Ilium

12 Above the Asteroid Belt

The ship began decelerating almost as soon as it left the Jovian magnetosphere, so their great ballistic arc above the plane of the ecliptic to Mars on the far side of the sun would take several standard days rather than hours. This was good for Mahnmut and Orphu of Io since they had a lot to discuss.

Soon after their departure, Ri Po and Korus III in the forward control module announced that they were deploying the boron sail. Mahnmut watched through ship’s sensors as the circular sail was unfolded and trailed seven kilometers behind them on eight bucky cables, then deployed to its full radius of five kilometers. It looked like a black circle cut out of the starfield to Mahnmut as he watched the stern video feed.

Orphu of Io left his hull-crèche and scuttled down the main cable, along the solenoid torus, and then out along the support cables like a horseshoe-crab Quasimodo, testing everything, tugging everything, scooting on reaction jets above the sail surface to check for cracks or seams or imperfections. He found nothing wrong and shuttled back to the ship with a strange and imperious zero-gravity grace.

Koros III ordered the modified Matloff/Fennelly magnetic scoop fired up and Mahnmut felt and recorded the ship’s energies changing as the device on the prow of their ship generated a scoop field radius of 1,400 kilometers, shoveling in loose ions and concentrating on gathering up the solar wind.

How long is this going to take to decelerate us enough to be able to stop at Mars? asked Mahnmut on the common line, thinking that Orphu would answer.

It was the imperious Koros III who responded. As ship velocity decreases and the effective area of the scoop increases, always keeping sail temperature from exceeding its melting point of two thousand degrees Kelvin, ship mass will equal 4 × 10 to the sixth power, and therefore deceleration from our current velocity of 0.1992 c to 0.001 c—the inelastic collision point—will require 23.6 standard years.

Twenty-three-point-six standard years ! cried Mahnmut over the common line. That was more discussion time than he had bargained for.

That would slow us only to a still-sizable velocity of 300 kilometers per second, said Koros III. One thousandth light speed is nothing to sneeze at where we’re going in-system.

Sounds like it’s going to be a hard landing on Mars, said Mahnmut.

Orphu made a rumbling, sneezing sound on the line.

The Callistan navigator came online. We’re not going to depend only upon the ion boron-sail deceleration, Mahnmut. The actual trip will take a little under eleven standard days. And our velocity upon entering Mars orbit will be less than six kilometers per second.

That’s better, said Mahnmut. He was in the control cradle of The Dark Lady, but all his familiar sensors and controls were dark. It was strange to be picking up all data other than his own life support from the larger ship’s sensors. What makes the difference?

The solar wind, said Orphu through the hull-crèche hardline. It averages about 300 km/sec out here and has an ion density of 10 to the sixth protons/m to the third power. We started with a half tank of Jovian hydrogen and a quarter tank of deuterium, and we’re going to strip more hydrogen and deuterium from the solar wind with the Matloff/Fennelly scoop and fire the four fusion engines on the bow just after passing the sun. That’s where the real deceleration is going to kick in.

I can’t wait, said Mahnmut.

Me too, said Orphu of Io. He made the rumbling, sneezing sound again. Mahnmut thought that the huge moravec had either no sense of irony or a wickedly sharp one.

Mahnmut read À la recherche du temps perdu—Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—while the ship passed some 140,000,000 kilometers above the Asteroid Belt.

Orphu had downloaded the French language in all of its classic intricacies along with the novel and biographical information on Proust, but Mahnmut ended up reading the book in five English translations because English was the lost language he had concentrated his own studies in over the past e-century and a half and he felt more comfortable judging literature in it. Orphu had chuckled at this and reminded the smaller moravec that comparing Proust to Mahnmut’s beloved Shakespeare was a mistake, that they were as different in substance as the rocky, terraformed in-system world they were headed for and their own familiar Jovian moons, but Mahnmut read it again in English anyway.

When he was finished—knowing that it had been a cursory multiple reading, but eager to start the dialogue—he contacted Orphu on tightbeam since the Ionian moravec was out of his crèche, checking the boron-sail cables again, lashed firmly to lifelines this time because of the increasing deceleration.

I don’t know, said Mahnmut. I just don’t see it. It all seems like the overwrought musings of an aesthete to me.

Aesthete? Orphu swiveled one of his communication stalks to lock in the tightbeam while his manipulators and flagella were busy spot-welding a cable connector. To Mahnmut, watching on rear video, the white welding-arc looked like a star against the black sail behind the awkward mass of Orphu. Mahnmut, are you talking about Proust or his Marcel-narrator?

Is there a difference? Even as he sent the sarcastic query, Mahnmut knew he was being unfair. He had sent Orphu hundreds—perhaps thousands—of e-mails over the last dozen e-years, explaining the difference between the Poet named “Will” in the sonnets and the historical artist named Shakespeare. He suspected the Proust, however dense and impenetrable, to be just as complex when it came to identity of author and characters.

Orphu of Io ignored that question and sent back—Admit that you loved Proust’s comic vision. He is, above almost all else, a comic writer.

Was there a comic vision? I saw little comedy in the work. Mahnmut was serious about this. It was not that the human sense of humor was alien to Mahnmut or moravecs; even the earliest spacefaring, self-evolving, only dimly sentient robots created and dispatched by the human race before the rubicon pandemic had been programmed to understand humor. Communication with human beings—real, two-way communication—had been impossible without humor. It was as human as anger or logic or jealousy or pride—all elements he had noticed and noted in Proust’s endless novel. But Proust and his protagonists as comic writers, comic characters? Mahnmut failed to see it, and if Orphu were right, it was a major oversight. It had been Mahnmut who spent decades on finding the word-play humor and satire in the Bard’s plays, Mahnmut who had ferreted out even the tiniest ironies in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Listen, said Orphu as he scuttled back along one of the taut bucky-lines to the ship, reaction jets pulsing. Read this part of “Swann in Love” again. This is where Swann, in thrall to the faithless and fickle Odette, is using all his skill as an emotional blackmailer to keep her from going to the theater without him. Listen to the humor here, my friend. He downloaded text.

“I swear to you,” he told her, shortly before she was to leave for the theatre, “that, in asking you not to go, I should hope, were I a selfish man, for nothing so much as that you should refuse, for I have a thousand other things to do this evening, and I shall feel trapped myself, and rather annoyed, if, after all, you tell me you’re not going. But my occupations, my pleasures are not everything; I must think of you also. A day may come when, seeing me irrevocably sundered from you, you will be entitled to reproach me for not having warned you at the decisive hour in which I felt that I was about to pass judgment on you, one of those stern judgments which love cannot long resist. You see, your Nuit de Cléopâtre (what a title!) has no bearing on the point. What I must know is whether you are indeed one of those creatures in the lowest grade of mentality and even of charm, one of those contemptible creatures who are incapable of forgoing a pleasure. And if you are such, how could anyone love you, for you are not even a person, a clearly defined entity, imperfect but at least perfectible. You are a formless water that will trickle down any slope that offers itself, a fish devoid of memory, incapable of thought, which all its life long in its aquarium will continue to dash itself a hundred times a day against the glass wall, always mistaking it for water. Do you realize that your answer will have the effect—I won’t say of making me cease loving you immediately, of course, but of making you less attractive in my eyes when I realise that you are not a person, that you are beneath everything in the world and incapable of raising yourself one inch higher? Obviously, I should have preferred to ask you as a matter of little or no importance to give up your Nuit de Cléopâtre (since you compel me to sully my lips with so abject a name) in the hope that you would go to it none the less. But, having decided to make such an issue of it, to draw such drastic consequences from your reply, I confessed it more honourable to give you due warning.”

Meanwhile, Odette had shown signs of increasing emotion and uncertainty. Although the meaning of his tirade was beyond her, she grasped that it was to be included in the category of “harangues” and scenes of reproach or supplication, which her familiarity with the ways of men enabled her, without paying any heed to the words that were uttered, to conclude that they would not make unless they were in love, and that since they were in love, it was unnecessary to obey them, as they would only be more in love later on. And so she would have heard Swann out with the utmost tranquility had she not noticed that it was growing late, and that if he went on talking much longer she would “never,” as she told him with a fond smile, obstinate but slightly abashed, “get there in time for the Overture.”

Mahnmut laughed out loud in the tight confines of The Dark Lady ’s pressurized control room. He saw it now. The humor was brilliant. He had read that passage the first time focusing on the human emotion of jealousy and the obvious effort of the Swann character to manipulate the behavior of the woman named Odette. Now it was . . . clear.

Thanks, he said to Orphu as the six-meter horseshoe-crab-shaped moravec settled into his hull-crèche. I think I hear the humor coming through now. I appreciate it. Everything is different than Shakespeare’s tone and language and structure, but something is—the same.

Obsession with the puzzle of what it means to be human, suggested Orphu. Your Shakespeare looks at all the facets of humanity through reaction to events, finding the deep-internal through characters defined as actions. Proust’s characters delve deep into memory to see the same facets. Perhaps your Bard is more like Koros III, leading this outward expedition. My sweet Proust is more like you, wrapped in the cocoon of The Dark Lady and diving deep, seeking the geography of reefs and the hard bottom and other living things and the whole world through echo-location.

Mahnmut thought about this for several rich nanoseconds. I don’t see how your Proust solved this puzzle—or rather, how he tried to solve it other than through immersion in memory.

Not just in memory, Mahnmut my friend, but in time.

Tens of meters away, shielded by his near-invulnerable and impenetrable double-hull of his submersible and that of of the ship carrying it, Mahnmut felt as if the Ionian had reached out and touched him in some personal—some profound—manner.

Time is separate from memory, muttered Mahnmut on their private line, speaking now mostly to himself, but is memory ever separate from time?

Precisely! boomed Orphu. Precisely. Proust’s protagonists—primarily the “I” or “Marcel” narrator, but also our poor Swann—have three chances to sniff out and put together the thick puzzle of life. Their three approaches fail but somehow the story itself succeeds, despite its narrator’s and even author’s failures!

Mahnmut thought about this for a time in silence. He switched his vision from external camera to external camera, looking away at the complexities of the ship itself and its frightening circular sail “downward” toward the rocks, toward the Belt. He willed the image to full magnification and there it was.

A solitary asteroid was tumbling against black. There was no danger of impact. Not only was their ship now 150,000,000 kilometers above the plane of the ecliptic and passing the Belt at blinding speed, but this asteroid—he queried Ri Po’s astrogation banks and identified the rock as Gaspra—was tumbling away from them. Still, it was a sizable mini-world—the overlay data said that Gaspra sized out at 20×16×11 kilometers—and the magnification, equal to a pass at about 16,000 kilometers—showed an irregular, sharpened-potato mass with a complicated pattern of cratering. More interestingly, there were obvious artificial elements in the image—straight lines gouged in the rock, gleams of light in dark craters, clear patterns of light sources on the asteroid’s flattened “nose.”

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 O2 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.

Mahnmut’s and Orphu’s love of lost-age human languages and literature was not all that unusual. More than two thousand e-years earlier, the first moravecs to be sent out to Jovian space to explore the moons and to contact the sentients known to be in the atmosphere of Jupiter were programmed by the first post-humans with elaborate full-sensory tapes of human history, human culture, and the human arts. The rubicon had already occurred, of course, and before that the Great Retreat, but there had still been some hope of saving the memory and records of the human past even if the last 9,114 old-style humans on Earth could not be saved by the final fax. In the centuries since contact had been lost with Earth, human art and human literature and human history had become the hobbies of thousands of the hardvac and moon-based moravecs. Mahnmut’s former partner, Urtzweil—who had been destroyed in an icefall under the European ice crater of Tyre Macula eighteen J-years before—had been passionate about the King James Bible. A copy of that bible still sat in the cubby under Mahnmut’s stowed work table, next to the gel-insulated lava lamp Urtzweil had given his partner as a gift.

Watching the filter-dimmed flare of the forward fusion engines on his video monitor, Mahnmut tried to connect his image of the historical Marcel Proust—a man who took to his bed for the last three years of his life, in his famous cork-lined room, surrounded by his always-arriving galley proofs, old manuscripts, and bottles of addictive potions, visited only by the occasional male prostitute and workers putting in one of the first opera-delivering telephones in Paris—with the Marcel-narrator of the exhausting work of perception that was In Search of Lost Time. Mahnmut’s memories were prodigious—he could call up the street maps of Paris in 1921, could download every photograph or drawing or painting ever done of Proust, could look at the Vermeer that caused Proust’s character to faint, could cross-check every character in the books with every real human being Proust had known—but none of this helped that much in Mahnmut’s understanding of the work. Human art, Mahnmut knew, simply transcended human beings.

Four secret paths to the truth of the puzzle of life, Orphu had said. The first—Proust’s characters’ obsession with nobility, with aristocracy, with the upper echelons of society—was obviously a dead end. Mahnmut did not have to wade through 3,000 pages of dinner parties the way Proust’s protagonist had in order to realize this.

The second, the idea of love as the key to life’s puzzle, this fascinated Mahnmut. Certainly Proust—like Shakespeare but in a completely different way—had attempted to explore all facets of human love—heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, familial, collegial, interpersonal—as well as love of places and things and of life itself. And Mahnmut had to agree with Orphu’s analysis that Proust had rejected love as a true line to deeper understanding.

The third path for Marcel had been art—art and music—but while that had led Marcel to beauty, it had not led to truth.

What is the fourth path? And if that failed for Proust’s heroes, what was the true path under and behind the pages, unknown to the characters but perhaps glimpsed by Proust himself?

All Mahnmut had to do to find out was open the line to Orphu. Lost in their own thoughts, perhaps, the two friends had communicated very little during this last day of deceleration. He’ll tell me later, thought Mahnmut. And perhaps by then I’ll see it myself . . . and see if it connects to Shakespeare’s analysis of what lies beyond love. Certainly the Bard had all but rejected sentimental and romantic and physical love by the end of the sonnets.

The fusion engines stopped firing. The release from high-g and hull-transmitted noise and vibration was almost terrifying.

Immediately the spherical fuel-engine spheres were jettisoned, small rockets carrying them away from the ship’s trajectory.

Releasing sail and solenoid came Orphu’s voice on the common line. Mahnmut watched on various hull video feeds as these components were ejected into space.

Mahnmut went back to the forward video. Mars was clearly visible now, only eighteen million kilometers ahead and below them. Ri Po provided trajectory overlays on the image. Their approach looked perfect. Small internal ion-thrusters were continuing to slow the ship and preparing to inject it into a polar orbit.

No records of radar or other sensor tracking during our descent, said Koros III. No attempt at interception.

Mahnmut thought that the Ganymedan had great dignity but also a propensity for stating the obvious.

We’re getting data through our passive sensors, said Ri Po.

Mahnmut checked the readouts. If they had been approaching—say—Europa, the displays would have shown radio, gravitonic, microwave, and a host of other technology-related emissions coming from the moravec-inhabited moon. Mars showed nothing. But the terraformed world was certainly inhabited. Already the bow-mounted telescope was able to pick up images of the white houses on Mons Olympos, the straight and curved slashes of roads, the stone heads lining the shore of the Northern Sea, and even some glimpses of individual movement and activity, but no radio traffic, no microwave relays, none of the electromagnetic signature of a technological civilization. Mahnmut remembered the phrase that Ri Po had used—idiot savants?

Prepare to enter Mars orbit in sixteen hours, announced Koros. We will observe from orbit for another twenty-four hours. Mahnmut, prepare your submersible for de-orbit burn thirty hours from now.

Yes, said Mahnmut over the common line, stifling the urge to add a “sir.”

Mars seemed quiet enough for most of the twenty-four hours they were in polar orbit around it.

There were artificial things in Stickney Crater on Phobos—mining machinery, what was left of a magnetic accelerator, broken habitation domes and robotic rovers—but they were cold and dusty and pockmarked and more than three millennia old. Whoever had terraformed Mars in the past century had nothing to do with the ancient artifacts on the inner moon.

Mahnmut had seen images of Mars when it was the Red Planet—although he always thought it more orange than red—but it was reddish-orange no longer. Coming in over the north pole, the telescopic view resolving things down to a meter in length, what was left of the polar ice cap—just a squiggle of water-ice now, all the CO2 having long since been sublimed away in the terraforming—a white island in the blue northern sea. Spirals of clouds moved across the ocean that covered more than half of the northern hemisphere. The highlands were still orangish and most of the land masses were brown, but the startling green of forests and fields were visible without using the telescope.

No one and nothing challenged the ship: no radio calls, no search or acquisition radar, no tightbeam or laser or modulated neutrino queries. As the tense minutes moved into long hours of silence, the four moravecs watched the views and prepared for the descent of The Dark Lady.

There was obviously life on Mars—human or post-human life, from the looks of it, along with at least one other species: the stone-head movers, possibly human, but short and green in the telescope photos. White-sailed ships moved along the northern coastline and up the water-filled canyons of Valles Marineris, but not many ships. A few more sails were visible on the cratered sea that had been Hellas Basin. There were obvious signs of habitation on Olympus Mons—and at least one high-tech people-mover stairway or escalator along the flanks of that volcano—and photographs of half a dozen flying machines near the summit caldera of Olympus, and a few glimpses of a few other white houses and terraced gardens on the high slopes of the Tharsis volcanoes—Ascraesus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsia Mons—but no signs whatsoever of an extensive planetary civilization. Koros III announced over the common line that he estimated no more than three thousand of the pale human-looking people lived on the four volcanoes, with perhaps twenty thousand of the green workers congregated in tent cities along the shorelines.

Most of Mars was empty. Terraformed but empty.

Hardly a danger to all sentient life-forms in the solar system, then, is it? asked Orphu of Io.

It was Ri Po who responded. Look at the planet through quantum mapping.

“My God,” Mahnmut said aloud to his empty enviro-crèche. Mars was a blinding red blaze of quantum-shift activity, with flow lines converging on the major volcano, Olympus Mons.

Could the few flying vehicles be causing this quantum havoc? asked Orphu. They don’t register on the electromagnetic spectrum and they certainly aren’t chemically propelled.

No, said Koros III. While the few flying machines move in and out of the quantum flux, they are not generating it. Or at least not the primary source.

Mahnmut looked at the bizarre quantum map overlay another minute before venturing a suggestion he’d been thinking about for days. Would it make sense to contact them via radio or another medium? Or just land openly on Olympus Mons. To come as friends rather than spies?

We have considered this course of action, said Koros. But the quantum activity is so intense that we find it imperative to gather more information before revealing ourselves.

Gather information and get these weapons of mass destruction as close to that volcano as possible, Mahnmut thought with some bitterness. He had never wanted to be a soldier. Moravecs were not designed to fight and the thought of killing sentient beings warred with programming as old as his species.

Nonetheless, Mahnmut prepared The Dark Lady for descent. He put the submersible on internal power and separated all life support umbilicals from the ship, remaining connected only through the comm cables that would be severed when they moved out of the hold. The submersible had been wrapped in ultrastealth and a reaction-pak of thrusters now girdled the bow and stern of the sub, but these would be controlled by Koros III during the entry phase, then jettisoned. The final add-on was the blister-circle of parachutes that would slow their fall after re-entry. These would also be controlled and jettisoned by Koros III. Only after they reached the ocean would Mahnmut guide his own submersible.

Preparing to come down to the submersible, called Koros III from the control deck.

Permission to board granted, replied Mahnmut, although their titular commander had not asked for permission. He was not Europan and did not know the protocols. Mahnmut saw the warning that the ship’s bay doors were opening, exposing The Dark Lady to space again so that Koros could make the transfer by guide cable.

Mahnmut flicked on the video feed from the hull where Orphu nestled. The Ionian noticed the attention. Good-bye for a while, my friend, said Orphu. We’ll meet again.

I hope so, said Mahnmut. He opened the submersible’s lower airlock and prepared to blow the last comm cables.

Wait, said Ri Po. Coming around the limb of the planet.

Control-room video showed Koros III dogging the airlock hatch he had just opened and returning to the instruments. Mahnmut removed his finger from the button arming the commline pyrotechnics.

Something was coming around the edge of Mars. Currently it was just a radar blip. The forward telescope gimbaled to acquire it.

It must have launched from Olympos when we were out of line of sight, said Orphu.

Hailing it now, said Ri Po.

Mahnmut monitored the frequencies as their ship began calling. The blip did not answer.

Do you see this? said Koros III.

Mahnmut did. The object was less than two meters long—an open chariot sans horses and surrounded by a gleaming forcefield. There were two humanoids in the open vehicle, a man and a woman, the female apparently steering it and the taller male just standing there, staring straight ahead as if he could see the stealth-wrapped ship some eight thousand kilometers away. The woman was tall and regal and blonde; the man had short gray hair and a white beard.

Orphu rumbled his laugh on the common line. It looks like pictures of God, he said. I don’t know who his girlfriend is.

As if hearing this insult, the gray-bearded man raised his arm.

The video input flared and died the same instant Mahnmut was thrown against the restraints of his high-g couch. He felt the ship shudder twice, terribly, and then begin tumbling wildly, centrifugal forces throwing Mahnmut hard to the right, then up, then to the left.

Is everyone all right? he screamed on the all-line. Can you hear me?

For several tumbling seconds the only response was silence and line-noise, then Orphu’s calm voice came through the snarl of static. I can hear you, my friend.

Are you all right? Is the ship all right? Did we fire on them?

I’m damaged and blinded, said Orphu as the static hissed and crackled. But I saw what happened before the blast blinded me. We didn’t fire on them. But the ship is—half gone, Mahnmut.

Half gone? Mahnmut repeated stupidly. What—

Some sort of energy lance. The control room—Koros and Ri Po—gone. Vaporized. All the bow gone. The upper hull is slagged. The ship is tumbling about twice per second and beginning to break up. My own carapace has been breached. My reaction jets are gone. Most of my manipulators are gone. I’m losing power and shell integrity. Get the submersible away from the ship—hurry!

I don’t know how! called Mahnmut. Koros had the control package. I don’t know . . .

Suddenly the ship lurched again and the comm and video lines were severed completely. Mahnmut could hear a violent hissing through the hull and realized that it was the ship boiling away around him. He switched on the submersible’s own cameras and saw only plasma glow everywhere.

The Dark Lady began tumbling and twisting more wildly, although whether with the dying ship or by itself, Mahnmut could not tell. He activated more cameras, the submersible’s underwater thrusters, and the damage control system. Half the systems were out or slow to respond.

Orphu? No response. Mahnmut activated the omni-directional masers, attempting a tightbeam lock. Orphu?

No response. The tumbling intensified. The Dark Lady’ s hold, pressurized for Koros’s arrival, suddenly lost all of its atmosphere, spinning the submersible more wildly.

I’m coming for you, Orphu, called Mahnmut. He blew the inner airlock door and slapped his restraint straps off. Behind him somewhere, either in the ship tearing itself apart or in The Dark Lady herself, something exploded and slammed Mahnmut violently against the control panel and then down into darkness.