Over the next few weeks, Mahnmut’s mood changed from depression to satisfaction to something like the moravec equivalent of joy. He worked every day with the LGM, keeping up his conversation with Orphu even as he sewed sails, spliced rigging, swabbed decks, pulled on the anchor, and took his turn at the tiller. The felucca was making about forty kilometers progress a day, which seemed like very little until one took into account that they were moving upstream, sailing with irregular winds, rowing much of the time, and stopping completely during the night. Since the Valles Marineris was about 4,000 kilometers long—almost the width of the Lost Age nation called the United States—Mahnmut was resigned to making the transit in about a hundred Martian days. Beyond the west edge of the inland sea, he kept reminding himself and Orphu reminded him when he forgot, was more than 1,800 kilometers of Tharsis Plateau.

Mahnmut was in no hurry. The pleasures of the sailing ship—she had no name as far as the moravec could tell, and he wasn’t about to kill a little green man to ask—were simple and real, the scenery was astounding, the sun was warm in the day and the air deliciously cool at night, and the desperate urgency of their mission was fading under the reassuring cycle of routine.

Near the end of the sixth week on the water, Mahnmut was working on the forward of the felucca’s two masts when a chariot appeared less than a kilometer dead ahead of the ship, flying low—only thirty meters or so higher than the ship’s sails—allowing Mahnmut no time to scurry for cover. He was alone at the intersection of the two segments of mast—a felucca’s sails are triangular, its two masts segmented, the upper section slanted rakishly back—and no little green men were in the rigging. Mahnmut was completely exposed to the gaze of anyone or anything flying the chariot.

It passed over traveling several hundred kilometers per hour, and so low that Mahnmut could see that the two horses pulling the chariot were holograms. A man in a tan tunic was the only occupant, standing tall and holding the virtual reins. The figure was golden-skinned, powerfully handsome, with long blond hair streaming behind him. He did not deign to look downward.

Mahnmut used the opportunity to study the vehicle and its occupant with every visual filter, frequency, and wavelength he had at his disposal, tightbeaming the data to Orphu in case the chariot god had seen him and decided to blast Mahnmut off the mast with a wave of his hand. The horses, reins, and wheels were holographic, but the chariot was real enough—composed of titanium and gold. Mahnmut couldn’t detect any rocket, ion-pulse, or jet wake, but the chariot was putting out energy all across the EM spectrum—enough to drown out Mahnmut’s radio narrative to Orphu if they hadn’t been on tightbeam. More ominously, the flying machine was trailing four-dimensional streamers of quantum flux. Part of the thing’s energy profile was captured in a forcefield that Mahnmut could clearly see in the infrared—a shield of energy forward of the hurtling aircraft to protect it from the wind of its own passage and a broader defensive bubble all around. Mahnmut was glad he hadn’t thrown a rock at the chariot or shot at it—if he’d had a rock or energy weapon, which he did not. That forcefield, Orphu calculated, would keep the driver safe from anything short of a low-yield nuclear explosion.

“What’s making it fly?” asked Orphu as the chariot receded in the east. “Mars doesn’t have enough of a magnetic field to propel any EM flying machine.”

“I think it’s the quantum flux,” said Mahnmut from his perch on the mast. It was a windy day and the felucca was rocking from side to side as it tacked back and forth and the whitecaps batted at it from the south.

Orphu made an impolite sound. “Directed quantum distortion can rip time and space apart—people and planets, too—but I don’t see how it can fly a chariot.”

Mahnmut shrugged despite the fact that his friend, invisible under the tarp rigged on the mid-deck, couldn’t see him. “Well, it didn’t have propellers,” he said. “I’ll download you the data, but it looked to me like the awkward thing was surfing on a curl of quantum distortion.”

“Peculiar,” said Orphu. “But even a thousand such flying machines couldn’t explain the locus of quantum distortion Ri Po recorded on Olympus Mons.”

“No,” agreed Mahnmut. “At least this . . . god . . . didn’t see us.”

There was a pause in the conversation and Mahnmut listened to the crash of the felucca’s bow against the waves and the flap of the lateen-rigged canvas as the big sails filled with wind again. There was a soft wind-strum through the rigging up where Mahnmut was, and he enjoyed the sound of it. He also enjoyed the less-than-gentle pitch and roll of the ship as it tacked, even while he compensated for it easily as he clung to the mast with one hand, his other hand on a taut line. They were deep into the widest section of the flooded rift valley now, in an area called Melas Chasma, with the huge, radiating sub-sea of Candor Chasma opening up to the north and the seabed more than eight kilometers beneath them, but there were cliffs belonging to huge islands—some several hundred kilometers long and thirty or forty kilometers across—visible on the horizon to the south.

“Perhaps he saw you and just radioed back to Olympus for reinforcements,” suggested Orphu.

Mahnmut sent the radio static equivalent of a sigh. “Always the optimist,” he said.

“Realist,” amended Orphu. But the tone of the next broadcast was serious. “You know, Mahnmut, that you’ll have to talk to the little green men again soon. We have too many questions that need answering.”

“I know,” said Mahnmut. The thought made him vaguely ill in a way that the pitching and rolling of the felucca never could.

“Perhaps we should inflate and launch the balloon sooner rather than later,” Orphu suggested again. Mahnmut had spent several days cobbling together a wider, broader gondola from the bamboo-three of the first one and some borrowed planks from one of the felucca’s less essential bulkheads. The LGM had not seemed to mind his borrowing their boards.

“I still don’t think we should launch yet,” said Mahnmut. “We’re not even sure about the prevailing winds this month, and the pulse-thrusters won’t give us much steering once the balloon gets up into the Martian jetstream. We’d better get as close to Olympus as we can before we risk the balloon.”

“I agree,” said Orphu after a silence, “but it is time we talked to the LGM again. I have a theory that it’s not telepathy that they’re using—either when they communicate with you or pass information among themselves.”

“No?” said Mahnmut, looking down at a dozen of the little green men as they came up from the oardecks and began working efficiently on the forward rigging. “I can’t imagine what else it could be. They certainly don’t have mouths or ears, and they’re not transmitting data on any radio, tightbeam, maser, or light frequency.”

“I think the information is in the particles in their bodies,” said Orphu. “Nanopackets of encoded information. That’s why they insist you use your hand to grasp that internal organ—it’s a sort of telegraph-central—and your hand, as opposed to, say, your general manipulators, is organic. Living molecular machines can pass into your bloodstream via osmosis and travel to your organic brain, where the same nanobytes help translate.”

“Then how do they communicate among themselves?” asked Mahnmut, dubious. He’d liked the telepathy theory.

“The same way,” said Orphu. “Touch. Their skins are semipermeable, probably with data passing to and fro with every casual contact.”

“I don’t know,” said Mahnmut. “Remember how this crew seemed to know everything about us when the felucca arrived? Where we were going? I had the feeling that our presence had been broadcast telepathically all along the little green man psychic network.”