by Dan Simmons
Nightenhelser and I bought this place where I’m sitting and writing this now. We’re partners. (Please note—I mean business partners, and good friends, of course, but not partners in the strange Twenty-first Century use of that word when it came to two men. I mean, I didn’t go from Helen of Troy to Nightenhelser of Ardis Town. I have problems, but not in that particular arena of confusion.)
I wonder what Helen would think of our tavern? It’s called Dombey & Son—the name was Nightenhelser’s suggestion, far too cute for my taste—and it gets a lot of business. It’s fairly clean compared to the other places strung along the riverbank here like shingles overhanging an old roof. Our barmaids are barmaids and not whores (at least not here or on our time or in our tavern). The beer is the best we can buy—Hannah, who is, I’m told, Ardis’s first millionaire of the new era, owns another company that makes the beer. Evidently brewing was something she learned about when studying sculpture and metal pouring. Don’t ask me why.
Do you see why I hesitate to tell this epic tale? I can’t keep my storytelling on a straight line. I tend to wander.
Perhaps I’ll bring Helen here someday and ask her what she thinks of the place.
But rumor has it that Helen cut her hair, dressed up like a boy, and went off on the Delphi adventure with Hector and Thrasymedes, with both men following her around like puppies after a bone. (Another reason I hesitate to begin telling this epic tale—I was never worth a damn with metaphors or similes. As Nightenhelser once said—I’m trope-ically challenged. Never mind.)
Rumor has it, hell. I know Helen is with the Delphi Expedition. I saw her there. She looks good in short hair and with a tan. Really good. Not like my Helen, but healthy and very beautiful.
I could tell you more about my place and more about Ardis Town—what politics looks like when it’s in its infancy (just about as useless and smelly as an infant) or what the people are like here, Greeks and Jews, functioned and non-functioned, believers, and cynics… but that’s not part of this tale.
Also, as I will discover later this evening, I’m not the real teller. I’m not the chosen Bard. I know that makes no sense to you now, but wait just a while here, and you’ll see what I mean.
These last eighteen years have not been easy for me, especially not the first eleven. I feel as scarred and pitted psychologically and emotionally as old Orphu of Io’s shell is physically. (He lives up the hill at Ardis most of the time. You will see him a little later, too. He’s going to the play tonight, but he always has an appointment with the kids each afternoon. That’s what tipped me off to the fact that even all my years as scholar and scholic did not make me the chosen one to tell this particular tale when the time comes to tell it.)
Yes, these last eighteen years, expecially the first eleven, have been tough, but I guess I feel richer for them. I hope you do when you hear the tale. If you don’t, it’s not my fault—I abdicate in the telling, although my memories are free for anyone who wants to borrow them.
I apologize. I have to go now. The afterwork crowd is coming in—the daytime tannery shift is just getting off, can you smell them? One of my barmaids is sick and another has just eloped with one of the young Athenians who chose to come here after Delphi and… well… I’m shorthanded. My bartender comes in for the evening shift in forty-five minutes, but until then, I’d better draw the beers and slice the roast beef for the sandwiches myself.
My name is Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., and I think the “Ph.D.” stands for “Pouring His Draft.”
Sorry. Humor never was, except for a few literary puns and belabored jokes, my strong point.
I’ll see you at the afternoon storytelling, before the play.
95
Seven years and five months after the Fall of Ilium:
On the day of the play, Harman had business in the Dry Valley. After lunch, he dressed in his combat suit and thermskin, borrowed an energy weapon from the Ardis House armory, and freefaxed down there.
The excavation of the post-humans’ stasis dome was going well. Walking between the huge excavation machines, avoiding the down-blast of a transport hornet hauling things north, it was hard for Harman to believe that eight and a half years earlier he’d come to this same dry valley with young Ada, the incredibly young Hannah, and the pudgy boy-man Daeman in search of clues about the Wandering Jew—the mystery woman he discovered was named Savi.
Actually, part of the blue stasis dome had been buried directly under the boulder where Savi had left her scratched clues leading them to her home on Mount Erebus. Even then, Savi had known that Harman was the only old-style human on Earth who could read those scratches.
The two supervisors on the stasis-dome excavation here were Raman and Alcinuous. They were doing a good job. Harman went down the checklist with them to make sure they knew which gear was destined for which community—the bulk of the energy weapons were destined for Hughes Town and Chom; the thermskins were going to Bellinbad; the crawlers were promised to Ulanbat and the Loman Estate; New Ilium had made a strong bid for the older flechette rifles.
Harman had to smile at this. Ten more years and the Trojans and Greeks would be using the same technology as the old-styles, even using the pavilion nodes to fax everywhere. Some of the Delphi group had already discovered the node near Olympus… the ancient town where the Games were held, not the mountain.
Well, he thought, the only solution was to stay ahead of them—in technology and everything else.
It was time to go home. But first Harman had one stop he wanted to make. He shook hands with Alcinuous and Raman and freefaxed away.
Harman had come back to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu, the place where he had been given his life back seven and a half years earlier. He freefaxed not to the Bridge itself, but to a ridgeline across the valley from the bridge and the high ruins on the terrace of Machu Picchu. He never tired of looking at the ancient structure, the green habitation globules hardly visible from this distance, but he’d come back not just out of sentiment.
He was to meet someone here.
Harman watched the early afternoon clouds shift up the valley from the direction of the waterfall. For a while, the sunlight turned the mists to gold, half obscuring the ruins of Machu Picchu, making them appear as half-glimpsed stepping-stones there beyond the old Bridge’s span. Everywhere Harman looked, life was winning its anti-entropic battle against chaos and energy loss—the grass on the hillsides, the canopy of trees in the mist-shrouded valley, the condors circling slowly on thermals, the tatters of blowing moss on the suspension cables of the Bridge itself, even the rust-colored lichen on the rocks near Harman.
As if to distract him from thoughts about life and living things, a very artificial spaceship rocketed from south to north across the sky, its long contrail slowly breaking up in the jet steam high above the Andes. Before Harman could be sure of the make and model of the ship, the gleaming speck was gone over the northern horizon behind the ruins, trailed by three sonic booms. It had been too large and too fast to be one of the hornets hauling gear north from the Dry Valley. Harman wondered if perhaps it was Daeman, returning from one of their joint expeditions with the moravecs, plotting and recording the decreasing quantum disturbances between Earth-system and Mars.
We have our own spacecraft now, thought Harman. He smiled at his own hubris at even thinking such a thing. But the thought still made him warm inside. Then he reminded himself that we have our own spacecraft, but we can’t yet build our own spacecraft.
Harman hoped he would live long enough to see that. This led his thoughts to the search for the rejuvenation vats in the polar and equatorial rings
“Good afternoon,” said a familiar voice behind him.
Harman raised the energy weapon out of habit and training, but lowered it even before he’d fully turned. “Good afternoon, Prospero,” he said.
The old magus stepped out of a niche in the rocks. “You’re wearing a full combat suit, my young friend. Did you expect to find me armed?”
Harman smiled. “I’ll never find you without weapons.”
“If one counts wit as a weapon,” said Prospero.
“Or guile,” said Harman.
The magus moved his veined old hands as if in defeat. “Ariel said you wished to see me. Is it about the situation in China?”
“No,” said Harman, “we’ll deal with that later. I came to remind you about the play.”
“Ah,” said Prospero, “the play.”
“You’ve forgotten? Or decided not to come?” said Harman. “Everyone will be disappointed except your understudy if you’re not coming.”
Prospero smiled. “So many lines to learn, my young Prometheus.”
“Not so many as you gave us,” said Harman.
Prospero opened his hands again.
“Shall I tell the understudy that he has to go on?” asked Harman. “He’ll be thrilled to do so.”
“Perhaps I would like to attend after all,” said the magus. “But must it be as a performer, not as a guest?”
“For this play, it must be as a performer,” said Harman. “When we do Henry IV, you can be our honored guest.”
“Actually,” said Prospero, “I’ve always wanted to play Sir John Falstaff.”
Harman’s laugh echoed off the crags and cliff face. “So I can tell Ada that you’ll be there and will stay for refreshments and conversation afterward?”
“I look forward to the conversation,” said the solid hologram, “if not to the stage fright.”
“Well …” said Harman, “break a leg.” He nodded and freefaxed away.
At Ardis House, he checked in his weapon and the combat suit, pulled on canvas jeans and a tunic, slipped on light shoes, and walked out to the north meadow where final preparations were going on at the playhouse. Men were rigging the colored lights that would hang over the rows of freshly sawed wooden seats and over the beer gardens and in the trellises. Hannah was busy testing the sound system from the stage. Some of the volunteers were slapping a final coat of paint on backdrops and someone kept drawing the curtain to and fro.
Ada saw him and tried walking with their two-year-old, Sarah, but the toddler was tired and fussy, so Ada swept her up and carried her up the grassy hill to her father. Harman kissed both of them, and then kissed Ada again.
She looked back at the stage and rows of seats, pulled a long strand of black hair out of her face, and said, “The Tempest? Do you really think we’re all ready for this?”
Harman shrugged, then put his arm around her shoulders. “It was next.”
“Is our star really coming?” she asked, leaning back against him. Sarah whimpered and shifted position a little bit so that her cheek was touching both her parents’ shoulders.
“He says he is,” said Harman, not believing it himself.
“It would have been nice if he’d rehearsed with the others,” said Ada.
“Well… we can’t ask for everything.”
“Can’t we?” said Ada, giving him the look that had typed her as the dangerous sort to Harman more than eight years ago.
A sonie rocketed low over the trees and houses, sweeping low toward the river and the town. “I hope that was one of the idiot adult males and not one of the boys,” said Ada.
“Speaking of boys,” said Harman. “Where’s ours? I didn’t see him this morning and I want to say hello.”
“He’s on the porch, getting ready for story time,” said Ada.
“Ah, story time,” said Harman. He turned to walk toward the dell in the south meadow where story time usually took place, but Ada gripped his arm.
“Harman…”
He looked at her.
“Mahnmut arrived a while ago. He says that Moira may be coming to the play tonight.”
He took her hand. “Well, that’s good… isn’t it?”
Ada nodded. “But if Prospero is here, and Moira, and you said you invited Ariel, although he wouldn’t play the part… what if Caliban comes?”
“He’s not invited,” said Harman.
She squeezed his hand to show that she was serious.
Harman pointed to the sites around the playhouse, trellised beer gardens, and house where the guards would be posted with their energy rifles.
“But the children will be at the play,” said Ada. “The people from the town…”
Harman nodded, still holding her hand. “Caliban can QT here any time he wants, my love. He hasn’t done so yet.”
She nodded slightly but she did not release his hand.
Harman kissed her. “Elian has been rehearsing Caliban’s moves and lines for five weeks,” he said. “Be not afeard. This isle is full of noises,/Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.”
“I wish that were always so,” said Ada.
“I do, too, my love. But we both know—you better than I—that it’s not the case. Shall we go watch John enjoy story hour?”
Orphu of Io was still blind, but the parents were never afraid he’d bump into something or hit anyone, even as the eight or nine boldest children of Ardis piled on his huge shell, climbing barefoot to find a perch. The tradition had become for the kids to ride Orphu down to the dell for the story hour. John, at a little over seven one of the oldest, sat at the highest point on that shell.
The big moravec proceeded slowly on its silent repellors, moving almost solemnly—except for the explosion of giggles from the children riding and the shouts from the other children trailing behind—carrying them from the porch down past the old elm to the dell between the bushes and the new houses.
In the shallow depression, magically out of sight of the houses and other adults except for the parents of some of those here, the children clambered off and sprawled on the banks of the grassy bowl. John sat the closest to Orphu, as he usually did. He looked back, saw his father, and waved but did not come back to say hello. The story came first.
Harman, still standing with Ada, Sarah snoring in his arms now—Ada’s arm having almost fallen asleep—noticed Mahnmut standing near the line of hedges. Harman nodded but the small moravec’s attention was on his old friend and the children.
“Tell the Gilgamesh story again,” shouted one of the bolder six-year-old boys.
The huge crab-monster slowly moved its carapace back and forth, as if shaking its head no. “That story’s finished for now,” rumbled Orphu. “Today we start a new one.”
The children cheered.
“This one is going to take a long time to tell,” said Orphu, his rumble sounding reassuring and engaging even to Harman.
The children cheered again. Two of the boys tumbled and rolled down the little hill together.
“Listen carefully,” said Orphu. One of his long, articulated manipulators had carefully separated the boys and set them gently on the slope, a few feet apart. Their attention turned immediately to the big moravec’s booming, mesmerizing voice.
“Rage—Sing, Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, sing of the rage that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down into Hades’ Dark House so many sturdy souls, great fighters’ souls, heroes’ souls, but also made their bodies carrion, feasts for the dogs and birds, even as Zeus’s will was done. Begin, O Muse, when the two first argued and clashed, the Greek king Agamemnon, lord of men, and the brilliant, godlike Achilles…”
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jean-Daniel Breque for his permission to use the details of one of his favorite walks down the avenue Daumesnil and the rest of that Promenade Plantée. A full description of this delightful walk can be found in Jean-Daniel’s essay “Green Tracks” in the Time Out Book of Paris Walks, published by Penguin.
I also would like to thank Professor Keith Nightenhelser for his suggestion of the Renoir-as-Creator quote from The Guermantes Way.
Finally, I would like to thank Jane Kathryn Simmons for permission to reprint her poem “Still Born” as it appears on p. 571.
About the Author
DAN SIM
MONS is the author of the critically acclaimed suspense novel The Crook Factory, as well as the award-winning Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, their sequel, Endymion, and The Rise of Endymion. He is also the author of Song of Kali, Carrion Comfort, Fires of Eden, and several other respected works. A former teacher, Mr. Simmons makes his home in Colorado.
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