“All right,” said Harman, but his voice carried a hint of being patronizing. She was babbling. “But you said you were in an iceberg down near Antarctica when the final fax came,” continued Harman. “How do you know where your friends were and what the voynix were doing?”
“Farnet, proxnet, and allnet records,” said the old woman. She turned and led them further east down the street.
Harman glanced at Daeman again, as if to share his concern about her nonsense-talk, but Daeman felt a rush of something—pride? superiority?—as he realized that he knew exactly what she meant when she talked about farnet and proxnet. He looked at his own palm and keyed the finder function, but the glow was blank. What would happen, he wondered, if he visualized the four blue rectangles above three red circles above four green triangles to summon the full-data function the way she’d taught him in the forest glen yesterday?
Savi stopped and spoke as if she’d read his mind. “You don’t want to invoke the allnet function here, Daeman. You wouldn’t be virtually immersed in energy-microclimate interactions like you were in the forest . . . not here in Jerusalem. You’d be dealing with five thousand years of pain, terror, and virulent anti-Semitism.”
“Anti-Semitism?” repeated Harman.
“Hatred of Jews,” said Savi.
Harman and Daeman looked at each other with quizzical expressions. The idea made no sense.
Daeman was beginning to be sorry that he’d changed his mind and come along. He was hungry. The sun was setting behind them. He didn’t know where he was going to sleep this night, but he suspected that it would be uncomfortable.
“Come,” said Savi and led them another block, through stone doorways, down a narrow alley, and out into a space dominated by a tall, blank wall.
“Is this what we came to see?” said Daeman, disappointed. It was a dead end—a courtyard bound around by lower walls, stone buildings, and this one big wall with some sort of round metallic structure just visible atop it. There was no way to get up there from here.
“Patience,” said Savi. She squinted at the disappearing sun. “And today’s Tisha b’Av, just as it was on the day of the final fax.”
Looking as if he was tired of repeating nonsense syllables, Harman said, “Tisha b’Av?”
“The Ninth of Av,” said Savi. “A day of lamentation. Both the First and Second Temples were destroyed on Tisha b’Av, and I think the voynix built this blasphemous Third Temple on the Ninth of Av on the day of the final fax.” She pointed to the black metal half-dome beyond the wall.
Suddenly there was a rumble so deep that Daeman’s bones and teeth rattled. Both he and Harman took a frightened step back, the air filled with ozone and static so thick that the hair on Daeman’s head rose and rippled like tall grass in a high wind, and—with an explosive crash faster and louder than a lightning strike—a solid shaft of pure blue, blindingly brilliant light some sixty feet across shot up from the metal half-dome, pierced the evening sky, and disappeared arrow-straight into space, barely missing the orbital e-ring in its eternal rotation to the east.
29
Candor Chasma
For eight Martian days and eight Martian nights, the dust storm raised waves ten meters high, howled through the rigging, and pounded the little felucca northward toward the leeward shore and death for all hands, including the two moravecs.
The little green men aboard were competent sailors, but they ceased to function at night and now were inert much of the day when the dust clouds overhead blotted out the sun. To Mahnmut, when the LGM found their dark corners beneath decks and curled up in niches to keep from rolling around, it was like sailing in a ship of the dead, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where the ship arrives crewed only by corpses.
The felucca’s sails were made of a tough, lightweight polymer rather than canvas, but the ferocity of the wind out of the southeast and the particles and pebbles being blasted at them tore the sheets to shreds. The deck was no longer a safe place to be, and, during a brief interval of sunlight, twenty LGM helped Mahnmut cut a hole in the mid-deck and lower Orphu to the deck below, where Mahnmut constructed a wood and tarp shelter for the Ionian and tucked him away from the pelting wind. Mahnmut himself sensed the airborne grit getting into his seams and works when he spent too much time helping the LGM abovedecks, so he hunkered down on the lower deck near Orphu when he could, making sure his friend was roped and bolted into place as the felucca pitched forty degrees to each side and the water—now mixed with the blowing red sand and as red as blood—forced its way through every crack. A dozen of the forty little green men aboard manned handpumps every hour they were conscious, pumping out the bilge and lower decks, and Mahnmut worked alone on a pump through the long nights.
They had used the wind to good advantage before the sails, rigging, and sea anchor were all damaged, working hard, tacking hard, sailing into the wind, waves crashing over the bow, to get deeper into the central inland sea, obviously all worried about the kilometer-high cliffs behind them to the north, and covering hundreds of kilometers in the first two days of the storm. They were somewhere now between Coprates Chasma and the islands of Melas Chasma, with the huge flooded-canyon complex of Candor Chasma ahead somewhere on their starboard side.
Then the storms grew worse, the skies grew darker, the LGM tucked and tied themselves into secure places belowdecks while they shut down in the sandstorm gloom, and both the bow and stern sea anchors—two elaborate curves of polycanvas dragging on cable trailing hundreds of meters beneath the ship—gave way on the same day. Mahnmut knew from earlier sightings that there were kilometer-high cliffs to their north, and—somewhere—the broad opening to the flooded canyons of Candor Chasma—but the electrostatic charge in the dust storm was defeating his GPS receiver, and it had been two days since he’d had a decent star or sunsight. The cliffs and their doom might be a half hour away for all he knew.
“Is there a chance we might sink?” asked Orphu that afternoon of the fourth day.
“The odds are good,” said Mahnmut. He didn’t want to lie to his friend, so he tried to couch the phrase as ambiguously as he could.
“Can you swim in this storm?” asked Orphu. He’d understood that the “good” odds in that sentence was bad news for the both of them.
“Not really,” said Mahnmut. “But I can swim under the waves.”
“I’ll sink like the proverbial rock,” said Orphu with a soft rumble. “How deep did you say Valles Marineris was here?”
“I didn’t say,” said Mahnmut.
“Well, say now.”
“About seven kilometers deep,” said Mahnmut, who had echo-sounded it just an hour earlier.
“Would you crush at that depth?” asked Orphu.
“No. I’ve worked at much deeper pressures. I’m designed for it.”
“Would I crush?”
“I . . . don’t know,” said Mahnmut. In truth, he did not, but he knew that Orphu’s moravec line had been designed for the zero pressure of space and for the occasional forays into the upper reaches of a gas giant or the sulfur pits of Io—not for the punishing pressures of a saline sea seven thousand meters deep. Most likely, his friend would be crushed to the size of a crumpled can or simply implode long before he reached three kilometers of depth.
“Is there any chance of putting ashore?” asked Orphu.
“I don’t think so,” said Mahnmut. “The cliffs I saw were enormous, sheer, with giant boulders at their base. Waves must be crashing fifty or a hundred meters high there now.”
“An interesting image,” said Orphu. “Is there any chance of the LGM bringing us to safe harbor?”