Ilium (33 page)

All of the little green men raised their hands to their chests.

Mahnmut’s splayed fingers encountered something hard, almost spherical. He could see a green blob about the size of a human heart centered in the man’s chest. His palm felt it pulse.

The little green man pulled again and Mahnmut understood. He closed his organic fingers around the organ.

WHAT
DO
YOU
NEED?

Shocked, Mahnmut almost jerked his hand free. He forced himself to leave his fingers where they were, wrapped around the little man’s green heart-blob. Mahnmut had
felt
the question flow up to his brain in pulses, throbs, vibrations. Not in words, certainly not in English or French or Russian or Chinese or Primary or any language Mahnmut had ever used. He did not know how to respond in kind, so he spoke. “I need to save my friend, who is trapped in the ship out there.”

A hundred and fifty green heads turned in unison to look at the submersible. Three hundred black eyes gazed a few seconds and then turned their gaze back on Mahnmut.

TELL
US
WITH
YOUR
THOUGHTS
WHERE
HE
IS

Mahnmut closed his eyes and formed an image of Orphu in the blocked hold, an image of the bay doors, an image of the interior corridor. The vibration-response throbbed back up his arm:

WAIT

Mahnmut’s hand was suddenly free and he pulled it from the little green man’s tight flesh with an audible squishing sound. The little green man collapsed onto the sand then, rolling on his side and lying motionless; the green blobs in his body ceased to flow, his black eyes clouded white and stared blindly, and his fingers twitched once and were still. The hundred and forty-something of the others turned away and went efficiently about the task of saving Orphu.

Mahnmut collapsed onto the sand next to what was clearly the emissary’s lifeless corpse.
Mother of God,
thought the moravec.
It kills them to communicate.

More little green men kept coming down the steep path from the cliff. Two hundred. Three hundred. Six hundred. Mahnmut quit trying to count and—ignoring the dead emissary’s request for him to wait—he waded and then paddled through the slight surf to the grounded submersible. Mahnmut went down through the conning tower airlock into his dry enviro-crèche, checking to see if any of the batteries had come back online. They hadn’t. He cycled through the internal airlock into the flooded corridor to the hold and swam down to the collapsed hull there. No way through to Orphu that way. Returning to the control room, he tried the hardline comm again. Silence. Salvaging his hardback edition of the sonnets, safe in a waterproof wrapper, Mahnmut stuffed other gear into a backpack—the remote comm he’d devised for Orphu if he could get him out, the ship’s log disks, hardcopy maps, a flare pistol, power cells—and clambered up to the top of the conning tower.

The little green men had brought great coils of their black cable down from the stone head they had been hauling along the cliff. They also brought scores of the rollers that the huge pallet had been moving on. They worked with an unbelievable efficiency—some swimming out to the submersible and attaching lines both above and under the waterline, others sinking metal rods from the rollers deep into the sand while pounding others into the rocky cliff face, still rigging pulleys and running the cable from the shore to the sub and back to the shore.

The sub was heavy—especially heavy with its water-damped reactor, flooded hold and corridors—and Mahnmut had trouble imagining these tiny green men actually moving the thing.

But they did.

Within twenty minutes, there were hundreds of cables running to the sub and then ashore and many little green men on each cable. They understood it was a rescue mission; the first thing they did was pull hard enough from the shore—the cables stretching like a black web back to the beach to the east—to tip the sub on its right side.

Mahnmut’s instict was to go help pull on the cables, but he knew that would be useless. Instead, he waited on the hull of
The Dark Lady
—shifting as the submersible shifted—and as soon as the bay doors were clear of the mud, he dove into the shallow water with a cell-bowered pry bar, his shoulder lamps on full bright.

The hull-bay doors had been twisted and partially melted by entry into the atmosphere, and Mahnmut was unable to open them more than a few centimeters before they jammed completely. Wanting to weep with frustration, pounding the hull with impotent fury, he suddenly had the sense that he was not alone and he swung around in the silt-filled seawater.

Half a dozen little green men stood on the bottom of the sea nearby, watching him. They did not seem to need to breathe.

Not wanting to “communicate” with them again at the price of killing one of them, Mahnmut pointed to the pried-up section of door, pointed to the surface, made a gesture of rolling cable and wrapping it around the torn flange of metal, and pantomimed pulling.

All six of the little green men nodded and kicked for the surface three meters above them.

A minute later sixty of them returned, some pulling cable, others with the black rods that slid out of the rollers they used to pull the stone heads. Again they worked with improbable efficiency, some working as a team to twist back a few centimeters of the doors at the opposite end of the hold bay, others running cable through as if threading a needle. Within a few minutes, they had dozens of strands of the strong cable running beneath the jammed bay doors. They kicked to the surface again, gesturing Mahnmut to follow.

Again he breathed air, felt sunlight on his polymer and skin, and stood on
The Dark Lady
’s hull as hundreds of the little green men rigged the cables through a system of cliff-side pulleys and pulled. And pulled again.

The submersible creaked, the hull groaned, silt surrounded them, and
The Dark Lady
rolled another thirty degrees to starboard and twisted around until the belly of the ship was in the air and the stern was pointed toward the beach. The alloy bay doors bent but did not open.

Mahnmut attacked the doors with his powered pry bar again. The tortued and twisted metal would not relent. His acetylene torch was out of O
₂
and energy.

The little green men gently pulled him away from his fruitless labors. Mahnmut pulled free and stumbled across the slippery hull toward the hold again, intent on prying at the warped and jammed doors until his own energy cells died, but then he saw that the LGM weren’t finished with their efforts.

They knotted and spliced cable, turning the fifty stands into one. Then they ran the lengthened cable up the cliff face and through a series of oversized pulleys connected to a latticework of support rods they had somehow driven into the stone. Finally, they ran the cable to the huge stone head and wrapped the ends around the figure’s neck a dozen times before tying it off.

Five of the little green men came over and pushed Mahnmut into the water, pulling him away from the sub.

Mahnmut could not believe what he was seeing. He had assumed that the great stone faces were sacred to the little green men, their positioning and raising along the coast a religious or psychological imperative calling for all of their time, energy, and devotion, the stone heads their only priority. Evidently he was wrong.

Hundreds of the green figures wrestled the head around on its pallet, got behind it, shoved, and pushed it off the cliff.

The stone head—its face to the cliff now—fell sixty meters, striking rocks at the base of the cliff and shattering into a dozen pieces, but the cable whirred on pulleys, rods popped out of stone, and the tied-off ends ripped the hold-bay doors off and threw them twenty meters into the air before dragging the torn metal up the cliff and back down again.

Hundreds of little green men swam for the sub, but Mahnmut reached it first, flicking on his searchlights again.

There were the three objects he’d left in the hold, including the large Device they were supposed to deliver to Mons Olympus. And tucked into the crèche, battered and torn and silent, was Orphu of Io.

Mahnmut used the last power in his pry bar to rip free the arresting flanges and tie-downs. Orphu’s great bulk sagged free, sloshing in seawater. But the bay was opened skyward now, the sub on its back, and there was no way that Mahnmut could ever get the Ionian out of the partially flooded pit the storage bay had become.

A dozen more little green men jumped into the space with Mahnmut, found grasping points on Orphu’s pitted and cracked carapace, and forced green arms and legs under the hard-vac moravec’s ungainly shape. Together, they found leverage and lifted. Working silently, never slipping or dropping him, they lifted Orphu out, gently wrapped more cables around him, slid him across the curve of
The Dark Lady’
s hull, lowered him to the water, set buoyant rollers under him, lashed them together into a raft, and gently propelled the Ionian’s body to the beach.

The little green men—at least a thousand strong on the beach now—stood back and gave Mahnmut room as he worked to find out if Orphu was dead or alive. The Ionian lay inert on the red-sand beach like some storm-battered, oversized trilobite washed ashore in one of Earth’s dim prehistoric ages.

Checking the skies for flying chariots that Mahnmut was sure were overdue, he emptied his backpack and waterproof bags of the gear he’d salvaged from
The Dark Lady
. First, he laid out five of the small but heavy power cells, connected them in series, and ran the cable to one of Orphu’s surviving input connectors. There was no response from the big Ionian, but the virtual indicator showed that the energy was flowing somewhere. Next, Mahnmut crawled up the curve of Orphu’s carapace—marveling at seeing the physical damage clearly for the first time here in the strong morning light—and screwed the radio receiver into the hardline socket. He tested the connection—receiving a carrier wave hum—and activated his own microphone.

“Orphu?”

No response.

“Orphu?”

Silence. The scores of little green men looked on impassively.

“Orphu?”

Mahnmut spent five minutes at the task, calling once every twenty seconds, using all comm frequencies and rechecking the receiver’s connections. The comm unit was receiving his transmission. It was Orphu who was not responding.

“Orphu?”

There wasn’t silence, exactly. From his external pickups, Mahnmut could hear more ambient noise than he’d ever encountered in his life: the lap of waves against the sand, the hiss of wind against the cliff behind him, the soft stir of the little green men shifting position from time to time, and the thousand nuances of vibrations in such a thick planetary atmosphere. It was just the commline and Orphu that were dead.

“Orphu?” Mahnmut checked his chronometer. He had been at it for more than thirty minutes. Reluctantly, in slow motion, he slid down off his friend’s carapace, walked fifteen paces down the beach, and sat in the wet sand where the water rolled in. The little green men made way for him and then surrounded him again at a respectful distance. Mahnmut looked at them—at the wall of tiny green bodies, expressionless faces, and unblinking black eyes.

“Don’t you all have work to do?” he asked, his voice sounding strange and choked to his own auditory inputs. Perhaps it was the acoustics of the Martian atmosphere.

The LGM did not move. The stone head was smashed into rubble of at the base of the cliff, but the little green men ignored it. A score of cables still ran out to the submersible where it lay inert in the low, rolling surf.

Mahnmut felt a sudden and immeasurably deep wave of loss and homesickness roll over him. He’d had three close relationships in his three Jovian decades—more than three hundred Martian years—of existence. First,
The Dark Lady,
which had been only a semi-sentient machine, but for which he’d been designed and in which he fit perfectly; the
Lady
was dead. Second, his exploration partner, Urtzweil, killed 18 J-years ago, half of Mahnmut’s lifetime ago. Now Orphu.

Now here he was hundreds of millions of kilometers from home, alone, unfit, untrained, and unprepared for this mission they’d sent him on. How was he supposed to get the 5,000 or so kilometers to Olympus Mons to plant the Device? And what if he did? Koros III may have known what to do there, what this mission was really about, but lowly Mahnmut, late of
The Dark Lady,
didn’t have a fucking clue.

Quit feeling sorry for yourself, idiot,
he thought. Mahnmut glanced at the LGM. It surely must be an illusion that they seemed downcast, even sad. They hadn’t mourned the death of one of their own, how could they show that emotion at the end of a moravec, a sentient machine they’d never imagined?

Mahnmut knew that he would have to communicate with the little green men again, but he hated the thought of reaching into one of the creatures’ chests, of killing it through communication. No, he wouldn’t do that until he had to.

He stood, returned to Orphu’s corpse, and began disconnecting the power cells.

“Hey,” said Orphu on the commband, “I’m still eating.”

Mahnmut was so startled he actually jumped backward in the sand. “Jesus, you’re alive.”

“As much as any of us moravecs are ‘alive.’ “

“God
damn
you,” said Mahnmut, feeling like laughing and crying, but mostly like hitting the big, battered horseshoe crab. “Why didn’t you answer me when I called? And called? And called?”

“What do you mean?” said Orphu. “I was in hibernation. Have been ever since the air and energy ran out on
The Lady
. You expect me to chat with you while I’m in hibernation?”

“What is this hibernation shit?” said Mahnmut, pacing around Orphu. “I never heard of moravecs going into hibernation.”

“You Europan vecs don’t have it?” asked Orphu.

“Obviously not.”

“Well, what can I say? Working alone in Io’s radiation torus, or anywhere in Jovian space, we hardvac moravecs sometimes run into situations where we just have to shut down everything for a while until someone can get to us to repair and recharge us. It happens. Not often, but it happens.”