Ilium

by Dan Simmons

  She has forgotten Athena’s modifications of Diomedes.

  Diomedes leaps forward, the goddess’s forcefield crackles and gives way, the Achaean lunges with his long spear and the shaft and barb of it tear through Aphrodite’s personal forcefield, silken robes, and divine flesh. The razor-sharp spearpoint slashes the goddess’s wrist so that red muscle and white bone show. Golden ichor—rather than red blood—sprays into the air.

  Aphrodite stares at the wound for a second and then screams—an inhuman scream, something huge and amplified, a female roar out of a bank of amplifiers at a rock concert from hell.

  She reels, stil screaming, and drops Aeneas.

  Rather than press home his successful attack on Aphrodite, Diomedes unsheaths his sword and prepares to decapitate the unconscious Aeneas.

  Phoebus Apollo, lord of the silver bow, QT’s into solidity between the berserk Diomedes and the fallen Trojan and holds the Achaean at bay with a pulsing hemisphere of plasma forcefield. Blinded by bloodlust, Diomedes hacks away at the forcefield, his own energy field crashing red against Apollo’s defensive yellow shield. Aphrodite is still staring at her mangled wrist, and it looks as if she may swoon and lie there helpless in front of the still-raging Diomedes. The goddess seems unable to concentrate enough to QT while in such pain.

  Suddenly her brother Ares arrives in a blazing flying chariot, shoving aside Trojans and Greeks alike as he widens the ship’s plasma footprint to land by his sister. Aphrodite is blubbering and wailing in pain, trying to explain that Diomedes has gone mad. “He’d fight Father Zeus!” screams the goddess, collapsing in the war god’s arms.

  “Can you fly this?” demands Ares.

  “No!” Aphrodite does swoon now. She falls into Ares’ arms, still cradling the injured left hand and wrist in her bloody—or ichorish—right hand. It is strangely disturbing to watch. Gods and goddesses don’t bleed. At least not in my nine years here.

  The goddess Iris, Zeus’s personal messenger, flicks onto the battlefield between the chariot and Apollo’s forcefield where the god still protects the fallen Aeneas. The Trojans have backed away now, eyes bugging, and Diomedes is being held at bay by the overlapped energy fields. The Achaean is radiating heat and fury in the infrared, looking all the world like a warrior made out of pulsing lava.

  “Take her to her mother,” commands Ares, laying the unconscious Aphrodite on the floor of the chariot. Iris lifts the energy-craft skyward and phase-shifts it out of sight.

  “Amazing,” says Nightenhelser.

  “Fan-fucking-tastic,” I say. It is the first time in my more than nine years here that I have seen a Greek or Trojan successfully attack a god. I turn to see Nightenhelser staring at me in shock. I forget sometimes that the scholic is from a previous decade. “Well, it is,” I say defensively.

  I want to follow Aphrodite to Olympos and see what happens between her and Zeus. Homer had written about it, of course, but there already has been enough disparity between the poem and real events here today to pique my interest.

  I begin edging away from Nightenhelser—who is watching events so raptly that he does not notice my departure—and ready myself to don the Hades Helmet and twist the personal QT medallion’s controls. But something is happening on the battlefield.

  Diomedes lets out a war cry almost as loud as Aphrodite’s still-echoing scream of pain, and then the augmented Achaean charges Aeneas and Apollo again. This time, Diomedes’ nano-strengthened body and phase-shifted sword hack through Apollo’s outer layers of energy shield.

  The god stands motionless as Diomedes hacks and cuts his way through the shimmering forcefield like a man shoveling invisible snow.

  Then Apollo’s voice rings out with amplification that must be audible two or three miles away. “Think, Diomedes! Back off! Enough of this mortal insanity—warring with the gods. We’re not of the same breed, human. We never were. We never will be.” Apollo grows in size from his imposing eight feet of stature to become a giant more than twenty feet tall.

  Diomedes halts his attack and backs away, although it is impossible to tell whether it is out of temporary fear or sheer exhaustion.

  Apollo bends down and opaques the forcefields around him and the fallen Aeneas. When the black fog disappear a minute later, the god is gone but Aeneas is still lying there, wounded, hip shattered, bleeding. The Trojan fighters rush to form a circle around their fallen and abandoned leader before Diomedes slaughters him.

  It is not Aeneas. I know that Apollo has left a tensile hologram behind and carried the real wounded prince to the heights of Pergamus—Ilium’s citadel—where the goddesses Leto and Artemis, Ares’ sister, will use their nanotech god-medicine to save Aeneas’ life and mend his wounds in minutes.

  I’m ready to flick away to Olympos when suddenly Apollo QT’s back to the battlefield, shielded from mortal view. Ares, still rallying Trojans behind his defensive shield, looks up when the other god arrives.

  “Ares, destroyer of men, you stormer of ramparts, are you going to let that piece of dogshit insult you like that?” Invisible to the Achaeans, Apollo is pointing at the panting and recovering Diomedes.

  “Insult me? How has he insulted me?”

  “You idiot,” thunders Apollo in ultrasonic frequencies audible only to the gods and scholics and the dogs in Troy, who set up a fearsome howling in response. “That . . . that mortal . . . has just assaulted the goddess of love, your sister, slashing the tendons of her immortal wrist. Diomedes even charged me, one of the most powerful of the gods. Athena has made him into something superhuman to make Ares, war god, reeking of blood, into a laughingstock!”

  Ares’ head swivels back toward the panting Diomedes, who has been ignoring the god since his attempt to cut through the forcefields failed.

  “He makes fun of me!?” screams Ares in a shout everyone from here to Olympos can hear. I’ve noted over the years that Ares is rather stupid for a god. He’s proving it today. “He dares make jest of me!!??”

  “Kill him,” cries Apollo, still speaking in the ultrasonic. “Cut out his heart and eat it.” And the god of the silver bow QT’s away.

  Ares is going crazy. I decide I can’t leave yet. I desperately want to QT to Olympos and see how badly injured Aphrodite is, but this is just too interesting to miss.

  First, the war god morphs into the runner Acamas, prince of Thrace, and runs to and from among the milling Trojans, urging them back into the battle to push the Greeks out of the salient they have created following Diomedes into the Trojan lines. Then Ares morphs into the form of Sarpedon and taunts Hector—the hero is holding back from the fight with rare reticence. Shamed by what he thinks are Sarpedon’s accusations, Hector rejoins his men. When Ares sees that Hector is rallying the main body of Trojan fighters, the god becomes himself and joins the circle of fighters holding the Greeks away from the hologram of unconscious Aeneas.

  I confess I’ve never seen fighting this fierce during my nine years here. If Homer taught us anything, it is that the human being is a frail vessel, a fleshly flagon of blood and loose guts just waiting to be spilled.

  They’re spilling now.

  The Achaeans don’t wait for Ares to get his second wind, but rush in with chariot and spear behind the wild leadership of Diomedes and Odysseus. Horses scream. Chariots splinter and tumble. Horsemen drive their steeds into a wall of spearpoints and gleaming shields. Diomedes flames to the front again, calling his men forward even while he kills every Trojan who comes within his reach.

  Apollo flicks back to the battlefield in a swirl of purple mist and releases the healed Aeneas—the real Aeneas—into the fray. The young man has been healed and more—he flows with light the way modified Diomedes did when Athena had finished with him. The Trojans, already rallying behind Hector, let out a massed yell at the sight of their resurrected prince and launch their counterattack.

  Now it is Aeneas and Diomedes leading the fighting on opposite sides of the line, killing enemy captains by the bucketful, while Apollo a
nd Ares urge more Trojans into the fray. I watch as Aeneas slaughters the carefree Achaean twins, Orsilochus and Crethon.

  Now Menelaus, recovered from his own wound, shoves past Odysseus and rushes toward Aeneas. I hear Ares laugh. The war god would love it if Agamemnon’s brother, Helen’s real husband, the man who started this war by mislaying his wife, was cut down dead this day. Aeneas and Meneleus come within arm’s reach of each other, the other fighters backing away in respect for aristeia, the two warriors’ spears thrusting and feinting, thrusting and feinting.

  Suddenly Nestor’s brother, Antilochus, good friend to the all-but-forgotten Achilles, leaps forward to stand shoulder to shoulder with Menelaus, obviously afraid the Greek cause will die with their captain if he does not intervene.

  Confronted with two legendary killers rather than one, Aeneas backs away.

  Two hundred yards east of this confrontation, Hector has waded into the Achaean line with such ferocity that even Diomedes falls back with his men. With his augmented vision, Diomedes must see Ares—invisible to the others—fighting at Hector’s side.

  I still want to leave, to check on Aphrodite, but I can’t tear myself away right now. I can see Nightenhelser madly taking notes on his recorder ansible. This makes me laugh, since the thousands of noble Trojans and Argives battling here are all as preliterate as two-year-olds. If they found Nightenhelser’s scribblings, even in Greek, they would mean nothing to these men.

  All the gods are getting into the act now.

  Hera and Athena blink back into existence, Zeus’s wife visibly urging Athena into the fight. Athena does not resist. Hebe, the goddess of youth and servant to the older gods, flashes down in a flying chariot, Hera takes control, and Athena also leaps aboard, dropping her robe while buckling on her breastplate. Athena’s battle shirt gleams. She lifts a crackling energy shield of bright yellow and pulsing red, and her sword sends bolts of lightning to the Earth.

  “Look!” It’s Nightenhelser shouting to me above the fray. There’s real lightning coming from the north, a towering bank of dark stratocumulus rising forty thousand feet or higher into the hot afternoon sky. The cloud suddenly shapes itself into the form and visage of Zeus.

  “LEAP TO IT THEN, WIFE AND DAUGHTER,” roars the thunder from that storm. “ATHENA, SEE IF YOU’RE THE WAR GOD’S MATCH. BRING HIM DOWN IF YOU CAN!”

  Black clouds roil low over the battlefield while rain and lightning strike down at Trojan and Argive alike.

  Hera brings the chariot low over the heads of the Greeks, then lower still, scattering Trojans like leather-and-bronze tenpins.

  Athena leaps down into a real chariot next to exhausted, blood-encrusted Diomedes and his faithful driver, Sthenelus. “Are you done for this day, mortal?” she screams at Diomedes, the last word dripping sarcasm. “Are you half the size of your father to stop when your opponents hold the field so?” She gestures to where Hector and Ares are sweeping the Greeks back before their charge.

  “Goddess,” Diomedes gasps, “the immortal Ares protects Hector and . . .”

  “DO I NOT PROTECT YOU?” roars Athena, fifteen feet tall and growing, looming over the fading glow of Diomedes.

  “Yes, Goddess, but . . .”

  “Diomedes, joy of my heart, cut down that Trojan and the god who protects him!”

  Diomedes looks startled, even horrified. “We mortals may not kill a god . . .”

  “Where is that written?” booms Athena and leans over Diomedes, injecting him with something new, pouring energy from her personal god-field to his. The goddess grabs the hapless Sthenelus and throws him thirty feet from the chariot. Athena takes the reins of Diomedes’ chariot and whips the horses forward, straight toward Hector and Ares and the entire Trojan army.

  Diomedes readies his spear as if he fully plans to kill a god—to slay Ares.

  And Aphrodite wants to use me to kill Athena herself, I think, heart pounding with the terror and excitement of the moment. Things may soon be going quite differently than Homer predicted here on the plains of Troy.

  12

  Above the Asteroid Belt

  The ship began decelerating almost as soon as it left the Jovian magnetosphere, so their great ballistic arc above the plane of the ecliptic to Mars on the far side of the sun would take several standard days rather than hours. This was good for Mahnmut and Orphu of Io since they had a lot to discuss.

  Soon after their departure, Ri Po and Korus III in the forward control module announced that they were deploying the boron sail. Mahnmut watched through ship’s sensors as the circular sail was unfolded and trailed seven kilometers behind them on eight bucky cables, then deployed to its full radius of five kilometers. It looked like a black circle cut out of the starfield to Mahnmut as he watched the stern video feed.

  Orphu of Io left his hull-crèche and scuttled down the main cable, along the solenoid torus, and then out along the support cables like a horseshoe-crab Quasimodo, testing everything, tugging everything, scooting on reaction jets above the sail surface to check for cracks or seams or imperfections. He found nothing wrong and shuttled back to the ship with a strange and imperious zero-gravity grace.

  Koros III ordered the modified Matloff/Fennelly magnetic scoop fired up and Mahnmut felt and recorded the ship’s energies changing as the device on the prow of their ship generated a scoop field radius of 1,400 kilometers, shoveling in loose ions and concentrating on gathering up the solar wind.

  How long is this going to take to decelerate us enough to be able to stop at Mars? asked Mahnmut on the common line, thinking that Orphu would answer.

  It was the imperious Koros III who responded. As ship velocity decreases and the effective area of the scoop increases, always keeping sail temperature from exceeding its melting point of two thousand degrees Kelvin, ship mass will equal 4×10 to the sixth power, and therefore deceleration from our current velocity of 0.1992 c to 0.001 c—the inelastic collision point—will require 23.6 standard years.

  Twenty-three-point-six standard years! cried Mahnmut over the common line. That was more discussion time than he had bargained for.

  That would slow us only to a still-sizable velocity of 300 kilometers per second, said Koros III. One thousandth light speed is nothing to sneeze at where we’re going in-system.

  Sounds like it’s going to be a hard landing on Mars, said Mahnmut.

  Orphu made a rumbling, sneezing sound on the line.

  The Callistan navigator came online. We’re not going to depend only upon the ion boron-sail deceleration, Mahnmut. The actual trip will take a little under eleven standard days. And our velocity upon entering Mars orbit will be less than six kilometers per second.

  That’s better, said Mahnmut. He was in the control cradle of The Dark Lady, but all his familiar sensors and controls were dark. It was strange to be picking up all data other than his own life support from the larger ship’s sensors. What makes the difference?

  The solar wind, said Orphu through the hull-crèche hardline. It averages about 300 km/sec out here and has an ion density of 10 to the sixth protons/m to the third power. We started with a half tank of Jovian hydrogen and a quarter tank of deuterium, and we’re going to strip more hydrogen and deuterium from the solar wind with the Matloff/Fennelly scoop and fire the four fusion engines on the bow just after passing the sun. That’s where the real deceleration is going to kick in.

  I can’t wait, said Mahnmut.

  Me too, said Orphu of Io. He made the rumbling, sneezing sound again. Mahnmut thought that the huge moravec had either no sense of irony or a wickedly sharp one.

  Mahnmut read À la recherche du temps perdu—Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—while the ship passed some 140,000,000 kilometers above the Asteroid Belt.

  Orphu had downloaded the French language in all of its classic intricacies along with the novel and biographical information on Proust, but Mahnmut ended up reading the book in five English translations because English was the lost language he had concentrated his own studies in
over the past e-century and a half and he felt more comfortable judging literature in it. Orphu had chuckled at this and reminded the smaller moravec that comparing Proust to Mahnmut’s beloved Shakespeare was a mistake, that they were as different in substance as the rocky, terraformed in-system world they were headed for and their own familiar Jovian moons, but Mahnmut read it again in English anyway.

  When he was finished—knowing that it had been a cursory multiple reading, but eager to start the dialogue—he contacted Orphu on tightbeam since the Ionian moravec was out of his crèche, checking the boron-sail cables again, lashed firmly to lifelines this time because of the increasing deceleration.

  I don’t know, said Mahnmut. I just don’t see it. It all seems like the overwrought musings of an aesthete to me.

  Aesthete? Orphu swiveled one of his communication stalks to lock in the tightbeam while his manipulators and flagella were busy spot-welding a cable connector. To Mahnmut, watching on rear video, the white welding-arc looked like a star against the black sail behind the awkward mass of Orphu. Mahnmut, are you talking about Proust or his Marcel-narrator?

  Is there a difference? Even as he sent the sarcastic query, Mahnmut knew he was being unfair. He had sent Orphu hundreds—perhaps thousands—of e-mails over the last dozen e-years, explaining the difference between the Poet named “Will” in the sonnets and the historical artist named Shakespeare. He suspected the Proust, however dense and impenetrable, to be just as complex when it came to identity of author and characters.

  Orphu of Io ignored that question and sent back—Admit that you loved Proust’s comic vision. He is, above almost all else, a comic writer.

  Was there a comic vision? I saw little comedy in the work. Mahnmut was serious about this. It was not that the human sense of humor was alien to Mahnmut or moravecs; even the earliest spacefaring, self-evolving, only dimly sentient robots created and dispatched by the human race before the rubicon pandemic had been programmed to understand humor. Communication with human beings—real, two-way communication—had been impossible without humor. It was as human as anger or logic or jealousy or pride—all elements he had noticed and noted in Proust’s endless novel. But Proust and his protagonists as comic writers, comic characters? Mahnmut failed to see it, and if Orphu were right, it was a major oversight. It had been Mahnmut who spent decades on finding the word-play humor and satire in the Bard’s plays, Mahnmut who had ferreted out even the tiniest ironies in Shakespeare’s sonnets.