I shake my head again and actually laugh. “There’s a slight flaw in your logic, madame. Why would the gods send me as your instrument if your goal is to overthrow the gods? That makes no sense.”
The five Trojan women stare at me for a moment. Then Helen says, “There are more gods than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”
I stare at her for a second, then decide it has to be a coincidence. Either that or I’m not hearing correctly. My chest still hurts and my muscles ache from the spasms the taser caused.
“Give me the tools,” I say, testing.
The women slide to me the Hades Helmet, the taser baton, the morphing bracelet, and the QT medallion. I lift the baton as if to hold them all at bay. “What’s your plan?” I ask.
“My husband never would have believed me if I’d reported to him that the goddess Aphrodite had appeared and taken Scamandrius and his nurse away to be held for ransom,” says Andromache. “Hector has served these gods all his life. He’s not the egomaniac that man-killer Achilles is. Hector would have thought that anything the gods did was only a test of him. Unless Aphrodite or another god were to kill our son in front of witnesses, in front of Hector himself. In that case, his rage would know no bounds. Why didn’t you kill my son?”
I have no words to answer that. So Andromache answers for me.
“You are a sentimental fool,” she snaps. “You say that Scamandrius will be dashed to his death on the rocks if you do not change the plans of the gods.”
“Yes.”
“And yet you refused to kill the child who already is fated to die, even though your entire plan to end this war and win your own battle with the gods depended upon it. You are weak, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”
“Yes,” I say.
Hecuba beckons me to sit, but I remain standing, taser baton in hand. “What’s your plan to end this war?” I ask. I’m almost afraid to ask. Would Andromache kill her own son to get her way? I look into her eyes and I’m even more afraid.
“We will tell you our plan,” says old Queen Hecuba, “but first you must prove to us that these last two god-toys work.” She gestures to the morphing bracelet and the medallion.
Watching them all carefully, I slip the bracelet on. The indicator tells me that there’s less than three minutes of actual morph time remaining. I use its scanning functioning to look at Hecuba, then trigger the morphing function.
The real Hecuba disappears as I assume her quantum probability wave space. “Believe me now?” I say in Hecuba’s voice. I raise my wrist—Hecuba’s wrist—and show them the morphing bracelet. I bring the taser baton out from her gown. The four remaining women, including Helen, gasp and step back, as shocked as if I’d cut the old dowager down with a short sword. More shocked, probably—death by swords, they know all too well.
I drop out of morph and Hecuba flicks back into existence on her side of the room. She blinks, although I know she’s had no sense of time passing, and the five women gabble together. I check the bracelet’s virtual indicator. Two minutes twenty-eight seconds of morph time left.
I slip the QT medallion chain around my neck. At least this device doesn’t seem to have any power limits. “You want me to QT out of here and then back to show you that this also works?” I ask.
Hecuba has recovered her composure. “No,” she says. “All of our plans—yours and ours—will depend upon your ability to travel to Olympos undetected and to return. Can you take one of us there now?”
I hesitate again. “I can,” I say at last, “but the Hades Helmet provides invisibility only for one. If I brought one of you to Olympos with me, you’d be seen.”
“Then you must bring something back here that will prove that you have traveled to Olympos,” says Hecuba.
I lift my hands, palms up. “What? Zeus’s chamber pot?”
All five women step back again, as if I’ve shouted some obscenity. I remember that—for very good reason—blasphemy is not the casual sport it was in my time, at the end of the Twentieth Century. These gods are very real, and insulting them has consequences. I glance at the walls and hope the lead really shields us from Olympos’s view—not because of the chamber pot quip, but because we seem to be planning deicide here.
“When I was with Aphrodite during the judgment of the gods,” Helen says softly, “I noticed that the goddess brushed her lustrous hair with a beautiful comb, forged in silver, shaped by some god of craft. Go to her chambers on Olympos and bring it back.”
I start to remind them of what I’d told them—that Aphrodite was currently floating in a healing vat—but then realized that it made no difference. Her comb wouldn’t be in the vat with her.
“All right,” I say, grasping the medallion and lifting on the Hades Helmet. “Don’t wander away while I’m gone.” I had the cowl in place before I triggered the medallion, so my voice must have come from emptiness in the second or two before I QT’d.
I don’t know for sure where Aphrodite’s private chambers are—she probably has one of those white temple-sized homes along the crater lake up here—but I do remember that the time she took me aside, almost seducing me—when she told me that I had to kill Athena—the Muse had brought me to Aphrodite in a chamber just off the Great Hall of the Gods. If it wasn’t her private chambers, it seemed at least an apartment she kept in the great hall, a sort of Olympian pied-à-terre.
I flick into solidity in the Great Hall and hold my breath.
The many mezzanines are empty, the hall is mostly dark, and the giant holographic viewing pool shows only three-dimensional static. But several gods are here, including Zeus, whom I’d thought to be away, sitting on Mount Ida watching the carnage on the Ilium battlefield. The King of Gods is on his high golden throne. Nearby are several other male gods, including Apollo. They’re all ten feet tall or taller. I’m forty feet away, and I’m invisible under the Hades Helmet, but I almost QT away I’m so afraid that they’ll hear me breathing. But their attention is on something else.
In front of and below the throne, in the center of the gods’ circle of attention, looking incongruous here to say the least, are what looks like a giant, pitted, cracked metallic crabshell the size of a Ford Expedition, a couple of futuristic-looking devices, and a small, shiny, vaguely humanoid robot. The robot is speaking—in English. The gods are listening, but they don’t look happy.
38
Atlantis and Earth Orbit
“I don’t understand why the post-humans called this place we’re headed ‘Atlantis,’ “ said Harman.
Savi, at the crawler controls, said, “I can’t say that I ever understood the vast majority of the posts’ actions.”
Daeman looked up from munching slowly on his third of the only remaining food bar. “What’s odd about the name ‘Atlantis’?”
“On the Lost Age maps,” said Harman, “the Atlantic Ocean is the big body of water west of here, beyond the Hands of Hercules. We’re in the basin of what used to be the Mediterranean Sea. It’s not in the Atlantic.”
“It’s not?” said Daeman.
“No.”
“So?” said Daeman.
Harman shrugged and fell quiet, but Savi said, “It’s possible the posts were being whimsical when they named their base here. But I seem to recall that a pre–Lost Age writer named Plato had talked about a city or kingdom called Atlantis in these regions, back when there was water here.”
“Plato,” mused Harman. “I’ve run across references to him in books I’ve read. And an odd drawing I saw once. A dog.”
Savi nodded. “A lot of the meaning of Lost Age iconography has been lost forever.”
“What’s a dog?” asked Harman. He sipped from Savi’s water bottle. The third of the food bar hadn’t been enough to satisfy his hunger, but there was no more food in the crawler.
“A small mammal that used to be very common, kept as a pet,” said Savi. “I don’t know why the posts allowed them to go extinct. Perhaps the rubicon virus targeted dogs as well.”