“Not quite. Another day, day and a half.”
“Is the wind still blowing us in the right direction?”
“More or less.”
“Define ‘less,’ old friend.”
“We’re heading north-northwest. We may miss Olympus Mons by a shade.”
“That takes a certain skill,” said Orphu. “To miss a volcano the size of France.”
“It’s a balloon, “ said Mahnmut. “I’m sure that Koros III planned to launch it from near the base of the volcano, not from twelve hundred kilometers away.”
“Wait,” said Orphu. “I seem to remember a little detail about the Tethys Sea being just north of Olympus.”
Mahnmut sighed. “That’s why I built this new gondola in the shape of an open boat.”
“You never mentioned that while you were building it.”
“It didn’t seem relevant then.”
They floated along in silence for a while. They were approaching the Tharsis volcanoes, and Mahnmut thought they might pass the northernmost, Ascraeus, by midday tomorrow. If the wind kept shifting, they’d miss the slopes completely, passing ten or twenty kilometers to the north of it. Mahnmut didn’t even have to change his vision into light-enhancement mode to marvel at the beauty of the moons’ light and the starlight on the icy upper regions of all four volcanoes.
“I’ve been thinking about this Prospero–Caliban thing,” Orphu said suddenly, making Mahnmut jump slightly. He’d been lost in thought.
“Yes?”
“I presume you’re thinking along the same lines that I’ve been—that these statues of Prospero and the LGM’s knowledge of The Tempest are the result of some human or post-human dictator’s interest in Shakespeare.”
“We don’t even know for sure that the stone heads are supposed to be Prospero,” said Mahnmut.
“Of course not. But the LGM suggested they were, and I don’t think the zeks ever lied to us. Perhaps they can’t lie—not when communicating with you through molecular nanodata packages the way they were.”
Mahnmut said nothing, but that had been his impression as well.
“Somehow,” continued Orphu, “those thousands of stone heads circling the north ocean . . .”
“And the flooded Hellas Basin in the south,” said Mahnmut, remembering the orbital images.
“Yeah. Somehow, those thousands of stone heads have something to do with Shakespeare’s characters.”
Mahnmut nodded at this, knowing that blind Orphu would take his silence as a nod.
“What if the dictator is actually Prospero?” said Orphu. “And not a human or post-human at all?”
“I don’t understand.” Mahnmut was confused. He checked the flow of oxygen from the tanks stowed near the Device. Both he and Orphu were securely jacked in and getting full flow. “What do you mean, what if the dictator was actually Prospero? You mean some post-human was playing the role of the old magician and forgot they were role-playing?”
“No,” said Orphu. “I mean—what if it’s Prospero?”
Mahnmut felt a stab of alarm. Orphu had been battered and blinded, zapped by huge quantities of ionizing radiation, and buffeted in the spaceship’s fall into the northern sea. Perhaps his reason was going.
“No, I’m not crazy,” said Orphu, sounding disgusted. “Listen to what I’m saying.”
“Prospero is a literary character,” Mahnmut said slowly. “A fictional construct. We know about him only because of the memory banks about human culture and history that were sent along with the early moravecs two e-millennia ago.”
“Yes,” said Orphu. “Prospero is a fictional construct and the Greek gods are myths. And that their presence here is just because they’re humans or post-humans in disguise. But what if they aren’t? What if they’re really Prospero . . . really Greek gods?”
Mahnmut felt true alarm now. He had looked straight on at the terror of continuing on this mission alone should Orphu die, but he’d never considered the worse alternative of having a blinded, crippled, insane Orphu of Io as a companion on this last stage of the mission. Could he bring himself to leave Orphu behind when they landed?
“How could the gods—or whatever these people in togas and flying chariots are—not be myths or post-humans lost in role playing?” asked Mahnmut. “Are you suggesting they’re . . . space aliens? Ancient Martians who somehow weren’t noticed during the Lost Age exploration of this planet? What?”
“I’m saying what if the Greek gods are Greek gods,” Orphu said softly. “What if Prospero is Prospero? Caliban Caliban? Should we meet him, which I hope we don’t.”
“Uh-huh,” said Mahnmut. “Interesting theory.”
“God damn it, don’t patronize me,” snapped Orphu. “Do you know anything about quantum teleportation?”
“Just the theory behind it,” said Mahnmut. “And the fact that this world is riddled with active quantum activity.”
“Holes,” said Orphu.
“What?”
“They’re like wormholes. When quantum shift events are maintained like this, even for a few nanoseconds, you get a standing-wormhole singularity effect. You know what a singularity is, right?”
“Yes,” said Mahnmut, irritated now at the way his friend was talking to him. “I know the definitions of wormholes, singularities, black holes, and quantum teleportation—and I know how all those conditions, except the last one, warp spacetime. But what the hell does that have to do with gods in togas and flying chariots? These are post-humans we’re dealing with on Mars. Possibly crazy post-humans, self-evolved beyond sanity, but post-humans.”
“You may be right,” said Orphu. “But let’s look at another alternative.”
“Which is what? That fictional characters have suddenly come to life?”
“Do you know why moravec engineers gave up on developing quantum teleportation as a way to travel to the stars?” said Orphu.
“It’s not stable,” said Mahnmut. “There’s evidence of some accident on Earth fifteen hundred or so years ago. The humans or post-humans were fooling around with quantum wormholes and it didn’t work and backfired on them somehow.”
“A lot of moravec observers think that it backfired precisely because it did work,” said Orphu.
“I don’t understand.”
“Quantum teleportation is an old technology,” said the Ionian. “The old-style humans were experimenting with it way back in the Twentieth or Twenty-first Century, before the posts even evolved themselves out of the human species. Before everything went to shit on earth.”
“So?”
“So the essence of quantum teleportation was that you couldn’t send large objects—nothing much bigger than a photon, and not even that, really. Just the complete quantum state of that photon.”
“What’s the difference between the complete quantum state of something or somebody and that thing or person?” asked Mahnmut.
“Nothing,” said Orphu. “That’s the sweet part. Quantum teleport a photon or a Percheron stallion, and you get a complete duplicate of the thing on the other end. So complete a duplicate that, to all intents and purposes, it is the photon.”
“Or Percheron,” said Manhmut. He’d always enjoyed looking at images of horses. As far as the moravecs knew, real horses had been extinct on Earth for millennia.
“But even if you teleport a photon from one place to another,” continued Orphu, “the rules of quantum physics demand that the particle teleported can bring no information with it. Not even information about its own quantum state.”
“Sort of useless then, isn’t it?” said Mahnmut. Phobos had finished its fast hurtle across the Martian night sky and set behind the distant curve of the world. Deimos moved at a more stately pace.
“That’s what the humans back in the Twentieth or Twenty-first Century thought,” said Orphu. “But then the post-humans began playing with quantum teleportation. First on Earth, and then in their orbital cities or whatever those objects in near Earth orbit are.”