by Dan Simmons
Zeus stares. Achilles does not move.
Zeus crouches with lightning speed, comes up with another arrow, steps closer, notches, pulls, releases.
It misses. From five feet away, the poisoned arrow misses.
Achilles does not stir. He stares hate into the now-panicked gaze of the Father of All Gods.
Zeus crouches again, sets the arrow to the cord with careful precision, goes to full pull again, his mighty muscles now sheened in sweat, visibly straining, the powerful bow almost humming with its coiled power. The King of the Gods steps forward until the point of the arrow is not much more than a foot away from Achilles’ broad chest.
Zeus fires.
The arrow misses.
This is not possible, but I see the arrow embed itself in the wall behind Achilles. It has not passed through Achilles, nor curved around, but somehow—impossibly—absolutely—it has missed.
Achilles leaps then, slapping the bow aside and seizing the twice-tall god by the throat.
Zeus staggers around the room trying to remove Achilles’ powerful hands from around his neck, pounding Achilles with a god-fist half as wide as Achilles’ broad back. The fleet-footed mankiller hangs on as Zeus thrashes, smashing timbers, the table, the doorway arch, the wall itself. It looks like a man with a child hanging from him, but Achilles hangs on.
Then the much larger god gets his own powerful fingers under Achilles’ much smaller fingers and peels back first the mortal’s left hand, then his right. Now Zeus crashes against, bangs onto, and smashes into things with a deadly purpose, holding Achilles’ forearms in his own massive hands, the mortal man dangling as Zeus head-butts Achilles—the sound echoing like two great boulders colliding—then rams his god-chest against mortal ribs, finally crashing both of them against the unyielding wall and into the doorway opposite us, arching Achilles’ back against the unyielding stone of the doorframe.
Five seconds of this and he will snap Achilles’ back like a bow made out of cheap balsa.
Achilles does not wait five seconds. Or three.
Somehow the fleet-footed mankiller has got his right hand free for an instant as Zeus bends him backward, backward, spine grinding against vertical stone.
I see what happens next in retinal echo, it occurs so quickly.
Achilles’ hand comes up from his own belly and belt with a short blade in his fist.
He rams the blade in under Zeus’s bearded chin, twists the knife, rams it deeper, rotates it with a cry louder even than Zeus’s scream of horror and pain.
Zeus stumbles backward into the hallway, crashing into the next room. Hephaestus and I run to follow.
They are in Odysseus’ and Penelope’s private bedchamber now. Achilles pulls the knifeblade free and the Father of All Gods raises both his massive hands to his own throat, his own face. Golden ichor and red blood both are pulsing into the air, flowing from Zeus’s nostrils and open, gaping mouth, filling his white beard with gold and red.
Zeus falls backward onto the bed. Achilles swings the knife far back, plunges it deep into the god’s belly, and then drags it up and to the right until the magical blade rasps on rib cage.
Zeus screams again, but before he can clutch himself lower, Achilles has pulled out yards of gray gut—gleaming god intestine—and wrapped it several times around one of the four posts of Odysseus’ great bed, tying it off in a mariner’s swift and sure knot.
That post is the living olive tree Odysseus fashioned this room and bed around, I think in a daze. The lines from The Odyssey come back to me from the Fitzgerald translation I first read as a boy, Odysseus speaking to his doubting Penelope—
An old trunk of olive
grew like a pillar on our building plot,
and I laid out our bedroom round that tree,
lined up the stone walls, built the walls and roof,
gave it a doorway and smooth-fitting doors.
Then I lopped off the silvery leaves and branches,
into a bedpost, drilled it, let it serve
as a model for the rest. I planned them all,
inlaid them all with silver, gold and ivory,
and stretched a bed between—a pliant web
of oxhide thongs dyed crimson.
Now more than the oxhide thongs are dyed crimson as Zeus struggles to free himself from the restraining tether of his own tied-off intestines, golden ichor and all-too-human-red-blood flowing from his throat, face, and belly. Blinded by his own pain and gore, Mighty Zeus feels for his tormenter by swinging his arms. Every step and tug in search of Achilles pulls more of his gleaming gray insides out. His screaming makes even the unflinching Hephaestus cover his ears.
Achilles prances lightly out of reach, dancing in closer only to slash and hack at the blind god’s arms, legs, thighs, penis, and hamstrings.
Zeus crashes down on his back, still connected to the living olive tree bedpost by thirty feet or more of knotted gray gut, but the immortal being still thrashes and howls, spewing ichor across the ceiling in complicated Rorschachs of divine arterial spray.
Achilles leaves the room and returns with his battle sword. He pins Zeus’s thrashing left arm with one battle-sandaled foot, raises the sword high, and brings it down so hard it strikes sparks on the floor after passing through Zeus’s neck.
The head of the Father of All Gods tumbles free, rolling under the bed.
Achilles goes to one gory knee and seems to be burying his face in the giant open wound that had been Zeus’s bronzed and muscled belly. For one perfectly horrible second I am sure that Achilles is eating the guts out of his fallen foe, his face largely hidden in the abdominal cavity—a man turned pure predator, a ravaging wolf.
But he was only hunting.
“Ahah!” cries the fleet-footed mankiller and pulls a huge, still pulsating purplish mass from the tumble of glistening gray.
Zeus’s liver.
“Where is that goddamned dog of Odysseus’?” Achilles asks himself, his eyes gleaming. He leaves us to carry the liver out to the dog Argus cowering somewhere in the courtyard.
Hephaestus and I stand aside quickly to give Achilles room as he passes.
As the sound of the mankiller’s—godkiller’s—footsteps recede, both the god of fire and I look around the room.
Not a square inch of bed, floor, ceiling, or wall appears to have remained unsplattered.
The huge, headless corpse on the stone floor, still tethered to the olive-tree post, continues to twitch and writhe, its bloodied fingers flexing.
“Holy fuck,” breathes Hephaestus.
I want to tear my gaze away but cannot. I want to leave the room to go vomit quietly somewhere, but cannot. “What…how…it’s still…partially…alive,” I gasp.
Hephaestus grins his most insane grin. “Zeus is an immortal, remember, Hockenberry? He’s in agony even now. I’ll burn the bits in the Celestial Fire.” He stoops to retrieve the short knife Achilles had used. “I’ll burn this god-killing Aphrodite blade as well. Melt it down and pour it into something new—a plaque commemorating Zeus, maybe. I never should have made this blade for the bloodthirsty bitch.”
I blink and shake my head, then grab the hulking fire god by his heavy leather vest. “What will happen now?” I ask.
Hephaestus shrugs. “Just what we agreed on, Hockenberry. Nyx and the Fates, who have always ruled the universe—this universe, at least—will allow me to sit on the gold throne of Olympos after this mad second war with the Titans is over.”
“How do you know who will win?”
He shows me his uneven white teeth against his black beard.
From the courtyard comes a commanding voice. “Here, dog…here Argus…here, boy. That’s a nice pup. I have something for you…good dog.”
“They don’t call them ‘the Fates’ for nothing, Hockenberry,” says Hephaestus. “It will be a long and nasty war, fought more on Ilium Earth than on Olympos, but the few surviving Olympians will win…again.”
“But the thing…the cl
oud-thing…the Voice thing…”
“Demogorgon has gone home to Tartarus,” rumbles Hephaestus. “It cares not the least fucking fig what happens now on Earth, Mars, or Olympos.”
“My people…”
“Your pretty Greek friends are fucked up the ass,” says Hephaestus and then he smiles at his own wit. “But, if it makes you feel any better, so are the Trojans. Anyone who stays on Ilium Earth will be in the cross-fire for the next fifty to a hundred years while this war goes on.”
I grab his vest harder. “You have to help us…”
He removes my hand as easily as an adult male would remove the clinging hand of a two-year-old child. “I don’t have to do a goddamned thing, Hockenberry.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, looks at the twitching thing on the floor behind, and says, “But in this case I will. QT back to your pitiful Achaeans and your woman, Helen, in the city and tell them to get their asses out of all high towers, off the walls, out of the buildings. There’s going to be a nine-point quake in old Ilium Town in a very few minutes. I need to burn this…thing…and get our hero back to Olympos so he can try to talk the Healer into waking his dead bimbo.”
Achilles is coming back. He is whistling and I can hear Argus’s nails scrabbling on stone as the dog eagerly follows.
“Go!” says Hephaestus, god of fire and artifice.
I reach for my medallion, realize it’s not there, realize I don’t need it, and QT well away from there.
84
Their estimated twelve hours of continuous work took a little more than eighteen hours. The forty-eight tumbled missiles and missile tubes were more trouble to sort out, separate, and cut up than either Orphu or Mahnmut could have guessed. Some of the metal warhead casings had cracked completely away, leaving only the plastoid-alloy MRV cradles and the containment fields themselves, each glowing blue from its own Cerenkov radiation.
The sight would have been interesting if anyone other than the silent moravecs on the Queen Mab had been watching: the submersible The Dark Lady crouching over the hull of the sunken death sub, its belly searchlights illuminating mostly a world filled with silt, fanning anemones, torn cables, twisted wiring, and lethal, greengrown missiles and warheads. Brighter than the dappled daylight coming in through the Breach wall, brighter than the super-halogen bright searchlights aimed on the work area, brighter than the sun itself were the fires of the 10,000-degree-Fahrenheit cutting torches that both the blind Orphu and the silt-blinded Mahnmut were wielding as delicately as scalpels.
Girders, winches, pulleys, and chains were all in place and now in heavy use as the two moravecs and The Dark Lady herself supervised the winching-up of each MRVed warhead as it was cut away from the missile itself. The cargo hold of Mahnmut’s Europan submersible was never really empty; it was honeycombed with a programmable flowfoam that formed itself into fluted cathedral buttressings of internal bracing against terrible pressures when the hold was “empty” of cargo, but that could and did flow tight around any cargo—including Orphu of Io when he rode in the corner of the cargo bay. Now the flowfoam was adapting itself to cushion and support each ungainly lump of warhead as Mahnmut and Orphu ratcheted and cursed it into place.
At one point a little beyond halfway through the exhausting work, Mahmut pretended to pat the containment-field-glowing warhead itself as the flowfoam closed around it, as he said—
“What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?”
“Your old friend Will?” asked Orphu as both moravecs dropped back into the confusion of agitated silt below to begin cutting away the next warhead.
“Yes,” said Mahnmut. “Sonnet Fifty-three.”
About two hours later, just after they had secured another blue-glowing warhead in the now-crowded hold—they were spacing the black holes as far apart as they could—Orphu said, “This answer to our problem is costing you your ship. I’m sorry, Mahnmut.”
The Europan nodded, trusting his huge friend’s deep radar to pick up the motion. As soon as Orphu had suggested this approach, Mahnmut had realized that it meant losing his beloved Dark Lady forever—there was no way they could take the chance of removing the warheads from the Lady’s flowfoam cushioned hull and putting them into a different cargo bay. The very best case scenario now was that the moravecs would have another spacecraft up there in low earth orbit that could boost The Dark Lady and her planet-lethal cargo out and away from Earth, into deep space, as gently but quickly as possible.
“I feel that I just got her back,” said Mahnmut, hearing the pathetic tone in his own radio voice.
“They’ll build you another someday,” said Orphu.
“It wouldn’t be the same,” said Mahnmut. He had spent more than a century and a half in this little sub.
“No,” agreed Orphu. “Nothing will ever be the same after all this.”
At the end of the eighteen hours, after the last Cerenkov-glowing cluster of nascent black holes was loaded away, flowfoamed into place, and The Dark Lady’s cargo bay doors were shut, both moravecs were in a state of near total physical and nervous exhaustion as they hovered together above the wreck of the boomer.
“Is there anything we need to investigate or bring back from The Sword of Allah?” asked Orphu.
“Not at this time,” sent Prime Integrator Asteague/Che from the Queen Mab. The ship had been conspicuously quiet during the last eighteen hours.
“I never want to see the goddamned thing again,” said Mahnmut, too exhausted to care that he was speaking on the common channel. “It’s an obscenity.”
“Amen,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo from the dropship circling above.
“Is there anything you guys want to tell us about what’s been going on up there with Odysseus and his girlfriend over the last eighteen hours or so?” asked Orphu.
“Not at this time,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che again. “Bring the warheads up. Be careful.”
“Amen,” said Mep Ahoo again, and there seemed to be no irony in the soldier ’vec’s voice.
Suma IV was a damned good pilot, one had to grant him that—and Orphu and Mahnmut did. Suma IV actually hovered the dropship so that The Dark Lady remained fully submerged as the aircraft-spaceship’s much larger bay doors closed under it. Then Suma IV slowly drained out the seawater, but only as the dropship’s own flowfoam took the water’s place, encysting the submersible and its blue-glowing cargo in another layer of wrapping.
Orphu of Io had already used dropcables to scramble and scrabble to the roof of the dropship before The Dark Lady was ingested, but Mahnmut left his enviro-crèche only at the last moment, allowing the Lady to steady and monitor herself during the delicate lifting and placement. Mahnmut felt that he should have some last words as he stepped off his ship forever more, but other than a tightbeamed and unacknowledged Goodbye, Lady, to the submersible’s AI, he said nothing.
The dropship lifted out of the water, ocean streaming from its cargo venting tubes, and Mahnmut used the last of his strength—mechanical and organic—to haul himself up to the top of the dropship and then down through the smaller of two access hatches into the troop-carrier hold.
In any other circumstances, the confusion in the troop-carrier section would have been comic, but not that many things seemed humorous to Mahnmut at that moment. By retracting all of his manipulators and antennae, Orphu had just been able to squeeze through the larger of the two dropship hatches, but now the Ionian’s bulk filled most of the space where the twenty rockvec soldiers had been perched on their web seating. The soldiers now spilled over into the narrow access corridor going forward to the cockpit itself, black-barbed rockvecs and their weapons sprawled everywhere, and Mahnmut had to crawl over their chitinous forms to join Mep Ahoo and Suma IV in the cramped cockpit.
Suma IV was flying the hovering dropship manually, using the omnicontroller constantly to balance the ship and its shifting contents, playing the thruster tabs the way human pianists
must have once played their instrument of choice.
“No more tie-down straps,” Suma IV said to Mahnmut without turning his head. “We used the last to harness your big friend into the troop-carrier space. Extend that last jumpseat and magtite yourself to the hull, please, Mahnmut.”
Mahnmut did as he was told. He realized that he was too tired to stand again—Earth’s gravity was terrible after all—and felt like weeping from the release of chemicals after the last eighteen hours of total effort and tension.
“Hang on,” said Suma IV.
The dropship engines roared and they rose slowly, vertically, meter by meter, no shocks, no surprises, until Mahnmut saw out the main cockpit window that they had reached an altitude of around two kilometers, and then they began to pitch forward slightly—the engines moving from the vertical to forward thrust. He could never have imagined that a machine could be handled so delicately.
Still, there were bumps and at each bump Mahnmut found himself holding his breath, feeling his organic heart pound as he waited for the black holes in the belly of the hold of the dropship to go critical. It would only take one and all the others would collapse into themselves a millionth of a second later.
Mahnmut tried to imagine the immediate aftermath—the mini-black-holes immediately merging and plunging through the hull of The Dark Lady and the dropship, the mass accelerating toward the center of the Earth at thirty-two feet per second, sucking in all the mass of the two moravec ships with it, and then the air molecules, then the sea, then the sea bottom, then the rock, then the crust of the Earth itself as the black holes plummeted centerward.
How many days or months would the large mini-black-hole, comprised of all seven hundred sixty-eight warhead black holes, ping-pong back and forth through the planet, arcing up into space—for how far?—on each ping or pong? The electronic computing part of Mahnmut’s mind gave him the answer even though he didn’t want it, even though the physical part of his brain was too weary to absorb it. Far enough for the black holes to suck in all of the million-plus objects on the orbital rings in the first hundred ping-pongs through the planet, but not so far that it would eat the moon.