“You can’t convince me that’s Proust,” said Mahnmut. The haze to the south was resolving itself.
“No,” said Orphu. “That’s Tennyson’s Ulysses .”
“Who’s Ulysses?”
“Odysseus.”
“Who’s Odysseus?”
There was a shocked silence. Finally, Orphu said, “Ah, my friend, this gap in your otherwise excellent education calls out for repair. We may well need to know as much as we can about . . .”
“Wait,” said Mahnmut. And a minute later, “Wait!”
“What is it?”
“Land,” said Mahnmut. “I can see land.”
“Anything else? Any details?”
“I’m changing magnification,” said Mahnmut.
Orphu waited, but finally said, “And?”
“The stone faces,” said Mahnmut. “I see the stone faces—on the cliff tops mostly—stretching as far to the east as I can see.”
“Just to the east? None to the west?”
“No. The line of faces ends almost where we’d reach land. I can see movement there. Hundreds of people—or things—moving along the cliffs and beach.”
“We’d better dive,” said Orphu. “Wait for dark before we make landfall. Find an ocean cave or something where you can bring the Lady in unseen, where . . .”
“Too late,” said Mahnmut. “The ship doesn’t have more than forty minutes of life support and propulsion left in her. Besides, the shapes—the people—have given up their work moving the stone faces west. They’re coming down to the beach by the hundreds. They’ve seen us.”
21
Ilium
I could tell you what it’s like to make love to Helen of Troy. But I won’t. And not just because it would be totally ungentlemanly of me to do so. The details are just not part of my story here. But I can say truthfully that if the vengeful Muse or maddened Aphrodite had found me a moment after Helen and I ended our first bout of lovemaking, say, a minute after we rolled apart on the sweat-moistened sheets to catch our breath and feel the cool breeze coming in ahead of the storm, and if the Muse and the goddess had crashed in and killed me then—I can tell you without fear of contradiction that the short second life of Thomas Hockenberry would have been a happy one. And at least it would have ended on a high note.
A minute after that instant of perfection, the woman was holding a dagger to my belly.
“Who are you?” demanded Helen.
“I’m your . . .” I began and stopped. Something in Helen’s eyes made me abort my lie about being Paris before I could vocalize it.
“If you say you are my new husband, I will have to sink this blade into your bowels,” she said evenly. “If you are a god, that shouldn’t matter. But if you aren’t . . .”
“I’m not,” I managed. The point of the knife was close enough to draw blood from the skin above my belly. Where did this knife come from? Had it been in the cushions while we were making love?
“If you aren’t a god, how have you taken Paris’s shape?”
I realized that this was Helen of Troy—the mortal daughter of Zeus—a woman who lived in a universe where gods and goddesses had sex with mortals all the time; a world where shapechangers, divine and otherwise, walked among mere humans; a world where the concept of cause and effect had completely different meanings. I said, “The gods gave me the ability to mor . . . to change appearances.”
“Who are you?” she asked. “What are you?” She did not seem angry, nor even especially shocked. Her voice was calm, her beautiful features undistorted by fear or fury. But the blade was steady against my belly. The woman wanted an answer.
“My name is Thomas Hockenberry,” I said. “I’m a scholic.” I knew that none of this would make sense. My name sounded strange even to me, hard-edged in the smoother tones of their ancient language.
“Tho-mas Hock-en-bear-reeee,” she mouthed. “It sounds Persian.”
“No,” I said. “Dutch and German and Irish, actually.”
I saw Helen frown and knew I was not only not making sense to her with these words, but was sounding actively deranged.
“Put on a robe,” she said. “We will talk on the terrace.”
Helen’s large bedroom had terraces on both sides, one looking down into the courtyard, the other looking out south and east over the city. My levitation harness and other gear—except for the QT medallion and morphing bracelet I had worn to bed—were hidden behind the curtain on the courtyard terrace. Helen led me to the outside terrace. We each wore thin robes. Helen kept her short, sharp knife in her hand as we stood at the railing in the reflected light from the city and from the occasional storm flash.
“Are you a god?” she asked.
I almost answered “yes”—it would be the easiest way to talk her out of putting that blade in my belly—but had the sudden, inexplicable, overwhelming urge to tell the truth for a change. “No,” I said. “I’m not a god.”
She nodded. “I knew you were not a god. I would have gutted you like a fish if you had lied to me about that.” She smiled grimly. “You don’t make love like a god.”
Well, I thought, but there was nothing else to say to that.
“How is it,” she asked, “that you can take the shape and form of Paris?”
“The gods have given me the ability to do so,” I said.
“Why?” The tip of the dagger blade was only inches from my bare skin through the robe.
I shrugged, but then realizing that shrugs weren’t used by the ancients, I said, “They lent me this ability for their own purposes. I serve them. I watch the battle and report to them. It helps that I can take the shape of . . . other men.”
Helen did not seem surprised by this. “Where is my Trojan lover? What have you done to the real Paris?”
“He’s well,” I said. “When I abandon this likeness, he will return to what he was doing when I morphed . . . when I took his shape.”
“Where will he be?” asked Helen.
I thought this was a slightly strange question. “Wherever he would have been if I hadn’t borrowed his form,” I said at last. “I think he’d just left the city to join Hector for tomorrow’s fighting.” Actually, when I morph out of Paris’s form, Paris will be exactly where he would have been if he’d continued on during the time I had his identity—sleeping in a tent, perhaps, or in the midst of battle, or shagging one of the slave girls in Hector’s war camp. But this was too difficult to explain to Helen. I didn’t think she’d appreciate a discourse on probability wave functions and quantum-temporal simultaneity. I couldn’t explain why it was that neither Paris nor those around him wouldn’t necessarily notice his absence, or how it was that events might reconnect to the Iliad as if I hadn’t interrupted the probability wave-collapse of that temporal line. Quantum continuity might be sewn up as soon as I canceled the morph function.
Shit, I didn’t understand any of this.
“Leave his form,” commanded Helen. “Show me your true shape.”
“My Lady, if I . . .” I began to protest, but her hand moved quickly, the blade cut through silk and skin, and I felt the blood flow on my abdomen.
Showing her that my right hand was going to move very, very slowly, I opened the glowing functions and touched the icon on the morphing bracelet.
I was Thomas Hockenberry again—shorter, thinner, gawkier, with my slightly myopic gaze and thinning hair.