by Dan Simmons
The Ionian rumbled until the silver cans in the moving conveyor belt rattled in their metal rings.
Back in the hornet, just Mahnmut and him, climbing toward the widening disk of Mars, Hockenberry said, “I forgot to ask… does it have a name? The ship?”
“Yes,” said Mahnmut. “Some of us thought it needed a name. We were first considering Orion …”
“Why Orion?” said Hockenberry. He was watching the rear window where Phobos and Stickney Crater and the huge ship were fast disappearing.
“That was the name your mid-Twentieth Century scientists gave the ship and the bomb-propellant project,” said the little moravec. “But in the end, the prime integrators in charge of the Earth voyage accepted the name that Orphu and I finally suggested.”
“What’s that?” Hockenberry settled deeper into his forcefield chair as they began to roar and sizzle into Mars’ atmosphere.
“Queen Mab,” said Mahnmut.
“From Romeo and Juliet,” said Hockenberry. “That must have been your suggestion. You’re the Shakespeare fan.”
“Oddly enough, it was Orphu’s,” said Mahnmut. They were in atmosphere now and flying over the Tharsis volcanoes toward Olympus Mons and the Brane Hole to Ilium.
“How does it apply to your ship?”
Mahnmut shook his head. “Orphu never answered that question, but he did cite some of the play to Asteague/Che and the others.”
“Which part?”
MERCUTIO: O then I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
BENVOLIO: Queen Mab, what’s she?
MERCUTIO: She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate stone
On the forefinger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomi
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep,
Her wagon spokes made of long spinners’ legs;
The cover, of the wings of grasshoppers;
Her traces, of the moonshine’s wat’ry beams;
Her collars, of the smallest spider web;
Her whip, of cricket’s bone, the lash of film;
Her wagoner, a small grey-coated gnat
Not half so big as a round little worm
Pricked from the lazy finger of a maid.
Her chariot is an empty hazelnut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love;
O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on curtsies straight;
O’er ladies’ lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues …
… and so on and so forth,” said Mahnmut.
“And so on and so forth,” repeated Dr. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D. Olympus Mons, the gods’ Olympos, was filling all the forward windows. According to Mahmut, the volcano was a mere 69,841 feet above Martian sea level—more than 15,000 feet shorter than people in Hock-enberry’s day had thought, but tall enough.’Twil serve, thought Hockenberry.
And up there, on the summit—the grassy summit—under the glowing aegis now catching the late-morning light—there were living creatures. And not just living creatures, but gods. The gods. Warring, breathing, fighting, scheming, mating creatures, not so unlike the humans Hockenberry had known in his previous life.
At that moment, all the clouds of depression that had been gathering around Hockenberry for months blew away—like the streamers of white cloud he could see blowing south from Olympos itself as the afternoon winds picked up from the northern ocean called the Tethys Sea—and at that moment, Thomas C. Hockenberry, Ph.D. in classics, was simply and purely and totally happy to be alive. Whether he chose to go on this Earth expedition or not, he realized, he would change places right then with no one in any other time or at any other place.
Mahnmut banked the hornet to the east of Mons Olympus and headed for the Brane Hole and Ilium.
17
Hera jumped from outside the exclusion field around Odysseus’ home on Ithaca directly to the summit of Olympos. The grassy slopes and white-columned buildings spreading out from the huge Caldera Lake all gleamed in the lesser light from the more distant sun.
Poseidon, the Earth-Shaker, QT’d into existence nearby. “It is done? The Thunderer sleeps?”
“The Thunderer makes thunder now only through his snores,” said Hera. “On Earth?”
“It is as we planned, Daughter of Kronos. All these weeks of whispering and advising Agamemnon and his captains have come to the moment. Achilles is absent—as always—below us on the red plain, so the son of Atreus is even now raising his angry multitudes against the Myrmidons and other of Achilles’ loyalists who stayed behind in camp. Then straight they march against the walls and open gates of Ilium.”
“And the Trojans?” said Hera.
“Hector still sleeps after his night’s vigil by his brother’s burning bones. Aeneas is below Olympos here, but taking no action against us in Hector’s absence. Deiphobus is still with Priam, discussing the Amazons’ intentions.”
“And Penthesilea?”
“Just within this hour did she awake and gird herself—and so did her twelve companions—for this mortal combat to come. They rode out of the city to cheers only a short time ago and just passed the Brane Hole.”
“Is Pallas Athena with her?”
“I’m here.” Athena, glorious in her golden battle armor, had just QT’d into instant solidity next to Poseidon. “Penthesilea has been sent off to her doom… and Achilles’. The mortals everywhere are in a state of shrill confusion.”
Hera reached out to touch the glorious goddess’s metal-wrapped wrist. “I know this was hard for you, sister-in-arms. Achilles has been your favorite since he was born.”
Pallas shook her bright, helmeted head. “No longer. The mortal lied about me killing and carrying off his friend Patroclus. He lifted his sword against me and all my Olympian kin and kind. He can’t be sent down to the shady halls of Hades too soon for my pleasure.”
“It’s Zeus whom I still fear,” interrupted Poseidon. His battle armor was a deep-sea verdigris, with elaborate loops of waves, fishes, squids, leviathans, and sharks. His helmet bracketed his eyes with the raised fighting pincers of crabs.
“Hephaestus’ potion will keep our dreaded majesty snoring like a pig for seven days and seven nights,” said Hera. “It’s vital that we achieve all of our goals within that time—Achilles dead or exiled, Agamemnon returned as leader of the Argives, Ilium overthrown or at least the ten-year-war resumed beyond hope of peace. Then Zeus will be confronted with facts he cannot change.”
“His wrath will be terrible still,” said Athena.
Hera laughed. “You deign to tell me about the son of Kronos’ wrath? Zeus’s anger makes mighty Achilles’ wrath look like the stone-kicking pouts of a sullen and beardless boy. But leave the Father to me. I will handle Zeus when all our ends are met. Now, we must…”
Before she could finish, other gods and goddesses began winking into existence there on the long lawn in front of the Hall of the Gods on the shore of Caldera Lake. Flying chariots, complete with holograms of their straining steeds pulling them, zoomed in from each point of the compass and landed nearby until the lawn filled up with cars. The gods and goddesses gravitated into three groups: those pressing close to Hera, Athena, Poseidon, and the other champions of the Greeks; those others filling in the ranks behind glowering Apollo—principal champion of the Trojans—Apollo’s sister Artemis, then Ares, his sister Aphrodite, their mother Leto, Demeter, and others who had also long fought for the triumph of Troy; and the third group, who had not yet taken sides. The quantum and chariot-borne convergence continued until there were hundreds of immortals clustered on the long lawn.
“Why is everyone here?” cried Hera, amusement in her voice. “Is there no one guarding the ramparts of Olympos today?�
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“Shut up, schemer!” shouted Apollo. “This plot to overthrow Ilium today is yours. And no one can find Lord Zeus to stop it.”
“Oh,” said white-armed Hera, “is the Lord of the Silver Bow so frightened by unseen events that he must run to his father?”
Ares, the war god, fresh from the healing and resurrection vats three times now after his ill-considered combats with Achilles, stepped up next to Phoebus Apollo. “Female,” gritted the tempestuous god of battle, growing to his full fighting height of more than fifteen feet, “we continue to suffer your existence because you’re the incestuous wife of our Lord Zeus. There is no other reason.”
Hera laughed her most calculatingly maddening laugh. “Incestuous wife,” she taunted. “Ironic talk from a god who beds his sister more than any other woman, goddess or mortal.”
Ares lifted his long killing spear. Apollo drew his powerful bow and notched an arrow. Aphrodite unlimbered her smaller but no less deadly bow.
“Would you incite violence against our queen?” asked Athena, stepping between Hera and the bows and spear. Every god on the summit had brought their personal forcefields up to full strength at the sight of the weapons being readied.
“Don’t speak to me of inciting violence!” shouted red-faced Ares at Pallas Athena. “What insolence. Do you remember only months ago when you spurred on Tydeus’ son, Diomedes, to wound me with his lance? Or how you cast your own immortal’s spear at me, wounding me, thinking yourself safely cloaked in your concealing cloud?”
Athena shrugged. “It was on the battlefield. My blood was up.”
“That’s your excuse for trying to kill me, you immortal bitch?” roared Ares. “Your blood was up?”
“Where is Zeus?” demanded Apollo, speaking to Hera.
“I am not my husband’s keeper,” said white-armed Hera. “Although he needs one at times.”
“Where is Zeus?” repeated Apollo, Lord of the Silver Bow.
“Zeus will have nothing to do with the events of men or gods for many days more,” said Hera. “Perhaps he will never return. What happens next in the world below, we on Olympos shall determine.”
Apollo notched the heavy, heat-seeking arrow back, but did not yet lift the bow.
Thetis, sea goddess, Nereid, daughter of Nereus—the true Old Man of the Sea—and Achilles’ immortal mother by the mortal man Peleus, stepped between the two angry groups. She wore no armor, only her elaborate gown sewn to look like patterns of seaweed and shells.
“Sister, brothers, cousins all,” she began, “stop this show of petulance and pride before we harm ourselves and our mortal children, and fatally offend our Almighty Father, who will return—no matter where he is, he will return—carrying the wrath at our defiance on his noble brow and death-dealing lightning in his hands.”
“Oh, shut up,” cried Ares, shifting the long killing spear in his right hand to throwing position. “If you hadn’t dipped your wailing, mortal brat in the sacred river to make him near-immortal, Ilium would have triumphed ten years ago.”
“I dipped no one in the river,” said Thetis, drawing herself up to her full height and folding her slightly scaly arms across her breasts. “My darling Achilles was chosen by the Fates for his great destiny, not by me. When he was newborn—and following the Fates’ imperious advice sent through thoughts alone—I nightly laid the infant in the Celestial Fire itself, purging him, through his own pain and suffering—(but even then, though only a baby, my Achilles did not cry out!)—of his father’s mortal parts. By night I scarred and burned him terribly. By day I healed his scorched and blackened baby flesh with the same ambrosia we use to freshen our own immortal bodies—only this ambrosia was made more effective by the Fates’ secret alchemy. And I would have made my babe immortal, succeeded in insuring Achilles’ pure divinity, had I not been spied on by my husband, the mere human man Peleus, who, seeing our only child twitching and searing and writhing in the flames, seized him by the heel and pulled him free from the Celestial Fire only minutes before my process of deification would have been finished and done with.
“Then, ignoring my objections as all husbands will, the well-meaning but meddling Peleus carried our babe off to Chiron, the wisest and least man-hating of all the centaur race, rearer of many heroes himself, who tended Achilles through childhood, healing him by herbs and salves known only to the centaur savants, then growing him strong by nourishing him with the livers of lions and the marrow of bears.”
“Would that the little bastard had died in the flames,” said Aphrodite.
Thetis lost her mind at that and rushed at the goddess of love, wielding no weapons but the long fishbone-nails at the ends of her fingers.
As calmly as if shooting for a prize during a friendly picnic game, Aphrodite raised her bow and shot an arrow through Thetis’ left breast. The Nereid fell lifeless to the grass and the black pregoddess essence of her whirled around her corpse like a swarm of black bees. No one rushed to claim and capture the body for repair by the Healer in the blue-wormed vats.
“Murderess!” cried a voice from the depths, and Nereus himself—the Old Man of the Sea—rose from the trackless depths of Olympos’ Caldera Lake, the self-same lake he’d banished himself to eight months earlier when his earthly oceans had been invaded by moravecs and men.
“Murderess!” boomed the giant amphibian again, looming fifty feet above the water, his wet beard and braided locks looking like nothing so much as a mass of writhing, slithering eels. He cast a bolt of pure energy at Aphrodite.
The goddess of love was thrown a hundred feet backward across the lawn, her god-blood-generated forcefield saving her from total destruction, but not from flames and bruises as her lovely body smashed through two huge pillars in front of the Hall of the Gods and then through the thick granite wall itself.
Ares, her loving brother, cast his spear through Nereus’ right eye. Roaring so loudly that his pain could be heard in Ilium an infinite distance below, the Old Man of the Sea pulled out both spear and eyeball and disappeared beneath the red-frothed waves.
Phoebus Apollo, realizing that the Final War had begun, raised his bow before Hera or Athena could react and fired two heat-seeking arrows that honed on their hearts. His drawing and firing were faster than even immortal eye could follow.
The arrows—unbreakable titanium both, coated with their own quantum fields to penetrate other forcefields—nonetheless stopped in midflight. And then melted.
Apollo stared.
Athena threw back her helmeted head and laughed. “You’ve forgotten, upstart, that when Zeus is well and truly gone, the aegis is programmed to obey our commands, Hera’s and mine.”
“You started this, Phoebus Apollo,” white-armed Hera said softly. “Now feel the full force of Hera’s curse and Athena’s anger.” She gestured ever so slightly and a boulder weighing at least a half a ton, lying at water’s edge, tore itself loose from Olympos’ soil and hurtled at Apollo at such speeds that it twice broke the sound barrier before striking the archer in the side of his head.
Apollo flew backward with a great crash and clatter of gold and silver and bronze, tumbling head over heel for seven rods in his fall, his tightly curled locks now covered with dust and soiled with lake mud.
Athena turned, cast a war lance, and when it fell some miles across the Caldera Lake, Apollo’s white-columned home there exploded in a mushroom of fire, the million bits of marble and granite and steel rising two miles toward the humming forcefield above the summit.
Demeter, Zeus’s sister, cast a shock wave at Athena and Hera that only folded air and blast around their pulsing aegis, but which lifted Hephaestus a hundred yards into the air and slammed him far across the summit of Olympos. Red-armored Hades answered back with a cone of black fire that obliterated all temples, ground, earth, water, and air in its wake.
The nine Muses screamed and joined Ares’ rallying pack. Lightning leaped down from chariots that QT’d in from nowhere and the shimmering aegis lashed up from
Athena. Ganymede, the cup bearer and only nine-tenths immortal, fell in the no-man’s-land and howled as his divine flesh burned away from mortal bones. Eurynome, daughter of Okeanos, cast her lot with Athena but was immediately set upon by a dozen Furies, who flapped and flocked around her like so many huge vampire bats. Eurynome screamed once and was borne away over the battlefield and beyond the burning buildings.
The gods ran for cover or for their chariots. Some QT’d away, but most massed in war groups on one side of the great Caldera or the other. Energy fields flared in red, green, violet, blue, gold, and a myriad of other colors as individuals melded their personal fields into focused fighting shields.
Never in the history of these gods had they fought like this—with no quarter, no mercy, no professional courtesy of the sort one god always gave another, with no assurance of resurrection at the many, many hands of the Healer or hope of the healing vats—and worst of all, with no intervention from Father Zeus. The Thunderer had always been there to restrain them, cajole them, threaten them into something less than a killing rage against their fellow immortals. But not this day.
Poseidon QT’d down to Earth to oversee the Achaean destruction of Troy. Ares rose, trailing bloody golden ichor, and rallied threescore of outraged gods—Zeus loyalists all, Trojan supporters all—to his side. Hephaestus QT’d back from where he had been blasted and spread a poison black fog across the battlefield.
The War between the Gods began that hour and spread to all Olympos and down to Ilium in the hours that followed. By sunset, the summit of Olympos was on fire and parts of the Caldera Lake had boiled away to be replaced by lava.
18
Riding out to meet Achilles, Penthesilea knew without doubt that every year, month, day, hour, and minute of her life up to this second had been nothing more than prelude to today’s sure pinnacle of glory. Everything that had come before, each breath, every bit of training, each victory or loss on the battlefield, had been but preparation. In the coming hours her destiny would be fulfilled. Either she would be triumphant and Achilles dead, or she would be dead and—infinitely worse—cast down in shame and forgotten to the ages.