Four secret paths to the truth of the puzzle of life, Orphu had said. The first—Proust’s characters’ obsession with nobility, with aristocracy, with the upper echelons of society—was obviously a dead end. Mahnmut did not have to wade through 3,000 pages of dinner parties the way Proust’s protagonist had in order to realize this.

The second, the idea of love as the key to life’s puzzle, this fascinated Mahnmut. Certainly Proust—like Shakespeare but in a completely different way—had attempted to explore all facets of human love—heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, familial, collegial, interpersonal—as well as love of places and things and of life itself. And Mahnmut had to agree with Orphu’s analysis that Proust had rejected love as a true line to deeper understanding.

The third path for Marcel had been art—art and music—but while that had led Marcel to beauty, it had not led to truth.

What is the fourth path? And if that failed for Proust’s heroes, what was the true path under and behind the pages, unknown to the characters but perhaps glimpsed by Proust himself?

All Mahnmut had to do to find out was open the line to Orphu. Lost in their own thoughts, perhaps, the two friends had communicated very little during this last day of deceleration. He’ll tell me later, thought Mahnmut. And perhaps by then I’ll see it myself . . . and see if it connects to Shakespeare’s analysis of what lies beyond love. Certainly the Bard had all but rejected sentimental and romantic and physical love by the end of the sonnets.

The fusion engines stopped firing. The release from high-g and hull-transmitted noise and vibration was almost terrifying.

Immediately the spherical fuel-engine spheres were jettisoned, small rockets carrying them away from the ship’s trajectory.

Releasing sail and solenoid came Orphu’s voice on the common line. Mahnmut watched on various hull video feeds as these components were ejected into space.

Mahnmut went back to the forward video. Mars was clearly visible now, only eighteen million kilometers ahead and below them. Ri Po provided trajectory overlays on the image. Their approach looked perfect. Small internal ion-thrusters were continuing to slow the ship and preparing to inject it into a polar orbit.

No records of radar or other sensor tracking during our descent, said Koros III. No attempt at interception.

Mahnmut thought that the Ganymedan had great dignity but also a propensity for stating the obvious.

We’re getting data through our passive sensors, said Ri Po.

Mahnmut checked the readouts. If they had been approaching—say—Europa, the displays would have shown radio, gravitonic, microwave, and a host of other technology-related emissions coming from the moravec-inhabited moon. Mars showed nothing. But the terraformed world was certainly inhabited. Already the bow-mounted telescope was able to pick up images of the white houses on Mons Olympos, the straight and curved slashes of roads, the stone heads lining the shore of the Northern Sea, and even some glimpses of individual movement and activity, but no radio traffic, no microwave relays, none of the electromagnetic signature of a technological civilization. Mahnmut remembered the phrase that Ri Po had used—idiot savants?

Prepare to enter Mars orbit in sixteen hours, announced Koros. We will observe from orbit for another twenty-four hours. Mahnmut, prepare your submersible for de-orbit burn thirty hours from now.

Yes, said Mahnmut over the common line, stifling the urge to add a “sir.”

Mars seemed quiet enough for most of the twenty-four hours they were in polar orbit around it.

There were artificial things in Stickney Crater on Phobos—mining machinery, what was left of a magnetic accelerator, broken habitation domes and robotic rovers—but they were cold and dusty and pockmarked and more than three millennia old. Whoever had terraformed Mars in the past century had nothing to do with the ancient artifacts on the inner moon.

Mahnmut had seen images of Mars when it was the Red Planet—although he always thought it more orange than red—but it was reddish-orange no longer. Coming in over the north pole, the telescopic view resolving things down to a meter in length, what was left of the polar ice cap—just a squiggle of water-ice now, all the CO2 having long since been sublimed away in the terraforming—a white island in the blue northern sea. Spirals of clouds moved across the ocean that covered more than half of the northern hemisphere. The highlands were still orangish and most of the land masses were brown, but the startling green of forests and fields were visible without using the telescope.

No one and nothing challenged the ship: no radio calls, no search or acquisition radar, no tightbeam or laser or modulated neutrino queries. As the tense minutes moved into long hours of silence, the four moravecs watched the views and prepared for the descent of The Dark Lady.

There was obviously life on Mars—human or post-human life, from the looks of it, along with at least one other species: the stone-head movers, possibly human, but short and green in the telescope photos. White-sailed ships moved along the northern coastline and up the water-filled canyons of Valles Marineris, but not many ships. A few more sails were visible on the cratered sea that had been Hellas Basin. There were obvious signs of habitation on Olympus Mons—and at least one high-tech people-mover stairway or escalator along the flanks of that volcano—and photographs of half a dozen flying machines near the summit caldera of Olympus, and a few glimpses of a few other white houses and terraced gardens on the high slopes of the Tharsis volcanoes—Ascraesus Mons, Pavonis Mons, and Arsia Mons—but no signs whatsoever of an extensive planetary civilization. Koros III announced over the common line that he estimated no more than three thousand of the pale human-looking people lived on the four volcanoes, with perhaps twenty thousand of the green workers congregated in tent cities along the shorelines.

Most of Mars was empty. Terraformed but empty.

Hardly a danger to all sentient life-forms in the solar system, then, is it? asked Orphu of Io.

It was Ri Po who responded. Look at the planet through quantum mapping.

“My God,” Mahnmut said aloud to his empty enviro-crèche. Mars was a blinding red blaze of quantum-shift activity, with flow lines converging on the major volcano, Olympus Mons.

Could the few flying vehicles be causing this quantum havoc? asked Orphu. They don’t register on the electromagnetic spectrum and they certainly aren’t chemically propelled.

No, said Koros III. While the few flying machines move in and out of the quantum flux, they are not generating it. Or at least not the primary source.

Mahnmut looked at the bizarre quantum map overlay another minute before venturing a suggestion he’d been thinking about for days. Would it make sense to contact them via radio or another medium? Or just land openly on Olympus Mons. To come as friends rather than spies?

We have considered this course of action, said Koros. But the quantum activity is so intense that we find it imperative to gather more information before revealing ourselves.

Gather information and get these weapons of mass destruction as close to that volcano as possible, Mahnmut thought with some bitterness. He had never wanted to be a soldier. Moravecs were not designed to fight and the thought of killing sentient beings warred with programming as old as his species.

Nonetheless, Mahnmut prepared The Dark Lady for descent. He put the submersible on internal power and separated all life support umbilicals from the ship, remaining connected only through the comm cables that would be severed when they moved out of the hold. The submersible had been wrapped in ultrastealth and a reaction-pak of thrusters now girdled the bow and stern of the sub, but these would be controlled by Koros III during the entry phase, then jettisoned. The final add-on was the blister-circle of parachutes that would slow their fall after re-entry. These would also be controlled and jettisoned by Koros III. Only after they reached the ocean would Mahnmut guide his own submersible.