by Dan Simmons
“That’s it?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo from the troop carrier deck. “That’s where we were with the Greeks and Trojans fighting? That shrubby hill and bit of land?”
“Six thousand years ago,” said Mahnmut from his control room of The Dark Lady in the dropship’s cargo bay.
“And in another universe,” said Orphu from his corner of The Dark Lady’s own cargo bay.
“It doesn’t look like much,” said Suma IV from the controls of the dropship. “Can we move on?”
“One more circle, please,” said Mahnmut. “Can we go lower? Fly over the plain between the ridge and the sea? Or the beach?”
“No,” said Suma IV. “Use your optics to magnify. I don’t choose to run that close to the interdiction field dome over the dried-up Mediterranean Sea or get that low.”
“I was thinking of getting a little closer to allow Orphu’s radar and thermal imaging to get better signals,” said Mahnmut.
“I’m fine,” rumbled the intercom voice from the hold.
The dropship orbited again at five thousand meters, the westernmost part of its circle above the ruins on the hilltop and still more than a kilometer from where the Mediterranean Basin began. Mahnmut zoomed his image from the primary camera feed, shut off other inputs, and looked down with a strange sense of sadness.
The rubble of the ruins of the ancient stones where Ilium had once stood lay on a ridge running westward toward the curve of Aegean shore—it was never really a bay, just a bend where ancient ships had tied up to stakes and stone anchors. And where Agamemnon and all the Greek heroes had beached their hundreds of black ships.
To the west then, the Aegean and Mediterranean had stretched forever—the wine-dark sea—but now, through the slight shimmer of the post-human-created interdiction field that would cut all the dropship’s power in a millisecond if they flew into it, there stretched away only more dirt, more rock, distant green fields—the dry Mediterranean Basin. Also easily visible to the west were ancient islands that once rose from the sea—islands that Achilles had conquered before assaulting Troy: Imbros, Lemnos, and Tenedos, visible now only as steep, forest-covered hills with rocky bases meeting the sandy bottom of the Basin.
Between the now-dry Aegean and the ridge holding the ruins of Troy, Mahnmut could see a kilometer and a half or so of alluvial plain. It was a forest of scrub trees now, but the little moravec could easily see this plain as it was when he had been there with Odysseus, Achilles, Hector, and all the other warriors—about three curving miles of shallow sea fringed with marshes and sandy alluvial flats, the man-crowded beach, the sand dunes that had soaked up so much blood in the years of fighting there, the thousands of bright tents above the beach, then the wide plain between the beach and the city—wooded now, but stripped bare of all trees then after a decade of foraging for firewood for cooking fires and corpse fires.
To the north there was water still visible: the strait once called the Dardanelles, the Hellespont, dammed up by glowing forcefield hands of the same sort as between Gibraltar and Africa on the west end of the drained Mediterranean.
As if he were studying the same area with his radar and other instruments, Orphu said over their private circuit—“The post-humans must have built some huge drainage system underground or this entire area would be flooded now.”
“Yes,” sent Mahnmut, not really interested in the engineering or physics of the thing. He was thinking of Lord Byron and of Alexander the Great and of all the others who had made their pilgrimage to Ilium, Troy, this strangely sacred site.
No stone there is without a name. The words seemed just to appear in Mahnmut’s mind. Who had written that? Lucan? Perhaps. Probably.
On the hilltop now, only a few gray-white scars of disturbed rock showed, a tumble of stones, all without a name. Mahnmut realized that he was looking at the ruins of ruins—some of those scrapes and scars probably dated back to the Troy-fanatic and amateur archaeologist Schliemann’s careless digs and brutal excavations from when he first started digging in 1870—more than three thousand years ago on this true Earth.
It was noplace special now. The last name it had held on any human map was Hisarlik. Rocks, scrub trees, an alluvial plain, a high ridge looking north to the Dardanelles and west to the Aegean.
But in Mahnmut’s mind’s eye he could see precisely where the armies had clashed on the Plains of Scamander and the Plain of Simois. He could see where the walls and topless towers of Ilium had held their high place there, where the long ridge dropped down toward the sea. He could still make out a thicketed ridge in between the city and the sea—the Greeks had called it Thicket Ridge even then, but the priests and priestesses in the temples of Troy often referred to it as Mryine’s Mounded Tomb—and he remembered how he had watched Zeus’s face rise in the south as an atomic mushroom cloud not so many months ago.
Six thousand years ago.
As the dropship completed its last, high circling, Mahnmut could make out where the great Scaean Gate had held back the screaming Greeks—there had been no large wooden horse in the Iliad Mahnmut had seen firsthand, and the great, main lane inside past the marketplace and central fountains all leading to Priam’s palace, destroyed in the bombing more than ten months ago in Mahnmut’s time, and just northeast of the palace the great Temple to Athena. Where only rocks waited now and scrub trees grew, Mahnmut from Europa could see where the busy Dardanian Gate had been and the main watchtower and well just north of it where once Helen had…
“There’s nothing here,” said their pilot, Suma IV, over the intercom. “I’m leaving now.”
“Yes,” said Mahnmut.
“Yes,” rumbled Orphu over the same commline.
They flew north, retracting the slow-flight wings and breaking the sound barrier again. The echo of the sonic boom went unheard on both sides of the empty Dardanelles.
“Are you excited?” Mahnmut asked his friend over their private line. “We’ll be seeing Paris in a few minutes.”
“A crater where the center of Paris used to be,” answered Orphu. “I think that black hole millennia ago took out Proust’s apartment.”
“Still and all,” said Mahnmut, “it’s where he wrote. And for a while a fellow named James Joyce as well, if I remember correctly.”
Orphu rumbled.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me that you were obsessed with Joyce as well as Proust?” persisted Mahnmut.
“It never came up.”
“But why those two as your primary focus, Orphu?”
“Why Shakespeare, Mahnmut? Why his sonnets rather than his plays? Why the Dark Lady and the Young Man rather than, say, Hamlet?”
“No, answer my question,” said Mahnmut. “Please.”
There was a silence. Mahnmut listened to the ramjet engines behind and above them, the hiss of the oxygen flowing through umbilicals and ventilators, the static emptiness of the main comm lines.
Finally Orphu said, “Remember my spiel up in the Mab about how great human artists—singularities of genius—could bring new realities into existence? Or at least allow us to cross universal Branes to them?”
“How could I forget? None of us knew if you were serious.”
“I was serious,” rumbled Orphu. “My interest in human beings focused on their Twentieth through Twenty-second centuries, counting from Christ. I decided long ago that Proust and Joyce had been the consciousnesses that had helped midwife those centuries into being.”
“Not a positive recommendation, if I remember history correctly,” Mahnmut said softly.
“No. I mean, yes.”
They flew in silence for a few more minutes.
“Would you like to hear a poem I ran across when I was a little pup of a moravec, fresh from the growth bins and factory latices?”
Mahnmut tried to imagine a newborn Orphu of Io. He gave up the effort. “Yes,” he said. “Tell me.”
Mahnmut had never heard his friend rumble poetry before. It was an oddly pleasant sound—
Still Born
I.
Little Rudy Bloom, ruddy-cheeked in his mother’s womb
Red light permeating his sleepy, unfocused watchings
Molly clicking long knitting needles as she weaves red wool for him
Feeling his small feet move against the inside of her
Tiny fetus dreams consume him, preparing him for the smell of blankets
II.
A man gently pats his lips with a red napkin
Eyes focused on a sea of clouds drifting behind high brick chimneys
Submerged in the sudden memory of hawthorn stalks rubbing together in a storm
Reaching small hands out towards fluttering pink petals
The scents of days long past curl into the low wings of his nostrils
III.
Eleven days. Eleven times the lifespan of a tiny creature emerging from a cocoon
Eleven hush-stained mornings of warmth and shadow creeping across floorboards
Eleven thousand heartbeats before night fell and the ducks abandoned the far pond
Eleven indicated by the long and short hands when she held him to her breast
Eleven days they watched his pink body sleeping in ruddy wool
IV.
Fragments of the novel were bound in his imagination
But loose pages drifted through the dark channels of his mind
Some were blank, others contained nothing but footnotes
Tediously he had suffered the contractions of his imagination
But once in ink, the memories never survived the night
When the Ionian rumble died away on the intercom, Mahnmut was silent for a short while, trying to assess the quality of the thing. He had trouble doing so, but he knew it meant a lot to Orphu of Io—the giant moravec’s voice had almost trembled near the end.
“Who is it by?” asked Mahnmut.
“I don’t know,” said Orphu. “Some Twenty-first Century female poet whose name was lost with the rest of the Lost Era. Remember, I encountered this when I was young—before I’d really read Proust or Joyce or any other serious human writer—but this bit of verse cemented Joyce and Proust together for me as two facets of a single consciousness. A singularity of human genius and insight. I never quite got over that perception.”
“It’s rather like the first time I encountered Shakespeare’s sonnets…” began Mahnmut.
“Turn on your video feed relayed from the Queen Mab,” Suma IV ordered all hands aboard.
Mahnmut activated the feed.
Two human beings were copulating wildly on a broad bed of silk sheets and bright woolen tapestries. Their energy and earnestness was astounding to Mahnmut, who had read enough about human sexual intercourse, but who had never thought to look up a video recording of it from the archives.
“What is it?” asked Orphu over the private comm. “I’m getting wild telemetric data—blood pressure levels soaring, dopamine flowing, adrenaline, heartbeat pounding—some fight to the death somewhere?”
“Ah…” said Mahnmut. Then the figures rolled over, still joined and moving rhythmically, almost frenetically, and the moravec saw the man’s face clearly for the first time.
Odysseus. The woman appeared to be the Sycorax person who had greeted their Achaean passenger on the orbital asteroid city. Her breasts and buttocks seemed even larger now, unfettered as they were, although at this particular instant, the woman’s breasts were flattened against Odysseus’ chest.
“Um…” began Mahnmut again.
Suma IV saved him.
“That input isn’t important. Switch to the forward dropship cameras.”
Mahnmut did so. He knew that Orphu was turning to the thermal, radar, and other imaging data he was still capable of receiving.
They were approaching the black-hole-cratered Paris, but just as in the images taken from the Queen Mab, there was no crater visible, only a dome-cathedral seemingly spun of webbed blue-ice.
Suma IV radioed the Mab: “Where is our many-handed friend who built this thing?”
“No Brane Holes visible anywhere we can see from orbit,” replied Asteague/Che at once. “Neither our ship viewers nor the cameras on the satellites we seeded can find it. The thing seems to have finished feasting on Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the other sites for the time being. Perhaps it’s returned home to Paris.”
“It has,” said Orphu on the shared comm. “Check the thermal imaging. Something very big and very ugly is nested right in the center of that blue spiderweb, just beneath the highest part of that dome. There are a lot of thermal vents there—it seems to be heating its nest with warmth from the crater—but it’s there, all right. You can almost see the hundreds of oversized fingers under the warm areas of the glowing brain in the deep-thermal imaging.”
“Well,” said Mahnmut over his private line, “at least it’s your Paris. Proust’s City of…”
Afterward, Mahnmut would never understand how Suma IV reacted so quickly, even while jacked into the dropship’s controls and central computer.
The six bolts of lightning leaped upward from different points around the giant blue dome. Only the dropship’s altitude and its pilot’s instantaneous reflexes saved them.
The dropship shifted from ramjets to scramjets, hurtled sideways in a 75-g bank, dove, rolled, and then climbed toward the north, but the six streaks of billion-volt lightning still missed them only by a few hundred meters. The implosion of air and shock wave of thunder flipped the dropship over twice, but Suma IV never lost control. The wings retracted to fins and the dropship ran for it.
Suma IV banked again, rolled deliberately, triggered full-active stealth, popped flares, and blanketed the air above the Paris blue-ice cathedral-dome with electronic interference.
A dozen fireballs rose from the ice-buried city, hurtling skyward at Mach 3, seeking them, seeking them, accelerating, seeking them. Mahnmut watched the radar track with something more than casual interest and knew that Orphu, with his direct sensory radar feed, must be feeling the plasma-missiles closing on him.
They did not find the dropship. Suma IV already had them scramjetting at Mach 5 and rising above thirty-two thousand meters and climbing into the fringes of space. The fireball-meteors exploded at different altitudes below them, their shock waves overlapping like a dozen violent ripples on pond.
“Why, that fucker…” began Orphu.
“Silence,” snapped Suma IV. The dropship rolled, dove, turned south, expanded its sphere of radar and electronic interference, and climbed again toward space. No fireballs or lightning came up from the city that was falling behind so quickly—six hundred kilometers below and behind already and getting smaller by the second.
“I guess our many-handed brain friend has weapons,” said Mahnmut.
“So do we,” came Mep Ahoo’s voice on the comm. “I think we should nuke him…warm up his nest for him a little bit. Ten million degrees Fahrenheit would do for a start.”
“Quiet!” snapped Suma IV from the cockpit.
Prime Integrator Asteague/Che’s voice came over the common band. “My friends, we…you…have a problem down there.”
“Tell us about it,” rumbled Orphu of Io, still forgetting that he was still on the common radio link.
“No,” said the Prime Integrator, “I am not speaking of the many-handed creature’s attack on you. I’m talking about a more serious problem. And just beneath your current trajectory track. Our sensors might not have picked it up if they had not been following you.”
“More serious?” sent Mahnmut.
“Much more serious,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “And not just one serious problem, I’m afraid…but seven hundred and sixty-eight of them.”
78
“PROCEED WITH YOUR APPEAL,” booms the Demogorgon.
Hephaestus nudges Achilles to signify that he will do the speaking, makes an awkward bow—a series of iron spheres and one glass bubble bobbling—and says, “Your Demogorgoness, Lord Kronos and other respected Titanis
ms, Immortal Hours, and…honorable other things. My friend Achilles and I come here today not to appeal, not to ask you for a boon, but to share essential information with all of you. Information you need to know and will want to know. Information which…”
“SPEAK UP, CRIPPLED GOD.”
Hephaestus forces a smile through his beard, grits his teeth hard, and repeats his preamble.
“SPEAK THEN.”
Achilles wonders if Kronos and the other Titans, not to mention the huge, indescribable entities surrounding them, things with odd names like the Immortal Hours and Charioteers, are going to take an active part in this meeting or if the Demogorgon has the floor until it—he—she—it—formally recognizes someone or something else to speak.
Hephaestus then surprises him.
From his bulky backpack—a clumsy iron and canvas frame holding what Achilles imagined must be tanks of air—the god of artifice pulls a brass ovoid studded with glass lenses. He carefully sets the device on the top of a boulder between him and the looming Demogorgon and fusses with various switches and settings. Then the dwarf-god says, shouting and amplifying his helmet speakers to the maximum, “Your Demogorgonoidness, most noble and frightening Hours, your most majestic Titans and Titanesses—Kronos, Rhea, Krios, Koios, Hyperion, Iapetos, Theia, Helios, Selene, Eos, and all others of Titan-persuasion assembled here—your many-armed Healernesses, rudely shaped Charioteers—all honored Beings out there in the fog and ash—rather than make my own case today, the case for removing the pretender Zeus from the throne for attempting to usurp all divinity unto himself—asking you to depose him, or at least oppose him, for presumptuously claiming all worlds and universes his own from this day forth to the end of time, I shall allow you to see an actual event. For even as we huddle here on this lava-riddled shitheap of a world, Zeus has called all the Olympian immortals into the Great Hall of the Gods. I left my camera concealed there but broadcasting live to a repeater station in Hellas Basin—the immortal Nyx’s Brane Hole allows us to receive this broadcast with less than a second of delay time. Behold!”