“From the bridge?” said Ada.
“The whole thing is a solar power receiver,” said Savi. “Or at least the green parts are.”
Ada looked at the dusty crystal coffins and tried to imagine going to sleep in one and waiting . . . what? Years before waking? Decades? Centuries? She shuddered.
Savi was looking at her and Ada blushed. But Savi smiled. One of her sincerely amused smiles, Ada thought.
They climbed to a long green glass cylinder hanging from a frayed and rusted support cable that was thicker than Harman was tall. Ada found herself treading softly, trying to lift her weight by sheer will, afraid that their combined weight would bring the cylinder down, the cable, the whole bridge. Again she caught Savi watching her. This time Ada did not blush but frowned back, tired of the old woman’s scrutiny.
All four of them stopped a minute, alarmed. It appeared that they had walked into a meeting hall filled with people—people standing along the edges of the room, men and women in weird garb, people sitting at desks and standing at control panels, people who did not move or turn their gazes in the direction of the newcomers.
“They’re not real,” said Daeman, walking to the nearest man—dressed in a dusty blue suit with some sort of fabric at his throat—and touching the figure’s face.
The five walked from figure to figure, staring at the men and women dressed in odd clothes, people with strangely patterned hair and unusual personal adornment—tattoos, strange jewelry, dyed hair and skin.
“I read that once servitors came in the shape of human beings . . .” began Harman.
“No,” said Savi. “These aren’t robots. Only mannequins.”
“What?” said Daeman.
Savi explained the word.
“Do you know who they’re supposed to be?” asked Hannah. “Or why they’re here?”
“No,” said Savi. She stood back while the others explored.
At the end of the chamber, set in a glass alcove as if in pride of place, the figure of a man was posed in an ornate wood and leather-slung chair. Even seen sitting, it was obvious that this figure was shorter than most of the other male mannequins in the hall, and dressed in some sort of tan tunic that looked like a short, belted dress made out of rough cotton or wool. The figure’s feet were shod with sandals. The short man could have been comic, but his features—short, curly gray hair, hawk nose, and fierce gray eyes staring out boldly from under heavy brows—were so powerful that Ada found herself approaching the mannequin warily. The man’s forearms were shaped with such muscle and so many scars, the stubby fingers were curled easily but with much strength on the wooden arms of the camp chair—everything about the carved form gave an impression of such coiled strength—of will as well as body—that Ada stopped six feet away from it. The man was visibly older than humans chose to look in this age—somewhere between Harman’s Second Twenty and Savi’s old age. The man’s tunic hung low enough that Ada could see the graying hair on his broad, bronzed chest.
Daeman hurried forward. “I know this man,” he said, pointing. “I’ve seen him before.”
“From the turin drama,” said Hannah.
“Yes, yes,” said Daeman, snapping his fingers in an attempt to remember. “His name is . . .”
“Odysseus,” said the man in the chair. He stood and took a step toward the startled Daeman. “Odysseus, son of Laertes.”
17
Mars
“She’s stabilizing,” said Mahnmut over the hardline to Orphu. “Roll rate down to about one revolution every six seconds. Pitch and yaw are approaching zero.”
“I’m going to try to flatten out the roll,” said Orphu. “Tell me when you have the polar cap in the reticule.”
“Okay, no—it’s drifting. Damn. What a mess.” Mahnmut was trying to line up the slash on the video feed with the white blur of the Martian polar cap through a blizzard of tumbling debris and still-glowing plasma.
“Yes,” said Orphu from the hold, “I am a mess.”
“I wasn’t talking about you.”
“I know. But I’m still a mess. I’d give half my Proust library if I had just one of my six eyes back.”
“We’ll get you hooked up to some visual feed,” said Mahnmut. “Hell. We’re tumbling again.”
“Let it tumble until right before we enter the atmosphere,” said Orphu. “Save our thruster fuel and energy. And—no—we’re not going to get this vision thing fixed. I did a damage check after you plugged me in here, and it’s not just the eyes and cameras that are missing. I was looking toward the bow when the ship was slagged, and the flash burned out every channel down to the organic level. My internal optic nerves are ash.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mahnmut. He felt sick and it wasn’t just from the tumbling. After a minute, he said, “We’re running fairly low on everything consumable here—water, air, reaction-pack fuel. Are you sure you want to stay inside this debris field?”
“It’s our best chance,” said Orphu. “On radar, we’re just another chunk of the destroyed spaceship.”
“Radar?” said Mahnmut. “Did you see what attacked us? A goddamned chariot. You think a chariot has radar?”
Orphu rumbled a laugh. “Do you think a chariot can launch an energy lance like the one that vaporized a third of the ship, including Koros and Ri Po? And yes, Mahnmut, I saw the chariot—it was the last thing I’ll ever see. But I don’t believe for a second that it was actually a chariot with an oversized human male and female riding in open vacuum. Uh-uh. Too cute . . . too cute by half.”
Mahnmut had nothing to say to that. He wished Orphu had damped all the roll—the sub was also pitching and yawing again—but everything else in the debris field was tumbling, so it made sense that they should be too.
“Want to talk about Shakespeare’s sonnets?” asked Orphu of Io.
“Are you shitting me?” The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better.
“Yes,” said Orphu. “I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Mahnmut. “The debris is beginning to glow. So are we. Picking up ionization.” He was pleased that his voice stayed calm. Ahead of them, larger bits of the destroyed spacecraft were glowing a dull red. The bow of The Dark Lady was also beginning to glow. The Dark Lady ’s external sensors started reporting hull temperature rising. They were entering Mars’s atmosphere.
“Time to straighten us out,” said Orphu, getting the relayed data down in the submersible’s hull, doing what he could with the partial Koros III control download as he fired the sub’s strap-on thrusters and realigned her gyros. “Roll gone?”
“Not quite.”
“We can’t wait. I’m going to turn this pile of scrap iron around before we burn up.”
“This ‘pile of scrap iron’ is called The Dark Lady and she may save our lives,” Mahnmut said coldly.
“Right, right,” said Orphu. “Tell me when the hash mark on the aft video monitor is centered on the limb of Mars above the pole. I’ll begin flattening the tumble then. God, what I’d give for one of my eyes back. Sorry, last time I’ll say that.”
Mahnmut watched the monitor. Because of the widening debris cloud, the only reliable fixes he’d been able to make for Orphu over the past thirty minutes or so came from Mars itself. Even the two little moons were invisible. Now the thrusters thumped hollowly and the damaged sub pivoted slowly, the bow camera losing its view of Mars and showing glowing plasma, white-hot melted metal, and a million shining shards that had once been their spacecraft and traveling companions.
The orange-red-brown-green bulk of Mars filled the aft camera and the hash mark Orphu had directed Mahnmut to draw in the monitor drifted up, up, crossing the cloud-dappled coastline, showing blue sea, then white . . .
“Polar cap,” reported Mahnmut. “There’s the upper limb.”