Daeman must have considered that question rhetorical; he did not answer.
“I have spoken to post-humans,” Savi said quietly.
This carried the others into silence. They waited silently. Such an idea was—at least to Harman and Ada—literally breathtaking.
“But that was a long time ago,” the old woman said, speaking so softly that the other leaned closer to hear. “A long, long time ago. Before the final fax.” Her eyes, a startling gray-blue a second before, now looked clouded, distracted.
Harman shook his head. “I was the one who heard the story about you—the Wandering Jew, the last of your Lost Age—but I don’t understand. How can you live beyond your Fifth Twenty?”
Ada blinked at Harman’s rudeness, but Savi did not seem to mind. “First of all, this hundred-year life span is a relatively recent addition to humankind, my dears. It is something the posts came up with only after the final fax. Only after they botched everything—our future, the Earth’s future—in that disastrous final fax. Only centuries after my nine thousand one hundred and thirteen post-rubicon fellow humans were faxed into the neutrino stream—never to be returned, although the posts promised them they would be—only after that . . . genocide . . . did your precious post-humans rebuild the core population of your ancestors and come up with this idea of one hundred years and a theoretical herd population of a million people . . .”
Savi stopped and took a breath. She was obviously agitated. She took another breath and gestured to the pitchers on the table. “I have tea here, if you are interested. Or a very strong wine. I am going to take some wine.” She did so, pouring with slightly shaking hands. She gestured to their goblets. Daeman shook his head. Hannah and Ada took tea. Harman accepted a goblet of red wine.
“Harman,” she began again, more composed now, “you asked two questions before I digressed from my answer. First, why have I noticed you. Second, how have I survived for so long.
“The answer to your first question is that I am interested in what the voynix are interested in and alarmed by, and they are interested in and alarmed by your behavior over the past decades . . .”
“But why would the voynix notice or care about me . . . “ began Harman.
Savi held up one finger. “To your second question, I can say that I stay alive over these past centuries by sleeping much of the time and by hiding when I am awake. When I move, it is either by sonie—you enjoyed a ride in one today—or through walking, hiking between the faxnode pavilions.”
“I don’t understand,” said Ada. “How can you hike between faxnodes?”
Savi stood. The others stood with her. “I understand it’s been a busy day for you, my young friends, but much lies ahead if you choose to follow me. If not, the sonie will return you to the nearest faxnode pavilion . . . in what used to be Africa, I believe. It is your choice.” She looked at Daeman. “Each of you must choose.”
Hannah drank the last of her tea and set the goblet down. “And what are you going to show us if we follow you, Savi Uhr?”
“Many things, my child. But first of all, I will show you how to fly and to visit places you’ve never heard of . . . places you’ve never dreamt of.”
The four looked at each other. Harman and Ada nodded to each other, agreeing that they would follow the woman. Hannah said, “Yes, count me in.”
Daeman seemed to be pondering the choice for a silent moment. Then he said, “I’ll go. But before I go, I want some of that strong wine after all.”
Savi filled his goblet.
14
Low Mars Orbit
Mahnmut reset his systems and did a quick damage assessment. Nothing disabling to either his organic or cybernetic components. The explosion had caused rapid depressurization of three forward ballast tanks, but twelve remained intact. He checked internal clocks; he had been unconscious for less than thirty seconds before reset and he was still connected virtually to his submersible across the usual bandwidths. The Dark Lady was reporting wild tumbling, some minor hull breach, monitoring-system overloads, hull temperatures above boiling, and a score of other complaints, but there was nothing that demanded Mahnmut’s immediate attention. He rebooted video connections, but all he could see was the red-hot glowing interior of the spacecraft’s hold, the open bay doors, and—through those doors—tumbling starfields.
Orphu?
There was no response on the common band or on any of the tightbeam or maser channels. Not even static.
The airlock was still open. Mahnmut grabbed a personal reaction pack and coils of unbreakable microfilament rope and pulled himself out the airlock doors, fighting the vector forces of the tumbling by grabbing handholds he knew from decades of deep-sea work. On his own hull, he checked that the sub’s payload-bay doors were fully opened, estimated how much room he would need, and then grabbed some of Koros’s carefully folded machines at random and jetted them out of his sub, out of the disintegrating spacecraft, tumbling away through the blobs of molten ship metal and glowing plasma. Mahnmut didn’t know if he was jettisoning the weapons of mass destruction that Koros had been planning to bring to the surface—on my ship! thought Mahnmut with the same outrage he’d felt earlier—or if he was jettisoning gear that he would need for survival if he ever reached Mars. At that moment, he didn’t care. He needed the space.
Tying the rope off to brackets on The Dark Lady’ s hull, Mahnmut jetted out into space, taking care not to collide with the shattered ship-bay doors.
Once outside and a safe hundred meters from the tumbling ship, he rotated to get his first view of the damage.
It was worse than he’d thought. As Orphu had described, the entire bow of the spacecraft was gone—the control room and everything ten meters aft of where the control room had been. Sheared off as if it had never existed. Only a glowing and dissipating cloud of plasma around the bow showed where Koros III and Ri Po had been.
The rest of the ship’s fuselage had cracked and fragmented. Mahnmut could only guess the catastrophic results if the fusion engines, hydrogen tanks, Matloff/Fennelly scoop, and other propulsion devices had not been jettisoned long before this attack. The secondary explosions would certainly have vaporized Orphu and him.
Orphu? Mahnmut was using radio now as well as tightbeam, but the reflector antennae had been slagged off the hull for the maser relay. There was no response.
Trying to avoid the flying shrapnel, blobs of glowing metal, and the worst of the expanding plasma cloud while keeping slack in the line so that the tumbling wouldn’t fling him around the dying ship, Mahnmut used the reaction thrusters to come up and over the hull of the ship. The tumbling was so fierce now—stars, Mars, stars, Mars—that Mahnmut had to shut down his eyes and use the pack’s radar feed to find his way around the hull.
Orphu was still in his cradle. For a second, Mahnmut was joyous—the radar signature showed his friend intact and in place—but then he activated his eyes and saw the carnage.
The blast that had sheared off the bow had also scorched and fractured the upper hull of the ship all the way back to Orphu’s position and—as the Ionian had reported—had cracked and blackened his heavy carapace for a third of his length. Orphu’s forward manipulators were gone. His forward comm antennae were missing. His eyes were gone. Cracks ran the last three meters of Orphu’s upper shell.
“Orphu!” called Mahnmut on direct tightbeam.