“Here,” said Hannah. “Noman showed me after he revived.” Her sculptor’s fingers tapped a series of glowing virtual buttons. The old-style human functions interacted with the crèche controls.
The coffin sighed, then began to hum. A mist flowed into the sleeping chamber through unseen vents and hid most of Harman’s body from view. Ice crystals formed on the clear cover. Several new lights came on. One winked red.
“Oh!” said Hannah. Her voice was very small.
“No,” said Ada. Her tone was calm but firm. “No. No. No.” She set her palm across the plastic control nexus of the coffin as if she were reasoning with the machine.
The red light winked, changed to amber, switched back to red.
“No,” Ada said firmly.
The red light wavered, dimmed, switched to amber. Stayed amber.
Hannah’s and Ada’s fingers met briefly above the coffin and then Ada returned her palm to the glowing curve of the AI nexus.
The amber light stayed on.
Several hours later, as late afternoon clouds moved in to obscure first the ruins of Machu Picchu and then the roadway of the suspension bridge six hundred feet below them, Ada said, “Hannah, freefax back to Ardis. Get some food. Rest.”
Hannah shook her head.
Ada smiled. “Then at least head up to the dining area and get us some fruit or something. Water.”
The amber light burned all that afternoon. Just after sundown, as the Andes valleys were bathed in alpenglow, Daeman, Tom, and Siris freefaxed in, but they stayed only a few moments.
“We’ve already reached thirty of the other communities,” Daeman said to Ada. She nodded, but her gaze never left the amber light.
The others eventually faxed away with promises to return in the morning. Hannah pulled the blanket around her and fell asleep there on the floor next to the coffin.
Ada remained—sometimes kneeling, sometimes sitting, but always thinking, and always with her palm on the coffin control nexus, always sending word of her presence and her prayers through the circuits separating her and her Harman, and always with her eyes on the amber monitor light.
Sometime after three a.m. local time, the amber light turned to green.
Part 4
88
One week after the Fall of Ilium:
Achilles and Penthesilea appeared on the empty ridgeline that rose between the Plain of the Scamander and the Plain of the Simois. As Hephaestus promised, there were two horses waiting—a powerful black stallion for the Achaean and a shorter but even more muscular white mare for the Amazon. The two mounted to inspect what was left.
There was not much left.
“How can an entire city like Ilium disappear?” said Penthesilea, her voice as contentious as always.
“All cities disappear,” said Achilles. “It is their fate.”
The Amazon snorted. Achilles had already noted that the blonde human female’s snort was similar to that of her white mare’s. “They aren’t supposed to disappear in a day … an hour.” The comment sounded like a complaint, a lament. Only two days after Penthesilea’s resurrection from the Healer’s tanks, Achilles was getting used to that constant tone of complaint.
For half an hour they allowed their horses to pick their way through the jumble of rock that stretched for two miles along the ridgeline that once had held mighty Troy. Not a single foundation stone was left. The divine magic that had taken Troy had sheared it off almost a foot beneath the earliest stones of the city. Not so much as a dropped spear or rotting carcass had been left behind.
“Zeus is powerful indeed,” said Penthesilea.
Achilles sighed and shook his head. The day was warm. Spring was coming. “I’ve told you, Amazon. Zeus did not do this. Zeus is dead by my own hand. This is the work of Hephaestus.”
The woman snorted. “I’ll never believe that little bumbuggering bad-breathed cripple could do something like this. I don’t even believe he’s a real god.”
“He did this,” said Achilles. With Nyx’s help, he mentally added.
“So you say, son of Peleus.”
“I told you not to call me that. I am no longer son of Peleus. I was Zeus’s son, no credit to him or me.”
“So you say,” said Penthesilea. “Which would make you a father-killer if your boasts are true.”
“Yes,” said Achilles. “And I never boast.”
Both Amazon and her white mare snorted in unison.
Achilles kicked the ribs of his black stallion and led them down off the ridge, along the rutted south road that had led from the Scaean Gate—the stump of the great oak tree that had always grown there since the creation of the city remained, but the great gates were gone—and then right again onto the Plain of the Scamander that separated the city from the beach.
“If this sad Hephaestus is now king of the gods,” said Penthesilea, her voice as loud and irritating as fingernails on a flat, slate rock, “why was he hiding in his cave the whole time we were on Olympos?”
“I told you—he’s waiting for the war between the gods and the Titans to end.”
“If he’s the successor to Zeus, why in Hades doesn’t he just end it himself by commanding the lightning and the thunder?”
Achilles said nothing. Sometimes, he had discovered, if he said nothing, she would shut up.
The Scamander Plain—worn smooth over its eleven years as a bat-tlefield—looked as if the ground had not been sheared, there were still the prints of thousands of sandaled men here, and blood dried on the rocks—but all living human beings, horses, chariots, weapons, corpses, and other artifacts had disappeared even as Hephaestus had described it to Achilles. Even the tents of the Achaeans and the burned hulks of their black ships were gone.
Achilles allowed their horses to rest on the beach for a few minutes and both man and Amazon watched the limpid waves of the Aegean roll up on the empty sand. Achilles would never tell the wolf-bitch next to him this, but his heart ached at the thought that he would never see his comrades in arms again—crafty Odysseus, booming big Ajax, the smiling archer Teucer, his faithful Myrmidons, even stupid, red-headed Menelaus and his scheming brother—Achilles’ nemesis—Agamemnon. It was strange, Achilles thought, how even one’s enemies become so important when they are lost to you.
With that, he thought of Hector and of the things Hephaestus had told him about the Iliad—about Achilles’ own other future—and this caused the despair to rise in him like bile. He turned his horse’s head south and drank from the goatskin of wine tied to the pommel.
“And don’t think I will ever believe that the bearded cripple god actually had the ability to make us married,” groused Penthesilea from behind him. “That was a load of horse cobblers.”
“He’s king of all gods,” Achilles said tiredly. “Who better to sanctify our wedding vows?”
“He can sanctify my ass,” said Penthesilea. “Are we leaving? Why are we heading southeast? What’s this way? Why are we leaving the battlefield?”
Achilles said nothing until he reined his horse to a halt fifteen minutes later.
“Do you see this river, woman?”
“Of course I see it. Do you think I’m blind? It’s just the lousy Scamander—too thick to drink, too thin to plow—brother of the River Simois which it joins just a few miles upstream.”
“Here, at this river we call the Scamander and which the gods call the holy Xanthes,” said Achilles, “here according to Hephaestus who quotes my biographer Homer, I would have had my greatest aristeia—the combat that would have made me immortal even before I slew Hector. Here, woman, I would have fought the entire Trojan army single-handed—and the swollen, god-raised river itself!—and cried to the heavens, ‘Die, Trojans, die!… till I butcher all the way to sacred Troy!’ Right there, woman, do you see where those low rapids run? Right there I would have slain in a blur of kills Thersilochus, Mydon, Astyplus, Mnesus, Thrasius, Aenius, and Ophelestes. And then the Paeonians would have fallen on me from the rear and I would have killed them all as well. And there, across the river on the Trojan side, I would have killed the ambidexterous Asteropaeus, my one Pelian-ash spearcast to his two. We both miss, but I hack the hero down with my sword while he’s trying to wrest my great spear from the riverbank to cast again….”