by Dan Simmons
It feels weird to be leaving Mars after all the trouble we went through to get there, sends Mahnmut on the tightbeam.
Indeed, answers Orphu of Io. Especially now that the Olympian gods are warring so furiously together. To illustrate his point, the deep space moravec zooms Mahnmut’s video of retreating Mars, focusing on the icy slopes and green summit of Olympus Mons. Orphu of Io sees the activity as a series of infrared data columns, but Mahnmut can see it clearly enough. Bright explosions flash here and there and the caldera—a lake only twenty-four hours ago—now glows yellow and red on the infrared, showing that it is filled with lava once again.
Asteague/Che, Retrograde Sinopessen, Cho Li, General Beh bin Adee, and the other prime integrators seemed actively frightened, sends Mahnmut as he runs checks on the submersible’s power systems. Their explanation to Hockenberry about the gravity of Mars being wrong—how whoever or whatever changed it to near Earth-normal—also frightened me. This is the first time that he and Orphu have found to speak privately since the launch of the Queen Mab and Mahnmut welcomes the chance to share his anxiety.
That’s not even the tip of the merde iceberg, sends Orphu.
What do you mean? Mahnmut’s organic parts feel a sudden chill.
That’s right, rumbles Orphu, you were so busy shuttling around Mars and Ilium, you didn’t hear all of the Prime Integrators Commission findings, did you?
Tell me.
You’ll be happier not knowing, my friend.
Shut up and tell me…you know what I mean. Talk.
Orphu sighs—an odd noise over the tightbeam, sounding like the entire one thousand and thirty feet of the Queen Mab has suddenly depressurized. First of all, there’s the terraforming…
So? In their many weeks of traveling across Mars by submersible, felucca, and balloon, Mahnmut had grown accustomed to the blue sky, blue sea, lichen, trees, and abundant air.
All that water and life and air wasn’t there a mere century and a quarter ago, sends Orphu.
I know. Asteague/Che explained that during our first briefing on Europa, almost a standard year ago. It almost seemed impossible that the planet could have been terraformed that quickly. So?
So it was impossible, sends Orphu of Io. While you were schmoozing with the Greeks and Trojans, our science ’vecs, both Five Moons and Belt, have been studying terraformed Mars. It wasn’t done by magic, you know…asteroids were used to melt the ice caps and free the CO2, more asteroids were targeted on the huge underground frozen water deposits and crashed into the Martian crust to set H2O flowing on the surface after millions of years, lichen, algae, and earthworms were seeded to prepare the soil for larger plants, and all that could happen only after fusion-fired oxygen and nitrogen generating plants had thickened the Martian atmosphere by a factor of ten.
In his submersible control crèche, Mahnmut quits tapping at his computer screen. He unjacks from virtual ports and lets the schematics and images of the sub and its reentry shuttle fade away. That would mean… he sends hesitantly.
Yep. That means that it took almost eight thousand standard years to terraform Mars to its present stage.
But…but… Mahnmut is sputtering on the tightbeam line, but he can’t help it. Asteague/Che had shown them astronomical photos of the old Mars, the airless, cold, lifeless Mars, taken from Jupiter and Saturn space only a standard century and a half ago. And the moravecs themselves had been seeded in the Outer System by human beings less than three thousand years earlier. Mars certainly hadn’t been terraformed then—except for a few domed Chinese colonies on Phobos and the surface, it was exactly as the early probes from Earth had first photographed it in the Twentieth or Twenty-first century or whenever.
But…sends Mahnmut again.
I love it when you’re speechless, sends Orphu, but there is none of the accompanying rumble that usually means the hard-vac moravec is amused.
You’re saying that we’re either talking magic or real gods here…a God-type god…or… Mahnmut’s tone on the tightbeam is approaching anger.
Or?
That’s not the real Mars.
Exactly, sends Orphu. Or rather, it’s the real Mars, but not our real Mars. Not the Mars that’s been in our solar system for lo, these billions of years.
Someone…something…swapped…our Mars…for…another…one?
It appears that way, sends Orphu. The Prime Integrators and their top science ’vecs didn’t want to believe it either, but that’s the only answer that fits the facts. The sol-day thing cinched it.
Mahnmut realizes that his hands are shaking. He clasps them, shuts off his vision and video feeds so he can concentrate, and sends—Sol-day thing?
A small matter, but important, sends Orphu. Did you happen to notice during your travels through the Brane Hole between Mars and the Earth with Ilium that the days and nights were the same length?
I guess so but… Mahnmut stops. He doesn’t have to access his nonorganic memory banks to know that the Earth rotates once every twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes, Mars every twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes. A small difference, but one whose disparity would have accumulated during the months of their stay on both Mars and the Hole-connected Earth where the Greeks were battling the Trojans. But it hadn’t. The days and nights on both worlds had been the same length, synchronized.
Jesus Christ, whispers Mahnmut on the tightbeam. Jesus Christ.
Maybe, sends Orphu, and this time the rumble is there. Or at least someone with comparable God-powers.
Someone or something from Earth punched holes in multidimensional Calabi-Yau Space, connected Branes across different universes, swapped our Mars for theirs…whoever and wherever “theirs” is…and left that other Mars…the terraformed Mars with gods on top of Olympos…still connected to the Ilium-Earth with quantum Brane Holes. And while they were at it, they changed the gravity and rotational period of Mars. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and holy crap!
Yes, sends Orphu. And the Prime Integrators now think that whoever or whatever did this little trick is on Earth or in near-Earth orbit. Still want to go on this trip?
I…I…if…I… begins Mahnmut and falls silent. Would he have volunteered for this trip if he’d known all this? After all, he already knew how dangerous it was, had known since he’d volunteered to go to Mars after being briefed on Europa. Whatever these beings were—these evolved post-humans or creatures from some other universe or dimension—they’d already shown themselves capable of controlling and playing with the very quantum fabric of the universe. What’s a couple of moved-around planets and altered rotation periods and gravitational fields compared to that? And what the hell was he doing on the Queen Mab hurtling toward Earth and its waiting god-monsters at a velocity of 180 km/sec and climbing? The unknown enemy’s control of the quantum underpinnings of the universe—of all universes—made this space-ship’s puny weapons and the thousand sleeping rockvec soldiers on board seem like a joke.
This is sort of sobering, he finally sends to Orphu.
Amen, sends his friend.
At that moment alarm bells begin ringing all over the ship, while alarm lights and klaxons override tightbeams and flash and clang across all other shared virtual and comm channels.
“Intruder! Intruder!” sounds the ship’s voice.
Is this a joke? sends Mahnmut.
No, replies Orphu. Your friend Thomas Hockenberry just…appeared…on the deck of the engine room here. He must have quantum teleported in.
Is he all right?
No. He’s bleeding profusely…there’s already blood all over the deck. He looks dead to me, Mahnmut. I’ve got him in my manipulators and I’m moving toward the human-hospital as fast as my repellors can get me there.
The ship is huge, the gravity is greater than anything he’s operated in before, and it takes Mahnmut several minutes to get out of his submersible, then out of the hold, and then up to the decks that he thinks of as the “human levels” of the ship. Besides enough sleeping and cooking quar
ters and toilets and acceleration couches to accommodate five hundred human beings, besides an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere set at sea-level pressure to be harmonious for humans, Deck 17 has a working medical infirmary outfitted with state-of-the-art early Twenty-second Century surgical and diagnostic equipment—ancient, but based on the most updated schematics that the Five Moons moravecs had on file.
Odysseus—their reluctant and angry human passenger—has been the only occupant of Deck 17 for this first day out from Phobos, but by the time Mahnmut arrives, he sees that a majority of the moravecs on the ship have gathered. Orphu is here, filling the corridor, as is the Ganymedan Prime Integrator Suma IV, the Callistan Cho Li, rockvec General Beh bin Adee, and two of the pilot techs from the bridge. The door to the medlab surgery is closed, but through the clear glass, Mahnmut can see Prime Integrator Asteague/Che watching as the spidery Amalthean, Prime Integrator Retrograde Sinopessen, works frantically over Hockenberry’s bloody body. Two smaller tech ’vecs are taking Sinopessen’s orders, wielding laser scalpels and saws, connecting tubes, fetching gauze, and aiming virtual imaging equipment. There is blood on Retrograde Sinopessen’s small metal body and elegant silver manipulators.
Human blood, thinks Mahnmut. Hockenberry’s blood. There is more blood spattered here on the floor of the wide access corridor, some on the walls, and more on the pitted carapace and broad manipulators of his friend Orphu of Io.
“How is he?” Mahnmut asks Orphu, vocalizing the words. It is considered impolite to tightbeam in the company of other ’vecs.
“Dead when I got him here,” says Orphu. “They’re trying to bring him back.”
“Is Integrator Sinopessen a student of human anatomy and medicine?”
“He’s always had an interest in Lost Era human medicine,” says Orphu. “It was his hobby. Sort of like you with Shakespeare’s sonnets and me with Proust.”
Mahnmut nods. Most of the moravecs he’d known on Europa had some interest in humanity and their ancient arts and sciences. Such interests had been programmed into the early autonomous robots and cyborgs seeded in the Asteroid Belt and Outer System, and their evolved moravec descendants retained the fascination. But does Sinopessen know enough human medicine to bring Hockenberry back from the dead?
Mahnmut sees Odysseus emerging from the cubby where he’s been sleeping. The barrel-chested man stops when he sees the crowd in the corridor and his hand automatically goes to the hilt of his sword—or rather, to the empty loop on his belt, for the moravecs had relieved him of his sword while he was unconscious on the hornet trip up to the ship. Mahnmut tries to imagine how strange this all must look to the son of Laertes—this metal ship they’ve described to him, sailing on the ocean of space he cannot see, now this motley assortment of moravecs in the corridor. No two ’vecs are quite the same in size or appearance, ranging from Orphu’s two-ton hulking presence to the blackly smooth Suma IV to the chitinous and warlike rockvec General Beh bin Adee.
Odysseus ignores all of them and goes straight to the med lab window to stare in at the surgery, his face expressionless. Again, Mahnmut wonders what the bearded, barrel-chested warrior is thinking, seeing this long-legged silver spider and the two black-shelled techvecs hunched over Hockenberry—a man whom Odysseus has seen and spoken to many times in the last nine months—Odysseus and the group of moravecs in the corridor all staring at Hockenberry’s blood and opened chest and spread ribs splayed like something in a butcher shop. Will Odysseus think that Retrograde Sinopessen is eating him? wonders Mahnmut.
Without turning his gaze away from the operation, Odysseus says to Mahnmut in ancient Greek, “Why did your friends kill Hockenberry, son of Duane?”
“They didn’t. Hockenberry suddenly appeared here in our ship…you remember how he can use the gods’ abilities to travel instantly from place to place?”
“I remember,” says Odysseus. “I’ve watched him transport Achilles to Ilium, disappearing and appearing again as do the gods themselves. But I never believed that Hockenberry was a god or a son of a god.”
“No, he’s not, and has never claimed to be,” says Mahnmut. “And now it looks as if someone has stabbed him, but he was able to QT…to travel like the gods travel…here for help. The silver moravec you see in there and its two assistants are trying to save Hockenberry’s life.”
Odysseus turns his gray-eyed gaze down on Mahnmut. “Save his life, little machine-man? I can see that he is dead. The spider is lifting out his heart.”
Mahnmut turns to look. The son of Laertes is right.
Unwilling to distract Sinopessen, Mahnmut contacts Asteague/Che on the common channel. Is he dead? Irretrievably dead?
The Prime Integrator standing near the surgical table watching the procedure does not lift his head as he answers on the common band. No. Hockenberry’s life functions ceased for only a little over a minute before Sinopessen froze all brain activity—he believes that there was no irreversible damage. Integrator Sinopessen informs me that normally the procedure would be to inject several million nanocytes to repair the human’s damaged aorta and heart muscle, then insert more specialized molecular machines to replenish his blood supply and strengthen his immune system. The Integrator discovered that this is not possible with scholic Hockenberry.
Why not? asks the Callistan integrator, Cho Li.
Scholic Hockenberry’s cells are signed.
Signed? says Mahnmut. He’d never had much interest in biology or genetics—human or moravec—although he had long studied the biology of kraken, kelp, and other creatures of the Europan ocean where he’d driven his submersible for the last standard century and more.
Signed—copyrighted and copy-protected, sends Asteague/Che on the common band. Everyone on the ship except Odysseus and the unconscious Hockenberry is listening. This scholic was not born, he was…built. Retroengineered from some starter DNA and RNA. His body will accept no organ transplants, but more important than that, it will not accept new nanocytes, since it is already filled with very advanced nanotechnology.
What kind? asks the buckycarbon-sheathed Ganymedan, Suma IV. What does it do?
We don’t know yet. This answer comes from Sinopessen himself, even as his thin fingers wield laser scalpel, sutures, and micro-scissors while one of his other hands holds Hockenberry’s heart. These nanomemes and microcytes are much more sophisticated and complex than anything this surgery has or anything we’ve designed for moravec use. The cells and subcellular machinery ignore our own nano-interrogation and destroy any alien intrusion.
But you can save him anyway? asks Cho Li.
I believe so, says Retrograde Sinopessen. I’ll finish replenishing Scholic Hockenberry’s blood supply, complete the cell-repair and sewing up, allow neural activity to resume, initiate Grsvki-field stimulus to accelerate recovery, and he should be all right.
Mahnmut turns to share this prognosis with Odysseus, but the Achaean has turned and walked away.
The second day out from Mars and Phobos.
Odysseus walks the hallways, climbs the stairways, avoids the elevators, searches the rooms, and ignores the Hephaestan artifices called moravecs as he seeks a way out of this metal-halled annex to Hades.
“O Zeus,” he whispers in a long chamber empty and silent except for humming boxes, whispering ventilators, and gurgling pipes, “Father wide-ruling over gods and men alike, Father whom I disobeyed and rashly warred with, He who hast thundered forth from starry heaven for all the length of my life, He who once sent his beloved daughter Athena to favor me with her protection and love, Father, I ask thee now for a sign. Lead me out of this metal Hades of shadows and shades and impotent gestures to which I have come before my time. I ask only for my chance to die in battle, O Zeus, O Father who rules over the firm earth and the wide sea. Grant me this final wish and I shall be thy servant for all the days remaining to me.”
There is no answer, not even an echo.
Odysseus, son of Laertes, father of Telemachus, beloved of Penelope, favorite of Athe
na, clenches his fists and teeth against his fury and continues to pace the metal tunnels of this shell, this hell.
The artifices have told him that he is in a metal ship sailing the black sea of the kosmos, but they lie. They have told him that they took him from the battlefield on the day the Hole collapsed because they seek to help him find his way home to his wife and son, but they lie. They have told him that they are thinking objects—like men—with souls and hearts like men, but they lie.
This metal tomb is huge, a vertical labyrinth, and it has no windows. Here and there Odysseus finds transparent surfaces through which he can peer into yet another room, but he finds no windows or ports to look out onto this black sea of which they speak, only a few bubbles of clear glass that show him an eternally black sky holding the usual constellations. Sometimes the stars wheel and spin as if he’s had too much to drink. When none of the moravec machine toys are around, he pounds the windows and the walls until his massive, war-calloused fists are bloody, but he makes no marks on the glass or metal. He breaks nothing. Nothing opens to his will.
Some chambers are open to Odysseus, many are locked, and a few—like the place called the bridge, which they showed him on that first day of his exile in this right-angled Hades—are guarded by the black and thorny artifices called rockvecs or battle ’vecs or Belt troopers. He has seen these black-thorned things fight during the months they helped protect Ilium and the Achaean encampments against the fury of the gods, and he knows that they have no honor. They are only machines using machines to fight other machines. But they are larger and heavier than Odysseus, armed with their machine weapons, and armored with their built-in blades and metal skin, whereas Odysseus has been stripped of all his weapons and armor. If all else fails, he will try to wrest a weapon away from one of the battle ’vecs, but only after he has exhausted all his other choices. Having held and wielded weapons since he was a toddler, Odysseus, son of Laertes, knows that they must be learned—practiced with—their function and form understood as any artist understands his tools—and he does not know these blunt, scalloped, heavy, pointless weapons that the rockvecs carry.