“And now Oenone’s accused him rather than Apollo of killing Paris.”
“Yep.” Hockenberry tosses a few more sticks on the fire. Sparks spin in the wind and rise toward the stars. There is blackness out over the ocean where clouds are moving in. Hockenberry guesses that it might rain before morning. Some nights, he sleeps up here—using his pack as a pillow and his cape for a blanket—but not tonight.
“But how could Philoctetes shift into Slow Time?” asks Mahnmut. The moravec rises and walks to the broken edge of the platform in the dark, evidently having no fear of the hundred-foot-plus drop. “The nanotechnology that allows that shift was only injected into Paris before that single combat, right?”
“You should know,” says Hockenberry. “You moravecs are the ones who injected Paris with the nanothingees so that he could fight the god.”
Mahnmut walks back to the fire but remains standing. He holds out his hands as if to warm them by the flames. Maybe he is warming them, thinks Hockenberry. He knows that parts of moravecs are organic.
“Some of the other heroes—Diomedes, for example—still have Slow-Time nanoclusters left in their systems from when Athena or one of the other gods injected them,” says Mahnmut. “But you’re right, only Paris had them updated ten days ago for the single combat with Apollo.”
“And Philoctetes wasn’t here for the last ten years,” says Hockenberry. “So it doesn’t make any sense that one of the gods would have accelerated him with the Slow-Time nanomemes. And it is acceleration, not a slowing down of time, right?”
“Right,” says the moravec. “ ‘Slow Time’ is a misnomer. It seems to the Slow-Time traveler that time has stopped—that everything and everyone is frozen in amber—but in reality, the body’s moved into hyperfast action, reacting in milliseconds.”
“Why doesn’t the person just burn up?” asks Hockenberry. He could have followed Apollo and Paris into Slow Time to watch the battle—in fact, if he’d been there that day, he would have. The gods had riddled his blood and bones with nanomemes for just that purpose, and many was the time he’d shifted into Slow Time to watch the gods prepare one of their Achaean or Trojan heroes for combat. “From friction,” he added. “With the air or whatever …” He broke off lamely. Science wasn’t his strong suit.
But Mahnmut nodded as if the scholic had said something wise. “The Slow-Time accelerator’s body would burn up—from internal heat if nothing else—if the tailored nanoclusters didn’t deal with that as well. It’s part of the body’s nano-generated forcefield.”
“Like Achilles’?”
“Yes.”
“Could Paris have burned up just because of that?” asks Hockenberry. “Some sort of nano-tech failure?”
“Very unlikely,” says Mahnmut and sits on the smaller block of stone. “But why would this Philoctetes kill Paris? What motive would he have?”
Hockenberry shrugs. “In the non-Iliad, non-Homeric tales of Troy, it is Philoctetes who kills Paris. With his bow. And a poisoned arrow. Just as Oenone described. Homer even refers to fetching Philoctetes to bring about the prophecy that Ilium will fall only when Philoctetes joins the fray—in the second book, I think.”
“But the Trojans and the Greeks are allies now.”
Hockenberry has to smile. “Just barely. You know as well as I that there are conspiracies and incipient rebellions brewing in both camps. Nobody but Hector and Achilles is happy about this war with the gods. It’s just a matter of time until there’s another rebellion.”
“But Hector and Achilles make for an almost unbeatable duo. And they have tens of thousands of Trojans and Achaeans loyal to them.”
“So far,” says Hockenberry. “But now maybe the gods themselves have been kibbitzing.”
“Helping Philoctetes shift into Slow Time?” says Mahnmut. “But why? Occam’s Razor suggests that if they wanted Paris dead, they could have just let Apollo kill him as everyone assumed he had. Until today. Until Oenone’s accusation. Why have a Greek assassinate him…” He stops and then murmurs, “Ah, yes.”
“Right,” said Hockenberry. “The gods want to hurry up the next mutiny, get Hector and Achilles out of the way, break up this alliance, and get the Greeks and Trojans killing each other again.”
“Thus the poison,” says the moravec. “So that Paris can live just long enough to tell his wife—his first wife—who really killed him. Now the Trojans will want revenge and even the Greeks loyal to Achilles will be ready to fight to defend themselves. Clever. Has anything else of comparable interest happened today?”
“Agamemnon’s back.”
“No shit?” says Mahnmut. I need to talk to him about his vernacular vocabulary, thinks Hockenberry.
This is like talking to one of my freshmen at IU.
“Yes, correct, no shit,” says Hockenberry. “He’s back from his voyage home a month or two early and has some really surprising news.”
Mahnmut leans forward expectantly. Or at least Hockenberry interprets the body language of the little humanoid cyborg as expressing expectation. The smooth metallic-plastic face shows nothing but reflection of the firelight.
Hockenberry clears his throat. “The people back home are gone,” he says. “Missing. Disappeared.”
Hockenberry had expected some sort of exclamation of surprise, but the little moravec waits silently.
“Everyone gone,” continues Hockenberry. “Not just in Mycenae, where Agamemnon first returned—not just his wife Clytemnestra and his son Orestes and all the rest of that cast, but everyone’s missing. Cities empty. Food sitting uneaten on tables. Horses starving in stables. Dogs pining on empty hearths. Cows unmilked in pastures. Sheep unshorn. Everywhere Agamemnon and his boats put in in the Peloponnese and beyond—Menelaus’ kingdom of Lacedaemon, empty. Odysseus’ Ithaca—empty.”
“Yes,” says Mahnmut.
“Wait a minute,” says Hockenberry. “You’re not in the least surprised. You knew. You moravecs knew that the Greek cities and kingdoms had been emptied out. How?”
“Do you mean how did we know?” asks Mahnmut. “Simple. We’ve been keeping tabs on these places from earth orbit since we arrived. Sending down remote drones to record data. There’s a lot to be learned here on the earth of three thousand years before your day—three thousand years before the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries, that is.”
Hockenberry is stunned. He’d never thought of the moravecs paying attention to anything other than Troy, the surrounding battlefields, the connecting Hole, Mars, Mount Olympos, the gods, maybe a Martian moon or two… Jesus, wasn’t that enough?
“When did they… disappear?” Hockenberry manages at last. “Agamemnon is telling everyone that some of the food left behind was fresh enough to eat.”
“I guess that depends upon your definition of ‘fresh,’ ” says Mahnmut. “According to our surveillance, the people disappeared about four and a half weeks ago. Just as Agamemnon’s little fleet was approaching the Peloponnese.”
“Jesus Christ,” whispers Hockenberry.
“Yes.”
“Did you see them disappear? On your satellite cameras or probes or whatever?”
“Not really. One minute they were there and the next minute they weren’t. It happened about two a.m. Greek time, so there wasn’t a lot of movement to monitor… in the Greek cities, I mean.”
“In the Greek cities …” Hockenberry repeats dully. “Do you mean… I mean… is there… have other people disappeared as well? In… say… China?”
“Yes.”
The wind suddenly whips around their eyrie and scatters sparks in all directions. Hockenberry covers his face with his hands during the spark storm and then brushes embers off his cloak and tunic. When the wind subsides, he throws the last of his sticks on the fire.
Other than Troy and Olympos—which, he discovered eight months ago, wasn’t on Earth at all—Hockenberry had only traveled to one other place in this past-Earth, and that was to prehistoric Indiana, where he deposited the only other surviving scholic, Keith Nightenhelser, with the Indians there to keep him safe when the Muse had gone on a killing spree. Now, without consciously meaning to, Hockenberry touches the QT medallion under his shirt. I need to check on Nightenhelser.