Ilium (36 page)

I thought that I knew all the gods and goddesses by name, but there are scores here that I don’t recognize. Those that I do know, the gods and goddesses who have been most involved in the fighting at Troy, stand out in the crowd like movie stars at a meeting of minor politicians, but even the least of these gods is taller, stronger, handsomer, and more perfect than any human movie star I remember from my other life. Nearest Zeus, opposite him across the hologram pool—which divides the room like a long moat now—I can see Pallas Athena, the war god Ares (obviously out of his healing tank, which was not damaged when I destroyed Aphrodite’s), Zeus’s younger brothers—the sea god Poseidon (who rarely comes to Olympos), and Hades, ruler of the dead. Zeus’s son, Hermes, stands near the pool, and the guide and giant killer is as lean and beautiful as statues I’ve seen of him. Another son of Zeus, Dionysus, the god of ecstatic release, is talking to Hera and—contrary to his public image—he has no goblet of wine in his hand. For a god of ecstatic release, Dionysus looks pale, feeble, and dour—like a man in only the third week of a twelve-step program. Beyond them, looking older than time, is Nereus, the true sea god, the Old Man of the Sea. His fingers and toes are webbed and there are gills visible below his armpits.

The Fates and the Furies are here in force, milling by accident or design between the gods and the goddesses. These are gods—of sorts—yet sometimes they have regulatory power over the other gods. They are not as human in appearance as the regular gods and goddesses, and I confess I know almost nothing about them except that they don’t live on Olympos, but on one of the three volcanoes far to the southeast, near where the muses reside.

My Muse, Melete, is here, standing with her sisters, Meneme and Aoide. The more “modern” muses are also in the crowd—the real Kalliope, Polymnia, Ourania, Erato, Kleis, Euterpe, Melpomene, Terpsichore, and Tahleia. Just beyond the muses are the A-list goddesses. Aphrodite is not among them—that is the first thing I notice. If she were, I would be as visible to her as these divinities are to me. But her mother, Dione, is in attendance, speaking to Hera and Hermes and looking very serious indeed. Near that group are Demeter—the goddess of crops—and her daughter Persephone, Hades’ wife. Behind them I can see Pasithea, one of the Graces. Farther back, as befits their lesser place, are the Nereids, nude to the waist, lovely, and treacherous-looking.

The meta-goddess called Night stands alone. Her gown and veil are of a purple so dark as to be black, and even the other gods and goddesses give her a wide berth. I know nothing about Night, except rumors that even Zeus is afraid of her, and I’ve never seen her on Olympos before.

I feel like a gawking movie fan in the crowd outside the Academy Awards, trying to separate the superstars from the lesser gods. Hebe there, for instance, standing near the males—she is the goddess of youth, Zeus and Hera’s child, but only a servant to the gods—and there, red hair like flames, is Hephaestus, the great artificer, talking to his wife, Charis, who is only one of the Graces. Pecking order among gods and goddesses I realize, not for the first time, is complicated stuff.

Suddenly the goddess Iris, Zeus’s messenger, flies forward—yes, flies—and claps her hands. “The Father will speak,” she says, her voice as clear and crisp as a flute solo.

Immediately the scores of soft conversations cease and the great, echoing hall goes silent.

Zeus stands. His gold throne and the gold steps leading up to it exude a glow that bathes him in divine light.

“Hear me, all you gods, and goddesses, too,” says Zeus, his voice soft but so strong that I feel the vibration of it off the high marble walls. “Some god or goddess this day has tried to hurt Aphrodite, now healing in our hall of healing, and—while she will live—it was a close thing and she will need many more days to heal again.
Some god or goddess tried to kill an immortal this day—tried to kill one of us who is not fated for death.
”

The muttering and shocked conversation start as a buzz and rise to a roar in the huge room.

“
SILENCE!!
” roars Zeus, and this time his voice is so loud that it knocks me down and slides me across the marble floor like a tumbleweed in a tornado. Luckily, I hit none of the gods or goddesses in my slide, and the noise I make is drowned out by the echoes of Zeus’s shout.

“Hear me now, oh gods and goddesses,” he continues, his voice amplified as if from the ultimate public address system. “Let no beautiful goddess, nor no god either, attempt to defy my strict decree. You will submit to my will—
NOW
!”

This time I am ready for the hurricane force of his voice and I cling to a column until the energy of it has passed.

“Listen to me,” says Zeus, almost whispering now, the sense of his power even more terrible for the soft tone. “Any god who violates my decree by helping the Trojans or Achaeans the way I have seen this month, back that god or goddess comes to Olympos, whipped on by my lightning and scourged by my thunder, eternally disgraced, banned henceforth from Olympos. Defy me, and find what it is like to be cast down to the murk of Tartarus half a universe away in space and time, in the deepest gulf that yawns beneath our quantum selves.”

As he speaks, the long hologram pit boils and bubbles, turns pitch-black, and then becomes something other than a hologram; the rectangular pit—looking like a dozen Olympic-sized swimming pools laid end to end, now broiling and filled with bubbling black oil—suddenly lets loose with a roar of its own, and becomes a hole opening on someplace dark and fiery and terribly deep. The stench of sulfur roils up and the gods and goddesses near the edge back away.

“Behold Tartarus,” cries Zeus, “the lowest depths of the House of Hades, a place as far below hell as Hades’ home is beneath the earth itself. Do you remember—you senior gods and goddesses amongst us—when you followed me into that ten-year war with the Titans who ruled before us? Do you remember that I cast Kronos and Rhea—my own parents—beyond these iron gates and brazen thresholds—aye, and Iapetus, too, for all his god-power?”

The hall is silent except for the muted roars and bellows and screams coming up from the open Tartarus Pit. I have no doubt whatsoever that this is a hole to hell, not a hologram, falling away not thirty feet from where I cower.

“
IF I CAST MY PARENTS DOWN INTO THIS PIT OF PITS FOR ALL ETERNITY,
” roars Zeus, “
DO YOU DOUBT THAT I WILL THROW YOUR SCREAMING SOUL THERE IN A SECOND?
”

The gods and goddesses do not answer, except to take several paces farther back from that foul void.

Zeus smiles terribly. “Come, try me, immortals, so that all can learn.”

A huge golden cable falls from the roof of the hall, straddling the hole to hell. Gods and goddesses scurry to get out of the way of its fall. It stikes marble with a resounding crash. The rope is thicker than a ship’s hawser and seems to be spun of thousands of inch-thick strands of true gold. It must weigh many tons.

Zeus strides down his golden stairs and lifts the cable, holding it easily in his giant hands. “Grasp your end,” he says almost cheerfully.

The gods and goddesses look at each other and do not move.

“
GRASP YOUR END!
”

Hundreds of immortals and their immortal servants rush to comply, scrambling for a handhold on the long cable like kids at a picnic tug-of-war. In a minute there is Zeus alone on his side of the Tartarus Pit, casually holding the cable, and the countless mob of gods and goddesses on the other side, powerful god-hands gripped tight on gold.

“Drag me down,” says Zeus. “Drag me down from sky to earth to Hades and deeper, to Tartarus’ stinking depths. Drag me down, I say.”

Not a single god moves a bronzed muscle.

“
DRAG ME DOWN, I COMMAND THEE!
” Zeus grasps the golden cable and begins to haul on it. Gods’ sandals slip and squeak and scuff on marble. Several hundred gods and goddesses all in a row are pulled closer to the pit, some stumbling, some going to their knees.

“
PULL, GODDAMN YOU!
” howls Zeus.
“PULL OR BE DRAGGED INTO STINKING TARTARUS UNTIL TIME ITSELF ROTS AWAY FROM THE BONES OF THE UNIVERSE!
”

Zeus tugs again and twenty yards of gold cable coils behind him. The conga line of gods and goddesses and graces and furies and nereids and nymphs and you-name-it on the other side—everyone pulling except purple-gowned Night—slides and screeches closer to the pit. Athena is the first on the cable and is only thirty feet from the edge when she screams, “Pull, you gods! Pull the old bastard in!!”

Ares and Apollo and Hermes and Poseidon and the rest of the most powerful gods put their backs into it. They quit sliding. The cable pulls tighter, fraying and creaking from the tension. The goddesses scream and pull in unison, Hera—Zeus’s wife—pulling even harder than the others. The gold cable stretches and groans.

Zeus laughs. He is holding them all at check with only one hand on the rope. Now he grabs the cable with his other hand and pulls again.

The gods scream like children on a roller coaster. Athena and those near her on the cable go sliding across the marble as if it were ice, closer and closer to the raging Tartarus Pit, even as dozens of lesser immortals surrender and throw themselves away from the cable. But Athena will not release her grip. The gray-eyed goddess is pulled relentlessly to the edge of the steaming trapdoor to hell. It looks as if the whole line of straining, sweating, cursing immortals is going in.

Zeus laughs and drops the cable. Score upon score of gods and goddesses fly backward and land unceremoniously on their immortal asses.

“You gods and goddesses, children, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, cousins, and servants—you cannot drag me down,” says Zeus. He walks back to his throne and sits. “Not even if you pulled your arms from their sockets, if you pulled yourselves to death, could you budge me if I do not choose to move. I am Zeus, the highest, mightiest of kings.”

He raises one huge finger. “But . . . if I choose to drag you up in earnest, I’d hoist you off this Olympos, dangle you in black space above Tartarus, tie on the earth and sea as well, hook the end around the horn of this hill called Olympos, and leave you dangling there in darkness until the sun grows cold.”

If I hadn’t just seen what I have seen, I’d think the old bastard was bluffing. Now I know better.

Athena gets to her feet, not more than a yard from the edge of the Tartarus Pit, and says, “Our Father, son of Kronos, who art in the highest throne of heaven, we know your power, Lord. Who can stand against you? Not us . . .”

All the immortals seem to be holding their breath. Athena’s temper is legendary, her diplomacy skills frequently lacking—if she says the wrong thing now . . .

“Even so,” says Zeus’s gray-eyed daughter, “we pity these mortals, my doomed Argive spearmen, acting out their little roles on their little stage, dying their terrible deaths, drowning in their own blood at the end of their little lives.”

She takes another two steps, so that the tips of her sandals are hanging over the edge of the black pit. Somewhere thousands of feet below her in the lightning-lashed Tartarus darkness, something large bellows in pain and fear. “Yes, Zeus,” continues Athena, “we will keep clear of the war as you command. But grant us—at the very least—permission to offer our mortal favorites tactics that may save them, so that they all won’t fall beneath the lightning of your immortal wrath.”

Zeus looks at his daughter a long moment and I for one can’t read his eyes. Fury? Humor? Impatience?

“Tritogeneia—third-born child—dear daughter,” says Zeus, “your courage has always given me a headache. But do not lose heart, for nothing of the lesson I showed you here today flows from anger, but only seeks to show all gathered here the consequences of their disobedience.”

And having spoken, Zeus steps down from his throne and his personal chariot flies in between the giant pillars, his pair of bronze-hooved horses—real, I see, not holograms—landing near him, their golden manes streaming behind them. Strapping on his golden armor and lifting his whip from its stand, Zeus climbs aboard his battle car, cracks the lash, and I watch the matched team and chariot roll across marble and then take to the air, circling the hall once a hundred feet above the gods’ and goddesses’ heads before flying out between the pillars and disappearing in a crack of quantum thunder.

Slowly the gods and goddesses and lesser sorts file out of the hall, murmuring and plotting among themselves, none—I’m sure—planning to obey their lord and king.

And me—I just sit here for a while—invisible and glad to be so. My jaw is hanging slack and I am breathing shallowly, like a whipped dog on a hot day. It feels like I’m drooling slightly.

Sometimes, up here on Olympos, it’s hard to believe completely in cause and effect and the scientific method.

25

Daeman was all alone now, just him and the sonie in the forest clearing, and he didn’t like it.

After Savi left, Odysseus had told his endless, pointless story and walked into the woods at the end of it. Hannah had waited a minute and then gone after the old man. (Daeman had known immediately that morning that Hannah and the bearded man had slept together the night before—his sex radar was seldom wrong.) A few minutes later, Ada and the other old man, Harman, had said they were going for a short walk and then disappeared under the trees in the opposite direction. (Daeman knew that they’d had sex the night before as well. Evidently he and the old witch, Savi, were the only ones not having any fun.)

So now Daeman was alone in the forest glade, leaning against the hull of the landed sonie and listening to leaves stirring and branches breaking in the dark woods and not liking it one bit. If an allosaurus appeared, he was ready to leap into the sonie—but what then? He didn’t even know how to access the holographic controls, much less how to activate the forcefield bubble or fly away. He’d be an hors d’oeuvre on a plate for the dino.

Daeman considered shouting into the woods, calling for Savi or any of the others to return, but immediately thought better of it. Were dinosaurs and other predators attracted to noise? He wasn’t going to experiment to find out. Meanwhile, he was acutely uncomfortable—not just from the anxiety, but from the need to go to the toilet. The others may have scampered off into the forest with the tissues Savi had provided, but Daeman was a civilized human being; he’d never gone to the toilet without . . . well . . . a toilet, and he wasn’t going to start now. Of course he didn’t know how many hours it would be until they got to Ardis Hall, and Savi was talking as if she wasn’t even going to stop there, just drop off Hannah, Ada, and the preposterous impostor calling himself Odysseus, and then head on to the Mediterranean Basin or wherever it was. Daeman knew he couldn’t wait
that
long.

He realized that he was discouraged more than frightened. Everyone had seemed surprised yesterday when he volunteered to go with the old woman and Harman on their preposterous expedition, but no one had guessed his real reason for choosing that alternative. First of all, he was afraid of the dinosaurs around Ardis Hall. He wasn’t going back there. Second, all that talk of faxing being a sort of destruction and rebuilding of people had made him extremely nervous. Well, who wouldn’t be, so shortly after waking up in the firmary and knowing that your real body had been destroyed? Daeman had faxed almost every day of his life, but the thought of stepping into a faxportal now, knowing that it was going to break down his muscles, bones, brain, and memory, and then just build a copy somewhere else—if the old woman was telling the truth—well, that idea bothered the hell out of him.

So he’d opted for traveling on the sonie for a few more days, facing neither Ardis dinosaurs nor fax destruction of his atoms or molecules or whatever.

Now he just wanted a toilet and a servitor or his mother to make him supper. Perhaps he would demand that the old woman drop him off at Paris Crater after Ardis. It wasn’t that far away, was it? Even though he’d got a glimpse of Harman’s scribbles—his “map”—Daeman had no concept of the world’s geography. Everything was as precisely as far away as everything else—a faxportal step.

The old woman stepped out of the forest, saw Daeman alone, leaning against the floating sonie, and said, “Where is everyone?”

“That’s what I was wondering. First the barbarian left. Then Hannah went after him. Then Ada and Harman walked off
that
way . . .” He gestured toward the tall trees on the opposite side of the glade.

“Why don’t you use your palm?” said Savi, and smiled as if something she’d said amused her.

“I already tried,” said Daeman. “On your ice-thingee. At the bridge. Here. It doesn’t work.” He raised his left palm, thought of the finder function, and showed her the blank rectangle of white floating there.

“That’s just the immediate locator function,” said Savi. “Just an arrow-guide once you’re close to something, like inside a library hunting for a volume but in the wrong aisle. Use farnet or proxnet.”

Daeman stared at her. From his first glimpse of the old woman, he had doubted her sanity.

“Ah, that’s right,” said Savi, still smiling that unamused smile. “You’ve all forgotten the functions. Generation after generation.”

“What are you talking about?” said Daeman. “The old functions like reading don’t work anymore. They went away when the post-humans left.” He pointed to the rings crossing in the patch of blue sky above.

“Nonsense,” said Savi. She walked over, leaned against the sonie next to him, and gripped his left arm, turning it palm toward her. “Think three red circles with blue squares in the center of each.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” She continued to hold his wrist.

Idiocy,
thought Daeman, but he visualized three red circles with blue squares floating in the center of each.

Instead of the small rectangle of white-yellow light that the finder function generated, a large blue oval of light now floated six inches above his palm.

“Whoa!” cried Daeman, pulling his wrist from her grasp and flicking his hand wildly as if a huge insect had just landed in it. The blue oval flickered with it.

“Relax,” said Savi. “It’s blank. Just visualize someone.”

“Who?” Daeman actively did not like this sensation—his body doing something he did not know it could do.

“Anyone. Someone close to you.”

Daeman closed his eyes and visualized his mother’s face. When he opened his eyes again, the blue oval was busy with diagrams. Street grids, a river, words that he could not read—an aerial view of the black circle that could only be the crater in the heart of Paris Crater. The image zoomed and suddenly he was in a stylized structure, fifth floor, back domi near the crater—not his home. Two stylized human figures, cartoon characters but with real, human faces, were in bed, the female above the male, moving . . .

Daeman closed his hand into a fist, shutting off the oval.

“Sorry,” said Savi. “I forgot that no one’s using trace inhibitors these days. Your girlfriend?”

“My mother,” said Daeman, tasting bile. It had been Goman’s domi-complex across the crater—he knew the layout of the rooms from when he was a boy, playing in the inner rooms while his mother consorted with the tall, dark-skinned man with the wine-smooth voice. Daeman didn’t like Goman, and hadn’t known his mother was still seeing him. According to what Harman had said earlier, it was already night in Paris Crater.

“Let’s try to see where Hannah and Ada and the others are,” said Savi. She chuckled. “Although they may wish they’d activated farnet inhibitors as well.”

Daeman didn’t want to uncurl his fist.

“Recycle it,” said Savi.

“How?”

“How do you get rid of your arrow-finder?”

“I just think ‘off,’ “ said Daeman, mentally adding, “
stupid
.”

“Do it.”

Daeman thought, the blue oval winked off.

“You activate proxnet by thinking one yellow circle with a green triangle in it,” said Savi. She looked at her own palm and a bright yellow rectangle appeared above it.

Daeman did the same.

“Think of Hannah,” said Savi.

He did so. Both of their palms showed a continent—North America, but Daeman could not identify it—then a zoom to the south-central section, zoom north of the coastline, zoom to a complex series of unreadable words and topographic maps, zoom below stylized trees to a stylized female form with Hannah’s head on the cartoon body, walking alone—no, not alone, Daeman realized, for there was a question mark walking next to her.

Savi chuckled again. “Proxnet doesn’t know how to process Odysseus.”

“I don’t see Odysseus,” said Daeman.

Savi reached into his yellow holographic cube and touched the question mark. She pointed to two red figures at the edge of the cloud. “That’s us,” she said. “Ada and Harman must be off the grid to the north.”

“How do we know it’s Hannah?” asked Daeman, although he’d glimpsed the top of her head

“Think ‘close-up,’ “ said Savi. She showed him her palm cloud, which had zoomed lower, leveled out, and was watching the stylized Hannah with the real Hannah’s face walk between stylized trees, along a stylized stream.

He thought “close-up” and marveled at the clarity of the image. He could see the tree shadows on her features. She was speaking animatedly to the symbol—Savi had called it a question mark—floating next to her. Daeman was glad that he hadn’t found Hannah in the middle of sex.

Savi must have visualized Ada and Harman, for her yellow palm cloud shifted and showed two figures walking on topographic symbols somewhere north of the stationary red dots that she’d said were Savi and Daeman.

“Everybody’s alive, nobody eaten by dinosaurs,” said Savi. “But I wish to hell they’d get back so we could leave. It’s getting late. If this were the old days, I’d just call them on their palms and tell them to get their butts back here.”

“You can use this to communicate?” said Daeman, holding up his bare palm.

“Of course.”

“Why don’t we know that?” His voice came out sounding almost angry.

Savi shrugged. “You don’t know much of anything anymore, you so-called old-style humans.”

“What do you mean, ‘so-called old-style’?” demanded Daeman. He was angry now.

“Do you really think the lost-age humans, the old-styles, had all this genetically tweaked nano-machinery in their cells and bodies?” asked Savi.

“Yes,” said Daeman, although he realized that he knew absolutely nothing about the Lost Age old-styles, and cared less.

Savi said nothing for a minute. She looked tired to Daeman’s eye, but perhaps all ancient, pre-firmary humans looked this bad—he didn’t know.

“We should go fetch them,” she said at last. “ I’ll take Hannah and Odysseus, you get Ada and Harman. Set your palm on proxnet, activate your finder the usual way, and that’ll lead you to them. Tell them that the bus is leaving.”

Daeman had no idea what “bus” meant, but that wasn’t important. “Are there other functions?” he asked before she could walk off.

“Hundreds,” said Savi.

“Show me one,” challenged Daeman. He didn’t believe her—not hundreds—but even one or two more would make him popular at parties, of interest to young women.

Savi sighed and leaned back against the sonie. A wind had come up and stirred the sequoia branches far above them. “I can show you the function that finally drove the post-humans off the Earth,” she said softly. “The allnet.”

Daeman closed his fist again and pulled his hand away. “Not if it’s dangerous.”

“It’s not,” said Savi. “Not to us. Here, I’ll go first.” She lowered his arm, pulled his fingers open, and touched his palm in a way he found almost exciting. Then she set her own left palm next to his.

“Visualize four blue rectangles above three red circles above four green triangles,” she said softly.

Daeman frowned—that was difficult, the shapes skittered right at the edge of his ability to hold the image—but he managed at last, his eyes closed.

“Open your eyes,” said Savi.

He did so, wildly grabbing the sonie for support with both hands a second later.

There was no palm cloud. No unreadable maps or cartoon figures.

Instead, everything within his sight had been transformed. The nearby trees he had been ignoring except to borrow their shade were now towering complexities—transparent, layer upon layer of pulsing, living tissue, dead bark, vesicules, veins, dead inner material showing structural vectors and rings with columns of flowing data, the moving green and red of life—needles, xylem, phloem, water, sugar, energy, sunlight. He knew that if he could read the flowing data, he would understand exactly the hydrology of the living miracle that was that tree, know exactly how many foot-pounds of pressure it was taking to osmotically raise all that water from the roots—Daeman could look down and
see
the roots under the soil, see the energy exchange of water from the soil into those roots and the long voyage, hundreds of feet, from roots to the vertical tubules raising that water—hundreds of feet vertically! Like a giant sucking from a straw!—and then the lateral motion of the water, molecules of water in pipelines only molecules wide, out along branches fifty, sixty, seventy feet wide, narrowing, narrowing, life and nutrients in that water, energy from the sun . . .

Daeman looked up and saw sunlight for the discrete rain of energy it was—sunlight striking pine needles and being absorbed, sunlight striking the humus beneath his feet and warming the bacteria there. He could count the busy bacteria! The world around him was a torrent of information, a tidal wave of data, a million micro-ecologies interacting all at once, energy to energy. Even death was part of the complex dance of water, light, energy, life, recycling, growth, sex, and hunger flowing all around him.

Daeman could see a dead mouse almost buried in the humus on the opposite side of the glade, little more than hair and bones now, but still a beacon of red-light energy as the bacteria feasted and the fly eggs incubated into maggots in the afternoon sunlight and the slow unraveling of complex protein molecules continued on the molecular level, and . . .