by Dan Simmons
He held up a broken slab of stone. There were strange scratches on the dirty rock.
“I can’t quite make that out,” said Moira.
“We couldn’t either at first,” said Mahnmut. “It took Dr. Hockenberry to help us know what we were looking at. Do you see how this forms
IUM and here below US and AER and here ET?”
“If you say so,” said Moira.
“It does. We know what this is now. It’s part of an inscription below a bust—a bust of him—that, according to our records, once read—‘JUDICO PYLIUM, GENIO SCORATUM, ARTE MARONEM: TERRA TEGIT, POPULUS MAERET, OLYMPUS HABET.’”
“I’m afraid I’m a bit rusty on my Latin,” said Moira.
“Many of us were,” said Mahnmut. “It translates—THE EARTH COVERS ONE WHO IS A NESTOR IN JUDGEMENT; THE PEOPLE MOURN FOR A SOCRATES IN GENIUS; OLYMPUS HAS A VIRGIL IN ART.”
“Olympus,” repeated Moira as if musing to herself.
“It was part of an inscription under a bust the townspeople had made of him, and set in stone in the chancelry of Trinity Church after he was interred there. The rest of the inscription is in English. Would you like to hear it, Moira?”
“Of course.”
“STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST BY SO FAST?
READ IF THOU CANST, WHOM ENVIOUS DEATH HATH PLAST,
WITH IN THIS MONUMENT SHAKSPEARE: WITH WHOME.
QUICK NATURE DIDE: WHOSE NAME DOTH DECK YS TOMBE,
FAR MORE THEN COST: SIEH ALL, YtHE HATH WRITT,
LEAVES LIVING ART, BUT PAGE, TO SERVE HIS WITT.”
“Very nice,” said Moira. “And quite helpful for your search, I would imagine.”
Mahnmut ignored the sarcasm. “It’s dated the day he died, the twenty-third of April, 1616.”
“But you haven’t found the actual grave.”
“Not yet,” admitted Mahnmut.
“Wasn’t there some headstone or inscription there, as well?” she asked innocently.
Mahnmut studied her face for a moment. “Yes,” he said at last. “Something cut into the actual grave slab set over his bones.”
“Didn’t it say something about—oh…’Stay away, moravecs. Go home?’”
“Not quite,” said Mahnmut. “The grave slab is supposed to have read—
“GOOD FRIEND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOSED HEARE:
BLESTE BE YE MAN TY SPARES THESE STONES,
AND CURST BE HE TY MOVES MY BONES.”
“Doesn’t that curse worry you a little?” asked Moira.
“No,” said Mahnmut. “You’re confusing me with Orphu of Io. He’s the one who watched all those Universal flatfilm horror movies from the Twentieth Century…you know, Curse of the Mummy and all that.”
“Still…” said Moira.
“Are you going to stop us from finding him, Moira?” asked Mahnmut.
“My dear Mahnmut, you must know by now that we don’t want to interfere with you, the old-styles, our new guests from Greece and Asia…with none of you. Have we thus far?”
Mahnmut said nothing.
Moira touched his shoulder. “But with this…project. Don’t you sometimes feel as if you’re playing God. Just a little bit?”
“Have you met Dr. Hockenberry?” asked Mahnmut.
“Of course. I spoke to him only last week.”
“Odd, he didn’t mention that,” said Mahnmut. “Thomas volunteers here at the dig at least a day or two every week. No, but what I meant to say was that the post-humans and the Olympian gods certainly ’played God’ when they re-created Dr. Hockenberry’s body and personality and memories from bits of bone, old data files, and DNA. But it worked out all right. He’s a fine person.”
“He certainly seems to be,” said Moira. “And I understand he’s writing a book.”
“Yes,” said Mahnmut. The moravec seemed to have lost his train of thought.
“Well, good luck again,” said Moira, holding out her hand. “And do give my best to Prime Integrator Asteague/Che when you see him next. Do tell him that I so enjoyed the tea we had at the Taj.” She shook the little moravec’s hand and began to walk toward the line of trees to the north.
“Moira,” called Mahnmut.
She paused and looked back.
“Did you say you were coming to the play tonight?” called Mahnmut.
“Yes, I think I will.”
“Will we see you there?”
“I’m not sure,” said the young woman. “But I’ll see you there.” She continued walking toward the forest.
94
Seven years and five months after the Fall of Ilium:
My name is Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., Hockenbush to my friends. I have no friends alive who call me that. Or rather, the friends who once might have called me that—Hockenbush, a nickname from my undergraduate days at Wabash College—have long since turned to dust on this world where so many things have turned to dust.
I lived fifty-some years on that first good Earth, and have been gifted with a bit more than twelve rich years in this second life—at Ilium, on Olympos, in a place called Mars although I didn’t know it was Mars until my last days there, and now back here. Home. On sweet Earth again.
I have much to tell. The bad news is that I have lost all the recordings I have made over the past twelve years as both scholic and scholar—the voice stones I handed to my Muse with each day’s observation of the Trojan War, my own scribbled notes, even the moravec recorder I used to describe the last days of Zeus and Olympos. I lost them all.
It doesn’t matter. I remember it all. Every face. Every man and woman. Every name.
Those who know say that one of the wonderful things about Homer’s Iliad is that no man died nameless in his telling. They all fell heavily, those heroes, those brutal heroes, and when they fell they went down, as another scholar said—I’m paraphrasing here—they went down heavily, crashing down with all their weapons and their armor and their possessions and their cattle and their wives and their slaves going down with them. And their names. No man died nameless or without weight in Homer’s Iliad.
If I tried to tell my tale, I would try to do as well.
But where to start?
If I am to be the Chorus of this tale—willing or unwilling—then I can start wherever I choose. I choose to start it here, by telling you where I live.
I enjoyed my months with Helen in New Ilium while that city rebuilt itself, the Greeks helping after the agreement with Hector that the Trojans would help them build their long ships in return, once the city’s walls were up again. Once the city lived again.
It never died. You see, Ilium—Troy—was its people…Hector, Helen, Andromache, Priam, Cassandra, Deiphobus, Paris…hell, even that ornery Hypsipyle. Some of those people died, but some survived. The city lived as long as they did. Virgil understood that.
So I can’t be Homer for you and I can’t even be Virgil telling the tale from the time of the fall of Troy…not enough time has passed for that part to become much of a story, although I hear that might be changing. I’ll be watching and listening as long as I am living.
But I live here now. In Ardis Town.
Not Ardis. A big house has gone back up on the broad meadow far up the hill a mile and a half from the old fax pavilion, a big house very near where Ardis Hall once rose, and Ada lives there yet with her family, but this place is Ardis Town, no longer Ardis.
There are a few more than twenty-eight thousand of us here in Ardis Town now, according to the last tax census—taken just five months ago. There is a community up on the hill, scattered around Ada’s new home of Ardis House, but most of the town is down here, spread along the new road that runs from the fax pavilion down along the river. Here is where the mills are, and the real marketplace, and the tanners’ smelly buildings, and the printing press and paper, and too many bars and whorehouses, and two synagogues, and one church that might best be described as the First Church of Chaos, and some good restaurants, and the stockyards�
�which smell almost as bad as the tannery—and a library (I helped bring that into being) and a school, although most of the children still live in or around Ardis House. Most of the students in our Ardis Town are adults, learning to read and write.
About half our residents are Greek and half are Jewish. They tend to get along. Most days.
The Jews have the advantage of being fully functioned; that is, they can freefax wherever the hell they want to go whenever the hell they want to do it. (I can do that as well…not fax, but QT. It’s in my cells and DNA, you know, written there by whoever or Whoever designed me. But I don’t QT as much any more. I like slower forms of transportation.)
I do help Mahnmut with his Find Will project, at least once a week if I can. You’ve already heard about that. I don’t think he ever will find his Will, and I suspect he believes that also. It’s become a sort of hobby for him and Orphu of Io, and I help out in the same spirit of “what the hell.” None of us—not even Mahnmut, I think—believes that Prospero, Moira, Ariel, any of the Powers That Be…even this Quiet we keep hearing so much about…are going to allow our little moravec to find and recombine the bones and DNA of William Shakespeare. I don’t blame the Powers That Be for feeling threatened.
The play is going on up at Ardis this evening. You’ve heard about that as well. Many of us in Ardis Town are going up the hill to it, although I confess the hill is steep, the road and stairs are dusty, and I may pay fivepence to ride up in one of the steam coaches that Hannah’s company runs. I just wish the damned things weren’t so noisy.
Speaking of finding and not finding someone, I don’t believe I’ve told you how I found my old friend Keith Nightenhelser.
The last I’d seen of my friend, he’d been with a prehistorical Indian tribe in the wilderness of what would once be Indiana—say in three thousand more years. It was a hell of a place for him and I felt guilty because I’d put him there. The idea was to keep him safe during the war between the heroes and the gods, but when I went back to look for old Nightenhelser, the Indians were gone and so was he.
And Patroclus—a very pissed-off Patroclus—was wandering around there somewhere as well, and I suspected that Nightenhelser had not survived.
But I freefaxed to Delphi three and a half months ago when Thrasymedes, Hector, and his crowd of adventurers interdicted the Delphi blue beam and lo and behold, in about the eighth hour of people emerging stunned from that little building—it reminded me of the old circus act where a tiny little car would drive up and fifty clowns would climb out—about eight hours into the people, mostly Greeks, emerging from that building, here comes my friend Nightenhelser. (We always called each other by our last names.)
Nightenhelser and I bought this place where I’m sitting and writing this now. We’re partners. (Please note—I mean business partners, and good friends, of course, but not partners in the strange Twenty-first Century use of that word when it came to two men. I mean, I didn’t go from Helen of Troy to Nightenhelser of Ardis Town. I have problems, but not in that particular arena of confusion.)
I wonder what Helen would think of our tavern? It’s called Dombey & Son—the name was Nightenhelser’s suggestion, far too cute for my taste—and it gets a lot of business. It’s fairly clean compared to the other places strung along the riverbank here like shingles overhanging an old roof. Our barmaids are barmaids and not whores (at least not here or on our time or in our tavern). The beer is the best we can buy—Hannah, who is, I’m told, Ardis’s first millionaire of the new era, owns another company that makes the beer. Evidently brewing was something she learned about when studying sculpture and metal pouring. Don’t ask me why.
Do you see why I hesitate to tell this epic tale? I can’t keep my storytelling on a straight line. I tend to wander.
Perhaps I’ll bring Helen here someday and ask her what she thinks of the place.
But rumor has it that Helen cut her hair, dressed up like a boy, and went off on the Delphi adventure with Hector and Thrasymedes, with both men following her around like puppies after a bone. (Another reason I hesitate to begin telling this epic tale—I was never worth a damn with metaphors or similes. As Nightenhelser once said—I’m trope-ically challenged. Never mind.)
Rumor has it, hell. I know Helen is with the Delphi Expedition. I saw her there. She looks good in short hair and with a tan. Really good. Not like my Helen, but healthy and very beautiful.
I could tell you more about my place and more about Ardis Town—what politics looks like when it’s in its infancy (just about as useless and smelly as an infant) or what the people are like here, Greeks and Jews, functioned and non-functioned, believers, and cynics…but that’s not part of this tale.
Also, as I will discover later this evening, I’m not the real teller. I’m not the chosen Bard. I know that makes no sense to you now, but wait just a while here, and you’ll see what I mean.
These last eighteen years have not been easy for me, especially not the first eleven. I feel as scarred and pitted psychologically and emotionally as old Orphu of Io’s shell is physically. (He lives up the hill at Ardis most of the time. You will see him a little later, too. He’s going to the play tonight, but he always has an appointment with the kids each afternoon. That’s what tipped me off to the fact that even all my years as scholar and scholic did not make me the chosen one to tell this particular tale when the time comes to tell it.)
Yes, these last eighteen years, expecially the first eleven, have been tough, but I guess I feel richer for them. I hope you do when you hear the tale. If you don’t, it’s not my fault—I abdicate in the telling, although my memories are free for anyone who wants to borrow them.
I apologize. I have to go now. The afterwork crowd is coming in—the daytime tannery shift is just getting off, can you smell them? One of my barmaids is sick and another has just eloped with one of the young Athenians who chose to come here after Delphi and…well…I’m shorthanded. My bartender comes in for the evening shift in forty-five minutes, but until then, I’d better draw the beers and slice the roast beef for the sandwiches myself.
My name is Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., and I think the “Ph.D.” stands for “Pouring His Draft.”
Sorry. Humor never was, except for a few literary puns and belabored jokes, my strong point.
I’ll see you at the afternoon storytelling, before the play.
95
Seven years and five months after the Fall of Ilium:
On the day of the play, Harman had business in the Dry Valley. After lunch, he dressed in his combat suit and thermskin, borrowed an energy weapon from the Ardis House armory, and freefaxed down there.
The excavation of the post-humans’ stasis dome was going well. Walking between the huge excavation machines, avoiding the down-blast of a transport hornet hauling things north, it was hard for Harman to believe that eight and a half years earlier he’d come to this same dry valley with young Ada, the incredibly young Hannah, and the pudgy boy-man Daeman in search of clues about the Wandering Jew—the mystery woman he discovered was named Savi.
Actually, part of the blue stasis dome had been buried directly under the boulder where Savi had left her scratched clues leading them to her home on Mount Erebus. Even then, Savi had known that Harman was the only old-style human on Earth who could read those scratches.
The two supervisors on the stasis-dome excavation here were Raman and Alcinuous. They were doing a good job. Harman went down the checklist with them to make sure they knew which gear was destined for which community—the bulk of the energy weapons were destined for Hughes Town and Chom; the thermskins were going to Bellinbad; the crawlers were promised to Ulanbat and the Loman Estate; New Ilium had made a strong bid for the older flechette rifles.
Harman had to smile at this. Ten more years and the Trojans and Greeks would be using the same technology as the old-styles, even using the pavilion nodes to fax everywhere. Some of the Delphi group had already discovered the node near Olympus…the ancient town where the
Games were held, not the mountain.
Well, he thought, the only solution was to stay ahead of them—in technology and everything else.
It was time to go home. But first Harman had one stop he wanted to make. He shook hands with Alcinuous and Raman and freefaxed away.
Harman had come back to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu, the place where he had been given his life back seven and a half years earlier. He freefaxed not to the Bridge itself, but to a ridgeline across the valley from the bridge and the high ruins on the terrace of Machu Picchu. He never tired of looking at the ancient structure, the green habitation globules hardly visible from this distance, but he’d come back not just out of sentiment.
He was to meet someone here.
Harman watched the early afternoon clouds shift up the valley from the direction of the waterfall. For a while, the sunlight turned the mists to gold, half obscuring the ruins of Machu Picchu, making them appear as half-glimpsed stepping-stones there beyond the old Bridge’s span. Everywhere Harman looked, life was winning its anti-entropic battle against chaos and energy loss—the grass on the hillsides, the canopy of trees in the mist-shrouded valley, the condors circling slowly on thermals, the tatters of blowing moss on the suspension cables of the Bridge itself, even the rust-colored lichen on the rocks near Harman.
As if to distract him from thoughts about life and living things, a very artificial spaceship rocketed from south to north across the sky, its long contrail slowly breaking up in the jet steam high above the Andes. Before Harman could be sure of the make and model of the ship, the gleaming speck was gone over the northern horizon behind the ruins, trailed by three sonic booms. It had been too large and too fast to be one of the hornets hauling gear north from the Dry Valley. Harman wondered if perhaps it was Daeman, returning from one of their joint expeditions with the moravecs, plotting and recording the decreasing quantum disturbances between Earth-system and Mars.