“Can you think of anything else it could be other than a bomb?” he asked Orphu.
“Not offhand,” said the Ionian. “But something containing that much pent-up implosive quantum energy represents technology way beyond my understanding. I’d suggest you treat the Device gently, put some cushions under it or something, but since it’s already survived the chariot people’s attack and atmospheric entry that fried me and killed your ship, it can’t be too delicate. Give it a kick in the ass and move on. What’s the next piece of cargo?”
The next piece of cargo was just a bit larger than the Device, but much more understandable. “It’s some sort of squirt communicator,” said Mahnmut. “It’s all folded in on itself, but I can see that if I activate it, it’ll unfurl onto its own tripod, aim a large dish toward the sky, and fire a serious burst of . . . something. Encoded energy in tightband or k-maser or perhaps even modulated gravity.”
“Why would Koros have needed that?” asked Orphu. “The comsats are still in orbit and the spaceship could have relayed any sort of tightbeam or radio back to Galilean space. Hell, even your sub could have contacted home.”
“Maybe this wasn’t meant to broadcast to Jupiter space,” suggested Mahnmut.
“Where then?”
Mahnmut had no suggestions.
“How was Koros going to code the message?” asked the Ionian.
“There are virtual jackports,” said Mahnmut after inspecting the compact machinery carefully under its nanocarbon skin. “We could download everything we’ve seen and learned, encrypt it, and activate it. Unless it needs an activation code or something. Want me to jack in and check?”
“No,” said Orphu. “Not yet.”
“I’ll close it then.”
“What does this communicator use for a squirt power source?” asked Orphu before Mahnmut could close up the device.
Mahnmut wasn’t familiar with the technology, but he described the magnetic container and forcefield schematics.
“My, my,” said Orphu. “That’s Chevkovian felschenmass. Artificial antimatter of the kind the Consortium used to fuel the first interstellar probe. There’s enough energy there to keep us alive and kicking for another several earth centuries if there were a way for us to tap into it.”
Mahnmut had felt his organic heart skip a beat. “Could we have used it to replace the fusion reactor on the Lady?”
Orphu was quiet for several long seconds. “No, I don’t think so,” he said at last. “Too much energy released too fast and too hard to tame. It’s possible that you and I could tap into its trickle field, but I don’t think we could have powered up The Dark Lady with it even if the sub could have been repaired. And you said you couldn’t do the repairs alone, right?”
“It would have taken the Conamara Chaos ice docks,” said Mahnmut, feeling a strange combination of regret and relief at the news that this wasn’t a fix for the poor Lady. As much as the death of his ship depressed him, the thought of turning back and sailing the 2,000-plus kilometers back to it was even more depressing.
The last piece of cargo was the largest, the heaviest, and the hardest for Mahnmut to figure out.
The container was a bamboo-three cube a meter and a half tall by two meters wide, wrapped in clear transpolymer. A brief inspection showed Mahnmut that the cube was filled with hundreds of square meters of micro-thin polyethylene stealth-composite with high-performance solarcell-strips embedded in the fabric, 24 interconnected, partially nested, articulated conical titanium segments, four pressurized canisters containing what his sensors said was helium, an oxygen-nitrogen mix, and methanol, 8 atmospheric pulse thrusters with jack-in controllers, and, finally, 12 fifteen-meter folded buckycarbon cables attached to the four sides of the bamboo-three box the thing came in.
“I give up,” said Mahnmut after several minutes of pondering and poking and refolding. “What the hell is it?”
“A balloon,” said Orphu.
Mahnmut shook his moravec head. There were both living and moravec balloon creatures in the atmosphere of Jupiter, more swimming in the soup of Saturn, but what would Koros III have wanted with an artificial balloon on Mars?
Orphu transmitted the answer even as Mahnmut heard it in his own mind. “Koros’s mission was to get to the top of Olympus Mons, to the locus of the quantum disturbance, and this way he wouldn’t have to climb the volcano. What are the dimensions of this . . . balloon?”
Mahnmut told the Ionian.
“Inflated with helium here at null-null, Martian sea level, that would give a diameter of just over sixty meters and a height of about thirty-five meters, which should easily lift the gondola, you, the Device, and the squirt radio to the fringes of space . . . or the top of Olympus,” said Orphu.
“Gondola?” said Mahnmut, still trying to absorb this concept.
“The box it came in. That’s obviously what Koros III planned to ride in. Does it have a transpolymer hood—some sort of pressurizable cover?”
“Yes.”
“There you have it.”
“But Olympus Mons has an escalator going up its south side,” Mahnmut said stupidly.
“Koros and the moravecs who planned this mission didn’t know that,” said Orphu.
Mahnmut looked away from the balloon for a minute to think. The southern cliffs of Valles Marineris were just a thin red line against the blue-green horizon as the felucca moved deeper into the center channels of the estuarial river. “The gondola is too small to carry you,” he said.
“Well, naturally . . .” began Orphu.
“I’ll build a bigger gondola,” interrupted Mahnmut.
“Do you really think we’ll be ascending to the summit of Olympus Mons?” Orphu said softly.
“I don’t know,” said Mahnmut, “but I do know that we’ll still be more than two thousand kilometers from the volcano when . . . if . . . we ever reach the western end of Valles Marineris in this little ship. I didn’t have any idea how we were going to get through the jumble of Noctis Labyrinthus and over the Tharsis Plateau to Olympus, but this . . . balloon . . . might work. Maybe.”
“We could start now,” said Orphu. “It would be faster than this . . . what did you call it?”
“Felucca,” said Mahnmut, glancing up at the rigging and sails sharp against the pink and blue sky. Several of the little green men were swinging effortlessly from line to line in the rigging. “And no, I don’t think we should try the balloon until we have to. It uses chameleon-stealth fabric, even on the gondola, but I’m not convinced that the flying-chariot people couldn’t track it. We’ll launch it when we reach Noctis Labyrinthus. That’ll be a long and difficult enough aerial journey as it is, since three of the tallest volcanoes on Mars will be between us and Olympus.”
Orphu rumbled close to the subsonic. “Around the World in Eighty Days, eh?”
“Not around the world,” said Mahnmut. “Counting this boat trip, we have to travel just a little more than one-fourth the way around it.”
Mahnmut tried to pass the time and shake himself out of his low mood by reading Shakespeare’s sonnets from the physical book he’d salvaged from The Dark Lady. It didn’t work. Whereas during the past few years he’d disappeared into analysis, ferreting out hidden structures, word-connections, and dramatic content, the sonnets seemed like sad things now. Sad and rather nasty.
Mahnmut the moravec could care less what “Will” the “poet” in the sonnets did to the “Young Man” or expected done in return—Mahnmut had neither penis nor anus and longed for neither—but the copious flattery and flagrant bullying of the thick-witted but wealthy “youth” by the older poet was oppressive to Mahnmut now, bordering on the perverse. He skipped to the “Dark Lady” sonnets, but these were even more cynical and perverse. Mahnmut agreed with the analysis that the poet’s interest in this woman was centered precisely on her promiscuity—this woman of the dark hair, dark eyes, dun breasts, and dark nipples was, if the poet was to be trusted, not a whore, but certainly something of a slut.