“Where?” said Mahnmut. “I mean where did they send them? Mars? Other star systems?”

“No, you need a receiver as well as a transmitter with quantum teleportation,” said the Ionian. “They just sent them from somewhere on the Earth to somewhere else on the Earth—or in their orbital cities—but they had a big surprise when the objects materialized.”

“Does this has something to do with a fly?” asked Mahnmut. His secret vice was old movies from the Twentieth Century to the end of the Lost Age.

“A fly?” said Orphu. “No. Why?”

“Never mind. What was the big surprise they got when they teleported these things?”

“First, that the quantum teleportation worked,” said Orphu. “But more important, that when the person or animal or thing came through, it carried information with it. Information about its own quantum state. Information about everything it shouldn’t have information about. Including memory for the human beings.”

“I thought you said that the rules of quantum mechanics forbid that.”

“They do,” said Orphu.

“Magic again?” asked Mahnmut, feeling the tug of alarm at the direction Orphu was headed. “Are we talking Prospero and Greek gods here?”

“Yes, but not in the way you sarcastically mean,” said Orphu of Io. “Our scientists at the time thought that the post-humans were actually exchanging tangled pairs with identical objects . . . or persons . . . in another universe.”

“Another universe,” Mahnmut repeated dully. “As in parallel universes?”

“Not quite,” said Orphu. “Not like the old idea of an infinite or near-infinite number of parallel universes. Just a few—a very finite number—of quantum phase-shifted universes co-existing with or near our own.”

Mahnmut had no idea what his friend was talking about, but he said nothing.

“Not only co-existing quantum universes,” continued the deep-space moravec, “but created universes.”

“Created?” repeated Mahnmut. “As in God?”

“No,” said Orphu. “As in through acts of genius, by geniuses.”

“I don’t understand.”

Deimos had set. The Martian volcanoes were visible now in starlight, masses of clouds creeping up their long slopes like pale-gray amoebae. Mahnmut checked his internal chronometer. One hour until Martian sunrise. He was cold.

“You know what human researchers found when they were studying the human mind millennia ago,” said Orphu. “Back before the post-humans were even a factor. Our own moravec minds are built the same way, although we use artificial as well as organic brain matter.”

Mahnmut tried to remember. “The human scientists were using quantum computers way back in the Twenty-first Century,” he said. “To analyze biochemical cascades in human synapses. They discovered that the human mind—not the brain, but the mind—wasn’t like a computer, it wasn’t like a chemical memory machine, but was exactly like . . .”

“A quantum-state standing wavefront,” said Orphu. “Human consciousness exists primarily as a quantum state waveform, just like the rest of the universe.”

“And you’re saying that consciousness itself created these other universes?” Mahnmut followed the logic, if it could be called that, but he was shocked by the absurd implications.

“Not just consciousness,” said Orphu. “Exceptional types of consciousness that are like naked singularities in that they can bend space-time, affect the organization of space-time, and collapse probability waves into discrete alternatives. I’m talking Shakespeare here. Proust. Homer.”

“But that’s so . . . so . . . so . . .” stammered Mahnmut.

“Solipsistic?”

“Stupid,” said Mahnmut.

They floated along in silence for several minutes. Mahnmut assumed that he might have hurt his friend’s feelings, but that wasn’t important right now. After a while, he said over the tightbeam, “So are you expecting to find the ghosts of the real Greek gods when we get to Olympus Mons?”

“Not ghosts,” said Orphu. “But you saw the quantum readings. Whoever these people are on Olympus, they’ve punched quantum holes all around this world, all centered on or near Olympus. They’re going somewhere. Coming from somewhere else. The quantum reality of this area is so unstable it may actually implode, and take a chunk of our solar system with it.”

“Do you think that’s what the Device is built to do?” asked Mahnmut. “Implode the quantum fields here before they reach some critical mass?”

“I don’t know,” said Orphu. “Perhaps.”

“And do you think that’s what screwed up the Earth and sent the post-humans to their orbital cities fourteen hundred years ago there? Some quantum failure?”

“No,” said Orphu. “I think that whatever happened on Earth was a result of quantum teleportation success, not failure.”

“What do you mean?” For a brief second, Mahnmut was not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

“I think they punched quantum tunnels into one or more of these alternate realities,” said Orphu. “And they let something in.”

They floated along in silence until sunrise.

The sun touched the top of the balloon first, painting the orange fabric in unreal light and causing each buckycable to gleam. Then it reached the three Tharsis volcanoes, glinting on ice, moving goldly down the east side of each of the three volcanoes like so much slow magma. Then the sun bathed the breaking clouds in pink and gold and illuminated the Valles Marineris Inland Sea all the way to the eastern horizon like a lapis crack in the world. Olympus Mons caught the sunlight a minute later and Mahnmut watched as the great peak seemed to rise above the western horizon like some advancing galleon with sails of gold and red.

Then the sun glinted on something closer and higher.

“Orphu!” sent Mahnmut. “We have company.”

“One of the chariots?”

“Still too far away to tell. Even with vision magnification, it’s lost in the sunrise glare.”

“Anything we can do if it is the chariot people? Have you found any weapons without telling me?”

“All we have to throw at them is harsh language,” said Mahnmut, still watching the gleaming speck. It was moving very fast and would be on them soon. “Unless you want me to trigger the Device.”

“It might be a bit early for that,” said Orphu.

“It seems odd that Koros III came on this mission without weapons.”

“We don’t know what he would have brought along from the command pod,” said Orphu. “But that reminds me of something I’ve been thinking about.”

“What’s that?”

“You remember we were discussing Koros’s secret mission to the asteroid belt a few years ago.”

“Yes?” The sun was still blazing from the advancing aircraft, but Mahnmut could see that it was a chariot now, its holographic horses in full gallop.

“What if it wasn’t a spy mission?” said Orphu.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, the rock moravecs have one thing we five-moons types never bothered to evolve.”

“Aggression?” said Mahnmut. “Bellicosity?”

“Exactly. What if Koros III was sent not as a spy, but as a . . .”

“Excuse me,” interrupted Mahnmut. “But our guest is here. One large humanoid in a chariot.”

Sonic booms crashed around Mahnmut, rippling the fabric of the huge balloon above. The chariot continued to decelerate. It circled the balloon once from a distance of a hundred meters.

“The same man who greeted us in orbit?” asked Orphu. His voice was perfectly calm. Mahnmut looked at the helpless shell lashed to the deck, without so much as an eye to watch what was going on.

“No,” he said. “That Greek god had a gray beard. This one is younger and clean shaven. He looks to be about three meters tall.” Mahnmut held up his hand, palm outward in the ancient sign for greeting, showing no weapon. “I think he . . .”

The chariot wheeled closer. The man at the reins held out his right hand, fist closed, and swept the fist from right to left.