“And will this night come soon?” presses Cassandra.
“Yes.”
“In months and years or days and weeks?”
“Days and weeks,” I say. I try to estimate how many days it will be before Achilles will kill Hector and Troy will fall if and when the Iliad time-table reasserts itself. Not many.
“Now tell us—tell me, O Man—what my fate will be after the rape of Ilium and Cassandra,” snaps Cassandra.
Here I hesitate. My mouth goes dry. “Your fate?” I manage.
“My fate, O Man of the Future,” hisses the beautiful blond. “Surely, ravaged or not, I’ll not be left behind when Andromache is dragged off to slavery and noble Helen is claimed again by angry Menelaus. What is to become of Cassandra, O Man?”
I try to lick my lips. Can she see her own fate? I have no idea if Apollo’s gift of prophecy goes beyond the fall of Troy. Someone, I think it was the poet-scholar Robert Graves, translated Cassandra’s name as ‘she who entangles men.’ “ But she’s also someone who has been cursed by the gods always to tell the truth. I decide to do the same.
“Your beauty will result in Agamemnon claiming you as his concubine,” I say, my voice barely audible. “He’ll take you home with him, as his . . . concubine.”
“Will I bear him children before we arrive?”
“I think so,” I say, sounding preposterous even to myself. I keep getting my Homer mixed up with my Virgil, my Virgil mixed up with my Aeschylus, and all of the above mixed up with Euripides. Hell, even Shakespeare took a whack at this story. “Twin sons,” I say after a pause. “Teledamus and . . . uh . . . Pelops.”
“And when I arrive at Sparta, Agamemnon’s home?” prompts Cassandra.
“Clytaemnestra will kill you with the same axe she murders Agamemnon with,” I say, my voice more shrill than I meant it to be.
Cassandra smiles. It is not a pleasant smile. “Before or after she beheads Agamemnon?”
“After,” I say. Fuck it. If she can take it, I can. I’m probably dead anyway. But I’ll use the taser on as many of these bitches as I can before they drag me down. “Clytaemnestra has to chase you for a while,” I say. “But she catches you. She cuts your head off as well. And then she kills your babies.”
The seven women look at me for a long, silent moment, and their gazes are unreadable. I tell myself never to play poker with any of these dames. Then Cassandra says, “Yes, this man knows the future. Whether his vision and presence here are a gift to us from the gods, or a trick of the gods to uncover our treachery, I do not know. But we must trust him with our secret. The time before the end of Ilium is too short to do otherwise.”
Helen nods. “Hock-en-bear-eeee, use your medallion to go to the camps of the Achaeans. Bring Achilles back to the foyer of the nursery in Hector’s house at the time of the next changing of the Ilium guards.”
I think. The guards on the wall change and the gongs ring at what would be 11:30 a.m. That’s about an hour from now.
“What if Achilles doesn’t want to come with me?” I ask.
The collective gaze the women pour on me now is four parts contempt combined with three parts pity.
I QT the hell out of there.
I shouldn’t do it, it’s foolish, and it’s mostly because I’m afraid to face Achilles, but all through Cassandra’s oral quiz, I’d found myself curious about the little robot back on Olympos. I’d seen odd things on Olympos before, of course—not counting the gods and goddesses, who are weird enough—odd things such as the giant insectoid Healer. But something about the little robot, if that’s what it is, had struck me. It didn’t seem part of either of the worlds I’ve been dividing my time between over the past nine years—neither of Olympos nor of Ilium. The little robot seemed more of my world. My old world. The real world. Don’t ask me why. I’ve never seen a humanoid robot except in sci-fi movies.
Besides, I tell myself, I have an hour before having to present Achilles to Hector. I tug on the Hades Helmet and quantum teleport back to the Great Hall of the Gods.
The little robot and the other devices, including the big crab-thing, are gone, but Zeus is still here. And so are more of the gods. Including the war god, Ares, who was last seen healing in the tank next to Aphrodite.
Mother of Mercy, where’s Aphrodite now? She can see me, even when I’m wearing this helmet. She ordered the Muse to give the helmet to me only because she could track me down any time she wants. Is she out of the tank already? Jesus Christ.
Ares is roaring at all the gods while Zeus sits on his throne. “Madness rules below!” cries the god of war. “I’m gone for a few days, and you let the war get out of hand. Kaos rules! Achilles has killed Agamemnon and taken command of the Achaean armies. Hector is in retreat when victory for the Trojans was royal Zeus’s command.”
Agamemnon dead? Achilles in command? Holy shit. We’re not in the Iliad anymore, Toto.
“And what of the automata I brought to you, Lord Zeus? These . . . moravecs?” demands Apollo, his voice echoing in the huge hall. I see more gods and goddesses filling the mezzanines above. The swimming pool viewing screen cut into the floor is showing scenes of madness and murder on the Trojan battle lines and in the Argive camp now. But my focus is on the huge, powerfully built, white-bearded Zeus where he sits on his golden throne. His wrists are massive, like something sculpted out of Carrara marble by Rodin. I’m close enough to see the gray hairs on Zeus’s bare chest.
“Calm down, Apollo, noble archer,” rumbles the god of all gods. “I’ve ordered the moravec automata eliminated. Hera has destroyed them both by now.”
Can this get worse? I wonder.
Right then, Aphrodite enters the hall between Achilles’ mother, Thetis, and my Muse.
40
Equatorial Ring
Daeman screamed all the way up.
Savi and Harman could have been screaming as well—should have been screaming—but Daeman could hear only his own screams. As soon as their chairs took off vertically and then began to pitch over as they rotated around their axis of lightning—Daeman facedown 10,000 feet above the green Mediterranean Basin and screaming all the way—two great restrictions began to push in on him: one the pressure of acceleration, but the other a constant, all-over pressing-in that had to be some kind of a forcefield. It not only held him tight on the red cushions of his hurtling chair, but it pressed against his face, chest, into his mouth, into his lungs.
Daeman still screamed.
The three chairs continued to rotate counterclockwise around the thick bolt of white energy, and suddenly Daeman was facing up at the stars and rings. He continued to scream, knowing that the chair would continue rotating, that this time he would fall out, and that now the fall would be from tens of thousands of feet higher.
He didn’t fall, but he screamed down at the Earth as they flew higher. Their trajectory seemed almost flat now, almost parallel to the surface of the planet so far below. It was night over Central Asia, but towering cumulus stretching hundreds of miles was lighted from within, quick flickers of lightning illuminating the red landmass glimpsed between the pearly cloud cover. Daeman didn’t know it was central Asia. The chairs rotated around again, showing him the stars and rings and a quite visible thin layer of atmosphere—below them now!—and the sun seemed to rise again in the west, prisming across that meniscus of atmosphere in bright red and yellow streamers.
They were out of 99 percent of the atmosphere now, but Daeman didn’t know that. The forcefield fed him air, kept him from being torn apart by g-forces, and allowed a pocket of air into which he could scream. He was getting hoarse by the time he realized that they were approaching the e-ring.
The ring wasn’t what he’d always imagined, but he was too busy clutching the arms of his chair and screaming to notice this. Daeman had always visualized the posts’ e- and p-rings as being made up of thousands of glowing glass castles through which one could see the post-humans partying and doing whatever post-humans do. It wasn’t that way at all.