I breathed a sigh of relief. Success, so far.
But that night I was troubled and sleepless, and was not because of the makeshift bed in a small room connected to the king’s suite. I paced and tossed, and pondered the will of the gods, and the words of Hermes, and the thing that I must do — or not do — and only when light touched the edges of the horizon early in the dawn was I able to rest my eyes for an hour or so.
I would have given much to know, then, that I would need to endure this agony for only one more day.
By morning I had tossed and turned myself into something resembling resolve. I followed the lugal as discreetly as I could, and when he moved to his court chambers to receive petitioners, I set myself up, weapons at hand, in a screened antechamber just behind his ornate judgment seat. Through the screen I saw tribal leaders, rich merchants, and priests come on errands of supplication or penitence, depending on their need, and then I saw a group of his generals approach.
They were the men that Sargon had told me might be involved. I shifted in my seat, getting ready for action, and I could also see that the lugal became subtly agitated. He glanced behind his back through the straw screen to me. I nodded, not knowing what was coming at this moment but wishing to give him some assurance, false as it might be.
Then it began.
The generals’ aides — all veteran, armed soldiers — spread along the sides of the room. The three generals approached the king, shouting that he had betrayed the great nation of Kish by not wiping Ur under the soles of his sandals when he had the chance. The lugal looked back behind him, expecting me to come out. I sat in my chair, gripping the handles with hands drained bloodless.
I saw it all in shards, like a pieces of a dream become nightmare, hating myself for not moving but forcing myself to carry out the plan.
They approached the throne and the lugal’s guard melted away: they had been bought or suborned. He drew his sword and prepared to fight, but arrows from the men at the sides of the rooms suddenly sprouted from his body, and finally I acted.
Bursting through the screen and leaving it dangling in crazed tatters behind me, I almost physically shifted into an inhuman speed, running forward and decapitating the first general’s head, slicing the second’s guts so deeply only his spine slowed my blade, and spitting the third with the point of my sword. Continuing, dashing, whirling, I ran to one side of the room, killing two of the lugal’s guards who had allowed this to happen and not pausing to think that I had, also. The generals’ aides who had just filled his body with arrows were frantically pumping shot after shot at me, and missing just as frequently. Picking up a sword from a fallen guard, I threw it like a dagger, pinning one to the wall, and the rest, out of arrows, fell back.
I grabbed the nearest courtier off the floor, trembling in fright, speckled with the blood of the king’s dead guard, and yelled his in face.
“Get Sargon now!”
Only then did I turn and face the man I had pretended to be ready to save. I walked up to him, knelt at his side, and turned him on his back. He looked up at me, dying, and knowing it, three arrows piercing his body. His eyes met mine and his lips, flecked with bloody froth from punctured lungs, moved spasmodically. A whisper left them, and I bent lower to hear.
“So … so this,” he husked as I put my ear to his mouth. “So this was your plan all along?”
Then all power left the muscles of his body and he slumped in my arms and the lugal of Kish died on the cold stone floor in a puddle of his own blood, just as Sargon entered the room. I gently laid the lugal’s head down, swallowed my self-loathing for a moment, stood, and opened my mouth.
“The king is dead,” I said. And, gesturing with both hands at Sargon, “Long live the king!”
Late that night, after the palace and the city has returned to some semblance of order, I spoke with Sargon in his chambers, now the royal chambers. I spoke the words that Hermes had given me, instruction to create an empire, the world’s first, and to rule it wisely, and to create centers of learning.
Then I gave him my sword, the sword of the gods I called it, and I gave him all of my armor. Finally I slipped out of the palace, feeling naked and light in only a short robe, and walked towards the city gates. A citizen saw me, my height, my bearing, and asked me if I was not a soldier of the king. I told him no longer, and I continued.
At the city gates I introduced myself to the guards, who recognized me, and ordered them to open the doors. Seeing something in my eyes to fear, they obeyed, and I slipped out of the city of Kish in the moon and starlight. I walked up the Euphrates, retracing the path I had ridden with the old man and his harvest, remembering the soldier with a broken leg and a broken life we had carried along to tell the lugal the tale.
I walked through the night and when morning came I did not stop, not for food, nor for drink. Everyone I passed on the road in the light of day looked the other way and choked off any greeting when they saw my face and the look in my eyes. The day grew hot and dusty, but I did not slow or stop. My feet, soft from weeks in the palace of the kings of Kish, grew sore, but I did not stop walking.
Finally after another cold and lonely night, on the morning of the second day, I reached the place by the river where I had arrived. I staggered down the steep side of the muddy bank, gulped huge mouthfuls of clean blue water from the river, bathed in the current, then found a spot in the shade of a tree on the soft grass.
There I sat for the rest of that day, eyes fixed on the far-off line where water met air. And I remembered the king of Kish, and I remembered his eyes, and I remembered his words.
“Not my plan,” I whispered to myself. “Not my plan.”
And then my head nodded, and my eyes closed, and I fell asleep. s.Leep took me, and I left that place.
But that place did not leave me.
Perchance to dream
’Curiouser and curiouser,’ cried Alice.
- Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland
First there is the cold. Then the dark. Tubes disconnect, wires detach.
I rose through levels of sleep, consciousness slowly returned, the surrounding pod dimly visible, gently strobing lights waking, lid unsealing. And then the warmth came, and I was awake.
I got up, looked, and wondered. It had been a long mission, a long lonely trip. I half expected to see the crude bed from my chambers in Kish, the first and oldest city of humans, but around me were varipods, like mine, opening, and releasing people.
My people.
I stepped out gladly, seeing Sama, Helo, Kin, and Tonia … and then, turning, Livia. I hugged each one, and if I hugged Livia a little longer, a little more intensely than the rest, they forgot it in their surprise.
“What is this?” wondered Kin aloud. “Why are you hugging us?”
Smiling, almost laughing, I told them where I had been and when I had been, that I had been on a mission for over a month, alone. And that it felt good to be reunited with my team, with my friends.
They looked uncomprehendingly at me.
“A month?” said Tonia. “We’ve been sleeping a month?”
That spurred more conversation, and it became clear to all that they had been left in s.Leep for more than thirty days while I had been busy making Sargon king in Kish. They were not happy to hear it, especially Livia.
“We are a team,” she said. “It isn’t right that one of us goes off into danger and the rest of us are left here like spare batteries, in storage.”
The implied criticism of the gods left the room awkward and embarrassed, though I was glad to see that Livia was starting to have her own thoughts and her own point of view, separate from the gods. And I intended to talk to her about it, soon. But not with everybody watching.
“Whatever the case, we’re all here together now,” I said quickly to defuse the tension. “And you must all be both very well rested and very hungry.”
So we made our way down to the Hall, and the servitors came out as always, and we feaste
d and drank and talked and laughed, as always.
And, as always, Hermes joined us.
The sound and light show started, and we continued drinking and picking at our plates. We had seen this before. Only when the silver bubble appeared and Hermes began to arrive did we fully turn and start to pay attention. I fixed an attitude of respectful submission on my face, and glanced at Livia, getting her attention, to ensure she did the same. With an almost invisible shake of her shoulders, she did.
“Greetings,” he said, understated as always.
We all nodded our heads in an abbreviated bow.
“It was necessary to send Geno on a solo mission to Kish,” Hermes said, getting straight to the point. “There was no virtue in sending a larger team, and, as it turned out, Geno did not need any help on this particular task.”
“Rather than keep you all awake for the entire six weeks of his mission, we decided it would be best for you to simply sleep the entire time and wake up at the end. This saved you much worry and frustration.”
“But,” started Livia.
Hermes raised his hand. “I know it’s not easy to hear now, but it was the best strategy. However, that is all history right now. I have come to tell you about the future.”
And he proceeded to explain that we would be leaving on a mission of the utmost importance very soon. That the gods had finally discovered the enemy headquarters, the place from which our attackers were fighting to change time and the world, and that our role would be to “take it out,” as he put it. Obliterate it, annihilate it, and kill all we found, to make safe the cosmos.
“You will have two weeks here to train, prepare, and hone your skills,” Hermes said. “You will need every ounce of ability you can muster. It will not be easy.”
With that, he left, and we turned to each other and simply gazed.
The rest of the day was a blur of training. High-tech weapons in far-future milieus, low-tech in bucolic settings with antique people and huge, odiferous horsepower. I almost felt at home in those settings after spending weeks in ancient Kish.
After so long away from the team and so long away from Livia I felt I had almost too much to tell. But for the day, I gave myself fully to the training. After returning from my solo mission and spending time in s.Leep, I could not believe how good my muscles and joints felt — and how relatively achy and slow I had gotten in Kish. With s.Leep, everything worked and moved so freely and powerfully, so much better than after ordinary natural rest, that it was a simple joy to run and fight and train.
Sort of like getting a powerful machine as a gift and using it just for sheer pleasure, like a new toy.
Evenings, however, after training, were given to conversation and companionship: the kind I had not known I had needed before but missed while solo for six weeks. And, of course, time with Livia.
I told her more than ever before, that first evening, of my hopes and fears, my beliefs about the gods in general and Hermes in particular, and the hopes that I had of understanding whatever tangled reality we were embedded in … and extricating ourselves from it. And I told her about the biggest news of the past six weeks: meeting the enemy, meeting someone like myself. Livia was fascinated by this, asking repeated questions about the man I had fought, his face, his features, and what he said, making me tell and re-tell everything.
Finally, after the third or fourth time, she stopped me.
“I almost feel like I know this person,” she said. “The way you describe him, with his long hair and small nose, and ear with a cleft in the top … I seem to remember him. Not from here … not from any of the fighters who we have trained with, but from the city.”
Together, we sifted through our almost-memories of living in the city of the gods, seeking the answer to the identity of the enemy. It was difficult, frustrating work, since those faint memories were buried so deeply it was difficult to tell actual memory from imagination or hope, and I came up entirely blank. But Livia felt that she knew this man, and the feeling was uneasy.
“He was an enemy of some sort. He was against something in our city, in some way. But I can’t remember any details of how or why, or really anything else about who he was. I do have a vague impression he was a leader of some kind of opposition group, but not the top leader.”
I didn’t know what to make of that, exactly, but it made sense.
And then I was finished talking and I reached out and touched Livia, brushing my fingertips over her face. She pulled me close, and we gazed at each other, eye to eye. I kissed her gently, on her left cheek, low along her jawline, whispering her name. Then again, higher, warming her cheek with my breath and whispering her name both tenderly and savagely. And a third time, higher, now on her left brow. Slowly, with infinite patience, I kissed the only woman I had ever loved on her forehead, still lightly, still gently, still whispering in delighted devotion that single word, and then continuing on down her other cheek.
I pulled a little apart, and looked into her eyes, and felt her breath on my lips. Smiled. She smiled back, then moved closer, and we breathed each other’s breath, and I bent down. Our lips touched and my heart sang as we kissed gently, then passionately, then sweetly and lovingly.
After hours or minutes — neither of us knew — we came up for air and sat, holding each other, on the floor of the remote corridor we had sought out for privacy. This kissing and this relationship was doing things to our bodies and our minds and our hearts that neither of knew, exactly, how to handle or how to control.
But we knew that it was good, and we knew we liked it.
The next morning it was back to training and we moved through modules on middle-modern weapons: 20th-century guns with explosive shells propelling bullets of steel and lead, and artillery, and motorized transport in vehicles with internal combustion engines burning ancient fossil fuels. Plus, as always and ever, extensive hand-to-hand combat.
Tonia and Helo threw themselves into a fight with exceptional vigor and injured themselves almost simultaneously in the process of attacking each other, her foot breaking while dislocating his knee. We laughed and pulled them apart as they tried to continue single-footed, still game and almost grinning despite the pain, and threw them into their varipods early, wishing them a good night’s s.Leep while they cursed their luck at missing the evening feast.
After the feast, when everyone dispersed, I took Livia away, kissed her briefly this time, and asked her if she was ready to leave this place, with me. She saw the grin on my face, knew I did not yet mean in any permanent way, and punched me on the chest, hard. I laughed, grabbed her hand, and took her back to the hall of feasting.
Everyone was gone and we had the place to ourselves. Just like last time, I walked up to the servitor’s entrance and waited at the side. When one came out, I slipped inside, pulling Livia after me. She looked around wonderingly at the long row of servitors as I walked with her to the far wall. I waited confidently, and as expected, one came up to us, arm outstretched.
I reached out, took the machine’s cold hard hand in my own, and uttered the words I had been thinking since I heard them from the lips of a man who knew me, and who I killed, thousands of years in the past and just a few days ago, outside the gates of the ancient city Ur.
“And protect,” I said.
And the servitor turned, faced the wall, uttered a series of beeps and touched four nondescript spots on the unmarked surface. Within seconds, a door appeared on the wall. Steeling ourselves for whatever might lie ahead, we opened the door and stepped through into darkness.
As we stepped through the doorway, lights flickered on and we found ourselves in the same room we had just left, in a sense, but reversed, a mirror image … and this kitchen had only five or six niches filled with servitors, with another twenty or more standing empty. Suddenly grasping what might be the layout, we walked over to the sliding servitor entrance. It whisked open, and we found ourselves in a new, large room. As the lights flicked on, first nearby and then off into the distanc
e, we saw that it was a room the same size and shape as the hall of feasting, but with controls and desks and screens filling most of the space, with only a small area left over for eating.
“I think we’ve found the control room,” I said to Livia. “The question is, is anybody home?”
And we rushed forward to explore the entire space, moving quickly but quietly through the room. Arriving in darkness might be a sign that this facility was unattended, but it was also possible that this particular moment just happened to be a sleep cycle. But the room was empty of any sign of habitation. No loose documents, no garbage, no food or drink stains on desks.
No dust either, so the servitors must be maintaining this side as well, I thought.
“We have to do a quick sweep through the entire space,” Livia said. “Who knows who or what else might be here.”
So we walked out of the hall-like control center. Quietly stepping into the s.Leep rooms, I saw empty, open varipods. Ignoring an odd, unsettling feeling, I walked out again quickly and we moved through to where, in our version of this place, the massive training rooms could be found. In the place of mock battlefields with water and alpine and space environments was a huge single room, perhaps a mile long, filled with massive machines gently humming, quiescent for the moment but seemingly poised and ready, waiting to spring into action.
“Perhaps these are the engines that transport us through time and space,” guessed Livia.
I nodded, and we returned to the control room, the hall of feasting. A servitor popped out, awaiting an order, but we ignored it as we searched through the area.
“I don’t remember,” I said, an ache starting deep in my head, “how to even turn these computers on.”
I sat at a desk, a large one towards the front of the room, and rested my hands on its surface. Immediately, a large image flared to life in front of me, seemingly hanging in mid-air. It was a projection, not quite translucent, but I could dimly see Livia behind it, and it was some kind of access screen.
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