Olympos

by Dan Simmons

  In the room with all the roaring machines and the huge, plunging cylinders, he talks to the huge metal crab of a monster. Somehow, Odysseus knows the thing is blind. Yet somehow, he also knows, it finds its way around without the use of its eyes. Odysseus has known many brave men who were blind, and has visited blind seers, oracles, whose human sight had been replaced with second sight.

  “I want to go back to the battlefields of Troy, Monster,” he says. “Take me there at once.”

  The crab rumbles. It speaks Odysseus’ language, the language of civilized men, but so abominably that the words sound more like the crash of harsh surf on rocks—or the plunge and hiss of the huge pistons above—rather than true human speech.

  “We have…long trip…in front of me…us…noble Odysseus, honored son of Laertes. When that is dead…finished…over…we hope to remove you…return you…to Penelope and Telemachus.”

  How dare this animated metal hulk touch the names of my wife and child with its hidden tongue, thinks Odysseus. If he had even the dullest of swords or the crudest of clubs, he would bash this thing to pieces, tear open its shell, and find and rip out that tongue.

  Odysseus leaves the crab-monster and seeks the bubble of curved glass where he can see the stars.

  They are not moving now. They do not blink. Odysseus sets his scarred palms against the cold glass.

  “Athena, goddess…I sing the glorious Power with azure eyes, Pallas Athena, tameless, chaste, and wise…hear my prayer.

  “Tritogenia, goddess…town-preserving Maid, revered and mighty; from his awful head whom Zeus himself brought forth…in warlike armor dressed…Golden! All radiant!…I beseech thee, hear my prayer.

  “Wonder, goddess, strange possessed…the everlasting Gods that Shape to see…shaking a javelin keen…impetuously rush from the crest of Aegis-bearing God, Father Zeus…so fearfully was heaven shaken…and did move beneath the might of the Cerulean-eyed….hear my prayer.

  “Child of the Aegis bearer, Third Born…sublime Pallas whom we rejoice to view…wisdom personified whose praise shall never unremembered be…hail to thee…please hear my prayer.”

  Odysseus opens his eyes. Only the unblinking stars and his own reflection return his gray-eyed gaze.

  The third day out from Phobos and Mars.

  To a distant observer—say, someone watching through a powerful optical telescope from one of the orbital rings around Earth—the Queen Mab would appear as a complicated spear-shaft of girder-wrapped spheres, ovals, tanks, brightly painted oblongs, many-belled thruster quads, and a profusion of black buckycarbon hexagons, all arranged around the core stack of cylindrical habitation modules, all of which, in turn, are balanced atop a column of increasingly brilliant atomic flashes.

  Mahnmut goes to see Hockenberry in the infirmary. The human is healing quickly, thanks in part to the Grsvki-process, which fills the tenbed recovery room with the smell of a thunderstorm. Mahnmut has brought flowers from the Queen Mab’s extensive greenhouse—his memory banks had told him that this was still proper protocol in the prerubicon Twenty-first Century from which Hockenberry, or at least Hockenberry’s DNA, had come. The scholic actually laughs at the sight of them and allows that he’s never been given flowers before, at least as best he can recall. But Hockenberry adds that his memory of his life on Earth—his real life, his life as a university scholar rather than as a scholic for the gods—is far from complete.

  “It’s lucky that you QT’d to the Queen Mab,” says Mahnmut. “No one else would have had the medical expertise or the surgical skills with which to heal you.”

  “Or the spidery moravec surgeon,” says Hockenberry. “Little did I know when I met Retrograde Sinopessen that he’d end up saving my life within twenty-four hours. Funny how life works.”

  Mahnmut can think of nothing to say to that. After a minute, he says, “I know you’ve talked to Asteague/Che about what happened to you, but would you mind discussing it again?”

  “Not at all.”

  “You say that Helen stabbed you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the motive was just to keep her husband—Menelaus—from ever discovering that it was she who betrayed him after you quantum teleported him back to the Achaean lines?”

  “I think so.” Mahnmut was not an expert at reading human facial expressions, but even he could tell that Hockenberry looked sad at the thought.

  “But you told Asteague/Che that you and Helen had been intimate…were once lovers.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll have to excuse my ignorance about such things, Dr. Hockenberry, but it would appear that Helen of Troy is a very vicious woman.”

  Hockenberry shrugs and smiles, albeit sadly. “She’s a product of her era, Mahnmut—formed by harsh times and motives beyond my understanding. When I used to teach the Iliad to my undergraduate students, I’d always emphasize that all of our attempts to humanize Homer’s tale—to make it into something explicable by modern humanist sensibilities—were destined to fail. These characters…these people…while completely human, were poised at the very beginning of our so-called civilized era, millennia before our current humanist values would begin to emerge. Viewed in that light, Helen’s actions and motivations are as hard for us to fathom as, say, Achilles’ almost complete lack of mercy or Odysseus’ endless guile.”

  Mahnmut nods. “Did you know that Odysseus is on this ship? Has he come to see you?”

  “No, I haven’t seen him. But Prime Integrator Asteague/Che told me he was aboard. Actually, I’m afraid he’ll kill me.”

  “Kill you?” says Mahnmut, shocked.

  “Well, you remember you used me to help kidnap him. I was the one who convinced him that you had a message from Penelope for him—all that garbage about the olive tree trunk as part of his bed back home in Ithaca. And when I got him to the hornet…zap! Mep Ahoo coldcocked him and loaded him aboard the hornet. If I were Odysseus, I’d sure carry a grudge against one Thomas Hockenberry.”

  Coldcocked, thinks Mahnmut. He loved it when he encountered a new English word. He runs it through his lexicon, finds it, discovers to his surprise that it isn’t an obscenity, and files it away for future use. “I’m sorry I put you in a position of possible harm,” says Mahnmut. He considers telling the scholic that in all the confusion of the Hole closing forever, Orphu had tightbeamed him an order from the prime integrators—get Odysseus—but then he thinks better of using that as an excuse. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., had been born into the century when the excuse of I was only following orders went out of style once and for all.

  “I’ll talk to Odysseus…” begins Mahnmut.

  Hockenberry shakes his head and smiles again. “I’ll talk to him sooner or later. In the meantime, Asteague/Che posted one of your rock-vecs as a guard.”

  “I wondered what the Belt moravec was doing outside the medlab,” says Mahnmut.

  “If worse comes to worse,” says Hockenberry, touching the gold medallion visible through the opening in his pajama tops, “I’ll just QT away.”

  “Really?” says Mahnmut. “Where would you go? Olympos is a war zone. Ilium may have been put to the torch by now.”

  Hockenberry’s smile disappears. “Yeah. There is that problem. I could always go look for my friend Nightenhelser where I left him—in Indiana, circa 1000 B.C.”

  “Indiana…” Mahnmut says softly. “On which Earth?”

  Hockenberry rubs his chest where, less than seventy-two hours earlier, Retrograde Sinopessen had been holding his heart. “Which Earth,” repeats the scholic. “You have to admit, that sounds odd.”

  “Yes,” says Mahnmut, “but I suspect we’ll all have to get used to thinking that way. Your friend Nightenhelser is on the Earth you QT’d away from—Ilium-Earth, we might call it. This spacecraft is headed toward an Earth that exists three thousand years after you first lived and…mmm…”

  “Died,” says Hockenberry. “Don’t worry, I’m used to that concept. It doesn’t bother me…too much.”

>   “It’s amazing that you were able to visualize the engine room of the Queen Mab so clearly after you were stabbed,” says Mahnmut. “You arrived here unconscious, so you must have activated the QT medallion just as you were on the verge of passing out.”

  The scholic shakes his head. “I don’t remember twisting the medallion or visualizing anything.”

  “What’s the last thing you remember, Dr. Hockenberry?”

  “A woman standing over me, looking down at me with an expression of horror,” says the man. “A tall woman, pale skin, dark hair.”

  “Helen?”

  Hockenberry shakes his head. “She’d left already, gone down the steps. This woman just…appeared.”

  “One of the Trojan women?”

  “No. She was dressed…strangely. In a sort of tunic and skirt, more like a woman of my era than like any female outfit I’ve seen in the last ten years on Ilium or Olympos. But not like my era either…” He trailed away.

  “Could she have been an hallucination?” asks Mahnmut. He doesn’t add the obvious—that Helen’s knife blade had nicked Hockenberry’s heart, spilling blood into his chest and denying it to the human’s brain.

  “She could have been…but she wasn’t. But I had the strangest sense when I stared at her and saw her looking back at me…”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know how to describe it,” says Hockenberry. “A sense of certainty that she and I were going to meet again soon, somewhere else. Somewhere far away from Troy.”

  Mahnmut thinks about this and the two—moravec and human—sit in comfortable silence for a long moment. The thud of the great pistons—a pounding that went through the very bones of the ship every thirty seconds followed by half-felt, half-heard hisses and sighs of the huge reciprocating cylinders—has become accustomed background noise, like the soft hiss of the ventilation system.

  “Mahnmut,” says Hockenberry, touching his chest through the gap in his pajama shirt, “do you know why I didn’t want to come along on your voyage to Earth?”

  Mahnmut shakes his head. He knows that Hockenberry can see his own reflection in the polished black plastic vision strip that runs around the front of Mahnmut’s red metal-alloy skull.

  “It’s because I understood enough about the ship—this Queen Mab—to know her real reason for going to Earth.”

  “The prime integrators told you the real reason,” says Mahnmut. “Didn’t they?”

  Hockenberry smiles. “No. Oh—the reasons they gave are true enough, but they’re not the real reason. If you moravecs wanted to travel to Earth, you didn’t have to build this huge monstrosity of a ship to make the voyage in. You had sixty-five combat spacecraft in orbit around Mars already, or shuttling between Mars and the Asteroid Belt.”

  “Sixty-five?” repeats Mahnmut. He’d known there had been ships in space, some of them hardly larger than the shuttle hornets, others large enough to haul heavy loads all the way from Jupiter space if necessary. He had no idea there were so many. “How do you know there were sixty-five, Dr. Hockenberry?”

  “Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo told me while we were still on Mars and Ilium-Earth. I was curious about the ships’ propulsion and he was vague—spacecraft engineering isn’t his specialty, he’s a combat ’vec—but I got the impression these other ships had fusion drives or ion drives…something much more sophisticated than atomic bombs in cans.”

  “Yes,” says Mahnmut. He didn’t know much about spacecraft either—the one that had brought Orphu and him to Mars had been a jury-rigged combination of solar sails and disposable fusion thrusters, all flung initially across the solar system by the two-trillion-watt moravec-built trebuchet of Jupiter’s accelerator-scissors—but even he, a modest submersible driver from Europa, knew that the Queen Mab was primitive and much larger than its stated mission would demand. He thought he knew where Hockenberry was headed with this, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it.

  “An atom bomb going off every thirty seconds,” the human says softly, “behind a ship the size of the Empire State Building, as all the prime integrators and Orphu were eager to point out. And the Mab doesn’t have any of the exterior stealth material that even the hornets are covered with. So you have this gigantic object with a bright what do you call it?…albedo…atop a series of atomic blasts that will be visible from the surface of the Earth in daytime by the time you arrive in Earth orbit…hell, it might be visible to the naked eye there now, for all I know.”

  “Which leads you to conclude…” says Mahnmut. He is tightbeaming this conversation to Orphu, but his Ionian friend has remained silent on their private channel.

  “Which leads me to believe that the real purpose of this mission is to be seen as soon as possible,” says Hockenberry. “To appear as threatening as possible so as to evoke a response from the powers on or around Earth—those very powers who you claim have jiggery-pokered the very fabric of quantum reality itself. You’re trying to draw fire.”

  “Are we?” says Mahnmut. Even as he says it, he knows that Dr. Thomas Hockenberry is right…and that he, Mahnmut of Europa, has suspected this all along but not confronted his own certainty.

  “Yes, you are,” says Hockenberry. “My guess is that this ship is just loaded with recording devices, so that when the Unknown Powers in orbit around Earth—or wherever they’re hiding—blast the Queen Mab to atoms—all the details of that power, the nature of those superweapons, will be transmitted back to Mars, or the Belt, or Jupiter Space, or wherever. This ship is like the Trojan Horse that the Greeks haven’t yet thought to build back on Ilium-Earth—and may never build, since I’ve screwed up the flow of events and since Odysseus is your captive here on the ship. But this is a Trojan Horse that you know…or are fairly certain…that the other side is going to burn. With all of us in it.”

  On the tightbeam, Mahnmut sends, Orphu, is this the truth of it?

  Yes, my friend, but not all of it, comes the grim reply.

  To the human, Mahnmut says, “Not with all of us in it, Dr. Hockenberry. You still have your QT medallion. You can leave at any time.”

  The scholic quits rubbing his chest—the scar is just a line on his flesh, livid still but fading where the molecular glue is healing the incision—and now he touches the heavy QT medallion hanging there. “Yes,” he says. “I can leave at any time.”

  32

  Daeman had selected nine other people at Ardis—five men and four women—to help him with the warning trip, faxing to all three hundred known faxnode portals to see if Setebos had been there and to warn the inhabitants there if Setebos had not—but he decided to wait until Harman, Hannah, and Petyr returned with the sonie. Harman had told Ada that they’d be back by the lunch hour or shortly after.

  The sonie wasn’t back by lunchtime or by an hour after that.

  Daeman waited. He knew that Ada and the others were nervous—scouts and firewood teams had noted shadowy movement of many voynix in the forests north, east, and south of Ardis, as if they were gathering for a major attack—and he didn’t want to pull ten people off their duties before Harman and the other two returned.

  They didn’t return by midafternoon. Lookouts on the guard towers and palisades kept glancing toward the low, gray clouds, obviously hoping to see the sonie.

  Daeman knew that he should leave—that Harman had been right, that the fax reconaissance and warning trip had to be done quickly—but he waited another hour. Then two. However illogical it might be, he felt that he would be abandoning Ada if he left before Harman and the sonie returned. If something had happened to Harman, Ada would be devastated but the community at Ardis might survive. Without the sonie, the fate of everyone might well be sealed during the next voynix attack.

  Ada had been busy all afternoon, only coming outside occasionally to stand alone on Hannah’s cupola tower to watch the skies. Daeman, Tom, Siris, Loes, and a few others stood nearby but did not speak to her. The clouds grew grayer and it began to snow again. All of the short afternoon felt more and
more like some terrible twilight.

  “Well, I have to go in to work in the kitchen,” said Ada at last, pulling her shawl higher around her shoulders. Daeman and the others watched her go. Finally he went into the house, up to his small third-floor cubby under the eaves, and dug through his clothing chest until he found what he needed—the green thermskin suit and osmosis mask given to him by Sari more than ten months earlier.

  The suit had been ripped and soiled—rent by Caliban’s claws and teeth, smeared by his blood and Caliban’s, then by the mud of their forced sonie landing the previous spring—and while cleaning had removed the stains, the suit had tried to heal all of its own rips and tears. It had almost succeeded. Here and there the green insulating overfabric was all but invisible, revealing the silver sheen of the molecular layer itself, but its heating and pressure-sealing faculties were almost intact—Daeman had faxed to an empty node at fourteen thousand feet above sea level, an uninhabited, wind-ravaged, snow-pelted node known only as Pikespik, to test it. The thermskin had kept him alive and warm and the osmosis mask had also worked, providing him with enough enhanced atmosphere to breathe easily.

  Now, in his room under the eaves, he laid the almost weightless thermskin and mask in his pack next to the extra crossbow bolts and water bottles and went downstairs to assemble his waiting team.

  A cry went up from outside. Daeman ran outdoors at the same time Ada and half the household did.