Ilium (64 page)

“Down!” roared Mahnmut on full amplification, shouting the word in Greek. “For your lives, get down now!! Don’t look to the south!!”

Few obeyed his command.

Mahnmut grabbed Orphu’s halter and ran for the slight shelter of a large boulder on the ridgetop thirty meters away.

The flash, when it came, blinded thousands. Mahnmut’s polarizing filters automatically went from Value 6 to Value 300. He didn’t pause in his wild running, tugging Orphu along behind him like a giant toy.

The shock wave hit seconds after the flash, rolling up from the south in a wall of dust and sending visible stress waves rippling through the atmosphere itself. The wind speed went from five kilometers per hour out of the west to a hundred klicks per hour from the south in less than a second. Hundreds of tents were ripped from their moorings and flown into the sky. Horses whinnied and fled their masters. The whitecaps blew out away from the land.

The roar and shock wave knocked everyone standing—everyone except Hector and Achilles—to the ground. The noise and shattering overpressure were overwhelming, vibrating human bones and moravec solid-state innards, as well as setting Mahnmut’s organic parts quivering. It was as if the Earth itself was roaring and howling in anger. Hundreds of Achaean and Trojan soldiers two kilometers or so to the south of the ridge burst into flame and were thrown high into the air, their ashes falling on thousands of cowering, fleeing men running north.

A section of the south wall of Ilium crumbled and fell, carrying scores of men and women with it. Several of the wooden towers in the city burst into flame, and one tall tower—the one from which Hockenberry had watched Hector saying good-bye to his wife and son just days ago—fell into the streets with a crash.

Achilles and Hector had their hands to their faces, shielding their eyes from the terrible flash that threw their shadows a hundred meters behind them on Thicket Ridge. Behind them, great boulders that had stood firm high on the Amazon Myrine’s mounded tomb vibrated, slipped, and fell, crushing running Achaeans and Trojans alike. Hector’s polished helmet stayed on his head, but his proud crest of red horsehairs were torn off in the high winds that followed the initial shock wave.

Has something happened?
tightbeamed Orphu.

Yes,
whispered Mahnmut.

I can feel some sort of vibration and pressure right through my shell,
said Orphu.

Yes,
whispered Mahnmut. The only reason the Ionian hadn’t tumbled away on the winds and blast was that Mahnmut had lashed the rope around the largest rock he could find on the lee side of their sheltering boulder.

What . . .
began Orphu.

Just a minute,
whispered Mahnmut.

The mushroom cloud was rising through ten thousand meters now, smoke and tons of radioactive debris lifting toward the stratosphere. The ground vibrated so fiercely to aftershocks that even Achilles and Hector had to drop to one knee rather than be thrown down like the tens of thousands of their men.

This atomic mushroom cloud resolved itself into a face.

“
YOU WANT WAR, O MORTALS?
” bellowed the bearded face of Zeus in the rising, roiling, slowly unfurling cloud. “
THE IMMORTAL GODS WILL SHOW YOU WAR.
”

51

Prospero sat there in a long, royal-blue robe covered with brightly colored embroidery showing galaxies, suns, comets, and planets. He held a carved staff in one age-motttled right hand and there was a foot-thick book under the palm of his left hand. The carved chair with the broad armrests was not quite a throne, but close enough to impart a sense of magisterial authority reinforced by the magus’s cool stare. The man was mostly bald, but a mane of vestigial white hair poured back over his ears and fell in curls to the blue of his robe. The once-grand head was now perched on an old man’s withered neck, but the face was iron-firm with character, showing coolly indifferent if not actively cruel little eyes, a bold beak of a nose, a forceful declaration of a chin not yet lost in jowls or wattles, and a sorcerer’s thin lips turned up in ancient habits of irony. He was, of course, a hologram.

Daeman had watched Harman burst through the semipermeable membrane and fall to the floor under the unexpected gravity, just as Daeman had done. Then, seeing Daeman sitting in a comfortable chair with his osmosis mask off, Harman had peeled his own mask off, breathed in the fresh air deeply, and then staggered to the other empty chair.

“It’s only one-third Earth gravity,” said Prospero, “but it must seem like Jupiter after a month in near zero-g.”

Neither Harman nor Daeman replied.

The room was circular, about fifteen meters across, and essentially a glassed-in dome from the floor up. Daeman hadn’t seen it while they were approaching the crystal city on the chairs because they’d come in at the asteroid’s south pole and this was the north pole, but he imagined it must look like a long, slender metal stalk with this glowing mushroom at its end. The only light in the room came from the soft glow of a circular virtual control console in the center of the space, behind Prospero, and the earthlight and moonlight and starlight flooding in above and around them. It was bright enough that Daeman could see the careful workings on the magus’s embroidered robe and the hand-oiled carvings on his staff.

“You’re Prospero,” said Harman, his chest rising and falling quickly under the blue thermskin. The fresh air in the room had been a shock to Daeman as well. It was like breathing a rich, thick wine.

Prospero nodded.

“But you’re not real,” continued Harman. The man
looked
solid. The robe fell in beautiful but dynamic folds and wrinkles in the one-third gravity.

Prospero shrugged. “This is true. I’m nothing more than a recorded echo of a shadow of a shade. But I can see you, hear you, talk with you, and sympathize with your travails. It’s more than some real beings are capable of doing.”

Daeman looked over his shoulder. He was holding the black gun loosely in his lap.

“Will Caliban come here?”

“No,” said Prospero. “My former servant fears me. Fears this speaking memory of me. If the blue-eyed hag who bore him was here on this isle, that damned quantum-witch Sycorax, she’d be on you here in a minute, but Caliban fears me.”

“Prospero,” said Daeman, “we need to get off this rock. Back to Earth. Alive. Can you help us?”

The old man leaned his staff against his chair and held up both mottled hands. “Perhaps.”

“Just perhaps?” said Daeman.

Prospero nodded. “As an echo of a recorded shadow, I can
do
nothing. But I can give you information. You can act if you will, and if you
have
the will. Few of your kind do anymore.”

“How do we get out of here?” asked Harman.

Prospero passed his hand over the book and a hologram rose above the center of the circular console behind him. It was the asteroid and the crystal city as seen from some miles out in space, the gold-glassed towers turning slowly beneath the vantage point as the asteroid turned on its axis. Daeman glanced at the bold blue and white of the Earth coming into view outside the windows and realized that the image was synchronized—it was a real-time view from somewhere out there.

“There!” cried Harman, pointing. He tried to jump out of his chair, but the gravity made him stagger and grab the armrest for support. “There,” he said again.

Daeman saw it. On an outside slab of terrace five or six hundred feet up that first tall tower where they’d entered, its metal shell glowing now in Earthlight—a sonie. “We searched the city,” said Daeman. “We never thought that there might be a vehicle parked
outside
the city.”

“It looks like the sonie we took to Jerusalem,” said Harman, leaning forward the better to see the holographic display.

“It
is
the same sonie,” said Prospero. He moved his palm again and the image disappeared.

“No,” said Daeman. “Savi told us that sonies couldn’t fly to the orbital rings.”

“She didn’t know they could,” said the old magus. “Ariel freed it from the voynixes’ stones and programmed it to come up here.”

“Ariel?” Daeman stupidly repeated. He was so, so hungry, and so very tired. He sorted through his memory. “Ariel? The avatar of the biosphere below?”

“Something like that,” said Prospero with a smile. “Savi never really met Ariel. All their communications were through the allnet. The old woman always thought that Ariel’s persona was male, when most frequently the sprite chooses a female avatar.”

Who gives a shit?
thought Daeman. Aloud, he said, “Can we take the sonie back to Earth?”

“I would think so,” said Prospero. “I think Ariel sent it pre-programmed to return the three of you to Ardis Hall. Another deus ex machina. I’m not happy with the machine being here.”

“Why not?” said Harman, but then he nodded. “Caliban.”

“Yes,” said Prospero. “Even my erstwhile goblin would grind his joints with dry convulsions and shorten up his sinews with aged cramps should he try hard vacuum without a suit or thermskin. But he forgot, and bit through poor Savi’s.”

“There were two more suits he could have had the last month,” said Daeman, his voice so low it fell below the whisper of ventilation. The room left the curve-slice of Earth above and rotated into starlight. There was a half-moon rising above Prospero.

“And he would have, but Caliban is no god,” said the magus. “Savi did not kill the beast with her full salvo of flechettes to its chest, but she hurt it sore. Caliban has been bleeding and recovering, gone deep sometimes to his deepest grotto where he packs the wounds with mud muck and drinks lizard blood for strength.”

“We’ve been drinking and eating the same,” said Daeman.

“Yes,” said Prospero, showing an old man’s yellow smile. “But you don’t
enjoy
it.”

“How do we get to the sonie?” asked Harman. “And do you have food in here?”

“No, to your second question,” said Prospero. “No one but Caliban has eaten here on this stony isle for the last five hundred years. But yes to your first. There is a membrane on the tower glass high up that will let you pass out to the launch terrace. Your suits may . . . may . . . protect you long enough to charge up the sonie and activate its guidance program. Do you remember how to fly the thing?”

“I think . . . I watched Savi . . . I mean . . .” stammered Harman. He shook his head as if brushing away cobwebs. His eyes looked as weary as Daeman felt. “We’ll have to. We will.”

“You’ll have to pass the firmary and Caliban again to reach the far tower,” said Prospero. The old man’s little eyes moved from Harman to Daeman and the gaze was judicial. “Do you have anything else you must do before you flee this place?”

“No,” said Harman.

“
Yes,
” said Daeman. He managed to stand and stagger over to the curved window-wall. The reflection there was thin, gaunt, and bearded, but there was something new in its eyes. “We have to destroy the firmary,” he said. “We have to destroy this whole damned place.”

52

For some reason, I flee with the Trojans on Thicket Ridge toward and through the smaller man-gates of the Scaean Gates, main entrance to Ilium. The wind still howls and we’re all partially deaf from the nuclear explosion to the south. My last glimpse of the mushroom cloud before entering the city with the shoving mob of Trojan soldiers shows me that the column of smoke and ash is already beginning to bend southeast with the prevailing wind. There’s still a hint of Zeus’s face in the coiled cloud at the top, but the wind and the cloud’s own infolding is breaking up that visage as well.

Scores are crushed at the man-gates, so Hector orders the guards to throw wide the central Scaean Gates, something that hasn’t been done for more than nine years. The thousands flock inside.

The Argives have run for their ships. Just as Hector is trying to rally his panicked troops here, I catch a glimpse of Achilles trying to hold back the fleeing Greeks. In the
Iliad,
in Achilles’ rampage after Patroclus’ death, Homer tells of the man-god fighting a flooding river—and winning, damming it with the bodies of his Trojan enemies—but now Achilles can’t stop this tsunami of fleeing Achaeans without killing hundreds, and this he will not do.

I’m swept into the city, already sorry that I ran. I realize that I should have fought my way through the milling mob on the ridge to where I saw the little robot, Mahnmut, sheltering behind the boulders atop the Amazon Myrine’s mounded tomb. Does the robot—what did he call his type? moravec?—does the moravec know that Zeus’s weapon was nuclear, possibly thermonuclear? Suddenly a memory emerges from my other life, as so many have in the past week or so—Susan trying to drag me to a talk at IU’s science hall during some multidisciplinary week at the university. A scientist named Moravec was speaking about his autonomous artificial intelligence theories. Fritz? Hans? I hadn’t gone, of course—of what interest would some scientist’s theories be to a classical scholar?

Well, it doesn’t matter now.

As if to underline this point, five chariots appear from the north—I know the QT point they translated in through up there—and begin circling the city at an altitude of three or four thousand feet. Even with optical amplification, I can’t make out the little figures in the gleaming machines, but it looks as if there are both gods and goddesses up there.

Then the bombardment begins.

The shafts scream down into the city like slender, silver, ballistic missiles, and where each one strikes, there is an explosion, dust and smoke rising, screams. Ilium is a large city by ancient standards, but the arrows come fast—from Apollo’s bow, I realize, although I think I can make out Ares doing the shooting when the chariot swoops low to assess the damage—and soon the explosions and screams are coming from every quarter of the walled metropolis.

I realize that I’ve not only lost control of everything, I’ve lost sight of everyone I should be talking to, helping, conferring with. Achilles is probably three miles away down the hill already, back with his men, trying to keep them from sailing away in panic. Hearing more explosions—conventional, not nuclear—coming from the direction of the Achaean camp, I don’t see how Achilles can succeed in rallying his men. I’ve also lost sight of Hector, and see that the huge Achaean Gates have been swung shut again—as if that can keep out the gods. Poor Mahnmut and his silent pal, Orphu, are probably destroyed out there on the ridge already. I don’t see how anything can survive this bombardment.

More explosions from the central marketplace. Red-crested Trojan soldiers rush to reinforce the walls, but the danger’s not outside the walls. The golden chariot swings above again, outside of even archer shot, and five silver arrows rain down like Scud missiles, exploding near the south wall, near the central well, and apparently right on Priam’s Palace. This is beginning to remind me of CNN images from the second war with Iraq right before I became ill with cancer.

Hector
. The hero is probably rallying his men, but since there’s nothing to rally them for except to duck and cover, it’s possible that Hector has gone to his home to check on Andromache. I think of that empty, bloodstained nursery and grimace even here in the smoke and noise of the bombed city street. The royal couple hasn’t had time to bury their baby yet.

Jesus, God, is all this my doing?

A flying chariot swoops low. An explosion breaches the ramparts along the main wall and throws a dozen red-caped figures into the air. Body parts rain into the streets and patter on rooftops like fleshy hail. Suddenly another memory returns, a similar horror, three thousand two hundred years in this world’s future, two thousand and one bloody years after the birth of Christ. In my mind’s eye, I see bodies hurling down into the street and a wall of dust and pumice chasing the fleeing thousands, just as I see down Ilium’s main street this moment. Only the buildings and modes of dress are different.

We’ll never learn. Things will never change.

I run for Hector’s home. More missiles rain down, blasting the plaza just inside the gate from where I’ve just come. I see a small child staggering into the street from rubble that was a two-story home just minutes before. I can’t tell if the toddler’s a little boy or girl, but the child’s face is bloody, its curly hair covered with plaster dust. I stop running and go to one knee to gather the child in—where can I take it? There’s no hospital in Ilium!—but a woman with a red scarf over her head runs to the infant and scoops it up. I wipe rivulets of sweat out of my eyes and stagger on toward Hector’s house.

It’s gone. The whole of Hector’s palace is missing—just rubble and a series of holes in the ground. I have to keep mopping sweat out of my eyes to see, and even when I see I can’t believe. This whole block has been pounded by the missiles raining down. Already, Trojan soldiers are digging through the rubble with their spears and makeshift shovels, their proud red-crests turned gray by the dust in the air. They create a human chain to hand bodies and body parts back to the waiting crowds in the street.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” says a voice. I realize that someone’s been saying my name over and over, but now has begun tugging at my arm. “Hock-en-bear-eeee!”

I turn stupidly, blink away sweat again, and look down at Helen. She’s dirty, her gown is bloodied, and her hair is unkempt. I’ve never seen anyone or anything so beautiful. She hugs me and I gather her in with both arms.

She pulls apart. “Are you badly hurt, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

“What?”

“Are your injuries severe?”

“I’m not hurt,” I say. She touches my face then and her hand comes away red with blood. I raise my hand to my temple—a deep cut there, another in my hairline—see the bloody fingers on both of my hands, and realize that I’ve been wiping blood away, not sweat. “I’m fine,” I say. I point to the smoking rubble. “Hector? Andromache?”

“They weren’t there, Hock-en-bear-eeee,” Helen shouts over the screams and babble. “Hector sent his family to Athena’s temple. The basement is safe there.”

I look through the smoke and see the tall roof of the temple standing.
Of course,
I think.
The gods aren’t going to bomb their own temples. Too much fucking ego.

“Theano is dead,” says Helen. “And Hecuba. And Laodice.”

I repeat the names stupidly. Athena’s priestess, the woman with the cold blade at my balls just hours ago. And Priam’s wife and daughter. Three of my Trojan Women dead already. And the bombardment’s just begun.

Suddenly I whirl around in panic. The noise is wrong. The blasts have stopped.

Men and women in the streets are pointing skyward and shouting. Four of the five chariots have already disappeared and now the fifth, Ares’ bombardment chariot, I think, flies north and winks out of existence, obviously QTing back to Olympos. All this damage—I look around at the tumbled buildings, smoking craters, bloodied bodies in the streets—from just one god’s attack with one bow and a few of Apollo’s arrows. What next? Biological attack? The Shining Archer—probably recovering up there in the healing tanks right now—is famous for firing plague into the people below.

I grab the medallion at my neck. “Where’s Hector?” I ask Helen. “I have to find Hector.”

“He went back out through the Scaean Gate with Paris, Aeneas, and his brother Deiphobus,” says Helen. “He said he has to find Achilles before all hearts flag.”

“I have to find him,” I repeat. I turn toward the main gate, but Helen pulls me back and around.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” she says, and pulls my face down to hers and kisses me there in the shoving, screaming street. When her lips leave mine, I can only blink stupidly, still bent to her kiss. “Hock-en-bear-eeee,” she says again. “If you must die, die well.”

Then she turns and strides back up the street without once looking back.