“We will help you if we can,” Asteague/Che says at last. “What do you desire?”
“I need to go somewhere without being seen,” I say and begin describing the lost Hades Helmet and my old morphing bracelet to them.
“The morphing technology—at least as it applies to living organisms—is beyond our technological capabilities,” says Retrograde… Sinopessen… I remember it now. “It manipulates reality on a quantum level we do not yet fully understand. We are far away from being able to create machines to alter that form of probability collapse.”
“And we have no clue as to how this Hades Helmet proffered true invisibility,” adds Cho Li. “Although if it is consistent with the Olympians’—or those powers behind the Olympians—other technologies, it probably involves a minor quantum shift through time rather than space.”
“Can you whomp up something like that for me?” I ask. I realize that there’s no compelling reason for these busy moravecs to do anything for me.
“No,” says Asteague/Che.
“We could adapt some chameleon cloth for him,” says General Beh bin Adee.
“Great,” I say. “What’s chameleon cloth?”
“An active-stealth camouflage polymer,” says the general. “Primitive but effective if one does not move too quickly between widely varying backgrounds. Roughly the same material that your Mars ship was coated in, only more breathable and invisible to the infrared. The eyepieces are nanocytic, so there would be no interruption of the chameleon adaptation.”
“The gods saw us and shot our Mars ship out of orbit,” I say.
“Well, yes… ” says General Beh bin Adee. “There is that to consider.”
“This chameleon cloth is the best you can do?”
“On short notice,” says Asteague/Che.
“Then I’ll take it. How long will it take your people… I mean your… moravecs… to fit me out in this chameleon suit and show me how to use it?”
“I ordered the environmental engineering department to begin work on such a suit the second we began discussing it,” says the Prime Integrator. “We had your vital measurements on record. They should bring the finished product within three minutes.”
“Wonderful,” I say, wondering if it is. Where exactly am I going? How can I convince those where I’m going to help the Greeks escape? Where could the Greeks escape to? Their families and servants and friends and slaves have all been sucked up into the blue beam rising from Delphi. As if in anticipation of getting out of here, I begin playing with the gold medallion hanging around my neck, fingering the sliding circle that activates it.
“By the way,” says Cho Li, “your quantum teleportation medallion does not work.”
“What!?” I rip myself out of the straps and float in place. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Our inspection when you were on the ship earlier has shown the disk to be effectively functionless,” says the navigator.
“You’re full of shit. You guys told me earlier that it just couldn’t be replicated for your use, that it was keyed to my DNA or something.”
Prime Integrator Asteague/Che makes a self-conscious noise that sounds amazingly like a human male clearing his throat in embarrassment. “It is true that there is some… communication… between the medallion around your neck and your cells and DNA, Dr. Hockenberry. But the medallion itself has no quantum function. It does not QT you through Calabi-Yau space.”
“That’s nuts,” I say again, trying to curb my language. I still need these moravecs’ help and lizard suit to get out of here. “I got here, didn’t I? All the way from the universe of the Ilium-Earth.”
“Yes,” says Cho Li. “You did. With no help whatsoever from that hollow gold medallion hanging around your neck. It is a mystery.”
A soldier moravec with the chameleon outfit appears from the open elevator-shaft doorway. The garment looks like nothing special. Actually, it reminds me of an oversized version of a so-called leisure suit I was foolish enough to own in the 1970s. It even had the same stupid, pointy collars and monkey-puke-green sheen to it.
“The collars extend into a full cowl,” says Asteague/Che as if reading my mind. “The suit itself has no color. This green is merely a default setting so we can find the material.”
I take the suit from the ‘vec soldier and make the mistake of trying to pull it on. Within seconds, I’m tumbling out of control, spinning around my own axis in zero-g, hanging on to the useless garment as if I’m waving a flag, but achieving nothing else.
General Beh bin Adee and his trooper grab me, secure me—they seem to know just where to lodge their feet on the consoles to keep themselves from acting with an equal and opposite reaction—and then they unceremoniously stuff me into the chameleon outfit. Then they attach one of the chair straps to my suit, velcroing me to some patch I can’t see. It keeps me in place.
I pull the collars up into a cowl and pull the cowl completely over my head.
It’s not nearly as comfortable as just putting on the Hades Helmet and disappearing. For one thing, it is tremendously hot in this lizard suit. For a second thing, the nanowhatsits that allow me to see through the material in front of my eyes don’t quite achieve cricital focus. An hour peering out of this thing and I’ll have the worst headache of my life.
“How is it?” asks Prime Integrator Asteague/Che.
“Great,” I lie. “Can you see me?”
“Yes,” says Asteague/Che, “but only via gravitational radar and other bands of the nonvisible-light spectrum. To all visual intents and purposes, you have blended in with the background. With General bin Adee, actually. Will the personages where you are traveling be using gravitational radar, enhanced negative thermal imaging, or other such techniques?”
Would they? I have no clue. Aloud, I say, “There’s one problem.”
“Yes? Perhaps we can fix it.” The Prime Integrator sounds solicitous, even actively concerned. My wife used to love James Mason.
“I have to twist the QT medallion to QT,” I say, wondering how muffled my voice sounds to them. Sweat is rolling down my temple, cheeks, and rib cage by now. “I can’t twist it without opening the suit and…”
“The chameleon cloth is tailored to be very loose,” interrupts Beh bin Adee. The military ‘vec always sounds slightly disgusted with me. “You can pull your arm inside the suit to touch the medallion. Both arms if you need to.”
“Oh, yeah,” I say, pulling my right arm out of the suit arm and into the suit, and with that as my final contribution to our conversation, I twist the medallion and quantum teleport away from the Queen Mab.
Does too work! I’m tempted to shout as I flick into solidity at the place in space/time that I’d envisioned. But then I remember that I forgot to ask the moravecs for a weapon. And some food and water. And maybe some impact armor.
But it wouldn’t be a good time for me to shout anything.
I’ve appeared in the Great Hall of the Gods on Mount Olympos and all the gods seem to be here—all except Hera, whose smaller throne is wreathed in black funereal ribbon. Zeus looks to be fifty feet tall where he sits on his own gold throne.
All of the other gods seem to be here—more even than I’d seen at their last large conclave, which I’d crashed in my infinitely more comfortable Hades Helmet. I don’t even know many of these gods, can’t identify them even after ten years of reporting to Olympos daily with my voice stones and action reports. There are hundreds upon hundreds of gods here, easily more than a thousand.