As much as he enjoyed breathing when he had the luxury of doing so, Mahnmut was surprised that the room was pressurized to 700 millibars—especially with the nonbreathing Ganymedan and Ionian in attendance. Then Asteague/Che began communicating through micro-modulation of pressure waves in the atmosphere—speech, Lost Age English no less—and Mahnmut realized that the room was pressurized for privacy, not for their comfort. Sound-speech was the most secure form of communication in the Galilean system, and even the armored, hard-vac Io worker had been retrofitted to accommodate it.
“I want to thank each of you for interrupting your duties to come here today,” began the Pwyll prime integrator, “especially those who traveled from offworld to be present. I am Asteague/Che. Welcome, Koros III of Ganymede, Ri Po of Callisto, Mahnmut of the south polar prospect survey here on Europa, and Orphu of Io.”
Mahnmut cycled in surprise and immediately opened a private tightbeam contact. Orphu of Io? Are you then my longtime Shakespearean interlocutor, Orphu of Io?
Indeed, Mahnmut. It is a pleasure to meet you in person, my friend.
How strange! What are the odds of us encountering each other in person this way, Orphu?
Not so strange, my friend. When I heard that you were going to be invited on this suicide expedition, I insisted on being included.
Suicide expedition ?
“. . . after more than fifty Jovian years without contact with the post-humans,” Asteague/Che was saying, “some six hundred Earth years, we’ve lost track of what the pH’s are up to. It makes us nervous. It is time to send an expedition in-system, toward the campfire, and to find out what the status of these creatures has become and to assess if they are a direct and immediate threat to Galileans.” Asteague/Che paused a moment. “We have reason to suspect that they are.”
The wall behind the Europan integrator had been transparent, showing the bulk of Jupiter above the starlit icefields, but now it opaqued and then displayed the various moons and worlds moving in their stately dance around the distant sun. The image zoomed on the Earth-Moon-rings system.
“For the last five hundred Earth years, there has been less and less activity on the modulated radio, gravitonic, and neutrino spectrums from the post-humans’ polar and equatorial habitation rings,” said Asteague/Che. “For the last century, none at all. On the Earth itself, only residual traces—possibly due to robotic activity.”
“Does the small group of original humans still exist?” asked Ri Po, the small Callistan.
“We don’t know,” said Asteague/Che. The integrator passed his hand across the allboard and an image of Earth filled the window. Mahnmut felt his breathing stop. Two-thirds of the planet was in sunlight. Blue seas and a few traces of brown continents were visible under moving masses of white clouds. Mahnmut had never seen Earth before, and the intensity of color was almost overwhelming.
“Is this a real-time image?” asked Koros III.
“Yes. The Five Moons Consortium has constructed a small optical deep-space telescope just outside the bow-shock front of the Jovian magnetodisk. Ri Po was involved in the project.”
“I apologize for its lack of resolution,” said the Callistan. “It has been over a Jovian century since we’ve resorted to visible light astronomy. And this project was rushed.”
“Are there signs of the originals?” asked Orphu of Io.
The descendents of your Shakespeare, Orphu said on tightbeam to Mahnmut.
“Unknown,” said Asteague/Che. “The greatest resolution is just under two kilometers and we’ve seen no sign of original-human life or artifacts, other than previously mapped ruins. There is some neutrino fax activity, but it may be automated or residual. In truth, the humans are of no concern to us right now. The post-humans are.”
My Shakespeare? You mean our Shakespeare! Mahnmut tightbeamed to the big Ionian.
Sorry, Mahnmut. As much as I love the sonnets—and even your Bard’s plays—my own concentration has been on Proust.
Proust! That aesthete! You’re joking!
Not at all . There came a rumble on the subsonic spectrum of the tightband which Mahnmut interpreted as the Ionian’s laughter.
The integrator brought up images of some of the millions of orbital habitations moving in their stately ring-dance around Earth. Many were white, others silver. As brilliant as they looked in the heavy light so close to the sun, they also looked strangely cold. And empty.
“No shuttles. No evidence of ring-to-Earth neutrino faxing. And the convoy-bridge of heavy materials being accelerated between the rings and Mars—observed as recently as twenty Jovian years ago, two hundred forty-some Earth/pH ring years ago—is gone.”
“You think the post-humans are gone?” asked Koros III. “Died off somehow? Or migrated?”
“We know there was a sea change in their energy use, chronoclastic, quantum, and gravitational,” said the integrator. The unit was taller and a bit more humanoid than Mahnmut, sheathed in bright yellow surface-shield materials. His voice was soft, calm, carefully modulated. “Our interest now turns to Mars.”
The image of the fourth planet filled the window.
Mahnmut’s interest in Mars was marginal at best, and his images of it were from the Lost Age. This world looked nothing like the photos and holos from that era.
Instead of a rust-red world, this recent image of Mars revealed a blue sea covering most of the northern hemisphere, the Valles Marineris river valley showing a ribbon of blue many kilometers wide connecting to that ocean. Much of the southern hemisphere remained reddish-brown, but there were also large splotches of green. The Tharsis volcanoes still ran southwest to northeast in dark procession—one with a visible smoke plume—but Olympus Mons now rose within twenty kilometers or so of a huge bay arcing in from the northern ocean. White clouds clumped and grouped across the sunlit half of the image and bright lights glowed somewhere near Hellas Basin beyond the dark edge of the terminator. Mahnmut could see a hurricane spiraling north of the Chryse Planitia coastline.
“They terraformed it,” Mahnmut said aloud. “The posts terraformed Mars.”
“How long ago?” asked Orphu of Io. None of the Galileans had any special interest in Mars—in any of the Inner Worlds, for that matter (except for their literature)—so this could have happened any time in the twenty-five hundred terrestrial years since the break between moravecs and humanity.
“In the last two hundred years,” said Asteague/Che. “Perhaps in the last century and a half.”
“Impossible.” Koros III’s statement was flat and final. “Mars could never be terraformed in so short a time.”
“Yes, impossible,” agreed Asteague/Che. “But it was.”
“So the posts migrated there,” said Orphu of Io.
Little Ri Po answered. “We think not. Resolution on our observation of Mars has been a bit better than that of Earth. For instance, along the coastlines . . .”
The window showed an area along a twisting peninsula north of where the broad Valles Marineris rivers—more of a long inland sea, actually—emptied into a bay, flowed through an isthmus, and then opened into the northern ocean. The image zoomed. All along the coast where the land came down to the sea—sometimes showing red-desert hills, elsewhere green and heavily forested plains—tiny black specks followed the shoreline. The image zoomed a final time.
“Are those . . . sculptures?” asked Mahnmut.
“Stone heads, we think,” said Ri Po. The image shifted and the shadow of one of the blurry images suggested a brow, a nose, a bold chin.