Ilium (23 page)

The sonie circled.

“A suspension bridge,” whispered Harman. “I’ve read about them.”

Ada was good at estimating the size of things, and she guessed that the main span of this bridge was almost a mile in length, although the roadbed had broken away in a score of places, showing rusted rebar and empty air. She guessed the two towers—each showing ancient orange paint, but sporting mostly rust—to be more than 700 feet tall, the top of each tower rising higher than the mountains at either end. The double-towers were green with what looked to be ivy from a distance, but as the sonie circled closer, Ada could see that the “growth” was artificial—green bubbles and stairways and globs of flexible glasslike material, wrapping around the towers, strung along the heavy suspension cables, even trailing down the support cables and hanging free above the ruined roadway. Clouds moved down from the high peaks and mixed with the fog rising from the deep canyons below the ruins on the hilltop, curling and writhing around the south tower and obscuring the roadway and hanging cables there.

“Does this place have a name?” asked Ada.

“The Golden Gate at Machu Picchu,” said Savi as she touched the controls to bring them closer.

“What does that mean?” asked Daeman.

“I have no idea,” said Savi.

The sonie circled the northern tower—dull orange and scabrous rust-red in the bright sunlight here beyond the clouds—and floated slowly, carefully, to the top of the tower, touching down without a sound.

The forcefield died away. Savi nodded and everyone crawled out, stretched, looked around. The air was cold and very thin.

Daeman wandered over to the rusted edge of the tower top, leaning out to look. Growing up with Paris Crater as his home base, he had no fear of heights.

“I wouldn’t fall if I were you,” said Savi. “There’s no firmary rescue here. You die away from the faxnodes, you stay dead.”

Daeman lurched backward, almost falling in his haste to get back from the edge. “What are you talking about?”

“Just what I said,” said Savi, hoisting her pack to her right shoulder. “There’s no fax to the firmary here. Try to stay alive until you get back.”

Ada looked skyward to where both rings were visible through the high, thin air. “I thought the post-humans could fax us from anywhere if we . . . got into trouble.”

“To the rings,” said Savi, her voice flat. “Where the firmary heals you. To where you ascend after your Fifth Twenty to join the post-humans.”

“Yes,” Ada said weakly.

Savi shook her head. “It’s not the posts who fax you away when something bad happens, rebuilding you. All that’s myth. Or to be less polite—bullshit.”

Harman opened his mouth to speak but it was Daeman who spoke first. “I was just there,” he said, anger in his voice. “In the firmary. In the rings.”

“In the firmary, yes,” said Savi. “But not healed by post-humans. If they’re up there, they don’t care a whit about you. And I don’t think they’re up there anymore.”

The four stood on the rusted tower summit more than five hundred feet above the ruined roadway, eight hundred feet above the grassy saddle and stone ruins. Wind from the higher peaks buffeted them and blew their hair.

“After our last Twenty, we go up to join the posts . . .” began Hannah, her voice small.

Savi laughed and led the way toward an irregular glass globule blobbing up over the west end of the ancient tower top.

There were rooms and anterooms and stairways descending and frozen escalators and smaller rooms off the main chambers. Ada thought it strange that the sky and the orange towers and the hanging cables and glimpses of the jungle and roadway below were not tinted green through the material, nor was the sunlight streaming in turned green—the green glass somehow passed colors accurately.

Savi led them down and around from one green module to the next, from one side of the bifurcated tower to another through thin tubes that should have been swinging in the strong breeze, but weren’t. Some of the chambers extended thirty or forty feet out beyond the tower, and Ada had no clue how the green globule was attached to the concrete and steel.

Some of the rooms were empty. Others had—artifacts. A series of animal skeletons stood silhouetted against the mountain skyline in one room. In another, what appeared to be replicas of machines lined display counters and hung from wires. In yet another, plexiglas cubes held fetuses of a hundred creatures, none of them human but some disturbingly close to human. In another room, faded holograms of starfields and ringfields moved over and through the observers.

“What is this place?” asked Harman.

“A sort of museum,” said Savi. “I think most of the important displays are missing.”

“Created by whom?” asked Hannah.

Savi shrugged. “Not by the posts, I think. I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure that the bridge—or the original of this bridge, it may be a replica—once stood above water near a Lost Age city on what was then the west coast of the continent north of here. Have you heard of such a thing, Harman?”

“No.”

“Perhaps I dreamt it,” said Savi with a rueful laugh. “My memory plays tricks on me after all these centuries of sleep.”

“You mentioned sleeping through the centuries once before,” Daeman said, his tone sounding brusque to Ada. “What are you talking about?”

Savi had led them down a long spiral staircase in the green-glass tube strung between the suspension cables, and now she gestured to a line of what appeared to be crystal coffins. “A form of cryosleep,” she said. “Only not cold—which is silly, because that’s what ‘cryo’ meant originally. Some of these cocoons still work, still freeze molecular motion. Not through cold, but through some microtechnology that draws power from the bridge.”

“From the bridge?” said Ada.

“The whole thing is a solar power receiver,” said Savi. “Or at least the green parts are.”

Ada looked at the dusty crystal coffins and tried to imagine going to sleep in one and waiting . . . what? Years before waking? Decades? Centuries? She shuddered.

Savi was looking at her and Ada blushed. But Savi smiled. One of her sincerely amused smiles, Ada thought.

They climbed to a long green glass cylinder hanging from a frayed and rusted support cable that was thicker than Harman was tall. Ada found herself treading softly, trying to lift her weight by sheer will, afraid that their combined weight would bring the cylinder down, the cable, the whole bridge. Again she caught Savi watching her. This time Ada did not blush but frowned back, tired of the old woman’s scrutiny.

All four of them stopped a minute, alarmed. It appeared that they had walked into a meeting hall filled with people—people standing along the edges of the room, men and women in weird garb, people sitting at desks and standing at control panels, people who did not move or turn their gazes in the direction of the newcomers.

“They’re not real,” said Daeman, walking to the nearest man—dressed in a dusty blue suit with some sort of fabric at his throat—and touching the figure’s face.

The five walked from figure to figure, staring at the men and women dressed in odd clothes, people with strangely patterned hair and unusual personal adornment—tattoos, strange jewelry, dyed hair and skin.

“I read that once servitors came in the shape of human beings . . .” began Harman.

“No,” said Savi. “These aren’t robots. Only mannequins.”

“What?” said Daeman.

Savi explained the word.

“Do you know who they’re supposed to be?” asked Hannah. “Or why they’re here?”

“No,” said Savi. She stood back while the others explored.

At the end of the chamber, set in a glass alcove as if in pride of place, the figure of a man was posed in an ornate wood and leather-slung chair. Even seen sitting, it was obvious that this figure was shorter than most of the other male mannequins in the hall, and dressed in some sort of tan tunic that looked like a short, belted dress made out of rough cotton or wool. The figure’s feet were shod with sandals. The short man could have been comic, but his features—short, curly gray hair, hawk nose, and fierce gray eyes staring out boldly from under heavy brows—were so powerful that Ada found herself approaching the mannequin warily. The man’s forearms were shaped with such muscle and so many scars, the stubby fingers were curled easily but with much strength on the wooden arms of the camp chair—everything about the carved form gave an impression of such coiled strength—of will as well as body—that Ada stopped six feet away from it. The man was visibly older than humans chose to look in this age—somewhere between Harman’s Second Twenty and Savi’s old age. The man’s tunic hung low enough that Ada could see the graying hair on his broad, bronzed chest.

Daeman hurried forward. “I know this man,” he said, pointing. “I’ve seen him before.”

“From the turin drama,” said Hannah.

“Yes, yes,” said Daeman, snapping his fingers in an attempt to remember. “His name is . . .”

“Odysseus,” said the man in the chair. He stood and took a step toward the startled Daeman. “Odysseus, son of Laertes.”

17

“She’s stabilizing,” said Mahnmut over the hardline to Orphu. “Roll rate down to about one revolution every six seconds. Pitch and yaw are approaching zero.”

“I’m going to try to flatten out the roll,” said Orphu. “Tell me when you have the polar cap in the reticule.”

“Okay, no—it’s drifting. Damn. What a mess.” Mahmut was trying to line up the slash on the video feed with the white blur of the Martian polar cap through a blizzard of tumbling debris and still-glowing plasma.

“Yes,” said Orphu from the hold, “I am a mess.”

“I wasn’t talking about you.”

“I know. But I’m still a mess. I’d give half my Proust library if I had just one of my six eyes back.”

“We’ll get you hooked up to some visual feed,” said Mahnmut. “Hell. We’re tumbling again.”

“Let it tumble until right before we enter the atmosphere,” said Orphu. “Save our thruster fuel and energy. And—no—we’re not going to get this vision thing fixed. I did a damage check after you plugged me in here, and it’s not just the eyes and cameras that are missing. I was looking toward the bow when the ship was slagged, and the flash burned out every channel down to the organic level. My internal optic nerves are ash.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mahnmut. He felt sick and it wasn’t just from the tumbling. After a minute, he said, “We’re running fairly low on everything consumable here—water, air, reaction-pack fuel. Are you sure you want to stay inside this debris field?”

“It’s our best chance,” said Orphu. “On radar, we’re just another chunk of the destroyed spaceship.”

“
Radar
?” said Mahnmut. “Did you see what attacked us? A goddamned
chariot
. You think a chariot has radar?”

Orphu rumbled a laugh. “Do you think a
chariot
can launch an energy lance like the one that vaporized a third of the ship, including Koros and Ri Po? And yes, Mahnmut, I
saw
the chariot—it was the last thing I’ll ever see. But I don’t believe for a second that it was actually a chariot with an oversized human male and female riding in open vacuum. Uh-uh. Too cute . . . too cute by half.”

Mahnmut had nothing to say to that. He wished Orphu had damped all the roll—the sub was also pitching and yawing again—but everything else in the debris field was tumbling, so it made sense that they should be too.

“Want to talk about Shakespeare’s sonnets?” asked Orphu of Io.

“Are you shitting me?” The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better.

“Yes,” said Orphu. “I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Mahnmut. “The debris is beginning to glow. So are we. Picking up ionization.” He was pleased that his voice stayed calm. Ahead of them, larger bits of the destroyed spacecraft were glowing a dull red. The bow of
The Dark Lady
was also beginning to glow.
The Dark Lady
’s external sensors started reporting hull temperature rising. They were entering Mars’s atmosphere.

“Time to straighten us out,” said Orphu, getting the relayed data down in the submersible’s hull, doing what he could with the partial Koros III control download as he fired the sub’s strap-on thrusters and realigned her gyros. “Roll gone?”

“Not quite.”

“We can’t wait. I’m going to turn this pile of scrap iron around before we burn up.”

“This ‘pile of scrap iron’ is called
The Dark Lady
and she may save our lives,” Mahnmut said coldly.

“Right, right,” said Orphu. “Tell me when the hash mark on the aft video monitor is centered on the limb of Mars above the pole. I’ll begin flattening the tumble then. God, what I’d give for one of my eyes back. Sorry, last time I’ll say that.”

Mahnmut watched the monitor. Because of the widening debris cloud, the only reliable fixes he’d been able to make for Orphu over the past thirty minutes or so came from Mars itself. Even the two little moons were invisible. Now the thrusters thumped hollowly and the damaged sub pivoted slowly, the bow camera losing its view of Mars and showing glowing plasma, white-hot melted metal, and a million shining shards that had once been their spacecraft and traveling companions.

The orange-red-brown-green bulk of Mars filled the aft camera and the hash mark Orphu had directed Mahnmut to draw in the monitor drifted up, up, crossing the cloud-dappled coastline, showing blue sea, then white . . .

“Polar cap,” reported Mahnmut. “There’s the upper limb.”

“Okay,” said Orphu. All the thrusters hammered. “See the pole now on the aft camera?”

“No.”

“Any recognizable stars?”

“No. Just more hull ionization.”

“Close enough for government work,” said the Ionian. “I’m going to use the ring of thrusters on the stern as braking rockets now.”

“Koros III was going to use the big reaction pack on the bow to slow us for re-entry, then jettison it before we hit the atmosphere,” said Mahnmut. The stern glow was a deeper red now.

“I’m keeping those heavier thrusters on while we enter the atmosphere,” said Orphu.

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

“Isn’t it possible that if we keep those thrusters attached, they’ll explode when they heat up during reentry?”

“It’s possible,” grunted the Ionian.

“We’re pretty battered,” said Mahnmut. “Any chance we’ll break up as stuff burns away from the hull?”

“Sure, there’s a chance,” said Orphu. He fired the heavy-ion thrusters.

Mahnmut was pressed into his acceleration couch for thirty seconds and then released as the noise and vibration ceased. He heard the heavy thump as the attitude-control ring was ejected into space.

A fireball flicked past the bow camera, although the bow camera was now showing the view behind them as they entered the atmosphere stern first. “We’re definitely hitting atmosphere,” said Mahmut, noticing that his voice wasn’t quite as calm as before. He’d never been in a real planetary atmosphere before and the idea of all those close-packed molecules added queasiness on top of his nausea. “The jettisoned thruster-pack just turned white-hot and burst into flame. I can see the stern beginning to glow. So is the main reaction pack on the bow, but not as badly. Most of the heat and shock wave seems to be around our stern. Wow—we’re falling behind some of the debris field, but it’s all burning up ahead of us. It’s like we’re in the middle of a huge meteor storm.”

“Good,” said Orphu. “Hang on.”

What had been the moravec spacecraft hit the thickened Martian atmosphere very much as Mahmut had described to Orphu—as a meteor storm with the larger fragments massing several metric tons and stretching tens of meters across. A hundred fireballs arced through the pale-blue Martian sky and a rattle of deep sonic booms shattered the silence of the northern hemisphere. The fireballs crossed the northern polar cap like a flight of fiery birds and continued south across the Tethys Sea, leaving long plasma vapor trails as they passed. It looked eerily as if the fragments were flying rather than falling.

For hundreds of millions of years, Mars had boasted a negligible atmosphere, of some 8 millibars, mostly carbon dioxide, as opposed to Earth’s thick 1,014 millibars of pressure at sea level. In less than a century, through a process that none of the moravecs understood, the world had been terraformed to a very breathable 840 millibars.

The fireballs streaked across the northern kilometer in rough formation, leaving sonic-boom footprints in their wake. Some of the smaller pieces—large enough to survive the fiery atmospheric entry but small enough to be deflected by the thick air—began splashing down some eight hundred kilometers south of the pole. If one were looking from space, it would appear that some deity was firing a string of oversized machine-gun bullets—tracer rounds—into Mars’ northern ocean.

The Dark Lady
was one of those tracer rounds. The stealth material around the stern and two-thirds of the hull burned off and joined the plasma trail streaming behind the hurtling submersible. External antennae and sensors burned away. Then the hull began to char and chip and flake.

“Ah . . . “ said Mahnmut from his acceleration couch, “shouldn’t we think about popping the parachutes?” He knew enough of Koros’s landing plan to know that the buckycarbon-fiber ‘chutes were supposed to deploy at around 15,000 meters, lowering them gently to the ocean’s surface. Mahnmut’s last glimpse of the ocean before the stern optics had burned away convinced him that they were lower than 15,000 meters and coming down
very
fast.

“Not yet,” grunted Orphu. The Ionian had no acceleration couches in the hold and it sounded as if the deceleration gravities were affecting him. “Use your radar to get our altitude.”

“Radar’s gone,” said Mahnmut.

“Will your sonar work?”

“I’ll try.” Amazingly, it did work, showing a return of solid—well, liquid water—surface coming at them at a distance of 8,200 meters—8,000 meters—7,800 meters. Mahmut relayed the information to Orphu and added, “Shall we pop the parachutes now?”

“The rest of the debris isn’t deploying parachutes.”

“So?”

“So do you really want to drift down under a canopy, showing up on all their sensors?”

“
Whose
sensors?” snapped Mahnmut, but he understood Orphu’s point. Still . . . “Five thousand meters,” he said. “Velocity three thousand two hundred klicks per hour. Do we really want to hit the water at this speed?”

“Not really,” said Orphu. “Even if we survive the impact, we’d be buried under hundreds of meters of silt. Didn’t you say that this northern ocean is only a few hundred meters deep?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to rotate your ship now,” said Orphu.

“
What
?” But then Mahnmut heard the heavy thruster pack firing—just some of its jets—and the gyros whirred, although the noise was more a grinding than a whirring.

The Dark Lady
began a painful tumble, bringing its bow around from the back. Wind and friction tore at the hull, ripping away the last of the mid-ship sensors and breaching a dozen compartments. Mahnmut switched off screaming alarms.

Bow forward now, one of the last working video pickups showed splashes in the ocean—if one can call steam and plasma impact plumes 2,000 meters high “spashes”—and Mahnmut guessed it would be their turn in seconds. He described the impacts to Orphu and said, “Parachutes? Please?”

“No,” said Orphu and fired the main thrusters that should have been jettisoned in orbit.

The deceleration forces threw Mahnmut forward in his straps and made him wish for the acceleration gel they’d used in the Io Flux Tube slingshot maneuver. More columns of steam rose around the hurtling submersible like Corinthian columns flicking past and the ocean filled the viewscreen. The thrusters roared and swiveled, slowing their velocity. Mahnmut saw the pack ring jettison and fly off behind them the instant the firing stopped. They were only a thousand meters above the ocean and the surface looked as hard as Europan surface ice to Mahnmut’s eye.

“Para . . .” began Mahnmut, pleading now and not ashamed of it.

The two huge parachutes deployed. Mahnmut’s vision went red, then black.

They hit the Tethys Sea.

“Orphu? Orphu?” Mahnmut was in darkness and silence, trying to get his data feeds back on line. His enviro-niche was intact, O
₂
still flowing. That was amazing. His internal clocks said that three minutes had passed since impact. Their velocity was zero. “Orphu?”

“Arugghh,” came a noise over the hardline. “Every time I get to sleep, you wake me.”

“How are you?”

“
Where
am I might be the better question,” rumbled Orphu. “I ripped free of the niche. I’m not even sure if I’m still in
The Dark Lady
. If I am, the hull is breached here—I’m in water. Salt water. Wait, maybe I just pissed myself.”

“You’re still attached by hardline,” said Mahnmut, ignoring the Ionian’s last comment. “You’re probably still in the hold. I’m getting some sonar data. We’re in bottom silt, but just under a few meters of the stuff, about eighty meters beneath the surface.”

“I wonder how many pieces I’m in,” mused Orphu.

“Stay there,” said Mahnmut. “I’m going to unclip from the hardline and come below to get you. Don’t move.”

Orphu rumbled his laugh. “How can I move, old friend? All my manipulators and flagella have gone to that big moravec heaven in the sky. I’m a crab without claws. And I’m not too sure about my shell. Mahnmut . . . wait!”

“What?” Mahnmut had unstrapped himself and was removing umbilicals and virtual-control cables.

“If . . . somehow . . . you could get to me, assuming the internal corridor isn’t smashed flat and the hull doors aren’t completely buckled or welded shut by the entry heat . . . what are you going to do with me?”

“See if you’re all right,” said Mahnmut, pulling the optical leads free. It was all darkness on the monitors anyway.

“
Think,
old friend,” said Orphu. “You drag me out of here—if I don’t come apart in your hands—what next? I won’t fit in your internal access corridors. Even if you hauled me around the outside of the sub, I can’t fit into your enviro-niche and I sure as hell can’t cling to the hull. Do you walk across the ocean bottom for a thousand klicks or so, carrying me as you go?”