by Dan Simmons
“Right,” says the moravec. “ ‘Slow Time’ is a misnomer. It seems to the Slow-Time traveler that time has stopped—that everything and everyone is frozen in amber—but in reality, the body’s moved into hyperfast action, reacting in milliseconds.”
“Why doesn’t the person just burn up?” asks Hockenberry. He could have followed Apollo and Paris into Slow Time to watch the battle—in fact, if he’d been there that day, he would have. The gods had riddled his blood and bones with nanomemes for just that purpose, and many was the time he’d shifted into Slow Time to watch the gods prepare one of their Achaean or Trojan heroes for combat. “From friction,” he added. “With the air or whatever …” He broke off lamely. Science wasn’t his strong suit.
But Mahnmut nodded as if the scholic had said something wise. “The Slow-Time accelerator’s body would burn up—from internal heat if nothing else—if the tailored nanoclusters didn’t deal with that as well. It’s part of the body’s nano-generated forcefield.”
“Like Achilles’?”
“Yes.”
“Could Paris have burned up just because of that?” asks Hockenberry. “Some sort of nano-tech failure?”
“Very unlikely,” says Mahnmut and sits on the smaller block of stone. “But why would this Philoctetes kill Paris? What motive would he have?”
Hockenberry shrugs. “In the non-Iliad, non-Homeric tales of Troy, it is Philoctetes who kills Paris. With his bow. And a poisoned arrow. Just as Oenone described. Homer even refers to fetching Philoctetes to bring about the prophecy that Ilium will fall only when Philoctetes joins the fray—in the second book, I think.”
“But the Trojans and the Greeks are allies now.”
Hockenberry has to smile. “Just barely. You know as well as I that there are conspiracies and incipient rebellions brewing in both camps. Nobody but Hector and Achilles is happy about this war with the gods. It’s just a matter of time until there’s another rebellion.”
“But Hector and Achilles make for an almost unbeatable duo. And they have tens of thousands of Trojans and Achaeans loyal to them.”
“So far,” says Hockenberry. “But now maybe the gods themselves have been kibbitzing.”
“Helping Philoctetes shift into Slow Time?” says Mahnmut. “But why? Occam’s Razor suggests that if they wanted Paris dead, they could have just let Apollo kill him as everyone assumed he had. Until today. Until Oenone’s accusation. Why have a Greek assassinate him…” He stops and then murmurs, “Ah, yes.”
“Right,” said Hockenberry. “The gods want to hurry up the next mutiny, get Hector and Achilles out of the way, break up this alliance, and get the Greeks and Trojans killing each other again.”
“Thus the poison,” says the moravec. “So that Paris can live just long enough to tell his wife—his first wife—who really killed him. Now the Trojans will want revenge and even the Greeks loyal to Achilles will be ready to fight to defend themselves. Clever. Has anything else of comparable interest happened today?”
“Agamemnon’s back.”
“No shit?” says Mahnmut. I need to talk to him about his vernacular vocabulary, thinks Hockenberry.
This is like talking to one of my freshmen at IU.
“Yes, correct, no shit,” says Hockenberry. “He’s back from his voyage home a month or two early and has some really surprising news.”
Mahnmut leans forward expectantly. Or at least Hockenberry interprets the body language of the little humanoid cyborg as expressing expectation. The smooth metallic-plastic face shows nothing but reflection of the firelight.
Hockenberry clears his throat. “The people back home are gone,” he says. “Missing. Disappeared.”
Hockenberry had expected some sort of exclamation of surprise, but the little moravec waits silently.
“Everyone gone,” continues Hockenberry. “Not just in Mycenae, where Agamemnon first returned—not just his wife Clytemnestra and his son Orestes and all the rest of that cast, but everyone’s missing. Cities empty. Food sitting uneaten on tables. Horses starving in stables. Dogs pining on empty hearths. Cows unmilked in pastures. Sheep unshorn. Everywhere Agamemnon and his boats put in in the Peloponnese and beyond—Menelaus’ kingdom of Lacedaemon, empty. Odysseus’ Ithaca—empty.”
“Yes,” says Mahnmut.
“Wait a minute,” says Hockenberry. “You’re not in the least surprised. You knew. You moravecs knew that the Greek cities and kingdoms had been emptied out. How?”
“Do you mean how did we know?” asks Mahnmut. “Simple. We’ve been keeping tabs on these places from earth orbit since we arrived. Sending down remote drones to record data. There’s a lot to be learned here on the earth of three thousand years before your day—three thousand years before the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries, that is.”
Hockenberry is stunned. He’d never thought of the moravecs paying attention to anything other than Troy, the surrounding battlefields, the connecting Hole, Mars, Mount Olympos, the gods, maybe a Martian moon or two… Jesus, wasn’t that enough?
“When did they… disappear?” Hockenberry manages at last. “Agamemnon is telling everyone that some of the food left behind was fresh enough to eat.”
“I guess that depends upon your definition of ‘fresh,’ ” says Mahnmut. “According to our surveillance, the people disappeared about four and a half weeks ago. Just as Agamemnon’s little fleet was approaching the Peloponnese.”
“Jesus Christ,” whispers Hockenberry.
“Yes.”
“Did you see them disappear? On your satellite cameras or probes or whatever?”
“Not really. One minute they were there and the next minute they weren’t. It happened about two a.m. Greek time, so there wasn’t a lot of movement to monitor… in the Greek cities, I mean.”
“In the Greek cities …” Hockenberry repeats dully. “Do you mean… I mean… is there… have other people disappeared as well? In… say… China?”
“Yes.”
The wind suddenly whips around their eyrie and scatters sparks in all directions. Hockenberry covers his face with his hands during the spark storm and then brushes embers off his cloak and tunic. When the wind subsides, he throws the last of his sticks on the fire.
Other than Troy and Olympos—which, he discovered eight months ago, wasn’t on Earth at all—Hockenberry had only traveled to one other place in this past-Earth, and that was to prehistoric Indiana, where he deposited the only other surviving scholic, Keith Nightenhelser, with the Indians there to keep him safe when the Muse had gone on a killing spree. Now, without consciously meaning to, Hockenberry touches the QT medallion under his shirt. I need to check on Nightenhelser.
As if reading his mind, the moravec says, “Everyone else is gone—everyone outside a five-hundred-kilometer radius of Troy. Africans. North American Indians. South American Indians. The Chinese and aborigines in Australia. Polynesians. Northern European Huns and Danes and Vikings-to-be. The proto-Mongols. Everyone. Every other human being on the planet—we estimated that there were about twenty-two million—has disappeared.”
“That’s not possible,” says Hockenberry.
“No. It wouldn’t seem so.”
“What kind of power…”
“Godlike,” says Mahnmut.
“But certainly not these Olympian gods. They’re just… just…”
“More powerful humanoids?” said Mahnmut. “Yes, that’s what we thought. There are other energies at work here.”
“God?” whispers Hockenberry, who had been raised in a strict Indiana Baptist family before he had traded faith for education.
“Well, maybe,” says the moravec, “but if so, He lives on or around planet Earth. Huge amounts of quantum energy were released from Earth or near-earth-orbit at the same time Agamemnon’s wife and kids disappeared.”
“The energy came from Earth?” repeats Hockenberry. He looks around at the night, the funeral pyre below, the city nightlife becoming active beneath them, the distant campfires of t
he Achaeans, and the more distant stars. “From here?”
“Not this Earth,” says Mahnmut. “The other Earth. Yours. And it looks like we’re going to it.”
For a minute Hockenberry’s heart pounds so wildly that he’s afraid he’s going to be sick. Then he realizes that Mahnmut isn’t really talking about his Earth—the Twenty-first Century world of the half-remembered fragments of his former life before the gods resurrected him from old DNA and books and God knows what else, the slowly-returning-to-consciousness world of Indiana University and his wife and his students—but the concurrent-with-terraformed-Mars Earth of more than three thousand years after the short, not-so-happy first life of Thomas Hockenberry.
Unable to sit still, he stands and paces back and forth on the shattered eleventh floor of the building, walking to the shattered wall on the northeast side, then to the vertical drop on the south and west sides. A pebble scraped up by his sandal falls more than a hundred feet into the dark streets below. The wind whips his cape and his long, graying hair back. Intellectually, he’s known for eight months that the Mars visible now through the Hole coexisted in some future solar system with Earth and the other planets, but he’d never really connected that simple fact with the idea that this other Earth was really there, waiting.
My wife’s bones are mingled with the dust there, he thinks and then, on the verge of tears, almost laughs. Fuck, my bones are mingled with the dust there.
“How can you go to that Earth?” he asks and immediately realizes how stupid the question is. He’s heard the story of how Mahnmut and his huge friend Orphu traveled to Mars from Jupiter space with some other moravecs who did not survive their first encounter with the gods. They have spaceships, Hockenbush. While most of the moravec and rockvec spacecraft had appeared as if by magic through the quantum Holes that Mahnmut had helped bring into existence, they were still spacecraft.
“We’re building a ship just for that purpose on and near Phobos,” the moravec says softly. “This time we’re not going alone. Or unarmed.”
Hockenberry can’t stop pacing back and forth. When he gets to the edge of the shattered floor, he has the urge to jump to his death—an urge that has tempted him when in high places since he was a kid. Is that why I like to come up here? Thinking about jumping? Thinking about suicide? He realizes it is. He realizes how lonely he’s been for the last eight months. And now even Nightenhelser is gone—gone with the Indians probably, sucked up by whatever cosmic vacuum cleaner made all the humans on earth except these poor fucked Trojans and Greeks disappear this month. Hockenberry knows that he can twist the QT medallion hanging against his chest and be in North America in no time at all, searching for his old scholic friend in that part of prehistoric Indiana where he’d left him eight months earlier. But he also knew that the gods might track him through the Planck-space interstices. It’s why he hasn’t QT’d in eight months.
He walks back to the fire and stands looming over the little moravec. “Why the hell are you telling me this?”
“We’re inviting you to go with us,” says Mahnmut.
Hockenberry sits down heavily. After a minute he is able to say, “Why, for God’s sake? What possible use could I be to you on such an expedition?”
Mahnmut shrugs in a most human fashion. “You’re from that world,” he says simply. “If not that time. There are humans on this other Earth, you know.”
“There are?” Hockenberry hears how stunned and stupid his own voice sounds. He’d never thought to ask.
“Yes. Not many—most of the humans appear to have evolved into some sort of post-human status and moved off the planet into orbital ring cities more than fourteen hundred years ago—but our observations suggest that there are a few hundred thousand old-style human beings left.”
“Old-style human beings,” repeats Hockenberry, not even trying not to sound stunned. “Like me.”
“Exactly,” says Mahnmut. He stands, his vision plate barely coming up to Hockenberry’s belt. Never a tall man, Hockenberry suddenly realizes how the Olympian gods must feel around ordinary mortals. “We think you should come with us. You could be of tremendous help when we meet and talk to the humans on your future Earth.”
“Jesus Christ,” repeats Hockenberry. He walks to the edge again, realizes again how easy it would be to take one more step off this edge into the darkness. This time the gods wouldn’t resurrect him. “Jesus Christ,” he says yet again.
Hockenberry can see the shadowy figure of Hector at Paris’s funeral pyre, still pouring wine into the earth, still ordering men to pile more firewood into the flames.
I killed Paris, thinks Hockenberry. I’ve killed every man, woman, child, and god who’s died since I morphed into the form of Athena and kidnapped Patroclus—pretending to kill him—in order to provoke Achilles into attacking the gods. Hockenberry suddenly laughs bitterly, not embarrassed that the little machine-person behind him will think he’s lost his mind. I have lost my mind. This is nuts. Part of the reason I haven’t jumped off this fucking ledge before tonight is that it would feel like a dereliction of duty… like I need to keep observing, as if I’m still a scholic reporting to the Muse who reports to the gods.
I’ve absolutely lost my mind. He feels, not for the first or fiftieth time, like sobbing.
“Will you go with us to Earth, Dr. Hockenberry?” Mahnmut asks softly.
“Yeah, sure, shit, why not? When?”
“How about right now?” says the little moravec.
The hornet must have been hovering silently hundreds of feet above them but with its navigation lights off. Now the black and barbed machine swoops down out of the darkness with such suddenness that Hockenberry almost falls off the edge of the building.
An especially strong gust of wind helps him keep his balance and he steps back from the edge just as a staircase ramp hums down from the belly of the hornet and clunks on stone. Hockenberry can see a red glow from inside the ship.
“After you,” says Mahnmut.
6
It was just after sunrise and Zeus was alone in the Great Hall of the Gods when his wife, Hera, came in leading a dog on a golden leash.
“Is that the one?” asked the Lord of the Gods from where he sat brooding on his golden throne.
“It is,” said Hera. She slipped the leash off the dog. It sat.
“Call for your son,” said Zeus.
“Which son?”
“The great artificer. The one who lusts after Athena so much that he humped her thigh just as this dog would if the dog had no manners.”
Hera turned to go. The dog started to follow her.
“Leave the dog,” said Zeus.
Hera motioned the dog to stay and it stayed.
The dog was large, gray, short-haired, and sleek, with mild brown eyes that somehow managed to look both stupid and cunning. It began to pace and its claws made scraping sounds on the marble as it wandered back and forth around Zeus’s gold throne. It sniffed the sandals and bare toes of the Lord of Lightning, the Son of Kronos. Then it claw-clicked its way to the edge of the huge holovision pool, peered in, saw nothing that interested it in the dark videoswirl of the surface static, lost interest, and wandered toward a pillar many yards away.
“Come here!” ordered Zeus.
The dog looked back at Zeus, then looked away. It began to sniff at the base of the huge white pillar in a preparatory way.
Zeus whistled.
The dog’s head came up and around, its ears shifted, but it did not come.
Zeus whistled again and clapped his hands.
The gray dog came quickly then, running in a rocking motion, tongue lolling, eyes happy.
Zeus stepped down from his throne and petted the animal. Then he pulled a blade from his robes and cut off the dog’s head with a single swing of his massive arm. The dog’s head rolled almost to the edge of the vision pool while the body dropped straight to the marble, forelegs stretched ahead of it as if it had been ordered to lie down and was complying in hope
s of getting a treat.
Hera and Hephaestus entered the Great Hall and approached across acres of marble.
“Playing with the pets again, My Lord?” asked Hera when she drew near.
Zeus waved his hand as if dismissing her, sheathed the blade in the sleeve of his robe, and returned to his throne.
Hephaestus was dwarfish and stocky as gods go, a little under six feet tall. He most resembled a great, hairy barrel. The god of fire was also lame and dragged his left leg along as if it were a dead thing, which it was. He had wild hair, an even wilder beard that seemed to merge with the hair on his chest, and red-rimmed eyes that were always darting to and fro. He seemed to be wearing armor, but closer inspection showed the armor to be a solid covering made up from hundreds of tiny boxes and pouches and tools and devices—some forged of precious metal, some shaped of base metal, some tooled of leather, some seemingly woven of hair—all hanging from straps and belts that crisscrossed his hairy body. The ultimate metalworker, Hephaestus was famous on Olympos for once having created women made of gold, young clockwork virgins, who could move and smile and give men pleasure almost as if they were alive. It was said that from his alchemic vats he had also fashioned the first woman—Pandora.
“Welcome, artificer,” boomed Zeus. “I would have summoned you sooner but we had no tin pots or toy shields to repair.”
Hephaestus knelt by the dog’s headless body. “You needn’t have done this,” he muttered. “No need. No need at all.”
“It irritated me.” Zeus raised a goblet from the arm of his golden throne and drank deeply.
Hephaestus rolled the headless body on its side, ran his blunt hand along its rib cage as if offering to scratch the dead dog’s belly, and pressed. A panel of flesh and hair popped open. The god of fire reached into the dog’s gut and removed a clear bag filled with scraps of meat and other things. Hephaestus pulled a sliver of wet, pink flesh from the gut-bag.