Olympos

22

After centuries of semitropical warmth, real winter had come to Ardis Hall. There was no snow, but the surrounding forests were free of all but the most stubbornly clinging leaves, frost marked the area of the great manor’s shadow for an hour after the tardy sunrise—each morning Ada watched the line of white-tinged grass on the sloping west lawn retreating slowly back up toward the house until it became only the thinnest moat of frost—and visitors reported that the two small rivers that crossed the road in the one-and-one-quarter miles between Ardis Hall and the faxnode pavilion both showed scrims of ice on their surface.

This evening—one of the shortest of the year—Ada went through the house lighting the kerosene lamps and many candles, moving gracefully despite the fact that she was in the fifth month of her pregnancy. The old manor house, built more than eighteen hundred years earlier, before the Final Fax, was comfortable enough; almost two dozen fireplaces—used mostly for decorative and entertainment purposes during the previous centuries—now warmed most of the rooms. In the other chambers in the sixty-eight-room mansion, Harman had sigled the plans for and then built what he called Franklin stoves, and this evening these radiated enough heat to make Ada sleepy as she moved from the lower hall to rooms and then to the staircase and upper halls and rooms, lighting the lamps.

She paused at the large arched window at the end of the hall on the third floor. For the first time in thousands of years, thought Ada, forests were falling to human beings wielding axes—and not just for the firewood. In the last of the wan winter twilight flowing through the gravity-warped panes, she could see the view-blocking but reassuring gray wall of the wooden palisade down the hill on the south lawn. The palisade stretched all around Ardis Hall, sometimes as close as thirty yards from the house, sometimes as far away as a hundred yards behind the house to the edge of the forest. More trees had been felled to build the watch towers rising at all the corners and angles of the palisade, and then even more to turn the scores of summer tents into homes and barracks for the more than four hundred people now living on the grounds of Ardis.

Where is Harman? Ada had been trying to block the urgency of that thought for hours—busying herself with a score of domestic tasks—but now she couldn’t ignore her concern. Her lover—“husband” was the archaic word that Harman liked to use—had left with Hannah, Petyr, and Odysseus—who insisted upon being called Noman these days—a little after dawn that morning, leading an oxen-pulled droshky, sweeping up through the forests and meadows ten miles and more from the river hunting for deer and searching for more of the lost cattle.

They should have been home by now. He promised me he’d be home long before dark.

Ada returned to the first floor and went into the kitchen. For centuries the preserve only of servitors and the occasional voynix bringing in meat from their slaughter grounds, the huge kitchen was now alive with human activity. It was Emme and Reman’s night to plan the meal—usually about fifty people ate in Ardis Hall itself—and there were almost a dozen men and women bustling around baking bread, preparing salads, roasting meat on the spit in the huge old fireplace, and generally producing a genial chaos that would soon resolve itself into a long table filled with food.

Emme caught Ada’s eye. “Are they back yet?”

“Not yet,” said Ada, smiling, attempting to make her voice sound totally unconcerned.

“They will be,” said Emme, patting Ada’s pale hand.

Not for the first time, and not with anger—she liked Emme—Ada wondered why people seemed to feel that they had a greater right to touch and pat you when you were pregnant. She said, “Of course they will. And I hope with some venison and at least four of those missing head of cattle… or better yet, two of the cattle and two cows.”

“We need the milk,” agreed Emme. She patted Ada’s hand again and returned to her duties by the fire.

Ada slipped outside. For a second the cold took her breath away, but she’d brought her shawl and now she hitched it higher around her shoulders and neck. The cold air felt like needles against her cheeks after the warmth of the kitchen and she paused a moment on the back patio to let her eyes adjust to the dark.

To heck with it, she thought, raising her left palm and invoking the proxnet function by visualizing a single yellow circle with a green triangle in it. It was the fifth time she’d tried the function in the last two hours.

The blue oval coalesced into existence above her palm but the holographic imagery was still blurred and static-lashed. Harman had suggested that these occasional failures of proxnet or farnet or even of the old finder function had nothing to do with their bodies—the nanomachinery was still there in their genes and blood, he’d said with a laugh—but may have something to do with the satellites and relay asteroids in either the p-ring or e-ring, perhaps due to interference caused by the nightly meteor showers. Looking up at the darkening evening sky, Ada could see those polar and equatorial rings shifting and turning overhead like two crisscrossing bands of light, each ring composed of thousands of discrete glowing objects. For almost all of her twenty-seven years, those rings had been reassuring—the friendly home of the Firmary where their bodies would be renewed every Twenty, the home of the post-humans who watched over them and whose ranks they would ascend to on each person’s Fifth and Final Twenty—but now, Ada knew from Harman and Daeman’s experience there, the rings were empty of post-humans and a terrible threat. The Fifth Twenty had been a lie these long centuries—a final fax up to unconscious death by cannibalism from the thing called Caliban.

The falling stars—actually chunks of the two orbital objects that Harman and Daemon had helped to collide eight months earlier—were streaking from west to east, but this was a tiny meteor shower, nothing like the terrible bombardment of those first weeks after the Fall. Ada mused on that phrase they’d all used in the past months. The Fall. Fall of what? Fall of the chunks of the orbital asteroid Harman and Daemon had helped Prospero destroy, fall of the servitors, fall of the electrical grid, the end of the service from the voynix who had fled human control that very night… the night of the Fall. Everything had fallen that day a little more than eight months ago, Ada realized—not just the sky, but their world as they and preceding generations of old-style humans had known it for more than fourteen Five Twenties.

Ada began to feel the queasiness of the nausea she’d suffered the first three months of pregnancy, but this was anxiety, not morning sickness. Her head ached from tension. She thought off and the proxnet flicked off, tried farnet—it wasn’t working either—tried the primitive finder function, but the three men and one woman she wanted to find weren’t close enough for it to glow red, green, or amber. She blinked off all the palm functions.

Invoking any function made her want to read more books. Ada looked up at the glowing windows of the library—she could see the heads of others in there now, sigling away—and she wished she was with them, running her hands across the spines of the new volumes brought in and stacked in recent days, watching the golden words flow down her hands and arms into her mind and heart. But she’d read fifteen thick books already this short winter day, and even the thought of more sigling made her nausea surge.

Reading—or at least sigl-reading—is a lot like being pregnant, she thought, rather pleased with the metaphor. It fills you with feelings and reactions you’re not ready for …it makes you feel too full, not quite yourself, suddenly moving toward some destined moment that will change everything in your life forever. She wondered what Harman would say about her metaphor—he was brutal in critiquing his own metaphors and analogies, she knew—and then she felt the nausea in her belly move to her heart as the concern flooded back in. Where are they? Where is he? Is my darling all right?

Ada’s heart was pounding as she walked out toward the glowing open hearth and web of wooden scaffolding that was Hannah’s cupola, manned twenty-four hours a day now that bronze and iron and other metals were being shaped for weapons.

Hannah’s friend Loes and a group of the younger men were stoking and maintaining the fires tonight. “Good evening, Ada Uhr,” called down the tall, thin man. He’d known her for years, but always preferred the formality of the honorific.

“Good evening, Loes Uhr. Any word from the watchtowers?”

“None, I’m afraid,” called down Loes, stepping away from the opening at the top of the cupola. Ada noticed in her distraction that the man had shaved his beard and that his face was red and sweaty from the heat. He was working bare-chested up there on a night when it might snow.

“Is there a pour tonight?” asked Ada. Hannah always informed her of such things—and night pours were dramatic to watch—but the metal furnace was not one of Ada’s responsibilities and a fact of their new life that was only of passing interest to her.

“In the morning, Ada Uhr. And I’m sure that Harman Uhr and the others will be back soon. They can find their way easily enough in ring-light and starlight.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” called Ada. Then, as an afterthought, she asked, “Have you seen Daeman Uhr?”

Loes mopped his brow, spoke softly to one of the other men who ran to get firewood, and then called down, “Daeman Uhr left for Paris Crater this evening, do you remember? He’s fetching his mother here to Ardis Hall.”

“Ah, yes, of course,” said Ada. She bit her lip, but had to ask, “Did he leave before dark? I certainly hope he did.” The voynix attacks between Ardis and the faxnode had increased in recent weeks.

“Oh, yes, Ada Uhr. He left with plenty of time to get to the pavilion before dark. And he was carrying one of the new crossbows. He’ll wait until after sunrise here to return with his mother.”

“That’s good,” said Ada, looking north toward the wooden wall and the forest beyond it. It was already dark here on the open hillside, the last of the light fled from the western sky where dark clouds were massing, and she could imagine how very dark it must be under the trees out there. “I’ll see you at dinner, Loes Uhr.”

“A good evening to you until then, Ada Uhr.”

She pulled her shawl up over her head as the wind came up. She was walking toward the north gate and the watchtower there, but she knew she wouldn’t call up to distract the guards there with her anxiety. Besides, she’d spent an hour out there in late afternoon, watching the northern approaches, waiting almost happily. That was before the anxiety had set in like nausea. Ada walked aimlessly around the eastern side of Ardis Hall, nodding to the guards leaning on their spears near the circular driveway. The torches along the drive had been lit.

She couldn’t go inside. Too much warmth, too much laughter, too much conversation. She saw young Peaen on the porch, talking earnestly with one of her young admirers who had moved to Ardis from Ulanbat after the Fall—one of the many disciples of Odysseus back when the old man had been a teacher, before he had become Noman and taciturn—and Ada turned back into the relative darkness of the side yard, not wishing to be drawn into so much as a greeting.

What if Harman dies? What if he is dead already somewhere out there in the dark?

Putting the thought into words made her feel better, made the nausea recede. The words were like objects, making the idea more solid—less a poisonous gas and more a loathsome cube of crystallized thought that she could rotate in her hands, studying its terrible facets.

What if Harman dies? She would not die herself—Ada, always a realist, knew that. She would live on, have the child, perhaps love again.

That last thought made the nausea return and she sat on a cold stone bench where she could look at the blazing cupola and at the closed north gate beyond it.

Ada knew that she had never really been in love before Harman—even when she had wanted to be, she’d known as both girl and young woman that the flirtations and dalliances had not been love, in a world before the Fall that had amounted to little more than flirtations and dalliances—with life and others and oneself.

Before Harman, Ada had never known the deep soul-satisfying pleasure of sleeping with one’s beloved—and here she did not use a euphemism, but was thinking of sleeping next to him, waking next to him in the night, feeling his arm around her as she fell asleep and often first thing when she woke in the morning. She knew Harman’s least self-conscious sounds and his touch and his scent—an outdoor and masculine scent, mixing the smell of leather of the tack in the stables visible there beyond the cupola and the autumn richness of the forest floor itself.

Her body had imprinted itself on his touch—and not just the intimate touch of their frequent lovemaking, but the slightest pressure of his hand on her shoulder or arm or back as he passed. She knew that she would miss the pressure of his gaze almost as much as she would miss his physical touch—indeed, his awareness of her and attention to her had become a sort of constant touch to Ada. She closed her eyes now and allowed herself to feel his large hand enclosing her cold, smaller hand—her fingers had always been long and thin, his were blunt and wide, his calloused palm always warmer than hers. She would miss his warmth. Ada realized that what she would miss most if Harman were dead—miss as much as the essence of her beloved—was his embodiment of her future. Not her fate, but her future—the ineffable sense that tomorrow meant seeing Harman, laughing with Harman, eating with Harman, discussing their unborn child with Harman, even disagreeing with Harman—she would forevermore miss the sense that the continuation of her life was more than another day of breathing, but was the gift of another day of engagement with her beloved across the spectrum of all things.

Sitting there on the cold bench with the rings revolving overhead and the nightly meteor shower increasing in intensity, her shadow thrown across the frost-whitened lawn by the glow of that light and the cupola, Ada realized that it was easier to contemplate one’s own mortality than the death of one’s beloved. This wasn’t a total revelation to her—she had imagined such a perspective before, Ada was very, very good at imagining—but the reality and totality of the feeling itself was a revelation. As with the sense of the new life within her, the sensation of loss and love for Harman infused her—it was somehow, impossibly, larger not only than herself but than her capacity for such a thought or feeling.

Ada had expected to love making love with Harman—with sharing her body with him and learning the pleasure his body could bring her—but she had been amazed to find that as their closeness grew, it was as if each of them had discovered another body—not hers, not his, but something shared and inexplicable. Ada had never discussed this with anyone—not even with Harman, although she knew that he shared the feeling—and it was her opinion that it had taken the Fall to liberate this mystery in human beings.

These last eight months since the Fall should have been a hard, sad time for Ada—the servitors crashed to uselessness, her life of ease and partying gone forever, the world that she had known and grown up in gone forever, her mother—who had refused to come back to the danger of Ardis Hall, staying at the Loman Estate near the eastern coast with two thousand others, dead along with all the others there in the massed voynix attack in the autumn—the disappearance of Ada’s cousin-friend Virginia from her estate outside of Chom above the Arctic Circle, the unprecedented worries about food and warmth and safety and survival, the terrible knowledge that the Firmary was gone forever and that the certainty of ascension to the heaven of the p-ring and e-ring was all a vicious myth, the sobering knowledge that only death awaited them someday and that even the Five Twenties lifespan was not their birthright any more, that they could die at any time… it all should have been terrifying and oppressive to the twenty-seven-year-old woman.

She had been happy. Ada had been happier than at any time in her life. She had been happy with the new challenges and with the need to find courage as well as the need to trust and depend on others for her life. Ada had been happy learning that she loved Harman and that he loved her in some way that their old world of fax-in parties and servitor luxuries and temporary connections between men and women would never have allowed. As unhappy as she was each time he left on a hunting trip or to lead an attack on voynixes or on a sonie voyage to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu or to another ancient site, or on one of his teaching fax-journeys to any of the three-hundred-some other communities of survivors—at least half the humans on Earth dead since the Fall, and there were never a million of us we know now, that number the post-humans had given us centuries ago had always been a lie—she was equally happy every time he returned and gloriously happy every cold, dangerous, uncertain day that he was there at Ardis Hall with her.

She would go on if her beloved Harman was dead—she knew in her heart that she would go on, survive, fight, birth and raise this child, perhaps love again—but she also knew this night that the fierce, gliding joy of the past eight months would be gone forever.

Quit being an idiot, Ada commanded herself.

She rose, adjusted her shawl, and had turned to go into the house when the bell in the gate watchtower rang out, as did the voice of one of the sentries.

“Three people approaching from the forest!”

All the men at the cupola dropped their work, grabbed spears or bows or crossbows, and ran to the walls. The roving sentries from the east and west yards also ran to the ladders and parapets.

Three people. For a moment, Ada stood frozen where she was. Four had left that morning. And they’d had a converted droshky pulled by an ox. They wouldn’t return without the droshky and ox unless something terrible had happened, and if it was just that someone had been injured—say, a twisted ankle or broken leg—they would have used the droshky to transport him or her.

“Three people approaching the north gate,” cried the watchtower guard again. “Open the gate. They’re carrying a body.”

Ada dropped her shawl and ran as fast as she could for the north gate.

23

Hours before the voynix attacked, Harman had the sense that something terrible was going to happen.

This outing hadn’t really been necessary. Odysseus—Noman now, Harman reminded himself, although to him the sturdy man with the salt-and-pepper beard would always be Odysseus—had wanted to bring in fresh meat, track down some of the missing cattle, and reconnoiter the hill country to the north. Petyr suggested that they just use the sonie, but Odysseus argued that even with the leaves off the trees, it was still difficult to see even something as large as a cow from a low-flying sonie. Besides, he wanted to hunt.

“The voynix want to hunt too,” Harman had said. “They’re getting bolder every week.”

Odysseus—Noman—had shrugged.

Harman had come along despite his sure knowledge that everyone on this little expedition had better things to do. Hannah had been working toward an early morning iron pour for the following day and her absence might throw that plan behind schedule. Petyr had been cataloging the hundreds of books brought in during the last two weeks, setting priorities on which should be sigled first. Noman himself had been talking about finally going on his long-delayed solo sonie search for the elusive robotic factory somewhere along the shores of what had once been called Lake Michigan. And Harman would have probably devoted the entire day to his obsessive attempt to penetrate the allnet and discover more functions, although he’d also been considering going to Paris Crater with Daeman to help fetch his friend’s mother.

But Noman—who constantly went on solo hunting expeditions—had wanted to go out with others this time. And poor Hannah, who had been in love with Noman-Odysseus since the day she’d met him on the Golden Gate Bridge at Machu Picchu more than nine months earlier, insisted on coming along. Then Petyr, who had first come to Ardis Hall as a disciple of Odysseus’ before the Fall, back when the old man was still teaching his strange philosophy, but who was now a disciple only of Hannah in the sense that he was helplessly in love with her, had also insisted on going. And finally Harman had agreed to join them because… he wasn’t sure why he had agreed to join them. Perhaps he didn’t want three such star-crossed lovers alone in the woods all day with their weapons.

Later, while walking behind those three in the cold forest and thinking these words, Harman had to smile. He’d run across that phrase—“star-crossed lovers”—only the previous day while reading—visually reading, not function-sigling—Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Harman was drunk on Shakespeare that week, having read three plays in two days. He was surprised he could walk, much less hold a conversation. His mind was filled to overflowing with incredible cadences, a torrent of new vocabulary, and more insight into the complexity of what it meant to be human than he’d ever hoped to achieve. It made him want to weep.

If he wept, he knew with some shame, it would not be for the beauty and power of the plays—the entire concept of staged drama was new to Harman and his postliterate world. No, he’d be weeping because of selfish sorrow over the fact that he’d not encountered such things as Shakespeare until less than three months before his allotted fivescore years was up. Even though he was certain, since he’d helped to destroy it, that the orbital Firmary would be faxing no more old-style humans up to the e-ring on their Fifth Twenty—or on any other Twenty for that matter—ninety-nine years of thinking that his life on earth would end on the stroke of midnight marking his hundredth birthday was a hard mind-set to escape.

As dusk approached, the four of them walked slowly along a cliff’s edge, returning from their fruitless day. Their pace was never faster than the lumbering ox they’d brought along to pull the droshky. Before the Fall, the conveyances had been balanced on one wheel by internal gyroscopes and pulled by voynix, but without internal power now, the damned things couldn’t balance, so the machine-guts and moving parts of each vehicle had been ripped out, the tongues moved farther apart, and a yoke rigged for the ox, while the single, slender center wheel had been replaced by two broader wheels on a newly forged axle. Harman thought the jury-rigged droshkies and carrioles were pathetically crude, but they did represent the first human-built wheeled vehicles in more than fifteen hundred years of nonhistory.

That thought also made him want to weep.

They’d headed about four miles north, walking mostly along the low bluffs overlooking a tributary to the river Harman now knew had once been named the Ekei, and before that the Ohio. The droshky was necessary to transport any deer carcasses they managed to accumulate—although Noman was notorious for walking miles with a dead deer draped over his shoulders—so their progress was slow in the way that only an ox’s progress could be slow.

At times, two of them would stay with the cart while two went into the woods with bows or crossbows. Petyr was carrying a flechette rifle—one of the few firearms at Ardis Hall—but they preferred to hunt with less noisy weapons. Voynix did not have ears, as such, but somehow their hearing was excellent.

All during the morning, the three old-style humans had monitored their palms. For whatever reason, voynix did not show up on the finders, farnet, or the rarely used allnet functions, but they usually did on proxnet. But then again, as Harman and Daeman had learned with Savi nine months earlier in a place called Jerusalem, voynix also used proxnet—to locate humans.

It didn’t matter this day. By noon, all of the functions were down. The four trusted to their eyes, being more careful in the forest, watching the edge of the tree line when moving through meadows and along the line of low bluffs.

The wind out of the northwest was very cold. All of the old distributories had quit working on the day of the Fall, and there had been few heavy garments needed before then anyway, so the three old-style humans were wearing rudely fashioned coats and cloaks of wool or animal hides. Odysseus… Noman… seemed impervious to the cold and wore the same chest armor and short-skirt sort of girdle he always wore on his expeditions, with only a short red blanket-cape draped around his shoulders for warmth.

They found no deer, which was odd. Luckily they ran across no allosauruses or other RNA-returned dinosaurs either. The consensus at Ardis Hall was that the few dinos that still hunted this far north had migrated south during this unusual cold spell. The bad news was that the sabertoothed tigers that had shown up the previous summer had not migrated with the large reptiles. Noman showed them fresh pugmarks not far from the cattle tracks they’d been following for much of the day.

Petyr made sure that the power rifle had a fresh magazine of crystal flechettes locked in.

They turned back after they found the rib cages and scattered, bloody bones of two of the missing cattle along a rocky stretch of cliff. Then ten minutes later, they found the hide, hair, vertebrae, skull, and amazing curved teeth of a sabertooth.

Noman’s head had come up and he’d turned three hundred and sixty degrees, scrutinizing every distant tree and boulder. He kept both hands on his long spear.

“Did another sabertooth do this?” asked Hannah.

“Either that or voynix,” said Noman.

“Voynix don’t eat,” said Harman, realizing how silly his comment was as soon as he’d said it.

Noman shook his head. His gray curls stirred in the wind. “No, but this sabertooth might have attacked a pack of voynix. Scavengers or other cats ate this one afterward. See those other pugmarks in the soft soil there? Right next to them are voynix padmarks.”

Harman saw them, but only after Noman actually pointed again.

They’d turned back then, but the stupid ox walked more slowly than ever, despite Noman’s encouragement to it with the shaft of his spear and even the sharp end on occasion. The wheels and axle squeaked and creaked and once they had to repair a loose hub. The low clouds moved in with an even colder wind and the daylight began to fade when they were still two miles from home.

“They’ll keep our dinner warm,” said Hannah. Until her recent bout of lovesickness, the tall, athletic young woman had always been the optimist. But now her easy smile seemed strained.

“Try your proxnet,” said Noman. The old Greek had no functions. But on the other hand, his ancient-style body, devoid of the last two mil-lennia’s nanogenetic tampering, didn’t register on finder, farnet, or proxnet on the voynix’s functions.

“Just static,” said Hannah, looking at the blue oval floating above her palm. She flicked it off.

“Well, now they can’t see us either,” said Petyr. The young man had a lance in one hand, the flechette rifle slung over his shoulder, but his gaze remained on Hannah.

They resumed trudging across the meadow, the high, brittle grass scraping against their legs, the repaired droshky squeaking louder than usual. Harman glanced at Noman-Odysseus’ bare legs above the high-strapped sandals and wondered why his calves and shins weren’t a maze of welts.

“It looks like our day was sort of useless,” said Petyr.

Noman shrugged. “We know now that something large is taking the deer near Ardis,” he said. “A month ago, I would have killed two or three on a long day’s hunt like this.”

“A new predator?” said Harman. He chewed his lip at the idea.

“Could be,” said Noman. “Or perhaps the voynix are killing off the wild game and driving the cattle away in an attempt to starve us out.”

“Are the voynix that smart?” asked Hannah. The organic-mechanical things had always been looked down upon as slave labor by the old-style humans—mute, dumb except to orders, programmed, like the servitors, to care for, take orders from, and protect human beings. But the servitors had all crashed on the day of the Fall and the voynix had fled and turned lethal.

Noman shrugged again. “Athough they can function on their own, the voynix take orders. Always have. From who or what, I’m not quite sure.”

“Not from Prospero,” Harman said softly. “After we were in the city called Jerusalem, which was crawling with voynix, Savi said that the noosphere thing named Prospero had created Caliban and the calibani as protection against the voynix. They’re not from this world.”

“Savi,” grunted Noman. “I can’t believe the old woman is dead.”

“She is,” said Harman. He and Daeman had watched the monster Caliban murder her and drag her corpse away, up there on that orbital isle. “How long did you know her, Odysseus… Noman?”

The older man rubbed his short, gray beard. “How long did I know Savi? Just a few months of real time… but spread out over more than a millennium. Sometimes we slept together.”

Hannah looked shocked and actually stopped walking.

Noman laughed. “She in her cryo crèche, I in my time sarcophagus on the Golden Gate. It was all very proper and parallel. Two babies in separate cribs. If I were to take the name of one of my countrymen in vain… I would say it was a platonic relationship.” Noman laughed heartily even though no one joined in. But when he was finished laughing, he said, “Don’t believe everything that old crone told you, Harman. She lied about much, misunderstood more.”

“She was the wisest woman I’ve ever met,” said Harman. “I won’t see her like again.”

Noman flashed his unfriendly smile. “The second part of that statement is correct.”

They encountered a stream that ran down into the larger stream, balancing precariously on rocks and fallen logs as they crossed. It was too cold to get their feet and clothes wet unless necessary. The ox lumbered through the chill water, bouncing the empty droshky behind him. Petyr crossed first and stood guard with the flechette rifle ready as the other three came over. They were not following the same cattle tracks home, but were within a few hundred yards of the way they’d come. They knew they had one more rolling, wooded ridge to cross, then a long rocky meadow, then another bit of meadow before Ardis Hall, warmth, food, and relative safety.

The sun had set behind the bank of dark clouds to the southwest. Within minutes, it was dark enough that the rings were providing most of the light. There were two lanterns in the droshky and candles in the pack that Harman carried, but they wouldn’t need them unless the clouds moved in to obscure the rings and stars.

“I wonder if Daeman got off to go get his mother,” said Petyr. The young man seemed uncomfortable in long silences.

“I wish he’d waited for me,” said Harman. “ Or at least until daylight on the other end. Paris Crater isn’t very safe these days.”

Noman grunted. “Of all of you, Daeman—amazingly—seems the best fitted to take care of himself. He’s surprised you, hasn’t he, Harman?”

“Not really,” said Harman. Instantly he realized that this wasn’t the truth. Less than a year ago, when he’d first met Daeman, he’d seen a whining, pudgy momma’s boy whose only hobbies were capturing butterflies and seducing young women. In fact, Harman was sure that Daeman had come to Ardis Hall ten months ago to seduce his cousin Ada. In their first adventures, Daeman had been timid and complaining. But Harman had to acknowledge to himself that events had changed the younger man, and much more for the better than they’d changed Harman. It had been a starved but determined Daeman—forty pounds lighter but infinitely more aggressive—who had taken on Caliban in single combat in the near zero-gravity of Prospero’s orbital isle. And it had been Daeman who had gotten Harman and Hannah out alive. Since the Fall, Daeman had been much quieter, more serious, and dedicated to learning every fighting and survival skill that Odysseus would teach.

Harman was a little envious. He’d thought of himself as the natural leader of the Ardis group—older, wiser, the only man on earth nine months ago who could read, or wanted to, the only man on earth who knew then that the earth was round—but now Harman had to admit that the ordeal that had strengthened Daeman had weakened him in both body and spirit. Is it my age? Physically, Harman looked to be in his healthy late thirties or early forties, like any Four Twenties-plus male before the Fall. The blue worms and bubbling chemicals he’d seen in the Firmary tanks up there had renewed him well enough during his first four visits. But psychologically? Harman had to worry. Perhaps old was old, no matter how skillfully one’s human form had been reworked. Adding to this feeling was the fact that Harman was still limping from injuries to his leg received up there on Prospero’s hellish isle eight months earlier. No Firmary tank now waited to undo every bit of damage done, no servitors floated forth to bandage and heal the result of every little careless accident. Harman knew his leg would never be right, that he’d limp until the day he died—and this thought added to his odd sadness this day.

They trudged on through the woods in silence. Each of them seemed to the others to be lost in his or her own thoughts. Harman was taking his turn to lead the ox by its halter, and the ox was getting more stubborn and willful as the evening grew darker. All it would take was for the stupid animal to lurch the wrong way, bash the droshky against one of these trees, and they’d have to either stay out all night repairing the goddamned thing or just leave it out here and lead the ox home without it. Neither alternative was appealing.

He glanced at Odysseus-Noman walking easily along, shortening his stride to keep pace with the slow ox and limping Harman, and then he looked at Hannah staring wistfully at Noman and Petyr staring wistfully at Hannah, and he just wanted to sit down on the cold ground and weep for the world that was too busy surviving to weep. He thought of the incredible play he’d just read—Romeo and Juliet—and wondered if some things and follies were universal to human nature even after almost two millennia of self-styled evolution, nano-engineering, and genetic manipulation.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have allowed Ada to get pregnant. This was the thought that haunted Harman the most.

She had wanted a child. He had wanted a child. More than that, uniquely after all these centuries, they had both wanted a family—a man to stay with the woman and child, the child to be raised by them and not by servitors. While all pre-Fall old-style humans knew their mothers, almost no one had known—or wanted to know—who his or her father was. In a world where males stayed young and vital until their Fifth and Final Twenty, in a small population—perhaps fewer than three hundred thousand people worldwide—and in a culture comprised of little more than parties and brief sexual liaisons where youthful beauty was prized above all else, it was almost certain that many fathers would unknowingly couple with their daughters, young men with their mothers.

This bothered Harman after he had taught himself to read and got his first glimpses of previous cultures, long-lost values—too late, too late—but the incest would have bothered no one else nine months ago. The same genetically engineered nano-sensors in a woman’s body that allowed her to choose from carefully stored sperm packets months or years after intercourse, would have never allowed the woman to choose someone from her immediate family as a breeding mate. It simply couldn’t happen. The nanoprogramming was foolproof, even if the coupling humans were fools.

But now everything is different, thought Harman. They would need families to survive—not just to make it through the voynix attacks and hardships after the Fall, but to help them organize for the war that Odysseus had sworn was coming. The old Greek wouldn’t say anything else about his Fall-night prophecy, but he had said that night that some large war was coming—some speculated a war related to the siege of Troy they’d all vicariously enjoyed under their turin cloths before those embedded microcircuits also ceased to function. “New worlds will appear on your lawn,” he’d told Ada.

As they came out into the last broad meadow before the final rim of forest, Harman realized that he was tired and scared. Tired of always trying to decide what was right—who was he to have destroyed the Firmary, possibly freed Prospero, and now always to be lecturing on family and the need to organize into protective groups? What did he know—ninety-nine-year-old Harman who had wasted almost all of his lifetime without learning wisdom?

And he was scared not so much of dying—although they all shared that fear for the first time in a millennium and half of human experience—but of the very change he’d helped bring about. And he was afraid of the responsibility.

Were we right to allow Ada to get pregnant now? In this new world, the two had decided that it made more sense—even in the midst of hardships and uncertainty—to begin a family, though “begin a family” was a strange phrase since it took a great effort even to think of having more than one child. Only one child had been permitted to each old-style human woman during the millennium-and-a-half rule of the absent post-humans. It had been disorienting to the point of vertigo for Ada and Harman to realize that they could have several children if they so chose and if their biology agreed. There was no waiting list, no need for post-human approval signaled through the servitors. On the other hand, they didn’t know if a human could have more than one child. Would their altered genetics and nanoprogramming allow it?

They’d decided to have the baby now, while Ada was still in her twenties and they thought they could show the others, not just at Ardis but in all the other surviving faxnode communities, what a family with a father present could be like.

All this frightened Harman. Even when he felt sure he was right, it frightened him. First there was the uncertainty of mother and child surviving a non-Firmary birth. There was not an old-style human alive who had seen a human baby being born—birth was, like death, something one had been faxed up to the e-ring to experience alone. And as with pre-Fall humans suffering serious injury or premature death, as Daeman once experienced upon being eaten by an allosaurus, Firmary birth was something so traumatic that it had to be blocked from memory. Women remembered no more about the Firmary birth experience than did their infants.

At the appointed time in her pregnancy, a time announced by servitors, the woman was faxed away and returned healthy and thin two days later. For many months afterward, the babies were fed and cared for exclusively by servitors. Mothers tended to keep in touch with their children, but they had little hand in raising them. Before the Fall, fathers not only did not know their children—they never knew they’d fathered a child, since their sexual contact with that woman may have occurred years or decades earlier.

Now Harman and the others were reading books about the ancient habit of childbirth—the process seemed unbelievably dangerous and barbaric, even when carried out in hospitals, which seemed to be crude pre-Firmary versions of the Firmary, and even when supervised by professionals—but now there wasn’t a single person on the planet who had seen a baby being born.

Except for Noman. The Greek had once admitted that in his former life, in that unreal age of blood and warfare shown in the turin-cloth adventure, he had seen at least part of the process of a child being born, including his own son, Telemachus. He was Ardis’s midwife.

And in a new world where there were no doctors—no one who understood how to heal the simplest injury or health problem—Odysseus-Noman was a master of the healing art. He knew poultices. He know how to stitch up wounds. He knew how to set broken bones. In his near-decade of travels through time and space after escaping someone named Circe, he’d learned about modern medical techniques such as washing one’s hands and one’s knife before cutting into a living body.

Nine months ago, Odysseus had talked about staying at Ardis Hall for only a few weeks before moving on. Now, if the old man tried to leave, Harman suspected that fifty people would jump on him and tie him down, just to keep him there for his expertise—making weapons, hunting, dressing out game, cooking over open flames, forging metal, sewing garments, programming the sonie for flight, healing, and dealing with wounds—helping a baby to be born.

They could see the meadow beyond the forest now. The rings were being swallowed by clouds and it was getting very dark.

“I wanted to see Daeman today …” began Noman.

It was the last thing he had time to say.

The voynix dropped down out of the trees like huge, silent spiders. There were at least a dozen of them. They all had their killing blades extended.

Two landed on the ox’s back and cut its throat. Two landed near Hannah and slashed at her, sending blood and fabric flying. She leaped back, trying to raise her crossbow and ratchet back the bolt, but the voynix knocked her down and leaned closer to finish the job.

Odysseus screamed, activated his sword—a gift from Circe, he’d told them long ago—to a vibrating blur, and leaped forward swinging. Bits of voynix shells and arms flew into the air and Harman was spattered by white blood and blue oil.

A voynix landed on Harman, knocking the wind out of him, but he rolled away from its fingerblades. A second voynix landed on all fours and snapped upright, moving like something in a speeded-up nightmare. Getting to his feet, fumbling his spear up, Harman stabbed at the second creature at the same instant the first one slashed at his back.

There was a ratcheting explosion as Petyr brought the rifle into play. Crystal flechettes whizzed by Harman’s ear as the voynix behind him spun and fell away under the impact of a thousand shining slivers. Harman turned just as the second voynix jumped. He rammed the spear through its chest and watched as the whirling thing went down, but cursed as it pulled the spear out of his hands in its falling. Harman reached for the shaft, but then jumped back and pulled his bow from his shoulder as three more voynix turned his way and attacked.

The four humans set their backs to the droshky as the eight remaining voynix made a circle and closed in on them, fingerblades gleaming in the dying light.

Hannah fired two crossbow quarrels deep into the chest of the one closest to her. It went down, but continued its attack on all fours, dragging itself forward with its blades. Odysseus-Noman stepped forward and sliced the thing in two with his Circe sword.

Three voynix rushed Harman. He had nowhere to run. He fired his single arrow, saw it glance off the lead voynix’s metal chest, and then they were on him. Harman ducked, felt something slash his leg, and now he was rolling under the droshky—he could smell the ox’s blood, a copperish taste in his mouth and nose—and then he was up and on his feet on the other side. The three voynix leaped up and over the droshky.

Petyr whirled, crouched, and fired an entire magazine of several thousand flechettes at the leaping figures. The three voynix flew apart and landed in a gout of organic blood and machine oil.

“Cover me while I reload!” shouted Petyr, reaching into his cape’s pocket to pull out another flechette magazine and slap it into place.

Harman dropped his bow—the things were too close—pulled out a short sword forged in Hannah’s furnace only two months ago, and began hacking away at the two closest metallic shapes. They were too fast. One dodged. The other batted Harman’s sword out of his hands.

Hannah jumped up into the droshky and fired a crossbow bolt into the back of the voynix that was slashing at Harman. The monster whirled but then spun back to the attack, metallic arms raised, blades swinging. It had no mouth or eyes.

Harman ducked beneath the killing blow, landed on his hands, and kicked at the thing’s knees. It was like kicking at thick metal pipes embedded in concrete.

All five of the remaining voynix were on Harman’s side of the cart now, rushing at Petyr and him before the younger man could raise the flechette rifle.

At that second, Odysseus came around the cart with a berserker scream and waded into them, his short sword a blur within a blur. All five voynix turned on him, their arms and rotating blades also spinning into motion.

Hannah raised the heavy crossbow but had no clear shot. Odysseus was in the middle of that whirling mass of violence and everything was moving too fast. Harman leaned into the droshky and pulled out one of the extra hunting spears.

“Odysseus, drop!” screamed Petyr.

The old Greek went down, although due to heeding the shout or just from the voynix attack, they couldn’t tell. He’d sliced two of the things apart, but the final three were still functional and lethal.

BRRPPPPPPPPPPPPPPRRRRRRRRRBRRRRRPPPPPBRPPPPPP.

The flechette rifle on full automatic sounded like someone sticking a wooden paddle into the blades of a swiftly turning fan. The final three voynix were thrown six feet backward, their shells riddled with over ten thousand crystal flechettes all glittering like a mosaic of broken glass in the dying ringlight.

“Jesus Christ,” gasped Harman.

The voynix that Hannah had wounded rose up behind her on the other side of the droshky.

Harman threw his spear with every ounce and erg of energy left in his body. The voynix staggered back, pulled the spear free, and snapped its shaft.

Harman jumped into the droshky and grabbed up another spear from the bed of the vehicle. Hannah fired two quarrels into the voynix. One of the bolts deflected off into the darkness under the trees, but the other sank deep. Harman leaped from the droshky and drove the remaining spear into the last voynix’s chest. The creature twitched and staggered back another step.

Harman wrenched the lance out, drove it home again with the pure violence of madness, twisted the barbed tip, pulled it free, and drove it home again.

The voynix fell backward, clattering onto the roots of an ancient elm.

Harman straddled the voynix, unmindful of its still-twitching arms and blades, lifted the blue-milked spear straight up, drove it down, twisted it, ripped it out, lifted it, drove it down lower on the thing’s shell, ripped it free, drove it in where a human’s groin would be, twisted the barbs to do maximum damage to the soft parts inside, lifted it out—part of the shell ripping away—and drove it home again so fiercely that he could feel the speartip hit soil and root. He pulled the spear free, lifted it, drove it deep, lifted it…

“Harman,” said Petyr, setting a hand on the older man’s shoulder. “It’s dead. It’s dead.”

Harman looked around. He didn’t recognize Petyr and couldn’t get enough air into his lungs. He heard a violent noise and realized that it was his own labored breathing.

It was too fucking damned dark. The clouds had covered the rings and it was too fucking damned dark here under the trees. There could be fifty more voynix there in the shadows, waiting to leap.

Hannah lighted the lantern.

There were no more voynix visible in the sudden circle of light. The fallen ones had ceased twitching. Odysseus was still down, one of the voynix fallen across him. Neither voynix nor man moved.

“Odysseus!” Hannah leaped from the droshky with the lantern, kicking the voynix corpse aside.

Petyr rushed around and went to one knee next to the fallen man. Harman limped over as quickly as he could, leaning on his spear. The deep scratches on his back and legs were just beginning to hurt.

“Oh,” said Hannah. She was on her knees, holding the lantern over Odysseus. Her hand was shaking. “Oh,” she said again.

Odysseus-Noman’s armor had been knocked off his body, the leather straps slashed apart. His broad chest was a latticework of deep wounds. A single slash had taken off part of his left ear and a section of scalp.

But it was the damage to the old man’s right arm that made Harman gasp.

The voynix—in their wild attempt to make Odysseus drop the Circe sword, which he had never done, it was still humming in his hand—had ripped the man’s arm to shreds and then all but torn the arm from his body. Blood and mangled tissue shone in the harsh lantern light. Harman could see white bone glistening. “Dear God,” he whispered. In the eight months since the Fall, no one at Ardis Hall or at any of the survivors’ communes Harman knew of had suffered such wounds and survived.

Hannah was pounding the earth with one fist while her other hand pressed palm downward on Odysseus’ bloody chest. “I can’t feel a heartbeat,” she said almost calmly. Only her wild white eyes in the lantern’s gleam belied that calm. “I can’t feel a heartbeat.”

“Put him in the droshky …” began Harman. He felt the post-adrenaline shakiness and nausea that he’d experienced once before. His bad leg and lacerated back were bleeding fiercely.

“Fuck the droshky,” said Petyr. The young man twisted the hilt of the Circe sword and the vibration ceased, the blade becoming visible again. He handed Harman the sword, the flechette rifle, and two extra magazines. Then he bent, went to one knee, lifted the unconscious or dead Odysseus over his shoulder, and stood. “Hannah, lead the way with the lantern. Reload your crossbow. Harman, bring up the rear with the rifle. Shoot at anything that even looks like it might move.” He staggered off toward the last meadow with the bleeding figure over his shoulder, looking ironically, horribly, much like Odysseus often had when hauling home the carcass of a deer.

Nodding dumbly, Harman cast aside the spear, tucked the Circe sword in his belt, lifted the flechette rifle, and followed the other two survivors out of the forest.

24

As soon as he faxed into Paris Crater, Daeman wished that he’d arrived in daylight. Or at least waited until Harman or someone else could have come with him.

It was about five p.m. and the light had been fading when he’d reached the fax pavilion palisade a little more than a mile from Ardis Hall, and now it was one in the morning, very dark, and raining hard here in Paris Crater. He’d faxed to the node closest to his mother’s domi—a fax pavilion called Invalid Hotel for no reason understood by any living person—and he came through the fax portal with his crossbow raised, swiveling and ready. The water pouring off the roof of the pavilion made looking out into the city feel like peering out through a curtain or waterfall.

It was irritating. The survivors in Paris Crater didn’t guard their faxnodes. About a third of the survivor communities, with Ardis leading the way, had put a wall around their fax pavilions and posted a full-time guard, but the remaining residents of Paris Crater just refused to do so. No one knew if voynix faxed themselves from place to place—there seemed to be enough of them everywhere without them having to do that—but the humans would never know if places like Paris Crater refused to monitor their nodes.

Of course, that guarding had begun at Ardis not as an attempt to prevent voynix from faxing, but as a way to limit the number of refugees streaming in after the Fall. The first reaction when the servitors crashed and the power failed was to flee toward safety and food, so tens and tens of thousands had been faxing almost randomly in those early weeks and months, flicking to fifty locations around the planet within a dozen hours, depleting food supplies and then faxing away again. Few places had their own store of food then; no place was really safe. Ardis had been one of the first colonies of survivors to arm itself and the first to turn away fear-crazed refugees, unless they had some essential skill. But almost no one had any important skill after more than fourteen hundred years of what Savi had called “sickening eloi uselessness.”

A month after the Fall and that early confusion, Harman had insisted at the Ardis Council meetings that they make up for their selfishness by faxing representatives to all the other communities, giving advice on how to raise crops, tips on how to improve security, demonstrations of how to slaughter their own meat animals, and—once Harman had discovered the reading sigl-function—seminars to show the scattered survivors how they could also pull crucial information from old books. Ardis had also bartered weapons and handed out the plans for making crossbows, bolts, bows, arrows, lances, arrowheads, speartips, knives, and other weapons. Luckily, most of the old-style humans had been using the turin cloths for entertainment for half a Twenty, so they were familiar with everything less complicated than a crossbow. Finally, Harman had sent Ardis residents faxing to all of the three hundred-plus nodes, asking every survivor’s help in finding the legendary robotic factories and distributories. He would demonstrate one of the few guns he’d brought back from his second visit to the museum at the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu and explain that if they were to survive the voynix, human communities needed thousands of these weapons.

Staring out into the darkness through the rain and runoff, Daeman realized that it would have been difficult to guard all this city’s fax-nodes; Paris Crater had been one of the largest cities on the planet just eight months earlier, with twenty-five thousand residents and a dozen working fax portals. Now, if his mother’s friends were to be believed, there were fewer than three thousand men and women left here. The voynix roamed the streets and skittered and scrabbled across the old skywalks and residential towers at will. It was past time to get his mother out of this town. Only a lifetime—almost two Twenties—of habit obeying his mother’s every wish and whim had caused Daeman to acquiesce to her insistence on staying here.

Still, it seemed relatively safe. There were more than a hundred survivors, mostly men, who had secured the tower complex near the west side of the crater where Marina, Daeman’s mother, had her extensive domi apartments. They had water because of rainfall accumulators stretched from rooftop to rooftop, and it rained most of the time in Paris Crater. They had food from terrace gardens and from the livestock they’d driven in from the old voynix-tended fields and then penned in the grassy swards around the crater. Every midweek there was an open market in the nearby Champs Ulysses with all of the survivor camps in West Paris Crater meeting to barter food, clothing, and other survival essentials. They even had wine faxed in from the far-flung vineyard-estate communities. They had weapons—including crossbows purchased from Ardis Hall, a few flechette guns, and an energy-beam projector one of the men had brought up from an abandoned underground museum someone had found after the Fall. Amazingly, the energy-beam weapon worked.

But Daeman knew that Marina had really stayed in Paris Crater because of an old bastard here named Goman who had been her primary lover for almost a full Twenty. Daeman had always disliked Goman.

Paris Crater had always been known as the “City of Light”—and it had been in Daeman’s experience growing up there, with floating glow globes on every street and boulevard, entire towers illuminated by electric lights, thousands of lanterns, and the lighted, thousand-foot-tall structure that symbolized the city towering over everything—but now the glow globes were dark and fallen, the electrical grid gone, most of the lanterns were dark or hidden behind shuttered windows, and the Enormous Whore had gone dark and inactive for the first time in two thousand years or more. Daeman glanced up at her as he ran, but her head and breasts—usually filled with bubbling photoluminescent red liquid—were invisible against or perhaps in the dark storm clouds and the famous thighs and buttocks were just black-iron armatures now, drawing the lightning that crackled over the city.

Actually, it was the lightning that helped Daeman traverse the three long city blocks between the Invalid Hotel faxnode and Marina’s domi tower. With the hood of his anorak up to give him at least an illusion of staying dry in the downpour, Daeman would wait at each intersection, crossbow raised, and then sprint across open areas when the lightning revealed the shadows in doorways and under arches to be free of voynix. He had tried proxnet and farnet when waiting in the pavilion, but both were down. This was good for him since the voynix were using both functions these days to seek out humans. Daeman didn’t need to bring up the finder function—this was his home, after all, despite the weaselly Goman’s usurpation of his place next to his mother.

There were abandoned altars in some of the lightning-illuminated empty courtyards. Daeman caught sight of crudely modeled papiermâché statues of what had been meant to be robed goddesses, naked archers, and bearded patriarchs as he sprinted by these sad testaments to desperation. The altars were for the Olympian gods of the turin drama—Athena, Apollo, Zeus, and others—and that craze for propitiation had begun even before the Fall here in Paris Crater and in other node communities on the continent that Harman, Daeman, and the other readers at Ardis Hall now knew as Europe.

The papier-mâché effigies had melted in the constant rain, so the once-again-abandoned gods on the windstrewn altars looked like humpbacked monstrosities from some other world. That’s more appropriate than worshiping the turin gods, thought Daeman. He had been on Prospero’s Isle in the e-ring and heard about the Quiet. Caliban himself—itself—had bragged to his three captives about the power of his god, the many-handed Setebos, before the monster killed Savi and dragged her away into the sewage-swamps there.

Daeman was only half a block from his mother’s tower when he heard a scrabbling. He faded back into the darkness of a rain-filled doorway and clicked off the safety on the crossbow. Daeman had one of the newer weapons that fired two sharp, barbed quarrels with each snap of the powerful steel band. He raised the weapon against his shoulder and waited.

Only the lightning allowed him to see the half-dozen voynix as they scrabbled by half a block away, heading west. They weren’t walking, but racing along the sides of old stone buildings here like metallic cockroaches, finding grip with their barbed fingerblades and horned footpeds. The first time Daeman had seen voynix scramble along walls like that had been in Jerusalem some nine months ago.

He knew now that the things could see in the infrared, so darkness alone would not hide him, but the creatures were in a hurry—scrabbling in the opposite direction from Marina’s tower—and none of them turned the IR-sensors on their chests in his direction in the three seconds it took them to scuttle out of sight.

Heart pounding, Daeman sprinted the last hundred yards to his mother’s tower where it rose above the west curve of the crater. The hand-cranked elevator basket wasn’t at street level, of course—Daeman could just make it out some twenty-five stories higher along the column of scaffolding, where the residential stacks began above the old shopping esplanade. There was a bell rope hanging at the bottom of the elevator scaffolding to alert the tower residents to a guest’s presence, but a full minute of pulling on Daeman’s part showed no lights coming on up there nor any answering tugs.

Still gasping from his run through the streets, Daeman squinted up into the rain and considered returning to Invalid Hotel. It would be a twenty-five-floor climb—much of it in the old dark stairwells—with absolutely no guarantee that the fifteen stories below the abandoned esplanade would be free of voynix.

Many of the former faxnode communities based in the ancient cities or high towers had to be abandoned after the Fall. Without electricity—old-style humans didn’t even know where the current had been generated or how it was distributed—the lift shafts and elevators wouldn’t work. No one was going to climb and descend two hundred and fifty feet—or much more for some tower communities such as Ulanbat, with its two-hundred-story Circles to Heaven—every time they needed to seek food or water. But, amazingly, some survivors still lived in Ulanbat, even though the tower rose in a desert where no food could be grown and no edible animals wandered as game. The secret there was the tower-core faxnodes every six floors. As long as other communities continued to barter food for the lovely garments that Ulanbat had always been famous for—and which they had in surplus after one-third of their population was killed by voynix before they learned how to seal off the upper floors—the Circles to Heaven would continue to exist.

There were no faxnodes in Marina’s tower, but the survivors up there had shown amazing ingenuity in adapting a small exterior servitor elevator to occasional human use, rigging the cables to a system of gears and cranks so that as many as three people could be lifted up from the street in a sort of basket. The elevator only went to the esplanade level, but that made the last ten stories more climbable. This wouldn’t work for frequent trips—and the ride itself was hair-raising, with startling jerks and occasional dips—but the hundred or so residents of his mother’s tower had more or less seceded from the surface world, relying on their high terrace gardens and water accumulators, sending their representatives down to market twice a week and having little other intercourse with the world.

Why don’t they respond? He pulled on the bell rope another two minutes, waited another three.

There was a scrabbling echo from two blocks south, toward the wide boulevard there.

Make up your mind. Stay or go, but decide. Daeman stepped farther out into the street and looked up again. Lightning illuminated the spidery black buckylace supports and gleaming bamboo-three structures on the towers above the old esplanade. Several windows up there were illuminated by lanterns. From this vantage point, he could see the signal fires that Goman kept burning on his mother’s city-side terrace, in the shelter of the bamboo-three roof.

Scrabbling noises came from alleys to the north.

“To hell with it,” said Daeman. It was time to get his mother out of here. If Goman and all his pals tried to stop him from taking her to Ardis tonight, he was prepared to throw all of them over the terrace railing into the Crater if he had to. Daeman set the safeties on the crossbow so he wouldn’t put two pieces of barbed iron into his foot by mistake, went into the building, and began climbing the dark stairway.

He knew by the time he reached the esplanade level that something was terribly wrong. The other times he’d come here in recent months—always arriving in daylight—there were guards here with their primitive pikes and more sophisticated Ardis bows. None tonight.

Do they drop their esplanade guard at night? No, that made no sense—the voynix were most active at night. Besides, Daeman had been here visiting his mother on several occasions—the last time more than a month ago—when he’d heard the guards changing through the night. He’d even stood guard once on the two a.m. to six a.m. shift, before faxing back to Ardis blurry-eyed and tired.

At least the stairway here above the esplanade was open on the sides; the lightning showed him the next rise or landing before he sprinted up the stairs or crossed a dark space. He kept the crossbow raised and his finger just outside the trigger guard.

Even before he stepped out onto the first residential level where his mother lived, he knew what he’d find.

The signal flames in the metal barrel on the city-side terrace were burning low. There was blood on the bamboo-three of the deck, blood on the walls, and blood on the underside of the eaves. The door was open to the first domi he came to, not his mother’s.

Blood everywhere inside. Daeman found it hard to believe that there had been this much blood in all the bodies of all the hundred-some members of the community combined. There were countless signs of panic—doors hastily barricaded, then the doors and barricades splintered, bloody footprints on terraces and stairways, shreds of sleeping clothes thrown here and there—but no real signs of resistance. No bloodied arrows or lances stuck in wooden beams after being thrown, their targets missed. There were no signs that weapons had been reached or raised.

There were no bodies.

He searched three other domis before working up the nerve to enter his mother’s. In each domi he found blood spattered, furniture shattered, cushions torn, tapestries ripped down, tables overturned, furniture stuffing strewn everywhere—blood on white feathers and blood on pale foam—but no bodies.

His mother’s door was locked. The old thumb locks had failed with the Fall, but Goman had replaced the automatic lock with a simple bolt and chain that Daeman had thought was too flimsy. It proved to be now. After several soft knocks with no answer. Daeman kicked hard three times and the door splintered and came out of its groove. He squeezed into the darkness, crossbow first.

The entryway smelled of blood. There was a light in the back rooms facing the crater, but almost none here in the foyer, hallway, or public anteroom. Daeman moved as silently as he could, his stomach convulsing at the stench of blood and slight ripples under his feet as he moved through unseen pools. He could see just well enough here to make sure there was nothing or no one waiting, and that there were no bodies underfoot.

“Mother!” His own cry alarmed him. Again. “Mother! Goman? Anyone?”

Wind stirred the chimes on the terrace beyond the living area, and although the crater and the city beyond the crater were mostly dark, lightning flashes illuminated the main sitting area. The blue and green silk tapestries he’d never loved but had grown so used to on the south wall had gained red-brown streaks and spatters. The nesting chair he’d always claimed when he was home—a body-molded womb of corrugated paper—had been shredded. There were no bodies. Daeman could only wonder if he was ready to see what he had to see here.

Swirls, trails, and smears of blood came in from the terrace and led from the common sitting room into the dining room where Marina loved to entertain at the long table. Daeman waited for the next flash of lightning—the storm had moved east and there were more seconds between each flash and the following thunder—and then he lifted the crossbow back to his shoulder and moved into the large dining room.

Three successive bolts of lightning showed him the room and its contents. There were no bodies as such. But on his mother’s twenty-foot-long mahogany table, a pyramid of skulls rose almost to the ceiling seven feet above Daeman’s head. Scores of empty eye sockets stared at him. The white of bone was like a retinal after-image between each lightning flash.

Daeman lowered the heavy crossbow, clicked on the safety, and came closer to the pyramid. There was blood everywhere in the room except atop the table, which was pristine. In front of the pyramid of grinning, gaping skulls was an old turin cloth, spread wide with its embroidered circuitry centered in line with the topmost skull.

Daeman stepped up onto the chair he’d always sat in when at his mother’s table, and then stepped on the table itself, bringing his face up to the level of that highest skull of these hundred skulls. In the white flashes from the receding storm, he could see that all of the other skulls were picked clean, pure white, holding no fleshly remains of their victims. This top skull was not so clean. Several strands of curly red hair had been left—oh so deliberately left—like a topknot and more at the back of the skull.

Daeman had reddish hair. His mother had red hair.

He jumped down from the table, threw open the window wall, and staggered out onto the terrace, retching over the side into the single, red eye of the crater magma fifty miles directly below. He vomited again, and then again, and then several more times, even though he had nothing left in him to throw up. Finally he turned, dropped the heavy crossbow onto the floor of the terrace, rinsed his face and mouth with water from the copper basin his mother left hanging there from ornamental chains as a birdbath, and then he collapsed with his back to the bamboo-three railing, staring in through the open sliding window-door of the dining room.

The lightning was growing dimmer and less frequent, but as Daeman’s eyes adjusted, the red glow from the crater illuminated the curved backs of countless skulls. He could see the red hair.

Nine months ago, Daeman would have wept like the thirty-seven-year-old child he was. Now, though his stomach churned and some black emotion folded itself into a fist in his chest, he tried to think coolly.

He had no question about who or what had done this thing. Voynix did not feed, nor did they carry off their victims’ bodies. This was not random voynix violence. This was a message to Daeman, and only one creature in all of dark creation could send such a message. Everyone in this domi tower had died and been filleted like fish, skulls stacked like white coconuts, just so the message could be delivered. And from the stench-freshness of the blood, it had occurred only hours earlier, perhaps even more recently.

Leaving his crossbow lying where it fell for now, Daeman got to his hands and knees, and then to his feet—only because he did not want to further smear his hands in the gore on the terrace floor—and he walked into the dining room again, circling the long table, finally climbing to take down his mother’s skull. His hands were shaking. He did not feel like weeping.

Humans had only just recently learned how to bury their fellow humans. Seven had died at Ardis in the past eight months, six from voynix, one from some mysterious illness that had carried the young woman away in one feverish night. Daeman hadn’t known it was possible for old-style humans to contract illness or disease.

Should I take her back with me? Have some burial service out by the wall where Noman and Harman had directed us to create the cemetery for our dead?

No. Marina had always loved her domis here in Paris Crater better than anyplace else in the faxable world.

But I can’t leave her here with these other skulls, thought Daeman, feeling wave after wave of indescribable emotion surge through him. One of these other skulls is that bastard Goman.

He carried the skull back out onto the terrace. The rain had grown much more fierce, the wind had dropped off, and Daeman stood a long minute at the railing, letting the raindrops wet his face and further clean the skull. Then he dropped the skull over the edge of the railing and watched it fall toward the red eye below until the tiny white speck was gone.

He lifted the crossbow and started to leave—back through the dining room, the common area, the inner hall—then he paused.

It hadn’t been a sound. The pounding of the rain was so loud that he couldn’t have heard an allosaurus if it was ten feet behind him. He’d forgotten something. What?

Daeman went back into the dining room, trying to avoid the accusatory stares of the dozens of skulls—What could I have done? he asked silently. Died with us, they silently responded—and swept up the turin cloth.

He—it—had left the cloth here for some purpose. It and the table were the only things in the domi complex not smeared and spattered with human blood. Daeman stuffed the cloth into the side pocket of his anorak and went out of that place.

It was dark in the stairway down to the esplanade and even darker in the enclosed stairway for fifteen stories beneath the esplanade. Daeman did not even raise his crossbow to the ready. If it—he—was waiting for him here, so be it. It would be a contest of teeth and fingernails and rages.

Nothing waited there.

Daeman was halfway back to the Invalid Hotel fax pavilion, walking stolidly down the center of the boulevard in the pounding rain, when there came a crackling and crashing behind him.

He turned, went to one knee, and raised the heavy weapon to his shoulder. This was not its sound. It was silent on its horn-padded and yellow-taloned webbed feet.

Daeman raised his face and stared, jaw going slack. A spinning had appeared in the direction of the crater, somewhere between him and his mother’s domi tower. The thing was some hundreds of meters across and spinning rapidly. A form of lightning crackled around it like a crown of electrical thorns and rays of random light stabbed out from the sphere. The wet air was filled with rumbles that made the pavements shake. Shifting fractal designs filled the sphere until the sphere became a circle and the circle sank, ripping a building apart as it settled to the earth and then partially beneath the earth.

Sunlight flooded out of the circle now, but it was not any sunlight as ever seen from Earth. The circle stopped sinking with only one-fourth of it wedged into the ground like some giant portal. It was only two blocks away, filling the sky to the east. Air rushed toward it from behind Daeman at near-hurricane speeds, almost knocking him down in its loud, wailing rush.

There was a daylit world visible through that still vibrating three-quarters circle—a world of a tepidly lapping blue sea, red soil, rocks, and a mountain—no, a volcano, rising to impossible heights in front of an off-blue sky. Something very large and pink and gray and moist emerged from that tepid sea and appeared to scuttle toward the open hole on centipede-fast feet that looked like giant hands to Daeman’s eyes. Then the air in front of that view was filled with debris and dust as the winds raged, mixed, were absorbed, and died away.

Daeman stood there another minute, peering through the obscuring dust, holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the diffused but still blinding sunlight streaming from the hole. The buildings of Paris Crater west of the hole—and the iron-armature thighs and emptied belly of the Enormous Whore—glinted in the cold, alien sunlight and then disappeared in the dust cloud broiling out of the hole. Other parts of the city remained invisible and wet, wrapped in night.

There came voynix scrabblings—urgent, many-clawed—from streets to the north and south.

Two voynix exploded out of a dark doorway on Daeman’s boulevard and rushed him on all fours, killing blades clattering.

He tracked them with his crossbow sight, led them, fired the first bolt into the leathery hood of the second voynix—it fell—and then fired his second bolt into the chest of the leading one. It fell but kept pulling itself closer.

Daeman carefully pulled two barbed, iron bolts from the pouch slung over his shoulder, reloaded, recocked, and shot both bolts into the thing’s nerve-center hump at a distance of ten feet. It quit crawling.

More scrabblings to the west and south. The reddish daylight from the hole was revealing everything on the street here. Daeman’s concealment of darkness was gone. Something bellowed from that rising dust cloud—making a sound like nothing Daeman had ever heard—deeper, more malignant, the incomprehensible growls sounding like some terrible language being bellowed in reverse.

Not hurrying, Daeman reloaded again, looked one last time over his shoulder at the red mountain visible through the hole in Paris Crater’s sky and cityscape, and then he jogged west—not in panic—toward Invalid Hotel.

25

Noman was dying.

Harman went in and out of the small room on the first floor of Ardis Hall that had been converted into a makeshift—and largely useless—infirmary. There were books in there from which they could sigl anatomy charts and instructions for simple surgery, mending broken bones, etc., but no one but Noman had been proficient in dealing with serious wounds. Two of those buried in the new cemetery near the northwest corner of the palisade had died after days of pain in this same infirmary.

Ada stayed with Harman, had been by his side since he’d staggered through the north gate more than an hour earlier, often touching his arm or taking his hand as if reassuring herself he was really there. Harman had been treated for his wounds on the cot next to where Noman lay now—Harman’s wounds had been deep scratches, requiring a painful few stitches and an even more painful administration of their crude, homemade versions of antiseptic—including raw alcohol. But the unconscious Noman’s terrible wounds to his arm and scalp were too serious to be treated with only these few inadequate measures. They’d cleaned him as best they could, applied stitches to his scalp, used their antiseptics on the open wounds—Noman did not even return to consciousness when the alcohol was poured on—but the arm was too mauled, connected to his torso only by ragged strings of ligament, tissue, and shattered bone. They had stapled and bandaged, but already the bandages were soaked through with blood.

“He’s going to die, isn’t he?” asked Hannah, who’d not left the infirmary even to change her bloody clothes. They’d treated her for slashes to her left shoulder and she’d never taken her eyes off Noman as the stitches and antiseptic were applied to her.

“Yes, I think so,” said Petyr. “He won’t survive.”

“Why is he still unconscious?” asked the young woman.

“I think that’s a result of the concussion he received,” said Harman, “not the claw wounds.” Harman wanted to curse at the simple fact that sigling a hundred volumes on neuroanatomy did not teach one how to actually open a skull and relieve pressure on the brain. If they tried it with their current rough instruments and almost nonexistent level of experience as surgeons, Noman would certainly die sooner than if they left things to nature’s way. Either way, Noman-Odysseus was going to die.

Ferman, who was the usual keeper of the infirmary and who had sigled more books on the subject than Harman, looked up from sharpening a saw and cleaver in case they decided to remove the arm. “We’ll have to decide soon about the arm,” he said softly and returned to working his whetstone.

Hannah turned to Petyr. “I heard him mumble a few times while you were carrying him but couldn’t hear what he said. Did it make any sense?”

“Not really. I couldn’t make most of it out. I think it was in the language the other Odysseus used in the turin drama…”

“Greek,” said Harman.

“Whatever,” said Petyr. “The couple of words I could make out in English weren’t important.”

“What were they?” asked Hannah.

“I’m sure he said something that ended in ‘gate.’ And then ‘crash’… I think. He was mumbling, I was panting loudly, and the guards on the wall were shouting. It was when we were approaching the north gate of the palisade, so he must have been saying ‘crash it’ if they don’t open it.”

“That doesn’t make much sense,” said Hannah.

“He was in pain and lapsing into coma,” said Petyr.

“Maybe,” said Harman. He left the infirmary, Ada still holding his arm, and began to pace through the manor house.

About fifty of Ardis’s population of four hundred were eating in the main dining room.

“You should eat,” said Harman, touching Ada’s stomach.

“Are you hungry?”

“Not yet.” In truth, the pain to Harman’s bad leg from the new slashes was bad enough to make him a little nauseated. Or perhaps it was the mental image of Noman lying there bleeding and dying.

“Hannah will be so upset,” whispered Ada.

Harman nodded distractedly. Something was gnawing at the subconscious and he was trying to let it have its way.

They went through the former grand ballroom where dozens of people were still working at long tables, applying bronze arrowheads to wooden shafts, then adding the prepared feathers, crafting spears, or carving bows. Many looked up and nodded as Ada and Harman went by. Harman led the way out back into the overheated blacksmithing annex where three men and two women were hammering bronze sword and knife blades, adding edges and sharpening on large whetstones. In the morning, Harman knew, this room would be insufferably hot as they carried in the molten metal from the next pour to be molded and hammered into shape. He paused to touch a sword blade and hilt that was finished except for the last of the leather to be wrapped around the hilt.

So crude, he thought. So unspeakably crude compared to the craft and artistry not only of Noman’s Circe sword—wherever that came from—but from the weapons in the old turin drama. And how sad that the first pieces of technology we old-style humans pour and cast and worry into a shape after two millennia or more are these rough weapons, their time come round again at last.

Reman came bursting into the blacksmith annex on the way to the main house.

“What is it?” said Ada.

“Voynix,” said Reman, who’d gone out to guard duty after finishing his chores in the kitchen. He was wet from the rain that had been falling since nightfall and his beard was icy. “A lot of voynix. More than I’ve ever seen at once.”

“Out of the woods yet?” asked Harman.

“Massing under the trees. But scores and scores of them.”

Outside, from the ramparts on all parts of the palisades the bells began to sound the alarm. The horns would blow if and when the voynix actually began their attack.

The dining hall emptied as men and women grabbed their coats and weapons and ran to their fighting stations on the walls, in the yard, and at windows, doorways, gables, porches, and balconies in the house itself.

Harman did not move. He let the running shapes flow around him like a river.

“Harman?” whispered Ada.

Turning against the current, he led her back into the infirmary where Noman lay dying. Hannah had pulled on her coat and found a lance, but seemed unable to leave Noman’s side. Petyr was half out the door but returned when Harman and Ada went in to stand by Noman’s bloodied cot.

“He didn’t say crash the gate,” whispered Harman. “He said Golden Gate. The crèche at Golden Gate.”

Outside, the horns began to blow.

26

Daeman knew that he should fax straight back to the Ardis node to report on what he’d seen, even if he had to make the mile-and-a-quarter-walk from the palisaded faxnode pavilion to Ardis Hall in the dark, but he couldn’t. As important as his news about the hole in the sky was, he wasn’t ready to go back.

He faxed to a previously unknown code he’d discovered when they were doing their node survey six months earlier, mapping out the four hundred and nine known nodes—hunting for survivors of the Fall—and looking for unnumbered destinations. This place was hot and in sunlight. The pavilion was on a knoll among palm trees stirring in soft breezes from the sea. Just down the hill began the beach—a white crescent almost encircling a lagoon so clear he could see the sandy bottom forty feet down out where the reef began. There were no people around, either old-style human or post-human, although Daeman had found the overgrown ruins of what had once been a pre–Final Fax city just inland on the north side of the crescent beach.

He’d seen no voynix in the dozen or so times he’d come here to sit and think. On one trip, some huge, legless, flippered saurian thing had risen out of the surf just beyond the reef, then crashed back into the water with a thirty-foot shark in its mouth, but other than that one disconcerting sighting, he’d seen nothing threatening here.

Now he trudged down to the beach, dropped his heavy crossbow onto the sand, and sat down next to it. The sun was hot. He pulled off his bulky backpack, anorak, and shirt. There was something hanging out of the pocket of his anorak and he pulled it out—the turin cloth from the table of skulls. He tossed it away on the sand. Daeman removed his shoes, trousers, and underwear and staggered naked toward the water’s edge, not even glancing toward the jungle’s edge to make sure he was alone.

My mother is dead. The fact hit him like a physical blow and he thought he might be sick again. Dead.

Daeman walked naked toward the surf. He stood at the edge of the lagoon and let the warm waves lap at his feet, move the sand from under his toes. Dead. He would never see his mother or hear her voice again. Never, never, never, never, never.

He sat down heavily on the wet sand. Daeman had thought himself reconciled to this new world where death was a finality; he thought he’d come to terms with this obscenity when he’d faced his own death eight months earlier up there on Prospero’s Isle.

I knew that I had to die someday… but not my mother. Not Marina. That’s not… fair.

Daeman sobbed a laugh at the absurdity of what he was thinking and feeling. Thousands dead since the Fall… he knew there were thousands dead, because he’d been one of Ardis’s envoys to the hundreds of other nodes, he’d seen the graves, even taught some communities how to dig graves and set the bodies in them to rot away…

My mother! Had she suffered? Had Caliban played with her, tormented her, tortured her before slaughtering her?

I know it was Caliban. He killed them all. It doesn’t matter if that’s impossible—it’s true. He killed them all, but only to get to my mother, to set her skull on top of the pyramid of skulls, wisps of her red hair remaining to show me that it was indeed my mother. Caliban. You whoremongering gill-slitted motherfucking sonofabitching asshole-licking freakshit murderous gape-mawed goddamned fucking…

Daeman couldn’t breathe. His chest simply locked up. He opened his mouth as if to retch again, but he couldn’t move air in or out.

Dead. Forever. Dead.

He stood, waded into the sun-warmed water, and then dove, striking out and swimming hard, swimming toward the reef where the waves lifted white and where he’d seen the giant beast with the shark in its jaws, swimming hard, feeling the sting of saltwater in his eyes and on his cheeks…

The swimming allowed him to breathe. He swam a hundred yards to where the lagoon opened onto the sea and then treaded water, feeling the cold currents tugging at him, watching the heavy waves beyond the reef, listening to the wonderful violence of their crashing, almost surrendering then to the undertow beckoning him out, farther, farther—there was no Pacific Breach as there was in the Atlantic, his body might drift for days—and then he turned and swam back into the beach.

He came out of the water oblivous of his nakedness but no longer oblivious to his safety. He lifted his salt-crusted left palm and invoked the farnet function. He was on this island in the South Pacific—Daeman almost laughed at this thought, since nine months ago, before he’d met Harman, he hadn’t known the names of the oceans, hadn’t even known the world was round, hadn’t known the landmasses, didn’t know there was more than one ocean—and what goddamn good had it done him since to know these things? None, as far as he could tell.

But the farnet showed him that there were no old-style humans or voynix around. He walked up the beach to his clothes and dropped onto the anorak, using it as a beach blanket. His tanned legs were covered with sand.

Just as he went to his knees, a gust of wind from the land caught the tumbling turin cloth and blew it over his head, toward the water. Acting on pure reflex, Daeman reached high and caught it. He shook his head and used the borders of the elaborately embroidered cloth to dry his hair.

Daeman flopped onto his back, the wadded cloth still in his hand, and stared up at the flawless blue sky.

She’s dead. I held her skull in my hands. How had he known for sure that this one skull out of a hundred—even with the obscene hint of the strands of short, red hair—had been his mother? He was sure. Perhaps I should have left her there with the others. Not with Goman, whose stubbornness at staying in Paris Crater killed her. No, not with him. Daeman had a clear image of the small, white skull tumbling toward the red-magma eye of the crater.

He closed his eyes, wincing. The pain of this night was a physical thing, lurking behind his eyes like lancets.

He had to get back to Ardis to tell everyone about what he’d seen—about the certainty of Caliban’s return to earth and about the hole in the night sky and about the huge thing that had come through the hole.

He imagined Harman’s or Noman’s or Ada’s or some of the other people’s questions. How can you be certain it was Caliban?

Daeman was certain. He knew. There had been a connection between him and the monster since the two tumbled in near zero-gravity in the great ruined cathedral space of Prospero’s orbital isle. He’d known since the Fall that Caliban was still alive—had probably, somehow, impossibly, certainly, escaped the isle and returned to Earth.

How could you know?

He knew.

How could one creature, smaller than a voynix, kill a hundred of the Paris Crater survivors—most of them men?

Caliban could have used the clone things from the Mediterranean Basin—the calibani that Prospero had created centuries ago to keep the Setebos’ voynix at bay—but Daeman suspected the monster had not. He suspected that Caliban alone had slaughtered his mother and all the others. Sending me a message.

If Caliban wants to send you a message, why didn’t he come to Ardis Hall and kill us all—saving you for last?

Good question. Daeman thought he knew the answer. He’d seen the Caliban-creature play with the eyeless lizard-things he’d caught up from the rank pools in his sewage ponds under the orbital city—play with them and tease them before swallowing them whole. He’d also seen Caliban play with them—Harman, Savi, and him—taunting them before leaping with lightning speed to bite through the old woman’s neck, dragging her under the water to devour. I’m being played with. We all are.

What did you see coming through the hole above Paris Crater?

Another good question. What had he seen? It had been dusty, the air filled with debris from the hurricane winds, and the light from the hole had been all but blinding. A huge, mucousy brain propelling itself on its hands? Daeman could imagine the reaction from the others at Ardis Hall—at any of the survivor communities—when he told them that.

But Harman would not laugh. Harman had been there with Daeman—and with Savi, who had only minutes more to live—when Caliban had cackled and hissed and huffed its odd litany to and about his father-god, Setebos—“Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!” the monster had cried. “Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.” And later, “… Thinketh, though, that Setebos, the many-handed as a cuttlefish, who, making Himself feared through what He does, looks up, first, and perceives he cannot soar to what is quiet and happy in life, but makes this bauble-world to ape yon real. These good things to match those as hips do grapes.”

Daeman and Harman had later decided that the “bauble-world” was Prospero’s orbital isle, but it was Caliban’s god Setebos he was thinking of now—“the many-handed as a cuttlefish.”

How big was this thing you saw come through the hole?

How big indeed? It had seemed to dwarf the smaller buildings. But the light, the wind, the mountain gleaming behind the scuttling thing—Daeman had no idea how large it had been.

I have to go back.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” moaned Daeman, knowing now that this easy epiphet so many had used since childhood related to some lost god from the Lost Age. “Oh, Jesus Christ.” He didn’t want to go back to Paris Crater tonight. He wanted to stay here in the warmth and sunlight and safety of this beach.

What did the giant cuttlefish thing do when it entered the city of Paris Crater? Was it coming to meet Caliban?

He had to go back and reconnoiter before faxing home to Ardis. But not this second. Not this very minute.

Daeman’s head was aching from the spikes of agony-sorrow behind his eyes. The goddamned sun was far too bright here. First he set his left palm across his eyes—fleshly light, too much—and then he lifted the turin cloth and set it over his face as he’d done many times before. He’d never been very interested in the turin drama—seducing young women and collecting butterflies had been his two interests in life—but he’d gone under the turin more than a few times out of boredom or mild curiosity. Simply out of habit, knowing all the turins were as dead and inoperative as the servitors and electric lights, he aligned the embroidered microcircuits in the cloth with the center of his forehead.

The images and voices and physical impressions flowed in.

Achilles kneels next to the dead body of the Amazon Penthesilea. The Hole has closed—red Mars stretches away east and south along the coast of the Tethys with no sign left of Ilium and the Earth—and most of the captains who had fought the Amazons with Achilles have escaped through it in time. Big and Little Ajax are gone, as are Diomedes, Idomeneus, Stichius, Sthenelus, Euryalus, Teucer—even Odysseus has disappeared. Some of the Achaeans—Euenor, Pretesilaus and his friend Podarces, Menippus—lay dead among the bodies of the defeated Amazons. In the confusion and panic as the Hole closed, even the Myrmidons, Achilles’ most faithful followers, have fled with the others, thinking their hero Achilles was with them.

Achilles is alone here with the dead. The Martian wind blows down from the steep cliffs at the base of Olympos and howls among scattered, hollow armor, stirring the bloodied pennants on the shafts of spears pinning the dead to the red ground.

The fleet-footed mankiller cradles the body of Penthesilea, lifting her head and shoulders to his knee. He weeps at the sight of what he has done—her pierced breast, her no-longer-bleeding wounds. Five minutes earlier, Achilles had been triumphant in his victory, crying at the dying queen—“I don’t know what riches Priam promised you, foolish girl, but here is your reward! Now the dogs and birds will feed on your white flesh.”

Achilles can only weep more fiercely at the memory of his own words. He cannot take his eyes from her fair brow, her still-pink lips. The Amazon’s golden curls stir to the rising breeze and he watches her eyelashes, waiting for them to flicker, for her eyes to open. His tears fall onto the dust of her cheek and brow, and he takes the hem of his tunic to wipe the mud from her face. Her eyelids do not flicker. Her eyes do not open.

His spearcast passed through her body and pierced her horse as well, so fierce had been the force of his throw.

“You should have married her, son of Peleus, not murdered her.”

Achilles looks up through his tears at the tall form standing between him and the sun.

“Pallas Athena, goddess …” begins the mankiller and then can only choke his words back or sob. He knows that among all the gods, Athena is his most sworn enemy—that it was she who appeared in his tent eight months earlier and murdered his dearest friend, Patroclus, that it is she whom he’d most longed to slaughter as he fought and wounded dozens of other gods in the past months—but Achilles can find no rage in his heart right now, only bottomless sorrow at the death of Penthesilea.

“How very strange,” says the goddess, looming over him in her golden armor, her tall golden lance catching the low sunlight. “Twenty minutes ago you were willing—nay, eager—to leave her body to the birds and dogs. Now you weep for her.”

“I did not love her when I killed her,” manages Achilles. He brushes at the muddy streaks on the dead Amazon’s fair face.

“No, and you have never loved thus before,” says Pallas Athena. “Never a woman.”

“I have bedded many a woman,” says Achilles, unable to take his eyes off Penthesilea’s dead face. “I have refused to fight for Agamemnon for the love of Briseis.”

Athena laughs. “Briseis was your slave, son of Peleus. All the women you have ever bedded—including the mother of your son, Pyrrhus, whom the Argives will someday call Neoptolemus—were your slaves. Slaves of your ego. You have never loved a woman before this day, fleet-footed Achilles.”

Achilles wants to stand and fight the goddess—she is, after all, his worst enemy, the murderer of his beloved Patroclus, the reason he led his people into war with the gods—but he finds that he cannot take his arms from around the corpse of Penthesilea. Her deadly spearcast had failed, but his heart has been pierced nonetheless. Never—not even at the death of his dearest friend Patroclus—has the mankiller felt such terrible sorrow. “Why… now?” he gasps between wracking sobs. “Why… her?”

“It is a spell put on you by the witch goddess of lust, Aphrodite,” says Athena, moving around him and the fallen horse and Amazon so that he can see her without moving his head. “It was always Aphrodite and her incestuous brother Ares who confounded your will, killed your friends, and murdered your joys, Achilles. It was Aphrodite who killed Patroclus and carried away his body these eight months past.”

“No… I was there… I saw…”

“You saw Aphrodite take my form,” interrupts Pallas Athena. “Do you doubt that we gods can take any form we wish? Shall I make myself into the form and shape of the dead Penthesilea so you can slake your lust with a living body rather than a dead one?”

Achilles stares up at her, his jaw hanging slack. “Aphrodite …” he says after a minute, his tone that of a deadly curse. “I will kill the cunt.”

Athena smiles. “An act most worthy and long overdue, fleet-footed mankiller. Let me give you this …” She hands him a small jewel-encrusted dagger.

Still cradling Penthesilea in his right arm, he accepts the thing with his left hand. “What is it?”

“A knife.”

“I know it’s a knife,” snarls Achilles, his tone showing no respect for the fact that he’s speaking to a goddess, third-born of all the gods sired by Zeus. “Why in Hades’ name would I want this girl’s toy of a blade when I have my own sword, my own gutting knife? Take this back.”

“This knife is different,” says the goddess. “This knife can kill a god.”

“I’ve cut down gods with my regular blade.”

“Cut them down, yes,” says Athena. “Killed them, no. This blade does for immortal flesh what your mere human sword does for your puny fellow mortals.”

Achilles stands, easily shifting the body of Penthesilea to his right shoulder. He holds the short blade in his right hand. “Why would you give me such a thing, Pallas Athena? We have opposed each other across this battlefield for months now. Why would you aid me now?”

“I have my reasons, son of Peleus. Where is Hockenberry?”

“Hockenberry?”

“Yes, that former scholic who became Aphrodite’s agent,” says Pallas Athena. “Does he still live? I have business with this mortal, but do not know where to seek him out. The moravec forcefields have clouded our godly vision of recent.”

Achilles looks around him, blinking as if noticing for the first time that he is the only living human being left on the red Martian plain. “Hockenberry was here only a few minutes ago. I spoke to him before I slew… her.” He begins weeping again.

“I look forward to meeting this Hockenberry again,” says Athena, muttering as if to herself. “Today is a time of reckonings, and his is long overdue.” She reaches out and takes Achilles’ chin in her powerful, slender hand, raising his face, locking her gaze to his. “Son of Peleus, do you wish this woman… this Amazon… alive again, to be your bride?”

Achilles stares. “I wish to be released from this spell of love, noble goddess.”

Athena shakes her golden-helmeted head. The red sun glints every where on her armor. “There is no release from this particular spell of Aphrodite—the pheromones have spoken and their judgment is final. Penthesilea will be your only love for this life, either as a corpse or as a living woman… do you want her alive?”

“Yes!!” cries Achilles, stepping closer with the dead woman in his arms and bright madness in his eyes. “Return her to life!”

“No god or goddess can do that, son of Peleus,” Athena says sadly. “As you once said to Odysseus—‘Of possessions cattle and fat sheep are things to be had for the lifting, and tripods can be won, and the tawny high heads of horses, but a man’s life—nor a woman’s, Achilles—cannot come back again, it cannot be lifted nor captured again by force, once it has crossed the teeth’s barrier. Not even Father Zeus has this power of resurrection, Achilles.”

“Then why the fuck did you offer it to me?” snarls the mankiller. He feels the rage flow in next to the love now—oil and water, fire and… not ice—but a different form of fire. He is very aware of both his rage and the god—and goddess-killing knife in his hand. To keep himself from doing something rash, he sets the blade in his broad warbelt.

“It is possible to return Penthesilea to life,” says Athena, “but I do not have that power. I will sprinkle her with a form of ambrosia which will preserve her from all decay. Her dead body will forevermore carry the blush on her cheeks and the hint of fading warmth you feel now. Her beauty will never depart.”

“What good does that do me?” snarls Achilles. “Do you really expect me to celebrate my love with an act of necrophilia?”

“That’s your personal choice,” says Pallas Athena with a smirk that almost makes Achilles pull the dagger from his belt. She continues, “But if you are a man of action, I expect you to carry your love’s body to the summit of Mount Olympos. There, in a great building near a lake, is our godly secret—a hall of clear, fluid-filled tanks where strange creatures tend to our wounds, repairing all damage, assuring that we return—as you put it so well—across the teeth’s barrier.”

Achilles turns and stares up at the endless mountain catching the sunlight. It rises forever. The summit is not in sight. The vertical cliffs at its base, a mere beginning to the giant massif, are more than fourteen thousand feet tall. “Climb Olympos …” he says.

“There was an escalator… a staircase,” says Pallas Athena, pointing with her long lance. “You see the ruins there. It is still the easiest way up.”

“I’ll have to fight my way up, every foot of the way,” says Achilles, grinning horribly. “I am still at war with the gods.”

Pallas Athena also grins. “The gods are now at war with each other, son of Peleus. And they know the Brane Hole has closed forever. Mortals no longer threaten the halls of Olympos. I would guess that you will climb undetected, unopposed, but once you are there they will surely sound the alarm.”

“Aphrodite,” whispers the fleet-footed mankiller.

“Yes, she will be there. And Ares. All the architects of your personal hell. You have my permission to kill them. I ask you only one favor in return for my ambrosia, my guidance, and my love.”

Achilles turns back to her and waits.

“Destroy the healing tanks after they have brought your Amazon love back to life. Kill the Healer—a great monstrous centipede thing with too many arms and eyes. Destroy everything in the Healer’s Hall.”

“Goddess, would that not destroy your own immortality?” asks Achilles.

“I will worry about that, son of Peleus,” says Pallas Athena. She extends her arms, palms downward, and golden ambrosia falls on the bloody, pierced body of Penthesilea. “Go now. I must return to my own wars. The issue of Ilium will be decided soon. Your fate will be settled there, on Olympos.” She points to the mountain rising endlessly above them.

“You goad me as if I have the power of a god, Pallas Athena,” whispers Achilles.

“You have always had the power of a god, son of Peleus,” says the goddess. She raises her free hand in benediction and QT’s away. The air rushes into the vacuum with a soft thunderclap.

Achilles lays Penthesilea’s body down among the other corpses only long enough to wrap it in clean white cloth retrieved from his battle tent. Then he seeks out his own shield, lance, helmet, and a single bag of bread and wineskins he’d brought along so many hours earlier. Finally, his weapons securely lashed to him, he kneels, lifts the dead Amazon, and begins walking toward Mount Olympos.

“Holy shit,” says Daeman, pulling the turin cloth away from his face. Long minutes have passed. He checks his proxnet palm—no voynix nearby. They could have deboned him like a fish while he lay under the turin’s spell. “Holy shit,” he says again.

There is no reply except for the low waves lapping along the beach.

“Which is more important?” he mutters to himself. “Getting this working turin cloth back to Ardis as quickly as possible—and figuring out why Caliban or his master left it for me? Or going back to Paris Crater to see what the many-handed-as-a-cuttlefish is up to there?”

He stays on his knees in the sand for a minute. Then he pulls on his clothes, stuffs the turin cloth into his backpack, sets his sword back on his belt, lifts the crossbow, and slogs up the hill to the waiting fax pavilion.

27

Ada awoke in the dark to find three voynix in her room. One of them was holding Harman’s severed head in its long fingerblades.

Ada awoke in the diffused light just before dawn with her heart pounding. Her mouth was open as if already forming a scream.

“Harman!”

She rolled out of bed, sitting on the edge, her head in her hands, her heart still pounding so fiercely that it gave her vertigo. She couldn’t believe that she’d come up to her bedroom and fallen asleep while Harman was still awake. This pregnancy was a stupid thing, she thought. It made her body a traitor at times.

She’d slept in her clothes—tunic, vest, canvas trousers, thick socks—and she pressed her hair and long shirt down as well as she could to calm the worst of the wildness, considered using some of the precious hot water for a standing bath at the basin—her birdbath, Harman always called it—and rejected the idea. Too much might have happened in the hour or two since she fell asleep. Ada pulled on her boots and hurried downstairs.

Harman was in the front parlor where the wide window doors had been unshuttered, allowing a view down the south lawn to the lower palisade. There was no sunrise—the morning was too cloudy—and it had begun to snow. Ada had seen snow before in her life, but only once here at Ardis Hall, when she was very young. About a dozen men and women, including Daeman—who looked oddly flushed—were standing by the windows, watching the snow fall and talking softly.

Ada gave Daeman a quick hug and moved close to Harman, slipping her arm around him. “How is Ody …” she began.

“Noman’s still alive, but only barely,” Harman said softly. “He’s lost too much blood. His breathing is becoming more and more difficult. Loes thinks that he’ll die within the next hour or two. We’re trying to decide what to do.” He touched her lower back. “Ada, Daeman has brought us some terrible news about his mother.”

Ada looked at her friend, wondering if his mother had simply refused to come to Ardis. She and Daeman had visited Marina twice in the past eight months, and neither time had they come close to convincing the older woman.

“She’s dead,” said Daeman. “Caliban killed her and everyone else in the domi tower.”

Ada bit her knuckle until it almost bled and then said, “Oh, Daeman, I am so, so sorry …” And then, realizing what he’d said, she whispered, “Caliban?” She had convinced herself from Harman’s stories about Prospero’s Isle that the creature had died up there. “Caliban?” she repeated stupidly. Her dream was still with her like a weight on her neck. “You’re sure?”

“Yes,” said Daeman.

Ada put her arms around him, but Daeman’s body was as tight and rigid as a rock. He patted her shoulder almost absently. Ada wondered if he was in shock.

The group resumed discussing the night’s defense of Ardis Hall.

The voynix had attacked just before midnight—at least a hundred of them, perhaps a hundred and fifty; it was hard to tell in the dark and rain—and they had rushed at least three out of the four sides of the palisade perimeter. It was the largest and certainly the most coordinated attack the voynix had ever carried out against Ardis.

The defenders had killed them until just before dawn—first setting the huge braziers alight, burning the precious kerosene and naphtha saved for that purpose, illuminating the walls and fields beyond the walls—and then showering volley upon volley of aimed bow-and-crossbow fire onto the rushing forms.

Arrows and bolts didn’t always penetrate a voynix’s carapace or leathery hood—more often than not they didn’t—so the defenders expended a huge percentage of their arrows and bolts. Dozens of the voynix had fallen—Loes reported that his team had counted fifty-three voynix corpses in the fields and woods at first light.

Some of the things had gotten to the walls and leapt to the ramparts—voynix could jump thirty feet and more from a standing start, like huge grasshoppers—but the mass of pikes and reserve fighters with swords had stopped any from getting to the house. Eight of Ardis’s people had been hurt, but only two seriously: a woman named Kirik with a badly broken arm, and Laman, a friend of Petyr’s, with four fingers lopped off—not by a voynix’s blades, but from a fellow defender’s ill-timed swing of a sword.

What had turned the tide was the sonie.

Harman launched the oval disk from the ancient jinker platform high on Ardis Hall’s gabled rooftop. He flew it from its center-forward niche.

The flying machine had six shallow, cushioned indentations for people lying prone, but Petyr, Loes, Reman, and Hannah had knelt in their niches, shooting down from the sonie, the three men wielding all of Ardis’s flechette rifles and Hannah firing the finest crossbow she’d ever crafted.

Harman couldn’t go lower than about sixty feet because of the voynix’s amazing leaping abilities. But that was close enough. Even in the dark and the rain, even with the voynix scuttling as fast as cockroaches and leaping like giant grasshoppers on a griddle, the sustained flechette and crossbow fire dropped the creatures in their tracks. Harman flew the sonie in among the tall trees at the bottom and top of the hill, the defenders on the palisade ramparts shot flaming arrows and catapult-launched balls of burning, hissing naphtha to illuminate the night. The voynix scattered, regrouped, and attacked six more times before finally disappearing, some toward the river far down the hill from Ardis and the rest into the hills to the north.

“But why did they stop attacking?” asked the young woman named Peaen. “Why’d they leave?”

“What do you mean?” said Petyr. “We killed a third of them.”

Harman crossed his arms and glared out at the softly falling snow. “I know what Peaen means. It’s a good question. Why did they break off the attack? We’ve never seen a voynix react to pain. They die… but they don’t complain about it. Why didn’t they all keep coming until they overran us or died?”

“Because someone or something recalled them,” Daeman said.

Ada glanced at him. Daeman’s face was almost slack, his voice dull, his eyes not quite focused on anything. For the last nine months, Daeman’s energy and determination had deepened and visibly increased daily. Now he was listless, seemingly indifferent to the conversation and the people around him. Ada felt sure that his mother’s death had almost undone him—perhaps it would yet do so.

“If the voynix were recalled, who recalled them?” asked Hannah.

No one spoke.

“Daeman,” Harman said, “please tell your story again, for Ada. And add any detail you left out the first time.” More men and women had gathered in the long room. Everyone looked tired. No one spoke or asked questions as Daeman gave his story again, his voice a dull monotone.

He told of the slaughter at his mother’s domi, the stack of skulls, the presence of the turin cloth on the table—the only thing not splattered with blood—and how he activated it later when he’d faxed somewhere else; he didn’t specify where exactly. He told of the appearance of the hole above the city of Paris Crater and about his glimpse of something large emerging from it—something that seemed to scuttle about on impossible sets of giant hands.

He explained how he had faxed away to regain his composure, then faxed to the Ardis node—the guards at the small fort there told him of the movement of voynix they’d glimpsed all night, the torches were lit and every man was at the walls, and about the sounds of fighting and flashes of torches and naphtha they’d seen from the direction of Ardis Hall. Daeman had been tempted to start toward Ardis on foot but the men at the barricades there at the fax pavilion were positive it’d be certain death to try that walk in the dark—they’d counted more than seventy voynix slipping past across meadows and into the woods, headed toward the great house.

Daeman explained how he’d left the turin cloth with Casman and Greogi, the two captains of the guard there, and directed one of them to fax to Chom or somewhere safe with the turin if the voynix overran the fax pavilion before he got back.

“We plan to fax out if those bastards attack us,” said Greogi. “We’ve made plans on who goes when and in which order, while others provide covering fire until it’s their turn. We’re not planning to die to protect this pavilion.”

Daeman had nodded and faxed back to Paris Crater.

He told the others now that if he had chosen the closer-in Invalid Hotel node to the more distant Guarded Lion, he would have died. All the center of Paris Crater had been transformed. The hole in space was still there—weak sunlight streaming out—but the center of the city itself had been encased in a webbed glacier of blue ice.

“Blue ice?” interrupted Ada. “It was that cold?”

“Very cold near the stuff,” said Daeman. “But not so bad just a few yards away. Just chilly and raining, It wasn’t really ice, I don’t think. Just something chill and crystalline—cold but organic, like spiderwebs rising out of icebergs—and the blocks and webs of the stuff covered the old domi towers and boulevards all around the crater in the heart of Paris Crater.”

“Did you see that… thing… you saw come through the hole?” asked Emme.

“No. I couldn’t get close enough. There were more voynix than I’d ever seen before. The Guarded Lion building itself—it used to be some sort of transport center, you know, with rails running in and out and landing pads on the roof—was alive with voynix.” Daeman looked at Harman. “It reminded me of Jerusalem last year.”

“That many?” said Harman.

“That many. And there was something else. Two things that I haven’t talked about yet.”

Everyone waited. Outside, the snow fell. There was a moan from the infirmary, and Hannah slipped away to check on Noman-Odysseus again.

“There’s a blue light shining from Paris Crater now,” said Daeman.

“A blue light?” asked the woman named Loes.

Only Harman, Ada, and Petyr registered comprehension—Harman because he’d been there in Jerusalem with Daeman and Savi nine months earlier; Ada and Petyr because they’d heard the stories.

“Does it shoot skyward like the one we saw in Jerusalem?” asked Harman.

“Yes.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” asked the redheaded woman named Oelleo.

Harman answered. “We saw a similar beam in Jerusalem last year—a city near the drained Mediterranean Basin. Savi, the old woman with us, said that the beam was made of …what was it, Daeman? Tachyons?”

“I think so.”

“Tachyons,” continued Harman. “And that it contained the captured codes of all of her race from before the Final Fax. That beam was the Final Fax.”

“I don’t understand,” said Reman. He looked very tired.

Daeman shook his head. “Neither do I. I don’t know if the beam came with the creature I saw come through the hole, or if the beam somehow brought that thing to Paris Crater. But there’s more news—and it’s worse.”

“How could it be?” asked Peaen with a laugh.

Daeman did not smile. “I had to get out of Paris Crater quickly—the Guarded Lion node would be death by now, voynix everywhere—and I knew it wouldn’t be light here yet, so I faxed to Bellinbad, then Ulanbat, then Chom, then Drid, then Loman’s Place, then Kiev, then Fuego, then Devi, then Satle Heights, then to Mantua, finally to Cape Town Tower.”

“To warn them all,” said Ada.

“Yes.”

“Why is that bad news?” asked Harman.

“Because the holes have opened at both Chom and Ulanbat,” said Daeman. “The community cores there are webbed with blue ice. The blue beams rise from both of those survivor colonies. Setebos has been there.”

28

The forty or so people in the room simply stared at each other. Then there was a babble-chorus of questions. Daeman and Harman explained what Caliban on the orbital isle had said about his god, Setebos, the “many-handed like a cuttlefish.”

They asked about Ulanbat and Chom. Chom he’d seen only from a distance—a growing web of blue ice. In Ulanbat, he told them, he’d faxed to the seventy-ninth floor of the Circles of Heaven and seen from the ring terrace there that the hole was a mile out over the Gobi Desert, the web of ice-stuff connecting the low outbuildings to the bottom levels of the Circles. The seventy-ninth floor seemed to be above the ice—for now.

“Did you see any people there?” asked Ada.

“No.”

“Voynix?” asked Reman.

“Hundreds. Scuttling in and under and around the ice web. But not in the Circles.”

“Then where are the people?” asked Emme in a small voice. “We know Ulanbat had weapons—we bartered them for their rice and textiles.”

“They must have faxed out when the hole appeared,” said Petyr. It sounded obvious to Ada that the young man was putting more certainty in his voice than he felt.

“If they faxed out,” said Peaen, “I mean the people in both Ulanbat and Chom, why haven’t they shown up here as refugees? Those three node cities—Paris Crater, Chom, Ulanbat—still house tens of thousands of old-style humans like us. Where are they? Where did they go?” She looked at Greogi and Casman, who’d just come in from their overnight guard duty at the fax pavilion. “Greogi, Cas, have people been faxing in overnight? Fleeing something?”

Greogi shook his head. “The only traffic was Daeman Uhr here—late last night and then again this morning.”

Ada stepped into the middle of the circle. “Look… we’ll meet to talk about this later. Right now you’re all exhausted. Most of you were up all night. A lot of people hadn’t eaten when all this started. Stoman, Cal, Boman, Elle, Anna, and Uru have been cooking up a huge breakfast. Those of you who need to go on guard duty—you’re first in line in the dining hall. Make sure you get plenty of coffee. The rest of you should also eat before you catch some sleep. Reman wanted me to mention that the iron pour will be at ten a.m. We’ll all get together in the old ballroom at three p.m. for a full community meeting.”

People milled, stirred, buzzed with conversation, but left to get their breakfasts and to go about their duties.

Harman walked toward the infirmary, caught Ada’s and Daeman’s eye, nodded in that direction. The two joined him as the last of the crowd dispersed.

Ada quietly told Siris and Tom, who’d been working as medical attendants, applying first aid to the wounded and watching over Noman during the night, that they should go get something to eat. The two slipped out, leaving Hannah sitting next to the bed and Daeman, Ada, and Harman standing.

“This is like old times,” said Harman, referring to when the five of them had traveled together, and then with Savi, nine months earlier. They’d rarely had time to be alone together since then.

“Except that Odysseus is dying,” said Hannah, her voice flat and ragged. She was holding the unconscious man’s left hand and squeezing it so tightly that all the interlaced fingers, his and hers, were white.

Harman stepped closer and studied the unconscious man. His bandages—just replaced an hour earlier—were soaked through with blood. His lips were as white as his fingertips and his eyes no longer moved beneath their closed eyelids. Noman’s mouth was open slightly and the breath that rattled there was swift, shallow, and unsure.

“I’m going to take him to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu,” said Harman.

Everyone stared at him. Finally Hannah said, “You mean when he… dies? To bury him?”

“No. Now. To save him.”

Ada gripped Harman’s upper arm so fiercely that he almost flinched away. “What are you talking about?”

“What Petyr said—Noman’s last words before losing consciousness near the wall yesterday evening—I think he was trying to tell him to take him back to the crèche at Golden Gate.”

“What crèche?” said Daeman. “I only remember the crystal coffins.”

“Cryotemporal sarcophagi,” said Hannah, enunciating each syllable with care. “I remember them in the museum there. I remember Savi talking about them. It’s where she slept some of the centuries away. It’s where she said she found Odysseus sleeping three weeks before we met here.”

“But Savi didn’t always tell the truth,” said Harman. “Perhaps she never did. Odysseus has admitted that he and Savi had known each other for a long, long time—that it was the two of them who distributed the turin cloths almost eleven years ago.”

Ada held up the turin cloth that Daeman had left behind in the other room.

“And Prospero told us… up there… that there was more to this Odysseus than we could understand. And on a couple of occasions, after a lot of wine, Odysseus has mentioned his crèche at the Golden Gate—joked about returning to it.”

“He must have meant the crystal coffins… the sarcophagi,” said Ada.

“I don’t think so,” said Harman, pacing back and forth past the empty beds. All of the other victims of last night’s fighting had decided to recuperate in their rooms in Ardis Hall or the outlying barracks. Only Noman was still here this morning. “I think there was another thing there at Golden Gate, a sort of healing crèche.”

“Blue worms,” whispered Daeman. His pale face grew even paler. Hannah was so shocked at the image—her cells remembered her hours in the worm-filled tanks up there in the Firmary on Prospero’s orbital isle even if her mind did not—that she released Odysseus’ hand.

“No, I don’t think so,” Harman said quickly. “We didn’t see anything that resembled the Firmary healing tanks when we were at the Golden Gate. No blue worms. No orange fluid. I think the crèche is something else.”

“You’re just guessing,” Ada said flatly, almost harshly.

“Yes. I’m just guessing.” He rubbed his cheeks. He was so very tired. “But I think that if Noman… Odysseus… survives the sonie flight, there might be a chance for him at the Golden Gate.”

“You can’t do that,” said Ada. “No.”

“Why not?”

“We need the sonie here. To fight the voynix if they come back tonight. When they come back tonight.”

“I’ll be back before dark,” said Harman.

Hannah stood. “How can that be? When we flew from the Golden Gate with Savi it took more than a day of flying.”

“It can fly faster than that,” said Harman. “Savi was flying slowly so as not to scare us.”

“How much faster?” asked Daeman.

Harman hesitated a few seconds. “Much faster,” he said at last. “The sonie tells me that it can get to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu in thirty-eight minutes.”

“Thirty-eight minutes!” cried Ada, who had also been on that long, long flight up with Savi.

“The sonie told you?” said Hannah. She was upset. “When did the sonie tell you? I thought the machine couldn’t answer questions about destinations.”

“It hasn’t until this morning,” said Harman. “Just after the fighting. I had a few minutes alone up on the jinker platform with the sonie and I figured out how to interface my palm functions with its display.”

“How did you discover that?” asked Ada. “You’ve been trying to find some function interface for months.”

Harman rubbed his cheek again. “I finally just asked it how to start the function interface. Three green circles within three larger red circles. Easy.”

“And it told you how long it would take to get to Golden Gate?” said Daeman. He sounded dubious.

“It showed me,” Harman said softly. “Diagrams. Maps. Airspeed. Velocity vectors. All superimposed on my vision—just like farnet or …” He paused.

“Or allnet,” said Hannah. They’d all experienced the vertigo-inducing confusion of allnet since Savi had shown them how to access it the previous spring. None of them had mastered its use. It was just too much information to process.

“Yeah,” said Harman. “So I figure if I take Odysseus… Noman… this morning, I can see if there’s some sort of a healing crèche there for him… install him in one of the crystal coffins if there’s not—and be back here before the three p.m. meeting. Heck, I could be back here for lunch.”

“He probably wouldn’t survive the trip,” said Hannah, her voice wooden. She was staring at the gasping unconscious man whom she loved.

“He definitely won’t survive another day here at Ardis without medical care,” said Harman. “We’re just… too… fucking… ignorant.” He slammed his fist down on a wooden cabinet top and then pulled it back, knuckles bleeding. He was embarrassed by the outburst.

Ada said, “I’ll go with you. You can’t carry him into the Bridge bubbles by yourself. You’ll have to use a stretcher.”

“No,” said Harman. “You shouldn’t go, my dear.”

Ada’s pale face came up quickly and her black eyes flashed with anger. “Because I’m…”

“No, not because you’re pregnant.” Harman touched her fingers that she’d folded into a fist, setting his large, rough fingers around her slender, softer ones. “You’re just too important here. This news that Daeman brought is going to spread through the entire community in the next hour. Everyone’s going to be near panic.”

“Another reason that you shouldn’t go,” whispered Ada.

Harman shook his head. “You’re the leader here, my darling. Ardis is your estate now. We’re all guests here at your home. The people will need answers—not just at the meeting, but in the coming hours—and you need to be here to calm them.”

“I don’t have any answers,” Ada said in a small voice.

“Yes, you do,” said Harman. “What would you suggest we do about Daeman’s news?”

Ada turned her face toward the window. There was frost on the panes, but it had quit snowing and raining outside. “We need to see how many of the other communities have been invaded by the holes and blue ice,” she said softly. “Send about ten messengers out to fax to the remaining nodes.”

“Just ten?” said Daeman. There were more than three hundred remaining faxnodes that had survivor communities.

“We can’t spare more than ten, in case the voynix return during the daylight,” Ada said flatly. “They can each take thirty codes and see how many nodes they can cover before nightfall in this hemisphere.”

“And I’ll look for more flechette magazines at the Golden Gate,” said Harman. “Odysseus brought back three hundred magazines with him when he found the three rifles last fall, but we’re almost out after last night.”

“We have teams pulling crossbow bolts from the voynix carcasses,” said Ada, “but I’ll tell Reman that we’ll need to cast as many new ones as we can today. I’ll have the workshop double up on that work today. The arrows take so much longer, but we can put more bows on the ramparts by darkfall.”

“I’m going with you,” Hannah said to Harman. “You will need someone else to carry Odysseus in on the stretcher, and no one here has explored the green bubble city on the Golden Gate more than I have.”

“All right,” said Harman, seeing his wife—what a strange word and thought, “wife”—throw the younger woman a sharp glance that considered jealousy and then rejected it. Ada knew that Hannah’s only love—as hopeless and unrequited as it had been—was for Odysseus.

“I’ll go, too,” said Daeman. “You could use an extra crossbow there.”

“True,” said Harman, “but I think it would be more useful if you’d be in charge of choosing the fax-messenger teams, briefing them on what you saw, and sorting out their destinations.”

Daeman shrugged. “All right. I’ll take thirty nodes myself. Good luck.” He nodded toward Hannah and Harman, touched Ada’s arm, and left the infirmary.

“Let’s eat very quickly,” Harman said to Hannah, “and then grab some clothes and weapons and get going. We’ll get some strong young guys to help us carry Odysseus outside. I’ll bring the sonie down.”

“Couldn’t we eat in the sonie?” said Hannah.

“I think it’d be better if we grabbed a fast bite first,” said Harman. He was remembering the impossible trajectories the sonie had shown him—the launch from Ardis almost vertical, leaving the atmosphere, arcing up into outer space, then reentering like a bullet dropped from heaven. Just the memory of the trajectory graphic made his heart pound.

“I’ll go get my stuff and see if Tom and Siris can help me get Odysseus ready for the trip,” said Hannah. She kissed Ada on the cheek and hurried out.

Harman took a last look at Odysseus—the strong man’s face was gray—and then took Ada by the elbow and led her down the hall to a quiet place by the rear door.

“I still think I should go,” said Ada.

Harman nodded. “I wish you could. But when the people digest Daeman’s news—when they get the sense that Ardis may be the last free node left and that someone or something is gobbling up all the other cities and settlements—there’s liable to be a real panic.”

“Do you think we’re the last ones left?” whispered Ada.

“I have no idea. But if this thing Daeman glimpsed coming through the hole is the Setebos god-thing that Caliban and Prospero talked about, I think we’re in big trouble.”

“And you think Daeman’s right… that Caliban himself is on Earth?”

Harman chewed his lip for a moment. “Yes,” he said at last. “I think Daeman’s right in thinking that the monster slaughtered everyone in the Paris Crater domi tower just to get to Marina, Daeman’s mother—to send Daeman a message.”

The clouds had covered the sun again and it grew darker outside. Ada seemed intent on watching the feverish activity on the cupola scaffolding. A team of a dozen men and women were laughing as they walked to relieve the guards on the north wall.

“If Daeman’s right,” Ada said softly, never turning to look at Harman, “what’s to keep Caliban and his creatures from coming here while you’re gone? What’s to prevent you from returning from this trip to save Odysseus only to find stacks of skulls in Ardis Hall? We wouldn’t even have the sonie to escape in.”

“Oh …” said Harman and it came out as a moan. He took a step away from her and brushed sweat from his forehead and cheeks, realizing how cold and clammy his skin was.

“My love,” said Ada, whirling, taking two fast steps, and hugging him fiercely. “I’m sorry I said that. Of course you have to go. It’s terribly important that we try to save Odysseus—not just because he’s our friend, but because he’s the only one who might know what this new threat is and how to counter it. And we need the flechette ammunition. And I wouldn’t flee Ardis in a sonie under any circumstances. It’s my home. It’s our home. We’re lucky to have four hundred others to help us defend it.” She kissed him on the mouth, then hugged him fiercely again and spoke into the leather of his tunic. “Of course you have to go, Harman. You do. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Just come back soon.”

Harman tried to speak but found no words. He hugged her to him.

29

When Harman flew the sonie down from the jinker platform to let it hover three feet off the ground near Ardis Hall’s main back door, it was Petyr who met him there.

“I want to go,” said the younger man. He was wearing his travel cape and weapons belt—a short sword and killing knife were slung on the belt—and his handmade bow and arrow-filled quiver were slung over his shoulder.

“I told Daeman …” began Harman, propping himself on an elbow and looking up as he lay in the forward-center open niche on the surface of the oval flying machine.

“Yes. And that made sense… to tell Daeman. He’s still in shock from his mother’s death and organizing the messengers might help him come out of it. But you need someone with you on the Bridge. Hannah’s strong enough to carry the litter with Noman on it, but you need someone to cover both your backs while you do it.”

“You’re needed here…”

Petyr interrupted again. His voice was quiet, firm, calm, but his gaze was intense. “No, I’m not, Harman Uhr,” said the bearded man. “The flechette rifle’s needed here, and I’m leaving it with the few flechette magazines left to it, but I’m not needed here. Like you, I’ve been up for more than twenty-four hours—I have a six-hour sleep period coming before I have to return to duty on the walls. I understand that you told Ada Uhr that you and Hannah will be back in a few hours.”

“We should be …” began Harman and stopped. Hannah, Ada, Siris, and Tom were carrying Odysseus-Noman’s stretcher out the door. The dying man was wrapped in thick blankets. Harman slid out of the hovering sonie and helped lift the old man into the cushioned rear-center niche. The sonie used directed forcefields as safety restraints for its passengers, but there was also a silk-webbed netting built into the periphery of each niche for gear or inanimate objects, and Harman and Hannah pulled this over the comatose Noman and secured it. Their friend might well be dead before they reached the Golden Gate and Harman didn’t want the body tumbling out.

Harman clambered forward and dropped into the piloting niche. “Petyr’s coming with us,” he told Hannah. Her gaze was on the dying Odysseus and she showed no flicker of interest at the news. “Petyr,” he continued, “left rear. And keep your bow and quiver handy. Hannah, right rear. Web in.”

Ada came around, leaned over the metal surface, and gave him a quick kiss. “Be back before dark or you’ll be in big trouble with me,” she said softly. She walked back into the manor house with Tom and Siris.

Harman checked to make sure that all were wearing their webnets, including himself, and then he thrust both palms under the sonie’s forward rim, activating the holographic control panel. He visualized three green circles set within three larger red circles. His left palm glowed blue and his vision was overlaid with impossible trajectories.

“Destination Golden Gate at Machu Picchu?” came the machine’s flat voice.

“Yes,” said Harman.

“Fastest flight path?” asked the machine.

“Yes.”

“Ready to initiate flight?”

“Ready,” said Harman. “Go.”

The restraint forcefields pressed down on all of them. The sonie accelerated over the palisade and trees, went nearly vertical, and broke the sound barrier before it reached two thousand feet of altitude.

Ada didn’t watch the sonie leave and when the sonic boom slammed the house—she’d heard hundreds of them during the meteor bombardment at the time of the Fall—her only reaction was to ask Oelleo, who was on housekeeping duty that week, to check for broken panes and mend them as needed.

She pulled a wool cape from her peg in the main hall and went out into the yard, then through the front gate of the palisade. The grass here—formerly her beautiful front lawn that ran downhill for a quarter of a mile, now Ardis’s pasture and killing ground—had been churned up by hooves and voynix peds and then refrozen. It was difficult to walk without spraining an ankle. Several oxen-pulled, long-bed droshkies rumbled along the edge of the tree line where men and women lifted voynix carcasses onto the cargo bed. The metal of their carapaces would be recycled into weapons. Their leatherish hoods would be cut and sewn into clothing and shields. Ada paused to watch Kaman, one of Odysseus’ earliest disciples last summer, use special tongs that Hannah had designed and forged to pull crossbow bolts out of voynix bodies. These went into buckets on the droshky and would be cleaned and re-sharpened. The droshky bed, Kaman’s gloved hands, and the frozen soil were blue with voynix blood.

Ada moved around the palisade, strolling in and out of the gates, chatting with other work groups, urging those who had been on the wall all morning to go in for breakfast, and finally climbing up on the furnace cupola to talk with Loes and watch the last preparations for the morning’s iron pour. She pretended not to notice Emme and three young men with crossbows casually walking thirty paces behind her all the way, watching the woods for movement, their crossbows cocked and double-loaded.

Ada came back into the house through the kitchen and checked her palm time function—thirty-nine minutes since Harman had left. If his silly sonie timetable was right—and she could hardly believe it, since she remembered so clearly the long, long day of flying up from the Golden Gate nine months ago, with the stop in what she now knew was a redwood forest in the area once called Texas—but if his timetable was right, they’d be there now. Assume an hour to find this mythical healing crèche, or at least to stow the dying Noman in one of the temporal sarcophagi, and her beloved would be home before lunch would be served. She reminded herself that tomorrow was her day on cooking duty for dinner.

She hung her shawl on its peg and went up to her room—the room she now shared with Harman—closing the door. She’d folded the turin cloth Daeman had brought back with him and slipped it into her largest tunic pocket during the conversations, and now she removed the cloth and unfolded it.

Harman had almost never gone under the turin. She remembered that Daeman also rarely indulged—seducing young women had been his idea of recreation before the Fall, although, to be fair, she also remembered that he had worked hard to collect butterflies in the fields and forests when he’d visited her at Ardis when she was a girl. They were technically cousins, although the phrase meant little in terms of blood relationship in that world that had ended nine months earlier. Like the term “sister,” the idea of “cousin” was an honorific given among female adults who had been friends for years, offering at least the idea of a special relationship between their children. Now, as an adult herself, and a pregnant one at that, Ada realized that the honorific “cousin” might have been a sign that her late mother and Daeman’s mother—also dead now, she realized with a pang—had chosen to be impregnated by the same father’s sperm packet at different times in their lives. She had to smile at that, and be thankful that the pudgy, lecherous young man Daeman had once been had never succeeded in seducing her.

No, Harman and Daeman had never spent much time under the turin cloth. But Ada had. She’d escaped to the gory images of the siege of Troy almost daily for the almost eleven years that the turins had functioned. Ada had to confess to herself that she had loved the violence and the energy of those imaginary people—at least they had been presumed to be imaginary until they met the older Odysseus at the Golden Gate—and even the barbaric language, somehow translated by the turin, had been like an intoxicating drug to her.

Now Ada lay back on the bed, lifted the turin cloth over her face, set the embroidered microcircuits against her forehead, and closed her eyes, not really expecting the turin to work.

It is night. She is in a tower in Troy.

Ada knows it’s Troy—Ilium—because she’s seen the nighttime silhouette of the city’s buildings and walls during her hundreds of times under the turin over the past decade, but she’s never seen it from this perspective before. She realizes that she’s in a shattered, circular tower with a wall missing on the south side of the building and that two people are huddled a few feet away, holding a low blanket over a fire consisting of little more than embers. She recognizes them at once—Helen and her former husband Menelaus—but she has no idea of why they’re together here, inside the city, looking out over the wall and the Scaean Gate at a night battle in full progress. What’s Menelaus doing here and how can he be sharing a blanket—no, she realizes, it’s a red warrior’s cape—with Helen? For almost ten years, Ada has watched Menelaus and the other Achaeans battling to get inside the city, presumably to capture or kill this very woman.

It’s obvious that the Achaeans are battling to get inside the city at this very moment.

Ada turns her nonexistent head to change her field of vision—this turin-cloth experience is different from all her other ones—and stares in awe out toward the Scaean Gate and the high wall.

This is much like our battle last night here at Ardis, she thinks, but then almost laughs at the comparison. Instead of a twelve-foot-tall rickety wooden palisade, Ilium is surrounded by its hundred-foot-high, twenty-foot-thick wall, its defense further augmented by its many towers, sally ports, embrasures, trenches, rows of sharpened stakes, moats, and parapets. Instead of an attacking army of a hundred-some silent voynix, this great city is being attacked by tens of thousands of cheering, roaring, cursing Greeks—torches and campfires and flaming arrows illuminate mile upon mile of the surging horde of heroes—each group complete with its own kings, captains, siege ladders, and chariots, each group intent upon its own battle-within-the-larger-battle. Instead of Ardis Hall with its four hundred souls, the defenders here—she can see thousands of archers and spearmen on just the parapets and stairways of the long south wall visible from this tower—are defending the lives of more than a hundred thousand terrified kinsmen, including their children, wives, daughters, young sons, and helpless elders. Instead of Harman’s one silent sonie flying over a backyard battlefield, Ada sees the air here filled with dozens of flying chariots, each protected by its own force bubble, its divine occupants launching shafts of energy and bolts of lightning either into the city or out toward the attacking hordes.

In all of her previous times under the turin, Ada has never seen so many of the Olympian gods so personally involved in the fighting. Even from this distance she can make out Ares, Aphrodite, Artemis, and Apollo flying and fighting in defense of Troy, and Hecuba, Athena, Poseidon, and other rarely seen gods raging on the side of the attacking Achaeans. There is no sign of Zeus.

Things have certainly changed during the nine months I’ve been away from the turin, thinks Ada.

“Hector has not come out of his apartments to lead the fight,” Helen whispers to Menelaus. Ada turns her attention back to the couple. They are huddled together over the tiniest of campfires up here on the broken, open-air platform, the red soldier’s cape shielding the embers from any-one’s view from below.

“He’s a coward,” says Menelaus.

“You know better than that. There has been no braver man in this mad war than Hector, son of Priam. He’s in mourning.”

“For whom?” laughs Menelaus. “Himself? His life span can now be counted in hours.” He gestures out toward the hordes of Achaeans attacking Troy from all directions.

Helen also looks. “Do you think this attack will succeed, my husband? It seems uncoordinated to me. And there are no siege engines.”

Menelaus grunts. “Yes, perhaps my brother led them to the attack too quickly—there is too much confusion. But if tonight’s attack fails, tomorrow’s will succeed. Ilium is doomed.”

“It seems so,” Helen says softly. “But it has always been, has it not? No, Hector is not grieving for himself, noble husband. He grieves for his murdered son, Scamandrius, and for the end of the war with the gods that might have avenged the baby.”

“The war was pure folly,” grumbles Menelaus. “The gods would have destroyed us or banished us from the earth, just as they stole our families back home.”

“You believe Agamemnon?” whispers Helen. “Everyone is gone?”

“I believe what Poseidon and Hera and Athena told Agamemnon—that our families and friends and slaves and everyone else in the world will be returned by the gods when we Achaeans put Ilium to the torch.”

“Could even the immortal gods do such a thing, my husband—remove all humans from our world?”

“They must have,” says Menelaus. “My brother does not lie. The gods told him it had been their work and lo, our cities are empty! And I’ve talked to the others who sailed with him. All of the farms and homes in the Peloponnesus are … shhh, someone’s coming.” He kicks the embers apart, rises, thrusts Helen into the deepest shadows of the broken wall, and stands in the blind side of the opening to the circular staircase, his sword out and ready.

Ada can hear the shuffle of sandals on the stairs.

A man Ada has never seen before—dressed in Achaean infantry armor and cape but less fit, milder-looking than any soldier she’s ever noticed while under the turin—steps up onto the open area where the stairway abruptly ends.

Menelaus springs, pins the man so he can’t raise his arms, and sets his blade across the startled intruder’s throat, ready to open his jugular with a single slash.

“No!” cries Helen.

Menelaus pauses.

“It is my friend Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

Menelaus waits a second, his expression set and forearm flexing as if still planning to cut the thinner man’s throat, but then he pulls the man’s sword out of its sheath and tosses it away. He shoves the thinner man down onto the floor and stands almost astride of him. “Hockenberry? The son of Duane?” growls Menelaus. “I’ve seen you with Achilles and Hector many times. You came with the machine-beings.”

Hockenberry? thinks Ada. She’s never heard a name like that in the turin tale.

“No,” says Hockenberry, rubbing both his throat and his bruised bare knee. “I’ve been here for years, but always observing until nine months ago when the war with the gods began.”

“You’re a friend of that dog-fucker Achilles,” snarls Menelaus. “You’re a lackey of my enemy, Hector, whose doom is sealed this day. And so is yours…”

“No!” Helen cries again and steps forward, grasping her husband’s arm. “Hock-en-bear-eeee is a favorite of the gods. And my friend. He is the one who told me of this tower platform. And you remember that he used to bear Achilles invisibly away, using the medallion at his throat to travel like the gods themselves.”

“I remember,” says Menelaus. “But a friend of Achilles and Hector is no friend of mine. He’s found us out. He’ll tell the Trojans where we’re hiding. He must die.”

“No,” says Helen a third time. Her white fingers look very small on Menelaus’ tanned and hairy forearm. “Hock-en-bear-eeee is the solution to our problem, my husband.”

Menelaus glares at her, not understanding.

Helen points to the battle going on out beyond the walls. The archers firing hundreds—thousands—of arrows in deadly volleys. The disorganized Achaeans first surging to the wall with ladders, then falling back as the archers’ crossfire thins their ranks. The last of the Trojan defenders outside the wall fighting valiantly on their side of the stakes and trenches—Achaean chariots crashing, wood splintering, horses screaming in the night as stakes pierce their lathered sides—and even the Achaean-loving goddesses and gods Athena, Hera, and Poseidon are falling back under the berserker counterassault of Troy’s principal defending gods, Ares and Apollo. The violet energy-arrows of the Lord of the Silver Bow are falling everywhere among the Achaeans and their immortal allies, dropping men and horses like saplings under the axe.

“I don’t understand,” growls Menelaus. “What can this scrawny bastard do for us? His sword doesn’t even have an edge.”

Still touching her husband’s forearm, Helen kneels gracefully and lifts the heavy gold medallion on its thick chain around Hockenberry’s neck. “He can carry us instantly to your brother’s side, my darling husband. He is our escape. Our only way out of Ilium.”

Menelaus squints, obviously understanding. “Stand back, wife. I’ll cut his throat and we’ll use the magic medallion.”

“It only works for me,” Hockenberry says softly. “Even the moravecs with their advanced engineering couldn’t duplicate it or make it work for them. The QT medallion is cued to my brainwaves and DNA.”

“It’s true,” says Helen, almost whispering. “This is why Hector and Achilles always held Hock-en-bear-eeee’s arm when they used the god magic to travel with him.”

“Stand up,” says Menelaus.

Hockenberry stands. Menelaus is not a tall man like his brother, nor a barrel-chested ox of a man like Odysseus or Ajax, but he is almost godlike in his muscle and mass compared to this thin, potbellied Hockenberry.

“Take us there now, son of Duane,” commands Menelaus. “To my brother’s tent on the sands.”

Hockenberry shakes his head. “For months I’ve not used the QT medallion myself, son of Atreus. The moravecs explained that the gods could track me through something called Planck space in the Calabi-Yau matrix—follow me through the void that the gods use for travel. I betrayed the gods and they would kill me if I quantum teleport again.”

Menelaus smiles. He lifts the sword, pokes it into Hockenberry’s belly until it draws blood through the tunic. “I’ll kill you now if you don’t, you pig’s arse. And draw your bowels out slow in the killing.”

Helen sets her free hand on Hockenberry’s shoulder. “My friend, look at the warring there—there beyond the wall. The gods are all engaged in bloodletting this night. There, see Athena falling back with a host of her Furies? See mighty Apollo in his chariot, firing down death into the retreating Greek ranks. No one will notice you if you QT this night, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

The meek-looking man bites his lip, looks again at the battle—the Trojan defenders clearly have the upper hand now, with more soldiers flowing out of sally ports and man doors near the Scaean Gate—Ada can see Hector, come at last, leading his core of crack troops.

“All right,” says Hockenberry. “But I can only QT one of you at a time.”

“You will take us both at once,” growls Menelaus.

Hockenberry shakes his head. “I can’t. I don’t know why, but the QT medallion allows me to teleport only one other person that I’m in contact with. If you remember me with Achilles and Hector, you remember that I never QT’d away with more than one of them, returning for the other a few seconds later.”

“It’s true, my husband,” says Helen. “I have seen this myself.”

“Take Helen first then,” says Menelaus. “To Agamemnon’s tent on the beach, near where the black ships are drawn up on the sand.” There are shouts on the street below, and all three step back from the edge of the shattered platform.

Helen laughs. “My husband, darling Menelaus, I can’t go first. I am the most hated woman in the memory of the Argives and Achaeans. Even in the few seconds it would take for my friend Hock-en-bear-eeee to come back here and return with you, Agamemnon’s guards or the other Greeks there—recognizing me as the bitch I am—would pierce me with a dozen lances. You must go first. You are my only protector.”

Menelaus nods and seizes Hockenberry by the bare throat. “Use your medallion… now.”

Before touching the gold circle, Hockenberry says, “Will you let me live if I do this? Will you let me go free?”

“Of course,” growls Menelaus, but even Ada can see the glance he gives Helen.

“You have my word that my husband Menelaus will not harm you,” says Helen. “Now go, QT quickly. I think I hear footsteps on the stairway below.”

Hockenberry grasps the gold medallion, closes his eyes, twists something on its surface, and he and Menelaus disappear with a soft plop of inrushing air.

For a minute, Ada is alone on the shattered platform with Helen of Troy. The wind rises, whistling softly through the broken masonry up here and bringing the shouts of the retreating Greeks and pursuing Trojans up from the torchlit plain below. People in the city are cheering.

Suddenly Hockenberry reappears. “Your turn,” he says, touching Helen’s forearm. “You’re right that no god pursued me. There’s too much chaos tonight.” He nods toward the sky filled with swooping chariots and slashing bolts of energy.

Hockenberry pauses before touching his medallion again. “You’re sure that Menelaus won’t hurt me when I bring you there, Helen?”

“He will not hurt you,” whispers Helen. She seems almost distracted, as if listening for the footsteps on the stairs.

Ada can hear only the wind and distant shouts.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee, wait a second,” says Helen. “I need to tell you that you were a good lover… a good friend. I am very fond of you.”

Hockenberry visibly swallows. “I’m… fond… of you, Helen.”

The black-haired woman smiles. “I’m not going to join Menelaus, Hock-en-bear-eeee. I hate him. I fear him. I will never submit to him again.”

Hockenberry blinks and looks out toward the now-distant Achaean lines. They are regrouping beyond their own staked trenches two miles away, near the endless line of tents and bonfires where the countless black ships are drawn up on the sand. “He’ll kill you if they take the city,” he says softly.

“Yes.”

“I can QT you away. Somewhere safe.”

“Is it true, my darling Hock-en-bear-eeee, that all the world is empty now? The great cities? My Sparta? The stony farms? Odysseus’ isle of Ithaca? The golden Persian cities?”

Hockenberry chews his lip. “Yes,” he says at last, “it’s true.”

“Then where could I go, Hock-en-bear-eeee? Mount Olympos? Even the Hole has disappeared, and the Olympians have gone mad.”

Hockenberry shows his palms. “Then we’ll just have to trust that Hector and his legions hold them off, Helen… my darling. I swear to you that whatever happens, I’ll never tell Menelaus that you chose to stay behind.”

“I know,” says Helen. From her wide sleeve, a knife slips into her hand. She swings her arm, bringing the short but very sharp blade up under Hockenberry’s ribs, piercing to the hilt. She twists the blade to find the heart.

Hockenberry opens his mouth as if to cry out but can only gasp. Grasping his bloody midsection, he collapses in a heap.

Helen has pulled the knife free as he fell. “Goodbye, Hock-en-bear-eeee.” She goes quickly down the steps, her slippers making almost no noise on the stone.

Ada looks down at the bleeding, dying man wishing she could do something, but she is, of course, invisible and intangible. On impulse, remembering how Harman had communicated with the sonie, she raises her hand to the turin cloth, feels the embroidery under her fingers, and visualizes three blue squares centered in three red circles.

Suddenly Ada is there—standing on that shattered, exposed platform in the topless tower in Ilium. She’s not turin-viewing something from there, she is there. She can feel the cold wind tugging at her blouse and skirt. She can smell the alien cooking scents and smell of livestock floating up from the marketplace visible below in the night. She can hear the roar of the battle just beyond the wall and feel the vibration in the air from the great bells and gongs ringing along the Trojan walls. She looks down and can see her feet firmly planted on the cracked masonry.

“Help… me… please,” whispers the bleeding, dying man. He has spoken in Common English. Eyes widening in horror, Ada realizes that he can see her… he is staring right at her. He uses the last of his strength to lift his left hand toward her, imploring, beseeching.

Ada flung the turin cloth from her brow.

She was in her bedroom at Ardis Hall. Panicked, her heart pounding, she called up the time function from her palm.

Only ten minutes had passed since she first lay down with the turin cloth, forty-nine minutes since her beloved Harman had left in the sonie. Ada felt disoriented and slightly nauseated again, as if the morning sickness were returning. She tried to shake the feeling away and replace it with resolve, but only ended up with a resolvedly stronger conviction of nausea.

Folding the turin cloth and hiding it in her underwear drawer, Ada hurried down to see what was happening in and around Ardis.

30

The sonie ride was even more exciting than Harman had imagined, and Harman knew that he had a damned good imagination. He was also the only one onboard the sonie who’d ridden a wooden chair up a cyclone of lightning all the way from the Mediterranean Basin to an asteroid on the equatorial ring, and he assumed that nothing could match the thrill and terror of that ride.

This ride came in a close second.

The sonie smashed through the sound barrier—Harman had learned about the sound barrier in a book he’d sigled just last month—before it reached two thousand feet of altitude above Ardis, and by the time the machine ripped out of the top layer of clouds into bright sunlight, it was traveling almost vertically and outrunning its own sonic booms, although the ride was far from silent. The hiss and rush of air roaring over the force-field was loud enough to drown out any attempts at conversation.

There were no attempts at conversation. The same forcefield that saved them from the roaring wind kept the four of them pinned belly-down in their cushioned niches; Noman remained unconscious, Hannah had one arm thrown over him, and Petyr was staring wide-eyed back over his shoulder at the clouds receding fast so far below.

Within minutes, the roaring lessened to a teakettle hiss and then faded away to a sigh. The blue sky grew black. The horizon arched like a white bow drawn to full pull and the sonie continued to shoot skyward—the silver tip of an invisible arrow. Then the stars suddenly became visible, not emerging gradually as they do at sunset, but all appearing in an instant, filling the black sky like silent fireworks. Directly above them, the slowly revolving e—and p-rings glowed frighteningly bright.

For a terrible moment, Harman was sure that the sonie was taking them back up to the rings—this same machine had brought Daeman, the unconscious Hannah, and him down from Prospero’s orbital asteroid, after all—but then the sonie began to level off and he realized that they were still thousands of miles from the orbital rings, just barely above the atmosphere. The horizon was curved, but the Earth still filled the view beneath them. When he and Savi and Daeman had ridden the lightning vortex up to the e-ring nine months ago, the Earth had seemed much farther below.

“Harman …” Hannah was calling from the rear niche as the sonie pitched over until it was upside down, the blinding sweep of the cloud-white planet now above them. “Is everything all right? Is this the way it should be?”

“Yes, this is normal,” called back Harman. Various forces, including fear, were trying to lift his prone body off the cushions, but the forcefield pressed him back down. His stomach and inner ears were reacting to the lack of gravity and horizon. In truth, he had no idea whether this was normal or whether the sonie had tried to perform some maneuver it wasn’t capable of and they were all seconds away from dying.

Petyr caught his eye and Harman saw that the younger man knew he was lying.

“I may throw up,” said Hannah. Her tone was completely matter-of-fact.

The sonie surged forward and down, propelled by invisible thrusters and forces, and the Earth began to spin. “Close your eyes and hang on to Odysseus,” called Harman.

The noise returned as they re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere. Harman found himself straining to look back up in the rings, wondering if much of Prospero’s orbital island had survived, wondering if Daeman was correct in his certainty that it was Caliban who had murdered the young man’s mother and slaughtered the others in Paris Crater.

Minutes passed. It seemed to Harman that they were re-entering above the continent he knew had once been called South America. There were clouds in both hemispheres, swirling, crenellated, rippled, flattened and towering, but he also caught a glimpse through the gaps in the cloud cover of the broad, watery strait that Savi told them had once been a continuous isthmus connecting the two continents.

Then fire surrounded them and the screech and roar grew louder even than during their ascent. The sonie spiraled into thicker atmosphere like a spinning flechette dart.

“It’ll be all right!” Harman shouted to Hannah and Petyr. “I’ve been through this before. It’ll be all right.”

They couldn’t hear him—the roaring was already too loud—so Harman didn’t add the “I’ve been through it before … once” disclaimer that he was thinking. Hannah had been aboard when this same sonie had brought Daeman, Harman, and her down from Prospero’s disintegrating orbital isle, but she hadn’t been fully conscious and had no real memory of the event.

Harman decided that closing his eyes as the sonie hurtled Earthward again within its womb of plasma was the best choice for him as well.

What the hell am I doing? Doubts filled him again. He was no leader—what did he think he was doing taking this sonie and two trusting lives and risking them this way? He’d never flown the sonie this way, why did he think it was going to make the trip successfully? And even if it did, how could he justify taking the sonie away from Ardis Hall at the community’s time of maximum danger? Daeman’s report of the Setebos creature’s entombing of Paris Crater and the other faxnode communities should have taken top priority, not this running off to the Golden Gate and Machu Picchu just to save Odysseus. How dare Harman leave Ada when she was pregnant and depending upon him? Noman was almost certainly going to die anyway, why risk several hundred lives—perhaps tens of thousands if their warning didn’t get out to the other communities—on this almost surely hopeless attempt to save the wounded old man?

Old man. As the wind shrieked and the sonie bucked, Harman held on for dear life and grimaced. He was the old man of the group, less than two months to go before his Fifth and Final Twenty. Harman realized that he was still expecting to disappear when his final birthday rolled around, and then be faxed up to the rings even if there were no healing tanks left there to receive him. And who knows that won’t be the case? he thought. Harman believed himself to be the oldest man on Earth, with the possible exception of Odysseus-Noman, who could be any age. But Noman probably would be dead in minutes or hours anyway. So might we all, thought Harman.

What the hell was he thinking, having a child with a woman only seven years beyond her First Twenty? What right did he have to urge others to return to the idea of Lost Era–type families? Who was he to say that the new reality demanded that fathers of children be known to the mother and to others and that the man should stay with the woman and children? What did the old man named Harman really know about the old idea of family—about duty—about anything, and who was he to lead anyone? The only thing unique about himself, Harman realized, was that he’d taught himself to read. He’d been the only person on Earth who could do that for many years. Big deal. Now everyone who wanted it had the sigl function and many others at Ardis had also learned how to decode the words and sounds from the squiggles in the old books.

I’m not so special after all.

The plasma shield around the sonie faded and the spinning ceased, but tongues of flame still licked past on either side.

If the sonie is destroyed—or just runs out of fuel, energy, whatever it runs on—Ardis is doomed. No one will ever know what happened to us—we’ll simply disappear and Ardis will be without its only flying machine. The voynix will attack again or Setebos would show up, and without the sonie to fly between the Hall and the faxnode pavilion, there will be no retreat for Ada and the others. I’ve endangered their only hope of escape.

The stars disappeared, the sky grew deep blue, then pale blue, and then they were entering a high cloud layer as the sonie bled off velocity.

If I get Noman into some sort of crèche, I’m heading straight back, thought Harman. I’m going to stay with Ada and let Daeman or Petyr or Hannah and the younger people make the decisions and go on their voyages. I have a baby to think of. That last thought was more terrifying than the violent leaping and bucking of the sonie.

For long minutes, the descending flying machine was wrapped in clouds that flowed over the sonie’s still-humming forcefield like whirling smoke, first mixing with the snow flying by and then just rushing by like the rising souls of all those billions of humans who had lived and died before Harman’s century on the still-shrouded Earth. Then the sonie broke out of the cloud cover about three thousand feet above the steep peaks and once again, Harman looked down on the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu.

The plateau was high, steep, green, and terraced, bordered by jagged peaks and deep, greener canyons. The ancient bridge, its rusted towers more than seven hundred feet tall, was almost-but-not-quite connected to the two jagged mountains on either side of the terraced plateau, which showed outlines of even more ancient ruins. What had once been buildings on the plateau were just stone outlines against the green now. At places on the huge bridge itself, paint that must once have been orange glowed like patches of lichen, but rust had turned most of the structure a deep, dried-blood red. The suspended roadbed had fallen away here and there, some suspension cables had collapsed, but the Golden Gate was most visibly still a bridge… but a bridge that started nowhere and went nowhere.

The first time Harman had seen the ruined structure from a distance, he’d thought the huge towers and heavy horizontal connecting cables were wrapped about with bright green ivy, but he knew now that these green bubbles, hanging vines, and connecting tubules were the actual habitation structures, probably added centuries after the bridge itself was built. Savi had said, perhaps not all in jest, that the green buckyglas globes and globs and spiraling strands were the only thing holding the older structure up.

Harman, Hannah, and Petyr all rose to their elbows to stare as the sonie slowed, leveled off briefly, and then began a long, descending turn that would bring them to the plateau and bridge from the south. The view was even more dynamic than the first time Harman had seen it since the clouds were lower now, rain was falling on the boundary peaks, and lightning was flashing behind the higher mountains to the west even while itinerant beams of sunlight shafted down through gaps in the flying clouds to illuminate the bridge, roadbed, green buckyglas helixes, and the plateau itself. Scudding clouds dragged black curtains of rain between the sonie and the bridge, obscuring their view for a minute, but then quickly moved past them toward the east as more tatters of clouds and shafts of sunlight kept the entire scene in apparent motion.

No, not just apparent motion, Harman realized… things were moving on the hill and bridge. Thousands of things were moving. At first Harman thought it was an optical trick of the quickly moving clouds and shifting light, but as the sonie swooped toward the north tower to land, he realized that he was looking at thousands of voynix—perhaps tens of thousands. The eyeless, gray-bodied, leather-humped creatures covered the old ruins and green summit and swarmed up the bridge towers, jostled against each other on the broken roadbed, and skittered and scuttled like six-foot-tall cockroaches along the rusted suspension cables. There were a score of the things on the flat north tower where Savi had landed them last time and where the sonie seemed intent upon landing now.

“Manual or automatic approach?” asked the sonie.

“Manual!” shouted Harman. The holographic virtual controls blinked into existence and he twisted the omni controller to turn the sonie away from the north tower just a few seconds and fifty feet before they would have landed amongst the voynix. Two of the voynix actually leaped at them, one of them coming within ten feet of the sonie before silently falling more than seventy stories to the rocks below. The dozen or so remaining voynix on the flat tower top followed the sonie with their eyeless, infrared gazes and dozens more streamed up the scabrous towers to the tops, their bladed fingers and sharp-edged peds cutting into cement as they clambered.

“We can’t land,” said Harman. The bridge and hillsides and even the surrounding peaks were alive with the scuttling things.

“There aren’t any voynix on the green bubbles,” called Petyr. He was up and on his knees, his bow in his left hand and an arrow notched. The forcefield had flicked off and the air was both chill and humid. The smell of rain and rotting vegetation was very strong.

“We can’t land on the green bubbles,” said Harman, circling the sonie about a hundred feet out from the suspension cables. “There’s no way in. We have to turn back.” He swung the sonie back north and began to gain altitude.

“Wait!” called Hannah. “Stop.”

Harman leveled off and set the sonie in a gentle, banking circle pattern. To the west, lightning flickered between the low clouds and high peaks.

“When we were here ten months ago, I explored the place while you and Ada were out hunting Terror Birds with Odysseus,” said Hannah. “One of the bubbles… on the south tower… had other sonies in it, like a sort of… I don’t know. What was that word we sigled from the gray-bound book? ‘Garage?’ ”

“Other sonies!” cried Petyr. Harman also wanted to shout aloud. More flying machines could decide the fate of everyone at Ardis Hall. He wondered why Odysseus had never mentioned the extra sonies when he came back with the flechette guns after his solo return trip to the Bridge some months ago.

“No, not sonies… I mean, not complete sonies,” Hannah said hurriedly, “but parts of them. Shells. Machine parts.”

Harman shook his head, feeling his eagerness deflate. “What does this have to do with …” he began.

“It looked like a place where they could land,” said Hannah.

Harman banked the sonie past the south tower, taking care to stay far out. There were over a hundred voynix atop the towers, but none on the scores of green bubbles that clustered and twisted around the bridge tower like grapes of various sizes. “There’s no opening anywhere,” called back Harman. “And so many bubbles… you’d never remember which one you were in from out here.” He remembered from their first visit that although the glass of the buckyglas globules was clear and color-free while inside looking out, the bubbles were opaque to an outside viewer.

Lightning flashed. It began to rain on them and the forcefield flickered up again. The voynix on the tops of the tower and the hundreds more clinging to the vertical tower itself turned their eyeless bodies to follow their circling.

“I can remember,” said Hannah from the rear niche. She was also on her knees, holding the unconscious Odysseus’ hand in hers. “I have a good visual memory… I’ll just retrace my steps from that afternoon I was there, look at the landscape from different angles, and figure out which bubble I was in.” She glanced around and then closed her eyes for a minute.

“There,” said Hannah, pointing to a green bubble protruding about sixty feet out from the south tower, two-thirds of the way up the orange-red monolith. It was just one of hundreds of green-glass bumps on that tower.

Harman flew lower.

“No opening,” he said as he twisted the virtual omnicontroller, bringing the sonie to a hover about seventy-five feet out from the bubble. “Savi landed us on the top of the north tower.”

“But it makes sense that they would have flown the sonies into that… garage,” said Hannah. “The bottom of it was flat, and a different substance than most of the green globes.”

“You two told me once that Savi said it was a museum,” said Petyr, “and I’ve sigled that word since then. They probably brought the sonie parts in piece by piece.”

Hannah shook her head. Harman thought, not for the first time, that the pleasant young woman could be stubborn when she wanted to be.

“Let’s go closer,” she said.

“The voynix …” began Harman.

“They aren’t out on the bubble, so they’d have to leap from the tower,” argued Hannah. “We can get all the way to the bubble and they can’t reach us by jumping.”

“They can be out on the green stuff in a minute …” began Petyr.

“I don’t think they can,” said Hannah. “Something’s keeping them off the glass.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Petyr.

“Wait,” said Harman. “Maybe it does.” He told them both about the crawler they’d been in when Savi drove Daeman and him into the Mediterranean Basin ten months earlier. “The top of the machine was like this glass,” he said, “tinted from the outside but clear when looking out. But nothing stuck to it. Not rain, not even voynix when they tried to jump on the crawler in Jerusalem. Savi said that the glass had some sort of forcefield just above the glass material that made it frictionless. I can’t remember if she said it was buckyglas, though.”

“Let’s go closer,” said Hannah.

Twenty feet from the bubble and Harman saw the way to get in. It was subtle, and if he hadn’t been to Prospero’s Isle, where both the airlock to the orbital city and the entrance to the Firmary worked with this same technology, he never would have noticed it. A barely visible rectangle on the edge of the elongated bubble was a slightly lighter green than the rest of the buckyglas. He told the other two about what Savi had called “semipermeable membranes” on Prospero’s airlock and Firmary.

“What if this isn’t one of those semiwhatsit membranes,” said Petyr. “Just a trick of the light?”

“I guess we crash,” said Harman. He nudged the omnicontroller and the sonie slid forward.

“If you couch him there, he shall die,” said a voice from the darkness. Then Ariel stepped into the light.

The semipermeable molecular membrane had been quite permeable enough, the rectangle had solidified behind them, Harman had landed the sonie on the metal deck amongst the cannibalized parts of the machine’s own kind, and the three of them had wasted no time getting Odysseus-Noman onto the stretcher and out of the garage. Hannah had grabbed the front of the stretcher, Harman had taken the rear, Petyr provided security, and they were into the green-bubble helix maze at once, traversing corridors, climbing unmoving escalators, and heading for the bubble filled with crystal coffins where Savi had said both she and Odysseus had slept their long cryosleeps.

Within minutes, Harman was impressed not only with Hannah’s memory—she never hesitated when they came to a junction of bubble corridors or stairs—but with her strength. The thin young woman wasn’t even breathing hard, but Harman would have welcomed a break. Odysseus-Noman wasn’t that tall, but he was heavy. Harman caught himself glancing at the unconscious man’s chest to make sure he was still breathing. He was… but only just.

When they reached the main bubble helix rising around the bridge tower, all three of them hesitated and Petyr raised his readied bow.

Scores of voynix were hanging from the bridge metal, apparently looking down at them with their eyeless carapaces.

“They can’t see us,” said Hannah. “The bubble’s dark from the outside.”

“No, I think they can see us,” said Harman. “Savi said their hood receptors see three hundred and sixty degrees in the infrared… the range of light that’s more heat than vision, our eyes don’t see into it… and I have the feeling they’re looking at us right through the opaque buckyglas.”

They advanced down the curved corridor another thirty paces and the voynix shifted their clinging postures to follow their advance. Suddenly half a dozen of the heavy creatures leaped down onto the glass.

Petyr raised his nocked bow and Harman was sure that the voynix would come crashing through the buckyglas, but there was only the softest of thumps as each voynix struck the millimeter-thin forcefield and slid off, falling away. The humans happened to be in a stretch of the bubble corridor where the floor was almost transparent—an unnerving experience, but at least Harman and Hannah had seen it before and trusted the near-transparent floor to hold them. Petyr kept glancing at his feet as if he were going to fall any second.

They passed through the largest room—museum, Savi had called it—and entered the long bubble with the crystal coffins. Here the buckyglas was almost opaque and very green. It reminded Harman of the time—could it only have been a year and a half ago—when he had walked miles out into the Atlantic Breach and peered in through towering walls of water on each side to see huge fish swimming higher than his head. The light had been dim and green like this.

Hannah set down the stretcher, Harman hurried to lower it with her, and she looked around. “Which cryo-crèche?”

There were eight crystal coffins in the long room, all empty and gleaming dully in the low light. Tall boxes of humming machines were connected to each coffin and virtual lights blinked green, red, and amber above metal surfaces.

“I have no idea,” said Harman. Savi had talked to Daeman and him about her sleeping for centuries in one or more of these cryo-crèches, but that conversation had taken place more than ten months ago while they were entering the Mediterranean Basin in the crawler and he didn’t remember the details well. Perhaps there had been no details to remember.

“Let’s just try this closest one,” said Harman. He took hold of the unconscious Odysseus under the man’s bandaged arms, waited for Petyr and Hannah to find a grip, and they started lifting him into the coffin closest to a spiral staircase that Harman remembered going up into another bubble corridor.

“If you couch him there, he shall die,” said a soft, androgynous voice from the darkness.

All three hurried to lower Odysseus back onto the stretcher. Petyr raised his bow. Harman and Hannah set their hands to their sword hilts. The figure emerged from the darkness beyond the monitoring machines.

Harman instantly knew that this was the Ariel of whom Savi and Prospero had spoken, but he did not know how he knew this. The figure was short—barely five feet tall—and not-quite-human. He or she had greenish-white skin that was not really skin—Harman could see right through the outer layer to the interior, where sparkling lights seemed to float in emerald fluid—and a perfectly formed face so androgynous that it reminded Harman of pictures of angels he had sigled from some of Ardis Hall’s oldest books. He or she had long slender arms and normal hands except for the length and grace of the fingers, and appeared to be wearing soft green slippers. At first Harman thought that the Ariel figure was wearing clothes—or not so much clothes as a series of pale, leaf-embroidered vines running round and round its slim form and sewn into a tight bodysuit—but then he realized that pattern lay in the creature’s skin rather than atop it. There was still no sign of gender.

Ariel’s face was human enough—long, thin nose, full lips curved in a slight smile, black eyes, hair curling down to his or her shoulders in greenish-white strands—but the effect of looking right through Ariel’s transparent skin to the floating nodes of light within diminished any sense that one was looking at a human being.

“You’re Ariel,” said Harman, not quite making it a question.

The figure dipped its head in acknowledgment. “I see that Savi herself has told thee of me,” he or she said in that maddeningly soft voice.

“Yes. But I thought that you would be… intangible… like Prospero’s projection.”

“A hologram,” said Ariel. “No. Prospero assumes substance as he pleases, but rarely does it please him to do so. I, on the other hand, whilst being called a spirit or sprite for so very long by so very many, yet love to be corporeal.”

“Why do you say that this crèche will kill Odysseus?” asked Hannah. She was crouching next to the unconscious man, trying to find his pulse. Noman looked dead to Harman’s eye.

Ariel stepped closer. Harman glanced at Petyr, who was staring at the figure’s translucent skin. The younger man had lowered the bow but continued to look shocked and suspicious.

“These are crèches such as Savi used,” said Ariel, gesturing toward the eight crystal coffins. “Therein all activity of the body is suspended or slowed, it is true, like an insect in amber or a corpse on ice, but these couches heal no wounds, no. Odysseus has for centuries kept his own time-ark hidden here. Its abilities surpasseth my understanding. “

“What are you?” asked Hannah, rising. “Harman told us that Ariel was an avatar of the self-aware biosphere, but I don’t know what that means.”

“No one does,” said Ariel, making a delicate motion part bow, part curtsy. “Wilst thou follow me then to Odysseus’ ark?”

Ariel led them to the spiral staircase that helixed up through the ceiling, but rather than climbing, she laid her right palm against the floor and a hidden segment of the floor irised open, showing more spiral staircase continuing downward. The stairs were wide enough to accommodate the stretcher, but it was still hard and tricky work to carry the heavy Odysseus down the stairway. Petyr had to go ahead with Hannah to keep the unconscious man from sliding off.

Then they followed a green bubble corridor to an even smaller room, this one allowing in even less light than the crystal coffin chamber above. With a start, Harman realized that this space was not in one of the buckyglas bubbles, but had been carved out of the concrete and steel of the actual Bridge tower. Here there was only one crèche, wildly different from the crystal boxes—this machine was larger, heavier, darker, an onyx coffin with clear glass only above where the man or woman’s face would be. It was connected by a myriad of cables, hoses, conduits, and pipes to an even larger onyx machine that had no dials or readouts of any sort. There was a strong smell which reminded Harman of the air just before a serious thunderstorm.

Ariel touched a pressure plate on the side of the time-ark and the long lid hissed open. The cushions inside were frayed and faded, still impressed with the outline of a man just Noman’s size.

Harman looked at Hannah, they hesitated only a second, and then they set Odysseus-Noman’s body inside the ark.

Ariel made a motion as if to shut the lid, but Hannah quickly stepped closer, leaned into the ark, and kissed Odysseus gently on the lips. Then she stepped back and allowed Ariel to close the lid. It sealed shut with an ominous hiss.

An amber sphere immediately flicked into existence between the ark and the dark machine.

“What does that mean?” asked Hannah. “Will he live?”

Ariel shrugged—a graceful motion of slim shoulders. “Ariel is the last of all living things to know the heart of a mere machine. But this machine decides its occupants’ fates within three revolutions of our world. Come, we must depart. The air here will soon grow too thick and foul to breathe. Up into the light again, and we shall speak to one another like civil creatures.”

“I’m not leaving Odysseus,” said Hannah. “If we’ll know if he’ll live or die within seventy-two hours, then I’ll stay until we know.”

“You can’t stay,” said an indignant Petyr. “We have to hunt for the weapons and get back to Ardis as quick as we can.”

The temperature in the stuffy alcove was rising quickly. Harman felt sweat trickle down his ribs under his tunic. The thunderstorm burning smell was very strong now. Hannah took a step away from them and folded her arms across her chest. It was obvious that she intended to stay near the crèche.

“You will die here, cooling this fetid air with your sighs,” said Ariel. “But if thee wishes to monitor your beloved’s life or death, step closer here.”

Hannah stepped closer. She towered over the slightly glowing form that was Ariel.

“Give me your hand, child,” said Ariel.

Hannah warily extended her palm. Ariel took the hand, set it against his or her chest, and then pushed it into its green chest. Hannah gasped and tried to pull away, but Ariel’s strength was too much for her.

Before Harman or Petyr could move, Hannah’s hand and forearm were free again. The young woman stared in horror at a green-gold blob that remained in her fist. As the three humans watched, the organ deliquesced, seeming to flow into Hannah’s palm until it was gone.

Hannah gasped again.

“It is only a telltale,” said Ariel. “When your lover’s condition changeth, thee shall know it now.”

“How will I know it?” asked Hannah. Harman saw that the girl was pale and sweating.

“Thee shall know it,” repeated Ariel.

They followed the palely glowing figure out into the green buckyglas corridor and then up the stairs again.

No one spoke as they followed Ariel through corridors and up frozen escalators and then along a helix of globules attached to the underside of the great suspension cable. They stopped in a glass room attached to the concrete and steel cross-support high on the south tower. Just beyond the glass, voynix on this horizontal segment of the Bridge silently threw themselves at the green wall, clawing and scrabbling but finding neither entry nor purchase. Ariel paid them no heed as he or she led them to the largest room along this string of globules. There were tables and chairs here, and machines set into countertops.

“I remember this place,” said Harman. “We ate dinner here our one night at the Bridge. Odysseus cooked his Terror Bird right outside there on the Bridge… during a lightning storm. Do you remember, Hannah?”

Hannah nodded, but her gaze was distracted. She was chewing her lower lip.

“I thought all of you might wish to eat,” said Ariel.

“We don’t have time …” began Harman, but Petyr interrupted.

“We’re hungry,” he said. “We’ll take time to eat.”

Ariel waved them to the round table. She or he used a microwave to heat three bowls of soup in wooden bowls, then brought the bowls to the table and set out spoons and napkins. She or he poured cold water into four glasses, set the glasses in place, and joined them at the table. Harman tasted the soup warily—found it delicious, filled with fresh vegetables—and ate it with pleasure. Petyr tasted his and ate slowly, suspiciously, keeping one eye on Ariel as the biosphere avatar stood by the counter. Hannah didn’t touch her soup. She seemed to have flowed into herself, out of reach, much as the green-gold glob from Ariel had.

This is madness, thought Harman. This greenish… creature… has one of our party reach into his or her chest and remove a golden organ, and the three of us come up to have hot soup while the voynix scrabble at the glass ten feet away and the self-aware avatar of the planetary biosphere acts as our servitor. I’ve gone mad.

Harman acknowledged to himself that he may have gone mad, but the soup was good. He thought of Ada and continued eating.

“Why are you here?” asked Petyr. He’d pushed the wooden bowl away from him and was staring intently at Ariel. His bow was by his chair.

“What would thee have me tell you?” asked Ariel.

“What the hell is going on?” asked Petyr, never one for small talk or subtleties. “Who the hell are you, really? Why are the voynix here and why are they attacking Ardis? What is that goddamned thing that Daeman saw in Paris Crater? Is it a threat… and if so, how can we kill it?”

Ariel smiled. “Always among the first questions of thy kind… what is it and how can I kill it?”

Petyr waited. Harman lowered his spoon.

“It is a good question,” said Ariel, “ for if thee were the first men to leap up, instead of the last, thou shoulds’t cry, ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!’ But it is a long tale, as long as dying Odysseus’, I think, and hard to tell over cold soup.”

“Then start by telling us again who you are,” said Harman. “Are you Prospero’s creature?”

“Aye, I was once. Not quite slave, not quite servant, but indentured to him.”

“Why?” asked Petyr. It had begun to rain hard, but the water droplets found no more purchase on the curved buckyglas than had the leaping voynix. Still, the pounding of the showers on the Bridge and girders made a background roar.

“The magus of the logosphere saved me from that damned witch Sycorax,” said Ariel, “whose servant then I was. For it was she who had mastered the deep codes of the biosphere, she who summoned Setebos, her lord, but when I showed myself too delicate to act her earthy and abhorred demands, she—in her most unmitigable rage—anchored me to a single, cloven pine, in which rift I did remain a dozen times a dozen years before being released by Prospero.”

“Prospero saved you,” said Harman.

“Prospero released me to do his bidding,” said Ariel. The thin, pale lips curved upward slightly. “And then demanded my service for another dozen times a dozen years.”

“And did you serve him?” asked Petyr.

“I did.”

“Do you serve him now?” asked Harman.

“I serve no man or magus now.”

“Caliban served Prospero once,” said Harman, trying to remember everything Savi had said, everything that the hologram named Prospero had told him up there on that orbital isle. “Do you know Caliban?”

“I do,” said Ariel. “A villain I do not love to look on.”

“Do you know if Caliban is back on Earth?” pressed Harman. He wished Daeman were here.

“Thou know’st it is truth,” said Ariel. “He seeks to turn all Earth into his old filthy-mantled pool, make the frozen sky his cell.”

The frozen sky his cell, thought Harman. “So Caliban is ally of this Setebos?” he asked aloud.

“Aye.”

“Why did you show yourself to us?” asked Hannah. The beautiful young woman’s gaze was still distracted by sorrow, but she had turned her head to look at Ariel.

Ariel began to sing—

“Where the bee sucks, there suck I

In a cowslip’s bell I lie;

There I crouch when owls do cry.

On the bat’s back I do fly

After summer merrily:

Merrily, merrily, shall I live now

Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.”

“The creature’s mad,” said Petyr. He stood abruptly and walked to the bridge-side wall. Three voynix leapt at him, struck the field above the buckyglas, and dropped away. One of them managed to sink its bladed hands into the Bridge concrete and arrested its fall. The other two disappeared in the clouds below.

Ariel laughed softly. Then he or she wept. “Our shared Earth is under siege. The war has come here. Savi is dead. Odysseus is dying. Setebos would fain kill everything I am and come from and exist to protect. You old-style humans are either enemies or allies… I choose the latter. You have no vote in the matter.”

“You’ll help us fight the voynix, Caliban, and this Setebos creature?” asked Harman.

“No, thee shall help me.”

“How?” said Hannah.

“I have tasks for thee. First, you came for weapons…”

“Yes!” said Hannah, Petyr, and Harman in unison.

“Those two who stay shall find them in a secret room at the bottom of the south tower, behind the old, dead computing machines. You will see a circle on the opaque, greenglass wall, having then a pentacle inscribed within. Say merely ‘open’ and you will find the room where sly Odysseus and poor, dead Savi did conceal their little Lost-Era toys.”

“You said the two who stay?” said Petyr.

“One of thee three should take the sonie home to Ardis Hall before yon Ardis falls,” said Ariel. “The second of thee should stay here and tend to Odysseus if he does not die, for he alone knows the secrets of Sycorax, since once he did lie with her—and no man lies with Sycorax without suffering a change. The third of thee shall come with me.”

The three people looked at each other. With the heavy rain and cloudy light, it was as if they were deep underwater, staring at each other through cold green gloom.

“I’ll stay,” said Hannah. “I’d decided to stay anyway. If Odysseus awakes, someone should be here.”

“I’ll take the sonie home,” said Harman, cringing at his own cowardice but not caring at the same time. He had to get home to Ada.

“I’ll go with you, Ariel,” said Petyr, stepping closer to the delicate little figure.

“No,” he or she said.

The three humans glanced at each other and waited.

“No, it must be Harman who comes with me,” said Ariel. “We will tell the sonie to take Petyr straight home, but at half the speed thee came. It is an old machine and should not suffer the spur without dire cause. Harman must come with me.”

“Why?” said Harman. He wasn’t going anywhere but home to Ada—of this he was sure.

“Because drowning is thy destiny,” said Ariel, “and because thy wife’s life and thy child’s life depend upon this destiny. And Harman’s destiny this day is to come with me.” Ariel rose from the ground then, weightless, floating above them, floating six feet above the table, his or her black gaze never leaving Harman’s face as she or he sang again—

“Full fathom five our Harman lies,

Of his bones are coral made:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Ding dong, ding dong.”

“No,” said Harman. “I’m sorry, but… no.”

Petyr set an arrow to his string and drew back the bow.

“Are you going bat-fowling?” asked Ariel, twenty feet away now as she/he drifted in the green-gloomed air, but smiling at Petyr.

“Don’t …” said Hannah, but whether she was talking to Ariel or Petyr he never found out.

“Time to go,” said Ariel, almost laughing.

The lights went out. In the absolute darkness, there came a fluttering, rushing sound—as of an owl swooping—and in the darkness, Harman felt something lift him off the floor as effortlessly as a hawk would lift a baby rabbit, flinging and carrying him backward through the darkness, sending him flailing and falling down into the sudden blackness between the tall pillars of the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu.

31

The first day out from Mars and Phobos.

The thousand-foot-long, moravec-built atomic spaceship Queen Mab moves up out of Mars’ gravity well with a series of brilliant explosions literally kicking it in the butt.

Escape velocity from the moon Phobos is a mere 10 cm/sec, but the Queen Mab quickly kicks herself up to 20 km/sec acceleration in order to start the process of climbing up and out of Mars’ gravity. While the three-hundred-meter-long spacecraft could travel to Earth at that velocity, it’s too impatient to do so; the Queen Mab plans to keep accelerating until its thirty-eight thousand tons of mass are moving at a brisk 700 km/sec. On the pulse-unit storage decks, well-oiled chains and ratchets and chutes guide the Coke-can-sized forty-five-kiloton bombs down and into the ejector mechanism that runs out through the center of the pusher plate at the rear end of the spacecraft. During this part of the voyage, a bomb-can is ejected every twenty-five seconds and is then detonated six hundred meters behind the Queen Mab. On each pulse-unit ejection, the muzzle of the ejection tube is sprayed by anti-ablation oil, which also coats the pusher after each detonation. The heavy pusher plate is driven backward into the ship on thirty-three-meter-long shock absorbers, and then its huge pistons drive it back into place for the next plasma flash. The Queen Mab is soon moving toward Earth at a comfortable and steady 1.28-g’s, its actual acceleration increasing with every blast. The moravecs, of course, could withstand hundreds or even thousands of times that g-force for short periods, but there is one human aboard—the shanghaied Odysseus—and the moravecs were unanimous in not wanting him to end up as raspberry jam on a deck floor.

On the engineering level, Orphu of Io and other technical ‘vecs watch steam pressure and oil-level gauges while also monitoring voltage and coolant levels. With atom bombs going off behind it every thirty seconds, the spacecraft has much use for lubricant, so oil reservoirs the size of small oceangoing oil tankers from the Lost Era ring the bottom ten decks. The engine-room deck with its myriad of pipes, valves, meters, reciprocating pistons, and huge pressure gauges still looks to all concerned like something out of an early-Twentieth Century steamship.

Even with its gentle 1.28-g-load, the Queen Mab will be accelerating briskly enough, for long enough, and then decelerating quickly enough, that it plans to reach the Earth-Moon system in just a little over thirty-three standard days.

Mahnmut is busy this first day out checking systems in his submersible the Dark Lady. The sub is not only fitted snugly into one of the holds of the Queen Mab, but is also attached to a winged reentry shuttle for its drop into the Earth’s atmosphere in a month or so, and Mahnmut is making sure that the new controls and interfaces for these new parts are all in working order. Although a dozen decks apart while they work, Mahnmut and Orphu chat with each other via private tightbeam while they watch on separate ship video and radar links as Mars falls farther and farther behind. The cameras showing Mahnmut this stern-view require sophisticated computerized filters to be able to peer through the near-continuous flash-blast of the constantly erupting “pulse-units”… aka bombs. Orphu, while blind to the visible spectrum of light, “watches” Mars recede through a series of radar plots.

It feels weird to be leaving Mars after all the trouble we went through to get there, sends Mahnmut on the tightbeam.

Indeed, answers Orphu of Io. Especially now that the Olympian gods are warring so furiously together. To illustrate his point, the deep space moravec zooms Mahnmut’s video of retreating Mars, focusing on the icy slopes and green summit of Olympus Mons. Orphu of Io sees the activity as a series of infrared data columns, but Mahnmut can see it clearly enough. Bright explosions flash here and there and the caldera—a lake only twenty-four hours ago—now glows yellow and red on the infrared, showing that it is filled with lava once again.

Asteague/Che, Retrograde Sinopessen, Cho Li, General Beh bin Adee, and the other prime integrators seemed actively frightened, sends Mahnmut as he runs checks on the submersible’s power systems. Their explanation to Hockenberry about the gravity of Mars being wrong—how whoever or whatever changed it to near Earth-normal—also frightened me. This is the first time that he and Orphu have found to speak privately since the launch of the Queen Mab and Mahnmut welcomes the chance to share his anxiety.

That’s not even the tip of the merde iceberg, sends Orphu.

What do you mean? Mahnmut’s organic parts feel a sudden chill.

That’s right, rumbles Orphu, you were so busy shuttling around Mars and Ilium, you didn’t hear all of the Prime Integrators Commission findings, did you?

Tell me.

You’ll be happier not knowing, my friend.

Shut up and tell me… you know what I mean. Talk.

Orphu sighs—an odd noise over the tightbeam, sounding like the entire one thousand and thirty feet of the Queen Mab has suddenly depressurized. First of all, there’s the terraforming…

So? In their many weeks of traveling across Mars by submersible, felucca, and balloon, Mahnmut had grown accustomed to the blue sky, blue sea, lichen, trees, and abundant air.

All that water and life and air wasn’t there a mere century and a quarter ago, sends Orphu.

I know. Asteague/Che explained that during our first briefing on Europa, almost a standard year ago. It almost seemed impossible that the planet could have been terraformed that quickly. So?

So it was impossible, sends Orphu of Io. While you were schmoozing with the Greeks and Trojans, our science ‘vecs, both Five Moons and Belt, have been studying terraformed Mars. It wasn’t done by magic, you know… asteroids were used to melt the ice caps and free the CO2, more asteroids were targeted on the huge underground frozen water deposits and crashed into the Martian crust to set H2O flowing on the surface after millions of years, lichen, algae, and earthworms were seeded to prepare the soil for larger plants, and all that could happen only after fusion-fired oxygen and nitrogen generating plants had thickened the Martian atmosphere by a factor of ten.

In his submersible control crèche, Mahnmut quits tapping at his computer screen. He unjacks from virtual ports and lets the schematics and images of the sub and its reentry shuttle fade away. That would mean… he sends hesitantly.

Yep. That means that it took almost eight thousand standard years to terraform Mars to its present stage.

But… but… Mahnmut is sputtering on the tightbeam line, but he can’t help it. Asteague/Che had shown them astronomical photos of the old Mars, the airless, cold, lifeless Mars, taken from Jupiter and Saturn space only a standard century and a half ago. And the moravecs themselves had been seeded in the Outer System by human beings less than three thousand years earlier. Mars certainly hadn’t been terraformed then—except for a few domed Chinese colonies on Phobos and the surface, it was exactly as the early probes from Earth had first photographed it in the Twentieth or Twenty-first century or whenever.

But … sends Mahnmut again.

I love it when you’re speechless, sends Orphu, but there is none of the accompanying rumble that usually means the hard-vac moravec is amused.

You’re saying that we’re either talking magic or real gods here… a God-type god… or… Mahnmut’s tone on the tightbeam is approaching anger.

Or?

That’s not the real Mars.

Exactly, sends Orphu. Or rather, it’s the real Mars, but not our real Mars. Not the Mars that’s been in our solar system for lo, these billions of years.

Someone… something… swapped… our Mars… for… another… one?

It appears that way, sends Orphu. The Prime Integrators and their top science ‘vecs didn’t want to believe it either, but that’s the only answer that fits the facts. The sol-day thing cinched it.

Mahnmut realizes that his hands are shaking. He clasps them, shuts off his vision and video feeds so he can concentrate, and sends—Sol-day thing?

A small matter, but important, sends Orphu. Did you happen to notice during your travels through the Brane Hole between Mars and the Earth with Ilium that the days and nights were the same length?

I guess so but… Mahnmut stops. He doesn’t have to access his nonorganic memory banks to know that the Earth rotates once every twenty-three hours and fifty-six minutes, Mars every twenty-four hours and thirty-seven minutes. A small difference, but one whose disparity would have accumulated during the months of their stay on both Mars and the Hole-connected Earth where the Greeks were battling the Trojans. But it hadn’t. The days and nights on both worlds had been the same length, synchronized.

Jesus Christ, whispers Mahnmut on the tightbeam. Jesus Christ.

Maybe, sends Orphu, and this time the rumble is there. Or at least someone with comparable God-powers.

Someone or something from Earth punched holes in multidimensional Calabi-Yau Space, connected Branes across different universes, swapped our Mars for theirs… whoever and wherever “theirs” is… and left that other Mars… the terraformed Mars with gods on top of Olympos… still connected to the Ilium-Earth with quantum Brane Holes. And while they were at it, they changed the gravity and rotational period of Mars. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and holy crap!

Yes, sends Orphu. And the Prime Integrators now think that whoever or whatever did this little trick is on Earth or in near-Earth orbit. Still want to go on this trip?

I… I… if… I… begins Mahnmut and falls silent. Would he have volunteered for this trip if he’d known all this? After all, he already knew how dangerous it was, had known since he’d volunteered to go to Mars after being briefed on Europa. Whatever these beings were—these evolved post-humans or creatures from some other universe or dimension—they’d already shown themselves capable of controlling and playing with the very quantum fabric of the universe. What’s a couple of moved-around planets and altered rotation periods and gravitational fields compared to that? And what the hell was he doing on the Queen Mab hurtling toward Earth and its waiting god-monsters at a velocity of 180 km/sec and climbing? The unknown enemy’s control of the quantum underpinnings of the universe—of all universes—made this space-ship’s puny weapons and the thousand sleeping rockvec soldiers on board seem like a joke.

This is sort of sobering, he finally sends to Orphu.

Amen, sends his friend.

At that moment alarm bells begin ringing all over the ship, while alarm lights and klaxons override tightbeams and flash and clang across all other shared virtual and comm channels.

“Intruder! Intruder!” sounds the ship’s voice.

Is this a joke? sends Mahnmut.

No, replies Orphu. Your friend Thomas Hockenberry just… appeared… on the deck of the engine room here. He must have quantum teleported in.

Is he all right?

No. He’s bleeding profusely… there’s already blood all over the deck. He looks dead to me, Mahnmut. I’ve got him in my manipulators and I’m moving toward the human-hospital as fast as my repellors can get me there.

The ship is huge, the gravity is greater than anything he’s operated in before, and it takes Mahnmut several minutes to get out of his submersible, then out of the hold, and then up to the decks that he thinks of as the “human levels” of the ship. Besides enough sleeping and cooking quarters and toilets and acceleration couches to accommodate five hundred human beings, besides an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere set at sea-level pressure to be harmonious for humans, Deck 17 has a working medical infirmary outfitted with state-of-the-art early Twenty-second Century surgical and diagnostic equipment—ancient, but based on the most updated schematics that the Five Moons moravecs had on file.

Odysseus—their reluctant and angry human passenger—has been the only occupant of Deck 17 for this first day out from Phobos, but by the time Mahnmut arrives, he sees that a majority of the moravecs on the ship have gathered. Orphu is here, filling the corridor, as is the Ganymedan Prime Integrator Suma IV, the Callistan Cho Li, rockvec General Beh bin Adee, and two of the pilot techs from the bridge. The door to the medlab surgery is closed, but through the clear glass, Mahnmut can see Prime Integrator Asteague/Che watching as the spidery Amalthean, Prime Integrator Retrograde Sinopessen, works frantically over Hockenberry’s bloody body. Two smaller tech ‘vecs are taking Sinopessen’s orders, wielding laser scalpels and saws, connecting tubes, fetching gauze, and aiming virtual imaging equipment. There is blood on Retrograde Sinopessen’s small metal body and elegant silver manipulators.

Human blood, thinks Mahnmut. Hockenberry’s blood. There is more blood spattered here on the floor of the wide access corridor, some on the walls, and more on the pitted carapace and broad manipulators of his friend Orphu of Io.

“How is he?” Mahnmut asks Orphu, vocalizing the words. It is considered impolite to tightbeam in the company of other ‘vecs.

“Dead when I got him here,” says Orphu. “They’re trying to bring him back.”

“Is Integrator Sinopessen a student of human anatomy and medicine?”

“He’s always had an interest in Lost Era human medicine,” says Orphu. “It was his hobby. Sort of like you with Shakespeare’s sonnets and me with Proust.”

Mahnmut nods. Most of the moravecs he’d known on Europa had some interest in humanity and their ancient arts and sciences. Such interests had been programmed into the early autonomous robots and cyborgs seeded in the Asteroid Belt and Outer System, and their evolved moravec descendants retained the fascination. But does Sinopessen know enough human medicine to bring Hockenberry back from the dead?

Mahnmut sees Odysseus emerging from the cubby where he’s been sleeping. The barrel-chested man stops when he sees the crowd in the corridor and his hand automatically goes to the hilt of his sword—or rather, to the empty loop on his belt, for the moravecs had relieved him of his sword while he was unconscious on the hornet trip up to the ship. Mahnmut tries to imagine how strange this all must look to the son of Laertes—this metal ship they’ve described to him, sailing on the ocean of space he cannot see, now this motley assortment of moravecs in the corridor. No two ‘vecs are quite the same in size or appearance, ranging from Orphu’s two-ton hulking presence to the blackly smooth Suma IV to the chitinous and warlike rockvec General Beh bin Adee.

Odysseus ignores all of them and goes straight to the med lab window to stare in at the surgery, his face expressionless. Again, Mahnmut wonders what the bearded, barrel-chested warrior is thinking, seeing this long-legged silver spider and the two black-shelled techvecs hunched over Hockenberry—a man whom Odysseus has seen and spoken to many times in the last nine months—Odysseus and the group of moravecs in the corridor all staring at Hockenberry’s blood and opened chest and spread ribs splayed like something in a butcher shop. Will Odysseus think that Retrograde Sinopessen is eating him? wonders Mahnmut.

Without turning his gaze away from the operation, Odysseus says to Mahnmut in ancient Greek, “Why did your friends kill Hockenberry, son of Duane?”

“They didn’t. Hockenberry suddenly appeared here in our ship… you remember how he can use the gods’ abilities to travel instantly from place to place?”

“I remember,” says Odysseus. “I’ve watched him transport Achilles to Ilium, disappearing and appearing again as do the gods themselves. But I never believed that Hockenberry was a god or a son of a god.”

“No, he’s not, and has never claimed to be,” says Mahnmut. “And now it looks as if someone has stabbed him, but he was able to QT… to travel like the gods travel… here for help. The silver moravec you see in there and its two assistants are trying to save Hockenberry’s life.”

Odysseus turns his gray-eyed gaze down on Mahnmut. “Save his life, little machine-man? I can see that he is dead. The spider is lifting out his heart.”

Mahnmut turns to look. The son of Laertes is right.

Unwilling to distract Sinopessen, Mahnmut contacts Asteague/Che on the common channel. Is he dead? Irretrievably dead?

The Prime Integrator standing near the surgical table watching the procedure does not lift his head as he answers on the common band. No. Hockenberry’s life functions ceased for only a little over a minute before Sinopessen froze all brain activity—he believes that there was no irreversible damage. Integrator Sinopessen informs me that normally the procedure would be to inject several million nanocytes to repair the human’s damaged aorta and heart muscle, then insert more specialized molecular machines to replenish his blood supply and strengthen his immune system. The Integrator discovered that this is not possible with scholic Hockenberry.

Why not? asks the Callistan integrator, Cho Li.

Scholic Hockenberry’s cells are signed.

Signed? says Mahnmut. He’d never had much interest in biology or genetics—human or moravec—although he had long studied the biology of kraken, kelp, and other creatures of the Europan ocean where he’d driven his submersible for the last standard century and more.

Signed—copyrighted and copy-protected, sends Asteague/Che on the common band. Everyone on the ship except Odysseus and the unconscious Hockenberry is listening. This scholic was not born, he was… built. Retroengineered from some starter DNA and RNA. His body will accept no organ transplants, but more important than that, it will not accept new nanocytes, since it is already filled with very advanced nanotechnology.

What kind? asks the buckycarbon-sheathed Ganymedan, Suma IV. What does it do?

We don’t know yet. This answer comes from Sinopessen himself, even as his thin fingers wield laser scalpel, sutures, and micro-scissors while one of his other hands holds Hockenberry’s heart. These nanomemes and microcytes are much more sophisticated and complex than anything this surgery has or anything we’ve designed for moravec use. The cells and subcellular machinery ignore our own nano-interrogation and destroy any alien intrusion.

But you can save him anyway? asks Cho Li.

I believe so, says Retrograde Sinopessen. I’ll finish replenishing Scholic Hockenberry’s blood supply, complete the cell-repair and sewing up, allow neural activity to resume, initiate Grsvki-field stimulus to accelerate recovery, and he should be all right.

Mahnmut turns to share this prognosis with Odysseus, but the Achaean has turned and walked away.

The second day out from Mars and Phobos.

Odysseus walks the hallways, climbs the stairways, avoids the elevators, searches the rooms, and ignores the Hephaestan artifices called moravecs as he seeks a way out of this metal-halled annex to Hades.

“O Zeus,” he whispers in a long chamber empty and silent except for humming boxes, whispering ventilators, and gurgling pipes, “Father wide-ruling over gods and men alike, Father whom I disobeyed and rashly warred with, He who hast thundered forth from starry heaven for all the length of my life, He who once sent his beloved daughter Athena to favor me with her protection and love, Father, I ask thee now for a sign. Lead me out of this metal Hades of shadows and shades and impotent gestures to which I have come before my time. I ask only for my chance to die in battle, O Zeus, O Father who rules over the firm earth and the wide sea. Grant me this final wish and I shall be thy servant for all the days remaining to me.”

There is no answer, not even an echo.

Odysseus, son of Laertes, father of Telemachus, beloved of Penelope, favorite of Athena, clenches his fists and teeth against his fury and continues to pace the metal tunnels of this shell, this hell.

The artifices have told him that he is in a metal ship sailing the black sea of the kosmos, but they lie. They have told him that they took him from the battlefield on the day the Hole collapsed because they seek to help him find his way home to his wife and son, but they lie. They have told him that they are thinking objects—like men—with souls and hearts like men, but they lie.

This metal tomb is huge, a vertical labyrinth, and it has no windows. Here and there Odysseus finds transparent surfaces through which he can peer into yet another room, but he finds no windows or ports to look out onto this black sea of which they speak, only a few bubbles of clear glass that show him an eternally black sky holding the usual constellations. Sometimes the stars wheel and spin as if he’s had too much to drink. When none of the moravec machine toys are around, he pounds the windows and the walls until his massive, war-calloused fists are bloody, but he makes no marks on the glass or metal. He breaks nothing. Nothing opens to his will.

Some chambers are open to Odysseus, many are locked, and a few—like the place called the bridge, which they showed him on that first day of his exile in this right-angled Hades—are guarded by the black and thorny artifices called rockvecs or battle ‘vecs or Belt troopers. He has seen these black-thorned things fight during the months they helped protect Ilium and the Achaean encampments against the fury of the gods, and he knows that they have no honor. They are only machines using machines to fight other machines. But they are larger and heavier than Odysseus, armed with their machine weapons, and armored with their built-in blades and metal skin, whereas Odysseus has been stripped of all his weapons and armor. If all else fails, he will try to wrest a weapon away from one of the battle ‘vecs, but only after he has exhausted all his other choices. Having held and wielded weapons since he was a toddler, Odysseus, son of Laertes, knows that they must be learned—practiced with—their function and form understood as any artist understands his tools—and he does not know these blunt, scalloped, heavy, pointless weapons that the rockvecs carry.

In the room with all the roaring machines and the huge, plunging cylinders, he talks to the huge metal crab of a monster. Somehow, Odysseus knows the thing is blind. Yet somehow, he also knows, it finds its way around without the use of its eyes. Odysseus has known many brave men who were blind, and has visited blind seers, oracles, whose human sight had been replaced with second sight.

“I want to go back to the battlefields of Troy, Monster,” he says. “Take me there at once.”

The crab rumbles. It speaks Odysseus’ language, the language of civilized men, but so abominably that the words sound more like the crash of harsh surf on rocks—or the plunge and hiss of the huge pistons above—rather than true human speech.

“We have… long trip… in front of me… us… noble Odysseus, honored son of Laertes. When that is dead… finished… over… we hope to remove you… return you… to Penelope and Telemachus.”

How dare this animated metal hulk touch the names of my wife and child with its hidden tongue, thinks Odysseus. If he had even the dullest of swords or the crudest of clubs, he would bash this thing to pieces, tear open its shell, and find and rip out that tongue.

Odysseus leaves the crab-monster and seeks the bubble of curved glass where he can see the stars.

They are not moving now. They do not blink. Odysseus sets his scarred palms against the cold glass.

“Athena, goddess… I sing the glorious Power with azure eyes, Pallas Athena, tameless, chaste, and wise… hear my prayer.

“Tritogenia, goddess… town-preserving Maid, revered and mighty; from his awful head whom Zeus himself brought forth… in warlike armor dressed… Golden! All radiant!… I beseech thee, hear my prayer.

“Wonder, goddess, strange possessed… the everlasting Gods that Shape to see… shaking a javelin keen… impetuously rush from the crest of Aegis-bearing God, Father Zeus… so fearfully was heaven shaken… and did move beneath the might of the Cerulean-eyed…. hear my prayer.

“Child of the Aegis bearer, Third Born… sublime Pallas whom we rejoice to view… wisdom personified whose praise shall never unremembered be… hail to thee… please hear my prayer.”

Odysseus opens his eyes. Only the unblinking stars and his own reflection return his gray-eyed gaze.

The third day out from Phobos and Mars.

To a distant observer—say, someone watching through a powerful optical telescope from one of the orbital rings around Earth—the Queen Mab would appear as a complicated spear-shaft of girder-wrapped spheres, ovals, tanks, brightly painted oblongs, many-belled thruster quads, and a profusion of black buckycarbon hexagons, all arranged around the core stack of cylindrical habitation modules, all of which, in turn, are balanced atop a column of increasingly brilliant atomic flashes.

Mahnmut goes to see Hockenberry in the infirmary. The human is healing quickly, thanks in part to the Grsvki-process, which fills the ten-bed recovery room with the smell of a thunderstorm. Mahnmut has brought flowers from the Queen Mab’s extensive greenhouse—his memory banks had told him that this was still proper protocol in the prerubicon Twenty-first Century from which Hockenberry, or at least Hockenberry’s DNA, had come. The scholic actually laughs at the sight of them and allows that he’s never been given flowers before, at least as best he can recall. But Hockenberry adds that his memory of his life on Earth—his real life, his life as a university scholar rather than as a scholic for the gods—is far from complete.

“It’s lucky that you QT’d to the Queen Mab,” says Mahnmut. “No one else would have had the medical expertise or the surgical skills with which to heal you.”

“Or the spidery moravec surgeon,” says Hockenberry. “Little did I know when I met Retrograde Sinopessen that he’d end up saving my life within twenty-four hours. Funny how life works.”

Mahnmut can think of nothing to say to that. After a minute, he says, “I know you’ve talked to Asteague/Che about what happened to you, but would you mind discussing it again?”

“Not at all.”

“You say that Helen stabbed you?”

“Yes.”

“And the motive was just to keep her husband—Menelaus—from ever discovering that it was she who betrayed him after you quantum teleported him back to the Achaean lines?”

“I think so.” Mahnmut was not an expert at reading human facial expressions, but even he could tell that Hockenberry looked sad at the thought.

“But you told Asteague/Che that you and Helen had been intimate… were once lovers.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to excuse my ignorance about such things, Dr. Hockenberry, but it would appear that Helen of Troy is a very vicious woman.”

Hockenberry shrugs and smiles, albeit sadly. “She’s a product of her era, Mahnmut—formed by harsh times and motives beyond my understanding. When I used to teach the Iliad to my undergraduate students, I’d always emphasize that all of our attempts to humanize Homer’s tale—to make it into something explicable by modern humanist sensibilities—were destined to fail. These characters… these people … while completely human, were poised at the very beginning of our so-called civilized era, millennia before our current humanist values would begin to emerge. Viewed in that light, Helen’s actions and motivations are as hard for us to fathom as, say, Achilles’ almost complete lack of mercy or Odysseus’ endless guile.”

Mahnmut nods. “Did you know that Odysseus is on this ship? Has he come to see you?”

“No, I haven’t seen him. But Prime Integrator Asteague/Che told me he was aboard. Actually, I’m afraid he’ll kill me.”

“Kill you?” says Mahnmut, shocked.

“Well, you remember you used me to help kidnap him. I was the one who convinced him that you had a message from Penelope for him—all that garbage about the olive tree trunk as part of his bed back home in Ithaca. And when I got him to the hornet… zap! Mep Ahoo coldcocked him and loaded him aboard the hornet. If I were Odysseus, I’d sure carry a grudge against one Thomas Hockenberry.”

Coldcocked, thinks Mahnmut. He loved it when he encountered a new English word. He runs it through his lexicon, finds it, discovers to his surprise that it isn’t an obscenity, and files it away for future use. “I’m sorry I put you in a position of possible harm,” says Mahnmut. He considers telling the scholic that in all the confusion of the Hole closing forever, Orphu had tightbeamed him an order from the prime integrators—get Odysseus—but then he thinks better of using that as an excuse. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., had been born into the century when the excuse of I was only following orders went out of style once and for all.

“I’ll talk to Odysseus …” begins Mahnmut.

Hockenberry shakes his head and smiles again. “I’ll talk to him sooner or later. In the meantime, Asteague/Che posted one of your rockvecs as a guard.”

“I wondered what the Belt moravec was doing outside the medlab,” says Mahnmut.

“If worse comes to worse,” says Hockenberry, touching the gold medallion visible through the opening in his pajama tops, “I’ll just QT away.”

“Really?” says Mahnmut. “Where would you go? Olympos is a war zone. Ilium may have been put to the torch by now.”

Hockenberry’s smile disappears. “Yeah. There is that problem. I could always go look for my friend Nightenhelser where I left him—in Indiana, circa 1000 B.C.”

“Indiana …” Mahnmut says softly. “On which Earth?”

Hockenberry rubs his chest where, less than seventy-two hours earlier, Retrograde Sinopessen had been holding his heart. “Which Earth,” repeats the scholic. “You have to admit, that sounds odd.”

“Yes,” says Mahnmut, “but I suspect we’ll all have to get used to thinking that way. Your friend Nightenhelser is on the Earth you QT’d away from—Ilium-Earth, we might call it. This spacecraft is headed toward an Earth that exists three thousand years after you first lived and… mmm…”

“Died,” says Hockenberry. “Don’t worry, I’m used to that concept. It doesn’t bother me… too much.”

“It’s amazing that you were able to visualize the engine room of the Queen Mab so clearly after you were stabbed,” says Mahnmut. “You arrived here unconscious, so you must have activated the QT medallion just as you were on the verge of passing out.”

The scholic shakes his head. “I don’t remember twisting the medallion or visualizing anything.”

“What’s the last thing you remember, Dr. Hockenberry?”

“A woman standing over me, looking down at me with an expression of horror,” says the man. “A tall woman, pale skin, dark hair.”

“Helen?”

Hockenberry shakes his head. “She’d left already, gone down the steps. This woman just… appeared.”

“One of the Trojan women?”

“No. She was dressed… strangely. In a sort of tunic and skirt, more like a woman of my era than like any female outfit I’ve seen in the last ten years on Ilium or Olympos. But not like my era either …” He trailed away.

“Could she have been an hallucination?” asks Mahnmut. He doesn’t add the obvious—that Helen’s knife blade had nicked Hockenberry’s heart, spilling blood into his chest and denying it to the human’s brain.

“She could have been… but she wasn’t. But I had the strangest sense when I stared at her and saw her looking back at me…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t know how to describe it,” says Hockenberry. “A sense of certainty that she and I were going to meet again soon, somewhere else. Somewhere far away from Troy.”

Mahnmut thinks about this and the two—moravec and human—sit in comfortable silence for a long moment. The thud of the great pistons—a pounding that went through the very bones of the ship every thirty seconds followed by half-felt, half-heard hisses and sighs of the huge reciprocating cylinders—has become accustomed background noise, like the soft hiss of the ventilation system.

“Mahnmut,” says Hockenberry, touching his chest through the gap in his pajama shirt, “do you know why I didn’t want to come along on your voyage to Earth?”

Mahnmut shakes his head. He knows that Hockenberry can see his own reflection in the polished black plastic vision strip that runs around the front of Mahnmut’s red metal-alloy skull.

“It’s because I understood enough about the ship—this Queen Mab—to know her real reason for going to Earth.”

“The prime integrators told you the real reason,” says Mahnmut. “Didn’t they?”

Hockenberry smiles. “No. Oh—the reasons they gave are true enough, but they’re not the real reason. If you moravecs wanted to travel to Earth, you didn’t have to build this huge monstrosity of a ship to make the voyage in. You had sixty-five combat spacecraft in orbit around Mars already, or shuttling between Mars and the Asteroid Belt.”

“Sixty-five?” repeats Mahnmut. He’d known there had been ships in space, some of them hardly larger than the shuttle hornets, others large enough to haul heavy loads all the way from Jupiter space if necessary. He had no idea there were so many. “How do you know there were sixty-five, Dr. Hockenberry?”

“Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo told me while we were still on Mars and Ilium-Earth. I was curious about the ships’ propulsion and he was vague—spacecraft engineering isn’t his specialty, he’s a combat ‘vec—but I got the impression these other ships had fusion drives or ion drives … something much more sophisticated than atomic bombs in cans.”

“Yes,” says Mahnmut. He didn’t know much about spacecraft either—the one that had brought Orphu and him to Mars had been a jury-rigged combination of solar sails and disposable fusion thrusters, all flung initially across the solar system by the two-trillion-watt moravecbuilt trebuchet of Jupiter’s accelerator-scissors—but even he, a modest submersible driver from Europa, knew that the Queen Mab was primitive and much larger than its stated mission would demand. He thought he knew where Hockenberry was headed with this, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it.

“An atom bomb going off every thirty seconds,” the human says softly, “behind a ship the size of the Empire State Building, as all the prime integrators and Orphu were eager to point out. And the Mab doesn’t have any of the exterior stealth material that even the hornets are covered with. So you have this gigantic object with a bright what do you call it?… albedo… atop a series of atomic blasts that will be visible from the surface of the Earth in daytime by the time you arrive in Earth orbit… hell, it might be visible to the naked eye there now, for all I know.”

“Which leads you to conclude …” says Mahnmut. He is tightbeaming this conversation to Orphu, but his Ionian friend has remained silent on their private channel.

“Which leads me to believe that the real purpose of this mission is to be seen as soon as possible,” says Hockenberry. “To appear as threatening as possible so as to evoke a response from the powers on or around Earth—those very powers who you claim have jiggery-pokered the very fabric of quantum reality itself. You’re trying to draw fire.”

“Are we?” says Mahnmut. Even as he says it, he knows that Dr. Thomas Hockenberry is right… and that he, Mahnmut of Europa, has suspected this all along but not confronted his own certainty.

“Yes, you are,” says Hockenberry. “My guess is that this ship is just loaded with recording devices, so that when the Unknown Powers in orbit around Earth—or wherever they’re hiding—blast the Queen Mab to atoms—all the details of that power, the nature of those superweapons, will be transmitted back to Mars, or the Belt, or Jupiter Space, or wherever. This ship is like the Trojan Horse that the Greeks haven’t yet thought to build back on Ilium-Earth—and may never build, since I’ve screwed up the flow of events and since Odysseus is your captive here on the ship. But this is a Trojan Horse that you know… or are fairly certain… that the other side is going to burn. With all of us in it.”

On the tightbeam, Mahnmut sends, Orphu, is this the truth of it? Yes, my friend, but not all of it, comes the grim reply. To the human, Mahnmut says, “Not with all of us in it, Dr. Hockenberry. You still have your QT medallion. You can leave at any time.”

The scholic quits rubbing his chest—the scar is just a line on his flesh, livid still but fading where the molecular glue is healing the incision—and now he touches the heavy QT medallion hanging there. “Yes,” he says. “I can leave at any time.”

32

Daeman had selected nine other people at Ardis—five men and four women—to help him with the warning trip, faxing to all three hundred known faxnode portals to see if Setebos had been there and to warn the inhabitants there if Setebos had not—but he decided to wait until Harman, Hannah, and Petyr returned with the sonie. Harman had told Ada that they’d be back by the lunch hour or shortly after.

The sonie wasn’t back by lunchtime or by an hour after that.

Daeman waited. He knew that Ada and the others were nervous—scouts and firewood teams had noted shadowy movement of many voynix in the forests north, east, and south of Ardis, as if they were gathering for a major attack—and he didn’t want to pull ten people off their duties before Harman and the other two returned.

They didn’t return by midafternoon. Lookouts on the guard towers and palisades kept glancing toward the low, gray clouds, obviously hoping to see the sonie.

Daeman knew that he should leave—that Harman had been right, that the fax reconaissance and warning trip had to be done quickly—but he waited another hour. Then two. However illogical it might be, he felt that he would be abandoning Ada if he left before Harman and the sonie returned. If something had happened to Harman, Ada would be devastated but the community at Ardis might survive. Without the sonie, the fate of everyone might well be sealed during the next voynix attack.

Ada had been busy all afternoon, only coming outside occasionally to stand alone on Hannah’s cupola tower to watch the skies. Daeman, Tom, Siris, Loes, and a few others stood nearby but did not speak to her. The clouds grew grayer and it began to snow again. All of the short afternoon felt more and more like some terrible twilight.

“Well, I have to go in to work in the kitchen,” said Ada at last, pulling her shawl higher around her shoulders. Daeman and the others watched her go. Finally he went into the house, up to his small third-floor cubby under the eaves, and dug through his clothing chest until he found what he needed—the green thermskin suit and osmosis mask given to him by Savi more than ten months earlier.

The suit had been ripped and soiled—rent by Caliban’s claws and teeth, smeared by his blood and Caliban’s, then by the mud of their forced sonie landing the previous spring—and while cleaning had removed the stains, the suit had tried to heal all of its own rips and tears. It had almost succeeded. Here and there the green insulating overfabric was all but invisible, revealing the silver sheen of the molecular layer itself, but its heating and pressure-sealing faculties were almost intact—Daeman had faxed to an empty node at fourteen thousand feet above sea level, an uninhabited, wind-ravaged, snow-pelted node known only as Pikespik, to test it. The thermskin had kept him alive and warm and the osmosis mask had also worked, providing him with enough enhanced atmosphere to breathe easily.

Now, in his room under the eaves, he laid the almost weightless thermskin and mask in his pack next to the extra crossbow bolts and water bottles and went downstairs to assemble his waiting team.

A cry went up from outside. Daeman ran outdoors at the same time Ada and half the household did.

The sonie was visible about a mile away. It had come out through the clouds smoothly enough, circling around from the southwest, but suddenly it wobbled, dived, righted itself, then wobbled again, suddenly diving steeply toward earth just beyond the stockade on the south lawn. The silvery disk pulled up at the last minute, actually struck the top of the wooden palisade—making three guards there throw themselves to the ground to avoid the machine—and then it plowed into the frozen ground, bounced thirty feet, hit again, threw sod high into the air, bounced once more, and slid to a halt, plowing a shallow furrow into the rising lawn.

Ada led the rush from the front porch as everyone ran to the downed machine. Daeman reached it just seconds after Ada.

Petyr was the only person in the machine. He lay stunned and bleeding in the forward-center position. The other five cushioned passenger niches were filled with… guns. Daeman recognized variations on the flechette rifles that Odysseus had brought back, but also handguns and other weapons he’d never seen before.

They helped Petyr out of the sonie. Ada tore a clean strip of cloth from her tunic and pressed it against the young man’s bleeding forehead.

“I hit my head when the forcefield went off …” said Petyr. “Stupid. I should have let it land itself… I said ‘manual’ when it came off autopilot just after it came out of the clouds… thought I knew how to fly it… didn’t.”

“Hush,” said Ada. Tom, Siris, and others helped support the wobbly man. “Tell us about it when we get you in the house, Petyr. You guards… back to your posts, please. The rest of you, back to whatever you were doing. Loes, perhaps you and some of the men could bring in those weapons and ammunition magazines. There may be more in the sonie’s storage compartments. Put everything in the main hall. Thank you.”

In the parlor of Ardis Hall, Siris and Tom brought disinfectant and bandages while Petyr told his story to at least thirty people.

He described the Golden Gate under voynix siege and the meeting with Ariel. “Then the bubble went dark for several minutes, the glass gone opaque to sunlight, and when the buckyglas became transparent again, Harman was gone.”

“Gone where, Petyr?” Ada’s voice was steady.

“We don’t know. We spent three hours searching the whole complex—Hannah and I—and we found the weapons in a sort of museum room in a bubble she’d never been in before—but there was no sign of Harman or this green thing, Ariel.”

“Where is Hannah?” asked Daeman.

“She stayed behind,” said Petyr. He was bent over, holding his bandaged head. “We knew we had to get the sonie and as many of the weapons back to Ardis as quickly as possible—Ariel had said that he, she, had reprogrammed the sonie to return more slowly than we’d gone—it took about four hours on the return trip. Ariel had said that Odysseus would be out of his crèche in seventy-two hours if the machine could save his life, and Hannah said she was going to stay there until she knew… knew whether he’d made it or not. Besides, we found scores more weapons—we’ll have to go back with the sonie—and Hannah said we could pick her up then.”

“Were the voynix on the verge of getting into the bubbles?” asked Loes.

Petyr shook his head and then grimaced at the pain. “We didn’t think so. They slid right off the buckyglas and there were no exits or entrances functioning except the semipermeable garage door that sealed behind me when I flew out.”

Daeman nodded thoughtfully. He remembered both the friction-free buckyglas of the crawler canopy during their drive into the Mediterranean Basin with Savi and the semipermeable membrane doors up on Prospero’s orbital isle.

“Anyway, Hannah has about fifty flechette weapons,” said Petyr with a wry grin, “we carried them out of the museum in chests and blankets. She could kill a lot of voynix if they do get in. Plus, the room that Odysseus’ crèche is in is sort of hidden from the rest of the complex.”

“We’re not sending the sonie back tonight, are we?” asked the woman named Salas. “I mean …” She glanced out the windows at the dimming afternoon.

“No, we’re not sending the sonie back today,” said Ada. “Thank you, Petyr. Go on to the infirmary and get some rest. We’ll bring the sonie up to the house and inventory the weapons and ammunition you brought back. You may have saved Ardis.”

People went about their business. Even out on the far lawn, there was the buzz of excited conversation. Loes and others who had fired the flechette guns originally brought back by Odysseus, tested the new weapons—all those flechette guns they tried worked—and set up an ad hoc firing range behind Ardis where they could begin training others. Daeman himself oversaw the brushing off of the sonie. It hummed back to life when the controls were reactivated and resumed its hover three feet off the ground. Half a dozen men walked it back to the house. The storage compartments at the rear and sides of the machine—where Odysseus had once stored his spears while going on a hunt for Terror Birds—had indeed been filled with more guns.

Finally, by late afternoon, with the winter twilight fading the day from the sky, Daeman went out to see Ada where she was standing by Hannah’s flaming hearth tower. He started to speak, then found he didn’t know what to say.

“Go,” said Ada. “Good luck.” She kissed Daeman on the cheek and pushed him back toward the house.

In the last gray light of the snowy afternoon, Daeman and the nine others loaded their packs with more crossbow bolts, biscuits, cheese, and water bottles—they considered taking some of the new flechette pistols, but decided to stay with the crossbows and knives, weapons they were familiar with—and then they quickly walked the mile and a quarter of road between the Ardis Hall stockade and the fax pavilion. At times they jogged. Shadows were moving within the deeper shade of the forest, although the ten couldn’t see any voynix in the open. There was no bird sound from the trees—not even the sparse flutters and calls common in deep winter. At the fax pavilion stockade, the nervous men and women keeping guard there—twenty of them—first welcomed them as their relief come early, then showed their displeasure when they learned the group was faxing out. No one had faxed in or out in the past twenty-four hours and the guard team had seen voynix—scores of them—moving west in the forest. They knew the faxnode pavilion was not really defensible should the voynix attack en masse and all of them wanted to be back at Ardis before nightfall. Daeman told them that Ardis was not the place they wanted to be this night—that a relief crew might not make it down to the fax pavilion before nightfall because of the voynix activity, but that someone would fly down in the sonie and check on them within the next few hours. If there was an attack here at the pavilion and the defenders here could get one messenger back to Ardis, the sonie could bring in reinforcements, five at a time.

Daeman looked at the team he’d put together—Ramis, Caman, Dorman, Caul, Edide, Cara, Siman, Oko, and Elle—and then he briefed the nine volunteers on their mission a final time: each had been assigned a list of thirty faxnode codes, codes simply rising in numerical order since distance from Ardis made no difference in the fax world, and explained again how they were to flick to all thirty sites before returning. If there was sign of the blue ice-web and the many-handed Setebos, they were to note it, see what they could from the fax pavilion there, and get the hell out. Their job was not to fight. If the community there looked normal, they were to spread the word to whoever was in charge, then fax on to the next node as quickly as possible. Even with delays in delivering their messages, Daeman hoped that each could complete his or her mission in less than twelve hours. Some of the nodes were sparsely inhabited—little more than a cluster of homes around a fax pavilion—so the stays should be short, even shorter if the humans had fled. If any of the messengers didn’t return to Ardis Hall in twenty-four hours, he or she would be presumed lost and someone sent in his or her place to notify those thirty nodes. They were to return early—before completing their circuit of thirty nodes—only if they were seriously injured or if they learned something that was important to the survival of everyone at Ardis. In that case, they were to come straight back.

The man named Siman looked anxiously at the surrounding hills and meadows. It was already growing dark. The man said nothing, but Daeman could read his mind—What chance would they have trying to make the mile and a quarter in the dark, with the voynix on the move?

Daeman called the fax pavilion defenders into their circle. He explained that if any of these people faxed back with important news and the sonie was not available, fifteen of the guard troop would accompany the messenger back to Ardis Hall. In no case was the fax pavilion to be left undefended.

“Any questions?” he asked the group. In the dying light, their faces were white ovals turned toward him. No one had a question.

“We’ll leave in fax code order,” he said. He did not waste time wishing them luck. One by one they faxed out, tapping the first of their codes onto the diskplate pad on the column in the center of the pavilion and flicking out of sight. Daeman had taken the last thirty codes, primarily because Paris Crater was one of these high numbers, as were the nodes he’d checked. But when he faxed out, he tapped none of these codes in. Instead, he set in the little-known high-number code for the uninhabited tropical isle.

It was still bright daylight when he arrived. The lagoon was light blue, the water beyond the reef still a deeper color. Storm clouds were piled high on the western horizon and morning sunlight illuminated the tops of what he’d recently learned were called stratocumulus.

Glancing around to make sure he was alone, Daeman stripped naked and pulled on the thermskin, allowing the hood to lie loose at his neck and the osmosis mask to hang on a strap beneath his tunic. Then he pulled on his trousers, tunic, and shoes, stuffing his underwear into his pack.

He checked the other items in his rucksack—strips of yellow cloth he’d cut up at Ardis, the two crude clawhammers he’d had Reman forge—Reman was the best ironworker at Ardis when Hannah was gone. Coils of rope. Extra crossbow quarrels.

He wanted to go back to Paris Crater first, but it was the middle of the night there and to see what he had to see, Daeman needed daylight. He knew that he had about seven hours before sunrise at Paris Crater and he was pretty sure that he could visit most of his other twenty-nine nodes by then. Some of those on his list were the ones he’d faxed to after fleeing from Paris Crater last time—Kiev, Bellinbad, Ulanbat, Chom, Loman’s Place, Drid, Fuego, Cape Town Tower, Devi, Mantua, and Satle Heights. Only Chom and Ulanbat had been infected with the blue ice then, and he hoped it would still be that way. Even if it took a full twelve hours to warn the people in the other cities and nodes, it would be full daylight when he faxed last to Paris Crater.

And Paris Crater is where he planned to do what he had to do.

Daeman tugged on his heavy pack, lifted the crossbow, walked back to the pavilion, said a silent goodbye to the tropical breezes and rustle of palm fronds, and tapped in the first code on his list.

33

Achilles has carried the dead but perfectly preserved corpse of the Amazon Penthesilea more than thirty leagues, almost ninety miles, up the slope of Mount Olympos and is prepared to carry her another fifty leagues more—or a hundred more if it comes to that, or a thousand—but somewhere on this third day, somewhere around the altitude of sixty thousand feet, the air and warmth disappear completely.

For three days and nights, with only short breaks for rest and catnaps, Achilles, son of Peleus and the goddess Thetis, grandson of Aeacus, has climbed within the glass-shrouded tube of the crystal escalator that rises to the summit of Olympos. Shattered on the lower slopes in the first days of fighting between the forces of Hector and Achilles and the immortal gods, most of the escalator had retained its pressurized atmosphere and its heating elements. Until the sixty-thousand-foot level. Until here. Until now.

Here some lightning bolt or plasma weapon has severed the escalator tube completely, leaving a gap of a quarter mile or more. It makes the crystal escalator on the red volcanic slope look like nothing so much as a snake chopped in half with a hoe. Achilles presses through the force-field on the open end of the tube and crosses that terrible openness, carrying his weapons, his shield, and the body of Penthesilea—the Amazon’s corpse anointed in Pallas Athena’s preserving ambrosia and bound in once-white linen he’d taken from his own command tent—but when he does reach the other side, his lungs bursting, eyes burning and ears bleeding from the low pressure, his skin scored by the burning cold, he sees that the tube beyond is shattered for miles more, the wreckage rising up over the ever-receding curving slope of Olympos, its interior without air or heat. Instead of a staircase he can climb, the escalator is now a series of shattered shards showing jagged metal and twisted glass for as far as he can see. Airless, freezing, it does not even offer shelter from the howling jet-stream winds.

Cursing, gasping, Achilles staggers back down the open slope, presses back through the humming forcefield at the opening to the crystal tube, and collapses on the metal steps, setting his wrapped burden gently on the stairs. His skin is raw and cracked from the cold—How can it be cold this close to the sun? he wonders. Fleet-footed Achilles feels sure that he has climbed higher than Icarus flew, and the wax on the wings of the boy-who-would-be-bird had melted from the heat of the sun. Had it not? But the mountaintops in the land of his childhood—Chiron’s land, the country of the centaurs—were cold, windy, inhospitable places where the air grew thinner the higher one climbed. Achilles realizes that he expected more from Olympos.

He takes a leather bag from his cape, removes a small wineskin from the pouch, and squirts the last of his wine between his parched and cracked lips. Achilles ate the last of his cheese and bread ten hours earlier, confident that he would soon reach the summit. But Olympos seems to have no summit.

It seems now like months since the morning of the day he’d begun this quest three days earlier—the day he’d killed Penthesilea, the day the Hole closed, sealing him away from Troy and his fellow Myrmidons and Achaeans, not that he cared that the Hole was gone, since he had no intention of going back until Penthesilea lived again and was his bride. But he hadn’t planned this expedition. On that morning three days earlier when Achilles had set out from his tent on the battlefield near the base of Olympos, he’d carried only a few scraps of food into the battle with the Amazons, not planning to be gone for more than a few hours. His strength that morning had seemed as limitless as his wrath.

Now Achilles wonders if he has the strength to descend the thirty leagues of metal staircase.

Maybe if I leave the woman’s corpse behind.

Even as the thought slides through his exhausted mind, he knows that he won’t do it… he can’t do it. What had Athena said? “There is no release from this particular spell of Aphrodite—the pheromones have spoken and their judgment is final. Penthesilea will be your only love for this life, either as a corpse or as a living woman…”

Achilles, son of Peleus, has no idea what pheromones might be, but he knows that Aphrodite’s curse is real enough. The love for this woman he so brutally killed chews at his guts more fiercely than the hunger pangs that make his belly growl. He’ll never turn back. Athena had said that there were healing tanks at the summit of Olympos, the gods’ secret, the source of their own physical repair and immortality—a secret path around the inviolate line between the light and dark that is Death’s teeth’s barrier. The healing tanks… this is where Achilles will take Penthesilea. When she breathes again, she will be his bride. He defies the Fates themselves to oppose him on this mission.

But now his exhaustion makes his powerful, tanned arms shake and he leans forward, resting those arms on his bloodied knees just above his greaves. He looks out through the crystal roof and sides of the enclosed metal staircase and—for the first time in three days—really takes in the view.

It is almost sunset and the shadow of Olympos stretches far out over the red landscape below. The Hole is gone and there are no longer any battlefield campfires visible on the red plain below. Achilles can see the winding line of the crystal escalator for much of the thirty leagues he has climbed, its glass catching more light than the dark slopes beneath it. Farther out, the shadow of the mountain falls across shoreline, distant hills, and even the blue sea that rolls in so tepidly from the north. Farther to the east now, Achilles can see the white summits of three other tall peaks, rising above low clouds, catching the red sunset glow. The edge of the world is curved. This strikes Achilles as a very strange thing, since everyone knows that the world is either flat or saucer-shaped, with the far walls curving upward, not downward as the edge of this world is now in the evening light. This is obviously not the Mount Olympos in Greece, but Achilles has been aware of this for many months. This red-soil, blue-sky world with this impossibly tall mountain is the true home of the gods, and he suspects that the horizon can curve downward here or do anything else it pleases.

He turns to look back uphill just as a god QT’s into sight.

He’s a small god by Olympian standards, a dwarf—just six feet tall—bearded, ugly, and, as he staggers around viewing the damage to his escalator—Achilles can see that he is crippled, almost hunchbacked. As familiar with the Olympian Pantheon as the next Argive hero, Achilles knows at once who this is—Hephaestus, god of fire and chief artificer to the gods.

Hephaestus appears to be almost finished surveying the damage to his artificing—standing out there in the freezing cold and howling jet stream, his back to Achilles, scratching his beard and muttering while he surveys the wreckage—and it looks as if he hasn’t noticed Achilles and his linen-wrapped bundle.

Achilles doesn’t wait for him to turn. Running through the forcefield at top speed, the fleet-footed mankiller tackles the god of fire and uses his favorite wrestling moves on him—first using the famous “body hold” that has won Achilles countless prizes in wrestling games, grabbing the god by his burly waist, flipping him upside down, and hurling him headfirst into the red rock. Hephaestus howls a curse and tries to rise. Achilles grabs the gnome-god by his burly forearm and uses the “flying mare” move—hurling Hephaestus over his shoulder in a complete flip and slamming him to the ground on his back.

Hephaestus moans and shouts a truly obscene curse.

Knowing that the god’s next move will be to teleport away, Achilles throws himself on the shorter, bulkier figure, wrapping his legs around Hephaestus’s waist in a rib-crunching scissors hold, setting his left arm around the bearded god’s neck, and pulling the short god-killing knife from his belt and holding it under the fire god’s chin.

“You fly away, I go with you and kill you at the same time,” hisses Apollo in the artificer’s hairy ear.

“You… can’t… kill… a fucking… god,” gasps Hephaestus, using his blunt, calloused god-fingers to try to pry Achilles’ forearm away from his throat.

Achilles uses the Athena-blade to draw a three-inch cut—long but shallow—under Hephaestus’ chin. Golden ichor spills onto the ratty beard. At the same instant, Achilles closes his legs tighter around the god’s creaking ribs.

The god shoots electricity through his body and into Achilles’ thighs. Achilles grimaces at the high voltage but does not release his grip. The god exerts superhuman strength to escape—Achilles counters with even more superhuman strength and holds him tight, increasing the pressure of his scissoring legs. Achilles brings the blade up more sharply under the red-faced god’s chin.

Hephaestus grunts, woofs, and goes limp. “All right… enough,” he gasps. “You win this match, son of Peleus.”

“Give me your word that you will not flick away.”

“I give you my word,” gasps Hephaestus. He groans as Achilles tightens his powerful thighs.

“And know that I will kill you when you break your word,”growls Achilles. He rolls away, aware that the air is too thin for him to stay conscious more than a few more seconds. Grabbing the fire god by his tunic and tangled hair, he drags him through the forcefield into the warmth and thick air of the enclosed crystal staircase.

Once inside, Achilles throws the god down on the metal steps and wraps his legs around Hephaestus’ ribs again. He knows through watching Hockenberry and the gods themselves that when they QT away to wherever they’re going, they transport with them anyone who is in physical contact.

Wheezing, moaning, Hephaestus glances at the linen-wrapped body of Penthesilea and says, “What brings you up to Olympos, fleet-footed Achilles? Bringing your laundry up to be washed?”

“Shut up,” gasps Achilles. The three days without food and the exertions of climbing sixty thousand feet on an airless mountain have taken too much out of him. He can feel his superhuman strength ebbing like water out of a sieve. Another minute and he’ll have to release Hephaestus—or kill him.

“Where did you get that knife, mortal?” asks the bearded and ichor-bleeding god.

“Pallas Athena entrusted me with it.” Achilles sees no reason to lie and unlike some—crafty Odysseus for one—he never lies anyway.

“Athena, eh?” grunts Hephaestus. “She is the goddess I love above all others.”

“Yes, I have heard this,” says Achilles. Actually, what Achilles has heard is that Hephaestus pursued the virgin goddess for centuries, trying to have his way with her. At one point he came close enough that Athena was batting Hephaestus’ turgid member away from her thighs—and Greeks coyly used the word for “thighs” to mean a woman’s pudenda—when, dry humping for all he was worth, the bearded cripple of a god ejaculated all over her upper legs just as the more powerful goddess shoved him away from her. As a child, Achilles’ stepfather, the centaur Chiron, had told him many tales in which the wool, erion, that Athena used to wipe away the semen, or the dust in which that semen fell, all played interesting roles. As a man and the world’s greatest warrior, Achilles had heard the poet-minstrels sing of “bridal dew”—herse or drosos in the language of his home isle—but these words also meant a newborn child itself. It was said that various human heroes—some included Apollon—had been born of this semen-impregnated wool or dust.

Achilles decides not to mention either tale right now. Besides, he’s almost out of strength—he needs to conserve his breath.

“Release me and I will be your ally,” says Hephaestus, gasping again. “We are like brothers anyway.”

“How are we like brothers?” manages Achilles. He has decided that if he has to release Hephaestus, he will drive the god-killing Athena dagger up through the god’s underjaw and into his skull, skewering the ar-tificer’s brain and pulling it free like spearing a fish from a stream.

“When I was flung into the sea not long after the Change, Eurynome, daughter of Okeanos, and your mother, Thetis, received me on their laps,” gasped the god. “I would have drowned had not your mother—dearest Thetis, daughter of Nereus—caught me up and cared for me. We are like brothers.”

Achilles hesitates.

“We are more than brothers,” gasps Hephaestus. “We are allies.”

Achilles does not speak because to do so would be to reveal his approaching weakness.

“Allies!” cries Hephaestus, whose ribs are snapping one after the other, like saplings in the cold. “My beloved mother, Hera, hates the immortal bitch Aphrodite, who is your enemy. My adored beloved, Athena, sent you on this task, you say, so it is my will to aid you in your quest.”

“Take me to the healing tanks,” manages Achilles.

“The healing tanks?” Hephaestus breathes deeply as Achilles relinquishes the pressure a bit. “You’ll be found out there now, son of Peleus and Thetis. Olympos is in the thrall of kaos and civil war this day—Zeus has disappeared—but there are still guards at the healing tanks. It is not yet dark. Come to my quarters, eat, drink, refresh yourself, and I will then take you directly to the healing tanks in the dead of night, when only the monstrous Healer and a few sleepy guards are there.”

Food? thinks Achilles. It’s true, he realizes, that he will hardly be able to fight—much less command others to bring Penthesilea back to life—unless he gets something to eat soon.

“All right,” grunts Achilles, pulling his legs from around the bearded god’s middle and pushing the Athena-blade back in his belt. “Take me to your quarters on the summit of Olympos. No tricks, now.”

“No tricks,” growls Hephaestus, scowling and feeling his bruised and broken ribs. “But it is an ill day when an immortal can be treated this way. Take hold of my arm and we will QT there now.”

“A minute,” says Achilles. He can barely lift Penthesilea’s body to his shoulder, he is so weak. “All right,” he says, grabbing the god’s hairy forearm, “we can go now.”

34

The voynix attacked a little after midnight.

After helping to make and serve dinner to the Ardis Hall multitudes, Ada had joined in the evening heavy outside work of reinforcing Ardis’s defenses. Despite requests from Peaen, Loes, Petyr, and Isis—all of whom knew she is pregnant—she stayed outside in the cold and light snow, helping to dig the ditches about a hundred feet inside the fences of the palisade. It had been Harman and Daeman’s idea—fire ditches, filled with their precious lantern oil and ignited if the voynix managed to break through the palisade—and Ada wished that Harman and Daeman were there that night to help dig.

The earth was frozen and Ada found that she was too weary to break through the soil, even though she had one of the sharper shovels. This frustrated her so much that she had to wipe away the tears and snot as she waited for Greogi and Emme to break through the frozen dirt before she could lift and shovel it away. Luckily, it was dark and no one was looking at her. The embarrassment of being seen crying would have made her blubber harder. When Petyr came from where he was working in the hall to finish first-floor defenses and asked her again to come in the house, at least, she told him truthfully that she loved working on the line out here with the hundreds of other laborers. The manual labor and the proximity of so many made her feel better and kept her from thinking about Harman, she said. It was the truth.

Some time after ten p.m., the ditches were finished. They were crude things, at best—five feet across, less than two feet deep, lined with plastic bags scavenged from Chom in previous weeks. Cans of the precious lamp oil—kerosene, Harman had called it—were in the hallway, ready to be carried out, poured, and ignited if the palisade defenders had to fall back.

“What happens after we use a year’s worth of lighting fuel in a few minutes?” Anna had asked.

“We sit in the dark,” had been Ada’s response. “But we’ll be alive.”

In truth, she had reservations about that assessment. If the voynix got past the outer perimeter, she doubted if a little wall of flame—if they even had time to ignite it—could hold them back. Harman and Daeman had helped draw up the plans for reinforcing Ardis’s doorways and attaching the heavy shutters on the inside of all the first—and second-floor windows—the work had been going on for three days and was almost completed, according to Petyr—but Ada had her doubts about that line of defense as well.

When the ditches were finished, guards doubled on the palisades, cans of kerosene set in the outer hall and people assigned to deliver them to the trenches in case of attack, the new flechette rifles and pistols distributed—there were enough to arm one out of every six persons at Ardis, a far cry from the two flechette rifles they’d had before—and Greogi was circling overhead in the sonie, keeping watch, Ada went inside to help Petyr with the interior defenses.

The heavy shutters were almost finished—large, solid planks of wood set deep into the ancient oak frames of Ardis Hall’s windows and ready to be swung shut and latched with iron locks forged in Hannah’s cupola out back. It looked so ugly that Ada just nodded her approval and then turned away to weep.

She remembered how beautiful and gracious Ardis Hall had been less than a year ago—part of a tradition that stretched back almost two thousand years. It had always been a wonderful place to live and to entertain—sophisticated, gracious, elegant. Less than a year ago they had celebrated Harman’s ninety-ninth birthday here in comfort with a huge feast out under the spreading elm and oak trees—lighted lanterns in the trees, food from all over the planet being served by floating servitors, docile voynix pulling carrioles and droshkies up the crushed-stone drive to the lighted front porch, with men and women from everywhere showing up in their finest robes and linens and elegant hairdos. Looking around at the scores of people in rough tunics milling in the cluttered main parlor, lanterns hissing and spitting in the dark, bedrolls on the floor and flechette rifles and crossbows stacked close to hand, fires burning in the fireplace not for ambience but for survival warmth with a score of exhausted and grimy men and women snoring near the hearth, muddy bootprints everywhere and heavy wooden shutters where her mother’s beautiful drapes once hung, Ada thought Has it come to this?

It had.

There were four hundred people living in and around Ardis now. It was no longer Ada’s home. Or rather, now it was the home to everyone willing to live here and fight for it.

Petyr showed her the shutters and other additions—slits cut into the first—and second-floor window shutters through which the defenders could continue to fire arrows, crossbow bolts, and flechettes at the voynix if they made it through the palisade, into the grounds—boiling water in huge vats on the third floor and raised by winches to the high gable terraces above, from which last-ditch defenders could pour the hot liquid down on the voynix. Harman had sigled that idea from one of his old books. Now the large vats of water and oil bubbled and boiled on makeshift stoves hauled up into Ada’s family’s former private quarters. It was all ugly, but it looked as if it might work.

Greogi came in.

“The sonie?” asked Ada.

“Up on the jinker platform. Reman and the others are preparing to take it up with archers.”

“What did you see?” asked Petyr. They’d quit sending reconnaissance parties out into the forest after sunset—the voynix could see better than humans in the dark and it was just too risky on such a cloudy night without moonlight or ringlight—so the sonie forays had become their eyes.

“It’s hard to see in the dark and sleet,” said Greogi. “But we dropped flares into the woods. There are voynix everywhere—more than we’ve ever seen before…”

“Where do they come from?” asked the older woman named Uru, rubbing her own elbows as if cold. “They’re not faxing in. I was on guard duty yesterday and…”

“That’s not our worry right now,” interrupted Petyr. “What else did you see, Greogi?”

“They’re still carrying rocks up from the river,” said the short, redheaded man.

Ada winced at this. The foot patrols had reported that as early as midday, voynix were seen carrying heavy stones and stacking them in the woods. It was a behavior the people of Ardis had never seen before, and any new behavior from the voynix made Ada sick with anxiety.

“Do they seem to be building something?” asked Casman. His voice sounded almost hopeful. “A wall or something? Shelters?”

“No, just stacking the rocks in rows and heaps near the edge of the woods,” said Greogi.

“We have to assume they’ll use them as missiles,” Siris said quietly.

Ada thought of all the years—centuries—that the voynix were powerful but passive, silent servants, doing all the tasks that old-style humans had abandoned—herding and slaughtering their animals for them, standing guard against ARNied dinosaurs and other dangerous replicant creatures, pulling droshkies and carrioles like beasts of burden. For centuries before the Final Fax fourteen hundred years earlier, it was said that voynix were everywhere but were immobile, unresponsive—simply headless statues with leathery humps and metal carapaces. Until the Fall nine months earlier, when Prospero’s Isle came flaming down from the e-ring in ten thousand meteoric pieces, no one in living memory had ever seen a voynix do something unexpected, much less act on its own initiative.

Times had changed.

“How do we defend against thrown rocks?” asked Ada. Voynix had powerful arms.

Kaman, one of Odysseus’ earliest disciples, stepped forward, closer to the center of the circle that had formed here in the second-floor parlor. “I sigled a book last month that told of ancient siege engines and pre–Lost Era machines that could fling huge rocks, boulders, for miles.”

“Did the book have diagrams?” asked Ada.

Kaman chewed a lip. “One. It wasn’t all that clear how it worked.”

“That’s not a defense anyway,” said Petyr.

“It would allow us to throw rocks back at them,” said Ada. “Kaman, why don’t you find that book and get it to Reman, Emme, Loes, Caul, and some of the others who help Hannah with the cupola and who are especially good at building things…”

“Caul’s gone,” said the woman with the shortest hair at Ardis, Salas. “He left today with Daeman and that group.”

“Well, get it to everyone left good at building things,” Ada said to Kaman.

The thin, bearded man nodded and jogged toward the library.

“We going to throw their rocks back at them?” asked Petyr with a smile.

Ada shrugged. She wished Daeman and the nine others weren’t gone. She wished Hannah had come back from the Golden Gate. Most of all, she wished Harman were home.

“Let’s go finish our work, people,” said Petyr. The group broke up with Greogi leading some people upstairs to the jinker platform to relaunch the sonie. Others went off to bed.

Petyr touched Ada’s arm. “You have to get some sleep.”

“Stand guard …” mumbled Ada. There seemed to be a loud buzz in the air, as if the cicadas of summer had returned.

Petyr shook his head and led her down the hall toward her room. Harman and my room, she thought.

“You’re exhausted, Ada. You’ve been going for twenty hours straight. All the day-shift people are asleep now. We have extra people on the walls and watching from above. We’ve done all we can do for today. You need to get some sleep. You’re special.”

Ada pulled her arm away in shock. “I’m not special!”

Petyr stared at her. His eyes were dark in the flickering lantern light of the hallway. “You are, whether you acknowledge it or not, Ada. You’re part of Ardis. To so many of us, you’re the living embodiment of this place. You’re still our hostess, whether you admit it or not. People wait for your decision on things, and not just because Harman’s been our de facto leader for months. Besides, you’re the only pregnant woman here.”

Ada couldn’t argue with that. She allowed herself to be led off to her bedroom.

Ada knew she should sleep—she had to sleep if she was to be any good to Ardis or herself—but sleep evaded her. All she could do was worry about the defenses and think of Harman. Where was he? Was he alive? Was he all right? Would he return to her?

As soon as this current voynix threat was past, she was flying to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu—no one could stop her—and she would find her lover, her husband, if it was the last thing she ever did.

Ada got up in the dark room, crossed to her dresser, and withdrew the turin cloth, carrying it back to bed with her. She had no urge to use a function to interact with the images again—her memory of the dying man in the tower looking up at her, seeing her, was too terribly fresh—but she did want to see the images of ancient Troy again. A city under siege—someone’s home under siege. It might give her hope.

She lay back, set the embroidered microcircuits in the cloth to her forehead, and closed her eyes.

It is morning in Ilium. Helen of Troy enters the main hall of Priam’s temporary palace—Paris and Helen’s former mansion—and hurries to join Cassandra, Andromache, Herophile, and the huge Lesbos slave-woman Hypsipyle, who stand in a cluster of royal women to the left and rear of King Priam’s throne.

Andromache shoots Helen a glance. “We sent servants to search for you in your quarters,” she whispers. “Where have you been?”

Helen has just had time to bathe and put on clean clothes since she escaped Menelaus and left the dying Hockenberry in the tower. “I was walking,” she whispers back.

“Walking,” says beautiful Cassandra in the inebriated tone that often accompanies her trances. The blonde woman smirks. “Walking… with your blade, dear Helen? Have you wiped it off yet?”

Andromache hushes Priam’s daughter. The slave woman Hypsipyle leans closer to Cassandra and now Helen can see that Hypsipyle has a grip on the prophetess’s pale arm. Cassandra winces from the pressure—Hypsipyle’s fingers are sinking into the pale flesh upon the command of Andromache’s nod—but then Cassandra smiles again.

We’ll have to kill her, thinks Helen. It seems like months since she has seen the other two surviving members of the original Trojan Women, as they had called themselves, but it has been less than twenty-four hours since she said goodbye to them and was kidnapped by Menelaus. The fourth and final surviving secret Trojan Women—Herophile, “beloved of Hera,” the oldest sibyl in the city—is here now in the cluster of important women, but Herophile’s gaze is vacant and she looks to have aged twenty years in the past eight months. As with Priam, Helen realizes, Herophile’s day is done.

Returning her thoughts now to the mindset of Ilium’s internal politics, Helen is amazed that Andromache has allowed Cassandra to stay alive—if Priam and the people learn that Andromache and Hector’s baby, Astyanax, is still alive, that the death of the child had been only a ruse for war with the gods, Hector’s wife would be ripped limb from limb. In fact, Helen realizes, Hector would kill her.

Where is Hector? Helen realizes that this is whom everyone is waiting for.

Just as she is about to whisper the question to Andromache, Hector enters, accompanied by a dozen of his captains and closest comrades. Even though the king of Troy—ancient Priam—is sitting on his throne, Queen Hecuba’s throne empty next to him, it is as if the true king of all Ilium has just entered the room. The red-crested spearmen standing guard snap to even greater attention. The weary war captains and heroes, many still covered with dust and blood from the night’s battle, stand straighter. Everyone, even the women of the royal family, hold their heads up higher.

Hector is here.

Even after ten years of admiring his presence and heroism and wisdom, even after ten years of being a plant curling toward the sunshine that is Hector’s charisma, Helen of Troy feels her pulse race for the ten thousandth time as Hector, son of Priam, true leader of the fighters and people of Troy, enters the hall.

Hector is wearing his battle armor. He is clean—obviously risen from a bed rather than a battlefield, his armor is freshly polished, his shield unmarked, even his hair is freshly shampooed and plaited—but the young man looks tired, wounded by a pain of the soul.

Hector salutes his royal father and sits easily in his dead mother’s throne while his captains take their place behind him.

“What is the situation?” asks Hector.

Deiphobus, Hector’s brother, bloodied by the night’s fighting, answers, looking at King Priam as if reporting to him but actually speaking to Hector. “The walls and great Scaean Gate are secure. We were almost taken by surprise by Agamemnon’s sudden attack and we were undermanned with so many of the fighters away through the Hole fighting the gods, but we repulsed the Argives, drove the Achaeans back to their ships by dawn. But it was a close thing.”

“And the Hole is closed?” asks Hector.

“Gone,” says Deiphobus.

“And all of our men made it back through the Hole before it disappeared?”

Deiphobus glances at one of his captains, receives some subtle signal. “We believe so. There was much confusion as thousands retreated back to the city, the moravec artifices fled in their flying machines, and Agamemnon launched his sneak attack—many of our bravest fell outside the walls, caught between our archers and the Achaeans—but we believe that no one was left behind on the other side of the Hole except Achilles.”

“Achilles did not return?” asks Hector, raising his head.

Deiphobus shakes his head. “After slaying all the Amazon women, Achilles stayed behind. The other Achaean captains and kings fled back to their own ranks.”

“Penthesilea is dead?” asks Hector. Helen realizes now that Priam’s greatest son has been out of touch for more than twenty hours, sunk in his own misery and disbelief that his war with the gods had ended.

“Penthesilea, Clonia, Bremusa, Euandra, Thermodoa, Alcibia, Dermachia, Derione—all thirteen of the Amazons were slaughtered, my lord.”

“What now of the gods?” asks Hector.

“They war amongst themselves most fiercely,” says Deiphobus. “It is like the days before… before our war against them.”

“How many are here?” asks Hector.

“For the Achaeans,” says Deiphobus, “Hera and Athena are their principal allies and patrons. Poseidon, Hades, and a dozen more of the immortals have been seen on the battlefield this night, urging on Agamemnon’s hordes, casting bolts and lightning at our walls.”

Old Priam clears his throat. “Then why do our walls still stand, my son?”

Deiphobus grins. “As in the old days, my father, for every god who wishes us ill, we have our protectors. Apollo is here with his silver bow. Ares led our counterattack at dawn. Demeter and Aphrodite…” He stops.

“Aphrodite?” says Hector. His voice is cold and flat, like a knife dropped on marble. Here was the goddess Andromache had said had killed Hector’s babe. Here was the name that forged the alliance between the greatest enemies in history—Hector and Achilles—and began their war against the gods.

“Yes,” says Deiphobus. “Aphrodite fights alongside the other gods who love us. Aphrodite tells us that it was not she who slayed our beloved Scamandrius, our Astyanax, our young lord of the city.”

Hector’s lips are white. “Continue,” he says.

Deiphobus takes a breath. Helen looks around the great hall. The scores of faces are white, intense, rapt with the force of the moment.

“Agamemnon and his men and their immortal allies are regrouping near their black ships,” says Hector ‘s balding brother. “They got close enough in the night to throw their ladders against our walls and send many a brave son of Ilium down to Hades, but their attacks were not well coordinated and came too soon—before the bulk of their captains and men were back through the Hole—and with Apollo’s help and Ares’ leadership, we threw them back beyond Thicket Ridge, back beyond their own old trenches and the abandoned moravec revetments.”

For a long moment there is total silence in the hall as Hector sits there, gaze lowered, seemingly lost in thought. His polished helmet in the crook of his arm gleams and throws a distorted reflection of the nearest watching faces.

Hector stands, walks to Deiphobus, clasps his brother’s shoulder a second, and turns to his father.

“Noble Priam, beloved Father, Deiphobus—dearest of all my brothers—has saved our city while I sulked in my apartments like an old woman lost in sour memories. But I ask now that I may be forgiven and that I might enter the ranks again in the defense of our city.”

Priam’s rheumy eyes seem to gain a faint glimmer of life. “You would put aside your fight with the gods who help us, my son?”

“My enemy is the enemy of Ilium,” says Hector. “My allies are those who kill the enemies of Ilium.”

“You will fight alongside Aphrodite?” presses old Priam. “You will ally yourself with the gods you’ve tried to kill these last many months? Kill those Achaeans, those Argives, whom you’ve learned to call friend?”

“My enemy is the enemy of Ilium,” repeats Hector, his jaw set. He lifts the golden helmet and sets it on. His eyes are fierce through the circles in polished metal.

Priam rises, hugs Hector, kisses his hand with infinite gentleness. “Lead our armies to victory this day, Noble Hector.”

Hector turns, clasps Deiphobus’ forearm for a second, and speaks loudly, addressing all the ranked and weary captains and their men.

“This day we bring fire to the enemy. This day we roar with war cries, all together! Zeus has handed us this day, a day worth all the rest in our long lives. This is the day we seize the ships, kill Agamemnon, and end this war forever!”

The silence echoes for a long pause and then suddenly the great hall is filled with a roar that frightens Helen, makes her step back behind Cassandra, who is smiling ear to ear in a sort of death rictus.

The hall empties then as if the people in it have been carried off by the roar—a roar that does not die but that begins anew and then grows even louder as Hector leaves Helen’s former palace and is cheered by his thousands of men waiting outside.

“Thus it begins again,” whispers Cassandra, her terrible grin frozen in place. “Thus the old futures come ‘round again to be born in blood.”

“Shut up,” hisses Helen.

“Get up, Ada! Get up!”

Ada threw the turin cloth aside and sat up in bed. It was Emme in her room, shaking her. Ada raised her left palm and saw that it was only a little after midnight.

Outside there came shouts, screams, the rip-crack of flechette rifles and the twang-thud of heavy crossbows firing. Something heavy smashed into the wall of Ardis Hall and a second later a window in the room next door exploded inward. There were flames lighting the win-dow—flames outside and below.

Ada jumped out of bed. She hadn’t even taken her boots off, so she tugged her tunic straight and followed Emme out into a hallway filled with running figures. Everyone had a weapon and was heading for his or her assigned positions.

Petyr met her at the base of the stairs.

“They’ve broken through the west wall. We have a lot of people dead. The voynix are in the compound.”

35

Ada emerged from Ardis Hall into confusion, darkness, death, and terror.

She and Petyr and a group of others had rushed out through the front door onto the south lawn, but the night was so dark that she could see only torches on the palisades and the vague shapes of people running toward the Hall, hear only shouts and screams.

Reman jogged up to them. The powerfully built bearded man—one of the earliest of those who came to Ardis to hear Odysseus’ teachings while he was still teaching—was carrying a crossbow with no bolts left in it. “The voynix came in over the north wall first. Three or four hundred of them at once, concentrated, en masse …”

“Three or four hundred?” whispered Ada. The previous night’s attack had been the worst, and they’d estimated that no more than a hundred and fifty of the creatures, spread out, had attacked all four sides of the compound.

“There are at least a couple of hundred coming over each wall,” gasped Reman. “But they came over the north wall first, behind a fusillade of stones. A lot of our people were hit… we couldn’t see the rocks in the dark… and when our numbers on the ramparts dropped, we had to keep our heads down, some ran, the voynix came leaping over, using each other’s backs as springboards. They were in among the cattle before we could bring up the reserves. I need more quarrels for the crossbow and a new spear…”

He started to brush past them into the foyer where the weapons were being dispensed, but Petyr caught his arm.

“Did you get the injured back from the wall?”

Reman shook his head. “It’s crazy up there. The voynix butchered those that fell, even those with just light head wounds or bruises from the rocks. We couldn’t… we couldn’t… get to them.” The big man turned away to hide his face.

Ada ran around the house toward the north wall.

The huge cupola was on fire and the flames illuminated the confusion. The temporary wooden barracks and tents where more than half the people at Ardis slept were also on fire. Men and women were running back toward Ardis Hall in total panic. The cattle were lowing as shadowy, flick-fast shapes of voynix slaughtered them—that was what voynix once did, Ada well knew, slaughter animals for humans, and they still had their deadly manipulator blades at the ends of those powerful steel arms. More cows went down in the mud and snow as Ada watched in horror, and then the voynix began hopping and leaping her way, quickly covering the hundred yards toward the house in giant grasshopper bounds.

Petyr grabbed her. “Come on, we have to fall back.”

“The fire trenches …” said Ada, pulling out of his grasp. She made her way across the current of running people until she reached one of the torches along the back patio, caught it up, and ran back toward the nearest trench. She had to dodge and weave her way against the crowd of men and women running toward the house—she could see Reman and others trying to stem the flight, but the panicked, defeated mob ran on, many of them throwing down their crossbows, bows, and flechette weapons. The voynix were past the burning cupola now, their silvery forms leaping across the burning scaffolding, striking down men and women trying to put out the fire. More voynix—scores of them—were hopping, scuttling, and running toward Ada. The trench was fifty feet away, the voynix less than eighty.

“Ada!”

She ran on. Petyr and a small group of men and women followed her to the trenches, even as the leading voynix leaped across the first ditch.

The kerosene drums were in place, but no one had poured the fluid into the trench. Ada pried the top off and kicked a heavy drum over, then rolled it along the edge of the trench as the strong-smelling fuel poured sluggishly into the shallow ditch. Petyr, Salas, Peaen, Emme, and others seized more of the heavy drums of lamp oil and began tipping and pouring them.

Then the voynix were on them. One of the creatures leaped the ditch and slashed Emme’s arm off at the shoulder. Ada’s friend did not even scream. She looked down at her missing arm in silent astonishment, her mouth hanging open. The voynix raised its arm and its cutting blades flashed in the light.

Ada dropped the torch into the trench, picked up a fallen crossbow, and fired a bolt into the voynix’s leather hump. The creature turned away from Emme and coiled, crouching, ready to leap at Ada. Petyr sloshed half a can of kerosene across its carapace at almost the same time that Loes threw his torch at the thing.

The voynix exploded into flame and staggered in circles, its infrared sensors overloaded, metal arms flapping. Two men near Petyr fired clouds of flechettes into it. Finally it fell into the ditch and ignited that entire section of the trench. Emme collapsed and Reman caught her, lifting her easily, and turned to carry her back to the house.

A fist-sized rock came hurtling out of the darkness, fast as a flechette and almost as invisible, and smashed in the back of Reman’s head. Still holding Emme, he tumbled backward into the burning ditch. Their bodies burst into flame.

“Come on!” shouted Petyr, grabbing Ada’s arm. A voynix leaped through the flames and landed between them. Ada fired the remaining crossbow bolt into the voynix’s belly, grabbed Petyr’s wrist, dodged past the staggered voynix, and turned to run.

There were fires all over the compound now, and Ada could see voynix everywhere—many past the flame trenches already, all of them within the walls. Some fell to flechette fire or were slowed by well-placed crossbow bolts and arrows, others were flung back when hit by flechette bursts, but the human firing was sporadic, individual, and poorly aimed. People were panicked. Discipline was not holding. The hail of flung rocks from the unseen voynix beyond the walls, on the other hand, was incessant—a constant and deadly barrage out of the darkness. Ada and Petyr tried to help a very young redheaded woman to her feet before the voynix overran them all. The woman had been struck in the side by a rock and was coughing blood onto her white tunic. Ada threw down her empty crossbow and used both hands to help the woman get to her feet and begin staggering back toward the Hall.

Flame trenches were being ignited on all four sides of Ardis Hall now by the retreating humans, but Ada saw the voynix run through the fire or leap over it. Wild shadows leaped everywhere on the lawn and the temperature rose a dozen degrees or more in a few seconds.

The woman sagged against Ada and almost pulled her down as she fell. Ada crouched next to her—amazed at the amount of blood the redheaded girl was vomiting onto her tunic—but Petyr was trying to pull her to her feet, guide her away. “Ada, we have to go!”

“No.”

Ada bent low, got the bleeding girl over her shoulder, and managed to stand. There were five voynix surrounding them.

Petyr had lifted a broken spear from the ground and was holding them back with feints and stabs, but the voynix were faster. They dodged back and lunged forward more quickly than Petyr could turn and thrust. One of the creatures grabbed the spear and wrenched it out of his hands. Petyr fell onto his stomach almost at the voynix’s feet. Ada looked around wildly for any weapon she could grab or use. She tried to set the girl on her feet so she could free her own hands, but the redhead’s knees buckled and she fell again. Ada rushed at the voynix standing over Petyr, ready to use her bare hands on it.

There came a rip of flechette fire and two of the voynix, including the one ready to behead Petyr, went down. The other three creatures whirled to meet the attack.

Petyr’s friend Laman—who had lost four fingers on his right hand in the last voynix attack—was firing a flechette pistol with his left hand. His right arm held up a wood-and-bronze shield and rocks ricocheted off it. Behind Laman came Salas, Oelleo, and Loes—all friends of Hannah’s and disciples of Odysseus—also using shields for defense and flechette weapons to kill. Two of the voynix went down and the third leaped back across the flaming ditch. But dozens more were running, leaping, and scrabbling around Ada’s group.

Petyr staggered to his feet, helped Ada lift the girl, and they headed toward the house still more than a hundred feet away, with Laman leading the way and Loes, Salas, and the petite Oelleo giving them protection on each side with their shields.

Two voynix landed on Salas’s back, driving her into the muddy, churned-up soil and tearing her spine away. Laman turned and shot the voynix in the hump with a full spread of flechettes. The creature was blasted sideways across the frozen ground, but Ada could see that Salas was dead. At that instant, a rock caught Laman in the temple and he fell lifeless.

Ada let Petyr support the girl’s weight while she snatched up the heavy flechette pistol. A solid volley of rocks came flying out of the darkness, but the humans crouched behind Loes’s and Oelleo’s shields. Petyr grabbed the fallen Laman’s shield and added it to the defensive barricade. One of the larger stones smashed Oelleo’s left arm through the wood and leather shield, and the woman—the absent Daeman’s close friend—threw back her head and screamed with the pain.

There were scores—hundreds—of voynix around them now, scrabbling, leaping, killing the wounded humans on the ground, with more rushing toward Ardis Hall.

“We’re cut off!” cried Petyr. Behind them, the flames in the trenches had lost much of their intensity and the voynix were leaping across without problem. The ground was littered with more human bodies than voynix corpses.

“We have to try!” shouted Ada. One arm around the unconscious girl, firing the flechette pistol with her right hand, she yelled for Oelleo to raise her shield with her right arm and to set it next to Loes’s. Behind that flimsy barricade, the five of them ran toward the house.

More voynix saw them coming and leaped to join the twenty or thirty blocking the way. Some of the creatures had crystal flechette darts lodged in their carapaces and leather humps; the light from the flames caught the crystal and danced in red and green flashes. A voynix grabbed Oelleo’s shield, pulled her off her feet, and cut her throat with a powerful slash of its left arm. Another pulled the girl away from Ada, who set the muzzle of the flechette pistol against the thing’s hump and squeezed the trigger four times. The blast blew out the front of the voynix’s carapace and it collapsed on top of the unconscious girl in a flood of its own blue-white blood-fluid, but Ada could hear the pistol click on an empty chamber as a dozen more voynix leapt closer.

Petyr, Loes, and Ada were kneeling now, trying to protect the fallen girl with the shield, Loes firing with the one remaining flechette gun, Petyr holding out the shortened, broken spear against the next attack, but there were scores of voynix converging.

Harman, Ada had time to think. She realized that she said his name with a mixture of total love and total anger. Why wasn’t he here? Why had he insisted on going away on her last day of life? Now the child growing in her belly was as doomed as Ada was, and Harman was not here to protect either of them. At that second she loved Harman beyond words and hated him at the same time. I’m sorry, she thought—not to Harman, not to herself, but to the fetus inside her. The closest voynix leaped at her and she threw her empty flechette pistol at its metal carapace.

The voynix flew backward, smashed to bits. Ada blinked. The five voynix on either side either fell or were flung backward. The dozen voynix around them crouched, raising their arms, as a withering hail of flechette fire rained down on them from the sonie. There were at least eight humans on the disk, overloading it, firing wildly.

Greogi brought the machine lower, chest height—Foolish! thought Ada. The voynix could leap on it, drag it down. If they lost the sonie, Ardis was lost.

“Hurry!” shouted Greogi.

Loes shielded them with his body as Petyr and Ada extricated the unconscious redheaded girl from the voynix carcass and tossed her into the center of the crowded sonie. Hands pulled Ada up. Petyr crawled on. Rocks were pelting around them. Three voynix leaped, higher than the heads of the people on the sonie, but someone—the young woman named Peaen—fired a flechette rifle and two of them were knocked aside. The last one landed on the front of the disk, directly in front of Greogi. The bald pilot stabbed the thing in the chest. The voynix pulled the sword with it when it fell away.

Loes turned and jumped aboard. The sonie wobbled from the weight, staggered, dropped, hit the frozen earth. Voynix were rushing from all sides now and they seemed much larger than usual from Ada’s perspective lying on the bloodied surface of the downed sonie.

Greogi did something with the virtual controls and the sonie bobbed, then rose vertically. Voynix leaped at them but those with rifles in the outer niches blasted them away.

“We’re almost out of flechettes!” shouted Stoman from the rear.

“Are you all right?” asked Petyr, leaning over Ada.

“Yes,” she managed. She’d been trying to stem the girl’s bleeding, but it was internal. Ada couldn’t find a pulse on the girl’s throat. “I don’t think …” she began.

The rocks hit the underside and edges of the sonie like a sudden hailstorm. One caught Peaen in the chest and knocked her backward, across the girl’s body. Another caught Petyr behind the ear, snapping his head forward.

“Petyr!” cried Ada, rising to her knees to grab him.

He lifted his face, looked at her quizzically, smiled slightly, and fell backward off the sonie, dropping into the scuttling mass of voynix fifty feet below.

“Hang on!” cried Greogi.

They circled high once, flew around Ardis Hall. Ada leaned out to see the voynix at every door, scuttling over the porch, beginning to climb every wall, smashing at every shuttered window. The Hall was surrounded by a giant rectangle of flame, and the burning cupola and barracks added to the light. Ada was never good at numbers and estimating, but she guessed that there were a thousand voynix inside the walls down there, all converging on the main house.

“I’m out of flechettes,” cried the man at the right front of the sonie. Ada recognized him—Boman—he’d cooked breakfast for her yesterday.

Greogi looked up, his face white behind streaks of blood and mud. “We should fly to the faxnode pavilion,” he said. “Ardis is lost.”

Ada shook her head. “You go if you want. I’m staying. Let me out there.” She pointed at the ancient jinker platform up between the gables and skylights on the roof. She remembered the day when she was a young teenager, leading her “cousin” Daeman up the ladders to show him that platform—he’d peeked up her skirt and discovered that she didn’t wear underwear. She’d done it deliberately, knowing what a lecherous boy-man her older cousin was in those days.

“Let me out,” she said again. Men and women—hunched shadows like lean and leaning gargoyles—were firing down from the gables, broad gutters, and the jinker platform itself, firing flechettes and bolts and arrows into the growing mob of skittering voynix below. Ada realized that it was like trying to stop an ocean’s tide by throwing pebbles at it.

Greogi hovered the sonie over the crowded platform. Ada jumped out and they lowered the girl’s body to her—Ada couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead. Then they handed her the unconscious but moaning Peaen. Ada lowered both bodies to the platform. Boman jumped down just long enough to throw four heavy bags of flechette magazines into the sonie and clamber back aboard. Then the machine pivoted silently on its axis and dived away, Greogi’s hands working the virtual controls gracefully, his face rapt with attention, reminding Ada of her mother’s focus when she used to play the piano in the front parlor.

Ada staggered to the edge of the jinker platform. She was very dizzy, and if someone in the dark hadn’t steadied her, she would have fallen. The dark figure who’d saved her moved away, back to the edge of the platform, and continued firing a flechette rifle with its heavy thunk-thunk-thunk. A rock flew up out of the darkness and the man or woman fell backward off the jinker platform, the body sliding down the steep roof and dropping away. Ada never saw who it was who had saved her.

Now she stood at the edge of the platform and looked down with a detachment almost approaching disinterest. It was as if what she was watching now was part of the turin-cloth drama—something vulgar and unreal she would view on a rainy autumn afternoon to pass the time away.

The voynix were climbing straight up the outside walls of Ardis Hall. Some of the window shutters had been smashed inward and the creatures were scrabbling in. Light from the front doors spilled down the voynix-crowded front steps and told Ada that the main doors had been breached—there must be no human defenders left alive in the front hall or foyer. The voynix moved with impossible insect-speed. They’d be up here on the roof in seconds, not minutes. Part of the west wing of Ada’s home was on fire, but the voynix were going to reach her long before the flames would.

Ada turned, groping in the dark along the jinker platform, feeling wet bodies there, searching for the flechette rifle her savior had dropped. She had no intention of dying with empty hands.

36

Daeman had expected it to be cold when he faxed to the Paris Crater node, but not this cold.

The air inside the Guarded Lion fax pavilion was too cold to breathe. The pavilion itself was sheathed in cords of thick, blue ice, the strands overlapping and attached to the circular faxnode structure like tendons wrapped tight to a bone.

It had taken him more than thirteen hours to fax to the other twenty-nine nodes and warn them of the coming of Setebos and the blue ice. Rumors had preceded him—people from other warned nodes had faxed in ahead of him, filled with panic—and everyone had questions. He’d told them what he knew and then faxed on as quickly as possible, but there were always more questions—where was it safe? All of the node communities had voynix gathering. Several had suffered small raiding attacks, but few had experienced the kind of serious attack that Ardis had fought off the night before Daeman left. Where to go? they all wanted to know. Where was safe? Daeman told them about what he knew of Setebos, Caliban’s many-handed god, and about the blue ice, and then he faxed on—although twice he’d had to brandish his crossbow to get away.

Chom, seen from its hilltop fax pavilion half a mile away, was a dead, blue bubble of ice. The Circles at Ulanbat were now completely enclosed in the strange blue strands and Daeman had faxed away at once before the cold seized him there, tapping in the code for Paris Crater, not knowing what to expect there.

Now he knew. Blue cold. The Guarded Lion faxnode buried in Setebos’ strange ice. Daeman hurriedly pulled up his thermskin hood and fixed the osmosis mask in place—and even then the air was so cold that it burned his lungs. He slung the crossbow over a shoulder already burdened with his heavy rucksack and considered his options.

No one—not even himself—would blame him for turning back now, faxing back to Ardis and reporting what he’d seen and heard. He’d completed his work. This fax pavilion was entombed in blue ice. The largest opening of the dozen or so visible was not more than thirty inches across and it curved away in an ice tunnel that might well lead nowhere. And if he did enter this ice-labyrinth that Setebos had created over the bones of a dead city, what if he didn’t get back? They might need him at Ardis. They certainly needed the information he’d gathered in the past thirteen hours.

Daeman sighed, unslung his pack and crossbow, crouched by the largest opening—it was low, near the floor—shoved the pack in ahead of him, nudged it forward with the cocked crossbow, and began crawling on the ice, feeling the deep-space cold through his thermskinned hands and knees.

The shuffling along was tiring and eventually painful. Less than a hundred yards in, the tunnel forked; Daeman took the left branch because there seemed to be more sunlight in it. Fifty yards beyond that, the tunnel dipped slightly, widened considerably, and then continued almost straight up.

Daeman sat back—feeling the cold reaching his butt through his clothing and thermskin—and then took a water bottle from his backpack. He was exhausted and dehydrated after his hours of faxing and the anxious confrontations with frightened people. He’d rationed his water, but he still had half this bottle left. It didn’t matter though, because the water was firmly frozen. He set the bottle inside his tunic, next to the molecular thermskin, and looked at the ice wall.

It wasn’t perfectly smooth—none of the blue ice was. All of it was striated, and here some of the striations ran horizontally or diagonally in such a way that he thought he might find fingerholds or footholds on it. But it continued rising for at least a hundred feet, angling slowly away from the vertical until it pitched out of sight above. But the sunlight seemed stronger up there.

He withdrew from his pack the two ice hammers he’d had Reman forge for him the long day before this one. Until he’d sigled the word from one of Harman’s old books, Daeman had never heard the word “hammer.” If he had heard the word before the Fall, the idea of such a tool would have bored him silly. Human beings did not use tools. Now his life depended upon these things.

The twin hammers were each about fourteen inches long, with one side of the ice hammer straight and sharp, the other curved and serrated. Reman had helped him tightly wrap the handles with cross-hatched leather—something he could find a grip with even through his thermskin gloves. The points had been sharpened as well as Hannah’s grindstone at Ardis had permitted.

Standing, craning his head back, setting the osmosis mask more firmly in place over his mouth and nose, Daeman shouldered his pack again, made sure the crossbow strap was firmly secure over his left shoulder—the heavy weapon lying diagonally over the pack on his back—and then he raised one of the hammers, slammed it into the ice, slammed it again, and pulled himself four feet up the wall. The tunnel was not much wider than the main chimney at Ardis, so Daeman braced himself across it with a straight leg while he set his left knee on the ice wall to rest there a minute. Then he raised the second hammer as high as he could reach and slammed it into the ice, pulling himself until he was hanging there from one hammer, supporting his weight on the other. Next time, he thought, I’m going to rig some sharp spikes for my boots.

Panting, laughing at the idea of ever doing this a second time, his breath icing the air even through the filtering osmosis mask, his pack threatening to pull him off his precarious perch, Daeman hacked and chipped toeholds, lifted himself, wedged the tips of his boots in, slammed the right hammer in higher, pulled himself up, hacked footholds with the left. After another twenty feet gained, he hung from both hammers embedded in the ice and leaned back to look up the ice chimney. So far so good, he thought. Only ten or fifteen more moves like that and I’ll reach the bend a hundred feet up. Another part of his mind whispered, And find that it’s a dead end. An even darker part of his mind muttered, Or you’ll fall and die. He shook all of the voices out of his head. His arms and legs were beginning to shake from the tension and fatigue. Next stop, he’d chip in a deeper foothold so he could rest more easily. If he had to come back down the ice chimney, he had the rope in his rucksack. Soon he’d find out if he’d packed enough.

Above the ice chimney, the tunnel leveled out for sixty feet or so, forked twice more, and then opened up to a canyon-wide crevasse in the blue ice. Daeman packed away the ice hammers with shaking hands and unlimbered his crossbow. When he reached the opening into the wide crevasse, he looked up and saw bright afternoon sunlight and blue sky. The crevasse stretched away to his right and left, the striated floor sometimes dropping away thirty, forty feet and more, the bottom of the gap connected only by ice bridges, the walls riddled with stalactites and stalagmites and spanned here and there above him by bridges of thick ice. Sections of buildings emerged from the icy blue matrix and then were swallowed again; he could see protruding segments of masonry, broken windows and windows blind with frost, bamboo-three towers and buckyfiber additions to the older, Lost Era buildings below, all equal now in the grip of the blue ice. Daeman realized that he was on the rue de Rambouillet near the Guarded Lion faxnode, but six stories above the street he’d walked down and ridden on in voynix-pulled droshkies and carrioles his whole life.

Ahead, to the northwest, the floor of the crevasse descended slowly until it was almost down at the original street level. Daeman fell twice on the slippery slope, but he’d taken one of the ice hammers out of the pack and both times he arrested his fall with the curved iron claw.

Lower now, the light bright and the air still burning his lungs, at the bottom of a two-hundred-foot crevasse whose ice walls were made of countless strands of what Daeman began more and more to think were some sort of living tissue, he saw a second crevasse-tunnel crossing his on the diagonal and he recognized it at once. Avenue Daumesnil. He knew this area well—he’d played here as a child, seduced girls here as a teenager, taken his mother for countless walks here as an adult.

If he followed the other crevasse to his right, the southeast, it would take him away from the crater and the city center, out toward the forest called Bois de Vincennes. But he didn’t want to head away from the center of Paris Crater—he’d seen the Hole appear to the northwest, very near his mother’s domi tower right on the Crater. To go that way, he would have to head up the Avenue Daumesnil crevasse toward the bamboo-three marketplace called the Oprabastel just opposite an ancient heap of overgrown rubble called the Bastille. He’d had rock fights there as a boy, with the few children from his domi tower flinging rocks and clods at those boys from the west, kids that his neighborhood group had always insultingly called the “radioactive bastillites” for some reason known to no one, adults or children.

The blue ice seemed thicker and more ominous in the direction of the Oprabastel, but Daeman realized he had no choice. He’d caught that first glimpse of Setebos in that direction, back toward the Crater.

The trench he was in angled around to the east again before intersecting Avenue Daumesnil. This larger crevasse was too deep to enter directly, so Daeman crossed it on an ice bridge. Looking down, he saw the bamboo-three and everplas-sealed ruins of the street and avenue he’d known his whole life, but the trench continued lower than that, revealing layers of ruins of some old steel-and-masonry city beneath the Paris Crater he was familiar with. He had the horrible image of the gray-and-pink brain Setebos scrabbling in the earth with its many hands, uncovering the bones of the city under the city. What was he hunting for? And then an even more horrible thought occurred to Daeman. What could he be burying?

The ropes and stalagmites of blue on regular street level were too thick to allow him to proceed northwest up Avenue Daumesnil itself, but, amazingly, there was a stretch of green pathway down there paralleling the avenue. He rigged a bent quarrel driven into the blue ice to secure his thirty-foot descent, looping a rope over it and lowering himself carefully, knowing that a broken leg now would probably mean his death. There was an icy overhang near the bottom and he had to swing free, then slide down the rope the last ten feet to the absurdly grassy floor of the trench.

There were a dozen voynix waiting in the darkness under the overhang.

Daeman was so surprised that he let go of the rope at the same instant he started fumbling for the crossbow strung across his back. He fell four feet, lost his footing on the grass, and tumbled backward without extricating the heavy crossbow. He half lay there on his back, hands empty, looking at the raised steel arms, sharp killing blades, and emerging carapaces of the mob of voynix frozen in the act of leaping at him from only eight feet away.

Frozen. All twelve of the creatures were mostly entombed in the blue ice with only bits of blade or arm or leg or shell protruding. None of their peds were fully on the ground and it was obvious that the ice had caught them in the act of running and leaping. Voynix were fast on their peds. How could this blue ice form quickly enough to catch them thus?

Daeman had no answer, only thankfulness that it had. He got to his feet, felt his back and ribs ache where he’d fallen on the crossbow and lumpy pack, and pulled the rope down. He could have left it fixed in place—he had more than a hundred feet more and he might need to ascend that ice cliff quickly on his return rather than laboriously chipping footholds with his ice hammers—but he might need all the rope before this day was done. Heading northwest now, parallel to the Avenue Daumesnil on what he still thought of as the Promenade Plantee—the familiar bamboo-three elevated walkway frozen in ice sixty feet above him now—Daeman freed the crossbow, made sure again that the heavy weapon was cocked and ready, and followed the impossible path of green grass toward the heart of Paris Crater.

Promenade Plantee, everyone in Paris Crater had called the walkway above. It was one of those rare old names, in words that seemed to predate the world’s common language, and no one Daeman knew had ever asked its meaning. He wondered now as he followed the green strip down the darkening and ever-deeper canyon through blue ice and excavated ruins if the walkway he’d known had been named after this older, forgotten path, buried until Setebos had seen fit to dig it up with his many hands.

Daeman advanced cautiously and with a growing sense of anxiety. He didn’t know what he thought he’d find here—his main goal had been to get one clear look at Setebos, if Setebos it was, and perhaps be able to report to everyone at Ardis Hall on just what this blue-ice city was like after its invasion—but as he saw other things frozen in the organic blue ice on either side of the Promenade, half a dozen more voynix, stacks of human skulls, more ruins that had not seen the light of day for centuries, his palms grew more moist even as his mouth dried up.

He wished he’d taken one of the flechette pistols or rifles that Petyr had brought back from the Bridge. Daeman clearly remembered Savi firing a full cloud of flechettes into Caliban’s chest at almost zero range up there in the subterranean grotto on Prospero’s orbital isle. It hadn’t killed the monster; Caliban had howled and bled, but had also lifted Savi in his long arms and bitten through her neck with one horribly audible snap of his jaws. Then the creature had hauled her body away, diving into the swamp and carrying her corpse off through the system of sewage pipes and flooded tunnels.

I came to find Caliban, thought Daeman, clearly acknowledging that as fact for the first time. Caliban was his enemy—his nemesis. Daeman had learned the word only the previous month and knew at once that in his life, the term “nemesis” applied only to Caliban. And—after his trying to kill the creature up there on Prospero’s isle, then leaving it to die there after maneuvering the orbiting black-hole machine into the island—it was all too possible that Caliban considered Daeman his nemesis.

Daeman hoped so, though the thought of fighting the creature again made his mouth drier and his palms wetter. But then Daeman would remember holding his mother’s skull, remember the taunting insult of that pyramid of skulls—an insult that could have come only from Caliban, Sycorax’s child, Prospero’s creature, worshiper of that god of arbitrary violence, Setebos—and he kept on walking, his crossbow with its two inadequate but sharpened and barbed bolts cocked and ready.

He was in the deep shadow of another larger overhang when he saw the forms emerging from the blue ice. These weren’t frozen voynix; they appeared to be humans, giants, heavily muscled and contorted, with blue-gray flesh and vacant, upturned eyes.

Daeman had his crossbow leveled and was frozen in his tracks for thirty seconds before he understood what he was looking at.

Statues. He’d first learned the real meaning of the word from Hannah—stone or some other material shaped into human form. There had been no “statues” in the Paris Crater and faxworld of his youth and the first time he’d actually seen one had been at the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu just ten months or so before. That place, or at least the green habitation globes clinging to it like ivy, was a museum more than a bridge, but it had taken Hannah—always interested in making and pouring molten metal into shapes—to explain that the human forms they were looking at there were “statues,” works of art—also an alien idea. Evidently these statues had no other reason for existence than to please the eye. Daeman had to smile even now at one memory from the Bridge—they’d thought that Odysseus, Noman now, had been one of those museum statues until he’d moved and spoken to them.

These shapes weren’t moving. Daeman stepped closer and lowered the crossbow.

The figures were huge—more than twice life-sized—and leaning out of the ice because the ancient building they were part of had tilted forward. Each stone or concrete gray shape was the same—a man, beardless, with curls around the gray mass that stood for his hair, nude except for a small sleeveless shirt that was pulled up above his midriff. The figure’s left arm was raised and bent, its hand set on the back of his head. The right arm was massive, muscular, bent at elbow and wrist, with his huge right hand resting on the man’s bare belly just under its chest, actually pushing up the gray, concrete folds of the shirt. The man’s right leg was the only other limb visible, curving out of the façade of the building, a shelf or ridge of some sort above small windows running through the line of identical male statues like something piercing their hips.

Daeman stepped closer, his eyes adapting to the darkness under the blue-ice overhang. The man’s—the “statue’s”—head was tilted to the right, the gray cheek almost touching the gray shoulder, and the expression on the sculpted face was hard for Daeman to describe—eyes closed, bow of lips pursed upward. Was it agony? Or some sort of orgasmic pleasure? It could be either—or perhaps some more complicated emotion known to humans then and lost to Daeman’s era. The long line of identical shapes emerging from both the façade of the ancient ruin and the wall of blue ice made Daeman think of a dancing line of simpering men undressing for some unseen audience. What had this building been? What use had the Ancients put it to? Why this decoration?

Nearby on the façade were letters—Daeman recognized them as such now after his months with Harman and his own learning the siglfunction.

sagi m yunez yanowski 1991

Daeman had never learned to read, but out of habit he set his thermskinned hand on the cold stone and brought up the mental image of five blue triangles in a row. Nothing. He had to laugh at himself—you couldn’t sigl stone, only books, and only certain books at that. Besides, would the sigl-function work through molecular thermskin? He had no way of knowing.

However, Daeman could read the numerals. One-nine-nine-one. No faxnode code ran that high. Could it be some sort of explanation of the statues? Or some ancient attempt to set the figures more firmly in time, just as the human likenesses had been set in stone? How does one number time? he wondered. Daeman tried for a moment to imagine what one-nine-nine-one might stand for in years… the years since the reign of some ancient king, such as Agamemnon or Priam in the turin drama? Or perhaps it was part of the way the artist of these disturbing statues proclaimed his or her own identity. Was it possible that everyone in the Lost Era identified themselves through numerals rather than names?

Daeman shook his head and left the blue-ice grotto. He was wasting time and the strangeness of these things—these buildings and “statues” that should have remained buried, these thoughts of people unlike those he’d always known, of someone trying to put a numerical value to time itself—were as alien and unsettling to him as the memory of Setebos coming through the Hole, a swollen, disembodied brain being carried by scuttling rats.

If he was to find Caliban and Setebos—or allow them to find him—he’d find them in this dome-cathedral.

It was not a true cathedral, of course—Daeman had only known that word, “cathedral,” for a few months, sigling it in a book of Harman’s from which he’d learned many words and understood almost nothing—but the inside of this huge dome seemed much like Daeman imagined a cathedral to be. But certainly no cathedral like this had ever stood in the city now called Paris Crater.

That was after dark. While the light still lasted, he’d followed the green slash of the Promenade Plantee along the trench of the Avenue Daumesnil until that dead-ended in an ice mass he guessed to be the Operbastel. Although the crevasse had closed overhead, he followed a tunnel that seemed to follow the Rude Lyon up to the juncture that was the Bastille. Here more tunnels and open, narrow crevasses—in one he could extend his arms and touch both ice walls at once—led to his left toward the Seine.

In Daeman’s lifetime and for a hundred Five-Twenty lifetimes before him, the Seine had been dried up and paved with human skulls. No one knew why the skulls were there, only that they always had been—they looked like white and brown paving stones from any of the many bridges one would cross in a droshky, barouche, or carriole—and no one in Daeman’s experience had ever wondered where the water in the river had disappeared to, since the mile-wide Crater itself bisected the old riverbed. Now there were more skulls—skulls recently liberated from living human bodies—lining the walls of the crevasse he was following toward the Île de la Cité and the east rim of the crater.

According to what little legend remained in a culture largely devoid of history, oral or otherwise, Paris Crater was said to have gained its crater more than two millennia ago when post-humans lost control of a tiny black hole they’d created during a demonstration at a place called the Institut de France. The hole had bored its way through the center of the earth several times but the only crater it had left in the planet’s surface was right here between the Invalids Hotel faxnode and the Guarded Lion node. Legends persisted that right where the north rim of the crater was now, a huge building called the Luv—or sometimes “the Lover”—had been sucked down to the center of the earth with the runaway hole, taking with it a lot of old-style human “art.” Since the only “art” that Daeman had ever encountered were these few “statues,” he couldn’t imagine that the loss of the Luv amounted to much if everything in it had been as stupid as the dancing naked men in the Avenue Daumesnil crevasse now behind him.

Daeman couldn’t see anything from the one open crevasse leading to Île St-Louis and Île de la Cité, so he spent the better part of an hour climbing an ice wall—laboriously chipping steps, driving in heavy bolts to loop his rope around, frequently hanging from one or both of his ice hammers to let the sweat run out of his eyes and to allow his pounding heart to slow. One good thing about the incredible exercise of the climb—he was no longer cold.

He came out atop the blue-ice crust over the city right about where the west end of Île de la Cité used to be. The ice was a hundred feet deep here and Daeman had expected to look west across the Crater and see at least the tops of the skyline he was used to—the tall buckylace and bamboo-three domi towers ringing the crater itself, his mother’s tower just across the way, and farther west the thousand-foot-high La putain énorme, the giant naked woman made of iron and polymer. A statue, just a big statue, he thought now, but I never knew the word before.

None of these things were visible. Straight ahead of Daeman, looking west, an enormous dome of organic blue ice rose at least two thousand feet above the level of the old city. Only corners, edges, shadows, and an occasional extruding terrace showed where the ring of once-proud towers had circled the crater. His mother’s tall domi was not visible. Nor was the putain farther west. Besides the huge blue dome itself—both blocking and absorbing what Daeman realized was late-evening light—the area around the crater was now a mass of airy ice towers, flying buttresses, complex tessellations, and blue ice stalagmites rising a hundred stories and more. All these soaring towers and protrusions surrounding the dome were connected through the air by webs of the blue ice that looked delicate but which—Daeman realized—must each be wider across than any of the city’s broad avenues. Everything glittered in the rich, low sunlight, and there appeared to be jolts and jots of light moving within the towers and webs and the dome itself.

Jesus Christ, whispered Daeman.

For all the scrotum-tightening impressiveness of glowing ice towers leaping sixty, eighty, a hundred stories above the lower cap of ice covering the old city, the dome was most impressive of all.

At least two hundred stories tall—Daeman could judge its height and staggering mass only by the glimpses of the old domi towers low on the dome’s flank—the dome stretched more than a mile in radius, from his position here on the Île de la Cité south to the huge garbage dump his mother used to call the Luxembourg Gardens, north past the greensward called boulevard Haussmann, enveloping the domi tower at Gare St-Lazare where his mother’s most recent lover used to live, and then west almost to the Champs de Mars, where the straddle-legged putain was always visible. But not visible this day. The dome blocked even a thousand-foot-tall woman from view.

If I’d faxed in to the Invalid Hotel node, I would have ended up inside the dome, he thought.

The idea made his heart pound more wildly than the ice climb had, but then he had two more terrifying thoughts in rapid succession.

His first thought was—Setebos built this thing across the Crater. That was impossible, but it had to be true. In fact, with the orange sunset glow lessening slightly on the towers and Dome itself, Daeman could now see a red glow coming up through the ice—a red pulsing that could be coming only from the Crater.

His second thought was—I have to go in there.

If Setebos was still here in Paris Crater, there is where he would be waiting. If Caliban was here, the Dome is where he would be.

Hands shaking from the cold—from the cold, he told himself—Daeman went back to the wall of ice, secured the rope around a bamboo-three girder emerging from the blue ice, and lowered himself back into the waiting crevasse.

It was already dark at the bottom of the narrow ice canyon—he could look up and see stars in the paling sky—and the only way forward from Île de la Cité was into one of the many small tunnels opening like eyes in the ice, tunnels in which it would be darker still.

Daeman found one tunnel opening about chest high above the floor of the crevasse and he crawled in, feeling the even deeper cold come up through the ice into his knees and palms. Only the thermskin kept him alive here. Only the osmosis mask kept his breath from freezing in his throat.

Scooting on his knees when he could, his rucksack scraping the lowering ice ceiling above him, his crossbow extended before him, he crawled on his belly toward the red glow in the dome-cathedral ahead.

37

Hockenberry comes to the astrogation bubble to confront Odysseus, perhaps to be beaten up by him, but he stays to get drunk with him.

It has taken Hockenberry more than a week to work up the courage to go talk to the only other human being on board, and by the time he does, the Queen Mab has reached its turn-around point and the moravecs have warned him that there will be twenty-four hours of zero-gravity before the ship rotates stern-first toward the Earth, the bombs begin detonating again, and the 1.28 Earth-gravity will return during the deceleration phase. Mahnmut and Prime Integrator Asteague/Che both came by to make sure that his cubby would be freefall-proofed—i.e., all sharp corners padded, loose things stowed so they wouldn’t float away, velcro slippers and mats provided—but no one warned Hockenberry that a common reaction to zero-g is to get violently seasick.

Hockenberry does. Repeatedly. His inner ear keeps telling him that he is falling out of control and there certainly is no horizon to focus on—his cubby doesn’t have a window or a porthole or anything to peer out of—and while the bathroom facilities were designed to operate in the predominant 1.28-g gravity environment, Hockenberry soon learns how to use the in-flight bags that Mahnmut brings him whenever he announces that he’s beginning to feel sick again.

But six hours of nausea is enough, and eventually the scholic begins to feel better and even starts to enjoy kicking around the padded cubby, floating from his bolted-down couch to his well-secured writing desk. Finally he asks permission to leave his room, permission is granted at once, and then Hockenberry has the time of his life floating down long corridors, kicking down the broad ship’s stairways that look so silly now in a truly three-dimensional world, and pulling his way from one handhold to the next in the wonderfully byzantine engine room. Mahnmut remains his faithful assistant during all this, making sure that Hockenberry doesn’t grab an unfortuitous lever in the engine room or forget that things still have mass here even while they show no weight.

When Hockenberry announces that he wants to visit Odysseus, Mahnmut tells him that the Greek is in the forward astrogation bubble and leads him there. Hockenberry knows that he should send the little moravec away—that this is to be a private apology and conversation, and possible beating, between the two men—but perhaps it is the craven part of the scholic that lets Mahnmut tag along. Surely the moravec won’t let Odysseus tear him limb from limb, whatever right the kidnapped Greek might have to do so.

The astrogation bubble consists of a round table anchored amidst an ocean of stars. There are three chairs connected to the table, but Odysseus merely uses one to anchor himself, hooking his bare foot between the slats. When the Queen Mab spins or pivots—which it seems to be doing a lot of in its twenty-four hours without thrust—the stars swing past in a way that would have sent Hockenberry running for the zero-g bag a few hours earlier, but which now doesn’t bother him. It’s as if he has always existed in freefall. Odysseus must feel the same way, Hockenberry thinks, for the Achaean has emptied three wine gourds of the nine or ten tied to the table by long tethers. He passes one to Hockenberry by propelling it through the air with a flick of his fingers, and even though Hockenberry’s stomach is empty, he can’t refuse the wine offered as a gesture of reconciliation. Besides, it’s excellent.

“The artifactoids ferment it and put it up somewhere here on this godless ship,” says Odysseus. “Drink up, human artifact. Join us, moravec.” This last is to Mahnmut, who has pulled himself down into one of the chairs but who declines the drink with a shake of his metallic head.

Hockenberry apologizes for deceiving Odysseus, for bringing him to the hornet so that the moravecs could shanghai him. Odysseus waves away the apology. “I thought of killing you, son of Duane, but to what purpose? Obviously the gods have ordained that I come on this long voyage, so it is not my place to defy the will of the immortals.”

“You still believe in the gods?” asks Hockenberry, taking a long sip of the powerful wine. “Even after going to war with them?”

The bearded war planner frowns at this, then smiles and scratches his cheek. “Sometimes it may be difficult to believe in one’s friends, Hockenberry, son of Duane, but one must always believe in one’s enemies. Especially if you are privileged to count the gods amongst your enemies.”

They drink a minute in silence. The ship rotates again. Bright sunlight blots out the stars for a moment and then the ship turns into its own shadow once more and the stars reappear.

The powerful wine hits Hockenberry in a wave of warmth. He’s happy to be alive—he raises his hand to his chest, touching not only the QT medallion there but the thin line of disappearing scar under his tunic—and he realizes that after ten years of living amongst the Greeks and Trojans, this is the first time he’s sat down to drink wine and schmooze with one of the serious heroes and major characters of the Iliad. How strange, after teaching the tale to undergraduates for so many years.

For a while the two men talk about the events they’d seen just before leaving Earth and the base of Olympos—the Hole between the worlds closing, the one-sided battle between the Amazons and Achilles’ men. Odysseus is surprised that Hockenberry knows so much about Penthesilea and the other Amazons, and Hockenberry doesn’t find it necessary to tell the warrior that he’d read about them in Virgil. The two men speculate on how quickly the real war will resume and whether the Achaeans and Argives under the leadership of Agamemnon again will finally bring down the walls of Troy.

“Agamemnon may have the brute strength to destroy Ilium,” says Odysseus, his eyes on the turning stars, “but if strength and numbers fail him, I doubt he has the craft.”

“The craft?” repeats Hockenberry. He has been thinking and communicating in this ancient Greek for so long that he rarely has to pause to consider a word, but he does so now. Odysseus has used the word dolos for craft—which could mean “cleverness” in a way that would draw either praise or abuse.

Odysseus nods. “Agamemnon is Agamemnon—all see him for what he is, for he is capable of nothing more. But I am Odysseus, known to the world for every kind of craft.”

Again Hockenberry hears this dolos and realizes that Odysseus is bragging of the very same character trait of cleverness and guile that made Achilles say of him—Hockenberry had been there to hear this during their embassy to Achilles months ago—“I hate that man like the very Gates of Death who… stoops to peddling lies.”

Odysseus had obviously understood Achilles’ implied insult that night, but had chosen not to take offense. Now, after four gourds of wine, the son of Laertes was showing pride in his cleverness. Not for the first time, Hockenberry wonders—Will they be able to bring down Troy without Odysseus’ wooden horse? He thinks of the layers of this word, dolos, and has to smile to himself.

“Why are you grinning, son of Duane? Did I say something funny?”

“No, no, honored Odysseus,” says the scholic. “I was just thinking about Achilles …” He lets his voice drift off before he says something that will anger the other man.

“I dreamt of Achilles last night,” says Odysseus, rotating easily in the air to look at the near-sphere of stars around them. The astrogation bubble looks both ways along the Queen Mab’s hull, but the metal and plastic there mostly reflect the starlight. “I dreamed that I talked to Achilles in Hades.”

“Is the son of Peleus dead then?” asks Hockenberry. He opens another gourd of wine.

Odysseus shrugs. “It was just a dream. Dreams do not accept time as a boundary. Whether Achilles breathes now or already shuffles amongst the dead, I do not know, but it’s certain that Hades will someday be his home—as it will be all of ours.”

“Ah,” says Hockenberry. “What did Achilles say to you in the dream?”

Odysseus turns his dark-eyed stare back on the scholic. “He wanted to know about his son, Neoptolemus, about whether the boy had become a champion at Troy.”

“And did you tell him?”

“I told him I did not know, that my own fate has carried me far from the walls of Ilium before Neoptolemus could enter battle there. This did not satisfy the son of Peleus.”

Hockenberry nods. He can imagine Achilles’ petulance.

“I tried to comfort Achilles,” continues Odysseus. “To tell him how the Argives honored him as a god now that he was dead—how living men would always sing of his feats of bravery—but Achilles would have none of it.”

“No?” The wine was not only good, it was wonderful. It sent liquid heat blossoming out from Hockenberry’s belly and made him feel as if he were floating more freely even than zero-g would allow.

“No. He told me to stuff those songs of glory up my ass.”

Hockenberry splutters a sort of laugh. Bubbles and beads of red wine float free. The scholic tries to bat them away, but the red spheres burst and make his fingers sticky.

Odysseus still stares out at the stars. “The shade of Achilles told me last night that he’d rather be a peasant sod buster, his hands covered with calluses not from the sword but from the plow, staring up an oxen’s ass ten hours a day, than to be the greatest hero in Hades, or even the king there, ruling over the breathless dead. Achilles doesn’t like being dead.”

“No,” says Hockenberry, “I could see that he would not.”

Odysseus pirouettes in zero-g, grabs the back of the chair, and looks at the scholic. “I’ve never seen you fight, Hockenberry. Do you fight?”

“No.”

Odysseus nods. “That’s smart. That’s wise. You must come from a long line of philosophers.”

“My father fought,” says Hockenberry, surprised at the memories flooding in. As far as he can tell, he’s not thought of or remembered his father in the last ten years of his second life.

“Where?” asks Odysseus. “Tell me the battle. I may have been there.”

“Okinawa,” says Hockenberry.

“I don’t know of this battle.”

“My father survived it,” says Hockenberry, feeling his throat tightening. “He was very young. Nineteen. He was in the Marines. He came home later that same year and I was born three years after that. He never spoke of it.”

“He didn’t brag of his bravery or describe the battle to his boy?” asks Odysseus, incredulous. “No wonder you grew up to be a philospher rather than a fighter.”

“He never mentioned it at all,” says Hockenberry. “I knew he was in the war, but I found out about his actions on Okinawa only years later, by reading old letters of commendation from his commanding officer, a lieutenant not much older than my father when they fought. I found the letters, and medals, in my father’s old Marine trunk after he died. I was already close to having my Ph.D. in classics then, so I used my research skills to learn something about the battle in which my father received a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.”

Odysseus doesn’t ask about these odd-sounding prizes. Instead, he says, “Did your father do well in battle, son of Duane?”

“I think he did. He was wounded twice on May 20, 1945, during a fight for a place called Sugar Loaf Hill on the island of Okinawa.”

“I don’t know this island.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” said Hockenberry. “It’s far away from Ithaca.”

“Were there many men in this fight?”

“My father’s side had one hundred and eighty-three thousand men ready to be thrown into the battle,” says Hockenberry. He is also looking out at the stars now. “His army was carried to the island of Okinawa in a fleet of more than sixteen hundred ships. There were a hundred and ten thousand of the enemy waiting for them, dug into rock and coral and caves.”

“No city to lay siege to?” asks Odysseus, looking at the scholic with an expression of interest for the first time since their conversation began.

“No real city, no,” says Hockenberry. “It was just one battle in a bigger war. The other side wanted to kill our people to prevent an invasion of their home island. Our side ended up killing them any way they could—they poured flame into their caves, entombed them alive. My father’s comrades killed more than a hundred thousand of the hundred and ten thousand Japanese on the island.” He takes a drink. “The Japanese were our enemies then.”

“A glorious victory,” says Odysseus.

Hockenberry makes a soft noise.

“The numbers involved—men, ships—reminds me of our war for Troy,” says the Argive.

“Yes, very similar,” says Hockenberry. “As was the ferocity of the fighting. Hand-to-hand in rain and mud, day and night.”

“Did your father return with much plunder? Slave girls? Gold?”

“He brought home a samurai sword—the sword of an enemy officer—but put it away in a trunk and never even showed it to me when I was a boy.”

“Were many of your father’s comrades sent down to the House of Death?”

“Counting both the men fighting on land and at sea, 12,520 Americans were killed,” says Hockenberry, his scholar’s mind—and his son’s heart—having no trouble recalling the figures. “There were 33,631 wounded on our side. The enemy, as I said, lost more than a hundred thousand dead, thousands and thousands burned to death and entombed in the caves and holes where they dug in to fight.”

“We Achaeans have lost more than twenty-five thousand comrades in front of the walls of Ilium,” says Odysseus. “The Trojans have built funeral pyres to at least that many of their own.”

“Yes,” says Hockenberry with a slight smile, “but that’s over a period of ten years. My father’s battle on the island of Okinawa lasted only ninety days.”

There is a silence. The Queen Mab rotates again, as smoothly and majestically as some giant marine mammal rolling over as it swims. Brilliant sunlight pours over them briefly, causing each man to raise his hand to shield his eyes, and then the stars return.

“I’m surprised I’ve never heard of this war,” says Odysseus, handing the scholic a fresh gourd of wine. “But still, you must be proud of your father, son of Duane. Your people must have treated the victors in that battle like gods. Songs will be sung of it for centuries around your hearths. The names of the men who fought and died there will be known to the grandsons of the grandsons of the heroes, and the details of every individual combat will be sung by minstrels and poets.”

“Actually,” says Hockenberry, taking a long drink, “almost everyone in my country has forgotten that battle already.”

Are you hearing this? sends Mahnmut on tightbeam. Yes. Orphu of Io is outside on the hull of the Queen Mab, scuttling around with the other hard-vac moravecs during the twenty-four hours that the ship is not under acceleration or deceleration, doing inspections and carrying out repairs on minor damage from micrometeorite hits, solar flares, or the effects of the fission bombs they have been detonating behind them. It is possible to work on the hull while the ship is under way—Orphu has been outside several times in the last two weeks, moving along the system of catwalks and ladders rigged for that purpose—but the big Ionian is already on record as saying he prefers the zero-gravity to what he’s described as working on the face of a hundred-story building while under acceleration, with an all-too-real sense of the stern and pusher plate of the ship being down.

Hockenberry sounds quite drunk, sends Orphu.

I think he is, responds Mahnmut. This wine that Asteague/Che had the galley replicate is powerful stuff, based on a sample of Medean wine from an amphora “borrowed” from Hector’s wine cellar. Hockenberry has been drinking lesser versions of this red Medean for years with the Greeks and Trojans, but almost certainly in moderation—the Greeks mix more water than wine into their cups. Sometimes they add saltwater or perfumes like myrrh.

Now that sounds barbarous, tightbeams Orphu.

At any rate, sends Mahnmut, the scholic hasn’t eaten since he was spacesick earlier today, so his empty stomach isn’t any help in keeping him sober.

It sounds as if he’ll be spacesick again later today.

If he is, sends Mahnmut, it’s your turn to bring him more spacesickness bags. I’ve held his head over them enough for one twenty-four-hour cycle.

Darn, sends Orphu of Io, I’d really love to take my turn at that, but I don’t think the doorways there in the human-cubby level of the ship are wide enough for me.

Wait, sends Mahnmut. Listen to this.

“Do you like to play games, son of Duane?”

“Games?” said Hockenberry. “What kind of games?”

“The kinds of game one would play during a celebration, or a funeral,” says Odysseus. “The games we would have had at Patroclus’ funeral, if Achilles had acknowledged his friend’s death and allowed us to put on a funeral after Patroclus’ disappearance.”

Hockenberry is quiet for a minute and then says, “You mean discus, javelin… that sort of thing.”

“Aye,” says Odysseus. “And chariot races. Footraces. Wrestling and boxing.”

“I’ve seen your boxing matches there at your camps near where the black ships are drawn up,” says Hockenberry, slurring only slightly. “The men fight with just rawhide thongs wrapped around their hands.”

Odysseus laughs. “What else should they wear on their hands, son of Duane? Great soft pillows?”

Hockenberry ignores the question. “Last summer in your camp I watched Epeus beat a dozen men bloody, smashing their ribs, breaking their jaws. He took on all comers and fought from early afternoon to late after moonrise.”

Odysseus is grinning. “I remember those matches. No one could stand up to Panopeus’ son that day, although many men tried.”

“Two men died.”

Odysseus shrugs and sips more wine. “Diomedes was training and backing Euryalus, son of Mecisteus, third in command of the Argolid fighters. He had him out running every morning before dawn, hardening his fists by slugging oxen halves fresh from the slaughter pens. But Epeus coldcocked him that evening in only twenty rounds. Diomedes had to drag his man out of the circle with poor Euryalus’ toes leaving ten furrows in the sand. But he lived to fight another day—and the next time he won’t drop his fucking guard, that’s for sure.”

“Boxing is a filthy enterprise,” quotes Hockenberry, “and if you stay in it long enough, your mind will become a concert hall where Chinese music never stops playing.”

Odysseus brays a laugh. “That’s funny. Who said it?”

“A wise man by the name of Jimmy Cannon.”

“But what is Chinese music?” asks Odysseus, still chuckling. “And what exactly is a concert hall?”

“Never mind,” says Hockenberry. “You know, in all the years of watching the war, I don’t remember your boxing champion, Epeus, ever distinguishing himself in aristeia—single combat for glory.”

“No, that’s true,” agrees Odysseus. “Epeus himself acknowledges that he’s no great man of war. Sometimes the courage it takes to face another man bare-fisted is not the kind required to run an enemy through the belly with your spearpoint, and then twist the blade out, spilling the man’s guts like so much offal in the dirt.”

“But you can do that.” Hockenberry’s voice is flat.

“Oh, yes,” laughs Odysseus. “But the gods have willed it so. I’m of a generation of Achaeans whom Zeus has decreed, from youth to old age, must wind down our brutal wars to the bitter end until we ourselves drop and die, down to the last man.”

Odysseus is quite the optimist, sends Orphu.

A realist, says Mahnmut on the tightbeam.

“But you were talking about games,” says Hockenberry. “I’ve seen you wrestle. And win. And you’ve won camp footraces as well.”

“Yes,” says Odysseus, “more than one time I’ve carried off the cup at the running race while Ajax has had to settle for the ox. Athena has helped me there—tripping up the big oaf to let me cross the finish line first. And I’ve bested Ajax in wrestling as well, clipping the hollow of his knee, throwing him backward, and pinning him before the dull-witted giant noticed that he’d been thrown.”

“Does that make you a better man?” asks Hockenberry.

“Of course it does,” booms Odysseus. “What would the world be without the agon—the agonistics of one man against another—to show everyone the order of precedence among men, just as no two other things on earth are alike? How could any of us alive know quality if competition and personal combat did not let all the world know who embodies excellence and who merely manages mediocrity? What games do you excel in, son of Duane?”

“I went out for track my freshman year at college,” says Hockenberry. “I didn’t make the team.”

“Well, I have to admit that I’m not half bad in the world of games where men compete,” says Odysseus. “I know how to handle a well-carved, fine-polished bow and will be the first among my comrades to hit my man in a moving mass of enemies, even with my friends jostling against me, everyone trying to take aim at once. One reason I was willing to follow Achilles and Hector into a war with the gods was my eagerness to test my prowess as an archer against Apollo’s skill—although in my heart, I knew this was folly. Whenever mortal man rivals the gods in archery—look at poor Eurytus of Oechalia—that man can bet he’ll die a sudden death, not pass away from old age within the halls of his own home. And I don’t think I’d go up against the Lord of the Silver Bow unless I had my best bow with me, and I never take it to war when I sail off in the black ships. That bow is on the wall of my great hall even now. Iphitus gave me that bow as a sign of friendship when we first met—the bow belonged to his father, the archer Eurytus himself. I liked Iphitus a lot, and I’m sorry I gave him only a sword and rough-hewn spear in exchange for the finest bow on earth. Heracles murdered Iphitus before I really had time to get to know the man.

“As for spears, I can fling a lance as far as the next man can shoot an arrow. And you’ve seen me box and wrestle. As for sprinting—yes, you saw me beat Ajax, and I can run for hours without vomiting up my breakfast, but in the short sprint, many runners will leave me behind in the dust unless Athena intervenes on my behalf.”

“I could have qualified for track,” says Hockenberry, almost muttering to himself now. “Long distance was my thing. But there was this guy named Brad Muldorff—the Duck we used to call him—who squeezed me out for the last position on the team.”

“Failing tastes of bile and dog vomit,” says Odysseus. “Shame on any man who gets used to that taste.” He gulps some wine, throwing his head back to swallow, then wipes droplets from his brown beard. “I dream of talking to dead Achilles in the shaded halls of Hades, but it’s my son Telemachus whom I really want to know about. If the gods are going to send me dreams, why not dreams of my son? He was a boy when I left—timid and untested—and I’d like to know if he’s turned into a man or become one of those pantywaists who hang around better men’s halls, seeking a rich wife, buggering boys, and playing the lyre all day.”

“We never had any children,” says Hockenberry. He rubs his forehead. “I don’t think we did. Memories of my real life are mixed up and murky. I’m like a sunken ship that someone refloated for their own reasons, but didn’t bother to pump all the water out—just enough to make it float. Too many compartments are still flooded.”

Odysseus looks at the scholic, obviously not understanding and obviously not interested enough to ask a question.

Hockenberry looks back at the Greek captain-king, his gaze suddenly focused and intense. “I mean, answer me this if you can… I mean, what does it mean to be a man?”

“To be a man?” repeats Odysseus. He opens the last two gourds of wine and hands Hockenberry one.

“Yess … excuse me, yes. To be a man. To become a man. In my country, the only rite of passage is when you get the car keys… or get laid for the first time.”

Odysseus nods. “Getting laid for the first time is important.”

“But certainly that can’t be it, son of Laertes! What does it take to be a man—or a human being, for that matter?”

This should be good, Mahnmut sends to Orphu on the tightbeam. I’ve wondered this myself more than a few times—and not just when I’m trying to understand Shakespeare’s sonnets.

We’ve all wondered it, replies Orphu. All of us obsessed with things human. Which is to say, all of us moravecs, since our programming and designed DNA lead us back to studying and trying to understand our creators.

“Being a man?” repeats Odysseus, his voice serious, almost distracted. “Right now I have to piss. Do you have to piss, Hockenberry?”

“I mean,” continues the scholic, “maybe it has something to do with consistency.” He has to try the word twice before getting it right. “Consistency. I mean, look at your Olympics versus ours. Just look at that!”

“That other moravec told me how to piss in that latrine in the room, it has some sort of vacuum that sucks it in even in this floating time, but I find it damned hard not to send blobs everywhere, don’t you, Hockenberry?”

“Twelve hundred years you ancient Greeks kept your Games going,” says Hockenberry. “Five days of games, every four years, for twelve hundred years, until some pissant Christian emperor of Rome abolished them. Twelve hundred years! Through drought and famine, pestilence and plague. Every four years, the wars would be brought to a halt, and your athletes would travel from all over their world to Olympia, to pay homage to the gods and to compete in the chariot races, footraces, wrestling, discus, and javelin, and pankration—that weird mixture of wrestling and kickboxing that I’ve never seen and I bet you haven’t either. Twelve hundred years, son of Laertes! When my own people brought the Games back, they couldn’t keep them going for much more than a hundred years without three of them being canceled for war, countries refusing to show up because they were pissed off by this or that slight or offense, and we even had terrorists kill Jewish athletes…”

“Pissed off, yes,” says Odysseus, releasing the gourd on its tether and spinning around, ready to kick back to his cubby. “Have to piss. Be right back.”

“Maybe the only thing that’s really consistent is what Homer said—‘Dear to us ever is the banquet and the harp and the dance and changes of raiment and the warm bath and love, and sleep.’ ”

“Who’s Homer?” asks Odysseus, pausing in midair at the irised door to the astrogation bubble.

“No one you’d know,” says Hockenberry, drinking more wine. “But you know what…”

He stops. Odysseus is gone.

Mahnmut goes out through the medical deck airlock, tethers himself even though he has reaction-thruster fuel in his backpack, and follows catwalks, ladders, and ship lines around and up the Queen Mab. He finds Orphu of Io welding a patch on the cargo bay doors in which The Dark Lady is stored, cradled under the folding wings of the reentry shuttle.

“That could have been more enlightening,” says Mahnmut on their private radio frequency.

“Most conversations share that particular quality,” says Orphu. “Even ours.”

“But we’re not usually drunk during our conversations.”

“Since moravecs don’t ingest alcohol for stimulative or depressive purposes, you are technically correct,” says Orphu, his shell, legs, and sensors brightly illuminated by the shower of sparks from his welding. “But we’ve discussed things while you’ve been hypoxic, drugged with fatigue toxins, and—as the humans would say—scared shitless, so Odysseus’ and Hockenberry’s disjointed conversation did not sound unfamiliar to my ears… if I had ears.”

“What would Proust say about what it takes to be human… or a man, for that matter?” asks Mahnmut.

“Ah, Proust, that tiresome fellow,” says Orphu. “I was reading him again just this morning.”

“You once tried to explain to me his steps to truth,” says Mahnmut. “But first you said he had three steps, then four, then three, then back to four. I don’t think you ever told me what they were, either. In fact, I think you lost track of what you were talking about.”

“Just testing you,” says Orphu with a rumble. “Seeing if you were listening.”

“So you say,” says Mahnmut. “I think you were having a moravec moment.”

“It wouldn’t be the first,” says Orphu of Io. Data overload from both their organic brains and cybernetic memory banks was an increasing problem as moravecs moved into their second or third century.

“Well,” says Mahnmut, “I doubt if Proust’s ideas about the essence of being human connect too well with Odysseus’.”

Four of Orphu’s multiply jointed arms are busy with the welding, but he shrugs two others. “You remember that he tried friendship—even as a lover—as being one of those paths,” says the Ionian. “So he has that in common with both Odysseus and our scholic in there. But Proust’s narrator discovers that his own calling to truth is writing, examining the nuances wrapped within the other nuances of his life.”

“But he’d rejected art earlier as a path to the deepest humanity,” says Mahnmut. “I thought you told me that he decided that art wasn’t the way to truth after all.”

“He discovers that real art is an actual form of creation,” says Orphu. “Here, listen to this passage from an early section of The Guermantes Way—

“ ‘People of taste tell us nowadays that Renoir is a great eighteenth-century painter. But in so saying they forget the element of Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even at the height of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To succeed thus in gaining recognition, the original painter or the orginal writer proceeds on the lines of the oculist. The course of treatment they give us by their painting or by their prose is not always pleasant. When it is at an end the practitioner says to us: “Now look!” And, lo and behold, the world around us (which was not created once and for all, but is created afresh as often as an original artist is born) appears to us entirely different from the old world, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we formerly saw, because they are Renoirs, those Renoirs we persistently refused to see as women. The carriages, too, are Renoirs, and the water, and the sky; we feel tempted to go for a walk in the forest which is identical with the one which when we first saw it looked like anything in the world except a forest, like for instance a tapestry of innumerable hues, but lacking precisely the hues peculiar to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe which has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe is precipitated by a new painter of original talent.’ And he goes on to explain how writers do the same thing, Mahnmut—bring new universes into existence.”

“Surely he doesn’t mean that in a literal sense,” says Mahnmut. “Not bringing real universes into existence.”

“I think he is speaking literally,” replies Orphu, his tone on the radio band as serious as Mahnmut has ever heard it. “Have you been following the quantum flux sensor readings that Asteague/Che has been putting on the common band?”

“No, not really. Quantum theory bores me.”

“This isn’t theory,” says Orphu. “Every day we’ve been making this Mars-Earth transit, the quantum instability between the two worlds, within our entire solar system, has grown larger. The Earth is at the center of this flux. It’s as if all of its space-time probability matrices have entered some vortex, some region of self-induced chaos.”

“What does that have to do with Proust?”

Orphu shuts off the welding torch. The large patch-plate on the cargo-bay doors is perfectly joined. “Somebody or something is screwing around with worlds, perhaps with entire universes. Break down the math of the quantum data flowing in, and it’s as if different quantum Calabi-Yau spaces have somehow attempted to coexist on one Brane. It’s almost as if new worlds are trying to come into existence—as if they’ve been willed into existence by some singular genius, just as Proust suggests.”

Somewhere on the Queen Mab, invisible thrusters fire and the long, inelegant-but-beautiful black buckycarbon and steel spacecraft rotates and tumbles. Mahnmut grabs a clutch-bar, his feet flying out away from the ship, as three hundred meters of atomic spacecraft twist and tumble like a circus acrobat. Sunlight slides across the two moravecs and then sets behind the bulky pusher plates at the stern. Mahnmut readjusts his polarized filters, sees the stars again, and knows that while Orphu can’t see them on the visible spectrum, he’s listening to their radio squawks and screeches. That themonuclear choir, the Ionian once had called it.

“Orphu, my friend,” Mahnmut says, “are you getting religious on me?”

The Ionian rumbles in the subsonic. “If I am—and if Proust is right and real universes are created when those rare, almost unique genius-level minds concentrate on creating them—I don’t think I want to meet the creators of this current reality. There’s something malignant at work here.”

“I don’t see why this …” begins Mahnmut and then pauses, listening to the common band. “What’s a twelve-oh-one alarm?”

“The mass of the Mab has just decreased by sixty-four kilograms,” says Orphu.

“Waste and urine dump?”

“Not quite. Our friend Hockenberry has just quantum teleported away.”

Mahnmut’s first thought is—Hockenberry’s in no condition to QT anywhere—we should have stopped him. Friends don’t let friends teleport drunk—but he decides not to share this with Orphu.

A second later, Orphu says, “Do you hear that?”

“No, what?”

“I’ve been monitoring the radio bands. We just brought the high-gain antenna around to aim it at Earth—or actually, the polar orbital ring around Earth—and it’s just picked up a modulated radio broadcast being masered right at us.”

“What does it say?” Mahnmut feels his organic heart beginning to pump faster. He doesn’t override the adrenaline, but lets it pump.

“It’s definitely from the polar ring,” says Orphu, “about thirty-five thousand kilometers above Earth. The message is in a woman’s voice. And it just says, over and over—‘Bring Odysseus to me.’ ”

38

Daeman entered the blue-ice dome-cathedral to an echoing susurration of whispers and chants.

“Thinketh, He made it, with the fire to match, one fire-eye in a ball of foam, that floats and feeds! Thinketh, He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye by moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue, that pricks deep into oakwarts for a worm, and says a plain word when she finds her prize, but will not eat the ants; the ants themselves that built a wall of seeds and settled stalks about their hole—He made all these and more, made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?”

Daeman recognized the voice at once—Caliban. The sibilant whispers echoed off blue-ice wall and blue-ice tunnel, seeming to come from everywhere, reassuringly distant, terrifyingly close. And somehow that single Caliban voice was a chorus, a choir, a multitude of voices in terrible harmony. More frightened than he thought he’d be—much, much more frightened than he’d hoped he would be—Daeman bent his head low and moved forward out of the ice tunnel onto the ice mezzanine.

After an hour’s crawling, often backtracking as some blue-ice tunnel narrowed and closed at a dead end, sometimes emerging into corridors ten yards across only to come up against a wall or vertical shaft far too high to climb, sometimes crawling on his belly so that his back scraped the ice ceiling, shoving his pack ahead of him along with the crossbow, Daeman had emerged into what he thought of as the center of the ice-dome cathedral.

Daeman had none of the ancient words to describe this space he had stepped out into, standing as he was on one of what looked to be hundreds of shadowy ice-mezzanines in the inner, curved wall of the vast structure, but if he had sigled the words, he would have fumbled through them now—spires, dome, arches, flying buttresses, apse, nave, basilica, choir loft, porch, chapel, rose window, alcove, pillar, altar. They all would have applied to one or more parts of what he was looking at now, and he would have needed more words. Many more words.

As best as Daeman could estimate, the interior of this space was just a little over a mile across and about two thousand feet from the red-glowing floor to the blue-ice apex of the dome. As he’d guessed earlier from the outside, Setebos had covered over the entire crater at the heart of Paris Crater and the vast circle now glowed red, pulsing as if from some huge heartbeat. Daeman had no idea whether this was due to some natural volcanic activity in the crater, some magma rising from miles below where the black hole had once torn at the heart of the Earth, or whether Setebos was somehow summoning and using that heat and light. The rest of the dome glowed in shades of colors Daeman could not describe—from all the varieties of red at the base, through iridescent and then subtle oranges along the periphery of the crater and lower reaches of the dome, veins of red branching up through orange-yellow buttresses and stalagmites and then the hotter colors fading into the cool glow of the immense blue pillars. The blue-ice walls, columns, tendons, and towers were shot through with pulses of green light and yellow sparks, ordered columns of red pulses moving along hidden channels like surges of electricity, open sparks connecting brachiated sections of the cathedral like dendrites firing.

The shell of the dome was thin enough in places that the last evening light from outside illuminated rose circles on the west side. The highest point on the ceiling was as thin as glass and showed an oval of darkening sky and an only slightly blurred view of the emerging stars. Most curious though, low on the inner walls of the dome were hundreds of cross-shaped impressions, each about six feet high. They circled the space, and by leaning out from his rough mezzanine slab, Daeman could see more of these cross-niches below him, indented as if burned into the blue-ice. They seemed to be made of metal and were empty, their steel interiors reflecting the red glow from the center of the crater.

The red-hued floor of the crater itself was not empty. Everywhere rose thorned stalagmites and craggy spires, with some rising all the way to the ceiling—creating neat rows of blue-ice pillars—while others remained freestanding. Nor was the floor of the crater smooth; everywhere were smaller craters and raised fumaroles. Gases, steam, and smoke curled out of most of these and Daeman caught the stink of sulfur on the tepid, overheated air currents. In the center of the red-glowing circle was a raised and raw-rimmed crater ringed with blue-ice stairways and lesser fumaroles. This crater above the crater appeared to be filled almost to the rim with round, white stones, until Daeman realized that the stones were the tops of human skulls—tens of thousands of human skulls, most lying beneath the mass that almost filled the crater. This raised crater looked very much like a nest and the impression was reinforced by the thing that filled it—gray brain tissue, convoluted ridges, multiple pairs of eyes, mouths, and orifices opening and shutting in no unison, a score of huge hands beneath it—these hands occasionally rearranging the huge form’s mass on its nest, settling it more comfortably—and he saw other hands, each larger than the room Daeman occupied at Ardis Hall, that had emerged from the brain on stalks and were pulling themselves and their trailing tentacles across the glowing floor. Some of the hands were close enough that Daeman could see a myriad of curved, barbed, black hair spikes or hooks emerging from the ends of those huge fingers. Each barb—some sort of evolved hair?—was longer than the killing knife that Daeman wore on his belt, and the fingers used the filaments to sink into the blue-ice. The hands could climb anywhere, pull themselves along any surface—masonry, ice, or steel—by sinking those black, hooked blades into whatever lay underhand.

The brain-shape of Setebos itself was much larger than Daeman remembered from its emergence through the Hole in the sky less than two days before—if that thing had been a hundred feet along its axis, it was now at least a hundred yards long and thirty yards high in the center, where the convoluted tissue was separated by a deep, glowing groove. It filled its nest and whenever it resettled its bulk, there came the crunch of skulls like the snapping and settling of straw.

“Thinketh, such glory shows nor right nor wrong in Him, nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord. ‘Saith, He is terrible: watch His feats in proof!”

Caliban’s sibilant hiss slid off the dome in some show of perfect acoustics, echoed off fumaroles and ziggurats, echoed again down the labyrinth of ice tunnels, and seemed to come at Daeman from front, back, and side—a murderous whisper.

As Daeman’s eyes adjusted to the red-glow gloom and the scale of the vast hollowed-out dome, he could see smaller objects moving now—scuttling around the base of Setebos’ nest, scurrying on all fours up the blue-ice steps to the base of the brain-shape and then trudging back down on hind legs only, carrying large oval pods that glowed with a sick and slick milkiness.

For a minute, Daeman thought they were voynix—he’d seen the remains of dozens of voynix during his long crawl in through the ice-maze, not voynix frozen in the ice as he’d encountered in the outside crevasse, but gutted remains of voynix, a hollowed-out carapace here, a torn ped or lacerated leather hump there, a set of claw-hands lying alone—but now looking through the stream and fog from the fumaroles, he could see that these attending shapes were not voynix. They had the form of Caliban.

Calibani, thought Daeman. He’d encountered them in the Mediterranean Basin with Savi and Harman almost a year earlier, and he realized now the significance of the cross shapes in the wall of the dome. Recharging cradles, Savi had called the hollowed-out crosses, and Daeman himself had stumbled across a single naked calibani lolling in one such vertical cross, arms spread, and he’d thought it dead until the yellow cat’s-eyes had flickered open.

Savi had told them that Prospero and the unmet biosphere entity named Ariel had evolved a strain of humanity into the calibani in order to stop the voynix from invading the Mediterranean Basin and other areas Prospero wanted to keep private. Daeman thought now that this was either a lie or Savi’s own mistake—the calibani weren’t evolved from any human strain, but rather cloned from the original and much more terrible Caliban, as Prospero had admitted up on his orbital isle—but at the time, Harman had asked the old Jewish woman why the post-humans had created the voynix in the first place if they—or Prospero—then had to create some other form of monster to contain them.

“Oh, they didn’t create the voynix,” the old woman had said. “The voynix came from somewhere else, serving someone else, with their own agenda.”

Daeman did not understand then and he understood less now. These calibani he watched scuttling like obscenely pink ants across the crater floor, carrying those milky eggs, were clearly not serving Prospero—they served Setebos.

Then who brought the voynix to Earth? he wondered. Why are the voynix attacking Ardis and the other old-style human communities if they’re not serving Setebos? Who do the voynix serve?

All Daeman knew for sure right now was that the coming of Setebos to Paris Crater had been a disaster for the voynix here—those not frozen in the rapidly expanding blue-ice had been caught and shelled like tasty crabs. Shelled by whom? Or by what? Two answers came to mind, and neither one was reassuring—the voynix had been crunched open either by the teeth and claws of the calibani or by Setebos’ own hands.

Daeman realized now that what he’d thought were gray-pink ridges running along the floor of the crater were actually more arm-stalks emanating from Setebos. The fleshy stalks disappeared into openings in the dome wall and…

Daeman whirled around, raising his crossbow, finger on the trigger. There had been a sliding sound in the ice tunnel behind him. One of Setebos’ hands, three times my size, squeezing through the tunnel behind me.

Daeman crouched there waiting, arms finally shaking from holding the weight of the raised crossbow, but no silent hand emerged. But the corridor of ice hissed and slithered to echoed noises.

The hands are in the walls and probably outside in the crevasses by now, thought Daeman, trying to slow his hammering heart. It’s dark in the tunnels and outside. What do I do if I run into one or more of the hands in there? He’d seen the pulsing feeding orifice in the palms of the hands below—a group of calibani had been feeding them large chunks of raw red meat, either voynix or human.

Finally he lay back on his belly on the blue-ice balcony, feeling the cold of the ice—a substance he now believed to be living tissue extruded by Setebos himself—flow up through his thermskin.

I can get out of here now. I’ve seen enough.

Lying there on his belly, the silly crossbow ahead of him, keeping his head down as a group of calibani scuttled across the crater floor on all fours not a hundred yards below and in front of him, Daeman waited for strength to return to his cowardly arms and legs so he could get the hell out of this unholy cathedral.

I need to report back to Ardis, came the reasonable voice in his mind. I’ve done all I can here.

No, you haven’t, answered the honest part of Daeman’s mind—the part that would get him killed someday. You have to see what those slick, gray egg shapes are.

The calibani had stowed some of those gray pods in a steaming fumarole not a hundred yards from him, below and to the right of his low mezzanine.

I can’t possibly climb down there. It’s too far.

Liar. It’s less than a hundred feet. You still have most of your rope and the spikes. And the ice hammers. Then it would just be a fast sprint out to look at the pod-shapes—grab one to bring back if you can—and then back to your balcony here and out.

That’s crazy. I’d be exposed the whole time I was on the crater floor. Those calibani were between me and that nest. If I’d been out there when they appeared, they would have grabbed me. Eaten me there or taken me to Setebos.

They’re gone now. Now is your chance. Get down there now.

“No,” said Daeman, realizing that he’d whispered the terrified syllable aloud.

But a minute later he was driving a spike into the blue-ice floor of his balcony, tying the rope securely around it, setting the crossbow over his shoulder next to his pack, and beginning the laborious process of lowering himself to the crater floor.

This is good. You’re showing some courage for a change and… Shut the fuck up, Daeman ordered that brave, totally stupid part of his mind.

His mind obeyed.

“Conceiveth all things will continue thus, and we shall have to live in fear of Him,” came the hymn-chant-hiss of Caliban—not from the calibani, Daeman was sure, but from Caliban himself. The original monster must be somewhere here in the dome, perhaps on the other side of Setebos and the crater nest.

“Thinketh this, that some strange day, Setebos, Lord, He who dances on dark nights, shall come to us like tongue to eye, like teeth to throat—or suppose, grow into it, as grub grow butterflies: else, here are we, and there is He, and nowhere help at all.”

Daeman continued sliding down the slippery rope.

39

The first thing Dr. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., had to do after quantum teleporting into Ilium was find an alley he could puke in.

That wasn’t hard, even in his inebriated state, since the ex-scholic had spent almost ten years in and around Troy and he’d QT’d back to a minor street off the square near Hector and Paris’s apartments where he’d been a thousand times. Luckily, it was night in Ilium, the shops, market stalls, and little restaurants around the square were closed and shuttered, and no spearman or night guard noticed his silent arrival. Still, he needed an alley and found it fast, was sick until the dry heaves passed, and then he needed an even darker and less traveled alley. Luckily the lanes were many and narrow near the dead Paris’s palace—now Helen’s home and the temporary palace of Priam—and Hockenberry quickly sought out the darkest and narrowest lane, barely four feet across, where he curled up on some straw, wrapped the blanket he’d brought from his cubby on the Queen Mab around him, and slept heavily.

He awoke a little after dawn, aching, surly, profoundly hungover, and acutely aware of both the noise in the square near the palace and the fact that he’d brought the wrong clothes from the Queen Mab; he was dressed in a soft gray cotton jumpsuit and zero-g slippers, something the moravecs had thought suitable for a Twenty-first Century man. The outfit didn’t blend in too well with the robes, leather greaves, sandals, tunics, togas, capes, furs, bronze armor, and rough homespun seen in Ilium.

When he did get to the public square—brushing off the worst of the alley filth even while noticing the real difference between the 1.28-g acceleration load he’d been living under and the single gravity of Earth, he felt bouncy and strong now despite his hangover—Hockenberry was surprised to see how few people were in the square. Just after dawn was the busiest time in this market, but most of the stalls were attended only by their owners, tables at the outdoor eating establishments were all but empty, and the only people at the far side of the square, in front of Paris’s, Helen’s, and now Priam’s palace, were the few guards by the doors and gates.

He decided that proper clothes should precede even breakfast, so he stepped into the shadows under the loggia and began bartering with a one-eyed, one-toothed ancient in a red-rag turban. This old man had the largest cart with the widest variety of goods—mostly discards or rags stolen from fresh corpses—but he haggled like a dragon loath to part with his gold. Hockenberry’s pockets were empty, so all he had to bargain with were the ship clothes and the blanket he’d brought along, but these were exotic enough—he had to tell the old man that he’d come all the way from Persia—that he ended up with a toga, high-lace sandals, some unlucky commander’s fine red wool cape, a regular tunic and skirt, and under linens—Hockenberry chose the cleanest ones in the bin, and when he couldn’t manage clean, he settled for louse-free. He left the plaza with a broad leather belt that held a sword that had seen much action but was still sharp, and two knives, one that he’d carry tucked into the belt and the other that slipped into a specially sewn fold inside the red cape. He also received a handful of coins. One glance back at the old man’s gaping, one-toothed grin let Hockenberry know that the geezer had made out well, that the unusual jumpsuit would probably trade for a horse or gold shield or better. Ah, well.

Hockenberry hadn’t asked the old man or the few other drowsy merchants what was going on—why the mostly empty square, why the absence of soldiers and families, why the strange quiet over the city—but he knew he’d find out soon enough.

When he’d been changing clothes behind the seller’s cart, the old man and two of his neighbors had offered him gold for his QT medallion, the fat man behind the fruit cart topping the bidding at 200 weight of gold and 500 silver Thracian coins, but Hockenberry had said no, glad that he’d taken possession of the sword and two daggers before stripping.

Now, after spending some of his new coins for a stand-up breakfast of fresh bread, dried fish, some cheese, and a hot-tea sort of substance infinitely less satisfying than coffee, he stepped back into the shadows and looked at Helen’s palace across the way.

He could QT into her private chambers. He’d certainly done it before.

And if she’s there, then what?

A fast thrust with his sword and then QT away again, the perfect invisible assassin? But who was to say that the guards wouldn’t see him? For the ten thousandth time in the last nine months, Hockenberry mourned the loss of his morphing bracelet—the gods’ essential basic for all of their scholics, allowing them to shift quantum probability to the point that Hockenberry, Nightenhelser, of any of the other ill-fated scholics could instantly displace any man or woman in or around Ilium, not only taking their form and clothing, but truly replacing them on the quantum level of things. This had allowed even the massive Nightenhelser to morph into a boy a third his weight without defying the rule that one of the scientific-oriented scholics years ago had described to Hockenberry as the conservation of mass.

Well, Hockenberry had no morphing capability now—the morphing bracelet had been left behind on Olympos along with his taser baton, shotgun microphone, and impact armor—but he still had the QT medallion.

Now he touched that gold circle against his chest and… hesitated. What would he do when he faced Helen of Troy? Hockenberry had no idea. He’d never killed anyone—much less the most beautiful woman he’d ever made love to, the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, a rival to the immortal goddess Aphrodite—so he hesitated.

There was a commotion toward the Scaean Gate. He walked that way, nibbling on the last of his bread, a newly purchased goatskin of wine slung over his shoulder, thinking about the situation here in Ilium.

I’ve been gone more than two weeks. On the night I left—on the night Helen tried to kill me—it appeared that the Achaeans were going to overrun the city.

Certainly Troy and its few allied gods and goddesses—Apollo, Ares, Aphrodite, lesser deities—didn’t seem capable of defending the city against the determined attack by Agamemnon’s armies supported by Athena, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest.

Hockenberry had seen enough of this war to know that nothing was certain. Of course, that had been Homer’s vision—the events here in this real past, on this real Earth, in and around this real Troy, had usually paralleled, if not always directly followed, Homer’s great tale. Now, with events diverging so dramatically in the past months—thanks, he knew, to the meddling of one Thomas Hockenberry—all bets were off. So he hurried to follow the tail end of crowds that obviously were headed straight toward the main city gates at first light.

He found her on the wall above the Scaean Gate, with the rest of the royal family and a bunch of dignitaries all crowded onto the wide reviewing platform where he’d watched her match faces to names during the gathering of the Achaean army for the Trojans ten years earlier. That day, she’d whispered the names of the various Greek heroes to Priam, Hecuba, Paris, Hector, and the others. Today Hecuba and Paris were dead—along with so many thousand others—but Helen still stood at Priam’s right, along with Andromache. The old king had been standing for the review of the armies ten years ago, but now he was half-reclining in the throne-cum-litter in which he was carried these days. Priam looked a lot more than ten years older than the vital king Hockenberry had watched here a mere decade ago—the old man was a shrunken, wizened caricature of powerful Priam.

But today the mummy seemed happy enough.

“Until this day I had pitied me,” cried Priam, addressing the dignitaries around him and a few hundred royal guardsmen on the stairs and plain below them. There was no army in sight—Thicket Ridge and the approaches to Ilium were clear of soldiers—but by straining and following Helen’s gaze, Hockenberry could see a huge mob almost two miles away, where the Greek black ships were drawn up. It looked as if the Trojan army had surrounded the Achaeans, overrun their moat and horse-staked trenches, and reduced the miles of Achaean camps to a rough semicircle hardly more than a few hundred yards across. If this was so, the Greeks had their backs to the sea and were surrounded by a powerful Trojan force just waiting to pounce.

“I pitied me,” repeated Priam, his cracked voice growing stronger, “and asked too many of you to pity me as well. Since my queen’s death by the hands of the gods, I have been but a harrowed, broken old man marked for doom… worse than old, past the threshold of decrepitude… certain that Father Zeus had singled me out to be wasted by a terrible fate.

“In the last ten years, I had seen too many of my sons laid low and I was certain that Hector would join them in the halls of Hades even before his father’s spirit traveled there. I was prepared to watch my daughters dragged away, my treasure vaults looted, the Paladion stolen from Athena’s temple, and helpless babies hurled from our parapets to the red-blooded end of barbarous war.

“A month ago, friends and family, warriors and wives, I waited to watch my sons’ wives be hauled off by the Argives’ bloody hands, Helen struck down by murderous Menelaus, my daughter Cassandra raped, so that I would be willing—nay, eager—to greet the Argive dogs before my doors, urge them to eat me raw, after the spear of Achilles or Agamemnon or crafty Odysseus or unforgiving Ajax or terrible Menelaus or powerful Diomedes would bring me down. Splitting me with a spear, wrenching and tearing my old life out of my old body, feeding my guts to my own dogs—yes, those faithful hounds who guarded my gates and chamber door—letting these suddenly rabid friends lap their master’s blood and eat their master’s heart in front of everyone.

“Yes, this was my lament ten months ago, two weeks ago… but look at the world born anew this morning, my beloved Trojans. Zeus took away all the gods—those who wished to save us, those who wished to destroy us. The Father of the Gods struck down his own Hera in a blast of his thunder. Mighty Zeus has burned the Argives’ black ships and ordered all immortals to return to Olympos to face his punishment for disobedience. With the gods no longer filling the days and nights with fire and noise, my son Hector led our troops to victory after victory. Without Achilles to stop the noble Hector, the Achaean pigs have been driven back to the burned hulls of their black ships, their southern camps shredded, their northern camps put to the torch. And now they are bound in tight from the west by Hector and our Ilium-born, by Aeneas and his Dardanians, by Antenor’s two surviving sons, Acamas and Archelochus.

“To the south, they are shut off from retreat by the shining sons of Lycaon and our faithful allies from Zelea, under the foot of Ida where Zeus oft makes his throne.

“To the north, the Greeks are stymied by Adrestus and Amphius, trim in their linen corsets, leading the Apaesians and the Adestrians, marvelous in their new-acquired gold and bronze, wrenched from the dead Achaeans who fell in their panicked flight.

“Our beloved Hippothous and Pylaeus, who survived the ten years of carnage and were ready to die this month with us, with their Trojan friends and brothers, but instead, this day, who lead their dark-skinned Plasgian warriors alongside the captains of Abydos and gleaming Arisbe. Instead of ignoble death and defeat this day, our sons and allies are but hours away from seeing the head of our enemy, Agamemnon, lifted high on a spike, while our Thracians and Trojans and Pelasgians and Cicones and Paeonians and Paphlagonians and Halizonians have lived to watch the end of this long war at last, and soon will be raking up the gold of defeated Argives, soon will be sweeping up the well-earned armor of Agamemnon and his men. This day, unable to flee to their black ships, all the Greek kings who came to kill and loot will be killed and looted.

“This day, all the gods willing—and Zeus has already spoken it into being—let my friends and family—and our foes—witness our final victory. Let us see the end to this war. Let us prepare now—before this beginning day ends—to welcome home Hector and Deiphobus in a victory celebration that will last a week—no, a month!—a party of celebration and deliverance that will let your faithful servant Priam of Ilium die a happy man!”

So spake Priam, King of Ilium, Father of Hector, and Hockenberry couldn’t believe his ears.

Helen slipped away from the side of Andromache and the other women, then descended the wide steps back down to the city, with only Andromache’s warrior slave-woman, Hypsipyle, at her side. Hockenberry hid behind the broad back of an imperial spearman until Helen was out of sight on the steps, and then he followed.

The two women turned down a narrow alley almost in the shadow of the west wall, then east up an even more narrow lane, and Hockenberry knew where they were going. Months ago, during his jealous phase after Helen had quit seeing him, he’d trailed Andromache and her here, discovering their secret. This was where Hector’s wife, Andromache, kept her secret apartment where Hypsipyle and another nurse watched over Andromache’s son, Astyanax. Not even Hector knew that his son was alive, that the baby’s murder by the hands of Aphrodite and Athena was a ruse by the few Trojan Women to end the war between the Argives and Trojans, turning Hector’s wrath toward the gods themselves.

Well, Hockenberry thought now, staying back at the head of the smaller alley so the two women would not notice they were being followed, that ruse had worked wonderfully well. But now the war with the gods was over and it looked as if the Trojan War was in its final hour.

Hockenberry didn’t want them to reach the apartment itself; there had been male Cicilian guards there as well. Now he bent and lifted a heavy, smooth, oval stone, just the size of his palm, and curled his fist around it.

Am I really going to kill Helen? He had no answer to that. Not yet.

Helen and Hypsipyle were pausing at the gate that led into the courtyard to the secret house when Hockenberry moved up quietly behind them and tapped the big Lesbos slave-woman on her brawny shoulder.

Hypsipyle whirled.

Hockenberry hit her in the jaw with a roundhouse uppercut. Even with the heavy rock in his fist, the big woman’s bony jaw almost broke his fingers. But Hypsipyle went backward like a toppled statue, her head striking the courtyard door on the way down. She stayed down, clearly unconscious, her big jaw looking broken.

Great, thought Hockenberry, after ten years in the Trojan War, you finally joined the fighting—by suckerpunching a woman.

Helen stepped back, the little hidden dagger that had once found Hockenberry’s heart already sliding down from her sleeve into her right hand. Hockenberry moved fast, clutching Helen’s wrist, forcing her hand and arm back against the rough-hewn door, and—his bleeding, bruised right hand barely working—pulling his own long knife from his belt and thrusting the point of it into the softness under her chin. She dropped her knife.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” she said, her head back but his knife drawing blood already.

He hesitated. His right arm was shaking. If he was going to do this, he needed to do it quickly, before the bitch began to speak. She had betrayed him, stabbed him in the heart and left him for dead, but she had also been the most amazing lover he’d ever had.

“You are a god,” whispered Helen. Her eyes were wide, but she showed no fear.

“Not a god,” gritted Hockenberry. “Just a cat. You took one of my lives. I’d already been given one extra. I must have seven left.”

Despite the knife point cutting into her underjaw, Helen laughed. “A cat having nine lives. I like that conceit. You always did have a way with words… for a foreigner.”

Kill her or not, but decide now… this is absurd, thought Hockenberry.

He pulled the point of the blade away from her throat, but before Helen of Troy could move or speak, he grabbed a fistful of her black hair in his left hand, held the dagger to her ribs, and pulled her down the alley with him, away from Andromache’s apartment.

They’d come full circle—back to the abandoned tower overlooking the Scaean Gate wall where he’d discovered Menelaus and Helen hiding, where Helen had stabbed him after he’d QT’d her husband to Agamem-non’s camp. Hockenberry shoved Helen up the narrow, winding staircase all the way to the top, to the mostly open level now atop the tower that had been shattered by the gods’ bombing months ago.

He pushed her toward the open edge, but out of view of anyone on the wall below. “Strip,” he said.

Helen brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Are you going to rape me before you throw me over the edge, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

“Strip.”

He stood back with his knife ready as Helen slipped out of her few layers of silky garments. This morning was warmer than the day on which he’d left—the wintry day when she’d stabbed him—but the breeze up this high was still cool enough to cause Helen’s nipples to stand on end and to bring out goosebumps on her pale arms and belly. As she let each layer fall away, he told her to kick them over to him. Watching her carefully, he felt through the soft robes and silky under-shift. No other hidden daggers.

She stood there in the morning light, legs slightly apart, not covering her breasts or pubic region with her hands but just letting her arms hang naturally at her sides. Her head was high and there was the slightest line of blood visible under her chin. Her gaze seemed to mix calm defiance with a mild curiosity about what was going to happen next. Even now, filled with fury as he was, he saw how she could have set these hundreds of thousands of men to killing one another. And it was a revelation to him that he could be so angry—close-to-killing angry—and still feel sexual desire for a woman. After the seventeen days in the 1.28-Earth-gravity acceleration field, he felt strong here on Earth, muscular, powerful. He knew that he could lift this beautiful woman in one arm and carry her wherever he wanted to, do whatever he wanted for as long as he wanted.

Hockenberry threw her clothes back to her. “Get dressed.”

She watched him warily as she picked up her soft garments. From the wall and Scaean Gate below came shouts, applause, and the banging of wooden spear shafts on bronze-and-leather shields as Priam ended his speech.

“Tell me what’s happened in the seventeen days I’ve been gone,” he said gruffly.

“That’s all you’ve come back for, Hock-en-bear-eeee? To ask me about recent events?” She was securing the low bodice across her white breasts.

He gestured her to the fallen piece of stone and when she’d taken a seat, he found another slab for himself about six feet away. Even with a knife in his hand, Hockenberry did not want to get too close to her.

“Tell me about the last weeks since I left,” he said again.

“Don’t you want to know why I stabbed you?”

“I know,” Hockenberry said tiredly. “You’d had me QT Menelaus out of the city but you decided not to follow him. If I was dead, and the Achaeans overran the city—which you were sure they were going to do—you could always tell Menelaus I refused to take you with me. Or something like that. But he would have killed you anyway, Helen. Men—even Menelaus, who’s not the sharpest sword in the armory—can rationalize being betrayed once. Not twice.”

“Yes, he would have killed me. But I hurt you, Hock-en-bear-eeee, so that I would have no choice… so that I had to stay in Ilium.”

“Why?” This didn’t make any sense to the former scholic. And his head hurt.

“When Menelaus found me that day, I realized that I was happy to go with him. Happy almost to be killed by him, if that had been his pleasure. My years here in Ilium as a harlot, as Paris’s false wife, as the reason for all this death, had made me mean in every sense of the word. Base, brittle, empty inside—common.”

You’re many things, Helen of Troy, he was tempted to say, but common is not one of them.

“But with Paris dead,” continued Helen, “I had no husband, no master, for the first time since I was a young girl. My first reaction of being glad to see Menelaus here in Ilium that day, I soon recognized as a slave’s happiness at seeing his chains and shackles again. By the time you joined us here in this very tower that night, all I wanted to do was stay in Ilium, alone, not as Helen, wife of Menelaus, not as Helen, wife of Paris, but just as… Helen.”

“That doesn’t explain why you stabbed me,” said Hockenberry. “You could have just told me you were staying after I delivered Menelaus to his brother’s camp. Or you could have asked me to transport you anywhere in the world—I would have obeyed.”

“That is the real reason I tried to kill you,” Helen said softly.

Hockenberry could only frown at her.

“That day, I decided to wed my fate not to any man’s, but to the city’s… to Ilium,” she said. “And I knew that as long as you were here and alive, I could make you use your magic to carry me anywhere… to safety… even as Agamemnon and Menelaus entered the city and put it to flames.”

Hockenberry thought about this for a long minute. It made no sense. He knew it never would. He set it aside. “Tell me about the last couple of weeks and what has happened,” he said for the third time.

“The days after I left you here for dead were dark ones for the city,” said Helen. “Agamemnon’s attack almost overwhelmed us that very night. Hector had been sulking in his apartments since before the Amazons went out to their doom. After the Hole had closed and it was certain that it wasn’t opening again, Hector stayed in his apartment, his thoughts his own, closed even to Andromache—I know she considered telling him the secret that their son still lived, but held off, not knowing how to explain the deception in any way that would not cause her own life to be forfeit—and during the next days’ battles, Agamemnon’s armies and their supporting gods killed many Trojans. Only the city’s Protector—Phoebus Apollo, Lord of the Silver Bow—firing his always unerring arrows into the Argive multitudes kept us from being overrun and destroyed on those dark days before Hector rejoined the fray.

“As it was, Hock-en-bear-eeee, the Argives, under Diomedes, did breach our walls at their lowest point—where the wild fig tree stands. Three times before in the ten years that did proceed our ill-fated war with the gods had the Argives tried that same spot, our weakness, perhaps revealed to them by some skilled prophet, but three times before, Hector, Paris, and our champions had beat them back—Great and Little Ajax in their attempts, then Atreus’ sons, the third time Diomedes himself—but this time, four days after I tried to kill you and left your body here for the carrion birds, Diomedes led his warriors from Argos on the fourth assault on the point where the wild fig tree stands. Even while Agamemnon’s ladders were rising to the western wall and battering rams the size of great trees were splintering the Scaean Gate in its huge hinges, Diomedes attacked the low point on our wall by stealth and strength, and by sunset that fourth day, the Argives were inside the wall.

“Only the courage of Deiphobus, Hector’s brother, Priam’s other son, the man who has been chosen by the royal family to be my next husband—only Deiphobus saved the city through his courage. Seeing the threat when others were despairing about Agamemnon’s ladders and rams, Deiphobus swept up survivors of his old battalion, and Helenus’, and the captain named Asisu, son of Hyrtacus, and a few hundred of Aeneas’ fleeing men, and with the combat veteran Asteropaeus at his side, Deiphobus formed a counterattack through the overrun city streets, turning the nearby marketplace into a second line. In terrible battle with the winning Diomedes, Deiphobus fought godlike—parrying even Athena’s spearcast, for the gods were battling here with as much violence as the men—more!

“At dawn that day, the Argive line was stopped temporarily—our wall by the wild fig tree breached, a dozen city blocks burned and occupied by the raging Argives, Agamemnon’s hordes still trying to scale our western and northern walls, the great Scaean Gate hanging by splinters and holding only by its iron bands—and that was the morning that Hector announced to Priam and the other despairing royals that he would re-enter the battle.”

“And did he?” asked Hockenberry.

Helen laughed. “Did he? Never has there been such a glorious aristeia, Hock-en-bear-eeee. On the first day of his wrath, Hector—protected by Apollo and Aphrodite from Athena’s and Hera’s bolts—met Diomedes in a fair fight and killed him, casting his finest spear all the way through the son of Tydeus and sending his Argus’ fighters fleeing. By sunset that day, the city was whole again and our masons were building up the wall by the old fig tree, making it as tall as the wall near the Scaean Gate.”

“Diomedes dead?” said Hockenberry. He was shocked. Ten years watching the fighting here and the scholic had begun to think that Diomedes was as invulnerable as Achilles or one of the gods. In Homer’s Iliad, Diomedes’ exploits—his excursus, his glorious single-combat or aristeia—had filled Book 5 and the beginning of Book 6, second only in length and ferocity in Homer’s tale to that of Achilles’ unleashed wrath in Books 20–22… a wrath that was never to be realized here now, thanks to Hockenberry’s own tampering with events.

“Diomedes is dead,” repeated Hockenberry, stunned.

“And Ajax as well,” said Helen. “For on the next day, Hector and Ajax met again—you remember that they had once fought in single combat but parted friends, so valiant was each of their struggles. But this time, Hector cut down the son of Telamon, using his sword to beat down the big man’s huge, rectangular shield, bending its metal back on itself, and when Great Ajax cried out ‘Mercy! Show mercy, son of Priam!,’ Hector showed him none, but drove his sword through the hero’s spine and heart, sending him down to Hades before the sun had risen a hand’s breadth above the horizon that morning. Ajax’s men, those famed fighters from Salamis, wept and rent their clothes in mourning that day, but they also fell back in confusion, crashing into Agamemnon and Menelaus’ armies as they surged over Thicket Ridge—you know that ridge just beyond the city to the west that the gods call the Amazon Myrine’s mounded tomb?”

“I know it,” said Hockenberry.

“Well, this is where the dead Ajax’s fleeing army crashed into the attacking men from Agamemnon and Menelaus’ corps. It was confusion. Pure confusion.

“And into the melee swept Hector, leading his Trojan and Allied captains—Deiphobus now following his brother, Acamas and old Pirous leading the Thracians close behind, Mesthles and Antiphus’ son driving the Maeonians on with shouts—all the remaining and surviving Trojan heroes, thought beaten just two days before, were part of that charge. I stood on the wall just below here that morning, Hock-en-bear-eeee, and for three hours none of us—Trojan women, old Priam, no longer able to walk but who had been carried there in his litter, we wives and daughters and mothers and sisters and the boys and old men—none of us could see a thing for three hours, so great was the dust cloud kicked up by the thousands of warriors and hundreds of chariots. Sometimes volleys of arrows from one side or the other would shield the sun.

“But when the dust settled and the gods retreated to Olympos after that morning’s fighting, Menelaus had joined Diomedes and Ajax in the House of Death, and…”

“Menelaus is dead? Your husband is dead?” said Hockenberry. Again, he was deeply shocked. These men had fought and prevailed for ten years against each other, another ten months against the gods.

“Didn’t I just say that he was?” asked Helen, irritated at being interrupted. “Hector didn’t kill him. He was brought down by an arrow in the air, an arrow shot by dead Pandarus’ son, young Palmys, Lycaon’s grandson, using the same god-blessed bow that Pandarus had used to wound Menelaus in the hip just a year ago. But this time, there was no invisible Athena to flick aside the shaft, and Menelaus received the arrow through the eye-circle in his helmet and it passed through his brain and out the back of the bronze head-sheath.”

“Little Palmys?” said Hockenberry, aware that he was repeating names like an idiot. “He can’t be more than twelve years old…”

“Not yet eleven,” said Helen with a smile. “But the boy used a man’s bow—his dead father’s, Pandarus, brought low by Diomedes a year ago—and the arrow settled all my husband’s debts and resolved all our marital doubts. I have Menelaus’ blood-splashed helmet in my rooms at the palace if you would like to see it—the boy Palmys kept his shield.”

“My God,” said Hockenberry. “Diomedes, Big Ajax, and Menelaus dead in a single twenty-four-hour period. No wonder you’ve driven the Argives back to their ships.”

“No,” said Helen, “the day might well still have gone to the Achaeans if Zeus had not appeared.”

“Zeus!”

“Zeus,” said Helen. “On the day that had begun with glorious victory, the gods and goddesses on the side of the Argives were so infuriated by the deaths of their champions that Hera and Athena alone murdered a thousand of our valiant Trojans with their fiery bolts. Poseidon, the old Earth-Shaker himself, bellowed so in anger that a score of strong buildings in Ilium crashed to the ground. Archers tumbled from our walls like falling leaves. Priam was thrown from his throne-litter.

“All our gains that day were lost in minutes—Hector falling back, still fighting, his men falling around him, Deiphobus wounded in the leg, finally having to be carried by his brother even while our Trojan men beat a retreat back to Thicket Ridge, then from Thicket Ridge to and through the Scaean Gates.

“We women actually rushed down to help set the great bar across the splintered gates, so wild was the fighting—scores of raging Argives had come through into the city with our retreating heroes—and again Poseidon shook the earth, knocking everyone to their knees even as Athena neutralized Apollo in their sky battles, their chariots whirling and flashing through the sky, while Hera herself cast explosive bolts of energy at our walls.

“Then Zeus appeared in the east. Larger and more impressive than any living mortal has ever seen…”

“More impressive than the day he appeared as a face in the atomic mushroom cloud?” asked Hockenberry.

Helen laughed. “Much more impressive, my Hock-en-bear-eeee. This Zeus was a colossus, his legs rising higher than Mount Ida’s snowy summit in the east, his huge chest above the clouds, his giant brow so high above us as to be almost invisible, taller than the tops of the tallest stratocumulus piled high, one upon another, on a summer day before a storm.”

“Whoa,” said Hockenberry, trying to imagine it. He’d once tussled with Zeus—well, not tussled exactly, more just a sort of general scuttling away from him during an earthquake on Olympos, culminating in sliding between the Lord of All Gods’ legs to grab the dropped QT medallion so he could teleport away right at the beginning of the human-god war—and the Father of the Gods had been wildly impressive when he was just his usual fifteen feet tall. He tried to imagine this ten-mile-high colossus. “Go on,” he said.

“So when this giant Zeus appeared, the armies stopped in their tracks, froze like statues, swords raised, spears poised back, shields high—even the chariots of the gods froze in the sky, Athena and Phoebus Apollo as motionless as all the thousands of mortals below—and Zeus thundered forth—I cannot imitate his voice, Hock-en-bear-eeee, for it was all thunder and all earthquake and volcanoes erupting at once—but Zeus thundered—UNCONTROLLABLE HERA—YOU AND YOUR TREACHERY YET AGAIN!—I WOULD BE SLEEPING YET HAD NOT YOUR CRIPPLED SON AND A MORTAL AWAKENED ME. HOW DARE YOU BETRAY ME WITH YOUR WARM EMBRACE, SEDUCE ME BLIND, SO THAT YOU CAN HAVE YOUR WAY, PURSUE YOUR WILL OF DESTROYING TROY IN DEFIANCE OF YOUR LORD’S COMMAND!”

“Your crippled son and a mortal?” repeated Hockenberry. The crippled son would be Hephaestus, god of fire. The mortal?

“That’s what he bellowed,” said Helen, rubbing her pale neck as if her imitation of the bass earthquake-rumble had hurt her throat.

“And then?” prompted Hockenberry.

“And then, before Hera could speak in her own defense, before any of the gods could move, Zeus, the King of the Black Cloud, struck her down with a thunderbolt. It must have killed her, immortal as we all thought she was.”

“The gods have a way of returning after they are ‘killed,’ ” muttered Hockenberry, thinking of the huge healing tanks and their roiling blue worms up in the great, white building on Olympos, tanks tended by the giant insectoid Healer.

“Yes, we all know that,” Helen said in a disgusted tone. “Didn’t our own Hector kill Ares half a dozen times in the past eight months? Only to face him again a few days later? But this was different, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

“How so?”

“Zeus’s lighting bolt destroyed Hera—threw bits of her golden chariot for miles, raining melted gold and steel on the rooftops of Troy. And gibbets of the goddess herself fell in a swath from the ocean to dead Paris’s palace—scorched shards of pink flesh, which none of us were brave enough to touch, but which simmered and smoked for days.”

“Jesus,” whispered Hockenberry.

“And then the mighty Zeus struck down Poseidon, opening a great yawning pit under the fleeing Sea God and dropping him into it, screaming. The screams echoed for hours, until all mortals—Argives and Trojans alike—wept from the sound.”

“Did Zeus say anything when he opened this pit?”

“Yes,” said Helen, “he cried—I AM ZEUS WHO DRIVES THE STORM CLOUDS, SON OF KRONOS, FATHER OF MEN AND GODS, MASTER OF PROBABILITY SPACE BEFORE YOU WERE CHANGED FROM YOUR PUNY POST-HUMAN FORMS! I WAS THE MASTER AND KEEPER OF SETEBOS BEFORE YOU DARED TO DREAM OF BEING IMMORTALS! YOU, POSEIDON, SHAKER OF THE EARTH, MY BETRAYER, DO YOU THINK I DON’T KNOW THAT YOU PLOTTED WITH MY OX-EYED QUEEN FOR MY OVERTHROW? I BANISH YOU TO TARTARUS, DEEP BENEATH HADES ITSELF, I SEND YOU PLUNGING DOWN TO THE PIT OF EARTH AND SEA WHERE KRONOS AND IAPETOS MAKE THEIR BEDS OF PAIN, WHERE NOT A RAY OF THE SUN CAN WARM THEIR HEARTS, DOWN TO THE DEPTHS OF TARTARUS WALLED ALL AROUND BY THE BLACK-HOLED ABYSS ITSELF!”

Hockenberry waited while Helen paused to clear her throat again.

“Do you have any water, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

He handed her the wineskin he’d filled with water from the plaza fountain and waited in silence while she drank.

“And this is what Zeus spoke as he opened up a pit beneath Poseidon and sent the Shaker of the Earth screaming into Tartarus. Those soldiers on the wall who saw into the pit could not speak for days, only mumble or scream.”

Hockenberry waited.

“And then the Father of the Gods ordered all the other gods back to Olympos to face their punishment—you will pardon me, Hock-en-bear-eeee, if I do not try to imitate Zeus’s bellow—and in an instant the flying chariots were gone, the Lord of the Silver Bow was gone, Athena was gone, red-eyed Hades was gone, that bitch Aphrodite was gone, bloodthirsty Ares was gone—all our Pantheon disappeared, QTing back to Olympos like guilty children waiting for their displeased father to use the rod on them.”

“Did Zeus disappear then, too?” asked Hockenberry.

“Oh, no, the Son of Kronos had just begun to play. His towering form strode over Ilium and walked across the miles between here and the shore like Astyanax playing in his sandbox, striding over his toy soldiers. Hundreds of Trojans and Argives died under the giant feet of Zeus that day, Hock-en-bear-eeee, and when he reached Agamemnon’s camp, Zeus reached out his palm and burned all the the hundreds of black ships pulled up on the sand there. And for those Argive ships still at anchor, or the convoy pulling in from Lemnos bringing wine sent across by Euneus, Jason’s son, carrying gifts to Atrides Agamemnon and the dead Menelaus, Zeus closed his flaming hand into a fist and a great wave rose up, dashing the Lemnos ships and the anchored Argive ships ashore—again like toys, like Astyanax splashing in his bath, sinking his slave-carved balsawood toy boats in petulance divine.”

“Holy God,” whispered Hockenberry.

“Yes, exactly,” said Helen. “And then Zeus disappeared in a crack of the loudest thunder yet, louder even than his voice that had deafened hundreds, and the wind howled into the place where giant Zeus had been, ripping up the Achaean tents and swirling them thousands of feet into the air, swirling strong Trojan stallions from their stalls and over our highest walls.”

Hockenberry looked to the west where the armies of Troy had surrounded the diminished army of the Argives. “That was almost two weeks ago. Have the gods returned at all? Any of them? Zeus?”

“No, Hock-en-bear-eeee. We have seen no immortals since that day.”

“But that was two weeks ago,” said Hockenberry. “Why has it taken so long for Hector to besiege the Argive army? Surely with the deaths of Diomedes, Big Ajax, and Menelaus, the Achaeans must have been demoralized.”

“They were,” agreed Helen. “But both sides were in shock. Many of us could not hear for days. As I said, those on the wall or those Argives too close to the opening pit of Tartarus were little more than drooling idiots for a week. A truce was called without either side declaring it. We gathered our dead—for we had suffered terribly during Agamemnon’s assaults, you remember—and for almost a week, corpse fires burned both here in the city and along the miles of shore where the terrified Argives still had their camps. Then, in the second week, when Agamemnon ordered men to the forests at the base of Mount Ida to begin felling trees—to make new ships, of course—Hector began the assault. The fighting has been slow and heavy work. With their backs to the sea and no ships for their flight, the Argives fight like cornered rats. But this morning, you see, the few thousands left are encircled there at the edge of the water and today Hector will unleash our final assault. Today ends the Trojan War, with Ilium still standing, Hector the hero of all heroes, and Helen free.”

For a while the man and woman just sat on their respective great stones and stared out to the west, where sunlight glinted on armor and spears and where horns were sounding.

Finally Helen said, “What will you do with me now, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

He blinked, looked at the knife still in his hand, and set it in his belt. “You can go,” he said.

Helen looked at his face but she did not move.

“Go!” said Hockenberry.

She left slowly. The sound of her slippers came up the circular staircase—he remembered the same soft sound from when he lay dying here two and a half weeks ago.

Where do I go now?

Trained as a scholic in his second life, he had the loyal urge to report these variances from the Iliad to the Muse, and thence to all the gods. This thought made him smile. How many of the gods still existed in that other universe where Olympus Mons on Mars had been turned into Olympos? How extensive had Zeus’s wrath really been? Had there been a genocidal deicide up there? He might never know. He didn’t have the courage to quantum teleport to Olympos again.

Hockenberry touched the QT medallion under his tunic. Back to the ship? He wanted to see the Earth—his Earth, even one three thousand years or so in his future—and he wanted to be with the moravecs and Odysseus when they saw it. He had no duty or role here in this Ilium-universe now.

He brought the QT medallion out and ran his hand over the heavy gold.

Not back to the Queen Mab. Not yet. He might not be a scholic any longer—the gods may have abandoned him just as he had betrayed them—but he was still a scholar. Decades of teaching the Iliad, all those memories of wonderful dusty classrooms and very young college students, all those faces—pale, pimply, healthy, tanned, eager, indifferent, inspired, insipid—came flowing back now, filling in the gaps. How could he not see the last act in this new and absurdly revised version?

Twisting the medallion, Dr. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., quantum teleported to the center of the besieged and doomed Achaean encampment.

40

Later, Daeman wasn’t sure when he decided to steal one of the eggs.

It wasn’t while he was sliding down the rope to the floor of the dome-crater, since he was too busy hanging on and trying not to be seen to plan anything then.

It wasn’t while he was scurrying across the hot, cracked floor of the crater, since his heart was pounding too loudly during that sprint to allow him to think of anything except reaching the fumarole where he’d seen the eggs. Twice he saw groups of calibani scuttling along beyond the nearest smoking vents and both times Daeman threw himself down and lay still until they had hurried off on their business toward the main Setebos nest. The floor of the crater was hot enough that it would have burned his hands if he hadn’t been wearing the thermskin under his regular clothes. As it was, a minute lying on his belly caused his shirt and trousers to singe. He sprinted forward and reached the side of the fumarole, crouching and panting in the heat—the walls of the fumarole were about twelve feet high, but rough, made of the same blue-ice as everything else. Daeman found enough fingerholds and footholds to climb it without using his ice hammers.

The fumarole—a hissing crater within the larger crater, one of dozens inside the dome-cathedral—was filled with human skulls. These were so heated that some glowed red even while sulfurous vapors hissed around them and rose into the stinking air. At least the steam and vapors gave Damean some cover as he dropped onto the mound of skulls and looked at the Setebos eggs.

Oval, gray-white, each pulsing with some internal energy or life, the things were each about three feet long. Daeman counted twenty-seven in this nest. Besides the cradling heap of hot skulls, the eggs themselves were surrounded by a ring of sticky, blue-gray mucus. Daeman crawled closer, fingers and feet scrabbling on skulls, and looked at the tall heap of eggs from as close as he could get without lifting his head above the level of the fumarole crater rim.

The shells were thin, warm, almost translucent. Some already glowed brightly, others had only a white gleam at their center. Daeman reached out and gingerly touched one—a mild heat, a strange sense of vertigo as if some instability in the egg itself flowed through his thermskinned finger. He tried to lift one and found it weighed about twenty pounds.

Now what?

Now he had to beat a retreat, get up the rope, out through the tunnels, back to the Avenue Daumesnil crevasse, and back to the Guarded Lion faxnode. He had to report all this to everyone at Ardis as soon as possible.

But why come all this way and risk exposure on the crater floor without taking a souvenir?

By dumping everything out of his rucksack except the extra crossbow bolts, he made room for the egg. At first it wouldn’t fit, but by pushing gently but insistently he managed to get the broad end of the oval through the opening and wedge the bolts in around the side of the egg. What if it breaks? Well, he’d have a messy pack, he thought, but at least he’d know what was inside the damned things.

I don’t want to break one of the eggs here, so close to Setebos and the calibani. We’ll inspect it back at Ardis.

Amen, thought Daeman. He was finding it very hard to breathe. He’d had his osmosis mask on all this time, but the sulfurous vapors from the fumarole vent and the overwhelming heat made him dizzy. He knew that if he’d come into the dome without the thermskin and mask, he would have lost consciousness long ago. The air in here was poisonous. Then how do the calibani breathe?

To hell with the calibani, thought Daeman. He waited until the steam and vapors were thick as a smoke screen and slid down the side of the fumarole, dropping the last five feet. The egg shifted heavily in his rucksack, almost causing him to fall.

Easy, easy.

“ ‘Saith, what He hates be consecrate, all come to celebrate Thee and Thy state! Thinketh, what I hate be consecrate to celebrate Him and what He ate!” Caliban’s chant-hymn was much louder down here. Somehow the acoustics of the giant dome-cathedral amplified as well as directed the monster’s voice. Either that or Caliban was closer now.

Running in a crouch, dropping to one knee at any hint of motion through the shifting vapors, Daeman made it the hundred yards to his rope still dangling from the blue-ice balcony. He looked up at the rope hanging free.

What was I thinking? It must be eighty feet to the balcony. I can never climb that—especially not with this weight on my back.

Daeman looked around for another tunnel entrance. The nearest one was three or four hundred feet away around the curve of the dome wall to his right, but it was filled with the huge arm-stalk of one of Setebos’ crawling hands.

That hand’s up there in the ice tunnels, waiting for me… with the others. He could see other arm stalks disappearing into tunnel openings now, the slick gray flesh of the tentacles almost obscene in their wet physicality. Some of them rose three or four hundred feet up the curving wall, hanging down like fleshy tubules, some visibly writhing in a sort of peristalsis as the hands pulled more arm-stalk in after them.

How many hands and arms does this motherfucking brain have?

“ ‘Believeth that with the end of life, the pain will stop? Not so! He both plagueth enemies and feasts on friends. He doth His worst in this our life, giving respite only lest we die through pain, saving last pain for worst!”

It was climb or die. Daeman had lost almost fifty pounds in the last ten months, converting some weight to muscle, but he wished now that he’d been on Noman’s obstacle course in the forest beyond Ardis’s north wall every single day of the last ten months, lifting weights in his spare time.

“Fuck it,” whispered Daeman. He jumped, grabbed the rope, got his legs and shins around it, reached higher with his thermskinned left hand, and began dragging himself up, shinnying when he could, resting when he had to.

It was slow. It was agonizingly slow. And the slowness was the least part of the agony. A third of the way up and he knew he couldn’t make it—knew he probably did not have the strength even to hang on while sliding down. But if he jumped, the egg would break. Whatever was inside would get out. And Setebos and Caliban would know at once.

Something about this image made Daeman giggle until his eyes were filled with tears, fogging the clear lenses on the osmosis mask hood. He could hear his breath rasping in the osmosis mask. He could feel the thermskin suit tightening as it labored to cool him off. Come on, Daeman, you’re almost halfway. Another few feet and you can rest.

He didn’t rest after ten feet. He didn’t rest after thirty feet. Daeman knew that if he tried to just hang here, if he paused to wrap the rope around his hands to just cling, he’d never get moving again.

Once the rope shifted on its belay pin and Daeman gasped, his heart leaping into his throat. He was more than halfway up the eighty-foot rope. A fall now would break a leg or arm and leave him crippled on the steaming, hissing crater floor.

The pin held. He hung there a minute, knowing how visible he was to calibani anywhere on this side of the crater. Perhaps dozens of the things were standing below him right now, waiting for him to fall into their scaly arms. He did not look down.

Another few feet. Daeman raised his aching, shaking arm, wrapped rope around his palm, and pulled himself up, his legs and ankles seeking traction. Again. Again. No pause allowed. Again.

Finally he couldn’t climb anymore. The last of his energy was done. He hung there, his entire body shaking, the weight of his crossbow and the giant egg in his pack pulling him backward, off balance. He knew that he would fall any second. Blinking madly, Daeman freed one hand to wipe the mist from his thermskin lenses.

He was at the overhang of the balcony—a foot beneath its edge.

One last impossible surge and he was up and over, lying on his belly, pulling himself up to the belaying pin and lying on it, lying on the rope, spread-eagled on the blue-ice balcony.

Don’t throw up … don’t throw up! Either the vomit would drown him in his own osmosis mask or he’d have to tug the mask off and the vapors would render him unconscious in seconds. He’d die here and no one would even know that he’d been able to climb eighty feet of rope—no, more, perhaps ninety feet—he, pudgy Daeman, Marina’s fat little boy, the kid who couldn’t do a single chin-up on the buckycarbon struts.

Some time later, Daeman returned to full consciousness and willed himself to move again. He pulled off the crossbow, checked to make sure it was still cocked and loaded, safety off now. He checked the egg—pulsing more whitely and brightly than before, but still in one piece. He set the ice hammers on his belt and pulled up the hundred feet of rope. It was absurdly heavy.

He got lost in the tunnels. It had been twilight when he’d come in, the last of daylight filtering through the blue-ice, but it was deep night outside now and the only illumination was from the yellow electrical discharges surging through the living tissue all around him—Daeman was sure the blue-ice was organic, somehow part of Setebos.

He had left yellow fabric markers at the intersections, nailed into the ice, but somehow he missed one of those and found himself crawling to new junctions, tunnels he’d never seen before. Rather than backtrack—the tunnel was too narrow to turn around in and he dreaded trying to crawl backward in it—he chose the tunnel that seemed to head upward and crawled on.

Twice the tunnels ended or pitched steeply downward and he did have to backtrack to the junction. Finally a tunnel both rose and widened, and it was with infinite relief that he got to his feet and began moving up the gently sloping ice ramp on his feet, crossbow in his hands.

He stopped suddenly, trying to control his panting.

There was a junction less than ten feet ahead, another one thirty feet behind, and from one or the other or both came a scratching, scrabbling sound.

Calibani, he thought, feeling the terror like the cold of outer space seeping through the thermskin, but then a colder thought came. One of the hands.

It was a hand. Longer than Daeman, thicker through the middle, pulling itself along on fingernails emerging from the gray flesh like ten inches of sharpened steel, with black-barbed fiber hairs at the ends of the fingers grabbing ice, the pulsating hand pulled itself into the junction less than ten feet in front of Daeman and paused there, the palm rising—the orifice in the center of that palm visibly fluttering open and shut.

It’s searching for me, thought Daeman, not daring to breathe. It senses heat.

He did not stir, not even to raise the crossbow. Everything depended upon the slashed and worn old thermskin suit. If he was radiating heat from it, the hand would be on him in a millisecond. Daeman lowered his face to the ice floor, not out of fear but to mask any heat emissions that might be leaking from his osmosis mask.

There was a wild scrabbling and when Daeman jerked his head up, he saw that the hand had taken a tunnel to his right. The fleshy, moving arm-stalk filled the tunnel ahead, almost blocking the junction.

I’ll be goddamned if I’m going backwards, thought Daeman. He crawled forward to the junction, moving as quietly as he could.

The arm-stalk was sliding through the junction; a hundred yards of it had already flowed past but it seemed endless. He could no longer hear the scrabbling of the hand itself.

It’s probably circled around through the tunnels and is behind me.

“ ‘Listen! White blaze—a tree’s head snaps—and there, there, there, there, there, His thunder follows! Fool to give at Him! Lo! ‘Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!”

Caliban’s chant was muffled by distance and ice, but it flowed up the tunnel after him.

Inches from the sliding arm-stalk, Daeman weighed the possibilities.

The tunnel it slid through was about six feet across and six feet high. The arm-stalk filled the width of the junction and tunnel—at least six feet, compressed by the blue-ice, but it was broader than it was tall. There was at least three feet of air between the top of the endless, sliding mass and the tunnel ceiling. On the other side, the tunnel Daeman had been following broadened and headed gradually toward the surface. Through the thermskin, he thought his skin could feel a movement of air from the outside. He might be only a few hundred feet from the surface here.

How to get past the arm-stalk?

He thought of the ice hammers—useless, he couldn’t hang from the ceiling and cross that six feet. He thought of going back, back into the labyrinth that he’d been crawling through for what seemed like hours, and he put that thought from his mind.

Maybe the arm-stalk will slide past. That thought showed him how tired and stupid he was. This thing ended in the brain-mass that was Setebos, the better part of a mile away in the center of the crater.

It’s going to fill all these tunnels up with its arms and its scrabbling hands. It’s searching for me!

Part of Daeman’s mind noted that pure panic tasted like blood. Then he realized that he’d bitten through the lining of his cheek. His mouth filled with blood, but he couldn’t take time to slide the osmosis mask off to spit, so he swallowed instead.

To hell with it.

Daeman made sure the safety was on and then he tossed the heavy crossbow across the sliding mass of arm-stalk. It missed the oily gray flesh by inches and skittered on the ice of the tunnel opposite. The pack and egg were more difficult.

It’ll break. It will smash open and the milky glow inside—it’s brighter now, I’m sure it’s brighter—will spill out and it’ll be one of these hands, small and pink rather than gray, and its orifice will open and the little hand will scream and scream, and the huge gray hand will come scuttling back, or perhaps straight down the tunnel ahead, trapping me…

“God damn you,” Daeman said aloud, not worrying about the noise. He hated himself for the coward he was, for the coward he’d always been. Marina’s pudgy little baby, capable of seducing the girls and catching butterflies and nothing else.

Daeman slipped the pack off, wrapped the top around the egg as best he could, and heaved it sideways over the sliding mass of oily arm.

It landed on the pack side rather than the exposed eggshell and slid. The egg looked intact as best Daeman could tell.

My turn.

Feeling light and free without the rucksack and heavy crossbow, he backed up thirty feet down the almost-horizontal tunnel and then broke into a sprint before he could give himself time to think about it.

He almost slipped, but then his boots found purchase and he was moving fast when he reached the arm. The top of his thermskin hood brushed the ceiling as he dove as high as he could, his arms straight ahead of him, his feet coming up—but not quite enough, he felt the toes of his boots grazing the thick slithering arm—Don’t come down on the pack and egg!—and then he was landing on his hands, rolling forward, crashing down—the blue-ice knocking the wind out of him, rolling over the crossbow but not firing it by accident because the safety was on.

Behind him the endless arm stopped moving.

Not waiting to get his breath back, Daeman grabbed the rucksack and crossbow and began running up the gently rising ice slope toward fresh air and the darkness of the exit.

He emerged into the fresh, cold night air a block or two south of the Île de la Cité crevasse he’d followed into the dome. There was no sight of any of the hands or calibani in the starlight and electric glow from the blue-ice nerve flashes.

Daeman pulled off the osmosis mask and gasped in huge draughts of fresh air.

He wasn’t out yet. With the pack on his back and the crossbow in his hands again, he followed this crevasse until it ended somewhere near where the Île St-Louis should be. There was an ice wall to his right, tunnel entrances to his left.

I’m not going in a tunnel again. Laboriously, his arms shaking with fatigue even before he did anything, Daeman took the ice hammers out of his belt, slammed one into the flickering blue-ice wall, and began to climb.

Two hours later, he knew he was lost. He’d been navigating by the stars and rings and by glimpses of buildings rising from the ice or the shapes of masonry half-glimpsed in the shadows of crevasses. He thought he’d been paralleling the crevasse that ran along Avenue Daumesnil, but he knew now that he must be mistaken—nothing lay before him but a wide, black crevasse, dropping into absolute darkness.

Daeman lay on his stomach near the edge, feeling the egg shifting in his rucksack as if it were alive, wanting to hatch, and he had to concentrate on not weeping. There had been scrabblings in the tunnel openings and crevasses he’d passed—more hands searching, he was sure. He’d seen none up here in the starlight and ringlight atop the ice mass, but the dome behind him was glowing more brightly than ever.

Setebos is missing his egg.

His? thought Daeman, resisting the urge to laugh since hysteria might be right behind the softest giggle.

Something at the edge of the bottomless abyss ahead of him caught his eye. Daeman pulled himself forward on his elbows.

One of his nails with a tatter of yellow cloth attached.

This was the ice chimney only a hundred and fifty yards from the Guarded Lion node where he’d faxed in to Paris Crater.

Weeping openly now, Daeman hammered in the last of his ice nails, bent it, secured the rope—not even bothering to knot it in the rappelling knot he’d learned so he could slide it free when he reached the bottom—and heaving himself over the edge, he let himself down into the darkness.

Leaving the rope behind, Daeman staggered and crawled the last hundred yards or so. There was one last junction, marked by his yellow tatters of cloth, then he had to crawl, and then he was out and sliding into the Guarded Lion fax pavilion where he could stand up on a solid floor. The faxpad glowed softly on its pedestal in the center of the circular node.

The naked shape hit him from the side, sending him sliding across the floor, his crossbow skittering on tile.

The thing—Caliban or calibani, he couldn’t tell in the blue darkness—wrapped long fingers around Daeman’s throat even as yellow teeth snapped at his face.

Daeman rolled again, tried to throw the clinging shape off, but the naked form hung on with its legs and spatulate, prehensile toes even as it clung tight with its long arms and powerful hands.

The egg! thought Daeman, trying not to land on his back as the two surged back and forth, crashing into the faxpad pedestal.

Then he was free for a second and leaping for the crossbow against the far wall. The amphibian man-shape snarled and grabbed him, throwing Daeman up against the ice. The yellow eyes and yellow teeth glowed in the blue gloom.

Daeman had fought Caliban before and this wasn’t Caliban—this fiend was smaller, not quite as strong, not quite as fast, but terrible enough. The teeth snapped at Daeman’s eyes.

The human got his left palm under the calibani’s chin and forced the jaw up, the scaly face with its flat nose arching up and back, the yellow eyes glaring. Daeman felt strength flowing in with the rush of the last of his adrenaline, and he tried to snap the creature’s neck by forcing its head back.

The calibani’s head whipped like a snake and it bit off two of the fingers on Daeman’s straining left hand.

The man howled and fell away. The calibani swung its arms wide, paused to swallow fingers, and leaped.

Daeman swept the crossbow up with his good right hand and fired both bolts. The calibani was thrown backward, impaled on the ice wall with one of the long, iron, barbed bolts protruding through its upper shoulder into the ice and the other through its palm, its hand raised next to its howling face. The naked creature writhed, pulled, snarled, and snapped one of the bolts free.

Daeman also howled. He leaped to his feet, pulled the knife from his belt, and rammed the long blade up through the calibani’s underjaw, up through its soft palate and into its brain. Then he pressed against the length of the calibani’s long body like a lover and twisted the blade around—twisted again, again, and then again—and kept twisting until the obscene writhing against him stopped.

He fell back onto the tile, cradling his mangled hand. Incredibly, there was no bleeding. The thermskin glove had closed around the stumps of the two amputated fingers, but the pain made him want to vomit.

He could do that, and he did, kneeling and throwing up until he could vomit no more.

There was a scrabbling from one or more of the tunnels on the opposite wall.

Daeman stood, jerked the long knife from the calibani’s underjaw—the creature’s body sagged but was held up by the bolt through its shoulder—and then he retrieved the other bolt, rocking it loose, picked up the crossbow, and crossed to the faxpad.

Something surged out of the glowing tunnel entrance behind him.

Daeman faxed into daylight at the Ardis Hall node. He staggered away from the faxpad there, fumbled a bolt out of his pack, dropped it in the groove in his crossbow, and used his foot to cock the massive mechanism. He aimed the crossbow at the faxpad node and waited.

Nothing came through.

After a long minute, he lowered the weapon and staggered out into the sunlight.

It looked to be early afternoon here at the Ardis node. There were no guards around. The palisade wall here had been pulled down in a dozen places. The carcasses of at least a score of dead voynix lay all around the fax pavilion, but other than streaks and smears and trails of human blood leading off to the meadow and into the forest, there was no sign of the humans who had been left behind to guard the pavilion.

Daeman’s hand hurt so terribly that his entire body and skull became only an echo to that throbbing pain, but he cradled his hand to his chest, set another bolt in the crossbow, and staggered out to the road. It was a little less than a mile and a half to Ardis Hall.

Ardis Hall was gone.

Daeman had approached cautiously, staying off the road and moving through the trees most of the way, wading the narrow river upstream from the bridge. He had approached the palisade and Ardis from the northeast, through the woods, ready to call out quickly to the sentries rather than be shot as a voynix.

There were no sentries. For half an hour, Daeman crouched at the edge of the woods and watched. Nothing moved except the crows and magpies feeding on the remnants of human bodies. Then he moved carefully around to the left, coming as close to the barracks and east entrance to the Ardis palisade as he could before coming out of the cover of the trees.

The palisade had been breached in a hundred places. Much of the wall was down. Hannah’s beautiful cupola and hearth had been burned and then knocked over. The line of barracks and tents where half of the four hundred people of Ardis had lived had all burned down. Ardis Hall itself—the grand hall that had weathered more than two thousand winters—had been reduced to a few carbon-smeared stone chimneys, burned and tumbled rafters, and heaps of collapsed stone.

The place stank of smoke and death. There were scores of dead voynix on what had been Ada’s front yard, more piled where the porch had stood, but mixed in with the shattered carapaces were remains of hundreds of men and women. Daeman couldn’t identify any of the corpses he could see around the burned ruins of the house—there a small charred corpse, seemingly too small to be an adult, burned black, the charred and flaking arms raised in a boxer’s posture, here a rib cage and skull picked almost clean by the birds, there a woman lying seemingly unharmed in the sooty grass, but—when Daeman rushed to her and rolled her over—missing a face.

Daeman knelt in the cold, bloodied grass and tried to weep. The best he could do was wave his arms to chase away the heavy crows and hopping magpies that kept trying to return to the corpses.

The sun was going down. The light was fading from the sky.

Daeman rose to look at the other bodies—flung here and there like bundles of abandoned laundry on the frozen earth, some lying under voynix carcasses, others lying alone, some fallen in clumps as if the people had huddled together at the end. He had to find Ada. Identify and bury her and as many of the others as he could before trying to make his way back to the fax pavilion.

Where can I go? Which community will take me in?

Before he could answer that or reach the other bodies in the quickly falling twilight, he saw the movement at the edge of the forest.

At first Daeman thought that the survivors of the Ardis massacre were coming out of the trees, but even as he raised his good hand to hail them, he saw the glint on gray carapaces and knew that he was wrong.

Thirty, sixty, a hundred voynix moved out of the forest and across the grass toward him from the road and forest to the east.

Sighing, too tired to run, Daeman staggered a few yards toward the woods to the southwest and then saw the movement there. Voynix scuttling out of the darkness there, more voynix dropping from the trees and moving out into the open on all fours. They’d be on him in a few seconds.

He knew that it was no use running around the smoldering ruins of the Great Hall toward the north. There would just be more voynix there.

Daeman went to one knee, noticed that the egg in his rucksack was glowing brightly enough now to throw his shadow across the frozen grass, and then pulled the last of the crossbow quarrels out.

Six. He had six bolts left. Plus the two already loaded.

Smiling grimly, feeling something like a terrible elation rise in him, he stood and leveled the weapon at the closest cluster of advancing shapes. They were sixty feet away. He’d let them get closer, knowing that they could close the gap in seconds running at full voynix speed. His mangled hand was good enough to level the crossbow with his thumb and remaining two fingers.

Something cracked and slapped behind him. Daeman whirled, ready to meet the attack, but it was the sonie, flying in low from the west. Two people were firing flechette rifles from the rear niches. Voynix leaped at it but were slapped away by clouds of flickering flechettes.

“Jump!” yelled Greogi as the sonie flew in at head height and then hovered next to Daeman.

The voynix rushed in from every side, bouncing and leaping like giant silver grasshoppers. A man Daeman vaguely recognized as Boman and a woman with dark hair—not Ada, but the woman named Edide who had gone with Daeman on the fax-warning expedition—were firing their flechette rifles in opposite directions on full automatic, pouring out a cloud of crystal darts.

“Jump!” Greogi yelled again.

Daeman shook his head, retrieved the rucksack with the egg, tossed it up into the sonie, tossed in his crossbow, and only then jumped. The sonie began to climb even as he leaped.

He didn’t quite make it. His good hand found a grip on the inner edge of the sonie, but his mangled left hand banged against metal, the pain blinded him, he released his grip and began to slide away toward the mass of silent voynix below.

Boman grabbed him by the arm and pulled him aboard.

Daeman couldn’t speak for most of the fast flight northeast, hurtling several miles above the dark forest, finally circling toward a bare spur of rock rising two hundred feet above the skeletal trees. Daeman had seen this granite knob years earlier, when he’d first visited Ada and her mother here at Ardis Hall. He’d been hunting for butterflies then and at the end of a long afternoon of meandering, Ada had pointed out the rocky point rising almost vertically from a brambled meadow beyond the forest. “Starved Rock,” she’d said, her teenager’s voice sounding almost proud and possessive.

“Why do they call it that?” he’d asked.

Young Ada had shrugged.

“Do you want to climb it?” he’d said, thinking that if he got her up there, he might be able to seduce her on a grassy summit.

Ada had laughed. “No one can climb Starved Rock.”

Now, in the last of the twilight and the first of the bright ringlight, Daeman saw what they had done. The summit was not grassy after all—bare rock stretched a flat hundred feet or so, broken by the occasional boulder, and crowded onto that summit were crude tarps and a half-dozen campfires. Dark figures huddled by those fires and more figures were posted at all the edges of the granite monolith… sentries, no doubt.

The field below Starved Rock seemed to be moving in the shadows. It was moving. Voynix shuffled and stirred there, stepping over hundreds of shattered carcasses of their own kind.

“How many people made it from Ardis?” asked Daeman as Greogi circled to land.

“About fifty,” said the pilot. His face was soot-streaked and looked infinitely weary in the glow from the virtual controls.

Fifty out of more than four hundred, thought Daeman numbly. He realized that his body was in shock from losing fingers, and his mind was going into something like shock after seeing what he’d seen back at Ardis. The numbness and disinterest were not unpleasant.

“Ada?” he said hesitantly.

“She’s alive,” said Greogi. “But she’s been unconscious for almost twenty-four hours. The Great Hall was burning and she wouldn’t leave until everyone else who could be carried off had been… and even then, I don’t think she would have left if that section of the burning roof hadn’t collapsed and a rafter hadn’t knocked her out. We don’t know if her baby is still… viable… or not.”

“Petyr?” said Daeman. “Reman?” He was trying to think of who would lead them with Harman gone, Ada injured, and so many lost.

“Dead.” Greogi hovered the sonie and lowered it toward the dark mass of the granite summit. It bumped to a stop. Dark forms from one of the campfires rose and walked toward them.

“Why are you still here?” Daeman asked Greogi, holding him by his shirtfront as the others stepped off the grounded sonie. “Why are you still here with the voynix down there?”

Greogi easily pulled Daeman’s hand free. “We tried the faxnode, but the voynix were on us before we could get people inside. We lost four people there before we could get away. And we don’t have anywhere else to fly… with Ada injured so severely and a dozen others badly hurt, we could never get them all off Starved Rock in time, before those fucking animals come up the cliff. We need everyone here just to hold off the voynix… If we start flying out a few at a time, those staying behind will be overrun. We probably don’t have enough flechette ammunition to hold out another night as it is.”

Daeman looked around. The campfires were low, pitiful things—mere burning moss or lichen and a few twigs, nothing more. The brightest thing on the dark rock was the Setebos egg still glowing milkily in his rucksack.

“Has it come to this?” Daeman asked, speaking to himself.

“I guess it has,” said Greogi, sliding off the sonie and staggering slightly. The man was obviously in some state beyond exhaustion. “It’s full dark now. The voynix will be coming up the sides any minute.”