Ilium

54 The Plains of Ilium and Olympos

I leave the burning city in search of Achilles and see chaos stretching all the way to the sea. Trojans and Achaeans alike are pulling bodies from smoking craters from the Scaean Gates to the surf’s edge, and everywhere confused men are helping their wounded comrades back to Ilium or across the defensive trench into the Greek camps. As with most aerial bombardments in my era, the effects of the attack were more terrifying than the results. I imagine that there are several hundred dead—Trojan and Achaean warriors and civilians in Ilium all included—but most escaped unharmed, especially out here away from falling walls and flying masonry.

As I’m clambering over the lowest part of Thicket Ridge, I see the little robot coming toward me, tugging along his floating crabshell friend like a little boy pulling an especially large Radio Flyer wagon. For some reason, I’m so pleased to see them alive—although “still in existence” might be a better term—that I come very close to crying.

“Hockenberry,” says the robot, Mahnmut, “you’re injured. Is it bad?”

I touch my forehead and scalp. The bleeding has almost stopped. “It’s nothing.”

“Hockenberry, do you know what that large blast was?”

“Nuclear explosion,” I say. “It could have been thermonuclear, but for all its roar, I suspect it was just a fission weapon. A little larger than the Hiroshima bomb, perhaps. I don’t know much about bombs.”

Mahnmut cocks his head at me. “Where are you from, Hockenberry?”

“Indiana,” I reply without thinking.

Mahnmut waits.

“I’m a scholic,” I say to him again, knowing that he’s passing all this along to his silent friend via the radio link he called tightbeam earlier. “The gods rebuilt me out of old bones and DNA and some sort of memory fragments they extracted from the bits they found on Earth.”

“Memory from DNA?” said Mahnmut. “I don’t think so.”

I wave my hands impatiently. “It doesn’t matter,” I snap. “I’m the walking dead. I lived in the second half of the Twentieth Century, probably died in the first part of the Twenty-first. I’m hazy on dates. I was hazy on everything in my past life until recent weeks, when memories started flooding back.” I shake my head. “I’m a dead man walking.”

Mahnmut continues looking at me with that dark metallic strip instead of eyes. Then he nods judiciously and kicks me—rather viciously—in the left shin.

“God damn it!” I cry, hopping on the other leg. “Why’d you do that?”

“You seem alive to me,” says the little robot. “How did you come here from the Twentieth or Twenty-first Lost Age century, Hockenberry? Most of our moravec scientists are fairly sure that such time travel is impossible unless you’re whipping around near the speed of light or swimming too close to a black hole. Did you do either of those things?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “And surely it doesn’t matter. Look at all this!” I gesture toward the smoking city and the chaos on the plains of Ilium. Already, some of the Greek ships are putting to sea.

Mahnmut nods. For a robot, his body language is oddly human. “Orphu wonders why the gods broke off their attack,” he says.

I glance at the huge battered shell of a thing behind him. Sometimes I forget that there’s reportedly a brain in there. “Tell Orphu that I don’t know,” I say. “Perhaps they just want to enjoy the fear and chaos down here for a while before administering the coup de grâce.” I hesitate a second. “That’s French for . . .” I begin.

“Yes, I know French, unfortunately,” says Mahnmut. “Orphu was just quoting some fairly irrelevant Proust to me in French during the bombardment. What are you going to do next, Hockenberry?”

I look toward the Achaean encampment. Tents are burning, wounded horses are running in panic, men are milling, ships are being outfitted for sea, others already are moving out away from the coast, their sails catching the wind. “I was going to find Achilles and Hector,” I say. “But it may take me hours in all this mess.”

“In eighteen minutes and thirty-five seconds,” says Mahnmut, “something is going to happen that may change everything.”

I look at him and wait.

“I planted a . . . Device . . . up there in the Caldera Lake,” says the little robot. “Orphu and I brought it all the way from Jupiter space. Putting that thing up there was the main goal of our mission, actually, although we weren’t supposed to be the ones delivering it to . . . well, that’s another story. At any rate, in seventeen minutes, fifty-two seconds, the Device triggers itself.”

“It’s a bomb?” I say hoarsely. Suddenly my mouth is absolutely dry. I couldn’t spit if my life depended on it.

Mahnmut shrugs in that oddly human way of his. “We don’t know.”

“You don’t know!?” I bellow. “You don’t know?? How could you plant a . . . a . . . Device up there and set a timer if you don’t know what it’s going to do? That’s ridiculous!”

“Perhaps,” says Mahnmut, “but it’s what we were sent here to do. . . well, sent there, actually . . . by the moravecs who planned this mission.”

“How long, did you say?” I ask, grabbing the apparent leather bracelet on my wrist that serves as my own covert chronometer. The bracelet has microcircuits and small holographic projectors for when I need to know the time.

“Seventeen minutes and eight seconds,” says the little robot. “And counting.”

I set the timer on my watch and leave the little holographic display visible. “Shit,” I say.

“Yes,” agrees Mahnmut. “Are you QTing back up there, Hockenberry? To Olympos?”

I’d set my hand on the QT medallion at my throat, but only because I was thinking about saving a few minutes by teleporting straight into the Achaean camp to find Achilles. But Mahnmut’s question makes me pause and think.

“Maybe I should,” I say. “Someone needs to see what the gods are up to. Perhaps I could play spy one last time.”

“And then what?” asks the robot.

It’s my turn to shrug. “Then I come back for Achilles and Hector. Then maybe, say, Odysseus and Paris. Aeneas and Diomedes. Carry the war to the gods, shuttling these heroes up there two by two, like animals on Noah’s Ark.”

“That doesn’t sound too efficient as military campaign logistics go,” says Mahnmut.

“Do you know military strategy, little robot person?”

“No. Actually, all I really know anything about is a submersible that sank on Mars and Shakespeare’s sonnets,” says Mahnmut. He pauses. “Orphu just told me that I shouldn’t include the sonnets in my résumé.”

“Mars?” I say.

The shiny metallic head turns up toward me. “You didn’t know that Olympos is really the volcano Olympus Mons on Mars? You’ve lived there for nine Earth years, haven’t you?”

For a second, I’m dizzy enough that I have to stagger over to a low boulder and sit or I’m afraid I’ll wake up on the ground. “Mars,” I repeat. Two moons, the huge volcano, the red soil, the reduced gravity that I was always so happy to return to after a long day on the plains of Ilium. “Mars.” Fuck me. “Mars.”

Mahnmut says nothing, perhaps knowing that he’s embarrassed me enough for one day.

“Wait a minute,” I say. “Mars doesn’t have blue skies, oceans, trees, air to breathe. I watched the first Viking lander touch down in 1976. I watched on TV years later, decades later, when that little Sojourner buggy thing trundled down and got stuck on a rock. There were no oceans. No trees. No air.”

“They’ve terraformed it,” says Mahnmut. “And rather recently, too.”

“Who’s terraformed it?” I say, hearing the defensive anger in my voice.

“The gods,” says Mahnmut, but I can hear the slight hint of a question mark in his smooth robot voice.

I look at my watch. Fifteen minutes thirty-eight seconds. I tap the virtual chronometer display in front of the little robot’s cameras or eyes or whatever’s behind that sunglass strip on his face. “What’s going to happen in fifteen minutes, Mahnmut? Don’t tell me you and Orphu don’t know.”

“We don’t know,” says Mahnmut.

“I’m going up there to see what’s going on,” I say, grabbing the medallion.

“Take me,” says Mahnmut. “I set the timer. I should be there when the Device activates.”

I pause again, looking at the huge shell behind Mahnmut. “Are you going to defuse it?” I ask.

“No. That was my mission—to deliver and activate the Device. But if the timer doesn’t trigger it, I should be there in person to set it off.”

“Are we talking . . . even as a low-priority probability . . . the end of the world here, Mahnmut?”

The robot’s hesitation tells me everything.

“You should stay with Orphu another . . . ah . . . fourteen minutes thirty-nine seconds,” I say. “The shape the poor guy’s in, the world might end and he wouldn’t know it unless you told him.”

“Orphu says that you’re pretty funny for a scholic, Hockenberry,” says Mahnmut. “I still think I should go with you.”

“One,” I say, “you’re using up all our goddamned time talking. Two, I only have one Hades Helmet and I don’t want to be caught because the gods see a robot walking with invisible me. Three . . . good-bye.”

I pull the Hades Helmet cowl down over my head, twist the medallion, and go.

I QT right into the Great Hall of the Gods.

It looks like they’re all here except for Athena and Apollo, whom I suppose are floating in the healing tanks with green worms in their eyes and armpits about now. In the few seconds I have before the baklava hits the fan, I see that the gods are armored and armed for war—the hall is resplendent with gold breastplates, shining spears, tall helmets with feathered plumes, and polished, god-sized shields. I see Zeus standing by his blazing chariot, Poseidon in dark armor, Hermes and Hephaestus armed to the teeth, Ares carrying Apollo’s silver bow, Hera in gleaming bronze and gold, and Aphrodite pointing my way . . .

Shit.

“SCHOLIC HOCKENBERRY!” belows Zeus himself, looking right at me across the crowded hall. “FREEZE!”

It’s not just Zeusian advice. Every muscle and tendon and ligament and cell in my body freezes. I feel the cold stop my heart. Brownian motion ceases in me. My hand doesn’t make it an inch toward the QT medallion before I’m a statue.

“Take the Hades Helmet, the QT device, and everything else from him,” commands Zeus.

Ares and Hephaestus spring forward and strip me naked in front of gods and goddesses. The leather helmet is tossed to a glowering Hades, and, dressed as he is in black chitinous armor of exotic design, he looks like a terrible, glowering beetle. Zeus steps forward and grabs up my QT medallion from the floor, staring at it and glowering as if he’s going to crush it in his giant fist. They two gods finish ripping my clothes off and don’t even leave me my wristwatch or underpants.

“Unfreeze,” says Zeus. I collapse onto the marble floor and pant, holding my chest. My heart aches so much as it begins beating again that I’m sure I’m having a coronary. It’s everything I can do just not to piss myself in front of everyone.

“Take him away,” says Zeus, turning his back on me.

The eight-foot-tall Ares, god of war, grabs me by the hair and drags me away.