“Excuse me,” said Mahnmut. “I’m just a submersible driver, no navigator or engineer, but I don’t see how we’re going to drop our speed anyway given the weak deceleration we’re getting from the ion-drive engines. Did we have something special in store for the last bit of braking?”
“Aerobraking,” said the many-limbed bulky little Callistan, Cho Li.
Mahnmut laughed at the image of the Queen Mab—all three hundred nine meters of bulky, girdered, crane-festooned, nonaerodynmic bulk of her—aerobraking through the Earth’s atmosphere and then realized that Cho Li hadn’t been joking.
“You can aerobrake this thing?” he said at last.
Retrograde Sinopessen skittered forward on his spidery silver legs. “Of course. We had always planned to aerobrake. The sixty-meter-wide pusher plate with its ablative coating retracts and morphs slightly to serve very nicely as a heat shield. The plasma field around us during the maneuver should not be prohibitive—we can even maser comm through it if we so choose. Our original plans were for a mild aerobraking maneuver at an altitude of one hundred and forty-five kilometers above Earth sea level with several passes to regulate our orbit—the difficult part will be passing through the busy artificial p-and e-rings, since they have nothing comparable to the debris-cleared F-ring Cassini Gap around Saturn—but those computations were easy enough. We just have to dodge like a sumbitch. Now, since we seem to have been ordered to make a command appearance at the lady’s asteroid-city on the p-ring, we plan to dip to thirty-seven kilometers and burn off velocity much more quickly, establishing the proper elliptical orbit for rendezvous on the first attempt.”
Orphu whistled.
Mahnmut tried to visualize it. “We’ll be dropping to within a hundred-some thousand feet of the surface? We’ll be able to see individual faces on the humans below.”
“Not quite,” said Asteague/Che. “But it will be more dramatic than we had planned. We’ll definitely leave a streak in their sky. But the old-style humans down there are probably too distracted right now to notice a streak in their sky.”
“What do you mean?” asked Orphu of Io.
Asteague/Che transmitted the most recent series of photographs. Mahnmut described the elements that Orphu could not get through the accompanying datametrics.
More images of slaughter. Human communities destroyed, human bodies left out for carrion crows. Infrared imagery showed hot buildings and cold corpses and the motion of equally cold humped and headless creatures who were doing the killing. Fires burned where homes and modest cities had been on the night side of the planet. All over the planet, the old-style humans seemed to be under attack by the gray-metallic headless creatures which the moravec experts could not identify. And on four continents, the blue-ice structures were multiplying and growing and now images appeared of a single, huge creature looking like a human brain with eyes, only the brain the size of a warehouse, then video—vertical images looking almost straight down on the thing scuttling on what looked like gigantic hands with more stalklike arms protruding like ganglia. Obscene proboscises extruded from feeding orifices and seemed to be drinking or feeding from the earth itself.
“I see the data,” said Orphu, “but I’m having trouble visualizing the creature. It can’t possibly be that ugly.”
“We’re looking at it,” said General Beh bin Adee, “and we’re having trouble believing what we’re seeing. And it is that ugly.”
“Is there any theory,” asked Mahnmut, “about what that thing is or where it’s from?”
“It’s associated with the blue-ice sites, originally seen at the former city of Paris and the largest blue-ice complex,” said Cho Li. “But that’s not what you mean. We simply don’t know its origins.”
“Have moravecs ever seen an image of anything like that in all our centuries of observing the Earth through telescopes from Jupiter space or Saturn space?” asked Orphu.
“No.” Asteague/Che and Suma IV spoke at the same time.
“The brain-hands-creature doesn’t travel alone,” said Retrograde Sinopessen, bringing up another series of holographic images and flat-plate projections. “These things are with it at every one of the eighteen sites we’ve seen the brain.”
“Humans?” asked Orphu. The data was confusing.
“Not quite,” said Mahnmut. He described the scales, fangs, overly long arms, and webbed feet of the forms in the images.
“And according to the datametrics, there are hundreds of those things,” said Orphu of Io.
“Thousands,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “We’ve looked at images taken simultaneously at sites thousands of kilometers apart and counted at least thirty-two hundred of the amphibian-looking forms.”
“Caliban,” said Mahnmut.
“What?” Asteague/Che’s softly inflected voice sounded puzzled.
“On Mars, Prime Integrator,” said the little Europan. “The Little Green Men talked about Prospero and Caliban…from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The stone heads, you remember, were supposed to be images of Prospero. They warned us about Caliban. The thing looks and sounds like some versions of Caliban in the staging of that play over the centuries on Earth.”
None of the moravecs had anything to say about that.
“There are eleven new Brane Holes on Earth since we began measuring this spike of quantum activity two weeks ago,” Beh bin Adee said at last. “As far as we can tell, the brain-creature has generated—or at least is using—all of them for transport purposes. It and the scaled, amphibious-looking things you call Caliban. And there is a pattern to where they appear.”
More holographic images misted into solidity above the chart table and Mahnmut described them on tightbeam, but Orphu had already absorbed the accompanying data.
“All battlegrounds or sites of ancient historical human massacres or atrocities,” said Orphu.
“Precisely,” said General Beh bin Adee. “You notice that the city of Paris was the first Brane quantum opening. We know that more than twenty-five hundred years ago, during the EU Empire’s Black Hole Exchange with the Global Islamic Surinate, more than fourteen million people died in and around Paris.”
“And the other Brane Hole sites here fit that category,” said Mahnmut. “Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Waterloo, HoTepsa, Stalingrad, Cape Town, Montreal, Gettysburg, Khanstaq, Okinawa, the Somme, New Wellington—all bloodied historical sites from millennia ago.”
“Do we have some sort of Calabi-Yau traveling intermemBrane tourist Brain here?” asked Orphu.
“Or something worse,” said Cho Li. “The neutrino and tachyon beams rising from the spots this…thing…visits carry some sort of complex coded information. The beams are interdimensional, not directional in our universe. We just can’t tap into the beams to decode the messages or content.”
“I think the brain is a ghoul,” said Orphu of Io.
“Ghoul?” asked Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
Orphu explained the term. “I think it’s sucking up some sort of dark energy from those places,” said the big Ionian.
“That hardly seems likely,” chirped Retrograde Sinopessen. “I know of no recordable…energy…left behind by the mere event of violent action. That is metaphysics…nonsense…not science.”
Orphu shrugged four of his multiple articulated arms.
“Do you think the large brain creature might be something the post-humans or old-styles designed and biofactured during the dementia years after rubicon?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “And the Caliban-creature and headless robotic killer things as well? All artifacts from wildcat RNA engineers? Like some of the anachronistic plant and animal life reintroduced to the planet?”
“Not the big thing,” said the tall Ganymedan, Suma IV. “We would have seen it before this. The brain creature with the hands came through Brane Holes from another universe just a few days ago. We don’t know where the Caliban things came from, or the humpbacked creatures that are decimating the old-style humans. They might well be artifacts of gen
etic manipulation. We have to remember that the post-humans designed themselves right out of the human gene pool more than fifteen hundred standard years ago.”
“And I’ve seen the holos of dinosaurs and Terror Birds and saber-toothed cats roaming this Earth,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo.
“The humpbacked metallic things have killed up to ten percent of the old-style population?” asked Mahnmut, who was a stickler for the proper use of that word “decimate.”
“They have,” said General Beh bin Adee. “Probably more. And just since we’ve been in transit from Mars.”
“So what do we do now?” asked Orphu of Io. “Although if no one has an immediate answer, I have a suggestion.”
“Go ahead,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
“I think you should defrost the thousand rockvec soldiers we have in cold storage, fire up the dropship and the dozen atmospheric hornets you have onboard, load them to the gunwales with troopers, and get into the fight.”
“Get into the fight?” repeated the navigator Callistan, Cho Li.
“Start by nuking that brain creature into radioactive pus,” said Orphu. “Then get moravec boots on the ground and defend the humans. Kill those Calibans and the headless-humped things that are killing humans everywhere. Get into the fight.”
“What an extraordinary suggestion,” said Cho Li in a shocked voice.
“We hardly have enough information to decide on a course of action at this point,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “For all we know, the brain creature—as we so respectfully call it—may be the only peaceful, sentient organism on Earth. Perhaps it’s some sort of interdimensional archaeologist or anthropologist or historian.”
“Or ghoul,” said Mahnmut.
“Our mission was to carry out surveillance,” said Suma IV in tones that were meant to be final. “Not start a war.”
“We can do both things for the price of one,” said Orphu. “We have the firepower aboard the Queen Mab to make a difference in whatever is going on down there. And although you haven’t officially told Mahnmut or me, we know there must be a host of more modern stealthed moravec warships following the Mab. This could be a wonderful opportunity to hit that thing—all those things—and coldcock them before they even know they’re in a fight.”
“What an extraordinary suggestion,” repeated Cho Li. “Absolutely extraordinary.”
“Right now,” said Asteague/Che in that odd James Mason voice that Mahnmut remembered from flatfilms, “our goal is not to start a war, but to deliver Odysseus to the Phobos-sized asteroid city in the polar ring as per the request of the Voice.”
“And before that,” said Suma IV, “we have to decide whether to go ahead with the dropship mission under cover of the aerobraking maneuver, or to wait until after rendezvous with the Voice’s orbital city and delivery of our human passenger.”
“I have a question,” said Mahnmut.
“Yes?” Prime Integrator Asteague/Che was also a Europan, thus almost the same size as the diminutive Mahnmut. The two stared visor-plate to visor-plate while the administrator waited.
“Does our human passenger want to be delivered to the Voice?” asked Mahnmut.
There was a silence broken only by the hum of ventilators, comm reports to and from those ’vecs monitoring instruments, and the occasional bang of attitude thrusters from the hull.
“Good heavens,” said Cho Li. “How could we have overlooked asking him?”
“We were busy,” said General Beh bin Adee.
“I’ll ask him,” said Suma IV. “Although it will be embarrassing at this point if Odysseus says no.”
“We have his garments all prepared,” said the skittering Retrograde Sinopessen.
“Garments?” rumbled Orphu of Io. “Is our son of Laertes a Mormon?”
No one responded. All moravecs had some interest in human history and society—it had been programmed into their evolving DNA and circuits to keep such an interest—but very few were as immersed in human thinking as the huge Ionian. Nor had the others evolved such an odd sense of humor.
“Odysseus obviously has been wearing clothing of our design while he’s been aboard the Queen Mab,” chirped Retrograde Sinopessen. “But the clothing he will wear during the rendezvous with the Voice’s orbital asteroid will have every sort of nano-sized recording and transmission device we could conceive of. We will all monitor his experience in real time.”
“Even those of us who are going down to Earth on the dropship?” asked Orphu.
There was an embarrassed silence. Moravecs were not given to frequent embarrassment, but they were capable of it.
“You were not chosen for the dropship crew,” Asteague/Che said at last in his clipped but not unpleasant tones.
“I know,” said Orphu, “but I think I can convince you that the drop-ship mission must be launched during the Mab’s aerobraking and that I have to be on board. The little corner of the hold on Mahnmut’s sub will serve me just fine as my passenger space. It has all the connections I need and I like the view.”
“The submersible bay has no view,” said Suma IV. “Except via video link, which might be interrupted if the dropship were to come under attack.”
“I was being ironic,” said Orphu.
“Also,” said Cho Li, making a noise like a small animal clearing its throat, “you are—technically, optically—blind.”
“Yes,” said Orphu, “I’ve noticed. But beyond proper affirmative-action hiring practices—never mind, it’s not worth the time to explain—I can give you three compelling reasons why I have to be included on the dropship mission to Earth.”
“We haven’t concluded that the mission itself should occur,” said Asteague/Che, “but please proceed with your reasons for being included. Then we Prime Integrators must make several decisions in the next fifteen minutes.”
“First of all, of course,” rumbled Orphu, “there’s the obvious fact that I will be a splendid ambassador to any and all sentient races we meet after landing on Earth.”
General Beh bin Adee made a rude sound. “Is that before or after you nuke them into radioactive pus?” he asked.
“Secondly, there is the less obvious but still salient fact that no moravec on this ship—perhaps no moravec in existence—knows more about the fiction of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and George Marie Wong—as well as the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman—than I do, therefore and ergo, no moravec knows more about human psychology than I do. Should we actually speak to an old-style human, my presence will be indispensable.”
I didn’t know you also studied Joyce, Faulkner, Wong, Dickinson, and Whitman, tightbeamed Mahnmut.
It never came up, answered Orphu. But I’ve had time to read out there in the hard vacuum and sulfur of the Io Torus over the last twelve hundred standard years of my existence.
Twelve hundred years! tightbeamed Mahnmut. Moravecs were designed for a long life span, but three standard centuries was generous for the average ’vec’s existence. Mahnmut himself was less than one hundred fifty years old. You never told me you were that old!
It never came up, transmitted Orphu of Io.
“I did not quite follow all the logical connections there in the verbal part before you tightbeamed your friend,” said Asteague/Che, “but pray continue. I believe you said that you had three compelling reasons why you should be included.”
“The third reason I deserve a chair on the dropship,” said Orphu, “figuratively speaking, of course, is that I’ve figured it out.”
“Figured what out?” asked Suma IV. The dark buckycarbon Ganymedan wasn’t visibly checking his chronometer, but his voice was.
“Everything,” said Orphu of Io. “Why there are Greek gods on Mars. Why there’s a tunnel through space and time to another Earth where Homer’s Trojan War is still being fought. Where this impossibly terraformed Mars came from. What Prospero and Caliban, two characters from an ancient Shakespearean play, are doing waiting for us on
this real Earth, and why the quantum basis for the entire solar system is being screwed up by these Brane Holes that keep popping up…everything.”
56
The woman who looked like a young Savi was indeed named Moira, although in the next hours Prospero sometimes called her Miranda and once he smilingly referred to her as Moneta, which added to Harman’s confusion. Harman’s embarrassment, on the other hand, was so great that nothing could add to it. For their first hour together, he could not look in Moira’s direction, much less look her in the eye. As Moira and he ate what amounted to breakfast as Prospero sat at the table, Harman finally managed to look in the woman’s direction but couldn’t raise his gaze to her eye level. Then he realized that this probably seemed as if he was staring at her chest, so he looked away again.
Moira seemed oblivious to his discomfort.
“Prospero,” she said, sipping orange juice brought to them by a floating servitor, “you foul old maggot. Was this key to my awakening your idea?”
“Of course not, Miranda, my dear.”
“Don’t call me Miranda or I’ll start calling you Mandrake. I am not now, nor was I ever, your daughter.”
“Of course you are and were my daughter, Miranda, my dear,” purred Prospero. “Is there a post-human alive whom I did not help become what they are? Were not my genetic sequencing labs your womb and your cradle? Am I therefore not thy father?”
“Is there another post-human alive today, Prospero?” asked the woman.
“Not to my knowledge, Miranda, dear.”
“Then fuck you.”
She turned to Harman, sipped coffee, sliced at an orange with a frighteningly sharp knife, and said, “My name is Moira.”
They were at a small table in a small room—a space more than a room—that Harman had not noticed before. It was an alcove set within the booklined wall halfway up the inside of the great inward-curving dome, at least three hundred feet above the marble-walled maze and floor. It was easy to understand why he hadn’t seen the space from below—the walls of this shallow alcove were also lined with books. There had been other alcoves along the way up, some holding tables like this one, others containing cushioned benches and cryptic instruments and screens. The iron stairways, it turned out, moved like escalators or it would have taken much longer for the three of them to climb this high. The exposure—there were no railings and the narrow marble walkways and the wrought-iron escalator steps were more air than iron—was horrifying. Harman hated to look down. He focused on the books instead and kept his shoulders against the shelves as he walked.