“Chariots.”
“. . . several of those flying machines crisscrossing above the sea in the several thousand square kilometers of the debris impact footprint.”
“Looking for us,” said Orphu.
“No register of radar or neutrino search,” said Mahnmut. “No energy search spectra at all . . .”
“Can they find us, Mahnmut?” Orphu’s voice was flat.
Mahnmut hesitated. He didn’t want to lie to his friend. “Possibly,” he said. “Almost certainly if they were using moravec technology, but they don’t seem to be. They’re just . . . looking. Perhaps just with eyes and magnetometers.”
“They found us in orbit easily enough. Targeted us.”
“Yes.” There was no question that the chariot or its occupants had some sort of target acquisition device that had worked well at 8,000 klicks of distance.
“Did you reel in the buoy?”
“Yes,” said Mahnmut. There were several seconds of silence except for the creak of the damaged hull, the hiss of ventilation, and the thump and hum of various pumps working in vain to clear the flooded sections. “We have several things going for us,” Mahnmut said at last. “First, there are tons and tons of metal debris from the spacecraft in this footprint, and it’s a long footprint. The first impacts weren’t that far south of the polar cap.
“Second, we’ve settled in bow first, and the only section of the sub above the silt line, the stern, still has some tatters of loose stealthwrap on it. Third, we’re powered down to the point that we have almost no energy signature at all. Fourth . . .”
“Yes?” said Orphu.
Mahnmut was thinking of the dying power supply, the dwindling reserves of air and water, and the doubtful propulsion system. “Fourth,” he said, “they still don’t know why we’re here.”
Orphu rumbled softly. “I don’t think we do either, old friend.” After a minute of no communication, Orphu said, “Well, you’re right. If they don’t find us in the next few hours, we may have a chance. Or is there any other bad news?”
Mahnmut hesitated. “We have a slight problem with our air supply,” he said at last.
“How serious a problem?”
“We’re not producing any.”
“Well, that is a problem,” said the Ionian. “How much in reserve?”
“About eighty hours. For two of us, that is. Certainly twice that, probably more, if it’s just for me.”
Orphu rumbled slightly over the intercom. “Just for you? Are you planning on stepping on my air hose, old friend? My organic parts need air too, you know.”
For a second Mahnmut couldn’t speak. “I thought . . . you’re a hardvac moravec . . . I mean . . .”
“You’re thinking that I spend long months in space without topping off from the Io tender,” sighed Orphu. “I produce my own oxygen from the internal fuel cells, using the the photovoltaics on my shell to power them.”
Mahnmut felt his pulse slow. Their chances of survival had just gone up if Orphu did not need ship’s air.
“But my shell photovoltaics are blasted to hell,” Orphu said softly, “and the fuel cells haven’t been producing O2 since the attack. I’m surviving on the ship’s supply. I’m sorry, Mahnmut.”
“Look,” Mahnmut said quickly, strongly. “I was planning to keep the air running to both of us anyway. It’s not a problem. I did the numbers—we have about eighty hours at our present consumption rate. And I can lower that. This whole control room and enviro-niche of mine is flooded. I’ll pour it back in and parcel it out. Eighty hours easy, and then we’ll come up for air. Their search should be over by then.”
“Are you sure you can get The Dark Lady out of the mud?” asked Orphu.
“Absolutely positive,” lied Mahnmut, voice firm.
“I vote we lie doggo in the seabed for . . . say . . . three sols, three Martian days, seventy-three hours or so, to see if their chariot search is really called off. Or twelve hours after our last radar contact with them. Whichever comes first. Will that give us enough time to get out of the mud and to the surface, plus leave some oxygen and energy to spare?”
Mahnmut looked at his virtual wall of red alarm and non-function lights. “Seventy-three hours should be plenty of extra time,” he said. “But if they go away sooner than that, we should get to the surface and head for the coast. The Lady can do about twenty knots on the surface with the reactor at this level, so it’ll take the better part of the day and a half to get to land anyway, especially if we’re picky about where to put in.”
“We’ll just have to avoid being picky,” said Orphu. “All right, it looks like the only thing we have to worry about for the next couple of days is boredom. Shall we play poker? Did you bring the virtual cards?”
“Yes,” said Mahnmut, brightening.
“You wouldn’t rob a blind moravec, would you?” said Orphu.
Mahnmut stopped in the process of downloading the green baize card table.
“I’m kidding, for Christ’s sake,” said Orphu. “My visual nodes are gone, but I still have memory and parts of my brain left. Let’s play chess.”
Three sols was 73.8 hours and Mahnmut did not want to stay in the seabed that long. The reactor was losing power faster than he’d estimated—the pumps were draining more energy than he’d planned on—and all the life support was flirting with failure.
During their first sleep period, Mahnmut went on internal power, took pry bars and cutting equipment, and descended the narrow crawlways and corridors to the hold. The interior spaces were flooded, the vertical gangway without power and pitch black. Mahnmut activated his shoulder lamps and swam lower. The water here was much warmer than Europa’s sea. Beams and girders had crumpled, blocking the last ten meters of the approach. Mahnmut cut them away with the torch. He had to check on Orphu’s condition.
Two meters from the airlock to the hold, Mahnmut was stopped cold. The impact had buckled the aft bulkhead, pressing it almost flat against the forward bulkhead. The already narrow corridor had been squashed into a space less than ten centimeters across. Mahnmut could see the hatchway to the hold—closed, dogged, and twisted—but he couldn’t reach it. He would have to cut his way through one or both of the thick pressure bulkheads and then probably use the torch to cut through the hatch itself. It would be a six- or seven-hour job and there was a basic problem—the torch ran on oxygen, just as he and Orphu did. Whatever he gave the torch came out of their air supply.
For several minutes, Mahnmut floated head-down in the darkness, silt floating in front of his lenses in the twin beams from his shoulder lamps. He had to decide now. Once Orphu awoke and realized what he was doing, the Ionian would try to talk him out of it. And logic dictated that he be talked out of it. Even if he got through the bulkheads in six or seven hours, Orphu had been correct—Mahnmut wouldn’t be able to move the huge moravec while they were still embedded in the seabed. Even first aid would be limited to the kits and system inputs that Mahnmut kept onboard for himself—they might not even work with the huge hardvac moravec. If Mahnmut could really get The Dark Lady free of the silt and to the surface, that would be the best time for Mahnmut to get to Orphu—even if he had to cut through the hull bay doors or outer hull. O2 would be plentiful then. And he could remove Orphu if he had to, find a way to lash him to the upper hull, in the sunlight and air.
Mahnmut kicked his way around and swam upward in the tilted and torn corridor, letting himself through the airlock into his personal space again. He stowed the cutting equipment. Later.
He was no sooner in his acceleration couch again when Orphu’s voice came over the comm. “You awake, Mahnmut?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“At the controls. Where else would I be?”
“Yes,” said Orphu, his deep voice sounding weary and old on the hardline. “But I was dreaming. I thought I felt a vibration. I thought you might be . . . I don’t know.”
“Go back to sleep,” said Mahnmut. Mor
avecs slept, if only to dream. “I’ll wake you for the buoy check in two hours.”
Mahnmut would deploy the periscope buoy for a few seconds every twelve hours, quickly scan the skies and gentle seas, and reel it back in. Flying machines were still crisscrossing the skies day and night at the end of the first forty-nine hours, but further north, nearer the pole.
Mahnmut was fairly comfortable. His control room and connecting enviro-niche was undamaged, warm, and tilted only slightly bow-down. He could move about if he wished. Several of the other habitable chambers had been flooded—including the science lab and Urtzweil’s former cubby—but although the pumps soon cleared these spaces, Mahnmut didn’t bother flooding them with air. In fact, the first thing he had done after their initial conversation was to hook into his O2 umbilical and drain his enviro-niche and control room. He told himself it was to save the oxygen, but he knew that part of the reason was that he felt guilty being so comfortable in his cozy niches when Orphu was in pain—existential pain at least—and floating in the flooded darkness of the hold. There was nothing Mahnmut could do about that yet—not with three-fourths of the damaged sub embedded in the ocean floor—but he went into the vacuum-filled science lab and cobbled together comm units and other things he’d need if he ever managed to free the Ionian.
And free myself, thought Mahnmut, although being separated from The Dark Lady did not seem like freedom to him. All deep-sea Europan cryobots had carried the kernel of agoraphobia in them—true terror of open spaces—and their evolved moravec descendents had inherited it. On the second day, after their eighth chess game, Orphu said, “The Dark Lady has some sort of escape device, doesn’t it?”
Mahnmut had hoped that Orphu wouldn’t know this fact. “Yes,” he said at last.
“What kind?”
“A little life bubble,” said Mahnmut, in a foul mood for having to talk about this. “Not much bigger than me. Mostly meant to survive deep pressures and get me to the surface.”
“But it has a beacon, its own life support system, some sort of propulsion and navigation systems? Some water and food?”
“Yes,” said Mahnmut, “what of it?” You wouldn’t fit in it and I can’t tow you behind it.
“Nothing,” said Orphu.
“I hate the idea of leaving The Dark Lady,” Mahnmut said truthfully. “And I don’t have to think about it now. Not for days and days.”
“All right,” said Orphu.
“I’m serious.”
“All right, Mahnmut. I was just curious.”
If Orphu had rumbled amusement at him at that moment, Mahnmut might well have crawled into the survival bubble and cast off. He was furious at the Ionian for raising this topic. “Want to play another game of chess?” Mahnmut asked.
“Not in this lifetime,” said Orphu.
At sixty-one hours after splashdown, there was only one chariot visible to radar, but it was circling just eight klicks above them and ten to the north. Mahnmut reeled in the periscope buoy as quickly as he could.
He sat listening to music over the intercom—Brahms—and, down in his flooded hold, Orphu presumably was doing the same.
Suddenly the Ionian asked, “Ever wonder why we’re both humanists, Mahnmut?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, humanists. All moravecs evolved into either us humanists with our odd interest in the old human race, or the more interactive types like Koros III. They’re the ones who forge moravec societies, Five Moon Consortiums, political parties . . . whatever.”
“I never noticed,” said Mahnmut.
“You’re kidding me.”
Mahnmut stayed silent. He was beginning to realize that in almost a century and a half of existence, he had managed to stay ignorant of almost everything important. All he knew were the cold seas of Europa—which he would never see again—and this submersible, which was hours or days away from ceasing to exist as a functioning entity. That and Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays.
Mahnmut barely resisted laughing on the hardline. What could be more useless?
As if reading his mind again, Orphu said, “What would the Bard say about this predicament?”
Mahnmut was scanning the energy data and the consumable readouts. They couldn’t wait the seventy-three hours. They would have to try to break free in the next six hours or so. And even then, if they weren’t able to pull themselves free right away, the reactor might cease functioning altogether, overload, and . . .
“Mahnmut?”
“I’m sorry. Dozing. What about the Bard?”
“He must have something to say about shipwrecks,” said Orphu. “I seem to remember lots of shipwrecks in Shakespeare.”
“Oh, yes,” said Mahnmut. “Lots of shipwrecks. Twelfth Night, The Tempest, the list goes on and on. But I doubt if there’s anything in the plays to help us in this situation.”
“Tell me about some of the shipwrecks.”
Mahnmut shook his head in the vacuum. He knew that Orphu was just trying to take his mind off current realities. “Tell me about your beloved Proust,” he said. “Does the narrator Marcel ever say anything about being lost on Mars?”
“He does, actually,” said Orphu with the slightest hint of a rumble.
“You’re joking.”
“I never joke about À la recherche du temps perdu,” said Orphu in a tone that almost, not quite, convinced Mahnmut that the Ionian was serious.
“All right, what does Proust say about surviving on Mars?” said Mahnmut. In five minutes he was going to deploy the periscope buoy again and bring them up even if the chariot was hovering ten meters overhead.
“In Volume Three of the French edition, Volume Five of the English translation I downloaded to you, Marcel says that if we suddenly found ourselves on Mars and grew a pair of wings and a new respiratory system, it would not take us out of ourselves,” said Orphu. “Not as long as we have to use our same senses. Not as long as we’re stuck in our same consciousnesses.”
“You’re kidding,” said Mahnmut.
“I never kid about the character Marcel’s perceptions in À la recherche du temps perdu,” Orphu said again in a tone that told Mahnmut that he was kidding all right, but not about that particular odd Mars reference. “Didn’t you read the editions I sent you at the beginning of the voyage in-system?”
“I did,” said Mahnmut. “I really did. I just sort of skipped over the last couple of thousand pages.”
“Well, that’s not uncommon,” said Orphu. “Listen, here’s a passage that comes after the growing wings and new lungs on Mars bit. Do you want it in French or English?”
“English,” Mahnmut said quickly. This close to a terrible death from suffocation, he didn’t want the added torture of listening to French.
“The only true voyage, the only Fountain of Youth,” recited Orphu, “would be found not in traveling to strange lands but in having different eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another person, of a hundred others, and seeing the hundred universes each of them sees, which each of them is.”
Mahnmut actually forgot about their imminent asphyxiation for a minute as he thought about this. “That’s Marcel’s fourth and final answer to the puzzle of life, isn’t it, Orphu?”
The Ionian stayed quiet.
“I mean,” continued Mahnmut, “you said that the first three failed for Marcel. He tried believing in snobbery. He tried believing in friendship and love. He tried believing in art. None of it worked as a transcendent theme. So this is the fourth. This . . .” He could not find the right word or phrase.
“Consciousness escaping the limits of consciousness,” Orphu said quietly. “Imagination outstripping the bounds of imagination.”
“Yes,” breathed Mahnmut. “I see.”
“You need to,” said Orphu. “You’re my eyes now. I need to see the universe through your eyes.”
Mahnmut sat in the umbilical O2 hiss silence for a minute. Then he said, “Let’s try to take The Dark Lady up.”
&nb
sp; “Periscope buoy?”
“To hell with them if they’re up there waiting. I’d rather die fighting than choke to death in the mud down here.”
“All right,” said Orphu. “You said ‘try’ to take the Lady up. Is there some doubt that you can get us out of the slime?”
“I have no fucking idea if we can break free of this stuff,” said Mahnmut, flicking virtual switches with his mind, powering the reactor up into the red, arming the thrusters and pyros. “But we’re going to give it a good try in . . . eighteen seconds. Hang on, my friend.”
“Since my grapplers, manipulators, and flagella are gone,” said Orphu, “I presume you mean that rhetorically.”
“Hang on with your teeth,” said Mahnmut. “Six seconds.”
“I’m a moravec,” said Orphu, sounding slightly indignant. “I don’t have any teeth. What were you . . .”
Suddenly the comm line was drowned out by the firing of all the thrusters, the booming of bulkheads creaking and giving way, and a great moaning sound as The Dark Lady fought to break free of Mars’ slimy grip.
18
Ilium
This city—Ilium, Troy, Priam’s City, Pergamus—is most beautiful at night.
The walls, each more than a hundred feet high, are lit with torches, illuminated by braziers on the ramparts, and backlit by the hundreds of fires of the Trojan army camping on the plain below. Troy is a city of tall towers, and most of these are lighted late into the night, windows warm with light, courtyards glowing, terraces and balconies warmed by candles and firepits and more torches. The streets of Ilium are broad and carefully paved—I once tried to slide my knifeblade between the stones and couldn’t—and most are lighted by open doorways, torches set into wall sconces, and by the cooking campfires of the thousands upon thousands of non-Trojan soldiers and their families living here now, allies to Ilium all.
Even the shadows in Ilium are alive. Young men and women of the lower classes make love in the dark alleys and on shadowy terraces. Well-fed dogs and eternally clever cats slip from shadow to shadow, narrow alley to courtyard, loping along the edges of the broad thoroughfares where fruit and vegetables, fish and meat have fallen from the day’s market carts and are theirs for the eating, and then slink back to narrow alleys’ gloom and darkness under the viaducts.