Ilium (22 page)

Blix shakes his head, his mouth sagging open. He sleeps in boxer shorts and a stained undershirt.

“Hockenberry!” demands the impatient Muse. “Nightenhelser says that he went to Ilium, but he’s not there. He hasn’t reported to me. Have you seen any of the day-shift scholics come through here?”

“No, Goddess,” says poor Blix, bowing his head in some sort of approximation of deference.

“Go back to bed,” the Muse says disgustedly. She strides outside, looks downhill toward the shore where the green men strain hauling their stone heads from the quarry, and then she QT’s away with a soft clap of inrushing air.

I could follow her trail through phase-shift space, but . . . why? She obviously wants the helmet and the medallion back. With Aphrodite in the vat, I’m a loose cannon to her—it is my bet that besides Aphrodite, only the Muse knows that I’ve been outfitted as a spy with these gadgets.

And perhaps even the Muse does not know how Aphrodite plans to use me—

To spy on Athena and then to kill her.

Why? Even if Zeus’s harsh words to his son, Ares, are true—that gods can die the True Death—is it possible for a mere mortal to do them in? Diomedes had done his best this day to kill two gods.

And did manage to put two of the gods out of action, floating in vats with green worms working on them.

I shake my head. Suddenly I’m very tired and very confused. My effort to defy the gods, only twenty-fours old now, has all but ended. Aphrodite will have me terminated by this time tomorrow.

Where to go?

I can’t hide from the gods for very long, and if it becomes obvious that I’m trying, Aphrodite will have my guts for garters that much sooner. As soon as the Goddess of Love is back in action tomorrow, she’ll see me—find me.

I can QT back to the battlefield below Ilium and allow myself to be found by the Muse. It may be my best chance. Even if she appropriates my gear, she will probably allow me to live until Aphrodite is devatted. What do I have to lose?

One day.
Aphrodite will be in the vat for one day, and none of the other gods can see me or find me until she’s back.
One day.

Effectively, I have one day left to live.

With that in mind, I finally decide where I am going.

16

The four travelers decided to eat after all.

Savi disappeared into one of her lighted tunnels for a few minutes and returned with warmer dishes—chicken, heated rice, curried peppers, and strips of grilled lamb. The four had munched on their food in Ulanbat hours earlier, but now they ate with enthusiasm.

“If you’re weary,” said Savi, “you can sleep here tonight before we head off. There are comfortable sleeping areas in some of the nearby rooms.”

Each said he or she was not that tired—it was only late afternoon Paris Crater time. Daeman looked around, swallowed some of the grilled lamb he was chewing, and said, “Why do you live in a . . .” He turned to Harman. “What did you call it?”

“An iceberg,” said Harman.

Daeman nodded and chewed and turned back to Savi. “Why do you live in an iceberg?”

The woman smiled. “This particular home of mine might be the result of . . . let’s say . . . an old woman’s nostalgia.” When she saw Harman looking at her intently, she added, “I was on a sort of sabbatical in a ‘berg much like this when the final fax went on without me fourteen of your allotted life spans ago.”

“I thought that everyone was stored during the final fax,” said Ada. She wiped her fingers on a beautiful tan linen napkin. “All the millions of old-style humans.”

Savi shook her head. “Not millions, my dear. There were just a few more than nine thousand of us when the posts carried out their final fax. As far as I can tell, none of those people—many of them my friends—were reconstituted after the Hiatus. All of us survivors of the pandemic were Jews, you know, because of our resistance to the rubicon virus.”

“What are Jews?” asked Hannah. “Or what
were
Jews?”

“Mostly a theoretical race construct,” said Savi. “A semidistinct genetic group brought about by cultural and religious isolation over several thousand years.” She paused and looked at her four guests. Only Harman’s expression suggested that he might have the slightest clue to what she was talking about.

“It doesn’t really matter,” Savi said softly. “But it’s why you heard of me referred to as ‘the Wandering Jew,’ Harman. I became a myth. A legend. The phrase ‘Wandering Jew’ survived after the meaning was lost.” She smiled again, but with no visible humor.

“How did you miss the final fax?” asked Harman. “Why did the post-humans leave you behind?”

“I don’t know. I’ve asked myself that question for centuries. Perhaps so that I could serve as . . . witness.”

“Witness?” said Ada. “To what?”

“There were many strange changes in heaven and Earth in the centuries before and after the final fax, my dear. Perhaps the posts felt that someone—even if just one old-style human being—should bear witness to all these changes.”

“Many changes?” said Hannah. “I don’t really understand.”

“No, my dear, you wouldn’t, would you? You and your parents and your parents’ parents’ parents have known a world that does not seem to change at all, except for some of the individuals—and there only at a steady pace of a century per person. No, the changes I’m talking about were not all visible, to be sure. But this is not the Earth that the original old-styles or the early posts once knew.”

“What’s the difference?” asked Daeman, his tone showing everyone how little the answer might interest him.

Savi trained her clear gray-blue eyes on him. “For one thing—a small thing to be sure, certainly small when compared to all the others, but important to me, nonetheless—there are no other Jews.”

She showed them the way to private toilet areas and suggested that they remove their thermskins for the voyage.

“Won’t we need them?” asked Daeman.

“It’ll be cold getting to the sonie,” said Savi. “But we’ll manage. And you won’t need them after that.”

Ada changed out of her thermskin and was back in the main room on the couch, looking at the ice walls and thinking about all this, when Savi came out of a different side chamber. The older woman was wearing thicker trousers than before, stronger and higher boots, a lined cape, and a cap pulled low, her hair pulled back in a gray ponytail. She was carrying a faded khaki backpack that looked heavy. Ada had never seen a woman dress quite like this and was fascinated by the old woman’s style. She realized that she was fascinated by Savi in general.

Harman was also fascinated, it seemed, but with the weapon still visible in Savi’s belt. “You’re still considering shooting one of us?” he asked.

“No,” said Savi. “At least not right now. But there are other things that may need shooting from time to time.”

The walk up and out of the interior and across the surface to the sonie
was
cold—the wind was still howling and the snow was still pelting—but the machine was warm under its bubble forcefield. Savi took the front spot that Harman had occupied during the flight out and Ada settled into her place on the right, noticing that when Savi passed her hand over the black cowl under the handgrip, a holographic control panel appeared.

“Where did
that
come from?” asked Harman from his spot to the left of the old woman. One occupant indentation was still empty between Daeman and Hannah.

“It wouldn’t have been a good idea for you to try to fly the sonie on your way here,” said Savi. She checked to make sure that everyone was settled in and secure in their prone positions; then she tweaked the handgrip, the machine hummed deeply, and they rose vertically seven or eight hundred feet above the ice, did a full inverted loop—the forcefield kept them pressed in their places but it
felt
as if there was nothing but air standing between them and a terrible death falling to the blue ice and black sea so far below—and then the machine righted itself, banked left, and climbed steeply toward the stars.

When the machine was flying northwest at high speed and serious altitude, Harman said, “Can this take us there?” He gestured with his left hand, his fingers pressing into the elastic forcefield above him.

“Where?” said Savi, still concentrating on the holographic displays in front of her. She raised her eyes. “The p-ring?”

Harman was almost on his back, staring up at the polar ring moving north to south above them—the tens of thousands of individual components burning startlingly bright in the clear, thin air at this altitude. “Yes,” he said.

Savi shook her head. “This is a sonie, not a spacecraft. The p-ring is
high
. Why would you want to go up there?”

Harman ignored the question. “Do you know where we could find a spacecraft?”

The old woman smiled again. Watching Savi carefully, Ada was noticing the variety of the woman’s expressions—the smiles with real warmth, those with none, and this kind, that suggested something actively cold or ironic.

“Perhaps,” she said, but her tone warned against further questioning.

Hannah asked, “Did you actually meet post-humans?”

“Yes,” said Savi, raising her voice slightly to be heard above the sonie’s hum as they hurtled northward. “I actually met some.”

“What were they like?” Hannah’s voice was slightly wistful.

“First off, they were all women,” said Savi.

Harman blinked at this. “They were?”

“Yes. A lot of us suspected that only a few posts ever came down to earth, but that they used different forms. All female. Perhaps there were no male post-humans. Perhaps they didn’t retain gender as they controlled their own evolution. Who knows?”

“Did they have names?” asked Daeman.

Savi nodded. “The one I knew best . . . well, the one I saw the most . . . was named Moira.”

“What were they like?” Hannah asked again. “Their personalities? Their looks?”

“They preferred floating to walking,” Savi said cryptically. “They liked to throw parties for us old-styles. They tended to speak in delphic riddles.”

There was silence for a minute except for the wind rushing over the polycarbon hull and the forcefield bubble. Finally Ada said, “Did they come down from their rings much?”

Savi shook her head again. “Not much. Very rarely toward the end, in the last years before the final fax. But it was rumored that they had some installations in the Mediterranean Basin.”

“Mediterranean Basin?” said Harman.

Savi smiled and Ada thought it was one of her amused smiles.

“A thousand years before the final fax, the posts drained a sizable sea south of Europe—dammed it up between a rock called Gibraltar and the tip of North Africa—and made it out of bounds for old-styles. A lot of it was turned to farmland—so the posts told us—but I did some trespassing there before being discovered and tossed out, and I found that there were . . . well, cities might be the best description, if something solid state can be called a city.”

“Solid state?” said Hannah.

“Never mind, child.”

Harman was prone again, on his elbows. He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of this Mediterranean Basin. Or Gibraltar. Or . . . what was it? North Africa.”

“I know you’ve discovered a few maps, Harman, and learned how to read them . . . after a fashion,” said Savi. “But they were poor maps. And old. The few books that the post-humans allowed to survive to this postliterate age were vague . . . harmless.”

Harman frowned again. They flew north in silence.

The sonie carried them out of the polar night into afternoon light, away from the dark ocean, and across land at a height they could only guess at and at a speed they could only dream of. The p-ring faded as the sky grew blue and the e-ring became visible to the north.

They crossed land hidden by tall white clouds, then saw high, snow-covered peaks and glacial valleys far below. Savi swooped the sonie lower, east of the peaks, and they flew a few thousand feet above rain forest and green savannahs, still moving so quickly that more peaks appeared like dots above the horizon and then grew into mountains in mere minutes.

“Is this South America?” asked Harman.

“It used to be,” said Savi.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that the continents have changed quite a bit since any of the maps you’ve seen were drawn,” said the old woman. “And they had quite a few more names since then as well. Did the maps you saw show this landmass connected to the one called North America?”

“Yes.”

“No more.” She touched the holographic symbols, twisted the handgrip, and the sonie flew lower. Ada rose up on her elbows, hair against the forcefield bubble, and looked around. Silently, except for the rush of air over their force bubble, the sonie flew just above treetop height—cycads, giant ferns, ancient, leafless trees flicked past. To the west rose the foothills along the line of high peaks. Farther east, rolling grasslands were dotted with more of these primitive trees. Large animals lumbered like mobile boulders near the rivers and lakes. Grazing animals with improbable snouts were streaked with white, brown, tan, red. Ada could identify none of them

Suddenly a herd of these grazing animals stampeded past a hundred feet beneath the sonie, all panicked, fleeing for their lives. After them loped half a dozen birdlike creatures—massive, eight feet tall or taller, Ada guessed, with wild feather plumage flying back from the largest beaks and the ugliest faces Ada had ever seen. The grazing animals were running fast—thirty or forty miles per hour Ada guessed in the seconds before the sonie carried them out of sight—but the birds were moving faster, perhaps sixty miles per hour, four times as fast as any droshky or carriole that Ada or the other three had ever ridden in.

“What . . .” began Hannah.

“Terror Birds,” said Savi. “
Phorushacos
. After the rubicon, the ARNists had a wild few centuries of such play. It’s sort of fitting, since the real Terror Birds wandered these plains and hills about two million years ago, but that kind of recombinant crap—like your dinosaurs up north—plays havoc with the ecology. The posts promised to clean it all up during the final fax Hiatus, but they didn’t.”

“What’s an ARNist?” asked Ada. The animals—red-beaked Terror Birds and prey alike—were out of sight behind them. Larger herds with larger animals were visible now to the west, being stalked by tigerish-looking things. The sonie swung higher and turned toward the foothills.

Savi sighed as if weary. “RNA artists. Recombinant freelancers. Social rebels and merry pranksters with sequencers and bootleg regen tanks.” She looked over at Ada, then at Harman, then back at Daeman and Hannah. “Never mind, children,” she said.

They flew another fifteen minutes above steaming forests and then turned west into a mountain range. Clouds moved around and between the mountain peaks below them and snow whipped around the sonie, but somehow the forcefield kept the elements at bay.

Savi touched a glowing image; the sonie slowed, circled, and turned west toward the late-afternoon sun. They were very high.

“Oh my,” said Harman.

Ahead of them, two sharp peaks rose on either side of a narrow saddle covered by grassy terraces and truly ancient ruins, stone walls with no roofs. A bridge—also from the Lost Age but obviously not as ancient as the stone ruins—ran from one of the sharp-toothed peaks to the other above the ruins. There was no road beyond the suspension bridge—the roadway ended in a wall of rock at both ends—and the foundations were sunk into rock between the ruins below.