by Dan Simmons
“Little Palmys?” said Hockenberry, aware that he was repeating names like an idiot. “He can’t be more than twelve years old…”
“Not yet eleven,” said Helen with a smile. “But the boy used a man’s bow—his dead father’s, Pandarus, brought low by Diomedes a year ago—and the arrow settled all my husband’s debts and resolved all our marital doubts. I have Menelaus’ blood-splashed helmet in my rooms at the palace if you would like to see it—the boy Palmys kept his shield.”
“My God,” said Hockenberry. “Diomedes, Big Ajax, and Menelaus dead in a single twenty-four-hour period. No wonder you’ve driven the Argives back to their ships.”
“No,” said Helen, “the day might well still have gone to the Achaeans if Zeus had not appeared.”
“Zeus!”
“Zeus,” said Helen. “On the day that had begun with glorious victory, the gods and goddesses on the side of the Argives were so infuriated by the deaths of their champions that Hera and Athena alone murdered a thousand of our valiant Trojans with their fiery bolts. Poseidon, the old Earth-Shaker himself, bellowed so in anger that a score of strong buildings in Ilium crashed to the ground. Archers tumbled from our walls like falling leaves. Priam was thrown from his throne-litter.
“All our gains that day were lost in minutes—Hector falling back, still fighting, his men falling around him, Deiphobus wounded in the leg, finally having to be carried by his brother even while our Trojan men beat a retreat back to Thicket Ridge, then from Thicket Ridge to and through the Scaean Gates.
“We women actually rushed down to help set the great bar across the splintered gates, so wild was the fighting—scores of raging Argives had come through into the city with our retreating heroes—and again Poseidon shook the earth, knocking everyone to their knees even as Athena neutralized Apollo in their sky battles, their chariots whirling and flashing through the sky, while Hera herself cast explosive bolts of energy at our walls.
“Then Zeus appeared in the east. Larger and more impressive than any living mortal has ever seen…”
“More impressive than the day he appeared as a face in the atomic mushroom cloud?” asked Hockenberry.
Helen laughed. “Much more impressive, my Hock-en-bear-eeee. This Zeus was a colossus, his legs rising higher than Mount Ida’s snowy summit in the east, his huge chest above the clouds, his giant brow so high above us as to be almost invisible, taller than the tops of the tallest stratocumulus piled high, one upon another, on a summer day before a storm.”
“Whoa,” said Hockenberry, trying to imagine it. He’d once tussled with Zeus—well, not tussled exactly, more just a sort of general scuttling away from him during an earthquake on Olympos, culminating in sliding between the Lord of All Gods’ legs to grab the dropped QT medallion so he could teleport away right at the beginning of the human-god war—and the Father of the Gods had been wildly impressive when he was just his usual fifteen feet tall. He tried to imagine this ten-mile-high colossus. “Go on,” he said.
“So when this giant Zeus appeared, the armies stopped in their tracks, froze like statues, swords raised, spears poised back, shields high—even the chariots of the gods froze in the sky, Athena and Phoebus Apollo as motionless as all the thousands of mortals below—and Zeus thundered forth—I cannot imitate his voice, Hock-en-bear-eeee, for it was all thunder and all earthquake and volcanoes erupting at once—but Zeus thundered—UNCONTROLLABLE HERA—YOU AND YOUR TREACHERY YET AGAIN!—I WOULD BE SLEEPING YET HAD NOT YOUR CRIPPLED SON AND A MORTAL AWAKENED ME. HOW DARE YOU BETRAY ME WITH YOUR WARM EMBRACE, SEDUCE ME BLIND, SO THAT YOU CAN HAVE YOUR WAY, PURSUE YOUR WILL OF DESTROYING TROY IN DEFIANCE OF YOUR LORD’S COMMAND!”
“Your crippled son and a mortal?” repeated Hockenberry. The crippled son would be Hephaestus, god of fire. The mortal?
“That’s what he bellowed,” said Helen, rubbing her pale neck as if her imitation of the bass earthquake-rumble had hurt her throat.
“And then?” prompted Hockenberry.
“And then, before Hera could speak in her own defense, before any of the gods could move, Zeus, the King of the Black Cloud, struck her down with a thunderbolt. It must have killed her, immortal as we all thought she was.”
“The gods have a way of returning after they are ’killed,’” muttered Hockenberry, thinking of the huge healing tanks and their roiling blue worms up in the great, white building on Olympos, tanks tended by the giant insectoid Healer.
“Yes, we all know that,” Helen said in a disgusted tone. “Didn’t our own Hector kill Ares half a dozen times in the past eight months? Only to face him again a few days later? But this was different, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”
“How so?”
“Zeus’s lighting bolt destroyed Hera—threw bits of her golden chariot for miles, raining melted gold and steel on the rooftops of Troy. And gibbets of the goddess herself fell in a swath from the ocean to dead Paris’s palace—scorched shards of pink flesh, which none of us were brave enough to touch, but which simmered and smoked for days.”
“Jesus,” whispered Hockenberry.
“And then the mighty Zeus struck down Poseidon, opening a great yawning pit under the fleeing Sea God and dropping him into it, screaming. The screams echoed for hours, until all mortals—Argives and Trojans alike—wept from the sound.”
“Did Zeus say anything when he opened this pit?”
“Yes,” said Helen, “he cried—I AM ZEUS WHO DRIVES THE STORM CLOUDS, SON OF KRONOS, FATHER OF MEN AND GODS, MASTER OF PROBABILITY SPACE BEFORE YOU WERE CHANGED FROM YOUR PUNY POST-HUMAN FORMS! I WAS THE MASTER AND KEEPER OF SETEBOS BEFORE YOU DARED TO DREAM OF BEING IMMORTALS! YOU, POSEIDON, SHAKER OF THE EARTH, MY BETRAYER, DO YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW THAT YOU PLOTTED WITH MY OX-EYED QUEEN FOR MY OVERTHROW? I BANISH YOU TO TARTARUS, DEEP BENEATH HADES ITSELF, I SEND YOU PLUNGING DOWN TO THE PIT OF EARTH AND SEA WHERE KRONOS AND IAPETOS MAKE THEIR BEDS OF PAIN, WHERE NOT A RAY OF THE SUN CAN WARM THEIR HEARTS, DOWN TO THE DEPTHS OF TARTARUS WALLED ALL AROUND BY THE BLACK-HOLED ABYSS ITSELF!”
Hockenberry waited while Helen paused to clear her throat again.
“Do you have any water, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”
He handed her the wineskin he’d filled with water from the plaza fountain and waited in silence while she drank.
“And this is what Zeus spoke as he opened up a pit beneath Poseidon and sent the Shaker of the Earth screaming into Tartarus. Those soldiers on the wall who saw into the pit could not speak for days, only mumble or scream.”
Hockenberry waited.
“And then the Father of the Gods ordered all the other gods back to Olympos to face their punishment—you will pardon me, Hock-en-bear-eeee, if I do not try to imitate Zeus’s bellow—and in an instant the flying chariots were gone, the Lord of the Silver Bow was gone, Athena was gone, red-eyed Hades was gone, that bitch Aphrodite was gone, blood-thirsty Ares was gone—all our Pantheon disappeared, QTing back to Olympos like guilty children waiting for their displeased father to use the rod on them.”
“Did Zeus disappear then, too?” asked Hockenberry.
“Oh, no, the Son of Kronos had just begun to play. His towering form strode over Ilium and walked across the miles between here and the shore like Astyanax playing in his sandbox, striding over his toy soldiers. Hundreds of Trojans and Argives died under the giant feet of Zeus that day, Hock-en-bear-eeee, and when he reached Agamemnon’s camp, Zeus reached out his palm and burned all the the hundreds of black ships pulled up on the sand there. And for those Argive ships still at anchor, or the convoy pulling in from Lemnos bringing wine sent across by Euneus, Jason’s son, carrying gifts to Atrides Agamemnon and the dead Menelaus, Zeus closed his flaming hand into a fist and a great wave rose up, dashing the Lemnos ships and the anchored Argive ships ashore—again like toys, like Astyanax splashing in his bath, sinking his slave-carved balsawood toy boats in petulance divine.”
“Holy God,” whispered Hockenberry.
“Yes, exactly,” said Helen. “And then Zeus disapp
eared in a crack of the loudest thunder yet, louder even than his voice that had deafened hundreds, and the wind howled into the place where giant Zeus had been, ripping up the Achaean tents and swirling them thousands of feet into the air, swirling strong Trojan stallions from their stalls and over our highest walls.”
Hockenberry looked to the west where the armies of Troy had surrounded the diminished army of the Argives. “That was almost two weeks ago. Have the gods returned at all? Any of them? Zeus?”
“No, Hock-en-bear-eeee. We have seen no immortals since that day.”
“But that was two weeks ago,” said Hockenberry. “Why has it taken so long for Hector to besiege the Argive army? Surely with the deaths of Diomedes, Big Ajax, and Menelaus, the Achaeans must have been demoralized.”
“They were,” agreed Helen. “But both sides were in shock. Many of us could not hear for days. As I said, those on the wall or those Argives too close to the opening pit of Tartarus were little more than drooling idiots for a week. A truce was called without either side declaring it. We gathered our dead—for we had suffered terribly during Agamemnon’s assaults, you remember—and for almost a week, corpse fires burned both here in the city and along the miles of shore where the terrified Argives still had their camps. Then, in the second week, when Agamemnon ordered men to the forests at the base of Mount Ida to begin felling trees—to make new ships, of course—Hector began the assault. The fighting has been slow and heavy work. With their backs to the sea and no ships for their flight, the Argives fight like cornered rats. But this morning, you see, the few thousands left are encircled there at the edge of the water and today Hector will unleash our final assault. Today ends the Trojan War, with Ilium still standing, Hector the hero of all heroes, and Helen free.”
For a while the man and woman just sat on their respective great stones and stared out to the west, where sunlight glinted on armor and spears and where horns were sounding.
Finally Helen said, “What will you do with me now, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”
He blinked, looked at the knife still in his hand, and set it in his belt. “You can go,” he said.
Helen looked at his face but she did not move.
“Go!” said Hockenberry.
She left slowly. The sound of her slippers came up the circular stair-case—he remembered the same soft sound from when he lay dying here two and a half weeks ago.
Where do I go now?
Trained as a scholic in his second life, he had the loyal urge to report these variances from the Iliad to the Muse, and thence to all the gods. This thought made him smile. How many of the gods still existed in that other universe where Olympus Mons on Mars had been turned into Olympos? How extensive had Zeus’s wrath really been? Had there been a genocidal deicide up there? He might never know. He didn’t have the courage to quantum teleport to Olympos again.
Hockenberry touched the QT medallion under his tunic. Back to the ship? He wanted to see the Earth—his Earth, even one three thousand years or so in his future—and he wanted to be with the moravecs and Odysseus when they saw it. He had no duty or role here in this Ilium-universe now.
He brought the QT medallion out and ran his hand over the heavy gold.
Not back to the Queen Mab. Not yet. He might not be a scholic any longer—the gods may have abandoned him just as he had betrayed them—but he was still a scholar. Decades of teaching the Iliad, all those memories of wonderful dusty classrooms and very young college students, all those faces—pale, pimply, healthy, tanned, eager, indifferent, inspired, insipid—came flowing back now, filling in the gaps. How could he not see the last act in this new and absurdly revised version?
Twisting the medallion, Dr. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., quantum teleported to the center of the besieged and doomed Achaean encampment.
40
Later, Daeman wasn’t sure when he decided to steal one of the eggs.
It wasn’t while he was sliding down the rope to the floor of the dome-crater, since he was too busy hanging on and trying not to be seen to plan anything then.
It wasn’t while he was scurrying across the hot, cracked floor of the crater, since his heart was pounding too loudly during that sprint to allow him to think of anything except reaching the fumarole where he’d seen the eggs. Twice he saw groups of calibani scuttling along beyond the nearest smoking vents and both times Daeman threw himself down and lay still until they had hurried off on their business toward the main Setebos nest. The floor of the crater was hot enough that it would have burned his hands if he hadn’t been wearing the thermskin under his regular clothes. As it was, a minute lying on his belly caused his shirt and trousers to singe. He sprinted forward and reached the side of the fumarole, crouching and panting in the heat—the walls of the fumarole were about twelve feet high, but rough, made of the same blue-ice as everything else. Daeman found enough fingerholds and footholds to climb it without using his ice hammers.
The fumarole—a hissing crater within the larger crater, one of dozens inside the dome-cathedral—was filled with human skulls. These were so heated that some glowed red even while sulfurous vapors hissed around them and rose into the stinking air. At least the steam and vapors gave Damean some cover as he dropped onto the mound of skulls and looked at the Setebos eggs.
Oval, gray-white, each pulsing with some internal energy or life, the things were each about three feet long. Daeman counted twenty-seven in this nest. Besides the cradling heap of hot skulls, the eggs themselves were surrounded by a ring of sticky, blue-gray mucus. Daeman crawled closer, fingers and feet scrabbling on skulls, and looked at the tall heap of eggs from as close as he could get without lifting his head above the level of the fumarole crater rim.
The shells were thin, warm, almost translucent. Some already glowed brightly, others had only a white gleam at their center. Daeman reached out and gingerly touched one—a mild heat, a strange sense of vertigo as if some instability in the egg itself flowed through his thermskinned finger. He tried to lift one and found it weighed about twenty pounds.
Now what?
Now he had to beat a retreat, get up the rope, out through the tunnels, back to the Avenue Daumesnil crevasse, and back to the Guarded Lion faxnode. He had to report all this to everyone at Ardis as soon as possible.
But why come all this way and risk exposure on the crater floor without taking a souvenir?
By dumping everything out of his rucksack except the extra crossbow bolts, he made room for the egg. At first it wouldn’t fit, but by pushing gently but insistently he managed to get the broad end of the oval through the opening and wedge the bolts in around the side of the egg. What if it breaks? Well, he’d have a messy pack, he thought, but at least he’d know what was inside the damned things.
I don’t want to break one of the eggs here, so close to Setebos and the calibani. We’ll inspect it back at Ardis.
Amen, thought Daeman. He was finding it very hard to breathe. He’d had his osmosis mask on all this time, but the sulfurous vapors from the fumarole vent and the overwhelming heat made him dizzy. He knew that if he’d come into the dome without the thermskin and mask, he would have lost consciousness long ago. The air in here was poisonous. Then how do the calibani breathe?
To hell with the calibani, thought Daeman. He waited until the steam and vapors were thick as a smoke screen and slid down the side of the fumarole, dropping the last five feet. The egg shifted heavily in his ruck-sack, almost causing him to fall.
Easy, easy.
“’Saith, what He hates be consecrate, all come to celebrate Thee and Thy state! Thinketh, what I hate be consecrate to celebrate Him and what He ate!” Caliban’s chant-hymn was much louder down here. Somehow the acoustics of the giant dome-cathedral amplified as well as directed the monster’s voice. Either that or Caliban was closer now.
Running in a crouch, dropping to one knee at any hint of motion through the shifting vapors, Daeman made it the hundred yards to his rope still dangling from the blue-ice balcony. He looke
d up at the rope hanging free.
What was I thinking? It must be eighty feet to the balcony. I can never climb that—especially not with this weight on my back.
Daeman looked around for another tunnel entrance. The nearest one was three or four hundred feet away around the curve of the dome wall to his right, but it was filled with the huge arm-stalk of one of Setebos’ crawling hands.
That hand’s up there in the ice tunnels, waiting for me…with the others. He could see other arm stalks disappearing into tunnel openings now, the slick gray flesh of the tentacles almost obscene in their wet physicality. Some of them rose three or four hundred feet up the curving wall, hanging down like fleshy tubules, some visibly writhing in a sort of peristalsis as the hands pulled more arm-stalk in after them.
How many hands and arms does this motherfucking brain have?
“’Believeth that with the end of life, the pain will stop? Not so! He both plagueth enemies and feasts on friends. He doth His worst in this our life, giving respite only lest we die through pain, saving last pain for worst!”
It was climb or die. Daeman had lost almost fifty pounds in the last ten months, converting some weight to muscle, but he wished now that he’d been on Noman’s obstacle course in the forest beyond Ardis’s north wall every single day of the last ten months, lifting weights in his spare time.
“Fuck it,” whispered Daeman. He jumped, grabbed the rope, got his legs and shins around it, reached higher with his thermskinned left hand, and began dragging himself up, shinnying when he could, resting when he had to.
It was slow. It was agonizingly slow. And the slowness was the least part of the agony. A third of the way up and he knew he couldn’t make it—knew he probably did not have the strength even to hang on while sliding down. But if he jumped, the egg would break. Whatever was inside would get out. And Setebos and Caliban would know at once.