by Dan Simmons
“Are we there yet?” interrupts Achilles.
The island—Hephaestus drones on as they continued descending—is more than eighty of Achilles’ leagues across and is filled with monsters.
“Monsters?” says Achilles. He has little interest in such things. He wants to know where Zeus is and he wants Zeus to tell the Healer to open the rejuvenation tanks and he wants the Amazon queen Penthesilea alive again. Everything else is beside the point.
“Monsters,” repeats the god of fire. “The first children of Gaia and Ouranos are misshapen fiends. But very powerful. Zeus allowed them to live on here rather than joining Kronos and Rhea in the Tartarus dimension. There are three Setebosians among them.”
This fact holds no interest for Achilles. He watches the island grow ahead of them and notices the huge, dark castle on the crags at its center. The few windows in the upright slags of stone glow orange, as if the interior is on fire.
“The island also holds the last of the Cyclopes,” drones on Hephaestus. “And the Erinyes.”
“Those Furies are here?” says Achilles. “I thought they were a myth as well.”
“No, no myth.” The crippled immortal banks the chariot around and lines up the horses’ heads with a flat, open space above a black-rock shelf at the base of the central castle. Dark clouds twist and writhe around the mountain and its keep. The valleys on either side are filled with furtive movement. “When they are released from this place they will spend the rest of eternity pursuing and punishing sinners. They are truly ‘those who walk in darkness,’ with writhing snakes for hair and red eyes that weep tears of blood.”
“Bring them on,” says the son of Peleus.
The chariot lands gently at the base of a gigantic sculpture set on a great ledge made of black stone. The chariot’s wooden wheels creak and the horses flick out of existence. The strange glowing panel that the Artificer had been using to control the craft disappears.
“Come,” says Hephaestus and leads Achilles toward the broad, seemingly endless stairway on the other side of the statue. The immortal drags his bad foot along on stone.
Achilles cannot help but look up at the sculpture—three hundred feet high at least, a powerful man holding the double-sphere of Earth and Heaven on his powerful shoulders. “This is a sculpture of Iapetos,” says Achilles.
“No,” growls the god of fire, “it’s old Atlas himself. Frozen here forever.”
The four hundredth step is the last. The black castle rises above, its towers and turrets and hidden gables lost in the roiling cloud. The two doors ahead of them are each fifty feet high and fifty feet apart from each other.
“Nyx and Hemera pass each other here every day—Night and Day,” whispers Hephaestus. “One going out, one coming in. They are never in the house at the same time.”
Achilles glances up at the black clouds and starless sky. “Then we’ve come at the wrong time. I have no business with Hemera. You said it was Night with whom we need to speak.”
“Patience, son of Peleus,” grumbles Hephaestus. The god seems nervous. He glances at a small but bulky machine on his wrist. “Eos rises…now.”
Around the eastern rim of the black island grows an orange glow. It fades.
“No sunlight penetrates this island’s polarized aegis,” whispers Hephaestus. “But it’s almost morning beyond. The sun will be rising over the Dao and Harmakhis Rivers and the eastern cliffs of Hellas Basin within seconds.”
A sudden flash blinds Achilles. He hears one of the gigantic iron doors slam shut, then the other one creak open. When he can see again, the second door is closed and Night stands in front of them.
Always in awe of Athena, Hera, and the other goddesses, this is the first time that Achilles, son of Peleus and the sea goddess Thetis, finds himself in terror of an immortal. Hephaestus has gone to both knees and lowered his head in respect and fear for the terrible apparition facing them, but Achilles forces himself to remain standing. Yet he has to fight an overwhelming urge to unstrap the shield from his back and cower behind it, his short god-killing-blade in his hand. Torn between fleeing or fighting, he lowers his face in deference as a compromise.
While the gods can assume almost any size—Achilles knows nothing of the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy and would not understand the explanation of how the immortals get around this law—gods and goddesses seem most comfortable at around nine feet tall: tall enough to make mortals feel like children; not so tall that they have to reinforce leg bones or become too awkward even in their own Olympian halls.
Night—Nyx—is fifteen feet tall, wrapped in a roiling, vaporous cloud, dressed in what seems like multiple layers of diaphanous black cloth, strips hanging down in scores of lengths, with either a black headdress that includes a veil over her face or perhaps a face that looks like a molded black veil. Impossibly, her black eyes are perfectly visible through the black veil and vaporous clouds. Before averting his face, Achilles saw that she was incredibly large-breasted, as if she would suckle all the world to darkness. Only her hands glow pale, long-fingered and powerful, as if the fingers are made of solidified moonlight.
Achilles realizes that Hephaestus is speaking, almost chanting. “…Fumigation with torches, Nyx, parent goddess, source of sweet repose from woes, Mother from whom Gods and men arose, Hear, blessed Nyx decked with starry light, in sleep’s sweet silence dwelling ebon night. Dreams and soft ease attend thy dusky train, pleased with lengthened gloom and feastful strain, dissolving anxious care, the friend of mirth, with darkling speed riding ’round the earth. Goddess of phantoms and of shadowy play…”
“Enough,” says Night. “If I want to hear an Orphic hymn I’ll travel through time. How dare you, God of Fire, bring a mere mortal to Hellas and the night-shrouded home of Nyx?”
Achilles shivers at the sound of the goddess’s voice. It is the sound of a violent winter sea crashing on rocks, but understandable nonetheless.
“Goddess whose natural power divides the natural day,” Hephaestus grovels, still on his knees, still bowing, “this mortal is the son of immortal Thetis and is a demigod in his own right on his particular Earth. He is called Achilles, son of Peleus, and his prowess…”
“Oh, I know Achilles, son of Peleus, and his prowess—sacker of cities, raper of women, and killer of men,” says Night in her wave-crashing tones. “What possible reason could compel you to bring this…foot soldier…to my black door, Artificer?”
Achilles decides it is time he spoke. “I need to see Zeus, Goddess.”
The dark wraith turns more in his direction. It as if she is floating, not standing, and the large and huge-breasted form swivels without friction. Her veiled face—or face with the meshed face of a black veil—peers down at him with eyes that are blacker than black. The clouds roil and broil around her.
“You need to see the Lord of Thunder, the God of All Gods, the Pelasgian Zeus, Lord of Ten Thousand Temples and Dodona’s Shrine, Father of All Gods and Men, Zeus the Ultimate King Who Marshals the Storm Clouds and Who Gives All Commands?”
“Yeah,” says Achilles.
“What about?” asks Nyx.
It is Hephaestus who speaks up. “Achilles seeks to bring a mortal to the Healer’s tanks, Mother of the first black germless egg. He wants to ask Father Zeus to command the Healer to bring back to life the Amazon queen, Penthesilea.”
Night laughs. If her voice had been a wild sea crashing against rocks, Achilles thinks her laugh sounds like a winter wind howling off the Aegean.
“Penthesilea?” says the black-garbed goddess, still chuckling. “That brainless, blond, big-boobed lesbian tart? Why on a million Earths would you want to bring that musclebound bimbo back to life, son of Peleus? After all, it was you I watched run her and her horse through with your father’s great lance, skewering them both like peppers on a kebab.”
“I have no choice,” rumbles Achilles. “I love her.”
Night laughs again. “You love her? This from the Achilles who beds slave gi
rls and conquered princesses and captured queens as indifferently as others eat olives, only to cast them away like spit-out pits? You love her?”
“It’s Aphrodite’s pheromone perfume,” says Hephaestus, still on his knees.
Night quits laughing. “Which type?” she asks.
“Number nine,” grumbles Hephaestus. “Puck’s potion. The type with the self-duplicating nanomachines in the bloodstream constantly reproducing more dependency molecules and depriving the brain of endorphins and seratonin if the victim doesn’t act on his infatuation. There is no antidote.”
Night turns her sculpted veil-face toward Achilles. “I think that you are well and truly fornicated, son of Peleus. Zeus will never agree to rejuvenate a mortal—much less an Amazon, a race he thinks of rarely and thinks precious little of when they do come to his mind. The Father of All Gods and All Men has little use for Amazons and less use for virgins. He would see a resurrection of such a mortal as a desecration of the Healer’s tanks and skills.”
“I will ask him nonetheless,” Achilles says stubbornly.
Night regards him in silence. Then the big-bosomed, ebony-ragged aparition turns toward Hephaestus, who is still on his knees. “Crippled God of Fire, busy artificer to more noble gods, what do you see when you look upon this mortal man?”
“A fucking fool,” grunts Hephaestus.
“I see a quantum singularity,” says the goddess Nyx. “A black hole of probability. A myriad of equations all with the same single three-point solution. Why is that, Artificer?”
The god of fire grunts again. “His mother, Thetis of the seaweed-tangled breasts, held this arrogant mortal in the celestial quantum fire when he was a pup, little more than a larva. The probability of his death day, hour, minute, and method is one hundred percent, and because it cannot be changed, it seems to give Achilles a sort of invulnerability to all other attacks and injury.”
“Yesssssssss,” hisses shrouded Night. “Son of Hera, husband of that brainless Grace known as Aglaia the Glorious, why are you helping this man?”
Hephaestus bows lower on the step. “At first he bested me in a wrestling match, beloved goddess of dreadful shade. Then I continued helping him because his interests coincided with mine.”
“Your interest is to find Father Zeus?” whispers Night. Somewhere in the black canyons to their right, someone or something howls.
“My interest, Goddess, is to thwart the growing flood of Kaos.”
Night nods and raises her veiled face to the clouds roiling around her castle towers. “I can hear the stars scream, crippled Artificer. I know that when you say ‘Kaos,’ you mean chaos—on a quantum level. You are the only one of the gods, save for Zeus, who remembers us and our thinking before the Change…who remembers little things like physics.”
Hephaestus keeps his face lowered and says nothing.
“Are you monitoring the quantum flux, Artificer?” asks Night. There is a sharp and angry edge to her voice that Achilles does not understand.
“Yes, Goddess.”
“How much time, God of Fire, do you think we have left to survive if the vortexes of probability chaos continue to grow at this logarithmic rate?”
“A few days, Goddess,” grunts Hephaestus. “Perhaps less.”
“The Fates agree with you, Hera-spawn,” says Nyx. The volume and sea-crash timbre of her voice make Achilles want to clap his callused hands over his ears. “Day and night, the Moirai—those alien entities which mortal men call the Fates—toil at their electronic abacuses, manipulating their bubbles of magnetic energy and their mile-long coils of computing DNA—and every day the Moirai’s view of the future becomes less certain, their threads of probability more raveled, as if the loom of Time itself is broken.”
“It’s that fucking Setebos,” grumbles Hephaestus. “Begging your pardon, ma’am.”
“No, you are correct, Artificer,” says the giant Nyx. “It’s that fucking Setebos, let loose at last, no longer contained in this world’s arctic seas. The Many-Handed has gone to Earth, you know. Not this mortal’s Earth, but our old home.”
“No,” says Hephaestus, raising his face at last. “I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, yes—the Brain has crossed the Brane.” She laughs and this time Achilles does clasp his hands over his ears. This is a sound that no mortal should be made to hear.
“How long do the Moirai say we have?” whispers Hephaestus.
“Clotho, the Spinner, says that we have mere hours left before the quantum flux implodes this universe,” says Night. “Atropos, she who cannot be turned and who carries the abhorred shears to cut all our threads of life at death’s sharp instant, says it may be a month yet.”
“And Lachesis?” asks the god of fire.
“The Disposer of Lots—and she rides the fractal waves of the electronic abacus better than the others, I think—sees Kaos triumphant on this world and in this Brane within a week or two. Any way we cut it, we have little time left, Artificer.”
“Will you flee, Goddess?”
Night stands silent. Howls echo from the crags and valleys beyond her castle. Finally she says, “Where can we flee, Artificer? Where can even we few of the Originals flee if this universe we were born into collapses into chaos? Any Brane Hole we can create, any quantum leap we can teleport, will still be connected by the threads of chaos to this universe. No, there is nowhere to flee.”
“What do we do then, Goddess?” grunts Hephaestus. “Just bend over, grab our sandals, and kiss our immortal asses goodbye?”
Night makes a noise like the Aegean in mirthful storm. “We need to confer with the Elder Gods. And quickly.”
“The Elder Gods…” begins the Artificer and stops. “Kronos, Rhea, Okeanos, Tethys…all those exiled to terrible Tartarus?”
“Yes,” says Night.
“Zeus will never allow it,” says Hephaestus. “No god is allowed to communicate with…”
“Zeus must face reality,” bellows Night. “Or all will end in chaos, including his reign.”
Achilles climbs two steps toward the huge, black figure. His shield is on his forearm now as if he is ready to fight. “Hey, do you remember I’m here? And I’m still waiting for an answer to my question. Where is Zeus?”
Nyx leans over him and aims one pale, bony finger like a weapon. “Your quantum probability for dying at my hand may be zero, son of Peleus, but should I blast you atom from atom, molecule from molecule, the universe—even on a quantum level—might have a hard time maintaining that axiom.”
Achilles waits. He has noticed that the gods often babble on in this nonsense talk. The only thing to do is wait until they make sense again.
Finally Nyx speaks in the voice of wind-tossed waves. “Hera, sister and bride, daughter of Rhea and Kronos and incestuous bedmate to her divine brother, defender of Achaeans to the point of treachery and murder, has seduced Lord Zeus away from his duties and his watchfulness, bedding him and injecting him with Sleep in the great house where a hero’s wife weeps and labors, weaving by day and tearing out her work at night. This hero brought not his best bow to do his bloody work at Troy, but left it on a peg in a secret room with a secret door, hidden away from suitors and looters. This is the bow that no one else can pull, the bow that can send an arrow straight through iron axe-helve sockets, twelve in line, or half again that many guilty or guiltless men’s bodies.”
“Thank you, Goddess,” says Achilles and backs away down the staircase.
Hephaestus looks around, then follows, careful not to turn his back on the huge ebony figure in the flowing robes. By the time both men are standing, Night is gone from her place at the head of the stairs.
“What in Hades was all that about?” whispers the Artificer as they climb into the chariot and activate the virtual control panel and holo-graphic horses. “A hero’s wife weeping, hidden fucking rooms, axehelve sockets, twelve in line. Nyx sounded like your babbling Delphic oracle.”
“Zeus is on the isle of Ithaca,” says Achilles
as they climb away from the castle and the island and the growls and bellows of unseen monsters in the dark. “Odysseus himself told me that he had left his best bow at his palace on that rocky isle of his, hidden away with herb-scented robes in a secret room. I’ve visited crafty Odysseus there in better days. Only he can bring that huge bow to full pull—or so he says, though I’ve never tried—and after an evening’s drinking, firing an arrow through iron axehelve sockets, twelve in line, is the son of Laertes’ idea of entertainment. And if there are suitors there seeking his sexy wife Penelope’s hand, he would be even more greatly entertained to put his shafts through their bodies instead.”
“Odysseus’ home on Ithaca,” mutters Hephaestus. “A good place for Hera to hide her sleeping lord. Do you have any idea, son of Peleus, what Zeus will do to you when you wake him there?”
“Let’s find out,” says Achilles. “Can you quantum teleport us straight from this chariot?”
“Watch me,” says Hephaestus. Man and god wink out of sight as the chariot—empty now—keeps flying north and west across Hellas Basin.
50
“This isn’t Savi.”
“Did you hear me say it was, friend of Noman?”
Harman stood on the solid metal of the bier seemingly suspended above more than five miles of air a hundred yards from the north face of Chomolungma—staring despite his powerful urge not to stare at the dead face and naked body of a young Savi. Prospero stood behind him on the iron stairs. The wind was coming up outside.