Ilium (30 page)

“I promise,” said Harman. He did kiss her then, but only on the cheek, and only the way her father might have, Ada thought, if she had ever known her father.

Harman turned as if leaving, but before Ada could command the door to iris open, he turned back toward her. “What do you think of Odysseus?” he asked.

“What do you mean? You mean, do I think he’s really Odysseus?” Ada was confused by the question.

“No. I mean what do you
think
of him? Are you interested in the man?”

“Interested in his story, you mean?” said Ada. “He’s intriguing. But I’ll have to hear what he says before I decide whether he’s telling the truth about things.”

“No, I . . .” Harman stopped and rubbed his chin. He seemed embarrassed. “I mean, do you find him
interesting
? Are you attracted to him?”

Ada had to laugh. Somewhere to the east, the receding thunder echoed the sound. “You idiot,” she said at last and, waiting no longer, walked to Harman, put her arms around him, and kissed him on the lips.

Harman responded passively for a few seconds and then embraced her and kissed her back. Through the thin silk that separated them, Ada could feel his excitement rise. Moonlight flowed over the skin of their faces and arms like spilled white milk. Suddenly a powerful gust of wind struck the bridge and the bubble of the sleeping cubbie swayed underfoot.

Harman lifted Ada and carried her to the bed.

20

“I think it’s Falstaff that made me fall out of love with the Bard.”

“What’s that?” said Mahnmut over the hardline. He was preoccupied, driving the dying submersible toward the still-out-of-sight coastline at a weakening eight knots, trying to keep the ship-functions on line, watching the skies for enemy chariots through the periscope buoy, and generally brooding about the improbability of their continued survival. Orphu had been silent down there in
The Dark Lady’
s hold for more than two hours. Now this. “What was that about Falstaff?” said Mahnmut.

“I was just saying that it was Falstaff that drove me away from Shakespeare and toward Proust,” said Orphu.

“I would have thought that you’d love Falstaff,” said Mahnmut. “He’s so funny.”

“I
did
love Falstaff,” said Orphu. “Hell, I identified with Falstaff. I wanted to
be
Falstaff. For a while, I thought I
looked
like Falstaff.”

Mahnmut tried to imagine this. He couldn’t. He returned his attention to ship’s functions and perusing the periscope. “What made you change your mind?” he asked.

“Do you remember the scene in
Henry IV, Part
1
where Falstaff finds the body of Henry Percy—Hotspur—on the battlefield?”

“Yes,” said Mahnmut. The periscope and radar showed the skies clear of chariots. He had been forced to shut down the failing reactor during the night and battery reserves were down to 4 percent, giving them only six knots now, and the power was still dropping. Mahnmut knew that he’d have to take
The Dark Lady
up to the surface again soon: every time they surfaced he brought in Martian air for his own survival, storing it in his enviro-crèche and breathing it until it got foul, funneling all the ship-produced air down to Orphu. The submersible had never been designed to open itself to Europan “atmosphere,” and he’d had to override a dozen safety protocols to let the Martian air in.

“Falstaff stabs Hotspur’s corpse in the thigh just to make sure he’s dead,” said Orphu. “Then carries Hotspur’s body on his back, trying to take credit for killing him.”

“Right,” said Mahnmut. The MPS said that they were within thirty kilometers of the coast, but there was no sign of it in the periscope, and he didn’t want to direct the radar toward land. He prepared to blow the ballast tanks and surface again, but had the dive planes ready for an emergency dive if anything showed on the radar. “
The better part of valor is discretion, in which better part I have saved my life,
” he quoted. “All the Shakespearean commentary I read—Bloom, Goddard, Bradley, Morgann, Hazlitt, and even Emerson—says that Falstaff may be one of the greatest characters Shakespeare ever created.”

“Yes,” said Orphu and stayed silent a minute while the submersible shook and rumbled to the ballast tanks being blown. When the ship was silent again except for the ocean rushing over the hull, he said, “But I find Falstaff despicable.”

“Despicable?” The sub broke the surface. It was just after dawn and the sun—so much larger than the point-star sun Mahnmut had grown up with on Europa—was just breaking free of the horizon. He opened the vents and breathed in fresh salt air.

“Wherein cunning but in craft? Wherein crafty but in villainy? Wherein villainous but in all things,”
said Orphu.

“But Prince Hal was joking when he said that.” Mahnmut decided to run on the surface. It was far more dangerous—radar had picked up a flying chariot every hour or two while they were submerged—but they could make eight knots on the surface, and stretch out their dwindling power reserves.

“Was he?” said Orphu. “He rejects the old blowhard in
Henry IV, Part
2
.”

“And Falstaff dies from it,” said Mahnmut, breathing in the clean air and thinking of Orphu down in the black and flooded hold, connected to life only by the O
₂
line and the intercom. The first time they had surfaced, Mahnmut had realized it would be impossible to get the big Ionian out of the hold until they reached land. “
The King has killed his heart,
” he said, quoting Hostess Quickly.

“I’ve decided he deserved to be rejected,” said Orphu. “When he was ordered to recruit soldiers for the war with Percy, Falstaff took bribes to let the good ones off and recruited only losers. Men he called ‘food for powder.’ “

Feeling
The Dark Lady
surging ahead faster through the low waves, Mahnmut kept monitoring the sonar, radar, and periscope. “Everyone says that Falstaff is a much more interesting character than Hal,” he said. “Funny, realistic, antimilitary, witty—Hazlitt wrote that
‘The bliss of freedom gained in humour is the essence of Falstaff.’ “

“Yes,” said Orphu. “But what kind of freedom is it? The freedom to mock everything? The freedom to be a thief and a coward?”

“Sir John
was
a knight,” said Mahnmut. Suddenly his attention focused on what Orphu was saying—Orphu the cynic and humorous commentator on the folly of moravec existence. “You sound more like Koros III,” he said.

This made Orphu rumble. “I’ll never be a warrior.”

“Was Koros a warrior? Do you think he killed moravecs during his mission to the Belt?” Mahnmut was curious.

“We’ll never know what happened in the Belt,” said Orphu, “and I doubt that Koros had any more eagerness to fight than do the rest of us peacable moravecs. But he was trained to leadership and duty—things that Falstaff mocked even in his beloved Prince Hal.”

“And you’re thinking that we’ve been called to duty here,” said Mahnmut. There was a haze to the south.

“Something like that.”

“And you think you might need to be more Hotspur than Falstaff?”

Orphu of Io rumbled again. “It may be too late for that.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.
”

“That’s not Falstaff.”

“Richard the Second,” came the voice from the hold.

“You think you’re too old for what lies ahead?” asked Mahnmut, wondering himself what might lie ahead.

“Well, I feel a little old, sans eyes, sans legs, sans hands, sans teeth, and sans shell,” said the Ionian.

“You never had teeth,” said Mahnmut. Koros’s mission had been to carry out reconnaissance near the big volcano, Olympos, and to deliver the Device in the cargo bay as close to the summit of Olympos as possible. But
The Dark Lady
was close to death and Orphu might also be dying. Even if Orphu survived, he would not be able to see or move or take care of himself if they managed to reach land. How could Mahnmut possibly deliver the Device across more than three thousand kilometers of landmass while keeping himself and his friend from being detected and destroyed by the chariot people?

Worry about that when you get the
Lady
to land and Orphu out of the hold,
he thought.
One thing at a time.
The blue sky was empty of threat, but he felt terribly exposed as the submersible continued to wallow southward through the waves. To Orphu, he said, “Does your friend Proust have any advice?”

Orphu cleared his throat with a rumble:

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done . . .

‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world . . .

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak in time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, and not to yield.

“You can’t convince me that’s Proust,” said Mahnmut. The haze to the south was resolving itself.

“No,” said Orphu. “That’s Tennyson’s
Ulysses
.”

“Who’s Ulysses?”

“Odysseus.”

“Who’s Odysseus?”

There was a shocked silence. Finally, Orphu said, “Ah, my friend, this gap in your otherwise excellent education calls out for repair. We may well need to know as much as we can about . . .”

“Wait,” said Mahnmut. And a minute later, “Wait!”

“What is it?”

“Land,” said Mahnmut. “I can see land.”

“Anything else? Any details?”

“I’m changing magnification,” said Mahnmut.

Orphu waited, but finally said, “And?”

“The stone faces,” said Mahnmut. “I see the stone faces—on the cliff tops mostly—stretching as far to the east as I can see.”

“Just to the east? None to the west?”

“No. The line of faces ends almost where we’d reach land. I can see movement there. Hundreds of people—or things—moving along the cliffs and beach.”

“We’d better dive,” said Orphu. “Wait for dark before we make landfall. Find an ocean cave or something where you can bring the
Lady
in unseen, where . . .”

“Too late,” said Mahnmut. “The ship doesn’t have more than forty minutes of life support and propulsion left in her. Besides, the shapes—the people—have given up their work moving the stone faces west. They’re coming down to the beach by the hundreds. They’ve seen us.”

21

I
could
tell you what it’s like to make love to Helen of Troy. But I won’t. And not just because it would be totally ungentlemanly of me to do so. The details are just not part of my story here. But I can say truthfully that if the vengeful Muse or maddened Aphrodite had found me a moment after Helen and I ended our first bout of lovemaking, say, a minute after we rolled apart on the sweat-moistened sheets to catch our breath and feel the cool breeze coming in ahead of the storm, and if the Muse and the goddess had crashed in and killed me then—I can tell you without fear of contradiction that the short second life of Thomas Hockenberry would have been a happy one. And at least it would have ended on a high note.

A minute after that instant of perfection, the woman was holding a dagger to my belly.

“Who are you?” demanded Helen.

“I’m your . . .” I began and stopped. Something in Helen’s eyes made me abort my lie about being Paris before I could vocalize it.

“If you say you are my new husband, I will have to sink this blade into your bowels,” she said evenly. “If you are a god, that shouldn’t matter. But if you aren’t . . .”

“I’m not,” I managed. The point of the knife was close enough to draw blood from the skin above my belly.
Where did this knife come from?
Had it been in the cushions while we were making love?

“If you aren’t a god, how have you taken Paris’s shape?”

I realized that this was Helen of Troy—the mortal daughter of Zeus—a woman who lived in a universe where gods and goddesses had sex with mortals all the time; a world where shapechangers, divine and otherwise, walked among mere humans; a world where the concept of cause and effect had completely different meanings. I said, “The gods gave me the ability to mor . . . to change appearances.”

“Who are you?” she asked. “
What
are you?” She did not seem angry, nor even especially shocked. Her voice was calm, her beautiful features undistorted by fear or fury. But the blade was steady against my belly. The woman wanted an answer.

“My name is Thomas Hockenberry,” I said. “I’m a scholic.” I knew that none of this would make sense. My name sounded strange even to me, hard-edged in the smoother tones of their ancient language.

“Tho-mas Hock-en-bear-reeee,” she mouthed. “It sounds Persian.”

“No,” I said. “Dutch and German and Irish, actually.”

I saw Helen frown and knew I was not only
not
making sense to her with these words, but was sounding actively deranged.

“Put on a robe,” she said. “We will talk on the terrace.”

Helen’s large bedroom had terraces on both sides, one looking down into the courtyard, the other looking out south and east over the city. My levitation harness and other gear—except for the QT medallion and morphing bracelet I had worn to bed—were hidden behind the curtain on the courtyard terrace. Helen led me to the outside terrace. We each wore thin robes. Helen kept her short, sharp knife in her hand as we stood at the railing in the reflected light from the city and from the occasional storm flash.

“Are you a god?” she asked.

I almost answered “yes”—it would be the easiest way to talk her out of putting that blade in my belly—but had the sudden, inexplicable, overwhelming urge to tell the truth for a change. “No,” I said. “I’m not a god.”

She nodded. “I knew you were not a god. I would have gutted you like a fish if you had lied to me about that.” She smiled grimly. “You don’t make love like a god.”

Well,
I thought, but there was nothing else to say to that.

“How is it,” she asked, “that you can take the shape and form of Paris?”

“The gods have given me the ability to do so,” I said.

“Why?” The tip of the dagger blade was only inches from my bare skin through the robe.

I shrugged, but then realizing that shrugs weren’t used by the ancients, I said, “They lent me this ability for their own purposes. I serve them. I watch the battle and report to them. It helps that I can take the shape of . . . other men.”

Helen did not seem surprised by this. “Where is my Trojan lover? What have you done to the real Paris?”

“He’s well,” I said. “When I abandon this likeness, he will return to what he was doing when I morphed . . . when I took his shape.”

“Where will he be?” asked Helen.

I thought this was a slightly strange question. “Wherever he would have been if I hadn’t borrowed his form,” I said at last. “I think he’d just left the city to join Hector for tomorrow’s fighting.” Actually, when I morph out of Paris’s form, Paris will be exactly where he would have been if he’d continued on during the time I had his identity—sleeping in a tent, perhaps, or in the midst of battle, or shagging one of the slave girls in Hector’s war camp. But this was too difficult to explain to Helen. I didn’t think she’d appreciate a discourse on probability wave functions and quantum-temporal simultaneity. I couldn’t explain why it was that neither Paris nor those around him wouldn’t necessarily notice his absence, or how it was that events might reconnect to the
Iliad
as if I hadn’t interrupted the probability wave-collapse of that temporal line. Quantum continuity might be sewn up as soon as I canceled the morph function.

Shit, I
didn’t
understand any of this.

“Leave his form,” commanded Helen. “Show me your true shape.”

“My Lady, if I . . .” I began to protest, but her hand moved quickly, the blade cut through silk and skin, and I felt the blood flow on my abdomen.

Showing her that my right hand was going to move very, very slowly, I opened the glowing functions and touched the icon on the morphing bracelet.

I was Thomas Hockenberry again—shorter, thinner, gawkier, with my slightly myopic gaze and thinning hair.

Helen blinked once and swung the dagger up fast—faster than I thought any person could move. I heard the ripping and tearing. But it wasn’t my stomach muscles she had sliced open, only the tie of the robe and the silken material itself.

“Don’t move,” she whispered. Helen of Troy flung my robe open, using her free hand to slide it off my shoulders.

I stood naked and pale in front of this formidable woman. If a dictionary ever needed a perfect definition of “pathetic,” a photograph of this moment would suffice.

“You may put the robe back on,” she said after a minute.

I tugged it back up. The sash was torn, so I held it together with my hand. She seemed to be thinking. For several minutes we stood there on the terrace in silence. Even as late as it was, the towers of Ilium glowed from torchlight. Watchfires flickered along the ramparts on the distant walls. Farther to the south, beyond the Scaean Gate, the corpse fires burned. To the southwest, lightning flashed in the towering storm clouds. There were no stars visible and the air smelled of the rain coming from the direction of Mount Ida.

“How did you know I was not Paris?” I asked at last.

Helen blinked out of her reverie and gave a small smile. “A woman may forget the color of her lover’s eyes, the tone of his voice, even the details of his smile or form, but she cannot forget how her husband fucks.”

It was my turn to blink in surprise and not just at Helen’s vulgar speech. Homer had literally sung the praises of Paris’s appearance—comparing him to a “stallion full-fed at the manger” when describing Paris’s rush to join Hector outside the city this very night,
sure in his racing stride . . . his head flung back, his mane streaming over his shoulders, sure and sleek in his glory.
Paris was, in the teenagers’ parlance of my previous life, a hunk. And while I had been in Helen’s bed, I had owned Paris’s streaming hair, his sun-bronzed body, his washboard belly, his oiled muscles, his . . .

“Your penis is larger,” said Helen.

I blinked again. Twice this time. She had not used the word “penis,” of course—Latin was not yet a real language—and the Greek word she had chosen was slang closer to “cock.” But that made no sense. When we were making love, I’d had Paris’s penis . . .

“No, that wasn’t how I knew you were not my lover,” said Helen. She seemed to be reading my mind. “That is just my observation.”

“Then how . . .”

“Yes,” said Helen. “It was
how
you you bedded me, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

I had nothing to say to this, and could not have spoken clearly if I’d had anything to say.

Helen smiled again. “Paris first had me not in Sparta, where he won me, nor in Ilium, where he brought me, but on the little island of Kranae on the way here.”

There was no island that I knew of named Kranae, and the word merely meant “rocky” in ancient Greek, so I took it to mean that Paris had interrupted their voyage to put into some small, rocky, unnamed island to have his way with Helen without the watching presence of the ship’s crew. Which would mean that Paris was . . . impatient.
So were you, Hockenberry
came the voice of something not totally unlike my conscience. Too late for a conscience.

“He’s had me—and I’ve had him—hundreds of times since then,” Helen said softly, “but never like tonight. Never like tonight.”

I was adither with confusion and smug with pride. Was this good? Was this a compliment? No, wait . . . that’s absurd. Homer sings of Paris as nearly godlike in his physical beauty and charm, a great lover, irresistible to women and goddesses alike, which must mean that Helen only meant —

“You,” she said, interrupting my confused thoughts, “
you
were . . .
earnest
.”

Earnest. I clutched the robe tighter and looked toward the coming storm to hide my embarrassment. Earnest.

“Sincere,” she said. “Very sincere.”

If she didn’t shut up soon and quit hunting for synonyms for “pathetic,” I thought I might wrestle the dagger away from her and cut my own throat with it.

“Did the gods send you here to me?” she asked.

I considered lying again. Certainly not even this strong-willed woman would gut someone on an errand from the gods. But again I chose not to lie. Helen of Troy seemed almost telepathic in her ability to read me. And telling the truth for a change felt good.

“No,” I said. “No one sent me.”

“You came here just because you wanted to bed me?”

Well, at least she hadn’t used the f-word again.
“Yes,” I said. “I mean, no.”

She looked at me. Somewhere in the city, a man laughed loudly, then a woman did the same. Ilium never slept.

“I mean—I was lonely,” I said. “I’ve been here for the whole war by myself, with no one to talk to, no one to touch . . .”

“You touched me enough,” said Helen.

I couldn’t tell from her tone if it was sarcasm or an accusation. “Yes,” I said.

“Are you married, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

“Yes. No.” I shook my head again. I must sound like a total idiot to Helen. “I believe I was married,” I said, “but if I was, my wife is dead.”

“You
believe
you were married?”

“The gods brought me to Mount Olympos across time and space,” I said, knowing she would not understand but not caring. “I
believe
I died in my other life, and they somehow brought me back. But they did not return all my memory to me. Images come and go from my real life, my former life . . . like dreams.”

“I understand,” said Helen. I realized from her tone that somehow, amazingly, she did understand.

“Is there a particular god or goddess you serve, Hock-en-bear-eee?”

“I report to one of the muses,” I said, “but I learned just yesterday that Aphrodite controls my fate.”

Helen looked up in surprise. “And so has she controlled mine,” she said softly. “Just yesterday, when the goddess saved Paris from Menelaus’ fury and brought him back here to our bed, Aphrodite ordered me to go to him. When I protested, she flew into a rage and threatened to make me the butt of hard, withering hate—her words—of both Trojans and Achaeans.”

“The goddess of love,” I said softly.

“The goddess of lust,” said Helen. “And I know much about lust, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

Again I didn’t know what to say.

“My mother was named Leda, called the daughter of Night,” she said in conversational tones, “and Zeus camed to her and fucked her while he was in the shape of a swan—a huge, horny swan. There was a mural in my home showing my two older brothers and an altar to Zeus and me as an egg, waiting to be hatched.”

I couldn’t help it—I barked a laugh. Then my stomach muscles clenched, waiting for the dagger’s blade to rip through it.

Instead, Helen smiled broadly. “Yes,” she said. “I know about abductions and being a pawn of the gods, Hock-en-bear-eeee.”

“Yes,” I said. “When Paris came to Sparta . . .”

“No,” interrupted Helen. “When I was eleven, Hock-en-bear-eeee, I was carried off—abducted from the temple of Artemis Orthia—by Theseus, uniter of the Attica communities into the city of Athens. Theseus made me pregnant—I bore him a girl child, Iphigenia, whom I could not look upon with love and handed over to Clytaemnestra, to raise with her husband, Agamemnon, as their own. I was rescued from this marriage by my brothers and returned to Sparta. Theseus then went off with Hercules in his war against the Amazons, where he took time to invade hell, marry an Amazon warrior, and explore the Labryinth of the minotaur in Crete.”