Orphu made an impolite sound. “Directed quantum distortion can rip time and space apart—people and planets, too—but I don’t see how it can fly a chariot.”
Mahnmut shrugged despite the fact that his friend, invisible under the tarp rigged on the mid-deck, couldn’t see him. “Well, it didn’t have propellers,” he said. “I’ll download you the data, but it looked to me like the awkward thing was surfing on a curl of quantum distortion.”
“Peculiar,” said Orphu. “But even a thousand such flying machines couldn’t explain the locus of quantum distortion Ri Po recorded on Olympus Mons.”
“No,” agreed Mahnmut. “At least this . . . god . . . didn’t see us.”
There was a pause in the conversation and Mahnmut listened to the crash of the felucca’s bow against the waves and the flap of the lateen-rigged canvas as the big sails filled with wind again. There was a soft wind-strum through the rigging up where Mahnmut was, and he enjoyed the sound of it. He also enjoyed the less-than-gentle pitch and roll of the ship as it tacked, even while he compensated for it easily as he clung to the mast with one hand, his other hand on a taut line. They were deep into the widest section of the flooded rift valley now, in an area called Melas Chasma, with the huge, radiating sub-sea of Candor Chasma opening up to the north and the seabed more than eight kilometers beneath them, but there were cliffs belonging to huge islands—some several hundred kilometers long and thirty or forty kilometers across—visible on the horizon to the south.
“Perhaps he saw you and just radioed back to Olympus for reinforcements,” suggested Orphu.
Mahnmut sent the radio static equivalent of a sigh. “Always the optimist,” he said.
“Realist,” amended Orphu. But the tone of the next broadcast was serious. “You know, Mahnmut, that you’ll have to talk to the little green men again soon. We have too many questions that need answering.”
“I know,” said Mahnmut. The thought made him vaguely ill in a way that the pitching and rolling of the felucca never could.
“Perhaps we should inflate and launch the balloon sooner rather than later,” Orphu suggested again. Mahnmut had spent several days cobbling together a wider, broader gondola from the bamboo-three of the first one and some borrowed planks from one of the felucca’s less essential bulkheads. The LGM had not seemed to mind his borrowing their boards.
“I still don’t think we should launch yet,” said Mahnmut. “We’re not even sure about the prevailing winds this month, and the pulse-thrusters won’t give us much steering once the balloon gets up into the Martian jetstream. We’d better get as close to Olympus as we can before we risk the balloon.”
“I agree,” said Orphu after a silence, “but it is time we talked to the LGM again. I have a theory that it’s not telepathy that they’re using—either when they communicate with you or pass information among themselves.”
“No?” said Mahnmut, looking down at a dozen of the little green men as they came up from the oardecks and began working efficiently on the forward rigging. “I can’t imagine what else it could be. They certainly don’t have mouths or ears, and they’re not transmitting data on any radio, tightbeam, maser, or light frequency.”
“I think the information is in the particles in their bodies,” said Orphu. “Nanopackets of encoded information. That’s why they insist you use your hand to grasp that internal organ—it’s a sort of telegraph-central—and your hand, as opposed to, say, your general manipulators, is organic. Living molecular machines can pass into your bloodstream via osmosis and travel to your organic brain, where the same nanobytes help translate.”
“Then how do they communicate among themselves?” asked Mahnmut, dubious. He’d liked the telepathy theory.
“The same way,” said Orphu. “Touch. Their skins are semipermeable, probably with data passing to and fro with every casual contact.”
“I don’t know,” said Mahnmut. “Remember how this crew seemed to know everything about us when the felucca arrived? Where we were going? I had the feeling that our presence had been broadcast telepathically all along the little green man psychic network.”
“Yes, it appeared that way to me as well,” said Orphu, “but besides the fact that neither human nor moravec science has ever established even a theoretical framework for telepathy, Occam’s razor would dictate that the felucca crew learned of us through simple physical contact with the LGM at our landing site—or from others who had been there.”
“Nanopackets of data in the bloodstream, eh?” said Mahnmut, allowing the skepticism to be audible in his tone. “But one of these individuals still has to die if I’m going to ask more questions.”
“Regrettably,” said Orphu, not bringing up his earlier arguments that individual LGM probably had no more autonomous personality than did human skin cells.
Several of the little men were clambering on the forward mast near Mahnmut now, tying off lines and sliding down the lateen sail with the ease of acrobats. They nodded their green heads amicably as they passed on their way up or down.
“I think I’ll wait until later to ask them,” said Mahnmut. “There’s a huge brown-red cloud on the southern horizon right now, and they’ll need all hands to get the ship ready for the coming storm.”
27
The Plains of Ilium
The Trojans are massacring the Greeks. My students in my other life would have said that they’re “decimating” the Greeks, using that term for total destruction so loved by late Twentieth and early Twenty-first Century lazy journalists and illiterate TV anchorpersons, but since “to decimate” was a precise term—the Romans killing every tenth man in a village in response to uprisings—and that would only result in 10 percent casualties, it’s fair to say that they’re doing much worse than decimating the Greeks.
The Trojans are massacring the Greeks.
After Zeus’s ultimatum to the other gods, he QT’s to Earth in his golden chariot and lands on the slopes of Mount Ida, the tallest mountain within easy god-view of Ilium, and assumes his oversized throne on the mountaintop there, gazing down and out at the high walls of the city and the hundreds of Achaean warships on the beach and at anchor offshore. The other gods are too intimidated to come down to play after Zeus’s demonstration of raw power, so the Father of the Gods holds out his golden scales and weighs the fates of death for the men below—one weight molded in the form of a Trojan horseman, the other an Argive spearman armored in bronze.
Zeus raises high the sacred scales, holding the beam mid-haft, and down goes the Achaeans’ day of doom while the fortunes of Troy go lifting skyward. Zeus smiles at this, and I’m close enough to see that the old bastard had his thumb on the scales.
The Trojans come broiling out of their city gates like hornets out of a disturbed hive. The sky is low, gray, seething with dark energy, and Zeus’s thunderbolts strike the battlefield frequently—and always among the Argives and long-haired Achaeans. Clearly seeing the signs of the displeasure of the King of the Gods, the Greeks still surge forward to fight—what else can they do?—and the plains of Ilium echo to the crash of shields pounded hide to hide, the scrape of pike, the rumble of chariots, and the screams of dying men and horses.
It goes badly for the Achaeans from the start. Lightning strikes among them, frying men like bronze-clad chickens on a rotisserie. Hector charges forward like a force of nature, and the quiet man I admired on the walls of Ilium with his wife and child is gone, replaced by a bloodied berserker cutting men down like stalks of grass and screaming to his followers for more blood, more carnage. His followers obey, the entire Trojan army and allies shouting as if from a single throat and surging forward en masse, rolling over the retreating Achaeans like a bronze-and-leather tsunami.