Inside, the space is as I remember it: the giant vats filled with bubbling, violet liquid, green worms roiling around the unconscious, floating, healing gods. The Healer—the giant centipede-thing with metallic arms and red eyes—is on the opposite side of Aphrodite’s reconstruction vat, preparing to remove her from it, I presume; his red eyes look my way and his many arms quiver as the chariot rushes into the quiet space, but he is not between me and my target and I accelerate forward before he or anything else can stop me.
It is only at the last second that I decide to jump rather than to stay with the chariot. It must be the memory of Helen, the night with Helen—the renewed pleasure of life in those hours with Helen.
The Hades Helmet still shielding me, I leap from the speeding chariot, land hard, feel something bruise if not break in my right shoulder, and then I tumble to a stop on the floor as the chariot flies directly into the reconstruction vat, smashing plastic and steel, throwing violet liquid a hundred feet into the air of the giant room. Something—either part of the chariot or a huge shard of vat glass—slices the giant centipede Healer in two.
Aphrodite’s body rolls out onto the floor in a wave of violet liquid and a coiling mass of writhing green worms. The other vats—including the one holding Ares in his nest of worms—rock but do not break or tumble.
Claxons, alarms, and sirens go off, deafening me.
I try to rise, but my head, left leg and right shoulder ache terribly and I sink back to the floor. I crawl to one side of the room, trying to stay out of the violet goo. I’m afraid of what the chemicals will do to me, but more afraid that the outline of my body will be visible in the flood if I can’t get away from it. Black spots dance in my vision and I realize I’m going to pass out. Gods and floating robot-machines are rushing into the great healing chamber.
In the seconds before I lose consciousness, I see mighty Zeus stride in, his cloak billowing, his brow furrowed.
Whatever’s going to happen next will have to happen without me. I set my forehead against the cool floor, close my eyes, and let the blackness wash over me.
22
The Coast of Chryse Planitia
“I killed my friend, Orphu of Io,” Mahnmut told William Shakespeare.
The two were walking in neighborhoods along the bank of the Thames. Mahnmut knew that it was the late summer of 1592 a.d., although he did not know how he knew. The river was busy with barges, wherries, and low-masted rivercraft. Beyond the Tudor buildings and ramshackle tenements on the north bank rose a profusion of London’s steeples and a few contorted towers. A hot haze hung over the river and behind the slums on either side.
“I should have saved Orphu, but I could not,” said Mahnmut. He had to walk quickly to keep up with the playwright.
Shakespeare was a compact man, in his late twenties, soft-spoken and dressed in a more dignified manner than Mahnmut would have expected from an actor and playwright. The young man’s face was a sharp oval, showing a hairline already receding, sideburns, and a wisp of a beard and thin mustache—as if Shakespeare were tentatively experimenting with a more permanent beard. His hair was brown, his eyes a grayish-green, and he wore a black doublet from which the wide, soft collars of a white shirt were visible, white drawstrings hanging down. There was a small gold hoop in the writer’s left ear.
Mahnmut wanted to ask Shakespeare a thousand questions—what was he writing now? what was life like in this city that would soon be overwhelmed by the plague? what is the hidden structure of the sonnets?—but all he could talk about was Orphu.
“I tried to save him,” explained Mahnmut. “The Dark Lady ’s reactor shut down and then the batteries went dead less than five kilometers from the coast. I was trying to find an inlet in one of the many caves along the cliffs—someplace we could hide the sub.”
“The Dark Lady?” asked Shakespeare. “This is the name of your ship?”
“Yes.”
“Pray continue.”
“Orphu and I were talking about the stone faces,” said Mahnmut. “It was night—we were approaching the coast at night, under cover of darkness, but I was using the night-vision scope and was describing the faces to him. He was still alive. The ship was providing just enough O2 for him.”
“O2?”
“Air,” explained Mahnmut. “As I say, I was describing the great stone heads to him—“
“Great stone heads? Statues?”
“Stone monoliths each about twenty meters tall,” said Mahnmut.
“Did you recognize the statue’s visage? Was he someone of your acquaintance, or perhaps a famous king or conqueror?”
“It was too far away for me to see details of the faces,” said Mahnmut.
They had come to a wide, multiarched bridge covered with three-story buildings. A passageway about four meters wide ran right through the structures, like a road through a tunnel, and at the moment pedestrians in motley were dodging a mass of sheep being driven north into the city. All along that walkway, human heads—some dried and mummified, some almost skulls except for tufts of hair or bits of rotted flesh, others so shockingly fresh that there was still a blush to the cheeks or lips—had been mounted on posts.
“What is all this?” asked Mahnmut. His organic parts felt queasy.
“London Bridge,” said Shakespeare. “Tell me what happened to your friend.”
Tired of looking up at the playwright, Mahnmut scampered up onto a stone wall that served as a railing. He could see a forbidding tower in the east, and he assumed it was the Tower from Richard III. Knowing that he was either dreaming or dying from lack of air himself, Mahnmut did not want this dream to end before he asked Shakespeare a question or two. “Have you begun writing your sonnets yet, Master Shakespeare?”
The playwright smiled and looked out at the reeking Thames, then turned to gaze at the stinking city. Raw sewage was everywhere, as were the carcasses of dead horses and cattle rotting in the mudflats, while a wild effluvium of bloody chicken parts flowed out from open gutters and swirled in stagnant backwaters. Mahnmut had all but shut off his olfactory input. He didn’t know how this human with his full-time nose could stand it.
“How do you know about my experiment with the sonnet?” asked Shakespeare.
Mahnmut approximated a human shrug. “A guess. So you’ve begun them?”
“I’ve considered playing with the form,” admitted the playwright.
“And who is the Young Man in the sonnets?” asked Mahnmut, hardly able to breathe at the thought of unraveling this ancient mystery. “Is it Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton?”
Shakespeare blinked in surprise and looked carefully at the moravec. “You seem to follow close on my heels in such things, tiny Caliban.”
Mahnmut nodded. “So Wriothesley is the Youth in the sonnets?”
“His lordship will have seen nineteen years this October and the down on his upper lip, it is said, has turned to sedge,” said the playwright. “Hardly a youth.”
“William Herbert then,” suggested Mahnmut. “He’s only twelve years old and he’ll become the third Earl of Pembroke nine years from now.”
“You know the dates of future succession and accession?” Shakespeare said with a tone of irony. “Does Master Caliban sail time’s sea as well as this ocean of Mars he speaks of?”
Mahnmut was too excited about solving this mystery to respond to that. “You’ll dedicate the large Folio of 1623 to William Herbert and his brother, and when your sonnets are printed, you’ll dedicate them to ‘Mr. W.H.”
Shakespeare stared at the moravec as if he were a fever dream. Mahnmut wanted to say No, you’re the dream of a dying brain, Master Shakespeare. Not I. Aloud, he said, “I just think it’s interesting that you have a young man or a boy as a lover.”
Mahnmut was surprised by the poet’s reaction. Shakespeare turned, drew a dagger from his belt, and held it under the moravec’s head-unit. “Do you have an eye, Little Caliban, that I may bury my blade in it?”