Free Ilium by Dan Simmons Page B

project was rushed.”
    “Are there signs of the originals?” asked Orphu of Io.
    The descendents of your Shakespeare, Orphu said on tightbeam to Mahnmut.
    “Unknown,” said Asteague/Che. “The greatest resolution is just under two kilometers and we’ve seen no sign of original-human life or artifacts, other than previously mapped ruins. There is some neutrino fax activity, but it may be automated or residual. In truth, the humans are of no concern to us right now. The post-humans are.”
    My Shakespeare? You mean our Shakespeare! Mahnmut tightbeamed to the big Ionian.
    Sorry, Mahnmut. As much as I love the sonnets—and even your Bard’s plays—my own concentration has been on Proust.
    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