Ilium (34 page)

“How long could you have stayed in this . . . hibernation?” asked Mahnmut, his anger shifting into something like giddiness.

“Not long,” said Orphu. “About five hundred hours.”

Mahnmut extended fingers through his manipulator pads, picked up a rock, and bounced it off Orphu’s shell.

“Did you hear something?” asked the Ionian.

Mahnmut sighed, sat in the sand near the end of Orphu that used to house his eyes, and began describing their current situation.

Orphu convinced Mahnmut that he’d have to communicate with the LGM through a translator again. The Ionian hated the idea of causing the death of one of the little green men as much as Mahnmut did—especially since the LGM had rescued him—but he argued that the mission depended on them communicating and communicating fast. Mahnmut had tried talking again, had tried sign language, had tried drawings in the sand—showing maps of the coast where they were and the volcano they had to get to—had even tried the idiot’s version of speaking a foreign language: shouting. The LGM all stared calmly but did not respond. Finally it was a little green man who took the initiative, stepping forward, seizing Mahnmut’s hand, and pulling it to his chest.

“Shall I?” Mahnmut asked Orphu over the commline.

“You have to.”

Mahnmut winced as his hand was pulled through the yielding flesh, as his fingers encircled and then gripped what could only be a beating green heart in the warm, syrupy fluid of the little man’s body.

HOW
CAN
WE
HELP
YOU?

Mahnmut had a hundred questions he wanted to ask, but Orphu helped him put first things first.

“The sub,” said Orphu. “We have to get it out of sight before a chariot flies over.”

Through a combination of language and images, Mahnmut conveyed the thought of moving the submersible a kilometer or so to the west, of pulling it into the ocean-cave in the cliff that jutted out to sea at the headland.

YES

Scores of the little green men began work even while Mahnmut stood there, his hand deep in the translator’s chest. They began sinking rods into the sand, running more cables to
The Dark Lady,
and rigging pulleys. The translator waited with Mahnmut’s hand around his heart.

“I want to ask him about the stone heads,” said Mahmut over the commline. “Ask him who they are, why they’re doing this.”

“Not until we try to find a way to get to Olympus,” insisted Orphu.

Mahmut sighed and communicated the request for help in getting to the large volcano. He transmitted images of Olympus Mons as he’d seen it from orbit and asked if there was anyway the LGM could help them travel either overland over the Tempe Terra highlands or east along the Tethys coast for more than four thousand kilometers, then south along the Alba Patera coast to Olympus Mons.

THAT
IS
NOT
POSSIBLE

“What does he mean?” asked Orphu when Mahnmut relayed the response. “Does he mean it’s not possible to help us, or to travel east that way?”

Mahnmut had felt something like relief when the LGM translator had all but pronounced their mission over, but now he forwarded Orphu’s request for clarification.

NOT
POSSIBLE
FOR
YOU
TO
TRAVEL
EAST
SECRETLY
BECAUSE
THE
DWELLERS
ON
OLYMPOS
WOULD
SEE
YOU
AND
KILL
YOU

“Ask him if there’s another way,” said Orphu. “Maybe we could go overland along the Kasei Valles.”

NO
YOU
WILL
GO
TO
THE
NOCTIS
LABYRINTH
BY
FELUCCA

“What’s a felucca?” asked Orphu when Mahnmut relayed the answer. “It sounds like an Italian dessert.”

“It’s a two-masted, lateen-rigged sailing ship,” said Mahnmut, whose training for the black underseas of Europa had included everything available in download about sailing the liquid seas of Earth. “Used to ply the Mediterranean millennia ago.”

“Ask them when we can leave,” sent Orphu.

“When can we leave?” asked Mahmut, feeling the question as a vibration through his fingers and a tickling in his mind.

THE
STONE
BARGE
ARRIVES
IN
THE
MORNING.
THE
FELUCCA
WILL
BE
WITH
IT.
YOU
CAN
LEAVE
ON
IT.

“We’ll need some other things salvaged from our submersible,” said Mahnmut. He sent the images of the Device and the two other pieces of cargo in the hold, visualized it being brought ashore and transported to the sea cave. Then he sent the image of LGM rolling Orphu to the same cave.

As if in response, dozens of the little green men began to wade and paddle back out to the ship. Others walked closer to Orphu and began arranging the rollers into an Orphu-sized pallet.

“I don’t think I can hold this man’s heart any longer,” Mahnmut said to Orphu over the comm. “It’s like grabbing a live electric wire.”

“Let go then,” said the Ionian.

“But . . .”

“Let go.”

Mahnmut thanked the translator—thanked all of them—and released his grip. Just as with the first translator, this little green man fell to the sand, twitched, hissed, dried out, and died.

“Oh, God,” whispered Mahnmut. He leaned back against Orphu’s shell. The little green men were already lifting the Ionian’s bulk, sliding rollers under him.

“What are they doing?”

Mahnmut described the translator’s body and the work all around him—their preparation to transport Orphu and the Device and other objects already being hauled in from the ship, the cables being attached to the sub, the hundreds of LGM pulling at the cables from the shore, already dragging
The Dark Lady
west toward the ocean cave where it would be safe from airborne eyes.

“I’ll go with you to the cave,” Mahnmut said dully. The translator’s body was like a dry, shriveled brown husk on the red sand. All of the interior organs had dried up and the fluid had flowed out of it, making the mud under it run like red blood. The other little green men ignored the translator’s corpse and were already beginning to roll Orphu along the sand toward the west.

“No,” said Orphu. “You know what you have to do.”

“I already described the faces to you when I saw them from the sea.”

“That was at night, through the periscope buoy,” said Orphu. “We need to look at one or two of them in the daylight.”

“The one at the base of the cliff is in pieces,” said Mahnmut, feeling like whining. “The next one is a full kilometer to the east. Way up on the cliffs.”

“You go ahead,” said Orphu. “I’ll stay in touch on comm while they trundle me off to the cave. You’ll be able to see how they handle
The Lady
during most of your walk.”

Mahnmut grudgingly complied, walking east, away from the crowd of LGM pulling his dead sub along the coast and rolling Orphu toward the cool shadow of the sea cave.

The fallen head was in too many pieces to make out its features. Mahnmut struggled up the steep trail that the little green men had descended with such apparent effortlessness. The path was narrow and frighteningly steep and wet-sandstone-slick.

At the top, Mahnmut paused a second to recharge his cells and to look around. The Tethys Sea stretched out as far as he could see to the north. To the south, inland, red stone gave way to low red hills and—several klicks further south—Mahnmut could make out the green of forests of shrubs on the foothills. There was some grass along the path he followed east along the edge of the cliff.

Mahnmut paused to look at the pad and prepared hole for the face the little green men had sacrificed in shoving off the cliff to pry open the hold-bay doors. It had been prepared carefully and Mahnmut could see how the stem at the base of the great stone heads’ necks slid down into the hole in the stone and then locked in place. These little green men were craftsmen and skilled stone workers.

Mahnmut walked east. He could see the next head along the eastern horizon. The moravec was not designed for walking—his role was mostly to sit in an exploration submersible, sometimes to swim—and when he grew tired of being a biped, he altered the workings of his joints and spine and padded along like a dog for a while.

When he reached the next stone head he paused by its broad base, seeing how the stone at the neck had been filled in with something like cement. He looked east at the path the rollers and thousands of LGM had created along the cliff top, and west to where the green mob had pulled the sub and pushed Orphu almost to the headland cave.

“There yet?” came Orphu’s voice.

“Yes. Leaning against the thing.”

“How about the face?”

“This is a bad angle from beneath,” said Mahnmut. “Mostly lips and chin and nostrils.”

“Get out on the beach again. These faces are meant to be seen from the sea for some reason.”

“But . . .” began Mahnmut, looking down at the steep cliff dropping at least a hundred meters away to the sand. There was a faint path on the greasy rock, just as at the other site. “If I break my neck getting down there,” he sent, “it’s your damned fault.”

“Understood,” said Orphu. “I can feel the vibration as they move me along here, but I have no idea how close we are to the cave. Can you see?”

Mahnmut magnified his vision as he looked to the west. “Just a couple of hundred meters from the overhang,” he said. “I’m going to climb down now. Are you sure you want me to check the next head as well? It’s another kilometer east and the heads looked all the same from orbit.”

“I think we should check it,” said Orphu.

“Sayeth the ‘vec with no legs,” muttered Mahnmut. He began the long, steep descent to the beach.

He stood as far away as he could, backing up until the low waves lapped at his legs. The face was distinct but not familiar. Saying nothing, lost in his own thoughts, he walked another kilometer east along the water’s edge. The next face was identical to the first: proud, imperious, commanding, its visage staring fiercely out to sea, the sculpted stone showing an old man’s face, mostly bald on top but with long hair flowing back on either side of the wrinkled face, small eyes under hard, downward slashes of eyebrows, wrinkles at the corner, high cheekbones gouged into stone, a small but firm chin, thin lips curving into a frown, and the same severe countenance.

“It’s an old man,” Mahnmut said on the comm. “Definitely an elderly human male, but I don’t recognize him from the history databanks.”

There was only static for a few seconds. “Fascinating,” said Orphu. “Why would an old man from Earth deserve thousands of these stone heads all along the Martian coastline?”

“I have no idea,” said Mahnmut.

“Is he one of the chariot people?” asked Orphu. “Does he look like a god?”

“Not a Greek god,” said Mahnmut. “More than anything else, he looks like a powerful but dyspeptic old man. Can I come back now? Before one of the toga-wearing graybeards in a chariot does come flying along and sees me standing out here gawking like a tourist?”

“Yes,” said Orphu. “I think you should come back.”

23

Odysseus didn’t tell the story of his travels that morning during breakfast in the green bubble atop the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu. No one remembered to ask him. Ada thought that everyone seemed preoccupied, and she soon realized why.

Ada was preoccupied because she’d slept little, but spent the most wonderful night of her life with Harman. Ada’d “had sex” before—what woman her age had not?—but she realized that she’d never
made love
before. Harman had been exquisitely tender yet eagerly insistent, attentive to her needs and responses but not controlled by them, sensitive but forceful. They slept a little—coiled together on the narrow bed by the curving glass window—but woke often, their bodies renewing the lovemaking before their minds were fully engaged. When the sun rose over the spire to the east of Machu Picchu, Ada felt like a different person—no, that wasn’t right, she realized, she felt like a
larger,
fuller, more connected person.

Ada thought that Hannah was also acting strangely that morning—flushed, hyperalert, attentive to every comment the man who called himself Odysseus made, glancing at Ada occasionally and then looking away, almost blushing.
My God,
Ada realized just as breakfast was ending and they were ready to leave, to fly north together to Ardis Hall,
Hannah slept with Odysseus.

For a minute, Ada couldn’t believe it, for never during their friendship had Hannah had ever commented on being with men or on sexual matters, but then she caught the glances Hannah was giving the bearded man, and the physical signs—the young woman sitting across from Odysseus but her body still reacting to every move the man made, hands nervous, leaning forward—and Ada realized it had been a busy night in the domis atop the Golden Gate.

Daeman and Savi were visibly the odd people out. The young man was in no better a mood than he’d been in the night before, barking questions about the Mediterranean Basin, eager to get going on his adventure with Harman and Savi, but obviously nervous about it. Savi seemed withdrawn, almost sorrowful, and in a hurry to leave.

Harman was quiet and—Ada thought—obviously still focused on Ada, although not obvious about it to the others. She caught his glance once or twice and something warm moved in her chest when he smiled at her. Once he put his hand on the outside of her leg under the table and patted twice.

“So what’s the plan?” Daeman asked as they were finishing their breakfast of hot croissants—Ada had watched in amazement as Savi had baked the bread earlier—and butter and berries and fresh-squeezed fruit juice and rich coffee.

“The plan is to fly Odysseus, Hannah, and Ada to Ardis Hall—we’re running late if we’re to get them there before dark—and then for you, Harman, and me to go on to the Mediterranean Basin,” said Savi. “Are you still game for that expedition, Daeman
Uhr
?”

“I’m still game.” Daeman did not sound game to Ada; he sounded tired or hung over or both.

“Then let’s get our gear in bags and our asses in gear and go,” said the ancient woman.

They flew out on the same sonie they’d flown in on, even though Hannah told Ada that there were other flying machines hangared in one of the rooms attached to the south tower of the bridge. The little sonie had a surprising number of compartments at the rear for Savi’s backpack and their other gear, but it was Odysseus who carried the most baggage—including a short sword in a scabbard, his shield, changes of raiment, and the two javelins he had used to hunt the Terror Birds. Savi lay in the front center depression, handling the glowing virtual controls, with Ada on her left and Harman on her right. Daeman, Odysseus, and Hannah filled the three concavities behind them, and Ada glanced back once to find her friend looking longingly at the bearded man.

They flew east over high mountains and then dropped lower and turned due north again, passing over thick jungle and a wide brown river that Savi said was called the Amazon. The jungle itself was solid rain forest canopy broken here and there only by a few blue glass pyramids whose apexes were a thousand feet high, parting low-moving rain clouds. Savi did not tell them what the pyramids might be and the others seemed too tired or preoccupied with their own thoughts to ask.

A half hour after the last of the pyramids had disappeared behind them, Savi banked the sonie hard left and they flew west by northwest across high mountains again. The air was so high and thin here that the forcefield bubble popped up even at their apparent low altitude of five hundred feet or so above the terrain, and the air in the bubble pressurized again to a higher oxygen content.

“Aren’t we going out of our way?” asked Harman after the long silence.

Savi nodded. “I had to give a wide berth to the Zorin Monoliths that run along the coastal shelf of what used to be Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia,” she said. “Some of them are still armed and automated.”

“What are the Zorin Monoliths?” asked Hannah.

“Nothing we have to worry about today,” said Savi.

“How fast are we traveling?” asked Ada.

“Slowly,” said Savi. She glanced at the virtual display surrounding her wrists and hands. “About three hundred miles per hour right now.”

Ada tried to imagine that speed. She couldn’t. She’d never traveled in anything faster than voynix-pulled droshky before their first trip in this sonie, and she had no idea how fast a droshky went. Probably not three hundred miles per hour, she thought. Certainly the mountains and ridges below were flicking past much faster than the familiar countryside had in the droshky or carriole ride between the fax portal and Ardis Hall.

They flew on another hour. At one point Hannah said, “I’m getting a sore neck craning to look over the edge of the sonie and the bubble’s too low to let me sit up. I wish . . .” She screamed. Ada, Daeman, and Harman let out similar yells.

Savi had moved her hand through the virtual control panel and the solid sonie under them had simply disappeared. In the brief seconds before Ada closed her eyes tight, she looked around at the perfect illusion of the six humans, their luggage, and Odysseus’ spears flying along in midair, unsupported by anything other than empty air.

“Warn us if you’re going to do something like that again,” Harman said shakily to Savi.

The old woman muttered something.

Ada spent a full minute or two touching the cold metal of the cowl ahead of her, feeling the soft leatherlike solidity of the contour couch beneath her legs and belly and chest, before daring to open her eyes again.
I’m not falling, I’m not falling, I’m not falling,
she told herself.
Yes, you
ARE
falling,
her eyes and inner ear told her. She closed her eyes again, opening them just as they came out of the highlands and followed a peninsula running northwest from the mainland.

“I thought you might want to see this,” Savi said to Harman, as if the rest of them wouldn’t know what they were talking about.

Ahead of them, the ocean sliced through the isthmus, open water visible for a gap of at least a hundred miles. Savi gained altitude and turned them north across open seas.

“The maps I’ve seen show old the isthmus connecting North and South America above sea level the whole way,” said Harman, straining up out of his couch to look behind them.

“The maps you’ve seen are useless,” said Savi. Her fingers moved and the sonie accelerated and gained more altitude.

It was past midday when another coastline came into sight. Savi dropped the sonie lower and they were soon flicking over swamps which quickly gave way to mile after mile of redwoods and sequoia —Savi named the trees—the tallest towering two or three hundred feet into the humid air.

“Anyone want to stretch their legs on solid ground while we stop for lunch?” asked Savi. “Or have some privacy in case nature is calling?”

Four of the five passengers loudly voted aye. Odysseus smiled slightly. He had been dozing.

They had lunch in a clearing on a small rise, surrounded by cathedral giants. The e- and p-rings moved palely through the bit of blue sky visible overhead.

“Are there dinosaurs around here?” Daeman asked, peering into the shadows beneath the trees.

“No,” said Savi. “They tend to prefer the middle and northern parts of the continent.”

Daeman relaxed against a fallen log and nibbled at his fruit, sliced beef, and bread, but sat straight up when Odysseus said, “Perhaps Savi
Uhr
is actually saying that there are more ferocious predators around here that keep the recombinant dinosaurs away.”

Savi frowned at Odysseus and shook her head, as if sighing over an incorrigible child. Daeman looked into the midday shadows under the trees again and moved closer to the sonie to finish his meal.

Hannah, rarely taking her gaze off Odysseus, did take time to pull her turin cloth from a pocket and set it over her eyes. She reclined for several minutes while the others ate silently in the shadowed heat and stillness. Finally Hannah sat up, removed the microcircuit-embroidered cloth, and said, “Odysseus, would you like to see what’s happening with you and your comrades in the war for the walled city?”

“No,” said the Greek. He tore off a strip of cold Terror Bird leftover with his white teeth and chewed slowly, then drank from the wineskin he’d brought with him.

“Zeus is angry and has tilted the balance toward the Trojans, led by Hector,” continued Hannah, ignoring Odysseus’ reticence. “They’ve driven the Greeks back through their defenses—the moat and the stakes—and they’re fighting around the black ships. It looks like your side is going to lose. All of the great kings—including you—have turned and run. Only Nestor stayed to fight.”

Odysseus grunted. “That garrulous old man. He stayed because his horse had been shot out from under him.”

Hannah glanced at Ada and grinned. It was obvious that Hannah’s goal had been to draw Odysseus into conversation and equally obvious that she thought she’d won. Ada still didn’t believe that this all-too-real man—sun-bronzed, wrinkled, scarred, so different than the firmary-renewed males of their experience—was the same person as the Odysseus of the turin drama. Like most intelligent people she knew, Ada believed that the turin cloth provided a virtual entertainment, probably written and recorded during the Lost Age.

“Do you remember that fight by the black ships?” prompted Hannah.

Odysseus grunted again. “I remember the feast the night before that miserable dog’s-ass day. Thirty ships arrived from the isle of Lemnos bringing wine—a thousand measures full, enough wine to drown the Trojan armies with, if we hadn’t had a better use for it. Euneus, Jason’s son, sent it as a gift for the Atrides—Agamemnon and Menelaus.” He squinted at Hannah and the others. “Now Jason’s voyage,
there’s
a story worth hearing.”

Everyone except Savi looked blankly at the barrel-chested man in his belted tunic.

“Jason and his Argonauts,” repeated Odysseus, looking from face to face. “Surely you’ve heard
that
tale.”

Savi broke the embarrassed silence. “They haven’t heard any tales, son of Laertes. Our so-called old-style humans here are without past, without myth, without stories of any sort—except for the turin cloth. They’re as perfectly postliterate as you and your comrades were preliterate.”

“We didn’t need scratches on bark or parchment or mud to make us men to be reckoned with,” growled Odysseus. “Writing had been tried in some age before ours and had been abandoned as a useless thing.”

“Indeed,” Savi said dryly. “ ‘Does an illiterate’s tool stand any less erect?’ I think Horace said that.”

Odysseus glared.

“Will you tell us about this Jason and his . . . his what?” asked Hannah, blushing in a way that convinced Ada that her friend had indeed slept with Odysseus the night before.

“Ar-go-nauts,” Odysseus said slowly, emphasizing each syllable as if speaking to a child. “And no, I won’t.”

Ada found her gaze wandering to Harman and her mind wandering to memories of the long night before. She wanted to walk off with Harman and talk to him in private about what they’d shared, or—failing that—just to close her eyes in the humid heat of the sun-dappled glade and nap, perhaps to dream about their lovemaking.
Or better yet,
thought Ada, peering at Harman through lowered lashes,
we could just steal off into the forest dim and make love again, rather than just dream about it.

But Harman didn’t seem to notice her glances and obviously had his lover’s telepathy-receiver turned off. Ada’s beloved appeared to be amused and interested by Odysseus’ comments. “Will you tell us a story about your turin cloth war?” he asked the bearded man.

“It was called the Trojan War and fuck your turin rag,” said Odysseus, but he’d been drinking steadily from his wineskin and appeared to have mellowed. “But I can tell you a story that your precious diaper cloth doesn’t know.”

“Yes, please,” said Hannah, shifting closer to the warrior.

“The Lord deliver us from storytellers,” muttered Savi. She rose, packed away her lunch package in the boot of the sonie, and walked into the forest.

Daeman watched her go with visible anxiety. “Do you really think there are worse predators here than dinosaurs?” he asked no one in particular.