by Dan Simmons
“Being spaghettified…” began Retrograde Sinopessen.
“I get the idea,” said Hockenberry. “So this use of quantum gravity and these quantum Brane Holes makes the adversary much scarier even than you’d feared.”
“Yes,” said Asteague/Che.
“And you’re taking this big spaceship to Earth to find out who or what created these Holes, terraformed Mars, and probably created the gods as well.”
“Yes.”
“And you want me along.”
“Yes.”
“Why?” said Hockenberry. “What possible contribution could I make to…” He paused and touched the lump under his tunic, the heavy circle against his chest. “The QT medallion.”
“Yes,” said Asteague/Che.
“Back when you guys first arrived, I loaned the medallion to you for six days. I was afraid you’d never give it back. You did tests on me as well…blood, DNA, the whole nine yards. I would have guessed that you’d replicated a thousand QT medallions by now.”
“If we were able to replicate a dozen…half a dozen…one more,” growled General Beh bin Adee, “the war with the gods would be over, Olympos occupied.”
“It’s not possible for us to build a duplicate QT device,” said Cho Li.
“Why?” Hockenberry’s headache was killing him.
“The QT medallion was customized to your mind and body,” Asteague/Che said in his mellifluous James Mason way. “Your mind and body were…customized…to work with the QT medallion.”
Hockenberry thought about this. Finally he shook his head and touched the heavy medallion under his tunic again. “That doesn’t make any sense. This thing wasn’t standard issue, you know. We scholics had to go to prearranged places to get back to Olympos—the gods QT’d us back. It was sort of a beam-me-up-Scotty thing, if you understand what I mean, which you can’t.”
“Yes, we understand perfectly,” said the Lionel transformer box on its millimeter-thin silver-spider legs. “I love that program. I have all the episodes recorded. Especially the first series…I’ve always wondered if there was some sort of hidden physical-romantic liaison between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.”
Hockenberry started to reply, stopped. “Look,” he said at last, “the goddess Aphrodite gave me this QT medallion so that I could spy on Athena, whom she wanted to kill. But that was more than nine years after I started work as a scholic, shuttling between Olympos and Ilium. How could my body have been ’customized’ to work with the medallion when nobody could have known that…” He stopped. A hint of nausea was creeping in under the headache. He wondered if the air was good in this blue bubble.
“You were originally…reconstructed…to work with the QT medallion,” said Asteague/Che. “Just as the gods were designed to QT on their own. Of this we are sure. Perhaps the answer to why lies back on Earth or in Earth orbit in one of the hundreds of thousands of post-human orbital devices and cities there.”
Hockenberry sat back in his chair. He’d noticed when they sat down at the table that his stool had been the only one with a back on it. The moravecs were very considerate that way.
“You want me along on the expedition,” he said, “so that I could QT back here if things go wrong. I’m like one of those emergency buoys that nuclear submarines used to carry in my time on Earth. They only launched it when they knew they were screwed.”
“Yes,” said Asteague/Che. “This is precisely the reason we want you along on the voyage.”
Hockenberry blinked. “Well, you’re honest…I’ll give you that. What are the goals of this expedition?”
“Goal One—to find the source of the quantum energy,” said Cho Li. “And to shut it off if possible. It threatens the entire solar system.”
“Goal Two—to make contact with any surviving humans or post-humans on or around the planet to interrogate them as to the motives behind this gods-Ilium connection and the dangerous quantum manipulation surrounding it,” said the gray-oily Ganymedan, Suma IV.
“Goal Three—to map the existing and any additional hidden quantum tunnels—Brane Holes—and to see if they can be harnessed for interplanetary or interstellar travel,” said Retrograde Sinopessen.
“Goal Four—to find the alien entities who entered our solar system fourteen hundred years ago, the real gods behind these midget Olympian gods, as it were, and to reason with them,” said General Beh bin Abee. “And if reason fails, to destroy them.”
“Goal Five,” Asteague/Che said softly in his slow British drawl, “to return all of our moravec and human crewmen to Mars…alive and functioning.”
“I like that goal, at least,” said Hockenberry. His heart was pounding and the headache had become the kind of migraine he’d had when in graduate school, during the unhappiest period of his previous life. He stood.
The five moravecs quickly stood.
“How long do I have to decide?” asked Hockenberry. “Because if you’re leaving in the next hour, I’m not going. I want to think about this.”
“The ship won’t be ready and provisioned for forty-eight hours,” said Asteague/Che. “Would you like to wait here while you think it over? We’ve prepared a suitable habitation for you in a quiet part of the…”
“I want to go back to Ilium,” said Hockenberry. “I’ll be able to think better there.”
Asteague/Che said, “We’ll prepare your hornet for immediate departure. But I’m afraid it’s getting rather hectic there today according to the updates I’m receiving from our various monitors.”
“Isn’t that the way?” said Hockenberry. “I leave for a few hours and miss all the good stuff.”
“You may find evolving events at Ilium and on Olympos too interesting to leave behind, Dr. Hockenberry,” said Retrograde Sinopessen. “I would certainly undersand an Iliad scholar’s commitment to remaining and observing.”
Hockenberry sighed and shook his aching head. “Wherever we are in what’s going on at Ilium and Olympos,” he said, “it’s way the hell outside the Iliad. Most of the time, I’m at as much of a loss as that poor woman Cassandra.”
A hornet came through the curving wall of the blue bubble, hovered over them, and set down silently. The ramp curled down. Mahnmut stood in the doorway.
Hockenberry nodded formally toward the moravec delegation, said, “I’ll let you know before the forty-eight hours are up,” and walked toward the ramp.
“Dr. Hockenberry?” said the James Mason voice behind him.
Hockenberry turned.
“We want to take one Greek or Trojan with us on this expedition,” said Asteague/Che. “Your recommendation would be appreciated.”
“Why?” said Hockenberry. “I mean, why take along someone from the Bronze Age. Someone who lived and died six thousand years before the time of the Earth you’re visiting?”
“We have our reasons,” said the Prime Integrator. “Just off the top of your mind, who would you nominate for the trip?”
Helen of Troy, thought Hockenberry. Give us the honeymoon suite on the trip to Earth and this could be one hell of an enjoyable expedition. He tried to imagine sex with Helen in zero-g. His headache stopped him from succeeding.
“Do you want a warrior?” asked Hockenberry. “A hero?”
“Not necessarily,” said General Beh bin Adee. “We’re bringing one hundred warriors of our own. Just someone from the Trojan War era who might be an asset.”
Helen of Troy, he thought again. She has a great… He shook his head. “Achilles would be the obvious choice,” he said aloud. “He’s invulnerable, you know.”
“We know,” Cho Li said softly. “We covertly analyzed him and know why he is, as you say, invulnerable.”
“It’s because his mother, the goddess Thetis, dipped him in the River…” began Hockenberry.
“Actually,” interrupted Retrograde Sinopessen, “it is because someone…some thing…has warped the quantum-probability matrix around Mr. Achilles to a quite improbable extent.”
“All right,” said
Hockenberry, not understanding a word of that sentence. “So do you want Achilles?”
“I don’t believe Achilles would agree to go with us, do you, Dr. Hockenberry?” said Asteague/Che.
“Ah…no. Could you make him go?”
“I believe it would be a riskier proposition than all the rest of the dangers involved in the visit to the third planet combined,” rumbled General Beh bin Adee.
A sense of humor from a rockvec? thought Hockenberry. “If not Achilles,” he said, “who then?”
“We were wondering if you would suggest someone. Someone courageous but intelligent. An explorer, but sensible. Someone we could communicate with. A flexible personality, you might say.”
“Odysseus,” said Hockenberry with no hesitation. “You want Odysseus.”
“Do you think he would agree to go?” asked Retrograde Sinopessen.
Hockenberry took a breath. “If you tell him that Penelope is waiting for him at the other end, he’ll go to hell and back with you.”
“We cannot lie to him,” said Asteague/Che.
“I can,” said Hockenberry. “I’d be glad to. Whether I go with you or not, I’ll be your intermediary in conning Odysseus into joining you.”
“We would appreciate that,” said Asteague/Che. “We look forward to hearing your own decision on joining us within the next forty-eight hours.” The Europan held out his arm and Hockenberry realized that there was a fairly humanoid hand on the end of it.
He shook the hand and got into the hornet behind Mahnmut. The ramp came up. The invisible chair grabbed him. They left the bubble.
14
Impatient, furious, pacing in front of his thousand best Myrmidons along the coastline at the base of Olympos, waiting for the gods to send down their champion for the day so that he could kill him, Achilles remembers the first month of the war—a time all Trojans and Argives still called “the Wrath of Achilles.”
They had QT’d down from the Olympian heights in legions then, these gods, confident in their forcefields and blood-machines, ready to leap into Slow Time and escape any mortal wrath, not knowing that the little moravec clock-people, new allies to Achilles, had their own formulas and enchantments to counter such god-tricks.
Ares, Hades, and Hermes had leaped first, clicking into the Achaean and Trojan ranks while the sky exploded. Flame followed forcelines until both Olympos and the mortal ranks became domes and spires and shimmering waves of flame. The sea boiled. The Little Green Men scattered for their feluccas. Zeus’s aegis shuddered and grew visible as it absorbed megatons of moravec assault.
Achilles had eyes only for Ares and his newly QT’d cohorts, Hades, red-eyed in his black bronze, and black-eyed Hermes in his barbed red-armor.
“Teach the mortals death!” screamed Ares, god of war, twelve feet tall, shimmering, attacking the Argive ranks at a run. Hades and Hermes followed. All three cast god-spears that could not miss their mark.
They missed their mark. Achilles’ fate was not to die that day. Or any day by the hands of an immortal.
One immortal’s spear grazed the fleet-footed mankiller’s strong right arm but drew no blood. Another embedded itself in his beautiful shield, but the god-forged layer of polarized gold blocked it. A third glanced from Achilles’ golden helmet without making a mark.
The three gods fired energy blasts from their god-palms. Achilles’ own nano-bred fields shed the millions of volts the way a dog shakes off water.
Ares and Achilles crashed together like mountains colliding. The quake threw hundreds of Trojans and Greeks and gods off their feet even as the battle lines joined. Ares was the first to fall back. He raised his red sword and swung a decapitating blow at the upstart mortal, Achilles.
Achilles ducked the blade and ran the war god through, scooping a slice through divine armor and gut until Ares’ belly opened, golden ichor covered mortal and immortal alike, and the war god’s divine bowels spilled out on the red Martian gorse. Too surprised to fall, too outraged to die, Ares stared at his own insides still unraveling and uncoiling onto the dirt.
Achilles reached high, grabbed Ares by his helmet and jerked him down and forward until his human spittle splattered the god’s perfect features. “You taste death, you gutless effigy!” Then, working like a marketplace butcher at the beginning of a long day’s labor, he lopped off Ares’ hands at the wrists, then his legs above the knee, and then his arms.
Screaming black whirling around the corpse, other gods gaping, Ares’ head continued to scream even after Achilles cut it off at the neck.
Hermes, horrified but also ambidextrous and deadly, raised his second spear.
Achilles leaped forward so quickly that everyone assumed he had teleported. Grabbing the second god’s spear, he jerked it toward him. Hermes tried to pull it back. Hades swung his black sword at Achilles’ knees but the mankiller leaped high, avoiding the blur of dark carbon-steel.
Losing the tug of war for his spear, Hermes leaped back and tried to QT away.
The moravecs had cast their field around them. No one would be quantum teleporting out or in until this fight was finished.
Hermes pulled his sword, a curved and wicked thing. Achilles cut off the giant-killer’s arm at the elbow, and the sword arm and the still-grasping hand fell to Mars’ rich, red soil.
“Mercy!” cried Hermes, throwing himself to his knees and embracing Achilles’ around the waist. “Mercy, I beg you!”
“There is none,” said Achilles and then hacked the god into as many quivering, gold-bleeding bits.
Hades backed away from the slaughter, his red eyes filled with fear. More gods were flicking into the human-set trap by the hundreds, and Hector and his Trojan captains and Achilles’ Mymidons and all the heroes of the Greeks were engaging them, the moravec forcefields not allowing the gods to QT away once they arrived. For the first time in the memory of anyone on the field, gods and heroes, demigods and mortals, legends and infantry grunts, all fought on something not unlike equal terms.
Hades shifted into Slow Time.
The world stopped turning. The air thickened. The waves froze in their curl against the rocky shore. Birds halted and hung in midflight. Hades panted and retched in relief. No mortal could follow him here.
Achilles shifted into Slow Time after him.
“This…is…not…possible,” the ruler of the dead said through the syrup-slow air.
“Die, Death,” shouted Achilles and drove his father Peleus’ spear through the god’s throat, just below where the black cheek-guards curved up again toward Hades’ skull-like cheekbones. Golden ichor spurted in slow motion.
Achilles shoved aside Hades’ black-ornamented shield and put his blade through the death god’s belly and spine. Dying, Hades still returned the thrust with a blow that could have split a mountainside. The black blade slid off Achilles’ chest as if it had not touched him. It was not Achilles’ fate to die that day, and never by the hands of an immortal. Hades’ fate was to die that day—however temporarily by human standards. He fell heavily and blackness swirled around him as he disappeared within an onyx cyclone.
Manipulating new nanotechnology without conscious effort, playing havoc with already-battered quantum fields of probability, Achilles flicked back out of Slow Time to rejoin the battle. Zeus had left the field. The other gods were fleeing, forgetting, in their panic, to raise the aegis behind them. More moravec magic, injected that very morning, allowed Achilles to push through their lesser energy fields and give pursuit up the cliffs of Olympos onto the lower ramparts.
Then his slaughter of gods and goddesses began in earnest.
But all this was in the early days of the war. Today—this day after Paris’s funeral—no gods are coming down to fight.
So, with his ally Hector gone and the Trojans quiescent on their part of the front today, Hector’s lesser-brother Aeneas in charge of the thousands of Trojans there, Achilles is meeting with his Achaean captains and moravec artillery experts to plan an imminent attack on Olympos.<
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The attack will be simple: while moravec energy and nuclear weapons activate the aegis on the lower slopes, Achilles and five hundred of his best captains and Achaeans in thirty transport hornets will punch through a lesser section of the energy shield almost a thousand leagues around the back of Olympos, make a dash for the summit, and carry the torch to the gods in their homes. For those Achaeans who are wounded or lose their nerve fighting in the very citadel of Zeus and the gods, the hornets will lift them out after the element of surprise fades. Achilles plans to stay until the top of Mount Olympos has been turned into a charnel house and all its white temples and god-dwellings are blackened rubble. After all, he thinks, Herakles once pulled down the walls of Ilium all by himself when angered and took the city single-handedly—why should the halls of Olympos be sacrosanct?
All morning, Achilles has expected Agamemnon and his simpler sibling, Menelaus, to show up, leading a mob of their loyal men to try to take back control of the Achaean forces and to push the war backward into mortal-versus-mortal, befriending the murderous, treacherous gods again, but so far that dog-eyed, deer-hearted former commander in chief has not shown his face. Achilles has decided that he will kill him when he does attempt the revolt. Him and his red-bearded stripling Menelaus and anyone and everyone who follows the two Atrides. The news of the home cities being emptied of all life is—Achilles is sure—merely a ruse by Agamemnon to incite the restless and cowardly Achaeans to revolt.
So when moravec Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo, the barbed rockvec in charge of the artillery and energy bombardment, looks up from the map they are studying under the silk of a lean-to shelter and announces that his binocular vision has picked up an odd-looking army coming through the Hole from the direction of Ilium, Achilles is not surprised.
But a few minutes later he is surprised as Odysseus—the most sharp-eyed among their command group huddled under the flapping canopy—says, “They’re women. Trojan women.”
“Amazons, you mean?” says Achilles, stepping out into the Olympos sunshine. Antilochus, son of Nestor, Achilles’ old friend from countless campaigns, had ridden his chariot into camp here an hour earlier, telling everyone of the arrival of the thirteen Amazons and Penthesilea’s vow to kill Achilles in single combat. The fleet-footed mankiller had laughed easily, showing his perfect teeth. He had not fought and defeated ten thousand Trojans and scores of gods to be frightened by a woman’s bluster.