Ilium (45 page)

Odysseus nods, stands, nods again in the direction of Achilles, and follows Big Ajax out of the tent.

I’m still standing with my mouth agape, ready to deliver Phoenix’s long, three-part speech—that clever speech!—with my own clever amendments and hidden agendas.

Patroclus and Achilles stand, stretch, and exchange glances. Obviously they’ve been expecting this embassy and both men knew Achilles’ shocking answer in advance.

“Phoenix, old father, loved by the gods,” Achilles says warmly, “I don’t know what really brought you here this stormy night, but well I remember when I was a lad and you’d lift me and carry me off to bed after lessons. Stay here this night, Phoenix. Patroclus and Automedon will prepare a soft bed for you. In the morning, we’ll sail for home and you can come . . . or not.”

He gestures and goes into his sleeping quarters in the back of the tent and I stand here like the fool I am, speechless in every sense, stunned at this wild veering away from the plotline of the
Iliad
.

Achilles has to be persuaded to stay, even if he doesn’t join in the fighting, so the
Iliad
works itself out this way—the Trojans winning again and the Greeks in full retreat with all of their great commanders wounded—Odysseus, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Diomedes, all of them—then, feeling sympathy for his friends while knowing that Achilles will never join the fight, Patroclus will put on Achilles’ golden armor and rout the Trojans back until, in single combat with Hector, Patroclus is killed, his body violated and desecrated.
That
will bring Achilles out of his tent, filled with killing wrath, thus sealing the fate of Hector and Ilium and Andromache and Helen and all the rest of us.

He’s really leaving?
I can’t quite grasp this. Not only didn’t I find the fulcrum and change things, now the entire
Iliad
has run off the rails. More than nine years I’ve been a scholic here, watching and observing and reporting to the muse and never once has there been a deep rift between the events in this war and Homer’s reporting in the poem. Now . . .
this
. If Achilles leaves, which he shows every indication of doing come the dawn, the Achaeans will be defeated, their ships burned, Ilium saved, and Hector, not Achilles, will be the great hero of the epic. It seems unlikely that Odysseus’
Odyssey
will ever happen . . . and certainly not the way it’s sung now. Everything has changed.
Just because the real Phoenix wasn’t here to give his real speech? Or have the gods been tampering with this fulcrum before I had a chance to?
I’ll never know. My chance to persuade Achilles and Odysseus in council, my clever plan, is lost forever.

“Come, old Phoenix,” Patroclus says, taking my arm as if I’m a child, leading me to a side room in the great tent where my cushions and coverlets are laid out. “It’s time to go to bed. Tomorrow’s another day.”

31

“What is it?” asked Harman. He and Daeman were standing in the shadow of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, just a few steps behind Savi, and all three were staring up at the solid beam of blue light that stabbed vertically into the darkening sky.

“I think it’s my friends,” said the old woman. “All nine thousand one hundred and thirteen of my friends—all the old-styles that were swept up in the final fax.”

Daeman looked at Harman and realized that they were both doubtful about Savi’s mental condition.

“Your friends?” said Daeman. “That’s a blue light.”

Savi tore her gaze away from the beam—it was illuminating the top of the ancient buildings and walls around them now, bathing everything in blue glow as the daylight faded further—and she looked at them with what might have been a rueful smile. “Yes. That beam of blue light. My friends.” She gestured for them to follow and began leading them away from the courtyard, away from the wall back the way they came, away from the base of the shaft of blue light.

“The posts told us that the final fax was a way of storing us while they cleaned up the world,” continued Savi, her voice soft but still echoing in the narrow alleyways here. “The plan was, they explained, to reduce our codes—we were all fax codes to the post-humans, even then, my friends—reduce our codes and put us in a continuous neutrino loop for ten thousand years while they tidied up the planet.”

“What does that mean?” said Harman. “Tidy up the planet?”

They walked under a long archway and Daeman could just barely see Savi’s face as she smiled again. “Things got messy toward the end of the Lost Age,” she said. “Messier after the rubicon. Then came the Demented Times. Freelance ARNists were bringing back dinosaurs and Terror Birds and long-extinct botanic forms, screwing up the planet’s ecology even as the biosphere and datasphere were beginning to merge into the self-aware noosphere—the logosphere. The post-humans had already fled to their rings by then—the Earth’s sentient noosphere didn’t trust them any longer—and for good reason, the posts were experimenting with quantum teleportation, opening portals onto places they didn’t understand, opening doors they shouldn’t have opened.”

Harman stopped as they came out onto a broader street. “Would you make sense, Savi? We don’t understand two-thirds of what you’re talking about.”

“How could you?” asked Savi, looking at Harman with an expression of either pain or severe displeasure. “How could you understand anything? No history. No technology. No books.”

“We have books,” said Harman, his voice defensive.

Savi laughed.

“What does all this talk of dinosaurs and noospheres have to do with the blue beam?” asked Daeman.

Savi sat on a low wall. The breeze had come up and it whistled through broken tiles on the rooftops. The air was cooling quickly. “They needed to get us out of the way while they cleaned things up,” repeated Savi. “A torus of neutrinos, they said. No mass. No muss. No fuss. Ten thousand years for them to tidy up the earth. Less than a blink of an eye for us old-styles. So they said.”

“But they left you behind,” said Harman.

“Yes.”

“By accident?”

“I doubt it,” said the old woman. “Very little the posts did was by accident. Perhaps they had some purpose for me. Perhaps they were punishing me for digging into histories better left buried. That’s what I was, you know—an historian. Cultural historian.” She laughed again for no reason that Daeman could fathom.

“So neutrinos are blue?” asked Daeman. He was determined to get a straight answer.

She laughed again. “I very much doubt it. I don’t think neutrinos have any color . . . or charm. But that blue beam appears every
Tisha b’Av
, every Ninth of Av, and something tells me that the rest of the old-style humans—all my friends—are stored and coded in that blue beam. I don’t think that machine is generating the beam. I think the Earth passes through the neutrino beam every year at this point on its orbit, and that machine merely makes the beam visible.”

“But it hasn’t been ten thousand years,” said Harman. “Only fourteen hundred, you say, since the final fax.”

Savi nods tiredly. “And things haven’t been tidied up much since the final fax, have they, my young friends?” She stands, lifts her backpack, and starts down the narrow street before suddenly freezing.

“A voynix!” says Daeman. “Now we won’t have to walk back to the sonie. We’ll have it fetch a carriole and . . .”

The voynix, an iron-and-leather silhouette in the western archway ahead of them, suddenly retracted its manipulatives and clicked cutting blades into place. Then it charged directly at them, running along the side of the building on all fours like a frenzied spider.

Savi had been wildly rummaging in her pack since Daeman had pointed, and now she brought out the black plastic-and-metal device—a gun, she’d called it—and aimed it at the charging voynix.

Daeman was too shocked to move. He was the closest to the scuttling voynix, still eight feet up the wall and loping on all fours, but the creature seemed focused on Savi and was hurtling right past Daeman. Suddenly the evening air was torn by a noise—RRRIIIIPPPPPPPPPP—as if wooden paddles were being dragged against stone slats, and the wall flew apart in a spray of masonry chips, the voynix was thrown backward and down onto the cobblestones, and Savi stepped forward, aimed, and fired again.

Scores of fingertip-sized holes appeared in the voynix’s carapace and metallic hood. Its right arm flew up as if it was going to throw something at them, but then more flechettes struck it and the arm became unhinged, tore off, flew backward. The voynix struggled to its feet, one cutting blade still whirring.

Savi shot it again, almost severing it at the waist. Its blue, milky internal fluid spattered the walls and paving stones. What remained of the voynix fell, twitched, and lay still.

Harman and Daeman cautiously moved closer, trying not to step in the blue fluid or on pieces of the creature. This was the second voynix they’d seen destroyed in two days.

“Come on,” said Savi, pulling an empty crystal flechette clip from her gun and slapping in a replacement. “If there are more around, we’re in serious trouble. We have to get to the sonie. And quickly.”

Savi led them down a narrow street, turned into a narrower alley, then turned again into something smaller than an alley—a crack between stone buildings. They emerged into a wide, dusty courtyard, went under a stone arch, and came into a smaller courtyard.

“Hurry,” whispered Savi. She led them up an outside staircase, across a rooftop terrace duned with dust, and then up a rotted wooden ladder past shuttered windows to a higher rooftop.

“What are we doing?” whispered Harman as the three came out into the cool night air atop the building. “Don’t we have to get back to the sonie?”

“I’ll call it to us,” said Savi. She went to one knee by the low rooftop wall and activated her proxnet function, shielding the glow above her palm. Harman crouched next to her.

Daeman remained standing. The air up here was cool after the heat of the cobblestoned streets and narrow alleys and the view was interesting from this point on the hill. To their right stabbed the blue beam, bathing all the domes and rooftops and streets in its pale light. It was dark now and stars were visible across the sky. The city had no lights burning, but ancient domes and spires and some arches gleamed to the blue light. Savi had told them that the walled compound on the hill where the beam burned was called Haram esh-Sharif, or Temple Mount, and the two domed structures at the base of the beam machine were the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aksa Mosque.

“Itbah al-Yahud!”
came a sudden, shrill, amplified cry from the streets behind them. The cry was repeated from the warren of narrow streets to their west, between them and the sonie.

“Itbah al-Yahud!”

Savi looked up from her palm display.

“What is
that
?” asked Harman in a shrill whisper. “Voynix don’t speak.”

“No,” said Savi. “It’s coming from the ancient, automated muezzin call-to-prayer speakers on all the mosques.”

“
Itbah al-Yahud
!” came the tremulous but urgent voice echoing from all over the dark city.
“Al-jihad!
” cried the amplified voice. “
Itbah al-Yahud
!”

“Damn!” said Savi, looking at her palm display. “No wonder it isn’t responding to the remote.”

“What?” Daeman and Harman both stepped closer, crouching to see the rectangular display floating inches above her palm. The view was of the front of the sonie where they had landed it. The fields of rocks and walled city glowed greenly in the camera’s low-light vision. Closer, looming over the lens, scores of voynix were milling around the sonie, throwing their bodies onto the machine, battering it with boulders and stacking huge rocks on top of it.

“They defeated the forcefield and broke something,” whispered Savi. “The sonie’s not coming to us.”

“
Allahu akbar!
” cried the echoing, amplified, trembling voices from all points of the low-roofed city.
“Itbah al-Yahud! Itbah al-Yahud!”

The three walked to the edge of the rooftop. For a second, Daeman thought that the buildings and cobblestoned streets and walled courtyards were trembling, crumbling, dissolving in the reflected blue light, but then he realized that things were crawling across the stone and domes and walls and rooftops. Thousands of things—like an invasion of roaches scrambling wildly toward the blue light. But then Daeman realized how far away the shimmering, crawling buildings were, computed the scale, and realized that it wasn’t roaches or spiders scrambling and scrabbling toward them, but voynix.

“
Itbah al-Yahud
!” screamed the metallic voice from everywhere. The syllables echoed back from the Mount without losing their demented urgency.

“What does that
mean?
” asked Daeman.

Savi was watching the blue-lighted voynix scrabbling closer over rooftops and through the maze of narrow, winding streets. The wave of huge insectoid shapes was less than two city blocks away now, close enough that they could all hear the scratch and tear of cutting blade and sharp manipulators on stone and tile. Savi turned slowly. Her face looked older than ever in the pulsing blue light.

“Itbah al-Yahud,”
she repeated softly.
“Kill the Jew.”