“Why not?” said Harman. He and Savi and Daeman had flown east across the Atlantic and then over the Sahara Marshes to Jerusalem, then taken a crawler into the dry Mediterranean Basin. It was a place on Earth he knew. And he wanted to see if the blue tachyon beam still rose from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Savi had said it carried all of the coded information of all her lost contemporaries from fourteen hundred years ago.
“The calibani are loosed,” said Prospero.
“They’ve left the Basin?”
“They are freed of their old restraints, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Or at least upon that part of it.”
“Then where are we going?”
“Patience, Harman of Ardis. Patience. Tomorrow we cross a mountain range I believe you will find most enlightening. Then into Asia—where you may behold the works of the mighty and the dead—and then west and west enough again. The Breach will wait.”
“Too slow,” said Harman, pacing back and forth. “Too long. If the functions don’t work here, I don’t have any way of knowing how Ada is. I need to go. I need to get home.”
“You want to know how your Ada fares?” asked Prospero. He was not smiling. The magus pointed to a red cloth draped over the couch. “Use that. This one time only.”
Harman frowned, went to the cloth, studied it. “A turin cloth?” he said. It was red—all turin cloths were tan. Nor was the microcircuit embroidery the same.
“There are a myriad of turin-cloth receivers,” said Prospero. “Just as there are a myriad of sensory transmitters. Every person can be one.”
Harman shook his head. “I don’t give a damn about the turin drama—Troy, Agamemnon, all that nonsense. I’m not in the mood for amusements.”
“This cloth tells you nothing of Ilium,” said Prospero. “It will show you your Ada’s fate. Try it.”
Trembling, Harman sat back on the couch, adjusted the red cloth over his face, touched the embroidery to his forehead, and closed his eyes.
45
The Queen Mab decelerated toward Earth on a column of nuclear explosions, the ship kicking out a Coke-can-sized fission bomb every thirty seconds, the bomb exploding and driving the pusher plate back up to the stern of the thousand-foot-long ship, the huge pistons and cylinders in the clockwork engine room cycling back and forth, the next can-bomb being ejected…
Mahnmut was watching on the stern video channel. If anyone on Earth didn’t know we were coming, they must know now, he said to Orphu on their tightbeam channel. The two had been invited to the bridge for the first time on the voyage and they were in the largest lift now, rising toward the bow of the ship—which during deceleration, of course, was aiming back toward space rather than at the rapidly growing Earth.
I don’t think the idea is to be subtle, tightbeamed Orphu.
Obviously not. But this is about as subtle as a stomach pump, about as subtle as a pay toilet in the diarrhea ward, about as subtle as…
Do you have a point? rumbled Orphu.
It’s too unsubtle, said Mahnmut. Too obvious. Too visible. Too precious—I mean, mid-Twentieth Century spaceship designs, for God’s sake. Fission bombs. Ejection mechanisms from the Atlanta, Georgia, Coca-Cola bottling plant circa 1959…
So your point is? interrupted Orphu. In the old days, his eye-stalks and video cameras would have tracked toward Mahnmut—some of them, at least—but those had not been replaced since his optic nerves had been burned out.
I have to assume that less obvious moravec ships—modern ships, stealth-activated and stealth-propelled ships—are following us, sent Mahnmut.
That has been my assumption as well, said the big hard-vac moravec.
You never mentioned it.
Nor have you, until now, said Orphu.
Why didn’t Asteague/Che and the other Prime Integrators tell us? asked Mahnmut. If we’re being put out ahead of the real fleet as the obvious target, we have a right to know.
Orphu sent a subsonic rumble that Mahnmut had learned was the Ionian’s equivalent of a shrug. It wouldn’t make any difference, would it? said the big moravec. If the Earth defenses fire on us and breach our rather modest forcefield defenses, we’ll be dead before we have time to complain.
Speaking of Earth defenses, has the voice from the orbital city said anything else since the message two weeks ago? The maser broadcast had been succinct; the recorded female-human voice had simply said “Bring Odysseus to me” over and over for twenty-four hours and then had cut off as quickly as it had begun. The message had not been broadcast at random—it had been aimed precisely at the Queen Mab.
I’ve been monitoring the incoming channels, said Orphu, and I haven’t heard anything new.
The lift whirred and stopped. The broad cargo doors opened. Mahnmut stepped onto the bridge for the first time since before their launch from Phobos and Orphu repellored after him.
The bridge was circular with a diameter of thirty meters, the ceiling dome-shaped and ringed with thick windows and holographic screens serving as windows. From a spaceship-spaceship point of view, it was almost completely satisfying to Mahnmut. Although the unnamed spacecraft that had brought Orphu, the late Koros III and Ri Po, and him to Mars had been centuries more advanced—accelerated to one-fifth light speed by magnetic scissors accelerator wickets, carrying a boron light sail, fusion engines, and other modern moravec devices—this strangely retro atomic spaceship and spaceship grid looked… right. Instead of purely virtual controls and simple jack-in stations, more than a dozen tech moravecs sat in old-fashioned acceleration chairs at even more old-fashioned metal and glass monitoring stations. There were actual switches, real toggles, physical dials—dials!—and a hundred other eye—and vid-camera-pleasing details. The floor looked to be of textured steel, perhaps lifted straight out of the hull of some World War II–era seagoing battleship.
The usual suspects—Orphu’s irreverent term—stood awaiting them near the central navigation table: Asteague/Che their central Prime Integrator from Europa, General Beh bin Adee representing the Belt fighter-moravecs, Cho Li their Callistan navigator (looking and sounding far too much like the dead Ri Po for Mahnmut’s comfort), Suma IV the brawny, buckycarbon-sheathed fly-eyed Ganymedan, and the spidery Retrograde Sinopessen.
Mahnmut walked closer to the map table and stepped up onto the metal ledge that allowed smaller moravecs to look down upon the glowing table surface. Mahnmut floated over.
“We have a little less than fourteen hours until low-Earth orbital insertion,” said Asteague/Che without greetings or introductions. His voice—that James Mason voice to Mahnmut’s Lost Era history-vid-trained ears and audio receivers—was smooth but businesslike. “We have to decide what to do.”
The Prime Integrator was vocalizing rather than transmitting on the common band. The bridge was pressurized to Earth normal—an atmospheric content the Europan moravecs liked and the others could tolerate—and audible speech was more private than common band chatter and less conspiratorial than tightbeaming.
“Have there been any more broadcasts from that woman asking us to deliver Odysseus?” asked Orphu.
“No,” said Cho Li, the bulky Callistan navigator. Cho Li’s voice, as always, was very, very soft. “But the orbital construction that was the source of that broadcast is our destination.”