Scholic Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., is dressed in a Trojan captain’s cape, armor, and clothes, and although he seems thrilled to be witnessing all this, he also appears to have some trouble standing still. While the thousands of warriors up to the level of noble Achilles wait almost motionless for the final stragglers in each army—human and immortal—to assemble, Hockenberry is shuffling from foot to foot.
“Something wrong?” whispers Mahnmut in English.
“I think something’s crawling in my shorts,” Hockenberry whispers back.
The armies are assembled. The silence is uncanny—there is no noise from either side except for the slow hiss of distant waves rolling in to the pebbled beach, the occasional whinny of a horse harnessed to a battle chariot, the soft sound of Martian breeze through the cliff rocks of Olympos, the air-hiss of flying chariots circling and the higher buzz of hornet fighters, the occasional inadvertent soft clank of bronze on bronze as some soldier shifts position, and the powerful, omnipresent negative sound of tens of thousands of anxious men trying to remember to breathe normally.
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
Ardis Hall
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.