by Dan Simmons
But, at risk of bruising or worse, Hera kept her naked knees and thighs tight closed.
“You want me, husband?”
Zeus was breathing through his mouth. His eyes were wild. “I want you, wife. Never has such a lust for goddess or mortal woman flooded my pounding heart and prick and overwhelmed me so. Open your legs!”
“Never?” asked Hera, keeping her legs closed. “Not even when you bedded Ixion’s wife, who bore you Pirithous, rival to all the gods in wisdom and…”
“Not even then, with Ixion’s wife of the blue-veined breasts,” gasped Zeus. He forced her knees wide and stepped between her white thighs, his phallus reaching to her pale, firm belly and vibrating with lust.
“Not even when you loved Ascrisius’ daughter Danae?” asked Hera.
“Not even with her,” said Zeus, leaning far forward to suckle at Hera’s raised nipples, first the left, then the right. His hand moved between her legs. She was wet—from the breastband’s work and from her own eagerness. “Although, by all the gods,” he added, “Danae’s ankles alone could make a man come!”
“It must have more than once with you, My Lord,” gasped Hera as Zeus set his broad palm beneath her buttocks and lifted her closer. The broad, hot head of his scepter was batting at her thighs now, making them moist with his own anticipating wetness. “For she bore you a paragon of men.”
Zeus was so excited that he could not find entry, but lunged around her warmth like a boy in his first time with a woman. When he released her breast with his left hand to guide himself home, Hera seized his wrist.
“Do you want me more than you wanted Europa, Phoenix’ daughter?” she whispered urgently.
“More than Europa, yes,” breathed Zeus. He grabbed her hand and set it on himself. She squeezed, but did not guide. Not yet.
“Do you want to lie with me more than you did with Semele, Dionysos’ irresistible mother?”
“More than Semele, yes. Yes.” He set her hand more firmly around himself and lunged, but he was so engorged that it was more a ram’s head shoving than a penetration. Hera was pushed two feet up the table. He pulled her back. “And more than Alcmene in Thebes,” he gasped, “although my seed that day brought invincible Herakles into the world.”
“Do you want me more than you wanted fair-haired Demeter when…”
“Yes, yes, god damn it, more than Demeter.” He pushed Hera’s legs further apart and, with only his right palm, lifted her backside a foot off the table. She could not help opening for him now.
“Do you want me more than you wanted Leda on the day you took the shape of a swan to couple with her while you beat her down and held her with your great swan’s wings and entered her with your great swan’s…”
“Yes, yes,” gasped Zeus. “Shut up, please.”
He entered her then. Opening her like some great ram-headed battering engine would open the Scaean Gates had the Greeks ever won entrance to Ilium.
In the next twenty minutes, Hera almost swooned twice. Zeus was passionate, but not quick. He took his pleasure urgently, but waited for its climax with all the miserliness of a hedonist ascetic. The second time, Hera felt consciousness sliding away under the oiled and sweating pounding—the table shook and almost upended although it was thirty feet long, the chairs and couches tumbled away, dust fell from the ceiling, Odysseus’ ancient home almost came down around them—and Hera thought, This will not do—I must be conscious when Zeus climaxes or all my scheming is for naught.
She forced herself to stay attentive even after four orgasms of her own. Odysseus’ great quiver of arrows fell from the wall, scattering barbed and possibly poisoned arrows across tile in the last seconds of Zeus’s heavy pounding. He had to hold Hera in place with one hand under her, pressing up so fiercely that she heard her divine hipbones creak, while his other gripped her shoulder, keeping her from sliding far down the quivering, straining table.
Then he erupted inside her. Hera did scream then and swooned for a few seconds, despite herself.
When her eyelids flickered opened, she felt his great weight upon her—he’d grown to fifteen feet in his involuntary last seconds of passion—his beard scratched against her breast, the top of his head—hair soaked with sweat—lay against her cheek.
Hera raised her treacherous finger with the injection ampule set in the false nail by crafty Hephaestus. Stroking his neck curls with her cool hand, she bent the nail back and activated the injector—there was barely a hiss, unheard over his ragged breathing and the pounding of both their divine hearts.
The drug was called Absolute Sleep and it lived up to its name within microseconds.
Almost instantly, Zeus was snoring and slobbering against her rubbed-red chest.
It took all of Hera’s divine strength to shove him off, to remove his softening member from her folds, to slide out from under him.
Her unique, Athena-made gown was a torn mess. So was she, Hera realized. Bruised and scratched and pummeled in every muscle, outside and in. The divine seed from the King of the Gods ran down her thigh as she stood. Hera mopped it away with the tatters of her ruined gown.
Retrieving Aphrodite’s breastband from the torn silk, Hera went into Odysseus’ wife Penelope’s dressing room, next to the bedroom where their great marriage bed had one post made of a living olive tree and a frame inlaid with gold, silver, and ivory, with thongs of oxhide dyed crimson stretched end to end to hold soft fleeces and rich coverlets. From camphor-lined trunks set by Penelope’s bath, Hera pulled gown after gown—Odysseus’ wife had been about her size, and the goddess could morph her shape enough to finish the tailoring—finally choosing a peach-colored silk shift with an embroidered band that would hold her bruised breasts high. But before dressing, Hera made her bath as best she could from the copper kettles of cold water set out days or weeks earlier for a hot bath Penelope never had.
Later, emerging into the dining hall again, dressed, walking gingerly, Hera stared at the great, bronzed, naked hulk snoring face-down on the long table. Could I kill him now? she wondered. It was not the first time—or the thousandth—that the queen had held this thought while looking at and listening to her snoring lord. She knew she was not alone in the wondering. How many wives—goddess and mortal woman, long dead and yet unborn—had felt this thought slipping across their minds like a cloud shadow over rocky ground? If I could kill him, would I kill him? If it were possible, would I act now?
Instead, Hera prepared to quantum teleport to the plains of Ilium. So far, the plot was unfolding according to plan. Poseidon, the Earth-Shaker, should be maneuvering Agamemnon and Menelaus into action at any minute. Within hours, if not sooner, Achilles might be dead—slain by the hands of a mere woman, although Amazon, his heel pierced by poison spearpoint—and Hector isolated. And if Achilles killed the woman who attacked him, Athena and Hera had plans for him still. The mortal revolt would be over by the time Zeus awoke, if Hera ever allowed him to awake at all—Absolute Sleep needed an antidote or it would work until these high walls of Odysseus’ home would tumble down in rot. Or Hera might wake Zeus soon, if her goals were fulfilled earlier than planned, and the Lord of Gods would not even be aware that he had been felled by drugs rather than mere lust and a need to sleep. Whenever she chose to waken her husband, the war between gods and men would be over, the Trojan War resumed, that status quo restored, the fait chosen by Hera and her co-conspirators most decidedly accompli.
Turning her back on the sleeping Son of Kronos, Hera walked from Odysseus’ house—for no one, not even a queen, could QT through the concealing forcefield Zeus had set around it—pressed through the watery wall of energy like an infant fighting from its caul, and teleported triumphantly back to Troy.
11
Hockenberry didn’t recognize any of the moravecs who met him in the blue bubble inside Stickney Crater on the moon Phobos. At first, when the chair forcefield clicked off and left him exposed to the elements, he’d panicked and held his breath for a few seconds—still thinking
he was in hard vacuum—but then he felt the air pressure against his skin and the comfortable temperature, so he’d taken a ragged breath just as little Mahnmut was introducing him to the taller moravecs who’d come forward like an official delegation. It was embarrassing, actually. Then Mahnmut had left and Hockenberry was on his own with these strange organic machines.
“Welcome, Dr. Hockenberry,” said the closest of the five moravecs facing him. “I trust your trip up from Mars was uneventful.”
For a second, Hockenberry felt a stab of something almost like nausea at hearing someone call him “Doctor.” Except for Mahnmut using the honorific, it had been a long time since… no, it had been never in this second life, unless his scholic friend Nightenhelser had used his title jokingly once or twice in the past decade.
“Thank you, yes… I mean… I’m sorry, I didn’t catch all your names,” said Hockenberry. “I apologize. I was… distracted.” Thinking I was going to die when the chair deserted me, thought Hockenberry.
The short moravec nodded. “I don’t doubt,” it said. “There’s a lot of activity in this bubble and the atmosphere certainly conveys the noise.”
That it did. And that there was. The huge blue bubble, covering at least two or three acres—Hockenberry was always poor at judging sizes and distances, a failure due to not playing sports, he’d always thought—was filled with gantry-structures, banks of machines larger than most buildings in his old stomping grounds of Bloomington, Indiana, pulsating organic blobs that looked like runaway blancmanges the size of tennis courts, hundreds of moravecs—all busy on one task or another—and floating globes shedding light and spitting out laser beams that cut and welded and melted and moved on. The only thing that looked even remotely familiar in the huge space, although completely out of place, was a round rosewood table sitting about thirty feet away. It was surrounded by six stools of varying heights.
“My name is Asteague/Che,” said the small moravec. “I’m Europan, like your friend Mahnmut.”
“European?” Hockenberry repeated stupidly. He’d been to France once on vacation and once to Athens for a classics conference, and while the men and women in both places had been… different… none of them resembled this Asteague/Che: taller than Mahnmut, at least four feet tall, and more humanoid—especially around the hands—but still covered with the same plasticky-metallic material as Mahnmut, although Asteague/Che was mostly a brilliant, slick yellow. The moravec reminded Hockenberry of a slick yellow-rubber raincoat he’d had and loved when he was a kid.
“Europa,” said Asteague/Che with no hint of impatience. “The icy, watery moon of Jupiter. Mahnmut’s home. And mine.”
“Of course,” said Hockenberry. He was blushing and knowing he was blushing made him blush again. “Sorry. Of course. I knew Mahnmut was from some moon out there. Sorry.”
“My title… although ‘title’ is too formal and ostentatious a word, perhaps ‘job function’ would be a more appropriate translation,” continued Asteague/Che, “is Prime Integrator for the Five Moons Consortium.”
Hockenberry bowed slightly, realizing that he was in the presence of a politician. Or at least a top bureaucrat. He had no clue as to what the other four moons might be named. He’d heard of Europa in his other life and he seemed to recall that they were finding a new Jovian moon every few weeks—or so it seemed—back at the end of the Twentieth Century, beginning of the Twenty-first—but the names escaped him. Maybe they hadn’t been named by the time he’d died, he couldn’t remember. Also, Hockenberry had always preferred Greek over Latin and thought that the solar system’s largest planet should have been called Zeus, not Jupiter… although in current circumstances that might be confusing.
“Allow me to reintroduce my colleagues,” said Asteague/Che.
The moravec’s voice had been reminding Hockenberry of someone and now he realized who—the movie actor James Mason.
“The tall gentleman to my right is General Beh bin Adee, commander of the Asteroid Belt contingent of combat moravecs.”
“Dr. Hockenberry,” said General Beh bin Adee. “A pleasure to meet you at last.” The tall figure did not offer his hand to shake, since he had no hand—only barbed pincers with a myriad of fine-motor manipulators.
Gentleman, thought Hockenberry. Rockvec. In the last eight months, he’d seen thousands of the soldier rockvecs on both the plains of Ilium and the surface of Mars around Olympos—always tall, about two meters as this one was, always black, as the general was, and always a mass of barbs, hooks, chitinous ridges, and sharp serrations. They obviously don’t breed them… or build them… for beauty in the Asteroid Belt, thought Hockenberry.
“My pleasure, General… Beh bin Adee,” he said aloud, and bowed slightly.
“To my left,” continued Prime Integrator Asteague/Che, “is Integrator Cho Li from the moon Callisto.”
“Welcome to Phobos, Dr. Hockenberry,” said Cho Li in a voice so soft it sounded absolutely feminine. Do moravecs have genders? wondered Hockenberry. He’d always thought of Mahnmut and Orphu as male robots—and there was no doubt about the testosteronic attitudes of the rockvec troopers. But these creations had distinct personalities, so why not genders?
“Integrator Cho Li,” repeated Hockenberry and bowed again. The Callistan—Callistoid? Callistonian?—was smaller than Asteague/Che but more massive and far less humanoid. Less humanoid even than the absent Mahnmut. What disconcerted Hockenberry a bit were the glimpses of what looked to be raw, pink flesh between panels of plastic and steel. If Quasimodo—the Hunchback of Notre Dame—had been assembled out of bits of flesh and used car parts, with boneless arms, a wandering multitude of eyes in assorted sizes, and a narrow maw that looked like a mail slit, and then miniaturized—he might have been a sibling of Integrator Cho Li. Because of the names, Hockenberry wondered if these Callistoidonal moravecs had been designed by the Chinese.
“Behind Cho Li is Suma IV,” said Asteague/Che in its, his, smooth, James Mason voice. “Suma IV is from the moon Ganymede.”
Suma IV was very human in height and proportion, but not so human in appearance. Somewhere over six feet tall, the Ganymedan had properly proportioned arms and legs, a waist, a flat chest, and the proper number of fingers—all sheathed in a fluid, grayish, oil-like coating that Hockenberry had once heard Mahnmut refer to as buckycarbon. But that had been on the hull of a hornet. Poured over a person… or a person-shaped moravec… the effect was disconcerting.
Even more disconcerting were this moravec’s oversized eyes with their hundreds upon hundreds of shining facets. Hockenberry had to wonder if Suma IV or his ilk had landed on Earth in his day … say at Roswell, New Mexico? Did Suma IV have some cousin on ice in Area 51?
No, he reminded himself, these creatures aren’t aliens. They’re robotic-organic entities that human beings designed and built and scattered in the solar system. Centuries and centuries after I died.
“How do you do, Suma IV,” said Hockenberry. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Dr. Hockenberry,” said the tall Ganymedan moravec. No James-Masony or little-girl tones here… the shiny black figure with the glittering fly’s eyes had a voice that sounded like boys pelting a hollow boiler with cinders.
“May I introduce our last representative from the Consortium,” said Asteague/Che. “Retrograde Sinopessen from Amalthea.”
“Retrograde Sinopessen?” repeated Hockenberry, stifling a sudden urge to laugh until he wept. He wanted to go lie down, take a nap, and wake up in his study in the old white house near Indiana University.
“Retrograde Sinopessen, yes,” said Asteague/Che, nodding.
The thrice-identified moravec skittered forward on silver-spider legs. Hockenberry observed that Mr. Sinopessen was about the size of a Lionel train transformer, although much shinier in a polished-aluminum sort of way, and his eight legs were so thin as to be almost invisible. Eyes or diodes or tiny little lights glowed at various points on and in the box.
“A pleasure, Dr. Hockenberry,” said the shin
y little box in a voice so deep it rivaled Orphu of Io’s near-subsonic rumble. “I’ve read all of your books and papers. All that we have in our archives, at least. They’re brilliant. It’s an honor to meet you in person.”
“Thank you,” Hockenberry said stupidly. He looked at the five moravecs, at the hundreds more working on other incomprehensible machines in the huge pressurized bubble, looked back at Asteague/Che, and said, “So now what?”
“Why don’t we sit down around that table and discuss this imminent expedition to Earth and your possible participation in it,” suggested the Europan Prime Integrator of the Five Moons Consortium.
“Sure,” said Thomas Hockenberry. “Why not?”
12
Helen was alone and unarmed when Menelaus finally cornered her.
The day after Paris’s funeral started bizarrely and grew only more bizarre as the day wore on. There was a smell of fear and apocalypse on the winter wind.
Early that morning, even as Hector was bearing his brother’s bones to their barrow, Helen was summoned by Andromache’s messenger. Hector’s wife and a female servant, a slave from the isle of Lesbos, her tongue torn out many years earlier, now sworn to serve the secret society once known as the Trojan Women, were holding wild-eyed Cassandra prisoner in Andromache’s secret apartments near the Scaean Gates.
“What’s this?” asked Helen as she came into the apartment. Cassandra did not know about this house. Cassandra was supposed to never know about this house. Now Priam’s daughter, the mad prophetess, sat sunk-shouldered on a wooden couch. The servant, whose slave name was Hypsipyle after Euneus’ famous mother by Jason, held a long-bladed knife in her tattooed hand.