“What are you doing here, Hockenberry?” snarls the unkempt god. Dwarfish as he is to other Olympians, he’s still taller than me.
“How did you see me?” is all that I can manage. Fifty yards away, it appears as if Kronos has killed Apollo with a huge cudgel. The stormcloud-being hovering above the roofless Great Hall of the Gods seems to be dissipating on the high winds that blow around the summit of Olympos.
Hephaestus laughs and taps a glass and bronze lens-thing dangling from his vest amidst a hundred other tiny gizmos. “Of course I could see you. So could Zeus. That’s why he had me build you, Hockenberry. It was all supposed to lead to his ascension to the Godhead today being observed—observed by someone who could fucking well write it down. We’re all postliterate here, you know.”
Before I can move or speak, Hephaestus grabs the heavy QT medallion, rips it off me—breaking the chain—and crushes it in his massive, blunt-fingered, filthy hand.
OhJesusGodAlmightyno I manage to think as the god of fire opens his fist just enough to drop the crumbs of gold into a vest pocket he pulls out wide.
“Don’t shit your pants, Hockenberry,” laughs the god. “This thing never worked. See—there’s no fucking mechanism! Just the dial you could ratchet around. This has always been your Dumbo Feather.”
“It worked… it’s always… I came from… I used it to…”
“No, you didn’t,” says Hephaestus. “I built you with the nanogenes necessary to quantum teleport—just like the big boys. Just like us gods. You just weren’t supposed to know about it until the proper time came. Aphrodite jumped the gun—gave you the fake medallion to use you in her plot to kill Athena.”
I look around wildly. The Great Hall of the Gods has collapsed. Flames lick up through the tumbled pillars. Fighting is spreading everywhere, but the summit is emptying out as more and more gods are flicking away to hide on Ilium Earth. Brane Holes are opening here and there and the Titans and monstrous entities are following the fleeing gods. The
Thundercloud Being that had ripped the roof and top three floors off the Great Hall is gone.
“You need to help me save the Greeks,” I say, my teeth actually chattering.
Hephaestus laughs again, rubs the back of his sooty hand across his greasy mouth. “I’ve already vacuumed up all the other humans on that fucking Ilium-history Earth,” he says. “Why should I save the Greeks? Or even the Trojans for that matter? What have they done for me recently? Plus, I’ll need some humans down there to worship me when I take this throne of Olympos in a few days…”
I can only stare at him. “You vacuumed up the people? You put the population of Ilium Earth in the blue beam rising from Delphi?”
“Who the hell do you think did it? Zeus? With all his technical prowess?” Hephaestus shakes his head. The Titan brothers Kronos, Iapetos, Hyperion, Krios, Koios, and Okeanos are walking this way. They are covered with the golden-ichor blood of gods.
Suddenly Achilles appears from the burning ruins. He is fully clad in his gold armor, his beautiful shield also besmirched by immortal blood, his long sword out, his eyes staring almost madly from the slits of his streaked and sooted golden helmet. The apparition ignores me and shouts at Hephaestus. “Zeus has fled!”
“Of course,” replies the god of fire. “Did you expect him to wait around for the Demogorgon to drag him down to Tartarus?”
“I can’t find Zeus’s location anywhere on the holographic pool locator!” shouts Achilles. “I forced Aphrodite’s mother, Dione, to help me with the locator. She said it would find him anywhere in the universe. When she failed, I cut her to ribbons. Where is he?”
Hephaestus smiles. “You remember, fleet-footed mankiller, the one place Zeus had hidden from all eyes when Hera wanted to fuck him into an eternity of sleep?”
Achilles grabs the fire god’s shoulder and almost lifts him off the ground. “Odysseus’ home! Take me there! At once.”
Hephaestus’ eyes crinkle into unamused slits. “You do not command the future Lord of Olympos such, mortal. Singularity that you are, you must treat your betters with more respect.”
Achilles releases his grip on Hephaestus’ leather vest. “Please. Now. Please.”
Hephaestus nods and then looks at me. “You come, too, Scholic Hockenberry. Zeus wanted you here for this day. Wanted you as witness. Witness ye shall be.”
82
The moravecs aboard the Queen Mab received all the following live, in real-time—Odysseus’ nano-imagers and transmitters were working well—but Asteague/Che decided not to relay it down to Mahnmut and Orphu of Io where they were working there beneath the ocean of Earth. The two ‘vecs were six hours into their twelve-hour job of cutting free and loading the seven hundred sixty-eight critical black-hole warheads and no one on the Mab wanted to distract them.
And what was occurring now could qualify as distracting.
The lovemaking—if that was what the near-violent copulation between Odysseus and the woman who had identified herself as Sycorax—was in one of its temporary states of pause. The two were sprawled naked on the tousled cushions, drinking wine from large two-handled mugs and eating some fruit, when a monstrous creature—amphibian gills, fangs, claws, webbed feet—pushed aside curtains and flip-flop-walked its way into Sycorax’s chambers.
“Dam, thinketh he yes that he must announce that as he was readying to melt a gourd-fruit into mash, when so Caliban did hear the airlock cycling. Something there is which has come to see you, Mother. Saith, it has all flesh-meat on its nose and fingers like blunt stones. Saith, Mother, and in His name I shall rend this work’s tasty flesh from its soft-chalk bones.”
“No, thank you, Caliban, my darling,” said the naked woman with the purple-colored eyebrows. “Show our visitor in.”
The amphibian thing called Caliban stepped aside. An older version of Odysseus entered.
All of the moravecs—even those who sometimes had trouble telling one human being from another—could see the resemblance. The young Odysseus sprawled naked on the silk cushions stared dumbly at the older Odysseus. This older version had the same short stature and broad chest, but more scars, gray hair and gray in his thicker beard, and bore himself with much more gravity than their passenger on the Mab’s voyage had.
“Odysseus,” said Sycorax. As well as the moravecs’ human emotion auditory analysis circuits could deduce, she sounded truly surprised.
He shook his head. “My name is Noman now. I’m pleased to see you again, Circe.”
The woman smiled. “We have both changed, then. I am Sycorax to the world and myself now, my much-scarred Odysseus.”
The younger Odysseus started to rise, his hands bunched into fists, but Sycorax made a motion with her left hand and the young Odysseus collapsed back onto the cushions.
“You are Circe,” said the man who called himself Noman. “You were always Circe. You will always be Circe.”
Sycorax shrugged very slightly, her full breasts jiggling. Young Odysseus was sprawled to her left. She patted the empty cushions on her right. “Come sit next to me, then… Noman.”
“No, thank you, Circe,” said the man dressed in tunic, shorts, and sandals. “I will stand.”
“You will come and sit next to me,” said Sycorax, her voice intense. She made a complicated motion with her right hand, her different fingers moving not at random.