Mahnmut led the way into a small steel-cage elevator, and they descended through level after level past the holds, where Mahnmut explained his Europan submersible The Dark Lady would go—and down through what the moravec described as “charge storage magazines.” The word “magazine” had military connotations for Hockenberry, but he assured himself that it couldn’t be that. He saved his questions for later.
They met Orphu of Io in the engine room, which the larger moravec called the Big Piston Room. Hockenberry expressed his pleasure at seeing Orphu with his full complement of legs and sensors—sans real eyes, he understood—and the two talked about Proust and grief for a few minutes before the tour resumed.
“I don’t know,” Hockenberry said at last. “You once described the ship you took in from Jupiter, and it sounded high tech beyond my understanding. Everything I’m looking at here seems…looks like…I don’t know.”
Orphu rumbled loudly. When he spoke, Hockenberry thought, not for the first time, that the huge moravec sounded Falstaffian.
“It probably looks like the engine room of the Titanic to you,” said Orphu.
“Well, yes. Should it?” said Hockenberry, trying not to sound more ignorant of such things than he was. “I mean, your moravec technology must be three thousand years beyond the Titanic. Three thousand years beyond my end-time in the early Twenty-first Century even. Why this…this?”
“Because it’s based largely on mid-Twentieth Century plans,” rumbled Orphu of Io. “Our engineers wanted something fast and dirty that would get us to Earth in the least possible time. In this case, about five weeks.”
“But Mahnmut and you once told me that you zipped in from Jupiter space in days,” said Hockenberry. “And I remember you talked about boron solar sails, fusion engines…a lot of terms I didn’t understand. Are you using those things in this ship?”
“No,” said Mahnmut. “We had the advantage coming in-system of using the energy from Jupiter’s flux tube and a linear accelerator in Jovian orbit—a device our engineers have been working on for more than two centuries. We don’t have those things going for us here in Mars orbit. We had to build this ship from scratch.”
“But why Twentieth Century technology?” asked Hockenberry, looking at the huge pistons and driveshafts gleaming up toward the ceiling sixty or seventy feet overhead in the giant room. It did look like the engine room in the Titanic in that movie, only more so—bigger, more pistons, more gleaming bronze and steel and iron. More levers. More valves. And there were things that looked like giant shock absorbers. And the gauges everywhere looked like they measured steam pressure, not fusion reactors or some such. The air smelled of oil and steel.
“We had the plans,” said Orphu. “We had the raw materials, both brought from asteroids in the Belt and mined right on Phobos and Deimos. We had the pulse units…” He paused.
“What are pulse units?” asked Hockenberry.
Big mouth, sent Mahnmut.
What, do you want me to hide their presence from him? sent Orphu.
Well, yes…at least until we were a few million miles away from here toward Earth, preferably with Hockenberry on board.
He might notice the effect of the pulse units during our departure and get curious, sent Orphu of Io.
“The pulse units are…small fission devices,” Mahnmut said aloud to Hockenberry. “Atomic bombs.”
“Atomic bombs?” said Hockenberry. “Atomic bombs? Aboard this ship? How many?”
“Twenty-nine thousand seven hundred in the charge storage magazines you passed through on the way to the engine room,” said Orphu. “Another three thousand and eight in reserve stored below the engine room here.”
“Thirty-two thousand atomic bombs,” Hockenberry said softly. “I guess you guys are expecting a fight when you get to Earth.”
Mahnmut shook his red and black head. “The pulse units are for propellant. To get us to Earth.”
Hockenberry raised his palms to show his lack of understanding.
“These huge piston things are…well…pistons,” said Orphu. “On the way to Earth, we’ll be kicking a bomb out through a hole in the center of the pusher-plate beneath us about once every second for the first few hours—then once an hour for much of the rest of the flight.”
“For every pulse cycle,” adds Mahnmut, “we eject a charge—you’d just see a puff of steam out in space—we spray oil on the pusher-plate out there to act as an anti-ablative for the plate and the ejection tube muzzle, then the bomb explodes, and there’d be a flash of plasma that slams against the pusher-plate.”
“Wouldn’t that destroy the plate?” said Hockenberry. “And the ship?”
“Not at all,” said Mahnmut. “Your scientists worked all this out in the 1950s. The plasma event slams the pusher-plate forward and drives these huge reciprocating pistons back and forth. Even after just a few hundred explosions behind our butt, the ship will begin to pick up some real speed.”
“These gauges?” said Hockenberry, putting his hand on one that looked like a steam pressure gauge.
“That’s a steam pressure gauge,” said Orphu of Io. “The one next to it is an oil pressure gauge. The one above you there is a voltage regulator. You were right, Dr. Hockenberry…this room would be more quickly understood and manned by an engineer from the Titanic in 1912 than by a NASA engineer from your era.”
“How powerful are the bombs?”
Shall we tell him? sent Mahnmut.
Of course, tightbeamed Orphu. It’s a little late to start lying to our guest now.
“Each propellant charge packs a little more than forty-five kilotons,” said Mahnmut.
“Forty-five kilotons each—twenty-four thousand-some bombs,” muttered Hockenberry. “Are they going to leave a trail of radioactivity between Mars and Earth?”
“They’re fairly clean bombs,” said Orphu. “As fission bombs go.”
“How big are they?” asked Hockenberry. He realized that the engine room must be hotter than the rest of the ship. There was sweat beaded on his chin, upper lip, and brow.
“Come up a level,” said Mahnmut, leading the way to a spiral stairway broad enough for Orphu to repellor up the wide steps with them. “We’ll show you.”
Hockenberry guessed the room to be about a hundred and fifty feet in diameter and half that tall. It was almost completely filled with racks and conveyor belts and metal levels and ratcheting chains and chutes. Mahnmut pushed an oversized red button and the conveyor belts and chains and sorting devices began whirring and moving, shunting along hundreds or thousands of small silver containers that looked to Hockenberry like nothing so much as unlabeled Coke cans.
“It looks like the inside of a Coca-Cola dispenser,” said Hockenberry, trying to lighten the sense of doom he was feeling with a bad joke.
“It is from the Coca-Cola company, circa 1959,” rumbled Orphu of Io. “The designs and schematics were from one of their bottling plants in Atlanta, Georgia.”
“You put in a quarter and it dispenses a Coke,” managed Hockenberry. “Only instead of a Coke, it’s a forty-five-kiloton bomb set to explode right behind the tail of the ship. Thousands of them.”
“Correct,” said Mahnmut.
“Not quite,” said Orphu of Io. “Remember, this is a 1959 design. You only have to put in a dime.”
The Ionian rumbled until the silver cans in the moving conveyor belt rattled in their metal rings.
Back in the hornet, just Mahnmut and him, climbing toward the widening disk of Mars, Hockenberry said, “I forgot to ask…does it have a name? The ship?”
“Yes,” said Mahnmut. “Some of us thought it needed a name. We were first considering Orion…”
“Why Orion?” said Hockenberry. He was watching the rear window where Phobos and Stickney Crater and the huge ship were fast disappearing.
“That was the name your mid-Twentieth Century scientists gave the ship and the bomb-propellant project,” said the little moravec. “But in the end, the prime integrators in charge of the
Earth voyage accepted the name that Orphu and I finally suggested.”
“What’s that?” Hockenberry settled deeper into his forcefield chair as they began to roar and sizzle into Mars’ atmosphere.
“Queen Mab,” said Mahnmut.
“From Romeo and Juliet,” said Hockenberry. “That must have been your suggestion. You’re the Shakespeare fan.”
“Oddly enough, it was Orphu’s,” said Mahnmut. They were in atmosphere now and flying over the Tharsis volcanoes toward Olympus Mons and the Brane Hole to Ilium.
“How does it apply to your ship?”
Mahnmut shook his head. “Orphu never answered that question, but he did cite some of the play to Asteague/Che and the others.”
“Which part?”
MERCUTIO:
O then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
BENVOLIO:
Queen Mab, what’s she?
MERCUTIO:
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomi
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep,
Her wagon spokes made of long spinners’ legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
Her traces, of the moonshine’s wat’ry beams;
Her collars, of the smallest spider web;
Her whip, of cricket’s bone, the lash of film;
Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat
Not half so big as a round little worm
Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid.
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on curtsies straight;
O’er ladies’ lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues…
…and so on and so forth,” said Mahnmut.
“And so on and so forth,” repeated Dr. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D. Olympus Mons, the gods’ Olympos, was filling all the forward windows. According to Mahmut, the volcano was a mere 69,841 feet above Martian sea level—more than 15,000 feet shorter than people in Hockenberry’s day had thought, but tall enough.’Twil serve, thought Hockenberry.
And up there, on the summit—the grassy summit—under the glowing aegis now catching the late-morning light—there were living creatures. And not just living creatures, but gods. The gods. Warring, breathing, fighting, scheming, mating creatures, not so unlike the humans Hockenberry had known in his previous life.
At that moment, all the clouds of depression that had been gathering around Hockenberry for months blew away—like the streamers of white cloud he could see blowing south from Olympos itself as the afternoon winds picked up from the northern ocean called the Tethys Sea—and at that moment, Thomas C. Hockenberry, Ph.D. in classics, was simply and purely and totally happy to be alive. Whether he chose to go on this Earth expedition or not, he realized, he would change places right then with no one in any other time or at any other place.
Mahnmut banked the hornet to the east of Mons Olympus and headed for the Brane Hole and Ilium.
17
Hera jumped from outside the exclusion field around Odysseus’ home on Ithaca directly to the summit of Olympos. The grassy slopes and white-columned buildings spreading out from the huge Caldera Lake all gleamed in the lesser light from the more distant sun.
Poseidon, the Earth-Shaker, QT’d into existence nearby. “It is done? The Thunderer sleeps?”
“The Thunderer makes thunder now only through his snores,” said Hera. “On Earth?”
“It is as we planned, Daughter of Kronos. All these weeks of whispering and advising Agamemnon and his captains have come to the moment. Achilles is absent—as always—below us on the red plain, so the son of Atreus is even now raising his angry multitudes against the Myrmidons and other of Achilles’ loyalists who stayed behind in camp. Then straight they march against the walls and open gates of Ilium.”
“And the Trojans?” said Hera.
“Hector still sleeps after his night’s vigil by his brother’s burning bones. Aeneas is below Olympos here, but taking no action against us in Hector’s absence. Deiphobus is still with Priam, discussing the Amazons’ intentions.”
“And Penthesilea?”
“Just within this hour did she awake and gird herself—and so did her twelve companions—for this mortal combat to come. They rode out of the city to cheers only a short time ago and just passed the Brane Hole.”
“Is Pallas Athena with her?”
“I’m here.” Athena, glorious in her golden battle armor, had just QT’d into instant solidity next to Poseidon. “Penthesilea has been sent off to her doom…and Achilles’. The mortals everywhere are in a state of shrill confusion.”
Hera reached out to touch the glorious goddess’s metal-wrapped wrist. “I know this was hard for you, sister-in-arms. Achilles has been your favorite since he was born.”
Pallas shook her bright, helmeted head. “No longer. The mortal lied about me killing and carrying off his friend Patroclus. He lifted his sword against me and all my Olympian kin and kind. He can’t be sent down to the shady halls of Hades too soon for my pleasure.”
“It’s Zeus whom I still fear,” interrupted Poseidon. His battle armor was a deep-sea verdigris, with elaborate loops of waves, fishes, squids, leviathans, and sharks. His helmet bracketed his eyes with the raised fighting pincers of crabs.
“Hephaestus’ potion will keep our dreaded majesty snoring like a pig for seven days and seven nights,” said Hera. “It’s vital that we achieve all of our goals within that time—Achilles dead or exiled, Agamemnon returned as leader of the Argives, Ilium overthrown or at least the ten-year-war resumed beyond hope of peace. Then Zeus will be confronted with facts he cannot change.”
“His wrath will be terrible still,” said Athena.
Hera laughed. “You deign to tell me about the son of Kronos’ wrath? Zeus’s anger makes mighty Achilles’ wrath look like the stone-kicking pouts of a sullen and beardless boy. But leave the Father to me. I will handle Zeus when all our ends are met. Now, we must…”
Before she could finish, other gods and goddesses began winking into existence there on the long lawn in front of the Hall of the Gods on the shore of Caldera Lake. Flying chariots, complete with holograms of their straining steeds pulling them, zoomed in from each point of the compass and landed nearby until the lawn filled up with cars. The gods and goddesses gravitated into three groups: those pressing close to Hera, Athena, Poseidon, and the other champions of the Greeks; those others filling in the ranks behind glowering Apollo—principal champion of the Trojans—Apollo’s sister Artemis, then Ares, his sister Aphrodite, their mother Leto, Demeter, and others who had also long fought for the triumph of Troy; and the third group, who had not yet taken sides. The quantum and chariot-borne convergence continued until there were hundreds of immortals clustered on the long lawn.
“Why is everyone here?” cried Hera, amusement in her voice. “Is there no one guarding the ramparts of Olympos today?”
“Shut up, schemer!” shouted Apollo. “This plot to overthrow Ilium today is yours. And no one can find Lord Zeus to stop it.”
“Oh,” said white-armed Hera, “is the Lord of the Silver Bow so frightened by unseen events that he must run to his father?”
Ares, the war god, fresh from the healing and resurrection vats three times now after his ill-considered combats with Achilles, stepped up next to Phoebus Apollo. “Female,” gritted the tempestuous god of battle, growing to his full fighting height of more than fifteen feet, “we continue to suffer your existence because you’re the incestuous wife of our Lord Zeus. There is no other reason.”
Hera laughed her most calculatingly maddening laugh. “Incestuous wife,” she taunted. “Ironic talk from a god who beds his sister more than any other woman, goddess or mortal.”
Ares lifted his long killing spear. Apollo drew his powerful bow and notched an arrow. Aphrodite unlimbered her smaller but no less deadly bow.
“Would you incite violence against our queen?” asked Athena, stepping between Hera and the bows and spear. Every god on the summit had brought their personal forcefields up to full strength at the sight of the weapons being readied.
“Don’t speak to me of inciting violence!” shouted red-faced Ares at Pallas Athena. “What insolence. Do you remember only months ago when you spurred on Tydeus’ son, Diomedes, to wound me with his lance? Or how you cast your own immortal’s spear at me, wounding me, thinking yourself safely cloaked in your concealing cloud?”
Athena shrugged. “It was on the battlefield. My blood was up.”
“That’s your excuse for trying to kill me, you immortal bitch?” roared Ares. “Your blood was up?”
“Where is Zeus?” demanded Apollo, speaking to Hera.
“I am not my husband’s keeper,” said white-armed Hera. “Although he needs one at times.”
“Where is Zeus?” repeated Apollo, Lord of the Silver Bow.
“Zeus will have nothing to do with the events of men or gods for many days more,” said Hera. “Perhaps he will never return. What happens next in the world below, we on Olympos shall determine.”
Apollo notched the heavy, heat-seeking arrow back, but did not yet lift the bow.
Thetis, sea goddess, Nereid, daughter of Nereus—the true Old Man of the Sea—and Achilles’ immortal mother by the mortal man Peleus, stepped between the two angry groups. She wore no armor, only her elaborate gown sewn to look like patterns of seaweed and shells.