Ilium (16 page)

Rockvecs,
Orphu said softly. He was obviously looking at the same video source.
There are a few million scattered around the Belt.

Are they as hostile as everyone says?
As soon as he sent his question, Mahnmut was afraid it would type him as anxious.

I don’t know. My guess is that they are—they chose to evolve in a much more competitive culture than we created. Word is that they fear and loathe post-humans and flatly hate us outlying moravecs. Koros III might know if the legends of their ferocity are true.

Koros? Why would he know?

Not many moravecs know it, but he led an expedition to the rocks about sixty e-years ago for Asteague/Che and the Five Moons Consortium. Nine moravecs went with him. Only three others returned.

Mahnmut pondered this for a minute. He wished he knew more about weapons; if the rockvecs wanted to kill them now, did they possess an energy weapon or hyperkinetic missile that could catch this ship? It seemed unlikely—not at their current velocity of more than 0.193 light speed. Mahnmut said to Orphu,
What are the three ways Proust’s characters tried to solve the puzzle of life—and failed?

The big deep-space moravec cleared his virtual throat.
First, they followed their noses down the scent-trail to nobility, title, birthright, and the landed gentry,
said Orphu.
Marcel, the narrator, tries this route for two thousand pages or so. At least he believes that in the more important aristocracy lies nobility of character. But it all comes up empty.

Just snobbery,
says Mahnmut.

Never
just
snobbery, my friend,
sends Orphu, his booming voice growing more animated over their private line.
Proust saw snobbery as the glue that holds society—any society, in any age—together. He studies it on all levels throughout the book. He never tires of its manifestations.

I did,
Mahnmut said quietly, hoping that his honesty wouldn’t offend his friend.

Orphu’s rumble, vibrating in the subsonic even on the line, assured Mahnmut that he hadn’t.

What was the second path he tried to follow to the answer of the puzzle of life?
asked Mahnmut.

Love,
said Orphu.

Love?
repeated Mahnmut. There had been plenty of it in the more than 3,000 pages of
In Search of Lost Time,
but it had all seemed so—hopeless.

Love,
boomed Orphu.
Sentimental love and physical lust.

You mean the sentimental love that Marcel—and Swann, I guess—felt for their family, Marcel’s grandmother?

No, Mahnmut—the sentimental attraction to familiar things, to memory itself, and to the people who fall into the realm of familiar things.

Mahnmut glanced at the tumbling asteroid called Gaspra. According to Ri Po’s databar, it took Gaspra about seven standard hours to revolve completely around his axis. Mahnmut wondered if such a place could ever be a source of familiarity, of sentimental attraction, to him, to any sentient being.
Well, the dark seas of Europa are.

Pardon?

Mahnmut felt his organic layers prickle when he realized he had spoken aloud on the private line.
Nothing. Why didn’t love lead to the answer to the puzzle of life?

Because Proust knew—and his characters discover—that neither love nor its more noble cousin, friendship, ever survive the entropy blades of jealousy, boredom, familiarity, and egotism,
said Orphu, and for the first time in their direct communication, Mahnmut fancied that he heard a tone of sadness in the big moravec’s voice.

Never?

Never,
said Orphu and rumbled a deep sigh.
Remember the last lines of “Swann in Love”?—“To think that I wasted years of my life, that I hoped to die, that I had my greatest love affair with a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type!”

I noted that,
said Mahnmut,
but I didn’t know at the time if it was supposed to be terribly funny or horribly bitter or unspeakably sad. Which was it?

All three, my friend,
sent Orphu of Io.
All three.

What was Proust’s characters’ third path to the puzzle of life?
asked Mahnmut. He increased the O
₂
input to his chamber to clear away the cobweb-tendrils of sadness that were threatening to gather in his heart.

Let’s save that for another time,
said Orphu, perhaps sensing his interlocutor’s mood.
Koros III is going to increase the scoop radius and it might be fun to watch the fireworks on the X-ray spectra.

They passed Mars’s orbit and there was nothing to see; Mars, of course, was on the opposite side of the sun. They passed Earth’s orbit a day later and there was nothing to see; Earth was far around the curve of its orbit on the plane of the ecliptic far below. Mercury was the only planet clearly visible on the monitors as they flashed above it, but by then the roar and blaze of the sun itself filled all their viewing screens.

As they passed over the sun at a perihelion of only 97,000,000 kilometers—radiator filaments trailing heat—the boron sail was collapsed, reeled in, and folded into its aft dome. Orphu helped the remote handlers with the job and Mahnmut watched on the ship’s screens as his friend shuttled to and fro, his surface scars and pitting quite visible in the blazing sunlight.

Two hours before they were scheduled to fire the fusion engines, Koros III surprised Mahnmut by inviting everyone to gather at the control-room module near the magnetic scoop horns.

There were no internal corridors in the ship. The plan had been for Koros to transfer to
The Dark Lady
via cables and grabholds once the ship was finished decelerating and in Martian orbit. Mahnmut was dubious about making the trip across the hull now to the control room.

Why should we physically gather to talk?
he asked Orphu on their private line.
And you can’t fit in the control-room module anyway.

I can hover outside, view all of you through the port, connect hardlines to the control module for a secure communication.

Why is that better than conferencing on the allcall?

I don’t know,
said Orphu,
but we fire the engines in one hundred fourteen minutes, so why don’t I shuttle around to the ship’s hold and pick you up?

That’s what they did. Mahnmut had no problem with vacuum and hard radiation, of course, but the thought of disconnecting from the ship and somehow being left behind had rattled him. Orphu met him at the cargo bay and Mahnmut had an unforgettable glimpse of
The Dark Lady,
starkly illuminated by the sun’s blinding rays, tucked in the spacecraft’s hold like a salt shark in a kraken’s belly.

Orphu used his manipulators to place Mahnmut in a sheltered niche in the Ionian’s carapace and clipped onto guidelines for the reaction-jet trip around the dark belly of the ship, up its girdered and torused ribs, and forward along the upper hull. Mahnmut glanced at the spherical fusion engines, clipped onto the prow like design afterthoughts, and checked the time—one hour and four minutes until ignition.

Mahnmut studied the ultrastealth material enclosing the ship proper—dead-black and porous baffle-wrap that made the ship, minus its fusion engines, boron sail, and other expendables, theoretically invisible to sight, radar, deep radar, gravitonic reflection, infrared, UV and neutrino probes.
But what difference does that make if we go in on four pillars of fusion flame for two days?

The control room had an airlock. Mahnmut helped Orphu connect his shielded hardline, and then he cycled through the lock and resumed breathing air the old-fashioned way.

“This ship is carrying weapons,” said Koros III without preamble; he spoke the words through the air. His multifaceted eyes and black humanoid shell reflected the red halogen lights.

The third moravec in the small, pressurized control room—the tiny Callistan, Ri Po—situated himself at the third point of the moravec triangle.

Are you hearing this?
subvocalized Mahnmut on his private line to Orphu. The huge Ionian was visible outside the forward windows.

Oh yes.

“Why are you telling us now?” Mahnmut asked Koros III.

“I thought you and the Ionian had a right to know. Your existences are at stake here.”

Mahnmut looked at the navigator. “You knew about the weapons?”

“I knew about the defense weaponry built into the ship,” replied Ri Po. “I didn’t know until now that there would be weapons brought to the surface. But it was a logical assumption.”

“To the surface,” repeated Mahnmut. “There are weapons in
The Dark Lady
’s hold.” It was not really a question.

Koros III nodded in that age-old humanoid signal of confirmation.

“What kind?” demanded Mahnmut.

“I am not at liberty to say,” the tall Gaynmedan said stiffly.

“Well, perhaps I’m not at liberty to transport weapons in my submersible,” snapped Mahnmut.

“You have no choice in the matter,” said Koros III. His voice sounded more sad than imperious.

Mahnmut seethed.

He’s right,
said Orphu and Mahnmut realized that the Ionian had spoken on the common line.
None of us have any choice at this point. We have to go ahead.

“Then why tell us?” Mahnmut demanded again.

It was Ri Po who responded. “We’ve been monitoring Mars since we came over the sun. From this distance, our instruments confirm the quantum activity detected from Jovian space—but the intensity is several magnitudes greater than we estimated. This world is a threat to the entire solar system.”

How so?
asked Orphu.
The post-humans experimented quantum shifting for centuries in their orbital cities around Earth.

Koros III shook his head in that quaint humanlike way, although “quaint” was not a word that came to Mahnmut’s mind when he stared at the tall, shiny-black figure with his gleaming fly’s eyes. “Nothing to this extent,” said their mission leader. “The amount of quantum phase-shifting occurring on Mars right now amounts to a hole torn in the fabric of space-time. It’s not stable. It’s not a sane exercise of quantum technology.”

Does it have something to do with the voynix?
asked Orphu. All most Jovian moravecs knew of the fabled voynix was that the planet Earth had radiated unprecedented quantum phase-shift activity when the creatures had first been mentioned in monitored post-human neutrino communications more than two thousand e-years earlier.

We don’t know if the voynix are involved, or, indeed, if they are still on Earth,
Koros sent on the common band. “I’ll repeat that I felt it ethically imperative to inform all of you that there are weapons aboard this ship and aboard the submersible on which Mahnmut will be transporting me. The decisions to use these weapons will not be yours. The responsibility lies solely with me when I am aboard this ship, and with Ri Po for ship defense when Mahnmut and I have dropped to the planet’s surface. The decision to use deadly force on Mars itself will be mine alone.”

“The ship’s weapons are not offensive then? Not to be used against targets on Mars?” asked Mahnmut.

“No,” said Ri Po. “The shipboard weapons are defensive only.”

But the weapons aboard
The Dark Lady
include weapons of mass destruction?
asked Orphu of Io.

Koros III paused, obviously weighing his orders against the crew’s right to know. Finally, he said, “Yes.”

Mahnmut tried to decide what these weapons of mass destruction might be. Fission bombs? Fusion weapons? Neutrino emitters? Plasma explosives? Antimatter devices? Planet-busting black-hole bombs? He had no idea. His centuries of existence gave him no experience with weapons outside those nonlethal nets, prods, and galvanizers needed to ward off kraken or capture Europan sea life.

“Koros,” he asked softly, “did you bring weapons on your mission to the rocks some decades ago?”

“No,” said the Ganymedan. “There was no need. However warlike and ferocious the asteroid moravecs have become in their recent evolution, they posed no threat to the existence of all sentient beings in the solar system.” Koros III projected the time; they had forty-one minutes until the fusion engines fired.
Any other questions?

Orphu had one.
Why are we wrapped in ultrastealth if we’re approaching Mars behind four fusion trails that will light us up like a supernova, visible day and night for sols to anything with eyes on the Martian surface? Wait . . . you’re
trying
to get a response. Trying to make them attack us.

“Yes,” said Koros. “It was the easiest way to assess their intentions. The fusion engines will shut off while we are still eighteen million kilometers from Mars. If they have not attempted to intercept us by then, we will jettison the engines, the solenoid toruses, and all other external devices, and enter Martian orbit with passive countermeasures hiding our location. Currently we do not know if the post-humans—or whatever entities have terraformed Mars and are currently residing there—have a technical or post-technical civilization.”

Mahnmut considered this. They would be jettisoning every form of propulsion that could get them home.

I would say that massive quantum phase-shift activity is a sign of something pretty technological,
said Orphu.

“Perhaps,” said Ri Po. “But there are idiot savants in the universe.”

With that cryptic statement, the meeting ended, atmosphere was drained out of the control room, and Orphu hauled Mahnmut back to his submersible in the ship’s hold.

The four engines fired on cue. For the next two days, Mahnmut was pinned to his high-g couch as the ship decelerated down onto the plane of the ecliptic toward Mars at more than 400-g’s. The hold around
The Dark Lady
was again filled with high-g gel, but his living compartment wasn’t, and the weight and lack of mobility grew tiring to Mahnmut. He couldn’t imagine the stress on Orphu out in his hull-cradle. Mars and all forward images were obscured by the four-sun glare of the engines, but Mahnmut passed the time by checking on video of the hull, the stars astern, and by rereading parts of
À la recherche du temps perdu
and finding connections and disparities with his beloved Shakespearean sonnets.