Ilium

by Dan Simmons

  “Do you ever wonder why they gave us that sense?” Orphu had asked when Mahnmut described the vegetation scent as they entered the broad Valles Marineris Estuary from the Tethys.

  “What’s that?” said Mahnmut.

  “Smell.”

  The Europan moravec had to think about that. He’d always taken his sense of smell for granted, although it was useless underwater or on the surface of Europa, and all but useless in The Dark Lady’s environmental crèche—in other words, everywhere he’d existed. “I could smell toxic fumes in the sub or in the pressurized cubbies of Conamara Chaos Central,” he said at last, knowing that this wasn’t a satisfactory answer. Moravecs had better built-in alarms for such dangers.

  Orphu rumbled softly. “I might have smelled the sulfur when I was on Io’s surface, but who would want to?”

  “You can smell things?” said Mahnmut. “That doesn’t make much sense for a hardvac moravec.”

  “Indeed,” said Orphu. “Nor does the fact that I spend . . . spent . . . a majority of my time viewing things on the human’s visible-light spectrum, but I did whenever possible.”

  Mahnmut thought about this as well. It was true; he did the same, even though he could easily see deep into the infrared and UV reaches of the spectrum. Orphu’s vision, Mahnmut knew, incorporated visualizations of radio frequencies and magnetic field lines, neither common to old-style humans, which made a lot more sense for a moravec working in the hard radiation fields of Galilean space. So why did the Ionian choose the limited human “visible” wavelengths most frequently?

  “I think it’s because our designers and all the subsequent generations of moravecs secretly wanted to be human,” said Orphu, answering Mahnmut’s unstated question with no accompanying rumble of irony or amusement. “The Pinocchio Effect, as it were.”

  Mahnmut didn’t agree with that, but he felt too depressed to argue the point.

  “What do you smell now?” asked Orphu.

  “Rotting vegetation,” said Mahnmut as the felucca took the far southern channel into the broad estuary. “It smells like Shakespeare’s Thames at low tide.”

  On the first week of sailing upriver, to keep from going mad from the inactivity, Mahnmut disassembled and inspected—as best he could—the three other pieces of recovered cargo, Orphu being the fourth.

  The smallest artifact, a smooth ovoid not much larger than Mahnmut’s compact torso, was the Device—the single most important element in the late Koros III’s mission. All Mahnmut and Orphu knew about the Device was that the Ganymedan was supposed to deliver it to Olympus Mons, and, under proper circumstances not shared with Mahnmut or Orphu, activate it.

  Mahnmut probed the Device with sonar and removed a tiny part of its reflective transalloy shell. Its function was not revealed. The actual machine, if machine it was, was macromolecular—essentially a single nano-squared machined molecule with a chewy central core of tremendous energy contained only by the macromolecule’s internal fields. The only “device-device” that Mahnmut could find associated with the shell was a current-generated zipper initiator. Thirty-two volts applied to just the right place on the shell would . . . do something . . . to the macromolecule inside.

  “It could be a bomb,” said Mahnmut as he carefully replaced the square centimeter of metal shell.

  “Quite a bomb,” muttered Orphu. “If the em-molecule is mostly a binding eggshell, we’re talking a planet-buster here. The yolk would be on us.”

  Pretending he hadn’t heard the pun in order to preserve their friendship and to keep from having to throw Orphu over the railing, Mahnmut had looked out at the passing canyon walls—they were still sailing within three kilometers of the high southern cliffs bordering the broad inland sea that day—and imagined all that red-rocked, terraced and striated beauty gone. He thought of the periscoping mangroves that grew in the Martian lower estuary marshlands, the natural topiary-gorse visible on the valley cliffs’ higher walls, even the fragile blue sky with ripples of high cirrus above the rock—and tried to imagine it all destroyed by one quantum explosion huge enough to rip a world apart. It hardly seemed right.

  “Can you think of anything else it could be other than a bomb?” he asked Orphu.

  “Not offhand,” said the Ionian. “But something containing that much pent-up implosive quantum energy represents technology way beyond my understanding. I’d suggest you treat the Device gently, put some cushions under it or something, but since it’s already survived the chariot people’s attack and atmospheric entry that fried me and killed your ship, it can’t be too delicate. Give it a kick in the ass and move on. What’s the next piece of cargo?”

  The next piece of cargo was just a bit larger than the Device, but much more understandable. “It’s some sort of squirt communicator,” said Mahnmut. “It’s all folded in on itself, but I can see that if I activate it, it’ll unfurl onto its own tripod, aim a large dish toward the sky, and fire a serious burst of . . . something. Encoded energy in tightband or k-maser or perhaps even modulated gravity.”

  “Why would Koros have needed that?” asked Orphu. “The comsats are still in orbit and the spaceship could have relayed any sort of tightbeam or radio back to Galilean space. Hell, even your sub could have contacted home.”

  “Maybe this wasn’t meant to broadcoast to Jupiter space,” suggested Mahnmut.

  “Where then?”

  Mahnmut had no suggestions.

  “How was Koros going to code the message?” asked the Ionian.

  “There are virtual jackports,” said Mahnmut after inspecting the compact machinery carefully under its nanocarbon skin. “We could download everything we’ve seen and learned, encrypt it, and activate it. Unless it needs an activation code or something. Want me to jack in and check?”

  “No,” said Orphu. “Not yet.”

  “I’ll close it then.”

  “What does this communicator use for a squirt power source?” asked Orphu before Mahnmut could close up the device.

  Mahnmut wasn’t familiar with the technology, but he described the magnetic container and forcefield schematics.

  “My, my,” said Orphu. “That’s Chevkovian felschenmass. Artificial antimatter of the kind the Consortium used to fuel the first interstellar probe. There’s enough energy there to keep us alive and kicking for another several earth centuries if there were a way for us to tap into it.”

  Mahnmut had felt his organic heart skip a beat. “Could we have used it to replace the fusion reactor on the Lady?”

  Orphu was quiet for several long seconds. “No, I don’t think so,” he said at last. “Too much energy released too fast and too hard to tame. It’s possible that you and I could tap into its trickle field, but I don’t think we could have powered up The Dark Lady with it even if the sub could have been repaired. And you said you couldn’t do the repairs alone, right?”

  “It would have taken the Conamara Chaos ice docks,” said Mahnmut, feeling a strange combination of regret and relief at the news that this wasn’t a fix for the poor Lady. As much as the death of his ship depressed him, the thought of turning back and sailing the 2,000-plus kilometers back to it was even more depressing.

  The last piece of cargo was the largest, the heaviest, and the hardest for Mahnmut to figure out.

  The container was a bamboo-three cube a meter and a half tall by two meters wide, wrapped in clear transpolymer. A brief inspection showed Mahnmut that the cube was filled with hundreds of square meters of micro-thin polyethylene stealth-composite with high-performance solarcell-strips embedded in the fabric, 24 interconnected, partially nested, articulated conical titanium segments, four pressurized canisters containing what his sensors said was helium, an oxygen-nitrogen mix, and methanol, 8 atmospheric pulse thrusters with jack-in controllers, and, finally, 12 fifteen-meter folded buckycarbon cables attached to the four sides of the bamboo-three box the thing came in.

  “I give up,” said Mahnmut after several minutes of pondering and poking and refolding. “What
the hell is it?”

  “A balloon,” said Orphu.

  Mahnmut shook his moravec head. There were both living and moravec balloon creatures in the atmosphere of Jupiter, more swimming in the soup of Saturn, but what would Koros III have wanted with an artificial balloon on Mars?

  Orphu transmitted the answer even as Mahnmut heard it in his own mind. “Koros’s mission was to get to the top of Olympus Mons, to the locus of the quantum disturbance, and this way he wouldn’t have to climb the volcano. What are the dimensions of this . . . balloon?”

  Mahnmut told the Ionian.

  “Inflated with helium here at null-null, Martian sea level, that would give a diameter of just over sixty meters and a height of about thirty-five meters, which should easily lift the gondola, you, the Device, and the squirt radio to the fringes of space . . . or the top of Olympus,” said Orphu.

  “Gondola?” said Mahnmut, still trying to absorb this concept.

  “The box it came in. That’s obviously what Koros III planned to ride in. Does it have a transpolymer hood—some sort of pressurizable cover?”

  “Yes.”

  “There you have it.”

  “But Olympus Mons has an escalator going up its south side,” Mahnmut said stupidly.

  “Koros and the moravecs who planned this mission didn’t know that,” said Orphu.

  Mahnmut looked away from the balloon for a minute to think. The southern cliffs of Valles Marineris were just a thin red line against the blue-green horizon as the felucca moved deeper into the center channels of the estuarial river. “The gondola is too small to carry you,” he said.

  “Well, naturally . . .” began Orphu.

  “I’ll build a bigger gondola,” interrupted Mahnmut.

  “Do you really think we’ll be ascending to the summit of Olympus Mons?” Orphu said softly.

  “I don’t know,” said Mahnmut, “but I do know that we’ll still be more than two thousand kilometers from the volcano when . . . if . . . we ever reach the western end of Valles Marineris in this little ship. I didn’t have any idea how we were going to get through the jumble of Noctis Labyrinthus and over the Tharsis Plateau to Olympus, but this . . . balloon . . . might work. Maybe.”

  “We could start now,” said Orphu. “It would be faster than this . . . what did you call it?”

  “Felucca,” said Mahnmut, glancing up at the rigging and sails sharp against the pink and blue sky. Several of the little green men were swinging effortlessly from line to line in the rigging. “And no, I don’t think we should try the balloon until we have to. It uses chameleon-stealth fabric, even on the gondola, but I’m not convinced that the flying-chariot people couldn’t track it. We’ll launch it when we reach Noctis Labyrinthus. That’ll be a long and difficult enough aerial journey as it is, since three of the tallest volcanoes on Mars will be between us and Olympus.”

  Orphu rumbled close to the subsonic. “Around the World in Eighty Days, eh?”

  “Not around the world,” said Mahnmut. “Counting this boat trip, we have to travel just a little more than one-fourth the way around it.”

  Mahnmut tried to pass the time and shake himself out of his low mood by reading Shakespeare’s sonnets from the physical book he’d salvaged from The Dark Lady. It didn’t work. Whereas during the past few years he’d disappeared into analysis, ferreting out hidden structures, word-connections, and dramatic content, the sonnets seemed like sad things now. Sad and rather nasty.

  Mahnmut the moravec could care less what “Will” the “poet” in the sonnets did to the “Young Man” or expected done in return—Mahnmut had neither penis nor anus and longed for neither—but the copious flattery and flagrant bullying of the thick-witted but wealthy “youth” by the older poet was oppressive to Mahnmut now, bordering on the perverse. He skipped to the “Dark Lady” sonnets, but these were even more cynical and perverse. Mahnmut agreed with the analysis that the poet’s interest in this woman was centered precisely on her promiscuity—this woman of the dark hair, dark eyes, dun breasts, and dark nipples was, if the poet was to be trusted, not a whore, but certainly something of a slut.

  Mahnmut had long since downloaded Freud’s 1910 essay, “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men,” in which the lost-age witch doctor had documented cases of human males who could be sexually aroused only by women well known to be promiscuous. Shakespeare had no hesitation of describing a woman’s vagina as the bay where all men ride and sneeringly punning—O cunning love—about his Dark Lady’s easy promiscuity, and Mahnmut had spent happy years finding deeper levels and dramatic structures behind these vulgarities, but this day—the sun close to setting straight down the great inland sea, the cliffs glowing rose-red to the north—he could see the sonnets only as dirty linen, a raunchy poet’s private confessions.

  “Reading your sonnets?” asked Orphu.

  Mahnmut closed the book. “How’d you know? Have you taken up telepathy now that you’ve lost your eyes?”

  “Not yet,” rumbled the Ionian. Orphu’s great crab shell was lashed to the deck ten meters from where Mahnmut sat near the bow. “Some of your silences are more literary than others, is all.”

  Mahnmut stood and turned toward the sunset. The little green men were hustling in the rigging and along the sea-anchor hawser, readying the ship for their sleep. “Why’d they program some of us to have a predisposition for human books?” he asked. “What possible use is that to a moravec now that the human race may be extinct?”

  “I’ve wondered that myself,” said Orphu. “Koros III and Ri Po were free from our affliction, but you must have known others who were obsessed with human literature.”

  “My old partner, Urtzweil, read and re-read the King James version of the Bible,” said Mahnmut. “He studied it for decades.”

  “Yes,” said Orphu. “And me and my Proust.” He hummed a few bars of “Me and My Shadow.” “Do you know what all these works we gravitate toward have in common, Mahnmut?”

  Mahnmut thought about it for a moment. “No,” he said at last.

  “They’re inexhaustible,” said Orphu.

  “Inexhaustible?”

  “Incapable of being used up. If we were human, these particular plays and novels and poems would be like houses that always opened onto new rooms, hidden stairways, undiscovered attics . . . that sort of thing.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Mahnmut, not buying into this metaphor.

  “You don’t sound happy with the Bard today,” said Orphu.

  “I think his inexhaustibility has exhausted me,” admitted Mahnmut.

  “What’s happening on deck? A lot of activity?”

  Mahnmut turned away from the sunset. Three-fourths of the ship’s complement of LGM were silently scurrying and tying down and clambering and letting out the sea anchor and securing. There were only three or four minutes of usable sunlight left before they went into hibernation—lying down, curling up, and shutting down for the night.

  “Did you feel the vibrations in the deck?” Mahnmut asked his friend. Except for smell, it was the last sense left to Orphu.

  “No, I just knew it was that time of day,” said the Ionian. “Why don’t you help them?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Help them,” repeated Orphu. “You’re an able-bodied seaman. Or at least you know a hawser from a hacksaw. Give them a hand—or your nearest moravec equivalent.”

  “I’d just get in the way.” He looked at the quick work and perfect precision of the little green men. They scuttled out along the rigging and up the masts like videos he’d seen of monkeys. “We don’t have telepathy,” added Mahnmut, “but I’m pretty sure they do. They don’t need my help.”

  “Nonsense,” said Orphu. “Make yourself useful. I’m going back to reading about Monsieur Swann and his faithless girlfriend.”

  Mahnmut hesitated a moment, but then slipped the irreplaceable book of sonnets into his backpack, trotted to the mid-deck, and joined in the lashing down of the lowered lateen sail. At first the
LGM paused in their synchronized work and just stared at him—black-button anthracite eyes staring from their clear, featureless green faces—but then they made room and Mahnmut, glancing at the setting sun and breathing in the clean Martian air, set to work with a will.

  Over the next few weeks, Mahnmut’s mood changed from depression to satisfaction to something like the moravec equivalent of joy. He worked every day with the LGM, keeping up his conversation with Orphu even as he sewed sails, spliced rigging, swabbed decks, pulled on the anchor, and took his turn at the tiller. The felucca was making about forty kilometers progress a day, which seemed like very little until one took into account that they were moving upstream, sailing with irregular winds, rowing much of the time, and stopping completely during the night. Since the Valles Marineris was about 4,000 kilometers long—almost the width of the Lost Age nation called the United States—Mahnmut was resigned to making the transit in about a hundred Martian days. Beyond the west edge of the inland sea, he kept reminding himself and Orphu reminded him when he forgot, was more than 1,800 kilometers of Tharsis Plateau.

  Mahnmut was in no hurry. The pleasures of the sailing ship—she had no name as far as the moravec could tell, and he wasn’t about to kill a little green man to ask—were simple and real, the scenery was astounding, the sun was warm in the day and the air deliciously cool at night, and the desperate urgency of their mission was fading under the reassuring cycle of routine.

  Near the end of the sixth week on the water, Mahnmut was working on the forward of the felucca’s two masts when a chariot appeared less than a kilometer dead ahead of the ship, flying low—only thirty meters or so higher than the ship’s sails—allowing Mahnmut no time to scurry for cover. He was alone at the intersection of the two segments of mast—a felucca’s sails are triangular, its two masts segmented, the upper section slanted rakishly back—and no little green men were in the rigging. Mahnmut was completely exposed to the gaze of anyone or anything flying the chariot.

  It passed over traveling several hundred kilometers per hour, and so low that Mahnmut could see that the two horses pulling the chariot were holograms. A man in a tan tunic was the only occupant, standing tall and holding the virtual reins. The figure was golden-skinned, powerfully handsome, with long blond hair streaming behind him. He did not deign to look downward.