Ilium
I chose one of these towers and climbed its winding interior staircase while still morphed as the spearman Dolon.
The tower was built something like a minaret—although Islam was still millennia in the future—and I was the only one on the narrow, circular balcony when I stepped out onto it. The sun was in my eyes, but by polarizing my visual filters and magnifying the focus on my god-given contact lenses, I had a clear view of the reunion on the wall.
Andromache rushed down the rampart and flung herself at her husband, her feet twirling in the air as he lifted her and returned the hug. His polished helmet caught the rich evening light. Other soldiers and worried wives on the wall stepped away, giving their leader and his bride some privacy. Only Andromache’s nurse, holding the one-year-old boy, stayed close to the couple.
I could have eavesdropped on their conversation with my shotgun-microphone baton, but I chose just to watch them, seeing their mouths move, studying their expressions. After her rush of relief at seeing her warrior-husband alive and unharmed, Andromache frowned and began speaking quickly, urgently. I remembered from Homer’s tale the rough outline of what she was saying—a retelling of her own woes, her loneliness after Achilles’ murder of her father and brothers. I could actually read her lips on some of the words as she said, “You are my father now, Hector, and my noble mother as well. You are a brother to me now, my love. And you are also my husband, young and warm and virile and alive! Take pity on me, my husband! Do not abandon me. Do not go back out onto the plains of Ilium and die there and have your body dragged behind an Achaean chariot until your flesh is flayed from your bones. Stay here! Fight here. Protect our city by fighting on the ramparts, here.”
“I can’t,” said Hector, his helmet flashing as he slowly shook his head.
“You can,” I saw Andromache say, her face contorted with love and fear. “You must. Draw your armies up close to where that fig tree stands . . . do you see it? This is where our beloved Ilium lies most open to their attack. Three times the Argives have tried that point, hoping to overrun our city, three times their best fighters led the way—both Ajaxes, the big and little, and Idomeneus, and terrible Diomedes. Perhaps a prophet showed them our weakness there. Fight here, my husband! Protect us here!”
“I can’t.”
“You can,” cried Andromache, pulling away from his embrace. “But you won’t!”
“Yes,” I watched Hector say, “I won’t.”
“Do you know what will happen to me, Noble Hector, when you die your noble death and become food for the Achaean dogs?”
I saw Hector wince but stay quiet.
“I will be dragged off as some sweaty Greek commander’s whore!” shouted Andromache, her voice so loud that I heard it half a block away. “Carried off to Argos as booty, as some slave for Big Ajax or Little Ajax or terrible Diomedes or some lesser captain to fuck at his whim!”
“Yes,” said Hector, his gaze pained but steady. “But I’ll be dead, with the earth over me to muffle your cries.”
“Yes, oh, yes,” cried Andromache, weeping and laughing at the same time now. “Noble Hector will be dead. And his son, whom all the citizens of Ilium call Astyanax—‘Lord of the City’—will be a slave to the Achaean pigs, sold away from his slave-whore mother. That will be your noble legacy, oh Noble Hector!”
And Andromache called the nurse closer and grabbed the child, holding him up like a shield between herself and Hector.
Now I saw the pain on Hector’s face, but he reached for the tiny boy, holding his arms out. “Come here, Scamandrius,” said Hector, calling their son by his given name rather than by the nickname given him by the city’s folk.
The boy flinched back and started to howl. I could hear his cries from my perch on the tower half a dozen rooftops away.
It was the helmet. Hector’s helmet. Polished, shining bronze, streaked with blood and grime, reflecting the sunlight and the distorted parapet and the boy himself. The helmet with its flaming red horsehair crest and its monstrously shining metal guards curving around Hector’s eyes and covering his nose.
The boy screamed and cowered against his mother’s breast, afraid of his father.
At such a moment, one would expect Hector to be devastated—no final hug from his son?—but the warrior laughed, threw back his head and laughed again, heartily and long. After a minute, Andromache laughed as well.
Hector swept the battle helmet off his head and set it atop the wall, where it blazed in the light of the setting sun. Then Hector swept his son up as well, hugging him and tossing him and catching him until the boy shrieked not in terror but delight. Holding his son in the crook of his strong right arm, Hector hugged Andromache to him with his left arm.
Still grinning, Hector raised his face to the sky. “Zeus, hear me! All you immortals, hear me!”
All the guards and women on the wall had fallen silent. The streets hushed in an eerie calm. I could hear Hector’s strong voice from blocks away.
“Grant this boy, my son, with whom I am well pleased, that he may be like me—first in glory among Trojans and men! Strong and brave like me, Hector, his father! And grant, oh gods, that Scamandrius, son of Hector, may rule all Ilium in power and glory some day and that all men shall say, ‘He is a better man than his father!’ This is my prayer, oh gods, and I ask no other boon from thee.”
And with that, Hector handed the child back to Andromache, kissed both of them, and left the wall for the battlefield.
I admit that the hours right after Hector bid good-bye to his wife were a low point for me. It didn’t help my mood to know that in the next year, Andromache would, indeed, be driven from the burning city to the land where she would be an expensive slave for other men. Nor did it help to know that the Achaean who will capture her—Pyrrhos, destined to become ancestor to the kings of the Eperiote tribe of the Molossians and to be given a hero’s tomb at Delphi—would rip Hector’s child, Scamandrius (called Astyanax, “Lord of the City,” by the residents of Ilium), from his nurse’s breast and will fling the child from the high walls to his bloody death. The same Pyrrhos will murder Hector’s and Paris’s father, King Priam, at the altar of Zeus in his own palace. The House of Priam will become all but extinct in one night. The thought is depressing.
This is not a defense for what I did next, but I offer it as a partial explanation.
I wandered the streets of Ilium until nightfall and after, feeling more alone and depressed than any time in my nine years as a scholic there. No longer morphed as Dolon, I was still dressed as a Trojan spearman—with the Hades Helmet ready for donning at a second’s notice, the QT medallion at the ready for instant escape—and soon found myself back near Helen’s compound. I confess that I had come here often over the years, stealing time between my scholic observations, coming secretly to the city and to this place just on the off chance of seeing her . . . of seeing Helen, the most beautiful and alluring woman in the world. How many times had I stood across the street from this multistory compound, staring up like a lovestruck boy and waiting until the lights were lit in the upper apartments and terraces, hoping against hope for just a glimpse of the woman?
Suddenly my moonstruck reverie was broken by a more chilling sight—a flying chariot trolling slowly above the streets and rooftops, cloaked to mortal eyes but quite visible to my enhanced vision. Leaning over the railing, scanning the streets, was my Muse. I had never seen the Muse fly so low above the city or plains of Ilium before. I knew she was looking for me.
I pulled up the Hades Helmet in an instant, hiding myself—I hoped—from gods and man. The technology must have worked. The Muse’s chariot floated less than a hundred feet overhead and never slowed.
When the chariot had passed, circling over the central marketplace a dozen blocks to the east, I activated the studs on my levitation harness. All of the scholics are outfitted with these harnesses, but we use them only rarely. Often, after a day’s confused fighting on the field, I had used the levitation harness to lift over t
he battlefield, to get a larger picture of the tactical situation, and then I would fly to Ilium—here to Helen’s house, to be honest—for a few minutes of hopeful gazing before QTing back to Olympos and my barracks.
Not now. I lifted above the street, invisible as I flew above the spearmen standing guard at the main entrance to Paris’s and Helen’s compound, crossed the high wall, and landed on one of the balconies of the inner courtyard outside the couple’s private apartments. Heart pounding, I entered the open doorway through blowing curtains. My sandals were almost silent on the stone floor. The compound’s dogs would have detected me—the Hades Helmet was no disguiser of scent—but the dogs were all on the ground floor and in the outer courtyard, not up here where the royal couple lived.
Helen was in her bath. Three female servants attended her, their bare feet leaving moist tracks as they carried warm water up and down marble steps leading to the sunken tub. Gauzy curtains surrounded the bath itself, but since the brazier tripods and the hanging lamps were inside the bathing area, the flimsy curtain material provided no obstacle to sight. Still invisible, I stood just outside the softly stirring fabric and stared at Helen in her bath.
So these are the boobs that launched a thousand ships, I thought, and immediately cursed myself for being such a jerk.
Shall I describe her to you? Shall I explain why the heat of her beauty, her naked beauty, can move men across three thousand years and more of cold time?
I think not—and not out of discretion or decorum. Helen’s beauty is beyond my poor powers of description. Having seen so many women’s breasts, was there anything unique about Helen’s soft, full breasts? Or something more perfect about the triangle of dark hair between her thighs? Or more exciting about her pale, muscled thighs? Or more amazing about her milky white buttocks and strong back and small shoulders?
Of course there was. But I’m not the man to tell you the difference. I was a minor scholar and—in my fantasies in my lost life—perhaps a novelist. It would take a poet beyond Homer, beyond Dante, even beyond Shakespeare to do justice to Helen’s beauty.
I stepped out of the bathing room, into the coolness of an empty terrace outside her bedroom, and touched the thin bracelet that allowed me to morph into other forms. The control panel of the bracelet only glowed when I called on it, but it spoke to my thumb with symbols and images. On it were stored the morphing data for all the men I had recorded in the past nine years. Theoretically, I could have morphed into a woman, but I had never found reason to do so and I certainly didn’t this night.
You have to understand something about morphing; it is not a reshaping of molecules and steel and flesh and bone into another shape. I don’t have a clue how morphing works, although a short-lived Twenty-first Century scholic named Hayakawa tried to explain his theory to me five or six years ago. Hayakawa kept stressing the conservation of matter and energy—whatever that is—but I paid little attention to that part of his explanation.
Evidently, morphing works on the quantum level of things. What doesn’t with these gods? Hayakawa asked me to imagine all the human beings here, including him and me, as standing probability waves. On the quantum level, he said, human beings—and everything else in the physical universe—exist from instant to instant as a sort of collapsing wavefront—molecules, memory, old scars, emotions, whiskers, beer breath, everything. These bracelets the gods gave us recorded probability waves and allowed us to interrupt and store the originals—and, for a short time, merge our own probability waves with the stored ones, take our own memories and will along into a new body when we morphed. Why this didn’t violate Hayakawa’s beloved conservation of mass and energy, I don’t know . . . but he kept insisting it did not.
This usurpation of another’s form and action is why we scholics almost always morphed into minor figures in the battle for Troy; literal spear carriers like the unnamed bodyguard whose form I had assumed after Dolon’s. If we were to become Odysseus, say, or Hector or Achilles or Agamemnon, we would look the part but the behavior would be our own—far inferior to the heroic character of the real person—and every minute we inhabited his form, we would carry actual events further and further from this unfolding reality that so paralleled the Iliad.
I have no idea where the real person went when we morphed into him. Perhaps the probability wave of that person simply floated around on the quantum level, no longer collapsing into what we called reality until we were finished with his form and voice. Perhaps the probability wave was stored in the bracelet we carried or in some machine or god’s microchip on Mons Olympos. I don’t know and don’t especially care. I once asked Hayakawa, shortly before he displeased the Muse and disappeared forever, if we could use the morphing bracelet to change into one of the gods. Hayakawa had laughed and said, “The gods protect their probability waves, Hockenberry. I wouldn’t try to mess with them.”
Now I triggered the bracelet and flicked through the hundreds of men I’d recorded there until I found the one I wanted. Paris. It’s probable that the Muse would have ended my existence if she’d even known that I had scanned Paris for future morphing. Scholics don’t interfere.
Where is Paris right now? Thumb over the activate icon, I tried to remember. The events of this afternoon and this evening—the confrontation between Hector and Paris and Helen, the meeting of Hector and his wife and son on the walls—all occurred near the end of Book Six of the Iliad. Didn’t they?
I couldn’t think. My chest ached with loneliness. My head was swimming, as if I’d been drinking all afternoon.
Yes, the end of Book Six. Hector leaves Andromache and Paris does catch up to him before Hector leaves the city—or just as Hector leaves the city. How had my favorite translation gone? “Nor did Paris linger long in his vaulted halls.” Helen’s new husband had buckled on his armor, as promised, and rushed out to join Hector and the two of them had strode through the Scaean Gates together, into more battle. I remember writing a paper for a scholarly convention in which I’d analyzed Homer’s metaphor of Paris racing along like a stallion breaking free of its tether, hair streaming like a mane back over his shoulders, eager for battle, blah, blah, blah.
Where is Paris now? After dark? What have I missed while wandering the streets and staring at Helen’s lights and Helen’s tits?
That was in Book Seven, and I’d always thought that Book Seven of the Iliad was a confusing, cobbled-together mess. It ended that long day that had begun in Book Two with Paris killing the Achaean named Menesthius and Hector slashing Eioneus’ throat. So much for husbandly hugs and fatherly embraces. Then there was more fighting and Hector had taken on Big Ajax in one-on-one combat and . . .
What? Nothing much. Ajax had been winning—he was the better fighter—but then the gods started quarreling about outcome again, there had been a lot of talk by the Greeks and Trojans, a lot of bluster blown back and forth, and a truce, and Hector and Ajax had swapped armor and acted like old pals, and then they all agreed to a truce while they gathered the dead for corpse fires, and . . .
Where the hell is Paris this night? Does he stay with Hector and the army to supervise the truce, speak at the funeral rituals? Or does he act more in character and come to Helen’s bed?
“Who gives a shit,” I said aloud and thumbed the activation icon on the bracelet and morphed into the form of Paris.
I was still invisible, decked out in Hades Helmet, levitation harness, everything.
I took off the helmet and everything else except the morphing bracelet and the small QT medallion hanging around my neck, hiding the gear behind a tripod in the corner of the balcony. Now I was only Paris in his war gear. I took off the armor and left it on the balcony as well, appearing now only as Paris in his soft tunic. If the Muse swooped down on me now, I had no defense except to QT away.
I walked back through the balcony curtains into the bathing area. Helen looked up in surprise as I parted the curtains.
“My lord?” she said, and I saw first the defiance in her eyes and the
n the downward-cast gaze of what might have been apology and self-subordination for her earlier harsh words. “Leave us,” she snapped at the servants and the women left on wet feet.
Helen of Troy came slowly up the steps of the bath toward me, her hair dry except for the wet strands over her shoulder blades and breasts, her head still lowered but her eyes looking up at me now through her lashes. “What will you have of me, my husband?”
I had to try twice before my voice would work properly. Finally, in Paris’s voice, I said, “Come to bed.”
19
Golden Gate at Machu Picchu
They walked from green globule to green globule on the Golden Gate, down unmoving escalators and across green-glass-enclosed walkways connecting the giant cables that supported the roadway so far below. Odysseus walked with them.
“Are you really the Odysseus from the turin drama?” asked Hannah.
“I’ve never seen the turin drama,” said the man.
Ada noticed that the man who called himself Odysseus had not really confirmed or denied anything, just sidestepped the question.
“How did you get here?” asked Harman. “And where did you come from?”
“It is a complicated answer,” said Odysseus. “I have been traveling for some time now, trying to find my way home. This is only a stop on the way, a place to rest, and I shall be leaving in a few weeks. I would prefer to tell some of my story later, if you don’t mind. Perhaps when we dine this evening. Savi Uhr may be able to help me make sense of parts of my tale.”
Ada thought that it was very strange to hear someone speak Common English as if it were not his native tongue; she had never heard an accent before. There were not even regional dialects in Ada’s fax-based world, where everyone lived everywhere—and nowhere.