Again he breathed air, felt sunlight on his polymer and skin, and stood on The Dark Lady’s hull as hundreds of the little green men rigged the cables through a system of cliff-side pulleys and pulled. And pulled again.
The submersible creaked, the hull groaned, silt surrounded them, and The Dark Lady rolled another thirty degrees to starboard and twisted around until the belly of the ship was in the air and the stern was pointed toward the beach. The alloy bay doors bent but did not open.
Mahnmut attacked the doors with his powered pry bar again. The tortued and twisted metal would not relent. His acetylene torch was out of O2 and energy.
The little green men gently pulled him away from his fruitless labors. Mahnmut pulled free and stumbled across the slippery hull toward the hold again, intent on prying at the warped and jammed doors until his own energy cells died, but then he saw that the LGM weren’t finished with their efforts.
They knotted and spliced cable, turning the fifty stands into one. Then they ran the lengthened cable up the cliff face and through a series of oversized pulleys connected to a latticework of support rods they had somehow driven into the stone. Finally, they ran the cable to the huge stone head and wrapped the ends around the figure’s neck a dozen times before tying it off.
Five of the little green men came over and pushed Mahnmut into the water, pulling him away from the sub.
Mahnmut could not believe what he was seeing. He had assumed that the great stone faces were sacred to the little green men, their positioning and raising along the coast a religious or psychological imperative calling for all of their time, energy, and devotion, the stone heads their only priority. Evidently he was wrong.
Hundreds of the green figures wrestled the head around on its pallet, got behind it, shoved, and pushed it off the cliff.
The stone head—its face to the cliff now—fell sixty meters, striking rocks at the base of the cliff and shattering into a dozen pieces, but the cable whirred on pulleys, rods popped out of stone, and the tied-off ends ripped the hold-bay doors off and threw them twenty meters into the air before dragging the torn metal up the cliff and back down again.
Hundreds of little green men swam for the sub, but Mahnmut reached it first, flicking on his searchlights again.
There were the three objects he’d left in the hold, including the large Device they were supposed to deliver to Mons Olympus. And tucked into the crèche, battered and torn and silent, was Orphu of Io.
Mahnmut used the last power in his pry bar to rip free the arresting flanges and tie-downs. Orphu’s great bulk sagged free, sloshing in seawater. But the bay was opened skyward now, the sub on its back, and there was no way that Mahnmut could ever get the Ionian out of the partially flooded pit the storage bay had become.
A dozen more little green men jumped into the space with Mahnmut, found grasping points on Orphu’s pitted and cracked carapace, and forced green arms and legs under the hard-vac moravec’s ungainly shape. Together, they found leverage and lifted. Working silently, never slipping or dropping him, they lifted Orphu out, gently wrapped more cables around him, slid him across the curve of The Dark Lady’s hull, lowered him to the water, set buoyant rollers under him, lashed them together into a raft, and gently propelled the Ionian’s body to the beach.
The little green men—at least a thousand strong on the beach now—stood back and gave Mahnmut room as he worked to find out if Orphu was dead or alive. The Ionian lay inert on the red-sand beach like some storm-battered, oversized trilobite washed ashore in one of Earth’s dim prehistoric ages.
Checking the skies for flying chariots that Mahnmut was sure were overdue, he emptied his backpack and waterproof bags of the gear he’d salvaged from The Dark Lady. First, he laid out five of the small but heavy power cells, connected them in series, and ran the cable to one of Orphu’s surviving input connectors. There was no response from the big Ionian, but the virtual indicator showed that the energy was flowing somewhere. Next, Mahnmut crawled up the curve of Orphu’s carapace—marveling at seeing the physical damage clearly for the first time here in the strong morning light—and screwed the radio receiver into the hardline socket. He tested the connection—receiving a carrier wave hum—and activated his own microphone.
“Orphu?”
No response.
“Orphu?”
Silence. The scores of little green men looked on impassively.
“Orphu?”
Mahnmut spent five minutes at the task, calling once every twenty seconds, using all comm frequencies and rechecking the receiver’s connections. The comm unit was receiving his transmission. It was Orphu who was not responding.
“Orphu?”
There wasn’t silence, exactly. From his external pickups, Mahnmut could hear more ambient noise than he’d ever encountered in his life: the lap of waves against the sand, the hiss of wind against the cliff behind him, the soft stir of the little green men shifting position from time to time, and the thousand nuances of vibrations in such a thick planetary atmosphere. It was just the commline and Orphu that were dead.
“Orphu?” Mahnmut checked his chronometer. He had been at it for more than thirty minutes. Reluctantly, in slow motion, he slid down off his friend’s carapace, walked fifteen paces down the beach, and sat in the wet sand where the water rolled in. The little green men made way for him and then surrounded him again at a respectful distance. Mahnmut looked at them—at the wall of tiny green bodies, expressionless faces, and unblinking black eyes.
“Don’t you all have work to do?” he asked, his voice sounding strange and choked to his own auditory inputs. Perhaps it was the acoustics of the Martian atmosphere.
The LGM did not move. The stone head was smashed into rubble of at the base of the cliff, but the little green men ignored it. A score of cables still ran out to the submersible where it lay inert in the low, rolling surf.
Mahnmut felt a sudden and immeasurably deep wave of loss and homesickness roll over him. He’d had three close relationships in his three Jovian decades—more than three hundred Martian years—of existence. First, The Dark Lady, which had been only a semi-sentient machine, but for which he’d been designed and in which he fit perfectly; the Lady was dead. Second, his exploration partner, Urtzweil, killed 18 J-years ago, half of Mahnmut’s lifetime ago. Now Orphu.
Now here he was hundreds of millions of kilometers from home, alone, unfit, untrained, and unprepared for this mission they’d sent him on. How was he supposed to get the 5,000 or so kilometers to Olympus Mons to plant the Device? And what if he did? Koros III may have known what to do there, what this mission was really about, but lowly Mahnmut, late of The Dark Lady, didn’t have a fucking clue.
Quit feeling sorry for yourself, idiot, he thought. Mahnmut glanced at the LGM. It surely must be an illusion that they seemed downcast, even sad. They hadn’t mourned the death of one of their own, how could they show that emotion at the end of a moravec, a sentient machine they’d never imagined?
Mahnmut knew that he would have to communicate with the little green men again, but he hated the thought of reaching into one of the creatures’ chests, of killing it through communication. No, he wouldn’t do that until he had to.
He stood, returned to Orphu’s corpse, and began disconnecting the power cells.
“Hey,” said Orphu on the commband, “I’m still eating.”
Mahnmut was so startled he actually jumped backward in the sand. “Jesus, you’re alive.”
“As much as any of us moravecs are ‘alive.’ “
“God damn you,” said Mahnmut, feeling like laughing and crying, but mostly like hitting the big, battered horseshoe crab. “Why didn’t you answer me when I called? And called? And called?”
“What do you mean?” said Orphu. “I was in hibernation. Have been ever since the air and energy ran out on The Lady. You expect me to chat with you while I’m in hibernation?”
“What is this hibernation shit?” said Mahnmut, pacing around Orphu. “I never heard
of moravecs going into hibernation.”
“You Europan vecs don’t have it?” asked Orphu.
“Obviously not.”
“Well, what can I say? Working alone in Io’s radiation torus, or anywhere in Jovian space, we hardvac moravecs sometimes run into situations where we just have to shut down everything for a while until someone can get to us to repair and recharge us. It happens. Not often, but it happens.”
“How long could you have stayed in this . . . hibernation?” asked Mahnmut, his anger shifting into something like giddiness.
“Not long,” said Orphu. “About five hundred hours.”
Mahnmut extended fingers through his manipulator pads, picked up a rock, and bounced it off Orphu’s shell.
“Did you hear something?” asked the Ionian.
Mahnmut sighed, sat in the sand near the end of Orphu that used to house his eyes, and began describing their current situation.
Orphu convinced Mahnmut that he’d have to communicate with the LGM through a translator again. The Ionian hated the idea of causing the death of one of the little green men as much as Mahnmut did—especially since the LGM had rescued him—but he argued that the mission depended on them communicating and communicating fast. Mahnmut had tried talking again, had tried sign language, had tried drawings in the sand—showing maps of the coast where they were and the volcano they had to get to—had even tried the idiot’s version of speaking a foreign language: shouting. The LGM all stared calmly but did not respond. Finally it was a little green man who took the initiative, stepping forward, seizing Mahnmut’s hand, and pulling it to his chest.
“Shall I?” Mahnmut asked Orphu over the commline.
“You have to.”
Mahnmut winced as his hand was pulled through the yielding flesh, as his fingers encircled and then gripped what could only be a beating green heart in the warm, syrupy fluid of the little man’s body.
HOW
CAN
WE
HELP
YOU?
Mahnmut had a hundred questions he wanted to ask, but Orphu helped him put first things first.
“The sub,” said Orphu. “We have to get it out of sight before a chariot flies over.”
Through a combination of language and images, Mahnmut conveyed the thought of moving the submersible a kilometer or so to the west, of pulling it into the ocean-cave in the cliff that jutted out to sea at the headland.
YES
Scores of the little green men began work even while Mahnmut stood there, his hand deep in the translator’s chest. They began sinking rods into the sand, running more cables to The Dark Lady, and rigging pulleys. The translator waited with Mahnmut’s hand around his heart.
“I want to ask him about the stone heads,” said Mahmut over the commline. “Ask him who they are, why they’re doing this.”
“Not until we try to find a way to get to Olympus,” insisted Orphu.
Mahmut sighed and communicated the request for help in getting to the large volcano. He transmitted images of Olympus Mons as he’d seen it from orbit and asked if there was anyway the LGM could help them travel either overland over the Tempe Terra highlands or east along the Tethys coast for more than four thousand kilometers, then south along the Alba Patera coast to Olympus Mons.
THAT
IS
NOT
POSSIBLE
“What does he mean?” asked Orphu when Mahnmut relayed the response. “Does he mean it’s not possible to help us, or to travel east that way?”
Mahnmut had felt something like relief when the LGM translator had all but pronounced their mission over, but now he forwarded Orphu’s request for clarification.
NOT
POSSIBLE
FOR
YOU
TO
TRAVEL
EAST
SECRETLY
BECAUSE
THE
DWELLERS
ON
OLYMPOS
WOULD
SEE
YOU
AND
KILL
YOU
“Ask him if there’s another way,” said Orphu. “Maybe we could go overland along the Kasei Valles.”
NO
YOU
WILL
GO
TO
THE
NOCTIS
LABYRINTH
BY
FELUCCA
“What’s a felucca?” asked Orphu when Mahnmut relayed the answer. “It sounds like an Italian dessert.”
“It’s a two-masted, lateen-rigged sailing ship,” said Mahnmut, whose training for the black underseas of Europa had included everything available in download about sailing the liquid seas of Earth. “Used to ply the Mediterranean millennia ago.”
“Ask them when we can leave,” sent Orphu.
“When can we leave?” asked Mahmut, feeling the question as a vibration through his fingers and a tickling in his mind.
THE
STONE
BARGE
ARRIVES
IN
THE
MORNING.
THE
FELUCCA
WILL
BE
WITH
IT.
YOU
CAN
LEAVE
ON
IT.
“We’ll need some other things salvaged from our submersible,” said Mahnmut. He sent the images of the Device and the two other pieces of cargo in the hold, visualized it being brought ashore and transported to the sea cave. Then he sent the image of LGM rolling Orphu to the same cave.
As if in response, dozens of the little green men began to wade and paddle back out to the ship. Others walked closer to Orphu and began arranging the rollers into an Orphu-sized pallet.
“I don’t think I can hold this man’s heart any longer,” Mahnmut said to Orphu over the comm. “It’s like grabbing a live electric wire.”
“Let go then,” said the Ionian.
“But . . .”
“Let go.”
Mahnmut thanked the translator—thanked all of them—and released his grip. Just as with the first translator, this little green man fell to the sand, twitched, hissed, dried out, and died.
“Oh, God,” whispered Mahnmut. He leaned back against Orphu’s shell. The little green men were already lifting the Ionian’s bulk, sliding rollers under him.
“What are they doing?”
Mahnmut described the translator’s body and the work all around him—their preparation to transport Orphu and the Device and other objects already being hauled in from the ship, the cables being attached to the sub, the hundreds of LGM pulling at the cables from the shore, already dragging The Dark Lady west toward the ocean cave where it would be safe from airborne eyes.
“I’ll go with you to the cave,” Mahnmut said dully. The translator’s body was like a dry, shriveled brown husk on the red sand. All of the interior organs had dried up and the fluid had flowed out of it, making the mud under it run like red blood. The other little green men ignored the translator’s corpse and were already beginning to roll Orphu along the sand toward the west.
“No,” said Orphu. “You know what you have to do.”
“I already described the faces to you when I saw them from the sea.”
“That was at night, through the periscope buoy,” said Orphu. “We need to look at one or two of them in the daylight.”
“The one at the base of the cliff is in pieces,” said Mahnmut, feeling like whining. “The next one is a full kilometer to the east. Way up on the cliffs.”
“You go ahead,” said Orphu. “I’ll stay in touch on comm while they trundle me off to the cave. You’ll be able to see how they handle The Lady during most of your walk.”
Mahnmut grudgingly complied, walking east, away from the crowd of LGM pulling his dead sub along the coast and rolling Orphu toward the cool shadow of the sea cave.
The fallen head was in to
o many pieces to make out its features. Mahnmut struggled up the steep trail that the little green men had descended with such apparent effortlessness. The path was narrow and frighteningly steep and wet-sandstone-slick.
At the top, Mahnmut paused a second to recharge his cells and to look around. The Tethys Sea stretched out as far as he could see to the north. To the south, inland, red stone gave way to low red hills and—several klicks further south—Mahnmut could make out the green of forests of shrubs on the foothills. There was some grass along the path he followed east along the edge of the cliff.
Mahnmut paused to look at the pad and prepared hole for the face the little green men had sacrificed in shoving off the cliff to pry open the hold-bay doors. It had been prepared carefully and Mahnmut could see how the stem at the base of the great stone heads’ necks slid down into the hole in the stone and then locked in place. These little green men were craftsmen and skilled stone workers.
Mahnmut walked east. He could see the next head along the eastern horizon. The moravec was not designed for walking—his role was mostly to sit in an exploration submersible, sometimes to swim—and when he grew tired of being a biped, he altered the workings of his joints and spine and padded along like a dog for a while.
When he reached the next stone head he paused by its broad base, seeing how the stone at the neck had been filled in with something like cement. He looked east at the path the rollers and thousands of LGM had created along the cliff top, and west to where the green mob had pulled the sub and pushed Orphu almost to the headland cave.
“There yet?” came Orphu’s voice.
“Yes. Leaning against the thing.”
“How about the face?”
“This is a bad angle from beneath,” said Mahnmut. “Mostly lips and chin and nostrils.”
“Get out on the beach again. These faces are meant to be seen from the sea for some reason.”
“But . . .” began Mahnmut, looking down at the steep cliff dropping at least a hundred meters away to the sand. There was a faint path on the greasy rock, just as at the other site. “If I break my neck getting down there,” he sent, “it’s your damned fault.”
“Understood,” said Orphu. “I can feel the vibration as they move me along here, but I have no idea how close we are to the cave. Can you see?”