Ilium

35 12,000 Meters Above the Tharsis Plateau

“What does Proust have to say about balloons?”

“Not much,” said Orphu of Io. “He wasn’t big on traveling in general. What does Shakespeare say about balloons?”

Mahnmut let that go. “I wish you could see this.”

“I wish I could see it, too,” said Orphu. “Describe everything to me.”

Mahnmut looked up. “We’re high enough here that the sky overhead is almost black, fading to dark blue, then to a lighter blue by the horizon, which is definitely curved. I can see the band of haze of atmosphere in both directions. Beneath us, it’s still cloudy—the early morning light makes the clouds glow gold and pink. Behind us, the cloud cover is broken and I can see the blue water and red cliffs of Valles Marineris stretching back to the eastern horizon. To the west, the direction we’re traveling, the clouds cover most of the Tharsis Plateau—they seem to be hugging the ground along the rising terrain—but the three closer volcanoes are poking up through the gold clouds. Arsia Mons is furthest to the left, then Pavonis Mons, then Ascraeus Mons farther over to the right, to the north. They’re all a bright white, snow and ice, gleaming in the morning light.”

“Can you see Olympus yet?” asked Orphu.

“Oh, yes. Even though it’s the farthest away, Olympus Mons is the tallest thing in sight, rising over the western curve of the planet. It’s between Pavonis and Ascraeus, but obviously further away. It’s also white with ice and snowfields, but the summit is free of snow and red in the sunrise.”

“Can you see Noctis Labyrinthus where we left the zeks?”

Mahnmut leaned over the edge of the gondola he’d built and looked below and behind them. “No, still cloud cover there. But when we were rising toward the overcast, I could see all of the quarry, the docks, and the whole tumble of Noctis. Beyond the seaport and quarry there, the jumble of canyons and cliff-collapses runs hundreds of kilometers west and scores of klicks north and south.”

It had been raining the last days of their felucca voyage, raining when they put into the crowded docks at the LGM quarry site in Noctis Labyrinthus, and raining harder when Mahnmut had finally assembled the jury-rigged gondola, inflated the balloon from its own tanks, and set out above what could only be called a city of the little green men. One of the LGM—or zeks, as they called themselves—had obviously offered his heart for communication, but Mahnmut had shaken his head no. Perhaps they didn’t die as individuals, as Orphu argued, but the sensation of using up another little green man was more than Mahnmut could handle. Instead, the gathered zeks had immediately understood what Mahnmut was doing with his homemade gondola, and they’d moved quickly to help connect tether cables, spread the fabric of the single-chamber, high-pressure balloon while it slowly inflated, and secure ground cables against the wind, all the while working as efficiently as a highly trained ground crew.

“What does the balloon look like?” asked Orphu. The deep-space moravec was tethered in the center of the enlarged gondola, strapped down by many meters of line and set into a frame Mahnmut had hammered together. Nearby, shielded and secured, were the transmitter and the smaller Device.

“It’s like a giant pumpkin above us,” said Mahnmut.

Orphu rumbled over the tightbeam. “Have you ever seen a pumpkin in real life?”

“Of course not, but we’ve both seen images. The balloon’s an orange ovoid, wider than it is tall, about sixty-five meters across and about fifty meters tall. It has vertical ridges like a pumpkin . . . and it’s orange.”

“I thought it was sheathed in stealth material,” said Orphu, sounding surprised.

“It is. Orange stealth material. I guess our moravec designers didn’t consider the fact that the people we’d be sneaking up on might have eyes as well as radar.”

This time Orphu’s rumble sounded like deep thunder. “Typical,” said the Ionaian. “Typical.”

“Our cluster of buckycarbon cables is rigged from the bottom of the balloon,” said Mahnmut. “Our gondola’s hanging about forty meters beneath the fabric.”

“Securely, I hope,” said Orphu.

“As secure as I could make it, although maybe I forgot to tie a couple of knots.”

Orphu rumbled again and went silent. Mahnmut watched the view for a while.

When Orphu made contact again, it was night. The stars burned coldly, but Mahnmut was still aware of more atmospheric twinkle than he’d ever seen in his life. The moon Phobos was hurtling low across the sky and Deimos had just risen. The clouds and volcanoes reflected the starlight. To the north, the ocean glimmered.

“Are we there yet?” asked Orphu.

“Not quite. Another day, day and a half.”

“Is the wind still blowing us in the right direction?”

“More or less.”

“Define ‘less,’ old friend.”

“We’re heading north-northwest. We may miss Olympus Mons by a shade.”

“That takes a certain skill,” said Orphu. “To miss a volcano the size of France.”

“It’s a balloon, “ said Mahnmut. “I’m sure that Koros III planned to launch it from near the base of the volcano, not from twelve hundred kilometers away.”

“Wait,” said Orphu. “I seem to remember a little detail about the Tethys Sea being just north of Olympus.”

Mahnmut sighed. “That’s why I built this new gondola in the shape of an open boat.”

“You never mentioned that while you were building it.”

“It didn’t seem relevant then.”

They floated along in silence for a while. They were approaching the Tharsis volcanoes, and Mahnmut thought they might pass the northernmost, Ascraeus, by midday tomorrow. If the wind kept shifting, they’d miss the slopes completely, passing ten or twenty kilometers to the north of it. Mahnmut didn’t even have to change his vision into light-enhancement mode to marvel at the beauty of the moons’ light and the starlight on the icy upper regions of all four volcanoes.

“I’ve been thinking about this Prospero–Caliban thing,” Orphu said suddenly, making Mahnmut jump slightly. He’d been lost in thought.

“Yes?”

“I presume you’re thinking along the same lines that I’ve been—that these statues of Prospero and the LGM’s knowledge of The Tempest are the result of some human or post-human dictator’s interest in Shakespeare.”

“We don’t even know for sure that the stone heads are supposed to be Prospero,” said Mahnmut.

“Of course not. But the LGM suggested they were, and I don’t think the zeks ever lied to us. Perhaps they can’t lie—not when communicating with you through molecular nanodata packages the way they were.”

Mahnmut said nothing, but that had been his impression as well.

“Somehow,” continued Orphu, “those thousands of stone heads circling the north ocean . . .”

“And the flooded Hellas Basin in the south,” said Mahnmut, remembering the orbital images.

“Yeah. Somehow, those thousands of stone heads have something to do with Shakespeare’s characters.”

Mahnmut nodded at this, knowing that blind Orphu would take his silence as a nod.

“What if the dictator is actually Prospero?” said Orphu. “And not a human or post-human at all?”

“I don’t understand.” Mahnmut was confused. He checked the flow of oxygen from the tanks stowed near the Device. Both he and Orphu were securely jacked in and getting full flow. “What do you mean, what if the dictator was actually Prospero? You mean some post-human was playing the role of the old magician and forgot they were role-playing?”

“No,” said Orphu. “I mean—what if it’s Prospero?”

Mahnmut felt a stab of alarm. Orphu had been battered and blinded, zapped by huge quantities of ionizing radiation, and buffeted in the spaceship’s fall into the northern sea. Perhaps his reason was going.

“No, I’m not crazy,” said Orphu, sounding disgusted. “Listen to what I’m saying.”

“Prospero is a literary character,” Mahnmut said slowly. “A fictional construct. We know about him only because of the memory banks about human culture and history that were sent along with the early moravecs two e-millennia ago.”

“Yes,” said Orphu. “Prospero is a fictional construct and the Greek gods are myths. And that their presence here is just because they’re humans or post-humans in disguise. But what if they aren’t? What if they’re really Prospero . . . really Greek gods?”

Mahnmut felt true alarm now. He had looked straight on at the terror of continuing on this mission alone should Orphu die, but he’d never considered the worse alternative of having a blinded, crippled, insane Orphu of Io as a companion on this last stage of the mission. Could he bring himself to leave Orphu behind when they landed?

“How could the gods—or whatever these people in togas and flying chariots are—not be myths or post-humans lost in role playing?” asked Mahnmut. “Are you suggesting they’re . . . space aliens? Ancient Martians who somehow weren’t noticed during the Lost Age exploration of this planet? What?”

“I’m saying what if the Greek gods are Greek gods,” Orphu said softly. “What if Prospero is Prospero? Caliban Caliban? Should we meet him, which I hope we don’t.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mahnmut. “Interesting theory.”

“God damn it, don’t patronize me,” snapped Orphu. “Do you know anything about quantum teleportation?”

“Just the theory behind it,” said Mahnmut. “And the fact that this world is riddled with active quantum activity.”

“Holes,” said Orphu.

“What?”

“They’re like wormholes. When quantum shift events are maintained like this, even for a few nanoseconds, you get a standing-wormhole singularity effect. You know what a singularity is, right?”

“Yes,” said Mahnmut, irritated now at the way his friend was talking to him. “I know the definitions of wormholes, singularities, black holes, and quantum teleportation—and I know how all those conditions, except the last one, warp spacetime. But what the hell does that have to do with gods in togas and flying chariots? These are post-humans we’re dealing with on Mars. Possibly crazy post-humans, self-evolved beyond sanity, but post-humans.”

“You may be right,” said Orphu. “But let’s look at another alternative.”

“Which is what? That fictional characters have suddenly come to life?”

“Do you know why moravec engineers gave up on developing quantum teleportation as a way to travel to the stars?” said Orphu.

“It’s not stable,” said Mahnmut. “There’s evidence of some accident on Earth fifteen hundred or so years ago. The humans or post-humans were fooling around with quantum wormholes and it didn’t work and backfired on them somehow.”

“A lot of moravec observers think that it backfired precisely because it did work,” said Orphu.

“I don’t understand.”

“Quantum teleportation is an old technology,” said the Ionian. “The old-style humans were experimenting with it way back in the Twentieth or Twenty-first Century, before the posts even evolved themselves out of the human species. Before everything went to shit on earth.”

“So?”

“So the essence of quantum teleportation was that you couldn’t send large objects—nothing much bigger than a photon, and not even that, really. Just the complete quantum state of that photon.”

“What’s the difference between the complete quantum state of something or somebody and that thing or person?” asked Mahnmut.

“Nothing,” said Orphu. “That’s the sweet part. Quantum teleport a photon or a Percheron stallion, and you get a complete duplicate of the thing on the other end. So complete a duplicate that, to all intents and purposes, it is the photon.”

“Or Percheron,” said Manhmut. He’d always enjoyed looking at images of horses. As far as the moravecs knew, real horses had been extinct on Earth for millennia.

“But even if you teleport a photon from one place to another,” continued Orphu, “the rules of quantum physics demand that the particle teleported can bring no information with it. Not even information about its own quantum state.”

“Sort of useless then, isn’t it?” said Mahnmut. Phobos had finished its fast hurtle across the Martian night sky and set behind the distant curve of the world. Deimos moved at a more stately pace.

“That’s what the humans back in the Twentieth or Twenty-first Century thought,” said Orphu. “But then the post-humans began playing with quantum teleportation. First on Earth, and then in their orbital cities or whatever those objects in near Earth orbit are.”

“And they had more success?” said Mahnmut. “But we know that something went wrong about fourteen hundred years ago, right about the time the Earth was showing all that quantum activity.”

“Something went wrong,” agreed Orphu. “But it wasn’t a failure of the quantum teleportation. The post-humans—or their thinking machines—developed a line of quantum transport based on entangled particles.”

“Spooky action at a distance,” said Mahnmut. He’d never been very interested in nuclear physics or astrophysics or particle physics—hell, in physics of any form—but he’d always enjoyed Einstein’s damning phrase attacking quantum mechanics. Einstein had owned a wicked tongue when it came to shooting down colleagues or theories he didn’t like.

“Yes,” said Orphu. The Ionian obviously didn’t enjoy getting interrupted. “Well, spooky action at a distance works on a quantum level, and the post-humans began sending larger and larger objects through quantum portals.”

“Percheron stallions?” said Mahnmut. He didn’t especially like being lectured at.

“No record of that, but the horses on Earth seem to have gone somewhere, so why not? Look, Mahnmut, I’m very serious here—I’ve been thinking about this since we left Jupiter space. Can I finish without the sarcasm?”

Mahnmut metaphorically blinked. Orphu did not sound so insane any longer, but he did sound serious . . . and hurt. “All right,” said Mahnmut. “I apologize. Go ahead.”

“We know that the post-humans accelerated their quantum research—fooling around, really—about the time we moravecs abandoned it, about fourteen hundred Earth years ago. They were punching holes in space-time left and right.”

“Excuse me,” said Mahnmut, interrupting as softly as he could. “I thought only black holes or wormholes or naked singularities could do that.”

“And quantum tunnels left activated,” said Orphu.

“But I thought quantum teleportation was instantaneous,” said Mahnmut. He was trying hard to understand now. “That it had to be instantaneous.”

“It does. With entanglement pairs, particles, or complex structures, shifting the quantum state of one member of the quantum twin-set instantly changes the quantum state of its partner.”

“Then how can there be tunnels activated if the . . . tunneling . . . is instantaneous?” said Mahnmut.

“Trust me on this,” said Orphu. “When you’re teleporting something large, say a small slice of cheese, just the amount of random quantum data being transmitted shoots the shit out of space-time.”

“How much raw quantum data would be in, say, a three-gram slice of cheese?”

“1024bits,” answered Orphu without hesitation.

“And how much in a human being?”

“Not counting the person’s memory, but just his or her atoms,” said Orphu, “1028kilobytes of data.”

“Well, that’s just four more zeros than a slice of cheese,” said Mahnmut.

“Mother of Mercy,” whined Orphu. “We’re talking orders of magnitude here. Which means . . .”

“I know what it means,” said Mahnmut. “I was just being silly again. Go on.”

“So about fourteen hundred years ago on Earth, the post-humans—it had to be the post-humans, since our probes at the time were sure that there were just a thousand or so old-style humans left, like almost-extinct-species animals being kept around in a zoo—the post-humans began quantum teleporting people and machines and other objects.”

“Where?” said Mahnmut. “I mean where did they send them? Mars? Other star systems?”

“No, you need a receiver as well as a transmitter with quantum teleportation,” said the Ionian. “They just sent them from somewhere on the Earth to somewhere else on the Earth—or in their orbital cities—but they had a big surprise when the objects materialized.”

“Does this has something to do with a fly?” asked Mahnmut. His secret vice was old movies from the Twentieth Century to the end of the Lost Age.

“A fly?” said Orphu. “No. Why?”

“Never mind. What was the big surprise they got when they teleported these things?”

“First, that the quantum teleportation worked,” said Orphu. “But more important, that when the person or animal or thing came through, it carried information with it. Information about its own quantum state. Information about everything it shouldn’t have information about. Including memory for the human beings.”

“I thought you said that the rules of quantum mechanics forbid that.”

“They do,” said Orphu.

“Magic again?” asked Mahnmut, feeling the tug of alarm at the direction Orphu was headed. “Are we talking Prospero and Greek gods here?”

“Yes, but not in the way you sarcastically mean,” said Orphu of Io. “Our scientists at the time thought that the post-humans were actually exchanging tangled pairs with identical objects . . . or persons . . . in another universe.”

“Another universe,” Mahnmut repeated dully. “As in parallel universes?”

“Not quite,” said Orphu. “Not like the old idea of an infinite or near-infinite number of parallel universes. Just a few—a very finite number—of quantum phase-shifted universes co-existing with or near our own.”

Mahnmut had no idea what his friend was talking about, but he said nothing.

“Not only co-existing quantum universes,” continued the deep-space moravec, “but created universes.”

“Created?” repeated Mahnmut. “As in God?”

“No,” said Orphu. “As in through acts of genius, by geniuses.”

“I don’t understand.”

Deimos had set. The Martian volcanoes were visible now in starlight, masses of clouds creeping up their long slopes like pale-gray amoebae. Mahnmut checked his internal chronometer. One hour until Martian sunrise. He was cold.

“You know what human researchers found when they were studying the human mind millennia ago,” said Orphu. “Back before the post-humans were even a factor. Our own moravec minds are built the same way, although we use artificial as well as organic brain matter.”

Mahnmut tried to remember. “The human scientists were using quantum computers way back in the Twenty-first Century,” he said. “To analyze biochemical cascades in human synapses. They discovered that the human mind—not the brain, but the mind—wasn’t like a computer, it wasn’t like a chemical memory machine, but was exactly like . . .”

“A quantum-state standing wavefront,” said Orphu. “Human consciousness exists primarily as a quantum state waveform, just like the rest of the universe.”

“And you’re saying that consciousness itself created these other universes?” Mahnmut followed the logic, if it could be called that, but he was shocked by the absurd implications.

“Not just consciousness,” said Orphu. “Exceptional types of consciousness that are like naked singularities in that they can bend space-time, affect the organization of space-time, and collapse probability waves into discrete alternatives. I’m talking Shakespeare here. Proust. Homer.”

“But that’s so . . . so . . . so . . .” stammered Mahnmut.

“Solipsistic?”

“Stupid,” said Mahnmut.

They floated along in silence for several minutes. Mahnmut assumed that he might have hurt his friend’s feelings, but that wasn’t important right now. After a while, he said over the tightbeam, “So are you expecting to find the ghosts of the real Greek gods when we get to Olympus Mons?”

“Not ghosts,” said Orphu. “But you saw the quantum readings. Whoever these people are on Olympus, they’ve punched quantum holes all around this world, all centered on or near Olympus. They’re going somewhere. Coming from somewhere else. The quantum reality of this area is so unstable it may actually implode, and take a chunk of our solar system with it.”

“Do you think that’s what the Device is built to do?” asked Mahnmut. “Implode the quantum fields here before they reach some critical mass?”

“I don’t know,” said Orphu. “Perhaps.”

“And do you think that’s what screwed up the Earth and sent the post-humans to their orbital cities fourteen hundred years ago there? Some quantum failure?”

“No,” said Orphu. “I think that whatever happened on Earth was a result of quantum teleportation success, not failure.”

“What do you mean?” For a brief second, Mahnmut was not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

“I think they punched quantum tunnels into one or more of these alternate realities,” said Orphu. “And they let something in.”

They floated along in silence until sunrise.

The sun touched the top of the balloon first, painting the orange fabric in unreal light and causing each buckycable to gleam. Then it reached the three Tharsis volcanoes, glinting on ice, moving goldly down the east side of each of the three volcanoes like so much slow magma. Then the sun bathed the breaking clouds in pink and gold and illuminated the Valles Marineris Inland Sea all the way to the eastern horizon like a lapis crack in the world. Olympus Mons caught the sunlight a minute later and Mahnmut watched as the great peak seemed to rise above the western horizon like some advancing galleon with sails of gold and red.

Then the sun glinted on something closer and higher.

“Orphu!” sent Mahnmut. “We have company.”

“One of the chariots?”

“Still too far away to tell. Even with vision magnification, it’s lost in the sunrise glare.”

“Anything we can do if it is the chariot people? Have you found any weapons without telling me?”

“All we have to throw at them is harsh language,” said Mahnmut, still watching the gleaming speck. It was moving very fast and would be on them soon. “Unless you want me to trigger the Device.”

“It might be a bit early for that,” said Orphu.

“It seems odd that Koros III came on this mission without weapons.”

“We don’t know what he would have brought along from the command pod,” said Orphu. “But that reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about.”

“What’s that?”

“You remember we were discussing Koros’s secret mission to the asteroid belt a few years ago.”

“Yes?” The sun was still blazing from the advancing aircraft, but Mahnmut could see that it was a chariot now, its holographic horses in full gallop.

“What if it wasn’t a spy mission?” said Orphu.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the rock moravecs have one thing we five-moons types never bothered to evolve.”

“Aggression?” said Mahnmut. “Bellicosity?”

“Exactly. What if Koros III was sent not as a spy, but as a . . .”

“Excuse me,” interrupted Mahnmut. “But our guest is here. One large humanoid in a chariot.”

Sonic booms crashed around Mahnmut, rippling the fabric of the huge balloon above. The chariot continued to decelerate. It circled the balloon once from a distance of a hundred meters.

“The same man who greeted us in orbit?” asked Orphu. His voice was perfectly calm. Mahnmut looked at the helpless shell lashed to the deck, without so much as an eye to watch what was going on.

“No,” he said. “That Greek god had a gray beard. This one is younger and clean shaven. He looks to be about three meters tall.” Mahnmut held up his hand, palm outward in the ancient sign for greeting, showing no weapon. “I think he . . .”

The chariot wheeled closer. The man at the reins held out his right hand, fist closed, and swept the fist from right to left.

The balloon exploded above them, helium venting as the fabric flamed. Mahnmut grabbed the wooden railing of the gondola to keep from being thrown out as the twisting mass of flaming fabric, buckycarbon cable, and boat-shaped gondola plunged toward the Tharsis Plateau thirteen kilometers below. The little moravec was in negative-g, feet above his head, connected to the gondola only by his fierce grip on the railing as the platform began to tumble in freefall.

The chariot with its ghostlike horses flew right at and through the flaming balloon fabric above. The man—god—reached out and grabbed the black buckycable in one huge fist. Impossibly, absurdly, instead of ripping his arm out of its socket, the gondola jerked to a stop as the man held several tons in one hand. He whipped the horses with the reins, using his other hand.

Trailing the pitching gondola and its contents forty meters below and behind it, the chariot turned and flew west toward Olympus Mons.