Mahnmut realized that Orphu was right—that agoraphobia was part of his problem, since he felt the depression most acutely on the clear days where the views were unlimited—but he also knew that it was more complicated than being separated from the secure crèche and sensory jacks of his ship. Mahnmut was—had always been—a sea captain, and he knew from his own history programming and later reading that nothing hurt captains more than the loss of their ships. On top of that, he’d been tasked with an important mission—delivering Koros III to the oceanward base of Olympus Mons—and he had failed miserably. Koros III was dead, as was Ri-Po, the moravec who should be waiting in orbit to receive, interpret, and relay Koros’s important reconnaissance data.
To whom? How? When? Mahnmut didn’t have a clue.
They talked about that as well during their weeks of quiet voyaging. It was even quieter at night, since the LGM went into hibernations as soon as the sun set, securing the felucca with a complicated sea anchor—Mahnmut had done echo soundings and determined that the water under them was more than six kilometers deep—and not stirring again until sunlight touched their green, transparent skin the next morning. It seemed obvious that the LGM gained energy solely through sunlight, even from the diffused light through morning fog. Certainly Mahnmut had never seen any of the little green men eat or secrete anything. He could ask them, but even though Orphu hypothesized that the individual LGM did not really “die” after communication—that the little green men were an aggregate consciousness rather than an assembly of real individuals—Mahnmut did not trust the hypothesis enough to reach into another little green person’s chest, grip what could be his heart, and ask questions that might be deferred until another day.
But Mahnmut had no reservations about asking Orphu questions.
“Why did they send us?” he asked on their tenth day. “We don’t understand the mission and aren’t suited to carry it out even if we did know what we’re supposed to do. It was madness to send us here this ignorant.”
“Moravec administrators are used to compartmentalizing duties and assigning specialties,” said Orphu. “You were the best they could find to drive Koros III to the volcano. I was the best moravec they could get to service the spacecraft. They never considered the possibility that you and I would be the team left to do the work of the other two.”
“Why not?” said Mahnmut. “They must have known that the mission would be dangerous.”
Orphu rumbled softly, “Probably they thought that if was all or nothing—that we’d all die if worse came to worst.”
“We almost did,” muttered Mahnmut. “We probably will.”
“Describe the day,” said Orphu. “Has the fog lifted yet?”
The days and the scenery and the nights were beautiful. Mahnmut’s knowledge of breathable-atmosphere worlds came exclusively from his data bank records of Earth, and this terraformed Mars was an interesting variation.
The skies varied from a bright light blue at midday to a pink-red sky at sunset that sometimes shifted hues toward a pure gold light that infused everything with radiance. The sun itself looked significantly smaller than the sun seen from Earth in old video-records, but it was immensely larger and brighter and warmer than any sun known by Galilean moravecs in the last two thousand e-years. The breeze was soft and smelled of salt sea and—sometimes, shockingly—of vegetation.
“Do you ever wonder why they gave us that sense?” Orphu had asked when Mahnmut described the vegetation scent as they entered the broad Valles Marineris Estuary from the Tethys.
“What’s that?” said Mahnmut.
“Smell.”
The Europan moravec had to think about that. He’d always taken his sense of smell for granted, although it was useless underwater or on the surface of Europa, and all but useless in The Dark Lady ’s environmental crèche—in other words, everywhere he’d existed. “I could smell toxic fumes in the sub or in the pressurized cubbies of Conamara Chaos Central,” he said at last, knowing that this wasn’t a satisfactory answer. Moravecs had better built-in alarms for such dangers.
Orphu rumbled softly. “I might have smelled the sulfur when I was on Io’s surface, but who would want to?”
“You can smell things?” said Mahnmut. “That doesn’t make much sense for a hardvac moravec.”
“Indeed,” said Orphu. “Nor does the fact that I spend . . . spent . . . a majority of my time viewing things on the human’s visible-light spectrum, but I did whenever possible.”
Mahnmut thought about this as well. It was true; he did the same, even though he could easily see deep into the infrared and UV reaches of the spectrum. Orphu’s vision, Mahnmut knew, incorporated visualizations of radio frequencies and magnetic field lines, neither common to old-style humans, which made a lot more sense for a moravec working in the hard radiation fields of Galilean space. So why did the Ionian choose the limited human “visible” wavelengths most frequently?
“I think it’s because our designers and all the subsequent generations of moravecs secretly wanted to be human,” said Orphu, answering Mahnmut’s unstated question with no accompanying rumble of irony or amusement. “The Pinocchio Effect, as it were.”
Mahnmut didn’t agree with that, but he felt too depressed to argue the point.
“What do you smell now?” asked Orphu.
“Rotting vegetation,” said Mahnmut as the felucca took the far southern channel into the broad estuary. “It smells like Shakespeare’s Thames at low tide.”
On the first week of sailing upriver, to keep from going mad from the inactivity, Mahnmut disassembled and inspected—as best he could—the three other pieces of recovered cargo, Orphu being the fourth.
The smallest artifact, a smooth ovoid not much larger than Mahnmut’s compact torso, was the Device—the single most important element in the late Koros III’s mission. All Mahnmut and Orphu knew about the Device was that the Ganymedan was supposed to deliver it to Olympus Mons, and, under proper circumstances not shared with Mahnmut or Orphu, activate it.
Mahnmut probed the Device with sonar and removed a tiny part of its reflective transalloy shell. Its function was not revealed. The actual machine, if machine it was, was macromolecular—essentially a single nano-squared machined molecule with a chewy central core of tremendous energy contained only by the macromolecule’s internal fields. The only “device-device” that Mahnmut could find associated with the shell was a current-generated zipper initiator. Thirty-two volts applied to just the right place on the shell would . . . do something . . . to the macromolecule inside.
“It could be a bomb,” said Mahnmut as he carefully replaced the square centimeter of metal shell.
“Quite a bomb,” muttered Orphu. “If the em-molecule is mostly a binding eggshell, we’re talking a planet-buster here. The yolk would be on us.”
Pretending he hadn’t heard the pun in order to preserve their friendship and to keep from having to throw Orphu over the railing, Mahnmut had looked out at the passing canyon walls—they were still sailing within three kilometers of the high southern cliffs bordering the broad inland sea that day—and imagined all that red-rocked, terraced and striated beauty gone. He thought of the periscoping mangroves that grew in the Martian lower estuary marshlands, the natural topiary-gorse visible on the valley cliffs’ higher walls, even the fragile blue sky with ripples of high cirrus above the rock—and tried to imagine it all destroyed by one quantum explosion huge enough to rip a world apart. It hardly seemed right.