’t float away or be able to achieve escape velocity by jumping, but light enough to float pretty much where you want to.”
“Pretty close to Phobos’ size and gravity,” said Mahnmut. “Any clue who the voice belongs to or who lives there?”
“The post-humans built these orbital environments more than two thousand standard years ago,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “You both know that we assumed the post-humans had died out—their radio chatter stopped more than a millennia ago even as the quantum flux between Earth and Mars began to build, we haven’t seen their ships in cislunar space through our telescopes, there’s been no sign of them on Earth itself—but we can’t preclude the possibility that a few have survived. Or evolved.”
“Into what?” asked Orphu.
Asteague/Che performed that most archaic, arcane, yet expressive of human motions—he shrugged. Mahnmut started to describe the other Europan’s shrug to his friend but Orphu tightbeamed that he’d picked it up on both radar and infrared sensors.
“Let me show you some recent activity before we decide if you’re going to drop The Dark Lady into Earth’s atmosphere,” continued Asteague/Che. He set one very humanoid hand above the chart table.
The orbital island hologram was replaced with holos showing Earth and Mars, in scale of size but not in distance, with a myriad of blue, green, and white strands connecting Near-Earth-Orbit and the surface of Mars. Columns of holographic data misted into existence. The two planets looked as if they’d been woven into a spider’s frenzied web, except in this case the web itself pulsed and grew, strands contracting and expanding, extruding new strands and nodes as if of their own volition. Mahnmut rushed to describe it all on the tightbeam channel.
It’s all right, transmitted Orphu. I’m reading the databands. It’s almost as good as seeing the graphics.
“This is quantum activity of the past ten standard days,” said Cho Li. “You’ll note that it’s almost ten percent more volatile and active than when we launched from Phobos. The instability is reaching a critical stage…”
“How critical?” asked Orphu of Io.
Asteague/Che turned his visored face toward the big Ionian. “Critical enough that we have to make a decision in the next week or so. Less time if the volatility continues to grow. This level of quantum instability threatens the entire solar system.”
“What decision?” asked Mahnmut.
“Whether to destroy the Earth’s polar and equatorial rings where the quantum flux originated, also whether to cauterize Olympus Mons and the other quantum nodes on Mars,” said General Beh bin Adee. “And to sterilize the Earth itself if need be.”
Orphu whistled, an odd sound on the echoing bridge. “Does the Queen Mab have such a military capability?” the Ionian asked softly.
“No,” said the general.
I guess I was right about the invisible moravec ships shadowing us, thought Mahnmut.
On the tightbeam, Orphu sent—I guess we were right about the invisible moravec ships shadowing us. If Mahnmut had had eyelids, he would have blinked at this similarity in their thought patterns
A silence descended. None of the six moravecs around the chart table spoke or transmitted again for almost a minute.
“There are more developments to share with you,” Suma IV said at last. The buckycarbon-sheathed Ganymedan touched controls and a different, magnified telescopic view of Earth leapt into place. Mahnmut recognized what had once been called the British Isles—Shakespeare!—and then the view zoomed in on the continent of Europe. Two images filled the holocube—an odd city radiating out from a black crater and then what might have been the same city, sheathed in a blue web not so dissimilar from the view of the quantum displacement between Earth and Mars. He described the blue mass to his friend.
“What the hell is it?” asked Orphu.
“We don’t know,” said Suma IV, “but it’s appeared in the last seven standard days. These coordinates match those of the ancient city of Paris in the nation of France, but where our astronomers from Phobos and Martian space had been observing old-style human activity—primitive but visible—now there is just this blue dome, blue webs, blue spires surrounding what was obviously an old black-hole crater.”
“What could be spinning that web?” asked Mahnmut.
“Again, we don’t know,” said Suma IV. “But look at the measurements coming from inside it.”
Orphu did not whistle this time, but Mahnmut felt the urge to. Temperatures in the blue-webbed parts of Paris had dropped below minus 100 degrees Celsius, where, just meters away, the temperatures still hovered near Earth normal for that region and time of the year, while just meters away from that, the temperature spiked to levels where lead would melt.
“Could this be a natural phenomenon?” asked Mahnmut. “Something the post-humans brought about during the Demented Times when they were fooling with Earth’s ecology and life forms?”
“We’ve never seen or recorded anything like this before,” said Asteague/Che. “And we’ve never stopped monitoring Earth from Consortium space. But look at this.”
A dozen other blue-marked locations appeared in the holocube map, which pulled back until it was a large Earth sphere again. Blue-webbed sites were marked elsewhere in Europe, in Asia, in what had been South America, southern Africa—a dozen in total. Next to the blue circles were data cubes recording measurements similar to the Paris phenomenon, with notes on the day, hour, minute, and second that the blue web had appeared to moravec sensors. Mahnmut raced to tightbeam the image descriptions to Orphu.
“And this,” said Asteague/Che.
Another sphere of Earth appeared showing straight blue lines rising from Paris and the other blue nodes, including one city marked Jerusalem. The thin blue shafts continued straight into space, disappearing beyond the solar system.
“Well, we’ve seen that before,” said Orphu of Io after Mahnmut described it to him. “It’s the same kind of tachyon beam that appeared at Delphi on the other Earth, the ancient Earth of Ilium, when the population disappeared.”
“Yes,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
“That beam didn’t seem to be aimed at anything in deep space,” said Mahnmut. “Are these?”
“Not unless you count grazing the Lesser Magellanic Clouds,” said Cho Li. “Plus, there is a quantum component to these tachyon beams.”
“What does that mean—‘quantum component’?” asked Orphu.
“The beams phase-shift on the quantum level, existing more in Calabi-Yau space than in four-dimensional Einsteinian spacetime,” said the Callistan navigator.
“You mean,” said Mahnmut, “they’re shifting into a different universe.”
“Yes.”
“The Ilium-Earth’s universe?” asked Mahnmut. His tone was hopeful. When the last Brane Hole that had connected the current-Mars and Ilium-Earth universes had collapsed weeks earlier, the moravecs had lost all communication with that ancient Earth of Troy and Agamemnon, but Hockenberry had been able to quantum teleport across the Calabi-Yau universe-membrane to the Queen Mab—and presumably to QT back, although no one knew where he’d gone when he’d teleported off the atomic spaceship. Mahnmut, who knew many of
the Greeks and Trojans, had hopes of reconnecting to that universe once again.
“We don’t think so,” said Cho Li. “The reasons are as complicated as the multiple-membrane Calabi-Yau space math our assumptions are based on and are guided by what we learned from the Device you successfully activated on Mars eight months ago, but we think the tachyon beam’s phase-shifting is to one or more different universes, not that of the Ilium-Earth.”
Mahnmut spread his hands. “So what does all this have to do with our mission to Earth? I was supposed to pilot The Dark Lady in Earth’s seas or oceans, bringing Suma IV down for his mission—just as I was supposed to bring the late Ri Po to Olympus Mons last year. Does the blue-web stuff and the tachyon beams change that plan?”
There was another silence.
“The dangers and cautionary unknowns of an atmospheric penetration are proliferating,” said Suma IV.
“Could you translate that?” said Orphu of Io.
“Observe, please,” said the tall Ganymedan.
A holographic astronomical recording began running above the chart table. Mahnmut described the visuals to Orphu on tightbeam.
“Please note the date,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
“That’s more than eight months ago,” said Mahnmut.
“Yes,” said the Europan Integrator. “Shortly after we used the Brane Holes to transit to Mars-Ilium space. You notice that the resolution is relatively poor compared to today’s observations of the orbital rings. This is because we were observing from Phobos Base.”
The visuals showed an orbital object similar to the one that had broadcast the message to the Queen Mab, but not quite the same. This asteroid was visible as a slowly rotating rock, albeit one with glowing glass towers, domes, and structures. This orbital object was smaller—less than two kilometers in length. Suddenly another object came into the visual range of the recording—a three-kilometer-long metal construct rather like a long silver wand, clustered about with girders, storage tanks, and fuel cylinders, the column ending in a bulbous, shimmering sphere. Thrusters were firing but Mahnmut didn’t believe the thing was merely a spacecraft.
“What the hell is that?” asked Orphu after hearing Mahnmut’s description and reading the data.
“An orbital linear accelerator with a wormhole collector at its snout,” said Asteague/Che. “Notice that someone—or something—on the asteroid city has sent masered commands to this unmanned linear accelerator, overriding countless safety protocols, and is driving it right toward the asteroid.”
“Why?” asked Orphu.
No one answered. The five moravecs watched and Orphu listened as the long, girdered orbital machine continued accelerating until it crashed into the asteroid island. Asteague/Che slowed the recording. The glowing towers and domes exploded and flew apart in extreme slow motion, then the asteroid itself broke up as the wormhole accumulator at the end of the linear accelerator exploded with the force of countless hydrogen bombs. There came a final series of slow-motion, silent explosions as the fuel tanks, thrusters, and main drive engines of the linear accelerator ignited themseves.
“Now watch,” said Suma IV.
A second telescopic view, then a radar plot, joined the holographic explosions. Mahnmut tightbeamed a description of the blaze of thruster tails from throughout the plane of the equatorial orbital ring as dozens, then hundreds of small spacecraft hurried toward the exploding orbital asteroid.
“What’s the scale on those?” asked Orphu.
“They’re each about six meters long by three meters wide,” said Cho Li.
“Unmanned,” said Orphu. “Moravecs?”
“More like the servitors the humans used centuries ago,” said Asteague/Che. “Simple AI’s with one purpose, as you will see.”
Mahnmut saw. And he described what he saw to Orphu. The hundreds, then thousands of tiny devices rushing toward the expanding asteroid and accelerator debris field were little more than high-powered lasers each with a brain and aiming device. The recording fast-forwarded through the next hours with the servitor-lasers scooting through, under, and over the debris field, zapping every piece of asteroid or accelerator that posed a serious threat of surviving reentry through the Earth’s atmosphere.
“The post-humans weren’t fools,” said Asteague/Che. “At least when it came to engineering. The mass they accumulated in the two rings they built around Earth, if gathered together, would build a sizeable fraction of another Luna—more than a million separate objects, some like the one that hailed us, almost as massive as Phobos. But they had near foolproof failsafes for keeping them in orbit and a defense in depth if they threatened to fall—these high-boost laser hornets that break up any debris are the last line of that defense. Meteors are still falling on Earth more than eight standard months later, but there have been no catastrophic impacts.”
“Orbital leukocytes,” said Orphu of Io.
“Precisely,” said the Prime Integrator of the Five Moons Consortium.
“I understand,” Mahnmut said at last. “You’re afraid that if we use the dropship carrying The Dark Lady the way we planned, these little robot leukocytes will scurry out and zap us as well.”
“The mass of the dropship and your submersible combined would be a threat to Earth,” agreed Asteague/Che. “We watched the… leukocytes, as Orphu put it… laser to plasma or boost uphill much smaller pieces of the destroyed asteroid.”
Mahnmut shook his metal-and-plastic head. “I don’t get it. You’ve had this recording and this knowledge for more than eight months, yet you hauled the Lady and us all this way… what’s changed?”
General Beh bin Adee pointed to something in the rerunning holo recording of the asteroid breakup.
The image zoomed. The computers enhanced the grainy, pixilated image.
What? tightbeamed Orphu.
Mahnmut described the enhanced image. There in the midst of all the explosions and zapped debris was a small craft with three human figures lying prone in what appeared to be an open cockpit. Only the slight shimmer of a forcefield showed why the three were not dying in a vacuum.
“What is that thing?” asked Mahnmut after he had described it to Orphu.
It was Orphu who answered. “An ancient flying vehicle used by both old-style humans and post-humans millennia ago. It was called an AFV—All Function Vehicle—or sometimes they just called it a sonie. The post-humans used them to shuttle to and from the rings.”
The recording sped up, paused, sped up again. Mahnmut described to Orphu the image of the sonie twisting and turning as segments of the asteroid exploded—were lasered—all around it.
The holo showed the trajectory of the sonie as it entered the atmosphere, spiraled across the center of North America, and landed in a region below one of the Great Lakes.
“That was one of our destinations,” said Asteague/Che. He tapped some icons and telescopic still images appeared of a large human home on a hill. The huge house was surrounded by outbuildings and what looked to be a defensive wooden wall. Human beings—or what appeared to be human beings—were visible near the walls and house. Several dozen could be seen in the still photograph.
“That was one week ago as we began decelerating,” said General Beh bin Adee. “These were taken yesterday.”
Same telescopic view, but now the house and wall were in ruins, burned. Corpses were visible scattered across a charred landscape.
“I don’t understand,” said Mahnmut. “It looks as if the humans are being massacred there where the sonie landed eight months ago. Who or what killed them?”
Beh bin Adee brought up an another telescope image, then magnified it. Scores of non-human bipeds were visible between bare branches of trees. The things were a dull silver-gray, essentially headless, with a dark hump. The arms and legs were articulated wrong to be either human or known moravecs.
“What are those?” asked Mahnmut. “Servitors of some kind? Robots?”
“We don’t know,” said Asteague/Che. “Bu
t these creatures are killing old-style human beings in their small communities all over Earth.”
Mahnmut said, “This is terrible but what does it have to do with canceling our mission?”
“I understand,” said Orphu of Io. “The issue is how do you get to the surface to see what’s going on. And the question is—why didn’t the laser leukocytes fire on the sonie in the first place? It was large enough that it might survive reentry and pose a threat to those on the ground. Why was it spared?”
Mahnmut thought for several seconds. “There were humans on board,” he said at last.
“Or post-humans,” said Asteague/Che. “The resolution isn’t fine enough for us to tell which.”
“The leukocytes allow a ship with human or post-human life aboard to pass into the atmosphere,” Mahnmut said slowly. “You’ve known this for more than eight months. That’s why you had me kidnap Odysseus for this mission.”
“Yes,” said Suma IV. “The human was going down to Earth with us. His human DNA was to be our passkey.”
“But now the voice from the other orbital isle is demanding that we deliver Odysseus to her or it,” said Orphu with a deep rumble that may have signified irony or humor or indigestion.
“Yes,” said Asteague/Che. “We have no idea if our dropship and your submersible will be allowed to enter Earth’s atmosphere if there is no human life on board.”
“We can always just ignore the invitation from the asteroid-city in the polar ring,” said Mahnmut. “Bring Odysseus down to Earth with us, maybe send him back up in the dropship …” He thought another few seconds. “No, that won’t work. Odds are that the asteroid-city will fire on us if the Queen Mab doesn’t rendezvous as requested.”
“Yes, it seems a real possibility,” said Asteague/Che. “This imperative to deliver Odysseus to the orbital city and the views of a massacre of humans on Earth by non-human creatures are new factors since we planned your dropship excursion.”
“Too bad Dr. Hockenberry QT’d away on us,” said Mahnmut. “His DNA may have been rebuilt by the Olympian gods or whomever, but it probably would have gotten us through the orbital leukocytes.”