by Dan Simmons
“Those chairs aren’t going anywhere for a while,” said Savi. She nodded toward where bits of the broken chairs and the red cushions floated.
“I can’t believe that the posts traveled regularly to the rings on those things,” said Harman. The slight quaver in the older man’s voice let Daeman know that he wasn’t the only one who had hated that ride.
“Maybe they were all roller-coaster fans,” said Savi.
“What’s a . . .” began Daeman.
“Never mind,” said the old woman. She lifted the backpack she’d had on her lap during the whole ride up and said, “Ready to go through the wall and meet the posts?”
Going through the wall wasn’t hard at all. Passing through it felt to Daeman like pushing through some sort of yielding membrane, or perhaps like swimming through a warm waterfall.
Swimming. In air. Even after thirty minutes of doing it, it felt passing strange to Daeman. At first he flailed around with both arms and legs kicking almost at random, the antics moving him hardly at all and invariably sending him tumbling head over heels, but then he learned the trick of kicking off from one solid object to the next, even for distances of a hundred feet or more, using his legs to propel him and his cupped palms to make slight midcourse corrections.
All of the buildings seemed connected through their interiors, and what looked like bright internal lighting as they’d approached turned out to be an illusion. The windows glowed warmly, but it was the windows that were emitting the light. The vast interiors—the first space they entered after emerging from the white wall was three or four hundred feet across and at least a thousand feet high, with open terraces rising on three sides of the columnar space—were all dimly lighted by the orange glow from the distant wall windows, giving Daeman a sense of moving deep underwater. To add to that illusion of being underwater, various untended plants had grown forty and fifty feet high and were swaying to the slight breezes like tall stands of kelp.
Daeman could feel the thinness of the atmosphere as he tried to swim through what was left of the air. And while the thermskin covered all exposed skin and conserved all of his body heat, he could still sense the freezing cold beyond the molecular layer. He could see its effects as well, since the inner panels of glass were covered by a thin film of ice and occasional clusters of free-floating ice crystals caught the light like dust in shafts of cathedral light.
They came across the first bodies after only five minutes of kicking and swimming through the connected asteroid buildings.
The surface below had been covered with grass, terrestrial plants, trees, plants and flowers which Daeman had never seen on earth, but all of these had died except for the swaying kelp towers. While the surface had been parklike, open balconies on metal columns and dining and gathering areas festooned on walls and window surfaces showed how small the forcefield gravity must have been. The post-humans must have been able to push off from the “ground” and soar a hundred or more vertical feet before needing another open platform or aerial stepping-stone to push again. Many of these platforms still held hoarfrosted tables, overturned chairs, bulbous couches, and freestanding tapestries.
And bodies.
Savi kicked her way up to a terrace almost a hundred feet across. At one time it obviously stood beside and looked down on a thin waterfall tumbling from a balcony four or five hundred feet higher on the permcrete wall, but now the waterfall was frozen into a fragile latticework of ice and the eating area held only floating bodies.
Female bodies. All female, although the gray objects looked more like leathery mummies than anything either male or female.
There was little decomposition as such, but the effects of extreme cold and decreasing air pressure had freeze-dried the corpses over years or decades or centuries. When Daeman floated closer to the first cluster of bodies—all free-floating in the zero-g, but tangled in the mesh of what had once been some sort of decorative net between the dining area and the waterfall—he decided it had been centuries, not just decades, since these women had breathed and walked and flown in what Savi said had probably been one-tenth gravity and laughed and done whatever else post-humans had done before . . . before what? The women’s eyes were still intact, although frozen and clouded white in the gray leathery faces, and Daeman looked into the milky stares of the half dozen or so of the bodies as if there might be some answer there. When none was forthcoming, he cleared his throat and said into his osmosis mask microphone, “What do you think killed them?”
“I was wondering the same thing,” said Harman, floating near a separate cluster of bodies. The blue of his suit was almost shocking in the dim, funereal light and set against the gray skin of the corpses. “Sudden depressurization?”
“No,” said Savi. Her face was only inches from the face of one of the dead women. “There’s no hemorrhaging behind the eyes or signs of asphyxia or burst eardrums the way there would be if there had been a cataclysmic loss of atmosphere. And look at this.”
The other two floated closer. Savi shoved three gloved fingers into a ragged hole in the corpse’s leathery neck. The fingers disappeared to the knuckle. Disgusted, Daeman kick-floated backward, but not before noticing that the other corpses also had such ragged wounds on their necks, thighs, and rib cages.
“Scavengers?” said Harman.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Savi, floating from corpse to corpse, inspecting each wound. “Nor the effects of decomposition. I don’t think there was much in the way of viable bacteria here even before the air began leaking out and the cold set in. Maybe post-humans didn’t even have bacteria in their guts.”
“How could that be?” asked Daeman.
Savi just shook her head. She floated to two bodies tangled in chairs on the next platform. These corpses showed wider wounds in the belly. Rags of loose, torn clothing floated in the thin, cold air. “Something chewed a hole into their bellies,” whispered Savi.
“What?” Daeman heard how hollow his voice sounded on the thermskin comm.
“I think all these people—posts—died of wounds,” said Savi. “Something chewed their throats and bellies and hearts out.”
“What?” Daeman asked again.
Instead of answering, Savi removed the black gun from her pack and slapped it onto the stiktite patch on the thigh of her thermskin suit. She pointed down the open mall of the interior city to where it curved a half mile or so straight ahead. “Something’s moving there,” she said.
Without waiting to see if the two men would follow, Savi kicked off and floated in that direction.
41
Olympus Mons
After their capture, Mahnmut thought that his best shot would have been to trigger the Device—whatever it was—as soon as the blond god in the flying chariot had destroyed the balloon and begun hauling them back to Olympus Mons.
But he couldn’t get to the Device. Or to the transmitter. Or to Orphu. It took everything Mahnmut had just to hang on to the railing of the gondola as they flew at almost Mach 1 toward the Martian volcano. If the Device, transmitter, and Orphu of Io hadn’t been lashed down to the gondola platform with every meter of rope and wire Mahnmut had been able to scavenge, all three objects would have all dropped 12,000 meters and more to the high plateau between the northernmost of the Tharsis volcanoes—Ascraeus—and the Tethys Sea.
The god in the machine—still carrying these metric tons of dead weight and the added weight of the bunched cables in one hand—actually gained altitude as the chariot headed north, swung out to sea still gaining altitude, and came in toward Olympus Mons from the north. Even with his short legs dangling and his manipulators sunk deep into the gondola railing, Mahnmut had to admit it was one hell of a sight.
A near-solid mass of clouds covered most of the region between the Tharsis volcanoes and Olympus, with only the solid masses of the volcanoes rising from the cloud cover. The rising sun was small but very bright to the southeast, painting the ocean and the clouds a brilliant gold. The golden glare from t
he Tethys Sea was so bright that Mahnmut had to notch up his polarizing filters. Olympus itself, rising right at the edge of the Tethys ocean, was staggering in its immensity, an endless cone of icefields rising to an impossibly green summit with a series of blue lakes in its caldera.
The chariot dipped and Mahnmut could make out the 4,000-meter vertical cliffs at the very base of its northwestern quadrant, and although the cliffs were in shadow, he could also see tiny roads and structures in what looked to be a narrow strip of beach, although there were almost certainly two or three miles of coastline between the cliffs and the golden ocean. Farther north and farther out to sea, turned into an island by the terraforming, was the isle of Lycus Sulci, which resembled nothing so much as a lizard’s head raised toward Olympus Mons.
Mahnmut described all of this to Orphu, subvocalizing on the tightbeam channel. The Ionian’s only comment was, “Sounds pretty, but I wish we were taking this tour under our own steam.”
Mahnmut remembered that he wasn’t here for sightseeing when the godlike humanoid dipped the chariot toward the summit of the giant volcano. Three thousand meters above the upper snow slopes, they passed through a forcefield—Mahnmut’s sensors registered the ozone shock and voltage differentials—and then leveled out for final approach to the green and grassy summit.
“I’m sorry I didn’t see this guy in the chariot coming sooner and take some evasive action,” Mahnmut said to Orphu in the last seconds before he had to shut down comm for landing.
“It’s not your fault,” said Orphu. “These deus ex machinas have a way of sneaking up on us literary types.”
After landing, the god who’d captured them grabbed Mahnmut by the neck and carried him unceremoniously into the largest artificial space the little Moravec had ever seen. Other male gods went out to haul in Orphu, the Device, and the transmitter. Still more male gods came into the hall as Zeus listened to their chariot god describe their capture. Mahn-mut was comfortable now thinking that these chariot people thought of themselves as gods, assuming now that their choice of Olympus Mons as a home was no coincidence. The holograms in niches of scores and scores more gods and goddesses reinforced his hypothesis. Then the über-god whom Mahnmut assumed to be Zeus began speaking and it was all Greek to the moravec. Mahnmut spoke a sentence or two in En-glish. The gray-bearded gods and the younger ones frowned their incomprehension. Mahnmut cursed himself for never loading ancient or modern Greek into his language base. It hadn’t seemed all that important at the time he’d first set out in The Dark Lady to explore the subsea oceans of Europa.
Mahnmut switched to French. Then German. Then Russian. Then Japanese. He was working his way through his modest database of human languages, framing the same sentence—“I came in peace and did not mean to trespass”—when the Zeus figure held up one massive hand to silence him. The gods spoke amongst themselves and didn’t sound happy.
What’s going on? tightbeamed Orphu. The Ionian’s shell was five meters away, on the floor with the other two artifacts from the gondola. Their captors hadn’t seemed to consider the possibility that there was a sentient person in that cracked and battered form, and they treated Orphu as another captured thing. Mahnmut had anticipated this. It’s why he phrased his sentence “I came in peace . . .” rather than “we.” Whatever the gods decided to do to him, Mahnmut, there was an outside chance that they would leave Orphu alone, although how the poor Ionian might be able to escape without eyes, ears, legs, or manipulators wasn’t clear to Mahnmut.
The gods are talking, tightbeamed Mahnmut. I don’t understand them.
Repeat a few of the words they’re using.
Mahnmut did, sending them silently.
That’s a variant on classical Greek, said Orphu. It’s in my database. I can understand them.
Upload the database to me, sent Mahnmut.
On tightbeam? said Orphu. It would take an hour. Do you have an hour?
Mahnmut turned his head to watch the beautiful humanoid males barking syllables at each other. They seemed near a decision. No, he said.
Subvocalize what they say to me and I’ll translate, we’ll decide the proper answer, and I’ll send back the phonemes for your response, said the Ionian.
In real time?
Do we have a choice? said Orphu.
Their captor was speaking to the bearded figure on the gold throne. Mahnmut sent on what he heard, got the translation within a fraction of a second, consulted with Orphu, and memorized the syllables of their response in Greek. It hardly seemed efficient to the little moravec.
“. . . it is a clever little automaton and the other objects are worthless as plunder, my lord Zeus,” said the two-and-a-half-meter-tall blond god.
“Lord of the silver bow, Apollo, do not dismiss such toys as worthless until we know whence they came and why. The balloon you destroyed was no toy.”
“Nor am I a toy,” said Mahnmut. “I came in peace and did not trespass intentionally.”
The gods did a collective double take and murmured amongst themselves.
How tall are these gods? sent Orphu on the tightbeam.
Mahnmut described them quickly.
Not possible, said the Ionian. The human skeletal structure begins to be inefficient at two meters of height, and three meters would be absurd. Lower leg bones would break.
This is Martian gravity, Mahnmut reminded his friend. It’s the worst g-field I’ve ever experienced, but it’s only about a third Earth-normal.
So you think these gods are from Earth? asked Orphu. It hardly seems likely unless . . .
Excuse me, sent Mahnmut. I’m getting busy here.
Zeus chuckled and sat forward on his throne. “So the little toy person can speak the human language.”
“I can,” replied Mahnmut, getting the words from Orphu, although neither moravec knew the proper honorific for the god of all gods, the king of the gods, the lord of the universe. They’d decided not to try.
“The Healers can speak,” snapped Apollo, still addressing Zeus. “They cannot think.”
“I can speak and think,” said Mahnmut.
“Indeed?” said Zeus. “Does the speaking and thinking little person have a name?”
“I am Mahnmut the moravec,” Mahnmut said firmly. “Sailor of the frozen seas of Europa.”
Zeus chuckled, but it was a deep enough rumble to vibrate Mahnmut’s surface material. “Are you now? Who is your father, Mahnmut the moravec?”
It took Mahnmut and Orphu a full two seconds of back and forth tightbeaming to decide on the honest reply. “I have no father, Zeus.”
“You are a toy then,” said Zeus. When the god frowned, his great, white brows almost touched above his sharp nose.
“Not a toy,” said Mahnmut. “Merely a person in a different form. As is my friend here, Orphu of Io, space moravec who works the Io Torus.” He gestured toward the shell and all divine eyes turned on Orphu. It had been Orphu’s insistence to reveal his nature. He said that he wanted to share whatever Mahnmut’s fate would be.
“Another little person, but this one in the form of a broken crab?” said Zeus, not chuckling now.
“Yes,” said Mahnmut. “May I know the names of our captors?”
Zeus hesitated, Apollo remonstrated, but in the end the king of the gods gave an ironic bow and opened his hand toward each god in turn.
“Your captor, as you know, is Apollo, my son. Next to him, doing much of the shouting before you joined our conversation, is Ares. The dark figure behind Ares is my brother Hades, another son of Kronos and Rhea. To my right is my wife’s son, Hephaestus. The royal god standing next to your crab-friend is my brother Poseidon, called here in honor of your arrival. Near Poseidon, with his collar of golden seaweed, is Nereus, also of the deep. Beyond noble Nereus is Hermes, guide and giant killer. There are many more gods . . . and goddesses, I see . . . coming into the Great Hall as we speak, but these seven gods and I shall be your jury.”
“Jury?” said Mahnmut. “My friend Orphu of Io
and I have committed no crime against you.”
“On the contrary,” said Zeus with a laugh. He switched to English. “You’ve come in from Jupiter space, little moravec, little robot, most probably with mischief in your heart. It was my daughter Athena and I who brought down your ship and I confess I thought you all destroyed. You’re tough little abominations. But let this be the end of you today.”
“You speak this creature’s language?” Ares demanded of Zeus. “You know this barbarian tongue?”
“Your Father speaks all languages, God of War,” snapped Zeus. “Be silent.”
The massive hall and many mezzanines were filling up quickly with gods and goddesses.
“Have this little dog-man-machine and the legless crab taken away to a sealed room in this hall,” said Zeus. “I will confer with Hera and others who have my ear, and we will decide shortly what to do with them. Take the other two objects to a nearby treasure room. We shall evaluate their worth by and by.”
The gods named Apollo and Nereus approached Mahnmut. The little moravec debated fight and flight—he had a low-voltage laser on his wrist that might surprise the gods for a second or two, and he could run quickly on all fours for short distances, perhaps scurry out of this Great Hall and dive into the caldera lake to hide in its depths—but then Mahnmut glanced over at Orphu, already being lifted effortlessly by four unnamed gods, and he allowed himself to be lifted and carried out of the hall like a big metal doll.
According to Mahnmut’s internal chronometer, they waited in the windowless storage room for thirty-six minutes before their executioner arrived. It was a big space, with walls of marble six feet thick and—Mahnmut’s instruments told him—embedded forcefields that could withstand a low-yield nuclear explosion.
It’s time to trigger the Device, tightbeamed Orphu. Whatever it does, it’s preferable to letting them destroy us without a fight.