Ilium

by Dan Simmons

  “I have not dreamt of you, weak-looking man,” she says.

  I ignore the insult and say nothing.

  “But I ask you this,” she continues. “I once dreamt of King Agamemnon and his queen Clytaemnestra as a great royal bull and cow. What does this dream say to you, O Prophet?”

  “I’m no prophet,” I say. “Your future is merely my past. But you see Agamemnon as a bull because he will be slaughtered like an ox upon his arrival home to Sparta.”

  “In his own palace?”

  “No,” I say. I feel like I’m in the crucible of oral exams at Hamilton College, my undergraduate alma mater. “Agamemnon will be killed in the house of Aigisthos.”

  “By whose hand? At whose will?” presses Cassandra.

  “Clytaemnestra’s.”

  “For what reason, O Non-prophet?”

  “Her anger at Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigeneia.”

  Cassandra continues to stare at me, but she nods slightly to the other women. “And what do you dream of me and my future, O Seer?” she asks sarcastically.

  “You will be savagely raped in this very temple,” I say.

  None of the women appears to be breathing. I wonder if I’ve gone too far. Well, this witch wants the truth, I’ll give her the truth.”

  Cassandra seems unfazed, even pleased. I realize that the young prophetess has been seeing this rape for most of her life. No one has listened to her warnings. It must be refreshing for her to hear someone else confirm her vision.

  But her voice sounds anything but pleased when she speaks again. “Who will rape me in this temple?”

  “Ajax.”

  “Little Ajax or Big Ajax?” asks the woman. Cassandra looks neurotic and anxious, but also very lovely in a vulnerable way.

  “Little Ajax,” I say. “Ajax of Locris.”

  “And what will I be doing upstairs in this temple, Little Man, when Big Ajax of Locris ravages me?”

  “Trying to save or hide the Palladion,” I answer. I nod toward the small statue just ten feet from me.

  “And does Little Ajax go unpunished, O Man?”

  “He’ll drown on his way home,” I say. “When his ship is wrecked on the Gyraean Rocks. Most scholars think this is a sign of Athena’s wrath.”

  “Will she bring doom to Ajax of Locris out of anger at my rape or to avenge the desecration of her temple?” demands Cassandra.

  “I don’t know. Probably the latter.”

  “Who else will be in the temple upstairs when I am raped, O Man?”

  I have to think a second here. “Odysseus,” I say at last, my voice rising at the end like a student’s hoping his answer is correct.

  “Who else besides Odysseus, the son of Laertes, will be witness to my defilement that night?”

  “Neoptolemus,” I say at last.

  “Achilles’ son?” interrupts Theano with a sneer. “He’s nine years old back in Argos.”

  “No,” I say. “He’s seventeen years old and a fierce warrior. They will call him here from Skyros after Achilles is killed, and Neoptolemus will be with Odysseus in the belly of the great wooden horse.”

  “Wooden horse?” says Andromache.

  But I can see from the dilated pupils in Helen, Herophile, and Cassandra that these women have had visions of the horse.

  “Does this Neoptolemus have another name?” asks Cassandra. She has the tone and intensity of a dedicated public prosecutor.

  “He will be known to future generations as Pyrrhos,” I say. I’m trying to remember minutiae from the BD scholia, from the Cyclic poets, from Proclus’ Cypria, and from my Pindar. It’s been a long time since I read Pindar. “Neoptolemus will not sail back to Achilles’ old home on Skyros after the war,” I say, “but will land in Molossia on the western side of the island, where later kings will call him Pyrrhos and say they are descended from him.”

  “Will he commit any other acts on the night the Greeks take Troy?” presses Cassandra.

  I look at my jury of Trojan women—Priam’s wife, Priam’s daughter, Scamandrius’ mother, Athena’s priestess, a Sibyl with paranormal powers. Then this vision-accursed child-woman and Helen, wife of both Menelaus and Paris. On the whole, I would prefer OJ’s jurors.

  “Pyrrhos, known now as Neoptolemus, will slaughter King Priam that night in Zeus’s temple,” I say. “He will throw Scamandrius down from the walls and dash the baby’s brains out on the rocks. He will personally drive Andromache to the slaveship. This I have told the others already.”

  “And will this night come soon?” presses Cassandra.

  “Yes.”

  “In months and years or days and weeks?”

  “Days and weeks,” I say. I try to estimate how many days it will be before Achilles will kill Hector and Troy will fall if and when the Iliad time-table reasserts itself. Not many.

  “Now tell us—tell me, O Man—what my fate will be after the rape of Ilium and Cassandra,” snaps Cassandra.

  Here I hesitate. My mouth goes dry. “Your fate?” I manage.

  “My fate, O Man of the Future,” hisses the beautiful blond. “Surely, ravaged or not, I’ll not be left behind when Andromache is dragged off to slavery and noble Helen is claimed again by angry Menelaus. What is to become of Cassandra, O Man?”

  I try to lick my lips. Can she see her own fate? I have no idea if Apollo’s gift of prophecy goes beyond the fall of Troy. Someone, I think it was the poet-scholar Robert Graves, translated Cassandra’s name as ‘she who entangles men.’ “ But she’s also someone who has been cursed by the gods always to tell the truth. I decide to do the same.

  “Your beauty will result in Agamemnon claiming you as his concubine,” I say, my voice barely audible. “He’ll take you home with him, as his . . . concubine.”

  “Will I bear him children before we arrive?”

  “I think so,” I say, sounding preposterous even to myself. I keep getting my Homer mixed up with my Virgil, my Virgil mixed up with my Aeschylus, and all of the above mixed up with Euripides. Hell, even Shakespeare took a whack at this story. “Twin sons,” I say after a pause. “Teledamus and . . . uh . . . Pelops.”

  “And when I arrive at Sparta, Agamemnon’s home?” prompts Cassandra.

  “Clytaemnestra will kill you with the same axe she murders Agamemnon with,” I say, my voice more shrill than I meant it to be.

  Cassandra smiles. It is not a pleasant smile. “Before or after she beheads Agamemnon?”

  “After,” I say. Fuck it. If she can take it, I can. I’m probably dead anyway. But I’ll use the taser on as many of these bitches as I can before they drag me down. “Clytaemnestra has to chase you for a while,” I say. “But she catches you. She cuts your head off as well. And then she kills your babies.”

  The seven women look at me for a long, silent moment, and their gazes are unreadable. I tell myself never to play poker with any of these dames. Then Cassandra says, “Yes, this man knows the future. Whether his vision and presence here are a gift to us from the gods, or a trick of the gods to uncover our treachery, I do not know. But we must trust him with our secret. The time before the end of Ilium is too short to do otherwise.”

  Helen nods. “Hock-en-bear-eeee, use your medallion to go to the camps of the Achaeans. Bring Achilles back to the foyer of the nursery in Hector’s house at the time of the next changing of the Ilium guards.”

  I think. The guards on the wall change and the gongs ring at what would be 11:30 a.m. That’s about an hour from now.

  “What if Achilles doesn’t want to come with me?” I ask.

  The collective gaze the women pour on me now is four parts contempt combined with three parts pity.

  I QT the hell out of there.

  I shouldn’t do it, it’s foolish, and it’s mostly because I’m afraid to face Achilles, but all through Cassandra’s oral quiz, I’d found myself curious about the little robot back on Olympos. I’d seen odd things on Olympos before, of course—not counting the gods and goddesses, who
are weird enough—odd things such as the giant insectoid Healer. But something about the little robot, if that’s what it is, had struck me. It didn’t seem part of either of the worlds I’ve been dividing my time between over the past nine years—neither of Olympos nor of Ilium. The little robot seemed more of my world. My old world. The real world. Don’t ask me why. I’ve never seen a humanoid robot except in sci-fi movies.

  Besides, I tell myself, I have an hour before having to present Achilles to Hector. I tug on the Hades Helmet and quantum teleport back to the Great Hall of the Gods.

  The little robot and the other devices, including the big crab-thing, are gone, but Zeus is still here. And so are more of the gods. Including the war god, Ares, who was last seen healing in the tank next to Aphrodite.

  Mother of Mercy, where’s Aphrodite now? She can see me, even when I’m wearing this helmet. She ordered the Muse to give the helmet to me only because she could track me down any time she wants. Is she out of the tank already? Jesus Christ.

  Ares is roaring at all the gods while Zeus sits on his throne. “Madness rules below!” cries the god of war. “I’m gone for a few days, and you let the war get out of hand. Kaos rules! Achilles has killed Agamemnon and taken command of the Achaean armies. Hector is in retreat when victory for the Trojans was royal Zeus’s command.”

  Agamemnon dead? Achilles in command? Holy shit. We’re not in the Iliad anymore, Toto.

  “And what of the automata I brought to you, Lord Zeus? These . . . moravecs?” demands Apollo, his voice echoing in the huge hall. I see more gods and goddesses filling the mezzanines above. The swimming pool viewing screen cut into the floor is showing scenes of madness and murder on the Trojan battle lines and in the Argive camp now. But my focus is on the huge, powerfully built, white-bearded Zeus where he sits on his golden throne. His wrists are massive, like something sculpted out of Carrara marble by Rodin. I’m close enough to see the gray hairs on Zeus’s bare chest.

  “Calm down, Apollo, noble archer,” rumbles the god of all gods. “I’ve ordered the moravec automata eliminated. Hera has destroyed them both by now.”

  Can this get worse? I wonder.

  Right then, Aphrodite enters the hall between Achilles’ mother, Thetis, and my Muse.

  40

  Equatorial Ring

  Daeman screamed all the way up.

  Savi and Harman could have been screaming as well—should have been screaming—but Daeman could hear only his own screams. As soon as their chairs took off vertically and then began to pitch over as they rotated around their axis of lightning—Daeman facedown 10,000 feet above the green Mediterranean Basin and screaming all the way—two great restrictions began to push in on him: one the pressure of acceleration, but the other a constant, all-over pressing-in that had to be some kind of a forcefield. It not only held him tight on the red cushions of his hurtling chair, but it pressed against his face, chest, into his mouth, into his lungs.

  Daeman still screamed.

  The three chairs continued to rotate counterclockwise around the thick bolt of white energy, and suddenly Daeman was facing up at the stars and rings. He continued to scream, knowing that the chair would continue rotating, that this time he would fall out, and that now the fall would be from tens of thousands of feet higher.

  He didn’t fall, but he screamed down at the Earth as they flew higher. Their trajectory seemed almost flat now, almost parallel to the surface of the planet so far below. It was night over Central Asia, but towering cumulus stretching hundreds of miles was lighted from within, quick flickers of lightning illuminating the red landmass glimpsed between the pearly cloud cover. Daeman didn’t know it was central Asia. The chairs rotated around again, showing him the stars and rings and a quite visible thin layer of atmosphere—below them now!—and the sun seemed to rise again in the west, prisming across that meniscus of atmosphere in bright red and yellow streamers.

  They were out of 99 percent of the atmosphere now, but Daeman didn’t know that. The forcefield fed him air, kept him from being torn apart by g-forces, and allowed a pocket of air into which he could scream. He was getting hoarse by the time he realized that they were approaching the e-ring.

  The ring wasn’t what he’d always imagined, but he was too busy clutching the arms of his chair and screaming to notice this. Daeman had always visualized the posts’ e- and p-rings as being made up of thousands of glowing glass castles through which one could see the post-humans partying and doing whatever post-humans do. It wasn’t that way at all.

  Most of the glowing objects they were rising toward so quickly, the wiggling, writhing thread of lightning still pitching up and away from them as they rode it higher, were complex structures of struts and cables and long glass tubes, more like antennae than orbital houses. At the end of some these structures were glowing globes of energy, each with pulsing black spheres at their center. Other structures supported giant mirrors—each stretching miles across, Daeman realized through his screaming—which were reflecting or beaming blue or yellow or dull-white shafts of energy to still other mirrors. Gleaming rings and spheres, looking to be made of the same energy-matter and exotic materials as Atlantis, fired lasers and pulsed attitude thrusters in studied bursts that opened and spread in glowing cones of particles. None of the spheres or rings or structures looked like they could be homes for post-humans.

  The Earth’s horizon became noticeably curved, then curved further, like a bow being slowly bent. The sun set again in the west and the sky exploded with stars only slightly less bright than the glowing ring structures above. Far below Daeman—hundreds of miles, at least—he could see a range of snow-topped mountains glowing in the starlight and ringlight. Farther to the west, near the sharp-curved limb of the world, an ocean gleamed. Suddenly the rotation of the chairs slowed and Daeman craned his neck and looked up.

  Set amidst the moving gantry-structures and mirrors moved a mountain with a glowing city wrapped around it.

  Daeman paused in his screaming as the chairs tilted forward more wildly and the forcefield pressed him down into the cushions and straight-backed chair more fiercely, and in that second of pause he noticed that the torquing shaft of energy along which they were sliding ended in that glowing city on the giant slab of rock.

  This city was not made of energy-stuff. It seemed to be made of glass, and each of the hundred thousand glass panes and facets was illuminated from within. It looked like a giant Japanese lantern to Daeman. Just as he realized that their twisting triangle of chairs was going to crash into one of the tallest circular spires on the near end of that orbiting mountain, his chair pitched completely over and the forcefield squeezed the breath out of him as they decelerated hard enough to make his vision go from red to black and back to red again.

  They hadn’t slowed enough. Daeman screamed a final time, his voice completely hoarse now, and then they slammed into the building that must have been a hundred stories tall.

  There was no crash of breaking glass, no fatal sudden stop. The building wall warped and absorbed them and funneled them down a long glowing cone, as if they’d dived into yielding yellow rubber, and then the funnel spat them out into a room with six glowing white walls. The shaft of energy disappeared. The chairs flew different directions. The forcefields went off.

  Daeman shouted a final time, slid across a hard floor, bounced off an even harder wall, then ricocheted to the ceiling and back to the floor. Then he saw only blackness.

  He was falling.

  Daeman jerked to consciousness as his body and brain told him he was tumbling, falling. From the chair? To the Earth? He opened his mouth to scream again but closed it as he realized that he was floating in midair with Savi holding one of his arms and Harman the other.

  Floating? Falling! He writhed and wriggled, but Savi and Harman—who were also floating in the white room—tumbled in the air with him, still holding him by the arms.

  “It’s all right,” said Savi. “We’re in zero-g.”

  “In w
hat?” gasped Daeman.

  “Zero gravity. No weight. Here, put this on.” She handed him one of the crawler’s osmosis masks. Someone had already pulled his thermskin cowl over his face and the smartsuit had extended its gloves over his hands. Now Daeman struggled in confusion, but the old woman and the older man tugged the clear osmosis mask into place over his nose and mouth.

  “It’s meant as an emergency rebreather in case of fire or toxic gases,” said Savi. “But it’ll work in vacuum for a few hours.”

  “Vacuum?” repeated Daeman.

  “The posts’ city has lost gravity and a lot of its air,” said Harman. “We’ve already been through the wall while you were unconscious. There’s enough air to swim through, but not quite thick enough to breathe.”

  Enough air to swim through? Already been through the wall? thought Daeman through his headache. They’re both crazy now. “How do you lose gravity?” he said aloud.

  “I think they used forcefields to give them some gravity on this asteroid,” said Savi. “This rock isn’t big enough to generate much of its own, and the city inside shows some signs of being oriented toward the ground.”

  Daeman didn’t ask what an asteroid was. He didn’t particularly care. “Can we get back down?” he said, but immediately added, “I’m not sitting on one of those chairs again.”

  Savi’s smile was visible through her osmosis mask. She’d taken off her outer clothing to let her thermskin work more efficiently—she was wearing a peach color—and the suit, no thicker than a coat of paint, showed how scrawny and bony the old woman really was. Harman was also wearing only his blue thermskin. Daeman looked down and realized they’d stripped him of his real clothes so that his green thermskin showed how pudgy he was. With the thermskin and osmosis mask in place, Daeman heard the others’ voices through his cowl earpatches, and heard the slight echo of his own voice rasping in the built-in microphones.