Careful not to lower his permiflesh deeper onto the point of the blade, Mahnmut shook his head very slightly and said, “I apologize. I am a stranger to your town, to your country, and to the manners here.”
“See those closest three heads on posts on the bridge?,” asked Shakespeare.
Mahnmut shifted his vision without moving his head. “Yes.”
“This time last week, they were strangers to our manners,” hissed the poet.
“I get the point,” said Mahnmut. “No pun intended, sir.”
Shakespeare slid the dagger back in its leather scabbard. Mahnmut remembered that the man was an actor, given to flourishes and exaggerations, although the dagger had been no stage prop. Nor had Shakespeare’s response been a denial to Mahnmut’s question.
Both looked back out at the river. The sun hung impossibly large and orange and low in the river haze to the west. Shakespeare’s voice was soft when he spoke. “If I pen these sonnets, Caliban, I will do so to explore my own failures, weaknesses, compromises, self-conceits, and sad ambiguities in the way that one probes a bloody socket for the missing tooth after a barroom brawl. How did you kill your friend, this Orphu of Io?”
Mahnmut had to take a second to catch up to the question. “I couldn’t get The Dark Lady to the cave inlet I had seen along the coast,” he said. “I tried and failed. The sub’s reactor died suddenly, the power went out. The Lady went aground in less than four fathoms of water, three kilometers or so from the cave. I tried blowing all the ballast tanks to bring her on her side—so I could free the bay doors to get to my friend—but she was already stuck fast.”
Mahnmut looked at the poet. Shakespeare seemed to be paying attention. The buildings on the bridge behind him were red with the Thames sunset. “I went outside and went on internal O2 and dived for hours,” continued Mahnmut. “I used pry bars and the last of the acetylene and my manipulator fingers, but I couldn’t open the bay doors, couldn’t clear the debris in the flooded accessway to the hold. Orphu was on commline for a while, but then I lost him as the internal systems failed. He never sounded worried, never frightened, just tired . . . very tired. Right up to when the comm failed. It was dark. I must have lost consciousness. Perhaps I’m at the bottom of the Martian ocean right now, dead with Orphu, or dying, dreaming this conversation as the last cells of my organic brain shut down.”
“Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,” said Shakespeare, his voice a monotone. “Which you by lacking have supposed dead, and there reigns love, and all love’s loving parts, and all the friends which you thought buried.”
Mahnmut regained consciousness to find himself on the beach, in low morning Martian daylight, and surrounded by dozens of little green men. They were bent over him, staring with small black eyes set into their green, transparent faces, and they backed a step or two away when Mahnmut sat up with a slight whir of his servos.
They were little. Mahnmut was just over a meter tall. These . . . persons . . . were shorter than that. They were humanoid in form, more so than Mahnmut, but not really human in appearance. They were bipedal, with arms and legs, but had no ears, no noses, and no mouths. They wore no clothes and had only three fingers on each hand, rather like cartoon characters Mahnmut had seen in the Lost Age media archives. They were sexless, Mahnmut noted, and their flesh—if flesh it was—was transparent, like soft plastic, revealing insides without organs or veins, bodies filled with floating green globules and clumps, particles and blobs, all flowing and bubbling in a way not that different from the insides of Mahnmut’s beloved lava lamp, now abandoned with the sunken submersible.
More little green men were coming down a trail set into the cliff face. Mahnmut could see the last of the erected stone faces a kilometer or so to the east. Another was visible, horizontal on a long wooden pallet set on rollers far above them near the edge of the cliff, bound about by ropes. The details of the faces were not discernible.
To hell with the heads. Mahnmut whirled and searched the sea and beach. Tepid waves rolled in with the regularity of a metronome. Where’s The Dark Lady?
There she was—two hundred meters out, part of the upper hull and command superstructure clearly visible. Her fathometer and sonar had died before she had, and Mahnmut had committed perhaps the most ancient and most grievious of sea captain’s offenses—running his ship aground. He had been on internal O2 while working wildly to free the hold doors on the sandy, muddy seabottom, but he realized that he must have passed out, been washed ashore here during the night.
Orphu! How long had he been unconscious, dreaming of Shakespeare? Mahnmut’s internal chronometer said that it had been a bit less than four hours.
He still might be alive in there. He started walking toward the water, intending to walk the bottom all the way out to the stranded submersible.
A dozen little green men moved between Mahnmut and the water, blocking his way. Then twenty. Then fifty. A hundred more surrounded him on the beach.
Mahnmut had never lifted his hand or manipulator in anger, but he was ready to fight now, to punch and slash and kick his way through this mob if he had to. But he would try to talk to them first. “Get out of my way,” he said, voice on full amplification and sounding loud in the Martian air. “Please.”
The black eyes in green faces stared at him. But they had neither ears to hear him with nor mouths to speak with.
Mahnmut laughed sadly and started to push his way through them, knowing that however much stronger he might be, they could overcome him by sheer numbers—sit on him while they tore him apart. The thought of such violence, his or theirs, made his organic insides clutch with horror.
One of the little green men held his hand up as if to say “stop.” Mahnmut paused. All the green heads turned to the right and looked up the beach. The mob parted magically as a little green man who looked exactly like the other little green men approached, stopped in front of Mahnmut, and extended both hands as if cupping an invisible bowl or praying.
Mahnmut did not understand. Nor did he want to take time to parley through sign language even if he could. Orphu might still be alive.
He started to brush past the little man, but a score of others closed ranks behind this emissary, blocking Mahnmut’s way. He would either have to fight now or pay attention to the gesturing green figure.
Mahnmut let out a sigh not much different than a moan and paused, holding his hands out in mimicry of the little green man’s gesture.
The emissary shook his head, touched Mahnmut’s left arm—both organic and moraveccian sensors told him that the green fingers were cool—and lowered Mahnmut’s left arm, then gripped the right. The little green man pulled Mahnmut’s hand closer, closer, until the moravec’s fingers and palm were flat against the cool, transparent flesh.
The little green man pulled harder, pushing himself forward and pulling Mahnmut’s hand hard enough that the moravec’s palm dented the flat chest, pressed the flesh inward, then . . . penetrated.
Mahnmut would have drawn his hand back in shock at this, but the little green man did not relent with his grip or with his strong pull. Mahnmut could see his dark hand entering the fluid of the little green man’s chest, could feel the transparent flesh closing tight around his forearm in a vacuum seal.
All of the little green men raised their hands to their chests.
Mahnmut’s splayed fingers encountered something hard, almost spherical. He could see a green blob about the size of a human heart centered in the man’s chest. His palm felt it pulse.
The little green man pulled again and Mahnmut understood. He closed his organic fingers around the organ.