“No, I’m not crazy,” said Orphu, sounding disgusted. “Listen to what I’m saying.”

“Prospero is a literary character,” Mahnmut said slowly. “A fictional construct. We know about him only because of the memory banks about human culture and history that were sent along with the early moravecs two e-millennia ago.”

“Yes,” said Orphu. “Prospero is a fictional construct and the Greek gods are myths. And that their presence here is just because they’re humans or post-humans in disguise. But what if they aren’t? What if they’re really Prospero . . . really Greek gods?”

Mahnmut felt true alarm now. He had looked straight on at the terror of continuing on this mission alone should Orphu die, but he’d never considered the worse alternative of having a blinded, crippled, insane Orphu of Io as a companion on this last stage of the mission. Could he bring himself to leave Orphu behind when they landed?

“How could the gods—or whatever these people in togas and flying chariots are—not be myths or post-humans lost in role playing?” asked Mahnmut. “Are you suggesting they’re . . . space aliens? Ancient Martians who somehow weren’t noticed during the Lost Age exploration of this planet? What?”

“I’m saying what if the Greek gods are Greek gods,” Orphu said softly. “What if Prospero is Prospero? Caliban Caliban? Should we meet him, which I hope we don’t.”

“Uh-huh,” said Mahnmut. “Interesting theory.”

“God damn it, don’t patronize me,” snapped Orphu. “Do you know anything about quantum teleportation?”

“Just the theory behind it,” said Mahnmut. “And the fact that this world is riddled with active quantum activity.”

“Holes,” said Orphu.

“What?”

“They’re like wormholes. When quantum shift events are maintained like this, even for a few nanoseconds, you get a standing-wormhole singularity effect. You know what a singularity is, right?”

“Yes,” said Mahnmut, irritated now at the way his friend was talking to him. “I know the definitions of wormholes, singularities, black holes, and quantum teleportation—and I know how all those conditions, except the last one, warp spacetime. But what the hell does that have to do with gods in togas and flying chariots? These are post-humans we’re dealing with on Mars. Possibly crazy post-humans, self-evolved beyond sanity, but post-humans.”

“You may be right,” said Orphu. “But let’s look at another alternative.”

“Which is what? That fictional characters have suddenly come to life?”

“Do you know why moravec engineers gave up on developing quantum teleportation as a way to travel to the stars?” said Orphu.

“It’s not stable,” said Mahnmut. “There’s evidence of some accident on Earth fifteen hundred or so years ago. The humans or post-humans were fooling around with quantum wormholes and it didn’t work and backfired on them somehow.”

“A lot of moravec observers think that it backfired precisely because it did work,” said Orphu.

“I don’t understand.”

“Quantum teleportation is an old technology,” said the Ionian. “The old-style humans were experimenting with it way back in the Twentieth or Twenty-first Century, before the posts even evolved themselves out of the human species. Before everything went to shit on earth.”

“So?”

“So the essence of quantum teleportation was that you couldn’t send large objects—nothing much bigger than a photon, and not even that, really. Just the complete quantum state of that photon.”

“What’s the difference between the complete quantum state of something or somebody and that thing or person?” asked Mahnmut.

“Nothing,” said Orphu. “That’s the sweet part. Quantum teleport a photon or a Percheron stallion, and you get a complete duplicate of the thing on the other end. So complete a duplicate that, to all intents and purposes, it is the photon.”

“Or Percheron,” said Manhmut. He’d always enjoyed looking at images of horses. As far as the moravecs knew, real horses had been extinct on Earth for millennia.

“But even if you teleport a photon from one place to another,” continued Orphu, “the rules of quantum physics demand that the particle teleported can bring no information with it. Not even information about its own quantum state.”

“Sort of useless then, isn’t it?” said Mahnmut. Phobos had finished its fast hurtle across the Martian night sky and set behind the distant curve of the world. Deimos moved at a more stately pace.

“That’s what the humans back in the Twentieth or Twenty-first Century thought,” said Orphu. “But then the post-humans began playing with quantum teleportation. First on Earth, and then in their orbital cities or whatever those objects in near Earth orbit are.”

“And they had more success?” said Mahnmut. “But we know that something went wrong about fourteen hundred years ago, right about the time the Earth was showing all that quantum activity.”

“Something went wrong,” agreed Orphu. “But it wasn’t a failure of the quantum teleportation. The post-humans—or their thinking machines—developed a line of quantum transport based on entangled particles.”

“Spooky action at a distance,” said Mahnmut. He’d never been very interested in nuclear physics or astrophysics or particle physics—hell, in physics of any form—but he’d always enjoyed Einstein’s damning phrase attacking quantum mechanics. Einstein had owned a wicked tongue when it came to shooting down colleagues or theories he didn’t like.

“Yes,” said Orphu. The Ionian obviously didn’t enjoy getting interrupted. “Well, spooky action at a distance works on a quantum level, and the post-humans began sending larger and larger objects through quantum portals.”

“Percheron stallions?” said Mahnmut. He didn’t especially like being lectured at.

“No record of that, but the horses on Earth seem to have gone somewhere, so why not? Look, Mahnmut, I’m very serious here—I’ve been thinking about this since we left Jupiter space. Can I finish without the sarcasm?”

Mahnmut metaphorically blinked. Orphu did not sound so insane any longer, but he did sound serious . . . and hurt. “All right,” said Mahnmut. “I apologize. Go ahead.”

“We know that the post-humans accelerated their quantum research—fooling around, really—about the time we moravecs abandoned it, about fourteen hundred Earth years ago. They were punching holes in space-time left and right.”

“Excuse me,” said Mahnmut, interrupting as softly as he could. “I thought only black holes or wormholes or naked singularities could do that.”

“And quantum tunnels left activated,” said Orphu.

“But I thought quantum teleportation was instantaneous,” said Mahnmut. He was trying hard to understand now. “That it had to be instantaneous.”

“It does. With entanglement pairs, particles, or complex structures, shifting the quantum state of one member of the quantum twin-set instantly changes the quantum state of its partner.”

“Then how can there be tunnels activated if the . . . tunneling . . . is instantaneous?” said Mahnmut.

“Trust me on this,” said Orphu. “When you’re teleporting something large, say a small slice of cheese, just the amount of random quantum data being transmitted shoots the shit out of space-time.”

“How much raw quantum data would be in, say, a three-gram slice of cheese?”

“1024bits,” answered Orphu without hesitation.

“And how much in a human being?”

“Not counting the person’s memory, but just his or her atoms,” said Orphu, “1028kilobytes of data.”

“Well, that’s just four more zeros than a slice of cheese,” said Mahnmut.

“Mother of Mercy,” whined Orphu. “We’re talking orders of magnitude here. Which means . . .”

“I know what it means,” said Mahnmut. “I was just being silly again. Go on.”

“So about fourteen hundred years ago on Earth, the post-humans—it had to be the post-humans, since our probes at the time were sure that there were just a thousand or so old-style humans left, like almost-extinct-species animals being kept around in a zoo—the post-humans began quantum teleporting people and machines and other objects.”