Olympos

41

Harman fell through darkness with Ariel for what seemed an impossible length of time.

When they landed, it wasn’t with a fatal crash at the base of the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu, but with a soft thump on a jungle floor covered with centuries’ buildup of leaves and other humus.

For a stunned second Harman couldn’t believe that he wasn’t dead, but then he stumbled to his feet, shoved the small Ariel figure away—though Ariel had already danced out of range—and then stood, blinking in the darkness.

Darkness. It had been daytime at the Golden Gate. He was… somewhere else. Wherever the somewhere else might be, besides on the dark side of the planet, Harman knew that it was in deep jungle. The night smelled of richness and rot, the thick, humid air clung to his skin like a soaked blanket, Harman’s shirt immediately soaked through and lay limp against him, and all around in the seemingly impenetrable night came the buzz of insects and the rustle of fronds, palms, undergrowth, insects, small creatures and large. Letting his eyes adapt, his hands raised into fists, hoping that Ariel would come back into striking range, Harman craned his head back and saw the hint of starlight between tiny gaps in foliage far, far above.

In another minute, he could see the pale, almost spectral, genderless figure of Ariel glowing slightly ten feet or so from him across the jungle floor.

“Take me back,” growled Harman.

“Take thee back where?”

“To the Bridge. Or to Ardis. But do it now.”

“I cannot.” The genderless voice was maddening, insulting.

“You will,” growled Harman. “You will right now. However you got me here, undo it, take me back. Now.”

“Or what consequence ensues?” asked the glowing figure in the jungle dark. Ariel’s voice sounded mildly amused.

“Or I’ll kill you,” Harman said flatly. He realized that he meant it. He would strangle this green-white flop of a thing, choke the life out of it, and spit on the corpse. And then you’ll be left lost in an unknown jungle warned the last sensible part of Harman’s mind. He ignored it.

“Oh, my,” said Ariel, feigning terror, “I shall be pinched to death.”

Harman leaped, arms extended. The little figure—not much more than four feet tall—caught him in midleap and threw him thirty feet through ripping fronds and tearing vines into the jungle.

It took Harman a minute or two to get his breath back and another minute to get to his knees. He realized at once that if Ariel had done that to him elsewhere—say, on the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu where they’d been a minute before—it would have broken his back. Now he stood again on deep humus, willed his vision to see through the encroaching darkness, and shoved and tore his way back through vines and thick vegetation to the small clearing where Ariel waited.

The sprite was no longer alone.

“O look,” Ariel said in happy, conversational tones, “here is more of us!”

Harman paused. He could see better now by the starlight filtering down into this little clearing in the jungle and what he saw made him stare.

There were at least fifty or sixty other shapes in the clearing and under the trees and amidst the ferns and vines beyond. They were not human, but neither were they voynix or calibani or any other bipedal form that Harman had seen in his ninety-nine years and nine months of life. These humanoid shapes were like rough sketches of people—short, not much taller than little Ariel, and, like Ariel, with transparent skin and organs floating in greenish liquid. But where Ariel had lips, cheeks, a nose, and the eyes of a young man or woman, with physical features and muscles one associated with the human body, these short, green forms had neither mouths nor human eyes—they looked back at Harman in the starlight from black dots in their faces that could have been lumps of coal—and from their boneless-looking frames to their three-fingered hands, the forms seemed to lack all identity.

“I don’t believe you’ve met my fellow ministers,” Ariel said softly, gesturing with a feminine turn of hand toward the mob of shapes in the shadows. “Instruments to this lower world, they were belched up before your kind was born. They have different names—his Prosperousness doth fain to call them this and that, as takes his pleasure—but they are more like me than not, descended from chlorophyll and the motes set there in the forest to measure it in time before post-humans. They are the zeks—helpers and workers and prisoners all, and who of us is not all these things?”

Harman stared at the greenish shapes. They stared unblinking back.

“Seize him,” lisped Ariel.

Four of the zeks came forward—they moved with a smooth grace that Harman wouldn’t have expected from such gingerbread shapes—and before he could run or fight, two of them seized him with three-fingered grips of iron. The third zek leaned in close, unbreathing, until its featureless chest touched the tunic above Harman’s chest, and the fourth seized Harman’s hand—just as Ariel had seized Hannah’s only a short while before—and thrust it through the yielding green-skin membrane of the third zek’s chest. Harman felt the soft heart-organ in his hand, almost coming to him like a pet, and then the unspoken words echoed in his brain—do not irritate ariel he will kill you on a whim. come with us and make no effort to resist. it is to your benefit and to your lady’s ada’s to come with us now.

“How do you know about Ada?” Harman shouted aloud.

come

That was the last word transmitted through Harman’s pulsing hand into his aching skull before his hand was wrenched free, the zek’s soft heart still in it, shriveling, dying, and then the zek itself pitched over backward, falling silently to the jungle floor, there to shrivel and desiccate and die. Ariel and the other zeks ignored the corpse of the communicator as Ariel turned and led the way down the slightest of trails along the dark jungle floor.

The zeks on either side of Harman still clung to his arm, but lightly now, and Harman made no effort to resist, only to keep up as the line of forms moved through the dark wood.

Harman’s mind was racing faster than his feet as he stumbled to keep up through the dark jungle. At times, when the foliage overhead was too thick, he couldn’t see anything—not even his legs or feet beneath him in the near absolute darkness—so he let the zeks guide him as if he were blind and concentrated on thinking. He knew that if he was ever going to see Ada and Ardis Hall again, he’d have to be a lot smarter in the coming hours than he’d been in the last many months.

First question—where was he? It had been a stormy morning when he’d been at the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu, but it felt very late here in this jungle. He tried to remember his self-taught geography, but the maps and spheres blurred in his mind now—words like Asia and Europe meaning almost nothing. But the darkness here suggested that Ariel hadn’t just whisked him to some jungle on the same southern continent that held the Bridge. He couldn’t walk back to Machu Picchu and Hannah and Petyr and the sonie.

Which led to the second question—how had Ariel brought him here? There had been no visible faxnode pavilion in the Golden Gate green globules. If there had been—if Savi had ever suggested a fax connection to the Bridge—he certainly wouldn’t have flown the sonie there to get the weapons and ammunition and try to get Odysseus to the healing crèche. No … Ariel had used some other means to transport him through space to this dark, rot-smelling, muggy, insect-filled place.

Since he was being dragged through the darkness not ten paces behind the biosphere avatar—or so Prospero had once identified Ariel—Harman realized he could just ask these questions. The worst the pale sprite—his/her body visibly glowing in starlight as they crossed the occasional small opening in the jungle—could do was not answer.

Ariel answered both questions, the second one first.

“I shall have thy company for only a few hours more,” said the small form. “Then I must deliver thee to my master, not long after we hear the strain of the strutting chanticleer—if strutting chanticleer there were in this wretched place.”

“Your master Prospero?” asked Harman.

Ariel did not answer.

“So what is the name of this wretched place?” Harman asked.

The sprite laughed, a sound like the tinkling of small bells, but not altogether a pleasant noise. “They should call this wood Ariel’s Nursery, for here ten times two hundred years ago, I came to be—rising into consciousness from a billion little sensor-transponders the old-old-style hu-mans—your very ilk, guest—called motes. Trees were talking to their human masters and to each other, chatting in the mossy old net that had become the nascent noosphere, gabbling on about temperatures and birds’ nests and hatchlings and pounds per square inch of osmotic pressure and trying to quantify photosynthesis the way a rheumy clerk counts his beads and bangles and thinks them treasure. The zeks—my beloved instruments of action, too many stolen from me for wasteful duty on the red world by that monster-magus master—rose likewise, yea, but not here, honored guest, not here, no.”

Harman understood almost none of that, but Ariel was talking—babbling—and he knew that if he could keep the creature engaged in conversation, he’d learn something important sooner or later.

“Prospero, your master, called you the avatar of the biosphere when I spoke to him, your master, nine months ago on his orbital isle,” said Harman.

“Aye,” said Ariel, laughing again, “and I call Prospero, whom you call my master, Tom Shit.” Ariel looked back at him, the small, greenish-white face glowing like some phosphorescent tropical plant as they plunged into a section of trail in total darkness under the encroaching leaves. “Harman, husband of Ada, friend of Noman, thou art, to mine eyes, a man of sin, a man whose destiny has import, in this lower world at least, less for what is in’t than for its pallid shape. Thou, ‘mongst all men, being most unfit to live—much less to live your full Five Twenty so like one of brother Caliban’s long-baked meals—since time and tides of time hath made you mad. And even with such valour, you know, men hang and drown their proper selves.”

Harman understood none of this and despite his asking many more questions, Ariel did not reply or speak again until dawn some three hours and many miles later.

An hour after Harman was sure that he had no energy left, they allowed him to stop and lean against a huge boulder to catch his breath. As the light came up, he realized that it was no boulder.

The boulder was actually a wall, the wall was part of a large building with levels set back as it rose, and the building was something that he guessed from his sigling was called a temple. Then Harman realized what his hands were touching and what his eyes were seeing.

Every inch of the large temple was carved. Some of the carvings were large—as wide as the length of Harman’s arm—but most were small enough that he could cover them with the palm of his hand.

In the carvings—each one becoming more clear as the tropical sunrise bled light through the jungle overhead—men and women were making love—having sex—as were men and more than one woman, men and men, women and women, women and men and what looked to be horses, men and elephants, women and bulls, women and women and monkeys and men and men and men….

Harman could only stare. He’d never seen anything like this in his ninety-nine years. On one level of carvings just at eye height, he could see a man with his head between a woman’s legs while another man, straddling the first, offered his erect penis to the straining woman’s open mouth, while behind her, a second woman wearing some sort of artificial penis was entering the first woman from behind while the first woman, servicing the two men and the woman behind her, was reaching her arm out to an animal Harman recognized from the turin drama as a horse, masturbating the excited stallion. Her other free hand was massaging the genitals of a human male figure standing next to the horse.

Harman stepped away from the temple wall, looking up at the vine-encrusted stone structure. There were thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of variations on this theme, showing Harman aspects of sex he’d never imagined, could never have imagined. Just some of the elephant images alone…. The human figures were stylized, faces and breasts oval, eyes almond-shaped, the women’s and men’s mouths curling in pleased and decadent smiles.

“What is this place?” he asked.

Ariel sang in a falsetto—

“Above, half seen, in the lofty gloom,

Strange works of a long dead people loom,

What did they mean to those who now are dust,

These rioting figures of love and lust?”

Harman tried again. “What is this place?”

For once Ariel answered simply. “Khajuraho.” The word meant nothing to Harman.

The biosphere sprite gestured, two of the little, green, largely transparent zeks touched Harman’s arm, and the procession moved away from the temple, following a barely discernible path through the jungle. Looking back, Harman caught a final glimpse of the stone building—buildings he realized now, there was more than one temple there, all of them carved with erotic friezes—and he noticed again how the jungle had all but reclaimed the structures. The coupling figures were bound about by vines, partially obscured by grass, and tightly constricted by roots and green feelers.

Then the place called Khajuraho disappeared in the green growth and Harman concentrated on plodding along behind Ariel.

As the sunlight illuminated the wild density of the jungle around them—ten thousand shades of green, most of which Harman had never imagined—all he could think of was how to get back to Ardis and Ada, or at least back to the Bridge before Petyr flew off in the sonie. He didn’t want to wait three days for Petyr’s return to pick up Hannah and the restored—if that crèche could restore life and health—Noman/Odysseus.

“Ariel?” he said suddenly to the small form that seemed to be floating at the front of the line of zeks ahead of him.

“Ay, sir?” The androgynous quality of the otherwise pleasant voice disturbed Harman.

“How did you transport me from the Golden Gate to this jungle?”

“Did I not do my spriting gently enough, O Man?”

“Yes,” said Harman, fearing that the pale figure was going to launch into more nonsense babble. “But how?”

“How dost thou travel from place to place, when you are not lying abelly in your sonie saucer?”

“We fax,” said Harman. “But there was no fax pavilion at the Golden Gate… no faxnode.”

Ariel floated higher, brushing branches and sending a shower of droplets down onto the zeks and Harman. “Did your friend Daeman go to a fax pavilion when the allosaurus ate him ten months ago?”

Harman stopped in his tracks. The zeks still holding his arms stopped with him, not yet pulling him on.

Of course, thought Harman. It had been in front of him all his life. He’d seen it all his life—but he’d been blind. When someone faxed up to the rings on any of his or her normal four Twenties of life, you went to the nearest fax pavilion. When someone wanted to fax anywhere, you went to the nearest faxnode pavilion. But when someone was injured—or killed, devoured as Daeman had been, torn apart in some freak accident—the rings faxed you up.

Harman had been there, on Prospero’s Isle, in the Firmary tanks where naked bodies arrived, were fixed by the bubbling nutrient and blue worms, and were faxed back. Harman and Daeman had done the faxing themselves, on Prospero’s instructions, destroying the servitors and setting the virtual dials and levers to fax as many of the bodies-under-repair home as they could.

Humans could be faxed without going to a fax pavilion, without starting from one of the three-hundred-some known faxnodes. Harman had seen this his entire life—almost one hundred years—but had never seen what he could see. The thought was too entrenched that the post-humans were calling you home when you were injured or killed before your Fifth Twenty. Faxnodes were science; going to the Firmary for emergency repair was something like religion.

But the Firmary on Prospero’s Isle had machinery that could fax anyone from anywhere without relying on nodes and pavilions.

And Harman and Daeman had destroyed the Firmary and Prospero’s Isle.

The zeks tugged at Harman’s arms to get him moving again, but gently. Harman did not move quite yet. The intensity of his thoughts made him dizzy; if the zeks had not been clutching him, he might have fallen to the jungle floor.

Prospero’s Isle was destroyed—he and all the old-style humans had watched the pieces burn through the night sky for months—but Ariel could still fax—a sort of free-fax, independent from nodes, portals, and pavilions. Something up on the rings—or on Earth itself—found the sprite, coded him, and faxed him, and today Harman with him, from the Bridge to here, wherever here and Khajuraho were. On the opposite side of the Earth if nothing else.

Harman might yet be able to fax home to Ada, if he could only get Ariel to reveal the secret of this free-faxing.

The zeks pulled again, gently but insistently. Ariel was far ahead, floating toward a patch of bright sunlight in the jungle. Harman did not want to get the zeks in trouble. Nor did he want to lose sight of Ariel—the sprite was his fax-ticket home.

Harman rushed, stumbling, to catch up with the avatar of Earth’s biosphere.

When they first emerged into the clearing the sun was so bright that Harman squinted and covered his eyes, not seeing the structure looming above him for several seconds. When he did see it, he froze in his tracks.

The thing—structure—it wasn’t quite a building—was gigantic, rising up for what Harman estimated—and his estimates on the size of things had always been uncannily good—for at least a thousand feet. Perhaps a little more. It had no skin; that is, the entire structure was a lacy, open-latticework skeleton of dark metal girders, rising inward from a huge square base that connected via semicircular metal arches at treetop level, then continuing to curve inward until it became a pure spire, its dark knob of a summit far, far above. A phrase that the metal-working Hannah had once described came to his mind—wrought iron. Harman felt sure that the trusses, arches, girders, and open latticework he was staring at here in the hot, jungle sun were all made of some sort of iron.

“What is it?” he breathed. The zeks had released him and stepped back into the shade of the jungle, as if afraid to go closer to the base of the incredible tower. Harman realized that nothing grew on the acre or more at the base of the tower except for low, perfectly manicured grass. It was as if the strength of the structure itself was keeping the jungle at bay.

“It’s seven thousand tons,” said Ariel in a voice much more masculine than any the biosphere sprite had used before. “Two and a half million rivets. Four thousand three hundred and eleven years old—or at least the original of this was. There are more than fourteen thousand of these in Khan Ho Tep’s eiffelbahn.”

“Eiffelbahn…” repeated Harman. “I don’t…”

“Come,” snapped Ariel. His voice was powerfully masculine now, deep, threatening, not to be disobeyed.

There was a sort of wrought-iron cage at the base of one of the arched legs.

“Get in,” said Ariel.

“I need to know…”

“Get in and you’ll learn everything you need to know,” said the biosphere avatar. “Including how to get back to your precious Ada. Stay here and you die.”

Harman stepped into the cage. An iron grating slid shut. Gears clanked, metal screeched, and the cage began rising on the curve, following a series of cables and iron tracks.

“Aren’t you coming?” Harman called down to Ariel.

The sprite did not answer. Harman’s elevator continued rising into the tower.

42

The tower seemed to have three major landings. The first and broadest was just above the level of the jungle treetops. Harman looked across at a solid carpet of green. The elevator did not stop.

The second landing was high enough that the elevator was traveling almost vertically and Harman had moved to the center of the small cage. Looking up and out, he could see that a series of cables ran from the top of this tower and disappeared far to the east and west, sagging a bit in the distance. The elevator did not stop at the second landing.

The third and final landing was a thousand feet above the ground, just below the domed top of the tower with its spike of antennae. Here the elevator slowed and stopped—ancient gears ground and slipped, the elevator cage slipped back six feet, and Harman grabbed the wrought-iron bars of the cage and prepared to die.

A brake stopped the cage. The wrought-iron door slid back. Harman shakily crossed five or six feet of iron bridge with rotted wood planks. Ahead of him, a much more elaborate door—polished sections of mahogany set into a filagree of wrought iron—clanked, stirred, and then hissed open. Harman paused only a second before entering the darker interior. Any place was preferable to that exposed little bridge a thousand feet above the latticework of girders disappearing in a vertigo of iron below.

He was in a room. When the door hissed and clanked shut behind him, Harman realized that it was twenty or thirty degrees cooler here in the large room than outside in the sun. He stayed where he was for a few seconds, allowing his eyes to adapt to the relative dimness.

He was standing on a small, carpeted and booklined entry mezzanine as part of a larger room. From the mezzanine, a wrought-iron staircase spiraled down to the main floor of the room and up through the ceiling to what presumably was a second story.

Harman descended.

He’d never seen furnishings like this—oddly styled furniture, tufted, with red-velour fabric, thick drapes over a wall of windows on the south side of the room, the drapes dragging their gold tassels onto the elaborately designed red and brown carpet. There was a fireplace in the north wall—Harman stared at the design of black iron and green ceramics. A long table with elaborately carved legs ran for at least eight feet of the fifteen feet of window wall where the panes near the corners of the window were as complicated as the silk of a spider’s web. Other furniture consisted of overstuffed single chairs with overstuffed ottomans, carved chairs of gleaming dark wood with gold metal inlays, and everywhere examples of what Hannah had once told him was polished brass.

There was a strange firehose of a speaking tube with a bell-shaped polished brass snout; there were levers of polished brass set into cherry-colored wooden boxes on the walls; on the long plank table rose several brass instruments—some with brass keys to punch and slowly turning gears, farther down the table an astrolabe with circles of brass turning within larger circles of brass, a polished brass lamp glowing softly with light. There were maps laid out on the table with small hemispheres of brass holding them down, more maps curled into a brass basket on the floor.

Harman ran forward and stared hungrily at the maps, pulling more out and unfurling them, laying brass hemispheres on them.

He’d never seen maps like these before. Everything was on a grid but within those grid boxes were ten thousand wriggly parallel lines—some close together where the map ran brown or green, some lines far apart where the map showed expanses of white. There were irregular blobs of blue that Harman guessed were lakes or seas and longer, wigglier blue lines that he guessed were rivers with unlikely names penned next to them—Tungabhadra, Krishna, Godavari, Normada, Mahanadi, and Ganga.

On the east and west wall of the room, surrounding smaller but still multipaned windows, were more bookshelves, more books, more brass trinkets, jade statues, brass machines.

Harman ran to the shelf and pulled down three books, smelling the scent of centuries rising from the ancient but still firm paper and the thick leather covers. The titles made his heart pound—The Third Dynasty of Khan Ho Tep—A.D. 2601–2939 and Ramayana and Mahabharata Scripture Revised According to Ganesh the Cyborg and Eiffelbahn Maintenance and AI Interface. Harman laid his right palm on the top book, closed his eyes to bring up the sigl function, and then hesitated. If he had time, he would prefer to read these books—sounding out each word and guessing at the definitions of the words from context. It was slow, laborious, painful, but he always gained more from reading than from sigling.

He laid the three books reverently on the polished, dust-free tabletop, and bounded up the circular stairs to the high second floor.

This was a bedroom—the head of the bed made of cylinders of polished brass, the bedspread a rich red velvet with fringes of elaborate, swirling designs. There was another chair set next to a brass floor lamp—a broader, comfortable-looking chair with floral designs, a high tufted leather ottoman pushed against it. There was a smaller room—a bathroom with a strange porcelain toilet under a porcelain tank and a hanging chain with a brass pull, panes of stained glass on the west wall, brass fixtures on faucets and spigots on the sink, a huge, clawfooted white porcelain bathtub with more brass fixtures. Back out in the bedroom again, the north wall here was also made up of windows—no, paned-glass doors with wrought-iron doorhandles.

Harman opened two of the doors and stepped out onto a wrought-iron balcony a thousand feet above the jungle. The sun and heat hit him like a hot fist. Blinking, he did not trust himself to stand on the iron—he could see the latticework of the tower beneath, but it would take no more than a gentle push to send him out and into nothing but air, a thousand feet of air.

Still gripping the door, he leaned out far enough to see some iron furniture, red cushions strapped on, a table on the ten-foot-wide balcony. Looking up, he saw the bulge of iron above the two-story room, a huge metal flywheel just under the gold-mica dome at the top of the tower, cables thicker than his forearm and thigh running out to the east and west.

Squinting to the east, Harman could see another vertical line of a dark tower there—how far away?—forty miles at least, seen from this height. He looked to the west to where the dozen or so cables disappeared, but there were only blue-black clouds of a storm visible there on the horizon.

Harman stepped back into the bedroom, shut the doors carefully, and walked back to the staircase and down and around, wiping the sweat from his forehead and neck with the sleeve of his tunic. It was so delightfully cool in here that he had no urge to go back down to the jungle yet.

“Hello, Harman,” said a familiar voice from the gloom near the table and dark drapes.

Prospero was far more solid than Harman remembered from their meeting months earlier on the orbital rock high in the e-ring. The magus’s wrinkled skin was no longer slightly transparent as his hologram had been. His robe of blue silk and wool, embroidered all about with gold planets, gray comets, and burning stars of red silk, hung in heavier folds now and dragged behind him on the Turkish carpet. Harman could see the long silver-white hair cascading behind the old man’s sharp ears and noted the age marks on his brow and his hands as well as the slight, clawlike yellowing to his fingernails. Harman noted the seeming solidity of the carved, twined staff that the old magus clutched in his right hand, and how Prospero’s blue slippers seemed to have weight as they shuffled across the wooden floor and thick carpet.

“Send me home,” demanded Harman, stepping toward the old man.

“Now.”

“Patience, patience, human named Harman, friend of Noman,” said the magus, showing his yellowed teeth in a slight smile.

“Fuck patience,” said Harman. He’d had no idea until this instant how deep the fury in him went from being kidnapped from the Bridge by Ariel, taken away from Ardis and Ada and his unborn child, almost certainly on the orders of this shuffling figure in the blue robe. He took a step closer to the old man, reached out, grabbed a bit of the magus’s flowing sleeve…

And was thrown eight feet backward across the room, finally sliding from the carpet to the polished floor and coming to rest on his back, blinking away retinal after-images of orange circles.

“I suffer no one’s touch,” Prospero said softly. “Do not make me remonstrate with this old man’s stick.” He raised his magus’s staff ever so slightly.

Harman got to one knee. “Send me back. Please. I can’t leave Ada alone. Not now.”

“You already have chosen that course, have you not? No man made you take Noman to Machu Picchu, yet no man stopped you, either.”

“What do you want, Prospero?” Harman got to his feet, tried unsuccessfully to blink away the last of the red-orange circles in his vision, and sat in the nearest wooden chair. “And how did you survive the destruction of the orbital asteroid? I thought your hologram was trapped there along with Caliban.”

“Oh, it was,” said Prospero, pacing back and forth. “A small part of my self, perhaps, taken all for all, but a vital small part. You brought me back to Earth.”

“I …” began Harman. “The sonie? Somehow you loaded your hologram into the sonie’s memory?”

“Aye.”

Harman shook his head. “You could have called that sonie up to the orbital isle any time.”

“Not true,” said the magus. “It was Savi’s machine and only makes orbital housecalls for humankind passengers. I do not qualify… quite.”

“Then how did Caliban escape?” asked Harman. “I know that it wasn’t in the sonie with Daeman, Hannah, and me.”

Prospero shrugged. “Caliban’s adventures are now solely Caliban’s concerns. The wretch no longer serves me.”

“He serves Setebos again,” said Harman.

“Yes.”

“But Caliban did survive and return to Earth after centuries.”

“Yes.”

Harman sighed and rubbed his hand over his face. He suddenly felt very tired and very thirsty.

“The wooden box beneath the mezzanine is a sort of cold-keeper,” said Prospero. “There is food in there… and bottles of pure water.”

Harman sat up straight. “Are you reading my mind, Magus?”

“No. Your face. There is no more obvious map than the human face. Go—get a drink. I will take a seat here by the window and await your return, refreshed, as interlocutor.”

Harman felt how shaky his legs and arms were as he walked to the large wooden box with the brass handle, then stared into the cold a minute at all the bottles of water and heaps of clear-wrapped food. He drank deeply.

Returning to the center of the red and tan carpet where Prospero sat at the table with the sunlight behind him, he said, “Why did you have Ariel bring me here?”

“Actually, in deference to accuracy, I had my biosphere sprite bring you to the jungle near Khajuraho since no faxing is allowed within twenty kilometers of the eiffelbahn.”

“Eiffelbahn?” repeated Harman, still sipping from the ice-cold water bottle. “Is that what you and Ariel call this tower?”

“No, no, my dear Harman. That is what we—or Khan Ho Tep, to be precise, since that gentleman built the eiffelbahn some millennia ago—called this system. This is just one of… oh, let me see… fourteen thousand eight hundred towers just like this.”

“Why so many?” asked Harman.

“It pleased the Khan,” said the magus. “And it takes that many Eiffel Towers to connect the cables from the east coast of China to the Atlantic Breach on the coast of Spain, what with all the trunk lines, spurs, side branches, and so forth.”

Harman had no idea what the old man was talking about. “The eiffelbahn is some sort of transport system?”

“An opportunity for you to travel in style for a change,” said Prospero. “Or I should say—for us to travel in style, for I shall travel with you for a small part of the way.”

“I’m not traveling anywhere with you until …” began Harman. Then he stopped, dropped the water bottle to the floor, and clutched the heavy table with both hands.

The entire two-story platform one thousand feet atop the tower had lurched. There was a grinding and tearing of metal, an horrendous screech, and then the entire structure tilted, lurched again, tilted further.

“The tower’s falling!” cried Harman. Beyond the many panes of glass in their elaborate iron frames, he could see the distant green horizon tilt, wobble, then tilt again.

“Not at all,” said Prospero.

The two-story living unit was falling—sliding right out of the tower, screeching and rending across dry metal as if giant metal hands were pushing it out into thin air.

Harman leaped to his feet, decided to run for the doorway on the mezzanine, but then fell to his hands and knees as the two-story unit fell free of the tower, dropped at least fifteen feet, and then jerked violently before beginning a slide to the west.

Heart pounding, Harman stayed on his knees while the huge living unit rocked perilously back and forth on its long axis, then steadied. Above them, the screeching turned into a high-decibal hum. Harman stood, found his balance, staggered to the table, and looked out the window.

The tower was to their left and receding, an open patch of sky visible where this two-story, one-thousand-foot-level apartment had been. Harman could see the cables overhead and now understood the hum to be connected with some sort of flywheel in the housing above them. The eiffelbahn was some sort of cablecar system and this large iron house of a structure was the car. The vertical line he’d seen to the east earlier had been another tower, just like the one they’d just left. And the car was moving quickly to the west.

He turned to Prospero and took a step closer but stopped before coming within range of the magus’s solid staff. “You have to let me get back to Ada,” he said, trying for firmness but hearing the detestable pleading whine in his voice. “The voynix are all around Ardis Hall. I can’t let her stay there in danger… without me. Please, Lord Prospero. Please.”

“It is too late for you to intercede there, Harman, friend of Noman,” said Prospero in his throaty, old-man’s voice. “What’s done is done at Ardis Hall. But let us put aside our sea-sorrow, sir, and not burden our remembrances with a heaviness that is gone. For we are embarked upon a new voyage now—surely the stuff of sea-change, friend of Noman—and one of us shall soon be the wiser, the deeper, fuller man, whilst our enemies—namely that darkness I bred and harbored out of Sycorax—shall drink of seawater and be forced to eat the withered roots of failure and the husks of scorn.”

43

There was a storm brewing on and around Mount Olympos. A planetary dust storm had blanketed Mars in a red shroud, the howling winds swirling around the forcefield aegis that the absent Zeus had left in place around the home of the gods. Electrostatic particles so excited the shield that lightning flashed day and night around the summit of Olympos and thunder rumbled in the subsonic. Sunlight near the top of the mountain was diffused into a dull, bloody glow, punctuated by sheets of lightning and the ever-present rumble of the wind and thunder.

Achilles—still carrying his beloved but dead Amazon queen, Penthesilea—had quantum teleported to the home of his captive, Hephaestus, god of fire, chief Artificer to all the gods, husband of Aglaia, also known as Charis—the “delightfulness of art,” one of the loveliest of Graces. Some said that the Artificer had built his wife as well.

Hephaestus had quantum teleported not directly into his home, but to its front door. To the casual glance the front of the crippled fire god’s home looked like other dwelling places of the immortals—white stone, white pillars, white portico—but this was only the entrance; in truth Hephaestus had built his house and extensive workshops into the steep south slope of Olympos, far from Caldera Lake and the cluster of so many of the gods’ huge temple-houses. He lived in a cave.

It was quite a cave, Achilles saw, as the foot-dragging Hephaestus led the way in and secured multiple iron doors behind them.

The cave had been carved out of the solid black stone of Olympos and this one room stretched away for hundreds of yards into the gloom. Everywhere were tables, arcane devices, magnifying lenses, tools, and machines in various stages of creation or dismembering. Deep in the cave roared an open hearth with liquid steel bubbling like orange lava. Closer to the front, where various stools, couches, low tables, a bed and braziers showed Hephaestus’s actual living space carved out of the endless workshop, stood, sat, and walked some gold women—Hephaestus’s infamous attendants—machine women with rivets, human eyes, metal breasts, and soft synthetic-flesh vaginas but also—so the tales said—with the stolen souls of human beings.

“You can lay her down here,” said the dwarf-god, gesturing to a littered benchtop. With one swipe of his hairy forearm, Hephaestus cleared the table.

Releasing his grip on the dwarf-god, Achilles laid his linen-wrapped burden down with the utmost gentleness and reverence.

Penthesilea’s face was visible and Hephaestus stared down for a minute. “She was beautiful, all right. And I can see Athena’s work in the preservation of the corpse. Several days since death obviously and no rot or discoloration at all. The Amazon still has a flush to her cheeks. Do you mind if I roll the linen down just to take a peek at her tits?”

“If you touch her or her shroud,” said Achilles, “I will kill you.”

Hephaestus held up his palms. “All right, all right. Just curious.” He slapped his palms together. “Food,” he said. “Then strategy to bring your lady back.”

The golden female attendants began bringing trays of hot food and large cups of wine to the round table at the center of Hephaestus’ circle of couches. Fleet-footed Achilles and hairy Hephaestus both dug in with a will, not speaking except to demand more food or for the communal wine cup to be passed.

The attendants brought steaming fried liver wrapped in lamb intestines as an appetizer—one of Achilles’ favorites. They carried in a complete roast piglet stuffed with the flesh of many small birds, raisins, chestnuts, egg yolks, and spiced meats. They set out bowls of pork stewed with bubbling apples and pears. They brought in pure delicacies such as roasted sow’s womb and olives with mashed chickpeas. For the main course they served huge fish fried to a crispy, flaky brown on the outside.

“Netted in Zeus’s own Caldera Lake atop Olympos,” Hephaestus said with his mouth full.

For dessert and to cleanse the palate between courses they had a variety of fruits, sweetmeats, and nuts. The golden metal women set out bowls of figs and heaps of almonds, more bowls of fat dates and flat plates of the kind of delicious honeycakes that Achilles had tasted only once before when visiting the small city of Athens. Finally came that dessert most loved by Agamemnon, Priam, and other kings of kings—cheesecake.

After the meal, the robot attendants swept the table and floor and brought in more casks and double-handed goblets of wine—ten types of wine at least. Hephaestus did the honor of mixing the water with the wine and passing the huge cups.

The dwarf-god and god-man drank for two hours but neither entered the state that Achilles’ people called paroinia—“intoxication frenzy.”

The two males were mostly silent, but the naked, golden, female attendants celebrated for them—lining up and dancing around the table in the sensuous conga line that aesthetes such as Odysseus called the komos.

The man and god took turns going off to use the cave’s toilet facilities, and when they were drinking wine again, Achilles said, “Is it night yet? Is it time for you to spirit me to the Healer’s Hall?”

“Do you really think that Olympos’ healing tanks will bring your Amazon doxie back to life, son of wet-breasted Thetis? Those tanks and worms were designed to repair immortals, not some human bitch—however beautiful.”

Achilles was too drunk and too distracted to take offense. “Goddess Athena told me that the tanks would renew life to Penthesilea and Athena does not lie.”

“Athena does nothing but lie,” snorted Hephaestus, lifting the huge two-handled cup and drinking deeply. “And a few days ago you were waiting at the foot of Olympos, throwing rocks at Zeus’s impenetrable aegis, howling for Athena to come down to fight so you could kill her just as surely as you stuck a spear through this Amazon’s lovely tit. What changed, O Noble Mankiller?”

Achilles frowned at the god of fire. “This Trojan War has been… complicated, Cripple.”

“I’ll drink to that,” laughed Hephaestus and lifted the big goblet again.

When they were ready to QT to the Healer’s Hall, Achilles dressed in full armor again, his sword sharpened on the fire god’s wheel and his shield polished, the son of Peleus walked to the bench to lift Penthe-silea’s body to his shoulder.

“No, leave her,” said Hephaestus.

“What are you talking about?” growled Achilles. “She’s the reason we’re going to the Healer’s Hall. I can’t leave her here.”

“We don’t know which of the gods or guards will be there tonight,” said the artificer. “You may have to fight your way through a phalanx. Do you want to do that with an Amazon’s corpse on your shoulder? Or were you planning to use her beautiful body as a shield?”

Achilles hesitated.

“There’s nothing here to harm her body,” said Hephaestus. “I used to have rats and bats and roaches, but I built mechanical cats and falcons and praying mantises to rid the cave of them.”

“Still…”

“If the Healer’s Hall is empty, it’ll take us three seconds to QT back here and fetch her corpse. In the meantime, I’ll have the golden girls watch over her,” said the artificer god. He snapped his stubby fingers and six of the metal attendants took up positions around the Amazon’s body. “Are you ready now?”

“Yes.”

Achilles gripped Hephaestus’ heavily scarred upper arm and the two men popped out of existence.

The Healer’s Hall was empty. No immortals were posted as guards. More surprising—even to Hephaestus—was that the many glass cylinders were empty. No gods were being healed and resurrected here tonight. In the huge space, lighted by only a few low-burning braziers and the violet light of the bubbling tanks themselves, nothing moved except the shuffling Hephaestus and the fleet-footed Achilles, shield held high.

Then the Healer emerged from the shadows of the bubbling vats.

Achilles raised his shield higher.

Athena had said to him over the corpse of Penthesilea—“Kill the Healer—a great, monstrous, centipede thing with too many arms and eyes. Destroy everything in the Healer’s Hall”—but Achilles had assumed that Athena was calling the healer a centipede out of insult, not as a literal description.

This thing had the segmented body of a centipede, but it rose thirty feet high, its segmented body swaying, its body-circling rings of black eyes on the top segment locked on Achilles and Hephaestus. The Healer had feelers and segmented arms—too many—and spindly hands with spidery fingers on the ends of half a dozen of those upper arms. One body segment near the top wore a vest of many pockets, bulging with tools, and there were straps and bands and black belts holding other tools on other segments of the swaying torso.

“Healer,” called Hephaestus, “where is everybody?”

The huge centipede swayed, waggled arms, and erupted in a stutter of noise from unseen mouths.

“Did you understand that?” Hephaestus asked Achilles.

“Understand what? It sounded like a boy running a stick along the rib cage of a skeleton.”

“It’s all good Greek,” said Hephaestus. “You just have to slow it down in your mind, listen more carefully.” To the Healer, the dwarf-god cried, “My mortal friend did not understand you. Could you repeat that, O Healer?”

“LordGodZeus’sOrdersAreThatNoMortalShallEverBePlaced InOneOfTheRegenerationTanksWithoutHisExpressCommand.The LordGodMasterZeusIsNowhereToBeFound.AndSinceHisCommand OnlyOnOlymposDoesTheHealerObeyICannotAllowAMortalToPass UntilZeusReturnsToHisThroneOnOlympos.”

“Did you understand that?” the artificer asked Achilles.

“Something about this thing obeying only Zeus and not allowing Penthesilea to be put into one of the vats without Zeus’s express command?”

“Precisely.”

“I can kill this big bug,” said Achilles.

“Perhaps so,” said Hephaestus. “Although the Healer is whispered to be even more immortal than we johnny-come-lately gods. But if you kill it, Penthesilea will never be brought back to life. Only the Healer knows how to operate the machinery and command the blue and green worms that are part of the healing process.”

“You’re the Artificer,” said Achilles, tapping his sword against the rim of his golden shield. “You must know how to operate this machinery.”

“The fuck I do,” growled Hephaestus. “This isn’t simple technology like we used when we were mere post-humans. I could never figure out the Healer’s quantum machines… and if I did, I still couldn’t order the blue worms to work. I think they respond only to telepathy and only to the Healer.”

“This bug said that he only obeyed Zeus on Olympos,” said Achilles, who was perilously close to losing his temper and killing the god of fire, the giant centipede, and every god still left on Olympos. “Who else can command it?”

“Kronos,” said Hephaestus with a maddening smile. “But Kronos and the other Titans have been banished to Tartarus forever. Only Zeus in this universe can tell the Healer what to do.”

“Then where is Zeus?”

“No one knows,” growled Hephaestus, “but in his absence the gods are warring with one another for control. The fighting is now mostly centered down on Ilium’s Earth, where the gods still support their Trojans or their Greeks, and Olympos is largely empty and peaceful now—it’s why I ventured out onto this fucking volcano’s slopes to survey the damage to my escalator.”

“Why would Athena give me this god-killing knife and order me to kill the Healer after the thing brings Penthesilea back to life?” asked Achilles.

Hephaestus’ eyes widened. “She told you to kill the Healer?” The bearded dwarf-god’s voice was low and puzzled. “I have no idea why she would order such a thing. She has some scheme, but it must be a mad one. With the Healer dead, the vats here would be useless… all of our immortality would be a joke. We could live a very long time, but we would suffer, son of Peleus. Suffer terribly without nano-rejuvenation.”

Achilles strode toward the Healer, pulling his famous shield tight until his eyes blazed through the slits of his shining war helmet. He pulled back his sword. “I’ll make this thing activate the vats for Penthesilea.”

Hephaestus hurried forward to grab Achilles’ arm. “No, my mortal friend. Believe me when I say that the Healer does not fear death and it will not be moved. It obeys only Zeus. Without the fucking Healer, the blue worms will not perform. Without the fucking blue worms, the vats are useless. Without the fucking vats, your Amazon queen will stay fucking dead forfuckingever.”

Achilles angrily shook off the artificer’s hand. “This… bug… has to put Penthesilea in the healing vats.” Even while he was saying this, Achilles again is reminded of Athena’s command for him to kill the Healer. What is that bitch-goddess up to? How is she using me? To what purpose? She’s not insane and she certainly has no intention of killing the one creature who can preserve her immortality.

“The Healer does not fear you, son of Peleus. You can kill it, but that only means you will never see your queen alive again.”

Achilles walked away from the dwarf-god, brushed past the huge Healer, and slammed his beautiful shield—with all its hammered concentric circles of symbols—hard into the clear plastic of the huge regeneration tank. The sound echoed in the dim darkness of the hall.

He swung back to Hephaestus. “All right. This bug obeys Zeus. Where is Zeus?”

The god of fire began to laugh and then stopped when he saw Achilles’ eyes blazing out through his helmet’s eyeslits. “You’re serious? Your plan is to bend the God of Thunder, the Father of All Gods to your will?”

“Where is Zeus?”

“No one knows,” repeated Hephaestus. The crippled god walked toward the tall doors, dragging his shorter leg behind. Lightning flashed outside as the dust storm made the forcefield aegis spark in a thousand places. The pillars cut columns of black out of the silver-white light flooding into the Hall of the Healer. “Zeus has been absent these two weeks and more,” shouted the fire god over his shoulder. He tugged at his tangled beard. “Most of us suspect some fucking plot of Hera’s. Maybe she threw her husband down into the hellpit of Tartarus to join his vanished father Kronos and mother Rhea.”

“Can you find him?” Achilles turned his back on the Healer and slid his sword into its loop on his broad girdle. He swung his heavy shield over his back. “Can you take me to him?”

Hephaestus could only stare. “You’d go down into Tartarus to try to bend the God of Gods to your mortal will? There’s only one life form in the pantheon of the original gods besides Zeus who might know where he is. That terrible power also is the only other immortal here on Mars who could send us to Tartarus. You would go to Tartarus if you had to?”

“I’d pass through the teeth of death and back again to bring life back to my Amazon,” Achilles said softly.

“You’d find Tartarus a thousand times worse than death and the shaded halls of Hades, son of Peleus.”

“Take me to this immortal of which you speak,” commanded Achilles. His eyes through the eyeslits of his helmet were not quite sane.

For a long minute the bearded artificer stood hunched over, panting slightly, eyes unfocused, his hand still tugging absently at his tangled beard. Then he said, “So be it,” dragged his bad leg across the polished marble more rapidly than seemed possible, and clasped both huge hands around Achilles’ forearm.

44

Harman hadn’t meant to sleep. As exhausted as he was, he’d agreed only to eat and drink something, warming up an excellent stew and eating it at the table by the window while Prospero sat silently in the overstuffed armchair. The magus was reading out of a huge, worn, leatherbound book.

When Harman turned to talk to Prospero again, to demand in stronger terms that he be returned to Ardis, the old man was gone and so was the book. Harman had sat at the table for some minutes, only half-aware of the jungle rolling by nine hundred feet below the moving, creaking, house-sized cablecar. Then—just to look at the upstairs again, he told himself—he’d dragged himself up the iron spiral staircase, stood looking at the large bed for a minute, and then had collapsed on it face-first.

When he awoke it was night. Moonlight and ringlight flooded through the panes into the strange bedroom, painting velvet and brass in light so rich it appeared to be stripes of white paint. Harman opened the doors and stepped out onto the bedroom terrace.

The air was cool almost a thousand feet above the jungle floor, the breeze constant due to the motion of the cablecar, but he still was struck by the humidity, heat, and organic scents of all the green life below. The top of the jungle canopy was almost unbroken, whitewashed with ring-light and moonlight from the three-quarters moon, and occasional strange sounds wafted up, audible even over the steady hum of the flywheels above and the creak of the long cable. Harman took a minute to orient himself by the e—and p-rings.

He was sure that the car had been headed west when they’d left the first tower hours earlier—he’d slept for ten hours, at least—but now there was no doubt that the cablecar was lumbering north-northeast. He could see the moonlight-illuminated tip of one of the eiffelbahn towers just showing over the horizon to the southwest, from the direction he must have come, and another coming closer less than twenty miles to the northeast. Somewhere, while he slept, the car he was traveling in must have changed direction at a tower junction. Harman’s knowledge of geography was all self-taught, gleaned from books he’d taught himself to read—and he was quite sure that until recent months he was the only old-style human on Earth who had any sense of geography, any knowledge that the earth was a globe—but he’d never paid much attention to this arrow-shaped subcontinent south of what used to be called Asia. Still, it didn’t take a cartographer’s knowledge to know that if Prospero had been telling the truth—if his destination was the coast of Europe where the Atlantic Breach began along the 40th Parallel—then he was going the wrong way.

It didn’t matter. Harman had no intention of staying in this odd device the necessary weeks or months it would take to travel all that distance. Ada needed him now.

He paced the length of the balcony, occasionally grabbing the railing when the cablecar-house rocked slightly. It was on his third turn that he noticed an iron-rung ladder running up the side of the structure just beyond the railing. Harman swung out, grasped a rung, and pulled himself onto the ladder. There was nothing beneath him and the ground now but a thousand feet of air and jungle canopy.

The ladder led onto the roof of the cablecar. Harman swung himself up, legs pinioning for a second before he found a handhold and pulled himself onto the flat roof.

He stood carefully, arms extended for balance when the cablecar rocked as it began climbing a ridgeline toward the blinking lights of an eiffelbahn tower now only ten miles or so ahead. Beyond the next tower, a range of mountains had just become visible on the horizon, their snowy peaks almost brilliant in the moonlight and ringlight.

Exhilarated by the night and sense of speed, Harman noticed something. There was a faint shimmering about three feet out from the leading edge of the cable car, a slight blurring of the moon, rings, and vista below. He walked to that edge and extended his hand as far as possible.

There was a forcefield there, not a powerful one—his fingers pressed through it as if pushing through a resistant but permeable membrane, reminding Harman of the entrance to the Firmary on Prospero’s orbital isle—but strong enough to deflect the wind from the blunt and non-aerodynamic side of the cablecar-house. With his fingers beyond the forcefield, he could feel the true force of the wind, enough to bend his hand back. This thing was moving faster than he’d thought.

After a half hour or so of pacing and standing on the roof, listening to the cables hum, watching the next eiffelbahn tower approach, and working out strategies to get back to Ada, Harman went hand over hand down the rung-ladder, jumped onto the balcony, and reentered the house.

Prospero was waiting for him on the first floor. The magus was in the same armchair, his robed legs not up on the ottoman, the large book open on his lap and his staff near his right hand.

“What do you want from me?” asked Harman.

Prospero looked up. “I see, young sir, that you are as disproportionate in your manners as our mutual friend Caliban is in his shape.”

“What do you want of me?” repeated Harman, his hands balling into fists.

“It is time for you to go to war, Harman of Ardis.”

“Go to war?”

“Yes. Time for your kind to fight. Your kind, your kin, your species, your ilk—yourself.”

“What are you talking about? War with whom?”

“With what might be a better phrasing,” said Prospero.

“Are you talking about the voynix? We’re already fighting them. I brought Noman-Odysseus to the Bridge at Machu Picchu primarily to fetch more weapons.”

“Not the voynix, no,” said Prospero. “Nor the calibani, although all these slave-things have been tasked to kill your kin and kind, the minutes of their plot come ‘round at last. I am speaking of the Enemy.”

“Setebos?” said Harman.

“Oh, yes.” Prospero placed his aged hand on the broad page of the book, set a long leaf in as a bookmark, closed the book gently, and rose, leaning on his staff. “Setebos, the many-handed as a cuttlefish, is here at last, on your world and mine.”

“I know that. Daeman saw the thing in Paris Crater. Setebos has woven some blue-ice web over that faxnode and a dozen others, including Chom and…”

“And do you know why the many-handed has come now to Earth?” interrupted Prospero.

“No,” said Harman.

“To feed,” Prospero said softly. “To feed.”

“On us?” Harman felt the cablecar slow, then bump, and he noticed the next eiffelbahn tower surrounding them for a second, the two-story structure of the car fitting into the landing on the thousand-foot level just as it had on the first tower. He felt the car swivel, heard gears grind and clank, and they slid out of the tower on a different heading, traveling more east than north now. “Has Setebos come to feed on us?” he asked again.

Prospero smiled. “Not exactly. Not directly.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means, young Harman human, that Setebos is a ghoul. Our many-handed friend feeds on the residues of fear and pain, the dark energy of sudden terror and rich residue of equally sudden death. This memory of terror lies in the soil of your world—of any warlike sentient creatures’ world—like so much coal or petroleum, all of a lost era’s wild energy sleeping underground.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It means that Setebos, the Devourer of Worlds, that Gourmet of Dark History, has secured some of your faxnodes in blue stasis, yes—to lay his eggs, to send his seed out across your world, to suck the warmth out of these places like a succubus sucking breath from a sleeping soul—but it’s your memory and your history that will fatten him like a many-handed blood tick.”

“I still don’t understand,” said Harman.

“His nest now is in Paris Crater, Chom, and these other provincial places where you humans party and sleep and waste your useless lives away,” said Prospero, “but he will feed at Waterloo, HoTepsa, Stalingrad, Ground Zero, Kursk, Hiroshima, Saigon, Rwanda, Cape Town, Montreal, Gettysburg, Riyadh, Cambodia, Khanstaq, Chancellorsville, Okinawa, Tarawa, My Lai, Bergen Belsen, Auschwitz, the Somme—do any of these names mean anything to you, Harman?”

“No.”

Prospero sighed. “This is our problem. Until some fragment of your human race regains the memory of your race, you cannot fight Setebos, you cannot understand Setebos. You cannot understand yourselves.”

“Why is that your problem, Prospero?”

The old man sighed again. “If Setebos eats the human pain and memory of this world—an energy resource I call umana—this world will be physically alive but spiritually dead to any sentient being… including me.”

“Spiritually dead?” repeated Harman. He knew the word from his reading and sigling—spirit, spiritual, spirituality—vague ideas having to do with ancient myths of ghosts and religion—it just made no sense coming from this hologram of a logosphere avatar, the too-cute construct of some set of ancient software programs and communication protocols.

“Spiritually dead,” repeated the magus. “Psychically, philosophically, organically dead. On the quantum level, a living world records the most sentient energies its inhabitants experience, Harman of Ardis—love, hate, fear, hope. Like particles of magnetite aligning to a north or south pole. The poles may change, wander, disappear, but the recordings remain. The resulting energy field is as real—although more difficult to measure and locate—as the magnetosphere a planet with a hot spinning core produces, protecting the living inhabitants with its forcefield from the harshest realities of space. So does the memory of pain and suffering protect the future of a sentient race. Does this make sense to you?”

“No,” said Harman.

Prospero shrugged. “Then take my word for it. If you ever want to see Ada alive again, you will have to learn… much. Perhaps too much. But after this learning, you will at least be able to join the fight. There may be no hope—there usually is none when Setebos begins devouring a world’s memory—but at least we can fight.”

“Why do you care?” asked Harman. “What difference does it make to you whether human beings survive? Or their memories?”

Prospero smiled thinly. “What do you take me for? Do you think I am a mere function of old e-mails, the icon of an ancient Internet with a staff and robe?”

“I don’t know what the hell you are,” said Harman. “A hologram.”

Prospero took a step closer and slapped Harman hard across the face.

Harman took a step back, gaping. He raised his hand to his stinging cheek, balled that hand into a fist.

Prospero smiled and held his staff between them. “If you don’t want to wake up on the floor ten minutes from now with the worst headache of your life, don’t think about it.”

“I want to go home to Ada,” Harman said slowly.

“Did you try to find her with your functions?” asked the magus.

Harman blinked. “Yes.”

“And did any of your functions work here on the cablecar, or in the jungle before it?”

“No,” said Harman.

“Nor will they work until you’ve mastered the rest of the functions you command,” said the old man, returning to his chair and carefully lowering himself into it.

“The rest of the functions …” began Harman. “What do you mean?”

“How many functions have you mastered?” asked Prospero.

“Five,” said Harman. One had been known to everyone for ages—the Finder Function, which included a chronometer—but Savi had taught them three others. Then he had discovered the fifth.

“Recite them.”

Harman sighed. “Finder function—proxnet, farnet, allnet, and sigling—reading through one’s palm.”

“And have you mastered the allnet function, Harman of Ardis?”

“Not really.” There was too much information, too much bandwidth, as Savi had said.

“And do you think that old-style humans—the real old-style humans, your undesigned and unmodified ancestors—had five such functions, Harman of Ardis?”

“I… I don’t know.” He’d never thought about it.

“They did not,” Prospero said flatly. “You are the result of four thousand years of gene-tampering and nanotech splicing. How did you discover the sigl function, Harman of Ardis?”

“I… just experimented with mental images, triangles, squares, circles, until one worked,” said Harman.

“That’s what you told Ada and the others,” said Prospero, “but that is a lie. How did you really learn to sigl?”

“I dreamt the sigl function code,” admitted Harman. It had been too strange—too precious—to tell the others.

“Ariel helped you with that dream,” said Prospero, his thin-lipped smile showing again. “We grew impatient. Would you like to guess how many functions each of you—every one of you ‘old-style humans’—has in your cells and blood and brainstuff?”

“More than five functions?” asked Harman.

“One hundred,” said Prospero. “An even hundred.”

“Teach them to me,” said Harman, taking a step toward the magus.

Prospero shook his head. “I cannot. I would not. But you need to learn them nonetheless. On this voyage you will learn them.”

“We’re going the wrong way,” said Harman.

“What?”

“You said the eiffelbahn would take me to the coast of Europe where the Atlantic Breach begins, but we’re heading east now, away from Europe.”

“We will swing north again two towers hence,” said Prospero. “Are you impatient to arrive?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be,” said the magus. “All the learning will happen during the trip, not after it. Yours will be the sea change of all sea changes. And trust me, you do not want to take the short route—over the old Pakistan passes into the waste called Afghanistan, south along the Mediterranean Basin and across the Sahara Marshes.”

“Why not?” said Harman. He and Savi and Daeman had flown east across the Atlantic and then over the Sahara Marshes to Jerusalem, then taken a crawler into the dry Mediterranean Basin. It was a place on Earth he knew. And he wanted to see if the blue tachyon beam still rose from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Savi had said it carried all of the coded information of all her lost contemporaries from fourteen hundred years ago.

“The calibani are loosed,” said Prospero.

“They’ve left the Basin?”

“They are freed of their old restraints, the center cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Or at least upon that part of it.”

“Then where are we going?”

“Patience, Harman of Ardis. Patience. Tomorrow we cross a mountain range I believe you will find most enlightening. Then into Asia—where you may behold the works of the mighty and the dead—and then west and west enough again. The Breach will wait.”

“Too slow,” said Harman, pacing back and forth. “Too long. If the functions don’t work here, I don’t have any way of knowing how Ada is. I need to go. I need to get home.”

“You want to know how your Ada fares?” asked Prospero. He was not smiling. The magus pointed to a red cloth draped over the couch. “Use that. This one time only.”

Harman frowned, went to the cloth, studied it. “A turin cloth?” he said. It was red—all turin cloths were tan. Nor was the microcircuit embroidery the same.

“There are a myriad of turin-cloth receivers,” said Prospero. “Just as there are a myriad of sensory transmitters. Every person can be one.”

Harman shook his head. “I don’t give a damn about the turin drama—Troy, Agamemnon, all that nonsense. I’m not in the mood for amusements.”

“This cloth tells you nothing of Ilium,” said Prospero. “It will show you your Ada’s fate. Try it.”

Trembling, Harman sat back on the couch, adjusted the red cloth over his face, touched the embroidery to his forehead, and closed his eyes.

45

The Queen Mab decelerated toward Earth on a column of nuclear explosions, the ship kicking out a Coke-can-sized fission bomb every thirty seconds, the bomb exploding and driving the pusher plate back up to the stern of the thousand-foot-long ship, the huge pistons and cylinders in the clockwork engine room cycling back and forth, the next can-bomb being ejected…

Mahnmut was watching on the stern video channel. If anyone on Earth didn’t know we were coming, they must know now, he said to Orphu on their tightbeam channel. The two had been invited to the bridge for the first time on the voyage and they were in the largest lift now, rising toward the bow of the ship—which during deceleration, of course, was aiming back toward space rather than at the rapidly growing Earth.

I don’t think the idea is to be subtle, tightbeamed Orphu.

Obviously not. But this is about as subtle as a stomach pump, about as subtle as a pay toilet in the diarrhea ward, about as subtle as…

Do you have a point? rumbled Orphu.

It’s too unsubtle, said Mahnmut. Too obvious. Too visible. Too precious—I mean, mid-Twentieth Century spaceship designs, for God’s sake. Fission bombs. Ejection mechanisms from the Atlanta, Georgia, Coca-Cola bottling plant circa 1959…

So your point is? interrupted Orphu. In the old days, his eye-stalks and video cameras would have tracked toward Mahnmut—some of them, at least—but those had not been replaced since his optic nerves had been burned out.

I have to assume that less obvious moravec ships—modern ships, stealth-activated and stealth-propelled ships—are following us, sent Mahnmut.

That has been my assumption as well, said the big hard-vac moravec.

You never mentioned it.

Nor have you, until now, said Orphu.

Why didn’t Asteague/Che and the other Prime Integrators tell us? asked Mahnmut. If we’re being put out ahead of the real fleet as the obvious target, we have a right to know.

Orphu sent a subsonic rumble that Mahnmut had learned was the Ionian’s equivalent of a shrug. It wouldn’t make any difference, would it? said the big moravec. If the Earth defenses fire on us and breach our rather modest forcefield defenses, we’ll be dead before we have time to complain.

Speaking of Earth defenses, has the voice from the orbital city said anything else since the message two weeks ago? The maser broadcast had been succinct; the recorded female-human voice had simply said “Bring Odysseus to me” over and over for twenty-four hours and then had cut off as quickly as it had begun. The message had not been broadcast at random—it had been aimed precisely at the Queen Mab.

I’ve been monitoring the incoming channels, said Orphu, and I haven’t heard anything new.

The lift whirred and stopped. The broad cargo doors opened. Mahnmut stepped onto the bridge for the first time since before their launch from Phobos and Orphu repellored after him.

The bridge was circular with a diameter of thirty meters, the ceiling dome-shaped and ringed with thick windows and holographic screens serving as windows. From a spaceship-spaceship point of view, it was almost completely satisfying to Mahnmut. Although the unnamed spacecraft that had brought Orphu, the late Koros III and Ri Po, and him to Mars had been centuries more advanced—accelerated to one-fifth light speed by magnetic scissors accelerator wickets, carrying a boron light sail, fusion engines, and other modern moravec devices—this strangely retro atomic spaceship and spaceship grid looked… right. Instead of purely virtual controls and simple jack-in stations, more than a dozen tech moravecs sat in old-fashioned acceleration chairs at even more old-fashioned metal and glass monitoring stations. There were actual switches, real toggles, physical dials—dials!—and a hundred other eye—and vid-camera-pleasing details. The floor looked to be of textured steel, perhaps lifted straight out of the hull of some World War II–era seagoing battleship.

The usual suspects—Orphu’s irreverent term—stood awaiting them near the central navigation table: Asteague/Che their central Prime Integrator from Europa, General Beh bin Adee representing the Belt fighter-moravecs, Cho Li their Callistan navigator (looking and sounding far too much like the dead Ri Po for Mahnmut’s comfort), Suma IV the brawny, buckycarbon-sheathed fly-eyed Ganymedan, and the spidery Retrograde Sinopessen.

Mahnmut walked closer to the map table and stepped up onto the metal ledge that allowed smaller moravecs to look down upon the glowing table surface. Mahnmut floated over.

“We have a little less than fourteen hours until low-Earth orbital insertion,” said Asteague/Che without greetings or introductions. His voice—that James Mason voice to Mahnmut’s Lost Era history-vid-trained ears and audio receivers—was smooth but businesslike. “We have to decide what to do.”

The Prime Integrator was vocalizing rather than transmitting on the common band. The bridge was pressurized to Earth normal—an atmospheric content the Europan moravecs liked and the others could tolerate—and audible speech was more private than common band chatter and less conspiratorial than tightbeaming.

“Have there been any more broadcasts from that woman asking us to deliver Odysseus?” asked Orphu.

“No,” said Cho Li, the bulky Callistan navigator. Cho Li’s voice, as always, was very, very soft. “But the orbital construction that was the source of that broadcast is our destination.”

Cho Li ran a manipulator tentacle over the map table and a large hologram of Earth appeared. The equatorial and polar rings were very bright, countless specks of light moving west to east along the equator and north to south around the poles.

“This is a live video feed,” said the tiny little silver box amidst the skinny little silver legs that comprised the Amalthean Retrograde Sinopessen.

“I can read the data bars via the common channel,” said Orphu of Io. “And I can ‘see’ all of you on my radar return and infrared scans. But there may be subtle aspects of the holo projections that I miss—being blind and all.”

“I’ll give a description via tightbeam of everything I see,” said Mahnmut. He connected via tightbeam and set up a high-speed squirt feed to the Ionian, describing the holographic image of the blue and white Earth hanging in space above the chart table, the bright polar and equatorial rings crisscrossing above the oceans and clouds. The rings were close enough that countless discrete objects could be seen gleaming against the black of space.

“Magnification?” asked Orphu.

“Just ten,” said Sinopessen. “Small binoculars level. We’re approaching the orbit of Earth’s Moon—although right now Luna is on the backside of the planet from us. We’ll cease use of the fission bombs and switch to ion drive as we enter their cislunar space—no reason to antagonize anyone there. Our velocity is down to ten kilometers per second and dropping. You may have noticed our one-point-two-five Earth-g deceleration the last two days.”

“How has Odysseus been taking the added g-load?” asked Mahnmut. He’d not seen their only remaining human passenger over the past week. Mahnmut had hoped that Hockenberry would QT back to the Queen Mab, but so far he hadn’t.

“Fine,” rumbled Suma IV, the tall Ganymedan. “He tends to stay in his bunk and quarters more than usual, but he was doing that before we raised the deceleration g-load.”

“Has he said anything about the female voice on the maser—or the ‘Bring Odysseus to me’ message?” asked Orphu.

“No,” said Asteague/Che. “He has told us that he doesn’t recognize the voice—that he’s sure it doesn’t belong to Athena, Aphrodite, or any of the Olympian immortals he’s met.”

“Where did the broadcast come from?” Mahnmut asked.

Cho Li activated a laser pen embedded in one of his manipulators and pointed out the speck in the polar ring, currently approaching the south pole on the backside of the transparent Earth holo. “Magnify,” the navigator ordered the Mab’s main AI.

The speck seemed to leap forward until it replaced the entire Earth hologram. It was a roughly dumbbell-shaped city of metal girders, opaque orange glass and light: tall glass towers, glass bubbles, glass domes, convoluted glass spires and arches. Mahnmut summarized it all in his tightbeam descriptions to Orphu.

“This is one of the larger artificial objects in Earth orbit,” said Retrograde Sinopessen. “About twenty kilometers long, roughly the size of their Lost Era city of Manhattan before it was flooded. It seems to be built around a stone and heavy metal core—probably a captured aster-oid—that gives—or gave—a little gravity to the inhabitants.”

“How much?” asked Orphu or Io.

“Roughly ten centimeters per second,” said the Almathean. “Enough that a human—or unmodified post-human—wouldn’t float away or be able to achieve escape velocity by jumping, but light enough to float pretty much where you want to.”

“Pretty close to Phobos’ size and gravity,” said Mahnmut. “Any clue who the voice belongs to or who lives there?”

“The post-humans built these orbital environments more than two thousand standard years ago,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “You both know that we assumed the post-humans had died out—their radio chatter stopped more than a millennia ago even as the quantum flux between Earth and Mars began to build, we haven’t seen their ships in cislunar space through our telescopes, there’s been no sign of them on Earth itself—but we can’t preclude the possibility that a few have survived. Or evolved.”

“Into what?” asked Orphu.

Asteague/Che performed that most archaic, arcane, yet expressive of human motions—he shrugged. Mahnmut started to describe the other Europan’s shrug to his friend but Orphu tightbeamed that he’d picked it up on both radar and infrared sensors.

“Let me show you some recent activity before we decide if you’re going to drop The Dark Lady into Earth’s atmosphere,” continued Asteague/Che. He set one very humanoid hand above the chart table.

The orbital island hologram was replaced with holos showing Earth and Mars, in scale of size but not in distance, with a myriad of blue, green, and white strands connecting Near-Earth-Orbit and the surface of Mars. Columns of holographic data misted into existence. The two planets looked as if they’d been woven into a spider’s frenzied web, except in this case the web itself pulsed and grew, strands contracting and expanding, extruding new strands and nodes as if of their own volition. Mahnmut rushed to describe it all on the tightbeam channel.

It’s all right, transmitted Orphu. I’m reading the databands. It’s almost as good as seeing the graphics.

“This is quantum activity of the past ten standard days,” said Cho Li. “You’ll note that it’s almost ten percent more volatile and active than when we launched from Phobos. The instability is reaching a critical stage…”

“How critical?” asked Orphu of Io.

Asteague/Che turned his visored face toward the big Ionian. “Critical enough that we have to make a decision in the next week or so. Less time if the volatility continues to grow. This level of quantum instability threatens the entire solar system.”

“What decision?” asked Mahnmut.

“Whether to destroy the Earth’s polar and equatorial rings where the quantum flux originated, also whether to cauterize Olympus Mons and the other quantum nodes on Mars,” said General Beh bin Adee. “And to sterilize the Earth itself if need be.”

Orphu whistled, an odd sound on the echoing bridge. “Does the Queen Mab have such a military capability?” the Ionian asked softly.

“No,” said the general.

I guess I was right about the invisible moravec ships shadowing us, thought Mahnmut.

On the tightbeam, Orphu sent—I guess we were right about the invisible moravec ships shadowing us. If Mahnmut had had eyelids, he would have blinked at this similarity in their thought patterns

A silence descended. None of the six moravecs around the chart table spoke or transmitted again for almost a minute.

“There are more developments to share with you,” Suma IV said at last. The buckycarbon-sheathed Ganymedan touched controls and a different, magnified telescopic view of Earth leapt into place. Mahnmut recognized what had once been called the British Isles—Shakespeare!—and then the view zoomed in on the continent of Europe. Two images filled the holocube—an odd city radiating out from a black crater and then what might have been the same city, sheathed in a blue web not so dissimilar from the view of the quantum displacement between Earth and Mars. He described the blue mass to his friend.

“What the hell is it?” asked Orphu.

“We don’t know,” said Suma IV, “but it’s appeared in the last seven standard days. These coordinates match those of the ancient city of Paris in the nation of France, but where our astronomers from Phobos and Martian space had been observing old-style human activity—primitive but visible—now there is just this blue dome, blue webs, blue spires surrounding what was obviously an old black-hole crater.”

“What could be spinning that web?” asked Mahnmut.

“Again, we don’t know,” said Suma IV. “But look at the measurements coming from inside it.”

Orphu did not whistle this time, but Mahnmut felt the urge to. Temperatures in the blue-webbed parts of Paris had dropped below minus 100 degrees Celsius, where, just meters away, the temperatures still hovered near Earth normal for that region and time of the year, while just meters away from that, the temperature spiked to levels where lead would melt.

“Could this be a natural phenomenon?” asked Mahnmut. “Something the post-humans brought about during the Demented Times when they were fooling with Earth’s ecology and life forms?”

“We’ve never seen or recorded anything like this before,” said Asteague/Che. “And we’ve never stopped monitoring Earth from Consortium space. But look at this.”

A dozen other blue-marked locations appeared in the holocube map, which pulled back until it was a large Earth sphere again. Blue-webbed sites were marked elsewhere in Europe, in Asia, in what had been South America, southern Africa—a dozen in total. Next to the blue circles were data cubes recording measurements similar to the Paris phenomenon, with notes on the day, hour, minute, and second that the blue web had appeared to moravec sensors. Mahnmut raced to tightbeam the image descriptions to Orphu.

“And this,” said Asteague/Che.

Another sphere of Earth appeared showing straight blue lines rising from Paris and the other blue nodes, including one city marked Jerusalem. The thin blue shafts continued straight into space, disappearing beyond the solar system.

“Well, we’ve seen that before,” said Orphu of Io after Mahnmut described it to him. “It’s the same kind of tachyon beam that appeared at Delphi on the other Earth, the ancient Earth of Ilium, when the population disappeared.”

“Yes,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“That beam didn’t seem to be aimed at anything in deep space,” said Mahnmut. “Are these?”

“Not unless you count grazing the Lesser Magellanic Clouds,” said Cho Li. “Plus, there is a quantum component to these tachyon beams.”

“What does that mean—‘quantum component’?” asked Orphu.

“The beams phase-shift on the quantum level, existing more in Calabi-Yau space than in four-dimensional Einsteinian spacetime,” said the Callistan navigator.

“You mean,” said Mahnmut, “they’re shifting into a different universe.”

“Yes.”

“The Ilium-Earth’s universe?” asked Mahnmut. His tone was hopeful. When the last Brane Hole that had connected the current-Mars and Ilium-Earth universes had collapsed weeks earlier, the moravecs had lost all communication with that ancient Earth of Troy and Agamemnon, but Hockenberry had been able to quantum teleport across the Calabi-Yau universe-membrane to the Queen Mab—and presumably to QT back, although no one knew where he’d gone when he’d teleported off the atomic spaceship. Mahnmut, who knew many of the Greeks and Trojans, had hopes of reconnecting to that universe once again.

“We don’t think so,” said Cho Li. “The reasons are as complicated as the multiple-membrane Calabi-Yau space math our assumptions are based on and are guided by what we learned from the Device you successfully activated on Mars eight months ago, but we think the tachyon beam’s phase-shifting is to one or more different universes, not that of the Ilium-Earth.”

Mahnmut spread his hands. “So what does all this have to do with our mission to Earth? I was supposed to pilot The Dark Lady in Earth’s seas or oceans, bringing Suma IV down for his mission—just as I was supposed to bring the late Ri Po to Olympus Mons last year. Does the blue-web stuff and the tachyon beams change that plan?”

There was another silence.

“The dangers and cautionary unknowns of an atmospheric penetration are proliferating,” said Suma IV.

“Could you translate that?” said Orphu of Io.

“Observe, please,” said the tall Ganymedan.

A holographic astronomical recording began running above the chart table. Mahnmut described the visuals to Orphu on tightbeam.

“Please note the date,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“That’s more than eight months ago,” said Mahnmut.

“Yes,” said the Europan Integrator. “Shortly after we used the Brane Holes to transit to Mars-Ilium space. You notice that the resolution is relatively poor compared to today’s observations of the orbital rings. This is because we were observing from Phobos Base.”

The visuals showed an orbital object similar to the one that had broadcast the message to the Queen Mab, but not quite the same. This asteroid was visible as a slowly rotating rock, albeit one with glowing glass towers, domes, and structures. This orbital object was smaller—less than two kilometers in length. Suddenly another object came into the visual range of the recording—a three-kilometer-long metal construct rather like a long silver wand, clustered about with girders, storage tanks, and fuel cylinders, the column ending in a bulbous, shimmering sphere. Thrusters were firing but Mahnmut didn’t believe the thing was merely a spacecraft.

“What the hell is that?” asked Orphu after hearing Mahnmut’s description and reading the data.

“An orbital linear accelerator with a wormhole collector at its snout,” said Asteague/Che. “Notice that someone—or something—on the asteroid city has sent masered commands to this unmanned linear accelerator, overriding countless safety protocols, and is driving it right toward the asteroid.”

“Why?” asked Orphu.

No one answered. The five moravecs watched and Orphu listened as the long, girdered orbital machine continued accelerating until it crashed into the asteroid island. Asteague/Che slowed the recording. The glowing towers and domes exploded and flew apart in extreme slow motion, then the asteroid itself broke up as the wormhole accumulator at the end of the linear accelerator exploded with the force of countless hydrogen bombs. There came a final series of slow-motion, silent explosions as the fuel tanks, thrusters, and main drive engines of the linear accelerator ignited themseves.

“Now watch,” said Suma IV.

A second telescopic view, then a radar plot, joined the holographic explosions. Mahnmut tightbeamed a description of the blaze of thruster tails from throughout the plane of the equatorial orbital ring as dozens, then hundreds of small spacecraft hurried toward the exploding orbital asteroid.

“What’s the scale on those?” asked Orphu.

“They’re each about six meters long by three meters wide,” said Cho Li.

“Unmanned,” said Orphu. “Moravecs?”

“More like the servitors the humans used centuries ago,” said Asteague/Che. “Simple AI’s with one purpose, as you will see.”

Mahnmut saw. And he described what he saw to Orphu. The hundreds, then thousands of tiny devices rushing toward the expanding asteroid and accelerator debris field were little more than high-powered lasers each with a brain and aiming device. The recording fast-forwarded through the next hours with the servitor-lasers scooting through, under, and over the debris field, zapping every piece of asteroid or accelerator that posed a serious threat of surviving reentry through the Earth’s atmosphere.

“The post-humans weren’t fools,” said Asteague/Che. “At least when it came to engineering. The mass they accumulated in the two rings they built around Earth, if gathered together, would build a sizeable fraction of another Luna—more than a million separate objects, some like the one that hailed us, almost as massive as Phobos. But they had near foolproof failsafes for keeping them in orbit and a defense in depth if they threatened to fall—these high-boost laser hornets that break up any debris are the last line of that defense. Meteors are still falling on Earth more than eight standard months later, but there have been no catastrophic impacts.”

“Orbital leukocytes,” said Orphu of Io.

“Precisely,” said the Prime Integrator of the Five Moons Consortium.

“I understand,” Mahnmut said at last. “You’re afraid that if we use the dropship carrying The Dark Lady the way we planned, these little robot leukocytes will scurry out and zap us as well.”

“The mass of the dropship and your submersible combined would be a threat to Earth,” agreed Asteague/Che. “We watched the… leukocytes, as Orphu put it… laser to plasma or boost uphill much smaller pieces of the destroyed asteroid.”

Mahnmut shook his metal-and-plastic head. “I don’t get it. You’ve had this recording and this knowledge for more than eight months, yet you hauled the Lady and us all this way… what’s changed?”

General Beh bin Adee pointed to something in the rerunning holo recording of the asteroid breakup.

The image zoomed. The computers enhanced the grainy, pixilated image.

What? tightbeamed Orphu.

Mahnmut described the enhanced image. There in the midst of all the explosions and zapped debris was a small craft with three human figures lying prone in what appeared to be an open cockpit. Only the slight shimmer of a forcefield showed why the three were not dying in a vacuum.

“What is that thing?” asked Mahnmut after he had described it to Orphu.

It was Orphu who answered. “An ancient flying vehicle used by both old-style humans and post-humans millennia ago. It was called an AFV—All Function Vehicle—or sometimes they just called it a sonie. The post-humans used them to shuttle to and from the rings.”

The recording sped up, paused, sped up again. Mahnmut described to Orphu the image of the sonie twisting and turning as segments of the asteroid exploded—were lasered—all around it.

The holo showed the trajectory of the sonie as it entered the atmosphere, spiraled across the center of North America, and landed in a region below one of the Great Lakes.

“That was one of our destinations,” said Asteague/Che. He tapped some icons and telescopic still images appeared of a large human home on a hill. The huge house was surrounded by outbuildings and what looked to be a defensive wooden wall. Human beings—or what appeared to be human beings—were visible near the walls and house. Several dozen could be seen in the still photograph.

“That was one week ago as we began decelerating,” said General Beh bin Adee. “These were taken yesterday.”

Same telescopic view, but now the house and wall were in ruins, burned. Corpses were visible scattered across a charred landscape.

“I don’t understand,” said Mahnmut. “It looks as if the humans are being massacred there where the sonie landed eight months ago. Who or what killed them?”

Beh bin Adee brought up an another telescope image, then magnified it. Scores of non-human bipeds were visible between bare branches of trees. The things were a dull silver-gray, essentially headless, with a dark hump. The arms and legs were articulated wrong to be either human or known moravecs.

“What are those?” asked Mahnmut. “Servitors of some kind? Robots?”

“We don’t know,” said Asteague/Che. “But these creatures are killing old-style human beings in their small communities all over Earth.”

Mahnmut said, “This is terrible but what does it have to do with canceling our mission?”

“I understand,” said Orphu of Io. “The issue is how do you get to the surface to see what’s going on. And the question is—why didn’t the laser leukocytes fire on the sonie in the first place? It was large enough that it might survive reentry and pose a threat to those on the ground. Why was it spared?”

Mahnmut thought for several seconds. “There were humans on board,” he said at last.

“Or post-humans,” said Asteague/Che. “The resolution isn’t fine enough for us to tell which.”

“The leukocytes allow a ship with human or post-human life aboard to pass into the atmosphere,” Mahnmut said slowly. “You’ve known this for more than eight months. That’s why you had me kidnap Odysseus for this mission.”

“Yes,” said Suma IV. “The human was going down to Earth with us. His human DNA was to be our passkey.”

“But now the voice from the other orbital isle is demanding that we deliver Odysseus to her or it,” said Orphu with a deep rumble that may have signified irony or humor or indigestion.

“Yes,” said Asteague/Che. “We have no idea if our dropship and your submersible will be allowed to enter Earth’s atmosphere if there is no human life on board.”

“We can always just ignore the invitation from the asteroid-city in the polar ring,” said Mahnmut. “Bring Odysseus down to Earth with us, maybe send him back up in the dropship …” He thought another few seconds. “No, that won’t work. Odds are that the asteroid-city will fire on us if the Queen Mab doesn’t rendezvous as requested.”

“Yes, it seems a real possibility,” said Asteague/Che. “This imperative to deliver Odysseus to the orbital city and the views of a massacre of humans on Earth by non-human creatures are new factors since we planned your dropship excursion.”

“Too bad Dr. Hockenberry QT’d away on us,” said Mahnmut. “His DNA may have been rebuilt by the Olympian gods or whomever, but it probably would have gotten us through the orbital leukocytes.”

“We have a little less than eleven hours to decide,” said Asteague/Che. “At that point we’ll be rendezvousing with the orbital city in the polar ring and it will be too late to deploy the dropship and submersible. I suggest we reconvene here in two hours and make a final decision.”

As the two stepped and repellored into the cargo elevator, Orphu of Io set one of his larger manipulator pads on Mahnmut’s shoulder.

Well, Stanley, sent the Ionian, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.

46

Harman experienced the attack on Ardis Hall in real time.

The turin-cloth experience—seeing, hearing, watching from the eyes of some unseen other—had always been a dramatic but irrelevant entertainment for him before this. Now it was a living hell. Instead of the absurd and seemingly fictional Trojan War, it was an attack on Ardis that Harman felt—knew—was real, either happening simultaneously to his viewing of it or very recently recorded.

Harman sat under the cloth, lost to the real world, for more than six hours. He watched from the time the voynix attacked a little after midnight until just before sunrise, when Ardis was ablaze and the sonie flew away to the north after his wounded, bleeding, unconscious, beloved Ada had been dragged aboard like a sack of suet.

Harman was surprised to see Petyr there at Ardis with the sonie—where were Hannah and Odysseus?—and he cried aloud in pain when he watched as Petyr was struck by a voynix-thrown rock and fell to his death. So many of his Ardis friends dead or dying—young Peaen falling, beautiful Emme having her arm torn off by a voynix and then burning to death in a ditch with Reman, Salas dead, Laman struck down. The weapons Petyr had brought from the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu had not turned the tide against the rampaging voynix.

Harman moaned under the blood-red turin cloth.

Six hours after he activated the microcircuit embroidery, the turin images ended and Harman rose and flung the cloth from him.

The magus was gone. Harman went into the small bathing room, used the strange toilet, flushed it with the porcelain handle on the brass chain, splashed water on his face and then drank prodigously, gulping handfuls of tap water. He came back out and searched the two-story cablecar-structure.

“Prospero! PROSPERO!!” His bellow echoed in the metal structure.

On the second floor, Harman threw open the doors to the balcony and stepped out. He jumped to the rungs—indifferent to the long fall beneath him—and climbed quickly to the roof of the moving, rising car.

The air was freezing. He’d turined away the night and a cold, gold sun was just rising to his right. The cables stretched away due north and they were rising. Harman stood at the edge of the roof and looked straight down, realizing that both the cablecar and the eiffelbahn must have been rising—climbing in altitude—for hours. He’d left the jungle and the plains behind in the night and climbed first into foothills and now into real mountains.

“Prospero!!!!” Harman’s shout echoed from the rocks hundreds of feet below.

He stood atop the cablecar until the sun was two handspans above the horizon, but no warmth came with the rising sun. Harman realized he was freezing. The eiffelbahn was carrying him into a region of ice, rock, and sky—all green and growing things had been left behind. He looked over the edge and saw a huge river of ice—he knew the word from his sigling, glacier—winding like a white serpent between rock and ice peaks, the sunlight blinding from it, the great white mass wrinkled with black fissures and pocked with rocks and boulders it was carrying downhill.

Ice fell from the cables above him. The turning wheels took on a new, cold hum. Harman saw that ice had formed on the roof of the rocking car, lined the rungs going down the outside wall, gleamed on the cables themselves. Crawling to the edge, hands aching, body shaking, he made his way carefully down the rung ladder, swung to the ice-encrusted balcony, and staggered into the heated room.

There was a fire in the iron fireplace. Prospero stood there, warming his hands.

Harman stood by the ice-latticed doorpanes for several minutes, shaking as much from rage as from the cold. He resisted the urge to rush the magus. Time was precious; he did not want to wake up on the floor ten minutes from now.

“Lord Prospero,” he said at last, forcing his voice to be sweet with reason, “whatever you want me to do, I will agree to do it. Whatever you want me to become, I agree to become—or to try my best to do it. I swear this to you on the life of my unborn child. But please allow me to return to Ardis now—my wife is injured, she may be dying. She needs me.”

“No,” said Prospero.

Harman ran at the old man. He would beat the fucking old fool’s bald head in with his own walking staff. He would…

This time Harman did not lose consciousness. The high voltage threw him back across the room, bounced him off the strange sofa, sent him falling to his hands and knees on the elaborate carpet. His vision still blinded by red circles, Harman growled and rose again.

“Next time I will burn your right leg off,” the magus said in a flat, cold, completely convincing tone. “If you ever get home to your woman, you’ll do so hopping.”

Harman stopped. “Tell me what to do,” he whispered.

“Sit down… no, there at the table where you can see outside.”

Harman sat at the table. The sunlight was very bright as it reflected from vertical ice walls and the rising glacier; much of the ice had melted from the glass panes. The mountains were growing taller—a profusion of the tallest peaks Harman had ever seen, much more dramatic than the mountains near the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu. The cablecar was following a high ridgeline, a glacier dropping farther and farther below to their left. At that moment the car rumbled through another eiffelbahn tower and Harman had to grab the table as the two-story car rocked, bounced, ground against ice, and then continued creaking upward.

The tower fell behind. Harman leaned against the cold glass to watch it recede—this tower was not black like the others, but resplendently silver, gleaming in the sunlight, its iron arches and girders standing out like a spider’s web in morning dew. Ice, thought Harman. He looked the other way, to his right, in the direction the cables were climbing and rising, and could see the white face of the most amazing mountain imaginable—no, beyond imagination. Clouds massed to the west of it, piling against a ridge as serrated and merciless looking as a bone knife. The face they were rising toward was striated with rock, ice, more rock, a summit pyramid of white snow and gleaming ice. The cablecar was grinding and slipping on icy cables following a ridgeline to the east of this incredible peak. Harman could see another tower on a swooping ridge high above, the rising cables connecting this mountain ridge to the higher peak. High above that—on and around the summit of the impossibly tall mountain—rose the most perfect white dome imaginable, its surface tinted a light gold from the morning sun, its central mass surrounded by four white eiffelbahn towers, the entire complex set on a white base cantilevered out over the sheer face of the mountain and connected to surrounding peaks by at least six slender suspension bridges arching out into space to other peaks—each of the bridges a hundred times higher, slimmer, and more elegant than the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu.

“What is this place?” Harman whispered. “Chomolungma,” said Prospero. “Goddess Mother of the World.”

“That building at the top…”

“Rongbok Pumori Chu-mu-lang-ma Feng Dudh Kosi Lhotse-Nuptse Khumbu aga Ghat-Mandir Khan Ho Tep Rauza,” said the magus. “Known locally as the Taj Moira. We’ll be stopping there.”

47

The voynix didn’t come scuttling up Starved Rock by the hundreds or thousands that first cold, rainy night Daeman was there. Nor did they attack on the second night. By the third night everyone was weak from hunger or seriously sick with colds, flu, incipient pneumonia, or wounds—Daeman’s left hand ached and throbbed with a sick heat where the calibani at Paris Crater had bitten off two of his fingers and he felt light-headed much of the time—but still the voynix did not come.

Ada had regained consciousness that second day on the Rock. Her injuries had been numerous—cuts, abrasions, a broken right wrist, two broken ribs on her left side—but the only ones that had been life threatening had been a serious concussion and smoke inhalation. She’d finally awakened with a terrible headache, a rough cough, and hazy memories of the last hours of the Ardis Massacre, but her mind was clear. Voice flat, she had gone through the list of friends she was not sure she’d dreamt she’d seen die or actually watched die, only her eyes reacting when Greogi responded with his litany.

“Petyr?” she said softly, trying not to cough.

“Dead.”

“Reman?”

“Dead.”

“Emme?”

“Dead with Reman.”

“Peaen?”

“Dead. A thrown rock crushed her chest and she died here on Starved Rock.”

“Salas?”

“Dead.”

“Oelleo?”

“Dead.”

And so on for another twoscore names before Ada sagged back onto the dirty rucksack that was her pillow. Her face was parchment white beneath the streaked soot and blood.

Daeman was there, kneeling, the Setebos Egg glowing unseen in his own backpack. He cleared his throat. “Some important people survived, Ada,” he said. “Boman’s here … and Kaman. Kaman was one of Odysseus’ earliest disciples and has sigled everything he could find on military history. Laman lost four fingers on his right hand defending Ardis but he’s here and still alive. Loes and Stoman are here, as well as some of the people I sent on my fax-warning expedition—Caul, Oko, Elle, and Edide. Oh, and Tom and Siris both made it.”

“That’s good,” said Ada and coughed. Tom and Siris were Ardis’s best medics.

“But none of the medical gear or medicines made it here,” said Greogi.

“What did?” asked Ada.

Greogi shrugged. “Weapons we were carrying but not enough flechette ammunition. The clothes on our back. A few tarps and blankets we’ve been huddling under during the last three nights of cold rain.”

“Have you gone back to Ardis to bury those who fell?” asked Ada. Her voice was steady except for the rasp and cough.

Greogi glanced at Daeman and then looked away, out over the edge of the tall rock summit on which they all huddled. “Can’t,” he said, voice full. “We tried. Voynix wait for us. Ambush.”

“Were you able to get any more stores from Ardis Hall?” asked the injured woman.

Greogi shook his head. “Nothing important. It’s gone, Ada. Gone.”

Ada only nodded. More than two thousand years of her family history and pride, burned down and gone forever. She was not thinking of Ardis Hall now, but of her surviving people injured, cold, and stranded on this miserable Starved Rock. “What have you been doing for food and water?”

“We’ve caught rainwater on plastic tarps and have been able to zip away on the sonie for some fast hunting,” said Greogi, obviously glad to change the subject from those who had died. “Mostly rabbits, but we got an elk yesterday evening. We’re still picking flechettes out of it.”

“Why haven’t the voynix finished us off?” asked Ada. Her voice sounded only mildly curious.

“Now that,” said Daeman, “is a good question.” He had his own theory about it, but it was too early to share it.

“It’s not that they’re afraid of us,” said Greogi. “There must be two or three thousand of the damned things down there in the woods and we don’t have enough flechette ammunition to kill more than a few hundred. They can come up the rock anytime they want. They just haven’t.”

“You’ve tried the faxnode,” said Ada. It wasn’t really a question.

“The voynix ambushed us there,” said Greogi. He squinted up at the blue sky. This was the first sunny day they’d had and everyone was trying to dry clothes and blankets, laying them out like signal sheets on the flat acre of rock that was the summit of Starved Rock, but it was still a bitter winter, worse than any in Ardis-dwellers’ memory, and everyone was shivering in the thin sunlight.

“We’ve done tests,” said Daeman. “We can stack twelve people in the sonie—twice what it’s designed for—but more than that and the ma-chine’s AI refuses to fly. And it handles like a pig with twelve.”

“How many of us did you say made it up here?” asked Ada. “Only fifty?”

“Fifty-three,” said Greogi. “Nine of those—including you until this morning—were too sick or injured to travel.”

“Eight now,” Ada said firmly. “That would be five trips on the sonie to evacuate everyone—assuming that the voynix don’t attack as soon as we start the evacuation and also assuming we had somewhere to go.”

“Yes, assuming we had somewhere to go,” said Greogi.

When Ada had fallen asleep again—sleep, Tom assured them, not the semicoma she’d been in—Daeman took his own rucksack, carrying it gingerly away from his body, and walked to the edge of Starved Rock’s summit. He could see the voynix down there, their leathery humps and headless, silvery bodies moving between the trees. Occasionally a group of them would move—seemingly with purpose—across the broad meadow on the south side of Starved Rock. None of them looked up.

Greogi, Boman, and the dark-haired woman Edide came over to see what he was doing.

“Thinking of jumping?” asked Boman.

“No,” said Daeman, “but I’m curious about whether you have any rope up here … enough to lower me to just out of reach of the voynix?”

“We have about a hundred feet of rope,” said Greogi. “But that leaves you seventy or eighty feet above the bastards—not that that would slow them down if they want to scramble up and grab you. Why the hell do you want to go down among ‘em?”

Daeman squatted, set the rucksack on the rock, and pulled the Setebos egg out. The others squatted to stare at it.

Even before they could ask, Daeman told them where he’d gotten it.

“Why?” asked Edide.

Daeman had to shrug at that. “It was one of those ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’ things.”

“I always end up paying for those,” said the small, dark-haired woman. Daeman thought that she might have seen four Twenties. It was hard to tell because of the Firmary rejuvenations, of course, but older old-style humans tended to have a greater sense of confidence than the younger ones.

Daeman lodged the glowing, slightly pulsing silver-white egg in a crevice in the rock so that it wouldn’t roll away and said, “Touch it.”

Boman tried first. He set his palm flat on the curved shell as if welcoming the warmth they could all feel flowing from it, but the blond man pulled his hand away quickly—as if he’d been shocked or nipped. “What the hell?”

“Yeah,” said Daeman. “I feel it too when I touch it. It’s like the thing sucks some energy out of you—is pulling something out of your heart. Or soul.”

Greogi and Edide tried touching it—they both pulled their hands away quickly and then moved farther from it.

“Destroy it,” said Edide.

“What if Setebos comes looking for it?” said Greogi. “Mothers do that, you know, when you steal their eggs. They take it personally. Especially when the mother is a monster-sized brain with yellow eyes and dozens of hands.”

“I thought of that,” said Daeman. He fell silent.

“And?” said Edide. Even in the few months he’d known her at Ardis Hall, she’d always seemed like a practical, competent person. It was one of the reasons he’d chosen her as part of his fax-to-three-hundred-nodes warning expedition. “Do you want me to destroy it?” she asked, standing and pulling on leather gloves. “We’ll see how far I can hurl the damned thing and whether I can hit a voynix.”

Daeman chewed his lip.

“We damned sure don’t want it hatching up here on the top of Starved Rock,” said Boman. The man actually had his crossbow out and was aiming it at the milky egg. “Even a little Setebos-thing, from your description of what the mommy-daddy thing did at Paris Crater, might kill us all up here.”

“Wait,” said Daeman. “It hasn’t hatched yet. The cold may not be enough to kill it here—to make it nonviable—but it may be slowing its gestation… or whatever the hell you call the hatching period with a monster’s egg. I want to try something with it before we destroy it.”

They used the sonie. Greogi drove. Boman and Edide knelt in the rear niches, flechette rifles ready. The forcefield was off.

Voynix stirred in the shadows under the trees at the far end of the meadow, less than a hundred yards away. They hovered a hundred feet above the meadow, out of voynix leaping range. “Are you sure?” said Greogi. “They’re faster than we are.”

Not quite sure that he could speak properly, Daeman nodded.

The sonie swooped down. Daeman jumped out. The sonie went up vertically, like a silver-disk elevator.

Daeman had a fully loaded flechette rifle hitched over his shoulder, but it was the rucksack he removed, sliding the Setebos egg part of the way out, taking care not to touch it with his bare hands. Even in the bright sunlight the thing glowed like radioactive milk.

As if offering them a gift, Daeman began walking toward the voynix at the far end of the meadow. The things were obviously watching him via the infrared sensors in their metallic chests. Several of them pivoted to keep him centered in their sensor range. More voynix moved out of the forest shadows to stand at the edge of the meadow.

Daeman glanced up, seeing the sonie sixty feet above him, seeing Boman’s and Edide’s flechette rifles raised and ready, but also knowing that a voynix running moved at more than sixty miles per hour. The things could be on him before the sonie could drop and hover and if there were enough of the creatures in the charge, no amount of covering fire would save him.

Daeman walked on with the glowing Setebos egg half out of his rucksack, like some Twenty present peeking out of its gift wrapping. Once the egg shifted—Daeman was so shocked at the internal movement and brighter glow that he almost dropped the thing, but hung on through the torn and dirty fabric of his rucksack—but after fumbling for a minute, he continued walking. He was close enough to the massed voynix now that he could almost smell the old-leather and rust stench of the things.

Daeman was ashamed to realize that his legs and arms were shaking slightly. I just wasn’t smart enough to think of another way, he thought. But there wasn’t another way. Not with the serious condition that so many of the Ardis survivors were in—not with starvation and dehydration looming.

He was less than fifty feet from the cluster of thirty or more voynix now. Daeman lifted the Setebos egg like a talisman and walked straight toward them.

At thirty feet, the voynix began to fade back into the forest.

Daeman picked up his pace, almost running now. Voynix on all sides were moving away.

Afraid that he might stumble and smash the egg—he had the sickening mental image of the egg splitting and a small Setebos brain scuttling out on its dozens of baby-hands and stalks, then the thing leaping for his face—he still forced himself to run toward the retreating voynix.

The voynix dropped to all fours and loped away—hundreds of them fleeing out in all directions like frightened grazers freeing predators on some prehistoric plain—and Daeman ran until he could run no more.

He dropped to his knees, hugging the rucksack to his chest, feeling the Setebos egg stirring and shifting, feeling energy flowing from him toward the evil thing until he pushed it away from himself, setting it on the ground like the toxic thing it was.

Greogi landed the sonie. “My God,” said the bald pilot. “My God.”

Daeman nodded. “Take me back to the base of Starved Rock. I’ll wait there with the egg while you ferry down those who can walk the mile or so to the faxnode pavilion. I’ll lead that procession. You can load the weak and wounded and follow us by air.”

“What …” began Edide and fell silent. She shook her head.

“Yeah,” said Daeman. “I remembered the bodies of the voynix frozen in the blue ice at Paris Crater. They had all been frozen in the act of running away from Setebos.”

He sat on the edge of the sonie, the rucksack on his lap, as they floated back to Starved Rock a comfortable six feet above the ground. There were no voynix in the trees or meadows.

“Where are we going to fax to?” asked Boman.

“I don’t know,” said Daeman. He felt very tired. “I’ll figure that out as we walk there down the road from Ardis.”

48

“You’ll need a thermskin,” said Prospero.

“Why?” Harman’s voice was distracted. He was staring out the glass doors at the beautiful triple-dome and marble arches of the Taj Moira. The cablecar house had clicked into place in the southeast eiffelbahn tower—one of four set at the corners of the giant square of cantilevered marble that held this magnificent building above the summit of Chomolungma. Harman had estimated the eiffelbahn tower to be about one thousand feet tall and the apex of the onion-domed white building was half again taller.

“The altitude here is eight thousand eight hundred forty-eight meters,” said the magus. “More vacuum than air. The temperature out there in the sunlight is thirty degrees below zero Fahrenheit. That gentle breeze is blowing at fifty knots. There’s a blue thermskin in the wardrobe next to the bed. Go up and put it on. You’ll need your outer clothes and boots. Call down when you have your osmosis mask in place—I need to lower the pressure in the car here before we open the mezzanine door.”

They took the elevator down from the thousand-foot-level platform. Harman looked at the tower struts, arches, and girders as they passed them on the way down and had to smile. The secret of the whiteness of this tower was as prosaic as white paint over the same dark iron and steel as the other eiffelbahn structures. He could feel the elevator and the entire tower shaking to the howling winds and realized that the paint must be scoured away in months or weeks here rather than years; he tried to imagine the kind of painting crew that would be always at work up here, then gave it up as a silly effort.

He was obeying the magus now because it got him out of the prison of the cablecar. Somehow here in this insane temple or palace or tomb or whatever it was on this insanely tall mountain, he would find a way back to Ada. If Ariel could fax without faxnode pavilions, so could he. Somehow.

Harman followed Prospero from the elevator at the base of the tower across the wide expanse of red sandstone and white marble leading to the front door of the domed building. The wind threatened to blow him off his feet but for some reason there was no ice on the exposed sandstone and marble.

“Don’t maguses feel the cold or need air?” he shouted at the old man in the trailing blue robe.

“Not in the least,” said the magus. The jet-stream-strong wind was blowing his robe to one side and sending his fringe of long, gray hair trailing sideways from his mostly bald skull. “One of the perquisites of old age,” he cried over the wind howl.

Harman veered to his right, arms extended for balance against the wind, and walked toward the low marble railing—not more than two feet high—that ran around the huge square of sandstone and marble like a low bench around a skating rink.

“Where are you going?” called Prospero. “Be careful there!”

Harman reached the edge and looked over.

Later, studying maps, Harman realized that he must have been looking north from this mountain called Chomolungma or Chu-mu-lang-ma Feng or Qomolangma Feng or HoTepma Chini-ka-Rauza or Everest, depending upon the age and origin of the map, and that when he stood at the railing he was staring out for hundreds of miles—and six miles straight down—into lands that had once been called Khan’s Ninth Kingdom or Tibet or China.

It was the down part that struck Harman viscerally.

The Taj Moira was essentially a sandstone-marble city block stuck on the summit of the Goddess Mother of the World like a tray embedded on a sharp stone, like a piece of paper slammed down onto a spike. As an engineering feet, the buckycarbon cantilevering was impressive to the point of impossibility—a god-child’s form of showing off.

Harman stood by the two-foot-high, ten-inch-wide marble “railing” and stared straight down for more than twenty-nine thousand feet with the full force of the jet stream at his back, trying to shove him off into the endless empty air. Later, maps would tell him that he had been looking at other mountains with names and the east and west Rongbuk Glaciers with the brown plains of China far beyond toward the curve of the earth, but none of that mattered now. Shoved by the strong arms of the howling wind, windmilling his arms to keep his balance, Harman was looking six miles straight down—from an overhang!

He dropped to his hands and knees and began crawling back toward the temple-tomb and the waiting magus. Thirty feet in front of the huge doorway, a small, sharp boulder—no more than five feet tall—rose from the marble squares, ending in a thirty-inch pyramid of ice. With Prospero watching—arms crossed and a small smile on his face—Harman wrapped his arms around the decorative boulder and used its imperfections to pull himself back to his feet. He continued to lean on the boulder, arms wrapped around it, his chin resting on the icy point, afraid that if he looked back over his shoulder at the distant low wall and vertiginous drop, the urge to run toward that wall and leap would be overpowering. He closed his eyes.

“Are you going to stay there all day?” asked the magus.

“I might,” said Harman, eyes still closed. After another minute, he shouted over the rising wind, “What is this rock anyway? Some sort of symbol? A monument?”

“It’s the summit of Chomolungma,” said Prospero. The magus turned and walked into the open, elegantly arched entrance of the structure he’d called Rongbok Pumori Chu-mu-lang-ma Feng Dudh Kosi Lhotse-Nuptse Khumbu aga Ghat-Mandir Khan Ho Tep Rauza. Harman saw that a semipermeable membrane was guarding that entrance—it had rippled as the magus passed through, another sign that Harman wasn’t dealing with just a hologram this time.

Several minutes later, still hugging his boulder-summit, the eyepieces and osmosis mask of his thermskin hood almost completely frosted over because of the pelting snow squalls that struck his body like icy missiles, Harman considered the fact that it was probably warm inside that building, warm beyond that semipermeable forcefield.

He did not crawl the last thirty feet to the door, but he walked hunched over, face lowered, palms down and extended, ready to crawl.

Inside the single huge room under the dome, marble steps rose to a series of mezzanines—each in turn connected to the next mezzanine by another marble staircase—that lined the interior of the inward curving dome for a hundred levels, a hundred stories, until mist and distance above obscured the apex of the dome itself. What had appeared like tiny apertures in the dome from the cablecar during the approach and from the eiffelbahn tower—hardly more than decorative elements in the white marble—now proved to be hundreds of perspex windows that sent shafts of light down to illuminate the rich-bound books with slowly moving squares and rectangles and trapezoids of brightness.

“How long do you think it would take you to sigl all that?” asked Prospero, leaning on his staff and turning in a circle to take in the many mezzanines of books.

Harman opened his mouth to speak and then shut it. Weeks?

Months? Even moving from book to book, just setting his palm in place long enough to see the golden words move down his fingers and arms, it might take years to sigl this library. Finally he said, “You told me that the functions didn’t work in and around the eiffelbahn. Have the rules changed?”

“We shall see,” said the magus. He moved deeper into the dome, his staff tapping the white marble and the sound echoing up and around the acoustically perfect dome.

Harman realized that it was warm in this place. He pulled back the thermskin hood and gloves.

The interior of the domed building was broken into discrete spaces, if not actual rooms, by a maze of white marble screens that rose only eight feet high and were not a complete barrier to sight because of their latticeworked, filigreed construction and countless elegant oval, heart-and leaf-shaped openings. Harman noticed that the walls around the base of the dome up to a height of forty feet or so, where the first mezzanine began, were completely covered with carved designs of flowers, vines, elaborate and impossible plants, all brightened by the presence of inlaid jewels. So were the marble screens. Harman set his hand against one of the marble partitions as Prospero led the way through the maze—and it was a real maze—and he realized that anywhere he could set his hand, it would cover two or three of the designs at once, that there would always be several precious stones under his fingers. Some of the flower designs were less than an inch square and looked to contain fifty or sixty tiny inlays.

“What are these rocks?” asked Harman. His people had enjoyed wearing precious stones for decoration, baubles always fetched by the robotic servitors, but he’d never wondered where they came from.

“These… rocks …” said Prospero, “include agate, jasper, lapis lazuli, bloodstone, and cornelians—there are more than thirty-five varieties of cornelian in this simple little carnation leaf where I set my hand on this screen, do you see?”

Harman saw. The place made him dizzy. Trapezoids of light moving on the west wall below the books made the marble sparkle, gleam, and shimmer from the thousands of precious stones inlaid there.

“What is this place?” asked Harman. He realized that he was whispering.

“It was built as a mausoleum… a tomb,” said the magus, sweeping around another junction of white marble screens and leading the way to the center of the great place as if the maze had yellow arrows painted on the floor. They stopped before an arched entrance to an inner rectangle at the center of the maze of hundreds of screens. “Can you read this stele, Harman of Ardis?”

Harman peered at it in the milky light. The letters in the marble were carved strangely—they were swirly and elaborate rather than the straight lines he was used to from books—but it was written in Standard World English.

“Read it aloud,” said the magus.

“ ‘Enter with awe the illustrious sepulchre of Khan Ho Tep, Lord of Asia and Protector of Earth, and his bride and beloved Lias Lo Amumja, adored by all the world. She left this transient world on the fourteenth night of the month of Rahab-Septem in the year of the Khanate 987. She and her Lord dwell now in the starry Heaven and watch over you who enter here.’ ”

“What do you think?” asked Prospero, standing under the elaborate arch where the center of the maze opened to the yet-unseen interior.

“Of the inscription or this place?”

“Both,” said the magus.

Harman rubbed his chin and cheek, feeling the stubble there. “This place is… wrong. Too big. Too rich. Out of scale. Except for the books.”

Prospero laughed and the noise echoed and then re-echoed. “I agree with you, Harman of Ardis. This place was stolen—the idea, the design, the inlays, the chessboard design of the courtyard outside—everything stolen except for the mezzanines and books, which were placed there six hundred years later by Rajahar the Silent, a distant descendant of the feared Khan Ho Tep. The Khan had the original Taj Mahal design enlarged by a factor of more than ten. That original building was beautiful, a true testament to love—nothing remains of that structure because the Khan had it slagged, wanting only this mausoleum to be remembered. This place is a memorial to wretched excess more than anything else.”

“The location is… interesting,” Harman said softly.

“Yes,” said Prospero, pulling up his blue sleeves. “That bit of wisdom is as true about real estate today as it was in Odysseus’ day—location, location, location. Come.”

They walked into the center of the marble-screen maze, an empty patch of marble perhaps a hundred yards square with what looked to Harman to be a bright reflecting pool in the center. Prospero’s walking staff made echoing taps as they walked slowly to the center.

It was no reflecting pool.

“Jesus Christ,” cried Harman, stepping back from the edge.

It seemed to be empty air. To the left, just visible, was the vertical north face of the mountain, but beneath them—perhaps forty feet beneath the level of the floor—a steel and crystal sarcophagus seemed to be floating in midair, high over the jagged glacier six miles below. Inside the sarcophagus lay a naked woman. A narrow, white marble spiral staircase snaked down to the level of the sarcophagus, the last step appearing to hang out over that empty air.

It can’t be open, thought Harman. There was no blast of the jet stream, no roaring of high-altitude wind up and through the opening in the floor. The sarcophagus had to be resting on something. By squinting, he could make out facets, a multitude of nearly invisible geodesics. The burial chamber was made up of some incredibly transparent plastic or crystal or glass. But why hadn’t he seen this sarcophagus and stairway during their ascent in the cablecar or…

“The burial vault is invisible from the outside,” Prospero said softly. “Have you looked at the woman yet?”

“The beloved Lias Lo Amumja?” said Harman, not all that interested in staring at a naked corpse. “Who left this transient world on whenever the hell it was? And where’s the Khan? Does he get his own crystal chamber?”

Prospero laughed. “Khan Ho Tep and his beloved Lias Lo Amumja, daughter of Cezar Amumja of the Central African Empire—she was a stone bitch and a harpy, Harman of Ardis, trust me on this—were dumped overboard less than two centuries after they were entombed here.”

“Dumped overboard?” said Harman.

“Perfectly preserved bodies unceremoniously dumped over the same wall you peered over thirty minutes ago,” said Prospero. “Tossed overboard like yesterday’s garbage from a tramp steamer. Successors to the Khan—each one more minor in his or her own way—liked to be buried here for all eternity… that eternity lasting until the next Khan-successor wanted the best possible mausoleum space.”

Harman could picture it.

“That is, until fourteen hundred years ago,” said Prospero, returning his blue-eyed gaze to the glass and wood sarcophagus four stories below them. “This woman was truly the beloved of someone in power and she has rested here for fourteen centuries, undisturbed. Look at her, Harman of Ardis.”

Harman had been looking in the general direction of the sarcophagus but trying not to stare at the body. The woman was too naked for his tastes—she looked too young to be dead, her body was still pink and pale, her breasts were too visible—nipples looking rosy even from forty feet away—the short hair on her head one comma of black against white satin pillows, the rich triangle of hair at her groin another black comma—her dark eyebrows, strong features, broad mouth even from this distance, almost… familiar.

“Jesus Christ,” cried Harman for the second time that morning, but this time loud enough that his shout echoed from the dome and bounced back from the mezzanines of books and white marble.

She was younger—much younger—hair black rather than gray, body firm and young rather than pulled into tired lines and folds by long centuries as Harman had seen with the skintight thermskin—but her face had the same strength, the cheekbones the same sharpness, the eyebrows the same bold slash, the chin the same firm set. There was no doubt.

It was Savi.

49

“So where is everyone?” asks fleet-footed Achilles, son of Peleus, as he follows Hephaestus across the grassy summit of Olympos.

The blond mankiller and Hephaestus, god of fire and Chief Artificer to all the gods, are walking along the shore of Caldera Lake between the Hall of the Healer and the Great Hall of the Gods. The other white-pillared god-homes seem dark and deserted. There are no chariots in the sky. There are no immortals walking the many paved walkways, illuminated by low, yellow-glowing lamps that Achilles notices are not torches.

“I told you,” says Hephaestus. “With the Cat away, the Mice are playing. Almost all of them are down on the Ilium-Earth to be players in the last act of your petty little Trojan War.”

“How does the war proceed?” asks Achilles.

“Without you there to kill Hector, your Myrmidons and all the other Achaeans and Argives and whatever you want to call them are getting their asses kicked by the Trojans.”

“Agamemnon and his people are retreating?” asks Achilles.

“Aye. The last time I looked—only a few hours ago, just before I made the mistake of checking out the damage to my crystal escalator and getting into a wrestling match with you—I saw in the holopool in the Great Hall that Agamemnon’s attack on the city walls had failed, yet again, and the Achaeans were falling back to their defensive trenches near the black ships. Hector was about to lead his army outside the walls—ready to take the offensive again. Essentially, it came down to which of us immortals were tougher than the others in a serious fight—it turns out that even with tough bitches like Hera and Athena fighting for Ilium—and Poseidon shaking the earth for the city, which is his thing, you know—shaking the earth—the pro-Greek team of Apollo, Ares, and that sneaky Aphrodite and her friend Demeter are carrying the day. As a general, Agamemnon sucks.”

Achilles only nods. His fate now is with Penthesilea, not with Agamemnon and his armies. Achilles trusts his Myrmidons to do the right thing—to flee if they can, to fight and die if they must. Ever since Athena—or Aphrodite disguised as Athena, if the Goddess of Wisdom had told him the truth several days earlier—murdered his beloved Patroclus, Achilles’ bloodlust has focused only on vengeance against the gods. Now—even though he knows it is just the result of Aphrodite’s perfumed magic—he has two goals: to bring his beloved Penthesilea back to life and to kill the bitch Aphrodite. Without being aware that he is doing so, Achilles adjusts the god-killing dagger in his belt. If Athena was telling the truth about the blade—and Achilles believed her—this bit of quantum-shifted steel will be the death of Aphrodite and any other immortals who get in his way, including this crippled god of fire, Hephaestus, if he tries to flee or block Achilles’ will.

Hephaestus leads Achilles to a parking area outside the Great Hall of the Gods where more than a score of golden chariots are lined up on the grass, metal umbilical cords snaking into some underground charging reservoir. Hephaestus climbs into one of the horseless cars and beckons Achilles aboard.

Achilles hesitates. “Where are we going?”

“I told you. To visit the one immortal who might know where Zeus is right now,” says the Artificer.

“Why don’t we just look for Zeus directly?” asks Achilles, still not stepping into the chariot. He has driven or been driven in a thousand chariots, but he has never flown in one the way he frequently sees the gods flitting to and fro above Ilium or Olympos, and while the idea does not actively frighten him, he’s in no hurry to leave the ground.

“There is a technology known only to Zeus,” says Hephaestus, “which can hide him from all of my sensors and spy devices. It’s obviously been activated, although I’d guess by his wife Hera rather than by the God of Gods himself.”

“Who is this other immortal who can show us where Zeus hides?” Achilles is distracted by the howling sandstorm and wild flashes of lightning and static discharge a few hundred yards above them as the planetary storm throws itself against Zeus’s Olympos-girding aegis forcefield.

“Nyx,” says Hephaestus.

“Night?” repeats Achilles. The fleet-footed mankiller knows the goddess’s name—the daughter of Kaos, one of the first sentient creatures to emerge from the Void that was there at the beginning of time before the original gods themselves helped separate the darkness of Erebus from the blue and green Gaia-order of Earth—but no Greek or Asian or African city he knew of worshiped the mysterious Nyx-Night. Legend and myth said that Nyx—alone, without an immortal male to impregnate her—had given birth to Eris (Discord), the Moirai (Fates), Hypnos (Sleep), Nemesis (Retribution), Thanatos (Death), and the Hesperides.

“I thought Night was a personification,” adds Achilles. “Or just an oxcart load of bullshit.”

Hephaestus smiles. “Even a personification or load of bullshit takes on physical form in this brave new world the post-humans, Sycorax, and Prospero helped make for us,” he says. “Are you coming? Or shall I QT back to my laboratory and enjoy the… ah… pleasures of your sleeping Penthesilea while you dither up here?”

“You know I’ll find you and kill you if you do that,” says Achilles with no threat in his voice, only cool promise.

“Yes, I do,” agrees Hephaestus, “which is why I’ll ask you one last time: Are you going to get aboard this fucking chariot or not?”

They fly southeast halfway around the great sphere of Mars, although Achilles does not know that it is Mars he is staring at, nor that it is a sphere. But he knows that the steep ascent above Olympos’ Caldera Lake and the violent penetration of the aegis into the howling dust storm behind the four horses that had appeared out of nowhere at takeoff—and then the ride through the blinding dust storm and high winds them-selves—is not something he would choose to do again soon. Achilles hangs on to the wood and bronze rim of the chariot and works hard not to close his eyes. Luckily, there is some field of energy around the chariot car itself—some minor form of the aegis or variation on the invisible body shields the gods use in combat, Achilles assumes—that protects the two of them from the hurling sand and blasting winds.

Then they are above the dust storm, black night sky above them and the stars shining brilliantly, two small moons visibly hurtling across the sky. By the time the chariot crosses the line of three huge volcanoes, they have passed south of the worst of the dust storm and features are visible far below them in the reflected starlight.

Achilles knows that the gods’ home on Olympos inhabits its own odd world, of course—he has been fighting on the red plain between what his moravec allies had called the Brane Hole for eight months, watching the tepid, tideless waves wash in from some northern sea that was not any of Earth’s—but he’s never before considered that the Olympians’ world might be so large.

They fly high above an endless, broad, flooded canyon and darkness is broken only by reflected starlight on water and a few moving lanterns leagues below that Hephaestus says are running lights on the Little Green Men’s quarry barges. Achilles sees no reason to ask the cripple to elaborate on that cryptic description.

They fly above treeless and then forested mountain ranges and countless circular depressions—craters, the god of fire calls them—some eroded or forested, many showing central lakes, but most obviously sharp and severe in the moonlight and starlight.

They fly higher, until the whistle of air around the chariot’s mini-aegis dies away and Achilles is breathing a pure air emitted from the chariot car itself. The oxygen content is so high that he feels a little drunk.

Hephaestus names some of the rocky, mountainous, or valleyed features unrolling far beneath them in the night. Achilles thinks the crippled god sounds like a bored bargeman announcing stops along a river’s way.

“Shalbatana Vallis,” says the immortal. And then, some minutes later—“Margaratifer Terra. Meridiania Planum. Terra Sabaea. That heavily forested area to the north is Schiaparelli, the foothills dead ahead are called Huygens. We’re swinging south now.”

The chariot car flying behind the four straining, slightly transparent horses does not swing south, it banks south, and Achilles hangs on for dear life even though the floor of the car always—impossibly—seems to be down.

“What’s that?” asks Achilles a few minutes later. A huge, circular lake has appeared, filling much of the southern horizon. The chariot is descending and while there is no dust storm here, the air still howls.

“Hellas Basin,” grunts the god of fire. “It’s more than fourteen hundred miles across and it has a bigger diameter than Pluto.”

“Pluto?” says Achilles.

“It’s a fucking planet, you stupid hick preliterate,” growls Hephaestus.

Achilles releases his death grip on the chariot rim, freeing his hands for action. He thinks he will pick the crippled god up, snap his back over his knee, and fling him down from the chariot. But then Achilles glances over the side of the car at the mountain peaks and black valleys still many leagues below and decides he’ll let the gimpy dwarf land the vehicle first. The lake looms ahead of them, filling the entire south. Then they cross the arcing northern shoreline and begin descending over starlit water. Achilles realizes that what had seemed like a circular lake from just a few miles higher is really a small, round ocean.

“It varies from two miles deep to more than four,” says Hephaestus, as if Achilles had asked or cared. “Those two huge rivers flowing in from the east are called Dao and Harmakhis. Our original plan was to put a couple of million old-style humans in the fertile valleys there, just let them fucking go forth and be fertile and multiply, but we never got around to turning the beam this way and de-faxing them. Actually, Zeus and the other Pantheon originals just forgot everything before they were gods—it seemed like a dream to all of us. Besides, Zeus was busy overthrowing his parents, the Titan first-generation immortals—Kronos and his sister-bride Rhea—and casting them down into the Brane-reached world called Tartarus.”

Hephaestus clears his throat and begins to recite in a minstrel’s voice that sounds to Achilles like someone sawing a lyre in half with a rusty blade—

“A dreadful sound troubled the boundless sea. The whole earth uttered a great cry. Wide heaven, shaken, groaned. From its foundation far Olympus reeled Beneath the onrush of the deathless gods, And trembling seized upon black Tartarus.”

Achilles can see only dark water to the right and left of them now, water hurtling by beneath at an impossible speed, the cliff-walled edges of the circular lake gone, below the rim of the horizons. To the south, a single craggy island appears.

“Zeus only won the war,” continues Hephaestus, “because he went back to the post-human Brane-punching machines in orbit around the original Earth—the real Earth, I mean, not yours, not this fucking terraformed counterfeit—and brought in Setebos and his egg-born ilk to fight Kronos’ legions. The hundred-handed monsters with their energy weapons and their hunger for eating terror out of the dirt won the day, although they were tough as shit stains to get rid of once the war was over. Also, one of the Titans’ fucking kids—Iapetus’ boy Prometheus—turned double agent. And then there was that lab-built hundred-headed clone monster named Typhon that came through the Brane Hole in the four hundred and twenty-fourth year of the war. Now that was something to see. I remember the day when…”

“Are we there yet?” interrupts Achilles.

The island—Hephaestus drones on as they continued descending—is more than eighty of Achilles’ leagues across and is filled with monsters.

“Monsters?” says Achilles. He has little interest in such things. He wants to know where Zeus is and he wants Zeus to tell the Healer to open the rejuvenation tanks and he wants the Amazon queen Penthesilea alive again. Everything else is beside the point.

“Monsters,” repeats the god of fire. “The first children of Gaia and Ouranos are misshapen fiends. But very powerful. Zeus allowed them to live on here rather than joining Kronos and Rhea in the Tartarus dimension. There are three Setebosians among them.”

This fact holds no interest for Achilles. He watches the island grow ahead of them and notices the huge, dark castle on the crags at its center. The few windows in the upright slags of stone glow orange, as if the interior is on fire.

“The island also holds the last of the Cyclopes,” drones on Hephaestus. “And the Erinyes.”

“Those Furies are here?” says Achilles. “I thought they were a myth as well.”

“No, no myth.” The crippled immortal banks the chariot around and lines up the horses’ heads with a flat, open space above a black-rock shelf at the base of the central castle. Dark clouds twist and writhe around the mountain and its keep. The valleys on either side are filled with furtive movement. “When they are released from this place they will spend the rest of eternity pursuing and punishing sinners. They are truly ‘those who walk in darkness,’ with writhing snakes for hair and red eyes that weep tears of blood.”

“Bring them on,” says the son of Peleus.

The chariot lands gently at the base of a gigantic sculpture set on a great ledge made of black stone. The chariot’s wooden wheels creak and the horses flick out of existence. The strange glowing panel that the Artificer had been using to control the craft disappears.

“Come,” says Hephaestus and leads Achilles toward the broad, seemingly endless stairway on the other side of the statue. The immortal drags his bad foot along on stone.

Achilles cannot help but look up at the sculpture—three hundred feet high at least, a powerful man holding the double-sphere of Earth and Heaven on his powerful shoulders. “This is a sculpture of Iapetos,” says Achilles.

“No,” growls the god of fire, “it’s old Atlas himself. Frozen here forever.”

The four hundredth step is the last. The black castle rises above, its towers and turrets and hidden gables lost in the roiling cloud. The two doors ahead of them are each fifty feet high and fifty feet apart from each other.

“Nyx and Hemera pass each other here every day—Night and Day,” whispers Hephaestus. “One going out, one coming in. They are never in the house at the same time.”

Achilles glances up at the black clouds and starless sky. “Then we’ve come at the wrong time. I have no business with Hemera. You said it was Night with whom we need to speak.”

“Patience, son of Peleus,” grumbles Hephaestus. The god seems nervous. He glances at a small but bulky machine on his wrist. “Eos rises… now.”

Around the eastern rim of the black island grows an orange glow. It fades.

“No sunlight penetrates this island’s polarized aegis,” whispers Hephaestus. “But it’s almost morning beyond. The sun will be rising over the Dao and Harmakhis Rivers and the eastern cliffs of Hellas Basin within seconds.”

A sudden flash blinds Achilles. He hears one of the gigantic iron doors slam shut, then the other one creak open. When he can see again, the second door is closed and Night stands in front of them.

Always in awe of Athena, Hera, and the other goddesses, this is the first time that Achilles, son of Peleus and the sea goddess Thetis, finds himself in terror of an immortal. Hephaestus has gone to both knees and lowered his head in respect and fear for the terrible apparition facing them, but Achilles forces himself to remain standing. Yet he has to fight an overwhelming urge to unstrap the shield from his back and cower behind it, his short god-killing-blade in his hand. Torn between fleeing or fighting, he lowers his face in deference as a compromise.

While the gods can assume almost any size—Achilles knows nothing of the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy and would not understand the explanation of how the immortals get around this law—gods and goddesses seem most comfortable at around nine feet tall: tall enough to make mortals feel like children; not so tall that they have to reinforce leg bones or become too awkward even in their own Olympian halls.

Night—Nyx—is fifteen feet tall, wrapped in a roiling, vaporous cloud, dressed in what seems like multiple layers of diaphanous black cloth, strips hanging down in scores of lengths, with either a black headdress that includes a veil over her face or perhaps a face that looks like a molded black veil. Impossibly, her black eyes are perfectly visible through the black veil and vaporous clouds. Before averting his face, Achilles saw that she was incredibly large-breasted, as if she would suckle all the world to darkness. Only her hands glow pale, long-fingered and powerful, as if the fingers are made of solidified moonlight.

Achilles realizes that Hephaestus is speaking, almost chanting.

“… Fumigation with torches, Nyx, parent goddess, source of sweet repose from woes, Mother from whom Gods and men arose, Hear, blessed Nyx decked with starry light, in sleep’s sweet silence dwelling ebon night. Dreams and soft ease attend thy dusky train, pleased with lengthened gloom and feastful strain, dissolving anxious care, the friend of mirth, with darkling speed riding ‘round the earth. Goddess of phantoms and of shadowy play…”

“Enough,” says Night. “If I want to hear an Orphic hymn I’ll travel through time. How dare you, God of Fire, bring a mere mortal to Hellas and the night-shrouded home of Nyx?”

Achilles shivers at the sound of the goddess’s voice. It is the sound of a violent winter sea crashing on rocks, but understandable nonetheless.

“Goddess whose natural power divides the natural day,” Hephaestus grovels, still on his knees, still bowing, “this mortal is the son of immortal Thetis and is a demigod in his own right on his particular Earth. He is called Achilles, son of Peleus, and his prowess…”

“Oh, I know Achilles, son of Peleus, and his prowess—sacker of cities, raper of women, and killer of men,” says Night in her wave-crashing tones. “What possible reason could compel you to bring this… foot soldier… to my black door, Artificer?”

Achilles decides it is time he spoke. “I need to see Zeus, Goddess.”

The dark wraith turns more in his direction. It as if she is floating, not standing, and the large and huge-breasted form swivels without friction. Her veiled face—or face with the meshed face of a black veil—peers down at him with eyes that are blacker than black. The clouds roil and broil around her.

“You need to see the Lord of Thunder, the God of All Gods, the Pelasgian Zeus, Lord of Ten Thousand Temples and Dodona’s Shrine, Father of All Gods and Men, Zeus the Ultimate King Who Marshals the Storm Clouds and Who Gives All Commands?”

“Yeah,” says Achilles.

“What about?” asks Nyx.

It is Hephaestus who speaks up. “Achilles seeks to bring a mortal to the Healer’s tanks, Mother of the first black germless egg. He wants to ask Father Zeus to command the Healer to bring back to life the Amazon queen, Penthesilea.”

Night laughs. If her voice had been a wild sea crashing against rocks, Achilles thinks her laugh sounds like a winter wind howling off the Aegean.

“Penthesilea?” says the black-garbed goddess, still chuckling. “That brainless, blond, big-boobed lesbian tart? Why on a million Earths would you want to bring that musclebound bimbo back to life, son of Peleus? After all, it was you I watched run her and her horse through with your father’s great lance, skewering them both like peppers on a kebab.”

“I have no choice,” rumbles Achilles. “I love her.”

Night laughs again. “You love her? This from the Achilles who beds slave girls and conquered princesses and captured queens as indifferently as others eat olives, only to cast them away like spit-out pits? You love her?”

“It’s Aphrodite’s pheromone perfume,” says Hephaestus, still on his knees.

Night quits laughing. “Which type?” she asks.

“Number nine,” grumbles Hephaestus. “Puck’s potion. The type with the self-duplicating nanomachines in the bloodstream constantly reproducing more dependency molecules and depriving the brain of endorphins and seratonin if the victim doesn’t act on his infatuation. There is no antidote.”

Night turns her sculpted veil-face toward Achilles. “I think that you are well and truly fornicated, son of Peleus. Zeus will never agree to rejuvenate a mortal—much less an Amazon, a race he thinks of rarely and thinks precious little of when they do come to his mind. The Father of All Gods and All Men has little use for Amazons and less use for virgins. He would see a resurrection of such a mortal as a desecration of the Healer’s tanks and skills.”

“I will ask him nonetheless,” Achilles says stubbornly.

Night regards him in silence. Then the big-bosomed, ebony-ragged aparition turns toward Hephaestus, who is still on his knees. “Crippled God of Fire, busy artificer to more noble gods, what do you see when you look upon this mortal man?”

“A fucking fool,” grunts Hephaestus.

“I see a quantum singularity,” says the goddess Nyx. “A black hole of probability. A myriad of equations all with the same single three-point solution. Why is that, Artificer?”

The god of fire grunts again. “His mother, Thetis of the seaweed-tangled breasts, held this arrogant mortal in the celestial quantum fire when he was a pup, little more than a larva. The probability of his death day, hour, minute, and method is one hundred percent, and because it cannot be changed, it seems to give Achilles a sort of invulnerability to all other attacks and injury.”

“Yesssssssss,” hisses shrouded Night. “Son of Hera, husband of that brainless Grace known as Aglaia the Glorious, why are you helping this man?”

Hephaestus bows lower on the step. “At first he bested me in a wrestling match, beloved goddess of dreadful shade. Then I continued helping him because his interests coincided with mine.”

“Your interest is to find Father Zeus?” whispers Night. Somewhere in the black canyons to their right, someone or something howls.

“My interest, Goddess, is to thwart the growing flood of Kaos.”

Night nods and raises her veiled face to the clouds roiling around her castle towers. “I can hear the stars scream, crippled Artificer. I know that when you say ‘Kaos,’ you mean chaos—on a quantum level. You are the only one of the gods, save for Zeus, who remembers us and our thinking before the Change… who remembers little things like physics.”

Hephaestus keeps his face lowered and says nothing.

“Are you monitoring the quantum flux, Artificer?” asks Night. There is a sharp and angry edge to her voice that Achilles does not understand.

“Yes, Goddess.”

“How much time, God of Fire, do you think we have left to survive if the vortexes of probability chaos continue to grow at this logarithmic rate?”

“A few days, Goddess,” grunts Hephaestus. “Perhaps less.”

“The Fates agree with you, Hera-spawn,” says Nyx. The volume and sea-crash timbre of her voice make Achilles want to clap his callused hands over his ears. “Day and night, the Moirai—those alien entities which mortal men call the Fates—toil at their electronic abacuses, manipulating their bubbles of magnetic energy and their mile-long coils of computing DNA—and every day the Moirai’s view of the future becomes less certain, their threads of probability more raveled, as if the loom of Time itself is broken.”

“It’s that fucking Setebos,” grumbles Hephaestus. “Begging your pardon, ma’am.”

“No, you are correct, Artificer,” says the giant Nyx. “It’s that fucking Setebos, let loose at last, no longer contained in this world’s arctic seas. The Many-Handed has gone to Earth, you know. Not this mortal’s Earth, but our old home.”

“No,” says Hephaestus, raising his face at last. “I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, yes—the Brain has crossed the Brane.” She laughs and this time Achilles does clasp his hands over his ears. This is a sound that no mortal should be made to hear.

“How long do the Moirai say we have?” whispers Hephaestus.

“Clotho, the Spinner, says that we have mere hours left before the quantum flux implodes this universe,” says Night. “Atropos, she who cannot be turned and who carries the abhorred shears to cut all our threads of life at death’s sharp instant, says it may be a month yet.”

“And Lachesis?” asks the god of fire.

“The Disposer of Lots—and she rides the fractal waves of the electronic abacus better than the others, I think—sees Kaos triumphant on this world and in this Brane within a week or two. Any way we cut it, we have little time left, Artificer.”

“Will you flee, Goddess?”

Night stands silent. Howls echo from the crags and valleys beyond her castle. Finally she says, “Where can we flee, Artificer? Where can even we few of the Originals flee if this universe we were born into collapses into chaos? Any Brane Hole we can create, any quantum leap we can teleport, will still be connected by the threads of chaos to this universe. No, there is nowhere to flee.”

“What do we do then, Goddess?” grunts Hephaestus. “Just bend over, grab our sandals, and kiss our immortal asses goodbye?”

Night makes a noise like the Aegean in mirthful storm. “We need to confer with the Elder Gods. And quickly.”

“The Elder Gods …” begins the Artificer and stops. “Kronos, Rhea, Okeanos, Tethys… all those exiled to terrible Tartarus?”

“Yes,” says Night.

“Zeus will never allow it,” says Hephaestus. “No god is allowed to communicate with…”

“Zeus must face reality,” bellows Night. “Or all will end in chaos, including his reign.”

Achilles climbs two steps toward the huge, black figure. His shield is on his forearm now as if he is ready to fight. “Hey, do you remember I’m here? And I’m still waiting for an answer to my question. Where is Zeus?”

Nyx leans over him and aims one pale, bony finger like a weapon. “Your quantum probability for dying at my hand may be zero, son of Peleus, but should I blast you atom from atom, molecule from molecule, the universe—even on a quantum level—might have a hard time maintaining that axiom.”

Achilles waits. He has noticed that the gods often babble on in this nonsense talk. The only thing to do is wait until they make sense again.

Finally Nyx speaks in the voice of wind-tossed waves. “Hera, sister and bride, daughter of Rhea and Kronos and incestuous bedmate to her divine brother, defender of Achaeans to the point of treachery and murder, has seduced Lord Zeus away from his duties and his watchfulness, bedding him and injecting him with Sleep in the great house where a hero’s wife weeps and labors, weaving by day and tearing out her work at night. This hero brought not his best bow to do his bloody work at Troy, but left it on a peg in a secret room with a secret door, hidden away from suitors and looters. This is the bow that no one else can pull, the bow that can send an arrow straight through iron axe-helve sockets, twelve in line, or half again that many guilty or guiltless men’s bodies.”

“Thank you, Goddess,” says Achilles and backs away down the staircase.

Hephaestus looks around, then follows, careful not to turn his back on the huge ebony figure in the flowing robes. By the time both men are standing, Night is gone from her place at the head of the stairs.

“What in Hades was all that about?” whispers the Artificer as they climb into the chariot and activate the virtual control panel and holographic horses. “A hero’s wife weeping, hidden fucking rooms, axe-helve sockets, twelve in line. Nyx sounded like your babbling Delphic oracle.”

“Zeus is on the isle of Ithaca,” says Achilles as they climb away from the castle and the island and the growls and bellows of unseen monsters in the dark. “Odysseus himself told me that he had left his best bow at his palace on that rocky isle of his, hidden away with herb-scented robes in a secret room. I’ve visited crafty Odysseus there in better days. Only he can bring that huge bow to full pull—or so he says, though I’ve never tried—and after an evening’s drinking, firing an arrow through iron axe-helve sockets, twelve in line, is the son of Laertes’ idea of entertainment. And if there are suitors there seeking his sexy wife Penelope’s hand, he would be even more greatly entertained to put his shafts through their bodies instead.”

“Odysseus’ home on Ithaca,” mutters Hephaestus. “A good place for Hera to hide her sleeping lord. Do you have any idea, son of Peleus, what Zeus will do to you when you wake him there?”

“Let’s find out,” says Achilles. “Can you quantum teleport us straight from this chariot?”

“Watch me,” says Hephaestus. Man and god wink out of sight as the chariot—empty now—keeps flying north and west across Hellas Basin.

50

“This isn’t Savi.”

“Did you hear me say it was, friend of Noman?”

Harman stood on the solid metal of the bier seemingly suspended above more than five miles of air a hundred yards from the north face of Chomolungma—staring despite his powerful urge not to stare at the dead face and naked body of a young Savi. Prospero stood behind him on the iron stairs. The wind was coming up outside.

“It looks like Savi,” said Harman. He could not slow the beating of his heart. Both the exposure to altitude and to the body in front of him made him almost sick with vertigo. “But Savi’s dead,” he said.

“You are sure?”

“I’m sure, goddamn you. I saw your Caliban kill her. I saw the bloody remnants of what he ate and what he left behind. Savi is dead. And I never saw her this young.”

The naked woman lying on her back in the crystal coffin could not have been older than three or four years beyond her first Twenty. Savi had been… ancient. All of them—Hannah, Ada, Daeman, and Harman—had been shocked at the sight of her—gray hair, wrinkles, a body that was past its prime. None of the old-style humans had ever seen the effects of aging before Savi… nor since, but that would all change now that the Firmary rejuvenation tanks were gone.

“Not my Caliban,” said Prospero. “No, not my monster then. The goblin was his own master, sick Sycorax-spawn, a lost in thrall Setebosslave, when you encountered it in yon orbital isle some nine months past.”

“This isn’t Savi,” repeated Harman. “It can’t be.” He forced himself to stride back up the stairs toward the central chamber of the Taj Moira, brushing brusquely past the blue-robed magus. But he paused before passing up through the granite ceiling. “Is she alive?” he asked softly.

“Touch her,” said Prospero.

Harman backed another step up the stairs. “No. Why?”

“Come down here and touch her,” said the magus. The hologram, projection, whatever it was, now stood next to the crystal sarcophagus. “It’s the only way you can tell if she is alive.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Harman stayed where he was.

“But I’ve not given you my word, friend of Noman. I’ve given no opinion on whether this is a sleeping woman, or a corpse, or merely a corollary of wax, wanting spirit. But I warrant you this, husband of Ada of Ardis—should she wake, should you wake her, should she be real—and should you then discourse with this waked and decanted spirit, all your most pressing questions will be answered.”

“What do you mean?” asked Harman, descending the steps in spite of his urge to flee.

The magus remained silent. His only answer was to open the crystal top to the clear sarcophagus.

No smell of corruption came forth. Harman stepped onto the metal bier platform, then came around to stand next to the magus. Except for glimpses of hairless corpses in the healing tanks on Prospero’s isle, he’d never seen a dead person until recent months. No old-style human had. But now he’d buried people at Ardis Hall and knew the terrible aspects of death—the lividity and rigor mortis, the eyes seeming to sink away from the light, the hard coldness of flesh. This woman—this Savi—showed none of these signs. Her skin looked soft and flushed with life. Her lips were pink almost to the point of redness, as were her nipples. Her eyes were closed, the lashes long, but it seemed that she could awaken any second.

“Touch her,” said Prospero.

Harman reached a trembling hand and snatched it back before he touched her. There was a slight but firm forcefield above the woman’s body—permeable but palpable—and the air inside the field was much warmer than that above it. He tried again, setting his fingers first to the woman’s throat—finding the barest hint of pulse, like a butterfly’s softest stirring—and then set his palm on her chest, between her breasts. Yes—the slightest beating of her heart, but slow—soft poundings far too far apart to be the heartbeat of a normal sleeper.

“This crèche is similar to the one your friend Noman sleeps in now,” Prospero said softly. “It pauses time. But rather than healing and protecting her for three days, as Noman-Odysseus’ slow-time sarcophagus does this very minute, this crystal coffin has been her home for one thousand four hundred and some years.”

Harman plucks his hand back as if he’d been bitten. “Impossible,” he said.

“Is it? Wake her and ask her.”

“Who is she?” demanded Harman. “It can’t be Savi.”

Prospero smiled. Below their feet, clouds had swept in to the north face of the mountain and were curling gray around the glass-bottomed shelter in which they stood. “No, it can’t be Savi, can it?” said the magus. “I knew her as Moira.”

“Moira? This place—the Taj Moira—is named after her?”

“Of course. It is her tomb. Or at least the tomb in which she sleeps. Moira is a post-human, friend of Noman.”

“The posts are all dead—gone—Daeman and Savi and I saw their Caliban-chewed and mummified bodies floating in the foul air of your orbital isle.” Harman had stepped back from the coffin again.

“Moira is the last,” said Prospero. “Come down from the p-ring more than fifteen hundred years ago. She was the lover and consort of Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep.”

“Who the hell is that?” The clouds had enveloped the Taj platform now and Harman felt on more solid ground with the glass floor showing only gray beneath him.

“A bookish descendant of the original Khan,” said the magus. “He ruled what was left of the Earth at the time the voynix first became active. He had this temporal sarcophagus built for himself but was in love with this Moira and offered it to her. Here she’s slept away the centuries.”

Harman forced a laugh. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why didn’t this Ho Tep whatshisname just have a second coffin built for himself?”

Prospero’s smile was maddening. “He did. It was set right here on this broad bier, next to Moira’s. But even a place as hard to get to as the Rangbok Pumori Chu-mu-lang-ma Feng Dudh Kosi Lhotse-Nuptse Khumbu aga Ghat-Mandir Khan Ho Tep Rauza will have its visitors over almost a millennium and a half. One of the early intruders pulled Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan’s body and temporal sarcophagus out of here and tossed it over the edge to the glacier below.”

“Why didn’t they take this coffin… Moira’s?” asked Harman. He was skeptical of everything the magus said.

Prospero extended an age-mottled hand toward the sleeping woman. “Would you throw this body away?”

“Why didn’t they loot the upstairs then?” said Harman.

“There are safeguards up there. I will be happy to show you later.”

“Why didn’t these early intruders wake … whoever this is?” asked Harman.

“They tried,” said Prospero. “But they never succeeded in opening the sarcophagus…”

“You didn’t seem to have any trouble doing that.”

“I was here when Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan devised the machine,” said the magus. “I know its codes and passwords.”

“You wake her, then. I want to talk to her.”

“I cannot wake this sleeping post-human,” said Prospero. “Nor could the intruders had they bypassed the security systems and managed to open her coffin. Only one thing will wake Moira.”

“What’s that?” Harman was on the lowest step again, ready to leave.

“For Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan or another human male descended from Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan to have sexual intercourse with her while she sleeps.”

Harman opened his mouth to speak, found nothing to say, and simply stood there, staring at the blue-robed figure. The magus had either gone insane or had always been mad. There was no third option.

“You are descended from Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep and the line of Khans,” continued Prospero, his voice sounding as calm and disinterested as someone speculating on the weather. “The DNA of your semen will awaken Moira.”

51

Mahnmut and Orphu went outside onto the hull of the Queen Mab where they could talk in peace.

The huge ship had ceased setting off its Coke-can-sized atomic bombs upon passing the orbit of Earth’s moon—they wanted to announce their arrival but not antagonize anyone or anything in the equatorial or polar rings into firing on them—and now the Mab was decelerating toward orbit under a mild one-eighth gravity using only its auxiliary ion-drive engines extended on short booms. Mahnmut thought that the blue glow “beneath” them was a pleasant alternative to the periodic smash and glare of the bombs.

The little Europan had to take care out in vacuum under deceleration, making sure that he was attached to the ship at all times, staying on the catwalks that ringed the ship, watching his step on the ladders that were everywhere on the thousand-foot-long spacecraft, but he knew that if he did something stupid Orphu of Io would come after him and save him. Mahnmut might be comfortable in full vacuum for only a dozen hours or so before having to replenish air and other requirements and he’d rarely practiced using the little peroxide thrusters built into his back, but this outside world of extreme cold, terrible heat, raging radiation, and hard vacuum was Orphu’s natural environment.

“So what do we do?” Mahnmut asked his huge friend.

“I think it’s imperative that we bring the dropship and The Dark Lady down,” said Orphu. “As soon as possible.”

“We?” said Mahnmut. “We?” The plan had been for Suma IV to pilot the dropship with General Beh bin Adee and thirty of his troopers—the rockvec soldiers under the direct command of Centurian Leader Mep Ahoo—in the dropship passenger nacelle, while Mahnmut waited in The Dark Lady down in the dropship’s hold. When and if the time came to use the submersible, Suma IV and any other required personnel would climb down into The Dark Lady via an access shaft. Despite Mahnmut’s misgivings about being separated from his old friend, there had never been any planning to include the huge, optically blind Ionian in the dropship part of the mission. Orphu was to remain with the Queen Mab as external systems engineer.

“So what is this ‘we’?” Mahnmut asked again.

“I’ve decided that I’m indispensable to this mission,” rumbled Orphu. “Besides, you still have that comfortable little niche for me in the sub’s hold—air and energy umbilicals, comm links, radar, and other sensor feeds—I could vacation there and be happy.”

Mahnmut shook his head, realized he was doing it in front of a blind moravec, realized then that Orphu’s radar and infrared sensors would pick up the movement, and shook his head again. “Why should we insist on going down? Trying to land on Earth could jeopardize the rendezvous with the broadcasting asteroid-city on the p-ring.”

“Bugger the broadcasting asteroid-city on the p-ring,” growled Orphu of Io. “The important thing right now is to get down to that planet as fast as we can.”

“Why?”

“Why?” repeated Orphu. “Why? You’re the one with the eyes, little friend. Didn’t you see those telescope images that you described to me?”

“The burned village, you mean?”

“Yes, the burned village, I mean,” rumbled Orphu. “And the other thirty or forty human settlements around the world that seemed to be under attack by headless creatures that seem to specialize in slaughtering old-style human beings—old-style humans, Mahnmut, the kind that designed our ancestors.”

“Since when has this turned into a rescue mission?” asked Mahnmut. The Earth was a big, bright, blue sphere now, growing by the minute. The e—and p-rings were beautiful.

“Since we saw the photos showing human beings being slaughtered,” said Orphu and Mahnmut recognized the near-subsonic tones in his friend’s voice. Those rumbles meant either that Orphu was very amused or very, very serious—and Mahnmut knew that he wasn’t amused at the moment.

“I thought the idea was to save our Five Moons, the Belt, and the solar system from total quantum collapse,” said Mahnmut.

Orphu growled low tones. “We’ll do that tomorrow. Today we have a chance to help people down there.”

“How?” said Mahnmut. “We don’t know the context. We have no idea what’s going on down there. For all we know, those headless metallic creatures are just killer robots that humans have built to kill each other. We’d be meddling in local wars that are none of our business.”

“Do you believe that, Mahnmut?”

Mahnmut hesitated. He looked far, far down to where the ion engines out on their booms lanced blue beams in the direction of the growing blue and white sphere.

“No,” he said at last. “No, I don’t believe that. I think something new is going on down there, just as it is on Mars and on Ilium-Earth and everywhere we look.”

“I do, too,” said Orphu of Io. “Let’s go in and convince Asteague/Che and the rest of the Prime Integrators that they have to launch the dropship and submersible when we go around the backside of the Earth. With me aboard.”

“Just how do you plan to convince them to do this?” asked Mahnmut.

This time, the Ionian’s deep rumble was more in the amused spectrum of bone-rattling subsonics. “I’ll make them an offer they can’t refuse.”

52

Harman tried to get as far away from the crystal coffin as he could. He would have returned to the eiffelbahn car but the winds outside were roaring—easily over a hundred miles per hour, enough to sweep him off the marble tabletop surrounding the Taj Moira—so he climbed through the spiraling levels of books instead.

The walkways were narrow and soon very high, each one a little farther out over the low-walled maze far below as the inside walls of the curved dome pressed the bookshelves and walkways farther in, and Harman would have been disturbed by the dizzying height beneath his feet on the open-iron catwalks if he hadn’t been so eager to put distance between himself and the sleeping woman.

The books had no titles. They were of uniform size. Harman estimated that there were hundreds of thousand of volumes in this huge structure. He pulled one out and opened it at random. The letters were small and printed in pre-rubicon English, older than any book or writing he’d yet encountered, and it took him minutes to sound out and guess at the first couple of sentences he encountered. He slid the book back in and set his palm on the spine, visualizing five blue triangles in a row.

It did not sigl. No golden words flowed down his hand and arm to settle in his memory. Either the sigl function did not work in this place or these ancient books were impervious to sigling.

“There’s a way you can read them all,” said Prospero.

Harman jumped backward. He’d not heard the magus approaching across the noisy catwalk. He was just suddenly there, not an arm’s length away.

“How can I read them all?” said Harman.

“The eiffelbahn car will be leaving in two hours,” said the magus. “If you’re not on it, it will be a while until the next one stops here at Taj Moira—eleven years, to be precise. So if you’re going to read all these books, you had best start at once.”

“I’m ready to go now,” said Harman. “It’s just too damned windy out for me to get to the car.”

“I’ll have one of the servitors rig a line when we are ready to leave,” said Prospero.

“Servitor? There are working servitors here?”

“Of course. Do you think the mechanisms of the Taj or the eiffelbahn repair themselves?” The magus chuckled. “Well, of course, in a way they do repair themselves, since most of the servitors are nanotech, part of the structures themselves and too small for you to detect.”

“All of our servitors at Ardis and the other communities quit working,” said Harman. “Just… crashed. And the power went out.”

“Of course,” said Prospero. “There are consequences to your destruction of the Firmary and my orbital isle. But the orbital and planetary power grid and other mechanisms are still intact. Even the Firmary could be replaced if you so choose.”

Harman was stunned to hear this. He turned and leaned on the iron railing, taking deep breaths, ignoring the long drop to the marble floor far below. When he and Daeman—with this magus’s instructions—had directed the huge “wormhole collector” into Prospero’s Isle nine months ago, it had been to destroy the terrible banquet table where Caliban had been feasting for centuries on the bodies and bones of Final Twenty old-style humans in the Firmary. Since that day, since the destruction of the Firmary and the knowledge that one would be faxed there after any serious injury and on every twentieth birthday, mortality had lain heavily on everyone’s spirit. Death and aging had become a reality for everyone. If Prospero was telling the truth now, virtual youth and immortality was once again an option. Harman didn’t know what he thought of this new option, but just the thought of choosing made him sick to his stomach.

“There’s another Firmary?” he said. He had spoken softly but his voice still echoed under the gigantic dome.

“Of course. There’s another on Sycorax’s orbital isle. It merely needs to be activated, as do the orbital power projectors and automated fax systems.”

“Sycorax?” said Harman. “The witch you said was Caliban’s mother?”

“Yes.”

Harman started to ask how they might get up to the orbital rings to activate the Firmary, power, and emergency fax system, but then he remembered that Savi’s sonie they kept at Ardis could fly to the rings. Harman took long breaths.

“Harman, friend of Noman,” said Prospero, “you need to listen to me now. You can leave this place when the eiffelbahn commences to run again in one hour and fifty-four minutes. Or you can go outside and leap to your death on the Khombu Glacier. All choices are yours. But it is as certain that night shall follow day that you shall never see your Ada again, nor return home to what is left of Ardis Hall, nor see your friends Daeman, Hannah, and the others survive this war with the voynix and calibani, nor ever again see a green Earth not turned blue and dead by Setebos’ hunger, if you do not waken Moira.”

Harman stepped away from the magus and balled both hands into fists. Prospero was leaning on his staff as if it was a walking stick, but Harman knew that one motion by Prospero with that staff would send him flying over the rail to his death on the jewel-encrusted marble walls hundreds of feet below. “There has to be another way to waken her,” he said through clenched teeth.

“There is not.”

Harman pounded the iron railing. “None of this makes any goddamned sense.”

“Do not infest your mind with beating on the strangeness of this business,” said Prospero, his words echoing under the high vault. “At picked leisure, which shall be shortly, Moira will resolve you of every one of these happened accidents. But first you must wake her.”

Harman shook his head. “I don’t believe that I’m descended from this Ahman Whatshisname Khan Ho Tep,” he said. “How could I be? We old-styles were created by the posts centuries after Savi’s people disappeared in the Final Fax and…”

Prospero smiled. “Precisely. Where do you think your DNA templates and stored bodies were taken from, friend of Noman? Moira can explain it all to you and more. She is a post-human, the last of her kind. She knows how you can read all these books before our eiffelbahn car leaves this station. She may well know how you can defeat the voynix—or the calibani—or perhaps even defeat Caliban and his lord, Setebos himself. But you will have to decide soon whether your Ada’s life is worth one small infidelity. We now have one hour and forty-five minutes before the eiffelbahn starts running again. Fourteen hundred years of sleep and more cannot be shaken off in an instant. Moira will need some time to awaken, to eat, to understand our situation, before she will be ready to travel with us.”

“She’d go with us?” Harman said stupidly. “On the eiffelbahn? Back to Ardis?”

“Almost certainly,” said Prospero.

Harman gripped the railing so tightly that his knuckles turned first bright red, then white. Finally he released the iron and turned to the waiting magus. “All right. But you wait here. Or better yet, go back to the car. Out of sight. I’ll do this thing, but I have to be alone.”

Prospero simply winked out of existence. Harman stood on the high railing for a minute, breathing in the musty leather smell of ancient books, and then he hurried down the nearest flight of steps.

53

It was a ragtag, motley group of forty-five freezing men and women that made the seven-mile walk from Starved Rock to the fax pavilion.

Daeman led the way, carrying the pack with its glowing, occasionally squirming white Setebos Egg, and Ada walked by his side despite her concussion and cracked ribs. The first few miles through the forest were the worst—the terrain was rough and rocky, the visibility was poor, it had started snowing again, and everyone was braced for the attack of unseen voynix. When thirty minutes passed, then forty-five minutes, and then an hour with no attack—no sign of the voynix at all—everyone began to relax a little.

A hundred feet above them, Greogi, Tom, and the eight seriously injured survivors of Ardis filled the sonie. Greogi would flit ahead, circle high over the forest, and then come back, swooping low just long enough to shout information.

“Voynix ahead about half a mile, but they’re retreating—staying away from you and the egg.”

Through the pounding headache and the duller ache from her wrist and broken ribs—every breath pained her—Ada found little comfort that the voynix were only a half mile away. She’d seen them run at full speed, watched them leap into and out of trees. The creatures could be on them in a minute. The group had about twenty-five flechette rifles or pistols with them, but not many extra magazines of ammunition. Because of her broken right wrist and taped-up ribs, Ada didn’t carry a weapon, which made her feel all the more exposed as she walked up front with Daeman, Edide, Boman, and a few of the others. The drifts were a foot or more deep here in the woods and Ada barely had the energy to kick her way through the clinging wet snow.

Even after they got out of the rockiest, thickest part of the forest, still heading southeast to intercept the road between Ardis and the fax pavilion, the group traveled with excruciating slowness because of those who were ambulatory but more seriously injured or sick, including some who’d been victims of hypothermia the last two nights. Siris, their other medic, was walking with them and she shuttled back and forth constantly, making sure that the ill and injured were getting help and reminding the leaders to slow their pace.

“I don’t understand,” said Ada as they came out into a wide meadow that she remembered from a hundred summer hikes.

“What’s that?” asked Daeman. He carried the rucksack with the glowing egg in it ahead of him at arm’s length, as if it smelled bad. In truth, as Ada had noticed, it did smell bad—a mixture of rotten fish and something sewerish. But it was still glowing and it vibrated from time to time, so presumably the little Setebos inside was still alive.

“Why do the voynix stay away while we have this thing?” said Ada.

“They must be afraid of it,” said Daeman. He slipped the rucksack from his right hand to his left. He was carrying a crossbow in his free hand.

“Yes, of course,” said Ada, speaking more sharply than she’d meant to. The throbbing in her head, ribs, and arms was making her short-tempered. “I mean, what is the connection between that… thing… in Paris Crater and the voynix?”

“I don’t know,” said Daeman.

“The voynix have been around… forever,” said Ada. “This Setebos monster just arrived a week ago.”

“I know,” said Daeman. “But I feel that somehow they’re connected. Maybe they always have been.”

Ada nodded, winced from the pain of nodding, and trod on. There was very little talking in the rough ranks of the forty-five men and women as they trudged through another patch of thick woods, crossed a familiar stream that was now mostly frozen over, and headed down a steep hill of frozen high grass and weeds.

The sonie swooped low. “Another quarter mile to the road,” Greogi called down. “The voynix have moved farther south. Two miles at least.”

When they reached the road there was a stir among the survivors, urgent whispers, people clapping one another on the back. Ada looked west toward Ardis Hall. The covered bridge was in sight just before the turn in the road that ran up to the manor house, but there was no sight of the great hall, of course, not even a plume of black smoke. For a minute she thought she was going to be sick to her stomach. Black spots danced in front of her eyes. She paused, put her hands on her knees, and lowered her head.

“Are you all right, Ada?” It was Laman speaking. The bearded man wore only rags, including one wrapped around his right hand where he had lost four fingers during the battle with the voynix at Ardis.

“Yes,” said Ada. She rose, smiled at Laman, and hurried to keep up with the small group at the front of the shuffling pack.

It was less than a mile to the fax pavilion now and all looked familiar, except for the unusual snow. There was not the slightest sign of voynix. The sonie circled above, disappeared in wider circles, and then swept back, Greogi giving them a thumbs-up as he dipped the machine low and then flew on ahead.

“Where are we going to fax, Daeman?” asked Ada. She heard the flatness and lack of affect in her own voice but was too tired and hurting to put any energy in her tone.

“I don’t know,” said the lean, muscled man who had once been the pudgy aesthete who’d tried to seduce her. “At least I don’t know where to go for the long run. Chom, Ulanbat, Paris Crater, Bellinbad, and the rest of the more populated nodes have probably been covered with blue ice by Setebos. But I do know an unpopulated node I stop by from time to time—it’s in the tropics. Warm. Nothing but an abandoned little town, but it’s on the ocean—some ocean, somewhere—and has a lagoon. I haven’t seen many animals there other than lizards and a few wild pigs, but they don’t seem to be afraid of people. We could fish, hunt, make more weapons, take care of our injured… lay low until we come up with a plan.”

“How will Harman, Hannah, and Odysseus-Noman find us?” asked Ada.

Daeman was silent for a minute and Ada could almost hear him thinking—We don’t even know if Harman is alive. Petyr said that he disappeared with Ariel. But what he finally said was, “No problem there. Some of us will fax back here regularly. And we can leave some sort of permanent note at Ardis Hall with the faxnode code for our tropical hideout. Harman can read. I don’t think the voynix can.”

Ada smiled wanly. “The voynix can do a lot of things none of us ever imagined they were capable of.”

“Yeah,” said Daeman. And then they were silent until they reached the fax pavilion.

The fax pavilion looked pretty much as Daeman had seen it forty-eight hours earlier. The stockade had been breached. There was dried human blood everywhere, but the voynix or wild animals had carried off the bodies of those Ardisites who’d fought to the death trying to defend the pavilion. But the pavilion structure itself was still intact, the faxnode column still rising in the center of the open, circular structure.

The band of humans stood awkwardly at the edge of the pavilion floor, looking over their shoulders at the dark forest. The sonie landed and the injured were helped out or carried.

“Nothing for five miles,” said Greogi. “It’s weird. The few voynix I saw were fleeing south as if you were in pursuit of them.”

Daeman looked at the milkily glowing egg in his backpack and sighed. “We’re not pursuing them,” he said. “We just want to get the hell out of here.” He told Greogi and the others of his plan.

There was a brief spate of argument. Some of the survivors wanted to fax to familiar locations and to see if friends and loved ones were alive. Caul was sure that the Loman Estate node wouldn’t have been invaded by this Setebos thing Daeman had told them about. Caul’s mother was there.

“All right, look!” Daeman called over the rising voices. “We don’t know where Setebos might be by now. The monster turned the huge city of Paris Crater into a castle of blue-ice strands in less than twenty-four hours. It’s been more than forty-eight hours since I got back and I was the last person to fax in. Here’s my suggestion…”

Ada noticed that the babbling stopped. People were listening. They accepted Daeman as a leader just as they had once accepted her leadership… and Harman’s. She had to stifle a sudden urge to weep.

“Let’s decide now if we’re going to stick together for a while or not,” said Daeman, his deep voice easily carrying to the edge of the crowd. “We can vote and…”

“What does ‘vote’ mean?” asked Boman.

Daeman explained the concept.

“So if just one more than half of us… votes… to stay together,” said Oko, “then we all have to do what the others want?”

“Just for a while,” said Daeman. “Let’s say… a week. We’re safer together than traveling apart. And we have people injured, sick, who can’t defend themselves. If people all fax different directions right now, how are we ever going to find each other again? Do we let those who want to strike off alone carry the flechette rifles and crossbows, or do those stay with the larger group who wants to stick together?”

“What do we do in that week… if we agree to go with you to this tropical paradise?” asked Tom.

“Just what I said,” answered Daeman. “Recuperate. Find or build some more weapons. Build some sort of defensive perimeter there… I remember a little island just beyond the reef. We could make some little boats, set up our homes and defenses on the island…”

“Do you think voynix can’t swim?” called Stoman.

Everyone laughed nervously but Ada glanced at Daeman. It had been gallows humor—a phrase she’d learned sigling the old books in Ardis Hall’s library—but it had broken the tension.

Daeman laughed easily. “I have no idea if voynix can swim, but if they can’t, that island would be the perfect place for us.”

“Until we breed so many children that we won’t fit on it anymore,” said Tom.

People laughed more easily this time.

“And we’ll send reconaissance teams out from the faxnode there,” said Daeman. “Starting the first day we arrive. That way, we’ll have some idea of what’s going on in the world and which nodes are safe to fax to. And after a week, anyone who wants to leave can. I just think it’s better for all of us if we stay together until our sick people are better and until we all get a chance to eat and sleep.”

“Let’s vote,” said Caul.

They did, hesitantly, with more laughter at the thought of raising their hands to decide such a serious issue. The vote was forty-three to seven to stay together, with three of the most seriously injured not voting because they were unconscious.

“All right,” said Daeman. He approached the faxpad.

“Wait a minute,” said Greogi. “What do we do with the sonie? It won’t fax and if we leave it here, the voynix will get it. It’s saved our lives more than once.”

“Oh, shit,” said Daeman. “I didn’t think about that.” He ran his hand over his dirty, blood-streaked face, and Ada saw how pale and tired he was under the thin veneer of energy he’d been projecting.

“I have an idea about that,” said Ada.

The crowd looked at her, their faces friendly, and waited.

“Most of you know that Savi showed some of us how to use new functions last year… proxnet, farnet, and allnet. Some of you have even tried them yourselves. When we get to Daeman’s tropical paradise, we call up the farnet function, see where the place is, and then someone faxes back here to fetch the sonie and fly it to our island. Harman, Hannah, Petyr, and Noman got to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu in less than an hour, so it shouldn’t take too long to fly to paradise.”

There was some chuckling, much nodding.

“I have an even better idea,” said Greogi. “The rest of you fax off to paradise. I’ll stay here and guard the sonie. One of you fax back with the directions and I’ll fly it there today.”

“I’ll stay with you,” said Laman, holding up a flechette rifle in his good left hand. “You’ll need someone to shoot voynix if they come back. And to keep you awake during the flight south.”

Daeman smiled tiredly. “All right?” he asked the group.

People shuffled forward, eager to fax.

“Wait,” said Daeman. “We don’t know what’s waiting for us there, so six of you with rifles—Caul, Kaman, Elle, Boman, Casman, Edide—you come with me to the pavilion node and we’ll fax through first. If everything’s good there, one of us will be back in two minutes or less. Then we should bring the wounded and sick through. Tom, Siris, could you please organize the stretcher teams? Then Greogi will supervise half a dozen of you back there with rifles to keep watch while the rest fax though. Okay?”

Everyone nodded impatiently. The rifle team walked to the star inlaid on the fax pavilion floor while Daeman poised his hand over the keypad. “Let’s go,” he said and tapped in the code for his uninhabited node.

Nothing happened. The usual puff of air and visual flicker as people faxed out of existence simply did not happen.

“One at a time,” said Daeman, although faxnodes could easily handle six people faxing at a time. “Caul. Stand on the star.”

Caul did, shifting his rifle nervously. Daeman faxed in the code again.

Nothing. The wind made a noise as it blew snow into the open pavilion.

“Maybe that faxnode doesn’t work anymore,” called a woman named Seaes from the crowd.

“I’ll try Loman’s Estate,” said Daeman and tapped in the familiar code.

It did not work.

“Holy Jesus Christ Shit,” cried the burly Kaman. He pushed forward. “Maybe you’re doing it wrong. Let me.”

Half a dozen people had a try. Three dozen familiar faxnode codes were tried. Nothing worked. Not Paris Crater. Not Chom or Bellinbad or the many Circles of Heaven code for Ulanbat. Nothing worked.

Finally everyone stood in silence, stunned, speechless, their faces turned to masks of terror and hopelessness. Nothing in the past year, none of the nightmares of the last months—not the Fall of the Meteors, not the failing of electricity and the fall of the servitors, not the early attacks of voynix nor the news from Paris Crater, not even the Ardis Hall Massacre or the hopeless situation on Starved Rock had struck these men and women with such a sense of hopelessness.

The faxnodes no longer worked. The world as they had known it since they were born no longer existed. There was nowhere to flee, nothing to do now but wait and die. Wait for the voynix to return or for the cold to kill them or for disease and starvation to finish them off one by one.

Ada stepped up onto the small base around the faxpad column so that she could be seen as well as be heard.

“We’re going back to Ardis Hall,” she said. Her voice was strong, brooking no argument. “It’s only a little more than a mile up the road. We can be there in less than an hour, even in our condition. Greogi and Tom will bring those to sick to walk.”

“What the fuck is at Ardis Hall?” asked a short woman whom Ada did not recognize. “What’s there except corpses and carrion and ashes and voynix?”

“Not everything burned,” Ada said loudly. She had no idea if everything had burned or not; she’d been unconscious when they’d flown her away from the flaming ruins. But Daeman and Greogi had described unburned sections of the compound. “Not everything burned,” she said again. “There are logs there. Remnants of the tents and barracks. If nothing else, we’ll pull down the stockade wall and build cabins out of the wood. And there will be artifacts—things that didn’t burn in the ruins. Guns, maybe. Things we left behind.”

“Like the voynix,” said a scarred man named Elos.

“Maybe so,” said Ada, “but the voynix are everywhere. And they’re afraid of this Setebos Egg that Daeman’s carrying. As long as we have it, the voynix will stay away. And where would you rather face them, Elos? In the darkness of the forest at night, or sitting around a big fire at Ardis, in a warm hut, while your friends help stand watch?”

There was silence but it was an angry silence. Some still tried tapping at the faxpad, then pounding the column in frustration.

“Why don’t we just stay here at the pavilion?” said Elle. “It has a roof already. We can close in the sides, build a fire. The stockade is smaller here and would be easier to rebuild. And if the fax starts working again, we could get out fast.”

Ada nodded. “That makes sense, my friend. But what about water? The stream is almost a quarter of a mile from the pavilion here. Someone would always have to be fetching water, risking exposure or voynix attack to get it. And there’s no place to store it here, nor room enough for all of us under this pavilion roof. And this valley is cold. Ardis gets more sunlight, we’ll have more building material to use there, and Ardis Hall had a well under it. We can build our new Ardis Hall around the well so we’ll never have to go outside for water.”

People shifted their weight from foot to foot but no one had anything to say. The thought of walking back down that frozen road, away from the salvation of the fax pavilion, seemed too difficult to contemplate.

“I’m going now,” said Ada. “It will be dark in a few hours. I want a big fire roaring before ringlight sets in.”

She walked out of the pavilion and headed west down the road. Daeman followed. Then Boman and Edide. Then Tom, Siris, Kaman, and most of the others. Greogi supervised loading the sick back into the sonie.

Daeman hurried to catch up to her and leaned close to whisper to her. “I have good news and bad news,” he said.

“What’s the good news?” Ada asked tiredly. Her head was pounding so ferociously that she had to keep her eyes closed, opening them only once in a while to stay on the frozen dirt road.

“Everyone’s coming,” he said.

“And the bad news?” asked Ada. She was thinking—I will not cry. I will not cry.

“This goddamned Setebos Egg is starting to hatch,” said Daeman.

54

As Harman took off his clothes in the crystal crypt beneath the marble mass of the Taj Moira, he realized just how damned cold it was in that glass room. It also must have been cold in the huge Taj chamber above, but the thermskin he’d put on in the eiffelbahn car had kept him from noticing. Now he hesitated at the foot of the clear coffin with the thermskin peeled half down his torso, his regular clothes in a tumble at his feet and goosebumps rising on his bare arms and chest.

This is wrong. This is absolutely, totally wrong.

Other than a lifetime awe of the post-humans in their orbital rings and the almost spiritual belief everyone had that they would rise to the rings and spend eternity with the posts after their Final Fax, Harman and his people knew nothing of religion. The closest they had come to understanding religious awe and ceremony had come from the glimpses they’d received of the Greek gods through the turin-cloth drama.

But now Harman felt that he was about to commit something like sin.

Ada’s life—the life of everyone I know and care for—may depend on me waking this post-human woman.

“By having sex with a dead or comatose stranger?” he whispered aloud. “This is wrong. This is crazy.”

Harman glanced over his shoulder and up the stairway, but, as he’d promised, Prospero was nowhere to be seen. Harman shucked out of the rest of his thermskin. The air was freezing cold. He looked down at himself and almost laughed at how contracted, cold, and shrunken he was.

What if this is all the crazy old magus’s idea of a joke? And who was to say whether Prospero was lurking around under some invisibility cloak or other contrivance of his magusy ways?

Harman stood at the foot of the crystal coffin and shook. The cold was part of it. The unpleasantness of what he was about to do a greater part. Even the idea that he was descended from this Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep made him queasy.

He remembered Ada injured, unconscious, atop that place called Starved Rock with the pitifully few other survivors of the massacre at Ardis.

Who’s to say that was real? Certainly Prospero could make a turin cloth transmit false images.

But he had to proceed as if the vision had been real. He had to proceed as if Prospero’s emotional statement to him that he had to learn, to change, to enter this fight against Setebos and the voynix and the calibani, or all would be lost, was true.

But what can one man who’s had his Five Twenties do? Harman asked himself.

As if to answer that, Harman crawled up over the edge of the massive crèche. He lowered himself carefully into the end of the thing, not touching the naked woman’s bare feet. The semipermeable forcefield made it feel as if he were slipping into a warm bath through a tingling resistance. Now only his head and shoulders were out of the warmth.

The coffin was long and wide, easily wide enough for him to lie down next to the sleeping female without touching her. The cushioned material she was lying on had looked like silk, but it felt more like some soft, metallic fiber under Harman’s knees. Now that he was mostly in the containment of the time crèche, he could feel surges and pulses of whatever energy field kept this Savi-lookalike young and perhaps asleep.

If I lower my head below the forcefield, thought Harman, maybe it’ll put me into a fifteen-hundred-year sleep as well and solve all my problems. Especially the problem of what to do next here.

He did crouch lower, putting his face below the level of the tingling forcefield the way a timid swimmer might enter the water. He was now on his hands and knees over the woman’s legs. The air was much warmer here in the crèche and he felt the vibration of energy from the sarcophagus machinery humming throughout his body, but it didn’t put him to sleep.

Now what? he thought. There must have been some time in Harman’s life where he had felt this awkward, but he couldn’t recall it.

As with the absence of the concept of sin in Harman’s world, so was there little incidence or thought of the idea of rape. There were no laws nor anyone to enforce laws in this now-vanished world of the old-style humans, but neither had there been aggression between the sexes or intimacy without permission by both parties. There had been no laws, no police, no prisons—none of the words Harman had sigled in the last eight months—but there had been a sort of informal shunning in their tight little communities of parties and cotillions and faxes to this event and that. No one had wanted to be left out.

And there had been enough sex for anyone who wanted it. And almost everyone had wanted it.

Harman had wanted it often enough in his almost-Five-Twenties. It was just in the last decade or so since he’d taught himself to read the strange squiggles in books that he had quit the fax-somewhere/bed-someone rhythm of life. He’d gained the odd idea that there was, or could be, or might be, someone special for him, someone with whom—for both of them—sexual intercourse should be an exclusive and shared special experience, separate from all the easy liaisons and physical friendships that made up the old-style human world.

It had been an odd thought. One that would have made no sense to almost anyone he would have told—but he told no one. And perhaps it was Ada’s youth, she was only seven-and-First-Twenty when they first made love and fell in love, which allowed her to share his odd and romantic notions of exclusiveness. They’d even held their own “wedding” ceremony at Ardis Hall, and while the four hundred others had mostly humored them, accepting this excuse for yet another party, a few—Petyr, Daeman, Hannah, a few others—had understood that it meant much more.

Thinking about this is not helping you do what Prospero says you have to do, Harman.

He was kneeling naked above a woman who had been sleeping—according to the lying logosphere avatar who called himself Prospero—for almost a millennium and a half. And he was surprised to find that he was not ready for sex?

Why did she look so much like Savi? Savi had been perhaps the most interesting person Harman had ever met—bold, mysterious, ancient, from another age, never quite honest, shrouded in ways that almost no old-style human from Harman’s age could ever be—but he’d never been attracted to her as a woman. He remembered her thin body in its skintight thermskin on Prospero’s orbital isle.

This younger Savi was not thin. Her muscles had not atrophied with the age of centuries. Her hair—everywhere—was dark—not the black he’d first thought, not the jet black of Ada’s beautiful hair, but very dark brown. The clouds had dissipated off the north face of Chomolungma and in the reflected bright light from the emerging sun, some of this woman’s hair glowed coppery red. Harman could see the tiny pores in her skin. Her nipples, he noticed, were more brown than pink. The set of her chin had Savi’s center crease and firmness, but the wrinkles he remembered on her brow and around her mouth and the corners of her eyes were not yet there.

Who is she? he wondered for the fiftieth time.

It doesn’t matter who she really is, Harman’s mind screamed at itself. If Prospero is telling the truth, she’s the woman you have to have sex with so she’ll wake up and teach you the things you have to learn to get home.

Harman leaned forward until his weight was partially on the sleeping woman. She was lying on her back with her arms at her side, palms down against the cushioned material, legs already slightly apart. Feeling every inch the violator, Harman used his right knee to move her left leg farther to the side, then his left knee to open her right leg. She could not have been more open and vulnerable to him.

And he could not have been less physically excited.

Harman raised his weight on his hands until he was doing a push-up above the supine form. He forced his head up and out of the only slightly buzzing forcefield and drew in great gulps of the freezing air there. When he lowered his head into the sarcophagus’ energy field again, he felt like a drowning man going under for the third time.

Harman laid his weight upon the sleeping woman. She did not budge or stir. Her eyelashes were long and dark, but there was not the slightest flutter or sense of her eyes moving under their lids as he’d seen Ada’s do so many times when he lay awake watching her sleeping next to him in the moonlight. Ada.

He closed his eyes and remembered her—not injured and unconscious on Starved Rock as Prospero’s red turin cloth had shown, but the way she had been during their eight months together at Ardis Hall. He remembered waking up next to her in the night just to watch her sleep.

He remembered the clean soap and female scent of her next to him in the night in their room with the bay window in the ancient Ardis manor.

Harman felt himself start to stir.

Don’t think about it. Don’t think about now. Just remember.

He allowed himself to remember that first time with Ada, just nine months three weeks and two days ago now. They had been traveling with Savi, Daeman, and Hannah and had just met the reawakened Odysseus at the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu. They each had separate sleeping cubbies that night—the round, green spheres clinging to the orange tower of the ancient bridge like grapes on a vine, these hanging beneath the horizontal support strut some seven hundred feet and more above the ruins far below.

After everyone had gone to his or her own sleeping domi—everyone taken aback that the floors were as transparent as the crystal floor of this crypt—No, don’t think about that now—Harman had slipped out of his room and knocked on Ada’s door. She’d let him in and he’d noticed how lustrous her dark eyes were that night.

He’d actually gone to her room to talk to her about something, not to make love to her that night. Or so he thought at the time. He’d already hurt Ada’s feelings once—in Paris Crater it was, he remembered now, at Daeman’s mother’s place, Marina’s domi high on the bamboo-three towers at the edge of the red-eyed crater. And Ada had risked her life—or at least a fax to the orbital Firmary—by climbing from her balcony to his, teetering over a thousand miles of black hole crater to join him on his balcony that night. And he’d said no. He’d said “Let’s wait.” And she had, although certainly no man had ever turned down or turned away beautiful black-haired Ada from Ardis Hall before.

But that night in the clear-sided sphere-domi hanging from the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu, with the mountains he later guessed to be the rocky Andes rising around them and the haunted ruins a thousand feet below, he’d come to talk to her about… what? Oh, yes—he’d come to her room to persuade her to remain behind at Ardis Hall with Hannah and Odysseus while he and Daeman went on with Savi to that legendary place called Atlantis where there might be a spaceship waiting to take them to the rings. He’d been very convincing. And he’d lied through his teeth. He told young Ada that it would be better if she were to introduce Odysseus to everyone at Ardis Hall, that he and Daeman would certainly be gone just a few days. In truth, he’d been frightened that Savi would lead them into terrible danger—and she had, at forfeit of her own life—and even then Harman did not want Ada in harm’s way. Even then, he felt that it would be his own flesh and soul sundered if harm came to her.

She’d been wearing the thinnest of short, silk sleeping gowns when she’d ordered the cubby door to iris open on the night she became his. The moonlight had been pale on her arms and eyelashes while he spoke so earnestly to her about staying at Ardis Hall with this stranger Odysseus.

And then he’d kissed her. No—he’d only kissed Ada on the cheek at the end of their conversation, the way a father or friend might kiss a child. It had been she who first kissed him—a full, open, lingering kiss, her arms going around him and pulling him closer as they stood there in the moonlight and starlight. He remembered feeling her young breasts against his chest through the thin silk of her blue nightgown.

He remembered carrying her to the small bed that lay against the curved, clear wall of the cubby. She’d helped him off with his clothes, both of them in a clumsy yet elegant hurry now.

Had the storm swept down out of the higher mountains and struck just as they began to make love on that narrow bed? Not long after, certainly. He did remember the moonlight on Ada’s upturned face and the moonlight illuminating her nipples as he cupped each breast and raised it to his lips.

But he remembered the wall of wind hitting the bridge, rocking the cubbie dangerously, sensuously, just as they began to rock and move themselves, Ada under him, her legs rising around his hips, her right hand slipping down and finding him, guiding him…

No one guided him now as he stiffened and rose against the sex of this woman in the crystal crèche. This won’t work, he thought through the surge of his own memories and renewed desire. She’ll be dry. I’ll have to…

But the rest of that thought was lost as he realized that she was not dry against his tentative probes, but soft and opening and even moist, as if she had lain there waiting for him all these years.

Ada had been ready for him—wet with excitement, her lips as warm as her warm sex, her arms insistent around him, her fingers arched on his bare back as he moved gently into her and with her. They had kissed until the kissing alone would have made Harman—he of the Four Twenties and nineteen years that very week, the oldest of the old that Ada knew or had ever known—almost swoon with a teenaged boy’s lust and excitement.

They’d moved as the cubbie rocked to the wild gusts of wind—gently at first, forever it seemed, and then with increasing passion and less restraint as Ada urged him to lose restraint, as Ada opened to him and urged him deeper, kissing him and holding him within the powerful circle of her arms and squeezing legs and raking fingernails.

And when he’d come, Harman had throbbed in her for what seemed like long moments. And Ada had responded with a series of internal throbs that felt like tremors rising from some infinitely deep epicenter until he felt as if it was her small hand clenching the core of him tighter, releasing, then clenching again, rather than her entire body.

Harman throbbed inside the woman who looked like Savi and couldn’t be. He did not linger but pulled out immediately, his heart pounding with guilt and something like horror even as he was filled with his love for Ada and his memories of Ada.

He rolled aside and lay panting and miserable next to the woman’s body on the metallic-silken cushions. The warm air stirred around them, trying to lull him to sleep. Harman felt at that moment that he could sleep—could sleep for a millennium and a half just as this stranger had—sleep through all the danger to his world and to his friends and to his single, perfect, betrayed beloved.

Some small movement brought him up out of the fringes of his dozing.

He opened his eyes and his heart almost stopped as he realized that the woman’s eyes were open. She had turned her head and was staring at him with a cool intelligence—an almost impossible level of awareness after being asleep so long.

“Who are you?” asked the young woman in dead Savi’s voice.

55

In the end, it wasn’t just Orphu’s eloquence but a myriad of factors that decided the moravecs to launch the atmospheric dropship carrying The Dark Lady.

The moravec meeting on the bridge happened much sooner than the two hours Asteague/Che had suggested. Events were occurring too quickly. Twenty minutes after their conference outside on the hull of the Queen Mab, Mahnmut and Orphu were back on the ship’s bridge conferring verbally in full Earth-standard sea-level atmosphere and gravity with the Callistan Cho Li, Prime Integrator Asteague/Che, General Beh bin Adee and his lieutenant Mep Ahoo, the ominous Suma IV, an agitated Retrograde Sinopessen, and half a dozen other moravec integrators and military rockvecs.

“This is the transmission we received eight minutes ago,” said the navigator Cho Li. Almost everyone had heard it, but he played it back via tightbeam anyway.

The maser broadcast coordinates were the same as the previous transmission—from the Phobos-sized asteroid in Earth’s polar ring—but there was no female human voice this time, only a string of rendezvous coordinates and delta-v rates.

“The lady wants us to bring Odysseus straight to her house,” said Orphu, “and not fool around swinging around the other side of the Earth on the way.”

“Can we do that?” asked Mahnmut. “Brake straight to her high polar orbit, I mean?”

“We can if we use the fission bombs again for a high-g deceleration the next nine hours,” said Asteague/Che. “But we don’t want to do that for a variety of reasons.”

“Excuse me,” said Mahnmut. “I’m just a submersible driver, no navigator or engineer, but I don’t see how we’re going to drop our speed anyway given the weak deceleration we’re getting from the ion-drive engines. Did we have something special in store for the last bit of braking?”

“Aerobraking,” said the many-limbed bulky little Callistan, Cho Li.

Mahnmut laughed at the image of the Queen Mab—all three hundred nine meters of bulky, girdered, crane-festooned, nonaerodynmic bulk of her—aerobraking through the Earth’s atmosphere and then realized that Cho Li hadn’t been joking.

“You can aerobrake this thing?” he said at last.

Retrograde Sinopessen skittered forward on his spidery silver legs. “Of course. We had always planned to aerobrake. The sixty-meter-wide pusher plate with its ablative coating retracts and morphs slightly to serve very nicely as a heat shield. The plasma field around us during the maneuver should not be prohibitive—we can even maser comm through it if we so choose. Our original plans were for a mild aerobraking maneuver at an altitude of one hundred and forty-five kilometers above Earth sea level with several passes to regulate our orbit—the difficult part will be passing through the busy artificial p—and e-rings, since they have nothing comparable to the debris-cleared F-ring Cassini Gap around Saturn—but those computations were easy enough. We just have to dodge like a sumbitch. Now, since we seem to have been ordered to make a command appearance at the lady’s asteroid-city on the p-ring, we plan to dip to thirty-seven kilometers and burn off velocity much more quickly, establishing the proper elliptical orbit for rendezvous on the first attempt.”

Orphu whistled.

Mahnmut tried to visualize it. “We’ll be dropping to within a hundred-some thousand feet of the surface? We’ll be able to see individual faces on the humans below.”

“Not quite,” said Asteague/Che. “But it will be more dramatic than we had planned. We’ll definitely leave a streak in their sky. But the old-style humans down there are probably too distracted right now to notice a streak in their sky.”

“What do you mean?” asked Orphu of Io.

Asteague/Che transmitted the most recent series of photographs. Mahnmut described the elements that Orphu could not get through the accompanying datametrics.

More images of slaughter. Human communities destroyed, human bodies left out for carrion crows. Infrared imagery showed hot buildings and cold corpses and the motion of equally cold humped and headless creatures who were doing the killing. Fires burned where homes and modest cities had been on the night side of the planet. All over the planet, the old-style humans seemed to be under attack by the gray-metallic headless creatures which the moravec experts could not identify. And on four continents, the blue-ice structures were multiplying and growing and now images appeared of a single, huge creature looking like a human brain with eyes, only the brain the size of a warehouse, then video—vertical images looking almost straight down on the thing scuttling on what looked like gigantic hands with more stalklike arms protruding like ganglia. Obscene proboscises extruded from feeding orifices and seemed to be drinking or feeding from the earth itself.

“I see the data,” said Orphu, “but I’m having trouble visualizing the creature. It can’t possibly be that ugly.”

“We’re looking at it,” said General Beh bin Adee, “and we’re having trouble believing what we’re seeing. And it is that ugly.”

“Is there any theory,” asked Mahnmut, “about what that thing is or where it’s from?”

“It’s associated with the blue-ice sites, originally seen at the former city of Paris and the largest blue-ice complex,” said Cho Li. “But that’s not what you mean. We simply don’t know its origins.”

“Have moravecs ever seen an image of anything like that in all our centuries of observing the Earth through telescopes from Jupiter space or Saturn space?” asked Orphu.

“No.” Asteague/Che and Suma IV spoke at the same time.

“The brain-hands-creature doesn’t travel alone,” said Retrograde Sinopessen, bringing up another series of holographic images and flat-plate projections. “These things are with it at every one of the eighteen sites we’ve seen the brain.”

“Humans?” asked Orphu. The data was confusing.

“Not quite,” said Mahnmut. He described the scales, fangs, overly long arms, and webbed feet of the forms in the images.

“And according to the datametrics, there are hundreds of those things,” said Orphu of Io.

“Thousands,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “We’ve looked at images taken simultaneously at sites thousands of kilometers apart and counted at least thirty-two hundred of the amphibian-looking forms.”

“Caliban,” said Mahnmut.

“What?” Asteague/Che’s softly inflected voice sounded puzzled.

“On Mars, Prime Integrator,” said the little Europan. “The Little Green Men talked about Prospero and Caliban… from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The stone heads, you remember, were supposed to be images of Prospero. They warned us about Caliban. The thing looks and sounds like some versions of Caliban in the staging of that play over the centuries on Earth.”

None of the moravecs had anything to say about that.

“There are eleven new Brane Holes on Earth since we began measuring this spike of quantum activity two weeks ago,” Beh bin Adee said at last. “As far as we can tell, the brain-creature has generated—or at least is using—all of them for transport purposes. It and the scaled, amphibious-looking things you call Caliban. And there is a pattern to where they appear.”

More holographic images misted into solidity above the chart table and Mahnmut described them on tightbeam, but Orphu had already absorbed the accompanying data.

“All battlegrounds or sites of ancient historical human massacres or atrocities,” said Orphu.

“Precisely,” said General Beh bin Adee. “You notice that the city of Paris was the first Brane quantum opening. We know that more than twenty-five hundred years ago, during the EU Empire’s Black Hole Exchange with the Global Islamic Surinate, more than fourteen million people died in and around Paris.”

“And the other Brane Hole sites here fit that category,” said Mahnmut. “Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Waterloo, HoTepsa, Stalingrad, Cape Town, Montreal, Gettysburg, Khanstaq, Okinawa, the Somme, New Wellington—all bloodied historical sites from millennia ago.”

“Do we have some sort of Calabi-Yau traveling intermemBrane tourist Brain here?” asked Orphu.

“Or something worse,” said Cho Li. “The neutrino and tachyon beams rising from the spots this… thing… visits carry some sort of complex coded information. The beams are interdimensional, not directional in our universe. We just can’t tap into the beams to decode the messages or content.”

“I think the brain is a ghoul,” said Orphu of Io.

“Ghoul?” asked Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

Orphu explained the term. “I think it’s sucking up some sort of dark energy from those places,” said the big Ionian.

“That hardly seems likely,” chirped Retrograde Sinopessen. “I know of no recordable… energy… left behind by the mere event of violent action. That is metaphysics… nonsense… not science.”

Orphu shrugged four of his multiple articulated arms.

“Do you think the large brain creature might be something the post-humans or old-styles designed and biofactured during the dementia years after rubicon?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “And the Caliban-creature and headless robotic killer things as well? All artifacts from wildcat RNA engineers? Like some of the anachronistic plant and animal life reintroduced to the planet?”

“Not the big thing,” said the tall Ganymedan, Suma IV. “We would have seen it before this. The brain creature with the hands came through Brane Holes from another universe just a few days ago. We don’t know where the Caliban things came from, or the humpbacked creatures that are decimating the old-style humans. They might well be artifacts of genetic manipulation. We have to remember that the post-humans designed themselves right out of the human gene pool more than fifteen hundred standard years ago.”

“And I’ve seen the holos of dinosaurs and Terror Birds and saber-toothed cats roaming this Earth,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo.

“The humpbacked metallic things have killed up to ten percent of the old-style population?” asked Mahnmut, who was a stickler for the proper use of that word “decimate.”

“They have,” said General Beh bin Adee. “Probably more. And just since we’ve been in transit from Mars.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Orphu of Io. “Although if no one has an immediate answer, I have a suggestion.”

“Go ahead,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“I think you should defrost the thousand rockvec soldiers we have in cold storage, fire up the dropship and the dozen atmospheric hornets you have onboard, load them to the gunwales with troopers, and get into the fight.”

“Get into the fight?” repeated the navigator Callistan, Cho Li.

“Start by nuking that brain creature into radioactive pus,” said Orphu. “Then get moravec boots on the ground and defend the humans. Kill those Calibans and the headless-humped things that are killing humans everywhere. Get into the fight.”

“What an extraordinary suggestion,” said Cho Li in a shocked voice.

“We hardly have enough information to decide on a course of action at this point,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “For all we know, the brain creature—as we so respectfully call it—may be the only peaceful, sentient organism on Earth. Perhaps it’s some sort of interdimensional archaeologist or anthropologist or historian.”

“Or ghoul,” said Mahnmut.

“Our mission was to carry out surveillance,” said Suma IV in tones that were meant to be final. “Not start a war.”

“We can do both things for the price of one,” said Orphu. “We have the firepower aboard the Queen Mab to make a difference in whatever is going on down there. And although you haven’t officially told Mahnmut or me, we know there must be a host of more modern stealthed moravec warships following the Mab. This could be a wonderful opportunity to hit that thing—all those things—and coldcock them before they even know they’re in a fight.”

“What an extraordinary suggestion,” repeated Cho Li. “Absolutely extraordinary.”

“Right now,” said Asteague/Che in that odd James Mason voice that Mahnmut remembered from flatfilms, “our goal is not to start a war, but to deliver Odysseus to the Phobos-sized asteroid city in the polar ring as per the request of the Voice.”

“And before that,” said Suma IV, “we have to decide whether to go ahead with the dropship mission under cover of the aerobraking maneuver, or to wait until after rendezvous with the Voice’s orbital city and delivery of our human passenger.”

“I have a question,” said Mahnmut.

“Yes?” Prime Integrator Asteague/Che was also a Europan, thus almost the same size as the diminutive Mahnmut. The two stared visor-plate to visor-plate while the administrator waited.

“Does our human passenger want to be delivered to the Voice?” asked Mahnmut.

There was a silence broken only by the hum of ventilators, comm reports to and from those ‘vecs monitoring instruments, and the occasional bang of attitude thrusters from the hull.

“Good heavens,” said Cho Li. “How could we have overlooked asking him?”

“We were busy,” said General Beh bin Adee.

“I’ll ask him,” said Suma IV. “Although it will be embarrassing at this point if Odysseus says no.”

“We have his garments all prepared,” said the skittering Retrograde Sinopessen.

“Garments?” rumbled Orphu of Io. “Is our son of Laertes a Mormon?”

No one responded. All moravecs had some interest in human history and society—it had been programmed into their evolving DNA and circuits to keep such an interest—but very few were as immersed in human thinking as the huge Ionian. Nor had the others evolved such an odd sense of humor.

“Odysseus obviously has been wearing clothing of our design while he’s been aboard the Queen Mab,” chirped Retrograde Sinopessen. “But the clothing he will wear during the rendezvous with the Voice’s orbital asteroid will have every sort of nano-sized recording and transmission device we could conceive of. We will all monitor his experience in real time.”

“Even those of us who are going down to Earth on the dropship?” asked Orphu.

There was an embarrassed silence. Moravecs were not given to frequent embarrassment, but they were capable of it.

“You were not chosen for the dropship crew,” Asteague/Che said at last in his clipped but not unpleasant tones.

“I know,” said Orphu, “but I think I can convince you that the drop-ship mission must be launched during the Mab’s aerobraking and that I have to be on board. The little corner of the hold on Mahnmut’s sub will serve me just fine as my passenger space. It has all the connections I need and I like the view.”

“The submersible bay has no view,” said Suma IV. “Except via video link, which might be interrupted if the dropship were to come under attack.”

“I was being ironic,” said Orphu.

“Also,” said Cho Li, making a noise like a small animal clearing its throat, “you are—technically, optically—blind.”

“Yes,” said Orphu, “I’ve noticed. But beyond proper affirmative-action hiring practices—never mind, it’s not worth the time to explain—I can give you three compelling reasons why I have to be included on the dropship mission to Earth.”

“We haven’t concluded that the mission itself should occur,” said Asteague/Che, “but please proceed with your reasons for being included. Then we Prime Integrators must make several decisions in the next fifteen minutes.”

“First of all, of course,” rumbled Orphu, “there’s the obvious fact that I will be a splendid ambassador to any and all sentient races we meet after landing on Earth.”

General Beh bin Adee made a rude sound. “Is that before or after you nuke them into radioactive pus?” he asked.

“Secondly, there is the less obvious but still salient fact that no moravec on this ship—perhaps no moravec in existence—knows more about the fiction of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and George Marie Wong—as well as the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman—than I do, therefore and ergo, no moravec knows more about human psychology than I do. Should we actually speak to an old-style human, my presence will be indispensable.”

I didn’t know you also studied Joyce, Faulkner, Wong, Dickinson, and Whitman, tightbeamed Mahnmut.

It never came up, answered Orphu. But I’ve had time to read out there in the hard vacuum and sulfur of the Io Torus over the last twelve hundred standard years of my existence.

Twelve hundred years! tightbeamed Mahnmut. Moravecs were designed for a long life span, but three standard centuries was generous for the average ‘vec’s existence. Mahnmut himself was less than one hundred fifty years old. You never told me you were that old!

It never came up, transmitted Orphu of Io.

“I did not quite follow all the logical connections there in the verbal part before you tightbeamed your friend,” said Asteague/Che, “but pray continue. I believe you said that you had three compelling reasons why you should be included.”

“The third reason I deserve a chair on the dropship,” said Orphu, “figuratively speaking, of course, is that I’ve figured it out.”

“Figured what out?” asked Suma IV. The dark buckycarbon Ganymedan wasn’t visibly checking his chronometer, but his voice was.

“Everything,” said Orphu of Io. “Why there are Greek gods on Mars. Why there’s a tunnel through space and time to another Earth where Homer’s Trojan War is still being fought. Where this impossibly terraformed Mars came from. What Prospero and Caliban, two characters from an ancient Shakespearean play, are doing waiting for us on this real Earth, and why the quantum basis for the entire solar system is being screwed up by these Brane Holes that keep popping up… everything.”

56

The woman who looked like a young Savi was indeed named Moira, although in the next hours Prospero sometimes called her Miranda and once he smilingly referred to her as Moneta, which added to Harman’s confusion. Harman’s embarrassment, on the other hand, was so great that nothing could add to it. For their first hour together, he could not look in Moira’s direction, much less look her in the eye. As Moira and he ate what amounted to breakfast as Prospero sat at the table, Harman finally managed to look in the woman’s direction but couldn’t raise his gaze to her eye level. Then he realized that this probably seemed as if he was staring at her chest, so he looked away again.

Moira seemed oblivious to his discomfort.

“Prospero,” she said, sipping orange juice brought to them by a floating servitor, “you foul old maggot. Was this key to my awakening your idea?”

“Of course not, Miranda, my dear.”

“Don’t call me Miranda or I’ll start calling you Mandrake. I am not now, nor was I ever, your daughter.”

“Of course you are and were my daughter, Miranda, my dear,” purred Prospero. “Is there a post-human alive whom I did not help become what they are? Were not my genetic sequencing labs your womb and your cradle? Am I therefore not thy father?”

“Is there another post-human alive today, Prospero?” asked the woman.

“Not to my knowledge, Miranda, dear.”

“Then fuck you.”

She turned to Harman, sipped coffee, sliced at an orange with a frighteningly sharp knife, and said, “My name is Moira.”

They were at a small table in a small room—a space more than a room—that Harman had not noticed before. It was an alcove set within the booklined wall halfway up the inside of the great inward-curving dome, at least three hundred feet above the marble-walled maze and floor. It was easy to understand why he hadn’t seen the space from below—the walls of this shallow alcove were also lined with books. There had been other alcoves along the way up, some holding tables like this one, others containing cushioned benches and cryptic instruments and screens. The iron stairways, it turned out, moved like escalators or it would have taken much longer for the three of them to climb this high. The exposure—there were no railings and the narrow marble walkways and the wrought-iron escalator steps were more air than iron—was horrifying. Harman hated to look down. He focused on the books instead and kept his shoulders against the shelves as he walked.

This woman was dressed much as Savi had been the first time he’d seen her—a blue tunic top made of cotton canvas, corded trousers, and high leather boots. She even wore a sort of short wool cape similar to the one he’d seen on Savi when they met, although this cape was a dark yellow rather than the deep red the older woman had worn. However, its complicated, many-folded cut seemed to be the same. The major difference between the two women—besides the vast difference in age—was that the older Savi had been carrying a pistol when they met, the first firearm Harman had ever seen. This version of Savi—Moira, Miranda, Moneta—he knew with absolute certainty, had not been armed when he first met her.

“What has happened since I first slept, Prospero?” asked Moira.

“You want a summary of fourteen centuries in as many sentences, my dear?”

“Yes. Please.” Moira separated the juicy orange into sections and handed a section to Harman, who ate it without tasting it.

“ ‘The woods decay,’ ” intoned the magus Prospero, “ ‘the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes; I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream The ever-silent spaces of the East, Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.’ ”

He bowed his balding and gray-haired head a bit.

“ ‘Tithonus,’ ” said Moira. “Tennyson before breakfast always makes my bowels ache. Tell me, is the world sane yet, Prospero?”

“No, Miranda.”

“Are my folk all dead or changeling’d then, as you say?” She ate grapes and redolent cheese and drank from a large goblet of ice water the floating servitors continued to refill for her.

“They are dead or changeling’d or both.”

“Are they coming back, Prospero?”

“God knows, my daughter.”

“Don’t give me God, please,” said Moira. “What about Savi’s nine thousand one hundred and thirteen fellow Jews? Have they been retrieved from the neutrino loop?”

“No, my dear. All the Jews and rubicon survivors in this universe remain a blue beam rising from Jerusalem and nothing more.”

“We did not keep our promise then, did we?” asked Moira, pushing her plate away and brushing crumbs and juice from her palms.

“No, daughter.”

“And you, Rapist,” she said, turning to the blinking Harman, “do you have any other purpose in this world than taking advantage of sleeping strangers?”

Harman opened his mouth to speak, thought of nothing to say, and shut his mouth. He felt actively ill.

Moira touched his hand. “Do not reproach yourself, my Prometheus. You had little choice. The air inside the sarcophagus was scented with an aerosol aphrodisiac so potent that Prospero sent it off with one of the original changelings—Aphrodite herself. Lucky for both of us its effects are very temporary.”

Harman felt a surge of relief followed by fury. “You mean I had no choice?”

“Not if you carried the DNA of Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep,” said Moira. “And all males of your race should.”

She turned back to Prospero. “Where is Ferdinand Mark Alonzo? Or rather, what was his fate?”

The magus bowed his head. “Miranda, beloved, three years after you entered the loop-fax sarcophagus, he died of one of the wildcat variants of rubicon that swept through the old population every year as surely as a summer zephyr. He was interred in a crystal sarcophagus next to yours—although all the fax equipment could do was keep his corpse from rotting then, since the Firmary tanks had not yet learned how to deal with rubicon. Before the vats could educate themselves, a score of Caliphate mandroids climbed Mount Everest, evaded the security shields, and began looting the Taj. The first thing they looted was poor Ferdinand Mark Alonzo’s heavy coffin—throwing it over the side.”

“Why didn’t they throw me over as well?” asked Moira. “Or for that matter, finish their looting? I noticed all the agate, jasper, bloodstones, emeralds, lapis, cornelian, and other baubles were still in place on the walls and screen maze.”

“Caliban faxed in and dispatched the twenty Caliphate mandroids for you,” said Prospero. “It took the servitors a month to mop up all the blood.”

Moira’s head came up. “Caliban still lives?”

“Oh, yes. Ask our friend Harman here.”

She glanced at Harman but refocused her attention on the magus. “I’m surprised Caliban didn’t rape me as well.”

Prospero smiled sadly. “Oh, he tried, Miranda my dear, he tried many times, but the sarcophagus would not open to him. Had the world bent to Caliban’s will and member, he would have long since peopled this island earth with little Calibans by you.”

Moira shuddered. Finally she turned to Harman again, ignoring the old man. “I need to know your story and your character and your life,” she said. “Give me your palm.” She set her right elbow on the table and held up one hand, palm toward him.

Confused, Harman did the same, but not touching her.

“No,” said Moira. “Have the old-style humans forgotten the sharing function?”

“They have, actually,” said Prospero. “Our friend Harman here can—or could until the eiffelbahn inhibited his access—call up only the finder, allnet, proxnet, and farnet functions. And those only by visualizing certain geometric shapes.”

“Mother of Heaven,” said Moira. She dropped her hand to the table. “Can they still read?”

“Only Harman and a handful of others he’s taught in the last few months,” said Prospero. “Oh, I forgot to mention that our friend did learn to sigl some months ago.”

“Sigl?” Moira laughed. “That was never meant to be used to understand books. That was an indexing function. It must feel like glancing at a recipe in a cookbook and thinking you’ve actually eaten the dinner. Harman’s people must be the dullest subspecies of homo sapiens ever to receive a patent.”

“Hey,” said Harman. “I’m right here. Don’t talk about me as if I’m not even here. And I may not know this sharing function, but I can learn it quickly. In the meantime, we can talk. I have questions to ask too, you know.”

Moira looked at him. He noticed the rich gray-green of her eyes.

“Yes,” she said at last, “I have been rude. You must have come a long way to waken me—and you took that action against your will—and I am sure you would rather be elsewhere in the world. The least I can do is show you some manners and answer your questions.”

“Can you show me how to do this sharing function you were talking about?” asked Harman. He was determined not to lose his temper with this woman who looked so much like Savi and spoke in her voice. “Or show me how to fax without faxnode pavilions,” he added. “The way Ariel does it.”

“Ah, Ariel,” said Moira. She glanced at Prospero. “The old-styles have forgotten how to freefax?”

“They’ve forgotten almost everything,” said Prospero. “They were made to forget. By your people, Moira. By Vala, by Tirzah, by Rahaba—by all your Urizened Beulahs.”

Moira tapped the flat of her knife against her palm. “Why did you use this person to wake me, Prospero? Has Sycorax consolidated her power and freed your monster Caliban from your control?”

“She has and he is free,” Prospero said softly, “but I felt it was time you woke because Setebos now walks this world.”

“Sycorax, Caliban, and Setebos,” repeated Moira. She drew in a long breath, hissing it between her teeth.

“Between the witch, the demidevil, and the thing of darkness,” Prospero said softly, “they would control the moon and Earth, decide all ebbs and flows, and deal all power to their command.”

Moira nodded and chewed her full lower lip for a moment. “When does your eiffelbahn car depart again?”

“In one hour,” said the magus. “Will you be on it, Miranda dear? Or will you be sleeping in the fax-coffin of time again, allowing your atoms and memories to be restored in such a meaningless loop forever?”

“I’ll be on your damned car,” said Moira. “And I’ll take from the update banks what I need to know about this brave new world I’m born into yet again. But first, young Prometheus has his questions to ask and then I have a suggestion on what he can do to regain his function status.” She glanced toward the apex of the dome.

“No, Moira,” said Prospero.

“Harman,” she said softly, putting her soft hand on the back of his, “ask your questions now.”

He licked his lips. “Are you really a post-human?”

“Yes, I am. That is what Savi’s people called us before the Final Fax.”

“Why do you look like Savi?”

“Ah … you knew her, then? Well, I will learn her health or fate when I call up the update function. I knew Savi, but more important, Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep was in love with her and she returned no love for him—they were of separate tribes, so to speak. So I took her form, her memories, her voice… everything… before coming here to the Taj.”

“How did you take her form?” asked Harman.

Moira looked at Prospero again. “His people do know nothing, don’t they?” To Harman she said, “We post-humans had reached the point where we had no bodies of our own, my young Prometheus. At least none that you would recognize as bodies. We needed none. There were only a few thousand of us, but we had bred ourselves out of the human gene pool, thanks to the genetic skills of the avatar of the cyberspace logosphere here…”

“You’re welcome,” said Prospero.

“When we wanted to take a human form—always a female human form, I might add, for all of us—we just borrowed one.”

“But how?” said Harman.

Moira sighed. “Are the rings still in the sky?”

“Of course,” said Harman.

“Polar and equatorial both?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think they are, Harman Prometheus? There are more than a million discrete objects up there… what do your people think they are?”

Harman licked his lips again. The air here in the great temple-tomb was very dry. “We know our Firmary, where we were rejuvenated, was up there. Most of us think the other objects up there are the posts—your people’s—homes. And your machines. Cities on orbiting islands like Prospero’s. I was there last year on Prospero’s Isle, Moira. I helped bring it down.”

“You did?” She looked at the magus again. “Well, good for you, young Prometheus. But you’re wrong in thinking that the million orbiting objects, most of them much smaller than Prospero’s Isle, were habitats for my kind or machines serving solely our purposes. There are a dozen or so habitats, of course, and several thousand giant wormhole generators, black hole accumulators, early experiments in our interdimensional travel program, Brane Hole generators… but most of the orbiting objects up there are serving you.”

“Me?”

“Do you know what faxing is?”

“I’ve done it all my life,” said Harman.

“Yes, of course, but do you know what it is?”

Harman took a breath. “We’d never really thought about it, but on our voyages last year Savi and Prospero explained that the faxnode pavilions actually turn our bodies into coded energy and then our bodies, minds, and memories are rebuilt at another node.”

Moira nodded. “But the fax pavilions and nodes are not necessary,” she said. “They were simply ruses to keep you old-style humans from wandering in places you shouldn’t go. This fax form of teleportation was staggeringly heavy on computer memory, even with the most advanced Calabi-Yau DNA and bubble-memory machines. Do you have any idea how much memory is required to store the data on just one human being’s molecules, much less the holistic wavefront of his or her personality and memories?”

“No,” said Harman.

Moira gestured toward the top of the dome, but Harman realized that she was actually gesturing toward the sky beyond and the polar and equatorial rings turning up there now against the dark blue sky. “A million orbital memory banks,” said the woman. “Each one dedicated to one of you old-style humans. And in many of the other clumsy orbital machines, the black-hole-powered teleportation devices themselves—GPS satellites, scanners, reducers, compilators, receivers, and transmitters—somewhere up there above you every night of your life, my Harman Prometheus, was a star with your name on it.”

“Why a million?” asked Harman.

“That was thought to be a viable minimum herd population,” said Moira, “although I suspect there are far fewer of you than that today since we allowed each woman to have only one child. In my day, there were only nine thousand three hundred and fourteen of your subspecies of humans—those with nanogenetic functions installed and active—and a few hundred thousand dying old-old-style humans, those like my beloved Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep, the last of his royal breed.”

“What are the voynix?” asked Harman. “Where did they come from? Why did they act as silent servants for so long and then start attacking my people after Daeman and I destroyed Prospero’s Isle and the Firmary? How do we stop them?”

“So many questions,” sighed Moira. “If you want them all answered, you will need context. To gain context, you need to read these books.”

Harman’s head jerked and he looked up and down at the curving inner dome lined with books. He could not do the mathematics on the square or cubic feet of books here, but he imagined—wildly, blindly—that there must be at least a million volumes on these shelves.

“Which books?” he asked.

“All of these books,” said Moira, lifting her hand from his to gesture in a circle toward everything. “You can, you know.”

“Moira, no,” Prospero said again. “You’ll kill him.”

“Nonsense,” said the woman. “He’s young.”

“He’s ninety-nine years old,” said Prospero, “more than seventy-five years older than Savi’s body was when you cloned it for your own purposes. She had memories then. You carry them now. Harman is no tabula rasa.”

Moira shrugged. “He’s strong. Sane. Look at him.”

“You’ll kill him,” said Prospero. “And with him, one of our best weapons against Setebos and Sycorax.”

Harman was very angry now, but also excited. “What are you talking about?” he demanded, pulling his hand back when Moira threatened to touch it again with hers. “Are you talking about me sigling all these books? It would take months… years. Decades, maybe.”

“Not sigling,” said Moira, “but eating them.”

“Eating them,” repeated Harman, thinking, Was she mad before she entered the time coffin or have the centuries of being replicated there, cell by cell, neuron by neuron, made her mad?

“Eating them,” agreed Moira. “In the sense that the Talmud spoke of eating books—not reading them, but eating them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you know what the Talmud is?” asked Moira.

“No.”

Moira pointed toward the apex of the dome again, some seventy stories above them. “Up there, my young friend, in a tiny little cupola made of the clearest glass, there is a cabinet formed of gold and pearl and crystal and I have the golden key. Within, it opens into a world and a little lovely moony night.”

“Like your sarcophagus?” asked Harman. His heart was pounding.

“Nothing like my sarcophagus,” laughed Moira. “That coffin was just another node on your faxing merry-go-round, replicating me through the centuries until it was time to wake and go to work. I’m talking about a machine that will allow you to read all these books in depth before the eiffelbahn car leaves the Taj station in …” She glanced at her palm. “Fifty-eight minutes.”

“Do not do this, Moira,” said Prospero. “He will do us no good in the war against Setebos if he is dead or a drooling moron.”

“Silence, Prospero,” snapped Moira. “Look at him. He’s already a moron. It’s as if his entire race has been lobotomized since Savi’s day. He might as well be dead. This way, if the cabinet works and he survives, he may be able to serve himself and us.” She took Harman’s hand again. “What do you most want in this universe, Harman Prometheus?”

“To go home to see my wife,” said Harman.

Moira sighed. “I can’t guarantee that the crystal cabinet—the knowledge and nuance of all these books that my poor, dead Ahman Ferdinand Mark Alonzo accumulated over his centuries—will allow you to freefax home to your wife… what is her name?”

“Ada.” The two syllables made Harman want to weep. It made him want to weep twice—once for missing her, again for betraying her.

“To Ada,” said Moira. “But I can guarantee that you will not get home alive to see her unless you take this chance.”

Harman stood and stepped out onto the railingless marble ledge three hundred feet above the cold marble floor below. He looked up at the center of the dome almost seven hundred feet above but could see nothing except a sort of haze there where the last of the metal catwalks converged like black and almost invisibly thin spiderwebs.

“Harman, friend of Noman …” began Prospero.

“Shut up,” Harman said to the magus of the logosphere.

To Moira he said, “Let’s go.”

57

“I quantum teleported us here according to your directions,” says Hephaestus, “but where in Hades’ Hell are we?”

“Ithaca,” says Achilles. “A rugged, rocky isle, but a good nurse to boys who would be men.”

“It looks and smells more like a hot, stinking shithole to me,” says the god of fire, limping along the dusty, rock-strewn trail that leads up a steep slope past meadows filled with goats and cattle to where the red tiles of several buildings glare in the merciless sun.

“I’ve been here before,” says Achilles, “the first time when I was a boy.” The hero’s heavy shield is strapped to his back, his sword secure in its scabbard on a belt hanging over his shoulder. The blond young man is not sweating from the climb or heat, but Hephaestus, limping along behind him, is huffing and pouring sweat. Even the immortal Artificer’s beard is wet with sweat.

The steep but narrow trail ends on top of the hill and in sight of several large structures.

“Odysseus’ palace,” says Achilles, jogging the last fifty yards.

“Palace,” gasps the god of fire. He limps into the clearing in front of the high gates, sets both hands on his crippled leg, and bends over as if he is going to be sick. “It’s more like a fucking vertical pigsty.”

The remnant of a small, abandoned fortress rises like a squat stone stump fifty yards to the right of the main house on the promontory overlooking the cliff. The home itself—Odysseus’ palace—is made of newer stone and newer wood, although the main doors—open—are comprised of two ancient stone slabs. Terra-cotta paving tiles on the terrace are made of expensive tile set neatly in place, obviously the work of the best craftsmen and stone masons—although equally obviously not dusted or swept recently—and all the outside walls and columns are brightly painted. Faux painted vines filled with images of birds and their nests spiral around the white columns on either side of the entry, but real vines have also grown there, their tangle inviting real birds and becoming home to at least one visible nest. Achilles can see colorful frescoes gleaming from the walls of the shadowy vestibule beyond the main doors, which have been left ajar.

Achilles starts forward but halts when Hephaestus grabs his arm. “There’s a forcefield here, son of Peleus.”

“I don’t see it.”

“You wouldn’t until you walked into it. I’m sure it would kill any other mortal man, but even though you’re the fleet-footed mankiller with what Nyx called your singularity probability quotient, the field would knock you on your ass. My instruments measure at least two hundred thousand volts in it and enough amperage to do real damage. Stand back.”

The bearded dwarf-god fiddles with boxes and corkscrewed metallic shapes hanging from the various leather straps and chest bands on his heavy vests, checks little dials, uses a short wand with alligator clip jaws to attach something that looks like a dead metallic ferret to some terminus in the invisible field, then links four rhomboid devices together with colored wire before pushing a brass button.

“There,” says Hephaestus, god of fire. “Field’s down.”

“That’s what I like about high priests,” says Achilles, “they do nothing and then brag about it.”

“You wouldn’t have fucking thought it was fucking nothing if you’d walked into that forcefield,” growls the god. “It was Hera’s work based on my machines.”

“Then I thank you,” says Achilles and strides through the archway, between the stone slabs of the open doorway, and into the vestibule and Odysseus’ home.

Suddenly there is a growling noise and a dark animal lunges snarling from the shadows.

Achilles’ sword is in his hand in an instant, but the dog has already collapsed on the dusty tiles.

“This is Argus,” says Achilles, patting the head of the prostrate and panting animal. “Odysseus trained this hound from a pup more than ten years ago, but told me that he had to leave for Troy before he ever took Argus hunting for boar or wild deer. Our crafty friend’s son, Telemachus, was supposed to be his master in Odysseus’ absence.”

“No one’s been his master for weeks,” says Hephaestus. “The mutt has all but starved to death.” It is true; Argus is too weak to stand or move his head. Only his large, imploring eyes follow Achilles’ hand as the hero pets the animal. The dog’s ribs stand out against his slack, lusterless hide like the hull timbers of an unfinished ship against old canvas.

“He can’t get outside Hera’s forcefield,” mutters Achilles. “And I’ll wager that there was nothing to eat inside. He’s probably had water from the rains and gutters, but no food.” He pulls several biscuits from the small bag he’s been carrying with his shield—biscuits purloined from the Artificer’s home—and feeds two to the dog. The animal can just barely chew them. Achilles sets three more biscuits next to the dog’s head and stands.

“Not even a corpse to feed on,” says Hephaestus. “What with the humans gone everywhere on your Earth now except around Ilium… just disappeared like fucking smoke. “

Achilles rounds on the limping god. “Where are our people? What have you and the other immortals done with them?”

The Artificer holds both palms high. “It wasn’t our doing, son of Peleus. Not even great Zeus’s. Some other force emptied out this Earth, not us. We Olympian gods need our worshipers. Living without our mortal grovelers, idolators, and altar-builders would be like narcissists—and I know Narcissus well—living in a world without mirrored surfaces. This wasn’t our deed.”

“You expect me to believe there are other gods?” asks Achilles, sword still half-raised.

“Big fleas have little fleas, and little fleas have littler fleas to bite ‘em, and littler fleas have even smaller fleas, and so on ad infinitum, or some doggerel like that,” says the bearded immortal.

“Be silent,” says Achilles. He pats the now actively chewing dog on the head one last time and turns his back on Hephaestus.

They pass through the vestibule into the main hall—the throne room as it were—where Achilles had been received years earlier by Odysseus and his wife Penelope. Odysseus’ son Telemachus had been a shy boy of six then, barely up to the task of bowing to the assembled Myrmidons and then hurriedly being led away by his nurse. The throne room is now empty.

Hephaestus is consulting one of his instrument-boxes. “This way,” he says, leading Achilles from the throne room back across the brightly frescoed vestibule to a longer, darker room. It is the banquet hall, dominated by a low table thirty feet long.

Zeus is sprawled supine on the table, his arms and legs thrown akimbo. He is naked and he is snoring. The banquet hall is a mess—cups, bowls, and utensils thrown everywhere, arrows spilled out all over the floor from where a great quiver had fallen from the wall, another wall missing a tapestry that was bunched up under the snoring Father of the Gods.

“It’s Absolute Sleep, all right,” grumbles Hephaestus.

“It sounds like it,” says Achilles. “I’m surprised the timbers don’t collapse from the snores and snorts.” The mankiller is stepping carefully over the heads of barbed arrows that are scattered on the floor. Although few Greek warriors admit it, most use deadly substances for poison on their speartips and arrowheads, and the only thing Achilles, son of Peleus, knows from the Oracle’s and his mother Thetis’s predictions of his own death is that a poisoned arrowhead piercing the only mortal part of his body will be the cause of his demise. But neither his immortal mother nor the Fates had ever told him exactly where or when he will die, or who will fire the deadly arrow. It would be too absurdly ironic, Achilles thinks now, to prick a toe on one of Odysseus’ ancient fallen arrows and die in agony even before he can waken Zeus to demand that Penthesilea be saved.

“No, I mean Absolute Sleep was the fucking drug Hera used to knock him out,” says the Artificer. “It was a potion I helped develop into aerosol form, although Nyx was the original chemist.”

“Can you wake him?”

“Oh, I think so, yes, yes, I think so,” says Hephaestus, pulling small bags and boxes off the ribbons laced to his leather vest and harnesses, peering into the boxes, rejecting some things, setting other vials and small devices on the tapestry-rumpled table next to Zeus’s giant thigh.

While the bearded dwarf-god fusses and assembles things, Achilles takes his first close-up gaze at Zeus the Father of All Gods and Men, He Who Marshals the Storm Clouds.

Zeus is fifteen feet tall, impressive even as he sprawls on his back, spraddle-legged on the tapestry and table, heavily muscled and perfectly formed, even his beard oiled into perfect curls, but other than the minor matters of size and physical perfection, he is just a big man who has enjoyed a great fuck and gone to sleep. The divine penis—almost as long as Achilles’ sword—still lies swollen, pink, and flaccid on the Lord God’s oily divine thigh. The God Who Gathers Storms is snoring and drooling like a pig.

“This should wake him up,” says Hephaestus. He holds up a syringe—something Achilles has never seen before—ending in a needle more than a foot long.

“By the gods!” cries Achilles. “Are you going to stick that into Father Zeus?”

“Straight into his lying, lusting heart,” says Hephaestus with a nasty cackle. “This is one thousand cc’s of pure divine adrenaline mixed with my own little recipe of various amphetamines—the only antidote to Absolute Sleep.”

“What will he do when he wakes?” asks Achilles, pulling his shield in front of him.

Hephaestus shrugs. “I’m not going to hang around to find out. I’m QTing out of here the second I inject this cocktail. Zeus’s response to being wakened with a needle in his heart is your problem, son of Peleus.”

Achilles grabs the dwarf-god by the beard and pulls him closer. “Oh, I guarantee it will be our problem if it is a problem, Crippled Artificer.”

“What do you want me to do, mortal? Wait here and hold your hand? It was your fucking idea to wake him up.”

“It’s also in your interest to awaken Zeus, god of one short leg,” says Achilles, not relinquishing his grip on the immortal’s beard.

“How so?” Hephaestus squints out of his good eye.

“You help me with this,” whispers Achilles, leaning closer to the grungy god’s misshapen ear, “and in a week it could be you who sits on the golden throne in the Hall of the Gods, not Zeus.”

“How can that be?” asks Hephaestus, but he is also whispering now. He still squints, but suddenly there is an eagerness in that squinting.

Still whispering, still holding Hephaestus’s beard in his fist, Achilles tells the Artificer his plan.

Zeus awakens with a roar.

As good as his word, Hephaestus has fled the instant he injected the adrenaline into the Father of the Gods’ heart, pausing only to pull the long needle free and fling the syringe from him. Three seconds later Zeus sits up, roars so loudly that Achilles has to clasp his hands over his ears, and then the Father leaps to his feet, overturns the thirty-foot-long heavy wooden table, and smashes out the entire south wall of Odysseus’ house.

“HERA!!!!” booms Zeus. “GOD DAMN YOU!”

Achilles forces himself not to cringe and cower, but he does step back while Zeus rips out the last of the wall, uses a timber to smash the overhanging chariot-wheel candle-chandelier to a thousand pieces, destroys the heavy, tumbled table with one smash of his giant fist, and paces wildly back and forth.

Finally the Father of All Gods seems to notice Achilles standing in the doorway to the vestibule. “YOU!”

“Me,” agrees Achilles, son of Peleus. His sword is in its belt loop, his shield politely strapped over his shoulder rather than on his forearm. His hands are empty and open. The god-killing long knife that Athena had given him for use in murdering Aphrodite is in his broad belt, but out of sight.

“What are you doing on Olympos?” growls Zeus. He is still naked. He holds his forehead with his huge left hand and Achilles can see the headache pain throbbing through Zeus the Father’s bloodshot eyes. Evidently Absolute Sleep leaves a hangover.

“You are not on Olympos, Lord Zeus,” Achilles says softly. “You’re on the isle of Ithaca—under a golden cloud of concealment—in the banquet hall of Odysseus, son of Laertes.”

Zeus squints around him. Then he frowns more deeply. Finally he looks down on Achilles once again, “How long have I been asleep, mortal?”

“Two weeks, Father,” says Achilles.

“You, Argive, fleet-footed mankiller, you couldn’t have awakened me here from whatever potion-charm white-armed Hera used to drug me. Which god revived me and why?”

“O Zeus Who Marshals the Thunderheads,” says Achilles, lowering his head and eyes almost meekly, as he has seen the meek do so many times, “I will tell you all you seek to know—and it is true that while most of the immortals on Olympos abandoned you, at least one god remained your loyal servant—but first I must ask for a boon.”

“A boon?” roars Zeus. “I’ll give you a boon you won’t forget if you speak again without permission. Stand there and be silent.”

The huge figure gestures and one of the three remaining walls—the one that had held the quiver of poison arrows and the outline of a great bow—mists into a three-dimensional vision surface much like the holopool in the Great Hall of the Gods.

Achilles realizes that he is looking at an aerial view of this very house—Odysseus’ palace. He can see the dog Argus outside. The starved hound has eaten the biscuits and revived enough to crawl into the shade.

“Hera would have left a forcefield beneath my cloaking golden cloud,” mutters Zeus. “The only one who could have lifted it is Hephaestus. I will deal with him later.”

Zeus moves his hand again. The virtual display shifts to the summit of Olympos, empty homes and halls, the abandoned chariots.

“They have gone down to play with their favorite toys,” mumbles Zeus.

Achilles sees a daylight battle in front of the walls of Ilium. Hector’s forces seem to be pushing the Argives and their siege machines back to Thicket Ridge and beyond. The air is filled with volleys of arrows and a score or more of flying chariots. Thunderbolts and bright red beams lash back and forth above the mortal battlefield. Explosions ripple across the battlefield and fill the sky as the gods do battle with each other even as their champions fight to the death below.

Zeus shakes his head. “Do you see them, Achilles? They are as addicted as cocaine addicts, as gamblers at their tables. For more than five hundred years since I conquered the last of the Titans—the original Changelings—and threw Kronos, Rhea, and the other monstrous Originals down into the gaseous pit of Tartarus, we have been evolving our godly, Olympian powers, settling into our divine roles… for WHAT???”

Achilles, who has not been explicitly asked to speak, keeps his mouth shut.

“DAMNED CHILDREN AT THEIR GAMES!!” bellows Zeus and again Achilles has to cover his ears. “Useless as heroin junkies or Lost Era teenagers in front of their videogames. After this long decade of their conniving and conspiring and secret fighting though I forbid it, and slowing time so they can arm their pet heroes with nanotech powers, they simply have to see it all to the bitter end and make sure their side wins. AS IF IT MAKES ONE GODDAMNED BIT OF DIFFERENCE!!”

Achilles knows that a lesser man—and all men are lesser men in Achilles’ view—would be on his knees screaming from the pain of the divine bellow by now, but the ultrasonic boom and roar of it still makes him weak inside.

“Addicts all,” says Zeus, his roar more bearable now. “I should have made them all sign up for Ilium Anonymous five years ago and avoided this terrible reckoning which now must come. Hera and her allies have gone too far.”

Achilles is watching the carnage on the wall. The image is so deep, so three-dimensional, that it is as if the wall has opened onto the crowded killing fields of Ilium itself. The Achaeans under Agamemnon’s clumsy leadership are visibly falling back—Apollo of the Silver Bow is obviously the most lethal god on the field, driving the flying chariots of Ares, Athena, and Hera back toward the sea—but it is not a rout, not yet, neither in the air nor on the ground. The view of the fighting gets Achilles’ blood up and makes him want to rush into the fighting, leading his Myrmidons in a swath of counterattack and killing that would end only with Achilles’ chariot and horses scarring the marble in Priam’s palace, preferably with Hector’s body being dragged behind it, leaving a bloody smear.

“WELL??” roars Zeus. “Speak up!”

“About what, O Father of All Gods and Men?”

“What is this… boon… you want from me, son of Thetis?” Zeus has been pulling on his garments as he’s watched the events on the vision wall.

Achilles steps closer. “In exchange for finding you and awakening you, Father Zeus, I would ask that you restore the life of Penthesilea in one of the Healing vats and…”

“Penthesilea?” booms Zeus. “That Amazon tart from the north regions? The blond bitch who murdered her sister Hippolyte to gain that worthless Amazon throne? How did she die? And what does she have to do with Achilles or Achilles with her?”

Achilles ground his molars but kept his gaze—now murderous—turned downward. “I love her, Father Zeus, and…”

Zeus bellows in laughter. “Love her, you say? Son of Thetis, I’ve watched you on my vision walls and floors and in person since you were a baby, since you were a snot-nosed youth being tutored by the patient centaur Chiron, and never have I seen you love a woman. Even the girl who fathered your son was left behind like excess baggage whenever you felt the urge to go off to war—or whoring and rape. You love Penthesilea, that brainless blond pussy with a spear. Tell me another tale, son of Thetis.”

“I love Penthesilea and wish her restored to health,” grits Achilles. All he can think of at this second is the god-killing blade in his belt. But Athena has lied to him before. If she lied about the abilities of that knife, he would be a fool to move against Zeus. Achilles knows that he is a fool at any rate, coming here to beseech the Father for this gift. But he perseveres, eyes still lowered but his hands balled into powerful fists. “Aphrodite gave the Amazon queen a scent to wear when she went into combat with me …” he begins.

Zeus roars laughter again. “Not Number Nine! Well, you are well and truly screwed, my friend. How did this Penthesilea twat die? No, wait, I will see for myself…”

The Lord Father moves his right hand again and the wallscreen blurs, shifts, leaps back across time and space. Achilles looks up to see the doomed Amazon charge against him and his men on the red plains at the base of Olympos. He watches Clonia, Bremusa, and the other Amazons fall to men’s arrows and blades. He watches again as he casts his father’s unfailing spear completely through Queen Penthesilea and the thick torso of her horse behind her, pinning her on her fallen steed’s horse like some wriggling insect on a dissecting tray.

“Oh, well done,” booms Zeus. “And now you want her brought back to life again in one of my Healer’s vats?”

“Yes, Lord,” says Achilles.

“I don’t know how you know about the Hall of Healing,” says Zeus, pacing back and forth again, “but you should know that even the Healer’s alien arts cannot bring a dead mortal back to life.”

“Lord,” says Achilles, his voice low but urgent, “Athena cast a spell of no corruption, of no encroaching death, over my beloved’s body. It might be possible to…”

“SILENCE!!” roars Zeus and Achilles is physically driven back to the holowall by the blast of noise. “NO ONE IN THE ORIGINAL PANTHEON OF IMMORTALS TELLS ZEUS THE FATHER WHAT IS POSSIBLE OR WHAT SHOULD BE DONE, MUCH LESS SOME MERE MORTAL, OVERMUSCLED SPEARMAN.”

“No, Father,” says Achilles, raising his gaze to the giant, bearded form, “but I hoped that…”

“Silence,” says Zeus again, but at a level that allows Achilles to remove his hands from his ears. “I’m leaving now—to destroy Hera, to cast down her accomplices into the bottomless pit of Tartarus, to punish the other gods in ways they will never forget, and to wipe out this invading Argive army once and for all. You Greeks—with your arrogance and your oily ways—really get on my tits.” Zeus begins to stride for the door. “You’re on Ilium-Earth here, son of Thetis. It may take you many months, but you can find your way home by yourself. I would not recommend you return to Ilium—there will be no Achaeans left alive there by the time you reach that place.”

“No,” says Achilles.

Zeus whirls. He is actually smiling through his beard. “What did you say?”

“I said no. You must grant my wish.” Achilles unlimbers his shield and sets it in place on his forearm, as if he is heading to the front. He pulls his sword.

Zeus throws his head back and laughs. “Grant your wish or… what, bastard son of Thetis?”

“Or else I will feed Zeus’s liver to that starving dog of Odysseus’ in the courtyard,” Achilles says firmly.

Zeus smiles and shakes his head. “Do you know why you are alive this very day, insect?”

“Because I am Achilles, son of Peleus,” says Achilles, stepping forward. He wishes he had his throwing spear. “The greatest warrior and noblest hero on Earth—invulnerable to his enemies—friend of the murdered Patroclus, slave and servant to no man… or god.”

Zeus shakes his head again. “You’re not the son of Peleus.”

Achilles stops advancing. “What are you talking about, Lord of Flies? Lord of Horse Dung? I am the son of Peleus who is the son of Aeacus, son of the mortal who mated with the immortal sea goddess Thetis, a king myself descended from a long line of kings of the Myrmidons.”

“No,” says Zeus and this time the giant god is the one who steps closer, towering over Achilles. “You are the son of Thetis, but the bastard son of my seed, not the seed of Peleus’.”

“You!” Achilles tries to laugh but it comes out a hoarse bark. “My immortal mother told me in all truth that…”

“Your immortal mother lies through her seaweed-crusted teeth,” laughs Zeus. “Almost three decades ago, I desired Thetis. She was less than a full goddess then, although more beautiful than most of you mortals. But the Fates—those accursed bean counters with the DNA-memory abacuses—warned me that any child I spawned with Thetis could be my undoing, could cause my death, could bring down the reign of Olympos itself.”

Achilles stares hate and disbelief through his helmet eyeholes.

“But I wanted Thetis,” continues Zeus. “So I fucked her. But first I morphed into the form of Peleus—some common mortal boy-man with whom Thetis was mildly infatuated at the time. But the sperm that conceived you is Zeus’s divine seed, Achilles, son of Thetis, make no mistake about that. Why else do you think your mother took you far away from that idiot Peleus and had you raised by an old centaur?”

“You lie,” growls Achilles.

Zeus shakes his head almost sadly. “And you will die in a second, young Achilles,” says the Father of All Gods and Men. “But you will die knowing that I told you the truth.”

“You can’t kill me, Lord of Crabs.”

Zeus rubs his beard. “No, I can’t. Not directly. Thetis saw to that. When she learned that I had been the lover who knocked her up, not that dickless worm Peleus, she also knew of the Fates’ prediction and that I would kill you as surely as my father, Kronos, ate his offspring rather than risk their revolts and vendettas when they grew up. And I would have done that, young Achilles—eaten you when you were a babe—had not Thetis conspired to dip you in the probability flames of the pure quantum celestial fire. You are a quantum freak unique unto the universe, bastard son of Thetis and Zeus. Your death—and even I do not know the details of it, the Fates will not share them—is absolutely appointed.”

“Then fight me now, God of Feces,” shouts Achilles and begins to advance, sword and shield ready.

Zeus holds up one hand. Achilles is frozen in place. Time itself seems to freeze.

“I cannot kill you, my impetuous little bastard,” mutters Zeus, as if to himself, “but what if I blast your flesh from your bone and then rip that very flesh into its constituent cells and molecules? It might take a while for even the quantum universe to reassemble you—centuries per-haps?—and I don’t think it could possibly be a painless process.”

Frozen in midstride, Achilles knows that he is still able to speak but does not.

“Or perhaps I could send you somewhere,” says Zeus, gesturing toward the ceiling, “where there is no air to breathe. That will be an interesting conundrum for the probability singularity of the celestial fire to solve.”

“There is no place outside the oceans with no air to breathe,” snarls Achilles, but then he remembers his gasping and weakness on the high slopes of Olympos just the day before.

“Outer space would give the lie to that assertion,” says Zeus with a maddening smile. “Somewhere beyond the orbit of Uranus, perhaps, or out in the Kuiper Belt. Or Tartarus would serve. The air there is mostly methane and ammonia—it would turn your lungs to burned twigs—but if you survived a few hours in terrible pain, you could commune with your grandparents. They eat mortals, you know.”

“Fuck you,” shouts Achilles.

“So be it,” says Zeus. “Have a good trip, my son. Short—agonizing—but good.”

The King of the Gods moves his right hand in a short, easy arc and the paving tiles beneath Achilles’ feet begin to dissolve. A circle opens in the floor of Odysseus’ banquet hall until the fleet-footed mankiller seems to be standing on flame-lighted air. From beneath him, from the horrific pit below filled with surging sulfurous clouds, black mountains rising like rotten teeth, lakes of liquid lead, the bubble and flow of hissing lava, and the shadowy movement of huge, inhuman things, comes the constant roar and bellow of the monsters once called Titans.

Zeus moves his hand again, ever so slightly, and Achilles falls into that pit. He does not scream as he disappears.

After a minute of gazing down at the flames and roiling black clouds so far below, Zeus moves his palm from left to right, the circle closes, the floor becomes solid and is made up of Odysseus’ handset tiles once again, and silence returns to the house except for the pathetic baying of the starving hound named Argus out in the courtyard somewhere.

Zeus sighs and quantum teleports away to begin his reckoning with the unsuspecting gods.

58

Prospero stayed behind as Moira led Harman around the marble balcony with no railing, up a moving flight of open iron stairs, then around again, up again, and so until the floor of the Taj became a circle seemingly miles below. Harman’s heart was pounding.

There were a few small, round windows set into the booklined wall of the endlessly rising and inward-curving dome. Harman had not seen them from below or from outside, but they allowed light in and gave him an excuse to pause for breath and courage. They stood in the light for a minute as Harman stared out at the distant mountain peaks shining icily in the late morning light. Masses of clouds had filled the valleys to the north and east, hiding the ripple-crevassed glaciers from view. Harman wondered how far he was looking beyond the peaks and glaciers and massing clouds to the dusty and nearly curved horizon be-yond—a hundred miles? Two hundred miles? More?

“It’s all right,” Moira said softly.

Harman turned.

“What you did to wake me,” she said. “It’s all right. We’re sorry. You really did have no choice. The mechanisms to incite you were in place before your father’s father’s great-great-grandfather was born.”

“But what are the odds that I would be descended from this Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep of yours?” said Harman. He could not hide the regret in his voice—nor did he want to.

Surprisingly, Moira laughed. It was Savi’s laugh—quick and spontaneous—but lacking the edge of bitterness Harman had heard in the older woman’s amusement. “The odds are one hundred percent,” said Moira.

Harman could only show his confusion in silence.

“Ferdinand Mark Alonzo made sure that when the next line of old-style humans were being… readied and decanted,” said Moira,”that some of his chromosomes would be in all males of the line.”

“No wonder we’re feeble and stupid and inept,” said Harman. “We’re all a bunch of inbred cousins.” He’d sigled a book on basic genetics less than three weeks earlier—although it seemed like years ago. Ada had been sleeping next to him while he watched the golden words flow from the book down his hand, wrist, and arm.

Moira laughed again. “Are you ready to go the rest of the way up to the crystal cabinet?”

The clear cupola at the top of the Taj Moira was much larger than it had appeared from below—Harman guessed it was at least sixty or seventy feet across. There were no marble walkways here and the iron-stairway escalators and black-iron catwalks all ended at the center of the dome, everything glowing in the sunlight from the clear windows encircling the Taj’s pointed cupola.

Harman had never been so high—not even on the tower of the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu seven hundred feet above the suspended road-way—and he’d never been overwhelmed by such a fear of falling. This platform was so high that he could look down and hide the entire circle of the marble floor of the Taj with his outstretched hand. The maze and the crypt entrance on the main floor were so far below that they looked like the microcircuit embroidery on a turin cloth. Harman forced himself not to look down as he followed Moira up the last stairway out onto the web of catwalks to the wrought-iron platform in the cupola itself.

“Is that it?” he asked, nodding toward a ten—or twelve-foot-tall structure in the center of the platform.

“Yes.”

Harman had expected this so-called crystal cabinet to be another version of Moira’s crystal sarcophagus, but this thing looked nothing like a coffin. It was faceted with glass and metal geodesic struts the color of old pewter. The word “dodecahedron” came to mind, but Harman had learned that from sigling rather than from reading and wasn’t sure if it was the correct term. The crystal cabinet was a multifaceted, twelve-sided object, roughly spherical except for the flat faces, made of a dozen or so slabs of clear glass or crystal framed by thin struts of burnished metal. Scores of multicolored cables and pipes ran from the walls of the cupola into the black metal base of the thing. Scattered on the platform near the cabinet were metal-mesh chairs, odd instruments with dark screens and keyboards, and micro-thin slabs of vertical clear plastic, some five or six feet high.

“What is this place?” asked Harman.

“The nexus of the Taj.” She activated several of the screened instruments and touched a vertical panel. The plastic disappeared as a holographic virtual control panel took its place. Moira’s hands danced on the virtual images, there was a deep sound from the walls of the Taj, and a golden liquid—not yellow but liquid gold, apparently no thicker than water—began pouring into the base of the crystal cabinet.

Harman walked closer to the dodecahedron. “It’s filling with liquid.”

“Yes.”

“That’s crazy. I can’t go in there now. I’d drown.”

“No, you won’t,” said Moira.

“You expect me to be in that cabinet when it has ten feet of this golden liquid in it?”

“Yes.”

Harman shook his head and backed away, stopping six feet from the edge of the metal platform. “No, no, no. That’s too crazy.”

“As you will, but it is the only way you can gain the knowledge of these books,” said Moira. “The fluid is the medium which allows the transmission of the contents of these million volumes. Knowledge you will need if you are to be our Prometheus in the struggle against Setebos and his kind. Knowledge you will need if you are to educate your own people. Knowledge you will need, my Prometheus, if you are to save your beloved Ada.”

“Yes, but if the water fills it—whatever the liquid is—it’ll be ten feet deep or deeper. I’m not a good swimmer …” began Harman.

Suddenly Ariel was standing next to them on the platform, although Harman hadn’t heard his steps on the metal floor. The small figure was carrying something bulky wrapped in what looked to be a red turin cloth.

“Ariel, my darling!” cried Moira. Her voice carried a tone of delight and excitement that Harman had not yet heard from her—nor even from Savi in the time he’d known her.

“Greetings to Miranda,” said the sprite, removing the red cloth and handing Moira some sort of antique instrument with strings. Harman’s people played and sang some music, but knew few instruments and made none.

“A guitar!” said the post-human woman, taking the oddly shaped instrument from the greenish-glowing sprite and touching the strings with her long fingers. The notes that issued forth reminded Harman of Ariel’s own voice.

Ariel bowed low and spoke in formal tone—

“Take This slave of Music, for the sake Of him who is the slave of thee. And teach it all the harmony In which thou canst, and only thou,

Make the delighted spirit glow, Till joy defines itself again, And, too intense, is turned to pain; For by permission and command Of thine own Prince Ferdinand, Poor Ariel sends this silent token Of more than ever can be spoken.”

Moira bowed toward the sprite, set the resonating instrument on a table, and kissed Ariel on his green-glowing forehead. “I thank thee, friend, sometimes friendly servant, never slave. How has my Ariel fared since I went to sleep?” And said:

“When you died, the silent Moon, in her interlunar swoon, Is not sadder in her cell Than deserted Ariel. When you live again on earth, Like an unseen star of birth, Ariel guides you o’er the sea Of life from your nativity.”

Moira touched his cheek, then looked at Harman, then back to the sprite—avatar of the biosphere. “Have you two encountered one another before?”

“We’ve met,” said Harman. “How is the world, Ariel, since I left it?” asked Moira, turning away from Harman again. Ariel said,

“Many changes have been run, Since Ferdinand and you begun Your course of love, and Ariel still Has tracked your steps, and served your will.”

In a less formal voice, as if concluding some official ceremony, the biosphere sprite said, “And how is it with you, my lady, now that you are born unto us again?”

Now it seemed to be Moira’s turn to sound more formal and cadenced than Harman had ever heard in Savi’s voice—

“This temple, sad and lone, Is all spared from the thunder of a war Foughten long since by giant hierarchy

Against rebellion: this old image here, Whose carved features wrinkled as he fell, Is Prosper’s; I Miranda, left supreme Sole Priestess of this desolation.”—

To his horror, Harman saw that both the post-human woman and inhuman biosphere entity were openly weeping.

Ariel stepped back, bowed again, swept his hand in Harman’s direction, and said, “This mortal man who’s done no harm, despite all the contrary his name implies, has he come to the crystal cabinet to be executed?”

“No,” said Moira, “to be educated.”

59

The Setebos Egg hatched during their first night back at the ruins of Ardis Hall.

Ada was shocked to see the devastation at her former home. She’d been unconscious when flown away on the sonie the night of the attack and because of her concussion and other injuries had only partial memories of the horrible hours before. Now she saw the ruins of her life and home and memories in stark daylight. It made her want to fall to her knees and weep until she slept, but because she was leading the group of forty-four other survivors as they came up the last hill toward Ardis, the sonie hovering with eight of the most severely ill and wounded above, she kept her head up and her eyes dry as she walked past the scorched ruins, glancing left and right only to point out articles and remnants that could be salvaged for their new camp.

Her home, the great manor of Ardis Hall, two thousand years of her family’s pride, was all but gone—only soot-blackened timbers and the stone remnants of the many fireplaces left—but there was a surprising amount to salvage elsewhere.

There were also the rotting bodies of their friends—at least bits and pieces of them—left in the fields.

Ada conferred with Daeman and a few others and they agreed that the first priority was creating a fire and shelter—first a rough lean-to and warm place for the ill and injured to be treated and brought to before the short winter day was over, a shelter large enough for all of them to make it through the night without freezing. While Ardis Hall was lost to them, segments of several of the barracks, sheds, and other outbuildings erected in the last nine months before the sky fell were partially intact. They might have crowded into one of these shacks, but they were too near the forest, too hard to defend, and too far from the well that had been right outside Ardis Hall.

They found heaps of kindling and dry wood and used what Ada thought was too many matches from their dwindling supply to start a large fire. Greogi landed the sonie and they unloaded the unconscious and semiconscious injured and made them as comfortable as they could on makeshift cots and bedrolls near the fire. A work detail kept carrying more firewood from the various ruins—no one wanted to go as far as the shadowy forest and Ada had forbidden such adventures for that day. The sonie took off and orbited in a mile-wide circle, the exhausted Greogi at the controls and Boman with his rifle, both men watching for voynix. One of the barracks—the one Odysseus built by hand for his followers months before—yielded a treasure trove of blankets and rolls of canvas, all smelling of smoke but usable, and in another tumbled but only partially burned shed near Hannah’s burned-out cupola, Caul found shovels, picks, crowbars, hoes, hammers, nails, spikes, nylon rope, carabiners, and other former servitor tools that might now save their lives. With the unscorched wood from the barracks and logs scavenged from large parts of the former palisade, a work party began erecting a structure part tent, part log cabin around the deep water well next to the still-smoldering ruins of Ardis—a temporary shelter good enough for that night and a few more nights at least. Boman had more elaborate plans for a permanent lodge with a tower, gun slits, and close-in palisade, but Ada told him to help build the survival lean-to first and plan the castle later.

There still was no sign of the voynix, but it was only afternoon and night would be coming quickly enough, so Ada and Daeman assigned Kaman and ten of his best marksmen to set up a perimeter defense. Other men and women with flechette weapons—they’d counted twenty-four working weapons and one that seemed defective, with fewer than one hundred and twenty magazines of crystal flechettes—were detailed to provide guard closer to the fire and lean-to.

It took a little more than three hours to get the basic structure hammered together and raised—walls only about six feet high, made from palisade logs, a cobbled-together arched roof made of wood planks from the barracks, and a canvas roof. It was important to put something between the wounded and the cold ground, but there was no time to fit a floor, so multiple layers of canvas were laid down atop straw brought in from the former hay barn near the north wall. The cattle themselves had disappeared—killed by voynix or simply run off. No one was going into the forest hunting for them that particular afternoon and the circling sonie had its own duties to perform.

By late afternoon, the temporary lean-to was completed. Ada, who had been working on new buckets and ropes for the well and leading burial parties with picks and shovels digging shallow graves in the frozen earth, returned to inspect the structure and found it large enough for at least forty-five people to crowd in close together to sleep, the others presumably on guard duty outside, and for all fifty-three of them to crowd into for meals if necessary, although it would be crowded. Three of the walls were of wood, but the fourth wall—facing the well and two fires now burning—was only canvas, with most of it open to the heat. Laman and Edide had scrounged metal and ceramic from Ardis Hall to build a stovepipe, if not an actual chimney, for the lean-to, but that modification would have to wait for the next day. There was no glass for windows, only small openings at different heights on each of the wood walls with sliding wood slats and covering canvas. Daeman agreed they could retreat to the lean-to and lay down a withering field of flechette fire from those slits, but one look at the canvas roof and the canvas fourth wall told everyone there that the voynix could not be held off long once they leaped to the attack.

But the Setebos Egg seemed to be keeping the voynix at bay.

It was almost dark when Daeman took Ada, Tom, and Laman away from the warmth of the fires to the ashes of Hannah’s cupola to open his rucksack and show them the hatching egg. The thing was glowing even more brightly, shedding a sick, milky light, and there were tiny cracks everywhere in the shell, but no openings yet.

“How long until it hatches?” asked Ada.

“How the hell should I know?” said Daeman. “All I know is that the little Setebos inside is still alive and trying to get out. You can hear the squeals and chewing sounds if you put your ear to the shell.”

“No thanks,” said Ada.

“What happens when it hatches?” asked Laman, who had been in favor of destroying the egg from the beginning.

Daeman shrugged.

“What exactly did you have in mind when you stole the thing from Setebos’ nest in the Paris Crater blue-ice cathedral?” asked the medic Tom, who’d heard the whole story.

“I don’t know,” said Daeman. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. At least we could find out what sort of creature this Setebos is.”

“What if Mommy comes looking for her baby?” asked Laman. It was not the first time that Daeman had been asked this.

He shrugged again. “We can kill it right after it hatches if we have to,” he said softly, looking at the growing winter darkness under the trees beyond the ruins of the old palisade.

“Can we?” said Laman. He put his left hand on the many-fissured eggshell and then pulled it away quickly as if the surface were hot. All those who had touched the egg had remarked on the unpleasantness of the experience, as if something on the inside of the shell were sucking energy through their palm.

Before Daeman could answer again, Ada said, “Daeman, if you hadn’t brought that thing back with you, most of us would probably be dead now. It’s kept the voynix away this long. Maybe it will after it hatches as well.”

“If it—or its mama-poppa—doesn’t eat us in our sleep,” said Laman, cradling his mangled right hand.

Later, just after dark, Siris came and whispered to Ada that Sherman, one of their more seriously wounded, had died. Ada nodded, rounded up two others—Edide and a still-portly man named Rallum—and they quietly carried the body out beyond the edge of the fire, setting it under lumber and stones near the tumbled barracks so that they could properly bury Sherman in the morning. The wind was cold.

Ada did a four-hour shift of guard duty in the dark with a loaded flechette rifle, the warming fire a distant glow and the nearest other sentry fifty yards away, her concussion causing her head to pound so fiercely she really couldn’t have seen a voynix or Setebos if it had sat on her lap. Her broken wrist required her to prop the weapon on her forearm. Then, when Caul relieved her from duty, she stumbled back to the crowded, snore-filled lean-to and fell into a deep sleep stirred only by terrible nightmares.

Daeman awakened her just before dawn, bending to whisper in her ear, “The egg has hatched.”

Ada sat up in the dark, feeling the press and breathing of bodies all around her, and for a moment she knew she was still in the nightmare. She wanted Harman to touch her shoulder and wake her into sunlight. She wanted his arm around her, not this freezing dark and press of strange bodies and flickering, fading firelight through canvas.

“It hatched,” repeated Daeman. His voice was very low. “I didn’t want to wake you, but we have to decide what to do.”

“Yes,” Ada whispered back. She’d slept in her clothes and now she slipped out of her nest of damp blankets and carefully picked her way over sleeping forms, following Daeman out through the canvas, past the low but still-tended fire, south, away from the lean-to toward another, much smaller fire.

“I slept out here away from the others,” said Daeman, speaking in a more normal tone as they got farther away from the main lean-to. His voice was still soft but each syllable roared in Ada’s aching head. Far overhead, the e—and p-rings whirled as they always whirled, turning and crossing in front of the stars and a fingernail moon. Ada saw something move up there and for a minute her heart pounded before she realized it was the sonie, orbiting silently in the night.

“Who’s flying the sonie?” she asked dully.

“Oko.”

“I didn’t know she knew how to fly it.”

“Greogi taught her yesterday,”said Daeman. They were approaching the smaller campfire and Ada saw the silhouette of another man standing there.

“Good morning, Ada Uhr,” said Tom.

Ada had to smile at the formal honorific. It had not been used much in recent months. “Good morning, Tom,” she whispered. “Where is this thing?”

Daeman pulled a long piece of wood out of the fire and extended it into the darkness like a torch.

Ada stepped back.

Daeman and Tom had obviously piled up palisade logs on three sides to cage the… thing… in the triangular space. But it was scurrying to and fro in that space, obviously ready and soon capable of climbing the two-foot-high flimsy wooden barricades.

Ada took the torch from Tom and crouched lower to study the Setebos thing in the flickering light.

Its multiple yellow eyes blinked and closed at the glare. The little Setebos—if that is what it was—was about a foot long, already larger in mass and length than a regular human brain, Ada thought, but still with the disgustingly pink wrinkles and folds and appearance of a living, disembodied brain. She could see the gray strip between the two hemispheres, a mucousy membrane covering it, and a slight pulsing, as if the whole thing was breathing. But this pink brain also had pulsating mouths—or orifices of some kind—and a myriad of tiny, pink baby hands beneath it and protruding from orifices. It scrabbled back and forth on those pudgy little pink fingers that looked like a mass of wriggling worms to Ada.

The yellow eyes opened, stayed open, and locked on Ada’s face. One of the orifices opened and screeching, scratching sounds came out.

“Is it trying to talk?” Ada whispered to both men.

“I have no idea,” said Daeman. “But it’s only a few minutes old. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s talking to us by the time it’s an hour old.”

“We shouldn’t let it get an hour old,” Tom said softly but firmly. “We should kill the thing now. Blow it apart with flechettes and then burn its corpse and scatter the ashes.”

Ada looked at Tom in surprise. The self-trained medic had always been the least violent and most life-affirming person she’d known at Ardis.

“At the very least,” said Daeman, watching the thing successfully trying to climb the low wooden barrier, “it needs a leash.”

Wearing heavy canvas-and-wool gloves they’d designed at Ardis early in the winter for work with livestock, Daeman leaned forward and plunged a sharp, thin spike that he’d curved to form a hook into the solid band of fibers—corpus callosum, Ada remembered it was called—connecting the two hemispheres of the little Setebos’s brain. Then, moving quickly, Daeman tugged to make sure the hook was secure, snapped a carabiner to it, and rigged twenty feet of nylon rope to the carabiner.

The little creature screamed and howled so loudly that Ada looked over her shoulder at the main camp, sure that everyone would come boiling out of the lean-to. No one stirred except one sentry near the fire who looked over her way sleepily and then went back to contemplating the flames.

The little Setebos writhed and rolled, running against the wooden barriers and finally clambering over them like a crab. Daeman tugged it up short on six feet of leash.

More tiny hands emerged from their folded state in the pink brain’s orifices and pulled themselves along on elastic stalks a yard or more long. The hands leaped at the nylon rope and tugged at it wildly, other hands exploring the hook and carabiner, trying to pull them free. The hook held. Daeman was pulled forward for a second but then jerked the scrabbling creature back onto the frozen grass of its cage.

“Strong little bastard,” he whispered.

“Let it wander,” said Ada. “Let’s see where it goes. What it does.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. Not far, but let’s see what it wants.”

Tom kicked the low post-wall down and the Setebos baby scurried out, the baby fingers under it working in unison, blurring like some obscene centipede’s legs.

Daeman allowed himself to be tugged along behind it, keeping the leash short. Ada and Tom walked beside Daeman, ready to move quickly if the creature turned toward them. It moved too quickly and too purposefully for any of the humans not to sense the danger from it.

Tom’s flechette rifle was being held at the ready and Daeman had another rifle strapped over his shoulder.

The thing didn’t head for the campfire or the lean-to. It tugged them twenty yards into the darkness of the west lawn. Then it scurried down into one of the former defensive trenches—a flame trench Ada had helped to dig—and seemed to squat on its spraddled hands.

Two new orifices opened at either ends of the little creature and stalks without hands, pulsing proboscises, emerged, wavered, and suddenly attached themselves to the ground. There came a sound that was a mixture of a pig rooting and a baby suckling.

“What the hell?” said Tom. He had the rifle aimed, the plastic-metal stock set firmly against his shoulder. The first shot, Ada knew, would slam several thousand crystal-barbed flechettes into the pulsing pink monstrosity at a velocity greater than the speed of sound.

Ada started shivering. Her constant, pulsing headache turned to a wave of nausea.

“I know this spot,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “It’s where Reman and Emme died during the voynix attack… they burned to death here.”

The Setebos spawn continued loudly rooting and suckling.

“Then it’s …” began Daeman and stopped.

“Eating,” finished Ada.

Tom put his finger on the trigger. “Let me kill it, Ada Uhr. Please.”

“Yes,” said Ada. “But not yet. I have no doubt that the voynix will return as soon as this thing dies. And it’s still dark. And we’re nowhere near ready. Let’s go back to your camp.”

They walked back to the campfire together, Daeman tugging the reluctant and finger-dragging Setebos thing along behind them.

60

Harman drowned.

His last thoughts before the water filled his lungs were—That bitch Moira lied to me—and then he gagged and choked and drowned in the swirling golden liquid.

The crystal dodecahedron had filled only to within a foot of its multifaceted top while Harman had been watching the golden liquid flow into it. Savi-Moira-Miranda had called the rich golden fluid the “medium” by which he would sigl—although that had not been her term—the Taj’s gigantic collection of books. Harman had stripped down to his thermskin layer.

“That has to come off, too,” said Moira. Ariel had stepped back into the shadows and now only the young woman stood in the bright light from the cupola windows with him. The guitar was on a nearby tabletop.

“Why?” said Harman.

“Your skin has to be in contact with the medium,” said Moira. “The transfer can’t work through a bonded molecular layer like a thermskin.”

“What transfer?” Harman had asked, licking his lips. He was very nervous. His heart was pounding.

Moira gestured toward the seemingly infinite rows of shelved books lining the hundred curved stories of inner dome-wall widening out below them.

“How do I know that there’s anything in those old books that will help me get back to Ada?” said Harman.

“You don’t.”

“You and Prospero could send me home right now if you wanted,” said Harman, turning away from the filling crystal tank. “Why don’t you do that so we can skip all this nonsense?”

“It’s not that easy,” said Moira.

“The hell it isn’t,” shouted Harman.

The young woman went on as if Harman had not spoken. “First of all, you know from the turin and from what Prospero told you that all of the planet’s faxnodes and fax pavilions have been shut off.”

“By whom?” said Harman, turning back to look at the crystal cabinet again. The golden fluid was swirling to within a foot of the top, but it had stopped filling. Moira had opened a panel on the top—one of the multifaceted glass faces—and he could see the short metal rungs that would allow him to climb up to that opening.

“By Setebos or his allies,” said Moira.

“What allies? Who are they? Just tell me what I need to know.”

Moira shook her head. “My young Prometheus, you’ve been told things for the better part of a year now. Hearing things means nothing unless you have the context in which to place the information. It is time for you to gain that context.”

“Why do you keep calling me Prometheus?” he barked at her. “Everyone seems to have ten names around here… Prometheus, I don’t know that name. Why do you call me that?”

Moira smiled. “I guarantee that you will understand that at least, after the crystal cabinet.”

Harman took a deep breath. One more smug smile out of this woman, he realized, and he might hit her in the face. “Prospero said that this thing could kill me,” he said. He looked at the cabinet rather than the post-human thing in Savi’s human form.

Moira nodded. “It could. I do not believe it will.”

“What are my chances?” said Harman. His voice sounded plaintive and weak to his own ears.

“I don’t know. Very good, I think, or I would not suggest you go through this… unpleasantness.”

“Have you done it?”

“Undergone the crystal cabinet transfer?” said Moira. “No. I had no reason to.”

“Who has?” demanded Harman. “How many lived? How many died?”

“All of the Chief Librarians have experienced the crystal cabinet transfer,” said Moira. “All the many generations of the Keepers of the Taj. All the linear descendents of the original Khan Ho Tep.”

“Including your beloved Ferdinand Mark Alonzo?”

“Yes.”

“And how many of these Keepers of the Taj survived the cabinet transfer?” asked Harman. He was still wearing the thermskin, but his exposed hands and face felt the terrible chill in the air up there near the top of the dome. He concentrated on not shivering.

Harman was afraid that if Moira merely shrugged, he’d just walk away forever. And he didn’t want to do that—not yet. Not until he knew more. This awkward crystal cabinet with its glowing gold liquid might kill him… but it might also return him to Ada sooner.

Moira did not shrug. She looked him in the eye—she had Savi’s eyes—and said, “I don’t know how many died. Sometimes the flow of information is simply too much—for lesser minds. I do not believe you have a lesser mind, Prometheus.”

“Don’t call me that again.” Harman’s freezing hands were tightened into fists.

“All right.”

“How long does it take?” he asked.

“The transfer itself? Less than an hour.”

“That long?” said Harman. “The eiffelbahn car leaves in forty-five minutes.”

“We’ll make it,” said Moira. Harman hesitated.

“The medium fluid is warm,” said Moira as if reading his mind. It was more likely, he realized, she was reading his shivers and shaking.

That may have decided the issue for Harman. He had peeled off the thermskin, embarrassed to be naked in front of this stranger with whom he had had a strange sort of sex less than two hours earlier. And it was cold.

He had quickly clambered up the side of the dodecahedron, using the short rungs for hand and footholds, feeling how cold the metal was against the bare soles of his feet.

It had been a relief when he lowered himself through the open panel and actually dropped into the golden liquid. As she’d promised, the fluid was warm. It had no scent and the few drops that landed on his lips had no taste.

And then Ariel had levitated from the shadows and closed and locked the panel above Harman’s head.

And then Moira had touched some control on the vertical and virtual control panel where she stood.

And then a pump chugged to life again somewhere in the base of the crystal cabinet and more fluid began to fill the closed container.

Harman had screamed at them then—screamed at them to let him out—and then, when both post-human and biosphere non-human ignored him, Harman had pounded and kicked, trying to open the panel, trying to shatter the crystal. The fluid continued to rise. For some seconds Harman found the last inch of air at the top facet of the dodecahedron and he breathed it in deeply, still pounding on the overhead panels. And then the fluid rose until there was no more inch of air, no more air bubbles except those escaping from Harman’s lips and nose.

He held his breath for as long as he could. He wished that his last thought could have been of Ada and his love for Ada—and his sorrow for having betrayed Ada—but although he thought of her, his last thoughts while holding his breath until his lungs were afire were a confused jumble of terror and fury and regret.

And then he could hold his breath no more and—still pounding on the unyielding crystal panel above him—he exhaled, coughed, gagged, cursed, gagged more, breathed in the thickening fluid, felt darkness flowing over his mind even as overwhelming panic continued to fill his body with useless adrenaline, and then his lungs held no air at all, but Harman did not know this. Heavier without air in his lungs, his body no longer kicking, moving, or breathing, Harman sank to the center of the dodecahedron.

61

There had been a flurry of activity and tightbeamed conversation on the bridge of the Queen Mab as another masered message came in from the Voice on the asteroid city on polar Earth orbit, but it was only a repeat of the previous rendezvous coordinates and after five minutes confirming this and with no other message following, the principal moravecs met back at the chart table.

“Where were we?” said Orphu of Io.

“You were about to present your Theory of Everything,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“And you said you knew who the Voice is,” said Cho Li. “Who or what is it?”

“I don’t know who the Voice is,” answered Orphu, vocalizing in soft rumbles rather than tightbeaming or transmitting on the standard in-ship comm channels. “But I have a pretty good guess.”

“Tell us,” said General Beh bin Adee. The Belt moravec’s tone did not suggest a polite request so much as a direct order.

“I’d rather explain my entire… Theory of Everything… first and then tell you about the Voice,” said Orphu. “It’ll make more sense in context.”

“Proceed,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

Mahnmut heard his friend take in a full breath of O-two, even though the Ionian had weeks or months of reserve in his tanks. He wanted to tightbeam his friend the question—Are you sure you want to go ahead with this explanation?—but since Mahnmut himself had no clue as to what Orphu was going to say, he remained silent. But he was nervous for his friend.

“First of all,” said Orphu of Io, “you haven’t released the information yet, but I’m pretty sure you’ve identified most of the million or so satellites that make up Earth’s polar and equatorial rings that we’re so quickly approaching… and I bet that most of the objects aren’t asteroids or habitations.”

“That is correct,” said Asteague/Che.

“Some of them we know to be early post-human attempts at creating and corralling black holes,” continued Orphu. “Huge devices like the wormhole accumulator that you showed us crashing into that other orbital asteroid city nine months ago. But how many of those are there? A few thousand?”

“Fewer than two thousand,” confirmed Asteague/Che.

“It’s my bet that the bulk of the rest of the million… things … that the post-humans put in orbit are data storage devices. I don’t know what kind—DNA, maybe, although that would require constant life support, so they’re probably bubble memory combined with some sort of advanced quantum computer with some complicated post-human memory storage that we moravecs haven’t discovered yet.”

Orphu paused and there was a silence that seemed to stretch on for hours to Mahnmut. The various Prime Integrators and moravec leaders were not looking at one another, but Mahnmut guessed that they had a private tightbeam channel and that they were conferring.

Asteague/Che finally broke the silence—which had probably lasted only seconds in real time.

“They are mostly storage devices,” said the Prime Integrator. “We’re not sure of their nature, but they appear to be some sort of advanced magnetic bubble-memory quantum wavefront storage units.”

“And each unit is essentially independent,” said Orphu. “Its own hard disk, so to speak.”

“Yes,” said Asteague/Che.

“And most of the rest of the satellites in the rings—probably no more than ten thousand or so—are basic power transmitters and some sort of modulated tachyon waveform transmitters.”

“Six thousand four hundred and eight power transmitters,” said the navigator Cho Li. “Precisely three thousand tachyon wave transmitters.”

“How do you know this, Orphu of Io?” asked Suma IV, the powerful Ganymedan. “Have you hacked into our Integrator comm channels or files?”

Orphu held two of his multisegmented forward manipulator arms out, flat palms up. “No, no,” he said. “I don’t have enough programming knowledge to hack into my sister’s diary… if I had a sister or if she had a diary.”

“Then how …” began Retrograde Sinopessen.

“It just makes sense,” said Orphu. “I have an abiding interest in human beings and their literature. Over the centuries, I’ve paid attention to those observations of Earth, the post-humans’ rings, and the data about the few humans left on the planet that the Five Moons Consortium has made public knowledge.”

“The Consortium has never released public information on the memory storage devices in orbit,” said Suma IV.

“No,” agreed Orphu, “but it makes sense that’s what those things are. All evidence fourteen centuries ago when they left the surface of the Earth was that there were only a few thousand post-human entities in existence, isn’t that right?”

“That is correct,” said Asteague/Che.

“Our moravec experts at the time weren’t even sure these post-humans had bodies… not bodies as we think of them,” said Orphu, “so they sure didn’t need to build a million cities in orbit.”

“That does not lead to the conclusion that the majority of the objects that are in Earth orbit are memory devices,” said General Beh bin Adee.

Mahnmut found himself wondering what the punishment on this ship was for espionage.

“It does when you look at what the old-style humans have been doing on Earth for almost a millennium and a half,” said Orphu of Io. “And what they haven’t been doing.”

“What do you mean, ‘haven’t been doing?’ ” asked Mahnmut. He’d planned to stay silent during this conversation, but his curiosity was too great.

“First of all, they haven’t been breeding like human beings breed,” said Orphu. “There were fewer than ten thousand of them for several centuries. Then that neutrino beam—guided by modulated tachyons, I understand from the astronomers’ online publications—shot up from Jerusalem fourteen hundred years ago, a beam aimed at nowhere in deep space, and then, suddenly, there seemed to be no humans left. None.”

“Only briefly,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“Yes, but still …” said Orphu. He seemed to lose track of what he was going to say, but then said, “And then, less than a century later, there were about one million old-style humans scattered around the planet. Evidently not descendants of those ten thousand or so who disappeared. No buildup of population… just wham, bang, thank-you-ma’am… one million people out of nowhere.”

“And what did that tell you?” asked Asteague/Che. The formidable little Europan seemed privately amused, rather as a teacher might be when a student suddenly showed unexpected promise.

“It told me that these old-styles weren’t born to begin with,” said Orphu of Io. “They were decanted.”

“Virgin birth?” asked Cho Li, the Callistan’s odd voice dripping sarcasm.

“Of a sort,” said Orphu, his easy, rumbling tones suggesting that he’d taken no offense at the sarcasm. “I think the post-humans have and had a million or so human memories and personalities and data on bodies stored in those orbital memory devices—who knows? Perhaps one satellite per human being—and they restocked the herd. Which leads to the explanation of why the population appears to have peaked at one million every few centuries, dropped to a few thousand, then jumped back to a million as if by magic.”

“Why?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. As with Mahnmut, the rockvec soldier sounded honestly curious.

“Minimum herd population,” said Orphu. “The post-humans seem to have allowed the old-styles to breed only to half of replacement numbers… that is, one baby per woman. And then only when there had been a death. And I’ve read the conjecture that the old-styles live exactly one Earth century and then disappear. Enough to keep the herd going given climate changes or whatever, not so many they could overbreed or wander off the reservation, but the population drops rapidly. Then, every thousand years or so, they restock the herd to its maximum size of one million old-styles. Because women have only one child, the population begins dropping until the next restocking.”

“Where did you read that old-style humans lived precisely a century?” asked Cho Li. He sounded shocked.

“In The Scientific Ganymedan,” said Orphu. “I’ve had a broadcast subscription for more than eight centuries.”

Prime Integrator Asteague/Che held up his very humanoid hand. “You’ll have to pardon me, Orphu of Io, but while I congratulate you on your deductions about the purpose of the orbital devices and about the precise longevity we’ve observed of the remaining hundred thousand old-style human beings—at least until recent months, during which time there’s been quite a drop-off in population due to these attacks by creatures unknown—you said that you could tell us why there are Greek gods on Mars, who the Voice is, how Mars was so miraculously terraformed, and what is causing the current quantum instability on both Earth and Mars.”

“I’m getting to that,” said Orphu. “Do you want me to condense it and put the whole Theory of Everything into a high-speed tightbeam squirt? That’d take less than a second.”

“No, no need for that,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “But perhaps speak more rapidly. We have less than three hours before we have to launch the dropship—or not—during the aerobraking maneuver.”

Orphu of Io rumbled on the subsonic levels in a way that Mahnmut had long interpreted as laughter.

“The old-style humans are clustered around some three hundred localized habitation centers on five continents of Earth, correct?” said the Ionian.

“Correct,” said Cho Li.

“And the populations around these nodes vary,” said Orphu, “yet our telescopes have never picked up any signs of transport—no major roads in use, no aircraft, no ships—not even quaint sailing ships like the one Mahnmut and I traveled the length of Mars’ Valles Marineris in—not even an occasional hot air balloon. So we assumed that the old-style humans were quantum teleporting, even though our moravec scientists could never perfect that mode of travel.”

“It was a reasonable assumption,” said Suma IV.

“Reasonable,” agreed Orphu of Io, “but wrong. We know now because of the quantum data left by the so-called Olympian gods on Mars and on the otherdimensional Earth where the battle for Troy is still being fought what real quantum teleportation looks like. We know its footprint, and what the old-style humans were doing to get from Point A to Point B ain’t it.”

“If the old-style humans aren’t quantum teleporting,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo, “then how have they been moving instantaneously from one place to the other on Earth for more than fourteen hundred years?”

“The old-fashioned idea of teleportation,” said Orphu. “Storing all the data of a human being’s body and mind and personality in code, breaking down the matter into energy, beaming it, then reassembling it elsewhere, just as in the old TV broadcast series from the Lost Era—Star Truck.”

“Trek,” corrected General Beh bin Adee.

“Aha!” said Orphu of Io. “Another fan.”

The General clacked barbed killing claws in embarrassment or irritation.

“Our scientists long since determined that storing such incredible amounts of data would be impossible,” said Cho Li. “It would require more terabytes of storage space than there are atoms in the universe.”

“Evidently the post-humans found a way to build that memory storage,” said Orphu, “because the old-style humans have been teleporting their butts off for centuries. Not true quantum-level teleportation of the kind our friend Hockenberry or the Olympian gods carry off, but the crude mechanical ripping apart of molecules and reassembling of them somewhere else.”

“Why would they do that for the old-style humans?” asked Mahnmut. “Why such an incredible engineering project for a few hundred thousand people whom they treat almost like pets… like creatures in a zoo? We’ve seen no signs of new human engineering, city building, or creativity for more than that millennium and a half.”

“Maybe the teleportation itself has something to do with that cultural retardation,” said Orphu. “Maybe not. But I’m convinced that’s what we’re looking at down there. It’s a case of ‘Beam me up, Scooty.’ ”

“Scotty,” corrected Retrograde Sinopessen.

“Thank you,” said Orphu. To Mahnmut he tightbeamed, That makes four of us.

“You may well be correct that the old-style humans have been using a crude form of matter replication-transmission rather than true quantum teleportation,” said Asteague/Che, “but that doesn’t explain Mars or…”

“No, but the post-humans’ obsession with reaching another dimensional universe does,” said Orphu, not even noticing in his excitement and pleasure of the telling that he was interrupting the most important Prime Integrator in all the Five Moons Consortium.

“How do you know the posts were obsessed with getting to another dimensional universe?” asked General Beh bin Adee.

“Are you kidding?” said Orphu. Mahnmut had to think that the stern Asteroid Belt rockvec general had not been asked that question many times in his life or military career.

“Just look at the junk the post-humans left behind in orbit,” continued Orphu, oblivious to the military moravec’s taken-abackness. “They have wormhole accumulators, black hole accelerators—all early attempts at ripping through space and time, taking shortcuts out into this universe… or to another one.”

“Black holes and wormholes don’t work,” the Callistan Cho Li said flatly. “At least not as transport devices.”

“Yeah, we know that now and that’s what the post-humans found out more than fifteen hundred years ago,” agreed Orphu. “Then, when they had these incredible memory-storage satellites in orbit, plus the crude matter-replication teleportation portals for the old-style humans—who, I would wager, they were using as guinea pigs in all this experimentation—only then did the post-humans start messing around with Brane Holes and quantum teleportation.”

“Our scientists and engineers have been… messing around, as you put it… with quantum teleportation and the generation of Calabi-Yau universe Membrane Holes for many centuries,” said Retrograde Sinopessen. The Amalthean was so agitated that he was almost dancing on his long, spidery, silver legs. “With no luck,” he added.

“That’s because we didn’t have the one thing that allowed the post-humans to make their breakthrough,” said Orphu of Io and paused. Everyone waited. Mahnmut knew that his friend was enjoying the moment.

“The million human bodies, minds, memories, and personalities that were stored as digital data in their orbital memory satellites,” said Orphu. His deep voice was triumphant, as if he’d solved some long-pondered mathematical conundrum.

“I don’t get it,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo.

Orphu’s radar flickered over all of them, a feathery touch on the electromagnetic spectrum. Mahnmut thought that his friend was waiting for their reactions, perhaps for their shouts of approval. No one moved or spoke.

“I don’t get it either,” said Mahnmut.

“What is the human brain?” Orphu asked rhetorically. “I mean, all of us moravecs have a piece of one. What is it like? How does it work? Like the binary or DNA computers we also carry around for thinking purposes?”

“No,” said Cho Li. “We know that the human brain is not like a computer, neither is it a chemical memory machine the way the Lost Era human scientists believed. The human brain… the mind… is a quantum-state holistic standing wavefront.”

“Exactly!” cried Orphu. “The post-humans used this intimate understanding of the human mind to perfect their Brane Holes, time travel, and quantum teleportation.”

“I still don’t see how,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“Think about how quantum teleportation works,” said Orphu. “Cho, you can explain that better than I can.”

The Callistan rumbled and then modulated the rumbles into words. “The early experiments in quantum teleportation—done by old-style humans in ancient times, as far back as the Twentieth Century A.D.—worked by producing entangled pairs of photons—and teleporting one of the pair—or actually by teleporting the complete quantum state of that proton—while transmitting the Bell-state analysis of the second photon through regular subliminal channels.”

“Doesn’t that violate Heisenberg’s principle and Einstein’s speed-of-light restrictions?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo, who, like Mahnmut, had obviously not been briefed on the mechanisms by which the gods on Mars’ Olympus Mons QT’d to Ilium.

“No,” said Cho Li. “Teleported photons carried no information with them when they moved instantaneously from place to place in this uni-verse—not even information about their own quantum state.”

“So quantum teleported photons are useless,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “At least for communication purposes.”

“Not quite,” said Cho Li. “The recipient of a teleported photon had a one-in-four chance of guessing its quantum state—the quantum photon had only that many possibilities—and, by guessing, utilizing the quantum bits of data. These are called qubits and we’ve successfully used them for instantaneous comm purposes.”

Mahnmut shook his head. “How do we get from quantum-state photons carrying no information to the Greek gods quantum teleporting to Troy?”

“The imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream,” intoned Orphu of Io. “He awoke and found it truth. John Keats.”

“Could you try to be more cryptic?” Suma IV asked caustically.

“I could try,” said Orphu.

“What does the poet John Keats have to do with quantum teleportation and the reason for the current quantum crisis?” asked Mahnmut.

“I suggest that the post-humans made their breakthrough in Brane Holes and quantum teleportation more than a millennium and a half ago precisely because of their intimate knowledge of the holistic quantum nature of human consciousness,” said the Ionian, his voice serious now.

“I’ve run some prelimary studies on the ship’s quantum computer,” Orphu continued, “and when you represent human consciousness as the standing wavefront phenomenon it really is, factor in terabytes of qubit quantum date on the wavefront basis for physical reality itself, apply the proper relativistic Coulomb field transforms to these mind-consciousness-reality wave functions, you quickly see how the post-humans opened Brane Holes to new universes and then teleported there themselves.”

“How?” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“They first opened Brane Holes to alternate universes in which there were points in space-time where entangled-pair wavefronts of human consciousness had already been,” said Orphu.

“Huh?” said Mahnmut.

“What is reality except a standing quantum wavefront collapsing through probability states?” asked Orphu. “How does the human mind work except as a sort of interferometer perceiving and collapsing those very wavefronts?”

Mahnmut still shook his head. He’d forgotten about the other moravecs standing on the bridge, forgotten that they might be taking his sub and the dropship down to Earth in less than three hours, forgotten the danger they were in… forgotten everything except the headache that his friend Orphu of Io was giving him.

“The post-humans were opening Brane Holes into alternate universes that had come into being through—or at least been perceived by—the focused lenses of pre-existing holographic wavefronts. Human imagination. Human genius.”

“Oh for the Christ’s sake,” said General Beh bin Adee.

“Possibly,” said Orphu. “If you assume an infinite or near-infinite set of alternate universes, then many of these have necessarily been imagined through the sheer force of human genius. Picture them as singularities of genius—Bell-state analyzers and editors of the pure quantum-foam of reality.”

“That’s metaphysics,” said Cho Li in a shocked voice.

“That’s bullshit,” said Suma IV.

“No, that’s what’s happened here,” said Orphu. “We have a terraformed Mars with altered gravity and are asked to believe that such terraforming could be achieved in a few years. That’s bullshit. We have statues of Prospero on a Mars where Greek gods live atop Mount Olympos and commute through time and space to an alternate Earth where Achilles and Hector are fighting over the future of Ilium. That’s bullshit. Unless…”

“Unless the post-humans opened portals to precisely those worlds and universes earlier imagined by the force of human genius,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “Which would explain the Prospero statues, the Calibanish creatures on Earth, and the existence of Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon and all the other humans on Ilium-Earth.”

“What about the Greek gods?” sneered Beh bin Adee. “Are we going to meet Jehovah and Buddha next?”

“We might,” said Orphu of Io. “But I would suggest that the Olympian gods we met are transformed post-humans. That’s where the post-humans disappeared to fourteen hundred years ago.”

“Why would they choose to change into gods?” asked Retrograde Sinopessen. “Especially gods whose powers come from nanotechnology and quantum tricks?”

“Why would they not?” asked Orphu. “Immortality, choice of gender, sex with each other and any mortal they choose to mate with, breeding many divine and mortal offspring—which is something the post-humans could not seem to do on their own—not to mention the decade-long chess game that is the siege of Troy.”

Mahnmut rubbed his head. “And the terraforming and gravity change on Mars…”

“Yes,” said Orphu. “It probably took the larger part of fourteen hundred years, not three years. And that was with the gods’ quantum technology at work.”

“So there’s a real Prospero down there or out there somewhere?” asked Mahnmut. “The Prospero from Shakespeare’s Tempest?”

“Or something or someone close to it,” said Orphu.

“What about the brain-monster that came through the Brane Hole on Earth just a few days ago?” asked Suma IV. The Ganymedan sounded angry. “Is it a hero in your precious human literature?”

“Possibly,” said Orphu. “Robert Browning once wrote a poem called ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’ in which the monster Caliban from Shakespeare’s Tempest ponders his god, a creature called Setebos, which Browning had Caliban describe only as ‘the many-handed as a cuttlefish.’ It was a god of arbitrary power that fed on fear and violence.”

“That’s quite a reach in speculation,” said Asteague/Che.

“Yes,” said Orphu. “But so is the creature we photographed that looks like a giant brain scuttling around on giant human hands. An improbable evolution in any universe, wouldn’t you say? But Robert Browning had an impressive imagination.”

“Are we going to meet Hamlet down there on Earth?” asked Suma IV with an audible sneer. “Oh,” said Mahnmut. “Oh. Oh, that would be nice.”

“Let’s not get carried away,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“Orphu, where did you get this whole idea?”

Orphu sighed. Instead of responding verbally, a holographic projector in the comm pod atop the huge Ionian’s pitted and scarred carapace created an image that floated above the chart table.

Six fat books sat in a virtual bookcase. One of the books—Mahnmut saw that it was titled In Search of Lost Time—Volume III—The Guermantes Way—fluttered open to page 445. The image zoomed in on the type on the page.

Mahnmut suddenly realized that Orphu was optically blind—he couldn’t see what he was projecting. It meant that he had to have all of Proust’s six volumes memorized. The idea made Mahnmut want to howl.

Mahnmut read along with the others as the font floated in midair—

“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 original 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 or writer of original talent.”

All the moravecs by the chart table stood in silence, broken only by the ventilator hums, machine sounds, and soft background communication of the moravecs actually flying the Queen Mab at that critical moment as they approached the equatorial and polar rings of Earth.

Finally General Beh bin Adee broke the silence—“What solipsistic nonsense. What metaphysical garbage. What total horse manure.”

Orphu said nothing.

“Perhaps it is horse manure,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “But it’s the most plausible horse manure I’ve heard in the last nine months of surreality. And it’s earned Orphu of Io a ride in the hold of the submersible The Dark Lady when the dropship separates and drops into the Earth’s atmosphere in… two hours and fourteen minutes. Let us all go prepare.”

Orphu and Mahnmut were heading for the elevator—Mahnmut walking in a sort of daze, the huge Orphu floating silently on his repel-lors—when Asteague/Che called out, “Orphu!”

The Ionian swiveled and waited, politely aiming his dead cameras and eye-stalks at the Prime Integrator.

“You were going to tell us who the Voice is that we rendezvous with today.”

“Oh, well …” Mahnmut’s friend sounded embarrassed for the first time. “That’s just a guess.”

“Share it,” said Asteague/Che.

“Well, given my little theory,” said Orphu, “who would demand in a female voice to see our passenger—Odysseus, son of Laertes?”

“Santa Claus?” suggested General bin Adee.

“Not quite,” said Orphu. “Calypso.”

None of the moravecs seemed to recognize the name.

“Or from the universe our other new friends came from,” continued Orphu, “the enchantress also known as Circe.”

62

Harman had drowned but was not dead. In a few minutes he would wish he were dead.

The water—the golden fluid—filling the dodecahedral crystal cabinet was hyperoxygenated. As soon as his lungs completely filled, oxygen began moving through the thin-walled capillaries of his lungs and reentering his bloodstream. It was enough to keep his heart beating—start beating again, one should say, since it had skipped beats and stopped for half a minute during his drowning process—and enough to keep his brain alive… dulled, terrified, seemingly disconnected from his body, but alive. He could not breathe in, his instincts still cried out for air, but his body was getting oxygen.

Opening his eyes was a huge struggle and all it rewarded him with was a swirling vision of a billion golden words and ten billion throbbing images waiting to be born in his brain. He was vaguely aware of the six-sided glass panel of the flooded crystal cabinet and of a blurrier shape beyond which might have been Moira, or perhaps Prospero, or even Ariel, but these things were not important.

He still wanted to breathe air the correct way. If he had not been only semiconscious—tranquilized by the liquid in preparation for the trans-fer—his gag reflex alone would probably have killed him or driven him insane.

But the crystal cabinet reserved other means for driving him insane.

The information began pouring into Harman now. Information, Moira and Prospero had said, from a million old books. Words and thoughts from almost a million long-dead minds, more, because every book contained multitudes of other minds in its arguments, its refutations, its fervent agreements, its furious revisions and rebellions.

Information began to pour in, but it was like nothing Harman had ever felt or experienced before. He had taught himself to read over many decades, becoming the first old-style human being in uncounted centuries to make sense of the squiggles and curves and dots in the old books moldering away on shelves everywhere. But words from a book flow into the mind in a linear fashion at the pace of conversation—Harman had always heard a voice not quite his own reading each word aloud in his own mind after he learned to read. Sigling was a more rapid but less effective way to absorb a book—the nanotech function flowed the data from books down one’s arms into the brain like coal being shoveled into a hopper, without the slow pleasure and context of reading. And after sigling a book, Harman always found that some new data had arrived, but much of the meaning of the book had been lost due to absence of nuance and context. He never heard a voice in his head when sigling and often wondered if it had been designed as a function for old-styles in the Lost Era to absorb tables of dry information, packets of predigested data. Sigling was not the way to read a novel or a Shakespearean play—although the first Shakespearean play Harman had encountered was an amazing and moving piece called Romeo and Juliet. Until Harman had read Romeo and Juliet, he’d not known that such a thing as a “play” existed—his people’s only form of fictional entertainment had been the turin drama about the siege of Troy, and that only for the past decade.

But while reading was a slow, linear flow and sigling was like a sudden tickling of the brain that left a residue of information behind, this crystal cabinet was…

The Maiden caught me in the Wild Where I was dancing merrily She put me into her Cabinet And locked me up with a golden Key

This information Harman was receiving was not entering through his eyes, ears, or any of the other human senses nature had evolved to bring data to the nerves and brain. It was not—strictly speaking—passing into him through touch, although the billion-billion pinpricks of information in the golden liquid passed through each pore of his skin and each cell of his flesh.

DNA, Harman knew now, likes the standard double helix model. Evolution had chosen the double helix for a variety of reasons to carry its most sacred cargo, but primarily because it was the easiest and most effective way for free energy to flow—forward or back—as that energy determines the folds, joins, forms, and function of such gigantic molecules as proteins, RNA, and DNA. Chemical systems always move toward the state of lowest free energy, and free energy is minimized when two complementary strands of nucleotides pair up like a double Shaker staircase.

But the post-humans who had redesigned the hardware and software of Harman’s branch of the old-style human genome had redesigned a sizeable percentage of the redundant DNA in his decanted species’ bodies. Instead of right-handed twisting B-DNA, the post-humans had set in place left-handed Z-DNA double helixes of the usual size, about two nanometers in diameter. They used these ZDNA molecules as keystones, lifting from them a scaffolding of more complex DNA helixes such as double-crossover molecules, tying these ropes of DX DNA together into leakproof protein cages. Within those billions upon billions of scaffolded protein cages deep within Harman’s bones, muscle fibers, gut tissue, testicles, toes, and hair follicles were biological reception and organizing macromolecules serving still more complex caged clusters of nanoelectronic organic memory storage clusters.

Harman’s entire body—every cell—was eating the Taj Moira’s library of a million volumes.

The Cabinet is formed of Gold And Pearl & Crystal shining bright And within it opens into a World And a little lovely Moony Night

The process hurt. It hurt a lot. Drowned and floating belly-up now like a dead carp in the golden liquid of the crystal cabinet, Harman felt the pain of a leg or arm that had gone to sleep and that was slowly, painfully coming awake again—the limb being pricked by ten thousand sharp, hot needles. But this was not just his leg or his arm. Cells in every part of his body, cells on every surface inside and out, molecules in every cell’s nucleus and every cell’s wall, were awakening to the data flowing the free energy route through the Yan-Shen-Yurke DNA circuits everywhere in the collective organism called Harman.

It hurt beyond Harman’s ability to imagine or contain such hurt. He opened his mouth repeatedly to scream from the pain, but there was no air in his lungs, no air around him, and his vocal cords merely vibrated in the golden liquid in which he’d drowned.

Metallic nanoparticles, carbon nanotubes, and more complex nanoelectronic devices everywhere in Harman’s body and brain, elements that had been there since before his birth, felt current, were polarized, rotated, realigned in three dimensions, and began conducting and storing information, each complex DNA bridge out of the trillions waiting in Harman’s cells rotating, realigning, recombining, and securing data across the DNA backbone of his most essential structure.

Harman could see Moira’s face near the glass, her dark Savi-eyes peering in, her crystal-warped expression expressing something—anxiety? Remorse? Sheer curiosity?

Another England there I saw Another London with its Tower Another Thames & other Hills And another pleasant Surrey Bower

Books—Harman realized through the Niagral cascade of pain—were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge.

As a child in his crèche, Harman had taken rare sheets of vellum and even more rare markers called pencils and covered the sheets with dots, then spent hours trying to connect all the dots with lines. There always seemed to be another possible line to draw, another two dots to connect, and before he was done the sheet of creamy vellum had become an almost solid smear of graphite. In later years, Harman had wondered if his young mind had been trying to capture and express his perception of the fax portals he had stepped through since he was old enough to walk—old enough to be carried by his mother, actually. Nine million combinations rising from three hundred known faxnode pavilions.

But this connect-the-dots of information to storage macromolecule cages was thousands of times more complex and infinitely more painful.

Another Maiden like herself Translucent lovely shining clear Threefold each in the other closed—O what a trembling fear

O what a smile! a threefold Smile Filled me, that like a flame I burnd I bent to Kiss the lovely Maid And found a Threefold Kiss returnd

Harman knew now that William Blake had made his living as an engraver, and not that popular or successful an engraver at that. [Everything is context.] Blake died on a hot and muggy Sunday evening—August 12, 1827—and on the day of his death, almost no one in the general public knew that the quiet but often angry engraver had been a poet respected by several of his better known contemporaries, including Samuel Coleridge. [Context is to data what water is to a dolphin.] [Dolphins were a species of aquatic animal driven to extinction early in the Twenty-second Century A.D.] William Blake quite literally considered himself a prophet along the lines of Ezekiel or Isaiah, although he held nothing but contempt for the mysticisms, dabblings in the occult, or theosophies so popular in his day. [Ezekiel Mao Kent was the name of the marine biologist who was by the side of Almorenian d’Azure, the last dolphin, who died of cancer in the Bengal Oceanarium on the hot, muggy evening of August 11, 2134 A.D. The N.U.N. Applied Species Committee decided not to replenish the family Delphinidae from stored DNA but, rather, to let the species join all other Delphinidae and other great marine-cetacean mammals in peaceful extinction.]

The data itself, Harman found as he stared, naked, out from the center of his own crystal, was tolerable. It was the constant nerve-web-expanding pain of context that would kill him.

I strove to sieze the inmost Form With ardor fierce & hands of flame But burst the Crystal Cabinet And like a Weeping Babe became

A weeping Babe upon the wild And Weeping Woman pale reclind And in the outward air again I filld with woes the passing Wind

Harman reached the limit of his ability to absorb such pain and complexity. He stirred his limbs in the thick, gold liquid, found that he had less mobility than an embryo, that his fingers had turned to fins, that his muscles had atrophied to weak rags, and that this pain was the true medium and placental fluid of the universe.

I am not a tabula rasa!! he wanted to scream at that bastard Prospero and that ultimate bitch Moira. This would kill him.

Heaven and Hell are born together, Harman thought and knew Blake had thought it first, knowing that Blake had thought it in refutation to Swedenborg’s Calvinistic belief in Predestination:

Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce And dost not know the Garment from the Man

Stop that! Stop it! Please God

Tho thou art Worshiped by the Names Divine Of Jesus & Jehovah: thou art still The Son of Morn in weary Nights decline The lost Travellers Dream under the Hill

Harman screamed despite the fact that there was no air in his lungs to form the scream, no air in his throat to allow the scream, and no air in the tank to conduct the scream. [The naked device, one of six trillion, consists of four double helixes connected in the middle by two unpaired DNA strands. The crossover region can assume two different states—the universe often enjoys assuming a binary form. Rotating the two helixes a half turn on one side of the central bridge junction creates the so-called PX or paranemic crossover state.] Do this three billion times per second and one achieves a purity of torture never dreamt of by the most fanatical designers of the Inquisition’s most ingenious racks, clamps, extractors, and sharp edges.

Harman tried to scream again.

Fifteen seconds had now elapsed since the transfer had begun.

Forty-four minutes and forty-five seconds remained.

63

My name is Thomas Hockenberry. I have a Ph.D. in classical studies. I specialize in studying, writing about, and teaching Homer’s Iliad.

For almost thirty years I was a professor, the last decade and a half at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. Then I died. I awoke—or was resurrected—on Mount Olympos—or what the beings posing as gods there called Mount Olympos, although I later discovered it was the great shield volcano on Mars, Olympus Mons. These beings, these gods, or their superior beings—personalities I’ve heard of but know little or nothing about, one of them named Prospero, as in Shakespeare’s The Tempest—reconstructed me to be a scholic, an observer of the Trojan War. I reported for ten years to one of the Muses, recording my daily accounts on speaking stones, for even the gods there are preliterate. I’m recording this on a small, solid-state electronic recorder that I stole from the moravec ship the Queen Mab.

Last year—just nine months ago—everything went to hell and the Trojan War as described in Homer’s Iliad ran off the rails. Since then there has been confusion, an alliance between Achilles and Hector—and thus between all Trojans and Greeks—to wage war against the gods, more confusion, betrayals, a closure of the last Brane Hole that connected present-day Mars to ancient Ilium and that caused the moravec troopers and technicians to flee this Ilium Earth. With Achilles gone—disappeared on the other side of the Brane Hole on a now-distant Mars of the future—the Trojan War resumed, Zeus disappeared, and in his absence the gods and goddesses came down to fight alongside their respective champions. For a while it looked as if Agamemnon and Menelaus’ armies had penetrated Troy. Diomedes was on the verge of capturing the city. Then Hector came out of sulking seclusion—interesting how that part of our recent story parallels Achilles’ long sulk in his tent in the real Iliad—and Priam’s son promptly killed the seemingly invulnerable Diomedes in single combat.

On the next day, I’m told, Hector bested Ajax—Big Ajax, Great Ajax, the Ajax from Salamis. Helen tells me that Ajax begged for his life but Hector slew him without mercy. Menelaus—Helen’s former husband and the aggrieved party who started this goddamned war—died with an arrow in the brain that same day.

Then, as I’d seen so many hundreds of times before in my more than ten years here watching, the initiative of battle swung once again, the gods supporting the Achaeans led the counterattack behind goddesses Athena and Hera, with roaring Poseidon destroying buildings in Ilium, and for a while Hector and his men were in retreat to the city again. I’m told that Hector carried his wounded brother, the heroic Deiphobus, on his back.

But two days ago, just as Troy was on the verge of falling yet again—this time to a combined attack of infuriated Achaeans and the most powerful and ruthless gods and goddesses, Athena, Hera, Poseidon, and their ilk beating back Apollo and the other gods defending the city—Zeus reappeared.

Helen tells me that Zeus blasted Hera to bits, dropped Poseidon into the hellpit of Tartarus, and commanded the rest of the gods back to Olympos. She says that the once-mighty gods, scores and scores of them, in their flying golden chariots and in their fine golden armor, went obediently quantum teleporting back to Olympos like guilty children awaiting their father’s spankings.

And now the Greeks are getting their asses kicked. Zeus himself, rising taller, Helen says, than the towering stratocumulus, killed thousands of Argives, drove the rest back to the ships and then burned their ships with bolts of his lightning. Helen says that the Lord of Gods commanded a huge wave to roll in, a wave that sank the blackened hulks of the ships. Then Zeus himself disappeared and has not returned since.

Two weeks later—after both sides lit corpse fires for the thousands of their fallen and observed their nine-day funeral rituals—Hector led a successful counterattack that has driven the Greeks even farther back. It appears that about thirty thousand of the original hundred thousand or so Argive fighters have survived, many of them—like their king Agamem-non—wounded and dispirited. With no ships for escape and no way to get their axemen to the wooded slopes of Mount Ida to cut wood for new ships, they’ve done the best they could—digging deep trenches, lining them with stakes, throwing up wooden revetments, digging a series of connecting trenches within their own lines, building up sand berms, massing their shields and spears and deadly archers in a solid wall around this dwindling semicircle of death. It’s the Greeks’ last stand.

It is now the third morning since my arrival and I am standing in the Greek encampment, a trenched and walled arc little more than a quarter of a mile around with the thirty thousand miserable Achaeans massed and huddled here by the smoldering ruins of their ships. Their backs are to the sea.

Hector has every advantage—an almost four-to-one ratio of men who have better morale and adequate food—the Greeks are beginning to starve even while they can smell the pigs and cattle roasting over the Trojan siege fires. Helen and King Priam had been sure that the Greeks would be defeated two days ago, but desperate men are brave men—men with nothing to lose—and the Greeks have been fighting like cornered rats. They also have had the advantage of shorter interior lines and fighting from behind fixed defenses, although admittedly these advantages will be short-lived with food running out, no permanent supply of water here since the Trojans damned up the river a mile from the beach, and typhoid beginning to spread within the crowded and unsanitary Achaean encampment.

Agamemnon is not fighting. For three days the son of Atreus, king of Mycenae, and commander in chief of this once-huge expeditionary force, has been hiding in his tent. Helen reported to me that Agamemnon had been wounded during the general Greek retreat, but I hear from captains and guards here in the camp that it was only a broken left forearm, nothing life-threatening. It seems that it was Agamemnon’s morale that was critically wounded. The great king—Achilles’ nemesis—had not been able to recover Menelaus’ body when his brother was struck down by the arrow through the eye, and while Diomedes, Big Ajax, and the other fallen Greek heroes received proper funerals and cremations on their tall biers near the shore, Menelaus’ body was last seen being dragged behind Hector’s chariot around the cheering-crowded walls of Ilium. It seems to have been the last straw for the high-strung and arrogant Agamemnon. Rather than being enraged into a fury of fighting, Agamemnon has sunk into depression and denial.

The other Greeks have not needed his leadership to know that they have to fight for their lives. Their command structure has been sorely thinned—Big Ajax dead, Diomedes dead, Menelaus dead, Achilles and Odysseus both disappeared on the other side of the closed Brane Hole—but gabby old Nestor has led most of the fighting for the last two days. The once revered warrior has become revered once again, at least among the thinning ranks of Achaeans, appearing on his four-horsed chariot wherever the Greek lines appeared ready to give way, urging trench engineers to replace stakes and redig collapsed areas, improving the internal trenches with sand berms and firing slits, sending men and boys out as scouts at night to steal water from the Trojans, and always calling for the men to have heart. Nestor’s sons Antilochus and Thrasymedes, who had few valorous moments during the first ten years of the war or during the short war with the gods, have fought splendidly the last two days. Thrasymedes was wounded twice yesterday, once by a spear and again by an arrow in the shoulder, but he fought on, leading his Pylian brigades to push back a Trojan offensive that had threatened to cut the defensive semicircle here in half.

It’s just after sunrise here on the third day—quite possibly the last day, since the Trojans were moving, shifting forces, bringing up more troops, chariots, and trench-bridging equipment all during the night—and more than a hundred thousand relatively fresh Trojan troops are massing around the defensive perimeter even as I speak.

I’ve brought the recorder here to Agamemnon’s camp because Nestor has called a council of his surviving war chieftains. At least those that can be spared from their fighting positions. These tired and filthy men ignore my presence—or rather, they probably remember that I spent much time with and near Achilles during the eight-month war with the gods, so they accept my presence. And the sight of this wafer-sized recorder in my hand means nothing to them.

I no longer know for whom I’m observing and recording these things—I imagine that I would be the ultimate persona non grata if I were to show up on Olympos and hand this recording chip to one of the Muses who sought to kill me—so I will make these observations and record this recording only as the scholar I once was, not as the slavescholic they turned me into. And even if I am no longer a scholar, I can serve as a war correspondent in these last hours of the last stand of the Greeks and the end of this heroic era.

NESTOR What is the news? And do you think your men will hold the line today?

IDOMENEUS (Commander of the Crete contingent. The last time I saw Idomeneus, he had just killed the Amazon Bremusa with a spearcast. Moments later, the Brane Hole closed. Idomeneus was among the last to abandon Achilles.)

The news is bad from my part of the line, Noble Nestor. For every Trojan we’ve killed in the last two days, three more have taken his place in the night. They ready their trench-filling tools and spears for the attack. Their archers are still massing. It will be decisive today.

LITTLE AJAX (As different as the Aeantes—the two Ajaxes—had been, they had been as close as brothers. I have never seen this Ajax of Locris look so grim. The grooves and wrinkles on his face are so outlined in mud and blood that they resemble a kabuki mask.)

Nestor, son of Neleus, hero of these darkest of times, my Locris fighters engaged the enemy through much of the night as Deiphobus’ scouts tried to flank us on the north end of the perimeter. We fought them back until the surf ran red. Our section of trench is filling up with our own and the Trojan dead until they soon will be able to walk across on bodies heaped ten feet high. A third of my men are dead, the rest exhausted. Hector has sent new troops to replace his losses.

NESTOR Podalirius, how goes it with the remaining son of Atreus?

PODALIRIUS (The son of Asclepius is one of the last healers left to the Greeks. He is also co-commander, along with his brother Machaon, of the Thessalians from Tricca.)

Noble Nestor, Agamemnon’s arm has been set in a splint, he has taken no herbs for the pain, and he is awake and rational.

NESTOR Why is it then that he has not emerged from his tent? His corps is the largest left to our army, but they shelter in the center like women. Their hearts are gone without their leader.

PODALIRIUS Their leader’s heart is gone without his brother Menelaus.

TEUCER (The master archer, half brother and dearest friend to the murdered Big Ajax.)

Then Achilles was right ten months ago when he confronted Agamemnon in all our sight and told the great king he has the heart of a fawn. (Spits into the sand.)

EUMELUS (Son of Admetus and Alcestis, commander of the Thessalians from Phereae. Often referred to by the missing Achilles and Odysseus as “lord of men.”)

And where is the accuser Achilles? The coward stayed behind at the base of Mount Olympos rather than face his death here with his comrades. The fleet-footed mankiller turned out also to have the heart—and hooves—of a fawn.

MENESTHIUS

(The huge captain of the Myrmidons, a former lieutenant of Achilles’.)

I’ll kill any man who says that about the son of Peleus. He would never abandon us of his own free will. We all saw and heard the goddess Athena tell Achilles that he had been enchanted by Aphrodite’s spell.

EUMELUS Enchanted by Amazon pussy, you mean.

(Menesthius steps toward Eumelus and begins to draw his sword.)

NESTOR

(Stepping between them.)

Enough! Aren’t the Trojans killing us quickly enough, or do we need to add to our own slaughter? Eumelus, step back! Menesthius, sheath your sword!

PODALIRIUS (Speaking as the Achaean’s last healer now, not as Agamemnon’s personal doctor.)

PODALIRIUS (cont.)

What’s killing us is the disease. Another two hundred dead, especially among the Epeans who are defending the riverbank to the south.

POLYXINUS

(Son of Agasthenes, co-commander of the Epeans.)

This is true, Lord Nestor. At least two hundred dead and another thousand too sick to fight.

DRESEUS

(Captain of the Epeans, just raised to the rank of commander.)

Half my men did not respond to muster this morning, Lord Nestor.

PODALIRIUS And it’s spreading.

AMPHION

(Another recently promoted captain of the Epeans.)

It’s Phoebus Apollo’s Silver Bow striking us down, just as it was ten months ago when the god-spread disease had corpse fires burning every night. It’s what led to the first falling-out between Achilles and Agamemnon—it’s what led to all our woes.

PODALIRIUS

Oh, fuck Phoebus Apollo and his Silver Bow. The gods—including Zeus—did their worst to us and now they’re gone, and only they know if they’re coming back. Personally, I don’t care if they do or don’t. These deaths, this disease, didn’t come from Apollo’s Silver Bow—I think it comes from the foul water the men are drinking. We’re drinking our own piss and sitting in our own excrement here. My father, Asclepius, had this theory of origins of disease in contaminated water and…

NESTOR

Learned Podalirius, we will rejoice to hear your father’s theory of disease at another time. Right now I need to know if we can hold off the Trojans today and what, if anything, my captains advise us to do.

ECHEPOLUS

(Son of Anchises)

We should surrender.

THRASYMEDES (Nestor’s son who had fought so valiantly the day before. His wounds are bandaged and bound up, but he appears to be suffering from them more today than in the heat of yesterday’s long fight.)

Surrender, my ass! Who is in our circle of Argives that so cowers from fear that he suggests craven surrender? Surrender to me, son of Anchises, and I’ll put you out of your misery as quickly as the Trojans certainly will.

ECHEPOLUS

Hector is an honorable man. King Priam used to be an honorable man, and may well still be. I traveled with Odysseus to Troy when the Ithacan came to reason with Priam, to try to get Helen back through talk to avoid this war, and both Priam and Hector were reasonable, honorable men. Hector will hear our surrender.

THRASYMEDES

That was eleven years and a hundred thousand souls sent down to Hades ago, you fool. You saw the extent of Hector’s mercy when Ajax the Great begged and pleaded for his life, his long shield hammered into tin, snot and tears rolling down our hero’s face. Hector severed his spine and hacked out his heart. His men probably won’t be so merciful to you.

NESTOR

I know there has been talk of surrender. But Thrasymedes is correct—too much blood has been spilled on this Trojan soil to hold out any hope for mercy. We would have given the citizens of Ilium none, would we, had we but breached their walls to more success three weeks ago—or ten years ago? All of you here know that we would have killed every man old enough or young enough to lift a sword or bow, slaughtered their old men for spawning our enemies, raped their women, carried all their surviving women and children into a life of slavery, and put the torch to their city and their temples. But the gods… or the Fates… whoever is deciding the outcome of this war, have turned against us. We cannot expect from the Trojans, who suffered our invasion and our ten years of siege, more mercy than we would have granted them. No, tell your men, if you hear these murmurings, that it is madness to surrender. Better to die on your feet than on your knees.

IDOMENEUS Better to not die at all. Is there no plan to save ourselves?

ALASTOR

(Teucer’s commander)

The ships are burned. The food is running out, but we will all be dead of thirst before we starve. Disease claims more every hour.

MENESTHIUS

My Myrmidons want to break out—fight our way through the Trojan lines and make for the south—to Mount Ida and the heavy forests there.

NESTOR

(nodding)

Your Myrmidons are not the only ones thinking about breaking out and escaping, brave Menesthius. But your Myrmidons cannot do it alone. None of our tribes or groups can. The Trojan lines stretch back for miles and their allies’ lines go deeper. They expect us to try to break out. They’re probably wondering why we haven’t tried it before this. You know the iron laws of combat with sword, shield, and spear, Menesthius—all Myrmidons and Achaeans know it—for every man who falls in shield-to-shield combat, a hundred are slaughtered while fleeing. We have no working chariots left—Hector’s chiefs have hundreds. They’ll run us down and slaughter us like sheep before we cross the dried bed of the River Scamander.

DRESEUS So we stay? And die here today or tomorrow on the beach next to the charred timbers of our great black ships?

ANTILOCHUS

(Nestor’s other son)

No. Surrender is out of the question for any man here with balls, and defense of this position will be untenable in a few hours—it may be untenable during the next attack—but I say we all try to break out at the same time. We have thirty thousand fighting men left—more than twenty thousand well enough to fight and run. Four out of five of us may fall, verily—be slaughtered like sheep before we reach the concealing forests of Mount Ida—but at those odds, four or five thousand of us will survive. Half that number may even survive the searches of the forest for us which the Trojans and their allies will carry out, like royalty pursuing a stag, and half that remaining number may find their way off this goddamned continent and cross the wine-dark seas to home. Those odds are good enough for me.

THRASYMEDES And for me.

TEUCER

Any odds are better than the certainty of our bones bleaching on this fucking goddamned motherfucking shit-eating piss-drinking beach.

NESTOR Was that a vote for breaking out, son of Telemon?

TEUCER You’re fucking goddamned right it was, Lord Nestor.

NESTOR Noble Epeus, you’ve had no voice in this council yet. What do you think?

EPEUS (Shuffling his feet and looking down in embarrassment. Epeus is the best boxer of all the Achaeans, and his face and shaved head show his years at the sport—cauliflower ears, a flattened nose, permanant scar tissue on his cheeks and brow ridges, countless scars even on his scalp. I cannot fail to see the irony in Epeus’ position in this council and my own effect on his life and fate. Never famed for his battle prowess, Epeus would have won the boxing matches in Patroclus’ funeral games—held by Achilles—and been the master builder of the Odysseus-conceived wooden horse if I had not begun screwing up the Homeric version of this story almost a year ago. As it stands now, Epeus is in the council of chieftains only because all his commanding officers—up to Menelaus—have been killed.)

Lord Nestor, when one’s opponent is most confident, when he crosses the fighting space toward you with certainty in his heart that you are down for the count, unable to rise, that is the best time to strike him hard. In this case, strike him hard, stun him, knock him back on his heels, and run for our lives. I was at the Games once when a boxer did just that.

(Laughter all around at this.)

EPEUS But it will have to be at night.

NESTOR I agree. The Trojans see too far and ride their chariots too quickly for us to have a fighting chance in the daylight.

MERIONES (Son of Molus, close comrade of Idomeneus, second in command of the Cretans.)

We won’t have a much better chance in the moonlight. The moon is three-quarters full.

LAERCES

(A Myrmidon, son of Haeman)

But the winter sun sets earlier and the moon rises later this week. We will have almost three hours from the beginning of real darkness—the kind of darkness where you need a torch to find your way—and the rising of the moon.

NESTOR

The question is, can we hold through the hours of daylight today and will our men have enough energy left in them to fight—we’ll have to concentrate our attack and hit hard to forge a hole in the Trojan lines—and enough energy left then to run the twenty miles and more to the forests of Mount Ida?

IDOMENEUS

They’ll have the energy to fight today if they know they might have a chance to live tonight. I say we hit the Trojans right in the center of their lines—right where Hector leads—since he’s concentrated his strength on both flanks for today’s fighting. I say we break out tonight.

NESTOR The rest of you? I need to hear from everyone here. It’s truly all or nothing, everyone or no one in this attempt.

PODALIRIUS

We’ll have to leave our sick and wounded behind, and there will be thousands more of these by nightfall. The Trojans will slaughter them. Perhaps do worse than mere slaughter in their frustration if any of us gets away.

NESTOR Yes. But such are the vagaries of war and fate. I need to hear your votes, Noble Chiefs of the Achaeans.

THRASYMEDES Aye. We go for it all tonight. And may the gods watch over those left behind and those captured later.

TEUCER

Fuck the gods up the ass. I say yes, if our fate is to die here on this stinking beach, I say we defy the Fates. Go tonight at fall of true dark.

POLYXINUS Yes.

ALAST OR Yes. Tonight.

LITTLE AJAX Aye.

EUMELUS Yes. All or nothing.

MENESTHIUS If my lord Achilles were here, he’d go for Hector’s throat. Maybe we can get lucky and kill the son of a bitch on our way out.

NESTOR Another vote for breaking out. Echepolus?

ECHEPOLUS

I think we’ll all die if we stay and fight another day. I think we’ll all die if we try to escape. I for one choose to stay with the wounded and offer my surrender to Hector, trusting in the hope that some shards of his former honor and sense of mercy have survived. But I will tell my men that they can make up their own minds.

NESTOR

No, Echepolus. Most of the men will follow their commander’s lead. You can stay behind and surrender, but I’m relieving you of your command and appointing Amphion in your place. You can go straight from this meeting to the tent where the wounded wait, but speak to no one. Your brigade is small enough and it is on Amphion’s left on the line… the two can merge with no confusion or need to reposition troops. That is, I am promoting Amphion if Amphion votes to fight our way out tonight.

AMPHION I so vote.

DRESEUS I vote for my Epeans—we fight and die tonight, or fight and escape. I for one want to see my home and family again.

EUMELUS

Agamemnon’s men told us, and the moravec things confirmed it, that our cities and homes were empty, our kingdoms now unpopulated—our people stolen away by Zeus.

DRESEUS

To which I say fuck Agamemnon, fuck the moravec toys, and fuck Zeus. I plan to go home to see if my family is waiting. I believe they are.

POLYPOETES

(Another son of Agasthenes, co-commander of the Lapiths from Argissa)

My men will hold the line today and lead the fight out tonight. I swear this by all the gods.

TEUCER Couldn’t you swear by something a little more constant? Like your bowels?

(Laughter around the circle)

NESTOR It’s agreed, then, and I concur. We’ll do everything in our power to hold back the Trojan onslaught today. To that end, Podalirius, oversee the serving out of all rations this morning except for what a man can carry in his tunic tonight. And double the morning’s water rations. Go through Agamemnon’s and dead Menelaus’ private stores, pull out anything edible. Commanders, tell your men before this morning’s battle that all they have to do today is hold—hold for their lives, die only for their comrades’ lives—and we will attack tonight at true dark. Some of us will reach the forest and—Fates willing—our homes and families again. Or, failing that, our names will be written in gold words of glory that will last forever. Our children’s grandchildren’s grandchildren will visit our burial mounds here in this accursed land and say—“Aye, they were men in those days.” So tell your sergeants and their men to breakfast well this morning, for most of us will eat dinner in the Halls of the Dead. So tonight, when it’s true dark and before the moon arises, I will authorize our favorite pugilist—Epeus—to ride up and down our lines, shouting Ápete—just as they do to start the chariot races and footraces at the Games. And then we’ll be off to our freedom!

(And that should have been the end of the meeting—and a rousing end it was, for Nestor is a born leader and knows how to wrap up a meeting with action items and energy, something my department chair at Indiana University never understood—but, as always, someone breaks the perfect rhythm of the perfect script. In this case, that someone is Teucer.)

TEUCER

Epeus, noble boxer, you never told us the end of your story. Whatever happened to that Olympics boxer who stunned his opponent and then ran out of the arena?

EPEUS

(Who as everyone knows is more honest than wise)

Oh, him. The Olympics priests hunted him down in the woods and killed him like a dog.

The Achaean chieftains have dispersed, gone back to their lines and their men. Nestor has left with his sons. The healer Podalirius has put together a detail of men to sack Agamemnon’s tent in a search for food and wine. I’m left alone here on the beach—or at least as alone as one can be when pressed cheek to jowl with thirty thousand other unwashed men all reeking of sweat and fear.

I touch the QT medallion under my tunic. Nestor did not ask for my vote. None of the Achaean heroes so much as looked at me during that entire debate. They know I don’t fight and they seem to like me no less for it—it’s the way these ancient Greeks treat men who like to dress up in women’s clothing and paint their faces white. There is no dishonor there in most of these men’s eyes, only dismissal. I’m a freak to them, an outsider, something less than a man.

I know I’m not going to stay until the bitter end. I doubt if I’ll stay during today’s battle since the air here will grow dark with volleys of arrows in the next half hour. I don’t have the morphing gear and impact armor that I had as a scholic—I haven’t even donned the metal or leather armor that’s so available from Achaean corpses all around me. If I stay, I doubt I’d last the day—the last two days have been a series of craven hours and timid cowering for me here, near the back of the line, near the tent where the wounded are dying. If I were to survive the day, my chances of surviving the attack on the Trojans after dark would be near zero.

And why would I stay? I have a quantum teleportation device hanging around my neck, for Christ’s sake. I could be in Helen’s chambers in two seconds, relaxing in a hot bath there in five minutes.

Why would I stay?

But I’m not ready to go. Not quite yet. I’m no longer a scholic and there may be no purpose to being a scholar here, but even as a war correspondent who will never be able to report his observations, this last glorious day of a lost glorious epoch is too interesting to miss.

I’ll stay for a while.

The horns are blowing everywhere. No one’s had time for those promised big breakfasts yet, but the Trojans are attacking all along the line.

64

To know that everything in the universe—everything in history, everything in science, everything in poetry and art and music, every person, place, thing, and idea—is connected, that is one thing. To experience that connection, even incompletely, that is quite another.

Harman was unconscious for most of nine days. When he wasn’t unconscious, he was awake only briefly and then screaming in pain from a headache beyond all capacity of his skull and brain to contain it. He threw up a lot. Then he would lapse into coma again.

On the ninth day he awoke. The headache rolled over him, worse than any headache he had ever experienced, but no longer the scream-maker of his nine-day nightmare. The nausea was gone and his stomach was empty. He’d later realize that he’d lost more than twenty-five pounds. He was naked and lying in the bed on the second floor of the eiffelbahn cablecar.

The cablecar is designed and decorated mostly in art noveau, he thought as he staggered out of bed and pulled on a silk dressing gown that had been thrown over the arm of the overstuffed Empire-era armchair next to the bed. He wondered idly where in the world anyone was raising worms to make silk—had it been one of the servitors’ duties these long centuries of human idleness? Was it being artificially created in some industrial vat somewhere, the way the post-humans had created—recreated, actually—his race of nano-altered human stock? Harman’s head hurt too much to ponder the thought now.

He paused on the mezzanine, closed his eyes, and concentrated. Nothing. He remained in the cablecar. He tried again. Nothing.

Staggering slightly, dizzy now, he went down the wrought-iron metal staircase to the first floor and collapsed into the only chair at the table near the window. The table was covered with white linen.

Harman said nothing as Moira brought out orange juice in a crystal glass, black coffee in a white thermidor, and a poached egg with a bit of salmon on the side. She poured the coffee into his cup. Harman lowered his head slightly to allow the heat from the coffee to rise against his face.

“Come here often?” asked Moira.

Prospero came into the room and stood in the brilliant and despicable morning light that was streaming in through the glass doors. “Ah, Harman… or should we call you New Man? It is a pleasure to see you awake and ambulatory.”

“Shut up,” said Harman, ignoring the food, sipping the coffee gingerly. He knew now that Prospero was a hologram, but a physical one—a logosphere avatar forming himself from microsecond to microsecond with matter being beamed down from one of the mass-fax-accumulators in orbit. He also knew that if he tried to strike or attack the old magus, the matter would turn to untouchable projection faster than any human reflexes.

“You knew that my chances of surviving the crystal cabinet were about one in a hundred,” said Harman, not even looking at Prospero. The light there was too bright.

“A little better than that, I think,” said the magus, mercifully drawing the heavy drapes.

Moira pulled a chair over and sat at the table with Harman. She was wearing a red tunic, but otherwise showed the same hardy adventure clothing she had been wearing in the Taj.

Harman looked unblinkingly at her. “You knew the young Savi. You attended the Final Fax Party in the New York Archipelago at the flooded Empire State Building, and you told her friends you hadn’t seen her, but you’d actually visited Savi at her home in Antarctica just two days before.”

“How on earth do you know that?” asked Moira.

“Savi’s friend Petra wrote a short essay about their attempt—mostly hers and her lover Pinchas’—to find Savi. It was printed and bound up right before the Final Fax. Somehow it found its way into your friend Ferdinand Mark Alonzo’s library.”

“But how would Petra have known that I visited Savi before the New York Archipelago party?”

“I think she and Pinchas found something Savi had written when they went through her Mount Erebus apartments,” said Harman. The coffee did not come back up on him, but it didn’t help his throbbing headache much either.

“So you know everything about everything now, do you?” asked Moira.

Harman laughed and regretted it almost immediately. He put down the coffee cup and held his right temple. “No,” he said at last, “I know just enough to know that I don’t know much of anything about anything. Besides, there are forty-one other libraries sprinkled around the Earth whose crystal cabinets I haven’t visited yet.”

“That would kill you,” said Prospero.

Harman wouldn’t have minded at that moment if someone had killed him. The headache put a pulsing corona around everything and everyone he tried to look at. He sipped more coffee and hoped that the nausea wouldn’t come back. The cablecar creaked along, although he knew that it was traveling at more than two hundred miles per hour. Its slight swaying back and forth did nothing to keep his stomach settled. “Would you like to hear all about Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel? Born in Dijon on December 15, 1832 A.D. Graduated from the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in 1855. Before coming up with the idea for his tower at the 1889 Centennial Exposition, he’d already designed the movable dome of the observatory at Nice and the framework for the Statue of Liberty in New York. He…”

“Stop it,” snapped Moira. “No one likes a showoff.”

“Where the hell are we?” asked Harman. He managed to get to his feet and shove back the drapes. They were passing through a beautiful wooded valley, the car moving along more than seven hundred feet above a winding river. Ancient ruins—a castle of some sort—were just visible along a ridgeline.

“We’ve just passed Cahors,” said Prospero. “We should be swinging south toward Lourdes at the next tower switching station.”

Harman rubbed his eyes but opened the glass door and stepped out. The forcefield deployed along the leading edge of the flat-sided cablecar kept him from being blown off the balcony. “What’s the matter?” he asked back through the open door. “Don’t you want to head north and visit your friend’s blue-ice cathedral?”

Moira looked startled. “How could you possibly know about that? There was no book in the Taj with that…”

“No,” agreed Harman, “but my friend Daeman saw the beginnings of that—the arrival of Setebos. I know from the books what the Many-Handed would do after he arrived in Paris Crater. So he’s still here… on Earth, I mean?”

“Yes,” said Prospero. “And he is no friend of ours.”

Harman shrugged. “You two brought him here the first time. Him and the others.”

“It was not our intention,” said Moira.

Harman had to laugh at that, no matter how much it made his head throb. “No, right,” said Harman. “You open an interdimensional door into darkness, leave it open, and then say ‘It was not our intention’ when something really vile comes through.”

“You’ve learned much,” said Prospero, “but you still do not understand all that you will have to if…”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Harman. “I’d listen to you more closely, Prospero, if I didn’t know that you’re mostly one of those things that came through the door. The post-humans spend a thousand years trying to contact Alien Others—changing the quantum setup of the entire solar system in the process—and get a many-handed brain and a retread cybervirus from a Shakespearean play instead.”

The old magus smiled at this. Moira shook her head in irritation, poured some coffee into a second cup, and drank without comment.

“Even if we wanted to drop by and say hello to Setebos,” said Prospero, “we could not. Paris Crater has no tower—has not had one since before the rubicon virus.”

“Yeah,” said Harman. He went back in, but stood looking out while he lifted his own cup and sipped coffee. “Why can’t I freefax?” he asked sharply.

“What?” said Moira.

“Why can’t I freefax? I know how to summon the function now without the training wheels symbol triggers, but it didn’t work when I got up. I want to jump back to Ardis.”

“Setebos shut down the planetary fax system,” said Prospero. “That includes freefaxing as well as the faxnode pavilions.”

Harman nodded and rubbed his cheek and chin. A week and a half of stubble, almost a real beard, rasped under his fingers. “So you two, and presumably Ariel, can still quantum teleport, but I’m stuck on this stupid cablecar until we get to the Atlantic Breach? You really expect me to walk across the ocean floor to North America? Ada will be dead of old age before I get to Ardis.”

“The nanotechnology that grants your people functions,” said Prospero, his old voice sounding sad, “did not prepare you for quantum teleportation.”

“No, but you can QT me home,” said Harman, looming over the old man where he now sat on the couch. “Touch me and QT. It’s that simple.”

“No, not that simple,” said Prospero. “And you’re literate enough now that you must know that you cannot compel either Moira or me to submit to threats or intimidation.”

Harman had accessed orbital clocks when he’d awakened and he knew he’d been unconscious for most of nine days. It made him want to smash the pot, cups, and table with his fist. “We’re on the eiffelbahn Route Eleven,” he said. “After we left Mount Everest, we must have followed the Hah Xil Shan Route up right past the Tarim Pendi Bubble. I could have found sonies there, weapons, crawlers, levitation harnesses, impact armor—everything Ada and our people need for their survival.”

“There were … detours,” said Prospero. “You would not have been safe if you had left the tower to explore the Tarim Pendi Bubble.”

“Safe!” snorted Harman. “Yes, we must live in a safe world, mustn’t we, magus and Moira?”

“You were more mature before the crystal cabinet,” said Moira with much disdain.

Harman didn’t argue the point. He set down his cup, leaned forward with both hands on the table, stared Moira in the eye, and said, “I know the voynix were sent forward through time by the Global Caliphate to kill Jews, but why did you posts store the nine thousand one hundred and fourteen of them and beam them into space? Why not just take them up to the Rings with you—or some other safe place? I mean, you’d already found the otherdimensional Mars and terraformed it. Why turn those people into neutrinos?”

“Nine thousand one hundred and thirteen,” corrected Moira. “Savi was left behind.”

Harman waited for an answer to his question.

Moira set down her coffee cup. Her eyes, just like Savi’s, showed every rush of anger she felt. “We told Savi’s people that they were being stored in the neutrino loop for a few thousand years while we cleaned up the untidiness on Earth,” she said softly. “They interpreted that to mean the RNA constructs everywhere left over from Dementia Times—dinosaurs and Terror Birds and cycad forests—but we also meant such little things as the voynix, Setebos, the witch in her city up in orbit…”

“But you didn’t clean up the voynix,” interrupted Harman. “The things were activated and built their Third Temple on the Mosque of the Dome…”

“We could not eliminate them,” said Moira, “but we reprogrammed them. Your people knew them as servants for fourteen hundred years.”

“Until they started slaughtering us,” said Harman. He turned his gaze on Prospero. “Which started after you directed Daeman and me on how to destroy your orbital city where you and Caliban were … imprisoned. All that to reclaim just one hologram of yourself, Prospero?”

“More the equivalent of a frontal lobe,” said the magus. “And the voynix would have been activated even if you had not destroyed the controlling elements in my city on the e-ring.”

“Why?”

“Setebos,” said Prospero. “His millennium and a half of being denied—of being kept and fed on alternate Earths and the terraformed Mars—had come to an end. When the Many-Handed opened the first Brane Hole to sniff the air of this Earth, the voynix reacted as programmed.”

“Programmed three thousand years ago,” said Harman. “The old-styles of my people aren’t all from Jewish descent like Savi’s folk.”

Prospero shrugged. “The voynix do not know that. All humans in Savi’s time were Jews, ergo… to the weak mind of all voynix… all humans are Jews. If A equals B and B equals C, then A equals C. If Crete is an island and England is an island, then…”

“Crete is England,” finished Harman. “But the rubicon virus did not come from a lab in Israel. That’s just another blood libel.”

“No, you are perfectly correct,” said Prospero. “The rubicon was indeed the one great contribution to science that the Islamic world gave the rest of the world in a two-thousand-year stretch of darkness.”

“Eleven billion dead,” said Harman, his voice shaking. “Ninetyseven percent of Earth’s population wiped out.”

Prospero shrugged again. “It was a long war.”

Harman laughed again. “And the virus got almost everyone but the group it was built to kill.”

“Israeli scientists had a long history of nanotech genetic manipulation by then,” said the magus. “They knew that if they did not inoculate their population’s DNA quickly, they could not do it at all.”

“They might have shared it,” said Harman.

“They tried. There was no time. But the DNA for your stock was… stored.”

“But the Global Caliphate didn’t invent time travel,” said Harman, not one hundred percent sure if this was a question or statement.

“No,” agreed Prospero. “A French scientist developed the first working time bubble…”

“Henri Rees Delacourte,” muttered Harman, remembering.

“… to travel back to 1478 A.D. to investigate an odd and interesting manuscript purchased by Rudolph II, the Holy Roman Emperor, in 1586,” continued Prospero without a pause. “It seemed a simple enough little trip. But we know now that the manuscript itself—filled with a strange, coded language and featuring wonderful drawings of non-terrestrial plants, star systems, and naked people—was a hoax. And Dr. Delacourte and his home city paid a price for the voyage when the black hole his team was using as a power source escaped its restraining force-field.”

“But the French and the New European Union gave the designs to the Caliphate,” said Harman. “Why?”

Prospero held up his old, vein-mottled hands almost as if he were giving a benediction. “The Palestinian scientists were their friends.”

“I wonder if that rare-book dealer from the early Twentieth Century, Wilfrid Voynich, could have dreamt that he’d have a race of self-replicating monsters named after him,” said Harman.

“Few of us can dream of what our true legacy will be,” said Prospero, his hands still raised as if in blessing.

Moira sighed. “Are you two finished with your little trip down memory lane?”

Harman looked at her.

“And you, my would-be Prometheus… your dingle is dangling. If this is a one-eyed staredown contest, you win. I blinked first.”

Harman looked down. His robe had come open during all the talking. He quickly sashed it shut.

“We’ll be crossing the Pyrenees in the next hour,” said Moira. “Now that Harman has something in his skull other than a pleasure thermometer, we have things to discuss… things to decide. I suggest that Prometheus go up and shower and get dressed. Grandfather here can take a nap. I’ll clear the breakfast dishes.”

65

Achilles is considering the possibility that he made a mistake in maneuvering Zeus into banishing him to the deepest, darkest pit in the hell-world of Tartarus, even though it had seemed like a good idea at the time.

First of all, Achilles can’t quite breathe the air here. While the quantum singularity of his Fate to Die by Paris’s Hand theoretically protects him from death, it doesn’t protect him from rasping, wheezing, and collapsing on the lava-hot black stone as the methane-tainted air fouls and scours his lungs. It’s as if he’s trying to breathe acid.

Secondly, this Tartarus is a nasty place. The terrible air pressure—equivalent to two hundred feet beneath the surface of Earth’s sea—presses in on every square inch of Achilles’ aching body. The heat is terrible. It would have long since killed any merely mortal man, even a hero such as Diomedes or Odysseus, but even demi-god Achilles is suffering, his skin blotched red and white, boils and blisters appearing everywhere on his exposed flesh.

Finally, he is blind and almost deaf. There is a vague reddish glow, but not enough to see by. The pressure here is so great, the atmosphere and cloud cover so thick, that even the small illumination from the pervasive volcanic red gloom is defeated by the rippling atmosphere, by fumes from live volcanic vents, and by the constant curtain-fall of acid rain. The thick, superheated atmosphere presses in on the fleet-footed mankiller’s eardrums until the sounds he can make out all seem like great, muted drumbeats and massive footsteps—heavy throbs to match the throbbing of his pressure-squeezed skull.

Achilles reaches under his leather armor and touches the small mechanical beacon that Hephaestus had given him. He can feel it pulse. At least it hasn’t imploded from the terrible pressure that presses in on Achilles’ eardrums and eyes.

Sometimes in the terrible gloom, Achilles can sense movement of large shapes, but even when the volcanic glow is at its reddest, he can’t make out who or what is passing near him in the terrible night. He senses that the shapes are far too big and too oddly shaped to be human. Whatever they are, the things have ignored him so far.

Fleet-footed Achilles, son of Peleus, leader of the Myrmidons and noblest hero of the Trojan War, demigod in his terrible wrath, lies spread-eagled flat on a pulsing-hot volcanic boulder, blinded and deafened, and uses all of his energy just to keep breathing.

Perhaps, he thinks, I should have come up with a different plan for defeating Zeus and bringing my beloved Penthesilea back to life.

Even the briefest thought of Penthesilea makes him want to weep like a child—but not an Achilles’ child, for the young Achilles had never wept. Not once. The centaur Chiron had taught him how to avoid responding to his emotions—other than anger, rage, jealousy, hunger, thirst, and sex, of course, for those were important in a warrior’s life—but weep for love? The idea would have made the Noble Chiron bark his harsh centaur’s laugh and then hit young Achilles hard with his massive teaching stick. “Love is nothing but lust misspelled,” Chiron would have said—and struck seven-year-old Achilles again, hard, on the temple.

What makes Achilles want to weep all the more here in this unbreathable hell is that he knows somewhere deep behind his surging emotions that he doesn’t give a damn about the dead Amazon twat—she’d come at him with a fucking poisoned spear, for the gods’ sake—and normally his only regret would be that it took so long for the bitch and her horse to die. But here he is, suffering this hell and taking on Father Zeus himself just to get the woman reborn—all because of some chemicals that gash-goddess Aphrodite had poured on the smelly Amazon.

Three huge forms loom out of the fog. They are close enough that Achilles’ straining, tear-filled eyes can make out that they are women—if women grew thirty feet tall, each with tits bigger than his torso. They are naked but painted in many bright colors, visible even through the red filter of this volcanic gloom. Their faces are long and unbelievably ugly. Their hair is either writhing like snakes in the superheated air or is a tangle of serpents. Their voices are distinct only because the booming syllables are unbearably louder than the booming background noise.

“Sister Ione,” booms the first shape looming over him in the gloom, “canst thou tell what form this is spread-eagled across this rock like a starfish?”

“Sister Asia,” answers the second huge form, “I wouldst say it were a mortal man, if mortals could come to this place or survive here, which they cannot. And if I could see it were a man, which I cannot since it lieth upon its belly. It does have pretty hair.”

“Sister Oceanids,” says the third form, “let us see the gender of this starfish.”

A huge hand roughly grips Achilles and rolls him over. Fingers the size of his thighs pluck away his armor, rip off his belt, and roll down his loin cloth.

“Is it male?” asks the first shape, the one her sister had called Asia.

“If you wouldst call it so for so little to show,” says the third shape.

“Whatever it is, it lies fallen and vanquished,” says the female giant called Ione.

Suddenly large shapes in the gloom that Achilles had assumed were looming crags stir, sway, and echo in non-human voices, “Lies fallen and vanquished!”

And invisible voices farther away in the reddish night echo again, “Lies fallen and vanquished!”

The names finally click. Chiron had taught young Achilles his mythology, as well as his theology to honor the living and present gods. Asia and Ione had been Oceanids—daughters of Okeanos—along with their third sister Panthea… the second generation of Titans born after the original mating of Earth and Gaia, Titans who had ruled the heavens and the earth along with Gaia in the ancient times before their third-generation offspring, Zeus, defeated them and cast them all down into Tartarus. Only Okeanos, of all the Titans, had been allowed exile in a kinder, gentler place—locked away in a dimension layer under the quantum sheath of Ilium-Earth. Okeanos could be visited by the gods, but his offspring had been banished to stinking Tartarus: Asia, Ione, Panthea, and all the other Titans, including Okeanos’ brother Kronos who became Zeus’s father, Okeanos’ sister Rhea who became Zeus’s mother, and Okeanos’ three daughters. All the other male offspring from the mating of Earth and Gaia—Koios, Krios, Hyperion, and Iapetos, as well as the other daughters—Theia, Themis, Mnemosyne, golden-wreathed Phoebe, and sweet Tethys—had also been banished here to Tartarus after Zeus’s victory on Olympos thousands of years earlier.

All this Achilles remembers from his lessons at the hoof of Chiron. A fucking lot of good it does me, he thinks.

“Does it speak?” booms Panthea, sounding startled.

“It squeaks,” says Ione.

All three of the giant Oceanids lean closer to listen to Achilles’ attempts at communication. Every attempt is terribly painful for the mankiller, since it means breathing in and trying to use the noxious atmosphere. An observer would have guessed from the resulting sounds—and guessed correctly—that there is an unusual amount of helium remaining in the carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia mix of Tartarus’ soup-thick atmosphere.

“It soundeth like a mouse that hath been squashed flat,” laughs Asia.

“But the squeaks sound vaguely like a squashed mouse’s attempt at civilized language,” booms Ione.

“With a terrible dialect,” agrees Panthea.

“We need to take him to the Demogorgon,” says Asia, looming closer.

Two huge hands roughly lift Achilles, the giant fingers squeezing most of the ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, and helium out of his aching lungs. Now the hero of the Argives is gaping and gasping like a fish out of water.

“The DemOgorgon will want to see this strange creature,” agrees Ione. “Carry him, Sister, carry him to the Demogorgon.”

“Carry him to the Demogorgon!!” echo the giant, insectoid shapes following the three giant women.

“Carry him to the Demogorgon!!” echo larger, less familiar shapes following farther behind.

66

The eiffelbahn ended along the 40th Parallel, on the coast where the nation of Portugal had once existed, just south of Figueira da Foz. Harman knew that less than a couple of hundred miles southeast, the modulated forcefield templates called the Hands of Hercules held the Atlantic Ocean out of the dry Mediterranean Basin, and he knew exactly why the post-humans had drained the Basin and to what purpose they’d used it for almost two millennia. He knew that less than a couple of hundred miles northeast of where the eiffelbahn ended here, there was a sixty-mile-wide circle of the terrain fused into glass where thirty-two hundred years ago the Global Caliphate had fought its determining battle with the N.E.U.—more than three million proto-voynix pouring over and past two hundred thousand doomed human mechanized-infantry knights. Harman knew that…

All in all, he knew, he knew too much. And understood too little.

The three of them—Moira, the solidified Prospero hologram, and Harman still-with-the-headache-of-a-lifetime—were standing on the top platform of the final eiffelbahn tower. Harman was finished with his cablecar ride—perhaps forever.

Behind them were the green hills of former Portugal. Ahead of them was the Atlantic Ocean with the Breach continuing due west from the line of the eiffelbahn route. The day was perfect—temperature perfect, mild breezes, not a cloud in the sky—and sunlight reflected off green at the top of the cliffs, white sand, and broad expanses of blue on either side of the slash of the Atlantic Breach. Harman knew that even from the top of the eiffelbahn tower he could see only sixty miles or so to the west, but the view seemed to go on for a thousand miles, the Breach starting as a hundred-meter-wide avenue with low blue-green berms on either side, but continuing on until it was only a black line intersecting with the distant horizon.

“You can’t seriously expect me to walk to North America,” said Harman.

“We seriously expect you to try,” said Prospero.

“Why?”

Neither the post-human nor the never-human answered him. Moira led the way down the steps to the lower elevator platform. She was carrying a rucksack and some other gear for Harman’s hike. The elevator doors opened and they stepped into the cagelike structure and began humming lower past iron trellises.

“I’ll walk with you for a day or two,” said Moira.

Harman was surprised. “You will? Why?

“I thought you might enjoy the company.”

Harman had no response to this. As they stepped out onto the grassy shelf under the eiffelbahn tower, he said, “You know, just a few hundred miles southeast of us here, in the Med Basin, there are a dozen post-human storage facilities that Savi never knew anything about. She knew about Atlantis and the Three Chairs way of riding lightning to the rings, but that was more or less a cruel post-human joke—she didn’t know about the sonies and actual cargo spacecraft stored at the other stasis bubbles. Or at least these stasis bubbles used to be there…”

“They still are,” said Prospero.

Harman turned to Moira. “Well, walk with me a few days to the Basin rather than send me on a three-month hike across the ocean floor… a hike I’ll probably never complete. We’ll fly a sonie to Ardis or one of the shuttles up the rings to have them turn the power and fax-node links back on.”

Moira shook her head. “I assure you, my young Prometheus, you do not want to walk toward the Mediterranean Basin.”

“Almost one million calibani are loose there,” said Prospero. “They used to be contained to the Basin, but Setebos has released them. They’ve slaughtered the voynix that once guarded Jerusalem, have swarmed across North Africa and the Middle East, and would have covered much of Europe now if Ariel weren’t holding them back.”

“Ariel!” cried Harman. The thought of the tiny little… sprite … single-handedly holding back a million rampaging calibani—or even one—was totally absurd.

“Ariel can call upon more resources than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Harman, friend of Noman,” said Prospero.

“Hmm,” said Harman, unconvinced. The three walked to the edge of the grassy cliff. A narrow path switchbacked down to the beach. From this close, the Atlantic Breach looked much more real and strangely terrifying. Waves lapped up on either side of the impossible segment cut out of the ocean. “Prospero,” said Harman, “you created the calibani to counter the voynix threat. Why do you allow them to rampage?”

“I no longer control them,” said the old magus.

“Since Setebos arrived?”

The magus smiled. “I lost control of the calibani—and of Caliban himself—many centuries before Setebos.”

“Why did you create the damned things in the first place?”

“Security,” said Prospero. And he smiled again at the irony of the word.

“We… the post-humans,” said Moira, “asked Prospero and his… companion… to create a race of creatures ferocious enough to stop the replicating voynix from flooding into the Mediterranean Basin and compromising our operations there. You see, we used the Basin for…”

“Growing food, cotton, tea, and other materials you needed in the orbital islands,” finished Harman. “I know.” He paused, thinking about what the post had just said. “Companion? Do you mean Ariel?”

“No, not Ariel,” said Moira. “You see, fifteen hundred years ago, the creature we call Sycorax was not yet the…”

“That will do,” interrupted Prospero. The hologram actually sounded embarrassed.

Harman didn’t want to let it go. “But what you told us a year ago is true, isn’t it?” he asked the magus. “Caliban’s mother was Sycorax and its father was Setebos… or was that a lie as well?”

“No, no,” said Prospero. “Caliban is a creature out of the witch by a monster.”

“I’ve been curious how a giant brain the size of a warehouse with dozens of hands bigger than me manages to mate with a human-sized witch,” said Harman.

“Very carefully,” said Moira—rather predictably, Harman thought.

The woman who looked like young Savi pointed to the Breach. “Are we ready to start?”

“Just another question for Prospero,” said Harman, but when he turned around to speak to the magus, he was gone. “Damn it. I hate it when he does that.”

“He has business to attend to elsewhere.”

“Yes, I’m sure. But I wanted to ask him one last time why he’s sending me across the Atlantic Breach. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m going to die out there. I mean, there’s no food….”

“I’ve packed a dozen food bars for you,” said Moira.

Harman had to laugh. “All right… after a dozen days, then there’s no food. And no water…”

Moira pulled a soft, curved, almost flat shape from the rucksack. The thing looked almost like one of the wineskins from the turin drama—but one that was all but empty. A thin tube ran from it. She handed it to Harman and he noticed how cool to the touch it was.

“A hydrator,” said Moira. “If there’s any humidity in the air at all, this collects it and filters it. If you’re in your thermskin, it collects your sweat and exhalations, scrubs them, and provides drinking water that way. You will not die of thirst out there.”

“I didn’t bring my thermskin,” said Harman.

“I packed it for you. You will need it for hunting.”

“Hunting?”

“Fishing might be a better term,” said Moira. “You can press through the restraining forcefields any time and kill fish underwater. You’ve been underwater in your thermskin before—up on Prospero’s Isle ten months ago—so you know that the skin protects you from pressure and the osmosis mask allows you to breathe.”

“What am I supposed to use for bait to get these fish?”

Moira flashed Savi’s quick smile. “For sharks, killer whales, and many other denizens of the deep out there, your own body will do quite nicely, my Prometheus.”

Harman was not amused. “And what do I use to kill the sharks, killer whales, and other denizens of the deep that I might want to eat… harsh language?”

Moira pulled a handgun from the rucksack and handed it to him.

It was black—darker and stubbier and much less graceful in design than the flechette weapons he was used to—and heavier. But the hand grip, barrel, and trigger were similar enough.

“This fires bullets, not crystal darts,” said Moira. “It’s an explosive device rather than gas-charged as with the weapons you’ve used before… but the principle is obviously the same. There are three boxes of ammunition in your rucksack… six hundred rounds of self-cavitating ammunition. That means that each bullet creates its own vacuum ahead of itself underwater… water does not slow it down. This is the safety—it’s on now—press down on the red dot with your thumb to release the safety. It has more recoil than flechette weapons and is much louder, but you’ll grow used to that.”

Harman hefted the killing device a few times, pointed it at the distant sea, made sure the safety was still on, and set it back in his pack. He’d test it later—once he was out in the Breach. “I wish we could get a few dozen of these weapons to Ardis,” he said softly.

“You can deliver this one to them,” said Moira.

Harman balled his right hand into a fist. He wheeled on Moira. “More than two thousand miles across here,” he said fiercely. “I don’t know how many miles I can hike a day, even if I do catch these goddamned fish and if your hydrator thing keeps working. Twenty miles a day? Thirty? That could be two hundred days of hiking just to get to the east coast of North America. But that kind of progress is only if the land in the Breach is flat … and I’m looking at proxnet and farnet mapping right now. There are fucking mountain ranges out there! And canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon! Boulders, rock crevasses, great furrows where continental drift dragged entire landmasses over the ocean floor, larger gaps where tectonic-plate activity opened up the bottom of the ocean and spewed forth lava. This ocean floor’s always re-creating itself—it’s bigger, rougher, and rockier than it used to be. It’ll take me a year to get across, and once I get there I’ll have almost another thousand miles to cover to get back to Ardis—and that’s through forests and mountains infested with dinosaurs, saber-toothed cats, and voynix. You and that mutant cyberspace personality can quantum teleport anywhere you want to go—and take me with you. Or you could command a sonie to fly here from any of your post-human hidey holes where you’ve stashed your toys, and I could be home at Ardis helping Ada in a few hours… less. Instead, you’re sending me to my death out there. And even if I survive, it’ll be many months before I can get back to Ardis and odds are that Ada and everyone I know will be dead—from that Setebos spawn, or the voynix, or the winter, or starvation. Why are you doing this to me?”

Moira did not flinch from his fierce gaze. “Has Prospero ever spoken to you of the logosphere’s predicators?” she asked softly.

“Predicators?” Harman repeated stupidly. He could feel the adrenaline filling his system beginning to drain away toward despair. In a minute, his hands would be shaking. “You mean predictors? No.”

“Predicators,” said Moira. “They are as unique—and often as dangerous—as Prospero himself. Sometimes he trusts them. Sometimes he does not. In this case, he has entrusted your life and perhaps the future of your race to them.”

Moira pulled her hydrator from the rucksack and slung it over her back, shifting the flexible drinking tube so it lay along the side of her cheek. She started down the steep path toward the beach.

Harman remained at the top of the cliff for a minute. Shouldering the rucksack, he shielded his eyes and stared back through the morning glare at the black eiffelbahn tower rising high against the blue sky. The cablecar cables ran off to the east. He could not see the next tower from this vantage point.

Swiveling, he looked out to the west. Large white birds and smaller white birds—gulls and terns, his protein DNA memory storage told him—wheeled and screeched over the lazy blue sea. The Atlantic Breach remained a startling impossibility, its eighty-foot-wide cleft taking on scale now that Moira was halfway down the cliff face.

Harman sighed, tugged the rucksack straps tighter—already feeling the sweat soaking through his tunic where it met the cotton of the small backpack—and began following Moira down the trail toward the beach and the sea.

67

A lot was happening at once.

The Queen Mab—all one thousand one hundred and eighteen feet of her—began her close-encounter aerobraking maneuver, the ship’s curved pusher plate draped across its derriere, both ship and saucer surrounded by flame and streaking plasma.

At the height of the ion-storm around the aerobraking spaceship, Suma IV cut loose the dropship.

Just as with the spacecraft that had first brought Mahnmut and Orphu to Mars, no one had gotten around to naming this dropship—it remained just “the dropship” in their maser and tightbeam conversations. But The Dark Lady was secure in the dropship’s hold, and in his environmental control cubby, Mahnmut kept up a running description of video feeds—both from the dropship’s camera and from the Queen Mab—as the stealth-shielded ovoid of the dropship thrust away from the flame-wreathed larger ship, spun through the upper atmosphere at five times the speed of sound, and finally deployed its stubby high-speed wings when their velocity dropped to a mere Mach 3.

Originally, General Beh bin Adee had planned to drop Earthward with the reconnaissance dropship, but the more imminent threat of the Voice’s asteroid rendezvous made all the Prime Integrators vote that the general remain aboard the Mab. Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo was in the jumpseat of the passenger/cargo compartment behind the main control blister on the upper part of the ship, and behind him—strapped into their web seating, heavy energy weapons locked upright between their black-barbed knees—rode his command: twenty-five rockvec Belt troopers recently defrosted and briefed on the Queen Mab.

Suma IV was an excellent pilot. Mahnmut had to admire the way the Ganymedan guided the dropship down through the upper atmosphere, using thrusters so briefly that the ship seemed to be flying itself, and he had to smile when he remembered his own disastrous plunge with Orphu through Mars’ atmosphere. Of course, his ship had been charred and broken then, but he could still give credit to a real pilot when he flew with one.

The data and radar profile are impressive, tightbeamed Orphu of Io from the hold. What’s the visual look like?

Blue and white, sent Mahnmut. All blue and white. More beautiful even than the photographs. The entire Earth is ocean below us.

All of it? said Orphu and Mahnmut thought it was one of the few times he’d heard his friend sound surprised.

All of it. A water world—blue ocean, a million ripples of reflected sunlight, white clouds—cirrus, high ripples, a mass of stratocumulus coming over the horizon above us… . no, wait. It’s a hurricane, a thousand kilometers across, at least. I can see the eye. White, spinning, powerful, amazing.

Our track is nominal, sent Orphu. Coming right up from Antarctica crossing the South Atlantic toward the northeast.

The Mab’s out of atmosphere and on the other side of the Earth now, sent Mahnmut. The communication sats we seeded are working fine. Mab’s velocity is down to fifteen kilometers per second and falling. She’s climbing back to the polar ring coordinates and decelerating on ion drive. Trajectory is good. She’s headed for the rendezvous point the Voice gave us. No one’s fired on her yet.

Even better, sent Orphu, no one’s fired on us yet, either.

Suma IV allowed atmospheric drag to slow them to less than the speed of sound just as they crossed the bulge of Africa. Their flight plan had called for them to fly over the dried Mediterranean Sea, shooting video and recording data about the odd constructs there, but instruments now told them that there was some sort of energy-damping field extending in a dome up to forty thousand meters above that dried sea. The dropship might fly into that and cease flying altogether. In fact, according to Suma IV, if they flew into that, all the moravecs on board might cease functioning. The Ganymedan banked the dropship east across the Sahara Desert, flying in a wide curve around to the south and east of the waterless Mediterranean.

The feed continued to flow in from the Queen Mab, carried around the blocking mass of the planet by a score of snowflake-size repeater satellites.

The large spacecraft had reached the coordinates beamed to it by the Voice—a small volume of empty space just outside the edge of the orbital ring some two thousand kilometers from the asteroid-city from which the Voice had broadcast its—her—messages. Obviously the Voice did not want a spaceship that was propelled by atomic bombs to come within shockwave proximity of her—its—orbital home.

Besides realtime data the dropship was uplinking, it was getting twenty broadband tightbeams of information flowing in: feeds from the Queen Mab’s many cameras and external sensors, comm bands from the Mab’s bridge, ground data from the various satellites they’d seeded, and multiple feeds from Odysseus. The moravecs had not only rigged the human’s clothing with nanocameras and molecular transmitters, they’d mildly sedated Odysseus during his last sleep period and had started to paint cell-sized imagers on the skin of his forehead and hands, but had discovered to their shock that Odysseus already had nanocameras in the skin there. His ear canals also had been modified—long before he came aboard the Queen Mab they realized, with nanocyte receivers. The moravecs modified all these so they would send every sight and sound back to the ship’s recorders. Other sensors had been installed around his body so that even if Odysseus were to die during the coming rendezvous, data about his surroundings would continue flowing back to the moravecs.

At that moment, Odysseus was standing on the bridge with Prime Integrator Asteague/Che, Retrograde Sinopessen, navigator Cho Li, General Beh bin Adee, and the other command moravecs there.

Suddenly Orphu and Mahnmut perked up as the Queen Mab relayed real-time radio data from the ship’s comm.

“Incoming maser message,” said Cho Li.

“SEND ODYSSEUS ACROSS ALONE,” came the sultry female voice from the asteroid-city. “USE A SHUTTLE WHICH IS NOT ARMED. IF I DETECT WEAPONS ABOARD HIS SHIP OR IF ANYONE ORGANIC OR ROBOTIC ACCOMPANIES ODYSSEUS, I WILL DESTROY YOUR SPACECRAFT.”

“The plot thickens,” said Orphu of Io on the common dropship band.

The moravecs in the dropship watched with only a second’s delay as Retrograde Sinopessen escorted Odysseus down to the number eight launch bay. Since all of the hornets were armed, only one of the three Phobos construction shuttles still aboard the Queen Mab would satisfy the Voice’s requirements.

The construction shuttle was tiny—a remote-handling ovoid with barely room inside to squeeze in one adult human being and no life support beyond air and temperature—and as Retrograde Sinopessen helped the Achaean fighter squirm into the cable and circuit-board cluttered space, the moravec said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Odysseus stared at the spidery moravec from Amalthea for a long moment. Finally he said in Greek, “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink life to the lees: all times have I enjoyed greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those that loved me and alone; on shore, and when through the scudding drifts the rainy Hyades vexed the dim sea; I am become a name…. Much have I seen and known; cities of men and manners, climates, councils, governments, and myself not least, but honored them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, far on the ringing plains of windy Troy…. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life were all too little, and of one to me little remains: but every hour is saved from that eternal silence, something more, a bringer of new things; and vile it were for some three suns to store and hoard myself… close the goddamned door, spider-thing.”

“But that’s …” began Orphu of Io.

“He’s been in the Mab’s library …” began Mahnmut.

“Hush!” commanded Suma IV.

They watched as the shuttle was sealed. Retrograde Sinopessen stayed in the shuttle bay, clinging to a strut so as not to be swept out in space as the bay dumped all its atmosphere, and then the ovoid shuttle moved out into space on silent peroxide thrusters. The egg-shaped thing tumbled, stabilized, aimed its nose at the orbital asteroid-city—only a glowing spark among thousands of other p-ring sparks at this dis-tance—and thrusted away toward the Voice.

“We’re coming up on Jerusalem,” said Suma IV on the intercom.

Mahnmut returned his attention to the dropship’s various video monitors and sensors.

Tell me what you see, old friend, tightbeamed Orphu.

All right… we’re still more than twenty kilometers high. On the unmagnified view, I see the dry Mediterranean Sea about sixty or eighty kilometers to the west, it’s a patchwork of red rock, dark soil, and what looks to be green fields. Then along the coast there’s the huge crater that used to be the Gaza Strip—a sort of impact crater, half-moon-shaped inlet to the dry sea—and then the land rises into mountains and Jerusalem is there, in the heights, on a hill of its own.

What does it look like?

Let me zoom a bit… yes. Suma IV’s doing an overlay with historical satellite photos, and it’s obvious that the suburbs and newer parts of the city are gone… but the Old City, the walled city, is still there. I can see the Damascus Gate… the Western Wall… Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock… and there’s a new structure there, one not in the old satellite photos. Something tall and made out of multifaceted glass and polished stone. The blue beam is coming up from it.

I’m reviewing the data on the blue beam, sent Orphu. Definitely a neutrino beam sheathed in tachyons. I don’t have a clue as to what function that might have and I bet our best scientists don’t either.

Oh, wait a minute… sent Mahnmut. I’ve zoomed on the Old City and it’s… crawling with life.

People? Humans?

No…

Those headless humpy organic-robotic things?

No, tightbeamed Mahnmut. Would you just let me describe these things at my own speed?

Sorry.

There are thousands—more than thousands—of the clawed, fin-footed amphibian things that you suggested looked like Caliban from The Tempest.

What are they doing? asked Orphu.

Just milling around, essentially, sent Mahnmut. No, wait, there are bodies on David Street near the Jaffa Gate… more bodies on the Tariq el-Wad in the old Jewish section near the Western Wall Plaza…

Human bodies? sent Orphu.

No… those headless humpy organic-robotic things. They’re pretty torn up… a lot of them look eviscerated.

Food for the Caliban monsters? asked Orphu.

I have no idea.

“We’re going to overfly the blue beam,” Suma IV broadcast on the intercom. “Everyone stay strapped in tight—I need to get some of our boom sensors into the beam itself.”

Is this wise? Mahnmut asked Orphu. Nothing about this expedition to Earth is wise, old friend. We don’t have a maggid aboard.

A what? tightbeamed Mahnmut.

Maggid, sent Orphu of Io. In olden days, the old Jews—long before the caliphate wars and the rubicon, I mean, back when humans wore bearskins and T-shirts—the old Jews said that a wise person had a maggid—a sort of spiritual counselor from a different world.

Maybe we’re the maggids, sent Mahnmut. We’re all from another world.

True, sent Orphu. But we’re not very wise. Mahnmut, did I ever tell you that I’m a gnostic?

Spell that, sent Mahnmut.

Orphu of Io did so.

What the hell is a gnostic? asked Mahnmut. He’d had several revelations about his old friend recently—including the fact that Orphu was an expert on James Joyce and Lost Era writers other than Proust—and he wasn’t sure he was ready for more.

It doesn’t matter what a gnostic is, sent Orphu, but a hundred years before the Christians burned Giordano Bruno at the stake in Venice, they burned a gnostic, a Sufi magus named Solomon Molkho in Mantua. Solomon Molkho taught that when the change occurred, the Dragon would be destroyed without weapons and everything on Earth and in the heavens would be changed.

“Dragons? Magus?” Mahnmut said aloud.

“What?” said Suma IV from the cockpit bubble.

“Say again?” commed Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo from his jumpseat in the troop transport module.

“Please say that again,” came Prime Integrator Asteague/Che’s British-accented voice from the Queen Mab, telling Mahnmut that the mother ship was monitoring their intercom chatter as well as their official transmissions. But not, he fervently hoped, tapping into their tight-beam conversations.

Never mind, sent Mahnmut. I’ll ask about the dragon and the maguses and such another time.

On the intercom, Mahnmut said, “Sorry… nothing… just thinking out loud.”

“Let’s maintain radio discipline,” snapped Suma IV.

“Yes… uh… sir,” said Mahnmut.

Down in the hold, Orphu of Io rumbled in the subsonic.

Odysseus’ construction shuttle slowly approached the brightly lit glass city girdling the asteroid. Sensors from the shuttle confirmed that the underlying asteroid was roughly potato-shaped and about twenty kilometers long by almost eleven kilometers in diameter. Every square meter of the asteroid’s nickel-iron surface was covered by the crystal city, with the steel, glass, and buckycarbon towers and bubbles rising to a maximum height of half a kilometer. Sensors showed that the entire structure was pressurized at sea-level Earth normal, that the molecules of air inevitably leaking out through the glass suggested Earth-norm oxygen-nitrogen-carbon-dioxide mix atmosphere, and that the internal temperatures would be comfortable for a human who had lived around the Mediterranean Sea before the late Lost Era climate changes… someone from Odysseus’ era, for instance.

On the bridge of the Queen Mab a thousand kilometers away and holding, all of the command ‘vecs monitored their sensors and screens more intently as an invisible tentacle of forcefield energy reached out from the crystal asteroid city, grabbed the construction shuttle, and pulled it in toward an airlock-like opening high on the tallest glass tower.

“Shut down the shuttle’s thrusters and autopilot,” commanded Cho Li.

Retrograde Sinopessen monitored Odysseus’ biotelemetry and said, “Our human friend is fine. Excited… heart rate up a bit and adrenaline levels rising… he can see out that little window… but otherwise healthy.”

Holographic images flickered above consoles and the chart table as the shuttle was drawn closer and then pulled into the dark rectangle of the airlock. A glass door slid shut. Sensors on the shuttle registered a forcefield differential pushing it “down”—substituting for gravity to within 0.68 Earth standard—and then the sensors recorded atmosphere rushing into the large airlock chamber. It was as breathable as the air at Ilium.

“Radio, maser, and quantum telemetric data is quite clear,” reported Cho Li. “The glass of the city wall does not block it.”

“He’s not in the city yet,” grumbled General Beh bin Adee. “He’s just in the airlock. Don’t be surprised if the Voice cuts off transmissions as soon as Odysseus is inside.”

They watched on the subjective skin cameras—and so did everyone aboard the dropship some fifty thousand kilometers away—as Odysseus uncoiled from the small space, stretched, and began walking toward an interior door. Although wearing soft shipsuit clothing, the human had insisted over all the moravecs’ protests on bringing his round shield and short sword. The shield was raised now and the sword was ready as the bearded man approached the brightly illuminated door.

“Unless anyone has any further need to study Jerusalem or the neutrino beam, I’ll set course for Europe now,” Suma IV said over the intercom.

No one protested, although Mahnmut was busy describing the colors of the Old City of Jerusalem to Ophu—the reds of the late afternoon sun on the ancient buildings, the gold gleaming of the mosque, the clay-colored streets and dark gray shadows of the alleys, the shocking, sudden green of olive groves here and there, and everywhere the slick, wet, slimy green of the amphibian creatures.

The dropship accelerated to Mach 3 and headed northeast toward the old capital of Dimashq in what had once been called Syria or the Kahn Ho Tep Province of Nyainqêntanglha Shan West, Suma IV keeping a distance between the aircraft and the dome of nullifying energy over the dried-up Mediterranean. As they covered the length of old Syria and banked sharply left to head west along the Anatolian Peninsula over the bones of old Turkey, the ship fully stealthed and doing a silent Mach 2.8 at an altitude of thirty-four thousand meters, Mahnmut suddenly said, “Can we slow down and orbit near the Aegean coast south of the Hellespont?”

“We can,” replied Suma IV over the intercom, “but we’re behind schedule for our survey of the blue-ice city in France. Is there something along the coast up here that’s worth our detour and time?”

“The site of Troy,” said Mahnmut. “Ilium.”

The dropship began decelerating and losing altitude. When it reached the crawling pace of three hundred kilometers per hour—and with the brown and green of the emptied Mediterranean approaching fast and the water of the Hellespont to the north—Suma IV retracted the stubby delta wings and unfolded the hundred-meter-long, multiplaned gossamer wings with their slowly turning propellers.

Mahnmut softly sang on the intercom—

“They say that Achilles in the darkness stirred…

And Priam and his fifty sons

Wake all amazed and hear the guns,

And shake for Troy again.”

Who’s that? sent Orphu. I don’t recognize that verse.

Rupert Brooke, Mahnmut replied on the tightbeam. World War I–era British poet. He wrote that on his way to Gallipoli … but he never got to Gallipoli. Died of disease along the way.

“I say,” boomed General Beh bin Adee on the common band, “I can’t say much for your radio discipline, little Europan, but that’s a cracking good poem.”

On the crystal city in polar orbit, the airlock door slid up and Odysseus entered into the city proper. It was filled with sunlight, trees, vines, tropical birds, streams, a waterfall tumbling from a tall outcropping of lichen-covered stone, old ruins, and small wildlife. Odysseus saw a red deer quit munching grass, raise its head, look at the human approaching behind his shield with sword raised, and then walk calmly away.

“Sensors indicate a humanoid form is approaching—not yet visible through the foliage,” Cho Li radioed to the dropship.

Odysseus heard the footsteps before he saw her—bare feet on packed soil and smooth rock. He lowered his shield and slid his sword into the loop on his broad belt as she came into sight.

The woman was beautiful beyond words. Even the inhuman moravecs in their steel and plastic shells, with organic hearts thumping next to their hydraulic hearts, organic brains and glands nestling next to plastic pumps and nanocyte servomechanisms—even the moravecs one thousand kilometers away staring at their holograms recognized how incredibly beautiful the woman was.

Her skin was a tanned brown, her hair long and dark but streaked with blond, the curls flowing down over her bare shoulders. She wore only the slightest two-piece outfit of glittering but flimsy silk that emphasized her full, heavy breasts and broad hips. Her feet were bare but there were gold bracelets around her slim ankles and a riot of bracelets on each wrist, silver and gold clasps on her smooth upper arms.

As she came closer, Odysseus and the staring moravecs in space and the staring moravecs circling above ancient Troy saw that the woman’s eyebrows arched in a sensuous curve over her amazingly green eyes, that her lashes were long and dark, and that what had looked like makeup around those amazing eyes from three meters away resolved into normal shadows and skin tones as she approached to within a meter of the stunned Odysseus. Her lips were soft, full, and very red.

In perfect Greek of Odysseus’ era, in a voice as soft as a breeze through palms or the rustle of perfectly tuned wind chimes, the beautiful woman said, “Welcome, Odysseus. I have been waiting for you for many years. My name is Sycorax.”

68

On the second evening of his hike through the Atlantic Breach with Moira, Harman found himself thinking of many things.

Something about walking between the two high walls of water—the Atlantic was more than five hundred feet deep here, on their second day of walking, now almost seventy miles out from the coast—was absolutely mesmerizing. A bundle of protein memory stored in modified DNA helixes somewhere near his spine pedantically tugged at Harman’s consciousness and wanted to fill in the details—(the word mesmerizing is based upon Franz Anton Mesmer, born May 23, 1734, in Iznang, Swabia, died March 5, 1815, in Meersburg, Swabia—German physician whose system of therapeutics known as mesmerism, in which he affected sympathetic control of his patients’ consciousness, was the forerunner of the later practice of hypnotism …)—but Harman’s mind, lost in labyrinths of thought, batted away the interruption. He was getting better at shutting down the nonessential voices roaring in and around his mind, but his head still hurt like a son of a bitch.

The five-hundred-foot-high walls of water on each side of the eighty-yard dry path were also frightening and even two days in the Breach hadn’t fully acclimated Harman to the sense of claustrophobia and fear of imminent collapse. He’d actually been in the Atlantic Breach once before, two years earlier when he was celebrating his ninety-eighth birth-day—leaving from faxnode 124 near the Loman Estate on what had once been the New Jersey coast of North America and walking two days out, two days back, but not covering nearly so much ground as he was with Moira—and the walls of water and deep gloom of the trench had not bothered him so much then. Of course, Harman thought, I was younger then. And believed in magic.

He and Moira had not spoken in several hours, but their strides easily matched each other and they walked well together in silence. Harman was analyzing some of the information that now filled his universe, but mostly he was thinking about what he could and should do if he ever did manage to get back to Ardis.

The first thing he should do, he realized, is apologize to Ada from the bottom of his heart for having left on that idiotic voyage to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu. His pregnant wife and unborn child should have come first. Consciously, he’d known that then, but he knew it now.

Next Harman was trying to stitch together a plan for saving his beloved, his unborn child, his friends, and his species. This was not so easy.

What was easier with the million volumes of information that had been—literally—poured into him was seeing some options.

First of all, there were the reawakened functions his mind and body kept exploring, almost one hundred of them. The most important of these, at least in the short term, was the free-fax function. Rather than find nodes and activate machinery, the nano-machinery present in every old-style human, and now understood by Harman, could fax from anywhere to anywhere on the planet Earth and even—should the interdictions be dropped—from the surface of the planet to selected points in the 1,108,303 objects, machines, and cities in orbit around the Earth. Free-faxing could save them all from the voynix—and from Setebos and his loosened calibani, even from Caliban himself—but only if the fax machines and storage modules in orbit were turned back on for humans.

Second, Harman now knew several ways he could get back up to the rings and even had a vague understanding of the alien-witch-thing named Sycorax who now ruled the former post-human orbital universe up there, but he had no clue as to how he and others could overpower Sycorax and Caliban—for Harman was certain that Setebos had sent his only begotten son up to the rings to interdict the fax function. But if they did prevail, Harman knew that he would have to drown in more crystal cabinets before he’d have all the technical information he needed to reactivate the complicated fax and sensor satellites.

Third, as Harman studied the many functions now available to him—many of which dealt with monitoring his own body and mind and finding data stored there—he knew that it would not be a problem sharing his newfound information. One of the lost functions was a simple sharing function—a sort of reverse sigling—wherein Harman could touch another old-style human, select the RNA-DNA caged protein memory packets he wanted to download, and the information would flow through his flesh and skin to the other person. It had been perfected for the Little Green Men prototypes almost two thousand years earlier, and quickly been adapted to human nanocyte function. All old-styles had this nano-induced DNA-bound memory capability and all old-styles had the hundred latent functions in their bodies and minds, but it took one informed person to start the rekindling of human abilities.

Harman had to smile. Moira could be… no, was … annoying with her many little in-jokes and obscure references, but he understood now why she kept calling him “my young Prometheus.” Prometheus, according to Hesiod, meant “foresighted” or “prophetic” and the character Prometheus in Aeschylus, and in the works of Shelley, Wu, and other great poets, was the Titan revolutionary who stole essential knowl-edge—fire—from the gods and brought it down to the groveling human race, elevating them into something almost like gods. Almost.

“That’s why you disconnected us from our functions,” Harman said, not even realizing that he was speaking aloud.

“What?”

He looked at the post-human woman walking next to him in the gathering gloom. “You didn’t want us to become gods. That’s why you never activated our functions.”

“Of course.”

“Yet all of the posts except you chose to go off to another world or dimension and play at being gods.”

“Of course.”

Harman understood. The first necessity and prerogative for a god, small “g” or capital “G,” was to have no other gods before him or her. He concentrated on his thoughts again.

Harman’s thinking had changed since the crystal cabinet. Where it once centered on things, places, people, and emotions, it now was mostly figurative—a complicated dance of metaphors, metonymies, ironies, and synecdoches. With billions of facts—things, places, and peo-ple—set into his very cells, the focus of his thoughts had shifted to the connections and shades and nuances and recognition side of things. Emotions were still there—stronger, if anything—but where his feelings had once surged like some big, booming bass overpowering the rest of the orchestra, they now danced like a delicate but powerful violin solo.

Much too much murky metaphor for a mere measly man, thought Harman, looking with irony at the presumption of his own thoughts. And an awful lot of alliteration from an anxious asshole.

Despite his self-mockery, he knew that he now owned the gift of being able to look at things—people, places, things, feelings, himself—with the kind of recognition that can only come from maturing into nuance, growing into oneself, and in the learning how to accept ironies and metaphors and synecdoches and metonymies not only in language, but in the hardwiring of the universe.

If he could reconnect with his own kind, get back to any old-style human enclave, not just back to Ardis, his new functions would change humankind forever. He would not force them on anyone, but since this iteration of homo sapiens was very close to being eradicated from this post-postmodern world, he doubted if anyone under attack by voynix, calibani, and a giant, soul-sucking brain skittering around on multiple hands would object too strenuously to gaining new gifts, powers, and a survival advantage.

Are these functions—in the long run—a survival advantage for my species?

Harman asked himself.

The answer, which came in his own mental voice, was the clear cry of a Zen master hearing a stupid question from one of his acolytes—“Mu!”—meaning roughly, “Unask the question, stupid.” This syllable was often to followed by the equally monosyllabic “Qwatz!” which was the Zen master’s cry simultaneous with leaping and striking the stupid student about the head and shoulders with the heavy, weighted teacher’s staff.

Mu. There is no “long run” here—that will be for my sons and daughters and their children to decide. Right now, everything—everything—exists in the short run.

And the threat of being disemboweled by a humpbacked voynix tends to focus the mind wonderfully well. If the functions were turned back on—Harman knew why the old functions, including the finder function, allnet, proxnet, farnet, as well as sigling, were not working—someone up there in the rings had turned off the transmissions as surely as they’d switched off the fax machines.

If the functions were turned back on…

But how could they be turned back on?

Once again, Harman studied the problem of getting back up to the rings and switching everything back on—power, servitors, fax, all of the functions.

He needed to know if there were others besides Sycorax up there, waiting, and what their defenses were. The million books he’d ingested in the crystal cabinet had no opinion on this crucial question.

“Why won’t you or Prospero QT me up to the rings?” asked Harman. He turned to look at Moira and realized that he could just barely see her in the failing light. Her face was illuminated mostly by ringlight.

“We choose not to,” she said in her most maddening Bartleby fashion.

Harman thought of the slug-throwing gun in his pack on the back. Would brandishing a weapon in her direction—and allowing her to read the sincerity in his face since the post-humans had their own functions for reading and understanding human reactions—would that combination convince her to quantum teleport him to Ardis or the rings?

He knew it wouldn’t. She would never have given him the gun if it were a threat to her. She had some countermeasure built into the weapon—perhaps she could keep it from firing just by the force of her post-human thoughts, some simple brainwave circuitry built into the firing mechanism—or something equally as foolproof and bulletproof built into her.

“You and the magus went to all that trouble to kidnap me, ship me across India to the Himalayas, just to stick me in the crystal cabinet, drown me, and educate me,” said Harman. These were the most words he’d strung together since they’d begun hiking the Breach, and he realized how banal and redundant they were. “Why did you do that if you don’t want me to prevail against Setebos and the other bad guys?”

Moira did not smile again. “If you’re meant to get to the rings, you’ll find a way up there.”

“ ‘Meant to’ sounds like some sort of Calvinist predestination,” said Harman, stepping over a low lump of desiccated coral. The Breach so far had been surprisingly easy—iron bridges over the few ocean-bottom abysses they’d encountered, paths blasted or lasered into rocky or coral ridges, gentle inclines for the most part and metal cables to help them descend or ascend where the going was steep—so Harman had not had to spend much time watching his feet. But it was hard to see detail in this falling light.

Moira had not responded or visibly reacted to his feeble witticism, so he said, “There are other Firmaries.”

“Prospero told you that before.”

“Yeah, but it’s just sunk in. We old-styles don’t have to die or rebuild medicine from scratch. There are more rejuvenation tanks up there.”

“Yes, of course. The post-humans prepared to serve an old-style population of one million. There are other Firmaries and blue-worm tanks on other orbital isles in both the equatorial and polar rings. Surely this is obvious.”

“Yes, obvious,” said Harman, “but you have to remember that I have all the savvy of a newborn babe.”

“I have not forgotten that,” said Moira.

“I don’t have specific data on where the other Firmaries are,” said Harman. “Can you pinpoint them for me?”

“I’ll point them out for you after we douse the campfire tonight,” Moira said drily.

“No. I mean on a chart of the rings.”

“Do you have a chart of the rings, my young Prometheus? Is that part of what you ate and drank back at the Taj?”

“No,” said Harman, “but you can draw one for us—orbital coordinates, everything.”

“Are you pondering immortality so soon after birth then, Prometheus?”

Am I? wondered Harman. Then he remembered his last thought before the realization that other Firmaries were in mothballs up there in the post-human rings—it had been of Ada, pregnant and injured.

“Why were all the operative fax-in/fax-out healing tanks on Prospero’s isle?” he asked. Even as he asked the question, he’d seen the answer like a memory of a forgotten nightmare.

“Prospero arranged that to keep his captive Caliban fed,” said Moira.

Harman felt his stomach lurch. Part of that was his reaction to having ever felt any friendly or forgiving thoughts toward the logosphere avatar magus. But most of the sudden surge of nausea came from the fact that he’d not eaten anything since two bites of that day’s food bar before dawn that morning, and he’d forgotten even to drink from his hydrator tube in the past few hours. “Why are you stopping?” he asked Moira.

“It’s too dark to walk,” said the post-human. “Let’s build our fire and cook our weenies and roast some marshmallows and sing camp songs. Then you can get a few hours’ sleep and dream of living forever in the bright future of the blue-worm tanks.”

“You know,” said Harman, “you can really be a sarcastic pain in the ass sometimes.”

Moira smiled now. Her smile was Cheshirecatlike, almost the only detail he could see of her in the Breach-trench darkness. “When my many sisters were here,” she said, “before they all flew off to become gods—many of them male gods, which I thought was a demotion—they used to tell me the same thing. Now pull that dried wood and seaweed that we’ve been picking up all day out of your pack and start us a nice fire… that’s a good little old-style.”

69

Mommy! Mommmmeeee! I’m so scared. It’s so cold and dark down here. Mommy! Come help me get out. Mommy, please!

Ada awoke just half an hour after falling asleep in the cold, early hours of the dark winter morning. The child-voice in her mind felt like a small, cold, and unwelcome hand inside her clothes.

Mommy, please. I don’t like it here. It’s cold and dark and I can’t get out. The rock is too hard. I’m hungry. Mommy, please help me get out of here. Mommeeeee.

As exhausted as she was, Ada forced herself out of her bedroll and into the cold air. The survivors—there were forty-eight now one week and five days after their return to the ruins of Ardis—had made tents out of salvaged canvas and Ada now slept with four other women. The cluster of tents and the original lean-to next to the well formed the center of a new palisade, with the sharpened stakes set only a hundred feet out from the center of the tent city and the tumbled ruins of the original Ardis Hall.

Mommeeee… please, Mommy….

The voice was there much of the time now and although Ada had learned to ignore it during most of her waking day, it kept her from sleeping. Tonight—this dark predawn morning—it was much worse than usual.

Ada pulled on her trousers, boots, and heavy sweater and stepped out of the tent, moving as quietly as she could so as not to waken Elle and her other tentmates. There were a few people awake by the center campfire—there always were, all through the night—and sentries out on the new walls, but the area between Ada and the Pit was empty and dark.

It was very dark; thick clouds had blocked the starlight and ringlight and it smelled like snow was on the way. Ada stepped carefully as she made her way to the Pit—some people still preferred sleeping outdoors now that they’d stitched together and lined better bedrolls and sleeping bags. She didn’t want to step on anyone. Just in her fifth month of pregnancy, Ada already felt fat and clumsy.

Mommeeeeeeeeee!

She hated that damned voice. With a real child growing inside her, she couldn’t tolerate the pleading, whining ersatz-child voice coming from that thing in the Pit, even if it was just a mental echo. She wondered if her own baby’s developing neural system could pick up this telepathic invasion. She hoped not.

Mommy, please let me out. It’s dark down here.

They’d decided to have one person standing guard at the Pit at all times, and tonight it was Daeman. She knew the thin, muscular silhouette with its flechette rifle slung over his shoulder even before she could make out his face. He turned to her as she came up to the edge of the Pit.

“Can’t sleep?” he whispered.

“It won’t let me,” she whispered back.

“I know,” said Daeman. “I can always hear it when it targets you with its pleading. Faint, but audible—a sort of tickling at the back of the brain. I hear the thing calling ‘Mommeee’ and just want to unload this magazine of flechettes into it.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” said Ada, staring down at the metal grill welded and bolted into rock above the Pit. The grill was large, heavy, and fine-meshed—they’d taken it from the old cistern near the ruins of Ardis Hall—and the Setebos baby had already grown to the point where it couldn’t get its stalk-wandering hands through the mesh. The Pit itself was only fourteen feet deep, but they’d hacked it and blasted it out of solid rock. And strong as the monstrous thing down there was—the many-eyed, many-handed brain part of it was now more than four feet long and its hands were stronger every day—it wasn’t strong enough to tear the grill’s bolts and welded, sunken rods out of the rock. Not yet.

“A good idea except for the fact that we’d have twenty thousand voynix on us in five minutes if we kill the thing,” whispered Daeman.

Ada didn’t have to be reminded of this, but hearing it said aloud made the coldness and chill of nausea creep deeper into her. The sonie was up now, in the cloudy dark, doing its slow reconnaissance orbits.

The news was the same every day—the voynix stayed away, in an almost perfect circle with a radius of just under two miles from what could be this last human encampment on Earth—yet the numbers kept growing. Greogi had estimated at least twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand of the dull-silvery things out there in the treeless forests yesterday afternoon. There would be more at first light this morning. There were more each day. It was as certain as the weak, wintry sunrises. It was as certain as the fact that the pleading, whining, insinuating mental voice coming up from the Pit would never stop until it got free.

And then what? wondered Ada.

She could imagine. Just the presence of the thing had cast a pall over the Ardis survivors. It was hard enough just to get through the days—building and expanding their little tents and shacks, salvaging what they could from the ruins, improving their hopeless little log fort, not to mention getting enough to eat—without the Setebos baby’s evil whining in their minds.

Food was a serious issue. All the cattle had been driven away during the massacre and sonie outings had found only their rotting carcasses in distant fields and on the winter forest floor. The voynix had slaughtered them as well. And with the soil frozen and even the hope of gardens or crops or planting months away, and with the canned and preserved goods that had been in the basement of Ardis Manor now merely melted blobs under charred rubble, the forty-eight Ardis survivors depended on the hunters who went out in the sonie every day. There was no game within the four-mile circle of the voynix army, so every day two men or women with flechette guns risked a trip beyond the voynix—a longer trip every day as the deer and larger game fled the area—and every evening, if they were lucky, a mule deer or wild pig would turn on the spit above the central cooking fire. But they hadn’t been that lucky recently—they didn’t have fresh meat every day, and fewer hunts provided them an animal to kill within the increasing radius of their flights, so they preserved what they could with smoking and with the remaining precious salt salvaged from the storehouses, and they munched on their monotonously bad-tasting jerky, and they watched the voynix continue massing, and each day and night their moods grew darker with the Setebos baby constantly sending its white, clammy hands and tendrils of telepathy into their brains. Even while they slept. And like the game they hunted from the sonie, sleep grew increasingly harder to find.

“Another few days,” Daeman said softly, “and I think it will be able to tear its way out of this cage.” He took the burning torch from its niche several feet away and held it out over the Pit. The size of a small calf, its brain surface gleaming with moist, gray mucus, Setebos’ baby was hanging from the grill. Half a dozen of its tendriled hands gripped the dark iron mesh. Eight or ten yellow eyes squinted, blinked, and closed at the sudden flare of light. Two of its feeding mouths pulsed open and Ada stared in fascination at the rows of small, white teeth in each.

“Mommy,” it squeaked. It had been speaking for the last week, but its actual voice was nowhere near as human-sounding or childlike as its telepathic voice

“Yes,” whispered Ada. “We’ll call a general meeting today. Let everyone vote on the time. But we have to make final preparations for departure soon.”

The plan pleased almost none of them, but it was the best they had come up with. While Daeman and a few others stood guard on the baby, they would begin evacuating materials and people to an island they’d scouted about thirty-five miles downriver from Ardis. It was not the paradise isle Daeman had wanted to fax to somewhere on the far side of the world, but this small rocky islet was in the center of the river, the currents ran fast there, and most important, the ground was defensible.

They all assumed that the voynix were faxing in somehow, from somewhere—although daily checks of the Ardis faxnode showed that it was still inoperable. That meant that the voynix could easily follow them, perhaps even fax to the island. But the forty-eight survivors could cluster and set their camp on a grassy depression on the center knob of the isle—hunt and bring in their food via sonie the way they were doing now—and the island was so small that the voynix would have trouble faxing in more than a few hundred at a time. They might be able to kill or drive off that many.

The last men and women to leave Ardis—and Ada fully intended to be the last woman—would kill the Setebos spawn. And then the voynix would flood over this hallowed place like frenzied grasshoppers, but the rest of the survivors would be on the island and safe. Safe for a few hours, Ada guessed.

Could voynix swim? Ada and the others had searched their memories for any instance of seeing one of their slave voynix swimming way back in the ancient history before the sky fell ten months earlier, before Harman and dead Savi and Daeman had destroyed the Firmary along with Prospero’s isle. Before the end of their foolish world of parties and endless faxing and safety. No one could be sure if they had ever seen a voynix swim.

But Ada was sure in her own heart. The voynix could swim. They could walk along the bed of the river under all that water and in all that swift current if they had to. They would get to the humans on their little island once the Setebos baby was dead.

And then the survivors, if there were any, would have to flee again—but to where? Ada’s vote was for the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu since she remembered well Petyr’s description of the voynix massed there being unable to get into the green environmental bubbles clustered on the bridge towers and suspension cables. But the majority of the others had not wanted to go to the Bridge they’d never seen—it was too far away, it would take too long to get there, they’d be caught inside the glass structures high above nothing with voynix all around them.

Ada had told them how Harman, Petyr, Hannah, and Noman/ Odysseus had reached the Bridge in less than an hour, hurtling up into the fringes of space and then tearing back down into the atmosphere above the southern continent. She explained how the sonie still had that flight plan in its memory—how a trip to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu would take only a few minutes longer than the ferry down the river to the rocky island.

But they still did not want to try that. Not yet.

But Ada and Daeman continued to make their plans for that long evacuation.

Suddenly there came a sound from above the dark line of trees to the southwest—a sort of rattling, hissing noise.

Daeman unslung his flechette rifle and held it ready, clicking off the safety. “Voynix!” he shouted.

Ada bit her lip, the Setebos thing at her feet forgotten for a moment, its mental urgings drowned out by real noise. Someone by the central fire was ringing the main alarm bell. People were stumbling out of the big lean-to and the other tents and yelling to wake others.

“I don’t think so,” said Ada, almost shouting so Daeman could hear her over the din. “It didn’t sound right.”

When the bell quit clanging and the shouts died down, she could hear it more clearly now—a metallic, rasping, mechanical noise—not like the sibilant leap and rustle of a thousand voynix attacking.

Then a light became visible—a searchlight stabbing down from the sky, only a few hundred feet up, the shaft and circle of light illuminating bare branches, frozen and fire-blackened grass, the palisade walls and the shocked sentries on the crude ramparts there.

The sonie did not have a spotlight.

“Get the rifles!” Ada shouted at the group milling near the central fire. Some people had weapons. Others grabbed them and readied them.

“Spread out!” shouted Daeman, running toward the clustered crowd and waving his arms. “Take cover!” Ada agreed. Whatever this thing was, if it had hostile intentions, there was no need to help it by clustering up like fat and happy targets.

The humming and rasping grew so loud that it drowned out even the warning bell that someone had redundantly and wildly begun ringing again.

Ada could see it now—something mechanical flying, something much bigger than their sonie but also much slower and more awkward, something not the sleek oval of their sonie but like two lumpy circles with the skittering searchlight stabbing out from the front circle. The thing bobbed and wavered as if it were ready to crash, but it cleared the low palisade walls—a sentry throwing himself to the ground to avoid protuberances on the flying machine—and then skidded roughly across the frozen grass not that far from the Pit, rose into the air again, and then settled heavily.

Daeman and Ada ran toward it, Ada running as well as her five months of pregnancy would allow her to and carrying a torch, and Daeman with the automatic flechette rifle raised and aimed at the dark shapes now clambering out of the landed machine.

The dark shapes were people—eight of them by Ada’s quick count. She saw faces she did not recognize, but the last two out of the machine, the two who had been at the controls near the front of the forward metal circle, were Hannah and Odysseus—or Noman as he’d asked to be called the last few months before he was injured and taken to the Bridge.

And then Ada and Hannah were hugging, both of them weeping but Hannah sobbing almost hysterically. When they paused to look at each other, Hannah gasped, “Ardis Hall? Where is it? Where is everyone? What’s happened? Is Petyr all right?”

“Petyr is dead,” said Ada, feeling the flatness of her own emotional reaction to the words. Too much horror had happened in too short a period of time; she felt that her soul had been bruised. “The voynix attacked in force shortly after you left. They overran the walls, used rocks as missiles. The house burned. Emme is dead. Reman is dead. Peaen is dead …” She went down the list of those old friends who had died in the attack and after.

Hannah—who had always been thin but who looked much thinner in the torchlight—covered her mouth in horror.

“Come,” said Ada, touching Noman’s wrist and putting her arm around Hannah again. “You all look starved. Come to the fire—it will be dawn soon. You can introduce your friends and we’ll get you some food. I want to hear all about everything.”

They sat by the fire until the winter sun rose, exchanging information as unemotionally as they could under the circumstances. Laman cooked a rich morning stew and they had that and tin cups of almost the last of the thick, rich coffee they’d found in one of the only partially burned storehouses.

The five new people, three men and two women, were named Beman, Elian, Stefe, Iyayi, and Susan. Elian was the leader, a completely bald man who carried the authority of age and who might have been almost as old as Harman. All were bandaged or had been slightly wounded and as the others talked, Tom and Siris tended to their injuries with what medical supplies were left.

Ada very quickly filled in her young friend Hannah—who somehow did not seem so young any more—and the silent Noman on the saga of the Ardis Massacre, the days and nights on Starved Rock, the nonfunctioning faxnode, the massing of the voynix, and the hatching and containment of the Setebos baby.

“I felt the thing in my mind even before we landed,” Noman said softly. While Hannah began her tale, the barrel-chested and gray-bearded Greek, clad only in his rough tunic even in the freezing weather, walked over to the Pit and stared down at its captive.

“Odysseus came out of his recovery crèche three days after Ariel took Harman away,” said the dark-haired young woman with the lustrous eyes. “The voynix continued to try to get in, but Odysseus reassured me that they couldn’t as long as the zero-friction field was on. We ate, slept …” Hannah lowered her eyes here for a minute and Ada knew that the two had done more than sleep. “We expected Petyr to return for us as he’d promised, but after a week Odysseus began work trying to assemble the fragments of sonies and other flying machines we’d seen in the garage—hangar—whatever one should call it. I did most of the welding. Odysseus did the circuitboard and propulsion system work. When we ran out of parts we needed, I scavenged through the rest of the Golden Gate bubbles and secret rooms.

“He got the thing to hover and fly a little bit within the hangar—it’s made up mostly of two servitor-type flying machines called skyrafts, not made for long-distance travel—but we had trouble with the guidance and control systems. Finally Odysseus had to dismantle part of a lesser AI that operated some of the Bridge kitchen, leaving the cooking and recipe parts but lobotomizing it to handle navigation and attitude for the raft. It’s not happy flying that clumsy machine—it keeps wanting to cook us breakfast and suggest recipes.”

Ada and some of the others laughed at this. There were more than a dozen people listening, including Greogi, one-handed Laman, Ella, Edide, Boman, and the two medics. The five injured newcomers were now eating their hot stew and listening in silence. The snow that Ada had smelled hours earlier now came down lightly but did not stick to the ground. Sunlight actually peeked through the scudding clouds.

“Finally, when we felt sure that Ariel wasn’t bringing Harman back and that Petyr or none of the rest of you were returning for us, we filled the raft with supplies—we brought more weapons that I found in another secret room—opened the hangar doors, and headed north, hoping that the repellors would keep us airborne and the crude navigation system would get us to the general vicinity of Ardis.”

“Was this yesterday?” asked Ada.

“It was nine days ago,” said Hannah.

Seeing Ada’s shocked reaction, the younger woman went on. “This thing flies slowly, Ada, fifty or sixty miles per hour at top speed. And it had problems. We lost most of the food supplies when we actually went down in the sea where Odysseus says the Isthmus of Panama used to be. Lucky for us, he’d added the flotation bags to the raft so that it could act like a real raft for a few hours while we jettisoned weight and Odysseus hammered the flight systems into working again.”

“Did you have Elian and the others with you then?” asked Boman.

Hannah shook her head, sipped more coffee, and huddled over the warm tin cup as if it was giving her necessary heat. “We had to stop along the coast once we crossed the Isthmus Sea,” she said. “There was a faxnode community there—you’ve been to it, I think, Ada: Hughes Town. There was that tall plascrete skyscraper there with all the ivy.”

“I went to a Three Twenty party there once,” said Ada, remembering the view of the sea from a terrace high atop that tower. She’d been young, not quite fifteen. It had been around the time she’d first met her pudgy “cousin” Daeman and she remembered an awakening sense of sensuality from those days.

Elian cleared his throat. The man had livid scars on his face, forearms, and hands, and his clothing was more a mass of torn rags than anything else, but he carried himself with strong authority. “There were more than two hundred of us in the node community when the voynix attacked a month ago,” he said in a soft but deep voice. “We had no weapons. But the primary Hughes Town Tower was too tall for them to leap onto easily, something about the outside surface of the tower made it hard for them to cling and climb there, and the overhanging terraces made defense easier than any other place else we could retreat to. We barricaded the stairways—the power for the elevators had gone off back during the Fall of the Skies, of course—and used whatever we could find for weapons: servitor tools, iron bars, crude bows and arrows made of metal cables and leaf springs from barouches and droshkies—anything. The voynix got most of us, half a dozen or so of us made it to the fax pavilion and faxed away for help before the fax quit working, and the five others and I were on the penthouse of the Hughes Town Tower with five hundred voynix occupying everything. We’d been out of food for five days and out of water for two when we saw Noman’s and Hannah’s sky-raft lumbering in over the gulf.”

“We had to jettison more of the food and medical supplies and even most of the guns and flechette ammunition to make up for the extra weight,” Hannah said sheepishly. “And we had to land three more times to work on it. But it finally got us here.”

“How did its navigation system know how to find Ardis?” asked Casman. The thin, bearded Ardis survivor had always been interested in machinery.

Hannah laughed. “It didn’t. It could barely find what Odysseus calls North America. He guided us here—Odysseus—following first one big river he calls the Mississippi, and then our own Ardis River, which he called the Leanoka or Ohio. And then we saw your fire.”

“You flew on at night?” asked Ada.

“We had to. There were too many dinosaurs and sabertooths down in the forests south of here to risk landing for very long. We all took turns helping fly the thing while Odysseus caught naps. But he’s been awake for most of seventy-two hours.”

“He looks… well again,” said Ada.

Hannah nodded. “The recovery crèche healed most of the wounds the voynix inflicted on him. We were right to bring him back to the Bridge. He would have died otherwise.”

Ada was silent a minute, thinking of how that decision had taken Harman from her.

As if reading her friend’s mind, Hannah said, “We looked for Harman, Ada. Even though Odysseus was sure that Ariel had quantum teleported him somewhere—that’s like faxing, only more powerful somehow, it’s what the gods did in the turin drama—even though Odysseus was sure that the Ariel-thing had QT’d him far away, we flew down and searched the old Machu Picchu ruins below the Golden Gate and even looked along the nearby rivers and waterfalls and valleys. There was no sign of Harman.”

“He’s still alive,” Ada said simply. She touched her swollen belly as she said this. She always did—it was not only a part of her connection to Harman, but it seemed to confirm that her intuitive feeling was accurate. It was almost as if Ada’s unborn child knew that Harman still lived… somewhere.

“Yes,” said Hannah.

“Did you see any other faxnode communities?” asked Loes. “Any other survivors?”

Hannah shook her head. Ada noticed that her young friend’s always-short hair had grown out some. “We stopped at two other nodes between Hughes Town and Ardis,” said Hannah. “Small-population nodes—Live Oak and Hulmanica. They’d both been sacked by voynix—there were voynix carcasses and human bones left, nothing more.”

“How many people do you think died there?” Ada asked softly.

Hannah shrugged and sipped the last of her coffee. “No more than forty or fifty total,” she said with the unemotional lack of affect common to all the Ardis survivors. “Nothing like the disaster here.” Hannah looked around. “I can feel something scrabbling at my mind like a bad memory.”

“That’s the little Setebos,” said Ada. “It wants to get in our minds and out of its Pit.” She always thought of the thing’s hole as “the Pit” with a capital “P.”

“Aren’t you afraid that its mother—father—whatever that thing in Paris Crater was that Daeman saw, will come for it?”

Ada looked over to where Daeman was standing by the Pit, speaking earnestly to Noman. “The big Setebos hasn’t showed up yet,” she said. “We’re more worried about what the little one will do.” She described to them all how the many-handed thing seemed to suck energy out of the earth where someone had died horribly.

Hannah shivered even though the sunlight was stronger now. “We saw the voynix in the woods with our searchlight,” she said softly. “Countless numbers of them. Row upon row of them. Just standing there under the trees and along the ridgelines, the closest about two miles out, I think. What are you going to do?”

Ada told her about the plan for the island.

Elian cleared his throat again. “Excuse me,” he said. “It’s not my business and I know I don’t get a vote here, but it seems to me that a rocky island like that would put you in our position in the tower. The voynix would keep coming—and you have so many more around you here—and you’d die off one by one. Someplace like the Bridge that Hannah told us about seems to make more sense.”

Ada nodded. She didn’t want to argue strategies quite yet—too many of the listening Ardis survivors sitting around this circle would vote for the island. “You do get a vote here, Elian,” she said instead. “Every one of you does. You’re part of our community now—any refugee we find will be—and you get as much of a vote as I do. Thank you for your opinion. We’re all going to discuss this at the noon meal and even the sentries will vote by proxy. I think you should get some sleep before then.”

Elian, Beman, the blond Iyayi—who somehow had remained beautiful despite her scratches and rags—and the short, silent woman named Susan and the big, bearded man named Stefe nodded and moved off with Tom and Siris to find empty bedrolls under canvas somewhere.

“You should sleep, too,” Ada said, touching Hannah’s forearm.

“What happened to your wrist, Ada?”

Ada looked down at the rough plaster cast and grubby bandage. “I broke it during the fight here. It’s nothing. I’m interested that the voynix disappeared from the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu. It makes me think we’re fighting a finite number of the things… if they have to redeploy, I mean.”

“A finite number,” agreed Hannah. “But Odysseus thinks there are more than a million voynix, and fewer than a hundred thousand of us humans.” She thought a second and added, “A hundred thousand of us before the slaughters began.”

“Does Noman have any idea why the voynix are killing us?” asked Ada, holding Hannah’s strong hand now.

“I think he does, but he hasn’t told me,” said Hannah. “There’s a lot he keeps to himself.”

That’s the understatement of the Twenty, thought Ada. Aloud she said, “You look exhausted, my dear. You really should get some sleep.”

“When Odysseus does,” said Hannah, meeting Ada’s gaze with something like the bashfulness, defiance, and pride of a young lover.

Ada nodded again.

Daeman stepped up to the fire. “Ada, could we see you a minute?”

Touching Hannah’s shoulder, Ada rose awkwardly and followed Daeman back to the Pit where Noman stood. The man they’d once called Odysseus was not much taller than Ada, but he was so solid and muscular that he emanated power. Ada could see the curly gray hairs on his chest through the open tunic.

“Admiring our pet?” asked Ada.

Noman did not smile. He scratched his beard, looked down into the Pit at the strangely quiescent baby, and then returned his dark-eyed gaze to Ada. “You’ll have to kill it,” he said.

“We plan to.”

“I mean quickly,” said Noman/Odysseus. “These things aren’t so much babies of the real Setebos as lice.”

“Lice?” Ada said. “I can hear its thoughts…”

“And you’ll hear them more and more loudly until the thing comes up out of there—it probably could already if it wanted to—and sucks the energy and souls right out of your bodies.”

Ada blinked and looked down into the Pit. The baby’s twohemisphered brain-back was just a gray glow down there. It was on the floor of the Pit now, tendrils and hands reeled in, its motile hands tucked under its mucousy body, its many eyes closed.

“The eggs hatch and these things swarm out,” continued Noman. “They’re like scouts for the real Setebos. These things only grow to be about twenty feet long. They find… food… in the soil and then return to the original Setebos, I don’t know quite how they travel so far, Brane Holes probably—this one’s not quite old enough to summon a Hole—and when they report back, the big Setebos thanks them for the information and eats them, absorbing all the evil and terror these… babies… have sucked up from the world.”

“How do you know so much about Setebos and his… lice?” asked Ada.

Noman shook his head as if that were too unimportant to deal with now.

And when are you going to start treating that sweet Hannah with the love and attention she deserves, you male pig? thought Ada.

“Noman had something important to tell us… ask us,” said Daeman. Ada’s friend looked worried.

“I need to take the sonie,” said Noman.

Ada blinked again. “Take it where?”

“Up to the rings,” said Noman.

“For how long?” asked Ada. She was thinking You can’t take the sonie! and she knew that Daeman was thinking the same thing.

“I don’t know,” said Odysseus in that strange accent of his.

“Well,” began Ada, “it’s out of the question that you take the sonie. We need it to escape this place. We need it for hunting. We’ll need it for…”

“I have to take the sonie,” repeated Noman. “It’s the only machine on this continent that can get me up there, and I don’t have time to fly to China or somewhere to find another. And the calibani will have made the Mediterranean Basin unapproachable by now.”

“Well,” said Ada again, hearing the edge of rockhard stubbornness that only rarely powered her voice, “you can’t just take the sonie. We’ll all die.”

“That’s not so important right now,” said the gray-bearded warrior.

Ada started to laugh but ended up only staring, her mouth partially open in amazement. “It’s important to us, Noman. We want to live.”

He shook his head as if Ada had not understood. “No one on this planet is going to live unless I can get up to the rings… and today,” he said. “I need the sonie. If I can, I’ll bring it back or send it back to you. If I can’t… well, it won’t matter.”

Ada wished she had a flechette rifle with her. She glanced at the one that Daeman carried—still unslung, he carried it casually. Noman seemed to have no weapon on him, but Ada had seen how strong this man was.

“I need the sonie,” Noman said again. “Today. Now.”

“No,” said Ada.

Down in the Pit, the many-handed orphan suddenly began a wailing, snorting, coughing sound that ended in a noise that sounded very much like a human laugh.

70

A storm was raging far above them. The rings and stars had long since disappeared and lightning illuminated the vertical walls of water on either side and the obscenely pale slash of the Breach stretching away so far to the east and west that the lightning did not last long enough to show its immensity.

Now, however, the lightning flashes overlapped, thunder exploding and echoing down the hallway of energy-bound water, and, lying on his back snug in his silk-thin sleeping bag and thermskin, Harman could see the waves fifty stories above, rising and thrashing another hundred or so feet as the Atlantic Ocean threw itself into the frenzy of the storm. The whipping, writhing clouds were only a few hundred feet above the towering waves. And while the dark depths on either side stayed calm here more than five hundred feet below the surface, Harman could see the layers of agitation far above him. Also agitated were the funnel-bridges—he didn’t have a good name for the transparent tubes and cones and energy-bound tunnels of water that connected the Atlantic south of the Breach to the Atlantic north of it, and Moira simply called them “conduits.” There was such a funnel-bridge visible two hundred feet above the dry bottom of the Breach, visible when the lightning flashed at least, less than a half mile to the west of where they had camped and another a mile or so behind them to the east. Both water tunnels were broiling with activity, huge quantities of white water surging from one side of the Breach to the other. Harman wondered if more water was forced across the Breach during storms. Certainly there was more water falling on them now—the shifting energy walls kept the high waves from pouring over and drowning them, but the spray drifted down as a constant mist. Harman’s outer clothes were tucked away in his rucksack, which was completely waterproof he’d discovered, as was the thinskin sleeping bag, but he’d left the osmosis mask open on his thermskin cowl and his face was damp. Whenever he licked his lips, he tasted salt.

Lightning struck the floor of the Breach less than a hundred yards from them. The percussion from the thunder shook Harman’s molars.

“Should we move?” he shouted at Moira, who was in her own thermskin—she stripped naked and pulled on the thermskin right in front of him with no sign of embarrassment, almost as if they were lovers, which, he realized with a blush, they had been.

“What?” shouted Moira. His voice had been lost in the crash of wave and roars of thunder.

“SHOULD WE MOVE?”

She slid her sleeping skin closer and leaned over to speak close to his ear. She’d left her face exposed as well and was just lying on the sleeping bag, and the mist had soaked the outer layer of the skintight thermskin, showing every rib and rise of hipbone.

“The only place we can move to be safe,” she said loudly next to his ear, “is underwater. We’d be safe from the lightning there at the bottom of the ocean. Want to adjourn?”

Harman didn’t. The thought of stepping through the forcefield barrier into that almost absolute dark and terrible pressure—even if the magical thermskin would keep him from drowning or being crushed—was more than he wanted to deal with this night. Besides, the storm seemed to be letting up a bit. The waves up there only looked to be sixty or eighty feet tall now.

“No thanks,” he shouted back to Moira. “I’ll risk it here.”

He rubbed his face dry and pulled the film-thin osmosis mask in place. Without the salt sting in his eyes and mouth, it was easier to concentrate.

And Harman had a lot to concentrate on. He was still trying to sort out his new human functions.

Many of these newly acquired—although “identified” would be a better word—functions had been interdicted along with his freefax abilities. For instance, Harman clearly saw how he could trigger access to the logosphere to acquire information or to communicate with anyone anywhere, but those functions had been interrupted by whoever or whatever was running the rings these days.

Other functions worked just fine but did not necessarily add to Harman’s peace of mind. There was a medical monitor function that, when queried, told and showed Harman that his diet of food bars and water would lead to certain vitamin deficiencies if he continued it for more than three months. It also informed him that calcium was building up in his left kidney—resulting in a kidney stone in a year or less—that there were two polyps in his colon since his last Firmary visit, that his muscles were deteriorating because of age—it had, after all, been ten years since his last Firmary tune-up, that a strep virus was failing to set up a colony in his throat because of his genetic-cued defenses, that his blood pressure was too high, and that there was the slightest of shadows on his left lung that should demand immediate attention by Firmary sensors.

Great, thought Harman, rubbing his thermskinned chest as if the slight shadow that he was sure was lung cancer was already beginning to ache. What do I do with this information? The Firmaries are a little out of bounds to me right now.

Other functions served more immediate purposes. In the last few days he’d discovered that he had a replay function through which he could relive with amazing clarity—much more like experiencing something in reality than through memory—any point or event in his life, pinpointing the memory in a protein memory bundle rather than in his brain, uploading it, and timing the replay to the second. He’d already replayed a few minutes of his first meeting with Ada nine times (his memory couldn’t have told him that she’d been wearing that light blue gown on the evening he met her at a fax-in party) and had replayed moments from the last time they’d made love more than thirty times. Moira had even commented on his fixed stare and robotic walk when he’d been replaying. She knew what he was up to, especially since neither his thermskin nor outer clothes had hidden his reaction.

Harman had enough sense to know that this function was addictive and that he must use it very, very carefully—especially while hiking across the bottom of the ocean—but he’d flashed back to certain dialogues he’d had with Savi to mine more data out of things she’d said about the past or about the rings or about the world—things that had seemed nonsensical or mysterious then, but made more sense now after the crystal cabinet. He also realized, with a great sadness, that Savi had been working from very incomplete information in her centuries of attempts to get up to the rings to negotiate with the post-humans, including her lack of knowledge of real spaceships stored in the Mediterranean Basin or the proper way to contact Ariel via Prospero’s private logo-sphere connections.

Seeing Savi so clearly through replay vision also made Harman realize how much younger this Moira-iteration of Savi’s face and body were, but also how much alike the women were.

Harman trolled through the other functions. Proxnet, farnet, and all-net were all down with the fax and logosphere functions—evidently everything internal worked; anything demanding use of the planetary system of satellites, orbital mass accumulators, fax and data transmitters, and so forth did not work.

But why did his internal indicators tell him that the sigl function was not working? Harman would have thought that sigling was as body-dependent as his medical monitoring, which worked all too well. Did the sigl function depend upon relay satellites in some way? His crystal cabinet data did not explain this.

“Moira?” he shouted. Only after he’d shouted did he realize that the storm had all but passed over and that except for the slide-crash of waves far above, the sound had abated. Also, he was wearing his osmosis mask with its inset microphones so poor Moira had heard his shout in her cowl earphones.

He pulled the osmosis mask free and breathed in the rich scent of the ocean again.

“What, oh mighty-lunged one?” replied Moira in soft tones. Her sleepingskin bag was about four feet away.

“If I use the touch-sharing function with my wife—with Ada—when I get home, will my unborn child receive the information as well?”

“Counting your fetus chickens before they’re hatched, my young Prometheus?”

“Just answer the damned question, would you?”

“You’ll have to try it,” said Moira. “I don’t recall the design parameters right now and I haven’t ever touch-shared with preggoes, and we godlike post-humans can’t get pregnant—nor did it help in that department that we were all female—so give it a try if and when you get home. I do remember though that there were safety nets installed in the genetic touch-share function. You can’t pour harmful information to a fetus or a young child—replaying her own moment of conception, for instance. We don’t want the little tyke in therapy for thirty years, now do we?”

Harman ignored the sarcasm. He rubbed his stubbled cheeks. He’d shaved before starting on this trip—the thermskin cowl was less than comfortable over a beard, he’d learned on Prospero’s Isle more than ten months earlier—but two days of stubble rasped under his palm.

“You have all the functions you gave us?” he said to Moira, adding the rising inflection of the question mark at only the last instant.

“My dear,” purred Moira. “Do you think we’re fools? Are we going to give mere old-style humans some ability we lack?”

“So you have more than we do,” said Harman. “More than this hundred you built into us?”

Moira did not answer.

Harman had discovered complex nanocameras and audioreceivers built into his skin cells. Some DNA-bound protein bundles could store this visual and auditory data. Other cells had been altered into bioelectronic transmitters—good for only short range because they were powered just by his own cellular energy, but easily strong enough to be picked up and boosted and retransmitted.

“The turin drama,” he said aloud.

“What’s that?” Moira said sleepily. The post-human woman had been dozing.

“I realize how you transmitted the images from Ilium—or your transvestite god-sisters did—and how we were able to receive them through the turin cloths.”

“Well… duh,” said Moira and went back to sleep.

Harman saw how he would no longer need a turin cloth to receive such transmissions. Between logosphere voice-over protocols and this multimedia connection, he could share both voice and full sensory data with any other human being who volunteered to uplink the input stream.

What would that be like, linked to Ada, while we made love? wondered Harman and then chided himself for being a dirty old man. A horny, dirty old man, he corrected himself.

Besides the logosphere function, there was another function he could trigger that offered a complicated sensory interface with the biosphere. Since it was satellite-dependent and interdicted at the moment, he could only guess how it worked and what it felt like. Was it like a chat with Ariel or did a person suddenly become one with the dandelions and hummingbirds? Could he communicate directly and at a distance with the Little Green Men that way? Feeling serious again, Harman remembered Prospero saying that Ariel was using the LGM to hold off the thousands upon thousands of attacking calibani along the southern fringes of Old Europe, and he immediately saw how he could use such a connection to ask the zeks for help fighting the voynix.

All this function-searching was giving Harman a worse headache. Almost by accident, he checked his medical monitor function and saw that indeed, his adrenaline levels and blood pressure combined was high enough to give him the headache he’d suffered with for two weeks now. He activated another medical function—this one more active than mere monitoring—and tentatively allowed some chemicals to be released into his system. Blood vessels in his neck dilated and relaxed. Warmth flowed back into his icy fingertips. The headache receded.

A teenaged boy could really use this function to chase away unwanted erections, thought Harman. He realized that he really was a horny, dirty old man.

Not so old, really, thought Harman. The medical monitor had told him that he had the physical body of an average slightly out-of-shape thirty-one-year-old man.

Other functions floated onto his mental checklist: figure-ground enhancement, enhanced empathy, another that he thought of as the berserker function—a temporary spiking of adrenaline and all other physical and strength-multiplying abilities, probably to be used as a last resort in a fight or if one had to lift a ton or two off one’s child. Besides the already used and misused memory replay function, Harman saw that replay data inputted through someone else’s sharing function. There was a function that would allow him to put his body into a sort of hibernation, a temporary slowing of everything to the point of stasis. He realized that this wasn’t a quick way to catch a nap but designed to be used with something like the crystal coffin in the Taj Moira if one needed to remain alive but inert for long periods of time—in Moira’s case, very long periods of time—without suffering bedsores, muscle atrophy, morning breath, and the other side effects of normal human unconsciousness. Harman saw at once that the real Savi had used this function many times in her time crèche on the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu and elsewhere to survive and thrive over the fourteen centuries of her hiding from the voynix and the post-humans.

There were many more functions—some of them intriguing beyond words—but the concentration necessary to explore them was bringing back Harman’s headache. He shut down that part of his brain for the night.

Immediately more powerful sensory information flowed in. The surge of waves far above. A photoluminescent-phytoplanktonish glow in the upper strata of the Atlantic that looked like an underwater aurora borealis to his tired eyes.

The sky over the ocean was also alive with light—not air-to-sea lightning this time but internal cloud lightning, silent explosions showing the fractal complexity of the churning clouds as lit from within. These pulses and explosions of light were silent—not the slightest hint of thunder reaching his little sleeping bag on the bottom of the Atlantic Breach—so Harman crossed his arms behind his head and just enjoyed the light show, also appreciating the effect of the cloud lightning on the still-churning surface of the ocean.

Patterns. Patterns everywhere. All of nature and the universe dancing at the edge of chaos, reprieved by fractal boundaries and a billion hidden algorithmic protocols hardwired into everything and every interaction, but beautiful nonetheless—oh, so beautiful. He realized that there was at least one function he hadn’t really explored that could sort out most of these patterns for him, far better than mere evolved human senses and sensibilities could, but it would probably be an interdicted function requiring ring-connections, and besides… Harman didn’t need a genetically enhanced function to appreciate the pure beauty of this silent mid-Atlantic show that was being put on just for him.

He lay on the floor of the Breach, hands behind his head, and said a prayer for Ada and his possible son or daughter. (Her functions, when activated, would tell her which it was.) He wished he could be with her now. He prayed to the God he’d never really thought about—to the Quiet God whom Setebos and his lackey Caliban feared above all else according to what the monster had blurted out on Prospero’s Isle—and he prayed only that his beloved Ada would remain well and alive and as happy as the terrible circumstances of these times and their separation across space would allow.

As he fell asleep, Harman heard the rasp and sawing of Moira’s snoring. He smiled as he drifted off. A thousand years of post-human nanocyte and DNA-rearranging cleverness hadn’t cured them from snoring. But, of course, it was Savi’s human body that…

Harman fell asleep in midthought.

71

Achilles wishes he was dead.

The air is so foul and thick here in Tartarus, his lungs burn so fiercely, his eyes are watering and hurting so much, his skin and guts feel like they are ready simultaneously to implode and explode from the pressure, the Oceanids monster-woman is carrying him so rib-shattering tightly in her thigh-fingered fist, and his outlook for the future is so fucking dim, that he wishes that he could just die and get it over with.

But the quantum Fates will not allow him this option. That bitch of a goddess mother of his, that tart Thetis who’d professed love to his father—the man whom he’d always honored as his father, Peleus—and then lain with Zeus like the aquatic roundheels she was, had held him in the Celestial Fire and created a quantum singularity point for his death—to be reached only through the actions of the now dead and cremated Paris of Ilium—and that, as they say, is that.

So he suffers and tries to focus on what is going on outside his tight, rapidly imploding sphere of pain and discomfort.

The three Titan-giant daughters of Okeanos—Asia, Panthea, and Ione—are striding quickly through the poisonous gloom toward a brighter glow that might be a volcanic eruption, Achilles held tight in Asia’s huge, sweaty fist. When Achilles is able to open his burning eyes and catch glimpses of the landscape through his tears—tears from toxic chemicals in the air, not from emotion—he gets blurry views of high, rocky ridges such as the one the three Oceanids are now striding along, thundering volcanoes, deep chasms filled with lava and oddly shaped monsters, an escort of the giant centipede-things that must be related to the Healer on Olympos, occasional glimpses of silhouettes that must be other Titans crashing and bellowing through the gloom, and a sky filled with orange-limned clouds, wild lightning, and other electrical displays.

Suddenly the giantess Titan named Panthea speaks—“Is that the véiled form we seek who sits on that ebony throne?”

Asia, bitch-voice booming like boulders crashing down a rocky slope. (Achilles has not the strength to cover his aching ears with his acid-scalded hands.)—“It is. The veil has fallen.”

Panthea—“I see a mighty darkness filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom dart round, as light from the meridian sun.—But the Demogorgon itself remains ungazed upon and shapeless, neither limb, nor form, nor outline; yet we all three feel it is a living Spirit.”

The Demogorgon speaks then and Achilles buries his face in Asia’s huge, rough palm in a vain effort to muffle the subsonic pain of that all-encroaching voice. “ASK WHAT THOU WOULDST KNOW, OCEANIDS.”

Asia offers up her palm with the writhing Achilles on it. “Canst thou tell us what shape and manner of thing this is we have caught? It seems more starfish than man, and it writhes and squeaks as such.”

The Demogorgon roars again. “IT IS ONLY A MORTAL MAN, ALTHOUGH MADE IMMORTAL BY THE CELESTIAL FIRE’S MISTAKE. IT IS NAMED ACHILLES AND IT IS VERY FAR FROM HOME. NO MORTAL HAS EVER COME TO TARTARUS BEFORE THIS DAY.”

“Ah,” says Asia, seeming to lose interest in her toy and roughly setting Achilles down on a burning-hot boulder.

Achilles feels the heat all around and when he opens his eyes, he can see farther because of the glow of lava and eruption, but is horrified to see that lava flowing past on both sides of his steaming boulder. When he looks up toward the Demogorgon on its throne—the throne a mountain taller than the erupting volcanoes, and the hooded and veiled non-shape on that throne seeming to rise up for miles and miles—the shapelessness of the Demogorgon makes him want to vomit. So he does. None of the Oceanics seems to notice his retching.

Asia asks the huge form, “What else canst thou tell?”

“ALL THINGS THOU DAR’ST DEMAND.”

“Who made the living world?” asks Asia. Achilles has already decided that she is the most talkative, if not the most intelligent, of the three idiot Oceanids.

“GOD.”

“Who made all that it contains?” persists Asia. “Thought? Passion? Reason? Will? Imagination?”

“GOD. ALMIGHTY GOD.”

Achilles decides that this Demogorgon is a spirit-thing of few words. And fewer thoughts in its head, if it has a head. He would give anything if he could rise and pull his sword from his belt, unsling his shield from his back. First he would kill the Demogorgon and then the three Titan sisters… slowly.

“Who made that sense, which, when the winds of Spring in rarest visitation, or the voice of one beloved heard in youth alone,” asks Asia in her crackly, booming voice, “fills the faint eyes with falling tears which dim the radiant looks of unbewailing flowers, and leaves the peopled world a solitude when it returns no more?”

Achilles throws up again. This time it is as an aesthetic statement more than a reaction to optical vertigo. He decides that he will kill the Oceanids first after all. He would like to kill this Asia bitch several times over. He visualizes hollowing out her skull and using it for a house, her eye sockets as round windows.

“MERCIFUL GOD,” intones the Demogorgon.

There is no Greek word for “ditto,” but Achilles thinks that the Demogorgon should coin one. It does not surprise the Achaean in the least that Oceanids and the formless spirit in the murk down here in Tartarus speak his form of Greek to one another. They’re strange creatures, monsters really, but even monsters in Achilles’ experience speak Greek. They’re not barbarians, after all.

“And who made terror, madness, crime, remorse,” continues Asia, her voice as relentless as the babble of a two-year-old who’s just learned how to keep a conversation going with an adult by asking “Why?” a hundred times over. “Which from the links of the great chain of things, to every thought within the mind of man sway and drag heavily, and each one reels under the load toward the pit of death; Abandoned hope, and love that turns to hate, and self-contempt, bitterer to drink than blood. Pain, whose unheeded and familiar speech is howling, and keen shrieks, day after day; and…”

She breaks off.

Achilles hopes that it is some Tartarusian cataclysm that will end their world and swallow up Asia and her two sisters screaming like honey-covered appetizers at a Myrmidon feast, but when he forces his eyes open he sees that it is only a circle of bright light opening, pouring white brilliance into the red gloom.

A Brane Hole.

Something far from human is silhouetted against the light of that hole. It’s shaped roughly like a man, but it is made up of metallic spheres—not only a sphere where the head should be, but spheres for the torso, spheres for the outflung arms, spheres for the staggering legs. Only the feet and hands—wrapped in some lighter-than-bronze metal—look even vaguely manlike.

The thing comes closer and two brilliant lights stab out from the smaller spheres that are its shoulders. A red light, thin as a javelin, leaps from its right hand and plays across the Oceanid Sisters, making their flesh sizzle and pop. The Titanesses stagger backward, wading through lava, evidently unharmed by the red beam but shielding their faces and eyes from the painful white light flowing out of the Brane Hole.

“Goddammit, Achilles, are you just going to lie there?”

It’s Hephaestus. Achilles now sees the iron-sphere bubbles as some sort of protective suit, with iron-shod feet and heavily gauntleted hands emerging from the chain of globes. There is some sort of steaming, burping breathing pack on the back and the top bubble is clear as glass; Achilles can now make out the dwarf-god’s ugly, bearded face in the reflected light from his shoulder searchlights and handheld laser.

Achilles manages a weak squeak.

Hephaestus laughs, the ugly noise amplified by the speakers in his pressure suit. “Don’t like the air and gravity here, eh? All right. Get into this. It’s called a thermskin and it’ll help you breathe.” The god of fire and artifice throws down some impossibly thin garment onto the boulder next to Achilles.

The hero tries to stir, but the air weakens and burns him. All he can do is wiggle and cough and retch.

“Oh, fuck me,” says the crippled god. “I guess I’ll have to dress you like an infant. I was afraid of this. Lie still, quit squirming. Don’t shit on me or puke on me while I’m undressing you and tucking you into this thing.”

Ten minutes later—with a tapestry of Hephaestus’ curses now hanging in the air like glowing smoke from the volcanoes—Achilles is upright on solid rock next to Hephaestus, dressed in a gold thermskin under his armor, breathing easily through the thermskin cowl’s clear membrane—the dwarf-god had called it an osmosis mask—brandishing his acid-etched shield and still-bright sword, staring up at the looming but still indistinct mass called the Demogorgon, and feeling invulnerable again and not a little pissed off. Achilles only hopes that the Oceanid named Asia will start asking one of her endless questions again so he will have an excuse to gut her like a fish.

“Demogorgon,” calls Hephaestus, using the amplifier built into his fishbowl helmet, “we have met once before, more than nineteen hundred years ago during the Olympians’ War with the Giants. I am called Hephaestus…”

“THOU ART THE CRIPPLED ONE,” booms Demogorgon.

“Yes. How nice of you to remember. Achilles and I have come to Tartarus to seek out you and the Titans—Kronos, Rhea, all of the Old Ones—and to ask for your help.”

“DEMOGORGON DOES NOT HELP MERE GODS AND MORTALS.”

“No, of course not,” says Hephaestus, his rasping voice amplified a hundred times by the speakers in his suit. “Shit. Achilles, do you want to take over? Talking to this thing is like talking to your own ass.”

“Can that big mass of nothing hear me?” Achilles asks the little god.

“I HEAR YOU.”

Achilles stares skyward, focusing on the roiling red clouds a little to the side of the featureless, veiled nonface of the nonthing looming above him. “When you say ‘God,’ Demogorgon, do you mean Zeus?”

“WHEN I SAY GOD, I MEAN GOD.”

“You must mean Zeus then, for right now the son of Kronos and Rhea is calling all the surviving gods together on Olympos and is announcing that he—Zeus—is the God of Gods, the Lord of All Creation, the God of This and All Universes.”

“THEN EITHER HE LIETH OR YOU DO, SON OF MAN. GOD REIGNS. BUT NOT ON OLYMPOS.”

“Then Zeus has enslaved all other gods and mortals,” says Achilles, his thermskin-speaker voice and radio broadcast echoing from the vol-cano’s slopes and cinder ridges.

“ALL SPIRITS ARE ENSLAVED WHICH SERVE THINGS EVIL: THOU KNOWEST IF ZEUS BE SUCH OR NOT.”

“I do know,” says Achilles. “Zeus is a greedy immortal son of a bitch—no offense to Rhea if she’s out there in the shadows somewhere listening. I think he’s a coward and a bully. But if you consider him God, then he will reign on Olympos and in the universe forever and forever.”

“I SPOKE BUT AS YE SPEAK, FOR ZEUS IS THE SUPREME OF ALL LIVING THINGS.”

“Who is the master of the slave?” asks Achilles.

“Oh, that’s good,” whisper-hisses Hephaestus. “That’s very good…”

“Shut up,” says Achilles.

The Demogorgon rumbles. It is so loud that at first Achilles thinks the nearest volcano is in full eruption. Then the rumble modulates itself into words.

“IF THE ABYSM COULD VOMIT FORTH ITS SECRETS—BUT A VOICE IS WANTING, THE DEEP TRUTH IS IMAGELESS; FOR WHAT WOULD IT AVAIL TO BID THEE GAZE ON THE REVOLVING WORLD? WHAT TO BID SPEAK ON FATE, TIME, OCCASION, CHANCE, AND CHANGE? TO THESE ALL THINGS ARE SUBJECT BUT ETERNAL LOVE AND THE PERFECTION OF THE QUIET.”

“Whatever you say,” says Achilles. “But as we speak, Zeus is proclaiming himself Lord of All Creation and soon he will demand that all of that creation—not just his little world at the base of Mount Olympos—pay homage to him and him alone. Goodbye, Demogorgon.”

Achilles turns to leave, grabbing the sputtering god of artifice by his metal-bubble arm and pulling him around, away from the unformed mass looming above them.

“HALT!… ACHILLES, FALSE SON OF PELEUS, TRUE SON OF ZEUS, WOULD-BE AUTHOR OF DEICIDE AND PATRICIDE. WAIT.”

Achilles stops, turns back, and waits with Hephaestus. The Oceanids are cowering, covering their heads as if from hot ashfall.

“I SHALL SUMMON THE TITANS FROM THEIR CREVICES AND CAVES, BRING THEM FORTH FROM THEIR COWERING CORNERS. I SHALL COMMAND THE IMMORTAL HOURS TO BRING THEM FORTH.”

With a sound that makes all the other unbearable sounds seem small, the rocks around Demogorgon’s throne cleave in the purple night, the lava glow grows deeper and broader, a rainbow of impossible colors arches through Tartarus’ gloom, and chariots the size of mountains appear from nowhere, drawn by gigantic steeds that are not horses—nothing like horses, not even remotely like horses—some being whipped on by wild-eyed charioteers that are not men or gods, other steeds staring behind them with burning eyes filled with fear. The charioteers themselves are almost impossible for mortal eyes to look upon, so Achilles averts his gaze. He thinks that it would be unwise to vomit again while sealed behind this thermskin facemask.

“THESE ARE THE IMMORTAL HOURS WHICH THOU DIDST DEMAND HEAR THY CASE,” booms the Demogorgon. “THEY SHALL BRING KRONOS AND HIS ILK HERE TO THIS PLACE.”

The air implodes with a series of sonic booms, the Oceanids scream in fright, and the huge chariots disappear in circles of flame.

“Well …” says Hephaestus over the suit radio and does not go on.

“Now we wait,” says Achilles, setting his sword in his belt and slinging his shield.

“Not for long,” says Hephaestus.

The air is filling with circles of fire again. The giant chariots are returning by the hundreds—no, by the thousands—each one filled with a giant form, some human-looking, many not.

“BEHOLD!” says the Demogorgon.

“It’s hard not to,” says Achilles. He braces himself and slides his great and beautiful shield across his forearm.

The Titans’ chariots come on.

72

Moira was gone when Harman awoke. The day was gray and cold and it was raining hard. The sea far above was churning and whitecapped, but not the violent surge of liquid mountain ranges he’d watched by lightning flash the night before. Harman hadn’t slept well—his dreams had been urgent and ominous.

He rolled up the silk-thin sleeping bag—it would dry by itself, he knew—and set it into his rucksack, leaving his clothes in the waterproof bag, taking out only his socks and boots to wear over his thermskin.

They’d had a campfire the last night before the storm began—no weenies and marshmallows, of course, Harman only knew what those were through the books he’d absorbed at the Taj—but he’d eaten the second half of his tasteless food bar and sipped water while they sat by the flickering flames.

Now the ashes were drenched and gray, the Breach floor between the rocks and coral had turned to mud, and Harman realized that he was walking in circles around their campsite, looking for some last sign of Moira… a note perhaps.

There was nothing.

He hitched the rucksack higher, pulled the thermskin cowl lower so that the goggles were properly lined up, wiped the rain from them, and began hiking west.

Instead of growing lighter as the day progressed, the skies grew darker, the rain came down more heavily, and the walls of water on either side grew taller and more oppressive. He’d gotten used to the trick of perspective where it was never the ocean bottom going down, but always the vertical walls of water on either side growing taller. Harman trudged on. The Breach descended through path-blasted ridges of black rock, passed over deep crevasses on narrow, slippery black iron bridges with no railings, and climbed steeply up more rock ridges. Even though high ridges made the walls of water on each side lower—the ocean was no more than two hundred feet deep here, Harman guessed—the climbing was exhausting and even more claustrophobic than before, with the rock walls on either side of the narrow path making him feel as if there were walls within walls closing in on him.

By midday—which only his internal time-function announced since the sun was completely absent and the rain was falling so fiercely that he considered pulling down his osmosis mask over his nose and mouth—the Breach path had come out of the underwater mountainous country and stretched flat and straight ahead. That was something and it helped improve Harman’s dark mood—but only a little.

He welcomed the rocky or coral sections of path now, since the ocean-floor bottom, which had a nice consistency of packed soil on the dry days, was become a squelching avenue of mud. Eventually he grew tired of walking—it was after noon at whatever local time it was there south of England—so he sat on a low boulder emerging from the forcefield-contained northern ocean and took out his daily food bar to munch on, while sipping cool water from the hydrator tube.

The food bars—one a day—left him hungry. And they tasted like he imagined sawdust must taste. And there were only four left. What Prospero and Moira expected him to do when the food bars ran out—assuming he had another seventy or eighty days of hiking ahead of him—he had no idea. Would the gun really work underwater? If it did, would it kill a big fish and could he haul it through the forcefield wall into the Breach? The dried seaweed and driftwood thrown down here from the sea above was already getting scarcer… how was he supposed to cook this theoretical fish? The lighter was in his pack, part of the sharp flip-knife, spoon, fork, multi-thingee, and he had a metal bowl he could morph into a pan by touching it in the right places, but was he really supposed to spend hours of his time each day fishing for…

Harman noticed another rock half a mile or so to the west. The thing was huge—the size of some of the more jagged ridges he’d passed through—and it protruded from the north wall of the Atlantic just before the dry bottom of the Breach dipped into another deep trench, but this rock or coral reef was strangely shaped. Instead of crossing the Breach with a path cut through it, this rock appeared to slant down from the water, disappearing in the sand and loam of the Breach itself. More than that, it looked strangely rounded, smoother than the volcanic basalt he’d been hiking through the last three days.

He’d learned how to activate the telescopic and magnification controls of his thermskin goggles and he did so now.

It was no rock. Some sort of gigantic, man-made device was protruding from the north wall of the Breach, its snout sunk into the dirt. The thing was huge, widening back from a bottle-nosed-dolphin bow—crumpled metal, exposed girders—to sinuous curves that widened like a woman’s thigh and disappeared through the forcefield.

Harman put away the last of his food bar, pulled out the gun and attached it to the stik-tite patch on the belt of his thermskin, and began walking toward the sunken ship.

Harman stood under the mass of the thing—much larger than he imagined from almost a mile away—and guessed it had been some sort of submarine. The bow was shattered, exposed girders looked to be rusted by rainfall rather than the sea, but the bulk of the smooth, almost rubbery-looking hull appeared more or less intact as it angled back up through the forcefield and into the ocean’s midday darkness. He could make out the silhouette of the thing for another ten yards or so in the ocean, but nothing more.

Harman stared at the large breach in the hull near the bow—a breach within a Breach, he thought stupidly, rain pounding down on his cowl and goggles—and was sure he could get into the submarine through that opening. He was equally sure that it would be pure idiocy to do so. His job was not to explore two-thousand-year-old sunken wrecks, but to get his ass back to Ardis, or at least to another old-style community, as quickly as he could—seventy-five days, a hundred days, three hundred days—it didn’t matter. His only job was to continue walking west. He didn’t know what was in this damned Lost Era machine, but something in there could kill him and he didn’t see how anything in there could enlighten him any further than he’d been enlightened by his drowning in the crystal cabinet.

But still….

It hadn’t taken his enlightenment through drowning for Harman to know that—however genetically modified and nanocytically reinforced—his species evolved from chimps and hominids. Curiosity had killed countless of those noble, knuckled ancestors, but it had also gotten them up off their knuckles.

Harman stowed the pack some yards from the bow—the thing was waterproof but he didn’t know if it was pressure-proof—pulled the ancient pistol from its stick-tite grip and held it in his right hand, activated the two bright searchlight patches on his upper chest, and squeezed his way past rended metal into the dark forward corridors of the dead machine.

73

The Greeks aren’t going to make it to nightfall.

They aren’t even going to make it to lunch at this rate. And neither am I.

The Achaeans are falling back into a tighter and tighter half circle, fighting like fiends, the sea at their backs and the surf running red, but Hector’s attack is relentless. At least five thousand Achaeans have fallen since the attack began just after dawn, among them noble Nestor—alive but carried unconscious to his tent, struck from his chariot by a lance that pierced his shoulder and shattered bone. The old hero who’d tried to step in to fill in for the absent or dead giants—Achilles, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Big Ajax, crafty Odysseus—has done his best, but the spear-point found him.

Nestor’s son Antilochus, the bravest of the Achaeans these past few days, is dead, pierced through the bowels by a well-placed Trojan bow-man’s shot. Nestor’s other captain son—Thrasymedes—is missing in action, pulled down into the Trojan-filled trench early on and not seen in the three hours since then. The trench and revetments are now in Hector’s bloody hands.

Little Ajax is wounded, a nasty sword cut to both shins just aside the greaves, and was carried from the field to the non-safety of the burned boats just minutes ago. Podalirius, fighting captain and skilled healer, son of the legendary Asclepius, is dead—cut down by a circle of killers from Deiphobus’ attacking legions. They hacked the brilliant physician’s body to pieces and hauled his bloodied armor back to Troy.

Alastor, Teucer’s friend and chieftain, who took over Thrasymedes’ command during the terrible battle of the bulge behind the abandoned trenches, fell in front of his men—still cursing and writhing for minutes with a dozen arrows in him. Five Argives fought their way forward to retrieve his body, but they were all cut down by Hector’s advance guard. Teucer himself was sobbing as he killed Alastor’s killers, firing arrow after arrow into their eyes and guts as he fell back with the slowly retreating Greeks.

There is nowhere left to retreat. We’re crammed here onto the beach, the rising tide lapping at our sandaled feet, and the rain of arrows is constant. All of the Greek horses have died loudly, except for those few whose owners, weeping, set them free and whipped them toward the advancing enemy lines. More trophies for the Trojans.

I’m going to be killed if I stay here. When I was a scholic, especially when I was Aphrodite’s secret-agent scholic, all decked out in levitation harness, impact armor, morphing bracelet, stun-baton, the Hades invisibility helmet—and whatever else I hauled around then—I felt pretty invulnerable, even when moderately close to the fighting. Except for the arrows, which are deadly enough at astounding distances, there isn’t much killing-from-afar in this war. Men smell their enemy’s sweat and breath and are splattered with his blood, brains, and saliva when they shove steel—or in most cases, bronze—into the man’s guts.

But I’ve almost been skewered three times in the last two hours: once by a cast spear that came over the lines of defenders and almost took my balls off—I leaped in the air to avoid it and when it buried itself in the wet sand here and I came down straddling it, the vibrating shaft smacked me in the gonads. Then an arrow parted my hair and a minute later another arrow, one of thousands darkening the sky and rising like a miniature forest out of the sand everywhere here, would have taken me square in the throat if an Argive I don’t even know hadn’t raised his round shield, leaned over, and deflected the barbed and poisonous shaft.

I have to get out of here.

My hand has touched the QT medallion a hundred times in the hours since dawn, but I haven’t quantum teleported away. I’m not sure why.

Yes I am. I don’t want to desert these men. I don’t want to be safe in Helen’s bathchamber or atop some nearby hill knowing that these Achaeans I’ve spent ten years watching and talking to and breaking bread with and drinking wine with are being slaughtered like proverbial cattle on this blood-dimmed bit of beach.

But I can’t save them.

Or can I?

I grab the medallion, concentrate on a place I’ve been, twist the gold circle half a turn, and open my eyes to find myself falling down a long, long elevator shaft.

No, I’m not falling, I realize—realize too late since I’ve already screamed twice—I’m in free fall in the main corridor on the deck of the Queen Mab, or at least in the main corridor on the deck where I’d had my private quarters. But there had been gravity then. Now there is only this falling and falling, tumbling in space but not really falling, flailing to get to the cubby door or to the astrogation bubble twenty yards down—or up—the corridor.

Two black and chitinous Belt moravecs, the soldiers with the built-in black armor, barbs, and masklike heads, kick out of a nearby elevator shaft—there is no elevator car in it—and grab me by the arms. They shoot back toward the shaft and I realize that the rockvecs can move in this zero-g not just because they’re used to it—it must be close to their native level of gravity in the Asteroid Belt—but because their carapaces have built-in and nearly silent thrusters that pulse expanding jets of what may just be water. Whatever it is, it allows them to move fluidly and quickly in this zero-gravity world. Without a word, they pull me into the shaft that runs the length of the Queen Mab—imagine jumping into an empty elevator shaft the height of the Empire State Building—so I do the only thing a sane man would do—I scream again.

The two soldiers jet me hundreds of feet up or down this echoing shaft—echoing to just my screams—and then pull me through some sort of forcefield membrane into a busy room. Even upside down as I am, I can recognize it as the bridge of the ship. I’d been on the bridge only once during my stay, but there was no mistaking this room’s function—moravecs I’d never seen before are busy monitoring three-dimensional virtual control boards, more rockvec soldiers are standing by holographic projections, and I recognize General Beh bin Adee, the skittery spider ‘vec—I can’t think of his name right now—as well as the strange-looking navigator, Cho Li, and the Prime Integrator, Asteague/Che.

It’s the Prime Integrator who effortlessly kicks through the zero-g bridge space to me as the two soldiers firmly set me into a mesh chair and tie me down so that I can’t escape. No, I realize, they’re not tying me down like a captive, merely attaching mesh web belts to hold me in place. It helps—just being stationary gives me a sense of up and down.

“Dr. Hockenberry, we didn’t expect you back,” says the little moravec who’s roughly the same shape and size as Mahnmut, but made of different-colored plastics, metals, and polymers. “I apologize for the lack of gravity. We’re not under thrust. I could arrange for the internal force-fields to exhibit a pressure differential that could simulate gravity for you—after a fashion—but the truth is we’re station-keeping near Earth’s polar ring and we do not want to exhibit a major change in internal energy uses unless we have to.”

“I’m all right,” I say, hoping that they haven’t heard my screams in the elevator shaft. “I need to talk to Odysseus.”

“Odysseus is… ah… indisposed right now,” says Asteague/Che.

“I need to speak with him.”

“I am afraid that this will not be possible,” says the moravec who’s about the same size as my friend Mahnmut, but who looks and speaks so differently. His voice actually has a soothing quality to it.

“But it’s imperative that I …” I stop in midsentence. They’ve killed Odysseus. It’s obvious that these half-robot things have done something terrible to the only other human being on their ship. I don’t know why they would have killed the Achaean, but then I’ve never understood two-thirds of the things these moravecs do or don’t do. “Where is he?” I ask, trying to sound in-control and authoritarian even while web-strapped into my little chair. “What have you done to him?”

“We’ve done nothing to the son of Laertes,” says Asteague/Che.

“Why would we harm our guest?” asks the boxlike, spiderlegged ‘vec whose name I can’t remember… no, I do recall it now, Retrograde Jogenson or Gunderson or something Scandinavian.

“Then bring Odysseus here,” I say.

“We cannot,” repeats Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “He is not on the ship.”

“Not on the ship?” I say, but then I look at one of the holographic displays set into a niche in the hull where a window should be. Hell, for all I know it is a window. The full blue and white is turning below, filling the viewscreen.

“Odysseus went down to this Earth?” I say. “To my Earth?” Is it my Earth? I lived and died there, yes, but thousands of years ago if the gods and moravecs are to be believed.

“No, Odysseus has not gone down to the surface again,” says Asteague/Che. “He has gone to visit the Voice that contacted the ship during our transit… the Voice which asked for him by name.”

“Show Dr. Hockenberry,” says General Beh bin Adee. “He’ll understand why he can’t talk to Odysseus right now.”

Asteague/Che appears to ponder this suggestion. Then the Europan moravec turns to look at the navigator Cho Li—I suspect some sort of radio transmission has taken place between them—and Cho Li moves a tentacle arm. A six-foot-wide three-dimensional holographic window opens not two feet in front of me.

Odysseus is making love to the most sensuous woman I’ve ever seen in my life—except perhaps for Helen of Troy, of course. My male ego had thought that my lovemaking—well, sexual intercourse—with Helen had been energetic and imaginative. But thirty seconds of staring slackjawed at the coupling going on between the naked Odysseus—his body battle-scarred, tanned, barrel-chested but short, and the pale, exotic, pneumatic, sensous, and slightly hirsute woman with the incredible eye makeup—lets me know that my exertions with Helen had been tame, unimaginative, and in slow motion compared to what these erotic athletes are involved in.

“Enough,” I say, mouth dry. “Turn it off.”

The pornographic window winks out of existence. “Who is that… lady?” I manage to say.

“She says her name is Sycorax,” answers Retrograde Somebody’sson. It’s always odd to hear that solid voice coming out of that tiny metal box atop those long skinny legs.

“Let me talk to Mahnmut and Orphu of Io,” I say. I’ve known those two ‘vecs the longest and Mahnmut is the most human of all these machine-people. If I can convince anyone here on the Queen Mab, it will be Mahnmut.

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible, either,” says Asteague/Che.

“Why? Are they having sex with some female moravec babes or something?” I hear how stupid my attempted witticism is as it mentally echoes in the long seconds of censuring silence that follow.

“Mahnmut and Orphu have entered the Earth’s atmosphere in a dropship carrying Mahnmut’s submersible,” says Asteague/Che.

“Can’t you link up to them by radio or something?” I ask. “I mean, they could patch together radio calls like that way back in my Twentieth and early Twenty-first centuries.”

“Yes, we are in contact,” says Retrograde Whoever. “But at the moment their ship is being attacked and we do not want to distract them with unnecessary communications. Their survival is problematic at best.”

I consider asking more questions—who on Earth is attacking my friends? Why? How?—but realize that such a dialogue would only distract me from my real reason for being here.

“You need to create a Brane Hole back to the beach near Ilium,” I say.

General Beh bin Adee moves his black-thorned arms in a way that might suggest a question. “Why?” he says.

“Because the Greeks are being slaughtered to a man by the Trojans and they don’t deserve to be wiped out that way. I want to help them escape.”

“No,” says the general. “I meant why do you think we have the ability to create Brane Holes at will?”

“Because I saw you do it once. You created all those Holes that you jumped through from the Asteroid Belt to Mars, then accidentally to Ilium-Earth. More than ten months ago. I was there, remember?”

“Our technology is not adequate to the effort of creating Brane Holes to different universes,” says Cho Li.

“But you did it, goddammit.” I can hear the whine in my voice.

“No, we did not,” says Asteague/Che. “What we actually did at the time was… it is hard to describe and I am not a scientist or engineer, although we have many… what we did at the time was interdict the so called gods’ Brane Hole connections and tunnel some of our own into the quantum matrix they had created.”

“Well,” I say, “do it again. Tens of thousands of human lives depend on it. And while you’re at it, you can bring back the few million Greeks and others in the Europe of Ilium-Earth who were disappeared—shot into space in a blue beam.”

“We don’t know how to do that, either,” says Asteague/Che.

Well then, what the fuck good are you? I’m tempted to ask. I don’t.

“But you’re safe here, Dr. Hockenberry,” continues the Prime Integrator.

Again, I want to shout at these plastic-metal things, but I realize that he—it—is correct. I am safe here on the Queen Mab. Safe from the Trojans at least. And perhaps the luscious babe boinking Odysseus has a sister….

“I need to go back,” I hear myself saying. Go back where, you idiot? To the Greeks’ Last Stand? Sounds like a baklava shop in L.A.

“You’ll be killed,” says General Beh bin Adee. The large, dark, humanoid soldier-thing doesn’t sound the least bit upset at the prospect.

“Not if you can help me.”

The moravecs seem to be communicating silently with one another again. I can see one of the holographic window-monitors far across the bridge is tuned to Odysseus and the exotic woman still going at it like rabbits. The woman is on top now and I can see that she’s even more beautiful and desirable than my first glimpse had suggested. I concentrate on not getting an erection in front of these moravecs. If they notice, and they tend to notice a lot about us humans, they might take it wrong.

“We will help you if we can,” Asteague/Che says at last. “What do you desire?”

“I need to go somewhere without being seen,” I say and begin describing the lost Hades Helmet and my old morphing bracelet to them.

“The morphing technology—at least as it applies to living organisms—is beyond our technological capabilities,” says Retrograde… Sinopessen… I remember it now. “It manipulates reality on a quantum level we do not yet fully understand. We are far away from being able to create machines to alter that form of probability collapse.”

“And we have no clue as to how this Hades Helmet proffered true invisibility,” adds Cho Li. “Although if it is consistent with the Olympians’—or those powers behind the Olympians—other technologies, it probably involves a minor quantum shift through time rather than space.”

“Can you whomp up something like that for me?” I ask. I realize that there’s no compelling reason for these busy moravecs to do anything for me.

“No,” says Asteague/Che.

“We could adapt some chameleon cloth for him,” says General Beh bin Adee.

“Great,” I say. “What’s chameleon cloth?”

“An active-stealth camouflage polymer,” says the general. “Primitive but effective if one does not move too quickly between widely varying backgrounds. Roughly the same material that your Mars ship was coated in, only more breathable and invisible to the infrared. The eyepieces are nanocytic, so there would be no interruption of the chameleon adaptation.”

“The gods saw us and shot our Mars ship out of orbit,” I say.

“Well, yes… ” says General Beh bin Adee. “There is that to consider.”

“This chameleon cloth is the best you can do?”

“On short notice,” says Asteague/Che.

“Then I’ll take it. How long will it take your people… I mean your… moravecs… to fit me out in this chameleon suit and show me how to use it?”

“I ordered the environmental engineering department to begin work on such a suit the second we began discussing it,” says the Prime Integrator. “We had your vital measurements on record. They should bring the finished product within three minutes.”

“Wonderful,” I say, wondering if it is. Where exactly am I going? How can I convince those where I’m going to help the Greeks escape? Where could the Greeks escape to? Their families and servants and friends and slaves have all been sucked up into the blue beam rising from Delphi. As if in anticipation of getting out of here, I begin playing with the gold medallion hanging around my neck, fingering the sliding circle that activates it.

“By the way,” says Cho Li, “your quantum teleportation medallion does not work.”

“What!?” I rip myself out of the straps and float in place. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Our inspection when you were on the ship earlier has shown the disk to be effectively functionless,” says the navigator.

“You’re full of shit. You guys told me earlier that it just couldn’t be replicated for your use, that it was keyed to my DNA or something.”

Prime Integrator Asteague/Che makes a self-conscious noise that sounds amazingly like a human male clearing his throat in embarrassment. “It is true that there is some… communication… between the medallion around your neck and your cells and DNA, Dr. Hockenberry. But the medallion itself has no quantum function. It does not QT you through Calabi-Yau space.”

“That’s nuts,” I say again, trying to curb my language. I still need these moravecs’ help and lizard suit to get out of here. “I got here, didn’t I? All the way from the universe of the Ilium-Earth.”

“Yes,” says Cho Li. “You did. With no help whatsoever from that hollow gold medallion hanging around your neck. It is a mystery.”

A soldier moravec with the chameleon outfit appears from the open elevator-shaft doorway. The garment looks like nothing special. Actually, it reminds me of an oversized version of a so-called leisure suit I was foolish enough to own in the 1970s. It even had the same stupid, pointy collars and monkey-puke-green sheen to it.

“The collars extend into a full cowl,” says Asteague/Che as if reading my mind. “The suit itself has no color. This green is merely a default setting so we can find the material.”

I take the suit from the ‘vec soldier and make the mistake of trying to pull it on. Within seconds, I’m tumbling out of control, spinning around my own axis in zero-g, hanging on to the useless garment as if I’m waving a flag, but achieving nothing else.

General Beh bin Adee and his trooper grab me, secure me—they seem to know just where to lodge their feet on the consoles to keep themselves from acting with an equal and opposite reaction—and then they unceremoniously stuff me into the chameleon outfit. Then they attach one of the chair straps to my suit, velcroing me to some patch I can’t see. It keeps me in place.

I pull the collars up into a cowl and pull the cowl completely over my head.

It’s not nearly as comfortable as just putting on the Hades Helmet and disappearing. For one thing, it is tremendously hot in this lizard suit. For a second thing, the nanowhatsits that allow me to see through the material in front of my eyes don’t quite achieve cricital focus. An hour peering out of this thing and I’ll have the worst headache of my life.

“How is it?” asks Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

“Great,” I lie. “Can you see me?”

“Yes,” says Asteague/Che, “but only via gravitational radar and other bands of the nonvisible-light spectrum. To all visual intents and purposes, you have blended in with the background. With General bin Adee, actually. Will the personages where you are traveling be using gravitational radar, enhanced negative thermal imaging, or other such techniques?”

Would they? I have no clue. Aloud, I say, “There’s one problem.”

“Yes? Perhaps we can fix it.” The Prime Integrator sounds solicitous, even actively concerned. My wife used to love James Mason.

“I have to twist the QT medallion to QT,” I say, wondering how muffled my voice sounds to them. Sweat is rolling down my temple, cheeks, and rib cage by now. “I can’t twist it without opening the suit and…”

“The chameleon cloth is tailored to be very loose,” interrupts Beh bin Adee. The military ‘vec always sounds slightly disgusted with me. “You can pull your arm inside the suit to touch the medallion. Both arms if you need to.”

“Oh, yeah,” I say, pulling my right arm out of the suit arm and into the suit, and with that as my final contribution to our conversation, I twist the medallion and quantum teleport away from the Queen Mab.

Does too work! I’m tempted to shout as I flick into solidity at the place in space/time that I’d envisioned. But then I remember that I forgot to ask the moravecs for a weapon. And some food and water. And maybe some impact armor.

But it wouldn’t be a good time for me to shout anything.

I’ve appeared in the Great Hall of the Gods on Mount Olympos and all the gods seem to be here—all except Hera, whose smaller throne is wreathed in black funereal ribbon. Zeus looks to be fifty feet tall where he sits on his own gold throne.

All of the other gods seem to be here—more even than I’d seen at their last large conclave, which I’d crashed in my infinitely more comfortable Hades Helmet. I don’t even know many of these gods, can’t identify them even after ten years of reporting to Olympos daily with my voice stones and action reports. There are hundreds upon hundreds of gods here, easily more than a thousand.

And all of them are silent. Waiting for Zeus to address them.

Trying not to breathe loudly or faint from the stifling heat in this goddamned lizard suit, hoping that none of these Olympian Immortals is using deep gravitational radar or enhanced negative thermal imaging, I stand perfectly still, almost cheek to jowl with the mob of gods and goddesses, nymphs, Furies, Erinyeses, and demigods, and wait to hear what Zeus is going to say.

74

Even before Harman stepped through the gash in the hull into the bow of the derelict ship, he had a pretty good idea what the thing was. The DNA-bound protein data packets in his body had a thousand references of thousands of types of seagoing craft across ten thousand years of human history. Harman couldn’t make a perfect match based only upon the damaged bow, the debris field around the bow, and by looking at the breached sheaths of elastic sonar-stealth material encasing the morphable smart-steel of the hull itself, but it was fairly obvious that he was stepping into a submarine from some century late in the Lost Era: possibly something from after the rubicon release but before the first post-humans had been genetically brought into being. Dementia times.

Once inside, making his way down an only slightly canted corridor and breathing through his osmosis mask even though this part of the sunken ship was dry, he was sure it was a submarine.

Harman was standing in a room that was listing only about ten degrees from vertical but the ancient impact with the ocean bottom here only two hundred feet beneath the surface of the sea—long before there was an Atlantic Breach—had crumpled metal and tumbled half a dozen long canisters off their racks. Harman wouldn’t need the pistol he was carrying. Nothing lived in this hulk. He pressed the pistol against the stick-tite patch on his right hip and extended a bit of thermskin elastic over it, securing it as surely as if he were wearing one of the holsters he’d seen in books via the crystal cabinet.

He cupped his right palm against the rounded edge of one of these tumbled canisters, curious to find if his data-seeking function would work through the molecule-thin thermskin gloves.

It did.

Harman was standing in the torpedo room of a Mohammed-class warship submarine. The AI in the guidance system of this particular torpedo—“torpedo” being neither a word nor concept he had ever encountered until that millisecond—had gone dead more than two thousand years earlier, but there was enough residual memory in the dead microcircuits for Harman to understand that his palm was inches above a nuclear warhead tucked into the end of a thirty-four-thousand-pound high-speed, self-cavitating, hunt-until-it-kills-something torpedo. This particular torpedo warhead—“warhead” being another term he had never encountered until that instant—was a simple fusion weapon, packing only 475 kilotons, the equivalent of 950 million pounds of TNT detonating. The blast from the pearl-sized sphere a few inches beneath his palm would reach tens of millions of degrees within a millionth of a second. Harman could almost feel the lethal neutron and gamma rays crouching there, invisible dragon-eels of death, ready to leap in all directions at the speed of light to kill and infect every bit of human nerve or tissue they would encounter, tearing through them like bullets through butter.

He snatched his hand away and rubbed it against his thigh as if cleaning something filthy from his palm.

This entire submarine was a single instrument designed for killing human beings. His briefest encounter with the warhead’s dead guidance AI had told him that the torpedo warheads were all but irrelevant to the machine and crew’s real mission. But to understand what that mission was, he would have to pass out of the torpedo room, up the canted deck, through the wardroom and mess room, up a ladder and down a corridor past the sonar shack and integrated comm room, and then up another ladder into the command and control center.

But everything beyond the near half of the torpedo room was under water.

The beams of light from his chest lamps showed him where the north wall of the Breach began not fifteen feet ahead. The submarine had been lying here along this ocean ridge two hundred feet beneath the surface and fully filled with water for many centuries before whatever created the Breach had sucked the ocean out of these forward compartments, but nothing lived here anymore, not so much as a dried barnacle remained from the myriad of undersea life forms that must have thrived here for centuries, and there were no signs of human bones or other remnants of the crew. The forcefield that held back the Atlantic Ocean did not physically slice through the morphable metal of the submarine’s hull or metal structure—Harman’s lamps picked up the solid, uninterrupted line of deck overhead—but he could visualize the complete oval-slice of ocean inside the hull of the ship. The north wall of the Breach forcefield held back the sea in every open space, but a step beyond that… Harman could imagine the pressure down here at two hundred feet and see the wall of darkness ahead, his lamplights reflecting off it as if from a dark-burnished but still mirrored surface.

Suddenly Harman was filled with a sick and terrible terror. He had to clutch at the despised torpedo to keep himself from reeling, from falling onto the corroded plates of the deck. He wanted to run from this ancient warship out into the air and sunlight, to rip off his osmosis mask, and to be sick if he had to in order to get rid of this poison that had suddenly filled his body and mind.

It was a mere torpedo he was leaning against, designed for destroying other ships, a harbor at most, yet its thermonuclear yield was three times the full explosive power dropped on Hiroshima—another word and image that had just entered Harman’s reeling mind—capable of destroying everything in a hundred-square-mile area.

Harman—always fair at judging distances and sizes even in his era that demanded no such skills—saw in his mind’s eye a ten-by-ten-mile area in the heart of Paris Crater, or with Ardis Hall at the center of its bull’s-eye. At Ardis, such a blast would not only vaporize the manor house and the new outbuildings in a microsecond, but blast away the hard-built palisades and roll its fireball to carry away the faxnode pavilion a mile and a quarter down the road less than a second later, turning the river at the base of the hills into steam and the forest into ash and fireball in an expanding circle of instant destruction ranging farther north than the Starved Rock he’d seen in his turin-cloth glimpse of Ada and the others.

Harman activated dormant biofeedback functions—too late—and received the message he dreaded. The torpedo room was filled with latent radiation. The damaged torpedo fusion warheads should have dropped beneath lethal leakage levels long ago, but in the process of doing so they must have irradiated everything in the forward part of the submarine.

No—the sensors told him that the radiation was worse straight ahead, aft of the torpedo room—the direction in which he would have to go if he wanted to learn more about this instrument of death. Perhaps the fusion reactor that had driven this obscene boat had been slowly leaking all these centuries. It was a radioactive hell ahead of him.

Harman knew just enough about his new biometric functions to realize that he could query the data monitors. He did so now, but only with the simplest question possible—Will the thermskin adequately shield me from this radioactivity?

The answer came back in his mind’s own voice and was unequivocal—No.

It was insane to go forward. He also didn’t have the courage to go forward through that black wall of water, into the maelstrom of radiation, through the rest of the submerged torpedo room, up through the dark and cold of the wardroom and mess room where ancient Geiger counters would have gone wild, needles pinned off their own dials, and then up again and down a corridor past the sonar and comm rooms, and then up another ladder that impossible, terrifying, bone-chilling, cell-killing distance into the submerged command and control center.

It was literally insane to stay in this malevolent hulk, much less to go deeper into it. It was death—death to himself, to the hopes of his species, to Ada’s trust in his return, to his unborn child’s need for a father in these most terrible and dangerous of times. Death to all futures.

But he had to know. The quantum remains of the torpedo warhead AI had told him just enough that he had to know the answer to a single, terrible question. So go forward is exactly what Harman did—one terrified step at a time.

After three days and nights in the Breach, this was the first time he had pressed through the forcefield wall. It was a semipermeable force-field, just like the ones he’d passed through before on Prospero’s orbital isle—and now Harman knew that the “semipermeable” meant that it was designed to allow old-style human beings or post-humans to pass through an otherwise impervious shield—but this time he was stepping through from air and warmth to cold, pressure, and darkness.

Harman trusted the thermskin to keep him alive from the effects of the deep if not from the radiation, and this it did; he refused even to call up data he knew he had on how the thermskin was designed, on what made it work. He didn’t care how it worked to keep the ocean pressure away—only that it did.

His chest lamps automatically increased their brightness to deal with the reflections and dense, particle-filled water.

The submerged parts of the submarine were as thick with living organisms as the dry parts of the torpedo room had been sterile. Whatever lived here now not only survived in heavy radiation but feasted on it, thrived on it. Every metal surface had been hidden beneath layers of mutated coraled fungus and masses of green, pink, and gray-bluish glowing living matter, their frills and tendrils waving slightly in unfelt currents. Crablike things scuttled from his lights. A blood-red eel lunged from a hole in what had been the aft torpedo room hatchway and then pulled its head back, leaving only its rows of teeth glinting in the light. Harman gave it room as he edged through that encrusted hatch.

The dead warhead AI had given him a rough schematic of the ship—at least enough to lead him to the command and control center—but the ladder he had to take up to the wardroom and eating area was gone. Most of this submarine had been built from super alloys that would last another two thousand years, even here beneath the sea, but the ladder—gangway his protein bundles told him it had been called—had long since corroded away.

Sinking his fingers into the silt and waving fans on either side of the slanted stairwell, hoping that he wasn’t putting his fingers into another eel’s mouth, Harman laboriously pulled himself up through the green soup of the sea. Particles and bundles of radioactive living particles clung to his thermskin and had to be wiped from his goggles and osmosis mask.

He was close to hyperventilating by the time he reached the wardroom level. He knew from experience that the osmosis mask would keep feeding him fine, fresh oxygen, but this sense of pressure against every square inch of his body made him squirm. He didn’t have to access memory modules to know that the thermskin would also protect him from the cold and pressure—the same type of suit had kept him alive in the zero-pressure of space—but outer space had felt cleaner.

I wonder if this slime coating my eyepieces was once part of the men and women who ran this boat?

He banished thoughts like that. They were not only ghoulish, they were absurd. If the crew had gone down with this boat, the ever-hungry denizens of the ocean had cleaned their bones in just a few years and then eaten and decomposed the bones themselves in not many more years.

But still—

Harman concentrated on making his way aft through the litter of overgrown and collapsed bunks. He could only know this had been a sleeping area for human beings through the schematic in the war-head’s decaying memory molecules; now it looked like an overgrown crypt, its fungus-thick gray shelves harboring mutated crab-things and light-fearing eel-things rather than the rotting bodies of Montagues or Capulets.

I have to actually read more of this Shakespeare person. So many things in the data packets connect to his thoughts and writings, thought Harman as he passed through an open hatchway, brushing aside stalagmites of slime, floating into what had been an eating area. What had once been a long dining table for some reason reminded him of Caliban’s cannibal table up on Prospero’s Isle so many months earlier. Perhaps it was because the fungus and mollusks here had mutated to a bloody pink color.

At the far end of the pink dining cavern, Harman knew, he had to go up a vertical ladder—a real ladder this time, no slanted gangway—to the integrated comm room before he could go aft through the sonar shack to the command and control center.

There was no ladder. And this time the narrow tube of a vertical corridor was clogged with green and blue marine growth, reminding Harman of Daeman’s description of Paris Crater turned into a blue-ice nest.

But this was Earth ocean life that had woven this web, however mutated, and Harman began ripping it apart, pulling out centuries of life’s slow encroachment and advancement in great, grunting handfuls, wishing all the time he had an axe. The water around him became so filled with glop that he couldn’t even see his hands. Something long and slippery—another eel? Some sort of sea snake?—slid along the length of his body and was gone below. He kept pulling away clumps and globs of thick, sludgy, radioactive stuff, fighting his way up through the blinding murk.

He felt as if he was being born again, but this time into a much more terrible world.

It was such a struggle that for several moments after he’d clawed his way up and into the comm room level, he didn’t know he’d arrived. Tendrils of green hung everywhere, the water was so filled with floating particles that his own searchlight beams blinded him, and he lay in the primordial ooze too exhausted to move.

Then—remembering that every moment he spent in this death-hulk meant a greater chance of death to him—Harman got to his knees, pulled vines and tentacles of old plant growth away from his shoulders and back, and began to shuffle aft.

The comm room was still alive.

Harman froze with the knowledge of it. Functions in his body that he hadn’t even catalogued yet picked up the pulsing readiness of machines hidden under the living gray-green carpet of this room to reach and communicate. Not with him. These comm AI’s did not acknowledge his presence—their ability to interact with human beings had long since died away with the shifting quantum core of their computers.

But they wanted to communicate with somebody—most of all to receive orders from somebody, something.

Knowing that he would not find what he needed to know here in the integrated comm room, Harman half-walked, half-swam aft past the encrusted sonar and GPS shack. He didn’t know why his bundle-memories wanted to call the little space a shack and he didn’t want to know.

Had he ever thought about submarines, which he never had, Harman would have probably guessed that such boats were built for traveling under water—he knew that the AI warhead had preferred a translation of the word “boat” to that of “ship”—that such underwater boats would have been made up of many small compartments, each one shut off with a door, a hatch, watertight, separate. This sub was not. The spaces were large in comparison to the volume of the ship itself, not overly capsulized or compartmentalized. If the ocean found a way in—as it obviously had—the deaths of the men and women in this machine would not have been by slow drowning, gasping for air near the ceilings, but in a massive, implosive pressure wave, killing all in seconds. It was almost as if the humans who had worked here had preferred the choice of instant death in larger spaces to slow drowning in smaller ones.

Harman quit swimming and let his feet sink to the deckplates when he realized he was in the middle of the command and control center.

There was less marine growth here, more bare metal. From just the warhead AI’s cartoon schematic, he could make out the torpedo launch and weapons’ control centers—vertical metal columns that would have projected a myriad of holographic virtual controls when the ship was in combat. Harman moved around the space, touching metal and plastic with his thermskinned palm, allowing the dead quantum brains embedded in the material to speak to him.

There was no chair, seat, or throne for the captain. That man had stood here, near the central holgraphic chart table, directly in front of a display console—virtual under the proper conditions, projected from within LCD plastic panels if the virtual system were damaged—into which every one of the ship’s many systems and functions were channeled and shown.

Harman moved his gloved hand through the green murk and imagined sonar displays appearing… here. Tactical displays to his left… there. Several yards back the way from which he’d come, gray-glob mushrooms were the stools where the crewman had crouched in front of constantly changing virtual displays controlling and reporting on ballast and trim, radar, sonar, GPS relay, drone controls, torpedo readiness and launch controls, physical wheels for controlling the diving planes….

He jerked his hand away. Harman didn’t need to know any of this crap. He needed only to know…

There.

It was a black metal monolith just aft of the captain’s station. No barnacles, mollusks, coral, or slime had attached themselves to it. The thing was so black that Harman’s lamps had not reflected back from it on his first several passes through that part of the command center.

This was the boat’s central AI, built to interface in a hundred ways with the submarine’s captain and crew. Harman knew that a quantum computer, even from this lost age, even one dead for more than two millennia, would be more alive at one percent capacity than most living things on the planet. Quantum artificial minds died hard and died slowly.

Harman knew that he would not have the codes to access the central AI’s banks, perhaps not even the language to understand the codes he did not know, but he also knew that it didn’t matter. His functions were developed and nanogenetically programmed into his DNA long after this machine had died. It would have no secrets from him.

The thought terrified him.

Harman wanted out of this flooded crypt. He wanted to get away from the radiation that must be pinging through his skin, brain, balls, guts, and eyes even as he stood here, frozen in indecision.

But he had to know.

Harman set his palm atop the black metal monolith.

The submarine was named The Sword of Allah. It had left its port on….

Harman skipped the log entries, dates, reasons for the ancient war—he lingered only long enough to confirm it was after the rubicon release, during the Dementia years when the Global Caliphate was near its end, the democracies of the West and Europe were already dead, the New European Union a fiction of gasping vassal states under the rising Khanate….

None of that mattered. What was in the belly of this submarine, as real as the fetus growing in the womb of his wife Ada, was what mattered.

Harman did pause long enough to listen to a fast-forward of the last testament of The Sword of Allah’s twenty-six crew members. The Mohammed-class ballistic-missile submarine was so automated that it required a crew of only eight, but there had been so many volunteers that twenty-six of the Chosen had been allowed to go on its last mission.

They were all men. They were all devout. They all surrendered their souls to Allah as their doom approached—a cordon of Khanate attack submarines, aircraft, spacecraft, and surface ships as far as Harman could tell. The men knew that they had only minutes to live—that the Earth had only minutes before its destruction.

The captain had given the launch command. The primary AI had seconded it and relayed it.

Why hadn’t the missiles launched? Harman searched the AI to its quantum guts and could find no reason why the missiles had not launched. The human command had been given, the four sets of physical keys had been turned, the AI target-package coordinates and individual launch commands had been confirmed and relayed, the missiles had been denoted in the proper launch sequence, the switches—both virtual and literal—had closed. All of the massive-metal missile hatches had been successively opened by redundant hydraulics—only a thin, blue, fiberglass dome had separated the missile tubes from the ocean, and each of these launch tubes had been filled with nitrogen to equalize the pressure to keep that ocean from rushing in until the actual instant of launch. The forty-eight missiles should have been propelled out of their crèches by the nitrogen gas generators, a twenty-five-hundred-volt charge igniting the nitrogen discharge. The gas itself would have produced more than eighty-six thousand pounds per square inch of pressure in less than a second, sending the missiles hurtling upward within their own rising bubbles of nitrogen until they popped out of the sea like rising corks, and then the solid rocket propellant in each missile would have been ignited the second the missiles hit open air above. There were redundant and double-redundant launch and ignition initiators. The missiles should have roared and flown to their targets. The AI’s launch indicators were all red. In each of the forty-eight missile silos back in the pregnant belly of The Sword of Allah, the sequence had proceeded properly from HOLD to DENOTE to LAUNCH to SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCHED.

But the missiles were all still sitting in their tubes. The dead and decaying AI knew that and communicated something like shame and chagrin through Harman’s tingling palm.

Harman’s heart was pounding so fiercely and he was breathing so raggedly that the osmosis mask had to lower the oxygen input so he wouldn’t hyperventilate.

Forty-eight missiles. Forty-eight warhead-platforms. Each warhead was MRVed and carried sixteen separate reentry vehicles. Seven hundred sixty-eight actual warheads, all armed, primed, safeties off, set to go. They had been targeted at seven hundred and sixty-eight of the world’s remaining cities, ancient monuments, and dwindling rubicon-survivors’ population centers.

But these were no mere thermonuclear warheads such as carried in The Sword of Allah’s torpedoes.

Each of the seven hundred sixty-eight actual warheads still aboard this sub carried a tenuously contained black hole. The human race’s and the Global Caliphate’s ultimate weapon at that point in time—its ultimate detergent, thought Harman with a noise that was part sob, part giggle.

The black holes in themselves were small. Each not much larger than what one of the dead crewmen had described in his urgent and religious farewell speech as “the soccer ball I grew up kicking around the ruins of Karachi.” But when they escaped their containment spheres and dropped on their targets, the result would be much more dramatic than a mere thermonuclear weapon.

The black hole would plunge into the earth, creating a soccer-ball-sized hole in the center of whatever target city it arrived at. But the second it was exposed there would be a plasma implosion a thousand times worse than a thermonuclear explosion. The descending black hole, turning all earth, rock, water, and magma ahead of it into a rising cloud of steam and plasma, would also suck in behind it the people, buildings, vehicles, trees, and actual molecular structure of its target city and hundreds of square miles around it.

The black hole that had created the kilometer-wide hole in the center of Paris Crater had been less than a millimeter wide and unstable—it had eaten itself before reaching the Earth’s core. Harman knew now that eleven million people had died because of that ancient experiment gone wrong.

These black holes were not meant to eat themselves. They were meant to ping-pong back and forth through the earth, reemerging into atmosphere, plunging back through the planet. Seven hundred sixty-eight plasma and ionizing-radiation surrounded spheres of ultimate destruction coring and recoring the Earth’s crust, mantle, magma, and core again and again and again, for months or years, until they all came to rest at the center of this dear, good Earth and began eating the fabric of the planet itself.

The twenty-six crewmen’s voices Harman had listened to had all celebrated this outcome to their mission. They would all be reunited in Paradise. Praise God!

Wanting only to be sick within his constraining osmosis mask, Harman forced himself to keep his hand on the black-monolith AI for another full, endless, eternal minute. There had to be some instructions here for finding some way to disarm these activated blackholes.

Their warhead containment fields had been very powerful, designed to last for centuries if they had to.

They had lasted for more than two and one-half millennia, but they were very unstable. Once one of the black holes escaped, they all would. It did not matter one iota whether they began their voyage to the Earth’s core and beyond from their targets or from this place along the north wall of the Atlantic Breach. The outcome would be the same.

There were no procedures in the AI or anywhere in The Sword of Allah for disarming them. The singularities existed—had for almost two hundred and fifty of Harman’s standard Five Twenties—and in a world where old-style humans’ highest technology consisted of crossbows, there was no way to reset their containment fields.

Harman pulled his hand away.

Later, he had no memory of finding his way out of the submerged parts of the submarine, or of staggering out through the dry forward torpedo room, through the rent in the hull, out onto the sunny strip of muddy dirt that was the Atlantic Breach.

He did remember peeling off his cowl and osmosis mask, dropping to his hands and knees, and vomiting for long minutes. Long after he’d gotten rid of the little substance in his belly—the food bars were nutritious but left little residue—he continued dry retching.

Then he was too weak even to stay on his hands and knees, so he crawled away from his own vomitus, collapsed, and rolled onto his back, looking up at the long, thin blue strip of sky. The rings were faint but clear, revolving, crossing, moving like the pale hands of some obscene clock mechanism counting down the hours or days or months or years until the warhead containment spheres just yards from Harman decayed to collapse.

He knew that he should get away from the radioactive wreck—crawl west if he had to—but his heart had no will to do so.

Finally, after what must have been hours—the strip of sky was darkening toward evening—Harman activated the function to query his own biomonitors.

As he’d suspected, the dosage he’d received had been lethal. The dizziness he felt now would only grow worse. The vomiting and dry retching would soon return. Blood was already pooling under his skin. Within hours—the process had already begun—the cells in his bowels and guts would begin sloughing off by the billion. Then would come the bloody diarrhea—intermittent at first but then constant as his body began literally to shit his dissolved guts out into the world. Then the bleeding would become primarily internal, cell walls breaking down completely, entire systems collapsing.

He’d live long enough to see and feel all this, he knew. Within a day he’d be too weak even to stagger along between the episodes of diarrhea and vomiting. He’d be prostrate in the Breach, his stillness broken only by involuntary seizures. Harman knew that he wouldn’t even be able to look at the blue sky or stars as he died—the biomonitors already reported the radiation-induced cataracts building on the surface of both his eyes.

Harman had to grin. No wonder Prospero and Moira had given him only a few days’ worth of food bars. They must have known he wouldn’t need even that many.

Why? Why make me Prometheus for the human race with all these functions, all this knowledge, all this promise to give Ada and my species, only to let me die alone here… like this?

Harman was still sane and conscious enough to know that billions of human beings no more elect than himself had hurled similar final thoughts toward the unanswering skies in the hours and minutes before their death.

He was also wise enough now to be able to answer his own question. Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Adam and Eve tasted of the fruit of knowledge in the Garden. All the old creation myths told versions of the same tale, exposed the same terrible truth—steal fire and knowledge from the gods and you become something more than the animals you evolved from, but still something far, far below any real God.

Harman at that second would give anything to rid himself of the twenty-six last personal and religious testaments by the madmen who crewed The Sword of Allah. In those impassioned farewells he felt the full weight of the burden he had been about to bring back to Ada, to Daeman, to Hannah, to his friends, to his species.

He realized that all of the last year—the turin-cloth story of Troy that had been Prospero’s little joke-gift to the old-humans, passed on through Odysseus and Savi, their various mad quests, the deadly masque on Prospero’s Isle up in the e-ring, his escape, the Ardis Manor people’s discovery of how to build weapons, fashion some crude beginnings to society, discover politics, even grope toward some religion…

It had all made them human again.

The human race had returned to Earth after more than fourteen hundred years of coma and indifference.

Harman realized that his and Ada’s child would have been fully human—perhaps the first real human being to be born after all those comfortable, inhuman, watched-over-by-false-post-human gods’ centuries of stasis—confronted by danger and mortality at every turn, forced to invent, pressured to create bonds with other human beings just to survive the voynix and the calibani and Caliban himself and the Setebos thing…

It would have been exciting. It would have been terrifying. It would have been real.

And it all would have led, could have led, might have led, back to The Sword of Allah.

Harman rolled to one side and vomited again. This time the vomitus consisted mostly of blood and mucus.

More rapid than I thought.

Eyes closed against the pain—all the varieties of pain, but most especially against the pain of this new knowledge—Harman felt on his right hip. The pistol was still secure there.

He undid the strap, pulled the weapon free of the stick-tite pad, used his other hand to rack the chamber the way Moira had shown him—chambering one of the shells—clicked off the safety, and held the muzzle to his temple.

75

The Demogorgon fills half of the flame-filled sky. Asia, Panthea, and the silent sister Ione continue to cower. The rocks and ridges and volcanic summits nearby are filling with gigantic, looming shapes—Titans, Hours, monster steeds, monster-monsters, Healer-type giant centipedes, inhuman Charioteers, more Titans, all coming to their positions like jurors showing up for a trial on the steps of a Greek temple. The thermskin goggles allow Achilles to see everything and he almost wishes they didn’t.

The monsters of Tartarus are too monstrous; the Titans too shaggy and titanic; the Charioteers and the things the Demogorgon had called the Hours aren’t really possible to bring into full focus at all. They make Achilles think of the time he cleaved a Trojan’s belly and chest open with a sword stroke and found a small human homunculus staring out at him, blue eyes seeming to blink at him through the shattered ribs and spilled entrails. It had been the only time he’d ever vomited on the battlefield. These Hour and Charioteer things were equally as difficult to look at.

As the Demogorgon waits for the monstrous jurors to sort themselves out and gather, Hephaestus pulls a slim cord from the helmet bubble of his absurd suit and clips the end of the line into the cowl of Achilles’ thermskin.

“Can you hear me now?” asks the crippled dwarf-god. “We have a few minutes to talk.”

“Yes, I hear you, but can’t the Demogorgon also? He did before.”

“No, this is a hardline. That Demogorgon is a lot of things, but not J. Edgar Hoover.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Listen, son of Peleus, we have to coordinate what we’re going to say to this giant rabble and the Demogorgon. A lot depends on it.”

“Don’t call me that,” growls Achilles with a glare that has frozen battlefield enemies in their tracks.

The god Hephaestus actually takes an alarmed step back, accidentally pulling tight the communications cord between them. “Call you what?”

“Son of Peleus. I never want to hear that phrase again.”

The god of artifice holds up his heavily gauntleted hands, palms outward. “Fine. But we still have to talk. We only have a minute or two before this kangaroo court commences.”

“What is a kangaroo?” Achilles is growing tired of this mini-god’s double-talk. The fleet-footed mankiller’s sword is in his hand. He has a strong suspicion that all he has to do to kill this so-called immortal is slash a gash in the bearded fool’s metal suit, and then step back to watch the god of fire choke to death on the acid air. Then again, Hephaestus is an Olympian immortal, even without the big bug’s Healing tanks back on Olympos. So perhaps, as Achilles had, the impudent bearded cripple, exposed to Tartarus’ acid air, would just cough, gag, retch, and sprawl around in pain for an eternity until one of the Oceanids ate him. It is a powerful impulse in Achilles to find out.

He resists the urge.

“Never mind,” says Hephaestus. “What are you going to say to the Demogorgon? Shall I do all the talking for us?”

“No.”

“Well, we need to get our stories straight. What are you going to ask the Demogorgon and the Titans to do other than kill Zeus?”

“I am not going to ask this Demogorgon thing to kill Zeus,” Achilles says firmly.

The bearded dwarf-god looks surprised behind the glass of his head-bubble. “You’re not? That’s why I thought we were here.”

“I am going to kill Zeus myself,” says Achilles. “And feed his liver to Argus, Odysseus’ dog.”

Hephaestus sighs. “All right. But for me to sit on the throne of Olympos—the deal you offered me and which Nyx agreed to—we still need to convince the Demogorgon to intercede. And the Demogorgon is insane.”

“Insane?” says Achilles. Most of the monstrous shapes seem to be in position now among the ridgelines, cindercones, and lava flows.

“You heard the thing going on about the God supreme, didn’t you?” says Hephaestus.

“I don’t know which god Demogorgon speaks of, if not Zeus.”

“Demogorgon is speaking of some single, supreme god of the entire universe,” says Hephaestus, his already raspy voice rasping even more over the communications line. “One god with a capital ‘G’ and no others at all.”

“That’s absurd,” says Achilles.

“Yes,” agrees the god of fire. “That’s why the Demogorgon’s race exiled him to this prison world of Tartarus.”

“Race?” says Achilles incredulously. “You mean there’s more than one of these Demogorgons?”

“Of course. Nothing living comes in complete sets of one, Achilles. Even you must have learned that. This Demogorgon is as crazy as a Trojan shithouse rat. He worships some single all-powerful capital-G god and sometimes refers to him as ‘the Quiet.’ ”

“The Quiet?” Achilles tries to imagine any god being a silent god. The concept is certainly something out of his experience.

“Yes,” growls Hephaestus over the cowl earphones. “Only this ‘the Quiet’ isn’t all of the single all-powerful capital-G god, but is just one of many manifestations of Him… capital H there.”

“Enough with the capitals,” says Achilles. “So the Demogorgon does believe in more than one god.”

“No,” insists the god of fire and artifice. “This big God just has many faces or avatars or forms, sort of like Zeus when he wants to screw a mortal woman. You remember once Zeus turned into a swan to…”

“What the fuck does all this have to do with the hearing that’s going to start in about thirty fucking seconds?” shouts Achilles over his thermskin microphones.

Hephaestus claps his hands over his glass bubble where his ears should be. “Hush,” hisses the dwarf-god over the intercom. “Listen, this has everything to do with our argument to convince the Demogorgon to release the Titans and the others here to attack Zeus, wipe out the current Olympians, and install me as the new king on Olympos.”

“But you just said the Demogorgon is a prisoner here.”

“I did. But Nyx—Night—opened the Brane Hole from Olympos to here. We can go back that way unless it closes before this goddamned hearing, trial, town meeting, whatever it is, gets under way. Besides, I think the Demogorgon can leave whenever it wants to.”

“What kind of prison is it that allows you to leave whenever you want to?” asks Achilles. He’s beginning to think that it’s the bearded dwarf-god who’s the lunatic here.

“You have to know a little about the Demogorgon’s race,” says the bubble-head on top of the iron-bubbled body. “Which is all anyone knows about them… very little. This Demogorgon is imprisoning himself here because he was told to. He can quantum teleport anywhere, any time… if he thinks it’s important enough to. We just have to convince him it’s important enough to.”

“But we have the Brane Hole,” says Achilles. “And what is Nyx getting out of this? You told me at Odysseus’ home before I woke Zeus that Night would open the Hole and I believed you, but why? What’s in it for her?”

“Survival,” says Hephaestus and looks around. All the monstrous shapes seem to be in position. The court is in session. Everyone is waiting for the Demogorgon to speak.

Achilles can see this as well. “What do you mean, survival?” he hisses over the interphone. “You told me yourself that Nyx is the one goddess whom Zeus fears. Her and her goddamned Fates. He can’t hurt her.”

The glass bubble moves back and forth as Hephaestus shakes his head. “Not Zeus. Prospero and Sycorax and… the people… the beings who helped create Zeus, me, the other gods, even the Titans. And I don’t mean Ouranos god of the sky mating with Gaia, mother Earth. Before them.”

Achilles tries to wrap his mind around this concept of someone other than Earth and Night creating the Titans and the gods. He can’t.

“They trapped a creature named Setebos on Mars and your Ilium-Earth for ten years,” continues Hephaestus.

“Who did?” says Achilles. He is totally confused by now. “What is a Setebos? And what relevance can this have to what we have to say to the Demogorgon in one minute?”

“Achilles, you must know enough of our history to know how Zeus and the other young Olympians defeated his father Kronos and the other Titans, even though the Titans were more powerful?”

“I do,” says Achilles, feeling like a child again, being tutored by Chiron, the centaur who raised him. “Zeus won the war between the gods and the Titans by enlisting the aid of terrible creatures against whom the Titans were powerless.”

“And which was the most terrible of these terrible creatures?” asks the bearded dwarf-god through the intercom. His teacherly tone makes Achilles want to gut him on the spot.

“The hundred-armed,” he answers, exerting the last of his patience. The Demogorgon will be speaking any second and none of this gibberish has helped Achilles know what to say. “The monstrous many-handed thing which you gods called Briareous,” he adds, “but which early men called Aigaion.”

“The thing called Briareous and Aigaion is really named Setebos,” hisses Hephaestus. “For ten years this creature has been distracted from its hungry intentions, left to feed on your puny human war between Trojans and Achaeans. But now it is loose again and the quantum underpinnings of the entire solar system are coming unhinged. Nyx is worried that they’ll destroy not only their Earth, but the new Mars and her entire dark dimension. Brane Holes connect everything. They’re being too reckless, this Sycorax and Setebos, Prospero and their ilk. The Fates predict total quantum destruction if someone or something does not intercede. Nyx would prefer me—the crippled dwarf—on the throne of Olympos rather than risk such total quantum meltdown.”

Since Achilles has not the least fucking clue as to what the dwarf-god is babbling about, he remains silent.

The Demogorgon seems to be clearing his non-throat to silence the last of the murmurs and movements in the crowd of Titans, Hours, Charioteers, Healers, and other malformed shapes.

“The best news,” hisses Hephaestus over his intercom, whispering now as if the huge shapeless and veiled mass above them can hear them despite the comm cord, “is that the Demogorgon and his god—the Quiet—eat Seteboses for snacks.”

“The Demogorgon is not the insane one here,” Achilles whispers back. “It’s you who’s crazy as a Trojan shithouse rat.”

“Nonetheless, will you let me speak for us?” Hephaestus whispers, urgency in every syllable.

“Yes,” says Achilles. “But if you say something I don’t agree with, I’m going to hack your cute little suit into separate iron balls and then cut your real balls off and feed them to you through that glass bowl.”

“Fair enough,” says Hephaestus and jerks the comm line free.

“YOU MAY BEGIN YOUR APPEAL,” booms the Demogorgon.

76

They decided to vote on whether Noman could borrow the sonie. The meeting was scheduled for noon, when the minimum number of sentries were posted and the bulk of the day’s necessary chores were done, so that most of the Ardis survivors—including the six newcomers and Hannah, bringing their number up to fifty-five—could attend, but already the nature of Odysseus/Noman’s request had got out to even the farthest-posted sentry and already the consensus was dead set against it.

Hannah and Ada spent the rest of the morning catching up with events. The younger woman was all but inconsolable over the loss of their friends and Ardis Hall itself, but Ada reminded her that the Hall could be rebuilt—at least some crude version of it.

“Do you think we’ll live to see that?” asked Hannah.

Ada had no answer. She squeezed Hannah’s hand.

They talked about Harman, about the details of his odd disappearance from the Golden Gate with the thing called Ariel and about Ada’s sense that Harman was still alive somewhere.

They talked about small things—how food was being prepared these days and Ada’s hopes to enlarge the camp before the voynix began massing as they had.

“Do you know why this Setebos baby keeps them away?” asked Hannah.

“None of us have a real clue,” said Ada. She led the young sculptor to the Pit. The Setebos-thing—Noman had called it a form of louse—was at the bottom, hands and tendrils curled under it, but its yellow eyes stared up with an inhuman indifference much worse than mere malevolence.

Hannah grabbed her temples. “Oh my… oh God… it’s clawing at my mind, wanting to get in.”

“It does that,” Ada said softly. She had carried a flechette rifle to the Pit and now she aimed it casually at the mass of blue-gray tissue and pink hands a few yards below.

“What if it… takes over?” asked Hannah.

“Begins to control us, you mean?” said Ada. “Turns us against one another?”

“Yes.”

Ada shrugged. “We half expect that to begin every day, every night. We’ve discussed it. So far, we all can vaguely hear this Setebos baby calling to us—like a bad smell in the background—but when it comes strongly, as it just did with you, it’s just one person at a time. If the rest of us hear it and feel it, it’s like an… I don’t know… an echo.”

“So you think that if it takes control,” said Hannah, “you think it’ll be one of you at a time.”

Ada shrugged again. “Something like that.”

Hannah looked at the heavy flechette rifle in Ada’s hand. “But if the thing starts controlling you right now, you could kill me—kill a lot of us—before…”

“Yes,” said Ada. “We’ve discussed that as well.”

“Did you come up with some plan?”

“Yes,” Ada said again, very quietly, as she stood above the Pit. “We’re going to kill this abomination before it comes to that.”

Hannah nodded. “But you’ll have to get all your people out of here before you can do that. I see why you don’t want to loan Odysseus the sonie.”

Ada had to sigh. “Do you know why he wants it, Hannah?”

“No. He won’t tell me. There’s so much he won’t tell me.”

“Yet you love him.”

“Since that first day we saw him at the Bridge.”

“You were under the turin cloth back when it worked, Hannah. You know that that Odysseus was married. We heard him speak to the other Achaeans about his wife, Penelope. His teenage son, Telemachus. The language they spoke was strange, but somehow we always understood it under the turin.”

“Yes.” Hannah looked down.

Down in the Pit, the Setebos baby began to scurry back and forth on its many pink hands. Five tendrils snaked up the side of the pit and other hands wrapped around the grill, pulling the metal until it seemed to bend. The thing’s many yellow eyes were very bright.

Daeman was on his way back from the forest and headed toward the noon gathering when he saw the ghost. He was carrying a heavy canvas bag filled with firewood on his back and wishing that he’d been on sentry duty or hunting detail that day instead of having to chop and haul wood when a woman stepped out of the forest only a dozen yards from him.

At first he saw her only in his peripheral vision—enough to know that it was a human being, female, and therefore part of the Ardis community rather than a voynix—and for a few seconds he kept walking, flechette rifle in his right hand but pointed downward, eyes lowered as he hitched up the heavy pack on his back, but when he turned her way to call a greeting, he froze.

It was Savi.

He straightened up and the huge load of wood in his makeshift canvas rucksack almost toppled him over backward. It would not have been an overreaction. He could only stare.

It was Savi—but not the gray-haired, older Savi he’d watched being murdered and dragged off by Caliban in the caverns under Prospero’s hellhole of an orbital isle almost a year earlier—this was a younger, paler, more beautiful Savi.

A resurrected Savi? No.

A ghost was Daeman’s dual stab of thought and fear. His era of old-style humans did not even believe in ghosts, did not truly have the concept of ghosts; he’d never heard of ghosts outside mentions in the turin drama or heard a ghost story until he started sigling the ancient books in Ardis Manor the previous autumn.

But this had to be a ghost.

The young Savi did not seem completely substantial. There was something—shimmery—about her as she saw him, turned, and began walking straight toward him. Daeman realized that he could see through her, more even than he’d been able to see through the hologram of Prospero up on the orbital isle.

Yet somehow he knew that this was no hologram. This was… something… real, real and alive, even as he noticed the soft, pale glow her entire body gave off and the fact that her feet did not seem to be touching the ground with any weight as she strode through the high, brown grass toward him. She was wearing a thermskin and nothing else. Daeman knew from experience that thermskins—not as thick as a coat of paint—made one feel more naked than naked, and that’s how she looked now as she began walking in his direction. Naked. The thermskin was a pale blue but showed every muscle working as she walked, emphasized rather than hid the slight bobble to her breasts. Deaman had grown used to Savi in thermskins, but where there had been slightly sagging breasts, slack buttocks, and floppy thigh muscles with the older Savi, this apparition showed high breasts, a flat stomach, and powerful, young muscles.

He freed his arms from the straps, dropped the load of firewood, and gripped his flechette rifle with both hands. Daeman could see the new inner palisade more than two hundred yards away and even a dark head moving above the line of logs, but no one else was in sight. He and the ghost were alone in this wintry field at the edge of the forest.

“Hello, Daeman.”

It was Savi’s voice. Younger, even more vibrant with life than the mesmerizing voice he remembered, but definitely Savi’s.

Daeman said nothing until she stopped within arm’s reach. Her very solidity seemed to flicker—one second complete, the next transparent and insubstantial. When she was substantial, he could see even the areolae around her slightly raised nipples. The young Savi, he realized, had been very beautiful.

She looked him up and down with those familiar dark eyes he remembered so well. “You look well, Daeman. You’ve lost a lot of weight. Gained muscle.”

Still he did not speak. Everyone who went out into the forest carried one of the high-decibel whistles they’d dug from the ruins. His was on a lanyard around his neck. He had only to raise it and blow it and a dozen armed men or women would be running his way in less than a minute.

Savi smiled. “You’re right. I’m not Savi. We’ve never met. I know you only from Prospero’s descriptions and video recordings.”

“Who are you?” he asked. His voice sounded hoarse, tight, tense, even to himself.

The apparition shrugged as if her identity were of little importance. “My name is Moira.”

The name meant nothing to Daeman. Savi had never mentioned anyone named Moira. Neither had Prospero. For a wild second he wondered if Caliban could be a shapeshifter.

“What are you?” he said at last.

“Ah!” The syllable was launched in Savi’s husky laugh. “A wonderfully intelligent question. Not ‘Why do you look like my dead friend Savi?’ but ‘What are you?’ Prospero was correct. You were never as stupid as you seemed, even a year ago.”

Daeman touched the whistle on his chest and waited.

“I’m a post-human,” said the Savi apparition.

“There are no more post-humans,” Daeman said. With his left hand, he raised the whistle slightly.

“There were no more post-humans,” said the shimmering woman. “Now there are. One. Me.”

“What do you want here?”

She slowly extended her hand and touched his right forearm. Daeman expected her hand to pass through him but her touch was as solid and real as that of any of the Ardis survivors. He could feel the pressure of her long fingers through his jacket. He could also feel an almost electrical tingle there.

“I want to come with you to watch the discussion and then the vote on whether Noman can borrow your sonie,” she said softly.

How in the hell does she know about that? he wondered. Aloud, he said, “If you show up, there probably won’t be a discussion and vote. Even Odys … Noman… will want to know who you are, where you’re from, what you want.”

She shrugged again. “Perhaps. But none of the others will see me. I will be visible only to you. This is a little trick Prospero built into my sisters when they went off to become gods and I decided to keep it for myself. It comes in handy from time to time.”

He fingered the whistle with his left hand, slipped the index finger of his right hand into the trigger guard of the flechette rifle, and looked at her as she shifted slightly from full focus to transparency back to full focus again. There was too much in what she just said to allow him even to frame the proper questions right now. His intuition was that the best thing he could do was keep her around. He couldn’t explain even to himself why that made sense. “Why would you want to come to the discussion?” he asked.

“I am interested in the outcome.”

“Why?”

She smiled. “Daeman, if I can be invisible to the other fifty-five people there, including Noman, I could certainly have remained unseen by you. But I want you to know I’m there. We will talk about things after the discussion and after the vote.”

“Talk about what things?” Daeman had seen the dead, brown, mummified corpses of what Savi, Harman, and he had thought were the last of the post-humans up in the thin, stale air of Prospero’s dying realm. All female. Most of them chewed on by Caliban centuries ago. Daeman had no clue if this apparition was what she claimed to be. To him, she more resembled the goddesses from the turin drama he had watched only on occasion—Athena perhaps, or a much younger Hera. Not as beautiful as the glimpses he’d had of Aphrodite. Suddenly he remembered that almost a year ago, in Paris Crater, there had been word of street altars being set up to the gods from the Trojan War turin drama.

But everyone in Paris Crater now was dead, including his mother. Murdered and eaten by Caliban. The city buried in that blue-ice gunk by Setebos. If the people of his home city had ever prayed to the turin gods and goddesses, it had done them no good. If this was a goddess from the drama, he was sure that she would do him no good.

“We can talk about where your friend Harman is,” said the spectral figure who called herself Moira.

“Where is he? How is he?” Daeman realized that he’d shouted.

She smiled. “We can talk after the vote.”

“At least tell me why this vote is so important that you’ve come from… wherever you’ve come from to watch it,” demanded Daeman, his voice sounding as hard as he’d become inside over the past year.

Moira nodded. “I came to hear it because it is important.”

“Why? To whom? How?”

She said nothing. Her smile had disappeared.

Daeman released the whistle. “Is it important that we give Noman the sonie or important that we don’t loan it to him?”

“I just want to watch,” said the Savi-ghost who called herself Moira. “Not vote.”

“I didn’t ask that.”

“I know,” said the thing with Savi’s voice.

The bell for the conclave rang. People were gathering around the central lean-to, tent, and cooking area.

Daeman was in no hurry to rush to it. He knew it might be less of a threat to lead a live voynix into their camp. He also knew he had a very short time in which to make his decision. “If you can view the meeting without being seen by anyone, why did you reveal yourself to me?” he asked, his voice low.

“I told you,” said the young woman, “this was my choice. Or perhaps I’m like a vampire—I can only enter a place the first time if I am invited in.”

Daeman didn’t know what a vampire was but he didn’t think that was important right now. “No,” he said. “I’m not going to invite you into our safe area unless you give me a compelling reason to do so.”

Moira sighed. “Prospero and Harman also said you were stubborn, but I couldn’t imagine they meant this stubborn.”

“You talk as if you’ve seen Harman,” said Daeman. “Tell me something about him—how he is, where he is—something that will make me believe you’ve met him.”

Moira continued to gaze at him and Daeman felt that the air around their locked gazes should be sizzling.

The bell quit ringing. The meeting had begun.

Daeman stood motionless, silent.

“All right,” said Moira, smiling slightly again. “Your friend Harman has a scar through his pubic hair, just above his penis. I didn’t ask him how he received it but it must have been since his last Twenty. The healing tanks on Prospero’s Isle would never have left it there.”

Daeman did not blink. “I’ve never seen Harman naked,” he said. “You’ll have to tell me something else.”

Moira laughed easily. “You lie. When Prospero and I gave Harman the thermskin he is wearing now, he said that he knew exactly how to get into one—they’re tricky to pull on, you know—and that you and he had worn them for weeks up on the Isle. He said that once you had to strip in front of Savi to pull your thermskins on. You’ve seen him naked and it’s a noticeable scar.”

“Why is Harman wearing a thermskin now?” asked Daeman. “Where is he?”

“Take me to the meeting,” said Moira. “I promise I will tell you about Harman afterward.”

“You should talk to Ada about him,” said Daeman. “They’re… married.” The strange word did not come easily to Daeman.

Moira smiled. “I will tell you and you can tell Ada if you think it is appropriate. Shall we go?” She held out her left arm, crooked, as if he were going to take it to escort her into a formal dining room.

He took her arm.

“… so that’s the beginning and end of my request,” Noman/Odysseus was saying as he saw Daeman enter the circle of fifty-four people. Most were sitting on sleeping pads or blankets. Some were standing. Daeman stood apart, behind the standing survivors.

“You want to borrow our sonie—the one thing offering us a chance of survival here,” said Boman, “and you won’t tell us why you want it or how long you might keep it.”

“That is correct,” said Noman. “I might need it for only a few hours—I could program it to return on its own. It’s possible that the sonie might not return at all.”

“We’d all die,” said one of the Hughes Town survivors, a woman named Stefe.

Noman did not reply.

“Tell us why you need it,” said Siris.

“No, that’s a private matter,” said Noman.

Some of the sitting, kneeling, and standing people chuckled, as if the bearded Greek had made a joke. But Noman did not smile. He was as serious as his demeanor.

“Go find another sonie!” cried Kaman, their would-be military expert. He’d told others that he had never trusted the real Odysseus in the turin drama he’d watched every day for ten years before the Fall and was prepared to trust this older version even less.

“I would find another if I could,” said Noman, his voice level, unagitated. “But the nearest ones I know about are thousands of miles from here. It would take too long for the cobbled-together sky-raft I built to get there, if the thing could get there at all. I need to use the sonie today. Now.”

“Why?” asked Laman, absently rubbing his still-bandaged right hand with its missing fingers.

Noman remained silent.

Ada, who had remained standing near the barrel-chested Greek after her opening of the meeting and her introduction, said softly, “Noman, can you tell us how it might benefit us if we let you borrow the sonie?”

“If I succeed in what I want to do, it’s possible that the faxnodes will begin working again,” he said. “In just a few hours. A few days at most.”

There was an audible intake of breath among the crowd.

“It’s more possible,” he continued, “that they won’t.”

“So that’s your reason for using our sonie?” asked Greogi. “To get the fax pavilions working again?”

“No,” said Noman. “It’s just a possible side effect of my trip. Not even a probable one.”

“Would your… borrowing of the sonie… help us in some other way?” asked Ada. It was clear that she was more sympathetic to Noman’s request than the majority of those frowning among the ragged clump of listeners.

Noman shrugged.

Everyone was so silent for the next moment that Daeman could hear two sentries calling to each other more than a quarter of a mile away to the south. He turned—the spectral Moira was still standing near him, her arms crossed across her thermskinned breasts. Incredible as it was, no one who had looked up to watch the two of them approach the group—including Ada, Noman, and Boman, who had been staring at him since he passed through the palisade gate—evidently had been able to see her.

Noman held out his blunt, powerful hands, fingers splayed as if reaching for them all—or perhaps pushing them all away. “You want to hear that I will perform some miracle for you all,” he said, his tone low but his powerful, rhetoric-trained voice still echoing off the palisade. “There is no such miracle. If you stay here with the sonie, you’ll be killed sooner or later. Even if you evacuate to this island downriver you’re thinking of fleeing to, the voynix will follow you there. They can still fax, and not just through the faxnodes you know about. There are tens of thousands of voynix surrounding you now, massed within two miles of here—while all over the Earth, the last few thousand human survivors are either fleeing or holed up in caves or towers or the ruins of their old communities. The voynix are killing them. You have the advantage that the voynix won’t attack while this Setebos… thing … in the pit is your captive. But within days, if not hours, that Setebos-louse will be strong enough to rip its way out of the pit and into your minds. Trust me, you don’t want to experience that. And, in the end, the voynix will come anyway.”

“All the more reason to keep the sonie to ourselves!” shouted the man named Caul.

Noman turned his hands palms-up. “Perhaps. But soon there will be no place on this Earth for you to flee. Do you think you’re the only ones with a Finder Function? Your functions have ceased to work—the voynix’s and the calibanis’ finder functions haven’t. They’ll find you. Even Setebos will find you when he’s finished gorging himself on your planet’s history.”

“You don’t seem to offer us any chance,” said Tom, the quiet medic.

“I am not,” said Noman, his voice rising now. “It is not for me to offer you a chance, although my trip may accidentally afford you one if I am successful. But the odds of my success are low—I won’t lie to you. You deserve the truth. But if something important does not change, sonie or no sonie, the odds of your success—of your survival—are zero.”

Daeman, who had sworn he would stay quiet during the discussion, heard himself shouting. “Can we go to the rings, Noman? The sonie would take us there—six at a time. It brought me home from Prospero’s Isle on the e-ring. Would we be safe in the orbital rings?”

All faces turned toward him. Not a single gaze moved to where the shimmering Moira stood not six feet to his right.

“No,” said Noman. “You would not be safe in the rings.”

The dark-haired woman named Edide stood suddenly. She seemed to be sobbing and laughing at the same time. “You’re not giving us a fucking chance!”

For the first time—maddeningly, infuriatingly—Odysseus/Noman smiled, his teeth white against his mostly gray beard. “It’s not for me to give you a chance,” he said harshly. “The Fates will either choose to do that or decline to do that. It is up to you today to give me a chance… or not.”

Ada stepped forward. “Let’s vote. I think that no one should abstain in this vote, since everything may depend on it. Those in favor of allowing Odysseus… I’m sorry, I mean Noman… to borrow our sonie, please hold up your right hand. Those opposed, keep your hands down.”

77

The city and battlefield of Troy—ancient Ilium—wasn’t much to look at from five thousand meters up.

“That’s it?” asked Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo from the troop carrier deck. “That’s where we were with the Greeks and Trojans fighting? That shrubby hill and bit of land?”

“Six thousand years ago,” said Mahnmut from his control room of The Dark Lady in the dropship’s cargo bay.

“And in another universe,” said Orphu from his corner of The Dark Lady’s own cargo bay.

“It doesn’t look like much,” said Suma IV from the controls of the dropship. “Can we move on?”

“One more circle, please,” said Mahnmut. “Can we go lower? Fly over the plain between the ridge and the sea? Or the beach?”

“No,” said Suma IV. “Use your optics to magnify. I don’t choose to run that close to the interdiction field dome over the dried-up Mediterranean Sea or get that low.”

“I was thinking of getting a little closer to allow Orphu’s radar and thermal imaging to get better signals,” said Mahnmut.

“I’m fine,” rumbled the intercom voice from the hold.

The dropship orbited again at five thousand meters, the westernmost part of its circle above the ruins on the hilltop and still more than a kilometer from where the Mediterranean Basin began. Mahnmut zoomed his image from the primary camera feed, shut off other inputs, and looked down with a strange sense of sadness.

The rubble of the ruins of the ancient stones where Ilium had once stood lay on a ridge running westward toward the curve of Aegean shore—it was never really a bay, just a bend where ancient ships had tied up to stakes and stone anchors. And where Agamemnon and all the Greek heroes had beached their hundreds of black ships.

To the west then, the Aegean and Mediterranean had stretched forever—the wine-dark sea—but now, through the slight shimmer of the post-human-created interdiction field that would cut all the dropship’s power in a millisecond if they flew into it, there stretched away only more dirt, more rock, distant green fields—the dry Mediterranean Basin. Also easily visible to the west were ancient islands that once rose from the sea—islands that Achilles had conquered before assaulting Troy: Imbros, Lemnos, and Tenedos, visible now only as steep, forest-covered hills with rocky bases meeting the sandy bottom of the Basin.

Between the now-dry Aegean and the ridge holding the ruins of Troy, Mahnmut could see a kilometer and a half or so of alluvial plain. It was a forest of scrub trees now, but the little moravec could easily see this plain as it was when he had been there with Odysseus, Achilles, Hector, and all the other warriors—about three curving miles of shallow sea fringed with marshes and sandy alluvial flats, the man-crowded beach, the sand dunes that had soaked up so much blood in the years of fighting there, the thousands of bright tents above the beach, then the wide plain between the beach and the city—wooded now, but stripped bare of all trees then after a decade of foraging for firewood for cooking fires and corpse fires.

To the north there was water still visible: the strait once called the Dardanelles, the Hellespont, dammed up by glowing forcefield hands of the same sort as between Gibraltar and Africa on the west end of the drained Mediterranean.

As if he were studying the same area with his radar and other instruments, Orphu said over their private circuit—“The post-humans must have built some huge drainage system underground or this entire area would be flooded now.”

“Yes,” sent Mahnmut, not really interested in the engineering or physics of the thing. He was thinking of Lord Byron and of Alexander the Great and of all the others who had made their pilgrimage to Ilium, Troy, this strangely sacred site.

No stone there is without a name. The words seemed just to appear in Mahnmut’s mind. Who had written that? Lucan? Perhaps. Probably.

On the hilltop now, only a few gray-white scars of disturbed rock showed, a tumble of stones, all without a name. Mahnmut realized that he was looking at the ruins of ruins—some of those scrapes and scars probably dated back to the Troy-fanatic and amateur archaeologist Schlie-mann’s careless digs and brutal excavations from when he first started digging in 1870—more than three thousand years ago on this true Earth.

It was noplace special now. The last name it had held on any human map was Hisarlik. Rocks, scrub trees, an alluvial plain, a high ridge looking north to the Dardanelles and west to the Aegean.

But in Mahnmut’s mind’s eye he could see precisely where the armies had clashed on the Plains of Scamander and the Plain of Simois. He could see where the walls and topless towers of Ilium had held their high place there, where the long ridge dropped down toward the sea. He could still make out a thicketed ridge in between the city and the sea—the Greeks had called it Thicket Ridge even then, but the priests and priestesses in the temples of Troy often referred to it as Mryine’s Mounded Tomb—and he remembered how he had watched Zeus’s face rise in the south as an atomic mushroom cloud not so many months ago.

Six thousand years ago.

As the dropship completed its last, high circling, Mahnmut could make out where the great Scaean Gate had held back the screaming Greeks—there had been no large wooden horse in the Iliad Mahnmut had seen firsthand, and the great, main lane inside past the marketplace and central fountains all leading to Priam’s palace, destroyed in the bombing more than ten months ago in Mahnmut’s time, and just northeast of the palace the great Temple to Athena. Where only rocks waited now and scrub trees grew, Mahnmut from Europa could see where the busy Dardanian Gate had been and the main watchtower and well just north of it where once Helen had…

“There’s nothing here,” said their pilot, Suma IV, over the intercom. “I’m leaving now.”

“Yes,” said Mahnmut.

“Yes,” rumbled Orphu over the same commline.

They flew north, retracting the slow-flight wings and breaking the sound barrier again. The echo of the sonic boom went unheard on both sides of the empty Dardanelles.

“Are you excited?” Mahnmut asked his friend over their private line. “We’ll be seeing Paris in a few minutes.”

“A crater where the center of Paris used to be,” answered Orphu. “I think that black hole millennia ago took out Proust’s apartment.”

“Still and all,” said Mahnmut, “it’s where he wrote. And for a while a fellow named James Joyce as well, if I remember correctly.” Orphu rumbled. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that you were obsessed with Joyce as well as Proust?” persisted Mahnmut. “It never came up.”

“But why those two as your primary focus, Orphu?”

“Why Shakespeare, Mahnmut? Why his sonnets rather than his plays? Why the Dark Lady and the Young Man rather than, say, Hamlet?”

“No, answer my question,” said Mahnmut. “Please.” There was a silence. Mahnmut listened to the ramjet engines behind and above them, the hiss of the oxygen flowing through umbilicals and ventilators, the static emptiness of the main comm lines.

Finally Orphu said, “Remember my spiel up in the Mab about how great human artists—singularities of genius—could bring new realities into existence? Or at least allow us to cross universal Branes to them?”

“How could I forget? None of us knew if you were serious.”

“I was serious,” rumbled Orphu. “My interest in human beings focused on their Twentieth through Twenty-second centuries, counting from Christ. I decided long ago that Proust and Joyce had been the consciousnesses that had helped midwife those centuries into being.”

“Not a positive recommendation, if I remember history correctly,”

Mahnmut said softly. “No. I mean, yes.” They flew in silence for a few more minutes. “Would you like to hear a poem I ran across when I was a little pup of a moravec, fresh from the growth bins and factory latices?” Mahnmut tried to imagine a newborn Orphu of Io. He gave up the effort. “Yes,” he said. “Tell me.” Mahnmut had never heard his friend rumble poetry before. It was an oddly pleasant sound—

Still Born

I.

Little Rudy Bloom, ruddy-cheeked in his mother’s womb Red light permeating his sleepy, unfocused watchings Molly clicking long knitting needles as she weaves red wool for him Feeling his small feet move against the inside of her Tiny fetus dreams consume him, preparing him for the smell of blankets

II.

A man gently pats his lips with a red napkin Eyes focused on a sea of clouds drifting behind high brick chimneys Submerged in the sudden memory of hawthorn stalks rubbing together in a storm Reaching small hands out towards fluttering pink petals The scents of days long past curl into the low wings of his nostrils

III.

Eleven days. Eleven times the lifespan of a tiny creature emerging from a cocoon Eleven hush-stained mornings of warmth and shadow creeping across floorboards Eleven thousand heartbeats before night fell and the ducks abandoned the far pond Eleven indicated by the long and short hands when she held him to her breast Eleven days they watched his pink body sleeping in ruddy wool

IV.

Fragments of the novel were bound in his imagination But loose pages drifted through the dark channels of his mind Some were blank, others contained nothing but footnotes Tediously he had suffered the contractions of his imagination But once in ink, the memories never survived the night

When the Ionian rumble died away on the intercom, Mahnmut was silent for a short while, trying to assess the quality of the thing. He had trouble doing so, but he knew it meant a lot to Orphu of Io—the giant moravec’s voice had almost trembled near the end.

“Who is it by?” asked Mahnmut.

“I don’t know,” said Orphu. “Some Twenty-first Century female poet whose name was lost with the rest of the Lost Era. Remember, I encountered this when I was young—before I’d really read Proust or Joyce or any other serious human writer—but this bit of verse cemented Joyce and Proust together for me as two facets of a single consciousness. A singularity of human genius and insight. I never quite got over that perception.”

“It’s rather like the first time I encountered Shakespeare’s sonnets …” began Mahnmut.

“Turn on your video feed relayed from the Queen Mab,” Suma IV ordered all hands aboard.

Mahnmut activated the feed.

Two human beings were copulating wildly on a broad bed of silk sheets and bright woolen tapestries. Their energy and earnestness was astounding to Mahnmut, who had read enough about human sexual intercourse, but who had never thought to look up a video recording of it from the archives.

“What is it?” asked Orphu over the private comm. “I’m getting wild telemetric data—blood pressure levels soaring, dopamine flowing, adrenaline, heartbeat pounding—some fight to the death somewhere?”

“Ah …” said Mahnmut. Then the figures rolled over, still joined and moving rhythmically, almost frenetically, and the moravec saw the man’s face clearly for the first time.

Odysseus. The woman appeared to be the Sycorax person who had greeted their Achaean passenger on the orbital asteroid city. Her breasts and buttocks seemed even larger now, unfettered as they were, although at this particular instant, the woman’s breasts were flattened against Odysseus’ chest.

“Um …” began Mahnmut again.

Suma IV saved him.

“That input isn’t important. Switch to the forward dropship cameras.”

Mahnmut did so. He knew that Orphu was turning to the thermal, radar, and other imaging data he was still capable of receiving.

They were approaching the black-hole-cratered Paris, but just as in the images taken from the Queen Mab, there was no crater visible, only a dome-cathedral seemingly spun of webbed blue-ice.

Suma IV radioed the Mab: “Where is our many-handed friend who built this thing?”

“No Brane Holes visible anywhere we can see from orbit,” replied Asteague/Che at once. “Neither our ship viewers nor the cameras on the satellites we seeded can find it. The thing seems to have finished feasting on Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the other sites for the time being. Perhaps it’s returned home to Paris.”

“It has,” said Orphu on the shared comm. “Check the thermal imaging. Something very big and very ugly is nested right in the center of that blue spiderweb, just beneath the highest part of that dome. There are a lot of thermal vents there—it seems to be heating its nest with warmth from the crater—but it’s there, all right. You can almost see the hundreds of oversized fingers under the warm areas of the glowing brain in the deep-thermal imaging.”

“Well,” said Mahnmut over his private line, “at least it’s your Paris. Proust’s City of…”

Afterward, Mahnmut would never understand how Suma IV reacted so quickly, even while jacked into the dropship’s controls and central computer.

The six bolts of lightning leaped upward from different points around the giant blue dome. Only the dropship’s altitude and its pilot’s instantaneous reflexes saved them.

The dropship shifted from ramjets to scramjets, hurtled sideways in a 75-g bank, dove, rolled, and then climbed toward the north, but the six streaks of billion-volt lightning still missed them only by a few hundred meters. The implosion of air and shock wave of thunder flipped the dropship over twice, but Suma IV never lost control. The wings retracted to fins and the dropship ran for it.

Suma IV banked again, rolled deliberately, triggered full-active stealth, popped flares, and blanketed the air above the Paris blue-ice cathedral-dome with electronic interference.

A dozen fireballs rose from the ice-buried city, hurtling skyward at Mach 3, seeking them, seeking them, accelerating, seeking them. Mahnmut watched the radar track with something more than casual interest and knew that Orphu, with his direct sensory radar feed, must be feeling the plasma-missiles closing on him.

They did not find the dropship. Suma IV already had them scramjetting at Mach 5 and rising above thirty-two thousand meters and climbing into the fringes of space. The fireball-meteors exploded at different altitudes below them, their shock waves overlapping like a dozen violent ripples on pond.

“Why, that fucker …” began Orphu.

“Silence,” snapped Suma IV. The dropship rolled, dove, turned south, expanded its sphere of radar and electronic interference, and climbed again toward space. No fireballs or lightning came up from the city that was falling behind so quickly—six hundred kilometers below and behind already and getting smaller by the second.

“I guess our many-handed brain friend has weapons,” said Mahnmut.

“So do we,” came Mep Ahoo’s voice on the comm. “I think we should nuke him… warm up his nest for him a little bit. Ten million degrees Fahrenheit would do for a start.”

“Quiet!” snapped Suma IV from the cockpit.

Prime Integrator Asteague/Che’s voice came over the common band. “My friends, we… you… have a problem down there.”

“Tell us about it,” rumbled Orphu of Io, still forgetting that he was still on the common radio link.

“No,” said the Prime Integrator, “I am not speaking of the many-handed creature’s attack on you. I’m talking about a more serious problem. And just beneath your current trajectory track. Our sensors might not have picked it up if they had not been following you.”

“More serious?” sent Mahnmut.

“Much more serious,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che. “And not just one serious problem, I’m afraid… but seven hundred and sixty-eight of them.”

78

“PROCEED WITH YOUR APPEAL,” booms the Demogorgon.

Hephaestus nudges Achilles to signify that he will do the speaking, makes an awkward bow—a series of iron spheres and one glass bubble bobbling—and says, “Your Demogorgoness, Lord Kronos and other respected Titanisms, Immortal Hours, and… honorable other things. My friend Achilles and I come here today not to appeal, not to ask you for a boon, but to share essential information with all of you. Information you need to know and will want to know. Information which…”

“SPEAK UP, CRIPPLED GOD.”

Hephaestus forces a smile through his beard, grits his teeth hard, and repeats his preamble.

“SPEAK THEN.”

Achilles wonders if Kronos and the other Titans, not to mention the huge, indescribable entities surrounding them, things with odd names like the Immortal Hours and Charioteers, are going to take an active part in this meeting or if the Demogorgon has the floor until it—he—she—it—formally recognizes someone or something else to speak.

Hephaestus then surprises him.

From his bulky backpack—a clumsy iron and canvas frame holding what Achilles imagined must be tanks of air—the god of artifice pulls a brass ovoid studded with glass lenses. He carefully sets the device on the top of a boulder between him and the looming Demogorgon and fusses with various switches and settings. Then the dwarf-god says, shouting and amplifying his helmet speakers to the maximum, “Your Demogorgonoidness, most noble and frightening Hours, your most majestic Titans and Titanesses—Kronos, Rhea, Krios, Koios, Hyperion, Iapetos, Theia, Helios, Selene, Eos, and all others of Titan-persuasion assembled here—your many-armed Healernesses, rudely shaped Charioteers—all honored Beings out there in the fog and ash—rather than make my own case today, the case for removing the pretender Zeus from the throne for attempting to usurp all divinity unto himself—asking you to depose him, or at least oppose him, for presumptuously claiming all worlds and universes his own from this day forth to the end of time, I shall allow you to see an actual event. For even as we huddle here on this lava-riddled shitheap of a world, Zeus has called all the Olympian immortals into the Great Hall of the Gods. I left my camera concealed there but broadcasting live to a repeater station in Hellas Basin—the immortal Nyx’s Brane Hole allows us to receive this broadcast with less than a second of delay time. Behold!”

Hephaestus fiddles with more switches, throws a toggle.

Nothing happens.

The god of fire bites his lip, curses into his microphone, and fiddles with the brass device some more. It blinks, whirs, flickers, and falls silent again.

Achilles begins to slide his god-killing blade from its place in his belt.

“Behold!” cries Hephaestus, again using full amplification.

This time the brass device projects a rectangle almost a hundred yards wide into the air above them all, in front of the Demogorgon and the hundreds of hulking forms in the red lava-light and smoke around them. The rectangle shows nothing but static and snow.

“Oh, fuck me,” growls Hephaestus, each word quite audible over his helmet speakers. He hurries to the device and wiggles some metal rods which remind Achilles of the ears of a rabbit.

The huge image above them leaps into clarity. It is a holographic projection, very deep, fully three-dimensional, in living color, striking the eye like a wide window into the actual Hall of the Gods itself. The visuals are accompanied by surround-sound—Achilles can hear the nearby whisper of the hundreds upon hundreds of the waiting gods’ sandals scuffing softly on marble. When Hermes softly breaks wind, it is audible to everyone here.

The Titans, Titanesses, Hours, Charioteers, insectoid Healers, unnamed monstrous shapes—everyone except the Demogorgon—gasp, each in its own inhuman way. Not at Hermes’ indiscretion, but at the immediacy and impact of the still widening and encircling holographic projection. By the time the band of light and motion closes around them here, the illusion of being among the immortals in the Great Hall of the Gods is very powerful. Achilles actually pulls his blade further free, thinking that Zeus on his golden throne and the thousand Olympian gods standing around them must certainly hear the noise in their midst and turn to see them all huddled here in the reek and gloom of Tartarus.

The Olympian gods do not turn. It’s a one-way broadcast.

Zeus—at least fifty feet tall on his throne—leans forward, scowls out at the ranks upon ranks of assembled gods, goddesses, Furies, and Erinyeses, and begins to speak. Achilles can clearly hear the god’s newfound ultimate self-importance in the archaic cadence of each slow syllable:

“You congregated powers of this Olympos, you who share the glory and the strength of him ye serve, rejoice! Henceforth I am omnipotent. All else has been subdued to me; alone the souls of man, like unextinguished fire, yet burns towards heaven with fierce reproach, and doubt, and lamentation, and reluctant prayer, hurling up insurrection, which might make our antique empire insecure, though built on eldest faith, and hell’s coeval, fear; And though my curses through the pendulous air, like snow on herbless peaks, fall flake by flake, and cling to it, though under my wrath’s night it climbs the crags of life, step after step, which wound it, as ice wounds unsandaled feet, it yet remains supreme o’er misery, aspiring, unrepressed, yet soon to fall:

Zeus stands suddenly and the radiance flowing from him is so brilliant that a thousand immortal gods and one very mortal man in a sweaty chameleon suit—the stealth-suited man is quite visible to Hephaestus’ camera and thus to everyone here in Tartarus—take a hesitant step backward as Zeus continues.

“Pour forth heaven’s wine, Idaean Ganymede, and let it fill the Daedal cups like fire, and from the flower-inwoven soil divine ye all triumphant harmonies arise, as dew from earth under the twilight stars: Drink! Be the nectar circling through your veins the soul of joy, ye ever-living gods, till exaltation bursts in one wide voice like music from Elysian winds.

And thou now attend beside me, veiled in the light of the desire which makes thee one with me, as I become God Ascendant, the single God to thee, the one and true Omnipotent God, Almighty God, true Lord of all Eternity!”

Hephaestus shuts off the brass and glass projector. The huge, circular window binding Tartarus to the Hall of the Gods on Olympos flicks out of existence and everything returns to cinder, soot, stink, and red gloom. Achilles shifts his feet farther apart, hefts his shield, and holds his god-killing knife out of sight behind that shield. He has no idea what will happen next.

For the longest moments, nothing does happen. Achilles expects shouts, cries, demands that Hephaestus prove that the images and voices had been real, Titans bellowing, the big Healer bugs scuttling around on rocks—but there is no movement, no sound from the hundreds of gigantic figures still gathered around. The air is so thick with smoke, the red-lava glare so filtered by the ash in the air, that Achilles silently thanks the gods—or someone—for the thermskin goggles he’s wearing that allow him to see what’s going on. He sneaks a glance at the Brane Hole that Hephaestus had said Nyx—Goddess Night herself—had opened for him. The Hole’s still there, about two hundred yards away, perhaps fifty feet high. If fighting starts, if the Demogorgon decides to eat both dwarf-god and Achaean hero as a snack, Achilles plans to make a run for that Brane Hole, even though he knows he’ll have to hack his way through giants and beasties every foot of the way. He’s prepared to do so.

The silence stretches. Dark winds howl over misshapen boulders and more misshapen sentient forms. The volcano burbles and belches but the Demogorgon does not make a noise.

Finally, it speaks—“ALL SPIRITS ARE ENSLAVED WHICH SERVE THINGS EVIL. NOW THOU KNOWEST WHETHER ZEUS BE SUCH OR NO.”

“Evil??” roars Kronos the Titan. “My son is mad! He is the usurper of all usurpers.”

Rhea, Zeus’s mother, has an even louder voice. “Zeus rides the wreckage of his own will. He is the scorn of the earth and the bane of Olympos. He needs to suffer the outcast of his own abandonment. He must wither in destined pain and be hanged from hell in his own adamantine chains.”

The Healer-monster speaks and Achilles is shocked to hear that its voice is very feminine. “Zeus reaches too far. He has first mimicked and now mocked the very Fates.”

One of the Immortal Hours booms down from its rocky precipice—“Downfall demands no direr name than this—Zeus Usurper.”

Achilles grabs the nearest shaking boulder, thinking that the volcano behind the Demogorgon is erupting, but it is only the muted rumble from the assembled Beings.

Kronos’ brother, the shaggy Titan Krios, speaks from where he stands amidst a lava flow. “This pretender must sink beneath the wide waves of his own ruin. I myself will ascend to Olympos where once we ruled and drag this empty thing down to hell, even as a vulture and a snake outspent drop, twisted in inexplicable fight.”

“Awful shape!” cries a many-armed Charioteer to the Demogorgon. “Speak!”

“MERCIFUL GOD REIGNS,” echoes the shapeless Demogorgon giant’s voice amid the Tartarus peaks and valleys. “ZEUS IS NOT ALMIGHTY GOD. ZEUS MUST NO LONGER REIGN ON OLYMPOS.”

Achilles had been sure that the veiled Demogorgon was limbless, but somehow the limbless giant raises a robed arm that was not visible a second earlier, extends something like terrible fingers.

The Brane Hole two hundred yards behind Hephaestus rises as if on command, hovers above them all, widens, and begins to drop.

“WORDS ARE QUICK AND WORDS ARE VAIN,” booms the Demogorgon as the burning red and still-widening circle of flame drops down around them all. “THE SINGLE SURE AND FINAL ANSWER MUST BE PAIN.”

Hephaestus grabs Achilles’ arm. The dwarf-god is grinning wildly, insanely, through his beard. “Hang on, kid,” he says.

79

It was a desperate, almost insane, turn of events, but Mahnmut couldn’t have been happier.

The dropship had hovered very low and dropped Mahnmut’s The Dark Lady submersible into the ocean about fifteen kilometers north of the troublesome critical-singularity coordinates. Suma IV explained that he didn’t want the splash setting off the seven hundred sixty-eight detected black holes—presumably on warheads in the the ancient, sunken sub also detected—and no one gave him an argument.

If Mahnmut had owned a human mouth, he would have been grinning like an idiot. The Dark Lady was designed and built for beneath-the-ice, black-as-inside-God’s-belly, horrific-pressure exploration and salvage work on Jupiter’s moon Europa, but it worked just fine in Earth’s Atlantic Ocean.

Better than fine.

“I wish you could see this,” Mahnmut said over their private comm. He and Orphu of Io were on their own again. None of the other moravecs had shown any great interest in approaching the seven hundred sixty-eight nascent but close-to-critical black holes and the drop-ship had already flown away on Suma IV’s continued reconnaissance—of the eastern seaboard of North America this time.

“I can ‘see’ the radar, sonar, thermal, and other data,” said Orphu.

“Yes, but it’s not the same. There’s so much light here in Earth’s ocean. Even here below twenty meters depth. Even full Jupiter-glow never illuminated my oceans—if there was a lead, a bare patch, above—deeper than a few meters.”

“I’m sure it’s beautiful,” said Orphu.

“It really is,” burbled Mahnmut, not noticing or caring if his big friend had been speaking ironically. “The sunlight shafts down, illuminating everything in a dappled-green, glowing way. The Lady isn’t sure of what to make of it.”

“She notices the light?”

“Of course,” said Mahnmut. “Her job is to report everything to me, to choose the right data and sensory feeds at the right time, and she’s self-aware enough to note all this difference in light, gravity and beauty here. She likes it, too.”

“Good,” rumbled Orphu of Io. “You’d better not ruin it by telling her why we’re here and what we’re swimming toward.”

“She knows,” said Mahnmut, not letting the big moravec ruin his buoyant mood. He watched as the sonar reported a ridgeline ahead—the ridge the wreck was on—rising to a silty bottom less than eighty meters below the surface. He still couldn’t get over how shallow this part of Earth’s ocean was. There was no spot in the Europan seas less than a thousand meters deep and here a ridgeline brought the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean up to not much more than sixty meters beneath the surface.

“I’ve run the full program of the disarmament protocol Suma IV and Cho Li downloaded to us,” continued Orphu. “Have you had time yet to study the details?”

“Not really.” Mahnmut had the long protocol in his active memory, but he’d been busy overseeing The Dark Lady’s exit from the dropship and the submersible’s adaptation to that beautiful, wonderful environment. His beloved sub was as good as new—better than new. The Phobos ‘vec mechanics had done a wonderful job on his boat. And every system that had worked well on Europa before their devastating crash landing in Mars’ Tethys Sea the previous year now worked better than well here in Earth’s gentle sea.

“The good news about the disarming of each black-hole warhead is that it’s theoretically doable,” said Orphu of Io. “We have the tools aboard—including the ten-thousand-degree cutting torch and the focused forcefield generators—and in many of the necessary steps, I can be your arms while you’re my visible-light spectrum eyes. We’ll have to work together on every warhead, but they’re theoretically disarmable.”

“That is good news,” said Mahnmut.

“The bad news is that if we work straight through, without coffee breaks or restroom stops, it’s going to take us a little over nine hours per black hole—not per MRVed warhead, mind you, but for each near-critical black hole.”

“With seven hundred sixty-eight black holes …” began Mahnmut.

“Six thousand nine hundred twelve hours,” said Orphu. “And since we’re on Earth and moravec standard time is real planetary time here, it’s two hundred forty-seven days, twelve hours, if everything goes according to plan and we don’t run into any real problems…”

“Well …” began Mahnmut. “I guess we deal with this factor when we find the wreck and see if we can get to the warheads at all.”

“It’s odd getting direct sonar input,” said Orphu. “It’s not so much like better hearing, it’s more as if my skin had suddenly enlarged to…”

“There it is,” interrupted Mahnmut. “I see it. The wreck.”

Perspectives and visual horizons were different there, of course, on the so-much-larger Earth than the Mars he’d almost gotten used to, even more out of proportion to perceived distances on the tiny Europa, where he had spent all the other standard years of his existence. But sonar readings, deep radar, mass-detection devices, and his own eyes told Mahnmut that the stern of this wreck was about five hundred meters dead ahead, lying on the silty bottom just a little below The Dark Lady’s depth of seventy meters, and that the crumpled boat itself was around fifty-five meters long.

“Good God,” whispered Mahnmut. “Can you see this on radar and sonar?”

“Yes.”

The wreck lay on its belly, bow-down, but the bow itself was invisible beyond the shimmering forcefield that held back the Atlantic Ocean from the dry strip of land that ran from Europe to North America. What made Mahnmut stare in amazement was the wall of light from the Breach wall itself. Here at more than seventy meters depth, where even in Earth’s sunlit oceans the bottom should be inky black, dappled sunlight illuminated the terminus of water and dappled the moss-green hull of the sunken sub itself.

“I can see what killed it,” said Mahnmut. “Does your radar and sonar pick up that blasted bit of hull above what should be the engine room? Just behind where the hull humps up to the long missile compartment?”

“Yes.”

“I think some sort of depth charge or torpedo or missile exploded there,” said Mahnmut. “See how the hull plates are all bent inward there. It cracked the base of the sail and bent it forward as well.”

“What sail?” asked Orphu. “You mean a sail like the triangular one on the felucca we took west up the Valles Marineris?”

“No. I mean that part that sticks up way forward, almost to the force-field wall there. In the early submarine days, they called it a conning tower. After they began building nuclear subs like this boomer in the Twentieth Century, they started calling the conning tower a sail.”

“Why?” asked Orphu of Io.

“I don’t know why,” said Mahnmut. “Or rather, I have it in my memory banks somewhere, but it’s not important. I don’t want to take the time to do a search.”

“What’s a boomer?”

“A boomer is the early Lost Era humans’ pet name for a ballistic missile submarine like this,” said Mahnmut.

“They gave pet names to machines built for the sole purpose of destroying cities, human lives, and the planet?”

“Yes,” said Mahnmut. “This boomer was probably built a century or two before it was sunk here. Perhaps built by one of the major powers then and sold to a smaller group. Something sank it here long before this groove in the Atlantic Ocean was created.”

“Can we get to the black hole warheads?” asked Orphu.

“Hang on. Let’s find out.”

Mahnmut inched The Dark Lady forward. He wanted nothing to do with the forcefield wall and the empty air beyond it so he never moved closer to that forcefield than the missile compartment of the wreck itself. He had The Dark Lady play powerful searchlights all over the wreck even as his instruments probed the interior of the ancient sub.

“This isn’t right,” he murmured aloud on their private line.

“What’s not right?” asked Orphu.

“The sub is overgrown with anemones and other sea life, the interior is rich with life, but it’s as if the sub sank here a century or so ago, not the two and a half millennia or so it would have to have gone down.”

“Could someone have been sailing it just a century or so ago?” asked Orphu.

“No. Not unless all our observation data has been wrong. The old-style humans have been almost without technology the last two thousand years down here. Even if someone had found this sub and managed to launch it, who would’ve sunk it?”

“The post-humans?”

“I don’t think so,” said Mahnmut. “The posts wouldn’t have used something so crude as a torpedo or depth charge on this thing. And they wouldn’t have left the black hole warheads here ticking away.”

“But the warheads are here,” said Orphu. “I can see the tops of them on the deep-radar return, with the critical-one black hole containment fields inside. We’d better get to work.”

“Wait,” said Mahnmut. He had sent remote vehicles no larger than his hand into the wreck and now the data was flowing back through microthin umbilicals. One of the remotes had tapped into the command and control center’s AI.

Mahnmut and Orphu listened to the last words of the twenty-six crew members as they prepared to launch the ballistic missiles that would destroy their planet.

When the testimonials and data flow were finished, the two moravecs were silent for a long minute.

“Oh, what a world,” whispered Orphu at last, “that hath such people in it.”

“I’m going to come down and get you ready to go EVA,” said Mahnmut, his voice a dull monotone. “We’ll look at this problem from close up.”

“Can we look into the dry area?” asked Orphu. “The gap?”

“I’m not going near it,” said Mahnmut. “The forcefield might destroy us—the Lady’s instruments can’t even decide what the field is made of—and I promise you that this submersible of ours is no good in air and on dry land. We’re not going near the breach.”

“Did you look at the dropship’s aerial photos of the bow of this wreck?” asked Orphu.

“Sure. I’ve got them on the screen in front of me,” said Mahnmut. “Some serious damage to the bow, but that doesn’t concern us. We can get at the missiles back here.”

“No, I meant the other things lying around on the dry ground out there,” said Orphu. “My radar data might not be as good as your optic images, but it almost looks like one of those lumps lying there is a human being.”

Mahnmut peered at his screen. The dropship had shot an extensive series of images before it had flown off and he flicked through all of them. “If it was a human being,” he said, “it’s been dead a long time. It’s flattened, limbs splayed wrong, desiccated. I don’t think it was—I think our minds are just trying to see that shape amidst random stuff. There’s quite a debris field out there.”

“All right,”said Orphu obviously aware of their priorities. “What do I have to do to get ready here?”

“Just stay where you are,” said Mahnmut. “I’m coming down to get you. We’ll go out together.”

The Dark Lady sat on its stubby legs not ten meters west of the stern of the wreck. Orphu had wondered how they would exit through the cargo bay doors set in the belly of the Europan submersible with the ship sitting on the bottom of the ocean, but that question had been settled when Mahnmut had extended the landing legs.

Mahnmut had entered the cargo bay through the interior airlock and tapped into direct comm contact with the big Ionian while the submersible pilot carefully flooded the hold with Earth ocean water, equalized pressures, and then opened the cargo bay door. They’d disconnected Orphu from his various umbilicals and the two had gently dropped to the bottom of the ocean.

As cracked and ancient as Orphu’s carapace was, he didn’t leak. When he showed curiosity at the pressure readings his shell and other body parts were reading, Mahnmut explained.

The atmospheric pressure up above, on a theoretical beach or just above the surface of the ocean here, held relatively steady at 14.7 pounds per square inch. About every 10 meters—actually every 33 feet, Mahnmut said, using the old Lost Era measurements with which Orphu was equally comfortable—that pressure increased by one atmosphere. Thus at 33 feet of depth, every square inch of the moravecs’ outer integument would feel 29.4 pounds of pressure. At 66 feet, they would be under three atmospheres, and so forth. At the depth of this wreck—more than 230 feet—the sea pressure was exerting eight atmospheres on every square inch of The Dark Lady’s hull and the moravecs’ bodies.

They were built to withstand far greater pressures, although Orphu was used to negative pressure differentials as he worked in the radiation-and sulfur-filled space around the moon Io.

And speaking of radiation, there was a lot of it around. They both registered it and the Lady monitored it and relayed her readings. It was not dangerous to moravecs of their design, but the feeling of the neutron and gamma rays pouring through them caught their attention.

Mahnmut explained that under this pressure, if they had been human beings and if they had been breathing tanked standard Earth air—a mixture of twenty-one percent oxygen with seventy-nine percent nitrogen—the multiplying and expanding nitrogen bubbles under eight atmospheres would be playing havoc with them, giving them nitrogen narcosis, distorting their judgment and emotions, and not allowing them to surface without hours of slow decompression at different depths. But the moravecs were breathing pure O-two, with their rebreathing systems compensating for the added pressure.

“Shall we look at our adversaries?” asked Orphu of Io.

Mahnmut led the way. As careful as he was climbing the curved hull of the wreck, silt rose around them like a terrestrial dust storm.

“Can you still see by fine radar?” asked Mahnmut. “This crap is blinding me on visual frequencies. I’ve read about this in all the old Earth-based diving stories. The first diver at a wreck site on the bottom or inside the wreck would get a view—all the others would have zero viz—at least until the silt and crud settles.”

“Zero viz, huh?” said Orphu. “Well, welcome to the club, amigo. The detailed radar I use in the sulphur-mess vacuum near Io serves to probe through these little silt clouds just fine. I see the hull, the hump of the missile compartment, the whatchamacallit—the broken sail—thirty meters forward. If you need help, just ask and I’ll lead you by the hand.”

Mahnmut grunted and switched his primary vision to thermal and radar frequencies.

They drifted over the missile compartment, five meters above the warheads themselves, both moravecs using their built-in thrusters to maneuver, each being careful not to squirt any thrust in the direction of the tumbled warheads.

And tumbled they were. There were forty-eight missile tubes and forty-eight missile tube hatches wide open.

These hatches look heavy, said Mahnmut over their tightbeam. Everything they said and saw, of course, including tightbeam, was being relayed up to the Queen Mab and the dropship via a relay radio buoy Mahnmut had deployed from The Dark Lady.

Ophu had been gripping one of the huge hatches—its diameter as large as the Ionian—and now he said, “Seven tons.”

Even after the crew had ordered the sub’s AI to open the forty-eight missile tube hatches, the missiles themselves still had been covered by blue fiberglass domes that held out the sea. Mahnmut saw at a glance how the missiles—propelled to the surface by huge charges of nitrogen gas, their engines to ignite only after each missile reached air—would easily burst through those fiberglass covers.

But the missiles had not exploded from their tubes in rising bubbles of nitrogen, nor had their engines ignited. The fiberglass dome-covers had long since worn away; only brittle blue fragments remained.

“What a mess,” said Orphu.

Mahnmut nodded. Whatever had hit the stern of The Sword of Allah, breaking its back just above the engine room, severing its propulsion jets, and sending the ocean rushing in through the length of the boomer as a wall of shock wave and seawater, had breached the various missile compartments and tumbled the missiles themselves. It looked like a heap of ancient straw. In some cases the warheads were still pointing vaguely upward, but in others the ancient, corroded rocket engines and their solid fuel were at the top and the warheads buried in silt.

Forget that easy six thousand nine hundred twelve hours of work, tight-beamed Orphu. It’ll take that long just to get to some of those warheads. And odds are overwhelming that any serious torch cutting or twisting on one will detonate another one.

Yeah, said Mahnmut. There was no silt obscuring his view now and he looked at the tangled mess primarily on his optical frequencies.

“Do either of you have a suggestion?” asked Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.

Mahnmut almost jumped. He’d known they were being monitored by everyone on the Mab, but he had been so absorbed with studying the wreckage that the connection had almost slipped his mind.

“Yes,” said Orphu of Io, switching to the common band. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

He described the procedure as succinctly and nontechnically as he could. Rather than try to disarm each warhead through the long protocol the Prime Integrators had downloaded, the Ionian now planned for Mahnmut and him to do it the quick and messy way. Mahnmut would bring The Dark Lady right above the wreck, extending her landing legs to full length until she was squatting over the boomer like a mother hen on her nest. They’d use all the ship’s belly searchlights to illuminate their work. Then Orphu and Mahnmut would separately use the torches to cut each warhead away from its missile, using a simple chain and pulley system to haul the nose cones directly up into The Dark Lady’s cargo hold and setting them in place in cargo baffles there like eggs in a carton.

“Isn’t there a great chance of the black holes going critical during this rough and tumble process?” asked Cho Li from the bridge of the Queen Mab.

“Yeah,” rumbled Orphu over the comm, “but the odds are one hundred percent that one of the black holes will activate if we spend a year or more futzing around with them. We’re doing it this way.”

Mahnmut touched one of the Ionian’s manipulators and nodded agreement, sure that his nod would be picked up by Orphu’s close radar.

Suma IV’s stern voice broke in over the commlink. “And what do you propose to do with the forty-eight warheads with their seven hundred sixty-eight black holes once you get them loaded in your submersible?”

“You’re going to pick us up,” said Mahnmut. “The dropship will haul The Dark Lady and its bellyful of death into outer space and we’ll send the holes on their way.”

“The dropship isn’t configured to fly out beyond the rings,” snapped Suma IV. “And the leukocyte robotic attack drones in the e—and p-rings will certainly mob us on the way up.”

“That’s your problem,” rumbled Orphu. “We’re going to get to work now. It should take us ten to twelve hours to hack and cut these warheads free and load them into The Dark Lady. When we break surface, you’d better have a plan. We know you have other spacecraft than the Mab up there on this mission—stealthed, out beyond the rings, whatever. You’d better have one ready to meet the dropship in low Earth orbit and take this mess off our hands. We don’t want to have come all this way to Earth just to destroy it.”

“Acknowledge your transmission,” said Asteague/Che. “Please be advised that we have a visitor up here. A small spacecraft—a sonie, I believe—is rendezvousing with Sycorax’s orbital isle as I speak.”

80

There was no ceremony surrounding Noman’s departure. One minute he was in the hovering sonie and chatting with Daeman, Hannah, and Tom who were standing beside it, and the next second the sonie had tilted almost vertically, its forcefield pressing Noman into the mat, and then it shot skyward like a flechette, disappearing into the low, gray clouds in seconds.

Ada felt cheated. She’d wanted her last words with the friend she’d once known as Odysseus.

The vote to allow Noman to borrow the sonie had been decided by one vote. The last vote—the deciding vote—had been cast by a man named Elian, the bald leader of the six Hughes Town refugees who had come in with Hannah and Noman on the skyraft, not even one of the Ardis survivors.

The Ardis people who had voted against losing the sonie were furious. There were demands for a recount. Flechette rifles actually had been raised in anger, along with shouting voices.

Ada had stepped into the middle of the melee and announced in a loud, calm voice that the issue had been decided. Noman was to be allowed to borrow the sonie but would return it as soon as possible. In the meantime, they would have the sky-raft that Noman and Hannah had cobbled together in the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu—the sonie could carry only six; the sky-raft could haul up to fourteen people at a time if they had to make a run for the island. This matter was settled.

The flechette rifles had been lowered, but the grumbling continued. Old friends of Ada’s refused to meet her gaze in the hours afterward and she knew that she’d used up the last of her capital as leader of the Ardis survivors.

Now Noman and the sonie were gone and Ada had never felt lonelier. She touched her slightly bulging belly and thought, Little person, son or daughter of Harman, if this was a mistake that endangers you, I shall be sorry to the last second of my life.

“Ada?” said Daeman. “Can I have a word in private with you?”

They walked out beyond the north palisade to where Hannah had once kept her scaffolded hearth working. Daeman told her about his meeting with the post-human who called herself Moira. He described how she looked exactly like a young Savi and how she was invisible to the rest of them as she stood near him during the meeting and the vote.

Ada shook her head slowly. “None of that makes any sense, Daeman. Why would a post-human appear in Savi’s body—stay invisible to the rest of us? How could she? Why would she?”

“I don’t know,” said Daeman.

“Did she have anything else to say?”

“She promised—before the meeting—to tell me something about Harman after the meeting if she could attend.”

“And?” said Ada. She felt her heart pounding so wildly that it might have been the child stirring within her, as eager as she to hear the news.

“All the Moira-ghost said afterward was ‘Remember that Noman’s coffin was Noman’s coffin,’ ” said Daeman.

Ada made him repeat that twice and said, “That makes no sense either.”

“I know,” said Daeman. He looked crestfallen, shoulders slumped. “I tried to make her explain but then she was… gone. Just disappeared.”

She stared hard at him. “Are you sure this happened, Daeman? We’ve all been working too hard, sleeping too little, worrying too much. Are you sure this Moira-ghost was real?”

Daeman stared hard back at her, his gaze as angrily defensive as hers was angrily doubtful, but he said nothing else.

“Remember that Noman’s coffin was Noman’s coffin,” muttered Ada. She looked around. People were going about their early afternoon chores, but the work groups had now broken themselves into clusters of those who had voted the same. Neither side was speaking to the bald man Elian. Ada fought off the urge to sob.

Neither Noman nor the sonie returned that day. Nor the next. Nor the next.

On the third day, Ada went up in the wobbly sky-raft with Hannah at the controls, accompanying Daeman’s hunting party out beyond the circle of voynix and trying to get an estimate of how many of the headless, carapaced killers were out there. It was a beautiful morning—no clouds at all, a blue sky and warmer winds promising spring—and she could easily see that the number of voynix pressing into their two-mile radius from the Pit had grown.

“It’s hard for me to guess,” Ada whispered to Daeman although they were a thousand feet above the monsters. “There must be three or four hundred just visible in that meadow. We never had to count large numbers of things growing up. What do you think? Fifteen thousand in the whole encircling mass? More?”

“More, I think,” Daeman said calmly. “I think there are thirty to forty thousand of the things surrounding us now.”

“Don’t they ever get tired of standing there?” asked Ada. “Don’t they have to eat? Drink?”

“Evidently not,” said Daeman. “Back when we thought they were servant-machines, I never saw one eat or drink or get tired, did you?”

Ada said nothing. Those times seemed too remote to think about, even though they had ended less than a year earlier.

“Fifty thousand,” muttered Daeman. “Perhaps there are fifty thousand here now, and more faxing in every day.”

Hannah flew them farther west to find game and fresh meat.

On the fourth day, the Setebos baby in the Pit had grown to the size of a yearling calf—one of their yearling calves, now all slaughtered by voynix, of course, but a calf that was only a pulsating gray brain with a score of pink hands on its belly, yellow eyes, pulsating orifices, and more three-fingered hands leaping out on gray stalks.

Mommy, Mommy, whispered the thing in Ada’s mind, in all their minds. It’s time for me to come out now. This pit is too small and I am too hungry to stay here any longer.

It was early evening, less than an hour from twilight and another long, dark winter night. The group gathered near the Pit. Men and women still tended to stand near only those who had voted as they had on the loan of the sonie. Everyone now carried a flechette weapon, although crossbows were kept close to hand in reserve.

Casman, Kaman, Greogi, and Edide stood over the Pit with their rifles aimed at the large thing in the hole. Others gathered close.

“Hannah,” said Ada, “is the sky-raft fully provisioned?”

“Yes,” said the younger woman. “All of the first trip crates are aboard and still room for ten people on the first trip. We can get fourteen people aboard on every trip after that.”

“And what time are you down to in rehearsing the trip to the island and the unpacking of the crates?” asked Ada.

“Forty-two minutes,” said Laman, rubbing the stumps of his missing fingers on his right hand. “Thirty-five minutes with just people. It takes a few minutes to get people aboard or off.”

“That’s not good enough,” said Ada.

Hannah stepped closer to the fire they kept burning near the Pit.

“Ada, the trip to the island takes fifteen minutes each way. The machine can’t fly any faster.”

“The sonie would have been there in less than a minute,” said Loes, one of the angriest of the Ardis survivors. “We could all have been delivered there in less than ten minutes.”

“We don’t have the sonie now,” Ada said. She heard the lack of affect in her own voice. Without meaning to, she glanced to the southwest, down toward the river and the island, but also toward the woods where fifty to sixty thousand voynix waited.

Noman had been right. Even if the entire colony of humans here escaped to the island, the voynix would be on them there in hours—perhaps minutes. Even though the Ardis faxnode was still nonfunctioning—they kept two people there at the pavilion day and night to keep testing it—the voynix were faxing. Somehow, they were faxing. There was nowhere on earth, Ada realized, that they would be free of the killers.

“Let’s get back to making dinner,” she called above the murmuring. Everyone could feel the Setebos spawn’s clammy voice in his or her mind.

Mommy, Daddy, it’s time for me to come out now. Open the grill, Daddy, Mommy, or I will. I’m stronger now. I’m hungry now. I want to come meet you now.

Greogi, Daeman, Hannah, Elian, Boman, Edide, and Ada sat talking late into the night. Above them the equatorial and polar rings whirled silently, turning as they always had. The Big Dipper was low in the north. There was a crescent moon.

“I think tomorrow, first light, we abandon the idea of the island and begin evacuating as many people as possible to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu,” said Ada. “We should have done it weeks ago.”

“It would take weeks for this stupid sky-raft to get to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu,” said Hannah. “And it may break down again and never get there. Without Noman to fix it, the people on the sky-raft will be stranded.”

“We’re dead if it breaks down here as well,” said Daeman. He touched Hannah’s shoulder as the young woman seemed to slump. “You’ve done an amazing job keeping it working, Hannah, but this is a technology we just don’t understand.”

“What technology do we understand?” muttered Boman.

“Crossbows,” said Edide. “We were getting damned good at building crossbows.”

No one laughed. After a few minutes, Elian said, “Tell me again why the voynix can’t get into the habitation part of this bridge at Machu Picchu.”

“The habitation bubbles are like grapes on a vine,” said Hannah, who had spent more time there than any of them. “But linked together. Clear plastic or something. It’s late Lost Era technology, maybe even post-human technology—some sort of forcefield just above the surface of the glass. Voynix just slide off.”

“We had something similar on the windows of the crawler Savi drove us in from Jerusalem into the Mediterranean Basin,” said Daeman. “She said it was a frictionless field to keep the rain off. But it worked for voynix and calibani too.”

“I’d enjoy seeing one of these calibani,” said Elian. “And also the Caliban thing you described.” The bald man’s mouth and other facial features seemed always set to a show of strength and curiosity.

“No,” Daeman said softly, “you wouldn’t enjoy seeing either one. Especially the real Caliban. Trust me on this.”

In the silence that followed, Greogi said what they had all been thinking. “We’re going to have to draw straws… something. Fourteen get to go to the Bridge. They can carry weapons, water, and minimum rations, hunt along the way perhaps, so a full sky-raft load of fourteen can go. The rest of us stay.”

“Fourteen out of fifty-four get to live?” said Edide. “Doesn’t seem right.”

“Hannah will be one of those who goes,” said Greogi. “She flies the sky-raft back if the fourteen get to the Bridge on the first trip.”

Hannah shook her head. “You can fly the thing as well as I can, Greogi. We can teach anyone here how to fly it as well as I can. I’m not automatically on the first trip and you know… you know … there won’t be a second trip. Not with the shape the sky-raft is in. Not with the voynix continuing to mass out there in the dark. Not with the Setebos thing getting stronger every hour. Those fourteen short straws, long straws, whichever, will have a chance to live. The rest will die here.”

“Then we’ll decide as soon as it’s light,” said Ada.

“There may be fighting,” said Elian. “People are angry, hungry, resentful. They may not want to draw straws to see who lives and who dies. They may rush the raft right away, or after they don’t get a seat.”

Ada nodded. “Daeman, take ten of your best people and have them surround the sky-raft—protect it—even before I call the council together. Edide, you and your friends quietly try to collect as many of the loose weapons as possible.”

“Most people sleep with their flechette rifles now,” said the blond woman. “They don’t let them out of their hands.”

Ada nodded again. “Do what you can. I’ll talk to everyone. Explain why this is the only hope.”

“The losers will want to be ferried to the island,” said Greogi. “At the very least.”

Boman nodded. “I would. I will if I don’t get the right-sized straw.”

Ada sighed. “It won’t do any good. I’m convinced that the island is just another place to die… the voynix will be there minutes after we are if the Setebos thing isn’t there to protect us. But we can do that. Ferry those who want to go, then let the fourteen head for the Bridge.”

“It will waste time,” said Hannah. “Put more stress on the sky-raft.”

Ada held her hands out, palms upward. “It may keep our people from killing each other, Hannah. It gives fourteen people a chance. And the rest get to choose where they stand and die. That’s something—an illusion of choice if nothing else.”

No one had anything else to say. They broke up to head toward their own sleeping tents and lean-tos.

Hannah followed Ada and touched her arm in the dark before they reached Ada’s sleeping tent.

“Ada,” whispered the younger woman, “I have this feeling that Harman is still alive. I hope you’re one of the fourteen.”

Ada smiled—her white teeth visible in the ringlight. “I have this feeling that Harman is alive, too, my dear. But I’m not going to be one of the fourteen. I’ve already decided that I’m not going to take part in the drawing of straws. My baby and I are staying at Ardis.”

In the end, none of their planning mattered.

Just after sunrise, Ada jerked awake to cold hands in her mind and within her womb.

Mommy—I have your little boy here. He’s going to stay inside for a few months while I teach him things—wonderful things—but I’m coming out to play!

Ada screamed as she felt the mind in the Pit touching the developing mind of the fetus inside her.

She was on her feet and running, carrying two flechette rifles, before anyone else could fully awaken.

The Setebos baby had bent the bars of the grill back and was squeezing its gray brain-girth through the bent mesh and bars. Already the thing had tentacles flung out fifteen feet to a side, three-fingered hands sunk deep in the dirt. Three of its feeding orifices were open and the long, fleshy, trunklike appendages there were already drinking grief and terror and history from the soil of Ardis. Its many yellow eyes were very bright and as it rose out of the Pit, the many fingers on its large pink hands were waving like sea anemones in a strong current.

Mommy, it’s all right, hiss-thought the thing as it pulled itself free of the Pit. All I’m going to do is …

Ada heard Daeman and others running behind her, but she did not look over her shoulder as she stopped, jerked down the flechette rifle from her shoulder, and fired a full clip into the Setebos thing.

It spun as thousands of crystal darts shredded part of its left lobe. Tentacles lashed toward her.

Ada dodged, slapped in a second magazine, emptied it into the writhing brain.

Mommmmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Ada dropped the first flechette rifle when the second magazine was empty, raised the second rifle, clicked it to full automatic, stepped three paces closer between the clawing tentacles, and fired the full magazine of flechettes between the yellow eyes at the front of the brain.

The Setebos spawn screamed—screamed with its real many mouths—and fell backward into the Pit.

Ada strode to the edge of the Pit, slammed in a new magazine and fired, ignoring the shouts and screams behind her. When that flechette magazine was empty, she slapped in another, aimed at the bleeding gray mass in the pit, and fired again. Again. Again. The brain split along its hemispheres and she blasted each pulped hemisphere as if smashing a pumpkin. The pink hands and long stalks spasmed, but the Setebos spawn was dead.

Ada felt it die. Everyone did. Its last mental scream—in no language except pain—hissed away to silence in their minds like filthy water going down a drain.

Everyone except sentinels came out from their shelters and stood grouped around the Pit, staring down, feeling the absence but not yet believing.

“Well, I guess I don’t have to go gather straws after all,” said Greogi to Ada, leaning close and almost whispering into her ear amidst the stunned silence.

Suddenly there came a noise from all around them—a whirring, whistling, humming, terrifying noise, distant yet growing louder, the whir and scrabbling noise echoing through the forest and from the surrounding hills.

“What in the hell …” began Casman.

“The voynix,” said Daeman. He took Ada’s rifle from her, slapped in a fresh magazine of flechettes, and handed it back to her. “They’re all coming at once.”

81

Here I am watching and listening as a god goes mad.

I don’t know what help I thought I could get up here on Olympos for my besieged and dying Achaeans, but now I’ve trapped myself, just as surely as the Greeks on their beach with the Trojans closing in are trapped to the death, me standing here in my sweaty chameleon suit, cheek by jowl with a thousand immortals, trying to hold my breath to keep from giving myself away while watching and listening as Zeus, already king of the gods, declares himself the one and only Eternal God Almighty.

I shouldn’t worry about being noticed. The gods around me are staring with their immortal jaws hanging slack, their godlike mouths hanging open, and their divine Olympian eyes bugging out.

Zeus has gone mad. And his dark eyes seem to be boring into me as he spittles on about his new ascendance to ultimate Godhood. I’m sure he can see me. His eyes have the self-pleasuring patience of a cat with a mouse between its paws.

I put my thick-suited hand on the QT medallion against my chest under the sticky chameleon suit.

But where to go? Back to the beach with the Achaeans means certain death. Back to Ilium to see Helen means pleasure and survival, but I will have betrayed… betrayed who? The Greeks haven’t even noticed when I’ve walked among them, at least not since Achilles and Odysseus both disappeared on the wrong side of the closing Brane Hole. Why should I feel loyalty to them when they don’t….

But I do.

Speaking of Odysseus—and X-rated images pop into my mind when I do think of him—I know that I can QT back to the Queen Mab. That might be the safest place for me, although I really have no place there among the moravecs.

Nothing feels right. No move feels better than a cowardly betrayal.

Betrayal of whom, for Gods’ sake? I ask myself, taking the Lord’s name in vain even as the universe’s new Lord and only Almighty God stares me in the eye and finishes his fist-pounding, spittle-flying rant.

Lord God Zeus did not end his speech with “ARE THERE ANY QUESTIONS?”—but he might as well have, based on the thickness of silence that now falls over the Great Hall of the Gods.

Then, suddenly, inexplicably—given the real-time terror of the situation—the undying pedant in me, the would-be scholar rather than the has-been scholic, is struck by a Miltonic line by Lucifer: I will exalt my throne above the stars of God …

Something rips the roof and upper floors of the Great Hall of the Gods clean away, revealing naked sky and a shapeless form. Wind and voices roar.

The wall crashes inward. Huge shapes, some vaguely human, smash in masonry, tumble pillars, flow down from the sky, and attack the assembled gods. Every immortal with any sense QT’s away or takes off running. I am frozen in place.

Zeus leaps to his feet. His golden armor and weapons are stacked not twenty feet from where he stands, but that is too far away. Too many forms are closing too quickly for the Father of the Gods to arm himself.

He raises and pulls back his muscled arm to fling lightning, to guide the thunder.

Nothing happens.

“Ai! Ai!” cries Zeus, staring at his empty right hand as if it has disobeyed him. “The elements obey me not!”

“NO REFUGE! NO APPEAL!” booms a voice from the shifting thundercloud mass looming over the disassembled building and the warring gods and shapes. “COME DOWN WITH ME NOW, USURPER. THOSE WHO REMAIN, LOVE NOT THRONES, ALTARS, JUDGMENT-SEATS, AND PRISONS, ALL THOSE FOUL SHAPES ABHORRED BY TRUE GOD AND MAN. COME, USURPER, TYRANT OF THE WORLD, COME TO YOUR NEW HOME STRANGE, SAVAGE, GHASTLY, DARK, AND EXECRABLE.”

For all its booming volume, the terrible voice is more terrible because of its calmness.

“No!” cries Zeus and quantum teleports away.

I hear the immortals fighting near me shout “Titans!” and “Kronos!” and then I run, praying that I remain invisible in my moravec chameleon suit, running out through the tumbling pillars, past the fighting forms, through literal lightning, out under the fire-rent blue skies of the Olympos summit.

Already some of the Olympian gods have taken to their flying chariots, and already they have been met and joined in battle by larger, stranger chariots and their indescribable drivers. All around the shores of the Caldera Lake, gods are fighting Titans—I see a form that can only be Kronos taking on both Apollo and Ares—while monsters are fighting gods and gods are fleeing.

Suddenly I am seized. A powerful hand jerks me to a stop, pins my right arm before I can reach for my QT medallion, and strips the chameleon suit off me like someone ripping Christmas wrap from a poorly wrapped package.

I see that it is Hephaestus, the bearded dwarf-god of fire, Chief Artificer to Zeus and the gods. Behind him on the grass are what looks to be a series of iron cannonballs and a goldfish bowl.

“What are you doing here, Hockenberry?” snarls the unkempt god. Dwarfish as he is to other Olympians, he’s still taller than me.

“How did you see me?” is all that I can manage. Fifty yards away, it appears as if Kronos has killed Apollo with a huge cudgel. The stormcloud-being hovering above the roofless Great Hall of the Gods seems to be dissipating on the high winds that blow around the summit of Olympos.

Hephaestus laughs and taps a glass and bronze lens-thing dangling from his vest amidst a hundred other tiny gizmos. “Of course I could see you. So could Zeus. That’s why he had me build you, Hockenberry. It was all supposed to lead to his ascension to the Godhead today being observed—observed by someone who could fucking well write it down. We’re all postliterate here, you know.”

Before I can move or speak, Hephaestus grabs the heavy QT medallion, rips it off me—breaking the chain—and crushes it in his massive, blunt-fingered, filthy hand.

OhJesusGodAlmightyno I manage to think as the god of fire opens his fist just enough to drop the crumbs of gold into a vest pocket he pulls out wide.

“Don’t shit your pants, Hockenberry,” laughs the god. “This thing never worked. See—there’s no fucking mechanism! Just the dial you could ratchet around. This has always been your Dumbo Feather.”

“It worked… it’s always… I came from… I used it to…”

“No, you didn’t,” says Hephaestus. “I built you with the nanogenes necessary to quantum teleport—just like the big boys. Just like us gods. You just weren’t supposed to know about it until the proper time came. Aphrodite jumped the gun—gave you the fake medallion to use you in her plot to kill Athena.”

I look around wildly. The Great Hall of the Gods has collapsed. Flames lick up through the tumbled pillars. Fighting is spreading everywhere, but the summit is emptying out as more and more gods are flicking away to hide on Ilium Earth. Brane Holes are opening here and there and the Titans and monstrous entities are following the fleeing gods. The

Thundercloud Being that had ripped the roof and top three floors off the Great Hall is gone.

“You need to help me save the Greeks,” I say, my teeth actually chattering.

Hephaestus laughs again, rubs the back of his sooty hand across his greasy mouth. “I’ve already vacuumed up all the other humans on that fucking Ilium-history Earth,” he says. “Why should I save the Greeks? Or even the Trojans for that matter? What have they done for me recently? Plus, I’ll need some humans down there to worship me when I take this throne of Olympos in a few days…”

I can only stare at him. “You vacuumed up the people? You put the population of Ilium Earth in the blue beam rising from Delphi?”

“Who the hell do you think did it? Zeus? With all his technical prowess?” Hephaestus shakes his head. The Titan brothers Kronos, Iapetos, Hyperion, Krios, Koios, and Okeanos are walking this way. They are covered with the golden-ichor blood of gods.

Suddenly Achilles appears from the burning ruins. He is fully clad in his gold armor, his beautiful shield also besmirched by immortal blood, his long sword out, his eyes staring almost madly from the slits of his streaked and sooted golden helmet. The apparition ignores me and shouts at Hephaestus. “Zeus has fled!”

“Of course,” replies the god of fire. “Did you expect him to wait around for the Demogorgon to drag him down to Tartarus?”

“I can’t find Zeus’s location anywhere on the holographic pool locator!” shouts Achilles. “I forced Aphrodite’s mother, Dione, to help me with the locator. She said it would find him anywhere in the universe. When she failed, I cut her to ribbons. Where is he?”

Hephaestus smiles. “You remember, fleet-footed mankiller, the one place Zeus had hidden from all eyes when Hera wanted to fuck him into an eternity of sleep?”

Achilles grabs the fire god’s shoulder and almost lifts him off the ground. “Odysseus’ home! Take me there! At once.”

Hephaestus’ eyes crinkle into unamused slits. “You do not command the future Lord of Olympos such, mortal. Singularity that you are, you must treat your betters with more respect.”

Achilles releases his grip on Hephaestus’ leather vest. “Please. Now. Please.”

Hephaestus nods and then looks at me. “You come, too, Scholic Hockenberry. Zeus wanted you here for this day. Wanted you as witness. Witness ye shall be.”

82

The moravecs aboard the Queen Mab received all the following live, in real-time—Odysseus’ nano-imagers and transmitters were working well—but Asteague/Che decided not to relay it down to Mahnmut and Orphu of Io where they were working there beneath the ocean of Earth. The two ‘vecs were six hours into their twelve-hour job of cutting free and loading the seven hundred sixty-eight critical black-hole warheads and no one on the Mab wanted to distract them.

And what was occurring now could qualify as distracting.

The lovemaking—if that was what the near-violent copulation between Odysseus and the woman who had identified herself as Sycorax—was in one of its temporary states of pause. The two were sprawled naked on the tousled cushions, drinking wine from large two-handled mugs and eating some fruit, when a monstrous creature—amphibian gills, fangs, claws, webbed feet—pushed aside curtains and flip-flop-walked its way into Sycorax’s chambers.

“Dam, thinketh he yes that he must announce that as he was readying to melt a gourd-fruit into mash, when so Caliban did hear the airlock cycling. Something there is which has come to see you, Mother. Saith, it has all flesh-meat on its nose and fingers like blunt stones. Saith, Mother, and in His name I shall rend this work’s tasty flesh from its soft-chalk bones.”

“No, thank you, Caliban, my darling,” said the naked woman with the purple-colored eyebrows. “Show our visitor in.”

The amphibian thing called Caliban stepped aside. An older version of Odysseus entered.

All of the moravecs—even those who sometimes had trouble telling one human being from another—could see the resemblance. The young Odysseus sprawled naked on the silk cushions stared dumbly at the older Odysseus. This older version had the same short stature and broad chest, but more scars, gray hair and gray in his thicker beard, and bore himself with much more gravity than their passenger on the Mab’s voyage had.

“Odysseus,” said Sycorax. As well as the moravecs’ human emotion auditory analysis circuits could deduce, she sounded truly surprised.

He shook his head. “My name is Noman now. I’m pleased to see you again, Circe.”

The woman smiled. “We have both changed, then. I am Sycorax to the world and myself now, my much-scarred Odysseus.”

The younger Odysseus started to rise, his hands bunched into fists, but Sycorax made a motion with her left hand and the young Odysseus collapsed back onto the cushions.

“You are Circe,” said the man who called himself Noman. “You were always Circe. You will always be Circe.”

Sycorax shrugged very slightly, her full breasts jiggling. Young Odysseus was sprawled to her left. She patted the empty cushions on her right. “Come sit next to me, then… Noman.”

“No, thank you, Circe,” said the man dressed in tunic, shorts, and sandals. “I will stand.”

“You will come and sit next to me,” said Sycorax, her voice intense. She made a complicated motion with her right hand, her different fingers moving not at random.

“No, thank you, I will stand.”

Again the woman blinked in surprise. Deeper surprise this time, the moravec facial-emotion analysts thought.

“Molü,” said Noman. “I think you know of it. A substance made from a rare black root which bears a milk-white bloom out of the earth once each autumn.”

Sycorax nodded slowly. “My, you have traveled far. But haven’t you heard? Hermes is dead.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Noman.

“No, I suppose it doesn’t. How did you get here, Odysseus?”

“Noman.”

“How did you get here, Noman?”

“I used Savi’s old sonie. It took me almost four full days, creeping from one orbital lump to the next, always hiding from these robotic intruder destroyers of yours or outrunning them in stealth mode. You need to get rid of those things, Circe. Or sonies need to include toilet facilities.”

Sycorax laughed softly. “And why on earth would I get rid of the interceptors?”

“Because I ask you to.”

“And why on earth would I do anything you ask, Odys… Noman?”

“I’ll tell you when I finish with my requests.”

Behind Noman, Caliban snarled. The human ignored the noise and the creature.

“By all means,” said Sycorax. “Continue with your requests.” Her smile showed how very little attention she was prepared to pay to these requests.

“First, as I say, eliminate the orbital interceptors. Or at least reprogram them so that spacecraft can move safely within and between the rings again…”

Sycorax’s smile did not waver. Nor did her violet-eyed, purple-painted gaze warm.

“Secondly,” continued Noman, “I would like you to remove the interdiction field above the Mediterranean Basin and to drop the Hands of Hercules fields.”

The witch laughed softly. “What an odd request. The resulting tsunami would be devastating.”

“You can do it gradually, Circe. I know you can. Refill the basin.”

“Before you go on,” she said coldly, “give me one reason I should do this thing.”

“There are things in the Mediterranean Basin which the old-style humans should not have soon.”

“The depots, you mean,” said Sycorax. “The spacecraft, weapons…”

“Many things,” said Noman. “Let the wine-dark sea refill the Mediterranean Basin.”

“Perhaps you haven’t noticed since you’ve been traveling,” said Sycorax, “but the old-style humans are on the verge of extinction.”

“I’ve noticed. I still ask you to refill the Mediterranean Basin—carefully, slowly. And while you’re at it, eliminate that folly that is the Atlantic Breach.”

Sycorax shook her head and lifted the two-handled cup to sip wine. She did not offer Noman any. The young Odysseus lay back glazed on the cushions, apparently unable to move.

“Is that all?” she said.

“No,” said Noman. “I’ll also ask you to reactivate all faxnodes for the old-style humans, all function links, and the rejuvenation tanks remaining on both the polar and equatorial rings.”

Sycorax said nothing.

“Finally,” said Noman, “I want you to send down your tame monster here to tell Setebos that the Quiet is coming to this Earth.”

Caliban hissed and snarled. “Thinketh, time has come to pluck the mankin’s sound legs off and leaveth stumps for him to ponder. Think-eth, He is strong and Lord and this bruised fellow shall receive a worm, nay, two worms, for using His name in vain.”

“Silence,” snapped Sycorax. She stood, looking more regal in her nakedness than other queens could in full regalia. “Noman, is the Quiet coming to this Earth?”

“I believe so, yes.” She seemed to relax. Lifting a clump of grapes from the bowl on the cushions, she carried them to Noman, offered them. He shook his head.

“You ask much of me, for an old and non-Odysseus,” she said softly, pacing the space between the cushioned bed and the man. “What would you give me in return?”

“Tales of my travels.” Sycorax laughed again. “I know your travels.”

“Not this time, you don’t. This has been twenty years, not ten.” The witch’s beautiful face twisted in something the moravecs’ interpreted as a sneer. “Always seeking the same thing… your Penelope.”

“No,” said Noman. “Not this time. This time when you sent the young me through the Calabi-Yau doorway my travels in space and time—twenty years for me—were all in search of you.”

Sycorax stopped her pacing and stared at him.

“You,” repeated Noman. “My Circe. We loved each other well and have made love well many times these twenty years. I’ve found you in your iterations as Circe, Sycorax, Alys, and Calypso.”

“Alys?” said the witch. Noman only nodded. “Did I have a slight gap between my front teeth then?”

“You did.” Sycorax shakes her head. “You lie. In all lines of reality it is the same, Odysseus-Noman. I save you, pull you from the sea, succor you, feed you honeyed wine and fine food, tend your wounds, bathe you, show you physical love of a sort you have only dreamed of, offer you immortality and eternal youth, and always you leave. Always you leave me for that weaving bitch Penelope. And your son.”

“I’ve seen my son this twenty years past,” said Noman. “He is grown into a fine man. I do not need to see him again. I wish to stay with you.”

Sycorax returns to her cushions and drinks two-handed from the large goblet. “I am thinking of turning all your moravec mariners into swine,” she said at last.

Noman shrugged. “Why not? You did that to all my other men in all these other worlds.”

“What kind of swine do you think moravecs will make?” asked the witch, her tone merely conversational. “Will they resemble a row of plastic piggybanks?”

Noman said, “Moira is awake again.” The witch blinked. “Moira? Why would she choose to waken now?”

“I don’t know,” said Noman, “but she’s in Savi’s young body. I saw her on the day I left Earth, but we didn’t speak.”

“Savi’s body?” repeated Sycorax. “What is Moira up to? And why now?”

“Thinketh,” said Caliban behind Noman, “He made the old Savi out of sweet clay for His son to bite and eat, add honeycomb and pods, chewing her neck until froth rises bladdery, quick, quick, till maggots scamper through my brain.”

Sycorax rose and paced again, coming close to Noman and raising one hand as if to touch his bare chest, then veering away. Caliban hissed and crouched, his palms on granite, his back hunched, his arms straight down between his crouched and powerful legs, his yellow eyes baleful. But he remained where she had told him to stay.

“You know I can’t send my son down to tell his father Setebos about the Quiet,” she said softly.

“I know this… thing … is not your son,” said Noman. “You built him out of shit and defective DNA in a tank of green slime.”

Caliban hissed and began to speak again in his terrible lisping rant. Sycorax waved him silent.

“Do you know your moravec friends are lifting more than seven hundred black holes into orbit even as we speak?” she asked.

Noman shrugged. “I didn’t know that, but I hoped they would be.”

“Where did they get them?”

“You know where they must have come from. Seven hundred sixty-eight black-hole warheads? There is only one place.”

“Impossible,” said Sycorax. “I sealed that wreck off inside a stasis-egg almost two millennia ago.”

“And Savi and I unsealed it more than a century ago,” said Noman.

“Yes, I watched as you and that bitch hurried around with your hopeless little schemes,” said Sycorax. “What in the hell did you hope to accomplish with those turin-cloth connections to Ilium?”

“Preparation,” said Noman.

“For what?” laughed Sycorax. “You don’t believe those two races of the human species will ever meet, do you? You can’t be serious. The Greeks and Trojans and their ilk would eat your naïve little old-style humans here for breakfast.”

Noman shrugged. “Call off this war with Prospero and let’s see what happens.”

Sycorax slammed down the wine goblet onto a nearby table. “Leave the field while that bastard Prospero remains on it?” she snapped. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am,” said Noman. “The old entity called Prospero is quite mad. His days are over. But you can leave before the same madness claims you. Let’s leave this place, Circe, you and I.”

“Leave?” The witch’s voice was very low, incredulous.

“I know this rock has fusion-drive engines and Brane Hole generators that could send us to the stars, beyond the stars. If we get bored, we step through the Calabi-Yau door and make love across the whole, rich universe of history—we could meet at different ages, wear our different bodies at different ages as easily as changing clothes, travel in time to join ourselves making love, freeze time itself so that we can take part in our own lovemaking. You have enough food and air here to keep us comfortable for a thousand years—ten thousand if you please.”

“You forget,” said Sycorax, rising and pacing again. “You’re a mortal man. In twenty years I’ll be changing your soiled underwear and feeding you by hand. In forty years you’ll be dead.”

“You offered me immortality once. The rejuvenation tanks are still here on your isle.”

“You rejected immortality!” screamed Sycorax. She picked up the heavy mug and threw it at him. Noman ducked but did not move his feet from where they were planted. “You rejected it again and again!” she screamed, tearing at her hair and cheeks with her nails. “You threw it in my face to return to your precious… Penelope … over and over again. You actually laughed at me.”

“I’m not laughing now. Come away with me.”

Her expression was wild with fury. “I should have Caliban kill you and eat you right here in front of me. I’ll laugh while he sucks the marrow from your cracked bones.”

“Come away with me, Circe,” said Noman. “Reactivate the faxes and functions, drop the old Hands of Hercules and other useless toys, and come away with me. Be my lover again.”

“You’re old,” she sneered. “Old and scarred and gray-haired. Why should I choose an old man over a vital younger one?” She stroked the thigh and flaccid penis of the seemingly hypnotized and motionless younger Odysseus.

“Because this Odysseus will not be leaving through the Calabi-Yau door in a week or month or eight years as that young one will,” said Noman. “And because this Odysseus loves you.”

Sycorax made a choked noise that sounded like a snarl. Caliban echoed her snarl.

Noman reached under his tunic and took a heavy pistol from where he had hidden it under his broad belt in the back.

The witch stopped pacing and stared. “You can’t possibly think that thing can hurt me.”

“I didn’t bring it to hurt you,” said Noman.

She flicked her violet gaze to the frozen younger Odysseus. “Are you mad? Do you know what mischief that would do on the quantum level of things? You’re courting kaos by even contemplating such a thing. It would destroy a cycle that has been going on in a thousand strands for a thousand…”

“Going on for too long,” said Noman. He fired six times, each explosion seemingly louder than the last. The six heavy bullets tore into the naked Odysseus, tearing his rib cage apart, pulping his heart, striking him in the middle of the forehead.

The younger man’s body jerked to the impacts and slid to the floor, leaving red streaks on the silk cushions and a growing pool of blood on the marble tiles.

“Decide,” said Noman.

83

I don’t know if I teleported here via my own, medallion-less ability, or just came along with Hephaestus because I was touching his sleeve when he QT’d. It doesn’t matter. I’m here.

Here is Odysseus’ home. A dog barks madly at us as Hephaestus, Achilles, and I pop into existence, but one glance from bloody-helmeted Achilles sends the mutt whining back out to the courtyard with its tail between its legs.

We’re in an anteroom looking into the great dining hall of Odysseus’ home on the isle of Ithaca. Some sort of forcefield hums over the house and courtyard. There are no impudent suitors lounging in the long room at the long table, no Penelope dithering, no impotent young Telemachus plotting, no servants hustling to and fro dispensing the absent Odysseus’ food and wine to indolent ne’er-do-wells. But the room looks as if the Slaughter of the Suitors has already taken place—chairs are overturned, a huge tapestry has been ripped off the wall and now lies thrown over table and floor, soaking up spilled wine, and even Odysseus’ greatest bow—the one that only he alone could pull, according to legend, a bow so wonderful and rare that he decided not to take it to Troy with him—now lies on the stone floor, amidst a clutter of Odysseus’ famous barbed and poisoned hunting arrows.

Zeus whirls. The giant wears the same soft garments he had been wearing on the Throne of Olympos, but he is not so gigantic now. Yet even shrunken to fit this space, he is still twice as tall as Achilles.

Beckoning us to stand back, the fleet-footed mankiller raises his shield, readies his sword, and steps into the dining hall.

“My son,” booms the God of Thunder, “spare me your childlike anger. Would you commit deicide, tyrannicide, and patricide in one terrible stroke?”

Achilles advances until he is across the span of the broad table from Zeus. “Fight, old man.”

Zeus continues smiling, apparently not the least bit alarmed. “Think, fleet-footed Achilles. Use your brain for once rather than your muscles or your dick. Would you have that useless cripple sit on the golden throne of Olympos?” He nods toward where Hephaestus stands silent in the doorway next to me.

Achilles does not turn his head.

“Just think for once,” repeats Zeus, his deep voice causing crockery to vibrate in the nearby kitchen. “Join with me, Achilles, my son. Become one with the penetrating presence that is Zeus, Father of All Gods. Thus joined, father and son, immortal and immortal, two mighty spirits, mingling, shall make a third, mightier than either alone—triune together, Father and Son and holy will, we shall reign over heaven and Troy and send the Titans back down to their pit forever.”

“Fight,” said Achilles. “You old pigfucker.”

Zeus’s broad face turns several shades of red. “Detested prodigy! Even thus, deprived of my control of all elements, I trample thee!”

Zeus grabs the long table by its edge and flips it into the air. Fifty feet of heavy wood planks and posts flies tumbling through the air toward Achilles’ head. The human ducks low and the table smashes into the wall behind him, destroying a fresco and sending splinters flying everywhere.

Achilles takes two steps closer.

Zeus opens his arms, opens his hands to show his palms. “Would you kill me as I am, oh man? Unarmed? Or shall we grapple barehanded like heroes in the arena until one fails to rise and the other takes the prize?”

Achilles hesitates only a second. Then he pulls off his golden helmet and sets it aside. He removes the circular shield from his forearm, lays the sword in its cusp, adds his bronze chest armor and greaves, and kicks all that to our doorway. Now he is clad only in his shirt, short skirt, sandals, and broad leather belt.

Eight feet from Zeus, Achilles opens his arms in a wrestler’s opening stance and crouches.

Zeus smiles then and—in a motion almost too fast for me to perceive—crouches and comes up with Odysseus’ bow and a poisoned black-feathered arrow.

Get away! I have time mentally to shout at Achilles but the blond and muscled hero does not budge.

Zeus goes to full pull, easily bending the bow that no one on Earth except Odysseus was supposed to be able to bend, aims the broad-bladed poison arrow right at Achilles’ heart eight feet away, and lets fly.

The arrow misses.

It cannot miss—not at that distance—the shaft appears straight and true, the black feathers full—but it misses by a full foot or more and buries itself deep in the smashed table angled against the wall. I can almost feel the terrible venom, rumored to be originally gathered from the most deadly of serpents by Hercules, as it drains into the wood of the table.

Zeus stares. Achilles does not move.

Zeus crouches with lightning speed, comes up with another arrow, steps closer, notches, pulls, releases.

It misses. From five feet away, the poisoned arrow misses.

Achilles does not stir. He stares hate into the now-panicked gaze of the Father of All Gods.

Zeus crouches again, sets the arrow to the cord with careful precision, goes to full pull again, his mighty muscles now sheened in sweat, visibly straining, the powerful bow almost humming with its coiled power. The King of the Gods steps forward until the point of the arrow is not much more than a foot away from Achilles’ broad chest.

Zeus fires.

The arrow misses.

This is not possible, but I see the arrow embed itself in the wall behind Achilles. It has not passed through Achilles, nor curved around, but somehow—impossibly—absolutely—it has missed.

Achilles leaps then, slapping the bow aside and seizing the twice-tall god by the throat.

Zeus staggers around the room trying to remove Achilles’ powerful hands from around his neck, pounding Achilles with a god-fist half as wide as Achilles’ broad back. The fleet-footed mankiller hangs on as Zeus thrashes, smashing timbers, the table, the doorway arch, the wall itself. It looks like a man with a child hanging from him, but Achilles hangs on.

Then the much larger god gets his own powerful fingers under Achilles’ much smaller fingers and peels back first the mortal’s left hand, then his right. Now Zeus crashes against, bangs onto, and smashes into things with a deadly purpose, holding Achilles’ forearms in his own massive hands, the mortal man dangling as Zeus head-butts Achilles—the sound echoing like two great boulders colliding—then rams his god-chest against mortal ribs, finally crashing both of them against the unyielding wall and into the doorway opposite us, arching Achilles’ back against the unyielding stone of the doorframe.

Five seconds of this and he will snap Achilles’ back like a bow made out of cheap balsa.

Achilles does not wait five seconds. Or three.

Somehow the fleet-footed mankiller has got his right hand free for an instant as Zeus bends him backward, backward, spine grinding against vertical stone.

I see what happens next in retinal echo, it occurs so quickly.

Achilles’ hand comes up from his own belly and belt with a short blade in his fist.

He rams the blade in under Zeus’s bearded chin, twists the knife, rams it deeper, rotates it with a cry louder even than Zeus’s scream of horror and pain.

Zeus stumbles backward into the hallway, crashing into the next room. Hephaestus and I run to follow.

They are in Odysseus’ and Penelope’s private bedchamber now. Achilles pulls the knifeblade free and the Father of All Gods raises both his massive hands to his own throat, his own face. Golden ichor and red blood both are pulsing into the air, flowing from Zeus’s nostrils and open, gaping mouth, filling his white beard with gold and red.

Zeus falls backward onto the bed. Achilles swings the knife far back, plunges it deep into the god’s belly, and then drags it up and to the right until the magical blade rasps on rib cage.

Zeus screams again, but before he can clutch himself lower, Achilles has pulled out yards of gray gut—gleaming god intestine—and wrapped it several times around one of the four posts of Odysseus’ great bed, tying it off in a mariner’s swift and sure knot.

That post is the living olive tree Odysseus fashioned this room and bed around, I think in a daze. The lines from The Odyssey come back to me from the Fitzgerald translation I first read as a boy, Odysseus speaking to his doubting Penelope—

An old trunk of olive grew like a pillar on our building plot, and I laid out our bedroom round that tree, lined up the stone walls, built the walls and roof, gave it a doorway and smooth-fitting doors. Then I lopped off the silvery leaves and branches, into a bedpost, drilled it, let it serve as a model for the rest. I planned them all, inlaid them all with silver, gold and ivory, and stretched a bed between—a pliant web of oxhide thongs dyed crimson.

Now more than the oxhide thongs are dyed crimson as Zeus struggles to free himself from the restraining tether of his own tied-off intestines, golden ichor and all-too-human-red-blood flowing from his throat, face, and belly. Blinded by his own pain and gore, Mighty Zeus feels for his tormenter by swinging his arms. Every step and tug in search of Achilles pulls more of his gleaming gray insides out. His screaming makes even the unflinching Hephaestus cover his ears.

Achilles prances lightly out of reach, dancing in closer only to slash and hack at the blind god’s arms, legs, thighs, penis, and hamstrings.

Zeus crashes down on his back, still connected to the living olive tree bedpost by thirty feet or more of knotted gray gut, but the immortal being still thrashes and howls, spewing ichor across the ceiling in complicated Rorschachs of divine arterial spray.

Achilles leaves the room and returns with his battle sword. He pins Zeus’s thrashing left arm with one battle-sandaled foot, raises the sword high, and brings it down so hard it strikes sparks on the floor after passing through Zeus’s neck.

The head of the Father of All Gods tumbles free, rolling under the bed.

Achilles goes to one gory knee and seems to be burying his face in the giant open wound that had been Zeus’s bronzed and muscled belly. For one perfectly horrible second I am sure that Achilles is eating the guts out of his fallen foe, his face largely hidden in the abdominal cavity—a man turned pure predator, a ravaging wolf.

But he was only hunting.

“Ahah!” cries the fleet-footed mankiller and pulls a huge, still pulsating purplish mass from the tumble of glistening gray.

Zeus’s liver.

“Where is that goddamned dog of Odysseus’?” Achilles asks himself, his eyes gleaming. He leaves us to carry the liver out to the dog Argus cowering somewhere in the courtyard.

Hephaestus and I stand aside quickly to give Achilles room as he passes.

As the sound of the mankiller’s—godkiller’s—footsteps recede, both the god of fire and I look around the room.

Not a square inch of bed, floor, ceiling, or wall appears to have remained unsplattered.

The huge, headless corpse on the stone floor, still tethered to the olive-tree post, continues to twitch and writhe, its bloodied fingers flexing.

“Holy fuck,” breathes Hephaestus.

I want to tear my gaze away but cannot. I want to leave the room to go vomit quietly somewhere, but cannot. “What… how… it’s still… partially… alive,” I gasp.

Hephaestus grins his most insane grin. “Zeus is an immortal, remember, Hockenberry? He’s in agony even now. I’ll burn the bits in the Celestial Fire.” He stoops to retrieve the short knife Achilles had used. “I’ll burn this god-killing Aphrodite blade as well. Melt it down and pour it into something new—a plaque commemorating Zeus, maybe. I never should have made this blade for the bloodthirsty bitch.”

I blink and shake my head, then grab the hulking fire god by his heavy leather vest. “What will happen now?” I ask.

Hephaestus shrugs. “Just what we agreed on, Hockenberry. Nyx and the Fates, who have always ruled the universe—this universe, at least—will allow me to sit on the gold throne of Olympos after this mad second war with the Titans is over.”

“How do you know who will win?”

He shows me his uneven white teeth against his black beard.

From the courtyard comes a commanding voice. “Here, dog… here Argus… here, boy. That’s a nice pup. I have something for you… good dog.”

“They don’t call them ‘the Fates’ for nothing, Hockenberry,” says Hephaestus. “It will be a long and nasty war, fought more on Ilium Earth than on Olympos, but the few surviving Olympians will win… again.”

“But the thing… the cloud-thing… the Voice thing…”

“Demogorgon has gone home to Tartarus,” rumbles Hephaestus. “It cares not the least fucking fig what happens now on Earth, Mars, or Olympos.”

“My people…”

“Your pretty Greek friends are fucked up the ass,” says Hephaestus and then he smiles at his own wit. “But, if it makes you feel any better, so are the Trojans. Anyone who stays on Ilium Earth will be in the crossfire for the next fifty to a hundred years while this war goes on.”

I grab his vest harder. “You have to help us…”

He removes my hand as easily as an adult male would remove the clinging hand of a two-year-old child. “I don’t have to do a goddamned thing, Hockenberry.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, looks at the twitching thing on the floor behind, and says, “But in this case I will. QT back to your pitiful Achaeans and your woman, Helen, in the city and tell them to get their asses out of all high towers, off the walls, out of the buildings. There’s going to be a nine-point quake in old Ilium Town in a very few minutes. I need to burn this… thing… and get our hero back to Olympos so he can try to talk the Healer into waking his dead bimbo.”

Achilles is coming back. He is whistling and I can hear Argus’s nails scrabbling on stone as the dog eagerly follows.

“Go!” says Hephaestus, god of fire and artifice.

I reach for my medallion, realize it’s not there, realize I don’t need it, and QT well away from there.

84

Their estimated twelve hours of continuous work took a little more than eighteen hours. The forty-eight tumbled missiles and missile tubes were more trouble to sort out, separate, and cut up than either Orphu or Mahnmut could have guessed. Some of the metal warhead casings had cracked completely away, leaving only the plastoid-alloy MRV cradles and the containment fields themselves, each glowing blue from its own Cerenkov radiation.

The sight would have been interesting if anyone other than the silent moravecs on the Queen Mab had been watching: the submersible The Dark Lady crouching over the hull of the sunken death sub, its belly searchlights illuminating mostly a world filled with silt, fanning anemones, torn cables, twisted wiring, and lethal, greengrown missiles and warheads. Brighter than the dappled daylight coming in through the Breach wall, brighter than the super-halogen bright searchlights aimed on the work area, brighter than the sun itself were the fires of the 10,000-degree-Fahrenheit cutting torches that both the blind Orphu and the silt-blinded Mahnmut were wielding as delicately as scalpels.

Girders, winches, pulleys, and chains were all in place and now in heavy use as the two moravecs and The Dark Lady herself supervised the winching-up of each MRVed warhead as it was cut away from the missile itself. The cargo hold of Mahnmut’s Europan submersible was never really empty; it was honeycombed with a programmable flowfoam that formed itself into fluted cathedral buttressings of internal bracing against terrible pressures when the hold was “empty” of cargo, but that could and did flow tight around any cargo—including Orphu of Io when he rode in the corner of the cargo bay. Now the flowfoam was adapting itself to cushion and support each ungainly lump of warhead as Mahnmut and Orphu ratcheted and cursed it into place.

At one point a little beyond halfway through the exhausting work, Mahmut pretended to pat the containment-field-glowing warhead itself as the flowfoam closed around it, as he said—

“What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend?”

“Your old friend Will?” asked Orphu as both moravecs dropped back into the confusion of agitated silt below to begin cutting away the next warhead.

“Yes,” said Mahnmut. “Sonnet Fifty-three.”

About two hours later, just after they had secured another blue-glowing warhead in the now-crowded hold—they were spacing the black holes as far apart as they could—Orphu said, “This answer to our problem is costing you your ship. I’m sorry, Mahnmut.”

The Europan nodded, trusting his huge friend’s deep radar to pick up the motion. As soon as Orphu had suggested this approach, Mahnmut had realized that it meant losing his beloved Dark Lady forever—there was no way they could take the chance of removing the warheads from the Lady’s flowfoam cushioned hull and putting them into a different cargo bay. The very best case scenario now was that the moravecs would have another spacecraft up there in low earth orbit that could boost The Dark Lady and her planet-lethal cargo out and away from Earth, into deep space, as gently but quickly as possible.

“I feel that I just got her back,” said Mahnmut, hearing the pathetic tone in his own radio voice.

“They’ll build you another someday,” said Orphu.

“It wouldn’t be the same,” said Mahnmut. He had spent more than a century and a half in this little sub.

“No,” agreed Orphu. “Nothing will ever be the same after all this.”

At the end of the eighteen hours, after the last Cerenkov-glowing cluster of nascent black holes was loaded away, flowfoamed into place, and The Dark Lady’s cargo bay doors were shut, both moravecs were in a state of near total physical and nervous exhaustion as they hovered together above the wreck of the boomer.

“Is there anything we need to investigate or bring back from The Sword of Allah?” asked Orphu.

“Not at this time,” sent Prime Integrator Asteague/Che from the Queen Mab. The ship had been conspicuously quiet during the last eighteen hours.

“I never want to see the goddamned thing again,” said Mahnmut, too exhausted to care that he was speaking on the common channel. “It’s an obscenity.”

“Amen,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo from the dropship circling above.

“Is there anything you guys want to tell us about what’s been going on up there with Odysseus and his girlfriend over the last eighteen hours or so?” asked Orphu.

“Not at this time,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che again. “Bring the warheads up. Be careful.”

“Amen,” said Mep Ahoo again, and there seemed to be no irony in the soldier ‘vec’s voice.

Suma IV was a damned good pilot, one had to grant him that—and Orphu and Mahnmut did. Suma IV actually hovered the dropship so that The Dark Lady remained fully submerged as the aircraft-spaceship’s much larger bay doors closed under it. Then Suma IV slowly drained out the seawater, but only as the dropship’s own flowfoam took the water’s place, encysting the submersible and its blue-glowing cargo in another layer of wrapping.

Orphu of Io had already used dropcables to scramble and scrabble to the roof of the dropship before The Dark Lady was ingested, but Mahnmut left his enviro-crèche only at the last moment, allowing the Lady to steady and monitor herself during the delicate lifting and placement. Mahnmut felt that he should have some last words as he stepped off his ship forever more, but other than a tightbeamed and unacknowledged Goodbye, Lady, to the submersible’s AI, he said nothing.

The dropship lifted out of the water, ocean streaming from its cargo venting tubes, and Mahnmut used the last of his strength—mechanical and organic—to haul himself up to the top of the dropship and then down through the smaller of two access hatches into the troop-carrier hold.

In any other circumstances, the confusion in the troop-carrier section would have been comic, but not that many things seemed humorous to Mahnmut at that moment. By retracting all of his manipulators and antennae, Orphu had just been able to squeeze through the larger of the two dropship hatches, but now the Ionian’s bulk filled most of the space where the twenty rockvec soldiers had been perched on their web seating. The soldiers now spilled over into the narrow access corridor going forward to the cockpit itself, black-barbed rockvecs and their weapons sprawled everywhere, and Mahnmut had to crawl over their chitinous forms to join Mep Ahoo and Suma IV in the cramped cockpit.

Suma IV was flying the hovering dropship manually, using the omnicontroller constantly to balance the ship and its shifting contents, playing the thruster tabs the way human pianists must have once played their instrument of choice.

“No more tie-down straps,” Suma IV said to Mahnmut without turning his head. “We used the last to harness your big friend into the troop-carrier space. Extend that last jumpseat and magtite yourself to the hull, please, Mahnmut.”

Mahnmut did as he was told. He realized that he was too tired to stand again—Earth’s gravity was terrible after all—and felt like weeping from the release of chemicals after the last eighteen hours of total effort and tension.

“Hang on,” said Suma IV.

The dropship engines roared and they rose slowly, vertically, meter by meter, no shocks, no surprises, until Mahnmut saw out the main cockpit window that they had reached an altitude of around two kilometers, and then they began to pitch forward slightly—the engines moving from the vertical to forward thrust. He could never have imagined that a machine could be handled so delicately.

Still, there were bumps and at each bump Mahnmut found himself holding his breath, feeling his organic heart pound as he waited for the black holes in the belly of the hold of the dropship to go critical. It would only take one and all the others would collapse into themselves a millionth of a second later.

Mahnmut tried to imagine the immediate aftermath—the mini-black-holes immediately merging and plunging through the hull of The Dark Lady and the dropship, the mass accelerating toward the center of the Earth at thirty-two feet per second, sucking in all the mass of the two moravec ships with it, and then the air molecules, then the sea, then the sea bottom, then the rock, then the crust of the Earth itself as the black holes plummeted centerward.

How many days or months would the large mini-black-hole, comprised of all seven hundred sixty-eight warhead black holes, ping-pong back and forth through the planet, arcing up into space—for how far?—on each ping or pong? The electronic computing part of Mahnmut’s mind gave him the answer even though he didn’t want it, even though the physical part of his brain was too weary to absorb it. Far enough for the black holes to suck in all of the million-plus objects on the orbital rings in the first hundred ping-pongs through the planet, but not so far that it would eat the moon.

It would make no difference to Mahnmut, Orphu, and the other moravecs, even those on the Queen Mab. The dropship moravecs would be spaghettified almost instantaneously, their molecules stretched toward the center of the earth with the mini-hole as it fell, then farther, elasticating—was that a word? Mahnmut tiredly wondered—back through themselves as the black hole cut another swatch back up through the molten, spinning core of the planet.

Mahnmut closed his virtual eyes and concentrated on breathing, on feeling the dropship accelerate smoothly but constantly as it climbed. It was as if they were on a smooth, glass ramp rising to the heavens. Suma IV was good.

The sky changed from afternoon blue to vacuum black. The horizon bent like an archer’s bow. The stars seemed to explode into sight.

Mahnmut activated his vision and watched out the cockpit window as well as via the dropship’s imager feed via the umbilical connection at his jumpseat station.

They weren’t climbing to the Queen Mab, that was obvious. Suma IV leveled out the dropship at an altitude of not more than three hundred kilometers—barely above the atmosphere—and tapped thrusters to roll the Earth into the overhead cockpit windows so that full sunlight fell on the ship’s cargo bay doors. The rings and the Mab were more than thirty thousand kilometers higher and the moravec atomic spacecraft was on the opposite side of the Earth at the moment.

Mahnmut shut off the virtual feed for a second—feeling the zero-g as a physical release from the gravity of their work the last eighteen hours—and looked up through the clear overheads at the terminator moving across what had once been Europe, at the blue waters and white cloud masses of the Atlantic Ocean—the breach-gap wasn’t even a thin line from this altitude or angle—and not for the first time in the last eighteen hours, Mahnmut the moravec wondered how a living species gifted with such a beautiful homeworld could arm a submarine—themselves, any machine—with such weapons of total mindless destruction. What in any mental universe could seem worth the murder of millions, much less the destruction of an entire planet?

Mahnmut knew that they were not out of harm’s way yet. For all technical purposes, they might as well still be at the bottom of the ocean for all the good these few hundred kilometers did them. If any one of the black holes activated now, tripping the others into singularity, the ping-pong ripping-through-the-heart-of-Earth end of things would be just as certain, just as sure. Being in free fall was not the same as being out of the Earth’s gravitational field. The warheads would have to be far away—far beyond the Moon’s orbit certainly, since it was obvious the Earth’s gravity still reigned there—millions of kilometers away before the threat to Earth was over. The only difference in outcome at this measly altitude, Mahnmut knew, would be that the moravecs’ spaghettification ratio might grow a few percent in the initial minutes.

A matte-black spacecraft uncloaked—unstealthed, deforcefielded, came out of hiding—damn, Mahnmut had no word for it—appeared less than five kilometers from them on the sunward side. The ship was obviously of moravec design, but of a more advanced design than any spacecraft Mahnmut had ever seen. If the Queen Mab had seemed like some artifact from the Earth’s Lost Era Twentieth Century, this just-appeared spacecraft seemed centuries ahead of everything the moravecs had now. Somehow the black shape succeeded in seeming both stubby and deadly sleek, both simple and impossibly complicated in its fractal-batwing geometries, and there was no doubt whatsoever in Mahnmut’s mind that the ship carried awesome weapons.

He wondered for a few seconds if the Prime Integrators were actually going to risk the loss of one of their stealthed warships but… no… even as he wondered, Mahnmut saw an opening morph into being in the warship’s curved belly and a long witch’s broom of a device peroxided itself out into space, rotated along its own axis, lined up with the drop-ship, and used secondary thrusters on either side of an absurdly oversized engine bell to shove itself silently in their direction.

Orphu tightbeamed him. Why are we surprised? The Prime Integrators have had more than eighteen hours to come up with something and we moravecs have always bred good engineers.

Mahnmut had to agree. As the broomstick thrusted closer, slowing and rotating again as it came, putting on the brakes now, keeping the thrust bursts far away from the dropship’s belly, Mahnmut could see that the thing was probably about sixty meters long along its axis with a small AI brain node hitched in the center of mass like a saddle on a skinny nag, lots of silver manipulators and heavy-metal clamps, and one whomping big high-thrust engine just forward of that huge engine bell, along with scores of tiny thruster quads.

“I’m releasing the submersible now,” said Suma IV on the common band.

Mahnmut watched from the dropship hull cameras as the long cargo bays opened and The Dark Lady was floated gently out, propelled by the tiniest puff of gas. His beloved submersible began to rotate very slowly and since its own stabilization system had been shut off, she didn’t even try to stabilize herself. Mahnmut thought that he had never seen anything so out of her element—again—as the Lady was here in space, three hundred kilometers above the bright blue evening ocean of Earth.

The broomstick robot ship didn’t allow the submersible to tumble for long. The thing thrusted carefully, matched velocities perfectly, pulled The Dark Lady close to it with manipulator arms moving as gently as a lover after a long and tentative absence from his beloved, and then latched solid clamps in place—clamps built to lock into the submersible’s docking receptacles and various vents. Again with a sort of loving care, the broomstick AI—or the moravec on the warship currently controlling it—extruded a bright gold-foil molecular blanket and carefully, carefully folded the crinkling thing around the entire sub. The engineers didn’t want changes in temperature to trigger the black holes.

Quad thrusters fired and the praying mantis form of the robot ship and the foil-blanketed bulk of The Dark Lady moved away from the drop-ship, the robot aligning along its axis so that its engine bell was aimed down, toward the blue sea and white clouds and visibly moving terminator crossing Europe.

“What are they going to do about the little laser leukocytes?” Orphu of Io asked on the common band.

Mahnmut had wondered that himself—how were they going to keep the cleanup robotic laser attackers from triggering the warheads—but it hadn’t been his problem so he hadn’t tried to work it out in the past eighteen hours.

“The Valkyrie, the Indomitable, and the Nimitz are going to accompany the robot ship and destroy any approaching leukocytes,” said Suma IV. “While our warships remain stealthed, of course.”

Orphu actually laughed aloud on the common band. “Valkyrie, Indomitable, and Nimitz?” he rumbled. “My, we peaceloving moravecs are getting scarier by the minute, aren’t we.”

No one answered. To break the silence, Mahnmut said, “Which one is that… no, wait, it’s gone.” The matte-black fractal bat had restealthed, its presence not even suggested by a blotted-out patch of starfield or ringfield.

“That was the Valkyrie,” said Suma IV. “Ten seconds.”

No one counted down aloud. Everyone, Mahnmut was sure, was counting silently.

At zero, the high-thrust engine bell was illuminated by the slightest blue glow, reminiscent to Mahnmut of the Cerenkov-radiation glow of the warhead nacelles. The broomstick-mantis began to move, began to climb—with agonizing slowness. But Mahnmut knew that anything under constant thrust long enough would achieve a horrific velocity soon enough, even while climbing up out of Earth’s gravity well, and he also knew that the robot ship would be increasing that thrust as it climbed. Probably by the time the ship and the dead, thermal-blanket-wrapped hulk of The Dark Lady reached the empty orbit of Earth’s moon, the package would have achieved escape velocity. Even if the black holes activated after that point, the singularities would be a hazard in space, no longer the death of Earth.

The robot ship soon disappeared against the moving ringfield. Mahnmut saw not the slightest hint of fusion or ion exhausts from the three stealthed moravec spacecraft that were presumably escorting the robot.

Suma IV closed the cargo bay doors. “All right, everyone, please listen up,” said the pilot. “Some strange things have been going on while our two friends have been busy under the surface of the water-ocean down there. We need to get back to the Queen Mab.”

“What happened to our reconnaissance mission …” began Mahnmut.

“You can download the recorded feed as we climb,” interrupted Suma IV. “But right now the prime integrators want us back aboard. The Mab is leaving for a while… pulling back to lunar orbit at least.”

“No,” said Orphu of Io.

The syllable seemed to echo on the comm line like the single tolling of some huge bell.

“No?” said Suma IV. “Those are our orders.”

“We need to go back down to that Atlantic gap, breach, whatever we call it,” said Orphu. “We need to go back down now.”

“You need to shut up and hang on,” said the big Ganymedan at the controls. “I’m taking the dropship back to the Mab as ordered.”

“Look at the images you shot from ten thousand meters,” said Orphu and fed the image to everyone aboard via their umbilicaled Internet.

Mahnmut looked. It was the same picture he’d looked at before they began work on cutting the warheads free: the startling gap in the ocean, the crumbled bow of the submarine emerging from the north wall of that gap, a small debris field.

“I’m blind on optic frequencies,” said Orphu, “but I kept manipulating the accompanying radar imagery and something’s odd there. Here’s the best magnification and clarification I could get on the visual photograph. You tell me if there’s something there that deserves closer examination.”

“I’ll tell you right now that nothing we see there will make me fly the dropship back there,” Suma IV said flatly. “You two haven’t got the word yet, but the asteroid isle—that huge asteroid where we dropped Odysseus off—is leaving. It’s already changed its axis and aligned itself, and fusion thrusters are igniting as we speak. And your friend Odysseus is dead. And more than a million satellites in the polar and equatorial rings—mass accumulators, the fax-teleport devices, other things—are all coming alive again. We’re leaving.”

“LOOK AT THE GODDAMNED PHOTOGRAPHS,” bellowed Orphu of Io.

All the moravecs on board, even those without ears, tried to put their hands over their ears.

Mahnmut looked at the next photograph in the digital series. It had not only been magnified far beyond their original view, but the pixels cleared up.

“That’s some sort of backpack sitting there on the dry floor of the breach,” said Mahnmut. “And next to it…”

“A pistol,” said Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. “A gunpowder slug-thrower, if my guess is correct.”

“And that looks like a human body lying next to the pack,” said one of the black-chitinous troopers. “Something that’s been dead a long time—all mummified and flattened.”

“No,” said Orphu. “I checked the best radar imagery. That’s not a human body, just a human thermskin.”

“So?” said Suma IV from his command chair at the controls. “The submarine wreck expelled one of its passengers or some of a human’s belongings. They’re part of the debris field.”

Orphu snorted loudly. “And it’s all still there after twenty-five hundred standard years? I doubt it, Suma. Look at the pistol. No rust. Look at the rucksack. No rot. That part of the breach-gap is open to the elements—including sunlight and wind—but this stuff hasn’t degraded.”

“It proves nothing,” said Suma IV as he tapped in the rendezvous coordinates for the Queen Mab. Thrusters kicked the dropship into proper alignment for the burn and climb. “Sometime in the past few years some old-style human wandered out there to die. We have more important things to deal with right now.”

“Look in the sand,” said Orphu.

“What?” said their pilot.

“Look at the fifth image I blew up. In the sand. I can’t see it, but the radar was good down to three millimeters. What do you see there—with your eyes?”

“A footprint,” said Mahnmut. “A footprint of a bare human foot. Several footprints. All distinct in the muddy soil and soft sand. All leading west. Rain would wipe away those prints in a few days. Some human has been there in the last forty-eight hours or less—perhaps even while we were working on recovering the warheads.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Suma IV. “Our orders are to return to the Queen Mab and we’re going to…”

“Take the dropship back down to the Atlantic Breach,” commanded Prime Integrator Asteague/Che from thirty thousand kilometers higher on the opposite side of the Earth. “Our review of imagery we took hastily on the last orbit shows what may be the body of a human being in the Breach approximately twenty-three kilometers to the west of the submarine wreckage. Go and recover it at once.”

85

I flick into solidity and realize that I’ve QT’d myself into Helen of Troy’s private bathing chambers deep within the palace she used to share with her dead husband, Paris, and which she now shares with her former father-in-law, King Priam. I know I have only a few minutes in which to act, but I don’t know what to do.

Slave girls and serving women shriek as I stride from room to room calling Helen’s name. I hear the servants calling for the guards and realize that I may have to QT away quickly if I don’t want to end up on the end of a Trojan spear. Then I see a familiar face in the next chamber. It’s Hypsipyle, the slave woman from Lesbos whom Andromache had used as a personal minder for crazy Cassandra. This Hypsipyle might know where Helen is, since Helen and Andromache were very close the last time I saw them. And at least this slave isn’t running away or calling for the guards.

“Do you know where Helen is?” I ask as I approach the heavyset woman. Her blunt face is as expressionless as a gourd.

As if in answer, Hypsipyle rears back and kicks me in the gonads. I levitate, grab myself, fall to the tiled floor, roll around in agony, and squeak.

She aims another kick that would take my head off if I don’t dodge it, so I try to dodge, take the kick on the shoulder, and end up rolling into the corner, not even able to squeak now, my left shoulder and arm numb all the way down to the fingertips.

I struggle to my feet, hunched over, as the huge woman approaches with her eye full of business.

QT somewhere, idiot, I advise myself.

Where?

Anywhere but here!

Hypsipyle grabs me by my tunic front, tears the tunic, and aims a ham-fisted blow at my face. I raise my forearms to block the blow and the impact of her big-knuckled fist almost breaks the radius and ulna in both arms. I bounce off the wall and she grabs me by the shirt again and punches me in the belly.

Suddenly I’m on my knees again, retching, trying to clutch both belly and balls, no longer having enough wind in me even to manage a squeak.

Hypsipyle kicks me in the ribs, breaking at least one, and I roll to my side. I can hear the slap of the guards’ sandals as they rush up the main staircase.

Now I remember. The last time I saw Hypsipyle she was protecting Helen and I sucker-punched her to drag Helen away with me.

The slave-woman lifts me like a rag doll and slaps me—first forehand, then backhand, then forehand again. I feel teeth loosen and find myself feeling glad that I’m not wearing the reading glasses I used to have to wear.

Jesus Christ, Hockenberry, rages part of my mind. You just watched Achilles kill Zeus-Who-Drives-the-Storm-Clouds in single combat, and here you are getting the shit kicked out of you by one lousy Lesbian.

The guards burst into the room, spearpoints raised toward me. Hypsipyle turns toward them, still holding my bunched tunic in one of her huge hands, the tops of my feet scraping the floor, and holds me out, offering me to their spears.

I QT the two of us to the top of the great wall.

A blast of sunlight around us. Trojan warriors yards away exclaiming and leaping back. Hypsipyle is so astonished at this instantaneous change of place that she drops me.

I use the few seconds of her confusion I have left to kick her heavy legs out from under her. She scrambles to all fours, but—still on my back—I pull back my legs, coil them, and kick her clean off the open rampart into the city below.

That’ll teach you, you great muscled cow, teach you not to mess with Dr. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D. in Classical Literature…

I get to my feet, dust myself off, and look down from the rampart. The great muscled cow has landed on the canvas roof of a marketplace stall backed to the wall, has torn through the canvas, landed again in a heap of what look to be potatoes, and is currently running toward the stairs near the Scaean Gate to scramble back up to where I wait.

Shit.

I run along the rampart toward where I now see Helen standing with the other members of the royal family on the broad reviewing area of the wall, near Athena’s Temple. Everyone’s attention is firmly fixed on the battle on the beach—my Achaeans’ doomed last stand, obviously in its last stages now—so no one interdicts me before I’m grabbing Helen by her beautiful white arm.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” she says, marveling. “What is it? Why do you…”

“We’ve got to get everyone out of the city!” I gasp. “Now! Right now!”

Helen shakes her head. Guards have whirled and gone for their spears or swords, but Helen waves them away. “Hock-en-bear-eee… it is wonderful… we are winning… the Argives fall like wheat before our scythe… any minute now Noble Hector will…”

“We have to get everyone out of the buildings, off the wall, out of the city!” I shout.

It’s no good. The guards are all around us now, ready to protect Helen, King Priam, and the other royal family members here by killing me or dragging me off in an instant. I’ll never convince Helen or Priam to warn the city in time.

Panting, aware of Hypsipyle’s heavy running footsteps coming down the rampart toward us, I gasp, “The sirens. Where did the moravecs put the air raid sirens?”

“Sirens?” says Helen. She looks alarmed now, as if my madness must be dealt with quickly.

“The air raid sirens. The ones that used to wail months ago when the gods attacked the city by air. Where did the moravecs—the machine-toy people—put the equipment for the air raid sirens?”

“Oh, in the anteroom of the Temple of Apollo, but Hock-en-bear-eeee, why do you…”

Keeping my grip firm on her upper arm, I visualize the steps of Apollo’s Temple here in Ilium and QT us there an instant before the guards and one big, angry woman from Lesbos can grab me.

Helen gasps as we pop into solidity on the white steps, but I drag her up into the anteroom. There are no guards here. Everyone in the city seems to be on the walls or in a high place to watch the end of the war play out on the beach to the west.

The equipment is here, in the small acolytes’ changing room next to the main temple anteroom. The air raid siren warning had been automatic, triggered by the moravecs’ antiaircraft missile and radar sites—now gone—that had been stationed outside the city—but, just as I remembered, the moravec engineers had put a microphone with the other electronic gear here, just in case King Priam or Hector had wanted to address the entire Trojan population through the thirty huge air-raid-siren loudspeakers set around the walled city.

I study the equipment for just a few seconds—it had been made simple enough for a child to use so that the Trojans could manage it themselves, and child-simple technology is exactly the kind Dr. Thomas Hockenberry can manage.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee….”

I flip the switch that says PA SYSTEM ON, throw the toggle that reads LOUDSPEAKER ANNOUNCEMENT, lift the archaic-looking microphone, and begin babbling, hearing my own words echoing back from a hundred buildings and the great walls themselves—

“ATTENTION! ATTENTION! ALL PEOPLE OF ILIUM… KING PRIAM IS ISSUING AN EARTHQUAKE WARNING… EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!! LEAVE ALL BUILDINGS… NOW! GET OFF THE WALLS… NOW!! RUN FROM THE CITY INTO OPEN COUNTRY IF YOU CAN. IF YOU ARE IN A TOWER, EVACUATE IT… NOW!! AN EARTHQUAKE WILL HIT ILIUM AT ANY SECOND. AGAIN, KING PRIAM IS ISSUING AN EARTHQUAKE EVACUATION ORDER EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY … LEAVE ALL BUILDINGS AND SEEK OPEN SPACE NOW!!”

I echo on for another blaring minute, then switch off, grab the staring, open-mouthed Helen, and drag her out of the Temple of Apollo into the central marketplace.

People are milling and talking, staring at the various speaker locations from where my blaring announcement had come, but no one seems to be evacuating. A few people wander out of the large buildings that adjoin this central open plaza, but almost no one is running for the open Scaean Gate and the countryside as my announcement had commanded them to.

“Shit,” I say.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee, you are very worked up. Come to my chambers and we shall have some honeyed wine and…”

I tug her along behind me. Even if no one else is headed through the open gate and out away from the buildings, I sure as hell am. And I’m going to save Helen whether she wants me to or not.

I slide to a stop just before entering the narrowing avenue at the west end of the huge plaza. What am I doing? I don’t have to run like an idiot. I just have to visualize Thicket Ridge way out beyond the walls and QT us there…

“Oh, shit,” I say again.

Above us, horizontal, seemingly miles wide, descending rapidly, is the kind of Brane Hole I’d seen above Olympos earlier—a flat circle rimmed by flames. Through the Hole I can see dark sky and stars.

“Damn!” I decide at the last second not to quantum teleport—the chances of us getting caught in quantum space just as the Brane Hole hits us is too great.

I tug the staring, horrified Helen a dozen yards back toward the center of the huge plaza. With any luck we’ll be out of the range of the falling walls and buildings.

The hoop of fire falls around us past Ilium, falls past the surrounding hills, plains, marshes, and beaches for a circle of at least two miles, and the instant after it falls, we fall. There is a sensation of the entire city of ancient Troy being on an elevator suddenly cut free of its cables, and two seconds later all hell breaks loose.

Much later, the moravec engineers would tell me that the entire city of Ilium fell a literal five feet and two inches before landing on the soil of the present-day Earth. All of those fighting on the beach—more than one hundred fifty thousand struggling, screaming, sweating men—also suddenly dropped five feet two inches, and not onto soft beach sand, but onto the rock and tangled scrub brush that had taken the sand’s place after the coastline had retreated almost three hundred yards to the west.

For Helen and me in Ilium’s great city square, those last minutes of Ilium were almost our last minutes as well.

It was the topless tower near the wall beyond the southeast corner of that square—the same damaged, topless tower where Helen had stabbed me in the heart in what seemed like ages ago—that came falling over lower buildings, toppling and collapsing like some giant factory smokestack, crashing directly at us as we cowered in the open square near the fountain.

It was the fountain itself that saved our lives. The multistepped structure with its pool and central obelisk—no more than twelve feet tall—was just large enough to part the path of the tower’s tumbling debris, leaving us coughing in a cloud of dust and smaller pieces, but sending the larger stone blocks careering elsewhere across the marketplace.

We were stunned. The huge paving stones of the plaza itself had been shattered by the five-foot fall. The fountain obelisk was tilting at a thirty-degree angle and the fountain itself had stopped forever. The entire city was lost in a cloud of dust that did not fully clear away for more than six hours. By the time Helen and I picked ourselves up and started dusting ourselves off, coughing and trying to clear our nose and throats of all the terrible white powder, other people were already running—most randomly, in pure panic, now that it was too late to run—while a few had even begun digging in the ruins and rubble, trying to find and help others.

More than five thousand people died in the Fall of the City. Most had been trapped in the larger buildings—both the Temple of Athena and the Temple of Apollo had collapsed, their many pillars cracking and flying apart like broken sticks. Paris’s palace, now the home of Priam, was rubble. No one on the terrace of Athena’s temple survived except for Hypsipyle, who was still hunting for me when her part of the wall collapsed. Many of the people had been on the main west and southwest ramparts, which did not collapse in their entirety, but which tumbled outward or inward in many places, sending bodies flying out and down to the rocks on the Plain of Scamander or into the city and down onto the rubble. King Priam was one of those who died that way, along with several other members of the royal family, including the ill-fated Cassandra. Andromache—Hector’s wife and a survivor if ever there was one—survived without a scratch.

The city of Troy was as much in an earthquake zone in the ancient days as that part of Turkey is now, people knew how to react to quakes then much as they do now, and my announcement probably saved many. Many people did run to solid doorways or escaped to open spaces to avoid the collapsing buildings. It was later estimated that several thousand ran out onto the plain itself before the city fell, the towers tumbled, and the walls came down.

For my part, I stared around in stunned disbelief. The noblest of cities, this survivor of ten years of siege by the Achaeans and months more war with the gods themselves, was now mostly rubble. Fires burned here and there—not the omnipresent flames of a modern city of my era after an earthquake, for there were no ruptured gaslines here—but fires enough from braziers and hearths and cooking kitchens and simple torches in windowless halls that were now open to the sky. Fires enough. The smoke mixed with the roiling dust to keep the many hundreds of us milling in the plaza coughing and dabbing at our eyes.

“I have to find Priam… Andromache…” said Helen between coughs. “I have to find Hector!”

“You go look after your people here, Helen,” I said between coughs. “I’ll go down to the beach in search of Hector.”

I turned to go but Helen grabbed my arm to stop me. “Hock-en-bear-eeee… what did this? Who did this?”

I told her the truth. “The gods.”

It had long been prophesied that Troy could not fall until the stone above the huge Scaean Gate was dislodged, and as I pushed my way out with fleeing crowds, I noticed that the wooden gates had splintered and that the great lintel had fallen.

Nothing was as it had been ten minutes earlier. Not only had the city been destroyed in an instant of encircling fire, but the surrounding area had changed, the sky had changed, the weather had changed. We weren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.

I had taught the Iliad for more than twenty years at Indiana University and elsewhere, but I had never thought to go to Troy—to the ruins of Troy along the coast of Turkey. But I’d seen photos enough of the place at the end of the Twentieth Century and beginning of the Twenty-first Century. This place where Ilium had crash-landed like Dorothy’s house looked more like the ruins of Troy in the Twenty-first Century—a small area named Hisarlik—than like the busy center of empire that had been Ilium.

As I looked at the changed scenery—and changed sky, since it had been early afternoon when the Greeks were fighting their last stand, and it was now twilight—I remembered a Canto of Don Juan by Byron, written when the poet had visited this place in 1810 and had felt both the connection here to heroic history and the distance from it—

High barrows without marble or a name, A vast, untilled and mountain-skirted plain And Ida in the distance, still the same, And old Scamander (if ‘tis he) remain; The situation seems still formed for fame—A hundred thousand men might fight again With ease; but where I sought for Ilion’s walls, The quiet sheep feeds, and the tortoise crawls.

I saw no sheep, but when I looked back at the toppled city, the ridge-line was much the same—although obviously five feet two inches lower where the city had just fallen onto the rubble of amateur archaeologist Schliemann’s ruins. A memory struck me that the ancient Romans had sheared off yards of the top of that ridgeline to build their own city of Ilion more than a millennium after the original Ilium disappeared, and I realized that we’d all been lucky to fall just five feet two inches. If it hadn’t been for Roman rubble on top of Greek ruins, the fall would have been much worse.

To the north where the Plain of Simois had stretched for many miles, a low grassland perfect for pasturing and running the famous Trojan horses, there now grew a forest. The smooth Plain of Scamander, the area between the city and the shoreline to the west, the plain where I’d watched most of the fighting take place during the last eleven years, was now a gully-riddled riot of scrub oak, pine, and swampy marsh. I headed for that beach, climbing what the Trojans had called Thicket Ridge without even recognizing where I was, but as soon as I reached the low ridgeline I stopped in amazement.

The Sea was gone.

It’s not just the mile or so of receded shoreline that I knew about from the memories of my Twenty-first Century previous life, the entire fucking Aegean Sea was gone!

I sat down on the highest boulder I could find on Thicket Ridge and thought about this. I wondered not only where Nyx and Hephaestus had sent us, but when. All I could tell right now in the failing twilight was that there were no electric lights visible anywhere inland or along the coast and that the bottom of what should be the Aegean here was overgrown with mature trees and shrubs.

Toto, we’re not only not in Kansas anymore, we’re not even in Oz anymore.

The evening sky was completely covered over by clouds, but it was still light enough that I could see the thousands upon thousands of men packed together in a half-mile arc along what had been the beach just fifteen minutes earlier. At first I was sure that they were still fighting—I could see thousands more fallen on each side—but then I realized that they were just milling around, all lines of combat, trenches, defenses, communication, and discipline lost. Later I’d discover that almost a third of the men down there, Trojans and Achaeans alike, had broken bones—mostly leg bones—from the five-foot fall onto rock and into gullies that hadn’t been there a second earlier. In places, I’d soon learn, men who had been trying to slash each other’s guts and skulls to bits a few minutes earlier were now lying moaning together or trying to help each other up.

I hurried to get down the hill and to cross the mile of alluvial plain that had been so much easier to cross when it had been so worn-down and bare from battle. By the time I reached the rear of the Trojan lines—such as they were—it was almost dark.

I started asking for Hector immediately, but it was another half hour before I found him, and by then everything was being done by torchlight.

Hector and his wounded brother Deiphobus were conferring with the temporary commander of the Argives—Idomeneus, son of Deucalion and commander of the Crete heroes, and Little Ajax of Locris, son of Oileus. Little Ajax had been carried to the conference on a litter, since he’d been slashed to the bone on both shins earlier in the day. Also there conferring with Hector was Thrasymedes, Nestor’s brave son whom I’d thought had been killed earlier in the day—he’d gone missing in the battle for the last trench and had been presumed dead down among the corpses there, but as I’d discover in a minute, he had only been wounded a third time, but it had taken him hours to dig his way out of the corpse-filled trench, then only to find himself among the Trojans. They’d taken him prisoner—one of the few acts of mercy this day or any day of the almost eleven years of war between the two groups—and now he was using a broken lance as a crutch as he negotiated with Hector.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” said Hector, apparently and oddly happy to see me. “Son of Duane! I am glad you survived this madness. What caused this? Who caused this? What has happened?”

“The gods caused this,” I said truthfully. “To be specific, the fire god Hephaestus and Night—Nyx—the mysterious goddess who lives and works with the Fates.”

“I know you were close to the gods, Hock-en-bear-eeee, son of Duane. Why have they done this thing? What do they want us to do?”

I shook my head. The torches were ripping and tearing at the night in the strong breeze coming in from the west—coming from the direction of what had once been the Mediterranean but which now bore smells of vegetation on the wind. “It doesn’t matter what the gods want,” I said. “You’ll never see the gods again. They’re gone forever.”

The hundred or two hundred packed men around us said nothing and for a minute there came only the sound of the torches and the moans of the many injured in the dark.

“How do you know this?” asked Little Ajax.

“I just came from Olympos,” I said. “Your Achilles killed Zeus in hand-to-hand combat.”

The murmurs would have grown to a roar if Hector had not silenced everyone. “Continue, son of Duane.”

“Achilles killed Zeus and the Titans returned to Olympos. Hephaestus will rule eventually—Night and the Fates have decided this already—but for the next year or so, your Earth would have been a battlefield on which no mere mortal could have survived. So Hephaestus sent you—the city, its survivors, you Achaeans, you Trojans—here.”

“Where is here?” asked Ideomeneus.

“I have no idea.”

“When will we be allowed to return?” asked Hector.

“Never,” I said. I was sure of this and my voice reflected that certainty. I’m not sure I ever spoke two syllables with such certainty before or since.

At that moment, the second of the three impossible things of the day occurred—the first being, by my count, the falling of Ilium into a different universe.

It had been cloudy since the city landed on the ridgeline—solid clouds spread from east to west—and the twilight darkness had come more quickly because of the cloud cover. But now the wind that had borne the smell of vegetation was moving the entire cloud mass from west to east, clearing the early night sky above us.

We heard the men—Achaeans and Trojans both—exclaiming for long seconds before we realized that they were looking and pointing skyward.

I became aware of the strange light even before I looked up at the skies. It was brighter than any night under a full moon that I’d ever experienced and it was a richer, milkier, and strangely more fluid sort of light. I found myself looking down at our multiple, moving shadows on the rock beneath us—shadows no longer thrown by torchlight—when Hector himself prodded my arm to make me look up.

The clouds had all but passed. The night sky was still Earth’s night sky; I could see Orion’s Belt, the Pleiades, Polaris, and the Big Dipper low in the north, all more or less in their proper places, but that familiar late winter sky and the crescent moon rising above tumbled Troy to the east were paled to insignificance by this new source of light.

Two broad and moving bands of stars were moving and crossing above us, one band in our south and obviously moving quickly west to east, the other ring directly above us and moving north to south. The rings were bright and milky but not indistinct—I could make out thousands upon thousands of bright individual stars in each ring even as some long-lost memory from a science column in some newspaper reminded me that on the clearest night from most places on Earth, only about three thousand separate stars were visible up there. Now there were tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of individual stars visible—all moving together and crossing in two bright rings above us, easily illuminating everything around us and giving us a sort of half-evening-light, the kind of half-light I’d always imagined they played softball by at midnight in Anchorage, Alaska. This may have been the most beautiful thing I’d seen in two lifetimes.

“Son of Duane,” said Hector, “what are these stars? Are they gods? New stars? What are they?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

At that moment, with more than a hundred and fifty thousand men in armor rubbernecking, staring openmouthed and fearful at the amazing new night sky of this other Earth, men closest to the beach started shouting about something else. It took several minutes for us to realize that something was happening at the westernmost reaches of the mob of men, and then it took those of us at Hector’s conference more minutes to make our way west to a rocky rise—perhaps the edge of the original beach here thousands of years ago in Ilium’s day—to see what the Achaeans were still shouting about.

For the first time I noticed that the hundreds of burned black ships were still here; they had passed through the Brane Hole with us—the scorched wrecks near no water now, beached forever on the scrubby ridges here high above the alluvial marsh to the west—and then I noticed what the hundreds of men were yelling about.

Something black and inky but which reflected the turning starlight above us was creeping across the floor of the missing sea from the west, something moving silently toward us along the bottom of the dry basin, something flowing and sliding eastward with the subtle, slow, but sure certainty of Death. It filled up the lowest points as we watched, then encircled the wooded hilltops in the distance near the horizon—quite easily visible in the light from the new rings above us—and within minutes those hilltops had been surrounded by the dark motion until they ceased being hilltops and became the islands of Lemnos and Tenedos and Imbros once again.

This was the third strange miracle of this seemingly endless day.

The wine-dark sea was returning to the shores of Ilium.

86

Harman held the pistol to his forehead for only a few seconds. Even as his finger touched the weapon’s trigger, he knew that he wasn’t going to end things that way. It was a coward’s way out, and however terrified he felt right then at the imminence of his own death, he did not want to exit as a coward.

He pivoted, aimed the weapon at the hulking bow of the ancient submarine where it emerged through the north wall of the Breach, and squeezed the trigger until the weapon stopped firing nine shots later. His hand was shaking so badly he didn’t even know if he’d hit the huge target, but the act of shooting at it both focused and exorcised some of his rage and revulsion at the folly of his own species.

The soiled thermskin came off slowly. Harman did not even consider trying to wash the thing, but simply cast it aside. He was shaking from the aftermaths of the vomiting and diarrhea, but he didn’t even consider putting on his outer clothes or boots as he rose, found his balance, and started walking west.

Harman didn’t have to query his new biometric functions to know that he was dying quickly. He could feel the radiation in his guts and bowels and testicles and bones. The final weakness was growing in him like some foul homunculus stirring. So he walked west, toward Ada and Ardis.

For several hours, Harman’s mind was wonderfully quiescent, becoming aware only to help him avoid stepping on something sharp or to lead him to the correct path through ridges of coral or rock. He was vaguely aware that the walls of the Breach on both sides were growing much higher—the ocean was deeper here—and that the air around him was much cooler. But the midday sun still struck him. Once, in midafternoon, Harman looked down and saw that his legs and thighs were still soiled, mostly with blood, and he staggered to the south wall of the Breach, reached his bare hand through the forcefield—his fingers feeling the terrible pressure and cold—and scooped enough saltwater out of the sea to clean himself. He staggered on toward the west.

When he did begin thinking again he was pleased to note that it was not just about the obscenity of the machine and its cargo of planetary death that were now out of sight behind him. He began to think about his own life, one hundred years of it.

At first Harman’s thoughts were bitter—scolding himself for wasting all those decades on parties and play and an aimless series of faxing to this social event or that—but he soon forgave himself. There had been good times there, real moments even amidst that false existence, and the last year of true friendships, real love, and honest commitment had made up at least in part for all the years of shallowness.

He thought of his own role in the last year’s events and found the capacity to forgive himself there as well. The post-human who called herself Moira teased him about being Prometheus, but Harman saw himself more as a sort of combined Adam and Eve who—by seeking out the one Forbidden Fruit in the perfect Garden of Indolence—had banished his species from that mindless, healthy place forever.

What had he given Ada, his friends, his race, in return? Reading? As central as reading and knowledge had been to Harman, he wondered if that one ability—so much more potentially powerful than the hundred functions now stirred to wakefulness in his body—could compensate for all the terror, pain, uncertainty, and death ahead.

Perhaps, he realized, it did not have to.

As evening darkened the long slot of sky far above, Harman stumbled westward and began thinking about death. His own, he knew, was only hours away, perhaps less, but what of the concept of death that he and his people had never had to face until recent months?

He allowed himself to search all the data stored in him after the crystal cabinet and found that death—the fear of death, the hope for surviving death, curiosity about death—had been the central spur for almost all literature and religion for the nine millennia of information he had stored. The religion parts, Harman could not quite comprehend—he had little context except for his current terror at the presence of Death. He saw the hunger there in a thousand cultures over thousands of years to have assurance—any assurance—that one’s life continued even after life so obviously had fled. He blinked as his mind sorted through concepts of afterlife—Valhalla, Heaven, Hell, the Islamic Paradise that the crew of the submarine behind him had been so eager to enter, the sense of having lived a Righteous life so as to live on in the minds and memories of others—and then he looked at all the myriad versions of the theme of being reborn into an Earthly life, the mandala, reincarnation, the Wu-Nine Path to Center. To Harmon’s mind and heart, it was all beautiful and as airy and empty as an abandoned spiderweb.

As he stumbled westward into the cold gathering shadows, Harman realized that if he responded to human views of Death now stored in his dying cells and very DNA, it was to the literary and artistic attempts to express the human side of the encounter—a sort of defiance of genius. Harman looked at stored images of the last self-portraits of Rembrandt and wept at the terrible wisdom in that visage. He listened to his own mind read every word of the full version of Hamlet and realized—as so many generations before had realized—that this aging prince in black might have been the only true envoy from the Undiscovered Country.

Harman realized that he was weeping and that it was not for himself or his imminent demise—nor even for the loss of Ada and his unborn child, who were never truly out of his mind—but it was simply because he had never had the chance to watch a Shakespearean play performed. He realized that if he were returning home to Ardis all hale and hearty, rather than as this bleeding, dying skeleton, he would have insisted that the community perform one of Shakespeare’s plays if they managed to survive the voynix.

Which one?

Trying to decide this interesting question kept Harman distracted long enough that he did not notice the sky above fading to deep twilight hues, nor did he notice when the slice of sky became only starfields and ring movement and he did not immediately notice that the cold in the deep trench he was staggering westward in was seeping into his skin first, then flesh, then his very bones.

Finally he could go on no longer. He kept stumbling over rocks and other unseen things. He could not even see where the walls of the Breach began. Everything was terribly cold and totally dark—a pretaste of death.

Harman did not want to die. Not yet. Not now. He curled into a fetal position on the sandy bottom of the Breach, feeling the grit and sand rubbing his skin raw as the reality that he was alive. He hugged himself, teeth chattering, pulled his knees higher up and hugged them, body shaking, but reassured that he was alive. He even thought wistfully about the rucksack he had left so far behind and of the thermal-blanket sleeping bag in it and of his clothes. His mind acknowledged the food bars left in it as well, but his stomach wanted no part of that.

Several times during the night, Harman had to crawl away from the nest in the sand he had made with his curled body and shake on hands and knees as he retched again and again—but dry heaves only. Anything he’d had in his stomach yesterday was long gone. Then he would crawl back slowly, laboriously, to his little fetal-shaped gouge in the sand, anticipating the slight warmth he would find again when curled up there the way he once might have anticipated a fine meal.

Which play? The first he had ever read had been Romeo and Juliet and it held the affection of first encounter. Now he reviewed King Lear—never, never, never, never never—and thought it perfectly appropriate for a dying man such as himself, even one who had not lived long enough to see his son or daughter, but it might be too much for the Ardis family in their first encounter with Shakespeare. Since they would have to be their own actors, he wondered who among them could even play old Lear… Odysseus-Noman was the only face that seemed right. He wondered how Noman fared this day.

Harman turned his face upward and watched the rings turn in front of the stars, a beauty he had never appreciated as much as he did this terrible night. A bright streak—brighter than the rest of the ring stars combined—a bold scratch against black onyx, moved across the p-ring and moved between the real stars before disappearing behind the Breach wall on the south side. Harman had no idea what it was—it lasted far too long to be a meteor—but he knew that it was so very, very far away that it could have nothing to do with him.

Thinking of death and thinking of Shakespeare, not yet decided on which play to stage first, Harman encountered these interesting lines stored deep in his DNA. It was Claudio speaking, Claudio from Measure for Measure, as the character confronted his own execution:

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod, and the dilated spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice; To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendant world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling—‘tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathèd worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death.

Harman realized that he was sobbing—curled, cold, and sobbing—but not sobbing in fear of death or at the imminence of his own loss of everything and everyone, but weaping gratitude that he came from a race that could spawn a man who could write those words, think those thoughts. It almost—almost—made up for the human thought that had conceived, designed, launched, and crewed the submarine behind him with its seven hundred sixty-eight black holes waiting to devour all futures for everyone.

Suddenly Harman laughed aloud. His mind had made its own leap to John Keat’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and he saw—he was not shown, but he saw on his own—the young Keats’s nod in Shakespeare’s direction with the lines to the singing bird—

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—To thy high requiem become a sod.

“Three cheers for the alliance of Claudio’s kneaded clod and Johnny’s earless sod!” cried Harman. The sudden attempt to speak made him cough again and when he peered at his hand in ringlight, he saw that he had coughed up red blood and three teeth.

Harman moaned, curled again in his womb of sand, shook, and had to smile again. His restless brain could no more quit poking at Shakespeare than his tongue could quit probing the three holes in his gums where his teeth had been. It was the couplet from Cymbeline that made Harman smile—

Golden lads and girls all must As chimney-sweepers come to dust.

He’d just gotten the pun. What kind of species of genius is it, wondered Harman, that can put such a childish, playful pun in such a sad dirge?

With that last thought, Harman slipped sideways into a cold sleep, insensate to the cold rain that had begun to fall on him.

He awoke.

That was the first marvel. He opened his blood-caked eyes onto a gray, cold gloomy predawn morning with the still-dark seawalls of the Breach rising five hundred feet or more on either side. But he had slept and now he waked.

The second marvel was that he could move, eventually, and after a fashion. It took Harman fifteen minutes to get to his hands and knees, but once there he crawled to the nearest boulder rising out of the sand and in another ten minutes managed to get to his feet and not quite fall again.

Now he was ready to walk west again, but he did not know which way was west.

He was completely turned around. The long Breach stretched away from side to side, but there was no clue to which way was east and which was west. Shaking, shivering, aching in ways he could never have imagined he could ache, Harman staggered in circles, hunting for his own footprints from the night before, but much of the seabed there was rock and the rain that had almost frozen him to death had wiped away any traces of prints of his bare feet.

Swaying, Harman took four steps in one direction. Convinced he was heading back toward the submarine, he wheeled and took eight steps in the other direction.

No use. Clouds hung low and solid above the Breach opening. He had no sense of east or west. Harman couldn’t bear the thought of walking back toward the submarine with all that evil lying in its belly, of losing the distance he had made so laboriously yesterday toward Ada and Ardis.

He staggered to the wall of the Breach—he did not know now whether it was the north or south wall—and stared at his reflection in the slowly thickening predawn glow.

Some creature that was not Harman stared back. His naked body already looked skeletal. There were patches of blood pooled under the skin everywhere—on his sunken cheeks, his chest, under the skin of his forearms, on his shaking legs, even a huge mottle on his lower belly. When he coughed again, two more teeth were expelled. It looked in the water’s mirror as if he had been weeping tears of blood. As if in an attempt to tidy himself, he brushed his hair to one side.

Harman stared at his fist for a long, empty moment. A huge swatch of hair had come away in his hand. It was as if he were holding a small dead creature made up completely of hair. He dropped it, brushed at his head again. More hair came loose. Harman looked at his reflection and saw the walking dead, already one-third bald.

Warmth touched his back.

Harman whirled and almost fell.

It was the sun—rising directly in the aperture of the Breach behind him. The sun, rising perfectly in the keyhole of the Breach, its golden rays bathing him in warmth in the few seconds before the clouds swallowed the orange sphere. What were the chances that the sun would rise directly down the Breach on this particular morning—as if he were a Druid waiting at Stonehenge for the equinox sunrise?

Harman felt so light-headed that he knew he’d forget which direction the sun had risen from if he did not act immediately. Aiming in the opposite direction of the warmth on his back, he began staggering west again.

By midday—the clouds parted between rain showers and gave hints of sunlight—Harman’s mind no longer felt connected to his staggering body. He was taking twice as many steps as he had to, staggering from the north wall of the Breach to the south wall, having to set his hands lightly against the buzz-jolt of the forcefield itself to set himself moving again down the endless trough.

He was wondering as he walked at what the future might be—or might have been—for his people. Not just the survivors of Ardis, but for all the old-style humans who might have survived the vicious voynix attacks. Now that the old world was gone forever, what form of government, of religion, of society, culture, politics, might they have created?

A protein memory module nestled deep in Harman’s encoded DNA—a memory that would not die until long after most of the other cells in Harman’s body had died and come apart—offered him this fragment from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks—“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.”

Harman laughed aloud and the single bark of a laugh cost him another front tooth. Morbid symptoms, indeed. The slightest scan of the context of that fragment told Harman that this Gramsci had been an intellectual promoting revolution, socialism, and communism—the last two theories having died and rotted away less than halfway through the Lost Era, abandoned for the naïve bullshit they were—but the problem of interregnums certainly had remained and now here it was again.

He realized that Ada had been leading her people toward some sort of crude Athenian democracy in the weeks and months before Harman had stupidly left his expecting beloved. They had never discussed it, but he was aware of her recognition that the four hundred people in the Ardis community then—this was before the slaughter by voynix he’d seen via the red turin cloth on the eiffelbahn—turned to her for leadership, and she hated that role, even as she fell into it naturally. By deferring things to constant votes, Ada was obviously trying to establish the basis for a future democracy should Ardis survive.

But if the red turin had given him true images—and Harman believed it had—Ardis as a real community had not survived. Four hundred people made up a community. Fifty-four ragged, starved survivors did not.

The radiation seemed to have sheared off much of the lining of Harman’s throat, and every time he swallowed now, he coughed up blood. This was a distraction. He tried to slow the pace of his swallowing to once every tenth step he took. His right hand, chin, and chest, he knew, were smeared with blood.

It would have been interesting seeing what social and political structures his race would have evolved. Perhaps the population, even before the voynix attacks, had—at a mere one hundred thousand men and women—never been sufficient to generate real dynamics such as politics or religious ceremonies or armies or social hierarchies.

But Harman didn’t believe this. He saw in his many protein memory banks the examples of Athens, Sparta, and the Greek entities long before Athens and Sparta ascended. The turin drama—what he now clearly saw as Homer’s Iliad—had borrowed its heroes from kingdoms as small as Odysseus’ isle of Ithaca.

Thinking of the turin drama, he remembered the altar quickly glimpsed on their trip to Paris Crater a year ago, just after Daeman was eaten by a dinosaur—it had been dedicated to one of the Olympian gods, although he forgot right then which one. The post-humans had served, at least for the last millennium and a half, as his people’s substitute for gods or a God, but what shapes and ceremonies would the future need for belief take?

The future.

Harman paused, panting, leaned against a shoulder-high black rock jutting out of the north wall of the Breach, and tried to think about the future.

His legs were shaking violently. It was as if his leg muscles were dissolving as he watched.

Panting, forcing breaths through his closing, bleeding throat, Harman stared ahead and blinked.

The sun was perched just above the cleft of the Breach. For a terrible second, Harman thought that it was still sunrise and that he had walked the wrong direction after all, but then he realized that he had been walking in a stupor all day. The sun had descended from the clouds and was preparing to set at the end of the long hallway of the Breach.

Harman took two more steps forward and fell on his face.

This time he could not rise. It took all of his energy to prop himself up on his right elbow to watch the sunset.

His mind was very clear. He no longer thought about Shakespeare or Keats or religions or heaven or death or politics or democracy. Harman thought about his friends. He saw Hannah laughing on the day of the metal pour by the river—remembered the specifics of her youthful energy and the glee of her friends as they poured the first bronze artifact created in how many thousand years? He saw Petyr sparring with Odysseus during the days the bearded Greek warrior would hold forth with his long statements of philosophy and odd question-and-answer periods on the grassy hill behind Ardis. There had been much energy and joy in those sessions.

Harman remembered Savi’s husky, cynical voice, and her huskier laugh. He perfectly recalled their cheering and shouting when Savi had driven Daeman and him out of Jerusalem in the crawler, with thousands of voynix chasing to no avail. And he saw his friend Daeman’s face as if through two lenses—the pudgy, self-absorbed boy-man from when Harman first met him, and the lean, serious version—a man to be trusted with one’s life—whom he’d last seen a few weeks ago on the day Harman left Ardis in the sonie.

And, as the sun entered the Breach so perfectly that its outer curves just touched the Breach wall—Harman smiled to think of a hissing steam sound rising and actually thought he heard one through his failing ears—Harman thought of Ada.

He thought of her eyes and smile and soft voice. He remembered her laugh and touch and the last time they had been together in bed. Harman allowed himself to remember how, when they turned away from one another as sleep came on, they also soon would curve against the other for warmth—Ada against his back, her right arm around him, himself later in the night against Ada’s back and perfect backside, a bit of excitement stirring in him even as he drifted off to sleep, his left arm around her, his left hand cupping her breast.

Harman realized that his eyelids were so caked with blood that he could not really blink, could not really shut his eyes. The setting sun—the bottom of it already below the Breach horizon—was burning red and orange echoes into his retina. It didn’t matter. He knew that after this sunset, he would never need to use his eyes again. So he concentrated on holding his beloved Ada in his mind and heart and on watching the last half of the sun’s disk disappear directly to his west.

Something moved and blocked the last of the sunset.

For several seconds, Harman’s dying mind could not process that information. Something had moved into his field of vision and blocked his view of the last of the sunset.

Still propped on his right elbow, he used the back of his left hand to rub some of the caked blood from his eyes.

Something was standing in the Breach not twenty feet west of Harman. It must have come through the Breach wall of water there on the north side. The thing was about the size of an eight—or nine-year-old child and was shaped more or less like a human child, but it wore a strange suit of metal and plastic. Harman saw a black visor where the little boy’s eyes should be.

On the verge of death, as the brain shuts down from lack of oxygen, an unsummoned protein memory molecule prompted him, hallucinations are not uncommon. Thus the frequent tales from resuscitated victims of a “long tunnel” ending in a “bright light” and…

Fuck that, thought Harman. He was staring down a long tunnel toward a bright light, although only the top rim of the sun remained, and both walls of the Breach were alive with light—silver, bright, mirrored surfaces with millions of facets of dancing light.

But the boy in the plastic and metal red-and-black suit was real.

And as Harman stared, something larger and stranger forced itself out through the north wall of the Breach.

The forcefield is semipermeable only to human beings and what they wear, thought Harman.

But this second apparition was nowhere near human. It was about twice the size of the largest droshky, but looked more like a giant, robotic crab monster with its big pincer claws and many metal legs and its huge, pitted carapace now pouring water off it in loud rivulets.

No one told me that the last minutes before death would be so visually amusing, thought Harman.

The little boy figure stepped closer. It spoke in English, its voice soft and rather boylike, perhaps sounding much like Harman’s future son might sound. “Sir,” it said, “can you use some assistance?”

87

It was just after sunrise and fifty thousand voynix were attacking from all directions. Ada paused to look back at the Pit where the shredded corpse of the Setebos spawn still lay.

Daeman touched her arm. “Don’t feel bad. We had to kill it sooner or later.”

She shook her head. “I don’t feel the least bit sorry,” she said. To Greogi and Hannah she shouted, “Get the sky-raft up!”

Too late. More than half the survivors had panicked at the scuttling roar of the voynix attack—the creatures were still invisible in the forest but the two-mile radius must have been cut in half by now. They’d be at Ardis in less than a minute.

“No! No!” shouted Ada as thirty people, in their panic, tried to fit aboard the slowly lifting sky-raft. Hannah was at the controls, trying to keep it at a steady three-foot hover, but more people were trying to clamber aboard.

“Take it up!” shouted Daeman. “Hannah! Take it up now!”

Too late. The heavy machine let out a mechanical whine, dipped to its right, and crashed to the ground, sending people flying.

Ada and Daeman ran to the fallen machine. Hannah looked up with a stricken face. “It won’t start again. Something’s broken.”

“Never mind,” Ada said, her voice calm. “It would never have made even one trip to the island.” She squeezed Hannah’s shoulder and raised her voice—“Everyone to the walls! Now!! Bring every weapon in the compound. Our best chance is to break their first charge.”

She turned and ran to the west wall and a minute later the others began to do the same, choosing empty spots in the now-circular palisade. Everyone followed Ada’s example of carrying at least two flechette rifles and a crossbow along with a heavy canvas bag of magazines and bolts.

Ada settled herself into a firing niche and discovered that Daeman was still beside her. “Good,” he said.

She nodded, although she had no idea what he was really saying to her.

Working very carefully, in no rush, Ada slapped in a fresh magazine, clicked off the safety, and aimed the rifle at the treeline no more than two hundred yards away.

The rushing, hissing, clacking noise made by the approaching voynix grew deafening and Ada found she had to resist the urge to drop her rifle and cover her ears. Her heart was pounding and she was feeling slightly nauseated, almost the way she’d felt earlier in her pregnancy, but she did not feel afraid. Not yet.

“All those years of the turin drama,” she said, not realizing that she was speaking aloud.

“What?” said Daeman, leaning closer to hear.

She shook her head. “I was just thinking about the turin drama. According to Harman, Odysseus said that he and Savi started that—distributing the turin cloths ten years ago, I mean. Maybe the idea was to teach us how to die with courage.”

“I’d rather they’d given us something to teach us how to win a fight against fifty thousand fucking voynix,” said Daeman. He clicked back the activation bolt on his rifle.

Ada laughed.

The little noise was drowned out by the roar as the voynix broke free of the forest—some leaping from tree branches even as others scuttled beneath the leapers—a gray wall of carapaces and claws rushing at them at fifty or sixty miles an hour. There were so many of them this time that Ada had trouble making out individual voynix bodies in the rising and falling mass. She looked over her shoulder and saw the same nightmare coming at them from all sides as the tens of thousands of voynix narrowed the radius at full speed.

No one yelled Fire! but suddenly everyone was shooting. Ada grinned in the grip of a sort of ferocious terror as the flechette rifle emptied its first magazine in a series of hard stutters against her shoulder. She let the ammunition clip drop free and slapped a fresh one in.

The flechettes struck by the thousands, crystal facets gleaming in the rising sun, but the hits seemed to make no difference. Voynix must be dropping, but there so many thousands still leaping, scuttling, jumping, running, scrambling, that Ada couldn’t even see the wounded and dead ones fall. The gray-silver wall of death had covered half the distance from the woods in a few seconds and the things would be over the low palisade walls in another few seconds.

Daeman may have been the first to go over the wall—Ada couldn’t swear to it, since it seemed to be an almost simultaneous decision. Grabbing up one weapon and screaming, he jumped from the parapet, vaulted over the tops of the logs, landed, rolled, and began rushing toward the voynix.

Ada laughed and wept. Suddenly it was the most important thing in the world to her that she join in that charge—the most important thing in the world to die attacking this mindless, vicious, stupid, programmed-for-murder enemy, and not wait here behind wood walls to be killed cowering.

Absurdly taking care because she was, after all, five months pregnant, Ada jumped, rolled, got to her feet, and rushed after Daeman, firing as she ran. She heard a familiar voice screaming to her left and she turned just long enough to see Hannah and Edide running not far behind, stopping to shoot, then running again.

She could see the humps on the gray-carapaced voynix bodies now. They were covering twenty or twenty-five feet at a leap, their killing claws extended. Ada ran and fired. She no longer knew that she was screaming or what words she might be screaming. Briefly, very briefly, she summoned an image of Harman and tried to send a message his direction—I’m sorry, my darling, sorry about the baby—but then she paid attention only to running and firing and the gray forms were almost on them, rising above them like a silver-gray tidal wave….

The explosions threw Ada ten feet back and burned off her eyebrows.

Men and women were lying all around her, thrown backward with her, too stunned to speak or rise. Some were trying to put out flames on their clothing. Some were unconscious.

The Ardis compound was encircled by a wall of flame that rose fifty, eighty, a hundred feet into the air.

A second wave of voynix appeared, running and leaping through the flames. More explosions erupted along this line of running gray-silver figures. Ada blinked as she watched carapaces and claws, legs and humps flying in every direction.

Then Daeman was pulling her to her feet. He was panting, his face blistered from flash burns. “Ada… we have to get… back… to…”

Ada pulled her arm free and stared up at the sky. There were five flying machines in the air above the Ardis clearing and none of them were sonies—four smaller, bat-winged devices were dropping canisters toward the tree line while a much larger winged machine was descending toward the center of their palisaded compound—the palisade walls mostly tumbled inward now from the multiple explosions.

Suddenly cables dropped from the bat-winged shapes and black, humanoid but not human shapes whizzed down the lines, hitting the ground faster than a human could and running to establish a perimeter. When some of these tall, black forms ran past Ada, she saw that they were not humans—nor even humans in combat armor of some sort—but taller creatures, strangely jointed, covered with barbs, thorns, and a chitinous ebony armor.

More voynix came through the flames.

The black figures between her and the voynix had gone to one knee and raised weapons that looked too heavy for human beings to lift. The guns suddenly exploded into action—chuga-chink-ghuga-chuga-ghink—sounding like some chain-driven cutting machine while pulses of pure blue energy raked the oncoming ranks of voynix. Wherever a blue pulse struck, the voynix exploded.

Daeman was pulling her back toward the compound.

“What?” she shouted over the din. “What?”

He shook his head. Either he couldn’t hear her or didn’t know the answer himself.

Another round of explosions knocked all the retreating humans down again. This time the mushrooms of flame rose two or three hundred feet into the cold morning air. All of the trees to the west and east of Ardis were burning.

Voynix leaped through the flames. The chitinous black soldiers shot them down by the score, then by the hundreds.

Then one of the black things was looming over her. It reached out a long, barbed arm and extended a hand that seemed more black claws than hand. “Ada Uhr?” it said in a calm, deep voice. “I am Centurion Leader Mep Ahoo. Your husband needs you. My squad and I will accompany you back to the compound.”

The large ship had landed next to the Pit. This flying machine was too large for the palisade and had knocked down most of the rest of the wooden wall on its landing. It stood on high, multiply jointed metal legs and some sort of bay doors had opened in its belly.

Harman was on a litter on the ground with several different creatures huddled around it. Ada ignored the creatures and ran to Harman.

Her beloved’s head was on a pillow and his body had been covered by a blanket, but Ada had to thrust her palm in her mouth to keep from screaming. His face was ravaged, cheeks hollow, gums all but empty of teeth. His eyes were bleeding. His lips had cracked until they looked as if something had chewed them to bits. His bare forearms were visible above the blanket and Ada could see the pooled blood under the skin—red skin that was sloughing off as if he had received the world’s worst sunburn.

Daeman, Hannah, Greogi, and others were huddled near her. She took Harman’s hand, felt the slightest pressure in return to her soft squeezing. The dying man on the litter tried to focus his cataract-covered eyes on her, tried to speak. He could only cough blood.

A small humanoid figure wrapped in red-and-black metal and plastic spoke to her. “You are Ada?”

“Yes.” She did not turn to look at the machine-boy. Her gaze was just for Harman.

“He managed to say your name and give us the coordinates for this place. We’re sorry we didn’t find him earlier.”

“What …” she began and did not know what to ask. One of the machine-things nearby was huge. It was delicately holding an intravenous bottle that fed something into Harman’s emaciated arm.

“He received a lethal dose of radiation,” said the boy-sized figure in its soft voice. “Almost certainly from a submarine he encountered in the Atlantic Breach.”

Submarine, thought Ada. The word meant nothing to her.

“We’re sorry, but we simply don’t have the medical facilities for human beings in this condition,” said the little person-machine. “We called the hornets down from the Queen Mab when we saw your problems here and they brought painkillers, more intravenous bottles, but we can do nothing for the radiation damage itself.”

Ada didn’t really understand anything the little person was saying. She held Harman’s hand with both of hers and felt him dying.

Harman coughed, obviously could not make the speech sounds he was trying to make, coughed again, and tried to pull his hand away. Ada clung but the dying man was insistent, pulling…

She realized that the pressure of her grip must be hurting him. She released his hand.

“I’m sorry, my darling.”

Behind them, more explosions, farther away now. The bat-shaped flying machines were firing into the surrounding forests with that constant chain-rattling noise. The tall, chitinous troopers ran back and forth through the camp—some administering aid to slightly injured human beings, mostly for flash burns.

Harman did not pull his right hand back but held it up toward her face.

Ada tried to hold his hand again, but he batted her hand away with his left hand. She kept her hands still and let him touch her neck, her cheek—he laid the palm flat against her forehead, then used all of his strength to mold his hand to her skull, clutching at her almost desperately.

Before she could even think to pull away, it began.

Nothing, not even the explosion that had just thrown her ten feet backward through the air, had ever struck Ada as this did.

First there was Harman’s clear voice—It’s all right, my love, my darling. Relax. It’s all right. I must give you this gift while I can.

And then everything around Ada disappeared except for the pressure from her beloved’s damaged hand and bleeding fingers, pouring images in to her—not just to her mind, but filling her with words, memories, images, pictures, data, more memories, functions, quotes, books, entire volumes, more books, more memories, his love for her, his thoughts about her and their child, his love, more information, more voices and names and dates and thoughts and facts and ideas and…

“Ada? Ada?” Tom was kneeling over her, splashing water on her face while he gently slapped her face. Hannah, Daeman, and others knelt nearby. Harman had dropped his arm. The little metal-plastic person still fussed over Harman, but her darling looked dead.

Ada stood. “Daeman! Hannah! Come here. Lean close.”

“What?” asked Hannah.

Ada shook her head. No time to explain. No time to do anything but share. “Trust me,” she said.

She reached out her left and right hands, gripped Daeman’s forehead with her left hand, Hannah’s with her right, and activated the Sharing function.

It took no more than thirty seconds—no more than the time it had taken for Harman to share the functions and essential data with her, the data he’d spent the hours of his walk west in the Breach compartmentalizing, preparing for transmission—but the thirty seconds seemed like thirty eternities to Ada. If she could have done the next part alone, she wouldn’t have bothered, wouldn’t have taken the time—not even if the future of the human race depended on it—but she couldn’t do the next part alone. She needed one person to continue the Sharing and one person to help her try to save Harman.

It was done.

All three—Ada, Daeman, Hannah—fell to their knees, eyes closed.

“What is it?” asked Siris.

Someone ran shouting into the compound. It was one of their volunteers at the pavilion a mile and a quarter away. The faxnode was working! Just as the voynix were closing in there, shouted the messenger, the faxnode had come alive.

There’s no time for the fax pavilion, thought Ada. And nowhere to go among the numbered faxnodes either. Everywhere the humans were in retreat or under direct attack. There was no other place on a known node where her darling could be saved.

The large creature that looked like some sort of giant metallic horseshoe crab was rumbling in English. “There are human rejuvenation tanks in orbit,” it was saying. “But the only tanks we know about for certain are on Sycorax’s orbital asteroid, and it just passed the moon under full thrust. We’re sorry we don’t know any other…”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Ada, kneeling next to Harman again. She touched his forearm. There was no reaction but she could feel the last embers of life in him—his biomonitors speaking to her new biometric functions. She was madly sorting through all the thousands of freefax nodes, the freefax function procedures itself.

There were the post-human storage depots in the Mediterranean Basin—they had medicines even for such radiation death—but the depots were sealed in stasis and Ada saw from the allnet monitors that the Hands of Hercules had slowly disappeared, refilling the Mediterranean. She would need machines—submersibles—to get to the depots there. Too long. There were other post storage areas—on the steppes of China, near the Dry Valley in Antarctica… but all would take too long to reach and the medical procedures were too complicated. Harman wouldn’t live long enough to…

Ada grabbed Daeman’s arm, pulled him down next to her. The man seemed dazed, transfixed. “All the new functions …” he said.

Ada shook him. “Tell me again what the Moira ghost said!”

“What?” Even his stare was unfocused.

“Daeman, tell me again what the Moira ghost said to you on the day that we voted on letting Noman leave. Was it ‘Remember …’ Tell me!”

“Ah… she said …’Remember, Noman’s coffin was Noman’s coffin,’ ” he said. “How can that…”

“No,” cried Ada. “The second Noman was meant to be two words. ‘Noman’s coffin was no man’s coffin.’ Hannah, you waited while that sarcophagus at the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu cured Odysseus. You’ve been to the Bridge more often than any of us. Will you go with me? Will you try?”

Hannah took only a second to understand what her friend was asking. “Yes,” she said.

“Daeman,” said Ada, rushing not only against time, but against Death, who was already among them, who already was holding Harman in his dark claws, “you need to do the Sharing with everyone here. At once.”

“Yes,” said Daeman, moving away quickly, calling others to him.

The moravec troopers—Ada knew them all now by form if not by name—were still firing around the perimeter, still killing the last of the attacking voynix. Not one voynix had gotten through.

“Hannah,” said Ada, “we’ll need the litter, but if it doesn’t freefax, put Harman’s blanket over your shoulder, we’ll use that if we have to.”

“Hey,” cried the small Europan morevac when Hannah roughly pulled the blanket off their dying human patient. “He needs that! He was shivering…”

Ada touched the little moravec’s arm, felt the humanity and soul even through the metal and plastic. “It’s all right,” she said at last. She pulled its name—his name—from his cybernetic memory. “Friend Mahnmut, it’s all right,” she said. “We know what we’re doing. After all this time, we finally know what we’re doing.”

She gestured for the others to stand back.

Hannah knelt on one side of the litter, one of her hands on Harman’s shoulder, the other on the metal handle of the litter itself. Ada did the same on her side.

“I think we just visualize that main room—the one where we met Odysseus—and the coordinates come to us,” said Ada. “It’s important that we’ve both been there.”

“Yes,” said Hannah.

“On the count of three?” said Ada. “One, two… three.”

Both women, the litter, and Harman winked out of existence.

Even though the dying Harman looked as if he weighed nothing, it took all of their strength for the two women to carry him and the litter from the main museum area of the Golden Gate Bridge at Machu Picchu, down several flights of stairs through the green bubble into the sarcophagus area, past Savi’s old-time sarcophagus and down the final flight of curved stairs to Odysseus-Noman’s coffin.

Ada’s palm could find only the slightest flicker of living response when she set her hand against her beloved’s ravaged chest, but she did not waste more time in searching for life.

“On the count of three again,” she panted.

Hannah nodded.

“One, two… three.”

They gently lifted the naked Harman out of the litter and lowered his body into Noman’s coffin. Hannah pulled the lid down and snapped it shut.

“How do you …” began Ada in a panic. She could interrogate all the various machinery here, her new functions told her that, but it would take too long…

“Here,” said Hannah. “Noman showed me after he revived.” Her sculptor’s fingers tapped a series of glowing virtual buttons. The old-style human functions interacted with the crèche controls.

The coffin sighed, then began to hum. A mist flowed into the sleeping chamber through unseen vents and hid most of Harman’s body from view. Ice crystals formed on the clear cover. Several new lights came on. One winked red.

“Oh!” said Hannah. Her voice was very small.

“No,” said Ada. Her tone was calm but firm. “No. No. No.” She set her palm across the plastic control nexus of the coffin as if she were reasoning with the machine.

The red light winked, changed to amber, switched back to red.

“No,” Ada said firmly.

The red light wavered, dimmed, switched to amber. Stayed amber.

Hannah’s and Ada’s fingers met briefly above the coffin and then Ada returned her palm to the glowing curve of the AI nexus.

The amber light stayed on.

Several hours later, as late afternoon clouds moved in to obscure first the ruins of Machu Picchu and then the roadway of the suspension bridge six hundred feet below them, Ada said, “Hannah, freefax back to Ardis. Get some food. Rest.”

Hannah shook her head.

Ada smiled. “Then at least head up to the dining area and get us some fruit or something. Water.”

The amber light burned all that afternoon. Just after sundown, as the Andes valleys were bathed in alpenglow, Daeman, Tom, and Siris freefaxed in, but they stayed only a few moments.

“We’ve already reached thirty of the other communities,” Daeman said to Ada. She nodded, but her gaze never left the amber light.

The others eventually faxed away with promises to return in the morning. Hannah pulled the blanket around her and fell asleep there on the floor next to the coffin.

Ada remained—sometimes kneeling, sometimes sitting, but always thinking, and always with her palm on the coffin control nexus, always sending word of her presence and her prayers through the circuits separating her and her Harman, and always with her eyes on the amber monitor light.

Sometime after three a.m. local time, the amber light turned to green.