Ilium

17 Mars

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

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

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

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

“I wasn’t talking about you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not quite.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

“Any recognizable stars?”

“No. Just more hull ionization.”

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

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

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

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

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

“It’s possible,” grunted the Ionian.

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

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

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

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

“Good,” said Orphu. “Hang on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Radar’s gone,” said Mahnmut.

“Will your sonar work?”

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

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

“So?”

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They hit the Tethys Sea.

“Orphu? Orphu?” Mahnmut was in darkness and silence, trying to get his data feeds back on line. His enviro-niche was intact, O2 still flowing. That was amazing. His internal clocks said that three minutes had passed since impact. Their velocity was zero. “Orphu?”

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

“How are you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mahnmut hesitated.

“I’m still functioning,” continued Orphu. “Or at least still communicating. I even have O2 flowing through the umbilical and some electrical energy coming in. I must be in the hold, even if it’s flooded. Why don’t you get The Dark Lady working and drive us somewhere more comfortable before we try to get together again?”

Mahnmut went on external air and took several deep breaths. “You’re right,” he said at last. “Let’s see what’s what.”

The Dark Lady was dying.

Mahnmut had worked in this submersible, through its various iterations and evolutions, for more than an Earth century, and he knew it was tough. Properly prepared, it could take many metric tons per square centimeter of pressure and the stresses of the 3,000-g flux-tube acceleration in stride, but the tough little sub was only as strong as its weakest part, and the energy stresses of the attack in Mars orbit had exceeded those weakest-part tolerances.

Her hull had stress fractures and unmendable flash burns. At the moment, they were buried bow-down with most of the sub in more than three meters of silt and harder seabed with only a few meters of the stern free of the mud, the hull and frame were warped, the hold-bay doors were warped shut and unreachable, and ten of the eighteen ballast tanks had been breached. The internal gangway between Mahnmut’s control room and the hold was flooded and partially collapsed. Outside, two-thirds of the stealth material had burned away, carrying all of the external sensors with it. Three of the four sonar arrays were out of action and the fourth could only ping forward. Only one of the four primary propulsion jets was operable and the maneuvering pulsers were a scrambled mess.

Of greater concern to Mahnmut was the damage to the ship’s energy systems: the primary reactor had been damaged by energy surge during the attack and was operating at 8 percent efficiency; the storage cells were on reserve power. This was enough to keep a minimum of life support running, but the nutrient converter was gone for good and they had only a few days’ worth of fresh water.

Finally, the O2 converter was offline. Fuel cells weren’t producing air. Long before they ran out of water or food, Mahnmut and Orphu would be out of oxygen. Mahnmut had internal air supplies, but only enough for an e-day or two without replenishing. All Mahnmut could hope was that since Orphu worked in space for months at a time, a little thing like no oxygen wouldn’t harm him now. He decided to ask the Ionian about it later.

More damage reports came in over the sub’s surviving AI systems. Given an e-month or more in a Conamara Chaos ice dock with a score of service moravecs working on her, The Dark Lady could be saved. Otherwise, her days—whether measured in Martian sols, Earth days, or Europan weeks—were numbered.

Keeping in touch with the mostly silent Orphu on the hardline—afraid his friend would cease to exist without warning—Mahnmut gave the most positive report he could and launched a periscope buoy. The buoy was deployed from the section of the stern still above the silt line and it still worked.

The buoy itself was smaller than Mahnmut’s hand, but it packed a wide array of imaging and data sensors. Information started flowing in.

“Good news,” said Mahnmut.

“The Five Moons Consortium launched a rescue mission,” rumbled Orphu.

“Not quite that good.” Rather than download the nonvisual data, Mahnmut summarized it to keep his friend listening and talking. “The buoy works. Better than that, the communication and positioning sats Koros III and Ri Po seeded in orbit are still up there. I wonder why the . . . persons who attacked us . . . didn’t sweep them out of space.”

“We were attacked by an Old Testament God and his girlfriend,” said Orphu. “They might not deign to notice comsats.”

“I think they looked more Greek than Old Testament,” said Mahnmut. “Do you want to hear the data I’m getting?”

“Sure.”

“The MPS puts us in the southern reaches of the Chryse Planitia region of the northern ocean, only about three hundred and forty kilometers from the Xanthe Terra coast. We’re lucky. This part of the Acidalia and Chryse sea is like a huge bay. If our trajectory had been a few hundred klicks to the west, we would have impacted on the Tempe Terra hills. Same distance to the east, Arabia Terra. A few more seconds of flight time south over Xanthe Terra highlands . . .”

“We’d be particles in the upper atmosphere,” said Orphu.

“Right,” said Mahnmut. “But if we get The Dark Lady unstuck, we can sail her right into the Valles Marineris delta if we have to.”

“You and Koros were supposed to land in the other hemisphere,” said Orphu. “North of Olympus Mons. Your mission was to do recon and deliver this device in the hold to Olympos. Don’t tell me the sub is in good enough shape to carry us up and around the Tempe Terra peninsula . . .”

“No,” admitted Mahnmut. In truth, it would be an amazing stroke of luck if The Dark Lady held together and kept functioning long enough to get them to the nearest land, but he wasn’t going to tell the Ionian that.

“Any other good news?” asked Orphu.

“Well, it’s a pretty day on the surface. All liquid water as far as the buoy could see. Moderate swells of less than a meter. Blue sky. Temperature in the high twenties . . .”

“Are they looking for us?”

“Pardon me?” said Mahnmut.

“Are the . . . people . . . that slagged us looking for us?”

“Yes,” said Mahnmut. “Passive radar showed several of those flying machines . . .”

“Chariots.”

“. . . several of those flying machines crisscrossing above the sea in the several thousand square kilometers of the debris impact footprint.”

“Looking for us,” said Orphu.

“No register of radar or neutrino search,” said Mahnmut. “No energy search spectra at all . . .”

“Can they find us, Mahnmut?” Orphu’s voice was flat.

Mahnmut hesitated. He didn’t want to lie to his friend. “Possibly,” he said. “Almost certainly if they were using moravec technology, but they don’t seem to be. They’re just . . . looking. Perhaps just with eyes and magnetometers.”

“They found us in orbit easily enough. Targeted us.”

“Yes.” There was no question that the chariot or its occupants had some sort of target acquisition device that had worked well at 8,000 klicks of distance.

“Did you reel in the buoy?”

“Yes,” said Mahnmut. There were several seconds of silence except for the creak of the damaged hull, the hiss of ventilation, and the thump and hum of various pumps working in vain to clear the flooded sections. “We have several things going for us,” Mahnmut said at last. “First, there are tons and tons of metal debris from the spacecraft in this footprint, and it’s a long footprint. The first impacts weren’t that far south of the polar cap.

“Second, we’ve settled in bow first, and the only section of the sub above the silt line, the stern, still has some tatters of loose stealthwrap on it. Third, we’re powered down to the point that we have almost no energy signature at all. Fourth . . .”

“Yes?” said Orphu.

Mahnmut was thinking of the dying power supply, the dwindling reserves of air and water, and the doubtful propulsion system. “Fourth,” he said, “they still don’t know why we’re here.”

Orphu rumbled softly. “I don’t think we do either, old friend.” After a minute of no communication, Orphu said, “Well, you’re right. If they don’t find us in the next few hours, we may have a chance. Or is there any other bad news?”

Mahnmut hesitated. “We have a slight problem with our air supply,” he said at last.

“How serious a problem?”

“We’re not producing any.”

“Well, that is a problem,” said the Ionian. “How much in reserve?”

“About eighty hours. For two of us, that is. Certainly twice that, probably more, if it’s just for me.”

Orphu rumbled slightly over the intercom. “Just for you? Are you planning on stepping on my air hose, old friend? My organic parts need air too, you know.”

For a second Mahnmut couldn’t speak. “I thought . . . you’re a hardvac moravec . . . I mean . . .”

“You’re thinking that I spend long months in space without topping off from the Io tender,” sighed Orphu. “I produce my own oxygen from the internal fuel cells, using the the photovoltaics on my shell to power them.”

Mahnmut felt his pulse slow. Their chances of survival had just gone up if Orphu did not need ship’s air.

“But my shell photovoltaics are blasted to hell,” Orphu said softly, “and the fuel cells haven’t been producing O2 since the attack. I’m surviving on the ship’s supply. I’m sorry, Mahnmut.”

“Look,” Mahnmut said quickly, strongly. “I was planning to keep the air running to both of us anyway. It’s not a problem. I did the numbers—we have about eighty hours at our present consumption rate. And I can lower that. This whole control room and enviro-niche of mine is flooded. I’ll pour it back in and parcel it out. Eighty hours easy, and then we’ll come up for air. Their search should be over by then.”

“Are you sure you can get The Dark Lady out of the mud?” asked Orphu.

“Absolutely positive,” lied Mahnmut, voice firm.

“I vote we lie doggo in the seabed for . . . say . . . three sols, three Martian days, seventy-three hours or so, to see if their chariot search is really called off. Or twelve hours after our last radar contact with them. Whichever comes first. Will that give us enough time to get out of the mud and to the surface, plus leave some oxygen and energy to spare?”

Mahnmut looked at his virtual wall of red alarm and non-function lights. “Seventy-three hours should be plenty of extra time,” he said. “But if they go away sooner than that, we should get to the surface and head for the coast. The Lady can do about twenty knots on the surface with the reactor at this level, so it’ll take the better part of the day and a half to get to land anyway, especially if we’re picky about where to put in.”

“We’ll just have to avoid being picky,” said Orphu. “All right, it looks like the only thing we have to worry about for the next couple of days is boredom. Shall we play poker? Did you bring the virtual cards?”

“Yes,” said Mahnmut, brightening.

“You wouldn’t rob a blind moravec, would you?” said Orphu.

Mahnmut stopped in the process of downloading the green baize card table.

“I’m kidding, for Christ’s sake,” said Orphu. “My visual nodes are gone, but I still have memory and parts of my brain left. Let’s play chess.”

Three sols was 73.8 hours and Mahnmut did not want to stay in the seabed that long. The reactor was losing power faster than he’d estimated—the pumps were draining more energy than he’d planned on—and all the life support was flirting with failure.

During their first sleep period, Mahnmut went on internal power, took pry bars and cutting equipment, and descended the narrow crawlways and corridors to the hold. The interior spaces were flooded, the vertical gangway without power and pitch black. Mahnmut activated his shoulder lamps and swam lower. The water here was much warmer than Europa’s sea. Beams and girders had crumpled, blocking the last ten meters of the approach. Mahnmut cut them away with the torch. He had to check on Orphu’s condition.

Two meters from the airlock to the hold, Mahnmut was stopped cold. The impact had buckled the aft bulkhead, pressing it almost flat against the forward bulkhead. The already narrow corridor had been squashed into a space less than ten centimeters across. Mahnmut could see the hatchway to the hold—closed, dogged, and twisted—but he couldn’t reach it. He would have to cut his way through one or both of the thick pressure bulkheads and then probably use the torch to cut through the hatch itself. It would be a six- or seven-hour job and there was a basic problem—the torch ran on oxygen, just as he and Orphu did. Whatever he gave the torch came out of their air supply.

For several minutes, Mahnmut floated head-down in the darkness, silt floating in front of his lenses in the twin beams from his shoulder lamps. He had to decide now. Once Orphu awoke and realized what he was doing, the Ionian would try to talk him out of it. And logic dictated that he be talked out of it. Even if he got through the bulkheads in six or seven hours, Orphu had been correct—Mahnmut wouldn’t be able to move the huge moravec while they were still embedded in the seabed. Even first aid would be limited to the kits and system inputs that Mahnmut kept onboard for himself—they might not even work with the huge hardvac moravec. If Mahnmut could really get The Dark Lady free of the silt and to the surface, that would be the best time for Mahnmut to get to Orphu—even if he had to cut through the hull bay doors or outer hull. O2 would be plentiful then. And he could remove Orphu if he had to, find a way to lash him to the upper hull, in the sunlight and air.

Mahnmut kicked his way around and swam upward in the tilted and torn corridor, letting himself through the airlock into his personal space again. He stowed the cutting equipment. Later.

He was no sooner in his acceleration couch again when Orphu’s voice came over the comm. “You awake, Mahnmut?”

“Yes.”

“Where are you?”

“At the controls. Where else would I be?”

“Yes,” said Orphu, his deep voice sounding weary and old on the hardline. “But I was dreaming. I thought I felt a vibration. I thought you might be . . . I don’t know.”

“Go back to sleep,” said Mahnmut. Moravecs slept, if only to dream. “I’ll wake you for the buoy check in two hours.”

Mahnmut would deploy the periscope buoy for a few seconds every twelve hours, quickly scan the skies and gentle seas, and reel it back in. Flying machines were still crisscrossing the skies day and night at the end of the first forty-nine hours, but further north, nearer the pole.

Mahnmut was fairly comfortable. His control room and connecting enviro-niche was undamaged, warm, and tilted only slightly bow-down. He could move about if he wished. Several of the other habitable chambers had been flooded—including the science lab and Urtzweil’s former cubby—but although the pumps soon cleared these spaces, Mahnmut didn’t bother flooding them with air. In fact, the first thing he had done after their initial conversation was to hook into his O2 umbilical and drain his enviro-niche and control room. He told himself it was to save the oxygen, but he knew that part of the reason was that he felt guilty being so comfortable in his cozy niches when Orphu was in pain—existential pain at least—and floating in the flooded darkness of the hold. There was nothing Mahnmut could do about that yet—not with three-fourths of the damaged sub embedded in the ocean floor—but he went into the vacuum-filled science lab and cobbled together comm units and other things he’d need if he ever managed to free the Ionian.

And free myself, thought Mahnmut, although being separated from The Dark Lady did not seem like freedom to him. All deep-sea Europan cryobots had carried the kernel of agoraphobia in them—true terror of open spaces—and their evolved moravec descendents had inherited it. On the second day, after their eighth chess game, Orphu said, “The Dark Lady has some sort of escape device, doesn’t it?”

Mahnmut had hoped that Orphu wouldn’t know this fact. “Yes,” he said at last.

“What kind?”

“A little life bubble,” said Mahnmut, in a foul mood for having to talk about this. “Not much bigger than me. Mostly meant to survive deep pressures and get me to the surface.”

“But it has a beacon, its own life support system, some sort of propulsion and navigation systems? Some water and food?”

“Yes,” said Mahnmut, “what of it?” You wouldn’t fit in it and I can’t tow you behind it.

“Nothing,” said Orphu.

“I hate the idea of leaving The Dark Lady,” Mahnmut said truthfully. “And I don’t have to think about it now. Not for days and days.”

“All right,” said Orphu.

“I’m serious.”

“All right, Mahnmut. I was just curious.”

If Orphu had rumbled amusement at him at that moment, Mahnmut might well have crawled into the survival bubble and cast off. He was furious at the Ionian for raising this topic. “Want to play another game of chess?” Mahnmut asked.

“Not in this lifetime,” said Orphu.

At sixty-one hours after splashdown, there was only one chariot visible to radar, but it was circling just eight klicks above them and ten to the north. Mahnmut reeled in the periscope buoy as quickly as he could.

He sat listening to music over the intercom—Brahms—and, down in his flooded hold, Orphu presumably was doing the same.

Suddenly the Ionian asked, “Ever wonder why we’re both humanists, Mahnmut?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, humanists. All moravecs evolved into either us humanists with our odd interest in the old human race, or the more interactive types like Koros III. They’re the ones who forge moravec societies, Five Moon Consortiums, political parties . . . whatever.”

“I never noticed,” said Mahnmut.

“You’re kidding me.”

Mahnmut stayed silent. He was beginning to realize that in almost a century and a half of existence, he had managed to stay ignorant of almost everything important. All he knew were the cold seas of Europa—which he would never see again—and this submersible, which was hours or days away from ceasing to exist as a functioning entity. That and Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays.

Mahnmut barely resisted laughing on the hardline. What could be more useless?

As if reading his mind again, Orphu said, “What would the Bard say about this predicament?”

Mahnmut was scanning the energy data and the consumable readouts. They couldn’t wait the seventy-three hours. They would have to try to break free in the next six hours or so. And even then, if they weren’t able to pull themselves free right away, the reactor might cease functioning altogether, overload, and . . .

“Mahnmut?”

“I’m sorry. Dozing. What about the Bard?”

“He must have something to say about shipwrecks,” said Orphu. “I seem to remember lots of shipwrecks in Shakespeare.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mahnmut. “Lots of shipwrecks. Twelfth Night, The Tempest, the list goes on and on. But I doubt if there’s anything in the plays to help us in this situation.”

“Tell me about some of the shipwrecks.”

Mahnmut shook his head in the vacuum. He knew that Orphu was just trying to take his mind off current realities. “Tell me about your beloved Proust,” he said. “Does the narrator Marcel ever say anything about being lost on Mars?”

“He does, actually,” said Orphu with the slightest hint of a rumble.

“You’re joking.”

“I never joke about À la recherche du temps perdu,” said Orphu in a tone that almost, not quite, convinced Mahnmut that the Ionian was serious.

“All right, what does Proust say about surviving on Mars?” said Mahnmut. In five minutes he was going to deploy the periscope buoy again and bring them up even if the chariot was hovering ten meters overhead.

“In Volume Three of the French edition, Volume Five of the English translation I downloaded to you, Marcel says that if we suddenly found ourselves on Mars and grew a pair of wings and a new respiratory system, it would not take us out of ourselves,” said Orphu. “Not as long as we have to use our same senses. Not as long as we’re stuck in our same consciousnesses.”

“You’re kidding,” said Mahnmut.

“I never kid about the character Marcel’s perceptions in À la recherché du temps perdu,” Orphu said again in a tone that told Mahnmut that he was kidding all right, but not about that particular odd Mars reference. “Didn’t you read the editions I sent you at the beginning of the voyage in-system?”

“I did,” said Mahnmut. “I really did. I just sort of skipped over the last couple of thousand pages.”

“Well, that’s not uncommon,” said Orphu. “Listen, here’s a passage that comes after the growing wings and new lungs on Mars bit. Do you want it in French or English?”

“English,” Mahnmut said quickly. This close to a terrible death from suffocation, he didn’t want the added torture of listening to French.

“ The only true voyage, the only Fountain of Youth,” recited Orphu, “would be found not in traveling to strange lands but in having different eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another person, of a hundred others, and seeing the hundred universes each of them sees, which each of them is.”

Mahnmut actually forgot about their imminent asphyxiation for a minute as he thought about this. “That’s Marcel’s fourth and final answer to the puzzle of life, isn’t it, Orphu?”

The Ionian stayed quiet.

“I mean,” continued Mahnmut, “you said that the first three failed for Marcel. He tried believing in snobbery. He tried believing in friendship and love. He tried believing in art. None of it worked as a transcendent theme. So this is the fourth. This . . .” He could not find the right word or phrase.

“Consciousness escaping the limits of consciousness,” Orphu said quietly. “Imagination outstripping the bounds of imagination.”

“Yes,” breathed Mahnmut. “I see.”

“You need to,” said Orphu. “You’re my eyes now. I need to see the universe through your eyes.”

Mahnmut sat in the umbilical O2 hiss silence for a minute. Then he said, “Let’s try to take The Dark Lady up.”

“Periscope buoy?”

“To hell with them if they’re up there waiting. I’d rather die fighting than choke to death in the mud down here.”

“All right,” said Orphu. “You said ‘try’ to take the Lady up. Is there some doubt that you can get us out of the slime?”

“I have no fucking idea if we can break free of this stuff,” said Mahnmut, flicking virtual switches with his mind, powering the reactor up into the red, arming the thrusters and gyros. “But we’re going to give it a good try in . . . eighteen seconds. Hang on, my friend.”

“Since my grapplers, manipulators, and flagella are gone,” said Orphu, “I presume you mean that rhetorically.”

“Hang on with your teeth,” said Mahnmut. “Six seconds.”

“I’m a moravec,” said Orphu, sounding slightly indignant. “I don’t have any teeth. What were you . . .”

Suddenly the comm line was drowned out by the firing of all the thrusters, the booming of bulkheads creaking and giving way, and a great moaning sound as The Dark Lady fought to break free of Mars’ slimy grip.