by Dan Simmons
Noman shrugged. “Call off this war with Prospero and let’s see what happens.”
Sycorax slammed down the wine goblet onto a nearby table. “Leave the field while that bastard Prospero remains on it?” she snapped. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am,” said Noman. “The old entity called Prospero is quite mad. His days are over. But you can leave before the same madness claims you. Let’s leave this place, Circe, you and I.”
“Leave?” The witch’s voice was very low, incredulous.
“I know this rock has fusion-drive engines and Brane Hole generators that could send us to the stars, beyond the stars. If we get bored, we step through the Calabi-Yau door and make love across the whole, rich universe of history—we could meet at different ages, wear our different bodies at different ages as easily as changing clothes, travel in time to join ourselves making love, freeze time itself so that we can take part in our own lovemaking. You have enough food and air here to keep us comfortable for a thousand years—ten thousand if you please.”
“You forget,” said Sycorax, rising and pacing again. “You’re a mortal man. In twenty years I’ll be changing your soiled underwear and feeding you by hand. In forty years you’ll be dead.”
“You offered me immortality once. The rejuvenation tanks are still here on your isle.”
“You rejected immortality!” screamed Sycorax. She picked up the heavy mug and threw it at him. Noman ducked but did not move his feet from where they were planted. “You rejected it again and again!” she screamed, tearing at her hair and cheeks with her nails. “You threw it in my face to return to your precious… Penelope … over and over again. You actually laughed at me.”
“I’m not laughing now. Come away with me.”
Her expression was wild with fury. “I should have Caliban kill you and eat you right here in front of me. I’ll laugh while he sucks the marrow from your cracked bones.”
“Come away with me, Circe,” said Noman. “Reactivate the faxes and functions, drop the old Hands of Hercules and other useless toys, and come away with me. Be my lover again.”
“You’re old,” she sneered. “Old and scarred and gray-haired. Why should I choose an old man over a vital younger one?” She stroked the thigh and flaccid penis of the seemingly hypnotized and motionless younger Odysseus.
“Because this Odysseus will not be leaving through the Calabi-Yau door in a week or month or eight years as that young one will,” said Noman. “And because this Odysseus loves you.”
Sycorax made a choked noise that sounded like a snarl. Caliban echoed her snarl.
Noman reached under his tunic and took a heavy pistol from where he had hidden it under his broad belt in the back.
The witch stopped pacing and stared. “You can’t possibly think that thing can hurt me.”
“I didn’t bring it to hurt you,” said Noman.
She flicked her violet gaze to the frozen younger Odysseus. “Are you mad? Do you know what mischief that would do on the quantum level of things? You’re courting kaos by even contemplating such a thing. It would destroy a cycle that has been going on in a thousand strands for a thousand…”
“Going on for too long,” said Noman. He fired six times, each explosion seemingly louder than the last. The six heavy bullets tore into the naked Odysseus, tearing his rib cage apart, pulping his heart, striking him in the middle of the forehead.
The younger man’s body jerked to the impacts and slid to the floor, leaving red streaks on the silk cushions and a growing pool of blood on the marble tiles.
“Decide,” said Noman.
83
I don’t know if I teleported here via my own, medallion-less ability, or just came along with Hephaestus because I was touching his sleeve when he QT’d. It doesn’t matter. I’m here.
Here is Odysseus’ home. A dog barks madly at us as Hephaestus, Achilles, and I pop into existence, but one glance from bloody-helmeted Achilles sends the mutt whining back out to the courtyard with its tail between its legs.
We’re in an anteroom looking into the great dining hall of Odysseus’ home on the isle of Ithaca. Some sort of forcefield hums over the house and courtyard. There are no impudent suitors lounging in the long room at the long table, no Penelope dithering, no impotent young Telemachus plotting, no servants hustling to and fro dispensing the absent Odysseus’ food and wine to indolent ne’er-do-wells. But the room looks as if the Slaughter of the Suitors has already taken place—chairs are overturned, a huge tapestry has been ripped off the wall and now lies thrown over table and floor, soaking up spilled wine, and even Odysseus’ greatest bow—the one that only he alone could pull, according to legend, a bow so wonderful and rare that he decided not to take it to Troy with him—now lies on the stone floor, amidst a clutter of Odysseus’ famous barbed and poisoned hunting arrows.
Zeus whirls. The giant wears the same soft garments he had been wearing on the Throne of Olympos, but he is not so gigantic now. Yet even shrunken to fit this space, he is still twice as tall as Achilles.
Beckoning us to stand back, the fleet-footed mankiller raises his shield, readies his sword, and steps into the dining hall.
“My son,” booms the God of Thunder, “spare me your childlike anger. Would you commit deicide, tyrannicide, and patricide in one terrible stroke?”
Achilles advances until he is across the span of the broad table from Zeus. “Fight, old man.”
Zeus continues smiling, apparently not the least bit alarmed. “Think, fleet-footed Achilles. Use your brain for once rather than your muscles or your dick. Would you have that useless cripple sit on the golden throne of Olympos?” He nods toward where Hephaestus stands silent in the doorway next to me.
Achilles does not turn his head.
“Just think for once,” repeats Zeus, his deep voice causing crockery to vibrate in the nearby kitchen. “Join with me, Achilles, my son. Become one with the penetrating presence that is Zeus, Father of All Gods. Thus joined, father and son, immortal and immortal, two mighty spirits, mingling, shall make a third, mightier than either alone—triune together, Father and Son and holy will, we shall reign over heaven and Troy and send the Titans back down to their pit forever.”
“Fight,” said Achilles. “You old pigfucker.”
Zeus’s broad face turns several shades of red. “Detested prodigy! Even thus, deprived of my control of all elements, I trample thee!”
Zeus grabs the long table by its edge and flips it into the air. Fifty feet of heavy wood planks and posts flies tumbling through the air toward Achilles’ head. The human ducks low and the table smashes into the wall behind him, destroying a fresco and sending splinters flying everywhere.
Achilles takes two steps closer.
Zeus opens his arms, opens his hands to show his palms. “Would you kill me as I am, oh man? Unarmed? Or shall we grapple barehanded like heroes in the arena until one fails to rise and the other takes the prize?”
Achilles hesitates only a second. Then he pulls off his golden helmet and sets it aside. He removes the circular shield from his forearm, lays the sword in its cusp, adds his bronze chest armor and greaves, and kicks all that to our doorway. Now he is clad only in his shirt, short skirt, sandals, and broad leather belt.
Eight feet from Zeus, Achilles opens his arms in a wrestler’s opening stance and crouches.
Zeus smiles then and—in a motion almost too fast for me to perceive—crouches and comes up with Odysseus’ bow and a poisoned black-feathered arrow.
Get away! I have time mentally to shout at Achilles but the blond and muscled hero does not budge.
Zeus goes to full pull, easily bending the bow that no one on Earth except Odysseus was supposed to be able to bend, aims the broad-bladed poison arrow right at Achilles’ heart eight feet away, and lets fly.
The arrow misses.
It cannot miss—not at that distance—the shaft appears straight and true, the black feathers full—but it misses by a full foot or more and buries i
tself deep in the smashed table angled against the wall. I can almost feel the terrible venom, rumored to be originally gathered from the most deadly of serpents by Hercules, as it drains into the wood of the table.
Zeus stares. Achilles does not move.
Zeus crouches with lightning speed, comes up with another arrow, steps closer, notches, pulls, releases.
It misses. From five feet away, the poisoned arrow misses.
Achilles does not stir. He stares hate into the now-panicked gaze of the Father of All Gods.
Zeus crouches again, sets the arrow to the cord with careful precision, goes to full pull again, his mighty muscles now sheened in sweat, visibly straining, the powerful bow almost humming with its coiled power. The King of the Gods steps forward until the point of the arrow is not much more than a foot away from Achilles’ broad chest.
Zeus fires.
The arrow misses.
This is not possible, but I see the arrow embed itself in the wall behind Achilles. It has not passed through Achilles, nor curved around, but somehow—impossibly—absolutely—it has missed.
Achilles leaps then, slapping the bow aside and seizing the twice-tall god by the throat.
Zeus staggers around the room trying to remove Achilles’ powerful hands from around his neck, pounding Achilles with a god-fist half as wide as Achilles’ broad back. The fleet-footed mankiller hangs on as Zeus thrashes, smashing timbers, the table, the doorway arch, the wall itself. It looks like a man with a child hanging from him, but Achilles hangs on.
Then the much larger god gets his own powerful fingers under Achilles’ much smaller fingers and peels back first the mortal’s left hand, then his right. Now Zeus crashes against, bangs onto, and smashes into things with a deadly purpose, holding Achilles’ forearms in his own massive hands, the mortal man dangling as Zeus head-butts Achilles—the sound echoing like two great boulders colliding—then rams his god-chest against mortal ribs, finally crashing both of them against the unyielding wall and into the doorway opposite us, arching Achilles’ back against the unyielding stone of the doorframe.
Five seconds of this and he will snap Achilles’ back like a bow made out of cheap balsa.
Achilles does not wait five seconds. Or three.
Somehow the fleet-footed mankiller has got his right hand free for an instant as Zeus bends him backward, backward, spine grinding against vertical stone.
I see what happens next in retinal echo, it occurs so quickly.
Achilles’ hand comes up from his own belly and belt with a short blade in his fist.
He rams the blade in under Zeus’s bearded chin, twists the knife, rams it deeper, rotates it with a cry louder even than Zeus’s scream of horror and pain.
Zeus stumbles backward into the hallway, crashing into the next room. Hephaestus and I run to follow.
They are in Odysseus’ and Penelope’s private bedchamber now. Achilles pulls the knifeblade free and the Father of All Gods raises both his massive hands to his own throat, his own face. Golden ichor and red blood both are pulsing into the air, flowing from Zeus’s nostrils and open, gaping mouth, filling his white beard with gold and red.
Zeus falls backward onto the bed. Achilles swings the knife far back, plunges it deep into the god’s belly, and then drags it up and to the right until the magical blade rasps on rib cage.
Zeus screams again, but before he can clutch himself lower, Achilles has pulled out yards of gray gut—gleaming god intestine—and wrapped it several times around one of the four posts of Odysseus’ great bed, tying it off in a mariner’s swift and sure knot.
That post is the living olive tree Odysseus fashioned this room and bed around, I think in a daze. The lines from The Odyssey come back to me from the Fitzgerald translation I first read as a boy, Odysseus speaking to his doubting Penelope—
An old trunk of olive grew like a pillar on our building plot, and I laid out our bedroom round that tree, lined up the stone walls, built the walls and roof, gave it a doorway and smooth-fitting doors. Then I lopped off the silvery leaves and branches, into a bedpost, drilled it, let it serve as a model for the rest. I planned them all, inlaid them all with silver, gold and ivory, and stretched a bed between—a pliant web of oxhide thongs dyed crimson.
Now more than the oxhide thongs are dyed crimson as Zeus struggles to free himself from the restraining tether of his own tied-off intestines, golden ichor and all-too-human-red-blood flowing from his throat, face, and belly. Blinded by his own pain and gore, Mighty Zeus feels for his tormenter by swinging his arms. Every step and tug in search of Achilles pulls more of his gleaming gray insides out. His screaming makes even the unflinching Hephaestus cover his ears.
Achilles prances lightly out of reach, dancing in closer only to slash and hack at the blind god’s arms, legs, thighs, penis, and hamstrings.
Zeus crashes down on his back, still connected to the living olive tree bedpost by thirty feet or more of knotted gray gut, but the immortal being still thrashes and howls, spewing ichor across the ceiling in complicated Rorschachs of divine arterial spray.
Achilles leaves the room and returns with his battle sword. He pins Zeus’s thrashing left arm with one battle-sandaled foot, raises the sword high, and brings it down so hard it strikes sparks on the floor after passing through Zeus’s neck.
The head of the Father of All Gods tumbles free, rolling under the bed.
Achilles goes to one gory knee and seems to be burying his face in the giant open wound that had been Zeus’s bronzed and muscled belly. For one perfectly horrible second I am sure that Achilles is eating the guts out of his fallen foe, his face largely hidden in the abdominal cavity—a man turned pure predator, a ravaging wolf.
But he was only hunting.
“Ahah!” cries the fleet-footed mankiller and pulls a huge, still pulsating purplish mass from the tumble of glistening gray.
Zeus’s liver.
“Where is that goddamned dog of Odysseus’?” Achilles asks himself, his eyes gleaming. He leaves us to carry the liver out to the dog Argus cowering somewhere in the courtyard.
Hephaestus and I stand aside quickly to give Achilles room as he passes.
As the sound of the mankiller’s—godkiller’s—footsteps recede, both the god of fire and I look around the room.
Not a square inch of bed, floor, ceiling, or wall appears to have remained unsplattered.
The huge, headless corpse on the stone floor, still tethered to the olive-tree post, continues to twitch and writhe, its bloodied fingers flexing.
“Holy fuck,” breathes Hephaestus.
I want to tear my gaze away but cannot. I want to leave the room to go vomit quietly somewhere, but cannot. “What… how… it’s still… partially… alive,” I gasp.
Hephaestus grins his most insane grin. “Zeus is an immortal, remember, Hockenberry? He’s in agony even now. I’ll burn the bits in the Celestial Fire.” He stoops to retrieve the short knife Achilles had used. “I’ll burn this god-killing Aphrodite blade as well. Melt it down and pour it into something new—a plaque commemorating Zeus, maybe. I never should have made this blade for the bloodthirsty bitch.”
I blink and shake my head, then grab the hulking fire god by his heavy leather vest. “What will happen now?” I ask.
Hephaestus shrugs. “Just what we agreed on, Hockenberry. Nyx and the Fates, who have always ruled the universe—this universe, at least—will allow me to sit on the gold throne of Olympos after this mad second war with the Titans is over.”
“How do you know who will win?”
He shows me his uneven white teeth against his black beard.
From the courtyard comes a commanding voice. “Here, dog… here Argus… here, boy. That’s a nice pup. I have something for you… good dog.”
“They don’t call them ‘the Fates’ for nothing, Hockenberry,” says Hephaestus. “It will be a long and nasty war, fought more on Ilium Earth than on Olympos, but the few surviving Olympians will win… again.”
“But the thing… the cloud-thing… the Voice thing…”
“Demogorgon has gone home to Tartarus,” rumbles Hephaestus. “It cares not the least fucking fig what happens now on Earth, Mars, or Olympos.”
“My people…”
“Your pretty Greek friends are fucked up the ass,” says Hephaestus and then he smiles at his own wit. “But, if it makes you feel any better, so are the Trojans. Anyone who stays on Ilium Earth will be in the crossfire for the next fifty to a hundred years while this war goes on.”
I grab his vest harder. “You have to help us…”
He removes my hand as easily as an adult male would remove the clinging hand of a two-year-old child. “I don’t have to do a goddamned thing, Hockenberry.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, looks at the twitching thing on the floor behind, and says, “But in this case I will. QT back to your pitiful Achaeans and your woman, Helen, in the city and tell them to get their asses out of all high towers, off the walls, out of the buildings. There’s going to be a nine-point quake in old Ilium Town in a very few minutes. I need to burn this… thing… and get our hero back to Olympos so he can try to talk the Healer into waking his dead bimbo.”
Achilles is coming back. He is whistling and I can hear Argus’s nails scrabbling on stone as the dog eagerly follows.
“Go!” says Hephaestus, god of fire and artifice.
I reach for my medallion, realize it’s not there, realize I don’t need it, and QT well away from there.
84
Their estimated twelve hours of continuous work took a little more than eighteen hours. The forty-eight tumbled missiles and missile tubes were more trouble to sort out, separate, and cut up than either Orphu or Mahnmut could have guessed. Some of the metal warhead casings had cracked completely away, leaving only the plastoid-alloy MRV cradles and the containment fields themselves, each glowing blue from its own Cerenkov radiation.
The sight would have been interesting if anyone other than the silent moravecs on the Queen Mab had been watching: the submersible The Dark Lady crouching over the hull of the sunken death sub, its belly searchlights illuminating mostly a world filled with silt, fanning anemones, torn cables, twisted wiring, and lethal, greengrown missiles and warheads. Brighter than the dappled daylight coming in through the Breach wall, brighter than the super-halogen bright searchlights aimed on the work area, brighter than the sun itself were the fires of the 10,000-degree-Fahrenheit cutting torches that both the blind Orphu and the silt-blinded Mahnmut were wielding as delicately as scalpels.