Proust! That aesthete! You’re joking!

Not at all . There came a rumble on the subsonic spectrum of the tightband which Mahnmut interpreted as the Ionian’s laughter.

The integrator brought up images of some of the millions of orbital habitations moving in their stately ring-dance around Earth. Many were white, others silver. As brilliant as they looked in the heavy light so close to the sun, they also looked strangely cold. And empty.

“No shuttles. No evidence of ring-to-Earth neutrino faxing. And the convoy-bridge of heavy materials being accelerated between the rings and Mars—observed as recently as twenty Jovian years ago, two hundred forty-some Earth/pH ring years ago—is gone.”

“You think the post-humans are gone?” asked Koros III. “Died off somehow? Or migrated?”

“We know there was a sea change in their energy use, chronoclastic, quantum, and gravitational,” said the integrator. The unit was taller and a bit more humanoid than Mahnmut, sheathed in bright yellow surface-shield materials. His voice was soft, calm, carefully modulated. “Our interest now turns to Mars.”

The image of the fourth planet filled the window.

Mahnmut’s interest in Mars was marginal at best, and his images of it were from the Lost Age. This world looked nothing like the photos and holos from that era.

Instead of a rust-red world, this recent image of Mars revealed a blue sea covering most of the northern hemisphere, the Valles Marineris river valley showing a ribbon of blue many kilometers wide connecting to that ocean. Much of the southern hemisphere remained reddish-brown, but there were also large splotches of green. The Tharsis volcanoes still ran southwest to northeast in dark procession—one with a visible smoke plume—but Olympus Mons now rose within twenty kilometers or so of a huge bay arcing in from the northern ocean. White clouds clumped and grouped across the sunlit half of the image and bright lights glowed somewhere near Hellas Basin beyond the dark edge of the terminator. Mahnmut could see a hurricane spiraling north of the Chryse Planitia coastline.

“They terraformed it,” Mahnmut said aloud. “The posts terraformed Mars.”

“How long ago?” asked Orphu of Io. None of the Galileans had any special interest in Mars—in any of the Inner Worlds, for that matter (except for their literature)—so this could have happened any time in the twenty-five hundred terrestrial years since the break between moravecs and humanity.

“In the last two hundred years,” said Asteague/Che. “Perhaps in the last century and a half.”

“Impossible.” Koros III’s statement was flat and final. “Mars could never be terraformed in so short a time.”

“Yes, impossible,” agreed Asteague/Che. “But it was.”

“So the posts migrated there,” said Orphu of Io.

Little Ri Po answered. “We think not. Resolution on our observation of Mars has been a bit better than that of Earth. For instance, along the coastlines . . .”

The window showed an area along a twisting peninsula north of where the broad Valles Marineris rivers—more of a long inland sea, actually—emptied into a bay, flowed through an isthmus, and then opened into the northern ocean. The image zoomed. All along the coast where the land came down to the sea—sometimes showing red-desert hills, elsewhere green and heavily forested plains—tiny black specks followed the shoreline. The image zoomed a final time.

“Are those . . . sculptures?” asked Mahnmut.

“Stone heads, we think,” said Ri Po. The image shifted and the shadow of one of the blurry images suggested a brow, a nose, a bold chin.

“This is ridiculous,” said Koros III. “There would have to be millions of these Easter Island heads to border the entire northern ocean.”

“We count four million, two hundred three thousand, five hundred and nine,” said Asteague/Che. “But the construction is incomplete. Note this photograph taken some months ago during Mars’s closest approach.”

A myriad of tiny, blurry forms pulled what might be a great stone head on rollers. The stone face was looking skyward, its shadow-eyes staring straight into the space telescope. The tiny figures appeared to be attached to the heads by multiple cables, pulling them along, Mahnmut thought, like Egyptian slaves hauling a pyramid block.

“Human workers?” said Orphu. “Or robots?”

“We think neither,” said Ri Po. “The size is wrong. And you notice the coloring of the figures on the spectral analysis bands.”

“Green?” said Mahnmut. He liked literary puzzles, not real-life ones. “Green robots?”

“Or a species of small green humanoids not previously encountered,” Asteague/Che said seriously.

Orphus of Io rumbled subsonic laughter. “LGM,” he said aloud.

[ ? ] sent Mahnmut.

Little Green Men, Orphu of Io sent on the common band and rumbled again.

“Why were we called here?” Mahnmut asked Asteague/Che. “What does this terraforming have to do with us?”

The integrator returned the window to transparency. The bands of Jupiter and plains of Europan ice in the evening light looked dull and muted after all the vibrant inner-system blues and whites. “We’re sending a team to Mars to investigate this and report back,” said Asteague/Che. “You’ve been chosen. You can say ‘no’ now.”

The four remained silent on all communications spectra.

“I said ‘report back,’ “ continued the prime integrator, “but not necessarily ‘come back.’ We have no sure way of returning you to the Jovian system. Please signal if you would like to be replaced on this mission.”

All four remained silent.

“All right,” said the Europan integrator. “You’ll download the specifics of the expedition in a few minutes, but let me cover the high points. We will use Mahnmut’s submersible for the actual surveillance on the planet. Ri Po and Orphu will map from orbit while Mahnmut and Koros III go to the surface. We’re especially interested in activity on and around Mons Olympos, the largest volcano. Quantum-shift activity there has been massive and inexplicable. Mahnmut will deliver Koros III to the coastline, and our Ganymedan friend will carry out reconnaissance.”

Mahnmut knew from his records and readings that Lost Age humans had signaled pending interruption by clearing their throats. He made a throat-clearing noise. “You have to excuse my stupidity, but how do we get The Dark Lady—my submersible—to Mars?”

“That’s not a stupid question,” said the integrator. “Orphu of Io?”

The giant armored horseshoe crab shifted on its repellors so that various black lenses looked at Mahnmut. “It’s been centuries since we’ve sent anything in-system. And anything delivered the old-fashioned way would take half a Jovian year. We’ve decided to use the scissors.”

Ri Po shifted in his slab niche. “I thought the scissors were going to be used only for interstellar exploration.”

“The Five Moons Consortium has decided that this takes precedence,” said Orphu of Io.

“I presume there will be some sort of spacecraft,” said Koros III. “Or are you going to fling us one after the other, naked, like so many chickens fired from a trebuchet?”

Orphu’s subsonic rumble shook the slab. He obviously liked Koros’ image.

Mahnmut had to access the common net. A trebuchet was a Lost Age human siege engine from their Level Two civilizations—pre-steam—mechanical but much more powerful than a mere catapult, able to launch huge boulders more than a mile.

“A spacecraft exists,” said Asteague/Che. “It has been designed to reach Mars in a few days and configured to hold Mahnmut’s submersible. The spacecraft has an atmospheric entry package for Mahnmut’s submersible—The Dark Lady .”

“Reach Mars in a few days,” repeated Ri Po. “What are the delta-v factors leaving Io’s flux tube?”

“Just under three thousand gravities,” said the integrator. “Earth g’s.”