by Dan Simmons
Andromache, Hector’s wife, came into the room and looked down on the sybil. Andromache’s hands were empty, but Cassandra could easily imagine the dagger in the sleeve of the older woman’s gown. For a long moment, neither woman spoke. Finally, Cassandra said, “Old friend, please release me.”
Andromache said, “Old friend, I should cut your throat.”
“Then do it, you bitch,” said Cassandra. “Don’t talk about it.” She had little fear, since even within the kaleidoscope of shifting views of the future in the past eight months since the old futures had died, she had never foreseen Andromache killing her.
“Cassandra, why did you say that about the death of my baby? You know that Pallas Athena and Aphrodite both came into my tiny son’s chamber eight months ago and slaughtered him and his wet nurse, saying that his sacrifice was a warning—that the gods on Olympos had been ill pleased at my husband’s failure to burn the Argive ships and that little Astyanax, whom his father and I had called Scamandrius, was to be their yearly heiffer chosen for sacrifice.”
“Bullshit,” said Cassandra. “Untie me.” Her head hurt. She always had a hangover after the most vivid of her prophecies.
“Not until you tell me why you said that I had substituted a slave baby for Astyanax in that bloodied nursery,” said cool-eyed Andromache. The dagger was in her hand now. “How could I do that? How could I know that the goddesses were coming? Why would I do that?”
Cassandra sighed and closed her eyes. “There were no goddesses,” she said tiredly but with contempt. She opened her eyes again. “When you heard the news that Pallas Athena had killed Achilles’ beloved friend Patroclus—news which still may turn out to be another lie—you decided, or conspired with Hecuba and Helen to decide—to slaughter the wet nurse’s own child, who was the same age as Astyanax, and then kill the wet nurse as well. Then you told Hector and Achilles and all the others who assembled at the sound of your screams that it was the goddesses who killed your son.”
Andromache’s hazel eyes were as blue and cold and ungiving as ice on the surface of a mountain stream in spring. “Why would I do that?”
“You saw the chance to realize the Trojan Women’s scheme,” said Cassandra. “Our scheme of all these years. To somehow turn our Trojan men away from war with the Argives—a war I had prophesied as ending in all of our death or destruction. It was brilliant, Andromache. I applaud your courage for acting.”
“Except, if what you say is true,” said Andromache, “I’ve helped plunge us all into an even more hopeless war with the gods. At least in your earlier visions, some of us women survived—as slaves, but still among the living.”
Cassandra shrugged, an awkward motion with her arms extended and tethered to the bedposts. “You were thinking only of saving your son, whom we know would have been foully murdered had the old past become the current present. I understand, Andromache.”
Andromache extended the knife. “It’s all of my family’s death—even Hector’s—if you were to ever speak of this again and if the rabble—Trojan and Achaean alike—were to believe you. My only safety is in your death.”
Cassandra met the other woman’s flat gaze. “My gift of foresight can still serve you, Old Friend. It may even save you—you and your Hector and your hidden Astyanax, wherever he is. You know that when I am in the throes of my visions that I cannot control what I cry aloud. You and Helen and whoever else is in on this conspiracy—stay with me, or assign murderous slave girls to stay with me, and shut me up if I start to babble such truth again. If I do reveal this to others, kill me then.”
Andromache hesitated, lightly bit her lower lip, and then leaned forward and cut the silken cord that bound Cassandra’s right wrist to the bed. While she was cutting the other cords, she said, “The Amazons have arrived.”
Menelaus spent the night listening to and then talking to his brother and by the time Dawn spread forth her rosy fingertips, he was resolved to action.
All night he had moved from one Achaean and Argive camp to another around the bay and along the shoreline, listening to Agamemnon tell the horrifying story of their empty cities, empty farm fields, abandoned harbors—of unmanned Greek ships bobbing at anchor in Marathon, Eretria, Chalcis, Aulis, Hermione, Tiryns, Helos, and a score of other shoreside cities. He listened to Agamemnon tell the horrified Achaeans, Argives, Cretans, Ithacans, Lacadaemons, Calydnaeans, Buprasians, Dulichions, Pylosians, Pharisans, Spartans, Messeians, Thracians, Oechalians—all the hundreds of allied groups of varied Greeks from the mainland, from the rocky isles, from the Peloponnese itself—that their cities were empty, their homes abandoned as if by the will of the gods—meals rotting on tables, clothing set out on couches, baths and pools tepid and scummed over with algae, weapons lying un-scabbarded. On the Aegean, Agamemnon described in his full, strong, booming voice—empty ships bellying against the waves, sails full but tattered, no sign of furling or storm—the skies were blue and the seas were fair coming and going in their month-long voyage, Agamemnon explained—but the ships were empty: Athenian ships full-loaded with cargo or still resplendent with rows of unmanned oars; great Persian scows empty of their clumsy crews and helmeted, hopeless spearmen; graceful, crewless Egyptian ships waiting to carry grain to the home islands.
“The world has been emptied of men and women and children,” cried Agamemnon at each Achaean encampment, “except for us here, the wily Trojans and us. While we have turned our backs on the gods—worse, turned our hands and hearts against them—the gods have carried away the hopes of our hearts—our wives and families and fathers and slaves.”
“Are they dead?” cried man after man in camp after camp. The cries always were made though moans of pain. Lamentations filled the winter night all along the line of Argive fires.
Agamemnon always answered with upraised palms and silence for a terrible minute. “There was no sign of struggle,” he would say at last. “No blood. No decaying bodies feeding the starving dogs and circling birds.”
And always, at every encampment, the brave Argive crews and bodyguards and foot soldiers and captains who had accompanied Agamemnon homeward were having their own private conversations with others of their rank. By dawn, everyone had heard the terrible news, and palsied terror was giving way to impotent rage.
Menelaus knew that this was perfect for their purpose—the Atridae brothers, Agamemnon and Menelaus—to turn the Acheaens not only against the Trojans once again and to finish this war, but to overthrow the dictatorship of fleet-footed Achilles. Within days, if not hours, Agamemnon would once again be commander in chief.
At dawn, Agamemnon had finished his duty of reporting to all the Greeks, the great captains had wandered away—Diomedes back to his tent, the Great Telamonian Ajax, who had wept like a child when he heard that Salamis had been found as empty as all the other homelands—and Odysseus, Idomeneus, and Little Ajax, who had cried out in pain with all his men from Locris when Agamemnon had told them the news, and even garrulous old Nestor—all had wandered away at dawn to catch a few hours’ restless sleep.
“So tell me the news of the War with the Gods,” said Agamemnon to Menelaus as the two brothers sat alone in center of their Lacadaemon encampment, surrounded by rings of loyal captains, bodyguards, and spearmen. These men stayed far enough away to let their lords converse in private.
Red-haired Menelaus told his older brother what news there was—the ignoble daily battles between moravec wizardry and the gods’ divine weapons, the occasional single combat—the death of Paris and a hundred lesser names, both Trojan and Achaean—and about the funeral just finished. The corpse-fire smoke had ceased to rise and the flames above the wall of Troy had disappeared from sight only an hour earlier.
“Good riddance,” said royal Agamemnon, his strong white teeth gnawing off a strip of the suckling pig they’d roasted for his breakfast. “I’m only sorry Apollo killed Paris… I wanted to do the job myself.”
Menelaus laughed, ate some of the suckling pig himself, washed it down with breakfast wi
ne, and told his dear brother about Paris’s first wife, Oenone, appearing out of nowhere and of her self-immolation.
Agamemnon laughed at this. “Would that it had been your bitch of a wife, Helen, who’d been so moved to throw herself into the flames, Brother.”
Menelaus nodded at this, but he felt his heart lurch at the sound of Helen’s name. He told Agamemnon of Oenone’s ravings about Philoctetes, not Apollo, being the cause of Paris’s death, and about the anger that had swept through the Trojan ranks, causing the small contingent of Achaeans to beat a hasty retreat from the city.
Agamemnon slapped his thigh. “Wonderful! It’s the penultimate stone set in place. Within forty-eight hours, I’ll stir this discontent into action throughout the Achaean ranks. We’ll be at war with the Trojans again before the week is out, Brother. I swear this on the stones and dirt of our father’s barrow.”
“But the gods …” began Menelaus.
“The gods will be as they were,” he said with what sounded like complete confidence. “Zeus neutral. Some helping the mewling, doomed Trojans. Most allying themselves with us. But this time we’ll finish the job. Ilium will be ashes within the fortnight… as sure as Paris is nothing but bones and ashes this morning.”
Menelaus nodded. He knew that he should ask questions about how his brother hoped to mend the peace with the gods again, as well as overthrow the invincible Achilles, but he ached to discuss a more pressing topic.
“I saw Helen,” he said, hearing his own voice stumble at his wife’s name. “I was within seconds of killing her.”
Agamemnon wiped grease from his mouth and beard, drank from a silver cup, and raised one eyebrow to show that he was listening.
Menelaus described his firm resolve and opportunity to get to Helen—and how both were ruined by Oenone’s sudden appearance and her dying accusations against Philoctetes. “We were lucky to get out of the city alive,” he said again.
Agamemnon squinted toward the distant walls. Somewhere a moravec siren wailed and missiles hurtled skyward toward some unseen Olympian target. The forcefield over the main Achaean camp hummed into a deeper tone of readiness.
“You should kill her today,” said Menelaus’ older and wiser brother. “Now. This morning.”
“This morning?” Menelaus licked his lips. Despite the pig grease, they were dry.
“This morning,” repeated the once and future commander in chief of all the Greek armies assembled to sack Troy. “Within a day or so, the opening rift between our men and those dog-spittle Trojans will be so great that the cowards will be closing and bolting their fucking Scaean Gate again.”
Menelaus looked toward the city. Its walls were rose-colored in the light of the rising winter sun. He was very confused. “They won’t allow me in by myself …” he began.
“Go in disguise,” interrupted Agamemnon. The royal king drank again and belched. “Think as Odysseus would think… as some crafty weasel would think.”
Menelaus, as proud a man as his brother or any other Achaean hero in his own way, wasn’t sure he appreciated that comparison. “How can I disguise myself?”
Agamemnon gestured toward his own royal tent, its scarlet silk billowing again nearby. “I have the lion skin and old bore-tusk wraparound helmet that Diomedes wore when he and Odysseus attempted to steal the Palladian from Troy last year,” he said. “With that strange helmet hiding your red hair and the tusks hiding your beard—not to mention the lion skin concealing your glorious Achaean armor—the sleepy guards at the gate will think you another barbarian ally of theirs and let you pass without challenge. But go quickly—before the guard changes and before the gates are locked to us for the duration of Ilium’s doomed existence.”
Menelaus had to think about this for only a few seconds. Then he rose, clasped his brother firmly on the shoulder, and went into the tent to gather his disguise and to arm himself with more killing blades.
8
The moon Phobos looked like a huge, grooved, dusty olive with bright lights encircling the concave end. Mahnmut told Hockenberry that the hollowed tip was a giant crater called Stickney and that the lights were the moravec base.
The ride up had not been without some adrenaline flow for Hockenberry. He’d seen enough of the moravec hornets at short range to notice that none of them seemed to have windows or ports, so he assumed the ride would be a blind one, except perhaps for some TV monitors. He’d underestimated asteroid-belt moravec technology—for all the hornets were from the rockvecs according to Mahnmut. Hockenberry had also assumed there would be acceleration couches or Twentieth Century space-shuttle-style chairs with huge straps and buckles.
There were no chairs. No visible means of support. Invisible force-fields enfolded Hockenberry and the small moravec as they seemed to sit on thin air. Holograms—or some sort of three-dimensional projections so real that there was no sense of projection—surrounded them on three sides and beneath them. Not only were they sitting on invisible chairs, the invisible chairs and their bodies were suspended over a two mile drop as the hornet flashed through the Hole and climbed for altitude to the south of Olympus Mons.
Hockenberry screamed.
“Does the display bother you?” asked Mahnmut.
Hockenberry screamed again.
The moravec quickly touched holographic controls that appeared as if by magic. The drop below them shrank until it appeared to be set into the metal floor of the hull like a mere giant-screen TV. All around them, the panorama continued to unfold as the forcefield-shrouded summit of Olympus Mons flashed past—lasers or some sort of energy lances flickering at them and splashing against the hornet’s own energy field—and then the blue Martian sky shifted to thin pink, then to black, and the hornet was above the atmosphere, pitching over—although the great limb of Mars seemed to rotate until it filled the virtual windows.
“Better,” gasped Hockenberry, flailing for something to hang on to. The forcefield chair didn’t fight him, but it didn’t release him either. “Jesus Christ,” he gasped as the ship did a one-hundred-eighty degree roll and fired its engines. Phobos tumbled into view, almost on top of them.
There was no sound. Not a whisper.
“I’m sorry,” said Mahnmut. “I should have warned you. This is Phobos filling the aft windowscreen right now. It’s the smaller of Mars’ two moons, just about eight miles in diameter… although you can see it’s not a sphere by any means.”
“It looks like a potato that some cat’s been clawing,” managed Hockenberry. The moon was approaching very fast. “Or a giant olive.”
“Olive, yes,” said Mahnmut. “That’s because of the crater at this end. It’s named Stickney—after Asaph Hall’s wife, Angeline Stickney Hall.”
“Who was… Asaph… Hall?” managed Hockenberry. “Some astronaut… or… cosmonaut… or… who?” He’d found something to hang on to. Mahnmut. The little moravec didn’t seem to mind his metal-plastic shoulders being clutched. The aft view-holo flared with flame as some silent thrusters or engines fired. Hockenberry was just barely succeeding in keeping his teeth from chattering.
“Asaph Hall was an astronomer with the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.,” said Mahnmut in his usual soft, conversational tones. The hornet was pitching over again. And spinning. Phobos and the Stickney Crater hole were filling first one holographic window and then another.
Hockenberry was pretty sure that the thing was crashing and that he would be dead in less than a minute. He tried to remember a prayer from his childhood—damn all those years as an intellectual agnostic!—but all he could bring back was the singsong “Now I lay me down to sleep…”
It seemed appropriate. Hockenberry went with it.
“I believe that Hall discovered both moons of Mars in 1877,” Mahnmut was saying. “There is no record—none of which I am aware—of whether Mrs. Hall appreciated a huge crater being named after her. Of course, it was her maiden name.”
Hockenberry suddenly realized why they were out of con
trol and going to crash and die. No one was flying the goddamned ship. It was just the two of them in the hornet, and the only control—real or virtual—that Mahnmut had touched had been the one to adjust the holographic views. He considered mentioning this oversight to the little organic-robot, but since the Stickney Crater was filling all the forward windows now and approaching at a speed they had no chance of decreasing before impact, Hockenberry kept his mouth shut.
“It’s a strange little moon,” said Mahnmut. “A captured asteroid, really—as is Deimos, of course. They’re quite different from each other. Phobos here orbits only three thousand seven hundred miles above the Martian surface—almost skimming the atmosphere, as it were—and is destined to crash into Mars in approximately eighty-three million years if no one does anything about it.”
“Speaking of crashing …” began Hockenberry.
At that moment the hornet slowed to a hover, dropped into the floodlit crater, and touched down near a complex network of domes, girders, cranes, glowing yellow bubbles, blue domes, green spires, moving vehicles, and hundreds of busy moravecs bustling around in vacuum. The landing, when it came, was so gentle that Hockenberry only just felt it through the metal floor and forcefield chair.
“Home again, home again,” chanted Mahnmut. “Well, not really home, of course, but… watch your head when we get out. That door is a little low for human heads.”
Before Hockenberry could comment or scream again, the door had swung out and down and all the air in the little compartment roared out into the vacuum of space.
Hockenberry had been a classics major and professor during his previous life, never very science literate, but he’d seen enough science-fiction movies in his time to know the fate of explosive decompression: eyes expanding until they were the size of grapefruits, eardrums bursting in great gouts of blood, flesh and skin boiling and expanding and ripping as internal pressures expanded when finding no resistance against the zero external pressure of hard vacuum.