Ilium (5 page)

“What about the voynix?”

“Did you ever wonder why they were motionless for so many centuries and are so active now?”

Daeman opened his mouth but had nothing to say to that. After a moment, he managed, “That business about the voynix not moving before the final fax is total nonsense. Myths. Folklore.”

Ada stepped closer. “Daeman, did you ever wonder where they came from?”

“Who, my dear?”

“The voynix.”

Daeman laughed heartily and honestly at this. “Of course not, my lady. The voynix have always been here. They are permanent, fixed, eternal—moving, sometimes out of sight, but always present—like the sun or the stars.”

“Or the rings?” asked Hannah in her soft voice.

“Precisely.” Daeman was pleased that she understood.

Harman pulled a heavy book from the shelves. “Daeman
Uhr,
Ada informs me that you are quite the lepidopterist.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Butterfly expert.”

Daeman could feel himself blush. It was always pleasing to have one’s skills recognized, even by strangers, even by less-than-sane strangers. “Hardly an expert, Harman
Uhr,
merely a collector who has learned a bit from his uncle.”

Harman came down the ladder and carried the heavy book to a reading table. “This should interest you then.” He opened the artifact. Page after glossy page showed colorful representations of butterflies.

Daeman stepped closer, speechless. His uncle had taught him the names of about twenty types of butterflies and he had learned from other collectors the names of a few of the others he’d captured. He reached out to touch the image of a Western Tiger Swallowtail.

“Western Tiger Swallowtail,” said Harman and added, “
Pterourus rutulus
.”

Daeman did not understand the last two words, but he stared at the older man in amazement. “You collect!”

“Not at all.” Harman touched a familiar gold and black image. “Monarch.”

“Yes,” said Daeman, confused.

“Red Admiral, Aphrodite Fritillary, Field Crescentspot, Common Blue, Painted Lady, Phoebus Parnassian,” Harman said, touching each image in turn. Daeman knew three of those named.

“You know butterflies,” he said.

Harman shook his head. “I’ve never even really considered that the different types have names until this minute.”

Daeman looked at the man’s blunt hand. “You have the reading function.”

Harman shook his head again. “No one has that palm function any longer. No more than they have comm function or geo-positioning or data access or self-fax away from nodes.”

“Then . . .” began Daeman and stopped in true confusion. Were these people taunting him for some reason? He had come to spend the weekend at Ardis Hall with good intentions—well, with the intention of seducing Ada, but all in good humor—and now this . . . malicious game?

As if sensing his growing anger, Ada put her slim fingers on his sleeve. “Harman doesn’t have the reading function, Daeman
Uhr,
” she said softly. “He has recently learned how to
read
.”

Daeman stared. This made no more sense than celebrating one’s ninety-ninth year or babbling on about the Atlantic Breach.

“It’s a skill,” Harman said quietly. “Rather like your learning the names of the butterflies or your fabled techniques as a . . . ladies’ man.”

This last phrase made Daeman blink.
Is my other hobby so well known?

Hannah spoke. “Harman has promised to teach us this trick . . . reading. It might come in handy. I need to learn about casting before I do more of it and burn myself.”

Casting
? Daeman knew fishermen who used that word. He could not imagine how it could have anything to do with burning onself or acquiring the reading function. He licked his lips and said, “I have no interest in these games. What do you want from me?”

“We need to find a spaceship,” said Ada. “And there’s reason to believe that you can help us.”

6

When my shift ends on the night of Achilles’ and Agamemnon’s confrontation, I quantum teleport back to the scholic complex on Olympos, record my observations and analysis, transfer the thoughts to a word stone, and carry it into the Muse’s small white room overlooking the Lake of the Caldera. To my surprise, the Muse is there, talking to one of the other scholics.

The scholic is named Nightenhelser—a friendly bear of a man who, I had learned over the last four years of his residency here, lived and taught college and died in the American Midwest some time in the early Twentieth Century. Seeing me at the door, the Muse finishes her business with Nightenhelser and sends him away, out her bronze door toward the escalator that spirals its way down off Olympos to our barracks and the red world below.

The Muse gestures me closer. I set the word stone on the marble table in front of her and step back, expecting to be dismissed without a word, as is the usual dynamic between the two of us. Surprisingly, she lifts the word stone while I’m still there and closes her hand around it even as she closes her eyes to concentrate. I stand and wait. I confess that I am nervous. My heart pounds and my hands, clasped behind my back as I stand in a sort of professorial parody of a soldier’s “at ease” position, are sweaty. I decided years ago that that the gods cannot really read minds—that their uncanny perception of mortals’ thoughts, heroes and scholics alike, comes from some advanced science in the study of facial muscles, eye movements and the like. But I could be wrong. Perhaps they are telepathic. If so—and if they bothered to read my mind during my moment of epiphany and decision on the beach after Agamemnon’s and Achilles’ showdown—then I am a dead man. Again.

I’ve seen scholics who displease the Muse, much less the more important gods. Some years ago—the fifth year of the siege, actually—there was a scholic from the Twenty-sixth Century, a chubby, irreverent Asian with the unusual name of Bruster Lin—and even though Bruster Lin was the brightest and most insightful scholar amongst us, his irreverence was his undoing. Literally. After one of his more ironic comments—it was about the
mano a mano
combat between Paris and Menelaus, winner take all, that would have settled the war on the outcome of that single combat. The one-on-one fight to the death between Helen’s Trojan lover and her Achaean husband—although staged in front of two cheering armies, with Paris beautiful in his golden armor and Menelaus fearful with his eye full of business—was never consummated. Aphrodite saw that her beloved Paris was going to be hacked into worm meat, so she swooped down and spirited him off the battlefield back to Helen, where, like effete liberals in every age, Paris was more the happy warrior in bed than on the battlefield. So it was after one of Bruster Lin’s amusing comments on the Paris–Menelaus episode, that the Muse—not amused—snapped her fingers and the billions upon trillions of obedient nanocytes in the hapless scholic’s body aggregated and exploded outward in one giant nano-lemming leap, shredding the still-smiling Bruster Lin into a thousand bloody shreds in front of the rest of us and sending his still-smiling head rolling toward our feet as we stood at attention.

It was a serious lesson and we took it to heart. No editorializing. No making merry with the serious business of the gods’ sport. The wages of irony is death.

The Muse opens her eyes and looks at me now. “Hockenberry,” she says, her tone that of a personnel bureaucrat from my century about to fire a mid-level white-collar worker, “how long have you been with us?”

I know the question is rhetorical, but when queried by a goddess, even a minor goddess, one answers even rhetorical questions. “Nine years, two months, eighteen days, Goddess.”

She nods. I am the oldest surviving scholic. Or, rather, I am the scholic who has survived the longest. She knows this. Perhaps this official recognition of my longevity is my elegy before explosive termination by nanocyte.

I had always taught my students that there were nine Muses, all daughters of Mnemosyne—Kleis, Euterpe, Thaleria, Melpomene, Terpsichorde, Erato, Plymnia, Ourania, and Kalliope—each one granted, at least by later Greek tradition, control of some artistic expression such as flute or dance or storytelling or heroic song—but in my nine years, two months, and eighteen days serving the gods as observer on the plains of Ilium, I’ve reported to, seen, and heard of only one Muse—this tall goddess who sits in front of me now behind her marble table. Still, because of her strident voice, I’ve always thought of her as “Kalliope,” even though the name originally meant “she of the beautiful voice.” I can’t say this solo Muse has a beautiful voice—it’s more klaxon than calliope to my ear—but it’s certainly one I’ve learned to jump to when she says “frog.”

“Follow me,” she says, rising fluidly and walking out the private side door of her white marble room.

I jump and follow.

The Muse is god-sized—that is to say, over seven feet tall but in perfect human proportions, less voluptuous than some of the goddesses but built like a Twentieth Century female triathlete—and even in the lessened gravity here on Olympos, I have to scramble to keep up as she strides across the close-cropped green lawns between white buildings.

She pauses at a chariot nexus. I say “chariot” and it is vaguely chariotlike—low, roughly horseshoe shaped, with a niche in the side allowing the Muse to step up into it, but this chariot lacks horses, reins and driver. She grips the railing and beckons me up.

Hesitantly, heart pounding wildly now, I step up and stand to one side as the Muse taps her long fingers across a gold wedge that might be some sort of control panel. Lights blink. The chariot hums, crackles, becomes suddenly girdled by a latticework of energy, and rises off the grass, twirling as it climbs. Suddenly a holographic pair of “horses” appears in front of the chariot and gallop as they seem to pull the chariot through the sky. I know that the holographic horses are there for the Greeks’ and Trojans’ need for closure, but the sense that they are real animals pulling a real chariot through the sky is very strong. I grab the metal bar along the rim and brace myself, but there is no sense of acceleration even as the transport disk jigs and jags, swoops once a hundred feet above the Muse’s modest temple, and then accelerates toward the deep depression of the Lake of the Caldera.

Chariot of the gods!
I think and blame the unworthy thought on fatigue and adrenaline.

I’ve seen these chariots a thousand times, of course, flying near Olympos or above the plains of Ilium as the gods shuttle to and fro on their godlike business, but I’ve always seen them from my vantage point on the ground. The horses look real from that angle and the chariot itself seems far less substantial when you’re in one, flitting a thousand feet above the summit of a mountain—volcano, actually—that itself rises some 85,000 feet above the desert floor.

The summit of Olympos should be airless and ice-covered, but the air here is as thick and breathable as it is some seventeen miles lower where the scholic barracks huddle at the base of the volcanic cliffs, and rather than ice, the broad summit is covered with grass, trees, and white buildings large enough and grand enough to make the Acropolis look like an outhouse.

The figure eight of the Lake of the Caldera at the center of the summit of Olympos is almost sixty miles across and we zip across it at near-supersonic speed, some forcefield or bit of godly magic keeping the wind from tearing our heads off at the same time it muffles the sound. Hundreds of buildings, each with acres of manicured lawn and gardens around it, gods’ homes, I presume, surround the lake, while great three-tiered autotriremes move slowly across the blue waters. Scholic Bruster Lin once told me that he estimated that Olympos was the size of Arizona, its grassy summit equaling approximately the surface area of Rhode Island. It was strange to hear of things here being compared to states on that other world, in that other time, from that other existence.

Clinging to the thin railing with both hands, I peek out beyond the mountaintop. The view is breathtaking.

We are high enough that I can see the curve of the world. To the northwest, the great blue ocean extends to that inverted cusp of horizon. To the northeast runs the coastline, and I fancy that even from this distance I can see the great stone heads that mark the boundary between sea and land. Due north is the scythe of the unnamed archipelago just visible from the shoreline a few miles from our scholic barracks, then nothing but blue again all the way to the pole. To the southeast I can see three other tall volcanic summits thrusting above the horizon, obviously lower than Olympos’s summit but, unlike climate-controlled Olympos, white with snow. One of them, I guess, must be Mount Helicon, home to my Muse and her sisters, if sisters she has. To the south and southwest, for hundreds of miles, I can make out a succession of cultivated fields, then wild forests, then red desert beyond, then perhaps forest again, until land blends with clouds and haze and no amount of blinking or rubbing of eyes can resolve the detail there.

The Muse sweeps our chariot around and descends toward the west shoreline of the Lake of the Caldera. I see now that the white specks I noticed during our crossing of the lake are huge white buildings, fronted with columns and steps, graced with gigantic pediments, and decorated with statuary. I am sure that no scholic has seen this part of Olympos . . . or at least seen it and lived to tell the rest of us about it.

We descend near the largest of the giant buildings, the chariot touches down, and the holographic horses wink out of existence. Several hundred other sky chariots are parked helter-skelter on the grass.

The Muse removes what looks to be a small medallion from her robe. “Hockenberry, I have been ordered to take you somewhere where you cannot be. I have been directed by one of the gods to give you two items that might keep you from being crushed like a gnat if you are detected. Put these on.”

The Muse hands me two objects—a medallion on a chain and what looks to be a tooled-leather hood. The medallion is small but heavy, as if it is made of gold. The Muse reaches forward and slides one part of the disc counterclockwise from the rest. “This is a personal quantum teleporter such as the gods use,” she says softly. “It can teleport you any place you can visualize. This particular QT disk also allows you to follow the quantum trail of the gods as they phase-shift through Planck space, but no one—except the god who gave me this—can trace your path. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I say, my voice almost quavering. I shouldn’t have this thing. It will be my death. The other “gift” is worse.

“This is the Helmet of Death,” she says, tugging the ornate leather headpiece over my head, but leaving it folded around my neck like a cowl. “The Hades Helmet. It was made by Hades himself and it is the only thing in the universe that can hide you from the vision of the gods.”

I blink stupidly at this. I vaguely remember scholarly footnotes about “the Helmet of Death,” and I remember that Hades’ name itself—in Greek, Äidès was thought to mean “the unseen one.” But as far as I knew, Hades’ Helmet of Death was mentioned only once by Homer, when Athena donned it to be invisible to the war god, Ares.
Why on earth or Olympos would any goddess loan this thing to me? What are they setting me up to do for them?
My knees go weak at the thought.

“Put the helmet on,” orders the Muse.

Clumsily, I tug up the thick leather. There are devices embedded in the material, circuit chips, nanotech machines. The helmet has clear, flexible eyepieces and mesh material over the mouth, and when I’ve pulled on the full cowl, the air seems to ripple strangely around us, although my sight is otherwise unaffected.

“Incredible,” says the Muse. She is staring right past me. I realize that I’ve achieved the goal of every adolescent boy—true invisibility, although how the helmet shields my entire body from sight, I have no idea. My impulse is to run like hell and hide from the Muse and all the gods. I stifle the impulse. There has to be a catch here. No god or goddess, not even my minor Muse, would give a mere scholic such power without safeguards.

“This device will shield you from the sight of all the gods except the goddess who authorized me to give it to you,” the Muse says quietly, staring at the empty air to the right of my head. “But that goddess can see and track you anywhere, Hockenberry. And although sound, scent, even heartbeat is muffled by the medallion, the gods’ senses are beyond your understanding. Stay close to me in the next few minutes. Tread lightly. Say nothing. Breathe as lightly and shallowly as possible. If you are detected, neither I nor your divine patroness can protect you from the wrath of Zeus.”

How do you breathe lightly and softly when you’re terrified?
But I nod, forgetting the Muse cannot see me now. When she waits, still staring slightly askance as if seeking me with her divine vision, I croak, “Yes, Goddess.”

“Put your hand on my arm,” she orders brusquely. “Stay with me. Do not lose contact with me. If you do, you will be destroyed.”

I put my hand on her arm like a timid debutante being escorted at a coming-out party. The Muse’s skin is cold.