Ilium (71 page)

Zeus steps forward, passing through the
aegis
like a giant stepping through a rippling waterfall.

Achilles walks out into no-man’s-land to face the Father of the Gods.

“
DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING TO SAY BEFORE YOU AND YOUR SPECIES DIE?
” says Zeus, his tone conversational but so amplified that it carries to the farthest reaches of the field, even to the men on the Greek ships at sea.

Achilles pauses, looks over his shoulder at the masses of men behind him, turns back, looks past Zeus toward Olympos and the masses of gods in front of him, and then crooks his neck to look up again at towering Zeus.

“Surrender now,” says Achilles, “and we’ll spare your goddesses’s lives so they can be our slaves and courtesans.”

64

Daeman slept for two days and two nights, waking fitfully only when Ada fed him broth or Odysseus bathed him. He woke again briefly the afternoon that Odysseus shaved him, drawing a straight razor through his lathered beard, but Daeman was too tired to speak or listen to language. Nor did the sleeping man pay any attention to the roars in the sky as the meteors returned the next night and then the next. He didn’t wake when a small bit of something traveling several thousand miles per hour plowed into the field behind the house, exactly where Odysseus had taught for weeks. The impact excavated a crater fifteen feet across and nine feet deep and broke every remaining window on Ardis Hall.

Daeman awoke mid-morning of the third day. Ada was sitting on the edge of his bed—her bed, it turned out—and Odysseus was leaning against the door frame, arms crossed.

“Welcome back, Daeman
Uhr,
” Ada said softly.

“Thank you, Ada
Uhr,
” said Daeman. His voice was hoarse and it seemed to him that he had to use an inordinate amount of energy just to croak a few words. “Harman? Hannah?”

“Both better,” said Ada. Daeman had never noticed how perfectly green the young woman’s eyes were. “Harman is out of bed and downstairs eating this morning, and Hannah is learning to walk again. Right now she’s on the front lawn, in the sun.”

Daeman nodded and closed his eyes. He had the overwhelming urge to keep them closed and to drift back into dreams and sleep. It hurt less there and right now his right arm ached and burned terribly. Suddenly he opened his eyes and pulled the covers off that arm, filled with a terrible certainty that they had amputated the limb while he slept and that all he was feeling was phantom pain from a phantom limb.

The arm was red, swollen, scarred, the wound from Caliban’s terrible bite stitched together with heavy thread, but the arm was there. Daeman tried to move it, to wiggle his fingers. The pain made him gasp, but the fingers had moved, the arm had lifted a bit. He dropped it back onto the sheet and gasped for a while.

“Who did that?” he asked a moment later. “The stitches? Servitors?”

Odysseus walked closer to the bed. “I did the stitching,” said the barrel-chested barbarian.

“The servitors don’t work anymore,” said Ada. “Anywhere. The faxnodes still operate, so we’re hearing from everywhere—servitors out of order, the voynix gone.”

Daeman frowned at this, trying to understand and failing. Harman entered the room, using a walking stick as a cane. Daeman saw that the older man had kept his beard, although it looked as if he’d trimmed it. He sat on a chair next to the bed and gripped Daeman’s left arm. Daeman closed his eyes for a minute and just returned the tight grip. When he opened his eyes, they were watering.
Fatigue,
he thought.

“The meteor storm is letting up, a little less fierce each evening,” said Harman. “But there have been casualties. Deaths. More than a hundred people died in Ulanbat alone.”

“Deaths?” repeated Daeman. The word had not held real meaning for a long, long time.

“You people had to learn about burials again from scratch,” said Odysseus. “No faxing up to a happy eternity as immortal post-humans in the e- and p-rings any longer. People are burying their dead and trying to tend to the injured.”

“Paris Crater?” managed Daeman. “My mother?”

“She’s well,” said Ada. “That city wasn’t hit. We have runners coming every day with news. She sent a letter, Daeman—she’s afraid to fax until things settle down. A lot of people are. With servitors and voynix gone and the power off everywhere, most people don’t want to travel unless they absolutely have to.”

Daeman nodded. “Why is the power off but the faxnodes still working? Where are the voynix? What’s going on?”

“We don’t know,” said Harman. “But the meteor shower didn’t include . . . what did Prospero call it? . . . a Species Extinction Event. We can be glad for that.”

“Yes,” said Daeman, but what he was thinking was—
So Prospero and Caliban and Savi’s death were real—it wasn’t all a dream?
He moved his right arm again and the pain answered the question.

Hannah came in wearing a simple white shift. There seemed to be a slight fuzz on her scalp. Her face looked more human and alive in every way. She moved to Daeman’s bedside, took care not to touch his arm, and bent over and kissed him firmly on the lips. “Thank you, Daeman. Thank you,” she said when the kiss was finished. She handed him a tiny forget-me-not she’d picked in the yard and he took it clumsily in his left hand.

“You’re welcome,” said Daeman. “I liked that kiss.” He had. It was as if he—Daeman, the world’s most eager womanizer—had never been kissed before.

“This is interesting,” said Hannah, unballing a turin cloth from her other hand. “I found it down by the old oak table, but it doesn’t work anymore. I tried two others. Nothing. Even the turins don’t work now.”

“Or maybe the Greek and Trojan battle drama is finished,” said Harman, holding the embroidered circuits on the cloth to his forehead and then tossing the cloth aside. “Perhaps the turin’s story is over.”

Odysseus was looking out the window at the blue sky and green lawn, but now he turned back toward the little gathering. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I suspect that the real war has just begun.”

“Do you know anything about the turin drama?” asked Hannah. “I thought you said you never went under the cloth.”

Odysseus shrugged. “Savi and I distributed the turin cloths almost ten years ago. I brought the prototype from . . . far away.”

“Why?” asked Daeman.

Odysseus opened his hand. “The war was coming. Human beings here on earth had to learn something about war, its terror and its beauty. And they had to learn something about those people in the tale—Achilles, Hector, the others. Even me.”

“Why?” asked Hannah.

“Because the war
is
coming,” said Odysseus.

“We’re not a part of it,” said Ada.

Odysseus folded his arms. “You will be. You’re not on the front lines yet, but those battle lines are coming this way. You’ll be part of this conflict whether you want to be or not.”

“How can we take part?” asked Ada. “We don’t know how to fight. Or even want to learn how.”

“About sixty of the young men and women who’ve stayed here will know a bit about fighting in a few weeks time,” said Odysseus. “Whether they want to fight when the time comes will be up to them. As it always is.” He pointed to Harman. “Believe it or not, your sonie’s fixable. I’ve been working on it and may have it in the air in a week or ten days.”

“I don’t want to see fighting,” said Ada. “I don’t want to be in a war.”

“No,” said Odysseus. “You’re right not to.”

Ada lowered her face as if to fight back tears. When she put her closed hand on the bed, Daeman set his fingers next to hers and handed her Hannah’s forget-me-not. Then he drifted off to sleep.

He awoke in darkness and moonlight with a shape sitting next to the bed.
Caliban!
Daeman instinctively lifted his right arm, folding his right hand into a fist, and the pain set off lights behind his eyes.

“Easy,” said Harman, leaning across him to straighten the bandaged arm. “Easy, Daeman.”

Daeman was gasping, trying not to vomit from the pain. “I thought you were . . .”

“I know,” said Harman.

Daeman sat up in bed. “Do you think he’s dead?”

The shadow-man shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve been wondering . . . thinking about it. About both of them.”

“Both of them?” said Daeman. “You mean Savi as well?”

“No . . . I mean, yes, I think about her a lot . . . but I was thinking about Prospero. The hologram of Prospero who said it was only an echo of a shadow or whatever.”

“What about it?”

“I think it
was
Prospero,” whispered Harman. He leaned closer. “I think he was imprisoned somehow on the post-humans’ asteroid city—what the Prospero holo called ‘my isle’—just as Caliban was imprisoned there.”

“By whom?” said Daeman.

Harman sat back and sighed. “I don’t know. These days I don’t know a damned thing.”

Daeman nodded. “It took us a long time to learn enough to realize that none of us knows a damned thing, didn’t it, Harman?”

The older man laughed. But when he spoke again, his whispered tone was serious. “I’m worried that we freed them.”

“Freed them?” whispered Daeman. He’d been hungry a second before, ravenous, but now his belly felt filled with icewater. “Caliban and Prospero.”

“Yes.”

“Or maybe we killed them,” said Daeman, voice hard.

“Yes.” Harman rose and clasped the younger man’s shoulder. “I’m going to go and let you get some sleep. Thank you, Daeman.”

“For what?”

“Thank you,” repeated Harman. He left the room.

Daeman lay back on the pillows, exhausted, but sleep didn’t come. He listened to night sounds coming through the broken window—crickets, night birds he couldn’t name, frogs croaking in the small pond behind the house, the rustle of leaves in the night breeze—and he found that he was grinning.

If Caliban’s alive, it’s a damned shame. But I’m alive as well. I’m
alive.

He slept then, a clean and dreamless sleep that lasted until Ada awoke him an hour after dawn with his first real breakfast in five weeks.

Four days later and Daeman was walking in the gardens alone on a cool but beautiful evening when Ada, Harman, Hannah, Odysseus, Petyr, and the young woman named Peaen came down the hill to find him.

“The sonie’s fixed,” said Odysseus. “Or at least it can fly. Want to watch its test flight?”

Daeman shrugged. “Not especially. But I do want to know what you’re going to do with it.”

Odysseus glanced at Petyr, Peaen, and Harman. “First, I’m going to do some reconnaissance,” he said. “See what the meteor damage is in the surrounding area, see if the machine will carry me all the way to the coast and back.”

“And if it doesn’t?” asked Harman.

Odysseus shrugged. “I’ll walk home.”

“Where’s home?” asked Daeman. “And how long will it take for you to get there, Odysseus
Uhr
?”

Odysseus smiled at that, but there was great sadness in his eyes. “If you only knew,” he said softly. “If you only knew.” Trailed by his two young disciples and Hannah, the barbarian walked back up the hill toward the house.

Harman and Ada strolled with Daeman.

“What’s he up to?” Daeman asked Harman. “Really?”

“He’s going to find the voynix,” said Harman.

“And then what?”

“I don’t know.” Harman didn’t need a cane any longer, but he’d said that he’d gotten used to the walking stick and now he used it to whack a weed growing among the flowers.

“Servitors used to weed the garden,” said Ada. “I try, but I’m so busy with the meals and laundry and everything . . .”

Harman laughed. “It’s hard to get good help these days,” he said.

Harman put his arm around Ada’s waist. The young woman looked at him with a gaze that Daeman couldn’t interpret, but knew was important.

“I lied,” Harman said to Daeman. “You know and I know that Odysseus is going to attack the voynix, stop them from doing whatever they’re planning to do.”

“Yes,” said Daeman. “I know.”

“He’ll use that war to prepare his disciples for what he considers the real war,” said Harman, looking up at the white manor house on the hill. “He’s trying to teach us how to fight before the real battle arrives. He says we’ll know it—that the war will come like whirling spheres, opening holes in the sky, bringing us to new worlds and new worlds to us.”

“I know,” said Daeman. “I’ve heard him say that.”

“He’s crazy,” said Harman.

“No,” said Daeman. “He isn’t.”

“Are you going to war with him?” asked Harman, sounding as if he’d asked himself this question many times.

“Not against the voynix,” said Daeman. “Not unless I have to. I have another battle to fight first.”

“I know,” said Harman. “I know.” He kissed Ada, said, “I’ll see you up at the house,” and walked up the hill alone, still limping slightly.

Daeman found himself suddenly out of energy. There was a wooden bench here with a view of the lower lawn and the evening-shadowed river valley, and he sat on it with relief. Ada sat next to him.

“Harman understood what you were talking about,” she said, “but I don’t. What battle do you have to fight first?”

Daeman shrugged, embarrassed to talk about it.

“Daeman?” Her voice suggested that she was going to sit here on the bench until he spoke, and he didn’t have the energy to stand up and walk away at the moment.

“There’s a blue searchlight rising into the night at a place called Jerusalem,” he said at last, “and in that light are trapped more than nine thousand of Savi’s people. Nine thousand Jews. Whatever Jews are.”

Ada looked at him, not understanding. Daeman realized that she’d not heard this part of their story yet. They were all slowly relearning the fine art of storytelling—it filled the candlelit evenings with something other than washing dishes.

“Before Odysseus’ promised war gets here,” said Daeman, his voice soft but determined, “before I have no choice but to fight in some huge struggle I don’t understand, I’m going to go get those nine thousand people out of that goddamned blue light.”