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
Equatorial Ring
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?”