“But they left you behind,” said Harman.
“Yes.”
“By accident?”
“I doubt it,” said the old woman. “Very little the posts did was by accident. Perhaps they had some purpose for me. Perhaps they were punishing me for digging into histories better left buried. That’s what I was, you know—an historian. Cultural historian.” She laughed again for no reason that Daeman could fathom.
“So neutrinos are blue?” asked Daeman. He was determined to get a straight answer.
She laughed again. “I very much doubt it. I don’t think neutrinos have any color . . . or charm. But that blue beam appears every Tisha b’Av, every Ninth of Av, and something tells me that the rest of the old-style humans—all my friends—are stored and coded in that blue beam. I don’t think that machine is generating the beam. I think the Earth passes through the neutrino beam every year at this point on its orbit, and that machine merely makes the beam visible.”
“But it hasn’t been ten thousand years,” said Harman. “Only fourteen hundred, you say, since the final fax.”
Savi nods tiredly. “And things haven’t been tidied up much since the final fax, have they, my young friends?” She stands, lifts her backpack, and starts down the narrow street before suddenly freezing.
“A voynix!” says Daeman. “Now we won’t have to walk back to the sonie. We’ll have it fetch a carriole and . . .”
The voynix, an iron-and-leather silhouette in the western archway ahead of them, suddenly retracted its manipulatives and clicked cutting blades into place. Then it charged directly at them, running along the side of the building on all fours like a frenzied spider.
Savi had been wildly rummaging in her pack since Daeman had pointed, and now she brought out the black plastic-and-metal device—a gun, she’d called it—and aimed it at the charging voynix.
Daeman was too shocked to move. He was the closest to the scuttling voynix, still eight feet up the wall and loping on all fours, but the creature seemed focused on Savi and was hurtling right past Daeman. Suddenly the evening air was torn by a noise—RRRIIIIPPPPPPPPPP—as if wooden paddles were being dragged against stone slats, and the wall flew apart in a spray of masonry chips, the voynix was thrown backward and down onto the cobblestones, and Savi stepped forward, aimed, and fired again.
Scores of fingertip-sized holes appeared in the voynix’s carapace and metallic hood. Its right arm flew up as if it was going to throw something at them, but then more flechettes struck it and the arm became unhinged, tore off, flew backward. The voynix struggled to its feet, one cutting blade still whirring.
Savi shot it again, almost severing it at the waist. Its blue, milky internal fluid spattered the walls and paving stones. What remained of the voynix fell, twitched, and lay still.
Harman and Daeman cautiously moved closer, trying not to step in the blue fluid or on pieces of the creature. This was the second voynix they’d seen destroyed in two days.
“Come on,” said Savi, pulling an empty crystal flechette clip from her gun and slapping in a replacement. “If there are more around, we’re in serious trouble. We have to get to the sonie. And quickly.”
Savi led them down a narrow street, turned into a narrower alley, then turned again into something smaller than an alley—a crack between stone buildings. They emerged into a wide, dusty courtyard, went under a stone arch, and came into a smaller courtyard.
“Hurry,” whispered Savi. She led them up an outside staircase, across a rooftop terrace duned with dust, and then up a rotted wooden ladder past shuttered windows to a higher rooftop.
“What are we doing?” whispered Harman as the three came out into the cool night air atop the building. “Don’t we have to get back to the sonie?”
“I’ll call it to us,” said Savi. She went to one knee by the low rooftop wall and activated her proxnet function, shielding the glow above her palm. Harman crouched next to her.
Daeman remained standing. The air up here was cool after the heat of the cobblestoned streets and narrow alleys and the view was interesting from this point on the hill. To their right stabbed the blue beam, bathing all the domes and rooftops and streets in its pale light. It was dark now and stars were visible across the sky. The city had no lights burning, but ancient domes and spires and some arches gleamed to the blue light. Savi had told them that the walled compound on the hill where the beam burned was called Haram esh-Sharif, or Temple Mount, and the two domed structures at the base of the beam machine were the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aksa Mosque.
“Itbah al-Yahud!” came a sudden, shrill, amplified cry from the streets behind them. The cry was repeated from the warren of narrow streets to their west, between them and the sonie.
“Itbah al-Yahud!”
Savi looked up from her palm display.
“What is that?” asked Harman in a shrill whisper. “Voynix don’t speak.”
“No,” said Savi. “It’s coming from the ancient, automated muezzin call-to-prayer speakers on all the mosques.”
“Itbah al-Yahud!” came the tremulous but urgent voice echoing from all over the dark city. “Al-jihad!” cried the amplified voice. “Itbah al-Yahud!”
“Damn!” said Savi, looking at her palm display. “No wonder it isn’t responding to the remote.”
“What?” Daeman and Harman both stepped closer, crouching to see the rectangular display floating inches above her palm. The view was of the front of the sonie where they had landed it. The fields of rocks and walled city glowed greenly in the camera’s low-light vision. Closer, looming over the lens, scores of voynix were milling around the sonie, throwing their bodies onto the machine, battering it with boulders and stacking huge rocks on top of it.
“They defeated the forcefield and broke something,” whispered Savi. “The sonie’s not coming to us.”
“Allahu akbar!” cried the echoing, amplified, trembling voices from all points of the low-roofed city. “Itbah al-Yahud! Itbah al-Yahud!”
The three walked to the edge of the rooftop. For a second, Daeman thought that the buildings and cobblestoned streets and walled courtyards were trembling, crumbling, dissolving in the reflected blue light, but then he realized that things were crawling across the stone and domes and walls and rooftops. Thousands of things—like an invasion of roaches scrambling wildly toward the blue light. But then Daeman realized how far away the shimmering, crawling buildings were, computed the scale, and realized that it wasn’t roaches or spiders scrambling and scrabbling toward them, but voynix.
“Itbah al-Yahud!” screamed the metallic voice from everywhere. The syllables echoed back from the Mount without losing their demented urgency.
“What does that mean?” asked Daeman.
Savi was watching the blue-lighted voynix scrabbling closer over rooftops and through the maze of narrow, winding streets. The wave of huge insectoid shapes was less than two city blocks away now, close enough that they could all hear the scratch and tear of cutting blade and sharp manipulators on stone and tile. Savi turned slowly. Her face looked older than ever in the pulsing blue light.
“Itbah al-Yahud,” she repeated softly. “Kill the Jew.”
32
Achilles’ Tent
I have to kill Patroclus.
That realization comes to me like a whisper in the night as I lie here in the Myrmidon encampment, in Achilles’ tent, wrapped in the shell of Phoenix’ old body.
I have to kill Patroclus.
I’ve never killed anyone. Jesus Christ, I protested the Vietnam War as a college student, couldn’t put the family dog to sleep—had to have my wife take her to the vet—and considered myself a pacifist for most of my academic life. I’ve never hit another man, for Christ’s sake.
I have to kill Patroclus.
It’s the only way. I trusted that rhetoric would do it—old Phoenix’s revised rhetoric—that rhetoric would persuade the man-killer Achilles into meeting with Hector, into ending this war, into burying the hatchet.
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Yeah, right in my forehead.
Achilles’ decision to leave—to return to a long life of pleasure but little glory—is deeply shocking to this scholic, to any student of the Iliad, but it makes sense. Honor is still more important than life to Achilles, but after Agamemnon’s insults, he sees no honor in killing Hector and then being killed in turn. Odysseus—that ultimate rhetorician—was eloquent in his explanation and evocation of how the living Achaeans and countless generations after would honor Achilles’ memory, but it’s not their honor that Achilles cares about. Only his sense of honor counts here, and there will be no honor now for him in killing Agamemnon’s enemies and dying for Agamemnon’s and Menelaus’ objectives. Only Achilles’ honor counts, and he’d rather sail for home in a few hours and live the life of a lesser mortal, forsaking his chance to be part of this band of brothers twenty centuries before Prince Hal and Agincourt, than compromise any more honor here on the bloody plains of Ilium.
I see that now. Why didn’t I see it before? If Odysseus could not convince Achilles to fight—Odysseus of the crafty ways and silver tongue—why did I think I’d succeed? I was a fool. Homer made me a fool, but I was still a fool.
I have to kill Patroclus.
Not long after Odysseus and Big Ajax left, just after the torches and tripod fires were extinguished in the main room of Achilles’ tent, I heard slave girls being escorted in for the pleasure of Achilles and Patroclus. I’d never seen either of these slave girls, but I knew their names—Homer leaves no one nameless in the Iliad. Achilles’ girl (I couldn’t have used that word while teaching at Indiana University in my other life or the Political Correctness Police would have had my job, but here it doesn’t seem appropriate to call these giggling sex toys “women”) was named Diomede, Phorbas’ daughter from the isle of Lesbos—although she was no lesbian. Patroclus’ main squeeze was named Iphis. I almost laughed out loud as I caught a glimpse of them through the folds in the tent door—Achilles, who is tall and blond and statuesque and chiseled with muscle, preferred the tiny, stocky, brunette and large-breasted Diomede; Patroclus, who is much shorter than Achilles and dark-haired, had opted for the tall, blonde, thin, small-busted Iphis. For half an hour or so, I could hear the women’s laughter, the men’s rough conversation, and then the moans and cries from all four in Achilles’ sleeping chamber. Obviously the hero and his pal had no qualms about having sex in the same room with each other, even commenting on it while it was occurring, which makes me think more of Bloomington, Indiana, male Realtors or lodge brothers having a weekend in the big city than it does of the noble warriors of this heroic age. Barbaric.
Then the girls left—giggling again—and there was silence except for muttered exchanges between the guards outside the tent and the crackle of brazier flames keeping those guards warm. That and monstrous snoring from Achilles’ sleeping chamber. I hadn’t heard Patroclus leave, so either he or the golden hero sounded like he had a deviated septum.
Now I lie here and consider my options. No, first I morph out of Phoenix’s old form—damn the consequences!—and lie here as Thomas Hockenberry and consider my options.
I have my hand on the QT medallion. I can jump to Helen’s sleeping chambers again—I know for a fact that Paris is out beyond the trench here, miles from the city, waiting for dawn to join Hector in the final slaughter of Greeks and the burning of the Achaean ships. Helen might be happy to see me. Or she might have no further use or amusement from the night-visitor named Hockenberry—how strange that someone here other than another scholic knows my name!—and she might call her guards. No problem with that; I can always QT away in an instant.
To what destination?
I can give up this mad plan to change the course of the Iliad, abandon my goal—formed on the night that Agamemnon and Achilles first quarreled—of defying the immortal gods, QT to Olympos, apologize to the Muse and to Aphrodite when they decant her, ask Zeus for a personal audience, and beg for a pardon.
Uh-huh. What are the odds that they’d forgive and forget, Hockenbush? You stole the Hades Helmet, the QT medallion, and all your scholic gear and used them for your own purposes. You fled from the Muse. Worst of all, you hijacked a flying chariot and tried to kill Aphrodite in her healing tank.
My best hope after apologizing would be that Zeus or Aphrodite or the Muse would kill me quickly, rather than turn me inside out or cast me down into the murky pit of Tartarus, where I’d probably be eaten alive by Kronos and the other barbarous Titans banished there by Zeus.
No, I’ve buttered my bread and now I have to lie in it. Or however that phrase goes. In for a penny, in for a pound. No guts, no glory. Better safe than sorry. But while I’m struggling for a cliché, any cliché, a profound realization settles over me in a profoundly unprofessorial but absolutely convincing phrasing—
If I don’t think of something soon, I am well and truly fucked.
I can go reason with Odysseus.
Odysseus is the sane one here, the civilized man, the wise tactician. Odysseus may be the answer tonight. I’ll have a better chance convincing Odyssus that an end to this war with the Trojans and common cause against the all-too-human gods is an option. To tell you the truth, I always enjoyed teaching the Odyssey to my students more than the Iliad; Fitzgerald’s sensibilities in the Odyssey are so much more humane than the rough bellicosity of Mandelbaum’s and Lattimore’s and Fagles’s and even Pope’s Iliad. I was mistaken to think that I could find the fulcrum of events by coming here with the embassy to Achilles. No, Achilles isn’t the man to approach this night—what’s left of this night—but Odysseus, son of Laertes, a man who might understand a scholar’s pleas and the compelling logic of peace.
I actually rise and touch the QT medallion, ready to go find Odysseus and make my plea. There’s only one little problem that keeps me from QTing in search of Odysseus: if Homer was telling the truth, I know what’s happening elsewhere while I’ve been lying in this tent and brooding. Agamemnon and Menelaus can’t sleep for their own brooding on the course of events, and some time around now, or perhaps in the last hour or so, the older and more royal brother calls for Nestor and asks for ideas that might stave off the massacre that seems so imminent. Nestor recommends a war counsel with Diomedes, Odysseus, Little Ajax, and some of the other Achaean captains. Once these leaders are gathered, Nestor suggests that the boldest among them should sneak behind Trojan lines and divine Hector’s intentions—will the Trojans and their allies try to burn the ships in a few hours’ time? Or is it possible that Hector has had enough blood and victory for now, and will lead his hordes back into the city to celebrate before opening further hostilities?
Diomedes and Odysseus are chosen to go find out, and since the two have come to this counsel from sleep, without their own weapons, they’re given gear by the guards, including a bull’s-hide helmet for Diomedes and a famous Mycaenaean boar’s-tusk helmet for Odysseus. With the skin of a lion that Diomedes has thrown across his shoulders and Odysseus’ black-leather helmet studded around with white teeth, the two warriors are terrifying to look upon.
Should I QT to that conference and observe it?
There’s no reason. Diomedes and Odysseus may already have left on their commando raid. Or Homer might have been lying or mistaken about this action, just as he was with Phoenix’s speech. Besides, it won’t help with my problem right now. I’m not a scholic anymore, just a man trying to find away to survive and end this war—or at least turn it against the gods.
Although there’s another part of tonight’s action elsewhere that comes to mind and chills my blood. When Diomedes and Odysseus venture out, they discover Dolon—the spearman whose body I borrowed just two nights ago when I followed Hector into his meeting with Helen and Paris—who’s been sent behind Achaean lines to spy for Hector. Dolon’s carrying a reflex bow and wearing a cap made of weasel skin and he’s sneaking carefully through the field of newly fallen dead in the dark, hunting for a way across the trench and past the Greek guards on the
line, but sharp-eyed Odysseus sees him coming in the darkness and he and Diomedes lie among the corpses, surprise Dolon, and disarm him.
The Trojan begs for his life. Odysseus will tell him—if he hasn’t already—that “Death is the last thing you have to worry about”—and then calmly, quietly pumps the young spearman for specific information about the disposition of Hector’s Trojans and their allies.
Dolon tells all—the location of the Carians and Paeonians and Leleges and Cauconians, the sleeping areas of the crack Pelesgians and the stolid, faithful Lycians and the cock-strutting Mysians, the whereabouts of the camp of the famed Phrygian horsemen and the Maeonian charioteers—he tells everything and begs for his life. He even suggests that they tie him up and keep him prisoner until they see for themselves that his information is correct.
Odysseus will smile, or perhaps he already has, and will pat the shaking, terrified Dolon on the shoulder—I remember the muscled balance of Dolon’s body from when I was morphed as the boy—and then the son of Laertes and Diomedes will strip the young man’s cap and bow and wolf pelt—Odysseus softly telling the terrified boy that they’re disarming him before bringing him to camp as a prisoner—and then Diomedes will hack Dolon’s head off with one savage blow of his sword. Dolon’s head will still be shrieking for mercy as it bounces across the sand.
And Odysseus will hold up the boy’s spear and bow and weasel cap and wolf-pelt, and will offer them to Pallas Athena, crying—“Rejoice in these, Goddess. They’re yours! Now guide us to the Thracian camp so that we can kill more men and steal their horses! Those spoils, too, will be yours.”
Barbarians. I’m among barbarians. Even the gods here are barbarians. One thing is sure—I won’t be going to talk to Odysseus tonight.
But why does Patroclus have to die?
Because I was right the first time—Achilles is the key, the fulcrum through which I can shift the fates of everyone, gods and men alike.