by Dan Simmons
“I should have saved Orphu, but I could not,” said Mahnmut. He had to walk quickly to keep up with the playwright.
Shakespeare was a compact man, in his late twenties, soft-spoken and dressed in a more dignified manner than Mahnmut would have expected from an actor and playwright. The young man’s face was a sharp oval, showing a hairline already receding, sideburns, and a wisp of a beard and thin mustache—as if Shakespeare were tentatively experimenting with a more permanent beard. His hair was brown, his eyes a grayish-green, and he wore a black doublet from which the wide, soft collars of a white shirt were visible, white drawstrings hanging down. There was a small gold hoop in the writer’s left ear.
Mahnmut wanted to ask Shakespeare a thousand questions—what was he writing now? what was life like in this city that would soon be overwhelmed by the plague? what is the hidden structure of the sonnets?—but all he could talk about was Orphu.
“I tried to save him,” explained Mahnmut. “The Dark Lady’s reactor shut down and then the batteries went dead less than five kilometers from the coast. I was trying to find an inlet in one of the many caves along the cliffs—someplace we could hide the sub.”
“The Dark Lady?” asked Shakespeare. “This is the name of your ship?”
“Yes.”
“Pray continue.”
“Orphu and I were talking about the stone faces,” said Mahnmut. “It was night—we were approaching the coast at night, under cover of darkness, but I was using the night-vision scope and was describing the faces to him. He was still alive. The ship was providing just enough O2 for him.”
“O2?”
“Air,” explained Mahnmut. “As I say, I was describing the great stone heads to him—“
“Great stone heads? Statues?”
“Stone monoliths each about twenty meters tall,” said Mahnmut.
“Did you recognize the statue’s visage? Was he someone of your acquaintance, or perhaps a famous king or conqueror?”
“It was too far away for me to see details of the faces,” said Mahnmut.
They had come to a wide, multiarched bridge covered with three-story buildings. A passageway about four meters wide ran right through the structures, like a road through a tunnel, and at the moment pedestrians in motley were dodging a mass of sheep being driven north into the city. All along that walkway, human heads—some dried and mummified, some almost skulls except for tufts of hair or bits of rotted flesh, others so shockingly fresh that there was still a blush to the cheeks or lips—had been mounted on posts.
“What is all this?” asked Mahnmut. His organic parts felt queasy.
“London Bridge,” said Shakespeare. “Tell me what happened to your friend.”
Tired of looking up at the playwright, Mahnmut scampered up onto a stone wall that served as a railing. He could see a forbidding tower in the east, and he assumed it was the Tower from Richard III. Knowing that he was either dreaming or dying from lack of air himself, Mahnmut did not want this dream to end before he asked Shakespeare a question or two. “Have you begun writing your sonnets yet, Master Shakespeare?”
The playwright smiled and looked out at the reeking Thames, then turned to gaze at the stinking city. Raw sewage was everywhere, as were the carcasses of dead horses and cattle rotting in the mudflats, while a wild effluvium of bloody chicken parts flowed out from open gutters and swirled in stagnant backwaters. Mahnmut had all but shut off his olfactory input. He didn’t know how this human with his full-time nose could stand it.
“How do you know about my experiment with the sonnet?” asked Shakespeare.
Mahnmut approximated a human shrug. “A guess. So you’ve begun them?”
“I’ve considered playing with the form,” admitted the playwright.
“And who is the Young Man in the sonnets?” asked Mahnmut, hardly able to breathe at the thought of unraveling this ancient mystery. “Is it Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton?”
Shakespeare blinked in surprise and looked carefully at the moravec. “You seem to follow close on my heels in such things, tiny Caliban.”
Mahnmut nodded. “So Wriothesley is the Youth in the sonnets?”
“His lordship will have seen nineteen years this October and the down on his upper lip, it is said, has turned to sedge,” said the playwright. “Hardly a youth.”
“William Herbert then,” suggested Mahnmut. “He’s only twelve years old and he’ll become the third Earl of Pembroke nine years from now.”
“You know the dates of future succession and accession?” Shakespeare said with a tone of irony. “Does Master Caliban sail time’s sea as well as this ocean of Mars he speaks of?”
Mahnmut was too excited about solving this mystery to respond to that. “You’ll dedicate the large Folio of 1623 to William Herbert and his brother, and when your sonnets are printed, you’ll dedicate them to ‘Mr. W.H.”
Shakespeare stared at the moravec as if he were a fever dream. Mahnmut wanted to say No, you’re the dream of a dying brain, Master Shakespeare. Not I. Aloud, he said, “I just think it’s interesting that you have a young man or a boy as a lover.”
Mahnmut was surprised by the poet’s reaction. Shakespeare turned, drew a dagger from his belt, and held it under the moravec’s head-unit. “Do you have an eye, Little Caliban, that I may bury my blade in it?”
Careful not to lower his permiflesh deeper onto the point of the blade, Mahnmut shook his head very slightly and said, “I apologize. I am a stranger to your town, to your country, and to the manners here.”
“See those closest three heads on posts on the bridge?,” asked Shakespeare.
Mahnmut shifted his vision without moving his head. “Yes.”
“This time last week, they were strangers to our manners,” hissed the poet.
“I get the point,” said Mahnmut. “No pun intended, sir.”
Shakespeare slid the dagger back in its leather scabbard. Mahnmut remembered that the man was an actor, given to flourishes and exaggerations, although the dagger had been no stage prop. Nor had Shakespeare’s response been a denial to Mahnmut’s question.
Both looked back out at the river. The sun hung impossibly large and orange and low in the river haze to the west. Shakespeare’s voice was soft when he spoke. “If I pen these sonnets, Caliban, I will do so to explore my own failures, weaknesses, compromises, self-conceits, and sad ambiguities in the way that one probes a bloody socket for the missing tooth after a barroom brawl. How did you kill your friend, this Orphu of Io?”
Mahnmut had to take a second to catch up to the question. “I couldn’t get The Dark Lady to the cave inlet I had seen along the coast,” he said. “I tried and failed. The sub’s reactor died suddenly, the power went out. The Lady went aground in less than four fathoms of water, three kilometers or so from the cave. I tried blowing all the ballast tanks to bring her on her side—so I could free the bay doors to get to my friend—but she was already stuck fast.”
Mahnmut looked at the poet. Shakespeare seemed to be paying attention. The buildings on the bridge behind him were red with the Thames sunset. “I went outside and went on internal O2 and dived for hours,” continued Mahnmut. “I used pry bars and the last of the acetylene and my manipulator fingers, but I couldn’t open the bay doors, couldn’t clear the debris in the flooded accessway to the hold. Orphu was on commline for a while, but then I lost him as the internal systems failed. He never sounded worried, never frightened, just tired . . . very tired. Right up to when the comm failed. It was dark. I must have lost consciousness. Perhaps I’m at the bottom of the Martian ocean right now, dead with Orphu, or dying, dreaming this conversation as the last cells of my organic brain shut down.”
“Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,” said Shakespeare, his voice a monotone. “Which you by lacking have supposed dead, and there reigns love, and all love’s loving parts, and all the friends which you thought buried.”
Mahnmut regained consciousness to find himself on the beach, in low morni
ng Martian daylight, and surrounded by dozens of little green men. They were bent over him, staring with small black eyes set into their green, transparent faces, and they backed a step or two away when Mahnmut sat up with a slight whir of his servos.
They were little. Mahnmut was just over a meter tall. These . . . persons . . . were shorter than that. They were humanoid in form, more so than Mahnmut, but not really human in appearance. They were bipedal, with arms and legs, but had no ears, no noses, and no mouths. They wore no clothes and had only three fingers on each hand, rather like cartoon characters Mahnmut had seen in the Lost Age media archives. They were sexless, Mahnmut noted, and their flesh—if flesh it was—was transparent, like soft plastic, revealing insides without organs or veins, bodies filled with floating green globules and clumps, particles and blobs, all flowing and bubbling in a way not that different from the insides of Mahnmut’s beloved lava lamp, now abandoned with the sunken submersible.
More little green men were coming down a trail set into the cliff face. Mahnmut could see the last of the erected stone faces a kilometer or so to the east. Another was visible, horizontal on a long wooden pallet set on rollers far above them near the edge of the cliff, bound about by ropes. The details of the faces were not discernible.
To hell with the heads. Mahnmut whirled and searched the sea and beach. Tepid waves rolled in with the regularity of a metronome. Where’s The Dark Lady?
There she was—two hundred meters out, part of the upper hull and command superstructure clearly visible. Her fathometer and sonar had died before she had, and Mahnmut had committed perhaps the most ancient and most grievious of sea captain’s offenses—running his ship aground. He had been on internal O2 while working wildly to free the hold doors on the sandy, muddy seabottom, but he realized that he must have passed out, been washed ashore here during the night.
Orphu! How long had he been unconscious, dreaming of Shakespeare? Mahnmut’s internal chronometer said that it had been a bit less than four hours.
He still might be alive in there. He started walking toward the water, intending to walk the bottom all the way out to the stranded submersible.
A dozen little green men moved between Mahnmut and the water, blocking his way. Then twenty. Then fifty. A hundred more surrounded him on the beach.
Mahnmut had never lifted his hand or manipulator in anger, but he was ready to fight now, to punch and slash and kick his way through this mob if he had to. But he would try to talk to them first. “Get out of my way,” he said, voice on full amplification and sounding loud in the Martian air. “Please.”
The black eyes in green faces stared at him. But they had neither ears to hear him with nor mouths to speak with.
Mahnmut laughed sadly and started to push his way through them, knowing that however much stronger he might be, they could overcome him by sheer numbers—sit on him while they tore him apart. The thought of such violence, his or theirs, made his organic insides clutch with horror.
One of the little green men held his hand up as if to say “stop.” Mahnmut paused. All the green heads turned to the right and looked up the beach. The mob parted magically as a little green man who looked exactly like the other little green men approached, stopped in front of Mahnmut, and extended both hands as if cupping an invisible bowl or praying.
Mahnmut did not understand. Nor did he want to take time to parley through sign language even if he could. Orphu might still be alive.
He started to brush past the little man, but a score of others closed ranks behind this emissary, blocking Mahnmut’s way. He would either have to fight now or pay attention to the gesturing green figure.
Mahnmut let out a sigh not much different than a moan and paused, holding his hands out in mimicry of the little green man’s gesture.
The emissary shook his head, touched Mahnmut’s left arm—both organic and moraveccian sensors told him that the green fingers were cool—and lowered Mahnmut’s left arm, then gripped the right. The little green man pulled Mahnmut’s hand closer, closer, until the moravec’s fingers and palm were flat against the cool, transparent flesh.
The little green man pulled harder, pushing himself forward and pulling Mahnmut’s hand hard enough that the moravec’s palm dented the flat chest, pressed the flesh inward, then . . . penetrated.
Mahnmut would have drawn his hand back in shock at this, but the little green man did not relent with his grip or with his strong pull. Mahnmut could see his dark hand entering the fluid of the little green man’s chest, could feel the transparent flesh closing tight around his forearm in a vacuum seal.
All of the little green men raised their hands to their chests.
Mahnmut’s splayed fingers encountered something hard, almost spherical. He could see a green blob about the size of a human heart centered in the man’s chest. His palm felt it pulse.
The little green man pulled again and Mahnmut understood. He closed his organic fingers around the organ.
WHAT
DO
YOU
NEED?
Shocked, Mahnmut almost jerked his hand free. He forced himself to leave his fingers where they were, wrapped around the little man’s green heart-blob. Mahnmut had felt the question flow up to his brain in pulses, throbs, vibrations. Not in words, certainly not in English or French or Russian or Chinese or Primary or any language Mahnmut had ever used. He did not know how to respond in kind, so he spoke. “I need to save my friend, who is trapped in the ship out there.”
A hundred and fifty green heads turned in unison to look at the submersible. Three hundred black eyes gazed a few seconds and then turned their gaze back on Mahnmut.
TELL
US
WITH
YOUR
THOUGHTS
WHERE
HE
IS
Mahnmut closed his eyes and formed an image of Orphu in the blocked hold, an image of the bay doors, an image of the interior corridor. The vibration-response throbbed back up his arm:
WAIT
Mahnmut’s hand was suddenly free and he pulled it from the little green man’s tight flesh with an audible squishing sound. The little green man collapsed onto the sand then, rolling on his side and lying motionless; the green blobs in his body ceased to flow, his black eyes clouded white and stared blindly, and his fingers twitched once and were still. The hundred and forty-something of the others turned away and went efficiently about the task of saving Orphu.
Mahnmut collapsed onto the sand next to what was clearly the emissary’s lifeless corpse. Mother of God, thought the moravec. It kills them to communicate.
More little green men kept coming down the steep path from the cliff. Two hundred. Three hundred. Six hundred. Mahnmut quit trying to count and—ignoring the dead emissary’s request for him to wait—he waded and then paddled through the slight surf to the grounded submersible. Mahnmut went down through the conning tower airlock into his dry enviro-crèche, checking to see if any of the batteries had come back online. They hadn’t. He cycled through the internal airlock into the flooded corridor to the hold and swam down to the collapsed hull there. No way through to Orphu that way. Returning to the control room, he tried the hardline comm again. Silence. Salvaging his hardback edition of the sonnets, safe in a waterproof wrapper, Mahnmut stuffed other gear into a backpack—the remote comm he’d devised for Orphu if he could get him out, the ship’s log disks, hardcopy maps, a flare pistol, power cells—and clambered up to the top of the conning tower.
The little green men had brought great coils of their black cable down from the stone head they had been hauling along the cliff. They also brought scores of the rollers that the huge pallet had been moving on. They worked with an unbelievable efficiency—some swimming out to the submersible and attaching lines both above and under the waterline, others sinking metal rods from the rollers deep into the sand while pounding others into the rocky cliff face, still rigging pulleys and running the cable from the shore to the sub and back to the
shore.
The sub was heavy—especially heavy with its water-damped reactor, flooded hold and corridors—and Mahnmut had trouble imagining these tiny green men actually moving the thing.
But they did.
Within twenty minutes, there were hundreds of cables running to the sub and then ashore and many little green men on each cable. They understood it was a rescue mission; the first thing they did was pull hard enough from the shore—the cables stretching like a black web back to the beach to the east—to tip the sub on its right side.
Mahnmut’s instict was to go help pull on the cables, but he knew that would be useless. Instead, he waited on the hull of The Dark Lady—shifting as the submersible shifted—and as soon as the bay doors were clear of the mud, he dove into the shallow water with a cell-bowered pry bar, his shoulder lamps on full bright.
The hull-bay doors had been twisted and partially melted by entry into the atmosphere, and Mahnmut was unable to open them more than a few centimeters before they jammed completely. Wanting to weep with frustration, pounding the hull with impotent fury, he suddenly had the sense that he was not alone and he swung around in the silt-filled seawater.
Half a dozen little green men stood on the bottom of the sea nearby, watching him. They did not seem to need to breathe.
Not wanting to “communicate” with them again at the price of killing one of them, Mahnmut pointed to the pried-up section of door, pointed to the surface, made a gesture of rolling cable and wrapping it around the torn flange of metal, and pantomimed pulling.
All six of the little green men nodded and kicked for the surface three meters above them.
A minute later sixty of them returned, some pulling cable, others with the black rods that slid out of the rollers they used to pull the stone heads. Again they worked with improbable efficiency, some working as a team to twist back a few centimeters of the doors at the opposite end of the hold bay, others running cable through as if threading a needle. Within a few minutes, they had dozens of strands of the strong cable running beneath the jammed bay doors. They kicked to the surface again, gesturing Mahnmut to follow.