“What are these rocks?” asked Harman. His people had enjoyed wearing precious stones for decoration, baubles always fetched by the robotic servitors, but he’d never wondered where they came from.
“These…rocks…” said Prospero, “include agate, jasper, lapis lazuli, bloodstone, and cornelians—there are more than thirty-five varieties of cornelian in this simple little carnation leaf where I set my hand on this screen, do you see?”
Harman saw. The place made him dizzy. Trapezoids of light moving on the west wall below the books made the marble sparkle, gleam, and shimmer from the thousands of precious stones inlaid there.
“What is this place?” asked Harman. He realized that he was whispering.
“It was built as a mausoleum…a tomb,” said the magus, sweeping around another junction of white marble screens and leading the way to the center of the great place as if the maze had yellow arrows painted on the floor. They stopped before an arched entrance to an inner rectangle at the center of the maze of hundreds of screens. “Can you read this stele, Harman of Ardis?”
Harman peered at it in the milky light. The letters in the marble were carved strangely—they were swirly and elaborate rather than the straight lines he was used to from books—but it was written in Standard World English.
“Read it aloud,” said the magus.
“‘Enter with awe the illustrious sepulchre of Khan Ho Tep, Lord of Asia and Protector of Earth, and his bride and beloved Lias Lo Amumja, adored by all the world. She left this transient world on the fourteenth night of the month of Rahab-Septem in the year of the Khanate 987. She and her Lord dwell now in the starry Heaven and watch over you who enter here.’”
“What do you think?” asked Prospero, standing under the elaborate arch where the center of the maze opened to the yet-unseen interior.
“Of the inscription or this place?”
“Both,” said the magus.
Harman rubbed his chin and cheek, feeling the stubble there. “This place is…wrong. Too big. Too rich. Out of scale. Except for the books.”
Prospero laughed and the noise echoed and then re-echoed. “I agree with you, Harman of Ardis. This place was stolen—the idea, the design, the inlays, the chessboard design of the courtyard outside—everything stolen except for the mezzanines and books, which were placed there six hundred years later by Rajahar the Silent, a distant descendant of the feared Khan Ho Tep. The Khan had the original Taj Mahal design enlarged by a factor of more than ten. That original building was beautiful, a true testament to love—nothing remains of that structure because the Khan had it slagged, wanting only this mausoleum to be remembered. This place is a memorial to wretched excess more than anything else.”
“The location is…interesting,” Harman said softly.
“Yes,” said Prospero, pulling up his blue sleeves. “That bit of wisdom is as true about real estate today as it was in Odysseus’ day—location, location, location. Come.”
They walked into the center of the marble-screen maze, an empty patch of marble perhaps a hundred yards square with what looked to Harman to be a bright reflecting pool in the center. Prospero’s walking staff made echoing taps as they walked slowly to the center.
It was no reflecting pool.
“Jesus Christ,” cried Harman, stepping back from the edge.
It seemed to be empty air. To the left, just visible, was the vertical north face of the mountain, but beneath them—perhaps forty feet beneath the level of the floor—a steel and crystal sarcophagus seemed to be floating in midair, high over the jagged glacier six miles below. Inside the sarcophagus lay a naked woman. A narrow, white marble spiral staircase snaked down to the level of the sarcophagus, the last step appearing to hang out over that empty air.
It can’t be open, thought Harman. There was no blast of the jet stream, no roaring of high-altitude wind up and through the opening in the floor. The sarcophagus had to be resting on something. By squinting, he could make out facets, a multitude of nearly invisible geodesics. The burial chamber was made up of some incredibly transparent plastic or crystal or glass. But why hadn’t he seen this sarcophagus and stairway during their ascent in the cablecar or…
“The burial vault is invisible from the outside,” Prospero said softly. “Have you looked at the woman yet?”
“The beloved Lias Lo Amumja?” said Harman, not all that interested in staring at a naked corpse. “Who left this transient world on whenever the hell it was? And where’s the Khan? Does he get his own crystal chamber?”
Prospero laughed. “Khan Ho Tep and his beloved Lias Lo Amumja, daughter of Cezar Amumja of the Central African Empire—she was a stone bitch and a harpy, Harman of Ardis, trust me on this—were dumped overboard less than two centuries after they were entombed here.”
“Dumped overboard?” said Harman.
“Perfectly preserved bodies unceremoniously dumped over the same wall you peered over thirty minutes ago,” said Prospero. “Tossed overboard like yesterday’s garbage from a tramp steamer. Successors to the Khan—each one more minor in his or her own way—liked to be buried here for all eternity…that eternity lasting until the next Khan-successor wanted the best possible mausoleum space.”
Harman could picture it.
“That is, until fourteen hundred years ago,” said Prospero, returning his blue-eyed gaze to the glass and wood sarcophagus four stories below them. “This woman was truly the beloved of someone in power and she has rested here for fourteen centuries, undisturbed. Look at her, Harman of Ardis.”
Harman had been looking in the general direction of the sarcophagus but trying not to stare at the body. The woman was too naked for his tastes—she looked too young to be dead, her body was still pink and pale, her breasts were too visible—nipples looking rosy even from forty feet away—the short hair on her head one comma of black against white satin pillows, the rich triangle of hair at her groin another black comma—her dark eyebrows, strong features, broad mouth even from this distance, almost…familiar.
“Jesus Christ,” cried Harman for the second time that morning, but this time loud enough that his shout echoed from the dome and bounced back from the mezzanines of books and white marble.
She was younger—much younger—hair black rather than gray, body firm and young rather than pulled into tired lines and folds by long centuries as Harman had seen with the skintight thermskin—but her face had the same strength, the cheekbones the same sharpness, the eyebrows the same bold slash, the chin the same firm set. There was no doubt.
It was Savi.
49
“So where is everyone?” asks fleet-footed Achilles, son of Peleus, as he follows Hephaestus across the grassy summit of Olympos.
The blond mankiller and Hephaestus, god of fire and Chief Artificer to all the gods, are walking along the shore of Caldera Lake between the Hall of the Healer and the Great Hall of the Gods. The other white-pillared god-homes seem dark and deserted. There are no chariots in the sky. There are no immortals walking the many paved walkways, illuminated by low, yellow-glowing lamps that Achilles notices are not torches.
“I told you,” says Hephaestus. “With the Cat away, the Mice are playing. Almost all of them are down on the Ilium-Earth to be players in the last act of your petty little Trojan War.”
“How does the war proceed?” asks Achilles.
“Without you there to kill Hector, your Myrmidons and all the other Achaeans and Argives and whatever you want to call them are getting their asses kicked by the Trojans.”
“Agamemnon and his people are retreating?” asks Achilles.
“Aye. The last time I looked—only a few hours ago, just before I made the mistake of checking out the damage to my crystal escalator and getting into a wrestling match with you—I saw in the holopool in the Great Hall that Agamemnon’s attack on the city walls had failed, yet again, and the Achaeans were falling back to their defensive trenches near the black ships. Hector was about to lead his army outside the walls—ready t
o take the offensive again. Essentially, it came down to which of us immortals were tougher than the others in a serious fight—it turns out that even with tough bitches like Hera and Athena fighting for Ilium—and Poseidon shaking the earth for the city, which is his thing, you know—shaking the earth—the pro-Greek team of Apollo, Ares, and that sneaky Aphrodite and her friend Demeter are carrying the day. As a general, Agamemnon sucks.”
Achilles only nods. His fate now is with Penthesilea, not with Agamemnon and his armies. Achilles trusts his Myrmidons to do the right thing—to flee if they can, to fight and die if they must. Ever since Athena—or Aphrodite disguised as Athena, if the Goddess of Wisdom had told him the truth several days earlier—murdered his beloved Patroclus, Achilles’ bloodlust has focused only on vengeance against the gods. Now—even though he knows it is just the result of Aphrodite’s perfumed magic—he has two goals: to bring his beloved Penthesilea back to life and to kill the bitch Aphrodite. Without being aware that he is doing so, Achilles adjusts the god-killing dagger in his belt. If Athena was telling the truth about the blade—and Achilles believed her—this bit of quantum-shifted steel will be the death of Aphrodite and any other immortals who get in his way, including this crippled god of fire, Hephaestus, if he tries to flee or block Achilles’ will.
Hephaestus leads Achilles to a parking area outside the Great Hall of the Gods where more than a score of golden chariots are lined up on the grass, metal umbilical cords snaking into some underground charging reservoir. Hephaestus climbs into one of the horseless cars and beckons Achilles aboard.
Achilles hesitates. “Where are we going?”
“I told you. To visit the one immortal who might know where Zeus is right now,” says the Artificer.
“Why don’t we just look for Zeus directly?” asks Achilles, still not stepping into the chariot. He has driven or been driven in a thousand chariots, but he has never flown in one the way he frequently sees the gods flitting to and fro above Ilium or Olympos, and while the idea does not actively frighten him, he’s in no hurry to leave the ground.
“There is a technology known only to Zeus,” says Hephaestus, “which can hide him from all of my sensors and spy devices. It’s obviously been activated, although I’d guess by his wife Hera rather than by the God of Gods himself.”
“Who is this other immortal who can show us where Zeus hides?” Achilles is distracted by the howling sandstorm and wild flashes of lightning and static discharge a few hundred yards above them as the planetary storm throws itself against Zeus’s Olympos-girding aegis forcefield.
“Nyx,” says Hephaestus.
“Night?” repeats Achilles. The fleet-footed mankiller knows the goddess’s name—the daughter of Kaos, one of the first sentient creatures to emerge from the Void that was there at the beginning of time before the original gods themselves helped separate the darkness of Erebus from the blue and green Gaia-order of Earth—but no Greek or Asian or African city he knew of worshiped the mysterious Nyx-Night. Legend and myth said that Nyx—alone, without an immortal male to impregnate her—had given birth do Eris (Discord), the Moirai (Fates), Hypnos (Sleep), Nemesis (Retribution), Thanatos (Death), and the Hesperides.
“I thought Night was a personification,” adds Achilles. “Or just an oxcart load of bullshit.”
Hephaestus smiles. “Even a personification or load of bullshit takes on physical form in this brave new world the post-humans, Sycorax, and Prospero helped make for us,” he says. “Are you coming? Or shall I QT back to my laboratory and enjoy the…ah…pleasures of your sleeping Penthesilea while you dither up here?”
“You know I’ll find you and kill you if you do that,” says Achilles with no threat in his voice, only cool promise.
“Yes, I do,” agrees Hephaestus, “which is why I’ll ask you one last time: Are you going to get aboard this fucking chariot or not?”
They fly southeast halfway around the great sphere of Mars, although Achilles does not know that it is Mars he is staring at, nor that it is a sphere. But he knows that the steep ascent above Olympos’ Caldera Lake and the violent penetration of the aegis into the howling dust storm behind the four horses that had appeared out of nowhere at takeoff—and then the ride through the blinding dust storm and high winds them-selves—is not something he would choose to do again soon. Achilles hangs on to the wood and bronze rim of the chariot and works hard not to close his eyes. Luckily, there is some field of energy around the chariot car itself—some minor form of the aegis or variation on the invisible body shields the gods use in combat, Achilles assumes—that protects the two of them from the hurling sand and blasting winds.
Then they are above the dust storm, black night sky above them and the stars shining brilliantly, two small moons visibly hurtling across the sky. By the time the chariot crosses the line of three huge volcanoes, they have passed south of the worst of the dust storm and features are visible far below them in the reflected starlight.
Achilles knows that the gods’ home on Olympos inhabits its own odd world, of course—he has been fighting on the red plain between what his moravec allies had called the Brane Hole for eight months, watching the tepid, tideless waves wash in from some northern sea that was not any of Earth’s—but he’s never before considered that the Olympians’ world might be so large.
They fly high above an endless, broad, flooded canyon and darkness is broken only by reflected starlight on water and a few moving lanterns leagues below that Hephaestus says are running lights on the Little Green Men’s quarry barges. Achilles sees no reason to ask the cripple to elaborate on that cryptic description.
They fly above treeless and then forested mountain ranges and countless circular depressions—craters, the god of fire calls them—some eroded or forested, many showing central lakes, but most obviously sharp and severe in the moonlight and starlight.
They fly higher, until the whistle of air around the chariot’s mini-aegis dies away and Achilles is breathing a pure air emitted from the chariot car itself. The oxygen content is so high that he feels a little drunk.
Hephaestus names some of the rocky, mountainous, or valleyed features unrolling far beneath them in the night. Achilles thinks the crippled god sounds like a bored bargeman announcing stops along a river’s way.
“Shalbatana Vallis,” says the immortal. And then, some minutes later—“Margaratifer Terra. Meridiania Planum. Terra Sabaea. That heavily forested area to the north is Schiaparelli, the foothills dead ahead are called Huygens. We’re swinging south now.”
The chariot car flying behind the four straining, slightly transparent horses does not swing south, it banks south, and Achilles hangs on for dear life even though the floor of the car always—impossibly—seems to be down.
“What’s that?” asks Achilles a few minutes later. A huge, circular lake has appeared, filling much of the southern horizon. The chariot is descending and while there is no dust storm here, the air still howls.
“Hellas Basin,” grunts the god of fire. “It’s more than fourteen hundred miles across and it has a bigger diameter than Pluto.”
“Pluto?” says Achilles.
“It’s a fucking planet, you stupid hick preliterate,” growls Hephaestus.
Achilles releases his death grip on the chariot rim, freeing his hands for action. He thinks he will pick the crippled god up, snap his back over his knee, and fling him down from the chariot. But then Achilles glances over the side of the car at the mountain peaks and black valleys still many leagues below and decides he’ll let the gimpy dwarf land the vehicle first. The lake looms ahead of them, filling the entire south. Then they cross the arcing northern shoreline and begin descending over star-lit water. Achilles realizes that what had seemed like a circular lake from just a few miles higher is really a small, round ocean.
“It varies from two miles deep to more than four,” says Hephaestus, as if Achilles had asked or cared. “Those two huge rivers flowing in from the east are called Dao and Harmakhis. Our original pl
an was to put a couple of million old-style humans in the fertile valleys there, just let them fucking go forth and be fertile and multiply, but we never got around to turning the beam this way and de-faxing them. Actually, Zeus and the other Pantheon originals just forgot everything before they were gods—it seemed like a dream to all of us. Besides, Zeus was busy overthrowing his parents, the Titan first-generation immortals—Kronos and his sister-bride Rhea—and casting them down into the Brane-reached world called Tartarus.”
Hephaestus clears his throat and begins to recite in a minstrel’s voice that sounds to Achilles like someone sawing a lyre in half with a rusty blade—
“A dreadful sound troubled the boundless sea.
The whole earth uttered a great cry.
Wide heaven, shaken, groaned.
From its foundation far Olympus reeled
Beneath the onrush of the deathless gods,
And trembling seized upon black Tartarus.”
Achilles can see only dark water to the right and left of them now, water hurtling by beneath at an impossible speed, the cliff-walled edges of the circular lake gone, below the rim of the horizons. To the south, a single craggy island appears.
“Zeus only won the war,” continues Hephaestus, “because he went back to the post-human Brane-punching machines in orbit around the original Earth—the real Earth, I mean, not yours, not this fucking terraformed counterfeit—and brought in Setebos and his egg-born ilk to fight Kronos’ legions. The hundred-handed monsters with their energy weapons and their hunger for eating terror out of the dirt won the day, although they were tough as shit stains to get rid of once the war was over. Also, one of the Titans’ fucking kids—Iapetus’ boy Prometheus—turned double agent. And then there was that lab-built hundred-headed clone monster named Typhon that came through the Brane Hole in the four hundred and twenty-fourth year of the war. Now that was something to see. I remember the day when…”