by Tad Williams
Ajax was shaking his huge head. "It is Agamemnon's own stiff neck that has brought this on us," he growled.
"It is the stiff necks of both of them," aged Phoinix replied. "Why are the greatest always so quick to fury, so swollen with pride?"
Paul felt that he was expected to say something, perhaps offer some wise Odyssean aphorism on the foibles of the mighty, but he was not quite ready to attempt improvised rhetoric of the kind that all this Classical conversation seemed to require. He tried to compensate by looking properly concerned.
Hang on a bit, he suddenly thought. I damn well should be concerned. If the Trojans come down on us and drive us into this ocean—and there's no reason that might not he in the cards on this go-round of the simulation—then it's not just a bunch of Puppets that get killed, spouting poetry. It'll be me and Azador, too.
Lulled by the familiarity of names, almost charmed by seeing such a famous place brought to life, he had lost track of just what he had sworn he would never forget.
If I don't take it seriously, he reminded himself, it will kill me.
The camp of Achilles and his Myrmidons was at the far end of the Greek flotilla, almost on the beach; Paul and his escorts walked a long way in the gray shadows of the boats. The Myrmidon soldiers sat or stood around their tents, dicing, arguing, full of what seemed to Paul like raw nervous energy. As he and the others approached, the men watched with faces either angry or sullen with shame; none greeted them as others had so cheerfully elsewhere in the camp. The split between Agamemnon and Achilles was clearly doing nothing good for morale.
Achilles' hut was only a little smaller than Agamemnon's, but workmanlike and undecorated—a place for a famous warrior to sleep and nothing more. A slender, handsome young man sat on a stool before the door, his chin propped on his hands, looking as though he had lost his best friend. His armor did not seem to fit him correctly, as though the pieces had been improperly tied. When he heard the footsteps he lifted his head and looked at Paul and the others nervously, but with what seemed no recognition.
Old Phoinix clearly recognized him, though, and greeted him. "Please, faithful Patroclus, tell the noble Achilles that Phoinix, with bold Ajax and famed Odysseus, would speak with him."
"He's sleeping," the young man said. "He's not well."
"Come—surely he will not turn away his old friends." Phoinix could not entirely disguise his irritation. Patroclus looked at him, then at Paul and massive Ajax, as though trying to decide what to do.
Something in the young man's hesitancy set Paul's revived sense of danger on edge. It was natural that in such a delicate situation, caught between the wishes of honored comrades-in-arms and the pride of his lord, Achilles, that this Patroclus should find himself uncertain of how to proceed, but something about the youth seemed subtly out of place.
"I'll tell him," Patroclus said at last, then disappeared inside the hut. He emerged a few moments later with his face set in an expression of disapproval and nodded them inside.
Someone had put in an effort to make the dwelling clean; the sandy floor had been swept with a branch, and the armor and few other possessions were all neatly placed along one wall. At the center of the room, stretched on a bed of boughs that had been covered with a wool rug, lay the focus of everyone's worries, Trojans and Greeks alike. He, too, was smaller than Ajax, who seemed to be the largest man in the whole countryside, but he was tall by any other standard and built like a marble statue, every muscle beneath his sun-browned skin sharply defined. Half-naked, with a cloak drawn over him like a sheet, he looked like a romantic painting come to life.
Achilles lifted his handsome head of dark golden curls and stared at them. He tilted his head to one side for a moment, as though listening to a voice no one else could hear, then turned back to face his guests. He did not look ill—his color, as far as Paul could tell inside the dark hut, seemed to be good—but there was a great lassitude to his movements.
"Tell Agamemnon I . . . I am sick," he said. "I cannot fight. There is no use sending people to ask me, even. . . ." again he paused, his eyes focusing distantly, ". . . even you, Phoinix, my old tutor."
The aged man looked to Paul, as though expecting him to offer the first arguments, but Paul did not want to dive in quite so quickly. Instead, as Phoinix took up the slack by describing Agamemnon's generous offer of reparations in intricate detail, Paul watched Achilles' reactions. The famous anger was absent, or at least suppressed. Although he was clearly annoyed, it seemed the petty frustration of a man awakened from a nap to no useful purpose, which suggested that Patroclus had told the truth. But Paul could not remember anything about Achilles being sick in The Iliad. Perhaps this was one of the variations, sprung from the complexity of an endlessly reiterating environment.
Phoinix's blandishments did nothing to change Achilles' mind. Ajax spoke brusquely about the duty that Achilles owed to the other Greeks, but that did not seem to impress the golden warrior either.
"You don't understand," he said, his voice rising a little. "I cannot fight—not now. Not yet. I am weak and sickly. I don't care about all your gifts." He hesitated again as if trying to remember something, or as if a small voice spoke in his ear. "A man can win prizes," he continued at last with slow deliberation, as though quoting a famous saying, "but there is no winning a man's life back again when it has passed the guard of his teeth."
He would say no more, and even Phoinix was at last forced to turn away in frustration and lead Paul, Ajax, and silent Azador out again.
"Will you come with us to give Agamemnon this sorrowful news?" the old man asked as they paced back along the row of beached ships. He looked ten years older, and Paul was again struck by how deadly serious these matters were to all those here.
"No, I wish to be alone and think," Paul said. "There is nothing I can say to make it better, but there may be some . . . device that I can come up with. That my mind can conceive." He didn't know why he was bothering to try to talk like them, really. The system would adapt to whatever form of speech he chose.
As Phoinix walked off to finish his sad mission, accompanied by hulking Ajax, Paul suddenly realized what was troubling him. He almost said it out loud to Azador, then decided he would be better off keeping his own counsel.
They didn't quite talk like everyone else, or act like everyone else, he thought. Achilles did a little better than his friend Patroclus, but even he sounded like he was getting some prompting. Could they be outsiders—visitors on the network? Of course, that was no guarantee that they wouldn't be enemies. They might even be members of the Grail Brotherhood having a pleasant holiday in one of their billion-credit playgrounds. He would have to keep an eye on them, think carefully. He was here for a reason, he had to believe that—Penelope, Vaala, whatever her name was, must intend something to happen for him at Troy.
The black mountain. She said I had to find it . . . but there aren't any mountains at all around here.
"I am going back to the raft," Azador said suddenly. "You see these people—they will all kill each other soon. I have no reason to let them kill me, too."
"Where will you go?"
The gypsy's shrug was eloquent. "It does not matter. Azador, he can take care of himself, whatever may happen. But you, Ionas. . . ." He smirked, suddenly. "Odysseus. You are going to wish you had gone with me. This sort of thing is too dangerous for you."
Paul was a little stung, but tried to sound matter-of-fact. "Could be. But I have to stay here. I'll wish you good luck, though—I won't forget you. Thank you for your help and your companionship."
Azador barked a laugh. "You must be an Englishman, with those manners—they smell of some English fancy-school. Are you an Englishman?" Paul's irritated silence made him laugh again. "I knew it! You, my friend, you will need more than good luck." He turned and walked up the beach.
What the hell am I doing? Paul thought. He's right—I should get bloody well out of here. This place is going to turn into a killing field—it's going to be
as bad as anything in the First World War. But here I'll be, playing guessing games and trotting around trying to figure out why some angel sent me here while a bunch of overmuscled madmen with spears try to kill me. An idiot, that's what I am, and I'm tired of it.
But what else can I do?
Somewhere on the far side of the wall a flock of crows rose from the field and spun upward like a lazy black cyclone before breaking apart and scattering across the sky. Paul watched them go, wondering how anyone could possibly conceive of that as anything other than a bad omen. He kicked the sand, considering what to do next.
I suppose it wouldn't hurt to explore a bit—look around the camp, talk to a few people. Then maybe later I'll drop back in on Achilles, greatest of warriors. . . .
CHAPTER 25
A Job with Unusual Benefits
NETFEED/NEWS: Silence from Mars Base
(visual: MBC project footage—construction of base)
VO: The largest construction project on Mars has gone silent and work has stopped. Space agency officials say they suspect a reproduction error may have infected the buglike builder robots.
(visual: General Equipment VPPR Corwin Ames at press conference)
AMES: "The problem is, we don't control these things. We just built the originals and sent them out. These are highly complex systems that reproduce themselves mechanically. If something in the blueprint mutates—changes for some reason, like a scratch on one of the templates—nothing except natural selection is going to stop it. We just have to hope that the bad changes have a high enough mortality rate that the breeder-builders weed them out in the next generation. . . ."
Brigadier General Daniel Yacoubian simply appeared in the imaginary dining hall; if his entrance had been accompanied by a puff of smoke, it would have made a very fine conjuring trick. "I got your message," he growled. "It better be important—I'm on the road and I'm in the middle of about a thousand things."
Robert Wells seemed to take an almost perverse pleasure in presenting himself honestly, even in VR. On close inspection, his sim showed every day of his one hundred and eleven years—the skin dull in some places, shiny in others, the movements slow and brittle. The anti-aging treatments were keeping him alive and even active, but they could not make him young, and he allowed his virtual presentation to reflect this important truth. Yacoubian found it perversely irritating.
"You are on a secure line, Daniel, aren't you?" Wells asked.
"Of course I am. I'm not an idiot. Your message said it was a priority matter."
"Ah. Good. Thank you for responding so quickly." Wells seated himself and waited for Yacoubian to do the same. Just beyond the open wall the Pacific Ocean seethed in the rocky coastal channels, tossing up confetti handfuls of spray. The general wondered idly if it were purely code, or whether Wells' engineers had done the easy thing and used actual images of the real-life ocean. He had a feeling that Wells would not do it the easy way, even for an environment that so few other people would ever see.
"So what's up? I don't think we've either of us got much time to waste, with countdown at T minus seventy-two hours or whatever it is."
"You sound a little nervous, Daniel." Wells had the unnerving habit of sitting very, very still, whether in RL or VR. It made Yacoubian positively itchy. The general drew a cigar from his breast pocket but did not light it.
"Jesus, is that what you got me on the line to talk about? Whether I'm nervous or not?"
Wells lifted his hand. The bones showed beneath the nearly translucent skin as he waved it. "No, of course not. We're all a bit . . . concerned, of course. Even after all these years of planning, of anticipation, it's hard to face the moment without feeling a little uncertainty. But it is the Ceremony I wanted to talk about."
Yacoubian put the cigar in his mouth, then took it out again. "Yeah?"
"I've just had the strangest call from Jongleur. I don't quite know what to make of it. For one thing, it was the first time I've ever talked to the Old Man when he wasn't wearing his Curse-of-the-Pharaohs sim. He called me up and left it on voice-only—blank screen. The whole experience was quite . . . old-fashioned."
Yacoubian scowled. "Are you sure it was him?"
"Please, Daniel. Do I ask you whether you're certain you're bombing the right country or defoliating the right jungles? It was the Old Man, all right."
"So what did he want? Jesus, Bob, you take your sweet time getting to the point."
"What are you, Daniel—seventy or so? It's charming that you're still young enough to be impatient. We're going to have a long time, a very long time, to think about these things after the fact if we do them right, but no time at all if we do them wrong."
"What are you talking about? Now you've got me worried." Yacoubian stood up and walked to the edge of the room. Outside, the Pacific stretched away on either hand as far as he could see, hugging the intricate coastline like an unimaginably large two-piece jigsaw puzzle.
"I just mean we shouldn't hurry things, Daniel. That's how mistakes get made." Wells pushed his chair back a little bit and rested his hands on the edge of the table. "Jongleur doesn't want me to go through the Ceremony when everyone else does. He wants me to sit it out with him and Jiun Bhao—fake it, I guess you would say."
"Jesus Christ!" Yacoubian whirled, his face contorted with anger. "What the hell is that about? Is he going to bump the rest of us off or something?"
Wells shrugged minutely. "I don't know. It wouldn't make much sense—we all need each other to make this work. I asked him why, of course. He said that Jiun Bhao wants to wait and go through the Ceremony last and Jongleur didn't feel he could refuse. The Old Man said it didn't seem fair to me, as one of the three project managers, if I didn't get to do the same."
"That's horseshit and you know it."
"Mostly, yes, I'm sure it is. But there's something going on that I can't grasp. It wouldn't do any good to talk to Jiun about it—you'd have better luck getting a rock to tap dance. I figure that they're nervous. They want to hold back because they're not sure it will work properly, and they want me because I'm the only one who can get the technical problems solved if something goes wrong."
Yacoubian's hands were balled into fists. "So . . . so the rest of us are just some kind of . . . guinea pigs? Canaries in a goddamn mine shaft?"
"Not you, Daniel." Wells smiled gently. "I told him that he had to include you in anything I was doing."
"You . . . oh." The general seemed uncertain of what to do next. "I . . . that's . . . thank you, Bob. But I still don't get it."
"I don't either, and all of this happening at the last minute leaves me a little uneasy. Let's make a few calls, shall we? Just listen, if you don't mind—I won't put you on view to any of them."
In marked contrast to Wells, Ymona Dedoblanco, the owner of forty-five percent of the stock of Krittapong Enterprises and thus one of the globe's wealthiest people, maintained a public sim that was aggressively misleading. Its physical appearance was pegged to her time as a Miss World contestant—a moment of ancient history that was of little import to anyone except Dedoblanco herself.
The former Miss Philippines pushed her shiny black hair away from her face. "What do you want? I am terribly, terribly busy. There are so many legal things to settle. . . ." She glared. "Well?"
"And it's a pleasure to see you, too," Wells said, smiling. "I just wanted to see if you had any last-minute questions."
"Questions?" It was hard not to see the lion-goddess face Jongleur had created for her as she shook her head in annoyance. "I have been waiting for this for twenty years. I have asked all my questions. My lawyers and . . . science people, whatever they are called, they have looked at everything."
"Are you worried at all? It's a big step for all of us."
"Worried? Such things are for little people, timid people. Is that all you wanted to know?"
"I guess so. I'll see you at the Ceremony, then."
She did not waste time with a long farewell, breaking the co
nnection so quickly that Yacoubian could almost hear the transoceanic silence before Wells selected another number.
Edouard Ambodulu, although obviously pleased to be the subject of Wells' concern, had nothing to add. The African president-for-life was busy with his own arrangements, many of which had resulted in various human rights groups making special pleas to the United Nations, all of which had been dutifully moved to the most distant part of the calendar by UNCov bureaucrats who knew hopeless causes when they saw them. Neither did Fereszny nor Nabilsi nor any of the other Grail Brotherhood inner circle seem to have any new concerns, at least none that Wells could turn up with his delicate probing. Of all the busy autocrats, only Ricardo Klement did not seem to resent the interruption.
The Latin American businessman—a euphemism which would have made even the most grasping, hardened graduate of Harvard's MBA program quiver with indignation—was a little reticent at first, perhaps because of Robert Wells' known enmity to Jongleur. Klement had hitched his wagon to the Old Man's star early, and had kept that wagon hitched by an ever more embarrassing descent into flattery and abject approval of anything Jongleur proposed. Yacoubian, watching invisibly, could not help but be impressed by how Wells dealt with him, relaxing the other man with small talk, making it clear that this was not some last-minute attempt at a political maneuver against Klement's beloved master.
"No, I'm just checking to see if anyone has any questions," Wells said. "We've had our differences, you and I, I'm not pretending we haven't, but we're all in this together, after all. We succeed or fail together."
"We will succeed," Klement said fervently. Oddly, of all the Brotherhood Wells had contacted, the Argentinean was the only one who shared Robert Wells' own brutal self-honesty. His sim showed him just as he was, festooned with tubes and half-obscured by dermal patches—a man struggling to hold off death in a private Buenos Aires hospital. "We have worked too hard not to succeed. Señor Jongleur has created a miracle. With your help, too, of course, Señor Wells."