Ilium (57 page)

In English, the goddess said, “My name is Hera and I’ve come to put you foolish, foolish moravecs out of your misery once and for all. I’ve never liked your kind.”

There was a flash and a jolt and an absolute blackness descended.

42

My impulse is to QT away from Olympos the second I see Thetis, Aphrodite, and my Muse enter the Great Hall, but I remember that Aphrodite must have the power she gave me of seeing and tracking pertubations in the quantum continuum. Any hasty quantum exit now may attract her attention. Besides, my business here is not quite finished.

Sliding sideways, putting tall gods and goddesses between me and the women entering, I tiptoe behind a broad column and then back out of the Great Hall. I can hear Ares’ angry shouts, still demanding to know what’s been happening on the Ilium battlefield in his absence, and then I hear Aphrodite say, “Lord Zeus, Father, still recovering from my terrible wounds as I am, I have asked to leave the healing vats and come here because it has been brought to my attention that there is a mortal man loose who has stolen a QT medallion and the Helmet of Death forged for invisibility by Lord Hades here himself. I fear that this mortal is doing great harm even as we speak.”

The crowd of gods bursts into an uproar of shouted questions and babble.

So much for any advantage I might have had.
Still shielded by the Helmet’s field, I run down a long corridor, turn left at the first junction, swing right down another corridor. I have no idea where I’m headed, knowing that my only hope is to stumble onto Hera. Sliding to a stop in another junction, hearing the roar increase from the Great Hall, I close my eyes and pray—and not to these swinish gods. It’s the first time I’ve prayed since I was nine years old and my mother had cancer.

I open my eyes and see Hera crossing a junction of corridors a hundred yards to my left.

My sandals make slapping noises that actually echo in the long marble halls. Tall golden tripods throw flame-light on the walls and ceilings. I don’t care about making noise now—I have to catch up to her. More roars echo down the hallways from the agitated assembly in the Great Hall. I wonder for an instant how Aphrodite will hide her complicity in arming me and sending me out to spy on and kill Athena, but then realize that the Goddess of Love is a consummate liar. I’ll be dead before I get a chance to tell anyone the truth of the matter. Aphrodite will be the hero who warned the other gods of my treachery.

Walking quickly, Hera suddenly stops and looks over her shoulder. I’d paused anyway and now I teeter on tiptoe, trying not to give away my position. Zeus’s wife scowls, looks both ways, and slides her hand across a twenty-foot-high metal door. The metal hums, internal locks click open, and the door swings inward. I have to scurry to slide into the room before Hera gestures the door closed behind her. An even greater roar from the Great Hall covers the sound of my sandals on stone. Hera pulls a smooth gray weapon—rather like a seashell with deadly black apertures—from the folds of her robe.

The little robot and the crab-shell are the only other things in the room. The robot backs away from Hera, obviously expecting what is to come next, and sets an oddly human-looking hand on the huge, crack-shelled figure, and for the first time I realize that the other object must also be a robot. Whatever these machines are, they aren’t part of Olympos—I’m convinced of that.

“My name is Hera,” says the goddess, “and I’ve come to put you foolish, foolish moravecs out of your misery once and for all. I’ve never liked your kind.”

I’d been pausing before she spoke. This is, after all, Hera, wife and sister to Zeus, queen of the gods and the most powerful of all of the goddesses with the possible exception of Athena. Perhaps it was the “your kind” part of “I’ve never liked your kind.” I was born into the middle of the Twentieth Century, lived into the Twenty-first Century, and I’ve heard that sort of phrase before—too many times before.

Whatever the final reason, I aim my baton and taser the arrogant bitch.

I wasn’t sure the 50,000 volts would work on a goddess, but it does. Hera spasms, starts to fall, and triggers the ovoid in her hands, blasting the glowing ceiling panels that illuminate the room. It goes absolutely dark.

I retract the taser electrode and thumb another charge ready, but it’s pitch-black in the windowless room and I can’t see a thing. I step forward and almost trip over Hera’s body. She seems to be unconscious, but still twitching on the floor. Suddenly two beams of light shaft across the room. I pull the Hades Helmet cowl off and see myself in the twin beams.

“Get that light out of my eyes,” I say to the little robot. The lights seem to be coming from his chest. The beams shift.

“Are you human?” asks the robot. It takes me a second to realize that he’s spoken in English.

“Yes,” I say. My own language sounds strange in my mouth. “What are you?”

“We’re both moravecs,” says the little form, moving closer, the twin beams shifting to Hera. Her eyelids are already fluttering. I stoop, pick up the gray weapon, and slide it into my tunic pocket.

“My name is Mahnmut,” says the robot. His dark head doesn’t even come up to my chest. I don’t see any eyes set in the metallic, plastic-looking face, but there are dark bands where the eyes might be, and I have the sense he’s staring at me. “My friend is Orphu of Io,” he adds. The robot’s voice is soft, only vaguely male, and not metallic or robot-sounding in the least. It . . . he . . . gestures toward the cracked shell that takes up fifteen or more feet of space across the room.

“Is . . . Orphu . . . alive?” I ask.

“Yes, but he has no eyes or manipulators right now,” says the little robot. “But I’m conveying what we say to Orphu via radio and he says that it is a pleasure making your acquaintance. He says that if he still had eyes, you would be the first human being he has ever laid eyes on.”

“Orphu of Io,” I repeat. “Isn’t there a moon of Saturn named Io?”

“Jupiter actually,” says the Mahnmut machine.

“Well, it’s nice meeting you,” I say, “but we have to get out of here right now and chat later. This cow is waking up. Someone’ll be looking for her in a minute or two. The gods are pretty upset right now.”

“Cow,” repeats the robot. He is looking down at Hera. “How droll.” The robot shifts his twin searchlight beams to the door. “The barn door appears to have locked behind the cow. Do you have some means of unlocking or blowing the door off its hinges?”

“No,” I say. “But we don’t have to go through the door to get out of here. Give me your hand . . . paw . . . whatever it is.”

The robot hesitates. “Are you planning to quantum teleport us out of here by any chance?”

“You know about QT?”

The little figure shifts the beams back to the inert crabshell that looms taller than my head. “Can you take both of us with you?”

It’s my turn to hesitate. “I don’t know. I suspect not. That much mass . . .” Hera is stirring and moaning at our feet—well, at my feet and at this Mahnmut’s vaguely footish-looking peds. “Give me your hand,” I say again. “I’ll QT you to safety, off Olympos, and I’ll come back for your friend.”

The little robot takes another step away. “I have to know that Orphu can be saved before I go.”

There are voices booming in the hall. Are they searching for me already? That’s likely the case. Has Aphrodite shared her seeing-through-the-Hades-Helmet technology, or are they just fanning out and searching the space as though they were hunting for an invisible man? Hera moans and turns on her side. Her eyelids are still fluttering, but she’s coming to.

“Fuck it,” I say. I tear off my cape and remove the levitation harness that’s part of my armor. “Give me some light here, please.” Should one say please to a robot? Of course, this Mahnmut didn’t say he was a robot, but a moravec. Whatever that is.

The first belt of the harness is far too short to fit around the big crabshell, but I link all three sections of the harness together, wrapping the buckles on each end to cracks in the shell. This poor Orphu bugger looks as if terrorists have been using him for target practice for years. There are craters within craters on his vaguely metallic-looking carapace.

“All right,” I say. “Let’s see if this works.” I activate the harness.

What must be tons of inert crabshell wobbles, bumps, but then levitates ten inches or so off the marble floor.

“Let’s see if this medallion can haul this much freight,” I say, not caring if the Mahnmut understands me. I hand the taser baton to the little robot. “If the cow stirs before I’m back, or if someone else comes through that door, aim and tap the baton here. It’ll stop one of them.”

“Actually,” says Mahnmut, “I have to go fetch two things they stole from us and I might be better served by that invisibility device you were using. Might it be borrowable?” He hands me the baton back.

“Shit,” I say. The voices are right outside the door now. I loosen my armor, tug off the leathery cowl, and toss it to the robot. Will Hades’ little device work for a machine? Should I tell him that Aphrodite can see him even with it on? No time now. I say, “How will I find you when I come back?”

“Come to the near side of the caldera lake any time in the next hour,” says the robot. “I’ll find you.”

The door opens. The little robot disappears.

With Nightenhelser and Patroclus, I’d simply grabbed them to include them in the QT field, although I’d been dragging the inert Patroclus with my arm around him. Now I lean against the Orphu shell, one arm thrown up over it as far as I can reach, while I visualize my destination and twist the medallion.

Bright sunlight and sand underfoot. The Orphu mass has teleported with me and now floats ten inches off the sand, which is good since there are small boulders beneath it. I don’t think it’s possible to emerge from QT into a solid object, but I’m glad we haven’t picked today to find out.

I’ve come to Agamemnon’s camp on the beach, but the tented area is mostly deserted this late morning hour. Despite the roiling storm clouds overhead, sunlight shafts down across the beach and across the bright tents, paints the long black boats with light, and shows me the Achaean guards jumping back in shock at our sudden appearance. I can hear the roar of battle a few hundred yards beyond the camp and know that the Greeks and Trojans are still fighting out there beyond the Achaean defensive trenches. Perhaps Achilles is leading a counterattack.

“This shell is sacred to the gods,” I shout at the guards who are crouching behind their spears. “Do not touch it upon pain of death. Where is Achilles? Has he been here?”

“Who wants to know?” demands the tallest and hairiest of the guards. He lifts his spear. I vaguely recognize him as Guneus, commander of the Enienes and Peraebians from Dodona. What this captain is doing standing guard in Agamemnon’s camp this day I don’t know and don’t have time to find out right now.

I taser Guneus down and look at the second in command, a bowlegged little sergeant. “Will
you
take me to Achilles?”

The man plants the butt of his spear in the sand, goes to one knee, and bows his head briefly. The other guards hesitate but then do the same.

I ask where Achilles is. “All this morning, godlike Achilles strode the edge of the surf, summoning sleeping Achaeans and rousing captains with his piercing cry,” says the sergeant. “Then he challenged the Atrides in combat and beat them both. Now he is with the great generals, planning a war, they say, against Olympos itself.”

“Take me to him,” I say.

As they lead me out of the camp, I glance back toward the Orphu of Io shell—it’s still floating above the sand, the remaining guards are still keeping a respectful district—and then I laugh aloud.

The little sergeant glances at me but I don’t explain. It’s simply that this is the first time in nine years that I’ve walked freely on the plains of Ilium in an unmorphed form, as Thomas Hockenberry rather than anyone else. It feels good.

43

Just before they found the firmary, Daeman had been complaining about being starved. He
was
starved. He’d never gone so long between meals before. The last thing he’d eaten had been a paltry few bites of the last dried food bar almost ten hours earlier.

“There must be
something
to eat in this city,” Daeman was saying. The three of them were kick-swimming their way through the dead orbital city. Above them, the glowing panes had given away to clear panels and they saw now how the asteroid and its city were slowly turning. The Earth would appear, move across their field of view above them, its soft light illuminating the empty space, floating bodies, dead plants, and floating kelp. “There has to be something to eat here,” repeated Daeman. “Cans of food, freeze-dried food . . .
something.
”

“If there is, it’s centuries old,” said Savi. “And as mummified as the post-humans.”

“If we find any servitors, they’ll feed us,” said Daeman, realizing that the statement was nonsense as soon as he said it.

Harman and the old woman did not bother replying. They floated into a small clearing in the wild kelpfields. The air seemed slightly thicker here, although Daeman did not lift his osmosis mask or thermskin cowl to try to breathe it. Even through the mask he could tell the little bit of cold air smelled foul.

“If we find a faxportal,” said Harman, “we’ll have to use it to get home.” Harman’s body was muscled and taut in his blue thermskin suit, but Daeman could see the beginning of wrinkles and lines around the eyes through the other man’s clear mask. He looked older than he had just a day earlier.

“I don’t know if there are faxportals up here,” said Savi. “And I wouldn’t fax again if I could.

Harman looked at her. The Earth rotated into view overhead and the soft Earthlight dimly illuminated all of their faces. “Will we have a choice? You said the chairs were a one-way ride.”

Savi’s smile was tired. “My code’s no longer in their faxbanks. Or if it is, it’s for delete purposes only. And I’m afraid the same may be true for both of you after the voynix detected us in Jerusalem. But even if your codes are viable, and even if we somehow located faxnodes here, and even if we somehow learned to operate the machinery—those are no common faxportals, you know—and I stayed behind to fax you home, I don’t think it would work.”

Harman sighed. “We’ll just have to find another way.” He looked around the dark city, frozen corpses, and swaying kelp beds. “This isn’t what I expected in the rings, Savi.”

“No,” said the old woman. “None of us did. Even in my day, we thought the thousands of lights in the sky at night meant millions upon millions of post-humans in thousands of orbital cities.”

“How many cities do you think they had?” asked Harman. “Besides this one?”

Savi shrugged. “Perhaps just one in the polar ring. Perhaps no more. My guess now is that there were only a few thousand post-humans when the holocaust hit them.”

“Then what were all those machines and devices we saw coming up?” asked Daeman. He didn’t really care, but he was trying to take his mind off his empty stomach.

“Particle accelerators of some sort,” said the old woman. “The posts were obsessed with time travel. Those thousands of big accelerators produced thousands of tiny wormholes, which they tweaked into stable wormholes—those were the swirling masses you saw at the end of most of the accelerators.”

“And the giant mirrors?” said Harman.

“Casimir Effect,” said Savi, “reflecting negative energy into the wormholes to keep them from imploding into black holes. If the wormholes were stable, the posts could have traveled through them to any place in space-time where they could position the other end of the wormhole.”

“Other solar systems?” asked Harman.

“I don’t think so. I don’t think the posts ever got around to sending probes out of the system. They seeded the outer system with intelligent, self-evolving robots long before I was born—the posts needed asteroids for building materials—but no starships, robot or otherwise.”

“Where were they going then with these wormholes?” said Harman.

Savi shrugged. “I think it was the quantum work that . . .”

“God
damn
it!” shouted Daeman. He’d listened to this meaningless drivel long enough. “I’m
hungry
! I want some
food
!”

“Wait,” said Harman. “I see something.” He pointed up and ahead of their direction of travel.

“It’s the firmary,” said Savi.

She was right. They’d swum-kicked another exhausting half mile through the underwater light of the dead asteroid city, ignoring the floating gray mummies of the dead post-humans they’d encountered, until they could clearly see the rectangle of clear plastic three hundred feet or so up one of the glowing walls. Inside, stretching for hundreds of yards, were row upon row of familiar healing tanks filled with naked old-style human beings, busy servitors—Daeman almost wept at the familiar sight—and other shapes moving to and fro in the bright hospital light within the room.

“Wait,” gasped Daeman. They’d been swimming and kicking through the thin, toxic air close to the ground, finding stanchions, terraces, dead trees, and other solid objects from which to kick off, but Daeman was exhausted. He’d never worked this hard.

Although visibly impatient to fly her way up to the glowing infirmary, Savi doubled back and floated near the panting Daeman. Harman looked up at the clear-walled room with something like hunger in his eyes.

Savi handed Daeman her bottle and he finished the last of the water without hesitation or asking permission. He was dehydrated and worn out.

“I promised Ada that I’d take her with us,” Harman said softly.

Both Daeman and the old Jew looked at him.

“I was sure we’d be in a spaceship,” said Harman with an embarrassed shrug. “I promised her I’d stop at Ardis Hall and pick her up.”

“She was angry at you anyway,” said Daeman between gasps for air. The osmosis mask never seemed to supply all the oxygen he needed.

“Yes,” said Harman.

Savi pushed aside a chewed gray corpse that floated out of the kelp, its frozen white eyes seeming to stare at them in reproach. “I doubt very much if Ada would be all that thankful to be here right now,”she said. She pointed up at the infirmary. “But you should be, Harman. This was your goal, wasn’t it? To get to the infirmary and negotiate a few more years?”

“Something like that,” said Harman.

She nodded toward the corpse. “It doesn’t look like it’s the posts you’ll be negotiating with.”

“Do you think the firmary is automated?” asked Harman. “That it’s just the servitors who’ve been keeping it running, faxing us up, repairing us for our allotted five Twenties, and then faxing us back to our dull little lives these past few centuries?”

“Why don’t we go up and find out?” said the old woman.

They got into the glowing, glass-sided rectangle through a white square of semipermeable wall just like the one at the airlock.

It was the firmary. It not only had light and air, it somehow had one-tenth Earth gravity. Daeman fell on his hands and knees coming through the wall, unable to adapt so quickly to the light but persistent tug of gravity. The sudden change, plus the welcome sight of the oh-so-familiar servitors, plus his terror in being back in the firmary so soon after the allosaurus episode, made his legs too weak for him to stand even in the swimming-pool g-field.

Savi and Harman walked from tank to tank. Savi had slipped her osmosis mask down and tested the air. “Thin, but there’s a terrible stench,” she said, her voice sounding strange and high-pitched. “They must need air for something here, but it’s too foul to breathe. Keep your masks on.”

Daeman needed no more prompting; he kept the mask in place.

The servitors ignored them, tending to various virtual control panels. Clear pipelines and tubes showed green and red fluid flowing to and from the tanks. Harman stared in each ten-foot-high holding tank. The human bodies in each were, for the most part, almost perfect, but unformed, the flesh too slick, the skulls and groin areas hairless, the eyes white. Only a few of the floating forms were nearly complete, and on these, eyes with color and torpid intelligence blinked out at them.

Daeman walked behind the other two, staying farther away from the tanks. He looked at these proto-humans, remembered his hazy images from his tank time only days earlier, and he shuddered again, backing away from the tanks until he bumped into a counter. A servitor floated around him, ignoring him.

“They’re evidently not programmed to deal with humans outside the tanks,” Savi said. “Although if you interfered with their work enough, they’d probably do something to get you out of the way.”

Suddenly a green light blinked on one of the vats holding a fully rebuilt body—a young woman, with blue eyes and red hair on her head and groin—and the fluid in the tank began bubbling wildly. A second later the body was gone. A few seconds after that, another body materialized in the tank—this one a pale man with staring dead eyes, and a wound on his forehead.

“They have a faxportal in each tank!” cried Daeman. Then he realized, of course they must. That’s how their bodies were brought up here each Twenty, or after each serious injury.
Or death.
“We could use these faxnodes,” he said.

“You might be able to,” said Savi, her face close to one of the tanks. “Or perhaps not. The fax is coded for the body in the tank. The faxing machinery might not recognize your codes and might just . . . flush you.”

Colored fluids flowed into the tank with the new corpse. Clusters of tiny blue worms appeared from an aperture, swam to the dead man, and burrowed into his battered skull and into his bloated, white flesh.

“Still want your extra tank time?” Savi asked Harman.

Harman only rubbed his chin and squinted down the multiple rows of glowing tanks. Suddenly he pointed. “Holy Christ,” he said.

The three approached slowly, half walking, half floating in the low but no longer negligible gravity. Daeman simply did not believe what he was seeing.

A third of the tanks at this end were filled with fluid but empty of human bodies. But there were bodies—parts of bodies—on every available surface here: the floor, the tables, the tops of servitor consoles, on top of disabled servitors themselves. At first glance, Daeman thought—hoped—that these were more mummified remains of the posts, as horrible as that was, but these were no mummies. Nor were they the remains of post-humans.

The firmary was something’s smorgasbord.

Lying on the long table ahead of them were human body parts—white, pink, red, moist, bloody, fresh. A dozen forms on that table, male and female, seemingly still wet from the tanks, lay eviscerated—organs scooped out, meat gnawed off bloody ribs. A human head lay under the table, blue eyes staring up in what might have been a second of shock as something or someone ate the body to which it had been attached. A small pile of hands lay in front of a tall-backed swivel chair turned away from the table.

Before any of them could speak to each other on the commline, the chair swiveled around. For a second, Daeman thought it was another human body propped up in the chair, but this one was greenish, intact, and breathing. Yellow eyes blinked. Impossibly long forearms and clawed fingers unfolded. A lizardy tongue flicked out over long teeth.

“Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as theyself,” said what Daeman realized had to be the real Caliban. “Thou thoughtest wrong.”

Savi and Harman grabbed Daeman as they kick-flew their way up the length of the firmary, Daeman screaming into the comm the same way he’d screamed on the way up in the chair. They hit the white wall dead on, passed through it without pause—feeling the thermskins clutch them tighter as they hit the freezing near-vacuum outside the firmary—and then kicked strongly off the clear wall as they dove toward the ground three hundred feet below.

Savi and Harman released Daeman’s arms as they paused on a platform sixty feet above the city floor. He had time to notice the floating mummies all around, bits of their throats and bellies bitten away with the same bite radius as the humans inside the firmary, realized that he was about to vomit into his breathing mask, and then the two on either side of him found something solid to kick from and swam toward the darkness ahead.

Daeman tugged up his mask in desperation and vomited into near-vacuum and stinking, cold air. He felt his eardrums bursting and his eyes swelling, but he tugged the mask back in place—smelling his own vomit and fear—and kicked off after Savi and Harman. He didn’t want to run. He just wanted to curl up, float in a tight ball, and throw up again. But even Daeman realized that he didn’t have that choice. Flailing wildly, looking over his shoulder at the glow of the firmary, Daeman swam and ran and kicked for his life.

Caliban caught them in the darkest corner of the city, where the wild-kelp beds swayed to the coriolis of the slowly turning asteroid. All of the glass walls of the city here were clear, showing them the cloud-whitened earth floating by for several minutes and then several minutes of darkness broken only by the cold stars. It was in the darkness that Caliban came.