by Dan Simmons
45
The Queen Mab decelerated toward Earth on a column of nuclear explosions, the ship kicking out a Coke-can-sized fission bomb every thirty seconds, the bomb exploding and driving the pusher plate back up to the stern of the thousand-foot-long ship, the huge pistons and cylinders in the clockwork engine room cycling back and forth, the next can-bomb being ejected…
Mahnmut was watching on the stern video channel. If anyone on Earth didn’t know we were coming, they must know now, he said to Orphu on their tightbeam channel. The two had been invited to the bridge for the first time on the voyage and they were in the largest lift now, rising toward the bow of the ship—which during deceleration, of course, was aiming back toward space rather than at the rapidly growing Earth.
I don’t think the idea is to be subtle, tightbeamed Orphu.
Obviously not. But this is about as subtle as a stomach pump, about as subtle as a pay toilet in the diarrhea ward, about as subtle as…
Do you have a point? rumbled Orphu.
It’s too unsubtle, said Mahnmut. Too obvious. Too visible. Too precious—I mean, mid-Twentieth Century spaceship designs, for God’s sake. Fission bombs. Ejection mechanisms from the Atlanta, Georgia, Coca-Cola bottling plant circa 1959…
So your point is? interrupted Orphu. In the old days, his eye-stalks and video cameras would have tracked toward Mahnmut—some of them, at least—but those had not been replaced since his optic nerves had been burned out.
I have to assume that less obvious moravec ships—modern ships, stealth-activated and stealth-propelled ships—are following us, sent Mahnmut.
That has been my assumption as well, said the big hard-vac moravec.
You never mentioned it.
Nor have you, until now, said Orphu.
Why didn’t Asteague/Che and the other Prime Integrators tell us? asked Mahnmut. If we’re being put out ahead of the real fleet as the obvious target, we have a right to know.
Orphu sent a subsonic rumble that Mahnmut had learned was the Ionian’s equivalent of a shrug. It wouldn’t make any difference, would it? said the big moravec. If the Earth defenses fire on us and breach our rather modest forcefield defenses, we’ll be dead before we have time to complain.
Speaking of Earth defenses, has the voice from the orbital city said anything else since the message two weeks ago? The maser broadcast had been succinct; the recorded female-human voice had simply said “Bring Odysseus to me” over and over for twenty-four hours and then had cut off as quickly as it had begun. The message had not been broadcast at random—it had been aimed precisely at the Queen Mab.
I’ve been monitoring the incoming channels, said Orphu, and I haven’t heard anything new.
The lift whirred and stopped. The broad cargo doors opened. Mahnmut stepped onto the bridge for the first time since before their launch from Phobos and Orphu repellored after him.
The bridge was circular with a diameter of thirty meters, the ceiling dome-shaped and ringed with thick windows and holographic screens serving as windows. From a spaceship-spaceship point of view, it was almost completely satisfying to Mahnmut. Although the unnamed spacecraft that had brought Orphu, the late Koros III and Ri Po, and him to Mars had been centuries more advanced—accelerated to one-fifth light speed by magnetic scissors accelerator wickets, carrying a boron light sail, fusion engines, and other modern moravec devices—this strangely retro atomic spaceship and spaceship grid looked…right. Instead of purely virtual controls and simple jack-in stations, more than a dozen tech moravecs sat in old-fashioned acceleration chairs at even more old-fashioned metal and glass monitoring stations. There were actual switches, real toggles, physical dials—dials!—and a hundred other eye-and vid-camera-pleasing details. The floor looked to be of textured steel, perhaps lifted straight out of the hull of some World War II–era seagoing battleship.
The usual suspects—Orphu’s irreverent term—stood awaiting them near the central navigation table: Asteague/Che their central Prime Integrator from Europa, General Beh bin Adee representing the Belt fighter-moravecs, Cho Li their Callistan navigator (looking and sounding far too much like the dead Ri Po for Mahnmut’s comfort), Suma IV the brawny, buckycarbon-sheathed fly-eyed Ganymedan, and the spidery Retrograde Sinopessen.
Mahnmut walked closer to the map table and stepped up onto the metal ledge that allowed smaller moravecs to look down upon the glowing table surface. Mahnmut floated over.
“We have a little less than fourteen hours until low-Earth orbital insertion,” said Asteague/Che without greetings or introductions. His voice—that James Mason voice to Mahnmut’s Lost Era history-vid-trained ears and audio receivers—was smooth but businesslike. “We have to decide what to do.”
The Prime Integrator was vocalizing rather than transmitting on the common band. The bridge was pressurized to Earth normal—an atmospheric content the Europan moravecs liked and the others could tolerate—and audible speech was more private than common band chatter and less conspiratorial than tightbeaming.
“Have there been any more broadcasts from that woman asking us to deliver Odysseus?” asked Orphu.
“No,” said Cho Li, the bulky Callistan navigator. Cho Li’s voice, as always, was very, very soft. “But the orbital construction that was the source of that broadcast is our destination.”
Cho Li ran a manipulator tentacle over the map table and a large hologram of Earth appeared. The equatorial and polar rings were very bright, countless specks of light moving west to east along the equator and north to south around the poles.
“This is a live video feed,” said the tiny little silver box amidst the skinny little silver legs that comprised the Amalthean Retrograde Sinopessen.
“I can read the data bars via the common channel,” said Orphu of Io. “And I can ’see’ all of you on my radar return and infrared scans. But there may be subtle aspects of the holo projections that I miss—being blind and all.”
“I’ll give a description via tightbeam of everything I see,” said Mahnmut. He connected via tightbeam and set up a high-speed squirt feed to the Ionian, describing the holographic image of the blue and white Earth hanging in space above the chart table, the bright polar and equatorial rings crisscrossing above the oceans and clouds. The rings were close enough that countless discrete objects could be seen gleaming against the black of space.
“Magnification?” asked Orphu.
“Just ten,” said Sinopessen. “Small binoculars level. We’re approaching the orbit of Earth’s Moon—although right now Luna is on the backside of the planet from us. We’ll cease use of the fission bombs and switch to ion drive as we enter their cislunar space—no reason to antagonize anyone there. Our velocity is down to ten kilometers per second and dropping. You may have noticed our one-point-two-five Earth-g deceleration the last two days.”
“How has Odysseus been taking the added g-load?” asked Mahnmut. He’d not seen their only remaining human passenger over the past week. Mahnmut had hoped that Hockenberry would QT back to the Queen Mab, but so far he hadn’t.
“Fine,” rumbled Suma IV, the tall Ganymedan. “He tends to stay in his bunk and quarters more than usual, but he was doing that before we raised the deceleration g-load.”
“Has he said anything about the female voice on the maser—or the ’Bring Odysseus to me’ message?” asked Orphu.
“No,” said Asteague/Che. “He has told us that he doesn’t recognize the voice—that he’s sure it doesn’t belong to Athena, Aphrodite, or any of the Olympian immortals he’s met.”
“Where did the broadcast come from?” Mahnmut asked.
Cho Li activated a laser pen embedded in one of his manipulators and pointed out the speck in the polar ring, currently approaching the south pole on the backside of the transparent Earth holo. “Magnify,” the navigator ordered the Mab’s main AI.
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 an
d 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 t
he 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.