Savi had moved her hand through the virtual control panel and the solid sonie under them had simply disappeared. In the brief seconds before Ada closed her eyes tight, she looked around at the perfect illusion of the six humans, their luggage, and Odysseus’ spears flying along in midair, unsupported by anything other than empty air.
“Warn us if you’re going to do something like that again,” Harman said shakily to Savi.
The old woman muttered something.
Ada spent a full minute or two touching the cold metal of the cowl ahead of her, feeling the soft leatherlike solidity of the contour couch beneath her legs and belly and chest, before daring to open her eyes again. I’m not falling, I’m not falling, I’m not falling, she told herself. Yes, you ARE falling, her eyes and inner ear told her. She closed her eyes again, opening them just as they came out of the highlands and followed a peninsula running northwest from the mainland.
“I thought you might want to see this,” Savi said to Harman, as if the rest of them wouldn’t know what they were talking about.
Ahead of them, the ocean sliced through the isthmus, open water visible for a gap of at least a hundred miles. Savi gained altitude and turned them north across open seas.
“The maps I’ve seen show old the isthmus connecting North and South America above sea level the whole way,” said Harman, straining up out of his couch to look behind them.
“The maps you’ve seen are useless,” said Savi. Her fingers moved and the sonie accelerated and gained more altitude.
It was past midday when another coastline came into sight. Savi dropped the sonie lower and they were soon flicking over swamps which quickly gave way to mile after mile of redwoods and sequoia—Savi named the trees—the tallest towering two or three hundred feet into the humid air.
“Anyone want to stretch their legs on solid ground while we stop for lunch?” asked Savi. “Or have some privacy in case nature is calling?”
Four of the five passengers loudly voted aye. Odysseus smiled slightly. He had been dozing.
They had lunch in a clearing on a small rise, surrounded by cathedral giants. The e- and p-rings moved palely through the bit of blue sky visible overhead.
“Are there dinosaurs around here?” Daeman asked, peering into the shadows beneath the trees.
“No,” said Savi. “They tend to prefer the middle and northern parts of the continent.”
Daeman relaxed against a fallen log and nibbled at his fruit, sliced beef, and bread, but sat straight up when Odysseus said, “Perhaps Savi Uhr is actually saying that there are more ferocious predators around here that keep the recombinant dinosaurs away.”
Savi frowned at Odysseus and shook her head, as if sighing over an incorrigible child. Daeman looked into the midday shadows under the trees again and moved closer to the sonie to finish his meal.
Hannah, rarely taking her gaze off Odysseus, did take time to pull her turin cloth from a pocket and set it over her eyes. She reclined for several minutes while the others ate silently in the shadowed heat and stillness. Finally Hannah sat up, removed the microcircuit-embroidered cloth, and said, “Odysseus, would you like to see what’s happening with you and your comrades in the war for the walled city?”
“No,” said the Greek. He tore off a strip of cold Terror Bird leftover with his white teeth and chewed slowly, then drank from the wineskin he’d brought with him.
“Zeus is angry and has tilted the balance toward the Trojans, led by Hector,” continued Hannah, ignoring Odysseus’ reticence. “They’ve driven the Greeks back through their defenses—the moat and the stakes—and they’re fighting around the black ships. It looks like your side is going to lose. All of the great kings—including you—have turned and run. Only Nestor stayed to fight.”
Odysseus grunted. “That garrulous old man. He stayed because his horse had been shot out from under him.”
Hannah glanced at Ada and grinned. It was obvious that Hannah’s goal had been to draw Odysseus into conversation and equally obvious that she thought she’d won. Ada still didn’t believe that this all-too-real man—sun-bronzed, wrinkled, scarred, so different than the firmary-renewed males of their experience—was the same person as the Odysseus of the turin drama. Like most intelligent people she knew, Ada believed that the turin cloth provided a virtual entertainment, probably written and recorded during the Lost Age.
“Do you remember that fight by the black ships?” prompted Hannah.
Odysseus grunted again. “I remember the feast the night before that miserable dog’s-ass day. Thirty ships arrived from the isle of Lemnos bringing wine—a thousand measures full, enough wine to drown the Trojan armies with, if we hadn’t had a better use for it. Euneus, Jason’s son, sent it as a gift for the Atrides—Agamemnon and Menelaus.” He squinted at Hannah and the others. “Now Jason’s voyage, there’s a story worth hearing.”
Everyone except Savi looked blankly at the barrel-chested man in his belted tunic.
“Jason and his Argonauts,” repeated Odysseus, looking from face to face. “Surely you’ve heard that tale.”
Savi broke the embarrassed silence. “They haven’t heard any tales, son of Laertes. Our so-called old-style humans here are without past, without myth, without stories of any sort—except for the turin cloth. They’re as perfectly postliterate as you and your comrades were preliterate.”
“We didn’t need scratches on bark or parchment or mud to make us men to be reckoned with,” growled Odysseus. “Writing had been tried in some age before ours and had been abandoned as a useless thing.”
“Indeed,” Savi said dryly. “ ‘Does an illiterate’s tool stand any less erect?’ I think Horace said that.”
Odysseus glared.
“Will you tell us about this Jason and his . . . his what?” asked Hannah, blushing in a way that convinced Ada that her friend had indeed slept with Odysseus the night before.
“Ar-go-nauts,” Odysseus said slowly, emphasizing each syllable as if speaking to a child. “And no, I won’t.”
Ada found her gaze wandering to Harman and her mind wandering to memories of the long night before. She wanted to walk off with Harman and talk to him in private about what they’d shared, or—failing that—just to close her eyes in the humid heat of the sun-dappled glade and nap, perhaps to dream about their lovemaking. Or better yet, thought Ada, peering at Harman through lowered lashes, we could just steal off into the forest dim and make love again, rather than just dream about it.
But Harman didn’t seem to notice her glances and obviously had his lover’s telepathy-receiver turned off. Ada’s beloved appeared to be amused and interested by Odysseus’ comments. “Will you tell us a story about your turin cloth war?” he asked the bearded man.
“It was called the Trojan War and fuck your turin rag,” said Odysseus, but he’d been drinking steadily from his wineskin and appeared to have mellowed. “But I can tell you a story that your precious diaper cloth doesn’t know.”
“Yes, please,” said Hannah, shifting closer to the warrior.
“The Lord deliver us from storytellers,” muttered Savi. She rose, packed away her lunch package in the boot of the sonie, and walked into the forest.
Daeman watched her go with visible anxiety. “Do you really think there are worse predators here than dinosaurs?” he asked no one in particular.
“Savi can take care of herself,” said Harman. “She has that gun-weapon.”
“But if something were to eat her,” said Daeman, still staring into the forest, “who would fly the sonie?”
“Hush,” said Hannah. She touched Odysseus’ wrist with her long tan fingers. “Tell us the story that the turin cloth doesn’t know. Please.”
Odysseus frowned, but Ada and Harman were nodding in agreement with Hannah’s request, so he flicked crumbs out of his beard and began.