by Dan Simmons
My QT medallion. He uses his left hand to touch the small quantum teleportation device where it hangs against his chest under his tunic. Why did I think I had nothing valuable with me? Even if I can’t use this any longer without being detected and pursued by the gods, it’s unique. Invaluable. Hockenberry pulls out the flashlight and holds it extended the way he used to aim his taser baton when he owned one. He wishes he had one now.
It occurs to him that it might be a god climbing the last of the eleven flights of steps just below him. The Masters of Olympos had been known to sneak into Ilium disguised as mortals. The gods certainly had reason enough to kill him and to take back their QT medallion.
The climbing figure comes up the last few stairs and steps into the open. Hockenberry flicks on the flashlight, shining the beam full on the figure.
It is a small and only vaguely humanoid form—its knees are backward, its arms are articulated wrong, its hands are interchangeable, and it has no face as such—barely a meter tall, sheathed in dark plastic and gray-black-and-red metal.
“Mahnmut,” Hockenberry says in relief. He shifts the circle of the flashlight beam away from the little Europan moravec’s vision plate.
“You carrying a sword under that cape,” asks Mahnmut in English, “or are you just happy to see me?”
It’s been Hockenberry’s habit to carry some fuel in his backpack for a small fire when he’s up here. In recent months, this has often meant dried cow chips, but tonight he’s brought plenty of sweet-smelling kindling sold everywhere on the black market today by those woodcutters who had brought back the wood for Paris’s pyre. Now Hockenberry has the little fire going while he and Mahnmut sit on blocks of stone on opposite sides of it. The wind is chill and Hockenberry, at least, is glad for the fire.
“I haven’t seen you around for a few days,” he says to the little moravec. Hockenberry notices how the flames reflect off Mahnmut’s shiny plastic vision plate.
“I’ve been up at Phobos.”
It takes Hockenberry a few seconds to remember that Phobos is one of the moons of Mars. The closer one, he thinks. Or maybe the smaller one. At any rate, a moon. He turns his head to see the huge Hole a few miles to the northeast of Troy: it’s now night on Mars as well—the disk of the Hole is only barely visible against the night sky, and that is only because the stars look slightly different there, more brilliant, or clustered more tightly together, or maybe both. Neither of the Martian moons is visible.
“Anything interesting happen today while I was gone?” asks Mahnmut.
Hockenberry has to chuckle at that. He tells the moravec about the morning funeral services and Oenone’s self-immolation.
“Whoa, doggies,” says Mahnmut. The ex-scholic can only assume that the moravec deliberately uses idiomatic English he thinks is specific to the era Hockenberry had lived through on his Earth. Sometimes it works; sometimes, like now, it’s laughable.
“I don’t remember from the Iliad that Paris had an earlier wife,” continues Mahnmut.
“I don’t think it’s mentioned in the Iliad.” Hockenberry tries to remember if he’d ever taught that fact. He doesn’t think so.
“That must have been pretty dramatic to watch.”
“Yes,” says Hockenberry, “but her accusations about Philoctetes really killing Paris were even more dramatic.”
“Philoctetes?” Mahnmut cocks his head in a way that seemed almost canine to Hockenberry. For whatever reason, he’s come to associate that movement with the idea that Mahnmut is accessing memory banks. “From the play by Sophocles?” asks Mahnmut after a second.
“Yeah. He was the original commander of the Thessalians from Methone.”
“I don’t remember him from the Iliad,” says Mahnmut. “And I don’t think I’ve met him here either.”
Hockenberry shakes his head. “Agamemnon and Odysseus dumped him on the isle of Lemnos years ago, on their way here.”
“Why’d they do that?” Mahnmut’s voice, so human in timbre, sounds interested.
“Because he smelled bad, mostly.”
“Smelled bad? Most of these human heroes smell bad.”
Hockenberry has to blink at that. He remembers thinking just that ten years ago, when he’d first started as a scholic here shortly after his resurrection on Olympos. But somehow he hadn’t noticed it after the first six months or so. Did he smell bad? he wonders. He says, “Philoctetes smelled especially bad because of his suppurating wound.”
“Wound?”
“Snakebite. Bitten by a poisonous snake when he…well, it’s a long story. The usual ‘stealing stuff from the gods’ story. But Philoctetes’ foot and leg got so bad that it just poured pus, smelled bad all the time, and sent the archer into screaming and fainting fits at regular intervals. This was on the boat ride here to Troy ten years ago, remember. So finally Agamemnon, on Odysseus’ advice, just dumped the old man on the island of Lemnos and literally left him to rot there.”
“But he survived?” says Mahnmut.
“Obviously. Probably because the gods kept him alive for some reason, but he was in agony with that rotting foot and leg the whole time.”
Mahmut cocks his head again. “All right…I’m remembering the Sophocles play now. Odysseus went to get him when the seer Helenus told the Greeks that they wouldn’t defeat Troy without Philoctetes’ bow—given to him by…who?…Heracles. Hercules.”
“Yes, he inherited the bow,” says Hockenberry.
“I don’t remember Odysseus going to fetch him. In real life, I mean. During the past eight months.”
Hockenberry shakes his head again. “It was very quietly done. Odysseus was gone for only about three weeks and no one made a big deal about it. When he returned, it was sort of like…oh, yeah, I picked up Philoctetes on my way back from getting the wine.”
“In Sophocles’ play,” says Mahnmut, “Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, was a central figure. But he never met his father when Achilles was alive. Don’t tell me he’s here too?”
“Not that I know of,” says Hockenberry. “Just Philoctetes. And his bow.”
“And now Oenone’s accused him rather than Apollo of killing Paris.”
“Yep.” Hockenberry tosses a few more sticks on the fire. Sparks spin in the wind and rise toward the stars. There is blackness out over the ocean where clouds are moving in. Hockenberry guesses that it might rain before morning. Some nights, he sleeps up here—using his pack as a pillow and his cape for a blanket—but not tonight.
“But how could Philoctetes shift into Slow Time?” asks Mahnmut. The moravec rises and walks to the broken edge of the platform in the dark, evidently having no fear of the hundred-foot-plus drop. “The nanotechnology that allows that shift was only injected into Paris before that single combat, right?”
“You should know,” says Hockenberry. “You moravecs are the ones who injected Paris with the nanothingees so that he could fight the god.”
Mahnmut walks back to the fire but remains standing. He holds out his hands as if to warm them by the flames. Maybe he is warming them, thinks Hockenberry. He knows that parts of moravecs are organic.
“Some of the other heroes—Diomedes, for example—still have Slow-Time nanoclusters left in their systems from when Athena or one of the other gods injected them,” says Mahnmut. “But you’re right, only Paris had them updated ten days ago for the single combat with Apollo.”
“And Philoctetes wasn’t here for the last ten years,” says Hockenberry. “So it doesn’t make any sense that one of the gods would have accelerated him with the Slow-Time nanomemes. And it is acceleration, not a slowing down of time, right?”
“Right,” says the moravec. “‘Slow Time’ is a misnomer. It seems to the Slow-Time traveler that time has stopped—that everything and everyone is frozen in amber—but in reality, the body’s moved into hyperfast action, reacting in milliseconds.”
“Why doesn’t the person just burn up?” asks Hockenberry. He could have followed Apollo and Paris into Slow Time
to watch the battle—in fact, if he’d been there that day, he would have. The gods had riddled his blood and bones with nanomemes for just that purpose, and many was the time he’d shifted into Slow Time to watch the gods prepare one of their Achaean or Trojan heroes for combat. “From friction,” he added. “With the air or whatever…” He broke off lamely. Science wasn’t his strong suit.
But Mahnmut nodded as if the scholic had said something wise. “The Slow-Time accelerator’s body would burn up—from internal heat if nothing else—if the tailored nanoclusters didn’t deal with that as well. It’s part of the body’s nano-generated forcefield.”
“Like Achilles’?”
“Yes.”
“Could Paris have burned up just because of that?” asks Hockenberry. “Some sort of nano-tech failure?”
“Very unlikely,” says Mahnmut and sits on the smaller block of stone. “But why would this Philoctetes kill Paris? What motive would he have?”
Hockenberry shrugs. “In the non-Iliad, non-Homeric tales of Troy, it is Philoctetes who kills Paris. With his bow. And a poisoned arrow. Just as Oenone described. Homer even refers to fetching Philoctetes to bring about the prophecy that Ilium will fall only when Philoctetes joins the fray—in the second book, I think.”
“But the Trojans and the Greeks are allies now.”
Hockenberry has to smile. “Just barely. You know as well as I that there are conspiracies and incipient rebellions brewing in both camps. Nobody but Hector and Achilles is happy about this war with the gods. It’s just a matter of time until there’s another rebellion.”
“But Hector and Achilles make for an almost unbeatable duo. And they have tens of thousands of Trojans and Achaeans loyal to them.”
“So far,” says Hockenberry. “But now maybe the gods themselves have been kibbitzing.”
“Helping Philoctetes shift into Slow Time?” says Mahnmut. “But why? Occam’s Razor suggests that if they wanted Paris dead, they could have just let Apollo kill him as everyone assumed he had. Until today. Until Oenone’s accusation. Why have a Greek assassinate him…” He stops and then murmurs, “Ah, yes.”
“Right,” said Hockenberry. “The gods want to hurry up the next mutiny, get Hector and Achilles out of the way, break up this alliance, and get the Greeks and Trojans killing each other again.”
“Thus the poison,” says the moravec. “So that Paris can live just long enough to tell his wife—his first wife—who really killed him. Now the Trojans will want revenge and even the Greeks loyal to Achilles will be ready to fight to defend themselves. Clever. Has anything else of comparable interest happened today?”
“Agamemnon’s back.”
“No shit?” says Mahnmut.
I need to talk to him about his vernacular vocabulary, thinks Hockenberry. This is like talking to one of my freshmen at IU.
“Yes, correct, no shit,” says Hockenberry. “He’s back from his voyage home a month or two early and has some really surprising news.”
Mahnmut leans forward expectantly. Or at least Hockenberry interprets the body language of the little humanoid cyborg as expressing expectation. The smooth metallic-plastic face shows nothing but reflection of the firelight.
Hockenberry clears his throat. “The people back home are gone,” he says. “Missing. Disappeared.”
Hockenberry had expected some sort of exclamation of surprise, but the little moravec waits silently.
“Everyone gone,” continues Hockenberry. “Not just in Mycenae, where Agamemnon first returned—not just his wife Clytemnestra and his son Orestes and all the rest of that cast, but everyone’s missing. Cities empty. Food sitting uneaten on tables. Horses starving in stables. Dogs pining on empty hearths. Cows unmilked in pastures. Sheep unshorn. Everywhere Agamemnon and his boats put in in the Peloponnese and beyond—Menelaus’ kingdom of Lacedaemon, empty. Odysseus’ Ithaca—empty.”
“Yes,” says Mahnmut.
“Wait a minute,” says Hockenberry. “You’re not in the least surprised. You knew. You moravecs knew that the Greek cities and kingdoms had been emptied out. How?”
“Do you mean how did we know?” asks Mahnmut. “Simple. We’ve been keeping tabs on these places from earth orbit since we arrived. Sending down remote drones to record data. There’s a lot to be learned here on the earth of three thousand years before your day—three thousand years before the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries, that is.”
Hockenberry is stunned. He’d never thought of the moravecs paying attention to anything other than Troy, the surrounding battlefields, the connecting Hole, Mars, Mount Olympos, the gods, maybe a Martian moon or two…Jesus, wasn’t that enough?
“When did they…disappear?” Hockenberry manages at last. “Agamemnon is telling everyone that some of the food left behind was fresh enough to eat.”
“I guess that depends upon your definition of ’fresh,’” says Mahnmut. “According to our surveillance, the people disappeared about four and a half weeks ago. Just as Agamemnon’s little fleet was approaching the Peloponnese.”
“Jesus Christ,” whispers Hockenberry.
“Yes.”
“Did you see them disappear? On your satellite cameras or probes or whatever?”
“Not really. One minute they were there and the next minute they weren’t. It happened about two a.m. Greek time, so there wasn’t a lot of movement to monitor…in the Greek cities, I mean.”
“In the Greek cities…” Hockenberry repeats dully. “Do you mean…I mean…is there…have other people disappeared as well? In…say…China?”
“Yes.”
The wind suddenly whips around their eyrie and scatters sparks in all directions. Hockenberry covers his face with his hands during the spark storm and then brushes embers off his cloak and tunic. When the wind subsides, he throws the last of his sticks on the fire.
Other than Troy and Olympos—which, he discovered eight months ago, wasn’t on Earth at all—Hockenberry had only traveled to one other place in this past-Earth, and that was to prehistoric Indiana, where he deposited the only other surviving scholic, Keith Nightenhelser, with the Indians there to keep him safe when the Muse had gone on a killing spree. Now, without consciously meaning to, Hockenberry touches the QT medallion under his shirt. I need to check on Nightenhelser.
As if reading his mind, the moravec says, “Everyone else is gone—everyone outside a five-hundred-kilometer radius of Troy. Africans. North American Indians. South American Indians. The Chinese and aborigines in Australia. Polynesians. Northern European Huns and Danes and Vikings-to-be. The proto-Mongols. Everyone. Every other human being on the planet—we estimated that there were about twenty-two million—has disappeared.”
“That’s not possible,” says Hockenberry.
“No. It wouldn’t seem so.”
“What kind of power…”
“Godlike,” says Mahnmut.
“But certainly not these Olympian gods. They’re just…just…”
“More powerful humanoids?” said Mahnmut. “Yes, that’s what we thought. There are other energies at work here.”
“God?” whispers Hockenberry, who had been raised in a strict Indiana Baptist family before he had traded faith for education.
“Well, maybe,” says the moravec, “but if so, He lives on or around planet Earth. Huge amounts of quantum energy were released from Earth or near-earth-orbit at the same time Agamemnon’s wife and kids disappeared.”
“The energy came from Earth?” repeats Hockenberry. He looks around at the night, the funeral pyre below, the city nightlife becoming active beneath them, the distant campfires of the Achaeans, and the more distant stars. “From here?”
“Not this Earth,” says Mahnmut. “The other Earth. Yours. And it looks like we’re going to it.”
For a minute Hockenberry’s heart pounds so wildly that he’s afraid he’s going to be sick. Then he realizes that Mahnmut isn’t really talking about his Earth—the Twenty-first Century world of the half-remembered fragment
s of his former life before the gods resurrected him from old DNA and books and God knows what else, the slowly-returning-to-consciousness world of Indiana University and his wife and his students—but the concurrent-with-terraformed-Mars Earth of more than three thousand years after the short, not-so-happy first life of Thomas Hockenberry.
Unable to sit still, he stands and paces back and forth on the shattered eleventh floor of the building, walking to the shattered wall on the northeast side, then to the vertical drop on the south and west sides. A pebble scraped up by his sandal falls more than a hundred feet into the dark streets below. The wind whips his cape and his long, graying hair back. Intellectually, he’s known for eight months that the Mars visible now through the Hole coexisted in some future solar system with Earth and the other planets, but he’d never really connected that simple fact with the idea that this other Earth was really there, waiting.
My wife’s bones are mingled with the dust there, he thinks and then, on the verge of tears, almost laughs. Fuck, my bones are mingled with the dust there.
“How can you go to that Earth?” he asks and immediately realizes how stupid the question is. He’s heard the story of how Mahnmut and his huge friend Orphu traveled to Mars from Jupiter space with some other moravecs who did not survive their first encounter with the gods. They have spaceships, Hockenbush. While most of the moravec and rock-vec spacecraft had appeared as if by magic through the quantum Holes that Mahnmut had helped bring into existence, they were still spacecraft.
“We’re building a ship just for that purpose on and near Phobos,” the moravec says softly. “This time we’re not going alone. Or unarmed.”
Hockenberry can’t stop pacing back and forth. When he gets to the edge of the shattered floor, he has the urge to jump to his death—an urge that has tempted him when in high places since he was a kid. Is that why I like to come up here? Thinking about jumping? Thinking about suicide? He realizes it is. He realizes how lonely he’s been for the last eight months. And now even Nightenhelser is gone—gone with the Indians probably, sucked up by whatever cosmic vacuum cleaner made all the humans on earth except these poor fucked Trojans and Greeks disappear this month. Hockenberry knows that he can twist the QT medallion hanging against his chest and be in North America in no time at all, searching for his old scholic friend in that part of prehistoric Indiana where he’d left him eight months earlier. But he also knew that the gods might track him through the Planck-space interstices. It’s why he hasn’t QT’d in eight months.