“What would Proust say about what it takes to be human… or a man, for that matter?” asks Mahnmut.

“Ah, Proust, that tiresome fellow,” says Orphu. “I was reading him again just this morning.”

“You once tried to explain to me his steps to truth,” says Mahnmut. “But first you said he had three steps, then four, then three, then back to four. I don’t think you ever told me what they were, either. In fact, I think you lost track of what you were talking about.”

“Just testing you,” says Orphu with a rumble. “Seeing if you were listening.”

“So you say,” says Mahnmut. “I think you were having a moravec moment.”

“It wouldn’t be the first,” says Orphu of Io. Data overload from both their organic brains and cybernetic memory banks was an increasing problem as moravecs moved into their second or third century.

“Well,” says Mahnmut, “I doubt if Proust’s ideas about the essence of being human connect too well with Odysseus’.”

Four of Orphu’s multiply jointed arms are busy with the welding, but he shrugs two others. “You remember that he tried friendship—even as a lover—as being one of those paths,” says the Ionian. “So he has that in common with both Odysseus and our scholic in there. But Proust’s narrator discovers that his own calling to truth is writing, examining the nuances wrapped within the other nuances of his life.”

“But he’d rejected art earlier as a path to the deepest humanity,” says Mahnmut. “I thought you told me that he decided that art wasn’t the way to truth after all.”

“He discovers that real art is an actual form of creation,” says Orphu. “Here, listen to this passage from an early section of The Guermantes Way—

“ ‘People of taste tell us nowadays that Renoir is a great eighteenth-century painter. But in so saying they forget the element of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even at the height of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original painter or the orginal writer proceeds on the lines of the oculist. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by their prose is not always pleasant. When it is at an end the practitioner says to us: “Now look!” And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we formerly saw, because they are Renoirs, those Renoirs we persistently refused to see as women. The carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky; we feel tempted to go for a walk in the forest which is identical with the one which when we first saw it looked like anything in the world except a forest, like for instance a tapestry of innumerable hues, but lacking precisely the hues peculiar to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe which has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter of original talent.’ And he goes on to explain how writers do the same thing, Mahnmut—bring new universes into existence.”

“Surely he doesn’t mean that in a literal sense,” says Mahnmut. “Not bringing real universes into existence.”

“I think he is speaking literally,” replies Orphu, his tone on the radio band as serious as Mahnmut has ever heard it. “Have you been following the quantum flux sensor readings that Asteague/Che has been putting on the common band?”

“No, not really. Quantum theory bores me.”

“This isn’t theory,” says Orphu. “Every day we’ve been making this Mars-Earth transit, the quantum instability between the two worlds, within our entire solar system, has grown larger. The Earth is at the center of this flux. It’s as if all of its space-time probability matrices have entered some vortex, some region of self-induced chaos.”

“What does that have to do with Proust?”

Orphu shuts off the welding torch. The large patch-plate on the cargo-bay doors is perfectly joined. “Somebody or something is screwing around with worlds, perhaps with entire universes. Break down the math of the quantum data flowing in, and it’s as if different quantum Calabi-Yau spaces have somehow attempted to coexist on one Brane. It’s almost as if new worlds are trying to come into existence—as if they’ve been willed into existence by some singular genius, just as Proust suggests.”

Somewhere on the Queen Mab, invisible thrusters fire and the long, inelegant-but-beautiful black buckycarbon and steel spacecraft rotates and tumbles. Mahnmut grabs a clutch-bar, his feet flying out away from the ship, as three hundred meters of atomic spacecraft twist and tumble like a circus acrobat. Sunlight slides across the two moravecs and then sets behind the bulky pusher plates at the stern. Mahnmut readjusts his polarized filters, sees the stars again, and knows that while Orphu can’t see them on the visible spectrum, he’s listening to their radio squawks and screeches. That themonuclear choir, the Ionian once had called it.

“Orphu, my friend,” Mahnmut says, “are you getting religious on me?”

The Ionian rumbles in the subsonic. “If I am—and if Proust is right and real universes are created when those rare, almost unique genius-level minds concentrate on creating them—I don’t think I want to meet the creators of this current reality. There’s something malignant at work here.”

“I don’t see why this …” begins Mahnmut and then pauses, listening to the common band. “What’s a twelve-oh-one alarm?”

“The mass of the Mab has just decreased by sixty-four kilograms,” says Orphu.

“Waste and urine dump?”

“Not quite. Our friend Hockenberry has just quantum teleported away.”

Mahnmut’s first thought is—Hockenberry’s in no condition to QT anywhere—we should have stopped him. Friends don’t let friends teleport drunk—but he decides not to share this with Orphu.

A second later, Orphu says, “Do you hear that?”

“No, what?”

“I’ve been monitoring the radio bands. We just brought the high-gain antenna around to aim it at Earth—or actually, the polar orbital ring around Earth—and it’s just picked up a modulated radio broadcast being masered right at us.”

“What does it say?” Mahnmut feels his organic heart beginning to pump faster. He doesn’t override the adrenaline, but lets it pump.

“It’s definitely from the polar ring,” says Orphu, “about thirty-five thousand kilometers above Earth. The message is in a woman’s voice. And it just says, over and over—‘Bring Odysseus to me.’ ”

Daeman entered the blue-ice dome-cathedral to an echoing susurration of whispers and chants.

“Thinketh, He made it, with the fire to match, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, that floats and feeds! Thinketh, He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye by moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue, that pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm, and says a plain word when she finds her prize, but will not eat the ants; the ants themselves that built a wall of seeds and settled stalks about their hole—He made all these and more, made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?”

Daeman recognized the voice at once—Caliban. The sibilant whispers echoed off blue-ice wall and blue-ice tunnel, seeming to come from everywhere, reassuringly distant, terrifyingly close. And somehow that single Caliban voice was a chorus, a choir, a multitude of voices in terrible harmony. More frightened than he thought he’d be—much, much more frightened than he’d hoped he would be—Daeman bent his head low and moved forward out of the ice tunnel onto the ice mezzanine.

After an hour’s crawling, often backtracking as some blue-ice tunnel narrowed and closed at a dead end, sometimes emerging into corridors ten yards across only to come up against a wall or vertical shaft far too high to climb, sometimes crawling on his belly so that his back scraped the ice ceiling, shoving his pack ahead of him along with the crossbow, Daeman had emerged into what he thought of as the center of the ice-dome cathedral.