Mahnmut used the last power in his pry bar to rip free the arresting flanges and tie-downs. Orphu’s great bulk sagged free, sloshing in seawater. But the bay was opened skyward now, the sub on its back, and there was no way that Mahnmut could ever get the Ionian out of the partially flooded pit the storage bay had become.
A dozen more little green men jumped into the space with Mahnmut, found grasping points on Orphu’s pitted and cracked carapace, and forced green arms and legs under the hard-vac moravec’s ungainly shape. Together, they found leverage and lifted. Working silently, never slipping or dropping him, they lifted Orphu out, gently wrapped more cables around him, slid him across the curve of The Dark Lady’ s hull, lowered him to the water, set buoyant rollers under him, lashed them together into a raft, and gently propelled the Ionian’s body to the beach.
The little green men—at least a thousand strong on the beach now—stood back and gave Mahnmut room as he worked to find out if Orphu was dead or alive. The Ionian lay inert on the red-sand beach like some storm-battered, oversized trilobite washed ashore in one of Earth’s dim prehistoric ages.
Checking the skies for flying chariots that Mahnmut was sure were overdue, he emptied his backpack and waterproof bags of the gear he’d salvaged from The Dark Lady. First, he laid out five of the small but heavy power cells, connected them in series, and ran the cable to one of Orphu’s surviving input connectors. There was no response from the big Ionian, but the virtual indicator showed that the energy was flowing somewhere. Next, Mahnmut crawled up the curve of Orphu’s carapace—marveling at seeing the physical damage clearly for the first time here in the strong morning light—and screwed the radio receiver into the hardline socket. He tested the connection—receiving a carrier wave hum—and activated his own microphone.
“Orphu?”
No response.
“Orphu?”
Silence. The scores of little green men looked on impassively.
“Orphu?”
Mahnmut spent five minutes at the task, calling once every twenty seconds, using all comm frequencies and rechecking the receiver’s connections. The comm unit was receiving his transmission. It was Orphu who was not responding.
“Orphu?”
There wasn’t silence, exactly. From his external pickups, Mahnmut could hear more ambient noise than he’d ever encountered in his life: the lap of waves against the sand, the hiss of wind against the cliff behind him, the soft stir of the little green men shifting position from time to time, and the thousand nuances of vibrations in such a thick planetary atmosphere. It was just the commline and Orphu that were dead.
“Orphu?” Mahnmut checked his chronometer. He had been at it for more than thirty minutes. Reluctantly, in slow motion, he slid down off his friend’s carapace, walked fifteen paces down the beach, and sat in the wet sand where the water rolled in. The little green men made way for him and then surrounded him again at a respectful distance. Mahnmut looked at them—at the wall of tiny green bodies, expressionless faces, and unblinking black eyes.
“Don’t you all have work to do?” he asked, his voice sounding strange and choked to his own auditory inputs. Perhaps it was the acoustics of the Martian atmosphere.
The LGM did not move. The stone head was smashed into rubble of at the base of the cliff, but the little green men ignored it. A score of cables still ran out to the submersible where it lay inert in the low, rolling surf.
Mahnmut felt a sudden and immeasurably deep wave of loss and homesickness roll over him. He’d had three close relationships in his three Jovian decades—more than three hundred Martian years—of existence. First, The Dark Lady, which had been only a semi-sentient machine, but for which he’d been designed and in which he fit perfectly; the Lady was dead. Second, his exploration partner, Urtzweil, killed 18 J-years ago, half of Mahnmut’s lifetime ago. Now Orphu.
Now here he was hundreds of millions of kilometers from home, alone, unfit, untrained, and unprepared for this mission they’d sent him on. How was he supposed to get the 5,000 or so kilometers to Olympus Mons to plant the Device? And what if he did? Koros III may have known what to do there, what this mission was really about, but lowly Mahnmut, late of The Dark Lady, didn’t have a fucking clue.
Quit feeling sorry for yourself, idiot, he thought. Mahnmut glanced at the LGM. It surely must be an illusion that they seemed downcast, even sad. They hadn’t mourned the death of one of their own, how could they show that emotion at the end of a moravec, a sentient machine they’d never imagined?
Mahnmut knew that he would have to communicate with the little green men again, but he hated the thought of reaching into one of the creatures’ chests, of killing it through communication. No, he wouldn’t do that until he had to.
He stood, returned to Orphu’s corpse, and began disconnecting the power cells.
“Hey,” said Orphu on the commband, “I’m still eating.”
Mahnmut was so startled he actually jumped backward in the sand. “Jesus, you’re alive.”
“As much as any of us moravecs are ‘alive.’ “
“God damn you,” said Mahnmut, feeling like laughing and crying, but mostly like hitting the big, battered horseshoe crab. “Why didn’t you answer me when I called? And called? And called?”
“What do you mean?” said Orphu. “I was in hibernation. Have been ever since the air and energy ran out on The Lady. You expect me to chat with you while I’m in hibernation?”
“What is this hibernation shit?” said Mahnmut, pacing around Orphu. “I never heard of moravecs going into hibernation.”
“You Europan vecs don’t have it?” asked Orphu.
“Obviously not.”
“Well, what can I say? Working alone in Io’s radiation torus, or anywhere in Jovian space, we hardvac moravecs sometimes run into situations where we just have to shut down everything for a while until someone can get to us to repair and recharge us. It happens. Not often, but it happens.”
“How long could you have stayed in this . . . hibernation?” asked Mahnmut, his anger shifting into something like giddiness.
“Not long,” said Orphu. “About five hundred hours.”
Mahnmut extended fingers through his manipulator pads, picked up a rock, and bounced it off Orphu’s shell.
“Did you hear something?” asked the Ionian.
Mahnmut sighed, sat in the sand near the end of Orphu that used to house his eyes, and began describing their current situation.
Orphu convinced Mahnmut that he’d have to communicate with the LGM through a translator again. The Ionian hated the idea of causing the death of one of the little green men as much as Mahnmut did—especially since the LGM had rescued him—but he argued that the mission depended on them communicating and communicating fast. Mahnmut had tried talking again, had tried sign language, had tried drawings in the sand—showing maps of the coast where they were and the volcano they had to get to—had even tried the idiot’s version of speaking a foreign language: shouting. The LGM all stared calmly but did not respond. Finally it was a little green man who took the initiative, stepping forward, seizing Mahnmut’s hand, and pulling it to his chest.
“Shall I?” Mahnmut asked Orphu over the commline.
“You have to.”
Mahnmut winced as his hand was pulled through the yielding flesh, as his fingers encircled and then gripped what could only be a beating green heart in the warm, syrupy fluid of the little man’s body.
HOW
CAN
WE
HELP
YOU?
Mahnmut had a hundred questions he wanted to ask, but Orphu helped him put first things first.
“The sub,” said Orphu. “We have to get it out of sight before a chariot flies over.”
Through a combination of language and images, Mahnmut conveyed the thought of moving the submersible a kilometer or so to the west, of pulling it into the ocean-cave in the cliff that jutted out to sea at the headland.