Ilium (42 page)

The old woman shook her head. “The Hands of Hercules were here before I was born and the posts never told us why they did it that way. I’ve always suspected it was just a whim on their part.”

“A whim,” repeated Harman. It seemed to trouble him.

“Are you sure we can’t just fly straight across the Basin?” asked Daeman.

“I’m sure,” said Savi. “The sonie would drop out of the sky like a stone.”

Through the late afternoon they flew across swamps, lakes, fern forests, and broad rivers above a land that Savi called the Northern Sahara. Soon the swamps dwindled and died and the land became drier, rockier. Herds of huge striped beasts—not dinosaurs, but as large as dinosaurs—moved by the hundreds across grasslands and rocky uplands.

“What are those?” asked Daeman.

Savi shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“If Odysseus were here, he’d probably want to kill one and have it for dinner,” said Harman.

Savi grunted.

It was late afternoon again when they lost altitude, circled a strange, walled city set on highlands only twenty-five miles from the Mediterranean Basin, and landed on a rocky plain just west of the city.

“What is this place?” asked Daeman. He’d never seen walls or buildings so old, and even from a distance it was unsettling.

“It’s called Jerusalem,” said Savi.

“I thought we were going down into the Basin to look for spaceships,” said Harman.

The old woman got out of the sonie and stretched. She looked very tired, but then, Daeman though, she
had
been driving the sonie for two straight days. “We are,” she said. “We’ll get transport here. And there’s something I want you to see at sunset.”

This sounded ominous to Daeman, but he followed her and Harman across the rocky plain, over rubble of what once might have been suburbs or newer sections of the old walled city but which now was a rising plain paved with stones pounded and ground fine as pebbles. She led them up to and though a gate in the wall, keeping up a mostly meaningless narration as they walked. The air was dry and cooling, the low sunlight rich on the ancient buildings.

“This was called the Jaffa Gate,” she said, as if that might mean something to them. “This is David Street, and it used to separate the Christian Quarter from the Armenian Quarter.”

Harman glanced at Daeman. It was obvious to Daeman that even the learned old man, so proud of his useless ability to read, had never heard the words “Christian” or “Armenian.” But Savi was babbling on, pointing out something called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the tumbled ruins to their left, and neither man interrupted her with a question until Daeman asked, “Aren’t there any voynix or servitors here?”

“Not now,” said Savi. “But when my friends Pinchas and Petra were here in the last minutes before the final fax fourteen hundred years ago, there were tens of thousands of voynix suddenly active near the Western Wall. I have no idea why.” She stopped walking and looked at each of them. “You understand, don’t you, that the voynix popped out of the temporalclastic cloud two centuries before the final fax, but they were immobile—rust and iron statues—not the obedient servants you have now? That’s important to remember.”

“All right,” said Harman, but his voice carried a hint of being patronizing. She was babbling. “But you said you were in an iceberg down near Antarctica when the final fax came,” continued Harman. “How do you know where your friends were and what the voynix were doing?”

“Farnet, proxnet, and allnet records,” said the old woman. She turned and led them further east down the steet.

Harman glanced at Daeman again, as if to share his concern about her nonsense-talk, but Daeman felt a rush of something—pride? superiority?—as he realized that he knew exactly what she meant when she talked about farnet and proxnet. He looked at his own palm and keyed the finder function, but the glow was blank. What would happen, he wondered, if he visualized the four blue rectangles above three red circles above four green triangles to summon the full-data function the way she’d taught him in the forest glen yesterday?

Savi stopped and spoke as if she’d read his mind. “You don’t want to invoke the allnet function here, Daeman. You wouldn’t be virtually immersed in energy-microclimate interactions like you were in the forest . . . not here in Jerusalem. You’d be dealing with five thousand years of pain, terror, and virulent anti-Semitism.”

“Anti-Semitism?” repeated Harman.

“Hatred of Jews,” said Savi.

Harman and Daeman looked at each other with quizzical expressions. The idea made no sense.

Daeman was beginning to be sorry that he’d changed his mind and come along. He was hungry. The sun was setting behind them. He didn’t know where he was going to sleep this night, but he suspected that it would be uncomfortable.

“Come,” said Savi and led them another block, through stone doorways, down a narrow alley, and out into a space dominated by a tall, blank wall.

“Is this what we came to see?” said Daeman, disappointed. It was a dead end—a courtyard bound around by lower walls, stone buildings, and this one big wall with some sort of round metallic structure just visible atop it. There was no way to get up there from here.

“Patience,” said Savi. She squinted at the disappearing sun. “And today’s Tisha b’Av, just as it was on the day of the final fax.”

Looking as if he was tired of repeating nonsense syllables, Harman said, “Tisha b’Av?”

“The Ninth of Av,” said Savi. “A day of lamentation. Both the First and Second Temples were destroyed on Tisha b’Av, and I think the voynix built this blasphemous Third Temple on the Ninth of Av on the day of the final fax.” She pointed to the black metal half-dome beyond the wall.

Suddenly there was a rumble so deep that Daeman’s bones and teeth rattled. Both he and Harman took a frightened step back, the air filled with ozone and static so thick that the hair on Daeman’s head rose and rippled like tall grass in a high wind, and—with an explosive crash faster and louder than a lightning strike—a solid shaft of pure blue, blindingly brilliant light some sixty feet across shot up from the metal half-dome, pierced the evening sky, and disappeared arrow-straight into space, barely missing the orbital e-ring in its eternal rotation to the east.

29

For eight Martian days and eight Martian nights, the dust storm raised waves ten meters high, howled through the rigging, and pounded the little felucca northward toward the leeward shore and death for all hands, including the two moravecs.

The little green men aboard were competent sailors, but they ceased to function at night and now were inert much of the day when the dust clouds overhead blotted out the sun. To Mahnmut, when the LGM found their dark corners beneath decks and curled up in niches to keep from rolling around, it was like sailing in a ship of the dead, like Bram Stoker’s
Dracula,
where the ship arrives crewed only by corpses.

The felucca’s sails were made of a tough, lightweight polymer rather than canvas, but the ferocity of the wind out of the southeast and the particles and pebbles being blasted at them tore the sheets to shreds. The deck was no longer a safe place to be, and, during a brief interval of sunlight, twenty LGM helped Mahnmut cut a hole in the mid-deck and lower Orphu to the deck below, where Mahnmut constructed a wood and tarp shelter for the Ionian and tucked him away from the pelting wind. Mahnmut himself sensed the airborne grit getting into his seams and works when he spent too much time helping the LGM abovedecks, so he hunkered down on the lower deck near Orphu when he could, making sure his friend was roped and bolted into place as the felucca pitched forty degrees to each side and the water—now mixed with the blowing red sand and as red as blood—forced its way through every crack. A dozen of the forty little green men aboard manned handpumps every hour they were conscious, pumping out the bilge and lower decks, and Mahnmut worked alone on a pump through the long nights.

They had used the wind to good advantage before the sails, rigging, and sea anchor were all damaged, working hard, tacking hard, sailing into the wind, waves crashing over the bow, to get deeper into the central inland sea, obviously all worried about the kilometer-high cliffs behind them to the north, and covering hundreds of kilometers in the first two days of the storm. They were somewhere now between Coprates Chasma and the islands of Melas Chasma, with the huge flooded-canyon complex of Candor Chasma ahead somewhere on their starboard side.

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.