Ilium (32 page)

Helen slides the sheet off my lower body. The light is coming up now and I can see her better than any time since I watched her in her bath the night before. She swings her leg up and straddles me, one hand flat on my chest while her other hand goes lower, finding, encouraging.

“Listen to me,” she says, looking down over her breasts at me. “If you are going to change our fates, you must find the fulcrum.”

I take this as an invitation and try to move into her.

“No, not yet,” she whispers. “Listen to me, Hock-en-bear-eeee. If you’re going to change our fates,
you must find the fulcrum
. And I don’t mean what you’re doing now.”

It’s difficult, but I pause long enough to listen.

An hour and a half later the city is coming alive and I am walking the streets, fully garbed in my usual scholic’s gear and morphed as a Thracian spearman. The sun has risen and the city is coming fully alive, with crowded streets, opening market stalls, driven animals, running children, and swaggering warriors breaking their fast before going out to kill.

Near the marketplace, I find Nightenhelser—morphed as a Dardanian watchman but visible as Nightenhelser through my lenses—eating breakfast in an outdoor restaurant we’ve both frequented. He looks up and recognizes me.

I don’t flee or use the Hades Helmet to disappear. I join him at the table under a low tree and order bread, dried fish, and fruit for breakfast.

“Our Muse was hunting for you at the barracks before dawn this morning,” says the portly Nightenhelser. “And again near the walls here this morning. She was asking after you by name. She seems eager to locate you.”

“Are you worried about being seen with me?” I ask. “Want me to move on?”

Nightenhelser shrugs. “All of us scholics are on borrowed time anyway. What does it matter?
Tempus edax rerum
.”

I’ve been thinking in ancient Greek for so long that it takes me a second to translate the Latin.
Time is a devourer.
Perhaps so, but I want more of it. I break the fresh, hot bread and eat, marveling at the glorious taste of it and of the sweet breakfast wine. Everything looks, smells, and tastes crisper, cleaner, newer and more wonderful this morning. Perhaps it was the night’s rain. Perhaps it was something else.

“You smell suspiciously perfumed this morning,” says Nightenhelser.

At first my only response is a blush—can the other scholic smell the night’s revelries on me?—but then I realize what he’s talking about. Helen had insisted I bathe with her before leaving. The old female slave who had directed the carrying of the hot water to the bath, I’d learned, was Aithra, Pittheus’ daughter, wife of King Aigeus and mother of the famous Theseus—ruler of Athens and the man who had abducted Helen when she was eleven. I remembered the name Aithra from my graduate-school days, but my instructor, Dr. Fertig, a fine Homerian scholar, had insisted that the name had been drawn at random from the epic stock—“Aithra, daughter of Pittheus” must have sounded good to Homer or some poetic predecessor who needed a name for a mere slave, said Dr. Fertig, and that the noble Theseus’ mother couldn’t possibly be Helen’s servant in Troy. Well . . .
wrong,
Dr. Fertig. Just half an hour ago, lounging in the sunken marble tub with a naked Helen, she mentioned that the old slave-woman Aithra was, indeed, Theseus’ mum . . . that Helen’s brothers Castor and Polydeukes, when they rescued her from Theseus’ captivity, had carried off the old lady as punishment, and Paris had brought her along to Troy with Helen.

“Thinking about something, Hockenberry?” asked Nightenhelser.

I blushed again. Right then I had been thinking about Helen’s soft breasts visible through the bubbles in the bath. I ate some fish and said, “I wasn’t on the field yesterday evening. Anything interesting happen?”

“Nothing much. Just Hector’s big duel with Ajax. Just the showdown we’ve been waiting for since the Achaean ships first touched their bows to shore down there. Just
all
of Book Seven.”

“Oh, that,” I said. Book Seven was an exciting duel between Hector and the Achaean giant, but nothing
happened
. Neither man hurt the other even though Ajax was obviously the better fighter, and when evening made it too dark to fight, Ajax and Hector called a truce, exchanged gifts of armor and weapons, and both sides went back to burn their dead. I hadn’t missed anything crucial; nothing to give up one minute with Helen.

“There was something odd,” said Nightenhelser.

I ate bread and waited.

“You know that Hector was supposed to come out of the city with his brother, Paris, and both were supposed to lead the Trojans back into battle. Homer says that Paris kills Menesthius at the beginning of the fight.”

“Yes?”

“And later, do you remember when King Priam’s counselor, Antenor, advises his fellow Trojans to give back Helen and all the treasures looted from Argos—give them back and let the Achaeans go away in peace?”

“That’s while Ajax and Hector are pals after they fail to kill each other, exchanging gifts on the field, right?” I say.

“Yes.”

“Well what about it?”

Nightenhelser sets his goblet down. “Well, it was Paris who was supposed to answer Antenor and urge his fellow Trojans to refuse to surrender Helen but offers to give up the treasures in exchange for peace.”

“So?” I say, realizing where this is going. My stomach suddenly feels queasy.

“Well, Paris wasn’t there last night—not to come out of the Scaean Gates with Hector, not to kill Menesthius, and not even to offer the peace proposal at dusk.”

I nod and chew. “So?”

“So that’s one of the largest discrepancies we’ve seen, isn’t it, Hockenberry?”

I have to shrug again. “I don’t know. Book Seven has the Achaeans building their defensive wall and trench near the shore, but you and I know that those defenses have been there since the first month after they arrived. Homer messes up the chronology sometimes.”

Nightenhelser looks at me. “Perhaps. But the absence of Paris to refute Antenor’s suggestion about giving up Helen was strange. Finally, King Priam spoke for his son—saying that he was sure that Paris would never surrender the woman, but that he might give up the treasure. But without Paris being there in person, a lot of the Trojans in the crowd were mumbling their agreement. It’s the closest thing to peace breaking out that I’ve seen in all the years I’ve been here, Hockenberry.”

My skin feels cold. My self-indulgence with Helen last night, my long impersonation of Paris, has already changed something important in the flow of things. If the Muse had known the details of the
Iliad
—which she didn’t—she would have known at once that I had taken Paris’s place in bed with Helen.

“Did you report the discrepancy to the Muse?” I ask softly. Nightenhelser would have gone off shift when darkness fell. Since I was missing, he was the only scholic on duty last evening. It was his duty to report such oddities.

Nightenhelser chews the last of his bread slowly. “No,” he says at last, “I didn’t dictate that to the word stone.”

I let out a breath. “Thank you,” I say.

“We’d better go,” says the other scholic. The restaurant is filling up with Trojan men and their wives waiting for a seat. As I drop coins on the table, Nightenhelser grips my forearm. “Do you know what you’re doing, Hockenberry?”

I look him in the eye. My voice is firm when I respond. “Absolutely not.”

Once on the street, I go the opposite direction from Nightenhelser. Stepping into an empty alley, I pull up the cowl of the Hades Helmet and touch the QT medallion.

It is sunrise on the summit of Mount Olympos. The white buildings and green lawns reflect the rich but lesser light here. I’ve always wondered why the sun seems smaller on and around Olympos than in the skies above Ilium.

I had envisioned the chariot stand near the Muse’s building, and that’s where I have arrived. I hold my breath as a chariot spirals down from the morning sky and lands not twenty feet from me, but Apollo steps out and strides away without noticing me. The Hades Helmet still works.

I step onto the chariot and touch the bronze plate near the front. I had watched the Muse carefully as she flew us across the caldera lake the other day. A glowing, transparent keyplate comes into existence inches above the brass. I touch the icons there in the sequence I’d watched the Muse use.

The chariot wobbles, rises, wobbles again, and steadies itself as I move the glowing, virtual energy controller next to the readouts. I twist it left and the chariot banks left fifty feet above the summit grass. I touch the forward-arrow icon and the chariot leaps ahead, flying south over the blue lake. To any god watching, it should look like an empty chariot flying itself, but no god is visible to watch.

Across the lake, I gain a bit of altitude and try to find the right building.
There—just beyond the Great Hall of the Gods.

Some goddess—I do not recognize her—cries out from the front steps of the huge building and points toward my seemingly empty chariot, but it’s too late—I’ve identified the building I want: huge, white, with an open doorway.

I’m getting the knack of the chariot controls now and I dive within twenty feet of the ground and accelerate toward the building. I have to lift the left side of the chariot almost perpendicular to the ground—I do not fall, there is some artificial gravity in the machine—as I zip between the giant columns at forty or fifty miles per hour.

Inside, the space is as I remember it: the giant vats filled with bubbling, violet liquid, green worms roiling around the unconscious, floating, healing gods. The Healer—the giant centipede-thing with metallic arms and red eyes—is on the opposite side of Aphrodite’s reconstruction vat, preparing to remove her from it, I presume; his red eyes look my way and his many arms quiver as the chariot rushes into the quiet space, but he is not between me and my target and I accelerate forward before he or anything else can stop me.

It is only at the last second that I decide to jump rather than to stay with the chariot. It must be the memory of Helen, the night with Helen—the renewed pleasure of life in those hours with Helen.

The Hades Helmet still shielding me, I leap from the speading chariot, land hard, feel something bruise if not break in my right shoulder, and then I tumble to a stop on the floor as the chariot flies directly into the reconstruction vat, smashing plastic and steel, throwing violet liquid a hundred feet into the air of the giant room. Something—either part of the chariot or a huge shard of vat glass—slices the giant centipede Healer in two.

Aphrodite’s body rolls out onto the floor in a wave of violet liquid and a coiling mass of writhing green worms. The other vats—including the one holding Ares in his nest of worms—rock but do not break or tumble.

Claxons, alarms, and sirens go off, deafening me.

I try to rise, but my head, left leg and right shoulder ache terribly and I sink back to the floor. I crawl to one side of the room, trying to stay out of the violet goo. I’m afraid of what the chemicals will do to me, but more afraid that the outline of my body will be visible in the flood if I can’t get away from it. Black spots dance in my vision and I realize I’m going to pass out. Gods and floating robot-machines are rushing into the great healing chamber.

In the seconds before I lose consciousness, I see mighty Zeus stride in, his cloak billowing, his brow furrowed.

Whatever’s going to happen next will have to happen without me. I set my forehead against the cool floor, close my eyes, and let the blackness wash over me.

22

“I killed my friend, Orphu of Io,” Mahnmut told William Shakespeare.

The two were walking in neighborhoods along the bank of the Thames. Mahnmut knew that it was the late summer of 1592 a.d., although he did not know how he knew. The river was busy with barges, wherries, and low-masted rivercraft. Beyond the Tudor buildings and ramshackle tenements on the north bank rose a profusion of London’s steeples and a few contorted towers. A hot haze hung over the river and behind the slums on either side.

“I should have saved Orphu, but I could not,” said Mahnmut. He had to walk quickly to keep up with the playwright.

Shakespeare was a compact man, in his late twenties, soft-spoken and dressed in a more dignified manner than Mahnmut would have expected from an actor and playwright. The young man’s face was a sharp oval, showing a hairline already receding, sideburns, and a wisp of a beard and thin mustache—as if Shakespeare were tentatively experimenting with a more permanent beard. His hair was brown, his eyes a grayish-green, and he wore a black doublet from which the wide, soft collars of a white shirt were visible, white drawstrings hanging down. There was a small gold hoop in the writer’s left ear.

Mahnmut wanted to ask Shakespeare a thousand questions—what was he writing now? what was life like in this city that would soon be overwhelmed by the plague? what is the hidden structure of the sonnets?—but all he could talk about was Orphu.

“I tried to save him,” explained Mahnmut. “The
Dark Lady
’s reactor shut down and then the batteries went dead less than five kilometers from the coast. I was trying to find an inlet in one of the many caves along the cliffs—someplace we could hide the sub.”

“The Dark Lady?
” asked Shakespeare. “This is the name of your ship?”

“Yes.”

“Pray continue.”

“Orphu and I were talking about the stone faces,” said Mahnmut. “It was night—we were approaching the coast at night, under cover of darkness, but I was using the night-vision scope and was describing the faces to him. He was still alive. The ship was providing just enough O
₂
for him.”

“O
₂
?”

“Air,” explained Mahnmut. “As I say, I was describing the great stone heads to him—“

“Great stone heads? Statues?”

“Stone monoliths each about twenty meters tall,” said Mahnmut.

“Did you recognize the statue’s visage? Was he someone of your acquaintance, or perhaps a famous king or conqueror?”

“It was too far away for me to see details of the faces,” said Mahnmut.

They had come to a wide, multiarched bridge covered with three-story buildings. A passageway about four meters wide ran right through the structures, like a road through a tunnel, and at the moment pedestrians in motley were dodging a mass of sheep being driven north into the city. All along that walkway, human heads—some dried and mummified, some almost skulls except for tufts of hair or bits of rotted flesh, others so shockingly fresh that there was still a blush to the cheeks or lips—had been mounted on posts.

“What is all this?” asked Mahnmut. His organic parts felt queasy.

“London Bridge,” said Shakespeare. “Tell me what happened to your friend.”

Tired of looking up at the playwright, Mahnmut scampered up onto a stone wall that served as a railing. He could see a forbidding tower in the east, and he assumed it was
the
Tower from
Richard III.
Knowing that he was either dreaming or dying from lack of air himself, Mahnmut did not want this dream to end before he asked Shakespeare a question or two. “Have you begun writing your sonnets yet, Master Shakespeare?”

The playwright smiled and looked out at the reeking Thames, then turned to gaze at the stinking city. Raw sewage was everywhere, as were the carcasses of dead horses and cattle rotting in the mudflats, while a wild effluvium of bloody chicken parts flowed out from open gutters and swirled in stagnant backwaters. Mahnmut had all but shut off his olfactory input. He didn’t know how this human with his full-time nose could stand it.

“How do you know about my experiment with the sonnet?” asked Shakespeare.

Mahnmut approximated a human shrug. “A guess. So you’ve begun them?”

“I’ve considered playing with the form,” admitted the playwright.

“And who is the Young Man in the sonnets?” asked Mahnmut, hardly able to breathe at the thought of unraveling this ancient mystery. “Is it Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton?”

Shakespeare blinked in surprise and looked carefully at the moravec. “You seem to follow close on my heels in such things, tiny Caliban.”

Mahnmut nodded. “So Wriothesley is the Youth in the sonnets?”

“His lordship will have seen nineteen years this October and the down on his upper lip, it is said, has turned to sedge,” said the playwright. “Hardly a youth.”

“William Herbert then,” suggested Mahnmut. “He’s only twelve years old and he’ll become the third Earl of Pembroke nine years from now.”

“You know the dates of future succession and accession?” Shakespeare said with a tone of irony. “Does Master Caliban sail time’s sea as well as this ocean of Mars he speaks of?”

Mahnmut was too excited about solving this mystery to respond to that. “You’ll dedicate the large
Folio
of 1623 to William Herbert and his brother, and when your sonnets are printed, you’ll dedicate them to ‘Mr. W.H.”

Shakespeare stared at the moravec as if he were a fever dream. Mahnmut wanted to say
No,
you’re
the dream of a dying brain, Master Shakespeare. Not I.
Aloud, he said, “I just think it’s interesting that you have a young man or a boy as a lover.”

Mahnmut was surprised by the poet’s reaction. Shakespeare turned, drew a dagger from his belt, and held it under the moravec’s head-unit. “Do you have an eye, Little Caliban, that I may bury my blade in it?”

Careful not to lower his permiflesh deeper onto the point of the blade, Mahnmut shook his head very slightly and said, “I apologize. I am a stranger to your town, to your country, and to the manners here.”

“See those closest three heads on posts on the bridge?,” asked Shakespeare.

Mahnmut shifted his vision without moving his head. “Yes.”

“This time last week, they were strangers to our manners,” hissed the poet.

“I get the point,” said Mahnmut. “No pun intended, sir.”

Shakespeare slid the dagger back in its leather scabbard. Mahnmut remembered that the man was an actor, given to flourishes and exaggerations, although the dagger had been no stage prop. Nor had Shakespeare’s response been a denial to Mahnmut’s question.

Both looked back out at the river. The sun hung impossibly large and orange and low in the river haze to the west. Shakespeare’s voice was soft when he spoke. “If I pen these sonnets, Caliban, I will do so to explore my own failures, weaknesses, compromises, self-conceits, and sad ambiguities in the way that one probes a bloody socket for the missing tooth after a barroom brawl. How did you kill your friend, this Orphu of Io?”

Mahnmut had to take a second to catch up to the question. “I couldn’t get
The Dark Lady
to the cave inlet I had seen along the coast,” he said. “I tried and failed. The sub’s reactor died suddenly, the power went out. The
Lady
went aground in less than four fathoms of water, three kilometers or so from the cave. I tried blowing all the ballast tanks to bring her on her side—so I could free the bay doors to get to my friend—but she was already stuck fast.”

Mahnmut looked at the poet. Shakespeare seemed to be paying attention. The buildings on the bridge behind him were red with the Thames sunset. “I went outside and went on internal O
₂
and dived for hours,” continued Mahnmut. “I used pry bars and the last of the acetylene and my manipulator fingers, but I couldn’t open the bay doors, couldn’t clear the debris in the flooded accessway to the hold. Orphu was on commline for a while, but then I lost him as the internal systems failed. He never sounded worried, never frightened, just tired . . . very tired. Right up to when the comm failed. It was dark. I must have lost consciousness. Perhaps I’m at the bottom of the Martian ocean right now, dead with Orphu, or dying, dreaming this conversation as the last cells of my organic brain shut down.”

“Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts,” said Shakespeare, his voice a monotone. “Which you by lacking have supposed dead, and there reigns love, and all love’s loving parts, and all the friends which you thought buried.”

Mahnmut regained consciousness to find himself on the beach, in low morning Martian daylight, and surrounded by dozens of little green men. They were bent over him, staring with small black eyes set into their green, transparent faces, and they backed a step or two away when Mahnmut sat up with a slight whir of his servos.

They
were
little. Mahnmut was just over a meter tall. These . . . persons . . . were shorter than that. They were humanoid in form, more so than Mahnmut, but not really human in appearance. They were bipedal, with arms and legs, but had no ears, no noses, and no mouths. They wore no clothes and had only three fingers on each hand, rather like cartoon characters Mahnmut had seen in the Lost Age media archives. They were sexless, Mahnmut noted, and their flesh—if flesh it was—was transparent, like soft plastic, revealing insides without organs or veins, bodies filled with floating green globules and clumps, particles and blobs, all flowing and bubbling in a way not that different from the insides of Mahnmut’s beloved lava lamp, now abandoned with the sunken submersible.

More little green men were coming down a trail set into the cliff face. Mahnmut could see the last of the erected stone faces a kilometer or so to the east. Another was visible, horizontal on a long wooden pallet set on rollers far above them near the edge of the cliff, bound about by ropes. The details of the faces were not discernible.

To hell with the heads
. Mahnmut whirled and searched the sea and beach. Tepid waves rolled in with the regularity of a metronome.
Where’s
The Dark Lady?

There she was—two hundred meters out, part of the upper hull and command superstructure clearly visible. Her fathometer and sonar had died before she had, and Mahnmut had committed perhaps the most ancient and most grievious of sea captain’s offenses—running his ship aground. He had been on internal O
₂
while working wildly to free the hold doors on the sandy, muddy seabottom, but he realized that he must have passed out, been washed ashore here during the night.

Orphu!
How long had he been unconscious, dreaming of Shakespeare? Mahnmut’s internal chronometer said that it had been a bit less than four hours.

He still might be alive in there.
He started walking toward the water, intending to walk the bottom all the way out to the stranded submersible.

A dozen little green men moved between Mahnmut and the water, blocking his way. Then twenty. Then fifty. A hundred more surrounded him on the beach.

Mahnmut had never lifted his hand or manipulator in anger, but he was ready to fight now, to punch and slash and kick his way through this mob if he had to. But he would try to talk to them first. “Get out of my way,” he said, voice on full amplification and sounding loud in the Martian air. “Please.”

The black eyes in green faces stared at him. But they had neither ears to hear him with nor mouths to speak with.

Mahnmut laughed sadly and started to push his way through them, knowing that however much stronger he might be, they could overcome him by sheer numbers—sit on him while they tore him apart. The thought of such violence, his or theirs, made his organic insides clutch with horror.

One of the little green men held his hand up as if to say “stop.” Mahnmut paused. All the green heads turned to the right and looked up the beach. The mob parted magically as a little green man who looked exactly like the other little green men approached, stopped in front of Mahnmut, and extended both hands as if cupping an invisible bowl or praying.

Mahnmut did not understand. Nor did he want to take time to parley through sign language even if he could. Orphu might still be alive.

He started to brush past the little man, but a score of others closed ranks behind this emissary, blocking Mahnmut’s way. He would either have to fight
now
or pay attention to the gesturing green figure.

Mahnmut let out a sigh not much different than a moan and paused, holding his hands out in mimicry of the little green man’s gesture.

The emissary shook his head, touched Mahnmut’s left arm—both organic and moraveccian sensors told him that the green fingers were cool—and lowered Mahnmut’s left arm, then gripped the right. The little green man pulled Mahnmut’s hand closer, closer, until the moravec’s fingers and palm were flat against the cool, transparent flesh.

The little green man pulled harder, pushing himself forward and pulling Mahnmut’s hand hard enough that the moravec’s palm dented the flat chest, pressed the flesh inward, then . . . penetrated.

Mahnmut would have drawn his hand back in shock at this, but the little green man did not relent with his grip or with his strong pull. Mahnmut could
see
his dark hand entering the fluid of the little green man’s chest, could
feel
the transparent flesh closing tight around his forearm in a vacuum seal.