by Dan Simmons
Hephaestus held up his palms. “All right, all right. Just curious.” He slapped his palms together. “Food,” he said. “Then strategy to bring your lady back.”
The golden female attendants began bringing trays of hot food and large cups of wine to the round table at the center of Hephaestus’ circle of couches. Fleet-footed Achilles and hairy Hephaestus both dug in with a will, not speaking except to demand more food or for the communal wine cup to be passed.
The attendants brought steaming fried liver wrapped in lamb intestines as an appetizer—one of Achilles’ favorites. They carried in a complete roast piglet stuffed with the flesh of many small birds, raisins, chestnuts, egg yolks, and spiced meats. They set out bowls of pork stewed with bubbling apples and pears. They brought in pure delicacies such as roasted sow’s womb and olives with mashed chickpeas. For the main course they served huge fish fried to a crispy, flaky brown on the outside.
“Netted in Zeus’s own Caldera Lake atop Olympos,” Hephaestus said with his mouth full.
For dessert and to cleanse the palate between courses they had a variety of fruits, sweetmeats, and nuts. The golden metal women set out bowls of figs and heaps of almonds, more bowls of fat dates and flat plates of the kind of delicious honeycakes that Achilles had tasted only once before when visiting the small city of Athens. Finally came that dessert most loved by Agamemnon, Priam, and other kings of kings—cheesecake.
After the meal, the robot attendants swept the table and floor and brought in more casks and double-handed goblets of wine—ten types of wine at least. Hephaestus did the honor of mixing the water with the wine and passing the huge cups.
The dwarf-god and god-man drank for two hours but neither entered the state that Achilles’ people called paroinia—“intoxication frenzy.”
The two males were mostly silent, but the naked, golden, female attendants celebrated for them—lining up and dancing around the table in the sensuous conga line that aesthetes such as Odysseus called the komos.
The man and god took turns going off to use the cave’s toilet facilities, and when they were drinking wine again, Achilles said, “Is it night yet? Is it time for you to spirit me to the Healer’s Hall?”
“Do you really think that Olympos’ healing tanks will bring your Amazon doxie back to life, son of wet-breasted Thetis? Those tanks and worms were designed to repair immortals, not some human bitch—however beautiful.”
Achilles was too drunk and too distracted to take offense. “Goddess Athena told me that the tanks would renew life to Penthesilea and Athena does not lie.”
“Athena does nothing but lie,” snorted Hephaestus, lifting the huge two-handled cup and drinking deeply. “And a few days ago you were waiting at the foot of Olympos, throwing rocks at Zeus’s impenetrable aegis, howling for Athena to come down to fight so you could kill her just as surely as you stuck a spear through this Amazon’s lovely tit. What changed, O Noble Mankiller?”
Achilles frowned at the god of fire. “This Trojan War has been… complicated, Cripple.”
“I’ll drink to that,” laughed Hephaestus and lifted the big goblet again.
When they were ready to QT to the Healer’s Hall, Achilles dressed in full armor again, his sword sharpened on the fire god’s wheel and his shield polished, the son of Peleus walked to the bench to lift Penthe-silea’s body to his shoulder.
“No, leave her,” said Hephaestus.
“What are you talking about?” growled Achilles. “She’s the reason we’re going to the Healer’s Hall. I can’t leave her here.”
“We don’t know which of the gods or guards will be there tonight,” said the artificer. “You may have to fight your way through a phalanx. Do you want to do that with an Amazon’s corpse on your shoulder? Or were you planning to use her beautiful body as a shield?”
Achilles hesitated.
“There’s nothing here to harm her body,” said Hephaestus. “I used to have rats and bats and roaches, but I built mechanical cats and falcons and praying mantises to rid the cave of them.”
“Still…”
“If the Healer’s Hall is empty, it’ll take us three seconds to QT back here and fetch her corpse. In the meantime, I’ll have the golden girls watch over her,” said the artificer god. He snapped his stubby fingers and six of the metal attendants took up positions around the Amazon’s body. “Are you ready now?”
“Yes.”
Achilles gripped Hephaestus’ heavily scarred upper arm and the two men popped out of existence.
The Healer’s Hall was empty. No immortals were posted as guards. More surprising—even to Hephaestus—was that the many glass cylinders were empty. No gods were being healed and resurrected here tonight. In the huge space, lighted by only a few low-burning braziers and the violet light of the bubbling tanks themselves, nothing moved except the shuffling Hephaestus and the fleet-footed Achilles, shield held high.
Then the Healer emerged from the shadows of the bubbling vats.
Achilles raised his shield higher.
Athena had said to him over the corpse of Penthesilea—“Kill the Healer—a great, monstrous, centipede thing with too many arms and eyes. Destroy everything in the Healer’s Hall”—but Achilles had assumed that Athena was calling the healer a centipede out of insult, not as a literal description.
This thing had the segmented body of a centipede, but it rose thirty feet high, its segmented body swaying, its body-circling rings of black eyes on the top segment locked on Achilles and Hephaestus. The Healer had feelers and segmented arms—too many—and spindly hands with spidery fingers on the ends of half a dozen of those upper arms. One body segment near the top wore a vest of many pockets, bulging with tools, and there were straps and bands and black belts holding other tools on other segments of the swaying torso.
“Healer,” called Hephaestus, “where is everybody?”
The huge centipede swayed, waggled arms, and erupted in a stutter of noise from unseen mouths.
“Did you understand that?” Hephaestus asked Achilles.
“Understand what? It sounded like a boy running a stick along the rib cage of a skeleton.”
“It’s all good Greek,” said Hephaestus. “You just have to slow it down in your mind, listen more carefully.” To the Healer, the dwarf-god cried, “My mortal friend did not understand you. Could you repeat that, O Healer?”
“LordGodZeus’sOrdersAreThatNoMortalShallEverBePlaced InOneOfTheRegenerationTanksWithoutHisExpressCommand.The LordGodMasterZeusIsNowhereToBeFound.AndSinceHisCommand OnlyOnOlymposDoesTheHealerObeyICannotAllowAMortalToPass UntilZeusReturnsToHisThroneOnOlympos.”
“Did you understand that?” the artificer asked Achilles.
“Something about this thing obeying only Zeus and not allowing Penthesilea to be put into one of the vats without Zeus’s express command?”
“Precisely.”
“I can kill this big bug,” said Achilles.
“Perhaps so,” said Hephaestus. “Although the Healer is whispered to be even more immortal than we johnny-come-lately gods. But if you kill it, Penthesilea will never be brought back to life. Only the Healer knows how to operate the machinery and command the blue and green worms that are part of the healing process.”
“You’re the Artificer,” said Achilles, tapping his sword against the rim of his golden shield. “You must know how to operate this machinery.”
“The fuck I do,” growled Hephaestus. “This isn’t simple technology like we used when we were mere post-humans. I could never figure out the Healer’s quantum machines… and if I did, I still couldn’t order the blue worms to work. I think they respond only to telepathy and only to the Healer.”
“This bug said that he only obeyed Zeus on Olympos,” said Achilles, who was perilously close to losing his temper and killing the god of fire, the giant centipede, and every god still left on Olympos. “Who else can command it?”
“Kronos,” said Hephaestus with a maddening smile. “But Kronos and the other Titans h
ave been banished to Tartarus forever. Only Zeus in this universe can tell the Healer what to do.”
“Then where is Zeus?”
“No one knows,” growled Hephaestus, “but in his absence the gods are warring with one another for control. The fighting is now mostly centered down on Ilium’s Earth, where the gods still support their Trojans or their Greeks, and Olympos is largely empty and peaceful now—it’s why I ventured out onto this fucking volcano’s slopes to survey the damage to my escalator.”
“Why would Athena give me this god-killing knife and order me to kill the Healer after the thing brings Penthesilea back to life?” asked Achilles.
Hephaestus’ eyes widened. “She told you to kill the Healer?” The bearded dwarf-god’s voice was low and puzzled. “I have no idea why she would order such a thing. She has some scheme, but it must be a mad one. With the Healer dead, the vats here would be useless… all of our immortality would be a joke. We could live a very long time, but we would suffer, son of Peleus. Suffer terribly without nano-rejuvenation.”
Achilles strode toward the Healer, pulling his famous shield tight until his eyes blazed through the slits of his shining war helmet. He pulled back his sword. “I’ll make this thing activate the vats for Penthesilea.”
Hephaestus hurried forward to grab Achilles’ arm. “No, my mortal friend. Believe me when I say that the Healer does not fear death and it will not be moved. It obeys only Zeus. Without the fucking Healer, the blue worms will not perform. Without the fucking blue worms, the vats are useless. Without the fucking vats, your Amazon queen will stay fucking dead forfuckingever.”
Achilles angrily shook off the artificer’s hand. “This… bug… has to put Penthesilea in the healing vats.” Even while he was saying this, Achilles again is reminded of Athena’s command for him to kill the Healer. What is that bitch-goddess up to? How is she using me? To what purpose? She’s not insane and she certainly has no intention of killing the one creature who can preserve her immortality.
“The Healer does not fear you, son of Peleus. You can kill it, but that only means you will never see your queen alive again.”
Achilles walked away from the dwarf-god, brushed past the huge Healer, and slammed his beautiful shield—with all its hammered concentric circles of symbols—hard into the clear plastic of the huge regeneration tank. The sound echoed in the dim darkness of the hall.
He swung back to Hephaestus. “All right. This bug obeys Zeus. Where is Zeus?”
The god of fire began to laugh and then stopped when he saw Achilles’ eyes blazing out through his helmet’s eyeslits. “You’re serious? Your plan is to bend the God of Thunder, the Father of All Gods to your will?”
“Where is Zeus?”
“No one knows,” repeated Hephaestus. The crippled god walked toward the tall doors, dragging his shorter leg behind. Lightning flashed outside as the dust storm made the forcefield aegis spark in a thousand places. The pillars cut columns of black out of the silver-white light flooding into the Hall of the Healer. “Zeus has been absent these two weeks and more,” shouted the fire god over his shoulder. He tugged at his tangled beard. “Most of us suspect some fucking plot of Hera’s. Maybe she threw her husband down into the hellpit of Tartarus to join his vanished father Kronos and mother Rhea.”
“Can you find him?” Achilles turned his back on the Healer and slid his sword into its loop on his broad girdle. He swung his heavy shield over his back. “Can you take me to him?”
Hephaestus could only stare. “You’d go down into Tartarus to try to bend the God of Gods to your mortal will? There’s only one life form in the pantheon of the original gods besides Zeus who might know where he is. That terrible power also is the only other immortal here on Mars who could send us to Tartarus. You would go to Tartarus if you had to?”
“I’d pass through the teeth of death and back again to bring life back to my Amazon,” Achilles said softly.
“You’d find Tartarus a thousand times worse than death and the shaded halls of Hades, son of Peleus.”
“Take me to this immortal of which you speak,” commanded Achilles. His eyes through the eyeslits of his helmet were not quite sane.
For a long minute the bearded artificer stood hunched over, panting slightly, eyes unfocused, his hand still tugging absently at his tangled beard. Then he said, “So be it,” dragged his bad leg across the polished marble more rapidly than seemed possible, and clasped both huge hands around Achilles’ forearm.
44
Harman hadn’t meant to sleep. As exhausted as he was, he’d agreed only to eat and drink something, warming up an excellent stew and eating it at the table by the window while Prospero sat silently in the overstuffed armchair. The magus was reading out of a huge, worn, leatherbound book.
When Harman turned to talk to Prospero again, to demand in stronger terms that he be returned to Ardis, the old man was gone and so was the book. Harman had sat at the table for some minutes, only half-aware of the jungle rolling by nine hundred feet below the moving, creaking, house-sized cablecar. Then—just to look at the upstairs again, he told himself—he’d dragged himself up the iron spiral staircase, stood looking at the large bed for a minute, and then had collapsed on it face-first.
When he awoke it was night. Moonlight and ringlight flooded through the panes into the strange bedroom, painting velvet and brass in light so rich it appeared to be stripes of white paint. Harman opened the doors and stepped out onto the bedroom terrace.
The air was cool almost a thousand feet above the jungle floor, the breeze constant due to the motion of the cablecar, but he still was struck by the humidity, heat, and organic scents of all the green life below. The top of the jungle canopy was almost unbroken, whitewashed with ring-light and moonlight from the three-quarters moon, and occasional strange sounds wafted up, audible even over the steady hum of the flywheels above and the creak of the long cable. Harman took a minute to orient himself by the e—and p-rings.
He was sure that the car had been headed west when they’d left the first tower hours earlier—he’d slept for ten hours, at least—but now there was no doubt that the cablecar was lumbering north-northeast. He could see the moonlight-illuminated tip of one of the eiffelbahn towers just showing over the horizon to the southwest, from the direction he must have come, and another coming closer less than twenty miles to the northeast. Somewhere, while he slept, the car he was traveling in must have changed direction at a tower junction. Harman’s knowledge of geography was all self-taught, gleaned from books he’d taught himself to read—and he was quite sure that until recent months he was the only old-style human on Earth who had any sense of geography, any knowledge that the earth was a globe—but he’d never paid much attention to this arrow-shaped subcontinent south of what used to be called Asia. Still, it didn’t take a cartographer’s knowledge to know that if Prospero had been telling the truth—if his destination was the coast of Europe where the Atlantic Breach began along the 40th Parallel—then he was going the wrong way.
It didn’t matter. Harman had no intention of staying in this odd device the necessary weeks or months it would take to travel all that distance. Ada needed him now.
He paced the length of the balcony, occasionally grabbing the railing when the cablecar-house rocked slightly. It was on his third turn that he noticed an iron-rung ladder running up the side of the structure just beyond the railing. Harman swung out, grasped a rung, and pulled himself onto the ladder. There was nothing beneath him and the ground now but a thousand feet of air and jungle canopy.
The ladder led onto the roof of the cablecar. Harman swung himself up, legs pinioning for a second before he found a handhold and pulled himself onto the flat roof.
He stood carefully, arms extended for balance when the cablecar rocked as it began climbing a ridgeline toward the blinking lights of an eiffelbahn tower now only ten miles or so ahead. Beyond the next tower, a range of mountains had just become visible on the horizon, their snowy peaks almost brill
iant in the moonlight and ringlight.
Exhilarated by the night and sense of speed, Harman noticed something. There was a faint shimmering about three feet out from the leading edge of the cable car, a slight blurring of the moon, rings, and vista below. He walked to that edge and extended his hand as far as possible.
There was a forcefield there, not a powerful one—his fingers pressed through it as if pushing through a resistant but permeable membrane, reminding Harman of the entrance to the Firmary on Prospero’s orbital isle—but strong enough to deflect the wind from the blunt and non-aerodynamic side of the cablecar-house. With his fingers beyond the forcefield, he could feel the true force of the wind, enough to bend his hand back. This thing was moving faster than he’d thought.
After a half hour or so of pacing and standing on the roof, listening to the cables hum, watching the next eiffelbahn tower approach, and working out strategies to get back to Ada, Harman went hand over hand down the rung-ladder, jumped onto the balcony, and reentered the house.
Prospero was waiting for him on the first floor. The magus was in the same armchair, his robed legs not up on the ottoman, the large book open on his lap and his staff near his right hand.
“What do you want from me?” asked Harman.
Prospero looked up. “I see, young sir, that you are as disproportionate in your manners as our mutual friend Caliban is in his shape.”
“What do you want of me?” repeated Harman, his hands balling into fists.
“It is time for you to go to war, Harman of Ardis.”
“Go to war?”
“Yes. Time for your kind to fight. Your kind, your kin, your species, your ilk—yourself.”
“What are you talking about? War with whom?”
“With what might be a better phrasing,” said Prospero.
“Are you talking about the voynix? We’re already fighting them. I brought Noman-Odysseus to the Bridge at Machu Picchu primarily to fetch more weapons.”
“Not the voynix, no,” said Prospero. “Nor the calibani, although all these slave-things have been tasked to kill your kin and kind, the minutes of their plot come ‘round at last. I am speaking of the Enemy.”