Ilium (27 page)

Not now. I lifted above the street, invisible as I flew above the spearmen standing guard at the main entrance to Paris’s and Helen’s compound, crossed the high wall, and landed on one of the balconies of the inner courtyard outside the couple’s private apartments. Heart pounding, I entered the open doorway through blowing curtains. My sandals were almost silent on the stone floor. The compound’s dogs would have detected me—the Hades Helmet was no disguiser of scent—but the dogs were all on the ground floor and in the outer courtyard, not up here where the royal couple lived.

Helen was in her bath. Three female servants attended her, their bare feet leaving moist tracks as they carried warm water up and down marble steps leading to the sunken tub. Gauzy curtains surrounded the bath itself, but since the brazier tripods and the hanging lamps were inside the bathing area, the flimsy curtain material provided no obstacle to sight. Still invisible, I stood just outside the softly stirring fabric and stared at Helen in her bath.

So these are the boobs that launched a thousand ships,
I thought, and immediately cursed myself for being such a jerk.

Shall I describe her to you? Shall I explain why the heat of her beauty, her naked beauty, can move men across three thousand years and more of cold time?

I think not—and not out of discretion or decorum. Helen’s beauty is beyond my poor powers of description. Having seen so many women’s breasts, was there anything unique about Helen’s soft, full breasts? Or something more perfect about the triangle of dark hair between her thighs? Or more exciting about her pale, muscled thighs? Or more amazing about her milky white buttocks and strong back and small shoulders?

Of course there was. But I’m not the man to tell you the difference. I was a minor scholar and—in my fantasies in my lost life—perhaps a novelist. It would take a poet beyond Homer, beyond Dante, even beyond Shakespeare to do justice to Helen’s beauty.

I stepped out of the bathing room, into the coolness of an empty terrace outside her bedroom, and touched the thin bracelet that allowed me to morph into other forms. The control panel of the bracelet only glowed when I called on it, but it spoke to my thumb with symbols and images. On it were stored the morphing data for all the men I had recorded in the past nine years. Theoretically, I could have morphed into a woman, but I had never found reason to do so and I certainly didn’t this night.

You have to understand something about morphing; it is not a reshaping of molecules and steel and flesh and bone into another shape. I don’t have a clue how morphing works, although a short-lived Twenty-first Century scholic named Hayakawa tried to explain his theory to me five or six years ago. Hayakawa kept stressing the conservation of matter and energy—whatever that is—but I paid little attention to that part of his explanation.

Evidently, morphing works on the quantum level of things. What doesn’t with these gods? Hayakawa asked me to imagine all the human beings here, including him and me, as standing probability waves. On the quantum level, he said, human beings—and everything else in the physical universe—exist from instant to instant as a sort of collapsing wavefront—molecules, memory, old scars, emotions, whiskers, beer breath, everything. These bracelets the gods gave us recorded probability waves and allowed us to interrupt and store the originals—and, for a short time, merge our own probability waves with the stored ones, take our own memories and will along into a new body when we morphed. Why this didn’t violate Hayakawa’s beloved conservation of mass and energy, I don’t know . . . but he kept insisting it did not.

This usurpation of another’s form and action is why we scholics almost always morphed into minor figures in the battle for Troy; literal spear carriers like the unnamed bodyguard whose form I had assumed after Dolon’s. If we were to become Odysseus, say, or Hector or Achilles or Agamemnon, we would look the part but the behavior would be our own—far inferior to the heroic character of the real person—and every minute we inhabited his form, we would carry actual events further and further from this unfolding reality that so paralleled the
Iliad
.

I have no idea where the real person went when we morphed into him. Perhaps the probability wave of that person simply floated around on the quantum level, no longer collapsing into what we called reality until we were finished with his form and voice. Perhaps the probability wave was stored in the bracelet we carried or in some machine or god’s microchip on Mons Olympos. I don’t know and don’t especially care. I once asked Hayakawa, shortly before he displeased the Muse and disappeared forever, if we could use the morphing bracelet to change into one of the gods. Hayakawa had laughed and said, “The gods protect their probability waves, Hockenberry. I wouldn’t try to mess with them.”

Now I triggered the bracelet and flicked through the hundreds of men I’d recorded there until I found the one I wanted.
Paris
. It’s probable that the Muse would have ended my existence if she’d even known that I had scanned Paris for future morphing. Scholics don’t interfere.

Where is Paris right now?
Thumb over the activate icon, I tried to remember. The events of this afternoon and this evening—the confrontation between Hector and Paris and Helen, the meeting of Hector and his wife and son on the walls—all occurred near the end of Book Six of the
Iliad
. Didn’t they?

I couldn’t think. My chest ached with loneliness. My head was swimming, as if I’d been drinking all afternoon.

Yes, the end of Book Six. Hector leaves Andromache and Paris does catch up to him before Hector leaves the city—or just as Hector leaves the city. How had my favorite translation gone?
“Nor did Paris linger long in his vaulted halls.”
Helen’s new husband had buckled on his armor, as promised, and rushed out to join Hector and the two of them had strode through the Scaean Gates together, into more battle. I remember writing a paper for a scholarly convention in which I’d analyzed Homer’s metaphor of Paris racing along like a stallion breaking free of its tether, hair streaming like a mane back over his shoulders, eager for battle, blah, blah, blah.

Where is Paris now? After dark? What have I missed while wandering the streets and staring at Helen’s lights and Helen’s tits?

That was in Book Seven, and I’d always thought that Book Seven of the
Iliad
was a confusing, cobbled-together mess. It ended that long day that had begun in Book Two with Paris killing the Achaean named Menesthius and Hector slashing Eioneus’ throat. So much for husbandly hugs and fatherly embraces. Then there was more fighting and Hector had taken on Big Ajax in one-on-one combat and . . .

What? Nothing much. Ajax had been winning—he was the better fighter—but then the gods started quarreling about outcome again, there had been a lot of talk by the Greeks and Trojans, a lot of bluster blown back and forth, and a truce, and Hector and Ajax had swapped armor and acted like old pals, and then they all agreed to a truce while they gathered the dead for corpse fires, and . . .

Where the hell is Paris this night? Does he stay with Hector and the army to supervise the truce, speak at the funeral rituals? Or does he act more in character and come to Helen’s bed?

“Who gives a shit,” I said aloud and thumbed the activation icon on the bracelet and morphed into the form of Paris.

I was still invisible, decked out in Hades Helmet, levitation harness, everything.

I took off the helmet and everything else except the morphing bracelet and the small QT medallion hanging around my neck, hiding the gear behind a tripod in the corner of the balcony. Now I was only Paris in his war gear. I took off the armor and left it on the balcony as well, appearing now only as Paris in his soft tunic. If the Muse swooped down on me now, I had no defense except to QT away.

I walked back through the balcony curtains into the bathing area. Helen looked up in surprise as I parted the curtains.

“My lord?” she said, and I saw first the defiance in her eyes and then the downward-cast gaze of what might have been apology and self-subordination for her earlier harsh words. “Leave us,” she snapped at the servants and the women left on wet feet.

Helen of Troy came slowly up the steps of the bath toward me, her hair dry except for the wet strands over her shoulder blades and breasts, her head still lowered but her eyes looking up at me now through her lashes. “What will you have of me, my husband?”

I had to try twice before my voice would work properly. Finally, in Paris’s voice, I said, “Come to bed.”

19

They walked from green globule to green globule on the Golden Gate, down unmoving escalators and across green-glass-enclosed walkways connecting the giant cables that supported the roadway so far below. Odysseus walked with them.

“Are you really the Odysseus from the turin drama?” asked Hannah.

“I’ve never seen the turin drama,” said the man.

Ada noticed that the man who called himself Odysseus had not really confirmed or denied anything, just sidestepped the question.

“How did you get here?” asked Harman. “And where did you come
from?
”

“It is a complicated answer,” said Odysseus. “I have been traveling for some time now, trying to find my way home. This is only a stop on the way, a place to rest, and I shall be leaving in a few weeks. I would prefer to tell some of my story later, if you don’t mind. Perhaps when we dine this evening. Savi
Uhr
may be able to help me make sense of parts of my tale.”

Ada thought that it was very strange to hear someone speak Common English as if it were not his native tongue; she had never heard an accent before. There were not even regional dialects in Ada’s fax-based world, where everyone lived everywhere—and nowhere.

The six emerged on the top of the tower where Savi had landed the sonie earlier. They emerged just as the sun was touching the top of southernmost of the two sharp peaks that anchored the bridge. The wind from the west was strong and cold. They walked to the railing at the edge of the platform and looked down at the sloping, grassy saddle with its terraced ruins more than eight hundred feet below.

“The last time I came to the Golden Gate, three weeks ago,” said Savi, “Odysseus was in one of the cryotemporal sarcophagi where I usually sleep. His arrival—and what it means—is the reason I finally contacted you, why I left those directions on the rock in the Dry Valley.”

Ada, Harman, Hannah, and Daeman stared at the old woman, obviously not understanding the terms or real meaning of her statement. Savi did not explain. The four waited for Odysseus to say something that would enlighten them.

“What is for dinner?” asked Odysseus.

“More of the same,” said Savi.

The bearded man shook his head. “No.” He pointed a broad, blunt finger at Harman, then again at Daeman. “You two. There is an hour of twilight left. A good time of day for hunting. Do you want to come with me?”

“No!” said Daeman.

“Yes,” said Harman.

“I want to come,” said Ada, surprised at the urgency in her own voice. “Please.”

Odysseus stared at her a long moment. “Yes,” he said at last.

“I should join you,” said Savi. She sounded dubious.

“I know how to handle your machine,” said Odysseus, nodding toward the sonie.

“I know, but . . .” Savi touched the black weapon in her belt.

“No need,” said Odysseus. “It’s just food I’m seeking, not a war. There will be no voynix down there.”

Savi still hesitated.

Odysseus looked at Ada and Harman. “Wait here. I’ll be back as soon as I get my spear and shield.”

Harman laughed before he realized that the barrel-chested man in the pale tunic was not joking.

Odysseus did indeed know how to fly the sonie. They lifted off the tower top, circled the high saddle with its ruins throwing complicated shadows in the low sunlight, and swooped down a valley at high speed.

“I thought you meant you’d be hunting below the bridge,” said Harman over the wind hiss.

Odysseus shook his head. Ada noticed that the man’s silver hair fell down his neck like a curly mane. “Nothing there except jaguars and chipmunks and ghosts,” said Odysseus. “We have to get out on the plains to find game. And there’s one prey in particular that I have in mind.”

They flew out of the canyon mouth and mountains at high speed and soared over high grasslands sprinkled with towering cycads and fern-topped trees. The sun was setting but still above the mountains, and everything on the plain threw long shadows. A herd appeared below—large grazing animals that Ada could not identify, brown hides with white-striped butts. The hundreds of creatures were antelopelike in form but each was three times an antelope’s size, with long, strangely jointed legs, long flexible necks, and dangling snouts that looked like pink hoses. The sonie made no noise as it swooped over them and none of the grazing animals even looked up.

“What are they?” asked Harman.

“Edible,” said Odysseus. He circled lower and landed the sonie behind some high fern shrubs some thirty yards downwind of the grazing herd. The sun was setting.

In addition to two absurdly long spears—each was almost as long as the sonie and the butts and shafts of the spears had protruded well beyond the forcefield bubble and stern of the flying machine—Odysseus had brought a round shield made of intricately worked bronze and layers of ox-hide, as well as a short sword in a scabbard and a knife tucked into the belt of his tunic. To Ada—who had gone under the turin cloth more frequently than she had admitted to Harman—this juxtaposition of a man from the fantastical turin drama of Troy with her world, or this wild version of her world, made her somewhat dizzy. She rose and started to follow Odysseus and Harman away from the landed sonie.

“No,” snapped Odysseus. “You stay with the vehicle.”

“The hell I will,” said Ada.

Odysseus sighed and spoke to them in a whisper. “Both of you stand here, behind this bush. Don’t move. If anything approaches, get in the sonie and activate the forcefield.”

“I don’t know how to do that,” whispered Harman.

“I left the AI active,” said Odysseus. “Just lie down in it and say ‘forcefield on.’ “

Carrying both spears, Odysseus went out onto the grassy plain, walking slowly and silently toward the grazing beasts. Ada could hear the floppy-nosed animals grunting and munching, could hear the grass being snapped off by their teeth, and could smell their strong scent. They did not run in alarm when the man approached, and when the animals on the edge of the herd finally looked up, Odysseus was within forty feet. He stopped, set down one spear and his shield, and hefted the other long spear.

The grazing animals had quit chewing and were watching the strange biped carefully now, but they did not seem alarmed.

Odysseus’ powerful body coiled, arced, and released. The spear flew flat and straight, hitting the closest animal above the chest and almost passing through its long, thick neck. It whirled, made a strangled noise, and fell heavily.

The other grazers snorted, bleated, and ran hard—each animal zigging and zagging in a way Ada had never seen before, the grazers’ oddly jointed legs allowing almost instant changes of direction—until the entire herd thundered out of sight down a draw a mile or so to the north.

Odysseus dropped to one knee next to the dead animal and pulled the short, curved knife from his belt. With a few quick strokes he opened the abdominal cavity, pulled out organs and entrails—tossing them onto the grass except for what looked to be the liver, which he set on a small plastic tarp he had laid out next to him—and then sliced the hide back from one haunch, cutting a thick slice of red meat free and setting it on the tarp as well. Then he cut the dead animal’s throat, draining more blood onto the grass, and tugged his spear free, taking care not to break it. He carefully wiped the shaft and bronze point on the grass.

Still standing near the bush, Ada felt a wave of dizziness pass over her and decided to sit down on the grass rather than run the risk of fainting. Ada had never seen an animal killed by a human being, much less butchered and partially skinned so expertly. It was terribly . . .
efficient
. Ashamed of her reaction but not wanting to faint, she lowered her head toward her knees until black spots quit dancing around the circle of her vision.

Harman touched her back in concern, but when she waved him away, he began walking out toward the carcass.

“Stay there,” called Odysseus.

Harman paused, confused. “They’re gone. Do you need help carrying . . .”

Odysseus held up one palm to keep Harman where he was. “This isn’t what I’m hunting for. This is . . .
Don’t move
.”

Harman and Ada turned their faces to the west. Two white-and-black-and-red bipedal forms were approaching at very high speed, faster even than the grazers had fled. Ada felt her breath catch in her throat and saw Harman freeze.

The creatures ran toward the bloody grazer carcass and the kneeling Odysseus at more than sixty miles per hour, then skidded to a stop in a small cloud of dust. Ada saw that they were the birds they’d seen from the sonie—
Terror Birds,
Savi had called them—but what had been strangely amusing from high in the air, ostrichlike creatures strutting like awkward chicks—turned out to be, in truth, terrifying.

The two Terror Birds had stopped five paces from the carcass, their eyes on Odysseus now. Each bird was more than nine feet tall, with short white feathers on their muscular bodies, black feathers on their vestigial wings, and powerful legs as thick as Ada’s torso. The birds’ beaks had to be at least four feet long, wickedly curved, red around the mouth—as if dipped in blood—and controlled by powerful jaw muscles that bulged below the half-dozen long red feathers that protruded from the back of each Terror Bird’s skull. Their eyes were a terrible, malevolent yellow ringed by blue circles and set under saurian brows. In addition to their rending predator beaks, the birds had powerful footclaws—each as long as Ada’s forearm—and an even more wicked-looking claw at the bend of each vestigial wing.

Ada knew at once that this monster was no mere scavenger, but a terrible predator.

Odysseus rose, a long spear in his left hand and his bloodied spear in his right hand. The Terror Birds’ heads snapped back in unison, yellow eyes blinked at yellow eyes, and the hunting pair moved apart like well-choreographed dancers, preparing to attack Odysseus from either side. Ada could
smell
the carrion reek of the monsters. She had no doubt that those powerful, naked legs could propel each Terror Bird twenty feet or more at its prey—Odysseus—in a single hop, claws extended and ripping as the one-ton monsters landed. It was also obvious that the pair worked perfectly as a killing team.

Odysseus did not wait for them to get into position or attack. With lethal grace he cast his first spear—flat and straight and hard—into the muscled breast of the Terror Bird on his left, then wheeled to face the second bird. The first bird let out a terrible screech that froze Ada’s lungs, but it was matched a second later by a roar and howl from Odysseus as he sprang across the grazer carcass, tossed the second killing spear from his left hand to his right, and thrust the bronze point at the second Terror Bird’s right eye.

The first bird staggered backward, clawing at the spear protruding from its chest, snapping off the thick oak shaft. The second bird dodged Odysseus’ thrust by whipping its head back like a cobra’s. Obviously taken by surprise by being attacked by this small featherless biped, the bird hopped twice—carrying it ten feet backward—and clawed at the parrying spear.

Odysseus had to whip the unwieldy spear back quickly after each thrust to keep from having it torn out of his hands. Still shouting, the man stepped backward and seemed to trip over the bloody grazer carcass, rolling on his side.

The uninjured Terror Bird saw its chance and took it, leaping six feet into the air and coming down on Odysseus with talons and killing claws extended.

Still rolling, Odysseus came to one knee in a single fluid movement and planted the butt of the spear in the ground an instant before the Terror Bird came down on it with the full weight of its body driving the bronze point home, up through its muscled chest, into its awful heart. Odysseus had to roll again to get out of its way as the huge creature crashed lifeless where he had been kneeling.

“Look out!” cried Harman and began running toward the fray.

The first Terror Bird—pouring blood from the spear wound and broken shaft still embedded in his chest—was rushing at Odysseus’ back. The bird’s head snapped forward on six feet of feathered-snake neck and the huge beak snapped where Odysseus’ head would have to be if he retreated. But the warrior had thrown himself forward rather than back, rolling again, but with empty hands this time as the Terror Bird ran past him and then wheeled, twisting and turning almost as impossibly fast as had the oddly jointed grazers.

“Hey!” shouted Harman and threw a rock at the giant bird.

The Terror Bird’s head snapped high, the yellow eyes blinked at the impertinence, and the huge predator kicked forward toward Harman, who skidded in the dirt, said “Shit!” in a high voice, and scrambled back the way he had come. Suddenly Harman realized that he couldn’t outrun the monster, and he turned, legs apart, fists raised, ready to meet the Terror Bird’s charge with his bare hands.

Ada looked around for a rock, a stick, a weapon of any sort. There was none in reach. She leaped to her feet.

Odysseus swept up his shield and—using the grazer’s carcass as a springboard—jumped aboard the Terror Bird’s back, pulling his short sword from its scabbard as he did so.