Ilium

  “Why should I?” I say, getting to my feet and leaning on the table. “Why should I help any of you?”

  Helen comes around the table and puts her hand on my forearm. I pull my arm away.

  “Hock-en-bear-eeee,” she purrs. “Don’t you know that the gods have sent you to us?”

  “What are you talking about?” I look around the room.

  “No, the gods can’t hear us in here,” says Helen. “The walls of this room are lined with lead. The gods can neither see nor hear through solid lead. This has been known for centuries.”

  I squint around me. What the hell. Why not? Superman’s X-ray vision never worked through lead either. But why would there be a god-proof room in Athena’s temple?

  Andromache steps closer. “Helen’s friend, Hock-en-bear-eeee, we—the women of Troy and Helen—have plotted for years to end this war. But the men—Achilles, the Argives, our own Trojan husbands and fathers—have power over us. They answer only to the gods. Now the gods have heard our most secret prayers and sent you as our instrument. With your help and our planning, we will change the course of events here, saving not only our city, our lives and our children’s lives, but also the destiny of mankind—freeing us from the rule of cruel and arbitrary deities.”

  I shake my head again and actually laugh. “There’s a slight flaw in your logic, madame. Why would the gods send me as your instrument if your goal is to overthrow the gods? That makes no sense.”

  The five Trojan women stare at me for a moment. Then Helen says, “There are more gods than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

  I stare at her for a second, then decide it has to be a coincidence. Either that or I’m not hearing correctly. My chest still hurts and my muscles ache from the spasms the taser caused.

  “Give me the tools,” I say, testing.

  The women slide to me the Hades Helmet, the taser baton, the morphing bracelet, and the QT medallion. I lift the baton as if to hold them all at bay. “What’s your plan?” I ask.

  “My husband never would have believed me if I’d reported to him that the goddess Aphrodite had appeared and taken Scamandrius and his nurse away to be held for ransom,” says Andromache. “Hector has served these gods all his life. He’s not the egomaniac that man-killer Achilles is. Hector would have thought that anything the gods did was only a test of him. Unless Aphrodite or another god were to kill our son in front of witnesses, in front of Hector himself. In that case, his rage would know no bounds. Why didn’t you kill my son?”

  I have no words to answer that. So Andromache answers for me.

  “You are a sentimental fool,” she snaps. “You say that Scamandrius will be dashed to his death on the rocks if you do not change the plans of the gods.”

  “Yes.”

  “And yet you refused to kill the child who already is fated to die, even though your entire plan to end this war and win your own battle with the gods depended upon it. You are weak, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  Hecuba beckons me to sit, but I remain standing, taser baton in hand. “What’s your plan to end this war?” I ask. I’m almost afraid to ask. Would Andromache kill her own son to get her way? I look into her eyes and I’m even more afraid.

  “We will tell you our plan,” says old Queen Hecuba, “but first you must prove to us that these last two god-toys work.” She gestures to the morphing bracelet and the medallion.

  Watching them all carefully, I slip the bracelet on. The indicator tells me that there’s less than three minutes of actual morph time remaining. I use its scanning functioning to look at Hecuba, then trigger the morphing function.

  The real Hecuba disappears as I assume her quantum probability wave space. “Believe me now?” I say in Hecuba’s voice. I raise my wrist—Hecuba’s wrist—and show them the morphing bracelet. I bring the taser baton out from her gown. The four remaining women, including Helen, gasp and step back, as shocked as if I’d cut the old dowager down with a short sword. More shocked, probably—death by swords, they know all too well.

  I drop out of morph and Hecuba flicks back into existence on her side of the room. She blinks, although I know she’s had no sense of time passing, and the five women gabble together. I check the bracelet’s virtual indicator. Two minutes twenty-eight seconds of morph time left.

  I slip the QT medallion chain around my neck. At least this device doesn’t seem to have any power limits. “You want me to QT out of here and then back to show you that this also works?” I ask.

  Hecuba has recovered her composure. “No,” she says. “All of our plans—yours and ours—will depend upon your ability to travel to Olympos undetected and to return. Can you take one of us there now?”

  I hesitate again. “I can,” I say at last, “but the Hades Helmet provides invisibility only for one. If I brought one of you to Olympos with me, you’d be seen.”

  “Then you must bring something back here that will prove that you have traveled to Olympos,” says Hecuba.

  I lift my hands, palms up. “What? Zeus’s chamber pot?”

  All five women step back again, as if I’ve shouted some obscenity. I remember that—for very good reason—blasphemy is not the casual sport it was in my time, at the end of the Twentieth Century. These gods are very real, and insulting them has consequences. I glance at the walls and hope the lead really shields us from Olympos’s view—not because of the chamber pot quip, but because we seem to be planning deicide here.

  “When I was with Aphrodite during the judgment of the gods,” Helen says softly, “I noticed that the goddess brushed her lustrous hair with a beautiful comb, forged in silver, shaped by some god of craft. Go to her chambers on Olympos and bring it back.”

  I start to remind them of what I’d told them—that Aphrodite was currently floating in a healing vat—but then realized that it made no difference. Her comb wouldn’t be in the vat with her.

  “All right,” I say, grasping the medallion and lifting on the Hades Helmet. “Don’t wander away while I’m gone.” I had the cowl in place before I triggered the medallion, so my voice must have come from emptiness in the second or two before I QT’d.

  I don’t know for sure where Aphrodite’s private chambers are—she probably has one of those white temple-sized homes along the crater lake up here—but I do remember that the time she took me aside, almost seducing me—when she told me that I had to kill Athena—the Muse had brought me to Aphrodite in a chamber just off the Great Hall of the Gods. If it wasn’t her private chambers, it seemed at least an apartment she kept in the great hall, a sort of Olympian pied-à-terre.

  I flick into solidity in the Great Hall and hold my breath.

  The many mezzanines are empty, the hall is mostly dark, and the giant holographic viewing pool shows only three-dimensional static. But several gods are here, including Zeus, whom I’d thought to be away, sitting on Mount Ida watching the carnage on the Ilium battlefied. The King of Gods is on his high golden throne. Nearby are several other male gods, including Apollo. They’re all ten feet tall or taller. I’m forty feet away, and I’m invisible under the Hades Helmet, but I almost QT away I’m so afraid that they’ll hear me breathing. But their attention is on something else.

  In front of and below the throne, in the center of the gods’ circle of attention, looking incongruous here to say the least, are what looks like a giant, pitted, cracked metallic crabshell the size of a Ford Expedition, a couple of futuristic-looking devices, and a small, shiny, vaguely humanoid robot. The robot is speaking—in English. The gods are listening, but they don’t look happy.

  38

  Atlantis and Earth Orbit

  “I don’t understand why the post-humans called this place we’re headed ‘Atlantis,’ “ said Harman.

  Savi, at the crawler controls, said, “I can’t say that I ever understood the vast majority of the posts’ actions.”

  Daeman looked up from munching slowly on his third of the only remaining food bar. ?
??What’s odd about the name ‘Atlantis’?”

  “On the Lost Age maps,” said Harman, “the Atlantic Ocean is the big body of water west of here, beyond the Hands of Hercules. We’re in the basin of what used to be the Mediterranean Sea. It’s not in the Atlantic.”

  “It’s not?” said Daeman.

  “No.”

  “So?” said Daeman.

  Harman shrugged and fell quiet, but Savi said, “It’s possible the posts were being whimsical when they named their base here. But I seem to recall that a pre–Lost Age writer named Plato had talked about a city or kingdom called Atlantis in these regions, back when there was water here.”

  “Plato,” mused Harman. “I’ve run across references to him in books I’ve read. And an odd drawing I saw once. A dog.”

  Savi nodded. “A lot of the meaning of Lost Age iconography has been lost forever.”

  “What’s a dog?” asked Harman. He sipped from Savi’s water bottle. The third of the food bar hadn’t been enough to satisfy his hunger, but there was no more food in the crawler.

  “A small mammal that used to be very common, kept as a pet,” said Savi. “I don’t know why the posts allowed them to go extinct. Perhaps the rubicon virus targeted dogs as well.”

  “Like horses?” said Daeman. He’d thought the huge, scary animals in the turin drama had been pure fantasy until recently.

  “Smaller and hairier than horses,” said Savi. “But equally extinct.”

  “Why would the posts bring back dinosaurs,” Daeman asked with a real shudder, “and not those wonderful turin horses and these dog things?”

  “As I said,” repeated Savi, “much of the posts’ behavior was hard to understand.”

  They had awakened shortly after dawn and driven north-northwest all day, rumbling down the red-clay road through fields rich with every sort of crop Daeman was familiar with and many he’d never seen. Twice they’d come to shallow rivers and once a deep, empty permcrete canal, all of which the crawler had crossed easily with its huge wheels and wildly articulated struts.

  There were servitors in the fields, and the commonplace look of them reassured Daeman until he realized that many of these servitors were huge—some twelve or fifteen feet tall and half that broad, much larger than the machines he was used to—and as they drove deeper into the Basin, both the crops and servitors continued to look more alien.

  The crawler was lumbering between tall green walls of what Savi said was sugarcane, the road not quite wide enough for the crawler and green stalks crunching under the six wheels, when Harman noticed the gray-green humanoid things slipping through the fields on either side. The forms moved so fluidly and quickly that they did not disturb the close-packed cane, flowing like ghost-corpses passing through the tall stalks.

  “Calibani,” said Savi. “I don’t think they’ll attack.”

  “I thought you said you fixed it so they wouldn’t,” said Daeman. “You know, that D-and-A stuff from the hair you stole from Harman and me.”

  Savi smiled. “Deals with Ariel are never certain. But I suspect that if the calibani were going to stop us, they would have done it last night.”

  “Won’t the forcefield around the sphere hold them off?” asked Daeman.

  The old woman shrugged. “Calibani are more clever than voynix. They might surprise us.”

  Daeman shuddered and watched the fields, catching only glimpses of the pale figures. The crawler moved out of the lane between the sugarcane fields and climbed a low hill. The road ran on through broad fields of winter wheat, stalks no taller than fifteen or sixteen inches, entire fields rippling in the breeze from the west. The calibani, at least a dozen on each side of the road, came out of the canefields behind them and loped along through the wheat, keeping a distance of sixty yards or so. Out in the open, they ran on all fours.

  “I don’t like the looks of them,” said Daeman.

  “You’d probably like the looks of Caliban even less,” said Savi.

  “I thought these were calibani,” said Daeman. The old woman never seemed to make sense for long.

  Savi smiled, steering the crawler across and over a row of six pipes carrying something from west to east or east to west. “It’s said that the calibani are cloned from the single Caliban, the third element of the Gaiaic Trinity, along with Ariel and Prospero.”

  “It’s said,” mocked Daeman. “Everything’s gossip with you. Don’t you know anything from firsthand knowledge? These old stories are absurd.”

  “Some are,” agreed Savi. “And even though I’ve been alive 1,500 years or more, that doesn’t mean I’ve been around all that time. So I have to report secondhand things I hear and read.”

  “What do you mean, you haven’t been around all that time?” asked Harman. He sounded very interested.

  Savi laughed, but not, Daeman thought, with much amusement in her voice. “I’m better nano-engineered for repair than you eloi,” she said. “But nobody lives forever. Or for fourteen hundred years. Or even a thousand. I spend most of my time like Dracula, sleeping in the long-term cryo crèches in places like the Golden Gate Bridge. I pop out from time to time, try to see what’s going on, try to find a way to get my friends out of the blue beam. Then back into the cold.”

  Harman leaned forward. “How many years have you been . . . awake?”

  “Fewer than three hundred,” said Savi. “And even that’s enough to tire a body out. And a mind. And a spirit.”

  “Who’s Dracula?” asked Daeman.

  Savi, not answering, kept driving the crawler north by northwest.

  She’d told them the site they were headed for was about three hundred miles from the shoreline where they’d entered the Basin from the land that had been called Israel—a word Daeman had never heard. But the phrase “three hundred miles” meant little to Harman and nothing at all to Daeman, since trips by voynix-pulled carriole or droshky were never longer than a mile or two. Anything farther than that, and Daeman would fax. Anyone would fax.

  Still, they had covered half that distance by midday, but then the red-clay road ended, the terrain grew rough, and the crawler had to move much more slowly, sometimes detouring for miles before returning to its course. Savi kept that course by using a small instrument from her pack and checking distances on a hand-drawn, much-folded map.

  “Why don’t you use the palm finding-function?” Daeman asked.

  “Farnet and allnet work here in the Basin,” said Savi, “but proxnet doesn’t, and the place we’re heading is in no net databank. I’m using a map and an ancient thing called a compass. Works, though.”

  “How does it work?” asked Harman.

  “Magic,” said Savi.

  That was answer enough for Daeman.

  They continued to descend, the Basin topography falling away above and behind them, the orderly rows of crops replaced now by boulder fields, gulleys, and occasional stands of bamboo or high ferns. The calibani were no longer visible, but it began to rain shortly after they reached the rough areas, and the creatures might have been just beyond the curtains of falling water.

  The crawler passed odd artifacts—the hulls of numerous ships made of wood and steel, a city of tumbled Ionian columns, ancient plastic objects gleaming in gray sediment, the bleached bones of numerous sea creatures, and several huge, rusted tanks that Savi called “submarines.”

  In the afternoon the rain lifted some and the three saw a high mesa appear to the northeast. It was high and broad and rolling rather than peaked, more mountain than mesa, green on top, ridged on the sides with steep, rilled cliffs.

  “Is that where we’re going?” asked Daeman.

  “No,” said Savi. “That’s Cyprus. I lost my virginity there one thousand, four hundred and eight-two years ago next Tuesday.”

  Daeman exchanged covert glances with Harman. Both men had the good sense not to say anything.

  By late afternoon the terrain became lower and marshier and fields of crops began appearing on either side of a rough, red-c
lay road again. Oddly formed servitors were working in the fields, but none looked up to watch the crawler trundle past. Most of the machines didn’t appear to have eyes. Once their way was blocked by a river at least two hundred yards across. Savi sealed the slice-door, shutting off the fresh air they’d been enjoying, made sure the sphere forcefield was activated, and rolled the crawler down the bank. The water was deep—forty feet or more near the center of the channel—and even the crawler’s searchlights had trouble cutting through the silt and gloom. The current was stronger than Daeman would have imagined for such a wide, deep river, and the crawler was buffeted around violently enough that Savi had to work the virtual controls and fight the machine back onto the proper course. Daeman guessed that a machine with smaller wheels, less flexible struts, or less motor power would have been carried away to the west.

  When they emerged on the north shore, the machine throwing mud thirty feet behind them and water rushing off the spider-struts like a waterfall, Harman said, “I didn’t know the crawler could be driven underwater.”

  “Neither did I,” said Savi. She took a bearing north by northwest and drove on.

  The first energy constructs appeared shortly after that and Harman was the first to notice them.

  The first device was shimmering and shifting thirty yards to the left of the clay road, in an opening beyond a stand of bamboo. Savi stopped so they could get out and see, although Daeman was leery of getting away from the crawler even though they’d seen no calibani for several hours. But Harman wanted to see it and Daeman didn’t want to stay in the sphere alone, so he ended up following the two down the strut ladder and across the field toward the glowing object. It felt strange to Daeman to be walking again after so many hours sitting.

  The first energy construct was small—about twenty feet long by eight or ten high, yellow and orange with moving green veins, roughly spherical with pseudopods growing out of the top, bottom, and ends, the forms blobbing into shapes of their own, and then being reabsorbed by the central mass. The thing floated about four feet off the ground and Daeman would get no closer than twenty paces, even as Savi and Harman walked right up to it.