“Why are you talking about fathers?” she asked.
He looked at her as they strolled farther down the hill, deeper into the sequoia forest. The shade was almost gloomy here, although shafts of light slanted down here and there through the cathedral hush. “Something Savi said to me this morning,” he said. “Something about me being old enough to be your grandfather. About me going after this quest to find the firmary—and getting involved with you—as a sort of denial of my Final Twenty.”
Ada’s first response was anger, followed immediately by a stab of jealousy. The anger was at Savi’s stupid remark—it was none of the old woman’s business who Ada slept with or how old he was; the jealousy came from the fact that Harman had left their bed that morning at sunrise to go down and talk to Savi. Ada had simply kissed him good-bye when he’d slipped out of bed, soniced and dressed that morning, feeling some disappointment that her new lover did not want to spend another hour with her before they all had to rise for breakfast, but respecting his choice, imagining that he was just an early riser from old habit.
But what was so important that he had to leave her at dawn to go talk to Savi? Wasn’t he planning to spend the next several days with Savi in his stupid quest for a spaceship? In fact, realized Ada, Savi was taking her place in that quest.
She studied Harman’s face—so much younger looking than Odysseus’ shocking crow’s feet and gray hair—and saw that he hadn’t noticed her flash of anger and jealousy. Harman was still preoccupied, obviously mulling over his own thoughts, and Ada wondered if his attention and sensitivity to her the last few days—culminating in their wonderful lovemaking last night—were aberrations, just part of a pre-lude to sex, and not his usual demeanor. She didn’t think so, but she didn’t know. Was all this closeness she’d been feeling with Harman an illusion, something she’d generated out of her infatuation with him?
“Do you know how you choose to get pregnant?” asked Harman, still poking the ground distractedly with his walking stick.
Ada stopped in shock. That question was . . . astounding.
Harman stopped and looked at her as if he had said nothing unusual. “I mean, do you know how the mechanism works?” he said, still seemingly oblivious to how inappropriate his question was. Men and women simply did not discuss such things.
“If you’re going to lecture me on the birds and the bees,” Ada said stiffly, “it’s a bit late.”
Harman laughed easily. Over the past couple of weeks, that laugh had enchanted Ada. Now it irritated the hell out of her.
“I don’t mean the sex, my dear,” he said. Ada noticed that it was the first time he’d used an endearment with her, but she was in no mood to appreciate it. “I mean when you receive permission to get pregnant, perhaps decades from now—and choose the sperm donor.”
Ada was blushing and the fact that she couldn’t stop blushing made her angry. She blushed more deeply. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
She did, of course. It was men who weren’t supposed to know or discuss such things. Most women decided to apply for pregnancy around their Third Twenty. Usually the waiting period was one to two years before permission was granted—relayed from the post-humans through servitors. At that point, the woman would cease sexual intercourse, take the prescribed pregnancy uninhibitor, and decide which of her former mates would be the sperm-father of her child. Pregnancy ensued within days and the rest was as ancient as . . . well, humankind.
“I’m talking about the mechanism by which you decide which stored sperm-packet is chosen by your body,” continued Harman. “The real old-style human females didn’t have that choice . . .”
“Nonsense,” snapped Ada. “We are the old-styles. It’s always been this way.”
Harman shook his head slowly, almost sadly. “No,” he said. “Even in Savi’s day, just fourteen hundred years ago, pregnancy was more of a slapdash thing. She says that this sperm-storage and selection mechanism was something the posts built into us—into women—based on some borrowed genetic structure from moths.”
“Moths!” said Ada, no longer simply shocked but truly, deeply angry now. This was as absurd as it was demeaning. “What the hell are you talking about, Harman Uhr?”
His head snapped up and he seemed to notice her reaction for the first time, as if her retreat to the formal honorific had been a slap in the face bringing him back to reality.
“It’s true,” he said. “I’m sorry if I upset you, but Savi says that the posts genetically structured this ability to choose father-sperm years after intercourse from the genes of a moth species named . . .”
“Enough!” shouted Ada. Her hands were balled into fists. She’d never struck anyone in her life, or wanted to, but at this moment she was close to swinging at Harman. “Savi says this, Savi says that. I’ve had enough of that old bitch. I don’t even believe she is that old . . . or wise. She’s just crazy. I’m going back to the sonie.” She walked off into the woods.
“Ada!” called Harman.
She ignored him, walking uphill, slipping on needles and wet humus.
“Ada!”
She strode on, ready to leave him behind.
“Ada, that’s the wrong direction.”
Hannah had caught up with Odysseus a few hundred yards from the glade. He whirled and put his hand on the hilt of his sword when he heard her crashing through the brush, but relaxed when he saw who it was.
“What do you want, girl?”
“I want to see your sword,” said Hannah, brushing her dark hair back from her face.
Odysseus laughed. “Why not?” He unclipped the leather sheath from his belt and handed over the weapon. “Be careful with the edges, girl. I could shave with this blade, if I ever chose to shave.”
Hannah drew the short sword and hefted it tentatively.
“Savi tells me that you work with metals,” said Odysseus. He bent to a stream, cupped his hand, sipped. “She says that you may be the only person, male or female, in all this brave new world, who knows how to forge bronze.”
Hannah shrugged. “My mother remembered old tales about forging metal. She played with fire and open hearths when she was younger. I continue the experiments.” She swung the sword overhand, chopping down.
“You’ve seen us fight in your turin cloth,” said Odysseus.
Hannah nodded. “So?”
“You’re using the sword properly, girl. Hacking rather than stabbing. This tool is made for severing limbs and spilling guts, nothing more refined.”
Hannah grimaced and handed the weapon back. “Is this the sword you used on the plains of Ilium?” she asked softly. “And in your adventure to steal the Pallodian?”
“No.” He lifted the blade vertically until some of the light spilling down between the high branches danced on its surface. “This particular sword was a gift to me, from . . . a female . . . during my travels.”
Hannah waited for more explanation, but instead of telling another story, Odysseus said, “Would you like to see what makes this sword different?”
Hannah nodded.
Odysseus used his thumb to tap at the hilt guard twice, and suddenly the sword seemed to shimmer slightly. Hannah leaned closer. Yes, there was a subtle but persistent hum coming from the blade. She lifted one hand toward the metal but Odysseus’ hand shot out quickly, grabbing her wrist.
“If you touched it now, girl, you’d lose all your fingers.”
“Why?” She didn’t struggle to pull her wrist away, and after a few seconds Odysseus released it.
“It’s vibrating,” said Odysseus, holding the sword blade flat just below eye level. Hannah noticed again that she was exactly the same height as Odysseus. The night before, she had heard him in the green bubble hall on the bridge after the others had turned in, joined him for a walk, returned to his domi to talk for hours, and had gone to sleep on the floor next to his cot. Hannah knew that Ada thought they’d become lovers; she didn’t mind and couldn’t think of a reason to disabuse her
friend of the notion.
“It’s almost as if it’s singing,” said Hannah, turning slightly better to hear the high-pitched hum.
Odysseus laughed loudly at this, although Hannah didn’t know why. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It wasn’t tossed to me by some Lady of the Lake, although that’s not too far from the truth of it.” He laughed again.
Hannah looked at the bearded man. She had no clue as to what he was talking about. She wondered if he did. “Why does it vibrate?” she asked.
“Stand back,” said the barrel-chested man.
Most of the sequoia around them were six to ten feet thick, some thicker, but a smaller pine—perhaps a ponderosa or Douglas fir—was growing in a sunny patch a few yards to their left. The tree was probably thirty or forty years old, about fifty feet tall, with a trunk perhaps eighteen inches thick.
Odysseus planted his feet, gripped the sword in one hand, and swung idly at the trunk in an effortless backhand stroke.
The blade moved so smoothly through its arc that it appeared that he’d missed completely. There was no noise of impact. A few seconds later, the tall pine tree shivered, shifted, and fell noisily to the ground.
Odysseus thumbed the hilt again and the faint vibration hum ceased.
Hannah stepped closer to inspect the chest-high stump and the fallen tree. The trunk sections looked as if they had been surgically separated, not sawed. She laid her palm on the top of the severed stump. There was no sap, no shavings. The wood was so smooth it felt as if it had been sealed in plastic, cauterized somehow. She turned back to Odysseus.
“That must have come in handy during the siege of Troy,” she said.
“You weren’t listening, girl,” said Odysseus. He slipped the weapon back in its sheath and strung it to his broad belt. “This was a gift some years after I’d left the war and begun my travels. If I’d had this at Ilium . . .” Odysseus grinned horribly. “There wouldn’t be a Trojan, god, or goddess left with a head on his or her shoulders, girl. I promise you that.”
Hannah found herself grinning back at the old man. They weren’t lovers—not yet—but Hannah was planning to stay at Ardis Hall while Odysseus was visiting there, and who knew what might happen?
“There you are,” said Savi, striding down the slope toward them. She closed her fist and what looked like a palm finder-field blinked out.
“Time to go on?” asked Odysseus, speaking to Savi but glancing toward Hannah as if they were old conspirators.
“Time to go on,” said Savi.
26
Between Eos Chasma and Coprates Chasma in East-Central Valles Marineris
Three weeks into the voyage west up the river—inland sea, really—of Valles Marineris, and Mahnmut was close to losing his moravec mind.
Their felucca, crewed by forty little green men, was just one of many ships plying their way east or west in the flooded rift valley or north-south up or down the estuary opening onto the Chryse Planitia Sea of the Northern Tethys Ocean. In addition to a score of other LGM-crewed feluccas, they had passed at least three 100-meter-long barges each day, each hauling four great, uncarved stones for heads, all headed east from the cliff quarry on the south side of Noctis Labryinthus at the west end of Valles Marineris, still some 2,800 kilometers ahead of Mahnmut’s west-bound felucca.
Orphu of Io had been rolled aboard and secured on the lower mid-deck, hidden from aerial view by a raised tarp, tied down next to the major pieces of cargo and other items recovered from The Dark Lady. Even the thought of his submersible—left behind in the shallow sea cavern along the Chryse Planitia coastline some 1,500 kilometers behind them—depressed Mahnmut.
Until this voyage, Mahnmut hadn’t known that he was capable of depression—capable of feeling such a terrible emotional malaise and sense of hopelessness that could leave him with almost no will and even less ambition—but the violent separation from his sub had shown him just how low he could feel. Orphu—blinded, crippled, hauled aboard like so much useless ballast—seemed in good spirits, although Mahnmut was learning how carefully and rarely his friend showed his true feelings.
The felucca had arrived, as promised, early that next Martian morning after their arrival on the coast, and while the LGM were man-hauling poor Orphu aboard, Mahnmut had gone down into the flooded sub several times, pulling out all the removable power units, solar cells, communication equipment, log disks, and all the navigation gear that he could haul.
“You swam naked out to the wreck and stuffed your pockets with biscuits before swimming back, eh?” Orphu had said that morning after Mahnmut told him about the salvage efforts.
“What?” Mahnmut wondered if the battered Ionian had finally lost his mind.
“Little continuity error in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe,” rumbled Orphu. “I always enjoy continuity errors.”
“I never read it,” Mahnmut said. He was in no mood for banter. Leaving The Dark Lady behind was tearing him apart.
They discussed his reaction during the first three weeks of their voyage, since they had little to do aboard the felucca except discuss things. The short-range radio receiver transmitter that Mahnmut had grafted onto Orphu’s commline jack worked well.
“You’re suffering from agoraphobia as much as from depression,” said Orphu.
“How so?”
“You were designed, programmed, and trained to be part of the sub, hidden under Europan ice, surrounded by darkness and crushing depths, comfortable in your tight spaces,” said the Ionian. “Even your short forays on the ice surface of Europa didn’t prepare you for these vast vistas, distant horizons, and blue skies.”
“The sky’s not blue right now,” was all that Mahnmut said in response. It was early morning, and, like most mornings, Valles Marineris was filled with low clouds and thick fog. The LGM had furled the felucca’s sails and were moving ahead by oars alone—thirty of the little green men rowed, fifteen on a side, seemingly indefatigable—whenever the wind didn’t move the two-masted, lateen-rigged sailing ship. Lanterns glowed on the bow, forward mast, both sides, and stern, and the felucca was barely moving. This section of the Valles Marineris was more than 120 kilometers wide and the section they would soon be entering would be 200 kilometers across—an inland sea rather than river, where, even on clear days, the high cliffs of the north or south banks of the waterway would be invisible in the distance—but there was enough LGM ship traffic along these channels to justify such caution in the fog.
Mahnmut realized that Orphu was right—that agoraphobia was part of his problem, since he felt the depression most acutely on the clear days where the views were unlimited—but he also knew that it was more complicated than being separated from the secure crèche and sensory jacks of his ship. Mahnmut was—had always been—a sea captain, and he knew from his own history programming and later reading that nothing hurt captains more than the loss of their ships. On top of that, he’d been tasked with an important mission—delivering Koros III to the oceanward base of Olympus Mons—and he had failed miserably. Koros III was dead, as was Ri-Po, the moravec who should be waiting in orbit to receive, interpret, and relay Koros’s important reconnaissance data.
To whom? How? When? Mahnmut didn’t have a clue.
They talked about that as well during their weeks of quiet voyaging. It was even quieter at night, since the LGM went into hibernations as soon as the sun set, securing the felucca with a complicated sea anchor—Mahnmut had done echo soundings and determined that the water under them was more than six kilometers deep—and not stirring again until sunlight touched their green, transparent skin the next morning. It seemed obvious that the LGM gained energy solely through sunlight, even from the diffused light through morning fog. Certainly Mahnmut had never seen any of the little green men eat or secrete anything. He could ask them, but even though Orphu hypothesized that the individual LGM did not really “die” after communication—that the little green men were an aggregate consciousness rather than an assembly of real individuals—Mahnmut did
not trust the hypothesis enough to reach into another little green person’s chest, grip what could be his heart, and ask questions that might be deferred until another day.
But Mahnmut had no reservations about asking Orphu questions.
“Why did they send us?” he asked on their tenth day. “We don’t understand the mission and aren’t suited to carry it out even if we did know what we’re supposed to do. It was madness to send us here this ignorant.”
“Moravec administrators are used to compartmentalizing duties and assigning specialties,” said Orphu. “You were the best they could find to drive Koros III to the volcano. I was the best moravec they could get to service the spacecraft. They never considered the possibility that you and I would be the team left to do the work of the other two.”
“Why not?” said Mahnmut. “They must have known that the mission would be dangerous.”
Orphu rumbled softly, “Probably they thought that if was all or nothing—that we’d all die if worse came to worst.”
“We almost did,” muttered Mahnmut. “We probably will.”
“Describe the day,” said Orphu. “Has the fog lifted yet?”
The days and the scenery and the nights were beautiful. Mahnmut’s knowledge of breathable-atmosphere worlds came exclusively from his data bank records of Earth, and this terraformed Mars was an interesting variation.
The skies varied from a bright light blue at midday to a pink-red sky at sunset that sometimes shifted hues toward a pure gold light that infused everything with radiance. The sun itself looked significantly smaller than the sun seen from Earth in old video-records, but it was immensely larger and brighter and warmer than any sun known by Galilean moravecs in the last two thousand e-years. The breeze was soft and smelled of salt sea and—sometimes, shockingly—of vegetation.