They had come to a wide, multiarched bridge covered with three-story buildings. A passageway about four meters wide ran right through the structures, like a road through a tunnel, and at the moment pedestrians in motley were dodging a mass of sheep being driven north into the city. All along that walkway, human heads—some dried and mummified, some almost skulls except for tufts of hair or bits of rotted flesh, others so shockingly fresh that there was still a blush to the cheeks or lips—had been mounted on posts.
“What is all this?” asked Mahnmut. His organic parts felt queasy.
“London Bridge,” said Shakespeare. “Tell me what happened to your friend.”
Tired of looking up at the playwright, Mahnmut scampered up onto a stone wall that served as a railing. He could see a forbidding tower in the east, and he assumed it was the Tower from Richard III. Knowing that he was either dreaming or dying from lack of air himself, Mahnmut did not want this dream to end before he asked Shakespeare a question or two. “Have you begun writing your sonnets yet, Master Shakespeare?”
The playwright smiled and looked out at the reeking Thames, then turned to gaze at the stinking city. Raw sewage was everywhere, as were the carcasses of dead horses and cattle rotting in the mudflats, while a wild effluvium of bloody chicken parts flowed out from open gutters and swirled in stagnant backwaters. Mahnmut had all but shut off his olfactory input. He didn’t know how this human with his full-time nose could stand it.
“How do you know about my experiment with the sonnet?” asked Shakespeare.
Mahnmut approximated a human shrug. “A guess. So you’ve begun them?”
“I’ve considered playing with the form,” admitted the playwright.
“And who is the Young Man in the sonnets?” asked Mahnmut, hardly able to breathe at the thought of unraveling this ancient mystery. “Is it Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton?”
Shakespeare blinked in surprise and looked carefully at the moravec. “You seem to follow close on my heels in such things, tiny Caliban.”
Mahnmut nodded. “So Wriothesley is the Youth in the sonnets?”
“His lordship will have seen nineteen years this October and the down on his upper lip, it is said, has turned to sedge,” said the playwright. “Hardly a youth.”
“William Herbert then,” suggested Mahnmut. “He’s only twelve years old and he’ll become the third Earl of Pembroke nine years from now.”
“You know the dates of future succession and accession?” Shakespeare said with a tone of irony. “Does Master Caliban sail time’s sea as well as this ocean of Mars he speaks of?”
Mahnmut was too excited about solving this mystery to respond to that. “You’ll dedicate the large Folio of 1623 to William Herbert and his brother, and when your sonnets are printed, you’ll dedicate them to ‘Mr. W.H.”
Shakespeare stared at the moravec as if he were a fever dream. Mahnmut wanted to say No, you’re the dream of a dying brain, Master Shakespeare. Not I. Aloud, he said, “I just think it’s interesting that you have a young man or a boy as a lover.”
Mahnmut was surprised by the poet’s reaction. Shakespeare turned, drew a dagger from his belt, and held it under the moravec’s head-unit. “Do you have an eye, Little Caliban, that I may bury my blade in it?”
Careful not to lower his permiflesh deeper onto the point of the blade, Mahnmut shook his head very slightly and said, “I apologize. I am a stranger to your town, to your country, and to the manners here.”
“See those closest three heads on posts on the bridge?,” asked Shakespeare.
Mahnmut shifted his vision without moving his head. “Yes.”
“This time last week, they were strangers to our manners,” hissed the poet.
“I get the point,” said Mahnmut. “No pun intended, sir.”
Shakespeare slid the dagger back in its leather scabbard. Mahnmut remembered that the man was an actor, given to flourishes and exaggerations, although the dagger had been no stage prop. Nor had Shakespeare’s response been a denial to Mahnmut’s question.
Both looked back out at the river. The sun hung impossibly large and orange and low in the river haze to the west. Shakespeare’s voice was soft when he spoke. “If I pen these sonnets, Caliban, I will do so to explore my own failures, weaknesses, compromises, self-conceits, and sad ambiguities in the way that one probes a bloody socket for the missing tooth after a barroom brawl. How did you kill your friend, this Orphu of Io?”
Mahnmut had to take a second to catch up to the question. “I couldn’t get The Dark Lady to the cave inlet I had seen along the coast,” he said. “I tried and failed. The sub’s reactor died suddenly, the power went out. The Lady went aground in less than four fathoms of water, three kilometers or so from the cave. I tried blowing all the ballast tanks to bring her on her side—so I could free the bay doors to get to my friend—but she was already stuck fast.”
Mahnmut looked at the poet. Shakespeare seemed to be paying attention. The buildings on the bridge behind him were red with the Thames sunset. “I went outside and went on internal O2 and dived for hours,” continued Mahnmut. “I used pry bars and the last of the acetylene and my manipulator fingers, but I couldn’t open the bay doors, couldn’t clear the debris in the flooded accessway to the hold. Orphu was on commline for a while, but then I lost him as the internal systems failed. He never sounded worried, never frightened, just tired . . . very tired. Right up to when the comm failed. It was dark. I must have lost consciousness. Perhaps I’m at the bottom of the Martian ocean right now, dead with Orphu, or dying, dreaming this conversation as the last cells of my organic brain shut down.”
“Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,” said Shakespeare, his voice a monotone. “Which you by lacking have supposed dead, and there reigns love, and all love’s loving parts, and all the friends which you thought buried.”
Mahnmut regained consciousness to find himself on the beach, in low morning Martian daylight, and surrounded by dozens of little green men. They were bent over him, staring with small black eyes set into their green, transparent faces, and they backed a step or two away when Mahnmut sat up with a slight whir of his servos.
They were little. Mahnmut was just over a meter tall. These . . . persons . . . were shorter than that. They were humanoid in form, more so than Mahnmut, but not really human in appearance. They were bipedal, with arms and legs, but had no ears, no noses, and no mouths. They wore no clothes and had only three fingers on each hand, rather like cartoon characters Mahnmut had seen in the Lost Age media archives. They were sexless, Mahnmut noted, and their flesh—if flesh it was—was transparent, like soft plastic, revealing insides without organs or veins, bodies filled with floating green globules and clumps, particles and blobs, all flowing and bubbling in a way not that different from the insides of Mahnmut’s beloved lava lamp, now abandoned with the sunken submersible.
More little green men were coming down a trail set into the cliff face. Mahnmut could see the last of the erected stone faces a kilometer or so to the east. Another was visible, horizontal on a long wooden pallet set on rollers far above them near the edge of the cliff, bound about by ropes. The details of the faces were not discernible.
To hell with the heads. Mahnmut whirled and searched the sea and beach. Tepid waves rolled in with the regularity of a metronome. Where’s The Dark Lady?
There she was—two hundred meters out, part of the upper hull and command superstructure clearly visible. Her fathometer and sonar had died before she had, and Mahnmut had committed perhaps the most ancient and most grievious of sea captain’s offenses—running his ship aground. He had been on internal O2 while working wildly to free the hold doors on the sandy, muddy seabottom, but he realized that he must have passed out, been washed ashore here during the night.