Ilium (15 page)

Apollo flicks back to the battlefield in a swirl of purple mist and releases the healed Aeneas—the real Aeneas—into the fray. The young man has been healed and more—he flows with light the way modified Diomedes did when Athena had finished with him. The Trojans, already rallying behind Hector, let out a massed yell at the sight of their resurrected prince and launch their counterattack.

Now it is Aeneas and Diomedes leading the fighting on opposite sides of the line, killing enemy captains by the bucketful, while Apollo and Ares urge more Trojans into the fray. I watch as Aeneas slaughters the carefree Achaean twins, Orsilochus and Crethon.

Now Menelaus, recovered from his own wound, shoves past Odysseus and rushes toward Aeneas. I hear Ares laugh. The war god would love it if Agamemnon’s brother, Helen’s real husband, the man who started this war by mislaying his wife, was cut down dead this day. Aeneas and Meneleus come within arm’s reach of each other, the other fighters backing away in respect for
aristeia,
the two warriors’ spears thrusting and feinting, thrusting and feinting.

Suddenly Nestor’s brother, Antilochus, good friend to the all-but-forgotten Achilles, leaps forward to stand shoulder to shoulder with Menelaus, obviously afraid the Greek cause will die with their captain if he does not intervene.

Confronted with two legendary killers rather than one, Aeneas backs away.

Two hundred yards east of this confrontation, Hector has waded into the Achaean line with such ferocity that even Diomedes falls back with his men. With his augmented vision, Diomedes must see Ares—invisible to the others—fighting at Hector’s side.

I still want to leave, to check on Aphrodite, but I can’t tear myself away right now. I can see Nightenhelser madly taking notes on his recorder ansible. This makes me laugh, since the thousands of noble Trojans and Argives battling here are all as preliterate as two-year-olds. If they found Nightenhelser’s scribblings, even in Greek, they would mean nothing to these men.

All the gods are getting into the act now.

Hera and Athena blink back into existence, Zeus’s wife visibly urging Athena into the fight. Athena does not resist. Hebe, the goddess of youth and servant to the older gods, flashes down in a flying chariot, Hera takes control, and Athena also leaps aboard, dropping her robe while buckling on her breastplate. Athena’s battle shirt gleams. She lifts a crackling energy shield of bright yellow and pulsing red, and her sword sends bolts of lightning to the Earth.

“Look!” It’s Nightenhelser shouting to me above the fray. There’s real lightning coming from the north, a towering bank of dark stratocumulus rising forty thousand feet or higher into the hot afternoon sky. The cloud suddenly shapes itself into the form and visage of Zeus.

“LEAP TO IT THEN, WIFE AND DAUGHTER,”
roars the thunder from that storm.
“ATHENA, SEE IF YOU’RE THE WAR GOD’S MATCH. BRING HIM DOWN IF YOU CAN!”

Black clouds roil low over the battlefield while rain and lightning strike down at Trojan and Argive alike.

Hera brings the chariot low over the heads of the Greeks, then lower still, scattering Trojans like leather-and-bronze tenpins.

Athena leaps down into a real chariot next to exhausted, blood-encrusted Diomedes and his faithful driver, Sthenelus.
“Are you done for this day, mortal?”
she screams at Diomedes, the last word dripping sarcasm.
“Are you half the size of your father to stop when your opponents hold the field so?”
She gestures to where Hector and Ares are sweeping the Greeks back before their charge.

“Goddess,” Diomedes gasps, “the immortal Ares protects Hector and . . .”

“
DO I NOT PROTECT YOU?”
roars Athena, fifteen feet tall and growing, looming over the fading glow of Diomedes.

“Yes, Goddess, but . . .”

“Diomedes, joy of my heart, cut down that Trojan and the god who protects him!”

Diomedes looks startled, even horrified. “We mortals may not kill a god . . .”

“Where is that written?”
booms Athena and leans over Diomedes, injecting him with something new, pouring energy from her personal god-field to his. The goddess grabs the hapless Sthenelus and throws him thirty feet from the chariot. Athena takes the reins of Diomedes’ chariot and whips the horses forward, straight toward Hector and Ares and the entire Trojan army.

Diomedes readies his spear as if he fully plans to kill a god—to slay Ares.

And Aphrodite wants to use me to kill Athena herself,
I think, heart pounding with the terror and excitement of the moment. Things may soon be going quite differently than Homer predicted here on the plains of Troy.

12

The ship began decelerating almost as soon as it left the Jovian magnetosphere, so their great ballistic arc above the plane of the ecliptic to Mars on the far side of the sun would take several standard days rather than hours. This was good for Mahnmut and Orphu of Io since they had a lot to discuss.

Soon after their departure, Ri Po and Korus III in the forward control module announced that they were deploying the boron sail. Mahnmut watched through ship’s sensors as the circular sail was unfolded and trailed seven kilometers behind them on eight bucky cables, then deployed to its full radius of five kilometers. It looked like a black circle cut out of the starfield to Mahnmut as he watched the stern video feed.

Orphu of Io left his hull-crèche and scuttled down the main cable, along the solenoid torus, and then out along the support cables like a horseshoe-crab Quasimodo, testing everything, tugging everything, scooting on reaction jets above the sail surface to check for cracks or seams or imperfections. He found nothing wrong and shuttled back to the ship with a strange and imperious zero-gravity grace.

Koros III ordered the modified Matloff/Fennelly magnetic scoop fired up and Mahnmut felt and recorded the ship’s energies changing as the device on the prow of their ship generated a scoop field radius of 1,400 kilometers, shoveling in loose ions and concentrating on gathering up the solar wind.

How long is this going to take to decelerate us enough to be able to stop at Mars?
asked Mahnmut on the common line, thinking that Orphu would answer.

It was the imperious Koros III who responded.
As ship velocity decreases and the effective area of the scoop increases, always keeping sail temperature from exceeding its melting point of two thousand degrees Kelvin, ship mass will equal
4
×
10
to the sixth power, and therefore deceleration from our current velocity of
0.1992
c to
0.001
c—the inelastic collision point—will require
23.6
standard years.

Twenty-three-point-six standard years
! cried Mahnmut over the common line. That was more discussion time than he had bargained for.

That would slow us only to a still-sizable velocity of
300
kilometers per second,
said Koros III.
One thousandth light speed is nothing to sneeze at where we’re going in-system
.

Sounds like it’s going to be a hard landing on Mars,
said Mahnmut.

Orphu made a rumbling, sneezing sound on the line.

The Callistan navigator came online.
We’re not going to depend only upon the ion boron-sail deceleration, Mahnmut. The actual trip will take a little under eleven standard days. And our velocity upon entering Mars orbit will be less than six kilometers per second.

That’s better,
said Mahnmut. He was in the control cradle of
The Dark Lady,
but all his familiar sensors and controls were dark. It was strange to be picking up all data other than his own life support from the larger ship’s sensors.
What makes the difference?

The solar wind,
said Orphu through the hull-crèche hardline.
It averages about 300 km/sec out here and has an ion density of
10
to the sixth protons/m to the third power. We started with a half tank of Jovian hydrogen and a quarter tank of deuterium, and we’re going to strip more hydrogen and deuterium from the solar wind with the Matloff/Fennelly scoop and fire the four fusion engines on the bow just after passing the sun. That’s where the real deceleration is going to kick in.

I can’t wait,
said Mahnmut.

Me too,
said Orphu of Io. He made the rumbling, sneezing sound again. Mahnmut thought that the huge moravec had either no sense of irony or a wickedly sharp one.

Mahnmut read
À la recherche du temps perdu
—Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time
—while the ship passed some 140,000,000 kilometers above the Asteroid Belt.

Orphu had downloaded the French language in all of its classic intricacies along with the novel and biographical information on Proust, but Mahnmut ended up reading the book in five English translations because English was the lost language he had concentrated his own studies in over the past e-century and a half and he felt more comfortable judging literature in it. Orphu had chuckled at this and reminded the smaller moravec that comparing Proust to Mahnmut’s beloved Shakespeare was a mistake, that they were as different in substance as the rocky, terraformed in-system world they were headed for and their own familiar Jovian moons, but Mahnmut read it again in English anyway.

When he was finished—knowing that it had been a cursory multiple reading, but eager to start the dialogue—he contacted Orphu on tightbeam since the Ionian moravec was out of his crèche, checking the boron-sail cables again, lashed firmly to lifelines this time because of the increasing deceleration.

I don’t know,
said Mahnmut.
I just don’t see it. It all seems like the overwrought musings of an aesthete to me.

Aesthete?
Orphu swiveled one of his communication stalks to lock in the tightbeam while his manipulators and flagella were busy spot-welding a cable connector. To Mahnmut, watching on rear video, the white welding-arc looked like a star against the black sail behind the awkward mass of Orphu.
Mahnmut, are you talking about Proust or his Marcel-narrator?

Is there a difference?
Even as he sent the sarcastic query, Mahnmut knew he was being unfair. He had sent Orphu hundreds—perhaps thousands—of e-mails over the last dozen e-years, explaining the difference between the Poet named “Will” in the sonnets and the historical artist named Shakespeare. He suspected the Proust, however dense and impenetrable, to be just as complex when it came to identity of author and characters.

Orphu of Io ignored that question and sent back—
Admit that you loved Proust’s comic vision. He is, above almost all else, a comic writer.

Was there a comic vision? I saw little comedy in the work.
Mahnmut was serious about this. It was not that the human sense of humor was alien to Mahnmut or moravecs; even the earliest spacefaring, self-evolving, only dimly sentient robots created and dispatched by the human race before the rubicon pandemic had been programmed to understand humor. Communication with human beings—real, two-way communication—had been impossible without humor. It was as human as anger or logic or jealousy or pride—all elements he had noticed and noted in Proust’s endless novel. But Proust and his protagonists as comic writers, comic characters? Mahnmut failed to see it, and if Orphu were right, it was a major oversight. It had been Mahnmut who spent decades on finding the word-play humor and satire in the Bard’s plays, Mahnmut who had ferreted out even the tiniest ironies in Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Listen,
said Orphu as he scuttled back along one of the taut bucky-lines to the ship, reaction jets pulsing.
Read this part of “Swann in Love” again. This is where Swann, in thrall to the faithless and fickle Odette, is using all his skill as an emotional blackmailer to keep her from going to the theater without him. Listen to the humor here, my friend.
He downloaded text.

“I swear to you,” he told her, shortly before she was to leave for the theatre, “that, in asking you not to go, I should hope, were I a selfish man, for nothing so much as that you should refuse, for I have a thousand other things to do this evening, and I shall feel trapped myself, and rather annoyed, if, after all, you tell me you’re not going. But my occupations, my pleasures are not everything; I must think of you also. A day may come when, seeing me irrevocably sundered from you, you will be entitled to reproach me for not having warned you at the decisive hour in which I felt that I was about to pass judgment on you, one of those stern judgments which love cannot long resist. You see, your
Nuit de Cléopâtre
(what a title!) has no bearing on the point. What I must know is whether you are indeed one of those creatures in the lowest grade of mentality and even of charm, one of those contemptible creatures who are incapable of forgoing a plea-sure. And if you are such, how could anyone love you, for you are not even a person, a clearly defined entity, imperfect but at least perfectible. You are a formless water that will trickle down any slope that offers itself, a fish devoid of memory, incapable of thought, which all its life long in its aquarium will continue to dash itself a hundred times a day against the glass wall, always mistaking it for water. Do you realize that your answer will have the effect—I won’t say of making me cease loving you immediately, of course, but of making you less attractive in my eyes when I realise that you are not a person, that you are beneath everything in the world and incapable of raising yourself one inch higher? Obviously, I should have preferred to ask you as a matter of little or no importance to give up your
Nuit de Cléopâtre
(since you compel me to sully my lips with so abject a name) in the hope that you would go to it none the less. But, having decided to make such an issue of it, to draw such drastic consequences from your reply, I confessed it more honourable to give you due warning.”
    Meanwhile, Odette had shown signs of increasing emotion and uncertainty. Although the meaning of his tirade was beyond her, she grasped that it was to be included in the category of “harangues” and scenes of reproach or supplication, which her familiarity with the ways of men enabled her, without paying any heed to the words that were uttered, to conclude that they would not make unless they were in love, and that since they were in love, it was unnecessary to obey them, as they would only be more in love later on. And so she would have heard Swann out with the utmost tranquility had she not noticed that it was growing late, and that if he went on talking much longer she would “never,” as she told him with a fond smile, obstinate but slightly abashed, “get there in time for the Overture.”

Mahnmut laughed out loud in the tight confines of
The Dark Lady
’s pressurized control room. He saw it now. The humor was brilliant. He had read that passage the first time focusing on the human emotion of jealousy and the obvious effort of the Swann character to manipulate the behavior of the woman named Odette. Now it was . . . clear.

Thanks,
he said to Orphu as the six-meter horseshoe-crab-shaped moravec settled into his hull-crèche.
I think I hear the humor coming through now. I appreciate it. Everything is different than Shakespeare’s tone and language and structure, but something is—the same.

Obsession with the puzzle of what it means to be human,
suggested Orphu.
Your Shakespeare looks at all the facets of humanity through reaction to events, finding the deep-internal through characters defined as actions. Proust’s characters delve deep into memory to see the same facets. Perhaps your Bard is more like Koros III, leading this outward expedition. My sweet Proust is more like you, wrapped in the coccoon of
The Dark Lady
and diving deep, seeking the geography of reefs and the hard bottom and other living things and the whole world through echo-location.

Mahnmut thought about this for several rich nanoseconds.
I don’t see how your Proust solved this puzzle—or rather, how he
tried
to solve it other than through immersion in memory.

Not just in memory, Mahnmut my friend, but in
time.

Tens of meters away, shielded by his near-invulnerable and impenetrable double-hull of his submersible and that of of the ship carrying it, Mahnmut felt as if the Ionian had reached out and touched him in some personal—some profound—manner.

Time is separate from memory,
muttered Mahnmut on their private line, speaking now mostly to himself,
but is memory ever separate from time?

Precisely!
boomed Orphu.
Precisely. Proust’s protagaonists—primarily the “I” or “Marcel” narrator, but also our poor Swann—have three chances to sniff out and put together the thick puzzle of life. Their three approaches fail but somehow the story itself succeeds, despite its narrator’s and even author’s failures!

Mahnmut thought about this for a time in silence. He switched his vision from external camera to external camera, looking away at the complexities of the ship itself and its frightening circular sail “downward” toward the rocks, toward the Belt. He willed the image to full magnification and there it was.

A solitary asteroid was tumbling against black. There was no danger of impact. Not only was their ship now 150,000,000 kilometers above the plane of the ecliptic and passing the Belt at blinding speed, but this asteroid—he queried Ri Po’s astrogation banks and identified the rock as Gaspra—was tumbling away from them. Still, it was a sizable mini-world—the overlay data said that Gaspra sized out at 20×16×11 kilometers—and the magnification, equal to a pass at about 16,000 kilometers—showed an irregular, sharpened-potato mass with a complicated pattern of cratering. More interestingly, there were obvious artificial elements in the image—straight lines gouged in the rock, gleams of light in dark craters, clear patterns of light sources on the asteroid’s flattened “nose.”