Harman rose, crossed to her, looked her in the eyes, and closed her robe, tying it without pressing his fingers against her. “I am honored,” he said, also whispering now. “But not yet, Ada. Not yet.” He took her hand and led her to the chaise longue.
When both of them were lying back on it side by side, Ada blinking in surprise and blushing in something like humiliation—whether at the rejection or at her own brazenness she was not sure—Harman reached behind the chair and come out with two cream-colored turin scarves. He folded each so that the embroidered microcircuitry was properly positioned.
“I don’t . . .” began Ada.
“I know. But just this once. I think that something important’s about to happen. Let us share this.”
She lay back on the soft cushion and let Harman adjust the turin across her eyes. She felt him lie back next to her, his right hand lying loosely across her left hand.
The images and sounds and sensations flowed in.
11
The Plains of Ilium
The gods have come down to play. More precisely, they have come down to kill.
The battle has been raging for some time now with the god Apollo lashing on the Trojans, with Athena spurring on the Argives, and other gods lounging in the shade of a tree on the nearest hill, sometimes laughing, Iris and their other servants pouring them wine. I’ve watched the Thracian chief Pirous, a bold Trojan ally, kill gray-eyed Diores with a rock. Diores, co-commander of the Epean contingent of the Greeks, went down with only a broken ankle after battled-maddened Pirous threw the rock, but most of Diores’ comrades fell back, Pirous hacked his way through the few who had stayed to guard their fallen captain, and—helpless now, his ankle smashed—poor Diores had to lie there while Pirous rushed in, speared the Thracian in the belly with his long casting spear, and pulled the man’s bowels out, hooking them on the barbed spearpoint and twisting more out while while Diores screamed.
This was the flavor of the last half-hour’s battle and it was a relief when Pallas Athena raised her hand, received nodded permission from other watching gods, and stopped time and motion in their tracks.
Now with my enhanced vision—enhanced by the contact lenses from the gods—I can see Athena across the milling no-man’s-land of lances, preparing Tydeus’ son, Diomedes, as a killing machine. I mean this almost literally. Like the gods themselves, and like me, Diomedes the man will now be part machine, his eyes and skin and very blood enhanced by nanotechnologies from some future age far beyond my short life span. In frozen time, Athena sets contact lenses similar to mine in the Achaean’s eyes, allowing him to see both the gods and, somehow, to slow time a bit when he concentrates in the thick of the action, thus—to the unenhanced onlooker’s view—increasing his reaction time threefold. Homer had written that Athena had “set the man ablaze,” and now I understand the metaphor; using the nanotechnology embedded in her palm and forearm, Athena is busy turning the neglible, latent electromagnetic field around Diomedes’ body into a serious forcefield. In the infrared, Diomedes’ body and arms and shield and helmet suddenly blazed “with tireless fire like the star that flames at harvest.” I realize now, watching Diomedes glow in the thick amber of god-frozen time, that Homer must have been referring to Sirius, the Dog Star, rising as the brightest star in the Greek (and Trojan) sky in late summer. It is in the eastern sky this night.
As I watch, she also injects billions of nanotech molecular machines into Diomedes’ thigh. As always with such a nano-invasion, the human body deals with it as an infection and Diomedes’ temperature goes up at least five degrees. I can watch the invading army of molecular machines moving up his thigh to his heart, from his heart to his lungs and arms and legs again, the heat making his body glow even more brightly in my infrared vision.
All around me, battlefield death is held in abeyance these stretched minutes. Ten yards to my left, I see a chariot frozen in a bubble of dust and human sweat and equine saliva. The Trojan charioteer—a short, even-tempered man named Phegeus, son of Troy’s foremost priest to the god Hephaestus and brother to stout Idaeus; in my morphed disguises, I had broken bread and drunk wine with Idaeus a dozen times in the past few years—is petrified in the act of leaning over the front of his chariot, the chariot rim in his left hand, a long throwing spear in his right. Ideaus stands next to his brother, frozen in the act of whipping on the motion-halted horses while clutching the rigid reins in his other hand. The chariot has been halted in the act of bearing down on Diomedes, all the human players here unaware that the goddess Athena has stopped everything while she plays dolls with her chosen champion, dressing Diomedes in forcefields and thru-view contact lenses and nano-augmenters like some pre-teen girl playing with her Barbie. (I remember a small girl playing with Barbie dolls, perhaps a sister from my own childhood. I don’t believe I had a daughter of my own. I’m not sure, of course, because the memories returning over the past months are like shards of glass with clouded reflections in them.)
I am close enough to the chariot to see the exultation of combat chiseled into Phegeus’ tanned face, and the fear frozen into his unblinking brown eyes. If Homer reported all this correctly, Phegeus will be dead in less than a minute.
I see other gods flocking to the battle site now like carrion crows to slaughter. There is Ares, god of war, flicking into solidity on my side of the battle lines, stepping close to the time-halted chariot holding Idaeus and his doomed brother. Ares palms open his own forcefield behind the frozen chariot carrying the two brothers toward death.
Why does Ares care what happens with these two? True, Ares is no lover of the Greeks—he has obviously learned to hate them in this war and kills them through his instruments or his own agency when he can—but why this obvious concern about Phegeus or his brother Idaeus? Is it just a countermove to Athena’s strategy of enabling Diomedes? This chess game with real human beings falling and screaming and dying has grown old to me, an obscenity. But the strategy still intrigues me.
Then I remember that the god of war is half-god-brother to Hephaestus, the god of fire, also born to Zeus’s wife, Hera. Phegeus’ and Idaeus’ father, Dares, has performed long and faithful service to the fire god within Troy’s walls.
This idiot war is more complicated and senseless than the Vietnam War I half remember from my youth.
Suddenly Aphrodite, my new spymaster and boss, QT’s into existence thirty yards to my left. She’s also here to help the Trojans and to enjoy the slaughter. But—
In the last slowed seconds before real-time resumes, I remember that if the actual fighting goes the way of the old poem, Aphrodite herself will be injured by Diomedes in the coming hour. Why would she come down to the fray knowing that a mortal will wound her?
The answer is the same that I’ve been reminded of so forcibly over the past nine years, but now the fact of it hits me with the force and flash of a nuclear explosion—The gods don’t know what will happen next! None but Zeus, it seems, is allowed to peer ahead at Fate’s checklist.
All of us scholics are aware of this—we are not allowed, by Zeus’s prohibition, to discuss future events with the gods and they are forbidden to ask us about the future books of the Iliad. Our task is only to confirm after the fact that Homer’s Iliad has been truthful to the events of the day we are tasked to observe and record. Many’s the time that Nightenhelser and I, while watching the little green men haul their face-stones toward the shore as the sun sets behind the sea to the west, have commented on this paradox of the gods’ own blindness to coming events.