by Dan Simmons
Menelaus pauses.
“Do not hesitate, my husband,” whispers Helen, her voice quavering only slightly. Menelaus can see her pulse beating wildly at the base of her heavy, blue-veined left breast. He seizes the hilt in both hands.
He does not yet bring the blade down. “Damn you,” he breathes. “Damn you.”
“Yes,” whispers Helen, face still downcast. The golden idol of Athena looms over them both in the incense-thick darkness.
Menelaus grips the sword hilt with a strangler’s fervor. His arms vibrate with the twin strain of preparing to behead his wife while simultaneously stopping the action.
“Why shouldn’t I kill you, you faithless cunt?” hisses Menelaus.
“No reason, husband. I am a faithless cunt. It and I have both been faithless. Finish it. Carry out your rightful sentence of death.”
“Don’t call me husband, damn you!”
Helen lifts her face. Her dark eyes are precisely the eyes Menelaus has dreamt of for more than ten years. “You are my husband. You always were. My only husband.”
He almost kills her then, so painful are these words. Sweat falls from his brow and cheeks and spatters on her simple robe. “You deserted me—you deserted me and our daughter,” he manages, “for that… that… boy. That popinjay. That pair of spangled leotards with a dick.”
“Yes,” says Helen and lowers her face again. Menelaus sees the small, familiar mole on the back of her neck, right at the base, right where the edge of the blade will strike.
“Why?” manages Menelaus. It is the last thing he will say before he kills her or forgives her… or both.
“I deserve to die,” she whispers. “For sins against you, for sins against our daughter, for sins against our country. But I did not leave our palace in Sparta of my own free will.”
Menelaus grinds his teeth so fiercely that he can hear them cracking.
“You were gone,” whispers Helen, his wife, his tormenter, the bitch who betrayed him, the mother of his child. “You were always gone. Gone with your brother. Hunting. Warring. Whoring. Plundering. You and Agamemnon were the true couple—I was only the breed sow left at home. When Paris, that trickster, that guileful Odysseus without Odysseus’ wisdom, took me by force, I had no husband home to protect me.”
Menelaus breathes through his mouth. The sword seems to be whispering to him like a living thing, demanding the bitch’s blood. So many voices rage in his ears that he can barely hear her soft tones. The memory of her voice has tormented him for four thousand nights; now it drives him beyond madness.
“I am penitent,” she says, “but that cannot matter now. I am suppliant, but that cannot matter now. Shall I tell you of the hundred times in the last ten years that I have lifted a sword or fashioned a noose from rope, only to have my tirewomen and Paris’s spies pull me back, urging me to think of our daughter if not of myself? This abduction and my long captivity here have been Aphrodite’s doing, husband, not my own. But you can free me now with one blow of your familiar blade. Do so, my darling Menelaus. Tell our child that I loved her and love her still. And know yourself that I loved you, and love you still.”
Menelaus screams, drops the blade clattering to the temple floor and falls to his knees next to his wife. He is sobbing like a child.
Helen removes his helmet, puts her hand on the back of his head, and draws his face to her bare breasts. She does not smile. No, she does not smile, nor is she tempted to. She feels the scratch of his short beard and his tears and the heat of his breath on her breasts that have held the weight of Paris, Hockenberry, Deiphobus, and others since Menelaus last touched her. Treacherous cunt, yes, thinks Helen of Troy. So are we all. She does not consider the last minute a victory. She was ready to die. She is very, very tired.
Menelaus gets to his feet. He angrily wipes tears and snot from his red mustache, reaches down for his sword, and slides it back into his strap ring. “Wife, lay aside your fear. What’s done is done—Aphrodite’s and Paris’s evil, not yours. On the marble over there is a temple-virgin’s cloak and veil. Put them on and we’ll leave this doomed city forever.”
Helen rises, touches her husband’s shoulder under the odd lion skin she once saw Diomedes wear while slaying Trojans, and silently dons the white cloak and laced white veil.
Together they go out into the city.
Helen cannot believe she is leaving Ilium like this. After more than ten years, to walk out through the Scaean Gate and put all this behind her forever? What of Cassandra? What of her plans with Andromache and the others? What of her responsibility for the war with the gods she—Helen—has helped start through their machinations? What, even, of poor sad Hockenberry and their little love?
Helen feels her spirits soar like a released temple dove as she realizes that none of these things are her problem anymore. She will sail home to Sparta with her rightful husband—she has missed Menelaus, the… simplicity… of him—and she will see their daughter, grown into a woman now, and will view the last ten years as a bad dream as she ages into the last quarter of her life, her beauty undimmed, of course, thanks to the will of the gods, not hers. She has been reprieved in every way possible.
The two are out in the street, walking as if both still in a dream, when the city bells ring, the great horns on the watchwalls blare, and criers begin to call. All of the city’s alarums are sounding at once.
The shouts sort themselves out. Menelaus stares at her through the gap in his absurd boar-tusk helmet and Helen stares back through the thin slit of her temple-virgin veil and turban. In those seconds, their eyes somehow manage to convey terror, confusion, and even grim amusement at the irony of it all.
The Scaean Gate is closed and barred. The Achaeans are attacking again. The Trojan War has begun anew.
They are trapped.
16
“Could I see the ship?” asked Hockenberry. The hornet had emerged from the blue bubble in Stickney Crater and was climbing toward the red disk of Mars.
“The Earth-ship?” said Mahnmut. At Hockenberry’s nod, he said, “Of course.”
The moravec broadcast commands to the hornet and it came around and circled the Earth-ship gantry, then rose until it docked with a port on the upper reaches of the long, articulated spacecraft.
Hockenberry wants to tour the ship, Mahnmut tightbeamed to Orphu of Io.
There was only a second of background static before—Well, why not? We’re asking him to risk his life on this voyage. Why shouldn’t he see all of the ship? Asteague/Che and the others should have suggested it to him.
“How long is this thing?” Hockenberry asked softly. Through the holographic windows, the ship seemed to drop away beneath them for miles.
“Approximately the height of your Twentieth Century Empire State Building,” said Mahnmut. “But a little rounder and lumpier in places.”
He’s certainly never been in zero-g, sent Mahnmut. Phobos gravity will just disorient him.
The displacement fields are ready, tightbeamed Orphu. I’ll set them to point-eight-g on ship lateral and go to Earth-normal internal pressure. By the time you two get in the forward airlock, everything will be breathable and comfortable for him.
“Isn’t this too large for the mission they were talking about?” said Hockenberry. “Even with hundreds of rockvec soldiers aboard, this seems like overkill.”
“We may want to bring things back with us,” said Mahnmut. Where are you? he sent to Orphu.
I’m on the lower hull now, but I’ll meet you in the Big Piston Room.
“Like rocks? Soil samples?” said Hockenberry. He’d been a young man the week human beings had first set foot on the moon. Memories came back now of him sitting in the backyard of his parents’ house and watching the ghostly black-and-white images from the Sea of Tranquility on a small TV on the picnic table, extension cord running to the summerhouse, while the half-full moon itself was visible above through the leaves of the oak tree.
“Like people,” said Mahnmut. “Perh
aps thousands or tens of thousands of people. Hang on, we’re docking.” The moravec silently commanded the holoports off; attaching at right angles more than one thousand feet up the vertical hull of a spacecraft was a view that would give anyone vertigo.
Hockenberry asked little and said less during his tour of the ship. He’d imagined technology beyond his imagining—virtual control panels that disappeared at the flick of a thought, more energy-field chairs, an environment built for zero-g with no sense of up or down—but what he saw felt like some gigantic Nineteenth or early-Twentieth Century steamship. What it felt like, he realized, was a tour of the RMS Titanic.
Controls were physical, made of metal and plastic. Couches were clunky, physical things—enough, it looked like, for a crew of about thirty moravecs—the couch proportions were never really right for humans—along with long storage bins with metal-and-nylon bunks along bulkheads. Entire levels were set aside with high-tech-looking racks and sarcophagi for a thousand rockvec troopers, Mahnmut explained, who would make the trip in a state somewhere above death but below consciousness. Unlike their trip to Mars, the moravec explained, this time they were going armed and ready for battle.
“Suspended animation,” said Hockenberry, who’d not avoided all sci-fi movies. He and his wife had had cable there toward the end.
“Not really,” said Mahnmut. “Sort of.”
There were ladders and broad stairways and elevators and all sorts of anachronistic mechanical devices. There were airlocks and science rooms and weapons’ lockers. The furniture—there was furniture—was large and clunky, as if weight were no problem. There were astrogation bubbles looking out toward the rim walls of Stickney and up toward Mars and down toward the gantry lights and moravec bustle. There were mess halls and cooking galleys and sleeping cubbies and bathrooms, all of which, Mahnmut hurriedly explained, were for human passengers, should they have any coming or going.
“How many human passengers?” asked Hockenberry.
“Up to ten thousand,” said Mahnmut.
Hockenberry whistled. “So is this a sort of Noah’s ark?”
“No,” said the little moravec. “Noah’s boat was three hundred cubits long by fifty cubits wide by thirty cubits tall. That translates to about four hundred fifty feet in length, seventy-five feet in width, and forty-five feet high. Noah’s ark had three decks comprising a volume of about one million four hundred thousand cubic feet and a gross tonnage of thirteen thousand nine hundred and sixty tons. This ship is more than twice that long, half again that width in diameter—although you saw that some sections, like the habitation cylinders and holds, are more bul-bous—and masses more than forty-six thousand tons. Noah’s ark was a rowboat compared to this craft.”
Hockenberry found that he had no response to this news.
Mahnmut led the way into a small steel-cage elevator, and they descended through level after level past the holds, where Mahnmut explained his Europan submersible The Dark Lady would go—and down through what the moravec described as “charge storage magazines.” The word “magazine” had military connotations for Hockenberry, but he assured himself that it couldn’t be that. He saved his questions for later.
They met Orphu of Io in the engine room, which the larger moravec called the Big Piston Room. Hockenberry expressed his pleasure at seeing Orphu with his full complement of legs and sensors—sans real eyes, he understood—and the two talked about Proust and grief for a few minutes before the tour resumed.
“I don’t know,” Hockenberry said at last. “You once described the ship you took in from Jupiter, and it sounded high tech beyond my understanding. Everything I’m looking at here seems… looks like… I don’t know.”
Orphu rumbled loudly. When he spoke, Hockenberry thought, not for the first time, that the huge moravec sounded Falstaffian.
“It probably looks like the engine room of the Titanic to you,” said Orphu.
“Well, yes. Should it?” said Hockenberry, trying not to sound more ignorant of such things than he was. “I mean, your moravec technology must be three thousand years beyond the Titanic. Three thousand years beyond my end-time in the early Twenty-first Century even. Why this… this?”
“Because it’s based largely on mid-Twentieth Century plans,” rumbled Orphu of Io. “Our engineers wanted something fast and dirty that would get us to Earth in the least possible time. In this case, about five weeks.”
“But Mahnmut and you once told me that you zipped in from Jupiter space in days,” said Hockenberry. “And I remember you talked about boron solar sails, fusion engines… a lot of terms I didn’t understand. Are you using those things in this ship?”
“No,” said Mahnmut. “We had the advantage coming in-system of using the energy from Jupiter’s flux tube and a linear accelerator in Jovian orbit—a device our engineers have been working on for more than two centuries. We don’t have those things going for us here in Mars orbit. We had to build this ship from scratch.”
“But why Twentieth Century technology?” asked Hockenberry, looking at the huge pistons and driveshafts gleaming up toward the ceiling sixty or seventy feet overhead in the giant room. It did look like the engine room in the Titanic in that movie, only more so—bigger, more pistons, more gleaming bronze and steel and iron. More levers. More valves. And there were things that looked like giant shock absorbers. And the gauges everywhere looked like they measured steam pressure, not fusion reactors or some such. The air smelled of oil and steel.
“We had the plans,” said Orphu. “We had the raw materials, both brought from asteroids in the Belt and mined right on Phobos and Deimos. We had the pulse units …” He paused.
“What are pulse units?” asked Hockenberry.
Big mouth, sent Mahnmut.
What, do you want me to hide their presence from him? sent Orphu.
Well, yes… at least until we were a few million miles away from here toward Earth, preferably with Hockenberry on board.
He might notice the effect of the pulse units during our departure and get curious, sent Orphu of Io.
“The pulse units are… small fission devices,” Mahnmut said aloud to Hockenberry. “Atomic bombs.”
“Atomic bombs?” said Hockenberry. “Atomic bombs? Aboard this ship? How many?”
“Twenty-nine thousand seven hundred in the charge storage magazines you passed through on the way to the engine room,” said Orphu. “Another three thousand and eight in reserve stored below the engine room here.”
“Thirty-two thousand atomic bombs,” Hockenberry said softly. “I guess you guys are expecting a fight when you get to Earth.”
Mahnmut shook his red and black head. “The pulse units are for propellant. To get us to Earth.”
Hockenberry raised his palms to show his lack of understanding.
“These huge piston things are… well… pistons,” said Orphu. “On the way to Earth, we’ll be kicking a bomb out through a hole in the center of the pusher-plate beneath us about once every second for the first few hours—then once an hour for much of the rest of the flight.”
“For every pulse cycle,” adds Mahnmut, “we eject a charge—you’d just see a puff of steam out in space—we spray oil on the pusher-plate out there to act as an anti-ablative for the plate and the ejection tube muzzle, then the bomb explodes, and there’d be a flash of plasma that slams against the pusher-plate.”
“Wouldn’t that destroy the plate?” said Hockenberry. “And the ship?”
“Not at all,” said Mahnmut. “Your scientists worked all this out in the 1950s. The plasma event slams the pusher-plate forward and drives these huge reciprocating pistons back and forth. Even after just a few hundred explosions behind our butt, the ship will begin to pick up some real speed.”
“These gauges?” said Hockenberry, putting his hand on one that looked like a steam pressure gauge.
“That’s a steam pressure gauge,” said Orphu of Io. “The one next to it is an oil pressure gauge. The one above you there is a voltage re
gulator. You were right, Dr. Hockenberry… this room would be more quickly understood and manned by an engineer from the Titanic in 1912 than by a NASA engineer from your era.”
“How powerful are the bombs?”
Shall we tell him? sent Mahnmut.
Of course, tightbeamed Orphu. It’s a little late to start lying to our guest now.
“Each propellant charge packs a little more than forty-five kilotons,” said Mahnmut.
“Forty-five kilotons each—twenty-four thousand-some bombs,” muttered Hockenberry. “Are they going to leave a trail of radioactivity between Mars and Earth?”
“They’re fairly clean bombs,” said Orphu. “As fission bombs go.”
“How big are they?” asked Hockenberry. He realized that the engine room must be hotter than the rest of the ship. There was sweat beaded on his chin, upper lip, and brow.
“Come up a level,” said Mahnmut, leading the way to a spiral stairway broad enough for Orphu to repellor up the wide steps with them. “We’ll show you.”
Hockenberry guessed the room to be about a hundred and fifty feet in diameter and half that tall. It was almost completely filled with racks and conveyor belts and metal levels and ratcheting chains and chutes. Mahnmut pushed an oversized red button and the conveyor belts and chains and sorting devices began whirring and moving, shunting along hundreds or thousands of small silver containers that looked to Hockenberry like nothing so much as unlabeled Coke cans.
“It looks like the inside of a Coca-Cola dispenser,” said Hockenberry, trying to lighten the sense of doom he was feeling with a bad joke.
“It is from the Coca-Cola company, circa 1959,” rumbled Orphu of Io. “The designs and schematics were from one of their bottling plants in Atlanta, Georgia.”
“You put in a quarter and it dispenses a Coke,” managed Hockenberry. “Only instead of a Coke, it’s a forty-five-kiloton bomb set to explode right behind the tail of the ship. Thousands of them.”
“Correct,” said Mahnmut.
“Not quite,” said Orphu of Io. “Remember, this is a 1959 design. You only have to put in a dime.”