by Dan Simmons
The Titans’ chariots come on.
72
Moira was gone when Harman awoke. The day was gray and cold and it was raining hard. The sea far above was churning and whitecapped, but not the violent surge of liquid mountain ranges he’d watched by lightning flash the night before. Harman hadn’t slept well—his dreams had been urgent and ominous.
He rolled up the silk-thin sleeping bag—it would dry by itself, he knew—and set it into his rucksack, leaving his clothes in the waterproof bag, taking out only his socks and boots to wear over his thermskin.
They’d had a campfire the last night before the storm began—no weenies and marshmallows, of course, Harman only knew what those were through the books he’d absorbed at the Taj—but he’d eaten the second half of his tasteless food bar and sipped water while they sat by the flickering flames.
Now the ashes were drenched and gray, the Breach floor between the rocks and coral had turned to mud, and Harman realized that he was walking in circles around their campsite, looking for some last sign of Moira…a note perhaps.
There was nothing.
He hitched the rucksack higher, pulled the thermskin cowl lower so that the goggles were properly lined up, wiped the rain from them, and began hiking west.
Instead of growing lighter as the day progressed, the skies grew darker, the rain came down more heavily, and the walls of water on either side grew taller and more oppressive. He’d gotten used to the trick of perspective where it was never the ocean bottom going down, but always the vertical walls of water on either side growing taller. Harman trudged on. The Breach descended through path-blasted ridges of black rock, passed over deep crevasses on narrow, slippery black iron bridges with no railings, and climbed steeply up more rock ridges. Even though high ridges made the walls of water on each side lower—the ocean was no more than two hundred feet deep here, Harman guessed—the climbing was exhausting and even more claustrophobic than before, with the rock walls on either side of the narrow path making him feel as if there were walls within walls closing in on him.
By midday—which only his internal time-function announced since the sun was completely absent and the rain was falling so fiercely that he considered pulling down his osmosis mask over his nose and mouth—the Breach path had come out of the underwater mountainous country and stretched flat and straight ahead. That was something and it helped improve Harman’s dark mood—but only a little.
He welcomed the rocky or coral sections of path now, since the ocean-floor bottom, which had a nice consistency of packed soil on the dry days, was become a squelching avenue of mud. Eventually he grew tired of walking—it was after noon at whatever local time it was there south of England—so he sat on a low boulder emerging from the forcefield-contained northern ocean and took out his daily food bar to munch on, while sipping cool water from the hydrator tube.
The food bars—one a day—left him hungry. And they tasted like he imagined sawdust must taste. And there were only four left. What Prospero and Moira expected him to do when the food bars ran out—assuming he had another seventy or eighty days of hiking ahead of him—he had no idea. Would the gun really work underwater? If it did, would it kill a big fish and could he haul it through the forcefield wall into the Breach? The dried seaweed and driftwood thrown down here from the sea above was already getting scarcer…how was he supposed to cook this theoretical fish? The lighter was in his pack, part of the sharp flip-knife, spoon, fork, multi-thingee, and he had a metal bowl he could morph into a pan by touching it in the right places, but was he really supposed to spend hours of his time each day fishing for…
Harman noticed another rock half a mile or so to the west. The thing was huge—the size of some of the more jagged ridges he’d passed through—and it protruded from the north wall of the Atlantic just before the dry bottom of the Breach dipped into another deep trench, but this rock or coral reef was strangely shaped. Instead of crossing the Breach with a path cut through it, this rock appeared to slant down from the water, disappearing in the sand and loam of the Breach itself. More than that, it looked strangely rounded, smoother than the volcanic basalt he’d been hiking through the last three days.
He’d learned how to activate the telescopic and magnification controls of his thermskin goggles and he did so now.
It was no rock. Some sort of gigantic, man-made device was protruding from the north wall of the Breach, its snout sunk into the dirt. The thing was huge, widening back from a bottle-nosed-dolphin bow—crumpled metal, exposed girders—to sinuous curves that widened like a woman’s thigh and disappeared through the forcefield.
Harman put away the last of his food bar, pulled out the gun and attached it to the stik-tite patch on the belt of his thermskin, and began walking toward the sunken ship.
Harman stood under the mass of the thing—much larger than he imagined from almost a mile away—and guessed it had been some sort of submarine. The bow was shattered, exposed girders looked to be rusted by rainfall rather than the sea, but the bulk of the smooth, almost rubbery-looking hull appeared more or less intact as it angled back up through the forcefield and into the ocean’s midday darkness. He could make out the silhouette of the thing for another ten yards or so in the ocean, but nothing more.
Harman stared at the large breach in the hull near the bow—a breach within a Breach, he thought stupidly, rain pounding down on his cowl and goggles—and was sure he could get into the submarine through that opening. He was equally sure that it would be pure idiocy to do so. His job was not to explore two-thousand-year-old sunken wrecks, but to get his ass back to Ardis, or at least to another old-style community, as quickly as he could—seventy-five days, a hundred days, three hundred days—it didn’t matter. His only job was to continue walking west. He didn’t know what was in this damned Lost Era machine, but something in there could kill him and he didn’t see how anything in there could enlighten him any further than he’d been enlightened by his drowning in the crystal cabinet.
But still….
It hadn’t taken his enlightenment through drowning for Harman to know that—however genetically modified and nanocytically reinforced—his species evolved from chimps and hominids. Curiosity had killed countless of those noble, knuckled ancestors, but it had also gotten them up off their knuckles.
Harman stowed the pack some yards from the bow—the thing was waterproof but he didn’t know if it was pressure-proof—pulled the ancient pistol from its stick-tite grip and held it in his right hand, activated the two bright searchlight patches on his upper chest, and squeezed his way past rended metal into the dark forward corridors of the dead machine.
73
The Greeks aren’t going to make it to nightfall.
They aren’t even going to make it to lunch at this rate. And neither am I.
The Achaeans are falling back into a tighter and tighter half circle, fighting like fiends, the sea at their backs and the surf running red, but Hector’s attack is relentless. At least five thousand Achaeans have fallen since the attack began just after dawn, among them noble Nestor—alive but carried unconscious to his tent, struck from his chariot by a lance that pierced his shoulder and shattered bone. The old hero who’d tried to step in to fill in for the absent or dead giants—Achilles, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Big Ajax, crafty Odysseus—has done his best, but the spear-point found him.
Nestor’s son Antilochus, the bravest of the Achaeans these past few days, is dead, pierced through the bowels by a well-placed Trojan bowman’s shot. Nestor’s other captain son—Thrasymedes—is missing in action, pulled down into the Trojan-filled trench early on and not seen in the three hours since then. The trench and revetments are now in Hector’s bloody hands.
Little Ajax is wounded, a nasty sword cut to both shins just aside the greaves, and was carried from the field to the non-safety of the burned boats just minutes ago. Podalirius, fighting captain and skilled healer, son of the legendary Asclepius, is dead—cut down by a circle of killers from Deiphobu
s’ attacking legions. They hacked the brilliant physician’s body to pieces and hauled his bloodied armor back to Troy.
Alastor, Teucer’s friend and chieftain, who took over Thrasymedes’ command during the terrible battle of the bulge behind the abandoned trenches, fell in front of his men—still cursing and writhing for minutes with a dozen arrows in him. Five Argives fought their way forward to retrieve his body, but they were all cut down by Hector’s advance guard. Teucer himself was sobbing as he killed Alastor’s killers, firing arrow after arrow into their eyes and guts as he fell back with the slowly retreating Greeks.
There is nowhere left to retreat. We’re crammed here onto the beach, the rising tide lapping at our sandaled feet, and the rain of arrows is constant. All of the Greek horses have died loudly, except for those few whose owners, weeping, set them free and whipped them toward the advancing enemy lines. More trophies for the Trojans.
I’m going to be killed if I stay here. When I was a scholic, especially when I was Aphrodite’s secret-agent scholic, all decked out in levitation harness, impact armor, morphing bracelet, stun-baton, the Hades invisibility helmet—and whatever else I hauled around then—I felt pretty in-vulnerable, even when moderately close to the fighting. Except for the arrows, which are deadly enough at astounding distances, there isn’t much killing-from-afar in this war. Men smell their enemy’s sweat and breath and are splattered with his blood, brains, and saliva when they shove steel—or in most cases, bronze—into the man’s guts.
But I’ve almost been skewered three times in the last two hours: once by a cast spear that came over the lines of defenders and almost took my balls off—I leaped in the air to avoid it and when it buried itself in the wet sand here and I came down straddling it, the vibrating shaft smacked me in the gonads. Then an arrow parted my hair and a minute later another arrow, one of thousands darkening the sky and rising like a miniature forest out of the sand everywhere here, would have taken me square in the throat if an Argive I don’t even know hadn’t raised his round shield, leaned over, and deflected the barbed and poisonous shaft.
I have to get out of here.
My hand has touched the QT medallion a hundred times in the hours since dawn, but I haven’t quantum teleported away. I’m not sure why.
Yes I am. I don’t want to desert these men. I don’t want to be safe in Helen’s bathchamber or atop some nearby hill knowing that these Achaeans I’ve spent ten years watching and talking to and breaking bread with and drinking wine with are being slaughtered like proverbial cattle on this blood-dimmed bit of beach.
But I can’t save them.
Or can I?
I grab the medallion, concentrate on a place I’ve been, twist the gold circle half a turn, and open my eyes to find myself falling down a long, long elevator shaft.
No, I’m not falling, I realize—realize too late since I’ve already screamed twice—I’m in free fall in the main corridor on the deck of the Queen Mab, or at least in the main corridor on the deck where I’d had my private quarters. But there had been gravity then. Now there is only this falling and falling, tumbling in space but not really falling, flailing to get to the cubby door or to the astrogation bubble twenty yards down—or up—the corridor.
Two black and chitinous Belt moravecs, the soldiers with the built-in black armor, barbs, and masklike heads, kick out of a nearby elevator shaft—there is no elevator car in it—and grab me by the arms. They shoot back toward the shaft and I realize that the rockvecs can move in this zero-g not just because they’re used to it—it must be close to their native level of gravity in the Asteroid Belt—but because their carapaces have built-in and nearly silent thrusters that pulse expanding jets of what may just be water. Whatever it is, it allows them to move fluidly and quickly in this zero-gravity world. Without a word, they pull me into the shaft that runs the length of the Queen Mab—imagine jumping into an empty elevator shaft the height of the Empire State Building—so I do the only thing a sane man would do—I scream again.
The two soldiers jet me hundreds of feet up or down this echoing shaft—echoing to just my screams—and then pull me through some sort of forcefield membrane into a busy room. Even upside down as I am, I can recognize it as the bridge of the ship. I’d been on the bridge only once during my stay, but there was no mistaking this room’s function—moravecs I’d never seen before are busy monitoring three-dimensional virtual control boards, more rockvec soldiers are standing by holographic projections, and I recognize General Beh bin Adee, the skittery spider ’vec—I can’t think of his name right now—as well as the strange-looking navigator, Cho Li, and the Prime Integrator, Asteague/Che.
It’s the Prime Integrator who effortlessly kicks through the zero-g bridge space to me as the two soldiers firmly set me into a mesh chair and tie me down so that I can’t escape. No, I realize, they’re not tying me down like a captive, merely attaching mesh web belts to hold me in place. It helps—just being stationary gives me a sense of up and down.
“Dr. Hockenberry, we didn’t expect you back,” says the little moravec who’s roughly the same shape and size as Mahnmut, but made of different-colored plastics, metals, and polymers. “I apologize for the lack of gravity. We’re not under thrust. I could arrange for the internal force-fields to exhibit a pressure differential that could simulate gravity for you—after a fashion—but the truth is we’re station-keeping near Earth’s polar ring and we do not want to exhibit a major change in internal energy uses unless we have to.”
“I’m all right,” I say, hoping that they haven’t heard my screams in the elevator shaft. “I need to talk to Odysseus.”
“Odysseus is…ah…indisposed right now,” says Asteague/Che.
“I need to speak with him.”
“I am afraid that this will not be possible,” says the moravec who’s about the same size as my friend Mahnmut, but who looks and speaks so differently. His voice actually has a soothing quality to it.
“But it’s imperative that I…” I stop in midsentence. They’ve killed Odysseus. It’s obvious that these half-robot things have done something terrible to the only other human being on their ship. I don’t know why they would have killed the Achaean, but then I’ve never understood two-thirds of the things these moravecs do or don’t do. “Where is he?” I ask, trying to sound in-control and authoritarian even while webstrapped into my little chair. “What have you done to him?”
“We’ve done nothing to the son of Laertes,” says Asteague/Che.
“Why would we harm our guest?” asks the boxlike, spiderlegged ’vec whose name I can’t remember…no, I do recall it now, Retrograde Jogenson or Gunderson or something Scandinavian.
“Then bring Odysseus here,” I say.
“We cannot,” repeats Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “He is not on the ship.”
“Not on the ship?” I say, but then I look at one of the holographic displays set into a niche in the hull where a window should be. Hell, for all I know it is a window. The full blue and white is turning below, filling the viewscreen.
“Odysseus went down to this Earth?” I say. “To my Earth?” Is it my Earth? I lived and died there, yes, but thousands of years ago if the gods and moravecs are to be believed.
“No, Odysseus has not gone down to the surface again,” says Asteague/Che. “He has gone to visit the Voice that contacted the ship during our transit…the Voice which asked for him by name.”
“Show Dr. Hockenberry,” says General Beh bin Adee. “He’ll understand why he can’t talk to Odysseus right now.”
Asteague/Che appears to ponder this suggestion. Then the Europan moravec turns to look at the navigator Cho Li—I suspect some sort of radio transmission has taken place between them—and Cho Li moves a tentacle arm. A six-foot-wide three-dimensional holographic window opens not two feet in front of me.
Odysseus is making love to the most sensuous woman I’ve ever seen in my life—except perhaps for Helen of Troy, of course. My male ego had thought that my lovem
aking—well, sexual intercourse—with Helen had been energetic and imaginative. But thirty seconds of staring slackjawed at the coupling going on between the naked Odysseus—his body battle-scarred, tanned, barrel-chested but short, and the pale, exotic, pneumatic, sensous, and slightly hirsute woman with the incredible eye makeup—lets me know that my exertions with Helen had been tame, unimaginative, and in slow motion compared to what these erotic athletes are involved in.
“Enough,” I say, mouth dry. “Turn it off.”
The pornographic window winks out of existence. “Who is that…lady?” I manage to say.
“She says her name is Sycorax,” answers Retrograde Somebody’sson. It’s always odd to hear that solid voice coming out of that tiny metal box atop those long skinny legs.
“Let me talk to Mahnmut and Orphu of Io,” I say. I’ve known those two ’vecs the longest and Mahnmut is the most human of all these machine-people. If I can convince anyone here on the Queen Mab, it will be Mahnmut.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible, either,” says Asteague/Che.
“Why? Are they having sex with some female moravec babes or something?” I hear how stupid my attempted witticism is as it mentally echoes in the long seconds of censuring silence that follow.
“Mahnmut and Orphu have entered the Earth’s atmosphere in a dropship carrying Mahnmut’s submersible,” says Asteague/Che.
“Can’t you link up to them by radio or something?” I ask. “I mean, they could patch together radio calls like that way back in my Twentieth and early Twenty-first centuries.”
“Yes, we are in contact,” says Retrograde Whoever. “But at the moment their ship is being attacked and we do not want to distract them with unnecessary communications. Their survival is problematic at best.”
I consider asking more questions—who on Earth is attacking my friends? Why? How?—but realize that such a dialogue would only distract me from my real reason for being here.