As if reading his mind, the moravec says, “Everyone else is gone—everyone outside a five-hundred-kilometer radius of Troy. Africans. North American Indians. South American Indians. The Chinese and aborigines in Australia. Polynesians. Northern European Huns and Danes and Vikings-to-be. The proto-Mongols. Everyone. Every other human being on the planet—we estimated that there were about twenty-two million—has disappeared.”
“That’s not possible,” says Hockenberry.
“No. It wouldn’t seem so.”
“What kind of power…”
“Godlike,” says Mahnmut.
“But certainly not these Olympian gods. They’re just… just…”
“More powerful humanoids?” said Mahnmut. “Yes, that’s what we thought. There are other energies at work here.”
“God?” whispers Hockenberry, who had been raised in a strict Indiana Baptist family before he had traded faith for education.
“Well, maybe,” says the moravec, “but if so, He lives on or around planet Earth. Huge amounts of quantum energy were released from Earth or near-earth-orbit at the same time Agamemnon’s wife and kids disappeared.”
“The energy came from Earth?” repeats Hockenberry. He looks around at the night, the funeral pyre below, the city nightlife becoming active beneath them, the distant campfires of the Achaeans, and the more distant stars. “From here?”
“Not this Earth,” says Mahnmut. “The other Earth. Yours. And it looks like we’re going to it.”
For a minute Hockenberry’s heart pounds so wildly that he’s afraid he’s going to be sick. Then he realizes that Mahnmut isn’t really talking about his Earth—the Twenty-first Century world of the half-remembered fragments of his former life before the gods resurrected him from old DNA and books and God knows what else, the slowly-returning-to-consciousness world of Indiana University and his wife and his students—but the concurrent-with-terraformed-Mars Earth of more than three thousand years after the short, not-so-happy first life of Thomas Hockenberry.
Unable to sit still, he stands and paces back and forth on the shattered eleventh floor of the building, walking to the shattered wall on the northeast side, then to the vertical drop on the south and west sides. A pebble scraped up by his sandal falls more than a hundred feet into the dark streets below. The wind whips his cape and his long, graying hair back. Intellectually, he’s known for eight months that the Mars visible now through the Hole coexisted in some future solar system with Earth and the other planets, but he’d never really connected that simple fact with the idea that this other Earth was really there, waiting.
My wife’s bones are mingled with the dust there, he thinks and then, on the verge of tears, almost laughs. Fuck, my bones are mingled with the dust there.
“How can you go to that Earth?” he asks and immediately realizes how stupid the question is. He’s heard the story of how Mahnmut and his huge friend Orphu traveled to Mars from Jupiter space with some other moravecs who did not survive their first encounter with the gods. They have spaceships, Hockenbush. While most of the moravec and rockvec spacecraft had appeared as if by magic through the quantum Holes that Mahnmut had helped bring into existence, they were still spacecraft.
“We’re building a ship just for that purpose on and near Phobos,” the moravec says softly. “This time we’re not going alone. Or unarmed.”
Hockenberry can’t stop pacing back and forth. When he gets to the edge of the shattered floor, he has the urge to jump to his death—an urge that has tempted him when in high places since he was a kid. Is that why I like to come up here? Thinking about jumping? Thinking about suicide? He realizes it is. He realizes how lonely he’s been for the last eight months. And now even Nightenhelser is gone—gone with the Indians probably, sucked up by whatever cosmic vacuum cleaner made all the humans on earth except these poor fucked Trojans and Greeks disappear this month. Hockenberry knows that he can twist the QT medallion hanging against his chest and be in North America in no time at all, searching for his old scholic friend in that part of prehistoric Indiana where he’d left him eight months earlier. But he also knew that the gods might track him through the Planck-space interstices. It’s why he hasn’t QT’d in eight months.
He walks back to the fire and stands looming over the little moravec. “Why the hell are you telling me this?”
“We’re inviting you to go with us,” says Mahnmut.
Hockenberry sits down heavily. After a minute he is able to say, “Why, for God’s sake? What possible use could I be to you on such an expedition?”
Mahnmut shrugs in a most human fashion. “You’re from that world,” he says simply. “If not that time. There are humans on this other Earth, you know.”
“There are?” Hockenberry hears how stunned and stupid his own voice sounds. He’d never thought to ask.
“Yes. Not many—most of the humans appear to have evolved into some sort of post-human status and moved off the planet into orbital ring cities more than fourteen hundred years ago—but our observations suggest that there are a few hundred thousand old-style human beings left.”
“Old-style human beings,” repeats Hockenberry, not even trying not to sound stunned. “Like me.”
“Exactly,” says Mahnmut. He stands, his vision plate barely coming up to Hockenberry’s belt. Never a tall man, Hockenberry suddenly realizes how the Olympian gods must feel around ordinary mortals. “We think you should come with us. You could be of tremendous help when we meet and talk to the humans on your future Earth.”
“Jesus Christ,” repeats Hockenberry. He walks to the edge again, realizes again how easy it would be to take one more step off this edge into the darkness. This time the gods wouldn’t resurrect him. “Jesus Christ,” he says yet again.
Hockenberry can see the shadowy figure of Hector at Paris’s funeral pyre, still pouring wine into the earth, still ordering men to pile more firewood into the flames.
I killed Paris, thinks Hockenberry. I’ve killed every man, woman, child, and god who’s died since I morphed into the form of Athena and kidnapped Patroclus—pretending to kill him—in order to provoke Achilles into attacking the gods. Hockenberry suddenly laughs bitterly, not embarrassed that the little machine-person behind him will think he’s lost his mind. I have lost my mind. This is nuts. Part of the reason I haven’t jumped off this fucking ledge before tonight is that it would feel like a dereliction of duty… like I need to keep observing, as if I’m still a scholic reporting to the Muse who reports to the gods.
I’ve absolutely lost my mind. He feels, not for the first or fiftieth time, like sobbing.
“Will you go with us to Earth, Dr. Hockenberry?” Mahnmut asks softly.
“Yeah, sure, shit, why not? When?”
“How about right now?” says the little moravec.
The hornet must have been hovering silently hundreds of feet above them but with its navigation lights off. Now the black and barbed machine swoops down out of the darkness with such suddenness that Hockenberry almost falls off the edge of the building.
An especially strong gust of wind helps him keep his balance and he steps back from the edge just as a staircase ramp hums down from the belly of the hornet and clunks on stone. Hockenberry can see a red glow from inside the ship.