“I said no. You must grant my wish.” Achilles unlimbers his shield and sets it in place on his forearm, as if he is heading to the front. He pulls his sword.
Zeus throws his head back and laughs. “Grant your wish or… what, bastard son of Thetis?”
“Or else I will feed Zeus’s liver to that starving dog of Odysseus’ in the courtyard,” Achilles says firmly.
Zeus smiles and shakes his head. “Do you know why you are alive this very day, insect?”
“Because I am Achilles, son of Peleus,” says Achilles, stepping forward. He wishes he had his throwing spear. “The greatest warrior and noblest hero on Earth—invulnerable to his enemies—friend of the murdered Patroclus, slave and servant to no man… or god.”
Zeus shakes his head again. “You’re not the son of Peleus.”
Achilles stops advancing. “What are you talking about, Lord of Flies? Lord of Horse Dung? I am the son of Peleus who is the son of Aeacus, son of the mortal who mated with the immortal sea goddess Thetis, a king myself descended from a long line of kings of the Myrmidons.”
“No,” says Zeus and this time the giant god is the one who steps closer, towering over Achilles. “You are the son of Thetis, but the bastard son of my seed, not the seed of Peleus’.”
“You!” Achilles tries to laugh but it comes out a hoarse bark. “My immortal mother told me in all truth that…”
“Your immortal mother lies through her seaweed-crusted teeth,” laughs Zeus. “Almost three decades ago, I desired Thetis. She was less than a full goddess then, although more beautiful than most of you mortals. But the Fates—those accursed bean counters with the DNA-memory abacuses—warned me that any child I spawned with Thetis could be my undoing, could cause my death, could bring down the reign of Olympos itself.”
Achilles stares hate and disbelief through his helmet eyeholes.
“But I wanted Thetis,” continues Zeus. “So I fucked her. But first I morphed into the form of Peleus—some common mortal boy-man with whom Thetis was mildly infatuated at the time. But the sperm that conceived you is Zeus’s divine seed, Achilles, son of Thetis, make no mistake about that. Why else do you think your mother took you far away from that idiot Peleus and had you raised by an old centaur?”
“You lie,” growls Achilles.
Zeus shakes his head almost sadly. “And you will die in a second, young Achilles,” says the Father of All Gods and Men. “But you will die knowing that I told you the truth.”
“You can’t kill me, Lord of Crabs.”
Zeus rubs his beard. “No, I can’t. Not directly. Thetis saw to that. When she learned that I had been the lover who knocked her up, not that dickless worm Peleus, she also knew of the Fates’ prediction and that I would kill you as surely as my father, Kronos, ate his offspring rather than risk their revolts and vendettas when they grew up. And I would have done that, young Achilles—eaten you when you were a babe—had not Thetis conspired to dip you in the probability flames of the pure quantum celestial fire. You are a quantum freak unique unto the universe, bastard son of Thetis and Zeus. Your death—and even I do not know the details of it, the Fates will not share them—is absolutely appointed.”
“Then fight me now, God of Feces,” shouts Achilles and begins to advance, sword and shield ready.
Zeus holds up one hand. Achilles is frozen in place. Time itself seems to freeze.
“I cannot kill you, my impetuous little bastard,” mutters Zeus, as if to himself, “but what if I blast your flesh from your bone and then rip that very flesh into its constituent cells and molecules? It might take a while for even the quantum universe to reassemble you—centuries per-haps?—and I don’t think it could possibly be a painless process.”
Frozen in midstride, Achilles knows that he is still able to speak but does not.
“Or perhaps I could send you somewhere,” says Zeus, gesturing toward the ceiling, “where there is no air to breathe. That will be an interesting conundrum for the probability singularity of the celestial fire to solve.”
“There is no place outside the oceans with no air to breathe,” snarls Achilles, but then he remembers his gasping and weakness on the high slopes of Olympos just the day before.
“Outer space would give the lie to that assertion,” says Zeus with a maddening smile. “Somewhere beyond the orbit of Uranus, perhaps, or out in the Kuiper Belt. Or Tartarus would serve. The air there is mostly methane and ammonia—it would turn your lungs to burned twigs—but if you survived a few hours in terrible pain, you could commune with your grandparents. They eat mortals, you know.”
“Fuck you,” shouts Achilles.
“So be it,” says Zeus. “Have a good trip, my son. Short—agonizing—but good.”
The King of the Gods moves his right hand in a short, easy arc and the paving tiles beneath Achilles’ feet begin to dissolve. A circle opens in the floor of Odysseus’ banquet hall until the fleet-footed mankiller seems to be standing on flame-lighted air. From beneath him, from the horrific pit below filled with surging sulfurous clouds, black mountains rising like rotten teeth, lakes of liquid lead, the bubble and flow of hissing lava, and the shadowy movement of huge, inhuman things, comes the constant roar and bellow of the monsters once called Titans.
Zeus moves his hand again, ever so slightly, and Achilles falls into that pit. He does not scream as he disappears.
After a minute of gazing down at the flames and roiling black clouds so far below, Zeus moves his palm from left to right, the circle closes, the floor becomes solid and is made up of Odysseus’ handset tiles once again, and silence returns to the house except for the pathetic baying of the starving hound named Argus out in the courtyard somewhere.
Zeus sighs and quantum teleports away to begin his reckoning with the unsuspecting gods.
58
Prospero stayed behind as Moira led Harman around the marble balcony with no railing, up a moving flight of open iron stairs, then around again, up again, and so until the floor of the Taj became a circle seemingly miles below. Harman’s heart was pounding.
There were a few small, round windows set into the booklined wall of the endlessly rising and inward-curving dome. Harman had not seen them from below or from outside, but they allowed light in and gave him an excuse to pause for breath and courage. They stood in the light for a minute as Harman stared out at the distant mountain peaks shining icily in the late morning light. Masses of clouds had filled the valleys to the north and east, hiding the ripple-crevassed glaciers from view. Harman wondered how far he was looking beyond the peaks and glaciers and massing clouds to the dusty and nearly curved horizon be-yond—a hundred miles? Two hundred miles? More?
“It’s all right,” Moira said softly.
Harman turned.
“What you did to wake me,” she said. “It’s all right. We’re sorry. You really did have no choice. The mechanisms to incite you were in place before your father’s father’s great-great-grandfather was born.”
“But what are the odds that I would be descended from this Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep of yours?” said Harman. He could not hide the regret in his voice—nor did he want to.
Surprisingly, Moira laughed. It was Savi’s laugh—quick and spontaneous—but lacking the edge of bitterness Harman had heard in the older woman’s amusement. “The odds are one hundred percent,” said Moira.
Harman could only show his confusion in silence.
“Ferdinand Mark Alonzo made sure that when the next line of old-style humans were being… readied and decanted,” said Moira,”that some of his chromosomes would be in all males of the line.”
“No wonder we’re feeble and stupid and inept,” said Harman. “We’re all a bunch of inbred cousins.” He’d sigled a book on basic genetics less than three weeks earlier—although it seemed like years ago. Ada had been sleeping next to him while he watched the golden words flow from the book down his hand, wrist, and arm.