Olympos Read online

  OLYMPOS

  DAN SIMMONS

  This novel is for Harold Bloom, who—in his refusal

  to collaborate in this Age of Resentment—has given me great pleasure.

  How could Homer have known about these things?

  When all this happened he was a camel in Bactria!

  —LUCIAN, The Dream

  …the real-life history of the earth must in the last instance be a history of a really relentless warfare. Neither his fellows, nor his gods, nor his passions will leave a man alone.

  —JOSEPH CONRAD, Notes on Life and Letters

  O write no more the tale of Troy,

  If earth Death’s scroll must be—

  Nor mix with Laian rage the joy

  Which dawns upon the free:

  Although a subtler Sphinx renew

  Riddles of death Thebes never knew.

  Another Athens shall arise,

  And to remoter time

  Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,

  The splendor of its prime;

  And leave, if naught so bright may live, All earth can take or Heaven can give.

  —PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, Hellas

  Contents Epigraph

  PART 1

  1 Helen of Troy awakes just before dawn to the sound…

  2 Red-haired Menelaus stood silent in his best armor, upright, motionless,…

  3 On the reviewing balcony high on the wall of Zeus’s…

  4 Menelaus watched as the winds blew in from the west…

  5 The corpse fire will burn all through the night.

  6 It was just after sunrise and Zeus was alone in…

  7 At dawn, Hector ordered the funeral fires quenched with wine.

  8 The moon Phobos looked like a huge, grooved, dusty olive…

  9 Penthesilea swept into Ilium on horseback an hour after dawn…

  10 Quantum teleportation through Planck space—a term the goddess Hera…

  11 Hockenberry didn’t recognize any of the moravecs who met him…

  12 Helen was alone and unarmed when Menelaus finally cornered her.

  13 “To answer your last question,” said Prime Integrator Asteague/Che,…

  14 Impatient, furious, pacing in front of his thousand best Myrmidons…

  15 Athena’s Temple. Menelaus advancing, red-faced, breathing hard—Helen on her…

  16 “Could I see the ship?” asked Hockenberry. The hornet had…

  17 Hera jumped from outside the exclusion field around Odysseus’ home…

  18 Riding out to meet Achilles, Penthesilea knew without doubt that…

  19 “What blue beam?” said Hockenberry.

  20 Along the coast of the northern Martian sea, called the…

  21 Even as she spurred her horse forward and lifted Athena’s…

  PART 2

  22 After centuries of semitropical warmth, real winter had come to…

  23 Hours before the voynix attacked, Harman had the sense that…

  24 As soon as he faxed into Paris Crater, Daeman wished…

  25 Noman was dying.

  26 Daeman knew that he should fax straight back to the…

  27 Ada awoke in the dark to find three voynix in…

  28 The forty or so people in the room simply stared…

  29 When Harman flew the sonie down from the jinker platform…

  30 The sonie ride was even more exciting than Harman had…

  31 The first day out from Mars and Phobos.

  32 Daeman had selected nine other people at Ardis—five men…

  33 Achilles has carried the dead but perfectly preserved corpse of…

  34 The voynix attacked a little after midnight.

  35 Ada emerged from Ardis Hall into confusion, darkness, death, and…

  36 Daeman had expected it to be cold when he faxed…

  37 Hockenberry comes to the astrogation bubble to confront Odysseus, perhaps…

  38 Daeman entered the blue-ice dome-cathedral to an echoing…

  39 The first thing Dr. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., had to do after…

  40 Later, Daeman wasn’t sure when he decided to steal one…

  PART 3

  41 Harman fell through darkness with Ariel for what seemed an…

  42 The tower seemed to have three major landings. The first…

  43 There was a storm brewing on and around Mount Olympos.

  44 Harman hadn’t meant to sleep. As exhausted as he was,…

  45 The Queen Mab decelerated toward Earth on a column of…

  46 Harman experienced the attack on Ardis Hall in real time.

  47 The voynix didn’t come scuttling up Starved Rock by the…

  48 You’ll need a thermskin,” said Prospero.

  49 “So where is everyone?” asks fleet-footed Achilles, son of…

  50 “This isn’t Savi.”

  51 Mahnmut and Orphu went outside onto the hull of the…

  52 Harman tried to get as far away from the crystal…

  53 It was a ragtag, motley group of forty-five freezing…

  54 As Harman took off his clothes in the crystal crypt…

  55 In the end, it wasn’t just Orphu’s eloquence but a…

  56 The woman who looked like a young Savi was indeed…

  57 “I quantum teleported us here according to your directions,” says…

  58 Prospero stayed behind as Moira led Harman around the marble…

  59 The Setebos Egg hatched during their first night back at…

  60 Harman drowned.

  61 There had been a flurry of activity and tightbeamed conversation…

  62 Harman had drowned but was not dead. In a few…

  63 My name is Thomas Hockenberry. I have a Ph.D. in…

  64 To know that everything in the universe—everything in history,…

  65 Achilles is considering the possibility that he made a mistake…

  66 The eiffelbahn ended along the 40th Parallel, on the coast…

  67 A lot was happening at once.

  68 On the second evening of his hike through the Atlantic…

  69 Mommy! Mommmmeeee! I’m so scared. It’s so cold and dark…

  70 A storm was raging far above them. The rings and…

  71 Achilles wishes he was dead.

  72 Moira was gone when Harman awoke. The day was gray…

  73 The Greeks aren’t going to make it to nightfall.

  74 Even before Harman stepped through the gash in the hull…

  75 The Demogorgon fills half of the flame-filled sky. Asia,…

  76 They decided to vote on whether Noman could borrow the…

  77 The city and battlefield of Troy—ancient Ilium—wasn’t much…

  78 “PROCEED WITH YOUR APPEAL,” booms the Demogorgon.

  79 It was a desperate, almost insane, turn of events, but…

  80 There was no ceremony surrounding Noman’s departure. one minute he…

  81 Here I am watching and listening as a god goes mad.

  82 The moravecs aboard the queen mab received all the following…

  83 I don’t know if I teleported here via my own,…

  84 Their estimated twelve hours of continuous work took a little…

  85 I flick into solidity and realize that I’ve QT’d myself…

  86 Harman held the pistol to his forehead for only a…

  87 It was just after sunrise and fifty thousand voynix were…

  PART 4

  88 One week after the fall of ilium:

  89 Nine days after the fall of ilium:

  90 Six months after the fall of ilium, on the ninth…

  91 Seven and a half months after the fall of ilium:

  92 One year after the fall of ilium:

  93 Seven years and five months after the fall of ilium:
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br />   94 Seven years and five months after the fall of ilium:

  95 Seven years and five months after the fall of ilium:

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Dan Simmons

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PART

  1

  1

  Helen of Troy awakes just before dawn to the sound of air raid sirens. She feels along the cushions of her bed but her current lover, Hockenberry, is gone—slipped out into the night again before the servants wake, acting as he always does after their nights of lovemaking, acting as if he has done something shameful, no doubt stealing his way home this very minute through the alleys and back streets where the torches burn least bright. Helen thinks that Hockenberry is a strange and sad man. Then she remembers.

  My husband is dead.

  This fact, Paris killed in single combat with the merciless Apollo, has been reality for nine days—the great funeral involving both Trojans and Achaeans will begin in three hours if the god-chariot now over the city does not destroy Ilium completely in the next few minutes—but Helen still cannot believe that her Paris is gone. Paris, son of Priam, defeated on the field of battle? Paris dead? Paris thrown down into the shaded caverns of Hades without beauty of body or the elegance of action? Unthinkable. This is Paris, her beautiful boy-child who had stolen her away from Menelaus, past the guards and across the green lawns of Lacedaemon. This is Paris, her most attentive lover even after this long decade of tiring war, he whom she had often secretly referred to as her “plunging stallion full-fed at the manger.”

  Helen slips out of bed and crosses to the outer balcony, parting the gauzy curtains as she emerges into the pre-dawn light of Ilium. It is midwinter and the marble is cold under her bare feet. The sky is still dark enough that she can see forty or fifty searchlights stabbing skyward, searching for the god or goddess and the flying chariot. Muffled plasma explosions ripple across the half dome of the moravecs’ energy field that shields the city. Suddenly, multiple beams of coherent light—shafts of solid blue, emerald green, blood red—lance upward from Ilium’s perimeter defenses. As Helen watches, a single huge explosion shakes the northern quadrant of the city, sending its shockwave echoing across the topless towers of Ilium and stirring the curls of Helen’s long, dark hair from her shoulders. The gods have begun using physical bombs to penetrate the force shield in recent weeks, the single-molecule bomb casings quantum phase-shifting through the moravecs’ shield. Or so Hockenberry and the amusing little metal creature, Mahnmut, have tried to explain to her.

  Helen of Troy does not give a fig about machines.

  Paris is dead. The thought is simply unsupportable. Helen has been prepared to die with Paris on the day that the Achaeans, led by her former husband, Menelaus, and by his brother Agamemnon, ultimately breach the walls, as breach they must according to her prophetess friend Cassandra, putting every man and boy-child in the city to death, raping the women and hauling them off to slavery in the Greek Isles. Helen has been ready for that day—ready to die by her own hand or by the sword of Menelaus—but somehow she has never really believed that her dear, vain, godlike Paris, her plunging stallion, her beautiful warrior-husband, could die first. Through more than nine years of siege and glorious battle, Helen has trusted the gods to keep her beloved Paris alive and intact and in her bed. And they did. And now they have killed him.

  She calls back the last time she saw her Trojan husband, ten days earlier, heading out from the city to enter into single combat with the god Apollo. Paris had never looked more confident in his armor of elegant, gleaming bronze, his head flung back, his long hair flowing back over his shoulders like a stallion’s mane, his white teeth flashing as Helen and thousands of others watched and cheered from the wall above the Scaean Gate. His fast feet had sped him on, “sure and sleek in his glory,” as King Priam’s favorite bard liked to sing. But this day they had sped him on to his own slaughter by the hands of furious Apollo.

  And now he’s dead, thinks Helen, and, if the whispered reports I’ve overheard are accurate, his body is a scorched and blasted thing, his bones broken, his perfect, golden face burned into an obscenely grinning skull, his blue eyes melted to tallow, tatters of barbecued flesh stringing back from his scorched cheekbones like…like… firstlings—like those charred first bits of ceremonial meat tossed from the sacrificial fire because they have been deemed unworthy. Helen shivers in the cold wind coming up with the dawn and watches smoke rise above the rooftops of Troy.

  Three antiaircraft rockets from the Achaean encampment to the south roar skyward in search of the retreating god-chariot. Helen catches a glimpse of that retreating chariot—a brief gleaming as bright as the morning star, pursued now by the exhaust trails from the Greek rockets. Without warning, the shining speck quantum shifts out of sight, leaving the morning sky empty. Flee back to besieged Olympos, you cowards, thinks Helen of Troy.

  The all-clear sirens begin to whine. The street below Helen’s apartments in Paris’s estate so near Priam’s battered palace are suddenly filled with running men, bucket brigades rushing to the northwest where smoke still rises into the winter air. Moravec flying machines hum over the rooftops, looking like nothing so much as chitinous black hornets with their barbed landing gear and swiveling projectors. Some, she knows from experience and from Hockenberry’s late-night rants, will fly what he calls air cover, too late to help, while others will aid in putting out the fire. Then Trojans and moravecs both will pull mangled bodies from the rubble for hours. Since Helen knows almost everyone in the city, she wonders numbly who will be in the ranks of those sent down to sunless Hades so early this morning.

  The morning of Paris’s funeral. My beloved. My foolish and betrayed beloved.

  Helen hears her servants beginning to stir. The oldest of the servants—the old woman Aithra, formerly queen of Athens and mother to royal Theseus until carried away by Helen’s brothers in revenge for the kidnapping of their sister—is standing in the doorway to Helen’s bed-chamber.

  “Shall I have the girls draw your bath, my lady?” asks Aithra.

  Helen nods. She watches the skies brighten a moment more—sees the smoke to the northwest thicken and then lessen as the fire brigades and moravec fire engines bring it under control, watches another moment as the rockvec battle hornets continue to fling themselves eastward in hopeless pursuit of the already quantum-teleported chariot—and then Helen of Troy turns to go inside, her bare feet whispering on the cold marble. She has to prepare herself for Paris’s funeral rites and for seeing her cuckolded husband, Menelaus, for the first time in ten years. This also will be the first time that Hector, Achilles, Menelaus, Helen, and many of the other Achaeans and Trojans all will be present at a public event. Anything could happen.

  Only the gods know what will come of this awful day, thinks Helen. And then she has to smile despite her sadness. These days, prayers to the gods go unanswered with a vengeance. These days, the gods share nothing with mortal men—or at least nothing except death and doom and terrible destruction carried earthward by their own divine hands.

  Helen of Troy goes inside to bathe and dress for the funeral.

  2

  Red-haired Menelaus stood silent in his best armor, upright, motionless, regal, and proud between Odysseus and Diomedes at the forefront of the Achaean delegation of heroes gathered there at the funeral rites within the walls of Ilium to honor his wife-stealing enemy, Priam’s son, that shit-eating pig-dog, Paris. Every minute he stood there Menelaus was pondering how and when to kill Helen.

  It should be easy enough. She was just across the broad lane and up the wall a bit, less than fifty feet from him opposite the Achaean delegation at the heart of the huge inner court of Troy, up there on the royal reviewing stand with old Priam. With luck, Menelaus could sprint there faster than anyone could intercept him. And even without luck, if the Trojans did have time to get between him and his wife,
Menelaus would hack them down like weeds.

  Menelaus was not a tall man—not a noble giant like his absent brother, Agamemnon, nor an ignoble giant like that ant-pizzle Achilles—so he knew he’d never be able to leap to the reviewing ledge, but would have to take the stairs up through the crowd of Trojans there, hacking and shoving and killing as he went. That was fine with Menelaus.

  But Helen could not escape. The reviewing balcony on the wall of the Temple of Zeus had only the one staircase down to this city courtyard. She could retreat into the Temple of Zeus, but he could follow her there, corner her there. Menelaus knew that he would kill her before he went down under the attacks of scores of outraged Trojans—including Hector leading the funeral procession now coming into sight—and then the Achaeans and Trojans would be at war with one another again, forsaking their mad war against the gods. Of course, Menelaus’ life would almost certainly be forfeit if the Trojan War resumed here, today—as would Odysseus’, Diomedes’, and perhaps even the life of invulnerable Achilles himself, since there were only thirty Achaeans here at the pig Paris’s funeral, and thousands of Trojans present all around in the courtyard and on the walls and massed between the Achaeans and the Scaean Gate behind them.