Olympos t-2

by Dan Simmons

  “Oh, I think so, yes, yes, I think so,” says Hephaestus, pulling small bags and boxes off the ribbons laced to his leather vest and harnesses, peering into the boxes, rejecting some things, setting other vials and small devices on the tapestry-rumpled table next to Zeus’s giant thigh.

  While the bearded dwarf-god fusses and assembles things, Achilles takes his first close-up gaze at Zeus the Father of All Gods and Men, He Who Marshals the Storm Clouds.

  Zeus is fifteen feet tall, impressive even as he sprawls on his back, spraddle-legged on the tapestry and table, heavily muscled and perfectly formed, even his beard oiled into perfect curls, but other than the minor matters of size and physical perfection, he is just a big man who has enjoyed a great fuck and gone to sleep. The divine penis—almost as long as Achilles’ sword—still lies swollen, pink, and flaccid on the Lord God’s oily divine thigh. The God Who Gathers Storms is snoring and drooling like a pig.

  “This should wake him up,” says Hephaestus. He holds up a syringe—something Achilles has never seen before—ending in a needle more than a foot long.

  “By the gods!” cries Achilles. “Are you going to stick that into Father Zeus?”

  “Straight into his lying, lusting heart,” says Hephaestus with a nasty cackle. “This is one thousand cc’s of pure divine adrenaline mixed with my own little recipe of various amphetamines—the only antidote to Absolute Sleep.”

  “What will he do when he wakes?” asks Achilles, pulling his shield in front of him.

  Hephaestus shrugs. “I’m not going to hang around to find out. I’m QTing out of here the second I inject this cocktail. Zeus’s response to being wakened with a needle in his heart is your problem, son of Peleus.”

  Achilles grabs the dwarf-god by the beard and pulls him closer. “Oh, I guarantee it will be our problem if it is a problem, Crippled Artificer.”

  “What do you want me to do, mortal? Wait here and hold your hand? It was your fucking idea to wake him up.”

  “It’s also in your interest to awaken Zeus, god of one short leg,” says Achilles, not relinquishing his grip on the immortal’s beard.

  “How so?” Hephaestus squints out of his good eye.

  “You help me with this,” whispers Achilles, leaning closer to the grungy god’s misshapen ear, “and in a week it could be you who sits on the golden throne in the Hall of the Gods, not Zeus.”

  “How can that be?” asks Hephaestus, but he is also whispering now. He still squints, but suddenly there is an eagerness in that squinting.

  Still whispering, still holding Hephaestus’s beard in his fist, Achilles tells the Artificer his plan.

  Zeus awakens with a roar.

  As good as his word, Hephaestus has fled the instant he injected the adrenaline into the Father of the Gods’ heart, pausing only to pull the long needle free and fling the syringe from him. Three seconds later Zeus sits up, roars so loudly that Achilles has to clasp his hands over his ears, and then the Father leaps to his feet, overturns the thirty-foot-long heavy wooden table, and smashes out the entire south wall of Odysseus’ house.

  “HERA!!!!” booms Zeus. “GOD DAMN YOU!”

  Achilles forces himself not to cringe and cower, but he does step back while Zeus rips out the last of the wall, uses a timber to smash the overhanging chariot-wheel candle-chandelier to a thousand pieces, destroys the heavy, tumbled table with one smash of his giant fist, and paces wildly back and forth.

  Finally the Father of All Gods seems to notice Achilles standing in the doorway to the vestibule. “YOU!”

  “Me,” agrees Achilles, son of Peleus. His sword is in its belt loop, his shield politely strapped over his shoulder rather than on his forearm. His hands are empty and open. The god-killing long knife that Athena had given him for use in murdering Aphrodite is in his broad belt, but out of sight.

  “What are you doing on Olympos?” growls Zeus. He is still naked. He holds his forehead with his huge left hand and Achilles can see the headache pain throbbing through Zeus the Father’s bloodshot eyes. Evidently Absolute Sleep leaves a hangover.

  “You are not on Olympos, Lord Zeus,” Achilles says softly. “You’re on the isle of Ithaca—under a golden cloud of concealment—in the banquet hall of Odysseus, son of Laertes.”

  Zeus squints around him. Then he frowns more deeply. Finally he looks down on Achilles once again, “How long have I been asleep, mortal?”

  “Two weeks, Father,” says Achilles.

  “You, Argive, fleet-footed mankiller, you couldn’t have awakened me here from whatever potion-charm white-armed Hera used to drug me. Which god revived me and why?”

  “O Zeus Who Marshals the Thunderheads,” says Achilles, lowering his head and eyes almost meekly, as he has seen the meek do so many times, “I will tell you all you seek to know—and it is true that while most of the immortals on Olympos abandoned you, at least one god remained your loyal servant—but first I must ask for a boon.”

  “A boon?” roars Zeus. “I’ll give you a boon you won’t forget if you speak again without permission. Stand there and be silent.”

  The huge figure gestures and one of the three remaining walls—the one that had held the quiver of poison arrows and the outline of a great bow—mists into a three-dimensional vision surface much like the holopool in the Great Hall of the Gods.

  Achilles realizes that he is looking at an aerial view of this very house—Odysseus’ palace. He can see the dog Argus outside. The starved hound has eaten the biscuits and revived enough to crawl into the shade.

  “Hera would have left a forcefield beneath my cloaking golden cloud,” mutters Zeus. “The only one who could have lifted it is Hephaestus. I will deal with him later.”

  Zeus moves his hand again. The virtual display shifts to the summit of Olympos, empty homes and halls, the abandoned chariots.

  “They have gone down to play with their favorite toys,” mumbles Zeus.

  Achilles sees a daylight battle in front of the walls of Ilium. Hector’s forces seem to be pushing the Argives and their siege machines back to Thicket Ridge and beyond. The air is filled with volleys of arrows and a score or more of flying chariots. Thunderbolts and bright red beams lash back and forth above the mortal battlefield. Explosions ripple across the battlefield and fill the sky as the gods do battle with each other even as their champions fight to the death below.

  Zeus shakes his head. “Do you see them, Achilles? They are as addicted as cocaine addicts, as gamblers at their tables. For more than five hundred years since I conquered the last of the Titans—the original Changelings—and threw Kronos, Rhea, and the other monstrous Originals down into the gaseous pit of Tartarus, we have been evolving our godly, Olympian powers, settling into our divine roles… for WHAT???”

  Achilles, who has not been explicitly asked to speak, keeps his mouth shut.

  “DAMNED CHILDREN AT THEIR GAMES!!” bellows Zeus and again Achilles has to cover his ears. “Useless as heroin junkies or Lost Era teenagers in front of their videogames. After this long decade of their conniving and conspiring and secret fighting though I forbid it, and slowing time so they can arm their pet heroes with nanotech powers, they simply have to see it all to the bitter end and make sure their side wins. AS IF IT MAKES ONE GODDAMNED BIT OF DIFFERENCE!!”

  Achilles knows that a lesser man—and all men are lesser men in Achilles’ view—would be on his knees screaming from the pain of the divine bellow by now, but the ultrasonic boom and roar of it still makes him weak inside.

  “Addicts all,” says Zeus, his roar more bearable now. “I should have made them all sign up for Ilium Anonymous five years ago and avoided this terrible reckoning which now must come. Hera and her allies have gone too far.”

  Achilles is watching the carnage on the wall. The image is so deep, so three-dimensional, that it is as if the wall has opened onto the crowded killing fields of Ilium itself. The Achaeans under Agamemnon’s clumsy leadership are visibly falling back—Apollo of the Silver Bow is obviously
the most lethal god on the field, driving the flying chariots of Ares, Athena, and Hera back toward the sea—but it is not a rout, not yet, neither in the air nor on the ground. The view of the fighting gets Achilles’ blood up and makes him want to rush into the fighting, leading his Myrmidons in a swath of counterattack and killing that would end only with Achilles’ chariot and horses scarring the marble in Priam’s palace, preferably with Hector’s body being dragged behind it, leaving a bloody smear.

  “WELL??” roars Zeus. “Speak up!”

  “About what, O Father of All Gods and Men?”

  “What is this… boon… you want from me, son of Thetis?” Zeus has been pulling on his garments as he’s watched the events on the vision wall.

  Achilles steps closer. “In exchange for finding you and awakening you, Father Zeus, I would ask that you restore the life of Penthesilea in one of the Healing vats and…”

  “Penthesilea?” booms Zeus. “That Amazon tart from the north regions? The blond bitch who murdered her sister Hippolyte to gain that worthless Amazon throne? How did she die? And what does she have to do with Achilles or Achilles with her?”

  Achilles ground his molars but kept his gaze—now murderous—turned downward. “I love her, Father Zeus, and…”

  Zeus bellows in laughter. “Love her, you say? Son of Thetis, I’ve watched you on my vision walls and floors and in person since you were a baby, since you were a snot-nosed youth being tutored by the patient centaur Chiron, and never have I seen you love a woman. Even the girl who fathered your son was left behind like excess baggage whenever you felt the urge to go off to war—or whoring and rape. You love Penthesilea, that brainless blond pussy with a spear. Tell me another tale, son of Thetis.”

  “I love Penthesilea and wish her restored to health,” grits Achilles. All he can think of at this second is the god-killing blade in his belt. But Athena has lied to him before. If she lied about the abilities of that knife, he would be a fool to move against Zeus. Achilles knows that he is a fool at any rate, coming here to beseech the Father for this gift. But he perseveres, eyes still lowered but his hands balled into powerful fists. “Aphrodite gave the Amazon queen a scent to wear when she went into combat with me …” he begins.

  Zeus roars laughter again. “Not Number Nine! Well, you are well and truly screwed, my friend. How did this Penthesilea twat die? No, wait, I will see for myself…”

  The Lord Father moves his right hand again and the wallscreen blurs, shifts, leaps back across time and space. Achilles looks up to see the doomed Amazon charge against him and his men on the red plains at the base of Olympos. He watches Clonia, Bremusa, and the other Amazons fall to men’s arrows and blades. He watches again as he casts his father’s unfailing spear completely through Queen Penthesilea and the thick torso of her horse behind her, pinning her on her fallen steed’s horse like some wriggling insect on a dissecting tray.

  “Oh, well done,” booms Zeus. “And now you want her brought back to life again in one of my Healer’s vats?”

  “Yes, Lord,” says Achilles.

  “I don’t know how you know about the Hall of Healing,” says Zeus, pacing back and forth again, “but you should know that even the Healer’s alien arts cannot bring a dead mortal back to life.”

  “Lord,” says Achilles, his voice low but urgent, “Athena cast a spell of no corruption, of no encroaching death, over my beloved’s body. It might be possible to…”

  “SILENCE!!” roars Zeus and Achilles is physically driven back to the holowall by the blast of noise. “NO ONE IN THE ORIGINAL PANTHEON OF IMMORTALS TELLS ZEUS THE FATHER WHAT IS POSSIBLE OR WHAT SHOULD BE DONE, MUCH LESS SOME MERE MORTAL, OVERMUSCLED SPEARMAN.”

  “No, Father,” says Achilles, raising his gaze to the giant, bearded form, “but I hoped that…”

  “Silence,” says Zeus again, but at a level that allows Achilles to remove his hands from his ears. “I’m leaving now—to destroy Hera, to cast down her accomplices into the bottomless pit of Tartarus, to punish the other gods in ways they will never forget, and to wipe out this invading Argive army once and for all. You Greeks—with your arrogance and your oily ways—really get on my tits.” Zeus begins to stride for the door. “You’re on Ilium-Earth here, son of Thetis. It may take you many months, but you can find your way home by yourself. I would not recommend you return to Ilium—there will be no Achaeans left alive there by the time you reach that place.”

  “No,” says Achilles.

  Zeus whirls. He is actually smiling through his beard. “What did you say?”

  “I said no. You must grant my wish.” Achilles unlimbers his shield and sets it in place on his forearm, as if he is heading to the front. He pulls his sword.

  Zeus throws his head back and laughs. “Grant your wish or… what, bastard son of Thetis?”

  “Or else I will feed Zeus’s liver to that starving dog of Odysseus’ in the courtyard,” Achilles says firmly.

  Zeus smiles and shakes his head. “Do you know why you are alive this very day, insect?”

  “Because I am Achilles, son of Peleus,” says Achilles, stepping forward. He wishes he had his throwing spear. “The greatest warrior and noblest hero on Earth—invulnerable to his enemies—friend of the murdered Patroclus, slave and servant to no man… or god.”

  Zeus shakes his head again. “You’re not the son of Peleus.”

  Achilles stops advancing. “What are you talking about, Lord of Flies? Lord of Horse Dung? I am the son of Peleus who is the son of Aeacus, son of the mortal who mated with the immortal sea goddess Thetis, a king myself descended from a long line of kings of the Myrmidons.”

  “No,” says Zeus and this time the giant god is the one who steps closer, towering over Achilles. “You are the son of Thetis, but the bastard son of my seed, not the seed of Peleus’.”

  “You!” Achilles tries to laugh but it comes out a hoarse bark. “My immortal mother told me in all truth that…”

  “Your immortal mother lies through her seaweed-crusted teeth,” laughs Zeus. “Almost three decades ago, I desired Thetis. She was less than a full goddess then, although more beautiful than most of you mortals. But the Fates—those accursed bean counters with the DNA-memory abacuses—warned me that any child I spawned with Thetis could be my undoing, could cause my death, could bring down the reign of Olympos itself.”

  Achilles stares hate and disbelief through his helmet eyeholes.

  “But I wanted Thetis,” continues Zeus. “So I fucked her. But first I morphed into the form of Peleus—some common mortal boy-man with whom Thetis was mildly infatuated at the time. But the sperm that conceived you is Zeus’s divine seed, Achilles, son of Thetis, make no mistake about that. Why else do you think your mother took you far away from that idiot Peleus and had you raised by an old centaur?”

  “You lie,” growls Achilles.

  Zeus shakes his head almost sadly. “And you will die in a second, young Achilles,” says the Father of All Gods and Men. “But you will die knowing that I told you the truth.”

  “You can’t kill me, Lord of Crabs.”

  Zeus rubs his beard. “No, I can’t. Not directly. Thetis saw to that. When she learned that I had been the lover who knocked her up, not that dickless worm Peleus, she also knew of the Fates’ prediction and that I would kill you as surely as my father, Kronos, ate his offspring rather than risk their revolts and vendettas when they grew up. And I would have done that, young Achilles—eaten you when you were a babe—had not Thetis conspired to dip you in the probability flames of the pure quantum celestial fire. You are a quantum freak unique unto the universe, bastard son of Thetis and Zeus. Your death—and even I do not know the details of it, the Fates will not share them—is absolutely appointed.”

  “Then fight me now, God of Feces,” shouts Achilles and begins to advance, sword and shield ready.

  Zeus holds up one hand. Achilles is frozen in place. Time itself seems to freeze.

  “I cannot kill you, my impetuous little bastard,
” mutters Zeus, as if to himself, “but what if I blast your flesh from your bone and then rip that very flesh into its constituent cells and molecules? It might take a while for even the quantum universe to reassemble you—centuries per-haps?—and I don’t think it could possibly be a painless process.”

  Frozen in midstride, Achilles knows that he is still able to speak but does not.

  “Or perhaps I could send you somewhere,” says Zeus, gesturing toward the ceiling, “where there is no air to breathe. That will be an interesting conundrum for the probability singularity of the celestial fire to solve.”

  “There is no place outside the oceans with no air to breathe,” snarls Achilles, but then he remembers his gasping and weakness on the high slopes of Olympos just the day before.

  “Outer space would give the lie to that assertion,” says Zeus with a maddening smile. “Somewhere beyond the orbit of Uranus, perhaps, or out in the Kuiper Belt. Or Tartarus would serve. The air there is mostly methane and ammonia—it would turn your lungs to burned twigs—but if you survived a few hours in terrible pain, you could commune with your grandparents. They eat mortals, you know.”

  “Fuck you,” shouts Achilles.

  “So be it,” says Zeus. “Have a good trip, my son. Short—agonizing—but good.”

  The King of the Gods moves his right hand in a short, easy arc and the paving tiles beneath Achilles’ feet begin to dissolve. A circle opens in the floor of Odysseus’ banquet hall until the fleet-footed mankiller seems to be standing on flame-lighted air. From beneath him, from the horrific pit below filled with surging sulfurous clouds, black mountains rising like rotten teeth, lakes of liquid lead, the bubble and flow of hissing lava, and the shadowy movement of huge, inhuman things, comes the constant roar and bellow of the monsters once called Titans.

  Zeus moves his hand again, ever so slightly, and Achilles falls into that pit. He does not scream as he disappears.

  After a minute of gazing down at the flames and roiling black clouds so far below, Zeus moves his palm from left to right, the circle closes, the floor becomes solid and is made up of Odysseus’ handset tiles once again, and silence returns to the house except for the pathetic baying of the starving hound named Argus out in the courtyard somewhere.