“Holy shit,” said Mahnmut, meaning to send the comment just to Orphu of Io, but managing to broadcast to all three of his colleagues.
“Indeed,” responded Ri Po.
Jupiter’s broiling polar lights—the brilliant auroral oval surrounding the gas giant’s north pole, accompanied by Io’s blazing footprint where the flux tube met atmosphere—flashed beneath them and disappeared astern.
Ganymede, which had been a million kilometers away across the system a few seconds before, zoomed toward them, flicked past, and was lost to sight behind them.
“Uruk Sulcus,” said Koros III on the common band and for a moment Mahnmut thought the command-moravec was choking or cursing before he noted the slightly sentimental tone to his usually cool voice and realized that Koros must have been referring to some region on Ganymede itself—a half-glimpsed grooved and dirty snowball flashing past—that must be home to the Ganymedan.
The tiny moon Himalia, which none of the crew had visited—nor cared to—whipped by like a firefly with its hair on fire.
“We’ve passed through the bow shock front,” reported Ri Po in his flat Callistan accent. “Out of the local pond for the first time, at least for this moravec.”
Mahnmut glanced at his screens. Ri Po’s readout reported that they were fifty-three Jupiter diameters out now and still accelerating. Mahnmut had to check unused memory banks and see that Jupiter had a diameter of almost 142,000 kilometers before he got a sense of their speed. The ship was arcing above the plane of the ecliptic, but Mahnmut vaguely remembered that the plan was for the sun’s gravity to hook them back down toward Mars, which was on the far side of the sun at the moment. At any rate, navigation wasn’t his concern. His job would begin when they landed in the ocean of Mars, and sailing there seemed simple enough—rich sunlight, warm temperatures, shallow depths with no pressure to speak of, stars to navigate by at night, geo-positioning satellites that they’d drop into orbit so they could navigate during the day, almost no radiation compared to the surface on Europa. No kraken! No ice. No ice! It all seemed too simple.
Of course, if the post-humans were hostile, there was a good chance that the moravecs would not survive the trip to Mars or the atmospheric entry, and even they did, there was a high probability that they could never return to their homes in Jupiter space, but there was nothing Mahnmut could do about any of that now. His thoughts began to turn back to Sonnet 127.
“Everyone all right?” asked Koros III.
Everyone reported in that they were fine. It took more than a few thousand gravities sitting on their respective chests to get this crew down. Morale was high.
Ri Po began reporting some other navigational and spacefaring facts, but Mahnmut wasn’t really paying attention. He was already caught up in the gravity field of Sonnet 127, the first of the “Dark Lady” sonnets.
8
Ardis
Daeman slept well and dreamt of women.
He found it slightly amusing, if not odd, that he dreamt of women only when he was not sleeping with one. It was as if he required warm female flesh next to him every night, and his subconscious supplied them when his daily efforts failed. As he awoke, late, in his comfortable room at Ardis Hall, the dream fled in fragments and tatters, but enough remained—along with usual morning erection—to bring back a vague memory of Ada’s body, or someone very much like Ada—warm, white-skinned, perfumed, with full buttocks and round breasts and solid thighs. Daeman looked forward to the weekend’s coming conquest and had little doubt this lovely morning that he would succeed.
Later, showered, shaved, dressed impeccably in what he considered rural casual—white-and-blue-striped cotton trousers, wool serge vest, pastel jacket, white silk shirt and ruby cravat stone, carrying his favorite wood walking cane and wearing black leather shoes a slight bit more sturdy than his usual formal slipper-pumps—he breakfasted in the sunlit conservatory and learned, to his satisfaction, that Hannah and that Harman person had left early that morning. “Preparing for the evening’s pour” was Ada’s cryptic explanation and Daeman did not have sufficient interest to ask for clarification. He was just glad the man was gone.
Ada did not bring up conversational absurdities such as books or spaceships, but spent the late morning with him, serving as guide, reacquainting him with Ardis Hall’s many wings and gabled corridors, its elaborate wine cellars and secret passages and ancient attics. He remembered a similar tour on his first visit there and the feckless girl-Ada leading him up a rickety ladder to the rooftop jinker platform and Daeman, alert as ever to such revelations, had half glimpsed a young man’s heaven up her hoisted skirt as she climbed above him: he perfectly remembered the milky thighs and dark, stippled shadows there.
This morning they climbed the same ladder to the same jinker platform, but this time Ada gestured him ahead, only smiling at his gentlemanly protests that she go first, the smile suggesting some vixen memory of the event he had thought had gone unnoticed by her at the time.
Ardis Hall was a tall manor and the jinker platform, its mahogany planks still gleaming, thrust out between gables to an overhang sixty feet above the gravel drive where voynix stood like rusted upright scarabs. Daeman stayed back from the unrailed edge, but Ada ignored the exposure and walked right to the brink, gazing wistfully at the long lawn and distant line of forest.
“Wouldn’t you give anything to have a working jinker?” she said. “Even if just for a few days?”
“No. Why would I?”
Ada gestured with her long-fingered hands. “Even with just a child’s jinker you could fly over the forest and river, over those hills to the west, fly on for days and days away from here, away from any faxport.”
“Why would anyone want to do that?”
Ada looked at him for a moment. “You’re not curious? About what’s out there?”
Daeman tapped at his vest as if brushing away crumbs. “Don’t be absurd, my dear. There’s nothing of interest out there . . . pure wilderness . . . no people. Why, everyone I know lives within a few miles of a faxport. Besides, there are Tyrannosaurus rexes out there.”
“A tyrannosaurus? In our forest?” said Ada. “Nonsense. We’ve never seen one here. Who told you that, cousin?”
“You did, my dear. The last time I visited, half a Twenty ago.”
Ada shook her head. “I must have been teasing you.”
Daeman thought about this, about his years of anxiety over the thought of ever visiting Ardis again, about his tyrannosaurus nightmares over the years, and could only scowl.
Ada seemed to read his thoughts and smiled slightly. “Did you ever wonder, Cousin Daeman, why the posts decided to keep our population at one million? Why not one million and one? Or nine hundred thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine? Why one million?”
Daeman blinked at this, trying to see the connection in her thoughts between talk of a Lost Age child’s jinker and dinosaurs and the human population that had been the same . . . well . . . forever. And he didn’t like her reminding both of them that they were cousins, since old superstitions sometimes inhibited sexual relations between family members. “I find that such idle speculations lead to indigestion, even on such a beautiful day, my dear,” he said. “Shall we return to a more felicitous topic?”
“Of course,” said Ada, blessing him with the sweetest of smiles. “Why don’t we go down and find some of the other guests before lunch and our trip to the pour site?”