Olympos

1

Helen of Troy awakes just before dawn to the sound of air raid sirens. She feels along the cushions of her bed but her current lover, Hockenberry, is gone—slipped out into the night again before the servants wake, acting as he always does after their nights of lovemaking, acting as if he has done something shameful, no doubt stealing his way home this very minute through the alleys and back streets where the torches burn least bright. Helen thinks that Hockenberry is a strange and sad man. Then she remembers.

My husband is dead.

This fact, Paris killed in single combat with the merciless Apollo, has been reality for nine days—the great funeral involving both Trojans and Achaeans will begin in three hours if the god-chariot now over the city does not destroy Ilium completely in the next few minutes—but Helen still cannot believe that her Paris is gone. Paris, son of Priam, defeated on the field of battle? Paris dead? Paris thrown down into the shaded caverns of Hades without beauty of body or the elegance of action? Unthinkable. This is Paris, her beautiful boy-child who had stolen her away from Menelaus, past the guards and across the green lawns of Lacedaemon. This is Paris, her most attentive lover even after this long decade of tiring war, he whom she had often secretly referred to as her “plunging stallion full-fed at the manger.”

Helen slips out of bed and crosses to the outer balcony, parting the gauzy curtains as she emerges into the pre-dawn light of Ilium. It is midwinter and the marble is cold under her bare feet. The sky is still dark enough that she can see forty or fifty searchlights stabbing skyward, searching for the god or goddess and the flying chariot. Muffled plasma explosions ripple across the half dome of the moravecs’ energy field that shields the city. Suddenly, multiple beams of coherent light—shafts of solid blue, emerald green, blood red—lance upward from Ilium’s perimeter defenses. As Helen watches, a single huge explosion shakes the northern quadrant of the city, sending its shockwave echoing across the topless towers of Ilium and stirring the curls of Helen’s long, dark hair from her shoulders. The gods have begun using physical bombs to penetrate the force shield in recent weeks, the single-molecule bomb casings quantum phase-shifting through the moravecs’ shield. Or so Hockenberry and the amusing little metal creature, Mahnmut, have tried to explain to her.

Helen of Troy does not give a fig about machines.

Paris is dead. The thought is simply unsupportable. Helen has been prepared to die with Paris on the day that the Achaeans, led by her former husband, Menelaus, and by his brother Agamemnon, ultimately breach the walls, as breach they must according to her prophetess friend Cassandra, putting every man and boy-child in the city to death, raping the women and hauling them off to slavery in the Greek Isles. Helen has been ready for that day—ready to die by her own hand or by the sword of Menelaus—but somehow she has never really believed that her dear, vain, godlike Paris, her plunging stallion, her beautiful warrior-husband, could die first. Through more than nine years of siege and glorious battle, Helen has trusted the gods to keep her beloved Paris alive and intact and in her bed. And they did. And now they have killed him.

She calls back the last time she saw her Trojan husband, ten days earlier, heading out from the city to enter into single combat with the god Apollo. Paris had never looked more confident in his armor of elegant, gleaming bronze, his head flung back, his long hair flowing back over his shoulders like a stallion’s mane, his white teeth flashing as Helen and thousands of others watched and cheered from the wall above the Scaean Gate. His fast feet had sped him on, “sure and sleek in his glory,” as King Priam’s favorite bard liked to sing. But this day they had sped him on to his own slaughter by the hands of furious Apollo.

And now he’s dead, thinks Helen, and, if the whispered reports I’ve overheard are accurate, his body is a scorched and blasted thing, his bones broken, his perfect, golden face burned into an obscenely grinning skull, his blue eyes melted to tallow, tatters of barbecued flesh stringing back from his scorched cheekbones like… like… firstlings—like those charred first bits of ceremonial meat tossed from the sacrificial fire because they have been deemed unworthy. Helen shivers in the cold wind coming up with the dawn and watches smoke rise above the rooftops of Troy.

Three antiaircraft rockets from the Achaean encampment to the south roar skyward in search of the retreating god-chariot. Helen catches a glimpse of that retreating chariot—a brief gleaming as bright as the morning star, pursued now by the exhaust trails from the Greek rockets. Without warning, the shining speck quantum shifts out of sight, leaving the morning sky empty. Flee back to besieged Olympos, you cowards, thinks Helen of Troy.

The all-clear sirens begin to whine. The street below Helen’s apartments in Paris’s estate so near Priam’s battered palace are suddenly filled with running men, bucket brigades rushing to the northwest where smoke still rises into the winter air. Moravec flying machines hum over the rooftops, looking like nothing so much as chitinous black hornets with their barbed landing gear and swiveling projectors. Some, she knows from experience and from Hockenberry’s late-night rants, will fly what he calls air cover, too late to help, while others will aid in putting out the fire. Then Trojans and moravecs both will pull mangled bodies from the rubble for hours. Since Helen knows almost everyone in the city, she wonders numbly who will be in the ranks of those sent down to sunless Hades so early this morning.

The morning of Paris’s funeral. My beloved. My foolish and betrayed beloved.

Helen hears her servants beginning to stir. The oldest of the servants—the old woman Aithra, formerly queen of Athens and mother to royal Theseus until carried away by Helen’s brothers in revenge for the kidnapping of their sister—is standing in the doorway to Helen’s bedchamber.

“Shall I have the girls draw your bath, my lady?” asks Aithra.

Helen nods. She watches the skies brighten a moment more—sees the smoke to the northwest thicken and then lessen as the fire brigades and moravec fire engines bring it under control, watches another moment as the rockvec battle hornets continue to fling themselves eastward in hopeless pursuit of the already quantum-teleported chariot—and then Helen of Troy turns to go inside, her bare feet whispering on the cold marble. She has to prepare herself for Paris’s funeral rites and for seeing her cuckolded husband, Menelaus, for the first time in ten years. This also will be the first time that Hector, Achilles, Menelaus, Helen, and many of the other Achaeans and Trojans all will be present at a public event. Anything could happen.

Only the gods know what will come of this awful day, thinks Helen. And then she has to smile despite her sadness. These days, prayers to the gods go unanswered with a vengeance. These days, the gods share nothing with mortal men—or at least nothing except death and doom and terrible destruction carried earthward by their own divine hands.

Helen of Troy goes inside to bathe and dress for the funeral.

2

Red-haired Menelaus stood silent in his best armor, upright, motionless, regal, and proud between Odysseus and Diomedes at the forefront of the Achaean delegation of heroes gathered there at the funeral rites within the walls of Ilium to honor his wife-stealing enemy, Priam’s son, that shit-eating pig-dog, Paris. Every minute he stood there Menelaus was pondering how and when to kill Helen.

It should be easy enough. She was just across the broad lane and up the wall a bit, less than fifty feet from him opposite the Achaean delegation at the heart of the huge inner court of Troy, up there on the royal reviewing stand with old Priam. With luck, Menelaus could sprint there faster than anyone could intercept him. And even without luck, if the Trojans did have time to get between him and his wife, Menelaus would hack them down like weeds.

Menelaus was not a tall man—not a noble giant like his absent brother, Agamemnon, nor an ignoble giant like that ant-pizzle Achilles—so he knew he’d never be able to leap to the reviewing ledge, but would have to take the stairs up through the crowd of Trojans there, hacking and shoving and killing as he went. That was fine with Menelaus.

But Helen could not escape. The reviewing balcony on the wall of the Temple of Zeus had only the one staircase down to this city courtyard. She could retreat into the Temple of Zeus, but he could follow her there, corner her there. Menelaus knew that he would kill her before he went down under the attacks of scores of outraged Trojans—including Hector leading the funeral procession now coming into sight—and then the Achaeans and Trojans would be at war with one another again, forsaking their mad war against the gods. Of course, Menelaus’ life would almost certainly be forfeit if the Trojan War resumed here, today—as would Odysseus’, Diomedes’, and perhaps even the life of invulnerable Achilles himself, since there were only thirty Achaeans here at the pig Paris’s funeral, and thousands of Trojans present all around in the courtyard and on the walls and massed between the Achaeans and the Scaean Gate behind them.

It will be worth it.

This thought crashed through Menelaus’ skull like the point of a lance. It will be worth it—any price would be worth it—to kill that faithless bitch. Despite the weather—it was a cool, gray winter’s day—sweat poured down under his helmet, trickled through his short, red beard, and dripped from his chin, spattering on his bronze breastplate. He’d heard that dripping, spattering-on-metal sound many times before, of course, but it had always been his enemies’ blood dripping on armor. Menelaus’ right hand, set lightly on his silver-studded sword, gripped the hilt of that sword with a numbing ferocity.

Now?

Not now.

Why not now? If not now, when?

Not now.

The two arguing voices in his aching skull—both voices his, since the gods no longer spoke to him—were driving Menelaus insane.

Wait until Hector lights the funeral pyre and then act.

Menelaus blinked sweat out of his eyes. He didn’t know which voice this was—the one that had been urging action or the cowardly one urging restraint—but Menelaus agreed with its suggestion. The funeral procession had just entered the city through the huge Scaean Gate, was in the process of carrying Paris’s burned corpse—hidden now beneath a silken shroud—down the main thoroughfare to the center courtyard of Troy, where ranks upon ranks of dignitaries and heroes waited, the women—including Helen—watching from the reviewing wall above. Within a very few minutes, the dead man’s older brother Hector would be lighting the pyre and all attention would be riveted on the flames as they devoured the already burned body. A perfect time to act—no one will notice me until my blade is ten inches into Helen’s traitorous breast.

Traditionally, funerals for such royal personages as Paris, son of Priam, one of the Princes of Troy, lasted nine days, with many of the days taken up by funeral games—including chariot races and athletic competitions, usually ending in spear-throwing. But Menelaus knew that the ritual nine days since Apollo blasted Paris into charcoal had been taken up by the long voyage of carts and cutters to the forests still standing on Mount Ida many leagues to the southeast. The little machine-things called moravecs had been called on to fly their hornets and magical devices along with the cutters, providing force-shield defenses against the gods should they attack. And they had attacked, of course. But the woodcutters had done their job.

It was only now, on the tenth day, that the wood was gathered and in Troy and ready for the pyre, although Menelaus and many of his friends, including Diomedes standing next to him here in the Achaean contingent, thought that burning Paris’s putrid corpse on a funeral pyre was an absolute waste of good firewood since both the city of Troy and the miles of Achaean camps along the shore had been out of fuel for campfires for many months, so picked-over were the scrub trees and former forests surrounding Ilium itself ten years into that war. The battlefield was a stubble of stumps. Even the branches had long since been scavenged. The Achaean slaves were cooking dinners for their masters over dung-fueled fires, and that didn’t improve either the taste of meat or the foul mood of the Achaean warriors.

Leading the funeral cortege into Ilium was a procession of Trojan chariots, one by one, the horses’ hooves wrapped in black felt and raising little noise on the broad stones of the city’s thoroughfare and town square. Riding on these chariots, standing silent beside their drivers, were some of the greatest heroes of Ilium, fighters who’d survived more than nine years of the original war and now eight months of this more terrible war with the gods. First came Polydorus, another son of Priam’s, followed by Paris’s other half brother, Mestor. The next chariot carried the Trojan ally Ipheus, then Laoducus, son of Antenor. Following in their own jewel-bedecked chariots were old Antenor himself, down among the fighting men as always rather than up on the wall with the other elders, then the captain Polyphetes, then Sarpedon’s famed charioteer, Thrasmelus, standing in for the Sarpedon himself, co-commander of the Lycians, killed by Patroclus months ago when Trojans still fought Greeks rather than gods. Then came noble Pylartes—not, of course, the Trojan killed by Great Ajax just before the war with the gods began, but this other Pylartes who so often fights alongside Elasus and Mulius. Also in this procession are Megas’ son, Perimus, as well as Epistor and Melanippus.

Menelaus recognized them all, these men, these heroes, these enemies. He’d seen their contorted and blood-filled faces under bronze helmets a thousand times across the short deadly space of lance-thrust and sword-hack separating him from his twin goals—Ilium and Helen.

She’s fifty feet away. And no one will expect my attack.

Behind the muffled chariots came groomsmen leading the potential sacrificial animals—ten of Paris’s second-best horses and his hunting dogs, droves of fat sheep—a serious sacrifice these last, since both wool and mutton were growing scarce under the siege of the gods—and some old, shambling crooked-horned cattle. These cattle were not there for their pride of sacrifice—who was there to sacrifice to now that the gods were enemies?—but there for their fat to make the funeral pyre burn brighter and hotter.

Behind the sacrificial animals came thousands of Trojan infantry, all in polished armor this dull winter’s day, their ranks running back out through the Scaean Gate and onto the plains of Ilium. In the midst of this mass of men moved Paris’s funeral bier, carried by twelve of his closest comrades-in-arms, men who would have died for Priam’s second-eldest son and who even now wept as they carried the massive palanquin for the dead.

Paris’s body was covered by a blue shroud and that shroud was already buried in thousands of locks of hair—symbols of mourning from Paris’s men and lesser relatives, since Hector and the closer relatives would cut their locks just before the funeral pyre was lighted. The Trojans had not asked the Achaeans to contribute locks for mourning, and if they had—and if Achilles, Hector’s principal ally these mad days, had passed on that request, or worse yet, formed it as an order to be enforced by his Myrmidons—Menelaus would have personally led the revolt.

Menelaus wished that his brother Agamemnon were there. Agamemnon always seemed to know the proper course of action. Agamemnon was their true Argive commander—not the usurper Achilles and never the Trojan bastard Hector, who presumed to give orders to Argives, Achaeans, Myrmidons, and Trojans alike these days. No, Agamemnon was the Greeks’ true leader, and if he were there today, he’d either stop Menelaus from this reckless attack on Helen or join him to the death in carrying it out. But Agamemnon and five hundred of his loyal men had sailed their black ships back to Sparta and the Greek Isles seven weeks earlier—they were expected to be gone another month, at least—ostensibly to round up new recruits in this war against the gods, but secretly to enlist allies in a revolt against Achilles.

Achilles. Now appeared that traitorous monster walking only a step behind weeping Hector, who kept pace just behind the bier, cradling his dead brother’s head in his two huge hands.

At the sight of Paris’s body, a great moan went up from the thousands of Trojans massed on the walls and within the square. Women on rooftops and the wall—lesser women, not the females in Priam’s royal family or Helen—began a keening ululation. Despite himself, Menelaus felt goosebumps break out on his forearms. Funeral cries from women always affected him thus.

My broken and twisted arm, thought Menelaus, stoking his anger as one would stoke a fading bonfire.

Achilles—this same Achilles man-god passing now as Paris’s bier was solemnly carried past this honor-contingent of Achaean captains—had broken Menelaus’ arm just eight months earlier, on the day that the fleet-footed mankiller had announced to all the Achaeans that Pallas Athena had killed his friend Patroclus and carried the body to Olympos as a taunt. Then Achilles had announced that the Achaeans and Trojans would no longer make war on each other, but besiege holy Mount Olympos instead.

Agamemnon had objected to this—objected to everything: to Achilles’ arrogance and usurpation of Agamemnon’s rightful power as king-of-kings of all the Greeks assembled here at Troy, to the blasphemy of attacking the gods, no matter whose friend had been murdered by Athena—if Achilles was even telling the truth—and had objected most to the fact that tens and tens of thousands of Achaean fighters being put under Achilles’ control.

Achilles’ response that fateful day had been short and simple—he would fight any man, any Greek, who opposed his leadership and his declaration of war. He would fight them in single combat or take them all on at once. Let the last man standing rule the Achaeans from that morning forward.

Agamemnon and Menelaus, the proud sons of Atreus, had both attacked Achilles with spear, sword, and shield, while hundreds of the Achaean captains and thousands of the infantry watched in stunned silence.

Menelaus was a bloodied veteran though not counted amongst the first ranks of heroes at Troy, but his older brother was considered—at least while Achilles had sulked in his tent for weeks—the fiercest fighter of all the Achaeans. His spearcasts were almost always on target, his sword cut through reinforced enemy shields like a blade through cloth, and he showed no mercy to even the noblest enemies begging for their lives to be spared. Agamemnon was as tall and muscled and godlike as blond Achilles, but his body bore a decade’s more battle scars and his eyes that day were filled with a demon’s rage, while Achilles waited coolly, an almost distracted look on his boy-man’s face.

Achilles had disarmed both brothers as if they were children. Agamemnon’s powerful spearcast deflected from Achilles’ flesh as if Peleus’ and the goddess Thetis’ son were surrounded by one of the moravecs’ invisible energy shields. Agamemnon’s savage sword swing—fierce enough, Menelaus had thought at the time, to cut through a block of stone—shattered on Achilles’ beautiful shield.

Then Achilles had disarmed them both—throwing their extra spears and Menelaus’ sword into the ocean—tossing them down onto the packed sand and ripping their armor from their bodies with the ease a great eagle might tear cloth away from a helpless corpse. The fleet-footed mankiller had broken Menelaus’ left arm then—the circle of straining captains and infantry had gasped at the green-stick snap of the bone—and then Achilles broke Agamemnon’s nose with a seemingly effortless flat thrust of his palm, finally kicking in the ribs of the king-of-kings. Then Achilles planted his sandal on the moaning Agamemnon’s chest while Menelaus lay moaning next to his brother.

Only then had Achilles drawn his sword.

“Surrender and vow allegiance to me this day and I will treat you both with the respect due the sons of Atreus and honor you as fellow-captains and allies in the war to come,” Achilles said. “Hesitate a second, and I’ll send your dog-souls down to Hades before your friends can blink and scatter your corpses to the waiting vultures so that your bodies will never find burial.”

Agamemnon, gasping and groaning, almost vomiting the bile rising within him, had given surrender and allegiance to Achilles. Menelaus, filled with the agony of a bruised leg, his own set of broken ribs, and a shattered arm, had followed suit a second later.

All in all, thirty-five captains of the Achaeans had chosen to oppose Achilles that day. All had been bested within an hour, the bravest of them decapitated when they refused to surrender, their corpses thrown to birds and fish and dogs just as Achilles had threatened, but the other twenty-eight had ended up swearing their service. None of the other great Achaean heroes of Agamemnon’s stature—not Odysseus, not Diomedes, not Nestor, neither Big nor Little Ajax, not Teucer—had challenged the fleet-footed mankiller that day. All had vowed aloud—after hearing more about Athena’s murder of Patroclus and, later, hearing the details of the same goddess’s slaughter of Hector’s baby son, Scamandrius—to declare war on the gods that very morning.

Now Menelaus felt his arm ache—the set bones had not healed straight and proper, despite the best ministrations of their famed healer, Podalirius, son of Asclepius, and the arm still bothered Menelaus on cool days like this—but he resisted the urge to rub that ache as Paris’s funeral bier and Apollo proceeded slowly in front of the Achaean delegation.

Now the shrouded and lock-covered bier is set down next to the funeral pyre, below the reviewing stand on the wall of the Temple to Zeus. The ranks of infantry in the procession cease marching. The women’s moans and ululation from the other walls cease. In the sudden silence, Menelaus can hear the horses’ rough breathing and then the stream from one horse pissing on stone.

On the wall, Helenus, the old male seer standing next to Priam, the primary prophet and counselor of Ilium, shouts down some short eulogy that is lost on the wind that has just come in from the sea, blowing like a cold, disapproving breath from the gods. Helenus hands a ceremonial knife to Priam, who, though almost bald, has kept a few long strands of gray hair above his ears for just such solemn occasions. Priam uses the razor-sharp blade to sever a lock of that gray hair. A slave—Paris’s personal slave for many years—catches that lock in a golden bowl and moves on to Helen, who receives the knife from Priam and looks at the blade for a long second as if contemplating using it on herself, plunging it into her breast—Menelaus feels a sudden alarm that she will do just that, depriving him of his vengeance that is now only moments away—but then Helen raises the knife, seizes one of her long side tresses, and slices off the end. The brunette lock falls into the golden bowl and the slave moves on to mad Cassandra, one of Priam’s many daughters.

Despite the effort and danger of bringing the wood from Mount Ida, the pyre is a worthy one. Since they could not fill the city square with a traditional royal pyre a hundred feet on each side and still have room for people there, the pyre is only thirty feet to a side, but taller than usual, rising up to the level of the reviewing platform on the wall. Broad wooden steps, small platforms in themselves, have been built as a ramp-way to the apex of the pyre. Strong timber, reft from Paris’s own palace walls, square and support the massive heap of firewood.

The strong pallbearers carry Paris’s bier to the small platform at the top of the pyre. Hector waits below at the foot of the wide stairs.

Now the animals are quickly and efficiently killed by men who are experts at both butchery and religious sacrifice—and after all, thinks Menelaus, what’s the difference between the two? The sheep and cattle’s throats are cut, blood drained into more ceremonial bowls, hides skinned, and fat flensed in mere minutes. Paris’s corpse is wrapped about in folds of animal fat like soft bread around burned meat.

Now the flayed animal carcasses are carried up the steps and laid around Paris’s shrouded body. Women—virgins in full ceremonial gowns with their faces covered by veils—come forth from Zeus’s temple carrying two-handled jars of honey and oil. Not allowed on the pyre itself, they hand these jars to Paris’s bodyguards, now turned bier-bearers, who carry the jars up the steps and set them around the bier with great care.

Paris’s favorite chariot horses are led forth, the four finest are chosen from the ten, and Hector cuts the animals’ throats with his brother’s long knife—moving from one to the next so quickly that even these intelligent, high-spirited, superbly trained war animals have no time to react.

It’s Achilles who—with wild zeal and inhuman strength—flings the bodies of the four massive stallions onto the pyre, one after the next, each one higher onto the pyramid of timbers and logs.

Paris’s personal slave leads six of his master’s favorite dogs into the clearing next to the pyre. Hector moves from one dog to the next, patting and scratching them behind the ears. Then he pauses to think a moment, as if remembering all the times he had seen his brother feed these dogs from the table and take them on hunting expeditions to the mountains or the inland marshes.

Hector chooses two of the dogs, nods for the others to be led away, holds each affectionately for a minute by the loose skin at the back of its neck as if offering it a bone or a treat, and then cuts each dog’s throat so violently that the blade almost severs the animal’s head from its body. Hector himself flings the corpses of the two dogs onto the pyre—heaving them far above the bodies of the stallions so that they land at the foot of the bier itself.

Now a surprise.

Ten bronze-armored Trojans and ten bronze-armored Achaean spearmen lead forward a man-pulled cart. On the cart is a cage. In the cage is a god.

3

On the reviewing balcony high on the wall of Zeus’s temple, Cassandra watched the funeral ceremony for Paris with a growing sense of doom. When the cart was pulled into the center courtyard of Troy—pulled by eight chosen Trojan spearmen, not by horses or oxen—the cart carrying its sole cargo of a doomed god, Cassandra came close to swooning.

Helen caught her elbow and held her up. “What is it?” whispered the Greek woman, her friend, who, with Paris, had brought all this pain and tragedy down on Troy.

“It’s madness,” whispered Cassandra, leaning back against the marble wall, although whether her madness, or the madness of sacrificing a god or the madness of this whole, long war, or the madness of Menelaus below in the courtyard—a madness which she had been sensing grow over the past hour like a terrible storm sent by Zeus—Cassandra did not make clear to Helen. Nor did she herself know which she meant.

The captured god, held not only behind the iron bars hammered into the cart but also within the clear egg of the moravec forcefield that had finally trapped him, was named Dionysos—or Dionysus, son of Zeus by Semele, god of fulfillment in wine and in sex and in release to rapture. Cassandra, whose personal Lord from childhood had been Apollo—Paris’s killer—had nonetheless communed with Dionysos on more than one intimate occasion. This god had been the only divinity captured in combat so far in the new war, wrestled into submission by godlike Achilles, denied his quantum teleportation by moravec magic, talked into surrender by the wily Odysseus, and kept in thrall by the borrowed moravec forceshield now shimmering around him like heated air on a midsummer’s day.

Dionysos was unprepossessing for a god—short of stature, a mere six feet tall, pale, pudgy even by mortal standards, with a mass of gold-brown curls and a boy’s first attempt at a sketchy beard.

The cart stopped. Hector unlocked the cage and reached through the semipermeable forcefield to drag Dionysos up onto the first step of the pyre’s staircase. Achilles also laid his hand on the small god’s neck.

“Deicide,” whispered Cassandra. “God murder. Madness and deicide.”

Helen and Priam and Andromache and the others on the reviewing balcony ignored her. All eyes were on the pale god and the two taller, bronzed mortals on either side of him.

Unlike Seer Helenus’ wispy voice, which had been lost to the cold wind and crowd murmur, Hector’s booming shout rolled out over the crowded city center and echoed back from the tall towers and high walls of Ilium; it might have been clearly audible atop Mount Ida leagues to the east.

“Paris, beloved brother—we are here to say farewell to you and to say it so that you shall hear us even there where you now reside, deep in the House of Death.

“We send you sweet honey, rare oil, your favorite steeds, and your most loyal dogs—and now I offer to you this god from Olympos, Zeus’s son, whose fat shall feed the hungry flames and speed your soul to Hades.”

Hector drew his sword. The forcefield flickered and died, but Dionysos remained shackled in leg irons and wrist irons. “May I speak?” said the pale little god. His voice did not carry as far as Hector’s had.

Hector hesitated.

“Let the god speak!” called down the seer Helenus from his place by Priam on the balcony of Zeus’s temple.

“Let the god speak!” cried the Achaean seer Calchas from his place near Menelaus.

Hector frowned but nodded. “Say your last words, bastard son of Zeus. But even if they are a plea to your father, they will not save you today. Nothing will save you today. Today you are firstling for my brother’s corpse fire.”

Dionysos smiled, but it was a tremulous smile—tremulous for a mortal man, much less for a god.

“Trojans and Achaeans,” called the flabby little god with the straggly bit of beard. “You can’t kill one of the immortal gods. I was born from the womb of death, you fools. As a boy-god, Zeus’s child, my toys were those prophesied as the toys of the new ruler of the world—dice, ball, top, golden apples, bullroarer, and wool.

“But the Titans, whom my Father had beaten and thrown down into Tartarus, the hell beneath hell, the nightmare kingdom below the kingdom of the dead where your brother Paris now floats like a forgotten fart, whitened their faces with chalk and came like the spirits of the dead and attacked me with their bare, white hands and tore me into seven pieces, and threw me into a cauldron standing over a tripod that stood above a fire much hotter than this puny pyre you build here today.”

“Are you finished?” asked Hector, raising his sword.

“Almost,” said Dionysos, his voice happier and stronger now, its power echoing back from the far walls that had sent Hector’s voice bouncing back earlier.

“They boiled me and then roasted me over the fire on seven spits, and the smell of my cooking was so delicious that it drew my father, Zeus himself, down to the Titans’ feast, hoping to be invited to the meal. But when he saw my boy’s skull on the spit and my boy’s hands in the broth, Father smote the Titans with lightning and hurled them back in Tartarus, where they reside in terror and misery unto this very day.”

“Is that all?” said Hector.

“Almost,” said Dionysos. He raised his face to King Priam and the royals on the balcony of Zeus’s temple. The small god’s voice was a bull-roar now.

“But others say that my boiled limbs were thrown into the earth where Demeter gathered them together—and thus came to man the first vines to give you wine. Only one boyish limb of mine survived the fire and the earth—and Pallas Athena brought that limb to Zeus, who entrusted my kradiaios Dionysos to Hipta, the Asian name for the Great Mother Rheaso, that she might carry it on her head. Father used that term, kradiaios Dionysos as a sort of pun, you seen, since kradia in the old tongue means ‘heart’ and krada means ‘fig tree’, so…”

“Enough,” cried Hector. “Endless prattling will not prolong your dog’s life. End this in ten words or fewer or I’ll end it for you.”

“Eat me,” said Dionysos.

Hector swung his great sword with both hands, decapitating the god with one blow.

The crowd of Trojans and Greeks gasped. The massed ranks all took a step backward. Dionysos’ headless body stood there on the lowest platform for several seconds, tottering but still upright, until it suddenly toppled like a marionette with its strings cut. Hector grabbed the fallen head, its mouth still open, lifted it by its thin beard, and threw it high up on the funeral pyre so that it landed between the corpses of the horses and the dogs.

Using his sword overhand like an axe now, Hector hacked away—cutting off Dionysos’ arms, then legs, then genitals—throwing every bit onto a different section of the pyre. He took care not to throw them too near Paris’s bier, however, since he and the others would have to sort the ashes later to separate Paris’s revered bones from the unworthy bone-garbage of the dogs, horses, and god. Finally, Hector cut the torso into dozens of small, fleshy bits, throwing most onto the pyre, but lobbing others down to the pack of Paris’s surviving dogs, who had been released into the square by the men who had been handling them since the funeral procession.

As the last bits of bone and gristle were hacked to bits, a black cloud seemed to rise from the pitiful remnants of Dionysos’ corpse—rising like a swirling mass of invisible black gnats, like a small cyclone of black smoke—so fierce for a few seconds that even Hector had to stop his grim work and step back. The crowds, including the Trojan infantry in ranks and the Achaean heroes, also took another step back. Women on the wall screamed and covered their faces with their veils and hands.

Then the cloud was gone, Hector threw the last bits of pasty-white and pink flesh onto the pyre and kicked the rib cage and spine in among the faggots of heaped wood. Then Hector struggled out of his bloody bronze, allowing his attendants to carry away the soiled armor. One slave brought a basin of water and the tall man washed blood off his arms and hands and brow with it, accepting a clean towel from another slave.

Clean now, clad only in tunic and sandals, Hector lifted the golden bowl filled with fresh-cut locks of hair for mourning, ascended the broad steps to the summit of the pyre where the bier resided on its resin-and-wood platform, and poured the hair of his brother’s loved ones and friends and comrades onto the shroud of Paris. A runner—the fastest runner in all the running games in Troy’s recent history—entered through the Scaean Gate carrying a tall torch, jogged through the crowd of infantry and onlookers—a crowd that parted for him—and ran up the wide platform steps to where Hector waited at the top of the pyre.

The runner handed the flickering torch to Hector, bowed, and descended the stairs backward, still bowing.

Menelaus looks up as a dark cloud moves in over the city.

“Phoebus Apollo shrouds the day,” whispers Odysseus.

A cold wind blows in from the west just as Hector drops the torch into the fat—and resin-soaked timber below the bier. The wood smokes but does not burn.

Menelaus, who has always been more excitable in battle than his brother Agamemnon or many other of the coolest killers and greatest heroes among the Greeks, feels his heart begin to pound as the moment for action approaches. It does not bother him so much that he may only have moments more to live, as long as that bitch Helen goes screaming down to Hades before him. If Menelaus, son of Atreus, had his way, the woman would be thrown down into the deeper hell of Tartarus where the Titans whom the dead god Dionysos had just been prattling about still scream and blunder about in the gloom and pain and roar.

Hector gestures, and Achilles carries two brimming goblets up to his former enemy and then goes back down the steps. Hector raises the goblets.

“Winds of the West and North,” cries Hector, raising the goblets, “blustering Zephyr and cold-fingered Boreas, come with a strong blast and light the pyre where Paris lies in state, all the Trojans and even the honoring Argives mourning around him! Come Boreas, come Zephyr, help us light this pyre with your breath and I promise you splendid victims and generous, brimming cups of libation!”

On the balcony above, Helen whispers to Andromache, “This is madness. Madness. Our beloved Hector invoking the aid of the gods, with whom we war, to burn the corpse of the god he just slaughtered.”

Before Andromache can reply, Cassandra laughs aloud from the shadows, drawing stern glances from Priam and the old men around him.

Cassandra ignores the reproachful stares and hisses at Helen and Andromache. “Madnesssss, yessss. I told you all was madness. It’s madness what Menelaussss is planning now, Helen, your slaughter, moments away, no less bloody than the death of Dionysos.”

“What are you talking about, Cassandra?” Helen’s whisper is harsh, but she has gone very pale.

Cassandra smiles. “I’m talking about your death, woman. And just minutes away, postponed only by the refusal of a corpse pyre to light.”

“Menelaus?”

“Your worthy husband,” laughs Cassandra. “Your previous worthy husband. The one who’s not rotting away now like charred compost on a woodpile. Can’t you hear Menelaus’ ragged breathing as he prepares to cut you down? Can’t you smell his sweat? Can’t you hear his foul heart pounding? I can.”

Andromache turns away from the funeral and steps closer to Cassandra, ready to lead her off the balcony into the temple, out of sight and earshot.

Cassandra laughs again and shows a short but very sharp dagger in her hand. “Touch me, bitch, and I’ll carve you up the way you cut up that slave baby you called your own child.”

“Silence!” hisses Andromache. Her eyes are suddenly wide with fury.

Priam and the other old men turn and scowl again. They obviously have not made out the words in their aged semi-deafness, but the tone of the angry whispers and hisses must be unmistakable to them.

Helen’s hands are shaking. “Cassandra, you’ve told me yourself that all your predictions from all your years of casting doom were false. Troy still stands months after you predicted its destruction. Priam is alive, not cut down in this very temple of Zeus as you prophesied. Achilles and Hector are alive, when for years you said they would die before the city fell. None of us women have been dragged into slavery as you predicted, neither you to Agamemnon’s house—where you told us Clytemnestra would slaughter that great king along with you and your infants—nor Andromache to…”

Cassandra throws back her head in a silent howl. Below them, Hector is still offering the wind gods sacrifices and honeyed wine if only they will light his brother’s pyre. If theater had been created at this time, the attendees here today would think that this drama had slipped into farce.

“All that is gone,” whispers Cassandra, slicing across her own forearm with the razor-sharp edge of her dagger. Blood trickles across her pale flesh and drips on marble, but she never looks down at it. Her gaze stays on Andromache and Helen. “The old future is no more, sisters. The Fates have abandoned us. Our world and its future have ceased to be, and some other one—some strange other kosmos—has come into being. But Apollo’s curse of second sight has not abandoned me, sisters. Menelaus is seconds away from rushing up here and sticking his sword through your lovely tit, Helen of Troy.” The last three words are spat out with total sarcasm.

Helen grabs Cassandra by the shoulders. Andromache wrestles away the knife. Together, the two shove the younger woman back between the pillars and into the cool shadows of the interior mezzanine of Zeus’s temple. The clairvoyant young woman is pressed back against the marble railing, the two older women hovering over her like Furies.

Andromache lifts the blade to Cassandra’s pale throat. “We’ve been friends for years, Cassandra,” hisses Hector’s wife, “but one more word out of you, you crazy cunt, and I’ll cut your throat like a hog being hung up to bleed.”

Cassandra smiles.

Helen puts one hand on Andromache’s wrist—although whether to restrain her or be an accomplice to murder, it is hard to tell. Her other hand remains on Cassandra’s shoulder.

“Is Menelaus coming to kill me?” she whispers into the tormented seer’s ear.

“Twice he will come for you today, and each time he will be thwarted,” replied Cassandra in monotone. Her eyes are not focused on either woman. Her smile is a rictus.

“When will he come?” asks Helen. “And who will thwart him?”

“First when Paris’s pyre is lighted,” says Cassandra, her tone as flat and disinterested as if she is reciting from an old children’s tale. “And secondly when Paris’s pyre burns out.”

“And who shall thwart him?” repeats Helen.

“First shall Menelaus be stopped by Paris’s wife,” says Cassandra. Her eyes have rotated up in her head so that only the whites show. “Then by Agamemnon and the would-be Achilles-killer, Penthesilea.”

“The amazon Penthesilea?” says Andromache, her surprised voice loud enough to echo in the Temple of Zeus. “She’s a thousand leagues from here, as is Agamemnon. How can they be here by the time that Paris’s funeral pyre burns out?”

“Hush,” hisses Helen. To Cassandra, whose eyelids are fluttering, she says, “You say Paris’s wife stops Menelaus from murdering me when the funeral pyre is lighted. How do I do that? How?”

Cassandra slumps to the floor in a swoon. Andromache slips the dagger into the folds of her gown and slaps the younger woman several times, hard. Cassandra does not awaken.

Helen kicks the fallen form. “Gods damn her. How am I to stop Menelaus from murdering me? We may be just minutes away from…”

From outside the temple a huge roar goes up from the Trojans and Achaeans in the square. Both women can hear the whoosh and roar.

The winds have obediently roared in through the Scaean Gate. The tinder and timber have caught the spark. The pyre is lighted.

4

Menelaus watched as the winds blew in from the west and fanned the embers of Paris’s pyre first into a few flickering tongues of flame and then into a blazing bonfire. Hector barely had time to run down the steps and leap free before the entire pyre erupted in flames.

Now, thought Menelaus.

The ordered ranks of Achaeans had broken up as the crowd jostled back away from the heat of the pyre, and Menelaus used the confusion to hide his movements as he slid past his fellow Argives and through the ranks of Trojan infantry facing the flames. He edged his way around to the left, toward Zeus’s temple and the waiting staircase. Menelaus noticed that the heat and sparks from the fire—the wind was blowing toward the temple—had driven Priam, Helen, and the others back off the balcony and—more important—the intervening soldiers off the stairs, so his way was clear.

It’s as if the gods are helping me.

Perhaps they are, thought Menelaus. There were reports every day of contact between Argives and Trojans and their old gods. Just because mortals and gods were warring now didn’t mean that the bonds of blood and old habit had been completely broken. Menelaus knew dozens of his peers who secretly offered sacrifices to the gods at night, just as they always had, even while fighting the gods by day. Hadn’t Hector himself just called on the gods of the west and north winds—Zephyr and Boreas—to help him light his brother’s pyre? And hadn’t the gods complied, even though the bones and guts of Dionysos, Zeus’s own son, had been scattered on the same pyre like inadequate firstlings that one tosses to dogs?

It’s a confusing time to be alive.

Well, answered the other voice in Menelaus’ mind, the cynical one that had not been ready to kill Helen this day, you won’t be alive for long, boyo.

Menelaus paused at the bottom of the steps and slipped his sword from its scabbard. No one noticed. All eyes were on the funeral pyre blazing and crackling thirty feet away. Hundreds of soldiers raised their sword hands to shield their eyes and face from the heat of the flames.

Menelaus stepped up onto the first step.

A woman, one of the veiled virgins who had earlier carried the oil and honey to the pyre, emerged from the portico of Zeus’s temple not ten feet from Menelaus and walked straight toward the flames. All eyes turned in her direction and Menelaus had to freeze on the lowest step, lowering his sword, since he was standing almost directly behind her and did not want to draw attention to himself.

The woman threw down her veil. The Trojan crowd opposite the pyre from Menelaus gasped.

“Oenone,” cried a woman from the balcony above.

Menelaus craned to look up. Priam, Helen, Andromache, and some of the others had stepped back out onto the balcony at the sound of the crowd’s gasps and shouts. It had not been Helen who spoke, but one of the attending female slaves.

Oenone? The name was vaguely familiar to Menelaus, something from before the last ten years of war, but he couldn’t place it. His thoughts were on the next half minute. Helen was at the top of these fifteen steps with no men between him and her.

“I am Oenone, Paris’s true wife!” shouted this woman called Oenone, her voice barely audible even at this proximity over the rage of wind and fierce crackling of the corpse fire.

Paris’s true wife? In his puzzlement, Menelaus hesitated. There were more Trojans jostling out of the temple and adjoining alleys to watch this spectacle. Several men stepped up onto the stairs next to and above Menelaus. The red-haired Argive remembered now that the word in Sparta after the abduction of Helen had been that Paris had been married to a plain-looking woman—ten years older than he had been on their wedding day—and that he had put this wife aside when the gods helped him to abduct Helen. Oenone.

“Phoebus Apollo did not kill Priam’s son, Paris,” shouted this woman called Oenone. “I did!”

There were shouts, even obscenities, and some of the Trojan warriors on the near side of the fire stepped forward as if to grab this crazy women, but their comrades held them back. The majority wanted to hear what she had to say.

Menelaus could see Hector through the flames. Even Ilium’s greatest hero was powerless to intercede here, since his brother’s blazing corpse fire stood between him and this middle-aged woman.

Oenone was so close to the flames that her clothing steamed. She looked wet, as if she had doused herself in water in preparation for this stunt. Her full breasts were clearly visible as they drooped under her soaked gown.

“Paris did not die from flames by Phoebus Apollo’s hands!” screamed the harpy. “When my husband and the god disappeared from sight into Slow Time ten days ago, they exchanged bowshots—it was an archer’s duel, just as Paris had planned. Both man and god missed his mark. It was a mortal—the coward Philoctetes—who fired the fatal arrow that doomed my husband!” Here Oenone pointed into the group of Achaeans to where old Philoctetes stood near Big Ajax.

“Lies!” screamed the old archer, who had been rescued from his isle of exile and disease only recently by Odysseus, months after the war with the gods had begun.

Oenone ignored him and stepped even closer to the flames. The skin of her bare arms and face reddened in the heat. The steam from her garments became as thick as a mist around her. “When Apollo QT’d back to Olympos in frustration, it was the Argive coward Philoctetes, bearing old grudges, who fired his poison arrow into my husband’s groin!”

“How could you know this, woman? None of us followed Priam’s son and Apollo into Slow Time. None of us saw the battle!” bellowed Achilles, his voice a hundred times more clear than the widow’s.

“When Apollo saw the treachery, he QT’d my husband to the slopes of Mount Ida, where I have lived in exile this decade and more …” continued Oenone.

There were a few shouts now, but for the most part the gigantic city square, filled with thousands of Trojan warriors, as well as the populated walls and rooftops above, were silent. Everyone waited.

“Paris begged me to take him back …” shouted the weeping woman, her wet hair now steaming as furiously as her clothes. Even her tears seemed to turn to steam. “He was dying of Greek poison, his balls and once-beloved member and lower belly already black from it, but he begged me to heal him.”

“How could a mere harridan heal him from mortal poison?” shouted Hector, speaking up for the first time, his voice bellowing through the flames like a god’s.

“An oracle had told my husband that only I could heal him from such a mortal wound,” Oenone shouted back hoarsely, her voice either failing now or being defeated by the heat and roar. Menelaus could hear her words, but he doubted if most of the others in the square could.

“He implored me in his agony,” cried the woman, “asking me to put balm on his poisoned wound. ’Do not hate me now,’ Paris begged me, ‘I left you only because the Fates ordered me to go to Helen. I wish I had died before bringing that bitch to Priam’s palace. I implore you, Oenone, by the love we bore each other and by the vows we once took, forgive me and heal me now.’ ”

Menelaus watched her take two more steps closer to the pyre, until flames licked around her, blackening her ankles and causing her sandals to curl.

“I refused!” she shouted, her voice hoarse but louder again. “He died. My only love and only lover and only husband died. He died in horrible pain, screaming obscenities. My servants and I tried to burn his body—to give my poor Fates-doomed husband the hero’s funeral pyre he deserved—but the trees were strong and hard to cut, and we were women, and weak, and I failed to do even this simple task. When Phoebus Apollo saw how poorly we had honored Paris’s remains, he took pity on his fallen foe a second time, QT’d Paris’s desecrated body back to the battlefield, and let the charred corpse fall out of Slow Time as if he had been burned in battle.

“I’m sorry that I did not heal him,” called Oenone. “I’m sorry for everything.” She turned long enough to look up at the balcony, but it was doubtful if she could see the people there clearly through the heat haze and smoke and pain of her burning eyes. “But at least that cunt Helen never saw him alive again.”

The ranks of Trojans began to murmur until the sound built into a roar.

Now, too late, a dozen Trojan guards ran toward Oenone to drag her back for further interrogation.

She stepped up onto the flaming pyre.

First her hair burst into flames, and then her gown. Incredibly, impossibly, she continued climbing the heaped wood, even as her flesh burned and blackened and folded back like charred parchment. Only in the last seconds before she fell did she visibly writhe in agony. But her screams filled the square for what seemed like minutes, stunning the crowd into silence.

When the massed Trojans spoke again, it was to shout for Philoctetes, demanding that the honor guard of Achaeans give him up.

Furious, confused, Menelaus looked up the staircase. Priam’s royal guard had surrounded everyone on the balcony now. The way to Helen was blocked by a wall of circular Trojan shields and a picket of spears.

Menelaus jumped down from his step and ran across the empty space near the pyre, feeling the heat hitting his face like a fist and knowing that his eyebrows were being singed off. In a minute he had joined the ranks of his fellow Argives, his sword raised. Ajax, Diomedes, Odysseus, Teucer, and the others had made their own circle around Philoctetes and also had their weapons raised and ready.

The overwhelming mass of Trojans surrounding them lifted high their shields, raised their spears, and advanced on the two dozen doomed Greeks.

Suddenly Hector’s voice roared everyone into immobility.

“Stop! I forbid this! Oenone’s babblings—if this even was Oenone who killed herself here today, for I did not recognize the crone—mean nothing. She was mad! My brother died in mortal combat with Phoebus Apollo.”

The furious Trojans did not seem convinced. Spearpoints and swords remained poised and eager. Menelaus looked around at his doomed band and noticed that while Odysseus was frowning and Philoctetes was cowering, Big Ajax was grinning as if anticipating the imminent slaughter that would end his life.

Hector strode past the pyre and put himself between the Trojan spears and the circle of Greeks. He still wore no armor and carried no weapons, but suddenly he seemed the most formidable foe on the field.

“These men are our allies and are my invited guests at the funeral of my brother,” shouted Hector. “You shall not harm them. Anyone who defies my order will die by my hand. I swear this on the bones of my brother!”

Achilles stepped off the platform and raised his shield. He was still dressed in his best armor and was armed. He said nothing and made no move, but every Trojan in the city must have been aware of him.

The hundreds of Trojans looked at their leader, looked over at fleet-footed mankilling Achilles, looked a final time at the funeral pyre where the woman’s corpse had been all but consumed by the flames, and they gave way. Menelaus could feel the fighting spirit slide out of the mobs surrounding them, could see the confusion on the tanned Trojan faces.

Odysseus led the Achaeans toward the Scaean Gates. Menelaus and the other men lowered their swords but did not sheath them. The Trojans parted like a reluctant but still-blood-hungry sea before them.

“By the gods …” whispered Philoctetes from the center of their circle as they went out through the gates and past more ranks of Trojans, “I swear to you that…”

“Shut the fuck up, old man,” said powerful Diomedes. “You say one more word before we’re back to the black ships, I’ll kill you myself.”

Beyond the Achaean pickets, past the defensive trenches and beneath the moravec forceshields, there was confusion along the coast even though the encampments there couldn’t have heard about the near disaster in the city of Troy. Menelaus broke away from the others and ran down to the beach.

“The King has returned!” cried a spearman, running past Menelaus and wildly blowing a conch shell. “The commander has returned.”

Not Agamemnon, thought Menelaus. He won’t be back for at least another month. Perhaps two.

But it was his brother, standing at the prow of the largest of the thirty black ships in his small fleet. His golden armor flashed as the rowers drove the long, thin craft through the surf and in toward the beach.

Menelaus waded into the waves until the water covered the bronze greaves protecting his shins. “Brother!” he cried, waving his arms over his head like a boy. “What news is there from home? Where are the new warriors you swore to return with?”

Still sixty or seventy feet out from shore, water splashing about the bow of his black ship as it surfed in on the long, great swell, Agamemnon covered his eyes as if the afternoon sun hurt them and shouted back, “Gone, fellow son of Atreus. All are gone!”

5

The corpse fire will burn all through the night.

Thomas Hockenberry, B.A. in English from Wabash College, M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale in classical studies, formerly on the faculty of Indiana University—in truth, head of the classics department there until he died of cancer in A.D. 2006—and most recently, for ten years of the ten years and eight months since his resurrection, Homeric scholic for the Olympian gods, whose duties during that time included reporting daily and verbally to his Muse, Melete by name, on the progress of the Trojan War and how the tale was following or diverging from Homer’s Iliad—the gods, it turns out, are as preliterate as three-year-olds—leaves the city square and Paris’s flaming pyre shortly before dusk and climbs the second-tallest tower in Troy, damaged and dangerous though it is, to eat his bread and cheese and drink his wine in peace. In Hockenberry’s opinion, it’s been a long, weird day.

The tower he frequently chooses for solitude is closer to the Scaean Gate than to the center of the city near Priam’s palace, but it’s not on the main thoroughfare and most of the warehouses at its base are empty these days. Officially, the tower—one of the tallest in Ilium before the war, almost fourteen stories tall by Twentieth Century reckoning and shaped like a poppy reed or a minaret with a bulbous swelling near its top—is closed to the public. A bomb from the gods in the early weeks of the current war blasted off the top three floors and diagonally shattered the bulb, leaving the small rooms near the top open to the air. The main shaft of the tower shows alarming cracks and the narrow spiral staircase is littered with masonry, plaster, and dislodged stones. It took hours for Hockenberry to clear the way to the eleventh-floor bulb during his first venture up the tower two months earlier. The moravecs—at Hector’s direction—have placed orange plastic tape across the entrances, warning people in graphic pictograms what harm they could come to—the tower itself could tumble over at any time according to the most alarming of the graphic images—and other symbols command them to stay out upon penalty of King Priam’s wrath.

The looters had then emptied the place within seventy-two hours, and after that the locals did stay out—for what use was an empty building? Now Hockenberry slips between the bands of tape, clicks on his flashlight, and begins his long ascent with little worry about being arrested or robbed or interrupted here. He’s armed with a knife and short sword. Besides, he’s well known: Thomas Hockenberry, son of Duane, occasional friend… well, no, not friend, but interlocutor at least… of both Achilles and Hector, not to mention a public figure now with more than passing acquaintance with both the moravecs and rockvecs… so there are very few Greeks or Trojans who will move to harm him without thinking twice.

But the gods, now… well, that’s another matter.

Hockenberry is panting by the third floor, actively wheezing and stopping to catch his breath by the tenth, and making noises like the 1947 Packard his father had once owned by the time he reaches the shattered eleventh floor. He’s spent more than ten years watching these human demigods—Greek and Trojan alike—warring and feasting and loving and debauching like muscular ads for the most successful health club in the world, not to mention the gods, male and female, who are walking advertisements for the best health club in the universe, but Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., has never found time to get himself in shape. Typical, he thinks.

The stairway winds tightly up through the center of the circular building. There are no doorways and some evening light comes into the central stairwell through windows in the tiny, pie-shaped rooms on either side, but the ascent is still dark. He uses the flashlight to make sure that the stairs are where they should be and that no new debris has tumbled into the stairwell. At least the walls are clean of graffiti—one of the many blessings of a totally illiterate populace, thinks Professor Thomas Hockenberry.

As always when he reaches his little niche on what is now the top floor, long since swept clear of debris and the worst of the plaster dust by him but open to rain and wind, he decides that the climb has been worth the effort.

Hockenberry sits on his favorite block of stone, sets down his pack, puts away his flashlight—loaned to him months ago by one of the moravecs—and pulls out his small wrapped package of fresh bread and stale cheese. He also digs out his wineskin. Sitting there, feeling the evening breeze coming off the sea stir his new beard and long hair, idly cutting off chunks of cheese and slicing the slab of bread with his combat knife, Hockenberry gazes out at the view and lets the tension of the day seep out of him.

The view is a good one. Sweeping almost three hundred degrees, blocked from being circular by just a shard of wall left standing behind him, the view allows Hockenberry to see most of the city beneath him—Paris’s funeral pyre just a few blocks east and seeming to be almost directly beneath him from this height—and the city walls all around, their torches and bonfires just being lighted, and the Achaean encampment strung out north and south along the coast for miles, the lights of the hundreds upon hundreds of cooking fires reminding Hockenberry of a view he’d once glimpsed from an aircraft descending above Lake Shore Drive in Chicago after dark, the lakefront bejeweled with its shifting necklace of headlights and countless lighted apartment buildings. And now, just visible against the wine-dark sea, are the thirty or so black ships just returned with Agamemnon, the long boats mostly still bobbing at anchor rather than pulled up on the beach. Agamemnon’s camp—all but empty the last month and a half—is ablaze with fires and blurred with motion this evening.

The skies are not empty here. To the northeast, the last of the space-warp holes, Brane Holes, whatever they are—people have just called the remaining one the Hole for the last six months—cuts a disk out of the Trojan sky as it connects the plains of Ilium to the ocean of Mars. Brown Asia Minor soil leads directly to red Martian dust without so much as a crack in the earth to separate the two. It’s a bit earlier in the evening on Mars, and a red twilight lingers there, outlining the Hole against the darker old-Earth sky here.

Navigation lights blink red and green on a score of moravec hornets flying night patrol above the Hole, over the city, circling out over the sea, and prowling as far away as the dimly glimpsed shadows that are the wooded peaks of Mount Ida to the east.

Even though the sun has just set—early on this winter’s night—the streets of Troy are open for business. The last traders in the marketplace near Priam’s palace have folded away their awnings and are trundling their wares away in carts—Hockenberry can hear the creaking wooden wheels over the wind even at this height—but the adjoining streets, filled with brothels and restaurants and bathhouses and more brothels, are coming alive, filling with jostling forms and flickering torches. As is the Trojan custom, every major intersection in the city, as well as every turn and angle on the broad walls around the city, are lighted every evening by huge bronze braziers in which oil or wood fires are kept burning all through the night, and the last of these are now being lighted by watchmen. Hockenberry can see dark forms pressing close to warm themselves around each of these fires.

Around all but one. In Ilium’s main square, Paris’s funeral pyre outshines all the other fires in and around the city, but only one dark form presses close to it as if for warmth—Hector, moaning aloud, weeping, calling to his soldiers and servants and slaves to pour more wood onto the howling flames while he uses a large, two-handed cup to dip wine from a golden bowl, constantly pouring it onto the ground near the pyre until the earth there is so drenched it looks to be oozing blood.

Hockenberry is just finishing his dinner when he hears the footsteps coming up the spiral staircase.

Suddenly his heart is pounding and he can taste the fear in his mouth. Someone has followed him up here—there can be little doubt. The tread on the steps is too light—as if the person climbing the stairs is trying to move stealthily.

Maybe it’s some woman scavenging, thinks Hockenberry, but even as the hope rises, it’s dashed; he can hear a faint metallic echo in the stairwell, as of bronze armor rattling. Besides, he knows, the women in Troy can be more deadly than most men he’d known in his Twentieth and Twenty-first century world.

Hockenberry rises as quietly as he can, sets the wineskin and bread and cheese aside, sheaths his knife, silently draws his sword, and steps back toward the only standing wall. The wind rises and rustles his red cape as he conceals the sword under its folds.

My QT medallion. He uses his left hand to touch the small quantum teleportation device where it hangs against his chest under his tunic. Why did I think I had nothing valuable with me? Even if I can’t use this any longer without being detected and pursued by the gods, it’s unique. Invaluable. Hockenberry pulls out the flashlight and holds it extended the way he used to aim his taser baton when he owned one. He wishes he had one now.

It occurs to him that it might be a god climbing the last of the eleven flights of steps just below him. The Masters of Olympos had been known to sneak into Ilium disguised as mortals. The gods certainly had reason enough to kill him and to take back their QT medallion.

The climbing figure comes up the last few stairs and steps into the open. Hockenberry flicks on the flashlight, shining the beam full on the figure.

It is a small and only vaguely humanoid form—its knees are backward, its arms are articulated wrong, its hands are interchangeable, and it has no face as such—barely a meter tall, sheathed in dark plastic and gray-black-and-red metal.

“Mahnmut,” Hockenberry says in relief. He shifts the circle of the flashlight beam away from the little Europan moravec’s vision plate.

“You carrying a sword under that cape,” asks Mahnmut in English, “or are you just happy to see me?”

It’s been Hockenberry’s habit to carry some fuel in his backpack for a small fire when he’s up here. In recent months, this has often meant dried cow chips, but tonight he’s brought plenty of sweet-smelling kindling sold everywhere on the black market today by those woodcutters who had brought back the wood for Paris’s pyre. Now Hockenberry has the little fire going while he and Mahnmut sit on blocks of stone on opposite sides of it. The wind is chill and Hockenberry, at least, is glad for the fire.

“I haven’t seen you around for a few days,” he says to the little moravec. Hockenberry notices how the flames reflect off Mahnmut’s shiny plastic vision plate.

“I’ve been up at Phobos.”

It takes Hockenberry a few seconds to remember that Phobos is one of the moons of Mars. The closer one, he thinks. Or maybe the smaller one. At any rate, a moon. He turns his head to see the huge Hole a few miles to the northeast of Troy: it’s now night on Mars as well—the disk of the Hole is only barely visible against the night sky, and that is only because the stars look slightly different there, more brilliant, or clustered more tightly together, or maybe both. Neither of the Martian moons is visible.

“Anything interesting happen today while I was gone?” asks Mahnmut.

Hockenberry has to chuckle at that. He tells the moravec about the morning funeral services and Oenone’s self-immolation.

“Whoa, doggies,” says Mahnmut. The ex-scholic can only assume that the moravec deliberately uses idiomatic English he thinks is specific to the era Hockenberry had lived through on his Earth. Sometimes it works; sometimes, like now, it’s laughable.

“I don’t remember from the Iliad that Paris had an earlier wife,” continues Mahnmut.

“I don’t think it’s mentioned in the Iliad.” Hockenberry tries to remember if he’d ever taught that fact. He doesn’t think so.

“That must have been pretty dramatic to watch.”

“Yes,” says Hockenberry, “but her accusations about Philoctetes really killing Paris were even more dramatic.”

“Philoctetes?” Mahnmut cocks his head in a way that seemed almost canine to Hockenberry. For whatever reason, he’s come to associate that movement with the idea that Mahnmut is accessing memory banks. “From the play by Sophocles?” asks Mahnmut after a second.

“Yeah. He was the original commander of the Thessalians from Methone.”

“I don’t remember him from the Iliad,” says Mahnmut. “And I don’t think I’ve met him here either.”

Hockenberry shakes his head. “Agamemnon and Odysseus dumped him on the isle of Lemnos years ago, on their way here.”

“Why’d they do that?” Mahnmut’s voice, so human in timbre, sounds interested.

“Because he smelled bad, mostly.”

“Smelled bad? Most of these human heroes smell bad.”

Hockenberry has to blink at that. He remembers thinking just that ten years ago, when he’d first started as a scholic here shortly after his resurrection on Olympos. But somehow he hadn’t noticed it after the first six months or so. Did he smell bad? he wonders. He says, “Philoctetes smelled especially bad because of his suppurating wound.”

“Wound?”

“Snakebite. Bitten by a poisonous snake when he… well, it’s a long story. The usual ‘stealing stuff from the gods’ story. But Philoctetes’ foot and leg got so bad that it just poured pus, smelled bad all the time, and sent the archer into screaming and fainting fits at regular intervals. This was on the boat ride here to Troy ten years ago, remember. So finally Agamemnon, on Odysseus’ advice, just dumped the old man on the island of Lemnos and literally left him to rot there.”

“But he survived?” says Mahnmut.

“Obviously. Probably because the gods kept him alive for some reason, but he was in agony with that rotting foot and leg the whole time.”

Mahmut cocks his head again. “All right… I’m remembering the Sophocles play now. Odysseus went to get him when the seer Helenus told the Greeks that they wouldn’t defeat Troy without Philoctetes’ bow—given to him by… who?… Heracles. Hercules.”

“Yes, he inherited the bow,” says Hockenberry.

“I don’t remember Odysseus going to fetch him. In real life, I mean. During the past eight months.”

Hockenberry shakes his head again. “It was very quietly done. Odysseus was gone for only about three weeks and no one made a big deal about it. When he returned, it was sort of like… oh, yeah, I picked up Philoctetes on my way back from getting the wine.”

“In Sophocles’ play,” says Mahnmut, “Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, was a central figure. But he never met his father when Achilles was alive. Don’t tell me he’s here too?”

“Not that I know of,” says Hockenberry. “Just Philoctetes. And his bow.”

“And now Oenone’s accused him rather than Apollo of killing Paris.”

“Yep.” Hockenberry tosses a few more sticks on the fire. Sparks spin in the wind and rise toward the stars. There is blackness out over the ocean where clouds are moving in. Hockenberry guesses that it might rain before morning. Some nights, he sleeps up here—using his pack as a pillow and his cape for a blanket—but not tonight.

“But how could Philoctetes shift into Slow Time?” asks Mahnmut. The moravec rises and walks to the broken edge of the platform in the dark, evidently having no fear of the hundred-foot-plus drop. “The nanotechnology that allows that shift was only injected into Paris before that single combat, right?”

“You should know,” says Hockenberry. “You moravecs are the ones who injected Paris with the nanothingees so that he could fight the god.”

Mahnmut walks back to the fire but remains standing. He holds out his hands as if to warm them by the flames. Maybe he is warming them, thinks Hockenberry. He knows that parts of moravecs are organic.

“Some of the other heroes—Diomedes, for example—still have Slow-Time nanoclusters left in their systems from when Athena or one of the other gods injected them,” says Mahnmut. “But you’re right, only Paris had them updated ten days ago for the single combat with Apollo.”

“And Philoctetes wasn’t here for the last ten years,” says Hockenberry. “So it doesn’t make any sense that one of the gods would have accelerated him with the Slow-Time nanomemes. And it is acceleration, not a slowing down of time, right?”

“Right,” says the moravec. “ ‘Slow Time’ is a misnomer. It seems to the Slow-Time traveler that time has stopped—that everything and everyone is frozen in amber—but in reality, the body’s moved into hyperfast action, reacting in milliseconds.”

“Why doesn’t the person just burn up?” asks Hockenberry. He could have followed Apollo and Paris into Slow Time to watch the battle—in fact, if he’d been there that day, he would have. The gods had riddled his blood and bones with nanomemes for just that purpose, and many was the time he’d shifted into Slow Time to watch the gods prepare one of their Achaean or Trojan heroes for combat. “From friction,” he added. “With the air or whatever …” He broke off lamely. Science wasn’t his strong suit.

But Mahnmut nodded as if the scholic had said something wise. “The Slow-Time accelerator’s body would burn up—from internal heat if nothing else—if the tailored nanoclusters didn’t deal with that as well. It’s part of the body’s nano-generated forcefield.”

“Like Achilles’?”

“Yes.”

“Could Paris have burned up just because of that?” asks Hockenberry. “Some sort of nano-tech failure?”

“Very unlikely,” says Mahnmut and sits on the smaller block of stone. “But why would this Philoctetes kill Paris? What motive would he have?”

Hockenberry shrugs. “In the non-Iliad, non-Homeric tales of Troy, it is Philoctetes who kills Paris. With his bow. And a poisoned arrow. Just as Oenone described. Homer even refers to fetching Philoctetes to bring about the prophecy that Ilium will fall only when Philoctetes joins the fray—in the second book, I think.”

“But the Trojans and the Greeks are allies now.”

Hockenberry has to smile. “Just barely. You know as well as I that there are conspiracies and incipient rebellions brewing in both camps. Nobody but Hector and Achilles is happy about this war with the gods. It’s just a matter of time until there’s another rebellion.”

“But Hector and Achilles make for an almost unbeatable duo. And they have tens of thousands of Trojans and Achaeans loyal to them.”

“So far,” says Hockenberry. “But now maybe the gods themselves have been kibbitzing.”

“Helping Philoctetes shift into Slow Time?” says Mahnmut. “But why? Occam’s Razor suggests that if they wanted Paris dead, they could have just let Apollo kill him as everyone assumed he had. Until today. Until Oenone’s accusation. Why have a Greek assassinate him…” He stops and then murmurs, “Ah, yes.”

“Right,” said Hockenberry. “The gods want to hurry up the next mutiny, get Hector and Achilles out of the way, break up this alliance, and get the Greeks and Trojans killing each other again.”

“Thus the poison,” says the moravec. “So that Paris can live just long enough to tell his wife—his first wife—who really killed him. Now the Trojans will want revenge and even the Greeks loyal to Achilles will be ready to fight to defend themselves. Clever. Has anything else of comparable interest happened today?”

“Agamemnon’s back.”

“No shit?” says Mahnmut. I need to talk to him about his vernacular vocabulary, thinks Hockenberry.

This is like talking to one of my freshmen at IU.

“Yes, correct, no shit,” says Hockenberry. “He’s back from his voyage home a month or two early and has some really surprising news.”

Mahnmut leans forward expectantly. Or at least Hockenberry interprets the body language of the little humanoid cyborg as expressing expectation. The smooth metallic-plastic face shows nothing but reflection of the firelight.

Hockenberry clears his throat. “The people back home are gone,” he says. “Missing. Disappeared.”

Hockenberry had expected some sort of exclamation of surprise, but the little moravec waits silently.

“Everyone gone,” continues Hockenberry. “Not just in Mycenae, where Agamemnon first returned—not just his wife Clytemnestra and his son Orestes and all the rest of that cast, but everyone’s missing. Cities empty. Food sitting uneaten on tables. Horses starving in stables. Dogs pining on empty hearths. Cows unmilked in pastures. Sheep unshorn. Everywhere Agamemnon and his boats put in in the Peloponnese and beyond—Menelaus’ kingdom of Lacedaemon, empty. Odysseus’ Ithaca—empty.”

“Yes,” says Mahnmut.

“Wait a minute,” says Hockenberry. “You’re not in the least surprised. You knew. You moravecs knew that the Greek cities and kingdoms had been emptied out. How?”

“Do you mean how did we know?” asks Mahnmut. “Simple. We’ve been keeping tabs on these places from earth orbit since we arrived. Sending down remote drones to record data. There’s a lot to be learned here on the earth of three thousand years before your day—three thousand years before the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries, that is.”

Hockenberry is stunned. He’d never thought of the moravecs paying attention to anything other than Troy, the surrounding battlefields, the connecting Hole, Mars, Mount Olympos, the gods, maybe a Martian moon or two… Jesus, wasn’t that enough?

“When did they… disappear?” Hockenberry manages at last. “Agamemnon is telling everyone that some of the food left behind was fresh enough to eat.”

“I guess that depends upon your definition of ‘fresh,’ ” says Mahnmut. “According to our surveillance, the people disappeared about four and a half weeks ago. Just as Agamemnon’s little fleet was approaching the Peloponnese.”

“Jesus Christ,” whispers Hockenberry.

“Yes.”

“Did you see them disappear? On your satellite cameras or probes or whatever?”

“Not really. One minute they were there and the next minute they weren’t. It happened about two a.m. Greek time, so there wasn’t a lot of movement to monitor… in the Greek cities, I mean.”

“In the Greek cities …” Hockenberry repeats dully. “Do you mean… I mean… is there… have other people disappeared as well? In… say… China?”

“Yes.”

The wind suddenly whips around their eyrie and scatters sparks in all directions. Hockenberry covers his face with his hands during the spark storm and then brushes embers off his cloak and tunic. When the wind subsides, he throws the last of his sticks on the fire.

Other than Troy and Olympos—which, he discovered eight months ago, wasn’t on Earth at all—Hockenberry had only traveled to one other place in this past-Earth, and that was to prehistoric Indiana, where he deposited the only other surviving scholic, Keith Nightenhelser, with the Indians there to keep him safe when the Muse had gone on a killing spree. Now, without consciously meaning to, Hockenberry touches the QT medallion under his shirt. I need to check on Nightenhelser.

As if reading his mind, the moravec says, “Everyone else is gone—everyone outside a five-hundred-kilometer radius of Troy. Africans. North American Indians. South American Indians. The Chinese and aborigines in Australia. Polynesians. Northern European Huns and Danes and Vikings-to-be. The proto-Mongols. Everyone. Every other human being on the planet—we estimated that there were about twenty-two million—has disappeared.”

“That’s not possible,” says Hockenberry.

“No. It wouldn’t seem so.”

“What kind of power…”

“Godlike,” says Mahnmut.

“But certainly not these Olympian gods. They’re just… just…”

“More powerful humanoids?” said Mahnmut. “Yes, that’s what we thought. There are other energies at work here.”

“God?” whispers Hockenberry, who had been raised in a strict Indiana Baptist family before he had traded faith for education.

“Well, maybe,” says the moravec, “but if so, He lives on or around planet Earth. Huge amounts of quantum energy were released from Earth or near-earth-orbit at the same time Agamemnon’s wife and kids disappeared.”

“The energy came from Earth?” repeats Hockenberry. He looks around at the night, the funeral pyre below, the city nightlife becoming active beneath them, the distant campfires of the Achaeans, and the more distant stars. “From here?”

“Not this Earth,” says Mahnmut. “The other Earth. Yours. And it looks like we’re going to it.”

For a minute Hockenberry’s heart pounds so wildly that he’s afraid he’s going to be sick. Then he realizes that Mahnmut isn’t really talking about his Earth—the Twenty-first Century world of the half-remembered fragments of his former life before the gods resurrected him from old DNA and books and God knows what else, the slowly-returning-to-consciousness world of Indiana University and his wife and his students—but the concurrent-with-terraformed-Mars Earth of more than three thousand years after the short, not-so-happy first life of Thomas Hockenberry.

Unable to sit still, he stands and paces back and forth on the shattered eleventh floor of the building, walking to the shattered wall on the northeast side, then to the vertical drop on the south and west sides. A pebble scraped up by his sandal falls more than a hundred feet into the dark streets below. The wind whips his cape and his long, graying hair back. Intellectually, he’s known for eight months that the Mars visible now through the Hole coexisted in some future solar system with Earth and the other planets, but he’d never really connected that simple fact with the idea that this other Earth was really there, waiting.

My wife’s bones are mingled with the dust there, he thinks and then, on the verge of tears, almost laughs. Fuck, my bones are mingled with the dust there.

“How can you go to that Earth?” he asks and immediately realizes how stupid the question is. He’s heard the story of how Mahnmut and his huge friend Orphu traveled to Mars from Jupiter space with some other moravecs who did not survive their first encounter with the gods. They have spaceships, Hockenbush. While most of the moravec and rockvec spacecraft had appeared as if by magic through the quantum Holes that Mahnmut had helped bring into existence, they were still spacecraft.

“We’re building a ship just for that purpose on and near Phobos,” the moravec says softly. “This time we’re not going alone. Or unarmed.”

Hockenberry can’t stop pacing back and forth. When he gets to the edge of the shattered floor, he has the urge to jump to his death—an urge that has tempted him when in high places since he was a kid. Is that why I like to come up here? Thinking about jumping? Thinking about suicide? He realizes it is. He realizes how lonely he’s been for the last eight months. And now even Nightenhelser is gone—gone with the Indians probably, sucked up by whatever cosmic vacuum cleaner made all the humans on earth except these poor fucked Trojans and Greeks disappear this month. Hockenberry knows that he can twist the QT medallion hanging against his chest and be in North America in no time at all, searching for his old scholic friend in that part of prehistoric Indiana where he’d left him eight months earlier. But he also knew that the gods might track him through the Planck-space interstices. It’s why he hasn’t QT’d in eight months.

He walks back to the fire and stands looming over the little moravec. “Why the hell are you telling me this?”

“We’re inviting you to go with us,” says Mahnmut.

Hockenberry sits down heavily. After a minute he is able to say, “Why, for God’s sake? What possible use could I be to you on such an expedition?”

Mahnmut shrugs in a most human fashion. “You’re from that world,” he says simply. “If not that time. There are humans on this other Earth, you know.”

“There are?” Hockenberry hears how stunned and stupid his own voice sounds. He’d never thought to ask.

“Yes. Not many—most of the humans appear to have evolved into some sort of post-human status and moved off the planet into orbital ring cities more than fourteen hundred years ago—but our observations suggest that there are a few hundred thousand old-style human beings left.”

“Old-style human beings,” repeats Hockenberry, not even trying not to sound stunned. “Like me.”

“Exactly,” says Mahnmut. He stands, his vision plate barely coming up to Hockenberry’s belt. Never a tall man, Hockenberry suddenly realizes how the Olympian gods must feel around ordinary mortals. “We think you should come with us. You could be of tremendous help when we meet and talk to the humans on your future Earth.”

“Jesus Christ,” repeats Hockenberry. He walks to the edge again, realizes again how easy it would be to take one more step off this edge into the darkness. This time the gods wouldn’t resurrect him. “Jesus Christ,” he says yet again.

Hockenberry can see the shadowy figure of Hector at Paris’s funeral pyre, still pouring wine into the earth, still ordering men to pile more firewood into the flames.

I killed Paris, thinks Hockenberry. I’ve killed every man, woman, child, and god who’s died since I morphed into the form of Athena and kidnapped Patroclus—pretending to kill him—in order to provoke Achilles into attacking the gods. Hockenberry suddenly laughs bitterly, not embarrassed that the little machine-person behind him will think he’s lost his mind. I have lost my mind. This is nuts. Part of the reason I haven’t jumped off this fucking ledge before tonight is that it would feel like a dereliction of duty… like I need to keep observing, as if I’m still a scholic reporting to the Muse who reports to the gods.

I’ve absolutely lost my mind. He feels, not for the first or fiftieth time, like sobbing.

“Will you go with us to Earth, Dr. Hockenberry?” Mahnmut asks softly.

“Yeah, sure, shit, why not? When?”

“How about right now?” says the little moravec.

The hornet must have been hovering silently hundreds of feet above them but with its navigation lights off. Now the black and barbed machine swoops down out of the darkness with such suddenness that Hockenberry almost falls off the edge of the building.

An especially strong gust of wind helps him keep his balance and he steps back from the edge just as a staircase ramp hums down from the belly of the hornet and clunks on stone. Hockenberry can see a red glow from inside the ship.

“After you,” says Mahnmut.

6

It was just after sunrise and Zeus was alone in the Great Hall of the Gods when his wife, Hera, came in leading a dog on a golden leash.

“Is that the one?” asked the Lord of the Gods from where he sat brooding on his golden throne.

“It is,” said Hera. She slipped the leash off the dog. It sat.

“Call for your son,” said Zeus.

“Which son?”

“The great artificer. The one who lusts after Athena so much that he humped her thigh just as this dog would if the dog had no manners.”

Hera turned to go. The dog started to follow her.

“Leave the dog,” said Zeus.

Hera motioned the dog to stay and it stayed.

The dog was large, gray, short-haired, and sleek, with mild brown eyes that somehow managed to look both stupid and cunning. It began to pace and its claws made scraping sounds on the marble as it wandered back and forth around Zeus’s gold throne. It sniffed the sandals and bare toes of the Lord of Lightning, the Son of Kronos. Then it claw-clicked its way to the edge of the huge holovision pool, peered in, saw nothing that interested it in the dark videoswirl of the surface static, lost interest, and wandered toward a pillar many yards away.

“Come here!” ordered Zeus.

The dog looked back at Zeus, then looked away. It began to sniff at the base of the huge white pillar in a preparatory way.

Zeus whistled.

The dog’s head came up and around, its ears shifted, but it did not come.

Zeus whistled again and clapped his hands.

The gray dog came quickly then, running in a rocking motion, tongue lolling, eyes happy.

Zeus stepped down from his throne and petted the animal. Then he pulled a blade from his robes and cut off the dog’s head with a single swing of his massive arm. The dog’s head rolled almost to the edge of the vision pool while the body dropped straight to the marble, forelegs stretched ahead of it as if it had been ordered to lie down and was complying in hopes of getting a treat.

Hera and Hephaestus entered the Great Hall and approached across acres of marble.

“Playing with the pets again, My Lord?” asked Hera when she drew near.

Zeus waved his hand as if dismissing her, sheathed the blade in the sleeve of his robe, and returned to his throne.

Hephaestus was dwarfish and stocky as gods go, a little under six feet tall. He most resembled a great, hairy barrel. The god of fire was also lame and dragged his left leg along as if it were a dead thing, which it was. He had wild hair, an even wilder beard that seemed to merge with the hair on his chest, and red-rimmed eyes that were always darting to and fro. He seemed to be wearing armor, but closer inspection showed the armor to be a solid covering made up from hundreds of tiny boxes and pouches and tools and devices—some forged of precious metal, some shaped of base metal, some tooled of leather, some seemingly woven of hair—all hanging from straps and belts that crisscrossed his hairy body. The ultimate metalworker, Hephaestus was famous on Olympos for once having created women made of gold, young clockwork virgins, who could move and smile and give men pleasure almost as if they were alive. It was said that from his alchemic vats he had also fashioned the first woman—Pandora.

“Welcome, artificer,” boomed Zeus. “I would have summoned you sooner but we had no tin pots or toy shields to repair.”

Hephaestus knelt by the dog’s headless body. “You needn’t have done this,” he muttered. “No need. No need at all.”

“It irritated me.” Zeus raised a goblet from the arm of his golden throne and drank deeply.

Hephaestus rolled the headless body on its side, ran his blunt hand along its rib cage as if offering to scratch the dead dog’s belly, and pressed. A panel of flesh and hair popped open. The god of fire reached into the dog’s gut and removed a clear bag filled with scraps of meat and other things. Hephaestus pulled a sliver of wet, pink flesh from the gut-bag.

“Dionysos,” he said.

“My son,” said Zeus. He rubbed his temples as if weary of all this.

“Shall I deliver this scrap to the Healer and the vats, O Son of Kronos?” asked the god of fire.

“No. We shall have one of our kind eat it so that my son may be reborn according to his wishes. Such Communion is painful for the host, but perhaps that will teach the gods and goddesses here on Olympos to take better care when watching out for my children. “

Zeus looked down at Hera, who had come closer and was now sitting on the second stone step of his throne with her right arm laid affectionately along his leg, her white hand touching his knee.

“No, my husband,” she said softly. “Please.”

Zeus smiled. “You choose then, wife.”

Without hesitation, Hera said, “Aphrodite. She’s used to stuffing parts of men into her mouth.”

Zeus shook his head. “Not Aphrodite. She has done nothing since she herself was in the vats to incur my displeasure. Shouldn’t it be Pallas Athena, the immortal who brought this war with the mortals down on us with her intemperate murder of Achilles’ beloved Patroclus? And of the infant son of Hector?”

Hera pulled her arm back. “Athena denies that she did these things, Son of Kronos. And the mortals say that Aphrodite was with Athena when they slaughtered Hector’s babe.”

“We have the vision-pool image of the murder of Patroclus, wife. Do you want me to play it again for you?” Zeus’s voice, so low it resembled distant thunder even when he whispered, now showed signs of growing anger. The effect was of a storm moving into the echoing Hall of the Gods.

“No, Lord,” said Hera. “But you know that Athena insists that it was the missing scholic, Hockenberry, who must have assumed her form and done these things. She swears upon her love for you that…”

Zeus stood impatiently and paced away from the throne. “The scholic morphing bands were not designed to grant a mortal the shape or power of a god,” he snapped. “It’s not possible. However briefly. Some god or goddess from Olympos did those deeds—either Athena or one of our family assuming Athena’s form. Now… choose who will receive the body and blood of my son, Dionysos.”

“Demeter.”

Zeus rubbed his short white beard. “Demeter. My sister. Mother to my much-loved Persephone?”

Hera stood, stepped back, and showed her white hands. “Is there a god on this mount who is not related to you, my husband? I am your sister as well as your wife. At least Demeter has experience giving birth to odd things. And she has little to do these days since there is no grain crop being harvested or sewn by the mortals.”

“So be it,” said Zeus. To Hephaestus he commanded, “Deliver the flesh of my son to Demeter, tell her it is the will of her lord, Zeus himself, that she eat this flesh and bring my son to life again. Assign three of my Furies to watch over her until this birth is achieved.”

The god of fire shrugged and dropped the bit of flesh into one of his pouches. “Do you want to see images from Paris’s pyre?”

“Yes,” said Zeus. He returned to his throne and sat, patting the step that Hera had vacated when she stood.

She obediently returned and took her place, but did not lay her arm on his leg again.

Grumbling to himself, Hephaestus walked over to the dog’s head, lifted it by its ears, and carried it to the vision pool. He crouched there at pool’s edge, pulled a curved metal tool from one of his chest-belts, and worried the dog’s left eyeball out of its socket. There was no blood. He pulled the eye free easily, but red, green, and white strands of optic nerve ran back into the empty eye socket, the cords unreeling as the god of fire pulled. When he had two feet of the glistening strands exposed, he pulled yet another tool from his belt and snipped them.

Pulling mucus and insulation off with his teeth, Hephaestus revealed thin, glittering gold wires within. These he crimped and attached to what looked to be a small metal sphere from one of his pouches. He dropped the eyeball and colored nerve strands into the pool while keeping the sphere next to him.

Immediately the pool filled with three-dimensional images. Sound surrounded the three gods as it emanated from piezo-electric micro-speakers set into the walls and pillars around them.

The images from Ilium were from a dog’s point of view—low, many bare knees and bronze shin-guarding greaves.

“I preferred our old views,” muttered Hera.

“The moravecs detect and shoot down all our drones, even the fucking insect eyes,” said Hephaestus, still fast-forwarding through Paris’s funeral procession. “We’re lucky to have…”

“Silence,” commanded Zeus. The word echoed like thunder from the walls. “There. That. Sound.”

The three watched the last minutes of the funeral rites, including the slaughter of Dionysos by Hector.

They watched Zeus’s son look right at the dog in the crowd when he said, “Eat me.”

“You can turn it off,” said Hera when the images were of Hector dropping the torch onto the waiting pyre.

“No,” said Zeus. “Let it run.”

A minute later, the Lord of Lightning was off his throne and walking toward the holoview pool with his brow furrowed, eyes furious, and fists clenched. “How dare that mortal Hector call upon Boreas and Zephyr to fan the fires containing a god’s guts and balls and bowels! HOW DARE HE!!”

Zeus QT’d out of sight and there was a clap of thunder as the air rushed into the hole in the air where the huge god had been a microsecond earlier.

Hera shook her head. “He watches the ritual murder of his son, Dionysos, easily enough, but flies into a rage when Hector tries to summon the gods of the wind. The Father is losing it, Hephaestus.”

Her son grunted, reeled in the eyeball, and set it and the metal sphere in a pouch. He put the dog’s head in a larger pouch. “Do you need anything else from me this morning, Daughter of Kronos?”

She nodded at the dog’s carcass, its belly panel still flopped open. “Take that with you.”

When her surly son was gone, Hera touched her breast and quantum teleported away from the Great Hall of the Gods.

No one could QT into Hera’s inner sleeping chamber, not even Hera. Long ago—if her immortal memory still served her, since all memories were suspect these days—she had ordered her son Hephaestus to secure her rooms with his artificer’s skills: forcefields of quantum flux, similar but not identical to those the moravec creatures had used to shield Troy and the Achaean camps from divine intrusion, pulsed within the walls; the door to her chamber was flux-infused reinforced titanium, strong enough to hold even an angered Zeus at bay, and Hephaestus had hung it from quantum doorposts snug and tight, locking it all with a secret bolt of a telepathic password that Hera changed daily.

She mentally opened that bolt and slipped in, securing the seamless, gleaming metal barrier behind her and moving into the bathing chamber, discarding her gown and flimsy underthings as she went.

First the ox-eyed Hera drew her bath, which was deep and fed from the purest springs of Olympos ice, heated by Hephaestus’s infernal engines tapping into the core of the old volcano’s warmth. She used the ambrosia first, using it to scrub away all faint stains or shadows of imperfection from her glowing white skin.

Then the white-armed Hera anointed her eternally adorable and enticing body with a deep olive rub, followed by a redolent oil. It was said on Olympos that the fragrance from this oil, used only by Hera, would stir not only every male divinity within the bronze-floored halls of Zeus, but could and did drift down to earth itself in a perfumed cloud that made unsuspecting mortal men lose their minds in frenzies of longing.

Then the daughter of mighty Kronos arranged her shining, ambrosial curls along her sharp-cheeked face and dressed in an ambrosial robe that had been made expressly for her by Athena, when the two had been friends so long ago. The gown was wonderfully smooth, with many designs and figures on it, including a wonderful rose brocade worked into the weft by Athena’s fingers and magic loom. Hera pinned this goddess material across her high breasts with a golden brooch, and fastened—just under her breasts—a waistband ornamented with a hundred floating tassels.

Into the lobes of her carefully pierced ears—just peeking out like pale, shy sea-things from her dark-scented curls—Hera looped her earrings, triple drops of mulberry clusters whose silver glint was guaranteed to cast hooks deep into every male heart.

Then back over her brow she veiled herself with a sweet, fresh veil made of suspended gold fabric that glinted like sunlight along her rosy cheekbones. Finally she fastened supple sandals under her soft, pale feet, crossing the gold straps up her smooth calves.

Now, dazzling from head to foot, Hera paused by the reflecting wall at the door to her bath chamber, considered the reflection for a silent moment, and said softly, “You still have it.”

Then she left her chambers and entered the echoing marble hall, touched her left breast, and quantum teleported away.

Hera found Aphrodite, goddess of love, walking alone on the grassy south-facing slopes of Mount Olympos. It was just before sunset, the temples and gods’ homes there on the east side of the caldera were limned in light, and Aphrodite had been admiring the gold glow on the Martian ocean to the north as well as on the icefields near the summit of three huge shield volcanoes visible far to the east, toward which Olympos threw its huge shadow for more than two hundred kilometers. The view was slightly blurred because of the usual forcefield around Olympos, which allowed them to breathe and survive and walk in near Earth-normal gravity here so close to the vacuum of space itself above terraformed Mars, and also blurred because of the shimmering aegis that Zeus had set in place around Olympos at the beginning of the war.

The Hole down there—a circle cut out of Olympos’ shadow, glowing within from a sunset on a different world and filled with lines of busy lights from mortal fires and moving moravec transports—was a reminder of that war.

“Dear child,” Hera called to the goddess of love, “would you do something for me if I asked, or would you refuse it? Are you still angry at me for helping the Argives these ten mortal years past while you defended your beloved Trojans?”

“Queen of the Skies,” said Aphrodite, “Beloved of Zeus, ask me anything. I will be eager to obey. Whatever I can do for one so powerful as yourself.”

The sun had all but set now, casting both goddesses into shadow, but Hera noticed how Aphrodite’s skin and ever-present smile seemed to glow of their own accord. Hera responded sensually to it as a female; she couldn’t imagine how the male gods felt in Aphrodite’s presence, much less the weak-willed mortal men.

Taking a breath—since her next words would commit her to the most dangerous scheme the scheming Hera had ever devised—she said, “Give me your powers to create Love, to command Longing—all the powers you use to overwhelm the gods and mortal men!”

Aphrodite’s smile remained, but her clear eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “Of course I will, Daughter of Kronos, if you so request—but why does someone who already lies in the arms of mighty Zeus require my few wiles?”

Hera kept her voice steady as she lied. As most liars do, she gave too many details in her lie. “This war wearies me, Goddess of Love. The plotting and scheming among the gods and among the Argives and Trojans hurts my heart. I go now to the ends of the generous other earth to visit Okeanos, that fountain from which the gods have risen, and Mother Tethys. These two kindly raised me in their own house and took me from Rhea when thundering Zeus, he of the wide brows, drove Kronos deep beneath the earth and the barren salt seas and built our new home here on this cold, red world.”

“But why, Hera,” Aphrodite asked softly, “do you need my poor charms to visit Okeanos and Tethys?”

Hera smiled in her treachery. “The Old Ones have grown apart, their marriage bed grown cold. I go now to visit them and to dissolve their ancient feud and to mend their discord. For too long have they stayed apart from each other and from their bed of love—I would lure them back to love, back to each other’s warm bodies, and no mere words of mine will suffice in this effort. So I ask you, Aphrodite, as your loving friend and one who wishes two old friends to love again, loan me one of the secrets of your charms so that I can secretly help Tethys win back Okeanos to desire.”

Aphrodite’s charming smile grew even more radiant. The sun had set now behind the edge of Mars, the summit of Olympos had been plunged into shadow, but the love goddess’s smile warmed them both. “It would be wrong of me to deny your warmhearted request, O Wife of Zeus, since your husband, our lord, commands us all.”

With that, Aphrodite loosed from beneath her breasts her secret breastband, and held the thin web of cloth and microcircuits in her hand.

Hera stared at it, her mouth suddenly dry. Dare I go forward with this? If Athena discovers what I’m up to, she and her fellow conspirators among the gods will attack me without mercy. If Zeus recognizes my treachery, he will destroy me in a way that no healing vat or alien Healer will ever hope to restore to even a simulacrum of Olympian life. “Tell me how it works,” she whispered to the goddess of love.

“On this band are all the beguilements of seduction,” Aphrodite said softly. “The heat of Love, the pulsing rush of Longing, the sibilant slidings of sex, the urgent lover’s cries, and the whispers of endearment.”

“All on that little breastband?” said Hera. “How does it work?”

“It has in it the magic to make any man go mad with lust,” whispered Aphrodite.

“Yes, yes, but how does it work?” Hera heard the impatience in her own words.

“How do I know?” asked the goddess of love, laughing now. “It was part of the package I received when… he … made us gods. A broad spectrum of pheromones? Nano-kindled hormone enactors? Microwaved energy directed directly at the sex and pleasure centers of the brain? It doesn’t matter… although this is only one of my many tricks, it works. Try it on, Wife of Zeus.”

Hera broke into a smile. She tucked the band between and under her high breasts, so that it was barely concealed by her gown. “How do I activate it?”

“Don’t you mean how will you help Mother Tethys activate it?” asked Aphrodite, still smiling.

“Yes, yes.”

“When the moment comes, touch your breast just as you would to activate the QT nanotriggers, but instead of imagining a far place to teleport, let one finger touch the circuited fabric in the breastband and think lustful thoughts.”

“That’s it? That’s all?”

“That is all,” said Aphrodite, “but it will suffice. A new world lies in this band’s weaving.”

“Thank you, Goddess of Love,” Hera said formally. Laser lances were stabbing upward through the forcefield above them. A moravec hornet or spacecraft had come through the Hole and was climbing for space.

“I know you won’t return with your missions unaccomplished,” said Aphrodite. “Whatever your eager heart is hoping to do, I am sure it will be fulfilled.”

Hera smiled at that. Then she touched her breast—careful not to touch the breastband nestled just beneath her nipples—and teleported away, following the quantum trail Zeus had made through folded space-time.

7

At dawn, Hector ordered the funeral fires quenched with wine. Then he and Paris’s most trusted comrades began raking through the embers, taking infinite care to find the bones of Priam’s other son while keeping them separate from the ashes and charred bones of dogs, stallions, and the weakling god. These lesser bones had all fallen far out near the edge of the pyre, while Paris’s charred remains lay near the center.

Weeping, Hector and his battle-comrades gathered Paris’s bones in a golden urn and sealed the urn with a double layer of fat, as was their custom for the brave and noble-born. Then, in solemn procession, they carried the urn through the busy streets and marketplaces—peasants and warriors alike stepping aside to let them pass in silence—and delivered the remains to the field cleared of rubble where the south wing of Priam’s palace had stood before the first Olympian bombing run eight months earlier. In the center of the cratered field rose a temporary tomb made from stone blocks scattered during the bombing—Hecuba, Priam’s wife, queen, and mother to Hector and Paris, had her few recovered bones in that tomb already—and now Hector covered Paris’s urn with a light linen shroud and personally carried it into the barrow.

“Here, Brother, I leave your bones for now,” said Hector in front of the men who’d followed him, “allowing the earth here to enfold you until I enfold you myself in the dim halls of Hades. When this war is over, we will build you and our mother and all those others who fall—most likely including myself—a greater tomb, reminiscent of the House of Death itself. Until then, Brother, farewell.”

Then Hector and his men came out and a hundred waiting Trojan heroes covered over the temporary stone tomb with dirt and piled more rubble and rocks high upon it.

And then Hector—who had not slept for two nights—went in search of Achilles, eager now to re-engage in combat with the gods and hungrier than ever to spill their golden blood.

Cassandra awoke at dawn to find herself all but naked, her robe torn and in disarray, her wrists and ankles tied with silken ropes to the posts of a strange bed. What mischief is this? she wondered, trying to remember if she had once again gotten drunk and passed out with some kinky soldier.

Then she remembered the funeral pyre and fainting into the arms of Andromache and Helen at its fiery conclusion.

Shit, thought Cassandra. My big mouth’s got me in trouble again. She looked around the room—no windows, huge stone blocks, a sense of underground damp. She might well be in someone’s personal underground torture chamber. Cassandra struggled and thrashed against the silken cords. They were smooth, but they were tight and well tied and remained firm.

Shit, Cassandra thought again.

Andromache, Hector’s wife, came into the room and looked down on the sybil. Andromache’s hands were empty, but Cassandra could easily imagine the dagger in the sleeve of the older woman’s gown. For a long moment, neither woman spoke. Finally, Cassandra said, “Old friend, please release me.”

Andromache said, “Old friend, I should cut your throat.”

“Then do it, you bitch,” said Cassandra. “Don’t talk about it.” She had little fear, since even within the kaleidoscope of shifting views of the future in the past eight months since the old futures had died, she had never foreseen Andromache killing her.

“Cassandra, why did you say that about the death of my baby? You know that Pallas Athena and Aphrodite both came into my tiny son’s chamber eight months ago and slaughtered him and his wet nurse, saying that his sacrifice was a warning—that the gods on Olympos had been ill pleased at my husband’s failure to burn the Argive ships and that little Astyanax, whom his father and I had called Scamandrius, was to be their yearly heiffer chosen for sacrifice.”

“Bullshit,” said Cassandra. “Untie me.” Her head hurt. She always had a hangover after the most vivid of her prophecies.

“Not until you tell me why you said that I had substituted a slave baby for Astyanax in that bloodied nursery,” said cool-eyed Andromache. The dagger was in her hand now. “How could I do that? How could I know that the goddesses were coming? Why would I do that?”

Cassandra sighed and closed her eyes. “There were no goddesses,” she said tiredly but with contempt. She opened her eyes again. “When you heard the news that Pallas Athena had killed Achilles’ beloved friend Patroclus—news which still may turn out to be another lie—you decided, or conspired with Hecuba and Helen to decide—to slaughter the wet nurse’s own child, who was the same age as Astyanax, and then kill the wet nurse as well. Then you told Hector and Achilles and all the others who assembled at the sound of your screams that it was the goddesses who killed your son.”

Andromache’s hazel eyes were as blue and cold and ungiving as ice on the surface of a mountain stream in spring. “Why would I do that?”

“You saw the chance to realize the Trojan Women’s scheme,” said Cassandra. “Our scheme of all these years. To somehow turn our Trojan men away from war with the Argives—a war I had prophesied as ending in all of our death or destruction. It was brilliant, Andromache. I applaud your courage for acting.”

“Except, if what you say is true,” said Andromache, “I’ve helped plunge us all into an even more hopeless war with the gods. At least in your earlier visions, some of us women survived—as slaves, but still among the living.”

Cassandra shrugged, an awkward motion with her arms extended and tethered to the bedposts. “You were thinking only of saving your son, whom we know would have been foully murdered had the old past become the current present. I understand, Andromache.”

Andromache extended the knife. “It’s all of my family’s death—even Hector’s—if you were to ever speak of this again and if the rabble—Trojan and Achaean alike—were to believe you. My only safety is in your death.”

Cassandra met the other woman’s flat gaze. “My gift of foresight can still serve you, Old Friend. It may even save you—you and your Hector and your hidden Astyanax, wherever he is. You know that when I am in the throes of my visions that I cannot control what I cry aloud. You and Helen and whoever else is in on this conspiracy—stay with me, or assign murderous slave girls to stay with me, and shut me up if I start to babble such truth again. If I do reveal this to others, kill me then.”

Andromache hesitated, lightly bit her lower lip, and then leaned forward and cut the silken cord that bound Cassandra’s right wrist to the bed. While she was cutting the other cords, she said, “The Amazons have arrived.”

Menelaus spent the night listening to and then talking to his brother and by the time Dawn spread forth her rosy fingertips, he was resolved to action.

All night he had moved from one Achaean and Argive camp to another around the bay and along the shoreline, listening to Agamemnon tell the horrifying story of their empty cities, empty farm fields, abandoned harbors—of unmanned Greek ships bobbing at anchor in Marathon, Eretria, Chalcis, Aulis, Hermione, Tiryns, Helos, and a score of other shoreside cities. He listened to Agamemnon tell the horrified Achaeans, Argives, Cretans, Ithacans, Lacadaemons, Calydnaeans, Buprasians, Dulichions, Pylosians, Pharisans, Spartans, Messeians, Thracians, Oechalians—all the hundreds of allied groups of varied Greeks from the mainland, from the rocky isles, from the Peloponnese itself—that their cities were empty, their homes abandoned as if by the will of the gods—meals rotting on tables, clothing set out on couches, baths and pools tepid and scummed over with algae, weapons lying un-scabbarded. On the Aegean, Agamemnon described in his full, strong, booming voice—empty ships bellying against the waves, sails full but tattered, no sign of furling or storm—the skies were blue and the seas were fair coming and going in their month-long voyage, Agamemnon explained—but the ships were empty: Athenian ships full-loaded with cargo or still resplendent with rows of unmanned oars; great Persian scows empty of their clumsy crews and helmeted, hopeless spearmen; graceful, crewless Egyptian ships waiting to carry grain to the home islands.

“The world has been emptied of men and women and children,” cried Agamemnon at each Achaean encampment, “except for us here, the wily Trojans and us. While we have turned our backs on the gods—worse, turned our hands and hearts against them—the gods have carried away the hopes of our hearts—our wives and families and fathers and slaves.”

“Are they dead?” cried man after man in camp after camp. The cries always were made though moans of pain. Lamentations filled the winter night all along the line of Argive fires.

Agamemnon always answered with upraised palms and silence for a terrible minute. “There was no sign of struggle,” he would say at last. “No blood. No decaying bodies feeding the starving dogs and circling birds.”

And always, at every encampment, the brave Argive crews and bodyguards and foot soldiers and captains who had accompanied Agamemnon homeward were having their own private conversations with others of their rank. By dawn, everyone had heard the terrible news, and palsied terror was giving way to impotent rage.

Menelaus knew that this was perfect for their purpose—the Atridae brothers, Agamemnon and Menelaus—to turn the Acheaens not only against the Trojans once again and to finish this war, but to overthrow the dictatorship of fleet-footed Achilles. Within days, if not hours, Agamemnon would once again be commander in chief.

At dawn, Agamemnon had finished his duty of reporting to all the Greeks, the great captains had wandered away—Diomedes back to his tent, the Great Telamonian Ajax, who had wept like a child when he heard that Salamis had been found as empty as all the other homelands—and Odysseus, Idomeneus, and Little Ajax, who had cried out in pain with all his men from Locris when Agamemnon had told them the news, and even garrulous old Nestor—all had wandered away at dawn to catch a few hours’ restless sleep.

“So tell me the news of the War with the Gods,” said Agamemnon to Menelaus as the two brothers sat alone in center of their Lacadaemon encampment, surrounded by rings of loyal captains, bodyguards, and spearmen. These men stayed far enough away to let their lords converse in private.

Red-haired Menelaus told his older brother what news there was—the ignoble daily battles between moravec wizardry and the gods’ divine weapons, the occasional single combat—the death of Paris and a hundred lesser names, both Trojan and Achaean—and about the funeral just finished. The corpse-fire smoke had ceased to rise and the flames above the wall of Troy had disappeared from sight only an hour earlier.

“Good riddance,” said royal Agamemnon, his strong white teeth gnawing off a strip of the suckling pig they’d roasted for his breakfast. “I’m only sorry Apollo killed Paris… I wanted to do the job myself.”

Menelaus laughed, ate some of the suckling pig himself, washed it down with breakfast wine, and told his dear brother about Paris’s first wife, Oenone, appearing out of nowhere and of her self-immolation.

Agamemnon laughed at this. “Would that it had been your bitch of a wife, Helen, who’d been so moved to throw herself into the flames, Brother.”

Menelaus nodded at this, but he felt his heart lurch at the sound of Helen’s name. He told Agamemnon of Oenone’s ravings about Philoctetes, not Apollo, being the cause of Paris’s death, and about the anger that had swept through the Trojan ranks, causing the small contingent of Achaeans to beat a hasty retreat from the city.

Agamemnon slapped his thigh. “Wonderful! It’s the penultimate stone set in place. Within forty-eight hours, I’ll stir this discontent into action throughout the Achaean ranks. We’ll be at war with the Trojans again before the week is out, Brother. I swear this on the stones and dirt of our father’s barrow.”

“But the gods …” began Menelaus.

“The gods will be as they were,” he said with what sounded like complete confidence. “Zeus neutral. Some helping the mewling, doomed Trojans. Most allying themselves with us. But this time we’ll finish the job. Ilium will be ashes within the fortnight… as sure as Paris is nothing but bones and ashes this morning.”

Menelaus nodded. He knew that he should ask questions about how his brother hoped to mend the peace with the gods again, as well as overthrow the invincible Achilles, but he ached to discuss a more pressing topic.

“I saw Helen,” he said, hearing his own voice stumble at his wife’s name. “I was within seconds of killing her.”

Agamemnon wiped grease from his mouth and beard, drank from a silver cup, and raised one eyebrow to show that he was listening.

Menelaus described his firm resolve and opportunity to get to Helen—and how both were ruined by Oenone’s sudden appearance and her dying accusations against Philoctetes. “We were lucky to get out of the city alive,” he said again.

Agamemnon squinted toward the distant walls. Somewhere a moravec siren wailed and missiles hurtled skyward toward some unseen Olympian target. The forcefield over the main Achaean camp hummed into a deeper tone of readiness.

“You should kill her today,” said Menelaus’ older and wiser brother. “Now. This morning.”

“This morning?” Menelaus licked his lips. Despite the pig grease, they were dry.

“This morning,” repeated the once and future commander in chief of all the Greek armies assembled to sack Troy. “Within a day or so, the opening rift between our men and those dog-spittle Trojans will be so great that the cowards will be closing and bolting their fucking Scaean Gate again.”

Menelaus looked toward the city. Its walls were rose-colored in the light of the rising winter sun. He was very confused. “They won’t allow me in by myself …” he began.

“Go in disguise,” interrupted Agamemnon. The royal king drank again and belched. “Think as Odysseus would think… as some crafty weasel would think.”

Menelaus, as proud a man as his brother or any other Achaean hero in his own way, wasn’t sure he appreciated that comparison. “How can I disguise myself?”

Agamemnon gestured toward his own royal tent, its scarlet silk billowing again nearby. “I have the lion skin and old bore-tusk wraparound helmet that Diomedes wore when he and Odysseus attempted to steal the Palladian from Troy last year,” he said. “With that strange helmet hiding your red hair and the tusks hiding your beard—not to mention the lion skin concealing your glorious Achaean armor—the sleepy guards at the gate will think you another barbarian ally of theirs and let you pass without challenge. But go quickly—before the guard changes and before the gates are locked to us for the duration of Ilium’s doomed existence.”

Menelaus had to think about this for only a few seconds. Then he rose, clasped his brother firmly on the shoulder, and went into the tent to gather his disguise and to arm himself with more killing blades.

8

The moon Phobos looked like a huge, grooved, dusty olive with bright lights encircling the concave end. Mahnmut told Hockenberry that the hollowed tip was a giant crater called Stickney and that the lights were the moravec base.

The ride up had not been without some adrenaline flow for Hockenberry. He’d seen enough of the moravec hornets at short range to notice that none of them seemed to have windows or ports, so he assumed the ride would be a blind one, except perhaps for some TV monitors. He’d underestimated asteroid-belt moravec technology—for all the hornets were from the rockvecs according to Mahnmut. Hockenberry had also assumed there would be acceleration couches or Twentieth Century space-shuttle-style chairs with huge straps and buckles.

There were no chairs. No visible means of support. Invisible force-fields enfolded Hockenberry and the small moravec as they seemed to sit on thin air. Holograms—or some sort of three-dimensional projections so real that there was no sense of projection—surrounded them on three sides and beneath them. Not only were they sitting on invisible chairs, the invisible chairs and their bodies were suspended over a two mile drop as the hornet flashed through the Hole and climbed for altitude to the south of Olympus Mons.

Hockenberry screamed.

“Does the display bother you?” asked Mahnmut.

Hockenberry screamed again.

The moravec quickly touched holographic controls that appeared as if by magic. The drop below them shrank until it appeared to be set into the metal floor of the hull like a mere giant-screen TV. All around them, the panorama continued to unfold as the forcefield-shrouded summit of Olympus Mons flashed past—lasers or some sort of energy lances flickering at them and splashing against the hornet’s own energy field—and then the blue Martian sky shifted to thin pink, then to black, and the hornet was above the atmosphere, pitching over—although the great limb of Mars seemed to rotate until it filled the virtual windows.

“Better,” gasped Hockenberry, flailing for something to hang on to. The forcefield chair didn’t fight him, but it didn’t release him either. “Jesus Christ,” he gasped as the ship did a one-hundred-eighty degree roll and fired its engines. Phobos tumbled into view, almost on top of them.

There was no sound. Not a whisper.

“I’m sorry,” said Mahnmut. “I should have warned you. This is Phobos filling the aft windowscreen right now. It’s the smaller of Mars’ two moons, just about eight miles in diameter… although you can see it’s not a sphere by any means.”

“It looks like a potato that some cat’s been clawing,” managed Hockenberry. The moon was approaching very fast. “Or a giant olive.”

“Olive, yes,” said Mahnmut. “That’s because of the crater at this end. It’s named Stickney—after Asaph Hall’s wife, Angeline Stickney Hall.”

“Who was… Asaph… Hall?” managed Hockenberry. “Some astronaut… or… cosmonaut… or… who?” He’d found something to hang on to. Mahnmut. The little moravec didn’t seem to mind his metal-plastic shoulders being clutched. The aft view-holo flared with flame as some silent thrusters or engines fired. Hockenberry was just barely succeeding in keeping his teeth from chattering.

“Asaph Hall was an astronomer with the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.,” said Mahnmut in his usual soft, conversational tones. The hornet was pitching over again. And spinning. Phobos and the Stickney Crater hole were filling first one holographic window and then another.

Hockenberry was pretty sure that the thing was crashing and that he would be dead in less than a minute. He tried to remember a prayer from his childhood—damn all those years as an intellectual agnostic!—but all he could bring back was the singsong “Now I lay me down to sleep…”

It seemed appropriate. Hockenberry went with it.

“I believe that Hall discovered both moons of Mars in 1877,” Mahnmut was saying. “There is no record—none of which I am aware—of whether Mrs. Hall appreciated a huge crater being named after her. Of course, it was her maiden name.”

Hockenberry suddenly realized why they were out of control and going to crash and die. No one was flying the goddamned ship. It was just the two of them in the hornet, and the only control—real or virtual—that Mahnmut had touched had been the one to adjust the holographic views. He considered mentioning this oversight to the little organic-robot, but since the Stickney Crater was filling all the forward windows now and approaching at a speed they had no chance of decreasing before impact, Hockenberry kept his mouth shut.

“It’s a strange little moon,” said Mahnmut. “A captured asteroid, really—as is Deimos, of course. They’re quite different from each other. Phobos here orbits only three thousand seven hundred miles above the Martian surface—almost skimming the atmosphere, as it were—and is destined to crash into Mars in approximately eighty-three million years if no one does anything about it.”

“Speaking of crashing …” began Hockenberry.

At that moment the hornet slowed to a hover, dropped into the floodlit crater, and touched down near a complex network of domes, girders, cranes, glowing yellow bubbles, blue domes, green spires, moving vehicles, and hundreds of busy moravecs bustling around in vacuum. The landing, when it came, was so gentle that Hockenberry only just felt it through the metal floor and forcefield chair.

“Home again, home again,” chanted Mahnmut. “Well, not really home, of course, but… watch your head when we get out. That door is a little low for human heads.”

Before Hockenberry could comment or scream again, the door had swung out and down and all the air in the little compartment roared out into the vacuum of space.

Hockenberry had been a classics major and professor during his previous life, never very science literate, but he’d seen enough science-fiction movies in his time to know the fate of explosive decompression: eyes expanding until they were the size of grapefruits, eardrums bursting in great gouts of blood, flesh and skin boiling and expanding and ripping as internal pressures expanded when finding no resistance against the zero external pressure of hard vacuum.

None of that happened.

Mahnmut paused on the ramp. “Aren’t you coming?” The little moravec’s voice sounded tinny in the human’s ears.

“Why aren’t I dead?” said Hockenberry. It felt as if he’d suddenly been wrapped in invisible bubble wrap.

“Your chair’s protecting you.”

“My chair??” Hockenberry looked around him but there was not so much as a shimmer. “You mean I have to keep sitting here forever or die?”

“No,” said Mahnmut, sounding amused. “Come on out. The forcefield-chair will come with you. It’s already providing heat, cooling, osmotic scrubbing and recycling of your oxygen—good for about thirty minutes—and acting as a pressure suit.”

“But the… chair… is part of the ship,” said Hockenberry, standing gingerly and feeling the invisible bubble wrap move with him. “How can it go outside the hornet?”

“Actually, the hornet is more a part of the chair,” said Mahnmut. “Trust me. But watch your step out here. The chair-suit will give you a little down-thrust once you’re on the surface, but the gravity on Phobos is so weak that a good jump would allow you to reach escape velocity. Adios, Phobos, for Thomas Hockenberry.”

Hockenberry paused at the top stair of the ramp and clutched the metal door frame.

“Come on,” said Mahnmut. “The chair and I won’t let you float away. Let’s get inside. There are other moravecs who want to talk to you.”

After leaving Hockenberry with Asteague/Che and the other prime integrators from the Five Moons Consortium, Mahnmut left the pressurized dome and went for a walk in Stickney Crater. The view was spectacular. The long axis of Phobos constantly pointed at Mars and the moravec engineers had tweaked it so that the red planet was always hanging directly above Stickney, filling most of the black sky, since the steep crater walls blocked out the peripheral views. The little moon turned on its axis once every seven hours—precisely the same amount of time it took to orbit Mars—so the giant red disk with its blue oceans and white volcanoes rotated slowly above.

He found his friend Orphu of Io several hundred meters up amidst the spiderweb of cranes, girders, and cables tethering the Going-to-Earth ship to the launch crater. Deep-space moravecs, engineering bots, black-beetled rockvecs, and Callistan supervisors scuttled and clambered over the ship and connecting girders like glittering aphids. Searchlights and worklights played on the dark hull of the huge Earth-ship. Sparks fell in cascades from batteries of roving autowelders. Nearby, more secure in the mesh of a metal cradle, was The Dark Lady, Mahnmut’s own deep-sea submersible from Europa. Months ago, the moravecs had salvaged the damaged and powerless vessel from its hiding place along the Martian coast of the north Tethys Sea, used tugs to lift it to Phobos, and then repaired, repowered, and modified the tough little sub for service on the Earth mission.

Mahnmut found his friend a hundred meters up, scuttling along steel cables under the belly of the spaceship. He hailed him on their old private band.

“Is that Orphu I spy? The Orphu formerly of Mars, formerly of Ilium, and always of Io? That Orphu?”

“The same,” said Orphu. Even on the radio or tightbeam channels, Orphu’s rumble seemed to border on the subsonic. The hardvac moravec used its carapace thrusters to jump thirty meters from the cables to the girder where Mahnmut was balancing. Orphu grabbed a girder with his manipulator pincers and hung there a few meters out.

Some of the moravecs—Asteague/Che, for example, the chitinous Belt moravecs for another, Mahnmut himself somewhat less so—were humanoid-looking enough. Not Orphu of Io. The moravec, designed and evolved to work in the sulfur-torus of Io in the magnetic, gravitational, and blinding radiation storms of Jupiter space, was about five meters long, more than two meters high, and slightly resembled a horseshoe crab, if horseshoe crabs were outfitted with extra legs, sensor packs, thruster pods, manipulators that almost—not quite—could serve as hands, and an aged, pitted shell-carapace so many times cracked and mended that it looked as if it had been cemented together by spackle.

“Is Mars still spinning up there, old friend?” rumbled Orphu.

Mahnmut turned his head skyward. “It is. Still rotating like some huge red shield. I can see Olympus Mons just coming out from the terminator.”

Mahnmut hesitated a moment. “I’m sorry about the outcome of the most recent surgery,” he said at last. “I’m sorry they couldn’t fix it.”

Orphu shrugged four articulated arm-legs. “It doesn’t matter, old friend. Who needs organic eyes when one has thermal imaging, sniffy little gas chromatograph mass spectrometers on my knees, radar—deep and phased—sonar and a laser-mapper? It’s just those useless, faraway things like stars and Mars that I can’t quite make out with all these lovely sensory organs.”

“Yes,” said Mahnmut. “But I’m sorry.” His friend had lost his organic optic nerve when he was almost destroyed during their first encounter with an Olympian god in Mars orbit—the same god who had blasted their ship and two comrades into gas and debris. Mahnmut knew that Orphu was lucky to be alive and repairable to the extent he had been, but still…

“Did you deliver Hockenberry?” rumbled Orphu.

“Yes. The prime integrators are briefing him now.”

“Bureaucrats,” rumbled the large Ionian. “Want a ride to the ship?”

“Sure.” Mahnmut jumped to Orphu’s shell, grabbed a handhold with his most serious gripping pincer, and held on as the hardvac moravec thrusted out away from the gantry, up to the ship, and then around. They were almost a kilometer above the crater floor here and the true size of the Earth-ship—tethered to the gantry like an ellipsoid helium balloon—became visible for the first time. It was easily five times the length of the spacecraft that had brought the four moravecs to Mars from Jupiter space more than a standard-year earlier.

“It’s impressive, isn’t it?” said Orphu. He’d been working with the Belt and Five Moons engineers for more than two months on the craft.

“It’s big,” said Mahnmut. And then, sensing Orphu’s disappointment, he added, “And rather beautiful in a bumpy, bulgy, black, bulbous, sinister sort of way.”

Orphu rumbled his deep laugh—tones that always made Mahnmut think of aftershocks from a Europan icequake or follow-on waves to a tsunami. “That’s an awful lot of alliteration from an anxious astronaut,” he said.

Mahnmut shrugged, felt bad for a second because his friend could not see the gesture, and then realized Orphu had seen it. The big moravec’s new radar was a very fine instrument, lacking only the ability to see colors. Orphu had told him that he could make out subtle shifts on a human’s face with the close-radar. Useful if Hockenberry does come on this mission, thought Mahnmut.

As if reading his mind and memory banks, Orphu said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about human sadness recently, and how it compares to our moravec style of dealing with loss.”

“Oh, no,” said Mahnmut, “you’ve been reading that French person again.”

“Proust,” said Orphu. “That ‘French person’s’ name is Proust.”

“I know. But why do you do that? You know that you always get depressed when you read Remembrance of Things Past.”

“In Search of Lost Time,” corrected Orphu of Io. “I’ve been reading the section called ‘Grief and Oblivion.’ You know, the part after Albertine dies and Marcel, the narrator, is trying to forget her, but he can’t?”

“Oh, well,” said Mahnmut. “That should cheer you up. How about if I loaned you Hamlet for a chaser?”

Orphu ignored the offer. They were high enough now to see the entire ship beneath them and to peer over the walls of Stickney Crater. Mahnmut knew that Orphu could travel many thousands of kilometers of deep space with no problem, but the sense that they were out of control and flying away from Phobos and the Stickney Base—just as he’d warned Hockenberry—was very strong.

“To cut the cords of connection to Albertine,” says Orphu, “the poor narrator has to go back through his memory and consciousness and confront all of the Albertines—the ones from memory, as well as the imaginary ones he’d desired and been jealous of—all those virtual Albertines he’d created in his own mind when he was worrying about whether she was sneaking out to see other women behind his back. Not to mention the different Albertines of his desire—the girl he hardly knew, the woman he captured but did not possess, the woman he’d grown tired of.”

“It sounds very tiring,” said Mahnmut, trying to convey through his own tone over the radio band how tired he was of the whole Proust thing.

“That’s not the half of it,” said Orphu, ignoring the hint—or perhaps oblivious to it. “To move ahead in grieving, poor Marcel—the narrator-character has the same name as the author, you know… wait, you did read this, didn’t you, Mahnmut? You assured me you had when we were coming in-system last year.”

“I… skimmed it,” said the Europan moravec.

Even Orphu’s sigh bordered on the subsonic. “Well, as I was saying, poor Marcel not only has to confront this legion of Albertines in his consciousness before being able to let her go, he has to also confront all the Marcels who had perceived these multiple Albertines—the ones who had desired her beyond all things, the insanely jealous Marcels, the indifferent Marcels, the Marcels whose judgment had been distorted by desire, the…”

“Is there a point here?” asked Mahnmut. His own area of interest over the past standard century and a half had been Shakespeare’s sonnets.

“Just the staggering complexity of human consciousness,” said Orphu. He rotated his shell one hundred and eighty degrees, fired his thrusters, and they started back toward the ship, the gantry, Stickney Crater, and safety—such as it was. Mahnmut craned his short neck to look up at Mars as they pivoted. He knew it was an illusion, but it seemed closer. Olympus and the Tharsis volcanoes were almost out of sight now as Phobos hurtled toward the far limb of the planet.

“Do you ever wonder how our grieving differs from… say… Hockenberry’s? Or Achilles’?” asked Orphu.

“Not really,” said Mahnmut. “Hockenberry seems to grieve as much for the loss of memory of most of his previous life as he does for his dead wife, friends, students, and so forth. But who can tell with human beings? And Hockenberry is only a reconstituted human being—someone or something rebuilt him out of DNA, RNA, his old books, and who knows what kinds of best-guess programs? As for Achilles—when he gets sad, he goes out and kills someone. Or a bunch of someones.”

“I wish I’d been there to see his Attack on the Gods during the first month of the war,” said Orphu. “From the way you described it, the carnage was astounding.”

“It was,” said Mahnmut. “I’ve blocked random access to those files in my NOM because they’re so disturbing.”

“That’s another element of Proust I’ve been thinking about,” said Orphu. They touched down on the upper hull of the Earth-ship and the big moravec drove connecting micro-pitons into the sheath of insulating material there. “We have our non-organic memory to fall back on when our neural memories seem doubtful. Human beings have only that confusing mass of chemically driven neurological storage to rely on. They’re all subjective and emotion-tinged. How can they trust any of their memories?”

“I don’t know,” said Mahnmut. “If Hockenberry goes with us to Earth, maybe we can get a glimpse of how his mind works.”

“It’s not as if we’ll be alone with him with a lot of time to talk,” said Orphu. “This will be a high-g boost and an even higher-g deceleration and there’ll be quite a mob this time—at least three dozen Five Moons ‘vecs and a thousand rockvec troopers.”

“Prepared for anything this time, huh?” said Mahnmut.

“I doubt it,” rumbled Orphu. “Although this ship carries enough weapons to reduce Earth to cinders. But so far, our planning hasn’t kept up with the surprises.”

Mahnmut felt the same sickness he’d been touched by when he’d learned their ship to Mars had been secretly armed. “Do you ever mourn for Koros III and Ri Po the way your Proust narrator mourns for his dead?” he asked the Ionian.

Orphu’s fine radar antenna shifted slightly toward the smaller moravec, as if trying to read Mahnmut’s expression the way he said he could a human’s. Mahnmut, of course, had no expression.

“Not really,” said Orphu. “We didn’t know them before the mission and didn’t travel in the same compartment with them during the mission. Before Zeus… got us. So mostly they were voices on the comm to me, although sometimes I access NOM to see their images… just to honor their memory, I guess.”

“Yes,” said Mahnmut. He did the same thing.

“Do you know what Proust said about conversation?”

Mahnmut resisted another sigh. “What?”

“He said… ‘When we chat, it is no longer we who speak…. we are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness of other people, and not of a self that differs from them.’ ”

“So when I talk to you,” Mahnmut said on their private frequency, “I’m really shaping myself into the likeness of a six-ton horseshoe crab with a beat-up shell, too many legs, and no eyes?”

“You can hope,” rumbled Orphu of Io. “But your reach should always exceed your grasp.”

9

Penthesilea swept into Ilium on horseback an hour after dawn with twelve of her finest sister-warriors riding two abreast behind her. Despite the early hour and the cold wind, thousands of Trojans were on the walls and lining the road that passed through the Scaean Gate to Priam’s temporary palace, all of them cheering as if the Amazon queen were arriving with thousands of reinforcements rather than thirteen. The mobs waved kerchiefs, thumped spears against leather shields, wept, hurrahed, and threw flowers beneath the hooves of the horses.

Penthesilea accepted it all as her due.

Deiphobus, King Priam’s son, Hector’s and the dead Paris’s brother, and the man whom the whole world knew would be Helen’s next husband, met the Amazon queen and her warriors just outside the walls of Paris’s palace, where Priam currently resided. The stout man stood in gleaming armor and red cape, his helmet brush stiff and golden, his arms folded until he extended one palm up in salute. Fifteen of Priam’s private guardsmen stood at rigid attention behind him

“Hail, Penthesilea, daughter of Ares, Queen of the Amazons,” cried Deiphobus. “Welcome to you and your twelve warrior women. All Ilium offers you thanks and honor this day, for coming as ally and friend to help us in our war with the gods of Olympos themselves. Come inside, bathe, receive our gifts, and know the true richness of Troy’s hospitality and appreciation. Hector, our noblest hero, would be here to welcome you in person but he is resting for a few hours after tending our brother’s funeral pyre all through the night.”

Penthesilea swung down lightly from her giant war steed, moving with consummate grace despite her solid armor and gleaming helmet. She grasped Deiphobus by the forearm with both her strong hands, greeting him with a fellow-warrior’s grip of friendship. “Thank you, Deiphobus, son of Priam, hero of a thousand single combats. I and my companions thank you, extend our condolences to you, your father, and all of Priam’s people at the news of Paris’s death—news that reached us two days ago—and we accept your generous hospitality. But I must tell you before I enter Paris’s home, Priam’s palace now, that I come not to fight the gods alongside you, but to end your war with the gods once and for all.”

Deiphobus, whose eyes tended to protrude in a hypothalic way at the best of times, literally goggled now at this beautiful Amazon. “How would you do this, Queen Penthesilea?”

“This thing I have come to tell you, and then to do,” said Penthesilea. “Come, take me in, friend Deiphobus. I need to meet with your father.”

Deiphobus explained to the Amazon queen and her bodyguard-army that his father, royal Priam, was staying here in this wing of Paris’s lesser palace because the gods had destroyed Priam’s palace on the first day of the war eight months earlier, killing his wife and the city’s queen, Hecuba.

“Again you have the Amazon women’s condolences, Deiphobos,” said Penthesilea. “Sorrow at the news of the queen’s death reached even into our distant isles and hills.”

As they entered the royal chamber, Deiphobos cleared his throat. “Speaking of your distant land, daughter of Ares, how is that you survived the gods’ wrath this month? Word has spread through the city overnight that Agamemnon found the Greek Isles empty of human life during his voyage home. Even the brave defenders of Ilium are quaking this morning at the thought of the gods eliminating all peoples save for the Argives and us. How is that you and your race was spared?”

“My race hasn’t been,” Penthesilea said flatly. “We fear that the land of the brave Amazon women is as empty as the other lands we’ve passed through the last week of our travel. But Athena has spared us for our mission. And the goddess sent an important message to the people of Ilium.”

“Pray tell us,” said Deiphobus.

Penthesilea shook her head. “The message is for royal Priam’s ears.”

As if on cue, trumpets sounded, curtains were pulled back, and Priam entered slowly, leaning on the arm of one of his royal guardsmen.

Penthesilea had seen Priam in his own royal hall less than a year before when she and fifty of her women had braved the Achaean siege to bring words of encouragement and alliance to Troy—Priam had told her that the Amazon’s help was not needed then, but had showered her with gold and other gifts. But now the Amazon queen was shocked into silence by Priam’s appearance.

The king, always venerable but filled with energy, had seemed to age twenty years in the past twelve months. His back, always so straight, was now crooked. His cheeks, always ruddy with wine or excitement at the times Penthesilea had seen him over her five-and-twenty years, even when she was a child and she and her sister, Hippolyte, had hidden behind curtains in their mother’s throne room when the royal party from Ilium visited to pay tribute, were now concave, as if the old man had lost all of his teeth. His salt-and-pepper hair and beard had gone a sad, straggly white. Priam’s eyes were rheumy now, gazing at ghosts.

The old man almost collapsed into the gold-and-lapis throne.

“Hail, Priam, son of Laomedon, noble ruler in the line of Dardanus, father of brave Hector, pitiable Paris, and welcoming Deiphobus,” said Penthesilea, going to one greaved knee. Her young-woman’s voice, although melodious, was more than strong enough to echo in the huge chamber. “I, Queen Penthesilea, perhaps the last of the Amazon queens, and my twelve breasted and bronze-armored warriors bring you praise, condolences, gifts, and our spears.”

“Your condolences and loyalties are your most precious gifts to us, dear Penthesilea.”

“I also bring you a message from Pallas Athena and the key to ending your war with the gods,” said Penthesilea.

The king cocked his head. Some of his retinue audibly gasped.

“Pallas Athena has never loved Ilium, beloved daughter. She always conspired with our Argive enemies to destroy this city and all within its walls. But the goddess is our sworn enemy now. She and Aphrodite murdered my son Hector’s baby, Astyanax, young lord of the city—saying that we and our children were like mere offerings to them. Sacrifices. There will be no peace with the gods until their race or ours is extinguished.”

Penthesilea, still on one knee but her head held high and her blue eyes flashing challenge, said, “The charge against Athena and Aphrodite is false. The war is false. The gods who love Ilium wish to love us and support us once again—including Father Zeus himself. Even gray-eyed Pallas Athena has come over to the side of Ilium because of the base treachery of the Achaeans—that liar Achilles most specifically, since he invented the calumny that Athena murdered his friend Patroclus.”

“Do the gods offer peace terms?” asked Priam. The old man’s voice was whispery, his tone almost wistful.

“Athena offers more than peace terms,” said Penthesilea, rising to her feet. “She—and the gods who love Troy—offer you victory.”

“Victory over whom?” called Deiphobus, moving to his father’s side. “The Achaeans are our allies now. They and the artificed beings, the moravecs, who shield our cities and camps from Zeus’s thunderbolts.”

Penthesilea laughed. At that moment, every man in the room marveled at how beautiful the Amazon queen was—young and fair, her cheeks flushed and her features as animated as a girl’s, her body under the beautifully molded bronze armor both lithe and lush at the same time. But Penthesilea’s eyes and eager expression were not those of a mere girl’s—they brimmed over with vitality, animal spirits, and sharp intelligence, as well as showing a warrior’s fire for action.

“Victory over Achilles who has misled your son, noble Hector, who even now leads Ilium to ruin,” cried Penthesilea. “Victory over the Argives, the Achaeans, who even now plot your downfall, the city’s ruin, your other sons’ and grandsons’ death, and the enslavement of your wives and daughters.”

Priam shook his head almost sadly. “No one can best fleet-footed Achilles in combat, Amazon. Not even Ares, who three times has been killed by Achilles’ own hands. Not even Athena, who has fled at his attack. Not even Apollo, who was carried back to Olympus in golden-bloodied pieces after challenging Achilles. Not even Zeus, who fears to come down to do single combat with the man-god.”

Penthesilea shook her head and her golden curls flashed. “Zeus fears no one, Noble Priam, pride of the Dardanus line. And he could destroy Troy—lo, destroy the entire earth on which Troy resides—with one flick of his aegis.”

Spearmen went pale and even Priam flinched at the mention of the aegis, Zeus’s most powerful and divine and mysterious weapon. It was understood by all that even the other Olympian gods could be destroyed in a minute if Zeus chose to use the aegis. This was no mere thermonuclear weapon such as the Thunder God dropped uselessly on moravec forcefields early in the war. The aegis was to be feared.

“I make this vow to you, Noble Priam,” said the Amazon queen. “Achilles will be dead before the sun sets on either world today. I vow on the blood of my sisters and mother that…”

Priam held up his hand to stop her.

“Make no vow before me now, young Penthesilea. You are like another daughter to me and have been since you were a baby. Challenging Achilles to mortal combat is death. What made you come to Troy to find your death this way?”

“It is not death, My Lord,” said the Amazon with strain audible in her voice. “It is glory.”

“Often the two are the same,” said Priam. “Come, sit down next to me. Talk to me softly.” He waved his bodyguard and son, Deiphobus, back out of the range of hearing. The dozen Amazon women also took several steps away from the two thrones.

Penthesilea sat on the high-backed throne, once Hecuba’s, recovered from the wreckage of the old palace and now kept empty here in Hecuba’s memory. The Amazon set her shining helmet on the broad arm of the throne and leaned closer to the old man.

“I am pursued by Furies, Father Priam. For three months to this day I have been pursued by the Furies.”

“Why?” asked Priam. He leaned closer, like some future-era priest to some yet unborn confessor. “Those avenging spirits seek to exact blood for blood only when no human avenger is left alive to do so, my daughter—especially when one family member has been injured by another. Surely you have hurt no member of your royal Amazon family.”

“I killed my sister, Hippolyte,” said Penthesilea, her voice quavering.

Priam pulled back. “You murdered Hippolyte? The former queen of the Amazons? Theseus’ royal wife? We heard that she had died in a hunting accident when someone had seen movement and mistaken the Queen of Athens for a stag.”

“I did not mean to murder her, Priam. But after Theseus abducted my sister—seduced her aboard his ship during a state visit, set sail, and carried her off—we Amazons set our mind to revenge. This year, while all eyes and attention in the home isles and Peloponnese were turned to your struggle here at Troy, with heroes away and Athens lying undefended, we made up a small fleet, set our own siege—though nothing so grand and immortal in the telling as the Argives’ siege of Ilium—and invaded Theseus’ stronghold.”

“We heard this, of course,” mumbled old Priam. “But the battle ended quickly in a treaty of peace and the Amazons departed. We heard that Queen Hippolyte died shortly after, during a grand hunt to celebrate the peace.”

“She died by my spear,” said Penthesilea, forcing every word out into the air. “Originally, the Athenians were on the run, Theseus was wounded, and we thought we had the city in our grasp. Our only goal was to rescue Hippolyte from this man—whether she wanted to be rescued or not—and we were close to doing so when Theseus led a counterattack that drove us a day’s bloody retreat back to our ships. Many of my sisters were slain. We were fighting for our lives now, and once again Amazon valor won out—we drove Theseus and his fighters back a day’s walk toward his walls. But my final spearcast, aimed for Theseus himself, found its deadly way into the heart of my sister, who—in her bold Athenian armor—looked like a man as she fought alongside her lord and husband.”

“Against the Amazons,” whispered Priam. “Against her sisters.”

“Yes. As soon as we discovered whom I had killed, the battle stopped. The peace was made. We erected a white column near the acropolis in my noble sister’s memory, and we departed in sorrow and shame.”

“And the Furies hound you now, for your sister’s shed blood.”

“Every day,” said Penthesilea. Her bright eyes were moist. Her fresh cheeks had gone flushed with the telling and now were pale. She looked extraordinarily beautiful.

“But what does Achilles and our war have to do with this tragedy, my daughter?” whispered Priam.

“This month, son of Laomedon and scion of the line of Dardanus, Athena appeared to me. She explained that no offering I could make to the Furies would ever appease the hell-beasts, but that I could make amends for Hippolyte’s death by traveling to Ilium with twelve of my chosen companions and defeating Achilles in single combat, thus ending this errant war and restoring peace between gods and men.”

Priam rubbed his chin where the gray stubble he’d let grow since Hecuba’s death passed for a beard. “No one can defeat Achilles, Amazon. My son Hector—the finest warrior Troy has ever bred—tried for eight years and failed. Now he is ally and friend to the fleet-footed mankiller. The gods themselves have tried for more than eight months, and all have failed or fallen before the wrath of Achilles—Ares, Apollo, Poseidon, Hermes, Hades, Athena herself—all have taken on Achilles and failed.”

“It’s because none of them knew of his weakness,” whispered the Amazon Penthesilea. “His mother, the goddess Thetis, found a secret way to confer invulnerability in battle to her mortal son when he was an infant. He cannot fall in battle except by injury to this one weak place.”

“What is it?” gasped Priam. “Where is it?”

“I swore to Athena—upon pain of death—that I would reveal it to no one, Father Priam. But that I would use the knowledge to kill Achilles by my own Amazon hand and thus end this war.”

“If Athena knows Achilles’ weakness, then why did she not use it to end his life in their own combat, woman? A duel which ended with Athena fleeing, wounded, QTing back to Olympos in pain and fear.”

“The Fates decreed when Achilles was an infant that his secret weakness would be found only by another mortal, during this battle for Ilium. But the work of the Fates has come undone.”

Priam sat back in his throne. “So Hector was fated to kill fleet-footed Achilles after all,” he murmured. “If we had not opened this war with the gods, that destiny would have come about.”

Penthesilea shook her head. “No, not Hector. Another mortal—a Trojan—would have taken Achilles’ life after he had killed Hector. One of the Muses had learned this from a slave they called a scholic, who knew the future.”

“A seer,” said Priam. “Like our esteemed Helenus or the Achaeans’ prophet Calchas.”

The Amazon shook her golden curls again. “No, the scholics did not see the future—somehow, they came from the future. But they are all dead now, according to Athena. But Achilles’ Fate awaits. And I will fulfill it.”

“When?” said old Priam, obviously turning over all the ramifications of this in his mind. He had not been king of the grandest city on earth for more than five decades for no reason, to no purpose. His son, Hector, was blood ally to Achilles now, but Hector was not king. Hector was Ilium’s noblest warrior, but while he might have once carried the fate of the city and its inhabitants in his sword arm, he had never imagined it in his mind. This was Priam’s work.

“When?” asked Priam again. “How soon can you and your twelve Amazon warriors kill Achilles?”

“Today,” promised Penthesilea. “As I promised. Before the sun sets on either Ilium or Olympos visible through that hole in the air we passed on the way in.”

“What do you require, daughter? Weapons? Gold? Riches?”

“Only your blessing, Noble Priam. And food. And a couch for my women and me, for a short nap before we bathe, adorn ourselves again in armor, and go out to end this war with the gods.”

Priam clapped his hands. Deiphobus, the many guards, his courtiers, and the twelve Amazon women stepped back into earshot.

He ordered fine food be brought to these women, then soft couches made available for their short sleep, then warm baths to be drawn and slave women to be ready to apply oils and unguents after their baths, and massages, and finally that the thirteen women’s horses be fed and combed and resaddled when Penthesilea was ready to go forth to do battle that afternoon.

Penthesilea was smiling and confident when she led her twelve companions out of the royal hall.

10

Quantum teleportation through Planck space—a term the goddess Hera did not know—was supposed to be instantaneous, but in Planck space, such terms had little meaning. Transit through such interstices in the weave of space-time left trails, and the gods and goddesses, thanks to the nanomemes and cellular re-engineering that was part of their creation, knew how to follow such trails as effortlessly as a hunter, as easily as the goddess Artemis would track a stag through the forest.

Hera followed Zeus’s winding trail through Planck nothing, knowing only that it was not one of the regular string channels between Olympos and Ilium or Mount Ida. It was somewhere else on the ancient earth of Ilium.

She QT’d into existence in a large hall that Athena knew well. A giant quiver of arrows and the outline of a giant bow was painted on one wall and there was a long, low table set with dozens of fine goblets, serving bowls, and golden plates.

Zeus looked up in surprise from where he was sitting at the table—he had reduced his size to a mere seven feet here in this human hall—and idly scratching behind the ears of a gray-muzzled dog.

“My Lord,” said Hera. “Are you going to cut that dog’s head off as well?”

Zeus did not smile. “I should,” he rumbled. “As a mercy to it.” His brow was still furrowed. “Do you recognize this place and this dog, wife?”

“Yes. It is Odysseus’ home, on rugged Ithaca. The dog is named Argus, and was bred by the younger Odysseus shortly before he left for Troy. He trained the pup.”

“And it waits for him still,” said Zeus. “But now Penelope is gone, and Telemachus, and even the suitors who had just now begun to gather like carrion crows in Odysseus’ home, seeking Penelope’s hand and lands and wealth, have mysteriously disappeared along with Penelope, Telemachus, and all other mortals save for those few thousand at Troy. There is no one to feed this mutt.”

Hera shrugged. “You could send it to Ilium and let it dine on Dionysos, your wastrel son.”

Zeus shook his head. “Why are you so harsh with me, wife? And why have you followed me here when I want to be alone to ponder this strange theft of all the world’s people?”

Hera stepped closer to the white-bearded God of Gods. She feared his wrath—of all the gods and mortals, only Zeus could destroy her. She feared for what she was about to do, but she was resolved to do it.

“Dread majesty, Son of Kronos, I stopped by only to say goodbye for a few sols. I did not want to leave our last discussion on its note of discord.” She stepped even closer and covertly touched Aphrodite’s breast-band tucked under her right breast. Hera could feel the flow of sexual energy filling the room; sense the pheromones flowing from her.

“Where are you going for several sols when both Olympos and the war for Troy are in such turmoil, wife?” grumbled Zeus. But his nostrils flared and he looked up at her with a new interest, ignoring Argus the dog.

“With Nyx’s help, I am off to the ends of this empty earth to visit Okeanos and Mother Tethys, who prefer this world to our cold Mars, as well you know, husband.” She took three steps closer so that she was almost within touching distance of Zeus.

“Why visit them now, Hera? They’ve done well enough without you in the centuries since we tamed the Red World and inhabited Olympos.”

“I’m hoping to end their endless feud,” said Hera in her guileful way. “For too long have they held back from each other, hesitated to make love because of the anger in their hearts. I wanted to tell you where I would be so that you would not flare in godly anger at me, should you think I’d gone in secret to Okeanos’ deep, flowing halls.”

Zeus stood. Hera could sense the excitement stirring in him. Only the folds of his god-robe concealed his lust.

“Why hurry, Hera?” Zeus’s eyes were devouring her now. His look made Hera remember the feel of her brother-husband-lover’s tongue and hands upon her softest places.

“Why tarry, husband?”

“Going to see Okeanos and Tethys is a journey you can take tomorrow or the day after tomorrow or never,” said Zeus, stepping toward Hera. “Today, here, we can lose ourselves in love! Come, wife…”

Zeus swept all the goblets, cutlery, and spoiled food from the long table with a blast of invisible force from his raised hand. He ripped a giant tapestry from the wall and tossed it onto the rough-plank table.

Hera took a step back and touched her breast as if she were going to QT away. “What are you saying, Lord Zeus? You want to make love here? In Odysseus’ and Penelope’s abandoned home, with that dog watching? Who is to say that all the gods will not be watching us through their pools and viewers and holowalls? If love is your pleasure, wait until I return from Okeanos’ watery halls and we will make love in my own bedroom, made private by Hephaestus’s craft…”

“No!” roared Zeus. He was growing in more ways than one now, his gray-curled head brushing the ceiling. “Don’t worry about prying eyes. I will make a golden cloud so dense around the isle of Ithaca and Odysseus’ home that the sharpest eyes in the universe, neither god nor mortal, not even Prospero or Setebos, could pierce the mist and see us while we’re making love. Take your clothes off!”

Zeus waved his blunt-fingered hand again and the entire house vibrated with the energy of the surrounding forcefield and concealing golden cloud. The dog, Argus, ran from the room, his hair standing on end from the energies being unleashed.

Zeus grabbed Hera by the wrist and pulled her closer with his right hand, even while pulling her gown down away from her breasts with his free hand. Aphrodite’s breastband fell away with the gown Athena had made for Hera, but it did not matter—the air was so thick with lust and pheromones that the queen thought she could swim in it.

Zeus lifted her with one arm and tossed her back on the tapestry-covered table. It was a good thing, thought Hera, that Odysseus had made his long dining table of thick, solid planks pulled from the deck of a ship run aground on Ithaca’s treacherous rocks. He pulled the gown away from her legs, leaving her naked. Then he stepped out of his own robes.

As many times as Hera had seen her husband’s divine phallus standing erect, it never ceased to stop her breath in her throat. All of the male gods were … well, gods … but in their almost-forgotten Transformation to Olympians, Zeus had saved the most impressive attributes for himself. This purple-knobbed staff now pressing between her pale knees was the only scepter this King of the Gods would ever need to create awe among mortals or envy among his fellow gods, and although Hera thought that he showed it too frequently—his lust was the equal of his size and virility—she still thought of this part of her Dread Majesty as hers alone.

But, at risk of bruising or worse, Hera kept her naked knees and thighs tight closed.

“You want me, husband?”

Zeus was breathing through his mouth. His eyes were wild. “I want you, wife. Never has such a lust for goddess or mortal woman flooded my pounding heart and prick and overwhelmed me so. Open your legs!”

“Never?” asked Hera, keeping her legs closed. “Not even when you bedded Ixion’s wife, who bore you Pirithous, rival to all the gods in wisdom and…”

“Not even then, with Ixion’s wife of the blue-veined breasts,” gasped Zeus. He forced her knees wide and stepped between her white thighs, his phallus reaching to her pale, firm belly and vibrating with lust.

“Not even when you loved Ascrisius’ daughter Danae?” asked Hera.

“Not even with her,” said Zeus, leaning far forward to suckle at Hera’s raised nipples, first the left, then the right. His hand moved between her legs. She was wet—from the breastband’s work and from her own eagerness. “Although, by all the gods,” he added, “Danae’s ankles alone could make a man come!”

“It must have more than once with you, My Lord,” gasped Hera as Zeus set his broad palm beneath her buttocks and lifted her closer. The broad, hot head of his scepter was batting at her thighs now, making them moist with his own anticipating wetness. “For she bore you a paragon of men.”

Zeus was so excited that he could not find entry, but lunged around her warmth like a boy in his first time with a woman. When he released her breast with his left hand to guide himself home, Hera seized his wrist.

“Do you want me more than you wanted Europa, Phoenix’ daughter?” she whispered urgently.

“More than Europa, yes,” breathed Zeus. He grabbed her hand and set it on himself. She squeezed, but did not guide. Not yet.

“Do you want to lie with me more than you did with Semele, Dionysos’ irresistible mother?”

“More than Semele, yes. Yes.” He set her hand more firmly around himself and lunged, but he was so engorged that it was more a ram’s head shoving than a penetration. Hera was pushed two feet up the table. He pulled her back. “And more than Alcmene in Thebes,” he gasped, “although my seed that day brought invincible Herakles into the world.”

“Do you want me more than you wanted fair-haired Demeter when…”

“Yes, yes, god damn it, more than Demeter.” He pushed Hera’s legs further apart and, with only his right palm, lifted her backside a foot off the table. She could not help opening for him now.

“Do you want me more than you wanted Leda on the day you took the shape of a swan to couple with her while you beat her down and held her with your great swan’s wings and entered her with your great swan’s…”

“Yes, yes,” gasped Zeus. “Shut up, please.”

He entered her then. Opening her like some great ram-headed battering engine would open the Scaean Gates had the Greeks ever won entrance to Ilium.

In the next twenty minutes, Hera almost swooned twice. Zeus was passionate, but not quick. He took his pleasure urgently, but waited for its climax with all the miserliness of a hedonist ascetic. The second time, Hera felt consciousness sliding away under the oiled and sweating pounding—the table shook and almost upended although it was thirty feet long, the chairs and couches tumbled away, dust fell from the ceiling, Odysseus’ ancient home almost came down around them—and Hera thought, This will not do—I must be conscious when Zeus climaxes or all my scheming is for naught.

She forced herself to stay attentive even after four orgasms of her own. Odysseus’ great quiver of arrows fell from the wall, scattering barbed and possibly poisoned arrows across tile in the last seconds of Zeus’s heavy pounding. He had to hold Hera in place with one hand under her, pressing up so fiercely that she heard her divine hipbones creak, while his other gripped her shoulder, keeping her from sliding far down the quivering, straining table.

Then he erupted inside her. Hera did scream then and swooned for a few seconds, despite herself.

When her eyelids flickered opened, she felt his great weight upon her—he’d grown to fifteen feet in his involuntary last seconds of passion—his beard scratched against her breast, the top of his head—hair soaked with sweat—lay against her cheek.

Hera raised her treacherous finger with the injection ampule set in the false nail by crafty Hephaestus. Stroking his neck curls with her cool hand, she bent the nail back and activated the injector—there was barely a hiss, unheard over his ragged breathing and the pounding of both their divine hearts.

The drug was called Absolute Sleep and it lived up to its name within microseconds.

Almost instantly, Zeus was snoring and slobbering against her rubbed-red chest.

It took all of Hera’s divine strength to shove him off, to remove his softening member from her folds, to slide out from under him.

Her unique, Athena-made gown was a torn mess. So was she, Hera realized. Bruised and scratched and pummeled in every muscle, outside and in. The divine seed from the King of the Gods ran down her thigh as she stood. Hera mopped it away with the tatters of her ruined gown.

Retrieving Aphrodite’s breastband from the torn silk, Hera went into Odysseus’ wife Penelope’s dressing room, next to the bedroom where their great marriage bed had one post made of a living olive tree and a frame inlaid with gold, silver, and ivory, with thongs of oxhide dyed crimson stretched end to end to hold soft fleeces and rich coverlets. From camphor-lined trunks set by Penelope’s bath, Hera pulled gown after gown—Odysseus’ wife had been about her size, and the goddess could morph her shape enough to finish the tailoring—finally choosing a peach-colored silk shift with an embroidered band that would hold her bruised breasts high. But before dressing, Hera made her bath as best she could from the copper kettles of cold water set out days or weeks earlier for a hot bath Penelope never had.

Later, emerging into the dining hall again, dressed, walking gingerly, Hera stared at the great, bronzed, naked hulk snoring face-down on the long table. Could I kill him now? she wondered. It was not the first time—or the thousandth—that the queen had held this thought while looking at and listening to her snoring lord. She knew she was not alone in the wondering. How many wives—goddess and mortal woman, long dead and yet unborn—had felt this thought slipping across their minds like a cloud shadow over rocky ground? If I could kill him, would I kill him? If it were possible, would I act now?

Instead, Hera prepared to quantum teleport to the plains of Ilium. So far, the plot was unfolding according to plan. Poseidon, the Earth-Shaker, should be maneuvering Agamemnon and Menelaus into action at any minute. Within hours, if not sooner, Achilles might be dead—slain by the hands of a mere woman, although Amazon, his heel pierced by poison spearpoint—and Hector isolated. And if Achilles killed the woman who attacked him, Athena and Hera had plans for him still. The mortal revolt would be over by the time Zeus awoke, if Hera ever allowed him to awake at all—Absolute Sleep needed an antidote or it would work until these high walls of Odysseus’ home would tumble down in rot. Or Hera might wake Zeus soon, if her goals were fulfilled earlier than planned, and the Lord of Gods would not even be aware that he had been felled by drugs rather than mere lust and a need to sleep. Whenever she chose to waken her husband, the war between gods and men would be over, the Trojan War resumed, that status quo restored, the fait chosen by Hera and her co-conspirators most decidedly accompli.

Turning her back on the sleeping Son of Kronos, Hera walked from Odysseus’ house—for no one, not even a queen, could QT through the concealing forcefield Zeus had set around it—pressed through the watery wall of energy like an infant fighting from its caul, and teleported triumphantly back to Troy.

11

Hockenberry didn’t recognize any of the moravecs who met him in the blue bubble inside Stickney Crater on the moon Phobos. At first, when the chair forcefield clicked off and left him exposed to the elements, he’d panicked and held his breath for a few seconds—still thinking he was in hard vacuum—but then he felt the air pressure against his skin and the comfortable temperature, so he’d taken a ragged breath just as little Mahnmut was introducing him to the taller moravecs who’d come forward like an official delegation. It was embarrassing, actually. Then Mahnmut had left and Hockenberry was on his own with these strange organic machines.

“Welcome, Dr. Hockenberry,” said the closest of the five moravecs facing him. “I trust your trip up from Mars was uneventful.”

For a second, Hockenberry felt a stab of something almost like nausea at hearing someone call him “Doctor.” Except for Mahnmut using the honorific, it had been a long time since… no, it had been never in this second life, unless his scholic friend Nightenhelser had used his title jokingly once or twice in the past decade.

“Thank you, yes… I mean… I’m sorry, I didn’t catch all your names,” said Hockenberry. “I apologize. I was… distracted.” Thinking I was going to die when the chair deserted me, thought Hockenberry.

The short moravec nodded. “I don’t doubt,” it said. “There’s a lot of activity in this bubble and the atmosphere certainly conveys the noise.”

That it did. And that there was. The huge blue bubble, covering at least two or three acres—Hockenberry was always poor at judging sizes and distances, a failure due to not playing sports, he’d always thought—was filled with gantry-structures, banks of machines larger than most buildings in his old stomping grounds of Bloomington, Indiana, pulsating organic blobs that looked like runaway blancmanges the size of tennis courts, hundreds of moravecs—all busy on one task or another—and floating globes shedding light and spitting out laser beams that cut and welded and melted and moved on. The only thing that looked even remotely familiar in the huge space, although completely out of place, was a round rosewood table sitting about thirty feet away. It was surrounded by six stools of varying heights.

“My name is Asteague/Che,” said the small moravec. “I’m Europan, like your friend Mahnmut.”

“European?” Hockenberry repeated stupidly. He’d been to France once on vacation and once to Athens for a classics conference, and while the men and women in both places had been… different… none of them resembled this Asteague/Che: taller than Mahnmut, at least four feet tall, and more humanoid—especially around the hands—but still covered with the same plasticky-metallic material as Mahnmut, although Asteague/Che was mostly a brilliant, slick yellow. The moravec reminded Hockenberry of a slick yellow-rubber raincoat he’d had and loved when he was a kid.

“Europa,” said Asteague/Che with no hint of impatience. “The icy, watery moon of Jupiter. Mahnmut’s home. And mine.”

“Of course,” said Hockenberry. He was blushing and knowing he was blushing made him blush again. “Sorry. Of course. I knew Mahnmut was from some moon out there. Sorry.”

“My title… although ‘title’ is too formal and ostentatious a word, perhaps ‘job function’ would be a more appropriate translation,” continued Asteague/Che, “is Prime Integrator for the Five Moons Consortium.”

Hockenberry bowed slightly, realizing that he was in the presence of a politician. Or at least a top bureaucrat. He had no clue as to what the other four moons might be named. He’d heard of Europa in his other life and he seemed to recall that they were finding a new Jovian moon every few weeks—or so it seemed—back at the end of the Twentieth Century, beginning of the Twenty-first—but the names escaped him. Maybe they hadn’t been named by the time he’d died, he couldn’t remember. Also, Hockenberry had always preferred Greek over Latin and thought that the solar system’s largest planet should have been called Zeus, not Jupiter… although in current circumstances that might be confusing.

“Allow me to reintroduce my colleagues,” said Asteague/Che.

The moravec’s voice had been reminding Hockenberry of someone and now he realized who—the movie actor James Mason.

“The tall gentleman to my right is General Beh bin Adee, commander of the Asteroid Belt contingent of combat moravecs.”

“Dr. Hockenberry,” said General Beh bin Adee. “A pleasure to meet you at last.” The tall figure did not offer his hand to shake, since he had no hand—only barbed pincers with a myriad of fine-motor manipulators.

Gentleman, thought Hockenberry. Rockvec. In the last eight months, he’d seen thousands of the soldier rockvecs on both the plains of Ilium and the surface of Mars around Olympos—always tall, about two meters as this one was, always black, as the general was, and always a mass of barbs, hooks, chitinous ridges, and sharp serrations. They obviously don’t breed them… or build them… for beauty in the Asteroid Belt, thought Hockenberry.

“My pleasure, General… Beh bin Adee,” he said aloud, and bowed slightly.

“To my left,” continued Prime Integrator Asteague/Che, “is Integrator Cho Li from the moon Callisto.”

“Welcome to Phobos, Dr. Hockenberry,” said Cho Li in a voice so soft it sounded absolutely feminine. Do moravecs have genders? wondered Hockenberry. He’d always thought of Mahnmut and Orphu as male robots—and there was no doubt about the testosteronic attitudes of the rockvec troopers. But these creations had distinct personalities, so why not genders?

“Integrator Cho Li,” repeated Hockenberry and bowed again. The Callistan—Callistoid? Callistonian?—was smaller than Asteague/Che but more massive and far less humanoid. Less humanoid even than the absent Mahnmut. What disconcerted Hockenberry a bit were the glimpses of what looked to be raw, pink flesh between panels of plastic and steel. If Quasimodo—the Hunchback of Notre Dame—had been assembled out of bits of flesh and used car parts, with boneless arms, a wandering multitude of eyes in assorted sizes, and a narrow maw that looked like a mail slit, and then miniaturized—he might have been a sibling of Integrator Cho Li. Because of the names, Hockenberry wondered if these Callistoidonal moravecs had been designed by the Chinese.

“Behind Cho Li is Suma IV,” said Asteague/Che in its, his, smooth, James Mason voice. “Suma IV is from the moon Ganymede.”

Suma IV was very human in height and proportion, but not so human in appearance. Somewhere over six feet tall, the Ganymedan had properly proportioned arms and legs, a waist, a flat chest, and the proper number of fingers—all sheathed in a fluid, grayish, oil-like coating that Hockenberry had once heard Mahnmut refer to as buckycarbon. But that had been on the hull of a hornet. Poured over a person… or a person-shaped moravec… the effect was disconcerting.

Even more disconcerting were this moravec’s oversized eyes with their hundreds upon hundreds of shining facets. Hockenberry had to wonder if Suma IV or his ilk had landed on Earth in his day … say at Roswell, New Mexico? Did Suma IV have some cousin on ice in Area 51?

No, he reminded himself, these creatures aren’t aliens. They’re robotic-organic entities that human beings designed and built and scattered in the solar system. Centuries and centuries after I died.

“How do you do, Suma IV,” said Hockenberry. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Dr. Hockenberry,” said the tall Ganymedan moravec. No James-Masony or little-girl tones here… the shiny black figure with the glittering fly’s eyes had a voice that sounded like boys pelting a hollow boiler with cinders.

“May I introduce our last representative from the Consortium,” said Asteague/Che. “Retrograde Sinopessen from Amalthea.”

“Retrograde Sinopessen?” repeated Hockenberry, stifling a sudden urge to laugh until he wept. He wanted to go lie down, take a nap, and wake up in his study in the old white house near Indiana University.

“Retrograde Sinopessen, yes,” said Asteague/Che, nodding.

The thrice-identified moravec skittered forward on silver-spider legs. Hockenberry observed that Mr. Sinopessen was about the size of a Lionel train transformer, although much shinier in a polished-aluminum sort of way, and his eight legs were so thin as to be almost invisible. Eyes or diodes or tiny little lights glowed at various points on and in the box.

“A pleasure, Dr. Hockenberry,” said the shiny little box in a voice so deep it rivaled Orphu of Io’s near-subsonic rumble. “I’ve read all of your books and papers. All that we have in our archives, at least. They’re brilliant. It’s an honor to meet you in person.”

“Thank you,” Hockenberry said stupidly. He looked at the five moravecs, at the hundreds more working on other incomprehensible machines in the huge pressurized bubble, looked back at Asteague/Che, and said, “So now what?”

“Why don’t we sit down around that table and discuss this imminent expedition to Earth and your possible participation in it,” suggested the Europan Prime Integrator of the Five Moons Consortium.

“Sure,” said Thomas Hockenberry. “Why not?”

12

Helen was alone and unarmed when Menelaus finally cornered her.

The day after Paris’s funeral started bizarrely and grew only more bizarre as the day wore on. There was a smell of fear and apocalypse on the winter wind.

Early that morning, even as Hector was bearing his brother’s bones to their barrow, Helen was summoned by Andromache’s messenger. Hector’s wife and a female servant, a slave from the isle of Lesbos, her tongue torn out many years earlier, now sworn to serve the secret society once known as the Trojan Women, were holding wild-eyed Cassandra prisoner in Andromache’s secret apartments near the Scaean Gates.

“What’s this?” asked Helen as she came into the apartment. Cassandra did not know about this house. Cassandra was supposed to never know about this house. Now Priam’s daughter, the mad prophetess, sat sunk-shouldered on a wooden couch. The servant, whose slave name was Hypsipyle after Euneus’ famous mother by Jason, held a long-bladed knife in her tattooed hand.

“She knows,” said Andromache. Hector’s wife sounded tired, as if she had been awake all night. “She knows about Astyanax.”

“How?”

It was Cassandra who replied, without lifting her head. “I saw it in one of my trances.”

Helen sighed. There had been seven of them at the height of their conspiracy—Andromache, Hector’s wife, and her mother-in-law, Hecuba, Priam’s queen, had begun the planning. Then Theano had joined the group—the horseman Antenor ‘s wife, but also high priestess in Athena’s temple. Then Hecuba’s daughter, Laodice, was brought into the secret circle. Those four had trusted Helen with their secret and their purpose—to end the war, to save their husbands’ lives, to save their children’s lives, to save themselves from enslavement by the Achaeans.

Helen had been honored to become one of the secret Trojan Women—no Trojan, she knew, but only the source of the true Trojan Women’s sorrows—and like Hecuba, Andromache, Theano, and Laodice, she had worked for years to find a third way—an end to the war with honor, but without such a terrible price.

They’d had no choice but to include Cassandra, Priam’s prettiest but maddest daughter, in their plotting. The young woman had been given the gift of second sight by Apollo, and they needed her visions if they were to plan and plot. Besides, Cassandra had already found them out in one of her mad trances—babbling already about the Trojan Women and their secret meetings in the vault beneath Athena’s temple—so they included her in order to silence her.

The seventh and final and oldest Trojan Woman was Herophile, “beloved of Hera,” the oldest and wisest sibyl and priestess of Apollo Smintheus. As a sibyl, Herophile often interpreted Cassandra’s wild dreams more accurately than Cassandra could.

So when Achilles had overthrown Agamemnon, the fleet-footed mankiller claiming that Pallas Athena herself had murdered his best friend, Patroclus, and then leading the Achaeans against the gods themselves in violent war, the Trojan Women had seen their chance. Excluding Cassandra from their planning—for the prophetess was too unstable in those final days before her prophesied fall of Troy—they had carried out the murder of Andromache’s nurse and that nurse’s child, Andromache then claiming—shouting, sobbing hysterically—that it had been Pallas Athena and the goddess Aphrodite who had slaughtered young Astyanax, Hector’s child.

Hector, like Achilles before him, had gone mad with grief and anger. The Trojan War ended. The War with the Gods began. The Achaeans and Trojans marched through the Hole to besiege Olympos with their new allies, the minor-gods, the moravecs.

And in that first day of bombing from the gods—before the moravecs protected Ilium with their forcefields—Hecuba had died. And her daughter Laodice. And Theano, Athena’s most beloved priestess.

Three of the seven Trojan Women dead that first day of the war they had brought about. Then hundreds of other warriors and civilians dear to them.

Now another? thought Helen, her heart sinking into some region of sorrow beneath sorrow. To Andromache, she asked, “Are you going to kill Cassandra?”

Hector’s wife turned her cold gaze in Helen’s direction. “No,” she said at last, “I’m going to show her Scamandrius, my Astyanax.”

Menelaus had no problem getting into the city in his clumsy disguise of boar-tusk helmet and lion-skin robe. He pushed in past the gate guards along with scores of other barbarians, Trojan allies all, after Paris’s funeral procession and just before the much-heralded arrival of the Amazon women.

It was still early. He avoided the area around Priam’s bombed-out palace since he knew that Hector and his captains would be there interring Paris’s bones and too many of those Trojan heroes could recognize the boar-tusk helmet or Diomedes’ lion skin. Wending his way past the bustling marketplace and through alleys, he came out by the small square in front of Paris’s palace—King Priam’s temporary quarters and still home to Helen. There were elite guards at the door, of course, and more on the walls and every terrace. Odysseus had once told him which set-back terrace was Helen’s, and Menelaus watched those billowing curtains with a terrible intensity, but his wife did not appear. There were two spearmen there in glinting bronze, which suggested that Helen was not at home this morning—she had never allowed bodyguards in her private apartments back in their more modest palace in Lacedaemon.

There was a wine and cheese shop across the square from Paris’s palace, rough tables set out into the sunny alley, and Menelaus broke his fast there, paying in the Trojan gold pieces he’d had the foresight to grab from Agamemnon’s trunk while he was dressing. He tarried there for hours—slipping more triangular coins to the shopkeeper to keep him happy during his tarrying—and listened to the gab and gossip from crowds in the square and townsfolk at adjoining benches.

“Is her ladyship in today?” one old crone asked another.

“Not since this morning. My Phoebe said that her chinks had gone and left at first light, yes, but not to honor her hubby’s bones bein’ put in all right and proper, no.”

“What then?” cackled the more toothless of the two old hags gumming their cheese. The old woman leaned closer as if ready to receive whispers, but the other old hag—as deaf as the first—fairly bellowed her response.

“Rumor has it that old priapic Priam insists that her Helenship—poxy foreign bitch that she is—marry his other son—not one of the army of Priam bastards roundabouts, you can’t throw a dog-puking rock without hitting a bastard of Priam’s, but that fat, stupid, rightful son, Deiphobus—and wed within forty-eight hours of Paris’s barbecue party.”

“Soon then.”

“Aye, soon. Today, perhaps. Deiphobus has been waiting his turn in line to boink the poxy doxy since the week Paris dragged her bumpy ass here—gods curse the day—so he’s probably well into the rites of Dionysos, if not of marriage, even as we speak, sister.”

The old hags cackled up bits of cheese and bread.

Menelaus slammed up from his table and strode the streets, carrying his spear in his left hand, his right hand on the hilt of his sword.

Deiphobus? Where does Deiphobus live?

It had been easier before the War with the Gods began. All of Priam’s unmarried sons and daughters—some in the fifties now—had lived in the huge palace in the center of the city—the Achaeans had carefully planned to carry the slaughter there first after breaching the Trojan walls—but that one lucky bomb on the first day of the new war had scattered the princes and their sisters to equally plush living quarters all over the huge city.

Thus, an hour after leaving the cheese shop, Menelaus was still striding the crowded streets when the Amazon Penthesilea and her dozen fighting women rode past while the crowds went wild.

Menelaus had to step back or be struck by the lead Amazon’s warhorse. Her greaved leg almost brushed his cloak. She never looked down or to the side.

Menelaus was struck so hard by Penthesilea’s beauty that he almost sat down then and there on the horse-dunged cobblestones. By Zeus, what frail beauty wrapped in such gorgeous, gleaming war armor! Those eyes! Menelaus—who’d never gone to war against or alongside the Amazon tribe—had never seen anything like it.

As if in a seer’s trance, he stumbled along behind the procession, following the crowds and the Amazons back to Paris’s palace. There the Amazon was greeted by Deiphobus, with no Helen in the retinue, so it seemed like the cheese hags had been wrong. At least about Helen’s current whereabouts.

Watching the door where Penthesilea had disappeared, Menelaus, like some lovestruck teenage shepherd boy, finally pulled himself away and began wandering the streets again. It was almost noon. He knew he had little time—Agamemnon had planned to start the uprising against Achilles’ rule by midday and have the battles fought by nightfall—and he recognized for the first time what a huge city Ilium was. What chance did he have of stumbling across Helen here in time to act? Almost none, he realized, since at first cry of battle amidst the Argive ranks, the great Scaean Gates would be closed and the guard on the walls doubled. Menelaus would be trapped.

He was headed for the Scaean Gates, filled with the triple nausea of failure, hatred, and love, almost running, half happy he had not found her and sick to his soul that he had not found and killed her, when he came upon a sort of riot near the gate.

He watched for a bit, seemingly unable to tear himself away from the spectacle, although the spectacle threatened to engulf him as it spiraled out of hand. Old women nearby babbled the tale.

It seemed the women of Troy had been somehow inspired by the mere arrival of Penthesilea and her egg-carton of Amazons—all sleeping now, presumably, on Priam’s softest couches—word had leaked out of the temporary palace of Penthesilea’s vow to kill Achilles—and Ajax, too, if she had the time, and any other Achaean captain who got in her way, since her Amazon eyes were full of business. This had stirred something dormant but certainly not passive in the women of Troy (as opposed to the surviving few Trojan Women), and they had rushed out into the street, to the walls, onto the very battlements, where the confused guards had given way to the screaming wives and daughters and sisters and mothers.

Then it seemed that a woman named Hippodamia, not the well-known wife of Pirithous, but rather the wife of Tisiphonus—such an unimportant Trojan captain that Menelaus had never faced him on the field nor heard of him around the campfire—now this Hippodamia was whipping the women of Troy into a killing frenzy with her shouted oratory. Menelaus had paused to blend into the crowd but stayed to listen and watch.

“Sisters!” screamed Hippodamia, a thick-armed and heavy-hipped woman not without appeal. Her tied-back hair had come loose and vibrated around her shoulders as she shouted and gestured. “Why haven’t we been fighting alongside our men? Why have we wept about the fate of Ilium—wailed about the fate of our children—yet done nothing to change that fate? Are we so much weaker than the beardless boys of Troy who, in this past year, have gone out to die for their city? Are we not as supple and as serious as our sons?”

The crowd of women roared.

“We share food, light, air, and our beds with the men of our city,” shouted full-hipped Hippodamia, “why have we failed to share their fates in combat? Are we so weak?”

“No!” roared a thousand women of Troy from the walls.

“Is there anyone here, any woman, who has not lost a husband, a brother, a father, a son, a kinsman in this war with the Achaeans?”

“No!”

“Does any among us doubt what would be our fate, as women, should the Achaeans have won this war?”

“No!”

“So let us not tarry and loiter here a moment longer,” shouted Hippodamia above the roar. “The Amazon queen has vowed to kill Achilles before the sun sets today, and she has come from afar to fight for a city that is not her home. Can we vow less, do less, for our home, for our men, for our children, and for our own lives and futures?”

“No!” This time the roar went on and on and women began running from the square, jumping from the steps to the wall, some almost trampling Menelaus in their eagerness.

“Arm yourselves!” screamed Hippodamia. “Toss aside your weavings and your wools, leave your looms, don armor, gird yourselves, meet me outside these walls!”

The men on the walls and watching, men who had been leering and laughing during the first part of Tisiphonus’ wife’s tirade, slunk back into doorways and alleys now, getting out of the way of the rushing mob. Menelaus did the same.

He had just turned to leave, heading for the nearby Scaean Gate—still open, thank the gods—when he saw Helen standing on a nearby corner. She was looking the other way and did not see him. He watched her kiss two women goodbye and begin walking up the street. Alone.

Menelaus stopped, took a breath, touched the hilt of his sword, turned, and followed her.

“Theano stopped this madness,” said Cassandra. “Theano spoke to the crowd and brought this mob of women to its senses.”

“Theano is dead eight months and more,” said Andromache in cold tones.

“In the other now,” said Cassandra in that maddening monotone she assumed when half in trance. “In the other future. Theano stopped this. All heeded the chief priestess of Athena’s Temple.”

“Well, Theano is worm meat. Dead as Prince Paris’s pizzle,” said Helen. “No one stopped this mob.”

Women were already returning to the square and filing out through the gate in a parody of military order. They had obviously scattered to their homes and girded themselves in whatever odd armor they could find around the house—a father’s dull bronze helmet, its crest wilted or missing horsehair, a brother’s cast-off shield, a husband’s or son’s spear or sword. All the armor was too large, the spears too heavy, and most of the women looked like children playing dress-up as they rattled and clank-banged by.

“This is madness,” whispered Andromache. “Madness.”

“Everything since the death of Achilles’ friend Patroclus has been mere madness,” said Cassandra, her pale eyes bright as with fever and their own madness. “Untrue. False. Unfirm.”

For more than two hours in Andromache’s sun-filled top-floor apartment by the wall, the women had spent time with eighteen-month-old Scamandrius, the “god-murdered” child the whole city had mourned, the babe for whom Hector had gone to war with all the Olympian gods to avenge. Scamandrius—Astyanax, “Lord of the City”—was healthy enough under the watchful eye of his new nurse, while at the door, loyal Cicilian guards brought from fallen Thebe stood twenty-four-hour watch. These men had tried to die for Andromache’s fallen father, King Eetion, killed by Achilles when the city fell, and, spared not by their own choice but by Achilles’ whims, now lived only for Eetion’s daughter and her hidden son.

The babe, babbling words and toddling up a mile these days, recognized his Aunt Cassandra after all these months, almost half his short life, and came rushing toward her with his arms outspread.

Cassandra accepted the hug, returned it, wept, and for almost two hours the three Trojan Women and the two slaves—one a wet nurse, the other a Lesbos killer—talked and played with the little boy and talked more when he was laid down to nap.

“You see why you must not speak these trance words aloud again,” Andromache said softly after the visit was done. “If the wrong ear hears them—if any ears other than ours hear this hidden truth—Scamandrius will die just as you once prophesied—thrown down from the highest point on the walls, his brains dashed out on the rocks.”

Cassandra went whiter than her usual white and wept again briefly. “I will learn how to hold my tongue,” she said at last, “even when I have no control over it. Your ever-watching servant will see to that.” She nodded toward the expressionless Hypsipyle.

Then they had heard the growing commotion and women’s screams from the nearby wall and city square and had gone out together, their veils pulled down, to see what all the fuss was about.

Several times during Hippodamia’s harangue, Helen was tempted to intervene. She realized, after it was too late—when the women had scattered by the hundreds to their homes to fetch armor and weapons, fritting to and fro like a pack of hysterical bees—that Cassandra was right. Theano, their old friend, the high priestess of the still-revered Temple of Athena, would have stopped this nonsense. With her temple-trained voice, Theano would have boomed out “What folly!” and gotten the attention of the crowd and sobered the women with her words. Theano would have explained that this Penthesilea—who had done nothing for Troy yet except make promises to its aging king and sleep—was the daughter of the war-god. Were any of these women shouting in this city square daughters of a god? Could any claim Ares as their father?

What’s more, Helen was sure Theano would have pointed out to the suddenly quieting crowd, the Greeks had not battled for almost ten years, equaling and sometimes besting such heroes as Hector, to submit this day to untrained female rabble. Unless you’ve secretly learned how to handle horses, manhandle chariots, cast spears half a league, deflect violent sword thrusts with your shield, and are prepared to separate men’s screaming heads from their sturdy bodies, go home—Theano would have said all this, Helen was sure—trade in your borrowed spears for spindles and let your men protect you and decide the outcome of their men’s war. And the mob would have dispersed.

But Theano was not there. Theano was—in Helen’s sensitive phrase—as dead as Prince Paris’s pizzle.

So the mobs of half-armored women marched out to war, heading for the Hole, going to the foothills of Olympos, sure they would slay Achilles even before the Amazon Penthesilea awoke from her beauty nap. Hippodamia rushed late through the Scaean Gates, her borrowed armor askew—it looked to be from some previous age, as from the time of the War with the Centaurs—its bronze breastplates poorly tied and clattering and banging against her large bosoms. The mob-arouser had lost control of her mob. Like all politicians, she was rushing—and failing—to get ahead of the parade.

Helen and Andromache and Cassandra—with the killer-slave Hypsipyle already watching the red-eyed prophetess—had kissed goodbye and Helen had gone her way, knowing that Priam wanted to settle her marriage-date with gross Deiphobus before this day was out.

But on her way back to the palace she had shared with Paris, Helen stepped away from the mobs and went into Athena’s Temple. The place was empty of course—these days few openly worshiped the goddess who had reportedly killed Astyanax and plunged the world of mortals into war with the Olympians—and Helen paused to step into the dark and incense-rich space, breathing in the calm, and to look up at the huge golden statue of the goddess.

“Helen.”

For an instant, Helen of Troy was sure the goddess had spoken in her former husband’s voice. Then she slowly turned.

“Helen.”

Menelaus was there not ten feet from her, his legs wide, sandals firmly planted on the dark marble floor. Even by only the flickering of the vestal votive candles, Helen could see his red beard, his glowering aspect, the sword in his right hand, and a boar-tusk helmet held loose in his left hand.

“Helen.”

It was as if this was all the cuckolded king and warrior could say now that his moment of vengeance was at hand.

Helen considered running and knew it would do no good. She could never get past Menelaus to the street, and her husband had always been one of the fleetest runners in all Lacedaemon. They had always joked that when they had a son, he would be too fast for either of them to catch for a spanking. They had never had a son.

“Helen.”

Helen had thought she’d heard every sort of male groan—from orgasm to death and everything in between—but she’d never heard such a surrender to pain from a man before. Certainly not sobbed out in one familiar but totally alien word like this.

“Helen.”

Menelaus walked quickly forward, raising his sword as he came.

Helen made no move to run. In the full light of the candles and the golden goddess glow, she went to her knees, looked up at her rightful husband, lowered her eyes, and pulled her gown down, baring her breasts, waiting for the blade.

13

“To answer your last question,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che, “we have to go to Earth because it appears that the center of all this quantum activity originates on or near the Earth.”

“Mahnmut told me shortly after I met him that you’d sent him and Orphu to Mars precisely because Mars—Olympus Mons in particular—was the source of all this… quantum?… activity,” said Hockenberry.

“That was what we believed when we tapped into the Olympians’ QT ability to transit these Holes, coming from the Belt and Jupiter space into Mars and the Earth of Ilium’s day. But our technology now suggests that Earth is the source and center of this activity, Mars the recipient… or target, perhaps would be the better word.”

“Your technology has changed so much in eight months?” said Hockenberry.

“We’ve easily tripled our knowledge of unified quantum theory since we piggybacked in on the Olympians’ quantum tunnels,” said Cho Li. The Callistan seemed to be the expert on technical things. “Most of what we know about quantum gravity, for instance, we’ve learned in the last eight standard months.”

“And what have you learned?” asked Hockenberry. He didn’t expect to understand the science, but he was suspicious of the moravecs for the first time.

Retrograde Sinopessen, the transformer with spider legs, answered in his incongruous rumble. “Everything we’ve learned is terrifying. Absolutely terrifying.”

That word Hockenberry understood. “Because the quantum whatsis is unstable? Mahnmut and Orphu told me that you knew that before you sent them to Mars. Is it worse than you thought?”

“Not just that factor,” said Asteague/Che, “but our growing understanding of how the force or forces behind the so-called gods are using this quantum-field energy.”

Force or forces behind the gods. Hockenberry noted that but did not pursue it at that moment. “How are they using it?” he asked.

“The Olympians actually use ripples—folds—in the quantum field to fly their chariots,” said the Ganymedan, Suma IV. The tall creature’s multifaceted eyes caught the light in a prism of reflections.

“Is that bad?”

“Only in the sense that it would be if you used a thermonuclear weapon to power a lightbulb in your home,” said Cho Li in his/her soft tones. “The energies being tapped into are almost immeasurable.”

“Then why haven’t the gods won this war?” asked Hockenberry. “It seems that your technology has sort of stalemated them… even Zeus’s aegis.”

Beh bin Adee, the rockvec commander, answered. “The gods use only the slightest fraction of the quantum energy in play on and around Mars and Ilium. We don’t believe they understand the technology behind their power. It’s been… loaned to them.”

“By whom?” Hockenberry was suddenly very thirsty. He wondered if the moravecs had included any human-style food or drink in their pressurized bubble.

“That’s what we’re going to Earth to find out,” said Asteague/Che.

“Why use a spaceship?” said Hockenberry.

“Pardon me?” asked Cho Li in soft tones. “How else could we travel between worlds?”

“The same way you got to Mars in your invasion,” said Hockenberry. “Use one of the Holes.”

Asteague/Che shook his head in a manner similar to Mahnmut’s. “There are no quantum-tunnel Brane Holes between Mars and Earth.”

“But you created your own Holes to come from Jupiter space and the Belt, right?” said Hockenberry. His head hurt. “Why not do that again?”

Cho Li answered. “Mahnmut succeeded in placing our transponder precisely at the quincunx locus of the quantum flux on Olympos. We have no one on Earth or in near-Earth orbit to do that for us now. That is one of the goals of our mission. We’ll be bringing a similar, although updated, transponder with us on the ship.”

Hockenberry nodded, but wasn’t quite sure of what he was nodding in agreement to. He was trying to remember the definition of “quincunx.” Was it a rectangle with a fifth point in the middle? Or something to do with leaves or petals? He knew it had to do with the number five.

Asteague/Che leaned closer over the table. “Dr. Hockenberry, may I give you a hint of why this frivolous use of quantum energy terrifies us?”

“Please.” Such manners, thought Hockenberry, who had been around Trojan and Greek heroes too long.

“Have you noticed anything about the gravity on Olympos and the rest of Mars during your more than nine years shuttling between there and Ilium, Doctor?”

“Well… yeah, sure … I always felt a little lighter on Olympos. Even before I realized it was Mars, which was only after you guys showed up. So? That’s right, isn’t it? Doesn’t Mars have less gravity than Earth?”

“Very much less,” piped in Cho Li… and her voice did sound a lot like pipes to Hockenberry’s ear. Pan’s pipes. “It’s approximately three seventy-two kilometers per second per second.”

“Translate,” said Hockenberry.

“It’s thirty-eight percent of Earth’s gravitational field,” said Retrograde Sinopessen. “And you were moving—quantum teleporting, actu-ally—between Earth’s full gravity and Olympos’ every day. Did you notice a sixty-two percent difference in gravity, Dr. Hockenberry.”

“Please, everyone, call me Thomas,” Hockenberry said while distracted. Sixty-two percent difference? I’d almost be floating like a balloon on Mars… jumping twenty yards at a leap. Nonsense.

“You didn’t observe this gravitational difference,” said Asteague/Che, not framing it as a question.

“Not really,” agreed Hockenberry. It was always a little easier walking after the return to Olympos after a long day observing the Trojan War—and not just on the mountain, but in the scholics barracks at the base of the huge massif. A little easier—a little lighter in the walking and carrying loads—but sixty-two percent difference? No way in hell. “There was a difference,” he added, “but not such a profound one.”

“You didn’t notice a profound difference, Dr. Hockenberry, because the gravity of the Mars you have been living on for the past ten years—and which we have been fighting on for the past eight Earth-standard months—is ninety-three point eight-two-one percent Earth normal.”

Hockenberry thought about this for a moment. “So?” he said at last. “The gods tweaked the gravity while they were adding the air and oceans. They are, after all, gods.”

“They’re something,” agreed Asteague/Che, “but not what they appear.”

“Is changing the gravity of a planet such a big deal?” asked Hockenberry.

There was a silence, and while Hockenberry did not see any of the moravecs turn their heads or eyes or whatever to look at any of the other moravecs, he had the sense that they were all busy communing on some radio band or the other. How to explain to this idiot human?

Finally Suma IV, the tall Ganymedan, said, “It is a very big deal.”

“Bigger even than the terraforming of a world like the original Mars in less than a century and a half,” piped in Cho Li. “Which is impossible.”

“Gravity equals mass,” said Retrograde Sinopessen.

“It does?” said Hockenberry, hearing how stupid he sounded but not caring. “I always thought it was what held things down.”

“Gravity is an effect of mass on space/time,” continued the silver spider. “The current Mars is three point nine-six times the density of water. The original Mars—the pre-terraformed world we observed not much more than a century ago—was three point nine-four times the density of water.”

“That doesn’t sound like too much of a change,” said Hockenberry.

“It is not,” agreed Asteague/Che. “It in no way accounts for an increase in gravitation attraction of almost fifty-six percent.”

“Gravity is also an acceleration,” Cho Li said in her musical tones.

Now they’d lost Hockenberry completely. He’d come here to learn about the upcoming visit to Earth and to hear why they wanted him to join them, not to be lectured like a particularly slow eighth grade science student.

“So they—someone, not the gods—changed Mars’ gravity,” he said. “And you think it’s a very big deal.”

“It is a very big deal, Dr. Hockenberry,” said Asteague/Che. “Whoever and whatever manipulated Mars’ gravity this way is a master of quantum gravity. The Holes… as they’ve come to be called… are quantum tunnels that also bend and manipulate gravity.”

“Wormholes,” said Hockenberry. “I know about them.” From Star Trek, he thought but did not say. “Black holes,” he added. Then, “And white holes.” He’d just exhausted his entire vocabulary on this subject. Even nonscience types like old Dr. Hockenberry at the end of the Twentieth Century had known that the universe was full of wormholes connecting distant places in this galaxy and others, and that to go through a wormhole, you went through a black hole and came out a white hole. Or maybe vice versa.

Asteague/Che shook his head in that Mahnmut way. “Not wormholes. Brane Holes … as in membrane. It looks like the post-humans in Earth orbit used black holes to create very temporary wormholes, but the Brane Holes—and there is only one left connecting Mars and Ilium, you must remember; the others have lost stability and decayed away—are not wormholes.”

“You’d be dead if you tried to go through a wormhole or a black hole,” said Cho Li.

“Spaghettified,” said General Beh bin Adee. The rockvec sounded as if he enjoyed the concept of spaghettification.

“Being spaghettified …” began Retrograde Sinopessen.

“I get the idea,” said Hockenberry. “So this use of quantum gravity and these quantum Brane Holes makes the adversary much scarier even than you’d feared.”

“Yes,” said Asteague/Che.

“And you’re taking this big spaceship to Earth to find out who or what created these Holes, terraformed Mars, and probably created the gods as well.”

“Yes.”

“And you want me along.”

“Yes.”

“Why?” said Hockenberry. “What possible contribution could I make to …” He paused and touched the lump under his tunic, the heavy circle against his chest. “The QT medallion.”

“Yes,” said Asteague/Che.

“Back when you guys first arrived, I loaned the medallion to you for six days. I was afraid you’d never give it back. You did tests on me as well… blood, DNA, the whole nine yards. I would have guessed that you’d replicated a thousand QT medallions by now.”

“If we were able to replicate a dozen… half a dozen… one more,” growled General Beh bin Adee, “the war with the gods would be over, Olympos occupied.”

“It’s not possible for us to build a duplicate QT device,” said Cho Li.

“Why?” Hockenberry’s headache was killing him.

“The QT medallion was customized to your mind and body,” Asteague/Che said in his mellifluous James Mason way. “Your mind and body were… customized… to work with the QT medallion.”

Hockenberry thought about this. Finally he shook his head and touched the heavy medallion under his tunic again. “That doesn’t make any sense. This thing wasn’t standard issue, you know. We scholics had to go to prearranged places to get back to Olympos—the gods QT’d us back. It was sort of a beam-me-up-Scotty thing, if you understand what I mean, which you can’t.”

“Yes, we understand perfectly,” said the Lionel transformer box on its millimeter-thin silver-spider legs. “I love that program. I have all the episodes recorded. Especially the first series… I’ve always wondered if there was some sort of hidden physical-romantic liaison between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.”

Hockenberry started to reply, stopped. “Look,” he said at last, “the goddess Aphrodite gave me this QT medallion so that I could spy on Athena, whom she wanted to kill. But that was more than nine years after I started work as a scholic, shuttling between Olympos and Ilium. How could my body have been ‘customized’ to work with the medallion when nobody could have known that …” He stopped. A hint of nausea was creeping in under the headache. He wondered if the air was good in this blue bubble.

“You were originally… reconstructed… to work with the QT medallion,” said Asteague/Che. “Just as the gods were designed to QT on their own. Of this we are sure. Perhaps the answer to why lies back on Earth or in Earth orbit in one of the hundreds of thousands of post-human orbital devices and cities there.”

Hockenberry sat back in his chair. He’d noticed when they sat down at the table that his stool had been the only one with a back on it. The moravecs were very considerate that way.

“You want me along on the expedition,” he said, “so that I could QT back here if things go wrong. I’m like one of those emergency buoys that nuclear submarines used to carry in my time on Earth. They only launched it when they knew they were screwed.”

“Yes,” said Asteague/Che. “This is precisely the reason we want you along on the voyage.”

Hockenberry blinked. “Well, you’re honest… I’ll give you that. What are the goals of this expedition?”

“Goal One—to find the source of the quantum energy,” said Cho Li. “And to shut it off if possible. It threatens the entire solar system.”

“Goal Two—to make contact with any surviving humans or post-humans on or around the planet to interrogate them as to the motives behind this gods-Ilium connection and the dangerous quantum manipulation surrounding it,” said the gray-oily Ganymedan, Suma IV.

“Goal Three—to map the existing and any additional hidden quantum tunnels—Brane Holes—and to see if they can be harnessed for interplanetary or interstellar travel,” said Retrograde Sinopessen.

“Goal Four—to find the alien entities who entered our solar system fourteen hundred years ago, the real gods behind these midget Olympian gods, as it were, and to reason with them,” said General Beh bin Abee. “And if reason fails, to destroy them.”

“Goal Five,” Asteague/Che said softly in his slow British drawl, “to return all of our moravec and human crewmen to Mars… alive and functioning.”

“I like that goal, at least,” said Hockenberry. His heart was pounding and the headache had become the kind of migraine he’d had when in graduate school, during the unhappiest period of his previous life. He stood.

The five moravecs quickly stood.

“How long do I have to decide?” asked Hockenberry. “Because if you’re leaving in the next hour, I’m not going. I want to think about this.”

“The ship won’t be ready and provisioned for forty-eight hours,” said Asteague/Che. “Would you like to wait here while you think it over? We’ve prepared a suitable habitation for you in a quiet part of the…”

“I want to go back to Ilium,” said Hockenberry. “I’ll be able to think better there.”

Asteague/Che said, “We’ll prepare your hornet for immediate departure. But I’m afraid it’s getting rather hectic there today according to the updates I’m receiving from our various monitors.”

“Isn’t that the way?” said Hockenberry. “I leave for a few hours and miss all the good stuff.”

“You may find evolving events at Ilium and on Olympos too interesting to leave behind, Dr. Hockenberry,” said Retrograde Sinopessen. “I would certainly undersand an Iliad scholar’s commitment to remaining and observing.”

Hockenberry sighed and shook his aching head. “Wherever we are in what’s going on at Ilium and Olympos,” he said, “it’s way the hell outside the Iliad. Most of the time, I’m at as much of a loss as that poor woman Cassandra.”

A hornet came through the curving wall of the blue bubble, hovered over them, and set down silently. The ramp curled down. Mahnmut stood in the doorway.

Hockenberry nodded formally toward the moravec delegation, said, “I’ll let you know before the forty-eight hours are up,” and walked toward the ramp.

“Dr. Hockenberry?” said the James Mason voice behind him.

Hockenberry turned.

“We want to take one Greek or Trojan with us on this expedition,” said Asteague/Che. “Your recommendation would be appreciated.”

“Why?” said Hockenberry. “I mean, why take along someone from the Bronze Age. Someone who lived and died six thousand years before the time of the Earth you’re visiting?”

“We have our reasons,” said the Prime Integrator. “Just off the top of your mind, who would you nominate for the trip?”

Helen of Troy, thought Hockenberry. Give us the honeymoon suite on the trip to Earth and this could be one hell of an enjoyable expedition. He tried to imagine sex with Helen in zero-g. His headache stopped him from succeeding.

“Do you want a warrior?” asked Hockenberry. “A hero?”

“Not necessarily,” said General Beh bin Adee. “We’re bringing one hundred warriors of our own. Just someone from the Trojan War era who might be an asset.”

Helen of Troy, he thought again. She has a great… He shook his head. “Achilles would be the obvious choice,” he said aloud. “He’s invulnerable, you know.”

“We know,” Cho Li said softly. “We covertly analyzed him and know why he is, as you say, invulnerable.”

“It’s because his mother, the goddess Thetis, dipped him in the River …” began Hockenberry.

“Actually,” interrupted Retrograde Sinopessen, “it is because someone… some thing … has warped the quantum-probability matrix around Mr. Achilles to a quite improbable extent.”

“All right,” said Hockenberry, not understanding a word of that sentence. “So do you want Achilles?”

“I don’t believe Achilles would agree to go with us, do you, Dr. Hockenberry?” said Asteague/Che.

“Ah… no. Could you make him go?”

“I believe it would be a riskier proposition than all the rest of the dangers involved in the visit to the third planet combined,” rumbled General Beh bin Adee.

A sense of humor from a rockvec? thought Hockenberry. “If not Achilles,” he said, “who then?”

“We were wondering if you would suggest someone. Someone courageous but intelligent. An explorer, but sensible. Someone we could communicate with. A flexible personality, you might say.”

“Odysseus,” said Hockenberry with no hesitation. “You want Odysseus.”

“Do you think he would agree to go?” asked Retrograde Sinopessen.

Hockenberry took a breath. “If you tell him that Penelope is waiting for him at the other end, he’ll go to hell and back with you.”

“We cannot lie to him,” said Asteague/Che.

“I can,” said Hockenberry. “I’d be glad to. Whether I go with you or not, I’ll be your intermediary in conning Odysseus into joining you.”

“We would appreciate that,” said Asteague/Che. “We look forward to hearing your own decision on joining us within the next forty-eight hours.” The Europan held out his arm and Hockenberry realized that there was a fairly humanoid hand on the end of it.

He shook the hand and got into the hornet behind Mahnmut. The ramp came up. The invisible chair grabbed him. They left the bubble.

14

Impatient, furious, pacing in front of his thousand best Myrmidons along the coastline at the base of Olympos, waiting for the gods to send down their champion for the day so that he could kill him, Achilles remembers the first month of the war—a time all Trojans and Argives still called “the Wrath of Achilles.”

They had QT’d down from the Olympian heights in legions then, these gods, confident in their forcefields and blood-machines, ready to leap into Slow Time and escape any mortal wrath, not knowing that the little moravec clock-people, new allies to Achilles, had their own formulas and enchantments to counter such god-tricks.

Ares, Hades, and Hermes had leaped first, clicking into the Achaean and Trojan ranks while the sky exploded. Flame followed forcelines until both Olympos and the mortal ranks became domes and spires and shimmering waves of flame. The sea boiled. The Little Green Men scattered for their feluccas. Zeus’s aegis shuddered and grew visible as it absorbed megatons of moravec assault.

Achilles had eyes only for Ares and his newly QT’d cohorts, Hades, red-eyed in his black bronze, and black-eyed Hermes in his barbed red-armor.

“Teach the mortals death!” screamed Ares, god of war, twelve feet tall, shimmering, attacking the Argive ranks at a run. Hades and Hermes followed. All three cast god-spears that could not miss their mark.

They missed their mark. Achilles’ fate was not to die that day. Or any day by the hands of an immortal.

One immortal’s spear grazed the fleet-footed mankiller’s strong right arm but drew no blood. Another embedded itself in his beautiful shield, but the god-forged layer of polarized gold blocked it. A third glanced from Achilles’ golden helmet without making a mark.

The three gods fired energy blasts from their god-palms. Achilles’ own nano-bred fields shed the millions of volts the way a dog shakes off water.

Ares and Achilles crashed together like mountains colliding. The quake threw hundreds of Trojans and Greeks and gods off their feet even as the battle lines joined. Ares was the first to fall back. He raised his red sword and swung a decapitating blow at the upstart mortal, Achilles.

Achilles ducked the blade and ran the war god through, scooping a slice through divine armor and gut until Ares’ belly opened, golden ichor covered mortal and immortal alike, and the war god’s divine bowels spilled out on the red Martian gorse. Too surprised to fall, too outraged to die, Ares stared at his own insides still unraveling and uncoiling onto the dirt.

Achilles reached high, grabbed Ares by his helmet and jerked him down and forward until his human spittle splattered the god’s perfect features. “You taste death, you gutless effigy!” Then, working like a marketplace butcher at the beginning of a long day’s labor, he lopped off Ares’ hands at the wrists, then his legs above the knee, and then his arms.

Screaming black whirling around the corpse, other gods gaping, Ares’ head continued to scream even after Achilles cut it off at the neck.

Hermes, horrified but also ambidextrous and deadly, raised his second spear.

Achilles leaped forward so quickly that everyone assumed he had teleported. Grabbing the second god’s spear, he jerked it toward him. Hermes tried to pull it back. Hades swung his black sword at Achilles’ knees but the mankiller leaped high, avoiding the blur of dark carbon-steel.

Losing the tug of war for his spear, Hermes leaped back and tried to QT away.

The moravecs had cast their field around them. No one would be quantum teleporting out or in until this fight was finished.

Hermes pulled his sword, a curved and wicked thing. Achilles cut off the giant-killer’s arm at the elbow, and the sword arm and the still-grasping hand fell to Mars’ rich, red soil.

“Mercy!” cried Hermes, throwing himself to his knees and embracing Achilles’ around the waist. “Mercy, I beg you!”

“There is none,” said Achilles and then hacked the god into as many quivering, gold-bleeding bits.

Hades backed away from the slaughter, his red eyes filled with fear. More gods were flicking into the human-set trap by the hundreds, and Hector and his Trojan captains and Achilles’ Mymidons and all the heroes of the Greeks were engaging them, the moravec forcefields not allowing the gods to QT away once they arrived. For the first time in the memory of anyone on the field, gods and heroes, demigods and mortals, legends and infantry grunts, all fought on something not unlike equal terms.

Hades shifted into Slow Time.

The world stopped turning. The air thickened. The waves froze in their curl against the rocky shore. Birds halted and hung in midflight. Hades panted and retched in relief. No mortal could follow him here.

Achilles shifted into Slow Time after him.

“This… is… not… possible,” the ruler of the dead said through the syrup-slow air.

“Die, Death,” shouted Achilles and drove his father Peleus’ spear through the god’s throat, just below where the black cheek-guards curved up again toward Hades’ skull-like cheekbones. Golden ichor spurted in slow motion.

Achilles shoved aside Hades’ black-ornamented shield and put his blade through the death god’s belly and spine. Dying, Hades still returned the thrust with a blow that could have split a mountainside. The black blade slid off Achilles’ chest as if it had not touched him. It was not Achilles’ fate to die that day, and never by the hands of an immortal. Hades’ fate was to die that day—however temporarily by human standards. He fell heavily and blackness swirled around him as he disappeared within an onyx cyclone.

Manipulating new nanotechnology without conscious effort, playing havoc with already-battered quantum fields of probability, Achilles flicked back out of Slow Time to rejoin the battle. Zeus had left the field. The other gods were fleeing, forgetting, in their panic, to raise the aegis behind them. More moravec magic, injected that very morning, allowed Achilles to push through their lesser energy fields and give pursuit up the cliffs of Olympos onto the lower ramparts.

Then his slaughter of gods and goddesses began in earnest.

But all this was in the early days of the war. Today—this day after Paris’s funeral—no gods are coming down to fight.

So, with his ally Hector gone and the Trojans quiescent on their part of the front today, Hector’s lesser-brother Aeneas in charge of the thousands of Trojans there, Achilles is meeting with his Achaean captains and moravec artillery experts to plan an imminent attack on Olympos.

The attack will be simple: while moravec energy and nuclear weapons activate the aegis on the lower slopes, Achilles and five hundred of his best captains and Achaeans in thirty transport hornets will punch through a lesser section of the energy shield almost a thousand leagues around the back of Olympos, make a dash for the summit, and carry the torch to the gods in their homes. For those Achaeans who are wounded or lose their nerve fighting in the very citadel of Zeus and the gods, the hornets will lift them out after the element of surprise fades.

Achilles plans to stay until the top of Mount Olympos has been turned into a charnel house and all its white temples and god-dwellings are blackened rubble. After all, he thinks, Herakles once pulled down the walls of Ilium all by himself when angered and took the city single-handedly—why should the halls of Olympos be sacrosanct?

All morning, Achilles has expected Agamemnon and his simpler sibling, Menelaus, to show up, leading a mob of their loyal men to try to take back control of the Achaean forces and to push the war backward into mortal-versus-mortal, befriending the murderous, treacherous gods again, but so far that dog-eyed, deer-hearted former commander in chief has not shown his face. Achilles has decided that he will kill him when he does attempt the revolt. Him and his red-bearded stripling Menelaus and anyone and everyone who follows the two Atrides. The news of the home cities being emptied of all life is—Achilles is sure—merely a ruse by Agamemnon to incite the restless and cowardly Achaeans to revolt.

So when moravec Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo, the barbed rockvec in charge of the artillery and energy bombardment, looks up from the map they are studying under the silk of a lean-to shelter and announces that his binocular vision has picked up an odd-looking army coming through the Hole from the direction of Ilium, Achilles is not surprised.

But a few minutes later he is surprised as Odysseus—the most sharp-eyed among their command group huddled under the flapping canopy—says, “They’re women. Trojan women.”

“Amazons, you mean?” says Achilles, stepping out into the Olympos sunshine. Antilochus, son of Nestor, Achilles’ old friend from countless campaigns, had ridden his chariot into camp here an hour earlier, telling everyone of the arrival of the thirteen Amazons and Penthesilea’s vow to kill Achilles in single combat. The fleet-footed mankiller had laughed easily, showing his perfect teeth. He had not fought and defeated ten thousand Trojans and scores of gods to be frightened by a woman’s bluster.

Odysseus shakes his head. “There must be two hundred of these women, all dressed out in ill-fitting armor, son of Peleus. No Amazons these. They are too fat, too short, too old, some almost lame.”

“Every day,” grumbles dour Diomedes, son of Tydeus, lord of Argos, “it seems we descend into another level of madness.”

Teucer, the bastard master-archer and Big Ajax’s half brother, says, “Shall I advance the camp pickets, noble Achilles? Have them intercept these women, whatever the folly of their mission here, and frog-march them back to their looms?”

“No,” says Achilles. “Let’s go out and meet them, see what brings the first women to venture through the Hole to Olympos and an Achaean camp.”

“Perhaps they’re looking for Aeneas and their Trojan husbands leagues to our left,” says Big Ajax, son of Telamon, leader of the Salamis army supporting the Myrmidons’ left flank this Martian morning.

“Perhaps.” Achilles sounds amused and mildly irritated, but not convinced. He walks out into the weaker Olympian sunlight, leading the group of Achaean kings, captains, subcaptains, and their most loyal fighting men.

It is indeed a rabble of Trojan women. When they are within a hundred yards, Achilles stops with his contingent of fifty or so heroes, and waits for the clanking band of shouting women to come on. It sounds like a gaggle of geese to the fleet-footed mankiller.

“Do you see any high-born among the women?” Achilles asks sharp-eyed Odysseus as they stand waiting for the rattling horde to cross the last hundred yards of red-gorse soil that separates them. “Any wives or daughters of heroes? Andromache or Helen or wild-eyed Cassandra or Medesicaste or venerable Castianira?”

“None of those,” Odysseus responds quickly. “No one of worth, either born to or married into. I recognize only Hippodamia—the big one with the spear and the ancient long shield, like that which Great Ajax chooses to carry—and her only because she visited me in Ithaca once with her husband, the far-traveling Trojan Tisiphonus. Penelope took her for a tour of our gardens, but said later that the woman was as sour as a pre-season pomegranate and would take no pleasure in beauty.”

Achilles, who can see the women clearly enough now, says, “Well, she herself is certainly no beauty to take pleasure in. Philoctetes, go forward, halt them, ask them what they are doing here on the our battleground with the gods.”

“Must I, son of Peleus?” whines the older-archer. “After the libel spread about me yesterday at Paris’s funeral, I hardly think that I should be the one…”

Achilles turns and silences the man with an admonishing glance.

“I’ll go with you to hold your hand,” rumbles Big Ajax. “Teucer, come with us. Two archers and a master spearman should answer for this prickless rabble, even if they turn uglier than they already are.”

The three men walk forward from Achilles’ contingent.

What happens next happens very quickly.

Philoctetes, Teucer, and Big Ajax stop some twenty paces from the obviously winded and gasping, loose-formed lines of armored women, and the former commander of the Thessalians and former castaway steps forward, holding Herakles’ fabled bow in his left hand while he holds his right palm up in peace.

One of the younger women to the right of Hippodamia casts her spear. Incredibly, astonishingly, it catches Philoctetes—ten-year survivor of poison snakebite and the ire of the gods—full in the chest, just above his light archer’s armor, and passes clean through, severing his spine and dropping him lifeless to the red soil.

“Kill the bitch!” screams Achilles, outraged, running forward and pulling his sword from its scabbard.

Teucer, under fire now from wild-cast women’s spears and a hail of ill-aimed arrows, needs no such prompting. Faster than most mortal eyes can follow, he notches an arrow, goes to full pull, and sets a yard-long shaft through the throat of the woman who has cut Philoctetes down.

Hippodamia and twenty or thirty women close with Big Ajax, thrusting spears tentatively and trying to swing their husbands’ or fathers’ or sons’ massive swords in awkward two-handed blows.

Ajax, son of Telamon, looks back at Achilles for just an instant, giving the other men a glance of something like amusement, and then he pulls his long blade, slams Hippodamia’s sword and shield aside with an easy shrug, and lops off the woman’s head as if he were cutting weeds in his yard. The other women, maddened beyond fear now, rush at the two standing men. Teucer puts arrow after arrow into their eyes, thighs, flopping breasts, and—within a few seconds—fleeing backs. Big Ajax finishes the rest who are foolish enough to linger, wading through them like a tall man among children, leaving corpses in his wake.

By the time Achilles, Odysseus, Diomedes, Nestor, Chromius, Little Ajax, Antilochus, and the others arrive, forty or so women are dead or dying, a few screaming their death agonies on the red-soaked red soil, and the rest are fleeing back toward the Hole.

“What in Hades’ name was that all about?” gasps Odysseus as he comes up to Big Ajax and steps among the bodies thrown down in all the graceful and graceless—but all too familiar to Odysseus—attitudes of violent death.

The son of Telamon grins. His face is spattered and his armor and sword run red with Trojan-women blood. “That’s not the first time I’ve killed women,” says the mortal giant, “but by the gods, it was the most satisfying!”

Calchas, son of Thestor and their most able soothsayer, hobbles up from behind. “This is not good. This is bad. This is not good at all.”

“Shut up,” says Achilles. He shields his eyes and looks toward the Hole where the last of the women are disappearing, only to be replaced by a small group of larger figures. “What now?” says the son of Peleus and the goddess Thetis. “Those look like centaurs. Has my old friend and tutor Chiron come to join our effort?”

“Not centaurs,” says sharp-eyed, keen-witted Odysseus. “More women. On horseback.”

“Horseback?” says Nestor, his old eyes squinting to see. “Not in chariots?”

“Riding horses like the fabled cavalries of ancient days,” says Diomedes, who sees them now. No one rides horses in these modern days, using them only to pull chariots—although both Odysseus and Diomedes himself escaped a Trojan camp on a midnight raid some months earlier, before the truce, by riding bareback on untethered chariot horses through Hector’s half-awakened army.

“The Amazons,” says Achilles.

15

Athena’s Temple. Menelaus advancing, red-faced, breathing hard—Helen on her knees, pale face lowered, paler breasts bared. He looms over her. He raises his sword. Her pale neck seems thin as a reed, offered. The endlessly sharpened blade will not even pause as it slices through skin, flesh, bone.

Menelaus pauses.

“Do not hesitate, my husband,” whispers Helen, her voice quavering only slightly. Menelaus can see her pulse beating wildly at the base of her heavy, blue-veined left breast. He seizes the hilt in both hands.

He does not yet bring the blade down. “Damn you,” he breathes. “Damn you.”

“Yes,” whispers Helen, face still downcast. The golden idol of Athena looms over them both in the incense-thick darkness.

Menelaus grips the sword hilt with a strangler’s fervor. His arms vibrate with the twin strain of preparing to behead his wife while simultaneously stopping the action.

“Why shouldn’t I kill you, you faithless cunt?” hisses Menelaus.

“No reason, husband. I am a faithless cunt. It and I have both been faithless. Finish it. Carry out your rightful sentence of death.”

“Don’t call me husband, damn you!”

Helen lifts her face. Her dark eyes are precisely the eyes Menelaus has dreamt of for more than ten years. “You are my husband. You always were. My only husband.”

He almost kills her then, so painful are these words. Sweat falls from his brow and cheeks and spatters on her simple robe. “You deserted me—you deserted me and our daughter,” he manages, “for that… that… boy. That popinjay. That pair of spangled leotards with a dick.”

“Yes,” says Helen and lowers her face again. Menelaus sees the small, familiar mole on the back of her neck, right at the base, right where the edge of the blade will strike.

“Why?” manages Menelaus. It is the last thing he will say before he kills her or forgives her… or both.

“I deserve to die,” she whispers. “For sins against you, for sins against our daughter, for sins against our country. But I did not leave our palace in Sparta of my own free will.”

Menelaus grinds his teeth so fiercely that he can hear them cracking.

“You were gone,” whispers Helen, his wife, his tormenter, the bitch who betrayed him, the mother of his child. “You were always gone. Gone with your brother. Hunting. Warring. Whoring. Plundering. You and Agamemnon were the true couple—I was only the breed sow left at home. When Paris, that trickster, that guileful Odysseus without Odysseus’ wisdom, took me by force, I had no husband home to protect me.”

Menelaus breathes through his mouth. The sword seems to be whispering to him like a living thing, demanding the bitch’s blood. So many voices rage in his ears that he can barely hear her soft tones. The memory of her voice has tormented him for four thousand nights; now it drives him beyond madness.

“I am penitent,” she says, “but that cannot matter now. I am suppliant, but that cannot matter now. Shall I tell you of the hundred times in the last ten years that I have lifted a sword or fashioned a noose from rope, only to have my tirewomen and Paris’s spies pull me back, urging me to think of our daughter if not of myself? This abduction and my long captivity here have been Aphrodite’s doing, husband, not my own. But you can free me now with one blow of your familiar blade. Do so, my darling Menelaus. Tell our child that I loved her and love her still. And know yourself that I loved you, and love you still.”

Menelaus screams, drops the blade clattering to the temple floor and falls to his knees next to his wife. He is sobbing like a child.

Helen removes his helmet, puts her hand on the back of his head, and draws his face to her bare breasts. She does not smile. No, she does not smile, nor is she tempted to. She feels the scratch of his short beard and his tears and the heat of his breath on her breasts that have held the weight of Paris, Hockenberry, Deiphobus, and others since Menelaus last touched her. Treacherous cunt, yes, thinks Helen of Troy. So are we all. She does not consider the last minute a victory. She was ready to die. She is very, very tired.

Menelaus gets to his feet. He angrily wipes tears and snot from his red mustache, reaches down for his sword, and slides it back into his strap ring. “Wife, lay aside your fear. What’s done is done—Aphrodite’s and Paris’s evil, not yours. On the marble over there is a temple-virgin’s cloak and veil. Put them on and we’ll leave this doomed city forever.”

Helen rises, touches her husband’s shoulder under the odd lion skin she once saw Diomedes wear while slaying Trojans, and silently dons the white cloak and laced white veil.

Together they go out into the city.

Helen cannot believe she is leaving Ilium like this. After more than ten years, to walk out through the Scaean Gate and put all this behind her forever? What of Cassandra? What of her plans with Andromache and the others? What of her responsibility for the war with the gods she—Helen—has helped start through their machinations? What, even, of poor sad Hockenberry and their little love?

Helen feels her spirits soar like a released temple dove as she realizes that none of these things are her problem anymore. She will sail home to Sparta with her rightful husband—she has missed Menelaus, the… simplicity… of him—and she will see their daughter, grown into a woman now, and will view the last ten years as a bad dream as she ages into the last quarter of her life, her beauty undimmed, of course, thanks to the will of the gods, not hers. She has been reprieved in every way possible.

The two are out in the street, walking as if both still in a dream, when the city bells ring, the great horns on the watchwalls blare, and criers begin to call. All of the city’s alarums are sounding at once.

The shouts sort themselves out. Menelaus stares at her through the gap in his absurd boar-tusk helmet and Helen stares back through the thin slit of her temple-virgin veil and turban. In those seconds, their eyes somehow manage to convey terror, confusion, and even grim amusement at the irony of it all.

The Scaean Gate is closed and barred. The Achaeans are attacking again. The Trojan War has begun anew.

They are trapped.

16

“Could I see the ship?” asked Hockenberry. The hornet had emerged from the blue bubble in Stickney Crater and was climbing toward the red disk of Mars.

“The Earth-ship?” said Mahnmut. At Hockenberry’s nod, he said, “Of course.”

The moravec broadcast commands to the hornet and it came around and circled the Earth-ship gantry, then rose until it docked with a port on the upper reaches of the long, articulated spacecraft.

Hockenberry wants to tour the ship, Mahnmut tightbeamed to Orphu of Io.

There was only a second of background static before—Well, why not? We’re asking him to risk his life on this voyage. Why shouldn’t he see all of the ship? Asteague/Che and the others should have suggested it to him.

“How long is this thing?” Hockenberry asked softly. Through the holographic windows, the ship seemed to drop away beneath them for miles.

“Approximately the height of your Twentieth Century Empire State Building,” said Mahnmut. “But a little rounder and lumpier in places.”

He’s certainly never been in zero-g, sent Mahnmut. Phobos gravity will just disorient him.

The displacement fields are ready, tightbeamed Orphu. I’ll set them to point-eight-g on ship lateral and go to Earth-normal internal pressure. By the time you two get in the forward airlock, everything will be breathable and comfortable for him.

“Isn’t this too large for the mission they were talking about?” said Hockenberry. “Even with hundreds of rockvec soldiers aboard, this seems like overkill.”

“We may want to bring things back with us,” said Mahnmut. Where are you? he sent to Orphu.

I’m on the lower hull now, but I’ll meet you in the Big Piston Room.

“Like rocks? Soil samples?” said Hockenberry. He’d been a young man the week human beings had first set foot on the moon. Memories came back now of him sitting in the backyard of his parents’ house and watching the ghostly black-and-white images from the Sea of Tranquility on a small TV on the picnic table, extension cord running to the summerhouse, while the half-full moon itself was visible above through the leaves of the oak tree.

“Like people,” said Mahnmut. “Perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of people. Hang on, we’re docking.” The moravec silently commanded the holoports off; attaching at right angles more than one thousand feet up the vertical hull of a spacecraft was a view that would give anyone vertigo.

Hockenberry asked little and said less during his tour of the ship. He’d imagined technology beyond his imagining—virtual control panels that disappeared at the flick of a thought, more energy-field chairs, an environment built for zero-g with no sense of up or down—but what he saw felt like some gigantic Nineteenth or early-Twentieth Century steamship. What it felt like, he realized, was a tour of the RMS Titanic.

Controls were physical, made of metal and plastic. Couches were clunky, physical things—enough, it looked like, for a crew of about thirty moravecs—the couch proportions were never really right for humans—along with long storage bins with metal-and-nylon bunks along bulkheads. Entire levels were set aside with high-tech-looking racks and sarcophagi for a thousand rockvec troopers, Mahnmut explained, who would make the trip in a state somewhere above death but below consciousness. Unlike their trip to Mars, the moravec explained, this time they were going armed and ready for battle.

“Suspended animation,” said Hockenberry, who’d not avoided all sci-fi movies. He and his wife had had cable there toward the end.

“Not really,” said Mahnmut. “Sort of.”

There were ladders and broad stairways and elevators and all sorts of anachronistic mechanical devices. There were airlocks and science rooms and weapons’ lockers. The furniture—there was furniture—was large and clunky, as if weight were no problem. There were astrogation bubbles looking out toward the rim walls of Stickney and up toward Mars and down toward the gantry lights and moravec bustle. There were mess halls and cooking galleys and sleeping cubbies and bathrooms, all of which, Mahnmut hurriedly explained, were for human passengers, should they have any coming or going.

“How many human passengers?” asked Hockenberry.

“Up to ten thousand,” said Mahnmut.

Hockenberry whistled. “So is this a sort of Noah’s ark?”

“No,” said the little moravec. “Noah’s boat was three hundred cubits long by fifty cubits wide by thirty cubits tall. That translates to about four hundred fifty feet in length, seventy-five feet in width, and forty-five feet high. Noah’s ark had three decks comprising a volume of about one million four hundred thousand cubic feet and a gross tonnage of thirteen thousand nine hundred and sixty tons. This ship is more than twice that long, half again that width in diameter—although you saw that some sections, like the habitation cylinders and holds, are more bul-bous—and masses more than forty-six thousand tons. Noah’s ark was a rowboat compared to this craft.”

Hockenberry found that he had no response to this news.

Mahnmut led the way into a small steel-cage elevator, and they descended through level after level past the holds, where Mahnmut explained his Europan submersible The Dark Lady would go—and down through what the moravec described as “charge storage magazines.” The word “magazine” had military connotations for Hockenberry, but he assured himself that it couldn’t be that. He saved his questions for later.

They met Orphu of Io in the engine room, which the larger moravec called the Big Piston Room. Hockenberry expressed his pleasure at seeing Orphu with his full complement of legs and sensors—sans real eyes, he understood—and the two talked about Proust and grief for a few minutes before the tour resumed.

“I don’t know,” Hockenberry said at last. “You once described the ship you took in from Jupiter, and it sounded high tech beyond my understanding. Everything I’m looking at here seems… looks like… I don’t know.”

Orphu rumbled loudly. When he spoke, Hockenberry thought, not for the first time, that the huge moravec sounded Falstaffian.

“It probably looks like the engine room of the Titanic to you,” said Orphu.

“Well, yes. Should it?” said Hockenberry, trying not to sound more ignorant of such things than he was. “I mean, your moravec technology must be three thousand years beyond the Titanic. Three thousand years beyond my end-time in the early Twenty-first Century even. Why this… this?”

“Because it’s based largely on mid-Twentieth Century plans,” rumbled Orphu of Io. “Our engineers wanted something fast and dirty that would get us to Earth in the least possible time. In this case, about five weeks.”

“But Mahnmut and you once told me that you zipped in from Jupiter space in days,” said Hockenberry. “And I remember you talked about boron solar sails, fusion engines… a lot of terms I didn’t understand. Are you using those things in this ship?”

“No,” said Mahnmut. “We had the advantage coming in-system of using the energy from Jupiter’s flux tube and a linear accelerator in Jovian orbit—a device our engineers have been working on for more than two centuries. We don’t have those things going for us here in Mars orbit. We had to build this ship from scratch.”

“But why Twentieth Century technology?” asked Hockenberry, looking at the huge pistons and driveshafts gleaming up toward the ceiling sixty or seventy feet overhead in the giant room. It did look like the engine room in the Titanic in that movie, only more so—bigger, more pistons, more gleaming bronze and steel and iron. More levers. More valves. And there were things that looked like giant shock absorbers. And the gauges everywhere looked like they measured steam pressure, not fusion reactors or some such. The air smelled of oil and steel.

“We had the plans,” said Orphu. “We had the raw materials, both brought from asteroids in the Belt and mined right on Phobos and Deimos. We had the pulse units …” He paused.

“What are pulse units?” asked Hockenberry.

Big mouth, sent Mahnmut.

What, do you want me to hide their presence from him? sent Orphu.

Well, yes… at least until we were a few million miles away from here toward Earth, preferably with Hockenberry on board.

He might notice the effect of the pulse units during our departure and get curious, sent Orphu of Io.

“The pulse units are… small fission devices,” Mahnmut said aloud to Hockenberry. “Atomic bombs.”

“Atomic bombs?” said Hockenberry. “Atomic bombs? Aboard this ship? How many?”

“Twenty-nine thousand seven hundred in the charge storage magazines you passed through on the way to the engine room,” said Orphu. “Another three thousand and eight in reserve stored below the engine room here.”

“Thirty-two thousand atomic bombs,” Hockenberry said softly. “I guess you guys are expecting a fight when you get to Earth.”

Mahnmut shook his red and black head. “The pulse units are for propellant. To get us to Earth.”

Hockenberry raised his palms to show his lack of understanding.

“These huge piston things are… well… pistons,” said Orphu. “On the way to Earth, we’ll be kicking a bomb out through a hole in the center of the pusher-plate beneath us about once every second for the first few hours—then once an hour for much of the rest of the flight.”

“For every pulse cycle,” adds Mahnmut, “we eject a charge—you’d just see a puff of steam out in space—we spray oil on the pusher-plate out there to act as an anti-ablative for the plate and the ejection tube muzzle, then the bomb explodes, and there’d be a flash of plasma that slams against the pusher-plate.”

“Wouldn’t that destroy the plate?” said Hockenberry. “And the ship?”

“Not at all,” said Mahnmut. “Your scientists worked all this out in the 1950s. The plasma event slams the pusher-plate forward and drives these huge reciprocating pistons back and forth. Even after just a few hundred explosions behind our butt, the ship will begin to pick up some real speed.”

“These gauges?” said Hockenberry, putting his hand on one that looked like a steam pressure gauge.

“That’s a steam pressure gauge,” said Orphu of Io. “The one next to it is an oil pressure gauge. The one above you there is a voltage regulator. You were right, Dr. Hockenberry… this room would be more quickly understood and manned by an engineer from the Titanic in 1912 than by a NASA engineer from your era.”

“How powerful are the bombs?”

Shall we tell him? sent Mahnmut.

Of course, tightbeamed Orphu. It’s a little late to start lying to our guest now.

“Each propellant charge packs a little more than forty-five kilotons,” said Mahnmut.

“Forty-five kilotons each—twenty-four thousand-some bombs,” muttered Hockenberry. “Are they going to leave a trail of radioactivity between Mars and Earth?”

“They’re fairly clean bombs,” said Orphu. “As fission bombs go.”

“How big are they?” asked Hockenberry. He realized that the engine room must be hotter than the rest of the ship. There was sweat beaded on his chin, upper lip, and brow.

“Come up a level,” said Mahnmut, leading the way to a spiral stairway broad enough for Orphu to repellor up the wide steps with them. “We’ll show you.”

Hockenberry guessed the room to be about a hundred and fifty feet in diameter and half that tall. It was almost completely filled with racks and conveyor belts and metal levels and ratcheting chains and chutes. Mahnmut pushed an oversized red button and the conveyor belts and chains and sorting devices began whirring and moving, shunting along hundreds or thousands of small silver containers that looked to Hockenberry like nothing so much as unlabeled Coke cans.

“It looks like the inside of a Coca-Cola dispenser,” said Hockenberry, trying to lighten the sense of doom he was feeling with a bad joke.

“It is from the Coca-Cola company, circa 1959,” rumbled Orphu of Io. “The designs and schematics were from one of their bottling plants in Atlanta, Georgia.”

“You put in a quarter and it dispenses a Coke,” managed Hockenberry. “Only instead of a Coke, it’s a forty-five-kiloton bomb set to explode right behind the tail of the ship. Thousands of them.”

“Correct,” said Mahnmut.

“Not quite,” said Orphu of Io. “Remember, this is a 1959 design. You only have to put in a dime.”

The Ionian rumbled until the silver cans in the moving conveyor belt rattled in their metal rings.

Back in the hornet, just Mahnmut and him, climbing toward the widening disk of Mars, Hockenberry said, “I forgot to ask… does it have a name? The ship?”

“Yes,” said Mahnmut. “Some of us thought it needed a name. We were first considering Orion …”

“Why Orion?” said Hockenberry. He was watching the rear window where Phobos and Stickney Crater and the huge ship were fast disappearing.

“That was the name your mid-Twentieth Century scientists gave the ship and the bomb-propellant project,” said the little moravec. “But in the end, the prime integrators in charge of the Earth voyage accepted the name that Orphu and I finally suggested.”

“What’s that?” Hockenberry settled deeper into his forcefield chair as they began to roar and sizzle into Mars’ atmosphere.

“Queen Mab,” said Mahnmut.

“From Romeo and Juliet,” said Hockenberry. “That must have been your suggestion. You’re the Shakespeare fan.”

“Oddly enough, it was Orphu’s,” said Mahnmut. They were in atmosphere now and flying over the Tharsis volcanoes toward Olympus Mons and the Brane Hole to Ilium.

“How does it apply to your ship?”

Mahnmut shook his head. “Orphu never answered that question, but he did cite some of the play to Asteague/Che and the others.”

“Which part?”

… and so on and so forth,” said Mahnmut.

“And so on and so forth,” repeated Dr. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D. Olympus Mons, the gods’ Olympos, was filling all the forward windows. According to Mahmut, the volcano was a mere 69,841 feet above Martian sea level—more than 15,000 feet shorter than people in Hock-enberry’s day had thought, but tall enough.’Twil serve, thought Hockenberry.

And up there, on the summit—the grassy summit—under the glowing aegis now catching the late-morning light—there were living creatures. And not just living creatures, but gods. The gods. Warring, breathing, fighting, scheming, mating creatures, not so unlike the humans Hockenberry had known in his previous life.

At that moment, all the clouds of depression that had been gathering around Hockenberry for months blew away—like the streamers of white cloud he could see blowing south from Olympos itself as the afternoon winds picked up from the northern ocean called the Tethys Sea—and at that moment, Thomas C. Hockenberry, Ph.D. in classics, was simply and purely and totally happy to be alive. Whether he chose to go on this Earth expedition or not, he realized, he would change places right then with no one in any other time or at any other place.

Mahnmut banked the hornet to the east of Mons Olympus and headed for the Brane Hole and Ilium.

17

Hera jumped from outside the exclusion field around Odysseus’ home on Ithaca directly to the summit of Olympos. The grassy slopes and white-columned buildings spreading out from the huge Caldera Lake all gleamed in the lesser light from the more distant sun.

Poseidon, the Earth-Shaker, QT’d into existence nearby. “It is done? The Thunderer sleeps?”

“The Thunderer makes thunder now only through his snores,” said Hera. “On Earth?”

“It is as we planned, Daughter of Kronos. All these weeks of whispering and advising Agamemnon and his captains have come to the moment. Achilles is absent—as always—below us on the red plain, so the son of Atreus is even now raising his angry multitudes against the Myrmidons and other of Achilles’ loyalists who stayed behind in camp. Then straight they march against the walls and open gates of Ilium.”

“And the Trojans?” said Hera.

“Hector still sleeps after his night’s vigil by his brother’s burning bones. Aeneas is below Olympos here, but taking no action against us in Hector’s absence. Deiphobus is still with Priam, discussing the Amazons’ intentions.”

“And Penthesilea?”

“Just within this hour did she awake and gird herself—and so did her twelve companions—for this mortal combat to come. They rode out of the city to cheers only a short time ago and just passed the Brane Hole.”

“Is Pallas Athena with her?”

“I’m here.” Athena, glorious in her golden battle armor, had just QT’d into instant solidity next to Poseidon. “Penthesilea has been sent off to her doom… and Achilles’. The mortals everywhere are in a state of shrill confusion.”

Hera reached out to touch the glorious goddess’s metal-wrapped wrist. “I know this was hard for you, sister-in-arms. Achilles has been your favorite since he was born.”

Pallas shook her bright, helmeted head. “No longer. The mortal lied about me killing and carrying off his friend Patroclus. He lifted his sword against me and all my Olympian kin and kind. He can’t be sent down to the shady halls of Hades too soon for my pleasure.”

“It’s Zeus whom I still fear,” interrupted Poseidon. His battle armor was a deep-sea verdigris, with elaborate loops of waves, fishes, squids, leviathans, and sharks. His helmet bracketed his eyes with the raised fighting pincers of crabs.

“Hephaestus’ potion will keep our dreaded majesty snoring like a pig for seven days and seven nights,” said Hera. “It’s vital that we achieve all of our goals within that time—Achilles dead or exiled, Agamemnon returned as leader of the Argives, Ilium overthrown or at least the ten-year-war resumed beyond hope of peace. Then Zeus will be confronted with facts he cannot change.”

“His wrath will be terrible still,” said Athena.

Hera laughed. “You deign to tell me about the son of Kronos’ wrath? Zeus’s anger makes mighty Achilles’ wrath look like the stone-kicking pouts of a sullen and beardless boy. But leave the Father to me. I will handle Zeus when all our ends are met. Now, we must…”

Before she could finish, other gods and goddesses began winking into existence there on the long lawn in front of the Hall of the Gods on the shore of Caldera Lake. Flying chariots, complete with holograms of their straining steeds pulling them, zoomed in from each point of the compass and landed nearby until the lawn filled up with cars. The gods and goddesses gravitated into three groups: those pressing close to Hera, Athena, Poseidon, and the other champions of the Greeks; those others filling in the ranks behind glowering Apollo—principal champion of the Trojans—Apollo’s sister Artemis, then Ares, his sister Aphrodite, their mother Leto, Demeter, and others who had also long fought for the triumph of Troy; and the third group, who had not yet taken sides. The quantum and chariot-borne convergence continued until there were hundreds of immortals clustered on the long lawn.

“Why is everyone here?” cried Hera, amusement in her voice. “Is there no one guarding the ramparts of Olympos today?”

“Shut up, schemer!” shouted Apollo. “This plot to overthrow Ilium today is yours. And no one can find Lord Zeus to stop it.”

“Oh,” said white-armed Hera, “is the Lord of the Silver Bow so frightened by unseen events that he must run to his father?”

Ares, the war god, fresh from the healing and resurrection vats three times now after his ill-considered combats with Achilles, stepped up next to Phoebus Apollo. “Female,” gritted the tempestuous god of battle, growing to his full fighting height of more than fifteen feet, “we continue to suffer your existence because you’re the incestuous wife of our Lord Zeus. There is no other reason.”

Hera laughed her most calculatingly maddening laugh. “Incestuous wife,” she taunted. “Ironic talk from a god who beds his sister more than any other woman, goddess or mortal.”

Ares lifted his long killing spear. Apollo drew his powerful bow and notched an arrow. Aphrodite unlimbered her smaller but no less deadly bow.

“Would you incite violence against our queen?” asked Athena, stepping between Hera and the bows and spear. Every god on the summit had brought their personal forcefields up to full strength at the sight of the weapons being readied.

“Don’t speak to me of inciting violence!” shouted red-faced Ares at Pallas Athena. “What insolence. Do you remember only months ago when you spurred on Tydeus’ son, Diomedes, to wound me with his lance? Or how you cast your own immortal’s spear at me, wounding me, thinking yourself safely cloaked in your concealing cloud?”

Athena shrugged. “It was on the battlefield. My blood was up.”

“That’s your excuse for trying to kill me, you immortal bitch?” roared Ares. “Your blood was up?”

“Where is Zeus?” demanded Apollo, speaking to Hera.

“I am not my husband’s keeper,” said white-armed Hera. “Although he needs one at times.”

“Where is Zeus?” repeated Apollo, Lord of the Silver Bow.

“Zeus will have nothing to do with the events of men or gods for many days more,” said Hera. “Perhaps he will never return. What happens next in the world below, we on Olympos shall determine.”

Apollo notched the heavy, heat-seeking arrow back, but did not yet lift the bow.

Thetis, sea goddess, Nereid, daughter of Nereus—the true Old Man of the Sea—and Achilles’ immortal mother by the mortal man Peleus, stepped between the two angry groups. She wore no armor, only her elaborate gown sewn to look like patterns of seaweed and shells.

“Sister, brothers, cousins all,” she began, “stop this show of petulance and pride before we harm ourselves and our mortal children, and fatally offend our Almighty Father, who will return—no matter where he is, he will return—carrying the wrath at our defiance on his noble brow and death-dealing lightning in his hands.”

“Oh, shut up,” cried Ares, shifting the long killing spear in his right hand to throwing position. “If you hadn’t dipped your wailing, mortal brat in the sacred river to make him near-immortal, Ilium would have triumphed ten years ago.”

“I dipped no one in the river,” said Thetis, drawing herself up to her full height and folding her slightly scaly arms across her breasts. “My darling Achilles was chosen by the Fates for his great destiny, not by me. When he was newborn—and following the Fates’ imperious advice sent through thoughts alone—I nightly laid the infant in the Celestial Fire itself, purging him, through his own pain and suffering—(but even then, though only a baby, my Achilles did not cry out!)—of his father’s mortal parts. By night I scarred and burned him terribly. By day I healed his scorched and blackened baby flesh with the same ambrosia we use to freshen our own immortal bodies—only this ambrosia was made more effective by the Fates’ secret alchemy. And I would have made my babe immortal, succeeded in insuring Achilles’ pure divinity, had I not been spied on by my husband, the mere human man Peleus, who, seeing our only child twitching and searing and writhing in the flames, seized him by the heel and pulled him free from the Celestial Fire only minutes before my process of deification would have been finished and done with.

“Then, ignoring my objections as all husbands will, the well-meaning but meddling Peleus carried our babe off to Chiron, the wisest and least man-hating of all the centaur race, rearer of many heroes himself, who tended Achilles through childhood, healing him by herbs and salves known only to the centaur savants, then growing him strong by nourishing him with the livers of lions and the marrow of bears.”

“Would that the little bastard had died in the flames,” said Aphrodite.

Thetis lost her mind at that and rushed at the goddess of love, wielding no weapons but the long fishbone-nails at the ends of her fingers.

As calmly as if shooting for a prize during a friendly picnic game, Aphrodite raised her bow and shot an arrow through Thetis’ left breast. The Nereid fell lifeless to the grass and the black pregoddess essence of her whirled around her corpse like a swarm of black bees. No one rushed to claim and capture the body for repair by the Healer in the blue-wormed vats.

“Murderess!” cried a voice from the depths, and Nereus himself—the Old Man of the Sea—rose from the trackless depths of Olympos’ Caldera Lake, the self-same lake he’d banished himself to eight months earlier when his earthly oceans had been invaded by moravecs and men.

“Murderess!” boomed the giant amphibian again, looming fifty feet above the water, his wet beard and braided locks looking like nothing so much as a mass of writhing, slithering eels. He cast a bolt of pure energy at Aphrodite.

The goddess of love was thrown a hundred feet backward across the lawn, her god-blood-generated forcefield saving her from total destruction, but not from flames and bruises as her lovely body smashed through two huge pillars in front of the Hall of the Gods and then through the thick granite wall itself.

Ares, her loving brother, cast his spear through Nereus’ right eye. Roaring so loudly that his pain could be heard in Ilium an infinite distance below, the Old Man of the Sea pulled out both spear and eyeball and disappeared beneath the red-frothed waves.

Phoebus Apollo, realizing that the Final War had begun, raised his bow before Hera or Athena could react and fired two heat-seeking arrows that honed on their hearts. His drawing and firing were faster than even immortal eye could follow.

The arrows—unbreakable titanium both, coated with their own quantum fields to penetrate other forcefields—nonetheless stopped in midflight. And then melted.

Apollo stared.

Athena threw back her helmeted head and laughed. “You’ve forgotten, upstart, that when Zeus is well and truly gone, the aegis is programmed to obey our commands, Hera’s and mine.”

“You started this, Phoebus Apollo,” white-armed Hera said softly. “Now feel the full force of Hera’s curse and Athena’s anger.” She gestured ever so slightly and a boulder weighing at least a half a ton, lying at water’s edge, tore itself loose from Olympos’ soil and hurtled at Apollo at such speeds that it twice broke the sound barrier before striking the archer in the side of his head.

Apollo flew backward with a great crash and clatter of gold and silver and bronze, tumbling head over heel for seven rods in his fall, his tightly curled locks now covered with dust and soiled with lake mud.

Athena turned, cast a war lance, and when it fell some miles across the Caldera Lake, Apollo’s white-columned home there exploded in a mushroom of fire, the million bits of marble and granite and steel rising two miles toward the humming forcefield above the summit.

Demeter, Zeus’s sister, cast a shock wave at Athena and Hera that only folded air and blast around their pulsing aegis, but which lifted Hephaestus a hundred yards into the air and slammed him far across the summit of Olympos. Red-armored Hades answered back with a cone of black fire that obliterated all temples, ground, earth, water, and air in its wake.

The nine Muses screamed and joined Ares’ rallying pack. Lightning leaped down from chariots that QT’d in from nowhere and the shimmering aegis lashed up from Athena. Ganymede, the cup bearer and only nine-tenths immortal, fell in the no-man’s-land and howled as his divine flesh burned away from mortal bones. Eurynome, daughter of Okeanos, cast her lot with Athena but was immediately set upon by a dozen Furies, who flapped and flocked around her like so many huge vampire bats. Eurynome screamed once and was borne away over the battlefield and beyond the burning buildings.

The gods ran for cover or for their chariots. Some QT’d away, but most massed in war groups on one side of the great Caldera or the other. Energy fields flared in red, green, violet, blue, gold, and a myriad of other colors as individuals melded their personal fields into focused fighting shields.

Never in the history of these gods had they fought like this—with no quarter, no mercy, no professional courtesy of the sort one god always gave another, with no assurance of resurrection at the many, many hands of the Healer or hope of the healing vats—and worst of all, with no intervention from Father Zeus. The Thunderer had always been there to restrain them, cajole them, threaten them into something less than a killing rage against their fellow immortals. But not this day.

Poseidon QT’d down to Earth to oversee the Achaean destruction of Troy. Ares rose, trailing bloody golden ichor, and rallied threescore of outraged gods—Zeus loyalists all, Trojan supporters all—to his side. Hephaestus QT’d back from where he had been blasted and spread a poison black fog across the battlefield.

The War between the Gods began that hour and spread to all Olympos and down to Ilium in the hours that followed. By sunset, the summit of Olympos was on fire and parts of the Caldera Lake had boiled away to be replaced by lava.

18

Riding out to meet Achilles, Penthesilea knew without doubt that every year, month, day, hour, and minute of her life up to this second had been nothing more than prelude to today’s sure pinnacle of glory. Everything that had come before, each breath, every bit of training, each victory or loss on the battlefield, had been but preparation. In the coming hours her destiny would be fulfilled. Either she would be triumphant and Achilles dead, or she would be dead and—infinitely worse—cast down in shame and forgotten to the ages.

The Amazon Penthesilea did not plan on being cast down in shame and forgotten to the ages.

When she awoke from her nap in Priam’s palace, Penthesilea had felt strong and happy. She had taken time to bathe, and when she was dressing—standing in front of the polished metal mirror in her guest quarters—she paid attention to her own face and body in a way she rarely if ever did.

Penthesilea knew that she was beautiful as judged by the highest standards of men, women, and gods. She did not care. It simply was not important to her warrior soul. But this day, while unhurriedly donning her cleaned garments and shining armor, she allowed herself to admire her own beauty. After all, she thought, she would be the last thing that fleet-footed mankilling Achilles would ever see.

In her midtwenties, the Amazon had a child-woman’s face and her large green eyes seemed even larger when framed, as they were now, by her short blond curls. Her lips were firm and rarely given to smiling, but they were also full and rosy. The body reflected in the burnished metal was muscled and tanned from hours of swimming, training, and hunting in the sun, but not lean. She had a woman’s full hips and behind, which she noticed with a slight pout of disapproval as she buckled her silver belt around her thin waist. Penthesilea’s breasts were higher and rounder than most women’s, even those of her fellow Amazons, and her nipples were pink rather than brown. She was still a virgin and planned to stay that way for the rest of her life. Let her older sister—she winced at the thought of Hippolyte’s death—be seduced by men’s tricks and carried away to captivity to be used as breeding stock by some hairy man; this would never be Penthesilea’s choice.

As she dressed, Penthesilea removed the magical perfumed balm from a silver, pomegranate-shaped vase and rubbed it above her heart, at the base of her throat, and above the vertical line of golden hair that rose from her sex. Such were the instructions of the goddess Aphrodite, who had appeared to her the day after Pallas Athena had first spoken to her and sent her on this mission. Aphrodite had assured her that this perfume—more powerful than ambrosia—had been formulated by the goddess of love herself to affect Achilles—and only Achilles—driving him into a state of overwhelming lust. Now Penthesilea had two secret weapons—the spear Athena had given her, which could not miss its mark, and Aphrodite’s perfume. Penthesilea’s plan was to deliver Achilles’ death blow while the mankiller stood there overcome with desire.

One of her Amazon comrades, probably her faithful captain Clonia, had polished her queen’s armor before allowing herself to nap, and now the bronze and gold gleamed in the metal mirror. Penthesilea’s weapons were at hand: the bow and quiver of perfectly straight arrows with their red feathers, the sword—shorter than a man’s, but perfectly balanced and just as deadly at close quarters as any man’s blade—and her double-bladed battle-axe, usually an Amazon’s favorite weapon. But not this day.

She hefted the spear Athena had given her. It seemed almost weightless, eager to fly to its target. The long, barbed killing tip was not bronze, nor even iron, but some sharper metal forged on Olympos. Nothing could dull it. No armor could stop it. Its tip, Athena had explained, had been dipped in the deadliest poison known to the gods. One cut in Achilles’ mortal heel and the poison would pump its way to the hero’s heart, dropping him within seconds, sending him down to Hades a few heartbeats after that. The shaft hummed in Penthesilea’s hand. The spear was as eager as she was to pierce Achilles’ flesh and bring him down, filling his eyes and mouth and lungs with the blackness of death.

Athena had whispered to Penthesilea about the source of Achilles’ near-invulnerability—had told her all about Thetis’ attempt to make the baby an immortal, thwarted only by Peleus pulling the infant from the Celestial Fire. Achilles’ heel is mortal, whispered Athena, its quantum probability set hasn’t been tampered with … whatever that meant. To Penthesilea, it meant that she was going to kill the mankiller Achilles—and womankiller and rapist as well, she knew, a scourge of women in his conquest of almost a score of cities taken by Achilles and his rampaging Myrmidons while the other Achaeans rested on their laurels and asses here on the coast. Even in her distant Amazon lands to the north, the young Penthesilea had heard how there had been two Trojan Wars—the Achaeans with their single-minded fighting here at Ilium, followed by long periods of sloth and feasting, and Achilles with his city-destroying, decade-long swath of destruction around all of Asia Minor. Seventeen cities had fallen to his relentless attacks.

And now it is his turn to fall.

Penthesilea and her women rode out through a city filled with confusion and alarms. Criers were calling out from the walls that the Achaeans were gathering behind Agamemnon and his captains. The rumor was that the Greeks were planning a treacherous assault while Hector slept and brave Aeneas was at the front on the other side of the Hole. Penthesilea noticed groups of women in the streets wandering aimlessly in ragtag bits of men’s armor, as if pretending to be Amazons. Now the watchmen on the walls were blowing trumpets and the great Scaean Gates were slammed shut behind Penthesilea and her warriors.

Ignoring the scurrying Trojan fighters falling into ranks on the plain between the city and the Achaean camps, Penthesilea led her dozen women east toward the looming Hole. She’d seen the thing during her ride in, but it still made her heart pound with excitement. More than two hundred feet tall, it was a perfect three-quarters circle sliced out of the winter sky and anchored in the rocky plains east of the city. From the north and east—she knew, since they’d approached from that direction—there was no Hole. Ilium and the sea were both visible and there was no hint of this sorcery. Only when approached from the southwest did the Hole become visible.

Achaeans and Trojans—staying separate but not fighting—were scurrying out through the Hole on foot and in chariots in long columns, as if some evacuation had been ordered. Responding to messages from Ilium and from Agamemnon’s camp, Penthesilea imagined, ordered to leave their front lines against the gods and to make haste home to prepare for renewed hostility against one another.

It did not matter to Penthesilea. Her goal was Achilles’ death and woe to any Achaean—or Trojan—who made the mistake of getting between her and that goal. She had sent legions of men in battle down to Hades before, and she would do it again today if she had to.

She actually held her breath as she led her double column of Amazon cavalry through the Hole, but all she felt upon emerging on the other side was a strange sense of lightness, some subtle shift in the light itself, and a momentary shortness of breath—when she did bother to inhale again—as if she were suddenly on a mountaintop where the air was thinner. Penthesilea’s horse also seemed to sense the change and pulled hard against the reins, but she forced him to his course.

She could not take her eyes off Olympos. The mountain filled the western horizon… no, it filled the world… no, it was the world. Straight ahead of her, beyond the small bands of men and moravecs and what looked like bodies on the red ground to the Amazon who had suddenly lost all interest in anything that was not Olympos, rose first the two-mile-high vertical cliffs at the base of the home of the gods, and then ten miles more of mountain, its slopes rising up and up and up…

“My Queen.”

Penthesilea heard the voice only distantly, recognized it at last as belonging to Bremusa, her second lieutenant after faithful Clonia, but ignored it as surely as she did the sight of the limpid ocean to their right or the great stone heads that lined the shore. These things meant nothing when compared to the looming reality of Olympos itself. Penthesilea leaned back in her thin saddle to follow the line of the shoulder of the mountain higher and then higher and then endlessly higher as it rose into and above the light blue sky…

“My Queen.”

Penthesilea swiveled to rebuke Bremusa only to find that the other women had reined their horses to a stop. The Amazon queen shook her head as if emerging from a dream and rode back to them.

She realized now that all the time she had been enraptured by Olympos, they had been passing women on this side of the Hole—women running, screaming, bleeding, stumbling, weeping, falling. Clonia had dismounted and had propped the head of such a wounded woman on her knee. The woman appeared to be wearing a bizarre crimson robe.

“Who?” said Penthesilea, looking down as if from a great height. She realized now that they had been following a trail of abandoned and bloody armor for the last mile or so.

“The Achaeans,” rasped the dying woman. “Achilles …” If she had been wearing armor, it had not helped. Her breasts has been cut off. She was almost naked. The crimson robe was actually her own blood.

“Take her back to …” began Penthesilea but stopped. The woman had died.

Clonia mounted and fell in to the right and rear of Penthesilea, where she always rode. The queen could feel the rage coming off her old comrade like heat from a bonfire.

“Forward,” said Penthesilea and spurred her war mount. Her war axe was strapped balanced across her pommel. Athena’s spear was in her right hand. They galloped the last quarter mile to the band of men ahead. The Achaeans were standing and bending over more bodies—looting them. The sound of the Greeks’ laughter was clear in the thin air.

Perhaps forty women had fallen here. Penthesilea slowed her steed to a walk, but the two lines of Amazon cavalry had to break ranks. Horses—even warhorses—do not like to step on human beings, and the bloodied corpses here—women all—had fallen so close that the horses had to pick their way carefully, setting their heavy hooves down in the few open spaces between the bodies.

The men looked up from their looting and pawing. Penthesilea estimated that there were about a hundred Achaeans standing around the women’s bodies, but none of these men was recognizable. There were none of the Greek heroes there. She looked five or six hundred yards farther on and saw a nobler group of men walking back to the main Achaean army.

“Look, more women,” said the mangiest of the men stripping the female corpses of their armor. “And this time they brought us horses.”

“What is your name?” asked Penthesilea.

The man grinned, showing missing and rotted teeth. “My name is Molion and I’m trying to decide whether to fuck you before or after I kill you, woman.”

“It must be a hard decision for such a limited mind,” Penthesilea said calmly. “I met a Molion once, but he was a Trojan, comrade to Thymbraeus. Also, that Molion was a living man, and you are a dead dog.”

Molion snarled and pulled his sword.

Without dismounting, Penthesilea swung her two-bladed axe and beheaded the man. Then she spurred her huge warhorse and rode down three others who barely had time to raise their shields before being trampled.

With an unearthly cry, her dozen Amazon comrades spurred into battle beside her, trampling, slashing, hacking, and spearing Achaeans as surely as if they were harvesting wheat with a scythe. Those men who stood to fight, died. Those who ran, died. Penthesilea herself killed the last seven men who had been stripping corpses alongside Molion and his three trampled friends.

Her comrades Euandra and Thermodoa had run down the last of the sniveling, groveling, begging Achaeans—an especially ugly, whining bastard who announced that his name was Thersites as he pleaded for mercy—and Penthesilea astounded her sisters by ordering them to let him go.

“Take this message to Achilles, Diomedes, the Ajaxes, Odysseus, Idomeneus, and the other Argive heroes I spy staring at us from yonder hill,” she boomed at Thersites. “Tell them that I, Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, daughter of Ares, beloved of Athena and Aphrodite, have come to end Achilles’ miserable life. Tell them that I will fight Achilles in single combat if he agrees, but that I and my Amazon comrades will kill all of them if they insist. Go, deliver my message.”

Ugly Thersites scampered away as fast as his shaking legs could take him.

Her good right arm, unbeautiful but totally bold Clonia, rode up next to her. “My Queen, what are you saying? We can’t fight all of the Achaean heroes. Any one of them is legend… together they are all but invincible, more than a match for any thirteen Amazons who have ever lived.”

“Be calm and resolute, my sister,” said Penthesilea. “Our victory is as much in the will of the gods as in our own strong hands. When Achilles falls dead, the other Achaeans will run—as they’ve run from Hector and mere Trojans when far lesser leaders of theirs have fallen or been wounded. And when they run, we will swing about, ride hard, pass back through that accursed Hole, and burn their ships before these so-called heroes can rally.”

“We will follow you into death, My Queen,” murmured Clonia, “just as we have followed you to glory in the past.”

“To glory again, my beloved sister,” said Penthesilea. “Look. That ratfaced dog Thersites has delivered our message and the Achaean captains are walking this way. See how Achilles’ armor gleams more brightly than any other’s. Let us meet them on the clean battlefield there.”

She spurred her huge horse and the thirteen Amazons galloped forward together toward Achilles and the Achaeans.

19

“What blue beam?” said Hockenberry.

They had been discussing the disappearance of this Ilium-era Earth’s population—all those outside a two-hundred-mile-radius of Troy—as Mahnmut guided the hornet down toward Mars, Olympos, and the Brane Hole.

“It’s a blue beam stabbing up from Delphi, in the Peloponnesus,” said the moravec. “It appeared the day the rest of the human population here disappeared. We thought it was composed of tachyons, but now we’re not sure. There’s a theory—just a theory—that all of the other humans were reduced to their basic Calabi-Yau string components, encoded, and fired into interstellar space on that beam.”

“It comes from Delphi?” repeated Hockenberry. He didn’t know a thing about tachyons or Calabi-Whatsis strings, but he knew quite a bit about Delphi and its oracle.

“Yes, I could show it to you if you have another ten minutes or so before you have to get back,” said Mahnmut. “The odd thing is that there’s a similar blue beam coming up from our present-day Earth, the one we’re headed for, but it’s coming from the city of Jerusalem.”

“Jerusalem,” repeated Hockenberry. The hornet was rocking and pitching as it nosed down toward the Hole and Hockenberry was gripping the invisible arms of the invisible forcefield chair. “The beams go up into the air? Into space? To where?”

“We don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be any destination. The beams stay on for quite a long time and rotate with the Earth, of course, but they pass out of the solar system—both Earth solar systems—and neither one seems to be aimed at any particular star or globular cluster or galaxy. But the blue beams are two-way. That is, there is a flow of tachyonic energy returning to Delphi—and presumably to Jerusalem—so that…”

“Wait,” interrupted Hockenberry. “Did you see that?”

They had just passed through the Brane Hole, skimming just under its upper arc.

“I did,” said Mahnmut. “It was just a blur, but it looked as if humans were fighting humans back there where the Achaeans generally keep their front lines near Olympos. And look—up ahead.” The moravec magnified the holographic windows and Hockenberry could see Greeks and Trojans fighting outside the walls of Ilium. The Scaean Gates—open these eight months of the alliance—were closed.

“Jesus Christ,” whispered Hockenberry.

“Yes.”

“Mahnmut, can we go back to where we saw the first signs of fighting? On the Mars side of the Brane Hole? There was something strange about that.”

What Hockenberry had seen was mounted cavalry—a very small troop—apparently attacking infantry. Neither the Achaeans nor the Trojans used cavalry.

“Of course,” said Mahnmut, bringing the hornet around in a swooping bank. They accelerated back toward the Hole again.

Mahnmut, are you still copying me? came Orphu’s voice on the tight-beam, relayed through the Hole by the transponders they’d buried there.

Loud and clear.

Is Dr. Hockenberry still with you?

Yes.

Stay on tightbeam then. Don’t let him know we’re talking. Do you see anything strange there?

We do. We’re going back to investigate it. Cavalry fighting Argive hoplites on the Mars side of the Brane, Argives against Trojans on the Earth side.

“Can you cloak this thing?” asked Hockenberry as they approached about two hundred feet above the dozen or so mounted figures who were approaching fifty-some Achaean foot soldiers. The hornet was still about a mile from the apparent confrontation. “Can you camouflage it? Make us less obvious somehow?”

“Of course.” Mahnmut activated full-stealth and slowed the hornet.

No, I’m not talking about what the humans are doing, sent Orphu. Can you see anything odd about the Brane Hole itself?

Mahnmut not only looked with his eyes on broad-spectrum, but he interfaced with all of the hornet’s instruments and sensors. The Brane seems normal, he sent.

“Let’s land behind Achilles and his men there,” said Hockenberry. “Can we do that? Quietly? “

“Of course,” said Mahnmut. He brought the hornet around and set it down silently about thirty yards behind the Achaeans. More Greeks were coming toward them from the army at the rear. The moravec could see some rockvecs in the approaching group, and could make out Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo.

No, it’s not normal, sent Orphu of Io. We’re picking up wild fluctuations in the Brane Hole and the rest of the membrane space. Plus something’s going on atop Olympos—quantum and graviton readings are off the scale. We have evidence of fission, fusion, plasma, and other explosions. But the Brane Hole is our immediate worry.

What are the anomaly parameters? asked Mahnmut. He’d never bothered himself with learning much W-theory or its various historical precursors, M-theory or string-theory, while driving his submersible under the ice of Europa. Most of what he knew now he’d downloaded from Orphu and the main banks on Phobos to catch up with the current thinking about the Holes he’d accidentally helped create to connect the Belt with Mars—and with this alternate Earth—and to understand why all but one of the Branes had disappeared in the last few months.

The Strominger-Vafa-Susskind-Sen sensors are giving us BPS rates showing increasing disparity between the Brane’s minimum mass and its charge, sent Orphu.

BPS? sent Mahnmut. He knew the mass-charge disparity had to be bad, but wasn’t sure why.

Bogomol’nyi, Prasard, Sommerfield sent Orphu in his oh-what-a-moron-but-I-like-you-anyway voice. The Calabi-Yau space near you there is undergoing a space-tearing conifold transition.

“Great, perfect,” said Hockenberry, slipping out of the invisible chair and rushing toward the lowering ramp. “What I wouldn’t give to have my old scholic gear back—morphing bracelet, shotgun mike, levitation harness. Are you coming?”

“In a second,” said Mahnmut. Are you telling me the Brane Hole is going unstable?

I’m telling you it’s going to collapse any minute, sent Orphu. We’ve ordered the moravecs and rockvecs around Ilium and along the coast there to get the hell out. We think they have time to load up their gear, but the hornets and shuttles should be coming out of there within the next ten minutes at about Mach 3. Be prepared for sonic booms.

That’ll leave Ilium open to air attack and QT invasion from Olympos, sent Mahnmut. He was horrified at the thought. They were abandoning their Trojan and Greek allies.

That’s not our problem anymore, rumbled Orphu of Io. Asteague/Che and the other prime integrators have ordered the evacuation. If that Brane Hole closes—and it will, Mahnmut, trust me on that—we lose all eight hundred of the technicians, missile battery vecs, and others stationed on the Earth side. They’ve already been ordered out. They’re risking their lives even taking the time to pack up their missiles, energy projectors, and other heavy weapons, but the integrators don’t want those things left behind, even if disabled.

Can I help? Mahnmut looked out the open hatch to where Hockenberry was jogging toward Achilles and his men. He felt useless—if he left Hockenberry behind, the scholic might die in the fight here. If he didn’t get the hornet airborne and through the Hole immediately, other moravecs might be sealed away from their real universe forever.

Stand by, I’ll check with the integrators and General Beh bin Adee, sent Orphu. A few seconds later the tightbeam channel crackled again. Stay where you are right now. You’re the best camera angle we have on the Brane at the moment. Can you hook all your feeds to Phobos and get outside the ship to add your own imaging to the link?

Yes, I can do that, sent Mahnmut. He de-stealthed the hornet—he didn’t want the approaching mob of Achaeans and rockvecs to bump into it—and hurried down the ramp to join Hockenberry.

Walking up to the cluster of Achaeans, Hockenberry felt a growing sense of unreality tinged with guilt. This is my doing. If I hadn’t morphed myself into Athena’s form and kidnapped Patroclus eight months ago, Achilles wouldn’t have declared war on the gods and none of this would have happened. If anyone dies here today, it’s all my fault.

It was Achilles who turned his back on the approaching cavalry and greeted him. “Welcome, Hockenberry, son of Duane.”

There were about fifty of the Achaean leaders and their captains and spearmen standing there waiting for the women on horseback to arrive—from the rapidly closing distance, Hockenberry could see that they were indeed women decked out in resplendent armor—and among the top men here he recognized Diomedes, Big and Little Ajax, Idomeneus, Odysseus, Podarces, and his younger friend Menippus, Sthenelus, Euryalus, and Stichius. The former scholic was surprised to see the leering camp-lawyer Thersites standing by Achilles’ side—normally, Hockenberry knew, the fleet-footed mankiller would not have allowed the corpse-robber within a mile of his person.

“What’s going on?” he asked Achilles.

The tall, blond god-man shrugged. “It’s been a bizarre day, son of Duane. First the gods refused to come down to fight. Then a motley group of Trojan women attacked us, killing Philoctetes with a lucky spearcast. Now these Amazons approach after killing more of our men, or so this rat by my side tells us.”

Amazons.

Mahnmut came hurrying up. Most of the Achaeans were used to the little moravec now and gave the metal-plastic creature only a passing glance before returning their gazes to the fast-approaching Amazons.

“What’s happening?” Mahnmut had spoken to Hockenberry in English.

Rather than answer in the same language, Hockenberry recited—

“Ducit Amazonidum lunatis agmina peltis

Penthesilea furens, mediisque in milibus ardet, aurea sunectens exwerta cingula mammae bellatrix, audetque viris concurrere virgo.”

“Don’t make me download Latin,” said Mahnmut. He nodded toward the huge horses being reined to a stop not five yards in front of them all, throwing up a cloud of dust that rolled over the Achaean captains.

“Furious, Penthesilea leads a battleline of Amazons,” translated Hockenberry. “With crescent shields, and she glows in the middle of thousands, fastening golden belts around the exposed breast, female warrior, and the maiden dares run with men.”

“That’s just great,” the little moravec said sarcastically. “But the Latin… it’s not Homer, I presume?”

“Virgil,” whispered Hockenberry in the sudden silence in which the paw of a horse’s hoof sounded crashingly loud. “Somehow we’re in the Aeneid here.”

“That’s just great,” repeated Mahnmut.

The rockvec techs are almost loaded and will be ready to lift off from the Earth side in five minutes or less, sent Orphu. And there’s something else you have to know. We’re pushing up the launch time for the Queen Mab.

How soon? sent Mahnmut, his mostly organic heart sinking. We promised Hockenberry forty-eight hours to make up his mind and try to talk Odysseus into going with us.

Well, he has less than an hour now, sent Orphu of Io. Maybe forty minutes if we can get these damned rockvecs tranked and shelved and their weapons stored. You’ll have to get back up here by then or stay behind.

But The Dark Lady, sent Mahnmut, thinking of his submersible. He’d not even run the last checks on the sub’s many systems.

They’re stowing her in the hold right now, sent Orphu from the Mab. I can feel the bumps. You can do your checklist when we’re in flight. Don’t dally down there, old friend. The tightbeam went from crackle to hiss as Orphu signed off.

Only one row back from the thin front line here, Hockenberry saw that the Amazons’ horses were huge… as big as Percherons or those Budweiser horses. There were thirteen of them and Virgil, bless his heart, had been right—the Amazon women’s armor left each of their left breasts bare. The effect was… distracting.

Achilles took three steps in front of the other men. He was so close to the blonde Amazon’s horse that he could have stroked its nose. He didn’t.

“What do you want, woman?” he asked. For such a huge, heavily muscled man, Achilles’ voice was very soft.

“I am Penthesilea, daughter of the war god Ares and the Amazon queen Otrere,” said the beautiful woman from high on her armored horse. “And I want you dead, Achilles, son of Peleus.”

Achilles threw back his head and laughed. It was an easy, relaxed laugh, and all the more chilling to Hockenberry because of that. “Tell me woman,” Achilles said softly, “how do you find the courage to challenge us, the most powerful heroes of this age, fighters who have laid siege to Olympos itself? Most of us are sprung from the blood of the Son of Kronos himself, Lord Zeus. Would you really do battle with us, woman?”

“The others can go if they want to live,” called down Penthesilea, her voice as calm as Achilles’ but louder. “I have no fight with Ajax, son of Telamon, or with the son of Tydeus or the son of Deucalion or the son of Laertes or the others gathered here. Only with you, son of Peleus.”

The men listed—Big Ajax, Diomedes, Idomeneus, and Odysseus—looked startled for a second, glanced at Achilles, and then laughed in unison. The other Achaeans joined in the laughter. Fifty or sixty more Argive fighters were coming up from the rear, the rockvec Mep Ahoo in their ranks.

Hockenberry didn’t notice as Mahnmut’s black-visored head swiveled smoothly around, and Hockenberry had no idea that Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo was tightbeaming the smaller moravec about the imminent collapse of the Brane Hole.

“You have offended the gods by your feeble attack on their home,” cried Penthesilea, her voice rising until it could be heard by the men a hundred yards away. “You have wronged the peaceful Trojans by your failed attack on their home. But today you die, womankiller Achilles. Prepare to do battle.”

“Oh, my,” said Mahnmut in English.

“Jesus Christ,” whispered Hockenberry.

The thirteen women screamed in their Amazon language, kicked their warhorses’ sides, the giant mounts leaped forward, and the air was suddenly filled with spears, arrows, and the clatter of bronze points slamming into armor and onto hastily raised shields.

20

Along the coast of the northern Martian sea, called the Northern Ocean or the Tethys Sea by the inhabitants of Olympos, the Little Green Men—also known as zeks—have erected more than eleven thousand great stone heads. Each of the heads is twenty meters tall. They are identical—each showing an old man’s face with a fierce beak of a nose, thin lips, high brow, frowning eyebrows, bald crown, firm chin, and a fringe of long hair streaming back over his ears. The stone for the heads comes from giant quarries gouged into the cliffs of the geologic tumble known as Noctis Labyrinthus on the westernmost end of the four-thousand-two-hundred-kilometer-long inland sea filling the rift known as Valles Marineris. From the quarries at Noctis Labyrinthus, the little green men have loaded each uncarved block of stone onto broad-beamed barges and floated them the length of Valles Marineris. Once out into the Tethys, zek-crewed feluccas with lanteen sails have guided the barges into position along the coast, where hundreds of thronging LGM unload each stone and carve the head in place as it lies on the sand. When the carving is finished except for the hair on the back of the head, the mob of zeks roll each head to a stone basepad prepared for it, sometimes having to lift the head up cliffs or transport it across bogs and marshes, and then they pull it upright using a combination of pulleys, tackle, and shifting sand. Finally they set a stone stem from the neck into the base stone niche and rock the huge head into place. Then a dozen LGM finish the carving of the wavy hair while the majority of the little beings move on to work on the next head.

The identical faces all look out to sea.

The first head was erected almost an Earth-measured century and a half ago, at the base of Olympus Mons near where the surf of the Tethys Sea rolls in, and since then the little green men have placed another head every kilometer of the way, traveling east, around the great mushroom-shaped peninsula called Tempe Terra, then curving back south and into the estuary of Kasei Valles, then southeast along the marshes of Lunae Planum, then to both sides of the huge estuary and sea-within-a-sea of Chryse Planitia, then on both cliff-faced shores of the broad estuary of Valles Marineris, and finally—in just the last eight months—northeast along the steep cliffs of Arabia Terra toward the northernmost archipelagoes of Deuteronilus and Protonilus Mensae.

But this day all work on the heads has ceased and more than a hundred feluccas have carried the LGM—meter-tall green photosynthesizing hominids with transparent flesh, no mouth or ears and coal-black eyes—to a point on the broad beaches of Tempe Terra some two hundred kilometers across the curve of water from Olympus Mons. From here the island volcano of Alba Patera can be seen far out in the sea to the west and the incredible massif of Olympus Mons rises up over the shoulder of the world far to the southwest.

The stone heads line a cliff face here some several hundred meters back from the water, but the beach is broad and flat and it is here that all seven thousand three hundred and three zeks have gathered, creating a solid mass of green along the beach except for an empty semicircle of sand some fifty-one meters across. For several Martian hours, the little green men stand silent and motionless, their black coal-button eyes trained on the empty sand. Feluccas and barges bob slightly to the very low Tethys surf. The only sound is wind blowing in from the west, occasionally lifting sand and pelting it against transparent green skin or whistling very slightly among the low gorse plants beyond the beach and below the cliffs.

Suddenly the air smells of ozone—although the zeks have no noses to pick up this scent—and repeated thunderclaps explode close above the beach. Although the LGM have no ears, they feel these explosions of sound through their incredibly sensitive skin.

Two meters above the beach, there suddenly appears a three-dimensional red rhomboid about fifteen meters wide. This rhomboid widens but then grows pinched at the waist, until it resembles two red candy kisses. At the points of these kisses, a tiny sphere emerges and then grows into a three-dimensional green oval, which appears to have swallowed the original red rhomboid. The oval and rhomboid begin to spin in opposite directions until sand is thrown a hundred meters into the air.

The LGM stand in the growing storm and stare impassively.

The three-dimensional oval and rhomboid spin themselves into a sphere, completing the original shape’s flop-transition mirror rephrasing. A circle ten meters across appears in midair and seems to sink into the sand until a Brane Hole cuts a slice out of space and time. Because this Brane Hole is newborn, its protective world-sheet is still visible, petals and layers of eleven-dimensional energy protecting the sand, the air, Mars, and the universe from this deliberate degeneration of space-time fabric.

From the hole emerges a puffing, chugging sort of steam-powered carriole, hidden gyroscopes balancing the metal and wooden mass on its single rubber wheel. The vehicle clears the Hole and comes to a stop precisely in the center of the space the zeks have left clear on the sand. An intricately carved door opens on the vehicle and wooden steps lower and unfold like some carefully contrived puzzle.

Four voynix—two-meter-tall metallic bipeds with barrel chests, no necks, and heads looking like mere humps on their bodies—emerge from the carriole and, using their manipulator hands rather than their cutting-blade hands, begin to assemble a complex apparatus that includes silver tentacles ending in small parabolic projectors. When they are finished, the voynix step back toward the now-silent steam vehicle and freeze into immobility.

A man or a projection of a man shimmers first into visibility and then into apparent solidity there on the sand between the projector’s tentacle-filaments. He is an old man in a blue robe covered with marvelously embroidered astronomical icons. He carries a tall wooden staff to help him walk. His gold-slippered feet are solid enough and his flickering mass heavy enough to make impressions in the sand. His features are precisely the same as the face of the statues on the cliff.

The magus walks to the edge of the limpid sea and waits.

Before long the sea stirs and something huge rises from the water just beyond the line of desultory surf. The thing is large and it comes up slowly, more like an island rising from the sea than like any organic creature such as a whale or dolphin or sea serpent or sea god. Water streams from its folds and fissures as it moves in toward the beach. The zeks step back and to the side, making a larger space for the thing.

In its shaping and color, it is most like a gigantic brain. The tissue is pink—like a living human brain—and the convolutions most resemble the maximized folded surface area of a brain, but there the resemblance to mind matter ends since this thing has multiple pairs of yellow eyes set in the folds between pink tissue and a surfeit of hands: small grasping hands with different numbers of fingers arising from the folds and waving like sea anemones stirred by cold currents, larger hands on longer stalks set on either side of the various inset eyes, and—as becomes more apparent as the house-sized thing emerges from the water and shuffles to the sand—multiple sets of huge hands on its underside and edges to propel it, each grub-white or dead-gray hand the size of a headless horse.

Moving crablike, darting sideways onto the sodden sand, the huge thing scatters LGM farther back and then comes to a stop less than five feet from the blue-robed old man, who—after an initial backing away to give the thing room to find fingerhold on the dry beach—now stands his ground, holding his staff and looking up calmly at the multiple sets of cold yellow eyes.

What have you done with my favorite worshiper? asks the many-handed in a voice without sound.

“He is loosed upon the world again, it pains me to say,” sighs the old man.

Which world? There are too many.

“Earth.”

Which Earth? There are too many.

“My Earth,” said the old man. “The true one.”

The brain with hands makes a sound through holes and apertures in its folds, a mucousy noise like a whale snorting thick seawater. Prosper, where is my priestess? My child?

“Which child?” asks the man. “Dost thou seek after your blue-eyed sow-raven whore, malignant thing, or after the hag-born freckled whelp bastard, never honored with a human shape, that she did litter there on the shore of my world?”

The magus had used the Greek word sus for “raven” and korax for “sow,” obviously enjoying his little pun, just as he had with the “litter.”

Sycorax and Caliban. Where are they?

“The bitch is missing. The lizard-pup is free.”

My Caliban has escaped the rock on which you confined him these long centuries?

“Have I not just said so? You need to trade some of your excess eyes for ears.”

Has he eaten all your puny mortals on that world yet?

“Not all. Not yet.” The magus gestures with his staff toward the stone versions of his own face that look out from atop the cliff behind him. “Have you enjoyed being watched, Many-Handed?”

The brain snorts brine and mucus once again. I’ll allow the green men to labor some more and then send a tsunami to drown all of them at the same time it knocks down your pathetic spy-stone effigies.

“Why not do it now?”

You know I can. The nonvoice somehow conveys a snarl.

“I know you can, malignant thing,” says Prospero. “But drowning this race would be a crime greater than many of your other great crimes. The zeks are close to compassion perfected, loyalty personified, not altered from their former state as you did the gods here on your monstrous whim, but truly creatures that are mine. I new-formed them.”

And for that alone it will give me more pleasure to kill them. What use are such mute, chlorophyllic ciphers? They’re like ambulatory begonias.

“They have no voice,” says the old magus, “but they are far from mute. They communicate with one another through genetically altered packages of data, passed cell to cell by touch. When they must communicate with someone outside their race, one of them volunteers his heart up to touch, dying as an individual but then being absorbed by all the others and thus living on.’Tis a beautiful thing.”

Manesque exire sepulcris, thinks-hisses the many-handed Setebos. All you’ve done is call up the dead men from their graves. You play Medea’s game

Without warning, Setebos pivots on his walking hands and sends a smaller hand from his brainfolds shooting out twenty meters on a snakelike stalk. The gray-grub fist slams into a little green man standing near the surf, penetrates his chest, seizes his floating green heart, and rips it out. The zek’s body falls lifeless to the sand, leaking out all its internal fluids. Another LGM instantly kneels to absorb what it can of the dead zek’s cellular essence.

Setebos retrieves his retractable armstalk, squeezes the heart into a dry husk as one would squeeze moisture out of a sponge, and flings it away. Its heart was as empty and voiceless as its head. There was no message there.

“Not to you,” agrees Prospero. “But the sad message now to me is not to speak so openly to my enemies. Others always suffer.”

Others are meant to suffer. That’s why we create them, you and I.

“Aye, to that end we have the key of both officer and office, to set all hearts in the state to what tune that pleases our ear. But your creations offend all, Setebos—especially Caliban. Your monster child is the ivy that hid my princely trunk and sucked my verdure out on it.”

And so was he born to do.

“Born?” Prospero laughs softly. “Your hag-seed’s bastard oozed into being amidst all the panoply of a true whore-priestess’s charms—toads, beetles, bats, pigs who once were men—and the lizard-boy would have made a sty of mine own Earth had not I taken the traitorous creature in, taught it language, lodged it in my own cell, used it with humane care, and showed to it all the qualities of humankind… for all the good it did me or the world or the lying slave itself.”

All the qualities of humankind, snorts Setebos. It moves five paces forward on its huge walking hands until its shadow falls over the old man. I taught him power. You taught him pain.

“When it did, like your own foul race, forget his own meaning and begin to gabble like a thing most brutish, I deservedly confined it into a rock where I kept it company in a form of myself.”

You exiled Caliban to that orbital rock and sent one of your holograms there so that you could bait and torture him for centuries, lying magus.

“Torture? No. But when it disobeyed, I racked the foul amphibian with cramps, filled his bones with ache, and made him roar so as to make the other beasts of that now-fallen orbital isle tremble at his din. And I shall do so again when I capture him.”

Too late. Setebos snorts. His unblinking eyes all turn to look down at the old man in the blue robe. Fingers twitch and sway. You said yourself that my son, with whom I am well pleased, is loosed upon your world. I knew this, of course. I will be there soon to join him. Together, along with the thousands of little calibani you were so obliging as to create when you still dwelt among the post-humans there and thought that doomed world good, father and son-grandson will soon scour your green orb into a more pleasing place.

“A swamp, you mean,” says Prospero. “Filled with foul smells, fouler creatures, all forms of blackness, and all infections that fetch up from bogs, fens, flats, and the stink from Prosper’s fall.”

Yes. The huge, pink-brain thing seems to dance up and down on its long fingerlegs, swaying as if to unheard music or pleasing screams.

“Then Prosper must not fall,” whispers the old man. “Must not fall.”

You will, magus. You are but a shadow of a rumor of a hint of a noosphere—a personification of a centerless, soulless pulse of useless information, senseless mumbles from a race long fallen into dotage and decay, a cyber-sewn fart in the wind. You will fall and so shall your useless bio-whore, Ariel.

Prospero lifts his staff as if to strike the monster. Then he lowers it and leans on it as though suddenly drained of all energy. “Ariel is still our Earth’s good and faithful servant. She shall never serve you or your monster son or your blue-eyed witch.”

She will serve us by dying.

“Ariel is Earth, monster,” breathes Prospero. “My darling grew into full consciousness from the noosphere interweaving itself with the self-aware biosphere. Would you kill a whole world to feed your rage and vanity?”

Oh, yes.

Setebos leaps forward on its giant fingertips and seizes up the old man in five hands, lifting him close to two of its sets of eyes. Where is Sycorax?

“She rots.”

Circe is dead? Setebos’ daughter and concubine cannot die.

“She rots.”

Where? How?

“Age and envy did turn her into a hoop, and I rolled her into the form of a fish, which now rots from the head down.”

The many-handed makes its mucus-snort and tears Prospero’s legs off, casting them into the sea. Then the thing rips away the magus’s arms, feeding them into a maw that opens from the deepest orifice of its folds. Finally, it pulls the old man’s entrails out, slurping them up as it would a long noodle.

“Does this amuse you?” asks Prospero’s head before that, too, is crunched by gray finger-thumbs and fed into the many-handed’s maw.

Silver tentacles on the beach flicker and the parabolic suckers at the end shine. Prospero flicks back into solidity farther away on the beach.

“You are a dull thing, Setebos. Ever angry, ever hungry, but tiresome and dull.”

I will find your true corporeal self, Prospero. Trust this. On your Earth or in its crust or under its sea or on its orbit, I will find the organic mass that once was you and I will chew on you slowly. There is no doubt of this.

“Dull,” says the magus. He looks weary and sad. “Whatever the fate of your clay-made gods and my zeks here on Mars—and my beloved men and women on the Earth of Ilium—you and I will meet again soon. On Earth this time. And this, our long war, will soon and finally end for the better or for the worse.”

Yes. The many-handed thing spits bloody shreds out onto the sand, pivots on its under-hands, and scuttles back into the sea until all that can be seen of it is a bloody spouting from its half-submerged tophole.

Prospero sighs. He nods to the voynix, crosses to the nearest LGM, and hugs one of the little green men.

“As much as I want to speak with you and hear your thoughts, my beloveds, my old heart can bear to see no more of your kind die today. So until I venture here again, in happier times, I pray thee, corragio! Have courage! Corragio!

The voynix come forward and flick off the projector. The magus vanishes. The voynix carefully fold up the silver tentacles, carry the projecting machine to the steam carriole, and disappear up its steps into its red-lighted interior. The steps fold up. The steam engine chugs more loudly.

The carriole puffs around in a lumbering, sand-spitting circle on the beach, the zeks silently stepping aside, and then the unwieldy machine lumbers through the Brane Hole and disappears.

A few seconds later, the Brane Hole itself shrinks, shrivels back into its eleven-dimensional world sheet of pure colored energy, shrinks again, and flicks out of existence.

For a while, the only sound or movement comes from the lethargic waves sliding into the red beach. Then the LGM disperse to their feluccas and barges and set sail back to their stone heads yet to be carved and raised.

21

Even as she spurred her horse forward and lifted Athena’s spear for the killing throw, Penthesilea realized that she’d overlooked two things that might seal her fate.

First of all—incredibly—she realized that Athena had never told her, nor had she asked the goddess, which heel of the mankiller’s was mortal. Penthesilea had assumed it was the right heel—that had been her image of Peleus pulling the baby from the Celestial Fire—but Athena had not specified, saying only that one of Achilles’ heels was mortal.

Penthesilea had imagined the difficulty of striking the hero’s heel, even with Athena’s charmed spear—feeling safe in assuming that Achilles would not be running away from her—but she’d instructed her Amazon comrades to strike down as many Achaeans to the rear of Achilles as possible. Penthesilea planned to throw at the fleet-footed mankiller’s heel the instant he turned to see who was wounded and who was dead, as any loyal captain would do. But to make this strategy work, Penthesilea had to hold back on her part of the attack, allowing her sisters to strike down these others so that Achilles would be made to turn. It went against Penthesilea’s warrior nature not to lead, not to be the first to make killing contact, and even though her sisters understood this attack plan was necessary for the mankiller to be brought down, it caused the Amazon queen to flush with shame as the line of horses closed with the line of men as Penthesilea’s huge steed hung a few seconds behind the others.

Then she realized her second mistake. The wind was blowing in from behind Achilles, not toward him. Part of Penthesilea’s plan depended upon the confusing effect of Aphrodite’s perfume, but the muscled male idiot had to smell it for the plan to work. Unless the wind changed—or unless Penthesilea closed the distance until she was literally on top of the blond Achaean warrior—the magical scent would not be a factor.

Fuck it, thought the Amazon queen as her comrades began to fire arrows and hurl spears. Let the Fates have their way and Hades take the hindmost! Ares—Father!—be with me and protect me now!

She half-expected the god of war to appear at her side then, and perhaps Athena and Aphrodite as well since it was their will that Achilles should die this day, but no god or goddess showed up in the few seconds before horses impaled themselves on hastily raised spears and thrown lances thunked down onto hurriedly raised shields and the unstoppable Amazons collided with the immovable Achaeans.

At first, both luck and the gods seemed to be with the Amazons. Although several of their horses were impaled on spearpoint, the huge steeds crashed on through Argive lines. Some of the Greeks fell back; others simply fell. The Amazon warriors quickly encircled the fifty or so men around Achilles and began slashing downward with their swords and spears.

Clonia, Penthesilea’s favorite lieutenant and the finest archer of all the living Amazons, was firing arrows as quickly as she could notch and release. Her targets were all behind Achilles, forcing the mankiller to turn as each man was hit. The Achaean Menippus went down with a long shaft through his throat. Menippus’ friend, the mighty Podarces, son of Iphiclus and brother of the fallen Protesilaus, leaped forward in rage, trying to pierce the mounted Clonia through the hip with his lance, but the Amazon Bremusa slashed the lance in half and then cut off Podarces’ arm at the elbow with a mighty downward slash.

Penthesilea’s sisters-in-arms, Euandra and Thermodoa, had been dismounted—their warhorses crashing to the ground, pierced through the heart by Achaean long lances—but the two women were on their feet in an instant, armored back to armored back, their crescent shields flashing—as they held off a circle of screaming, attacking Greek men.

Penthesilea found herself crashing through Argive shields in the second wave of Amazon attack, her comrades Alcibia, Dermachia, and Derione by her side. Bearded faces snarled up at them and were slashed down. An arrow, fired from the Achaeans’ rear ranks, ricocheted off Penthesilea’s helmet, causing her vision to blur red for an instant.

Where is Achilles? The confusion of battle had disoriented her for a moment, but then the Amazon queen saw the mankiller twenty paces to her right, surrounded by the core of Achaean captains—the Ajaxes, Idomeneus, Odysseus, Diomedes, Sthenelus, Teucer. Penthesilea gave out a loud Amazon war cry and kicked her horse in the ribs, urging it toward the core of heroes.

At that second the mob seemed to part for an instant just as Achilles turned to watch one of his men, Euenor of Dulichium, fall with one of Clonia’s arrows in his eye. Penthesilea could easily see Achilles’ exposed calf under the greaves’ straps, his dusty ankles, his calloused heels.

Athena’s spear seemed to hum in her hand as she drew back and threw with all her might and strength. The lance flew true, striking the fleet-footed mankiller in his unprotected right heel … and glancing away.

Achilles’ head snapped around and came up until his blue-eyed gaze locked on Penthesilea. He grinned a horrible grin.

The Amazons were engaged with the core group of Achaean men now, and their luck began to turn.

Bremusa cast a spear at Idomeneus, but Deucalion’s son raised his round shield almost casually and the lance broke in two. When he cast his longer spear, it flew deadly true, piercing the red-haired Bremusa just below the left breast and coming out through her spine. She tumbled backward off her lathered horse and half a dozen lesser Argives raced to strip her of her armor.

Screaming rage at their sister’s fall, Alcibia and Dermachia drove their horses at Idomeneus, but the two Ajaxes grabbed the steeds’ reins and wrestled them to a stop with their awful strength. When the two Amazons leaped down to carry the battle on foot, Diomedes, son of Tydeus, decapitated both of them with one wide sweep of his sword. Penthesilea watched in horror as Alcibia’s head rolled, still blinking, to a dusty stop, only to be lifted up by the hair by a laughing Odysseus.

Penthesilea felt her leg raked by some grasping unnamed Argive and she plunged her second spear down through the man’s chest until it pierced his bowels. He fell away, mouth gaping, but took her spear with him. She freed her battle-axe and spurred her horse forward, riding with only her knees holding her on to her steed.

Derione, riding to the Amazon queen’s right, was pulled off her horse by Little Ajax, son of Oileus. On her back, her breath knocked out of her, Derione was just reaching for her sword when Little Ajax laughed and slammed his spear through her chest, twisting it until the Amazon stopped writhing.

Clonia fired an arrow at Little Ajax’s heart. His armor deflected it. That is when Teucer, bastard son of Telamon, master archer of all archers, shot three fast arrows into the grunting Clonia—one in her throat, one through her armor into her stomach, a last one so deep into her bared left breast that only the feathers and three inches of the end of the shaft stayed visible. Penthesilea’s dear friend fell lifeless from her bleeding horse.

Euandra and Thermodoa were still standing and fighting back to back—though wounded and bleeding and almost falling over from weariness—when the press of Achaeans around them fell away and Meriones, son of Molus, friend of Idomeneus and second in command of the Cretans, cast two spears at once—one from each hand. The heavy spears cut through all layers of the Amazon women’s light armor and Thermodoa and Euandra fell dead in the dust.

All the other Amazons were down now. Penthesilea was wounded with a hundred scratches and slashes, but none of them mortal. Her axe blades were covered with blood and Argive gore, but the weapon was too heavy for her to lift now, so she set it aside and pulled her short sword. The space between her and Achilles opened wider.

As if the goddess Athena had ordained it, the unbroken spear she’d cast at Achilles’ right heel was on the ground near her exhausted horse’s right hoof. Normally, the Amazon queen could have bent low from a galloping horse to swoop up the magical weapon, but she was too exhausted, her armor was too heavy on her, and her wounded steed had no strength left to move, so Penthesilea slipped sideways on her saddle and slid down, bending low to retrieve the spear just as two of Teucer’s arrows whizzed over her helmet top.

When she stood, there was no one left in her focused vision except Achilles. The rest of the surging throngs of screaming Achaeans were unimportant blurs.

“Throw again,” said Achilles, still grinning his horrible grin.

Penthesilea put every ounce of strength left to her in the spearcast, throwing low where Achilles’ bare, muscular thighs were visible below the circle of his beautiful shield.

Achilles crouched as quickly as any panther. Athena’s spear struck his shield and splintered.

Now Penthesilea could only stand there and grasp her axe again as Achilles, still grinning, lifted his own lance, the legendary spear that the centaur Chiron had made for his father, Peleus, the lance that never missed its mark.

Achilles threw. Penthesilea raised her crescent shield. The lance smashed through the shield without slowing, pierced her armor, tore through her right breast and out her back, and went through her horse standing behind her, piercing its heart as well.

Amazon queen and her war steed fell into the dust together, Penthesilea’s legs and feet flying high on the pendulum of the rising spear embedded in both their chests. As Achilles approached, sword in hand, Penthesilea strained to hold him in her sight as her vision dimmed. The axe fell from her nerveless fingers.

“Holy shit,” whispered Hockenberry.

“Amen,” said Mahnmut.

The ex-scholic and little moravec had been next to Achilles during the entire brawl. They walked forward now as Achilles stood next to Penthesilea’s twitching body.

“Tum saeva Amazon ultimus cecidit metus,” murmured Hockenberry. Then the savage Amazon fell, our greatest fear.

“Virgil again?” said Mahnmut.

“No, Pyrrhus in Seneca’s tragedy, Troades.”

Now a strange thing happened.

As various Achaeans crowded around to strip the dead or dying Penthesilea of her armor, Achilles folded his arms and stood above her, his nostrils flaring as if taking in the stink of blood and horse sweat and death. Then the fleet-footed mankiller raised his huge hands to his face, covered his eyes, and began to weep.

Big Ajax, Diomedes, Odysseus, and several other captains who had pressed close to see the dead Amazon queen stepped back in amazement. Rat-faced Thersites and some lesser Achaeans ignored the weeping man-god and persisted in their stripping of Penthesilea’s armor, pulling her helmet from her lolling head, allowing the dead queen’s golden locks to tumble down.

Achilles threw his head back and moaned as he had on the morning of Patroclus’ murder and kidnapping by Hockenberry disguised as Athena. The captains stepped farther back from the dead woman and horse.

Thersites used his knife to cut away the straps on Penthesilea’s chest-plate armor and belt, slashing into the dead queen’s fair flesh in his hurry to gather his unearned spoils. The queen was all but naked now—only one dangling greave, her silver belt, and a single sandal remaining on her slashed and bruised but somehow still-perfect body. Peleus’ long lance still pinned her to the carcass of the horse and Peleus’ son made no move to retrieve the spear.

“Step away,” said Achilles. Most of the men obeyed at once.

Ugly Thersites—Penthesilea’s armor under one arm and the queen’s bloodied helmet under his other arm—laughed over his shoulder as he continued to strip her of her belt. “What a fool you are, son of Peleus, to weep so for this fallen bitch, standing there sobbing for her beauty. She’s a meal for worms now, worth no more than that.”

“Step away,” said Achilles in his terrible monotone. Tears continued to streak down his dusty face.

Emboldened by the mankiller’s show of womanly weakness, Thersites ignored the command and tugged the silver belt from around dead Penthesilea’s hips, raising her body slightly to free the priceless band and making the motion an obscenity by moving his own hips as if copulating with the corpse.

Achilles stepped forward and struck Thersites with his bare fist, smashing his jaw and cheekbone, knocking every one of the rat-man’s yellow teeth out of his mouth, and sending him flying over the horse and dead queen to lie in the dust, vomiting blood from both mouth and nose.

“No grave or barrow for you, you bastard,” said Achilles. “You once sneered at Odysseus, and Odysseus forgave you. You sneered at me just now, and I killed you. The son of Peleus will not be taunted without a reckoning. Go now, go on down to Hades and taunt the shadows there with your mocking wit.”

Thersites choked on his own blood and vomit and died.

Achilles pulled Peleus’ spear slowly—almost lovingly—from the dust, the horse’s corpse, and up and out through Penthesilea’s softly rocking corpse. All the Achaeans stepped farther back, not understanding the mankiller’s moans and weeping.

“Aurea cui postquam nudavit cassida frontem, vicit victorem candida forma virum,” whispered Hockenberry to himself. “After her gilded metal helmet was removed, her forehead exposed, her brilliant form conquered the man… Achilles… the victor.” He looked down at Mahnmut. “Propertius, Book Three poem Eleven of his Elegies.”

Mahnmut tugged at the scholic’s hand. “Someone’s going to be writing an elegy for us if we don’t get out of here. And I mean now.”

“Why?” said Hockenberry, blinking as he looked around.

Sirens were going off. The rockvec soldiers were moving among throngs of retreating Achaeans, urging them with alarms and amplified voices to get through the Hole at once. A huge retreat was under way, with chariots and running men pouring toward and through the Hole, but it wasn’t the moravec loudspeakers that were creating the retreat—Olympos was erupting.

The earth… well, the Mars earth … shook and vibrated. The air was filled with the stink of sulfur. Behind the retreating Achaean and Trojan armies, the distant summit of Olympos glowed red beneath its aegis and columns of flame were leaping miles into the air. Already, rivers of red lava could be seen on the upper reaches of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system. The air was full of red dust and the stink of fear.

“What’s going on?” asked Hockenberry.

“The gods caused some sort of eruption up there and the Brane Hole is going to disappear any minute,” said Mahnmut, leading Hockenberry away from where Achilles had knelt next to the fallen Amazon queen. The other dead Amazons had also been stripped of all their armor, and except for the core of captain-heroes, most of the men were hurrying toward the Hole.

You need to get out of there, came Orphu of Io’s voice over the tight-beam to Mahnmut.

Yes, sent Mahnmut, we can see the eruption from here.

Worst than that, came Orphu’s voice on the tightbeam. The readings show the Calabi-Yau space there bending back toward a black hole and wormhole. String vibrations are totally unstable. Olympus Mons may or may not blow that part of Mars to bits, but you have minutes, at most, before the Brane Hole disappears. Get Hockenberry and Odysseus back to the ship here.

Looking between the moving armor and dusty thighs, Mahnmut caught sight of Odysseus standing speaking to Diomedes thirty paces away. Odysseus? he sent. Hockenberry hasn’t had time to talk to Odysseus, much less convince him to come with us. Do we really need Odysseus?

The Prime Integrator analysis says we do, sent Orphu. And by the way, you had your video on during that entire fight. That was one hell of a thing to see.

Why do we need Odysseus? sent Mahnmut. The ground rumbled and quaked. The placid sea to their north was no longer placid; great breakers rolled in against red rocks.

How am I supposed to know? rumbled Orphu of Io. Do I look like a prime integrator to you?

Any suggestions on how I’m going to persuade Odysseus to leave his friends and comrades and the war with the Trojans to come join us? sent Mahnmut. It looks like he and the other captains—except for Achilles—are going to get into their chariots and head back through the Hole in about one minute. The smell from the volcano and all the noise are driving the horses crazy—and the people, too. How am I going to get Odysseus’ attention at a time like this?

Use some initiative, sent Orphu. Isn’t that what Europan sub-drivers are famous for? Initiative?

Mahnmut shook his head and walked over to Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo where the rockvec stood using his loudspeaker to urge the Achaeans to return through the Brane Hole at once. Even his amplified voice was lost under the volcano rumble and the pounding of hooves and sandaled feet as the humans ran like hell to get away from Olympos.

Centurion Leader? sent Mahnmut, connecting directly via tactical channels.

The two-meter-tall black rockvec turned and snapped to attention. Yes, sir.

Technically, Mahnmut had no command rank in the moravec army, but in practical terms, the rockvecs understood that Mahnmut and Orphu were on the level of commanders such as the legendary Asteague/Che.

Go over to my hornet there and await further orders.

Yes, sir. Mep Ahoo left the evacuation shouts to one of the other rockvecs and jogged to the hornet.

“I have to get Odysseus over to the hornet,” Mahnmut shouted to Hockenberry. “Will you help?”

Hockenberry, who was looking from the convulsions high on the shoulder of Olympos back at the quivering Brane Hole, gave the little moravec a distracted look but nodded and walked with him toward the cluster of Achaean captains.

Mahnmut and Hockenberry strode briskly past the two Ajaxes, Idomeneus, Teucer, and Diomedes to where Odysseus stood frowning at Achilles. The tactician seemed lost in thought.

“Just get him to the hornet,” whispered Mahnmut.

“Son of Laertes,” said Hockenberry.

Odysseus’ head whipped around. “What is it, son of Duane?”

“We have word from your wife, sir.”

“What?” Odysseus scowled and put his hand on his sword hilt. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about your wife, Penelope, mother of Telemachus. She has sent a message to you through us, conveyed by moravec magic.”

“Fuck your moravec magic,” snarled Odysseus, scowling down at Mahnmut. “Go away, Hockenberry, and take that little abomination with you, before I open both of you from crotch to chin. Somehow… I don’t know how, but somehow… I’ve always sensed that these new misfortunes rode in with you and these cursed moravecs.”

“Penelope says to remember your bed,” said Hockenberry, improvising and hoping he remembered his Fitzgerald correctly. He had tended to teach the Iliad and let Professor Smith handle the Odyssey.

“My bed?” frowned Odysseus, stepping away from the other captains. “What are you prattling about?”

“She says to tell you that a description of your marriage bed will be our way of letting you know that this message is truly from her.”

Odysseus pulled his sword and set the side of the razored blade against Hockenberry’s shoulder. “I am not amused. Describe the bed to me. For every error in your description, I will lop off one of your limbs.”

Hockenberry resisted the urge to run or piss himself. “Penelope says to tell you that the frame was inlaid with gold, silver, and ivory, with thongs of oxhide stretched end to end to hold the many soft fleeces and coverlets.”

“Bah,” said Odysseus, “that could describe any great man’s couch. Go away.” Diomedes and Big Ajax had gone over to urge the still-kneeling Achilles to abandon the Amazon queen’s corpse and come with them. The Brane Hole was visibly vibrating now, its edges blurry. The roar from Olympos was so loud now that everyone had to shout to be heard.

“Odysseus!” cried Hockenberry. “This is important. Come with us to hear your message from fair Penelope.”

The short, bearded man turned back to glower at the scholic and moravec. His sword was still raised. “Tell me where I moved the bed after my bride and I moved in, and I may let you keep your arms.”

“You never moved it,” said Hockenberry, his raised voice steady despite his pounding heart. “Penelope says that when you built your palace, you left a strong, straight olive tree where the bedroom is today. She says that you cut away the branches, set the tree into a ceiling of wood, carved the trunk, and left it as one post of your marriage bed. These were words she said to tell you so that you would know that it was truly she who sent her message.”

Odysseus stared for a long minute. Then he slid his sword back in its belt-sheath and said, “Tell me the message, son of Duane. Hurry.” The man glanced at the lowering sky and roaring Olympos. Suddenly a flight of twenty hornets and dropship transports flew out through the Hole, hauling the moravec techs to safety. A series of sonic booms pounded the Martian earth and made running men duck and raise their arms to cover their heads.

“Let’s go over by the moravec machine, son of Laertes. It is a message best delivered in private.”

They walked through the milling, shouting men to where the black hornet crouched on its insectoid landing gear.

“Now, speak, and hurry,” said Odysseus, grasping Hockenberry’s shoulder in his powerful hand.

Mahnmut tightbeamed Mep Ahoo. You have your taser?

Yes, sir.

Taser Odysseus unconscious and load him into the hornet. Take the controls. We’re going up to Phobos immediately.

The rockvec touched Odysseus on the neck, there was a spark, and the bearded man collapsed into the moravec soldier’s barbed arms. Mep Ahoo slid the unconscious Odysseus into the hornet and jumped in, firing up the repellors.

Mahnmut looked around—none of the Achaeans had seemed to notice the kidnapping of one of their captains—and then jumped in next to Odysseus. “Come on,” he said to Hockenberry. “The Hole’s going to collapse any second. Anyone on this side stays on Mars forever.” He glanced up at Olympos. “And forever may be measured in minutes if that volcano blows.”

“I’m not going with you,” said Hockenberry.

“Hockenberry, don’t be crazy!” shouted Mahnmut. “Look over there. All the Achaean top brass—Diomedes, Idomeneus, the Ajaxes, Teucer—they’re all running for the Hole.”

“Achilles isn’t,” said Hockenberry, leaning closer to be heard. Sparks were falling all around, rattling on the roof of the hornet like hot hail.

“Achilles has lost his mind,” shouted Mahnmut, thinking Shall I have Mep Ahoo taser Hockenberry?

As if reading his mind, Orphu came on the tightbeam. Mahnmut had forgotten that all this real-time video and sound was still being relayed up to Phobos and Queen Mab.

Don’t zap him, sent Mahnmut. We owe Hockenberry that. Let him make up his own mind.

By the time he does, he’ll be dead, sent Orphu of Io.

He was dead once, sent Mahnmut. Perhaps he wants to be again.

To Hockenberry, Mahnmut shouted, “Come on. Jump in! We need you aboard the Earth-ship, Thomas.”

Hockenberry blinked at the use of his first name. Then he shook his head.

“Don’t you want to see Earth again?” shouted the little moravec. The hornet was shaking on its gear as the ground vibrated with marsquake tremors. The clouds of sulfur and ash were swirling around the Brane Hole, which seemed to be growing smaller. Mahnmut realized that if he could keep Hockenberry talking another minute or two, the human would have no choice but to come with them.

Hockenberry took a step away from the hornet and gestured toward the last of the fleeing Achaeans, the dead Amazons, the dead horses, and the distant walls of Ilium and warring armies just visible through the now vibrating Brane Hole.

“I made this mess,” said Hockenberry. “Or at least I helped make it. I think I should stay and try to clean it up.”

Mahnmut pointed toward the war going on beyond the Brane Hole. “Ilium is going to fall, Hockenberry. The ‘vec forcefields and air defenses and anti-QT fields are gone.”

Hockenberry smiled even while shielding his face from the falling embers and ash. “Et quae vagos vincina prospiciens Scythas ripam catervis Ponticam viduis ferit excisa ferro est, Pergannum incubuit sibi,” he shouted.

I hate Latin, thought Mahnmut. And I think I hate classics scholars. Aloud, he said, “Virgil again?”

“Seneca,” shouted Hockenberry. “And she … he meant Penthesilea… the neighbor of the wandering Scythians, keeping watch, leads her destitute band toward the Pontic banks, having been cut down by iron, Pergamum … you know, Mahnmut, Ilium, Troy… itself stumbled.”

“Get your ass in the hornet, Hockenberry,” shouted Mahnmut.

“Good luck, Mahnmut,” said Hockenberry, stepping back. “Give my regards to Earth and Orphu. I’ll miss them both.”

He turned and slowly jogged past where Achilles was kneeling and weeping over Penthesilea’s body—the mankiller was alone now except for the dead, the other living humans having all fled—and then, as Mahnmut’s hornet lifted off and clawed toward space, Hockenberry ran as hard as he could toward the visibly shrinking Hole.