by Dan Simmons
Zeus roars laughter again. “Not Number Nine! Well, you are well and truly screwed, my friend. How did this Penthesilea twat die? No, wait, I will see for myself…”
The Lord Father moves his right hand again and the wallscreen blurs, shifts, leaps back across time and space. Achilles looks up to see the doomed Amazon charge against him and his men on the red plains at the base of Olympos. He watches Clonia, Bremusa, and the other Amazons fall to men’s arrows and blades. He watches again as he casts his father’s unfailing spear completely through Queen Penthesilea and the thick torso of her horse behind her, pinning her on her fallen steed’s horse like some wriggling insect on a dissecting tray.
“Oh, well done,” booms Zeus. “And now you want her brought back to life again in one of my Healer’s vats?”
“Yes, Lord,” says Achilles.
“I don’t know how you know about the Hall of Healing,” says Zeus, pacing back and forth again, “but you should know that even the Healer’s alien arts cannot bring a dead mortal back to life.”
“Lord,” says Achilles, his voice low but urgent, “Athena cast a spell of no corruption, of no encroaching death, over my beloved’s body. It might be possible to…”
“SILENCE!!” roars Zeus and Achilles is physically driven back to the holowall by the blast of noise. “NO ONE IN THE ORIGINAL PANTHEON OF IMMORTALS TELLS ZEUS THE FATHER WHAT IS POSSIBLE OR WHAT SHOULD BE DONE, MUCH LESS SOME MERE MORTAL, OVERMUSCLED SPEARMAN.”
“No, Father,” says Achilles, raising his gaze to the giant, bearded form, “but I hoped that…”
“Silence,” says Zeus again, but at a level that allows Achilles to remove his hands from his ears. “I’m leaving now—to destroy Hera, to cast down her accomplices into the bottomless pit of Tartarus, to punish the other gods in ways they will never forget, and to wipe out this invading Argive army once and for all. You Greeks—with your arrogance and your oily ways—really get on my tits.” Zeus begins to stride for the door. “You’re on Ilium-Earth here, son of Thetis. It may take you many months, but you can find your way home by yourself. I would not recommend you return to Ilium—there will be no Achaeans left alive there by the time you reach that place.”
“No,” says Achilles.
Zeus whirls. He is actually smiling through his beard. “What did you say?”
“I said no. You must grant my wish.” Achilles unlimbers his shield and sets it in place on his forearm, as if he is heading to the front. He pulls his sword.
Zeus throws his head back and laughs. “Grant your wish or…what, bastard son of Thetis?”
“Or else I will feed Zeus’s liver to that starving dog of Odysseus’ in the courtyard,” Achilles says firmly.
Zeus smiles and shakes his head. “Do you know why you are alive this very day, insect?”
“Because I am Achilles, son of Peleus,” says Achilles, stepping forward. He wishes he had his throwing spear. “The greatest warrior and noblest hero on Earth—invulnerable to his enemies—friend of the murdered Patroclus, slave and servant to no man…or god.”
Zeus shakes his head again. “You’re not the son of Peleus.”
Achilles stops advancing. “What are you talking about, Lord of Flies? Lord of Horse Dung? I am the son of Peleus who is the son of Aeacus, son of the mortal who mated with the immortal sea goddess Thetis, a king myself descended from a long line of kings of the Myrmidons.”
“No,” says Zeus and this time the giant god is the one who steps closer, towering over Achilles. “You are the son of Thetis, but the bastard son of my seed, not the seed of Peleus’.”
“You!” Achilles tries to laugh but it comes out a hoarse bark. “My immortal mother told me in all truth that…”
“Your immortal mother lies through her seaweed-crusted teeth,” laughs Zeus. “Almost three decades ago, I desired Thetis. She was less than a full goddess then, although more beautiful than most of you mortals. But the Fates—those accursed bean counters with the DNA-memory abacuses—warned me that any child I spawned with Thetis could be my undoing, could cause my death, could bring down the reign of Olympos itself.”
Achilles stares hate and disbelief through his helmet eyeholes.
“But I wanted Thetis,” continues Zeus. “So I fucked her. But first I morphed into the form of Peleus—some common mortal boy-man with whom Thetis was mildly infatuated at the time. But the sperm that conceived you is Zeus’s divine seed, Achilles, son of Thetis, make no mistake about that. Why else do you think your mother took you far away from that idiot Peleus and had you raised by an old centaur?”
“You lie,” growls Achilles.
Zeus shakes his head almost sadly. “And you will die in a second, young Achilles,” says the Father of All Gods and Men. “But you will die knowing that I told you the truth.”
“You can’t kill me, Lord of Crabs.”
Zeus rubs his beard. “No, I can’t. Not directly. Thetis saw to that. When she learned that I had been the lover who knocked her up, not that dickless worm Peleus, she also knew of the Fates’ prediction and that I would kill you as surely as my father, Kronos, ate his offspring rather than risk their revolts and vendettas when they grew up. And I would have done that, young Achilles—eaten you when you were a babe—had not Thetis conspired to dip you in the probability flames of the pure quantum celestial fire. You are a quantum freak unique unto the universe, bastard son of Thetis and Zeus. Your death—and even I do not know the details of it, the Fates will not share them—is absolutely appointed.”
“Then fight me now, God of Feces,” shouts Achilles and begins to advance, sword and shield ready.
Zeus holds up one hand. Achilles is frozen in place. Time itself seems to freeze.
“I cannot kill you, my impetuous little bastard,” mutters Zeus, as if to himself, “but what if I blast your flesh from your bone and then rip that very flesh into its constituent cells and molecules? It might take a while for even the quantum universe to reassemble you—centuries perhaps?—and I don’t think it could possibly be a painless process.”
Frozen in midstride, Achilles knows that he is still able to speak but does not.
“Or perhaps I could send you somewhere,” says Zeus, gesturing toward the ceiling, “where there is no air to breathe. That will be an interesting conundrum for the probability singularity of the celestial fire to solve.”
“There is no place outside the oceans with no air to breathe,” snarls Achilles, but then he remembers his gasping and weakness on the high slopes of Olympos just the day before.
“Outer space would give the lie to that assertion,” says Zeus with a maddening smile. “Somewhere beyond the orbit of Uranus, perhaps, or out in the Kuiper Belt. Or Tartarus would serve. The air there is mostly methane and ammonia—it would turn your lungs to burned twigs—but if you survived a few hours in terrible pain, you could commune with your grandparents. They eat mortals, you know.”
“Fuck you,” shouts Achilles.
“So be it,” says Zeus. “Have a good trip, my son. Short—agonizing—but good.”
The King of the Gods moves his right hand in a short, easy arc and the paving tiles beneath Achilles’ feet begin to dissolve. A circle opens in the floor of Odysseus’ banquet hall until the fleet-footed mankiller seems to be standing on flame-lighted air. From beneath him, from the horrific pit below filled with surging sulfurous clouds, black mountains rising like rotten teeth, lakes of liquid lead, the bubble and flow of hissing lava, and the shadowy movement of huge, inhuman things, comes the constant roar and bellow of the monsters once called Titans.
Zeus moves his hand again, ever so slightly, and Achilles falls into that pit. He does not scream as he disappears.
After a minute of gazing down at the flames and roiling black clouds so far below, Zeus moves his palm from left to right, the circle closes, the floor becomes solid and is made up of Odysseus’ handset tiles once again, and silence returns to the house except for the pathetic baying of the starving hound named Argus out i
n the courtyard somewhere.
Zeus sighs and quantum teleports away to begin his reckoning with the unsuspecting gods.
58
Prospero stayed behind as Moira led Harman around the marble balcony with no railing, up a moving flight of open iron stairs, then around again, up again, and so until the floor of the Taj became a circle seemingly miles below. Harman’s heart was pounding.
There were a few small, round windows set into the booklined wall of the endlessly rising and inward-curving dome. Harman had not seen them from below or from outside, but they allowed light in and gave him an excuse to pause for breath and courage. They stood in the light for a minute as Harman stared out at the distant mountain peaks shining icily in the late morning light. Masses of clouds had filled the valleys to the north and east, hiding the ripple-crevassed glaciers from view. Harman wondered how far he was looking beyond the peaks and glaciers and massing clouds to the dusty and nearly curved horizon beyond—a hundred miles? Two hundred miles? More?
“It’s all right,” Moira said softly.
Harman turned.
“What you did to wake me,” she said. “It’s all right. We’re sorry. You really did have no choice. The mechanisms to incite you were in place before your father’s father’s great-great-grandfather was born.”
“But what are the odds that I would be descended from this Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep of yours?” said Harman. He could not hide the regret in his voice—nor did he want to.
Surprisingly, Moira laughed. It was Savi’s laugh—quick and spontaneous—but lacking the edge of bitterness Harman had heard in the older woman’s amusement. “The odds are one hundred percent,” said Moira.
Harman could only show his confusion in silence.
“Ferdinand Mark Alonzo made sure that when the next line of old-style humans were being…readied and decanted,” said Moira,”that some of his chromosomes would be in all males of the line.”
“No wonder we’re feeble and stupid and inept,” said Harman. “We’re all a bunch of inbred cousins.” He’d sigled a book on basic genetics less than three weeks earlier—although it seemed like years ago. Ada had been sleeping next to him while he watched the golden words flow from the book down his hand, wrist, and arm.
Moira laughed again. “Are you ready to go the rest of the way up to the crystal cabinet?”
The clear cupola at the top of the Taj Moira was much larger than it had appeared from below—Harman guessed it was at least sixty or seventy feet across. There were no marble walkways here and the iron-stairway escalators and black-iron catwalks all ended at the center of the dome, everything glowing in the sunlight from the clear windows encircling the Taj’s pointed cupola.
Harman had never been so high—not even on the tower of the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu seven hundred feet above the suspended road-way—and he’d never been overwhelmed by such a fear of falling. This platform was so high that he could look down and hide the entire circle of the marble floor of the Taj with his outstretched hand. The maze and the crypt entrance on the main floor were so far below that they looked like the microcircuit embroidery on a turin cloth. Harman forced himself not to look down as he followed Moira up the last stairway out onto the web of catwalks to the wrought-iron platform in the cupola itself.
“Is that it?” he asked, nodding toward a ten-or twelve-foot-tall structure in the center of the platform.
“Yes.”
Harman had expected this so-called crystal cabinet to be another version of Moira’s crystal sarcophagus, but this thing looked nothing like a coffin. It was faceted with glass and metal geodesic struts the color of old pewter. The word “dodecahedron” came to mind, but Harman had learned that from sigling rather than from reading and wasn’t sure if it was the correct term. The crystal cabinet was a multifaceted, twelve-sided object, roughly spherical except for the flat faces, made of a dozen or so slabs of clear glass or crystal framed by thin struts of burnished metal. Scores of multicolored cables and pipes ran from the walls of the cupola into the black metal base of the thing. Scattered on the platform near the cabinet were metal-mesh chairs, odd instruments with dark screens and keyboards, and micro-thin slabs of vertical clear plastic, some five or six feet high.
“What is this place?” asked Harman.
“The nexus of the Taj.” She activated several of the screened instruments and touched a vertical panel. The plastic disappeared as a holo-graphic virtual control panel took its place. Moira’s hands danced on the virtual images, there was a deep sound from the walls of the Taj, and a golden liquid—not yellow but liquid gold, apparently no thicker than water—began pouring into the base of the crystal cabinet.
Harman walked closer to the dodecahedron. “It’s filling with liquid.”
“Yes.”
“That’s crazy. I can’t go in there now. I’d drown.”
“No, you won’t,” said Moira.
“You expect me to be in that cabinet when it has ten feet of this golden liquid in it?”
“Yes.”
Harman shook his head and backed away, stopping six feet from the edge of the metal platform. “No, no, no. That’s too crazy.”
“As you will, but it is the only way you can gain the knowledge of these books,” said Moira. “The fluid is the medium which allows the transmission of the contents of these million volumes. Knowledge you will need if you are to be our Prometheus in the struggle against Setebos and his kind. Knowledge you will need if you are to educate your own people. Knowledge you will need, my Prometheus, if you are to save your beloved Ada.”
“Yes, but if the water fills it—whatever the liquid is—it’ll be ten feet deep or deeper. I’m not a good swimmer…” began Harman.
Suddenly Ariel was standing next to them on the platform, although Harman hadn’t heard his steps on the metal floor. The small figure was carrying something bulky wrapped in what looked to be a red turin cloth.
“Ariel, my darling!” cried Moira. Her voice carried a tone of delight and excitement that Harman had not yet heard from her—nor even from Savi in the time he’d known her.
“Greetings to Miranda,” said the sprite, removing the red cloth and handing Moira some sort of antique instrument with strings. Harman’s people played and sang some music, but knew few instruments and made none.
“A guitar!” said the post-human woman, taking the oddly shaped instrument from the greenish-glowing sprite and touching the strings with her long fingers. The notes that issued forth reminded Harman of Ariel’s own voice.
Ariel bowed low and spoke in formal tone—
“Take
This slave of Music, for the sake
Of him who is the slave of thee.
And teach it all the harmony
In which thou canst, and only thou,
Make the delighted spirit glow,
Till joy defines itself again,
And, too intense, is turned to pain;
For by permission and command
Of thine own Prince Ferdinand,
Poor Ariel sends this silent token
Of more than ever can be spoken.”
Moira bowed toward the sprite, set the resonating instrument on a table, and kissed Ariel on his green-glowing forehead. “I thank thee, friend, sometimes friendly servant, never slave. How has my Ariel fared since I went to sleep?” And said:
“When you died, the silent Moon,
in her interlunar swoon,
Is not sadder in her cell
Than deserted Ariel.
When you live again on earth,
Like an unseen star of birth,
Ariel guides you o’er the sea
Of life from your nativity.”
Moira touched his cheek, then looked at Harman, then back to the sprite-avatar of the biosphere. “Have you two encountered one another before?”
“We’ve met,” said Harman.
“How is the world, Ariel, since I left it?” asked Moira, turning away from Harman again.
Ariel said,
“Many changes have been run,
Since Ferdinand and you begun
Your course of love, and Ariel still
Has tracked your steps, and served your will.”
In a less formal voice, as if concluding some official ceremony, the biosphere sprite said, “And how is it with you, my lady, now that you are born unto us again?”
Now it seemed to be Moira’s turn to sound more formal and cadenced than Harman had ever heard in Savi’s voice—
“This temple, sad and lone,
Is all spared from the thunder of a war
Foughten long since by giant hierarchy
Against rebellion: this old image here,
Whose carved features wrinkled as he fell,
Is Prosper’s; I Miranda, left supreme
Sole Priestess of this desolation.”—
To his horror, Harman saw that both the post-human woman and inhuman biosphere entity were openly weeping.
Ariel stepped back, bowed again, swept his hand in Harman’s direction, and said, “This mortal man who’s done no harm, despite all the contrary his name implies, has he come to the crystal cabinet to be executed?”
“No,” said Moira, “to be educated.”
59
The Setebos Egg hatched during their first night back at the ruins of Ardis Hall.
Ada was shocked to see the devastation at her former home. She’d been unconscious when flown away on the sonie the night of the attack and because of her concussion and other injuries had only partial memories of the horrible hours before. Now she saw the ruins of her life and home and memories in stark daylight. It made her want to fall to her knees and weep until she slept, but because she was leading the group of forty-four other survivors as they came up the last hill toward Ardis, the sonie hovering with eight of the most severely ill and wounded above, she kept her head up and her eyes dry as she walked past the scorched ruins, glancing left and right only to point out articles and remnants that could be salvaged for their new camp.