Ilium

  Then the storms grew worse, the skies grew darker, the LGM tucked and tied themselves into secure places belowdecks while they shut down in the sandstorm gloom, and both the bow and stern sea anchors—two elaborate curves of polycanvas dragging on cable trailing hundreds of meters beneath the ship—gave way on the same day. Mahnmut knew from earlier sightings that there were kilometer-high cliffs to their north, and—somewhere—the broad opening to the flooded canyons of Candor Chasma—but the electrostatic charge in the dust storm was defeating his GPS receiver, and it had been two days since he’d had a decent star or sunsight. The cliffs and their doom might be a half hour away for all he knew.

  “Is there a chance we might sink?” asked Orphu that afternoon of the fourth day.

  “The odds are good,” said Mahnmut. He didn’t want to lie to his friend, so he tried to couch the phrase as ambiguously as he could.

  “Can you swim in this storm?” asked Orphu. He’d understood that the “good” odds in that sentence was bad news for the both of them.

  “Not really,” said Mahnmut. “But I can swim under the waves.”

  “I’ll sink like the proverbial rock,” said Orphu with a soft rumble. “How deep did you say Valles Marineris was here?”

  “I didn’t say,” said Mahnmut.

  “Well, say now.”

  “About seven kilometers deep,” said Mahnmut, who had echo-sounded it just an hour earlier.

  “Would you crush at that depth?” asked Orphu.

  “No. I’ve worked at much deeper pressures. I’m designed for it.”

  “Would I crush?”

  “I . . . don’t know,” said Mahnmut. In truth, he did not, but he knew that Orphu’s moravec line had been designed for the zero pressure of space and for the occasional forays into the upper reaches of a gas giant or the sulfur pits of Io—not for the punishing pressures of a saline sea seven thousand meters deep. Most likely, his friend would be crushed to the size of a crumpled can or simply implode long before he reached three kilometers of depth.

  “Is there any chance of putting ashore?” asked Orphu.

  “I don’t think so,” said Mahnmut. “The cliffs I saw were enormous, sheer, with giant boulders at their base. Waves must be crashing fifty or a hundred meters high there now.”

  “An interesting image,” said Orphu. “Is there any chance of the LGM bringing us to safe harbor?”

  Mahnmut looked around at the gloomy space on the lower decks. The LGM were tucked away and lashed to the decks like so many chlorophyll dolls, green arms and legs flopping with the wild pitching and rolling of the ship. “I don’t know,” he said, and let his tone convey his skepticism.

  “Then you’ll just have to get us through this,” said Orphu.

  Mahnmut did his damnedest to save them. On the fifth day, with the sky a bloody darkness and the wind howling through the tattered sails, the LGM stowed like cordwood below, and the double-wheel on the rear deck tied to hold the rudder straight, Mahnmut lowered what was left of the sails and brought out the cord and huge needles he’d seen the LGM use to mend the polycanvas; only now he was sewing while the ship was lurching to and fro, fifteen-meter waves striking it side-on, slewing the felucca around, waves washing over the mid-deck.

  He rigged a smaller, makeshift sea anchor first, deploying it from the bow anchor cable to bring the bow into the wind again, trying to beat away from the unseen but ever-present lee shore behind them. He’d started work mending the triangular mainsail when the rudder cables belowdeck snapped. The felucca staggered, shipped several huge waves of red water, tore away its weatherhelm, and then slewed around and ran before the wind again, tall waves crashing over the rear deck. Only the crude sea anchor had kept them from capsizing when the rudder went. Mahnmut went to the bow, and there—as the red clouds parted for just a moment and as the felucca rose to the top of the next wind-driven wave—he could see the high cliffs of the north side of Valles Marineris visible through the spume and gloom. The ship would be on the rocks in less than an hour if the steering wasn’t fixed and fixed soon.

  Mahnmut rigged a rope and went down over the stern to make sure that the rudder was still physically attached—it was, but swinging free on its massive gimbal—and then he climbed the wet rope through crashing waves, crossed the mid-deck, slid down stairways to the second deck, found the emergency steering center there—just a platform with pulleys where the LGM could steer the ship by physically pulling on the tiller ropes if the steering mechanism was damaged above, found the two large cables there slack, scrambled down another ladder to the darkness of the third deck, flicked on his chest and shoulder lamps to illuminate his way, exchanged his manipulatives for cutting edges, and hacked through the deck to where he guessed the tiller ropes had parted. The moravec had no idea if this was the way the ancient Earth feluccas had been rigged—he guessed not—but this large Martian felucca was steered by a double-wheel on the high stern deck, which turned two massive hemp ropes that parted ways, ran along each side of the ship through a system of pulleys, and then came together again to run through this long wooden shaft to the physical tiller that turned the rudder. During the weeks of voyage, he’d wandered the ship, learning the rigging and the layout of the various cable systems. If one or both of the great cables had simply parted—unthreaded by the stress of the storm—he might be able to splice them, but he had to be able to reach them. If they’d snapped farther back toward the tiller where he couldn’t reach them, everyone aboard the ship was doomed. Would he jump at the last moment, try to swim beneath the crashing surf past the high cliffs, searching for a calm harbor somewhere along the thousand kilometers of shoreline of Candor Chasma from which to drag himself from the sea? One thing was certain—he couldn’t bring Orphu of Io with him. Breaking through into the tiller rope shaft, he switched his beams to bright and looked fore and aft. He couldn’t see the cables.

  “Everything going all right?” asked Orphu.

  Mahnmut jumped at the sound of the radio voice in his ears. “Yes,” he said. “Doing a little rudder repairs.” There they were! The twin cables had snapped, the aft segements were about six meters away in the narrow guide box, the forward segments just visible ten meters forward. He ran back and forth, smashing through the hardwood planking and pulling each section of thigh-thick cable out of its box and dragging them toward the center using every erg of energy in his system.

  “You sure everything’s all right?” asked Orphu.

  He retracted his cutting edges and extended all his manipulatives, setting his fine motor control to Extra Fine. He began splicing the strands of thick hemp so rapidly that his metallic fingers became a blur in the shafts of his halogen lights cutting through the third-deck darkness. Water sloshed back and forth past him and over him as the ship rolled backward up each terrible wave and then slid down the wave’s rear side, slewing into the trough. Then Mahnmut would brace himself for the next wave crashing into the stern again with the sound and impact of a cannon being fired. And he knew that every wave meant the ship was that much closer to the waiting rocks and cliffs.

  “Everything’s good,” said Mahnmut, fingers flying, weaving strands, using the low-wattage lasers at his wrist to spotweld the metallic fibers that ran through the ragged hemp. “I’m busy right now.”

  “I’ll check back in a few minutes,” suggested Orphu.

  “Yes,” said Mahnmut, thinking, If I can’t regain the steerage, we’ll be on the rocks in thirty minutes or so. I’ll tell him fifteen minutes before the fact. “Yes,” answered Mahnmut, “do that. Check back in a few minutes.”

  She wasn’t The Dark Lady—the crude felucca had no name—but she was sailable and steerable again. Up on the rear deck, his legs and feet braced against the pitch and roll, the storm-lashed cliffs clearly visible less than a kilometer dead ahead, the tatters of canvas he’d sewn into crude sails raised on both masts, Mahnmut grabbed the wheel. The tiller cable held and the rudder responded. He wrestled the ship around into the wind and called
Orphu to inform him of the situation. He told the Ionian the truth—they probably had less than fifteen minutes before the ship would be dashed on those rocks, but he was sailing this pig of a ship for all she was worth.

  “Well, I appreciate your honesty,” said Orphu. “Is there anything that I can do to help?”

  Mahnmut, leaning all his weight on the large wheel, turning the ship up the coming wave so as not to capsize her, said, “Any suggestions would be appreciated.”

  The dust cloud showed no signs of lifting nor the wind of abating. Lines hummed, torn polycanvas flapped, and the bow disappeared in a wall of white foam that struck Mahnmut twenty meters back. Orphu said, “Yet again? What do you here? Shall we give o’er and drown? Have you a mind to sink?”

  It took Mahnmut a few seconds to place this. Riding over the next wave in near zero-g, looking back over his shoulder and seeing the thousand-meter cliffs closer, the moravec brought up The Tempest in his secondary memory and cried, “A pox o’your throat, you bawling, blasphemous incharitable dog!”

  “Work you, then.”

  “Hang, cur, hang, you whoreson insolent noisemaker,” said Mahnmut, shouting over the wind and crash of wave even though the radio comm needed no shouts to carry. “We are less afraid to be drowned than thou art.”

  “I’ll warrant him for drowning,” rumbled Orphu, “though the ship were no stronger than a nutshell and as leaky as an unstanched wench . . . Mahnmut? What exactly is an ‘unstanched wench’?”

  “A menstruating woman,” said Mahnmut, fighting the wheel to port now, leaning into it. Tons of water washed across him. He could no longer see the cliffs over his shoulder because of the swirling red mist and higher waves, but he could feel the rocks behind him.

  “Oh,” said Orphu. “How embarrassing. Where was I?”

  “Lay her a-hold,” prompted Mahnmut.

  “Lay her a-hold, a-hold! Set her two courses, two courses! Off to sea again! Lay her off!”

  “All lost!” recited Mahnmut. “To prayers, to prayers! All lost! . . . Wait a minute!”

  “I don’t remember ‘Wait a minute!’ “ said Orphu.

  “No, wait a minute. There’s a break in the cliffs ahead—an opening in the coastline.”

  “Big enough to sail into?” asked Orphu.

  “If it’s the opening to Candor Chasma,” said Mahnmut, “it’s a body of water bigger than Conamara Chaos on Europa!”

  “I don’t remember how large Conamara Chaos was,” admitted Orphu.

  “Larger than all three of the North American Great Lakes with Hudson Bay thrown in,” said Mahnmut. “Candor Chasma is essentially another huge inland sea opening to the north . . . there should be thousands of square kilometers in which to maneuver. No lee shore!”

  “Is that good?” asked Orphu, obviously unwilling to get his hopes up.

  “It’s a chance for survival,” said Mahnmut, pulling on lines to fill what was left of the mainsail with wind. He waited until they’d crested the next wave and swung the wheel, turning the heavy ship ponderously to starboard, swinging the bow toward that ever-widening gap in the coastal cliffs. “It’s a chance for survival,” he said again.

  It ended on the afternoon of the eighth day. One hour the dust clouds were still low and scudding, the wind was still raging, and the seas within the great Candor Chasma basin remained white and wild; the next hour, after a final bloody rain, the skies were blue, the seas grew placid, and the little green men stirred from their niches and came up on deck like children rising from a restful nap.

  Mahnmut was spent. Even with a recharge trickle from the portable solar cells and occasional jolts from their draining energy cubes, he was worn out organically, mentally, cybernetically, and emotionally.

  The LGM seemed to marvel at what remained of the mended sails, at the spliced tiller cables, and at other repairs Mahnmut had carried out in the past three days. Then they got to work crewing the bilge pumps, hosing down the blood-red decks, mending more canvas, caulking the warped hull and bulkhead planks, repairing splintered masts, untangling lines, and sailing the ship. Mahnmut went to the mid-deck and supervised the lifting of Orphu from the soggy lower deck, helped secure his friend to the deck and rig the sun-tarp over him, and then Mahnmut found a warm, sunny place on the mid-deck, out of the way, with a wooden wall behind him and a coil of rope in front ameliorating the agoraphobia a bit, and there he allowed himself to float into a half-stupor. When he shut down his eyes, he could still see the high waves approaching, feel the pitching deck beneath, and hear the howl of wind, despite the calm seas around them now. He peeked. The ship was sailing south again, tacking into the mild southwestern wind, heading back toward the broad opening where Candor Chasma opened into the Valles Marineris at the place called Meles Chasma. Mahnmut shut down his vision again and allowed himself to doze off.

  Something touched Mahnmut’s shoulder and he started awake. One by one, the forty LGM were filing past him, each green figure touching him on the shoulder as it passed. He reported this to Orphu, using the subvocal channel.

  “Perhaps they’re expressing their gratitude for your saving them,” said the Ionian. “I know I would if I had arms or legs left to pat you with.”

  Mahnmut said nothing, but he could hardly believe that this was the reason for the contact. He hadn’t seen any emotions from the LGM—not even when their translators had withered and died after communicating with him—and he found it hard to believe they were all grateful, even though the LGM were good enough sailors to realize that the ship would have sunk had it not been for Mahnmut’s intervention.

  “Or maybe they just think you’re lucky and they’re trying to get some of it to rub off,” added Orphu.

  Before Mahnmut could express his opinion of this idea, the last of the LGM in line had reached him, but instead of patting the moravec’s carbonfiber shoulder and moving on, the little green man went to his knees, lifted Mahnmut’s right hand, and set it against his chest.

  “Oh, no,” Mahnmut groaned to Orphu. “They want to do the communication thing again.”

  “That’s good,” said the Ionian. “We have questions to ask.”

  “The answers aren’t worth the death of another of these little green men,” said Mahnmut. He was pulling his hand back as hard as the black-eyed LGM was tugging it toward his green chest.

  “It might well be worth it,” said Orphu. “Even if the LGM unit does undergo anything similar to our idea of death, which I doubt. Besides, it’s his initiative. Let him make contact.”

  Mahnmut quit struggling and let the LGM pull his hand against its chest—into its chest.

  Once again there was the shocking, sickening feeling of his fingers sliding through flesh and being immersed in the warm, thick saline solution, of his hand contacting and then encircling that pulsing organ the size of a human heart.

  “Try holding it a bit less tightly this time,” suggested Orphu. “If the communication is truly through molecular packets of organic nanobytes, less surface area of contact might cut down the volume of their thoughts.”

  Mahnmut nodded, realized that Orphu could not see his nod, but then focused only on the strange vibration from his hand through his arm to his mind as the little green man began the conversation.

  WE GIVE YOU

  GRATITUDE FOR

  SAVING

  OUR SHIP.

  “You’re welcome,” Mahnmut said aloud, focusing his thoughts through spoken language at the same time he shared the exchange with Orphu on the tightbeam band. “Who are you?” he asked. “What do you call yourselves?”

  ZEKS.

  The word meant nothing to Mahnmut. He felt the LGM’s communication organ pulse in his hand and had the wild urge to release it, to rip his fist from this doomed person’s chest—but that would help neither of them now. Do you know this word—‘Zeks’? Mahnmut asked Orphu.

  Just a minute, sent Orphu. Accessing third-tier memory. Here it is—from A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. It was a slang term re
lated to the Russian word “sharashka”—“a special scientific or technical institute staffed with prisoners”—the prisoners of these Soviet labor camps were called zeks.

  Well, sent Mahnmut, I don’t think these chlorophyll-based Martian LGM are prisoners of some short-lived Earth regime from more than two thousand years ago. The entire exchange with Orphu had taken less than two seconds. To the little green man, he said, “Would you tell us where you’re from?”

  This time the answer was not in words but images—green fields, a blue sky, a sun much larger than the one in Mars’s sky, a distant range of mountains hazy in the thick air. “Earth?” said Mahnmut, shocked.

  NOT THE STAR IN THE NIGHT SKY HERE

  was the LGM’s response.

  A DIFFERENT EARTH.

  Mahnmut pondered this but did not know how to phrase a clarifying question other than his clumsy “Which Earth, then?”

  The little green man answered only with the same images of green fields, distant mountains, an Earthlike view of the sun. Mahnmut could feel this LGM’s energy fading, the heartlike organ pulsing with less vitality. I’m killing him, he thought in panic.

  Ask about the stone faces came Orphu on the commline.

  “Who is the man represented in the stone faces?” Mahnmut asked dully.

  THE MAGUS.

  HE OF THE BOOKS.

  LORD OF THE SON OF SYCORAX, WHO BROUGHT US HERE.

  THE MAGUS IS MASTER EVEN OF SETEBOS, OUR LORD’S

  MOTHER’S GOD.

  Magus! sent Mahnmut to Orphu.

  It means magician, sorcerer—as in the Three Magi . . .

  Goddammit, Mahnmut sent fiercely, angrily—he was wasting this dying green person’s time. The heart-organ pulsed more weakly with every second that passed. I know what “magus” means, but I don’t believe in magic and neither do you, Orphu.

  But it appears that our LGM do, responded Orphu. Ask about the dwellers on Olympus.