Ilium Read online

  “I was there!” Hannah said, her eyes bright. “About ten thousand people came.”

  Harman pulled a much-folded sheet of paper from a tunic pocket and began spreading it on the padded ottoman between them. “Do you remember which node?”

  Hannah shook her head. “It was one of the half-forgotten nodes. One of the empty ones. The organizers sent the node code around the day before the ceremony began. No one lived there, I think. It was a rocky valley surrounded by snow. I remember that it was light all day, all night, for the five days of Burning Man. And cold. The servitors had set up a Planck field over the whole valley and heaters here and there in the valley itself, so it wasn’t uncomfortable, but no one was allowed beyond the edges of the valley.”

  Harman looked at his faded and folded sheet of microvellum. The page was covered with squiggly lines, dots, and arcane runes like those found in books. He stabbed a finger down on a dot near the bottom. “Here. In what used to be Antarctica. A node called ‘The Dry Valley.’ “

  Daeman looked at him blankly.

  “This is a map I’ve been working on for fifty years,” said Harman. “A two-dimensional representation of the Earth with all the known faxnodes mapped on it, along with their codes. Antarctica was a Lost Age name for one of the seven continents. I have seven Antarctic faxnodes recorded, but only one of them—this dry valley that I’ve heard of but never visited—is free of snow and ice.”

  This obviously did nothing to enlighten Daeman. Even Ada and Hannah looked confused.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Harman. “But if the sun was out all day and all night, this dry valley is the probable faxport. During the polar summers, there are days when the sun doesn’t set there.”

  “The sun doesn’t set in June in Chom,” Daeman said, obviously bored. “Is that near your dry valley?”

  “No.” Harman pointed to a dot near the top of the map. “I’m pretty sure that Chom is on this large peninsula up here, above the arctic circle. Near the north pole, not the south.”

  “North pole?” said Ada.

  Daeman looked at the two women. “And I thought the witch at Burning Man was crazy.”

  “Do you remember anything else this woman, this witch, said?” asked Harman, obviously too excited to be insulted.

  Daeman shook his head. He looked tired. “Just babble. We’d been drinking a lot. It was the night of the burning and we’d been awake for days and nights in that damned daylight—catching a few hours of nap in one of the big orange tents. It was the last night and there are usually orgies on the last night and I thought that perhaps she . . . but she was too old for my tastes.”

  “But she talked about a spaceship?” Harman was visibly trying to be patient.

  Daeman shrugged again. “Someone there . . . a young man, about Hannah’s age . . . was bemoaning the fact that we didn’t have sonies to fly around in since the final fax, and this . . . witch . . . who had been very quiet but who was obviously also very drunk . . . said we did, that there were jinkers and sonies if you knew where to look for them. She said she used them all the time.”

  “And the spaceship?” prompted Harman.

  “She said she’d seen one, is all,” said Daeman, rubbing his temples as if they hurt. “Near a museum. I asked her what a museum was, but she didn’t answer.”

  “Why did you call this older woman a witch?” asked Hannah.

  “I didn’t start it. Everyone called her that.” Daeman sounded a bit defensive. “I think it’s because she said she hadn’t faxed in, but had walked, when it was obvious that she couldn’t have . . . there were no other nodes or structures around the valley and the Planck field sealed it off.”

  “That’s true,” said Hannah. “That last Burning Man may have been in the most remote place I’ve ever faxed to. I’m sorry I didn’t meet this woman there.”

  “I only remember her there two nights,” said Daeman. “The first and the last. And she kept to herself except for this one crazy exchange.”

  “How did you know that she was old?” Ada asked softly.

  “You mean other than her obvious insanity?”

  “Yes.”

  Daeman sighed. “She looked old. As if she had been to the firmary too many times . . .” He paused then and frowned, obviously thinking about his own recent visit there. “She looked older than anyone I’ve ever seen. I think she actually had those grooves on her face.”

  “Wrinkles?” said Hannah. The girl sounded envious.

  “But you don’t remember her name?” said Harman.

  Daeman shook his head. “Someone by the fire called her by name that night but I can’t quite . . . I’d been drinking too, you know, and not sleeping.”

  Harman glanced at Ada, took a breath, and said, “Could it have been Savi?”

  Daeman’s head came up quickly. “Yes. I think it was. Savi . . . yes, that sounds right. Unusual.” He saw Harman and Ada exchange meaningful glances again and said, “What? Is this significant? Do you two know her?”

  “The Wandering Jew,” said Ada. “Have you heard that legend?”

  Daeman smiled tiredly. “About the woman who somehow missed the final fax fourteen hundred years ago and who’s been condemned to wander the earth ever since? Of course. But I didn’t know the woman in the legend had a name.”

  “Savi,” said Harman. “Savi’s her name.”

  Marina came in with two servitors carrying mugs of mulled wine and a tray of cheese and breads. The uncomfortable silence was broken by small talk while they ate and sipped.

  “We’ll fax there tonight,” Harman said to Hannah and Ada. “To the dry valley. There might be some clue left.”

  Hannah held her steaming mug in both hands. “I don’t see how. That Burning Man was, as Daeman said, more than eighteen months ago.”

  “When’s the next one?” asked Ada. She never went to such dementia-era ceremonies.

  It was Harman who answered. “One never knows. The Burning Man Cabal sets the time and notifies people only days before the event. Sometimes they’re a few months apart. Sometimes a dozen years. The one in the dry valley was the last one. If you’ve been to any of the previous three, you’re invited. I missed it because I was hiking in the Mediterranean Basin.”

  “I want to go with you to find this woman,” said Daeman.

  The others, including his mother, looked at him with surprise. “Do you feel up to it?” asked Ada.

  He ignored the question and said, “You’ll need me to identify the woman if you find her. This . . . Savi.”

  “All right,” said Harman. “We appreciate your help.”

  “But we’ll fax out in the morning,” said Daeman. “Not tonight. I’m tired.”

  “Of course,” said Ada. She looked at Hannah and Harman. “Shall we fax back to Ardis?”

  “Nonsense,” said Marina. “You’ll be our guests tonight. We have comfortable guest domis on the upper level.” She caught Ada’s subtle glance in Daeman’s direction. “My son has been very tired since the . . . accident. He may sleep ten hours or more. If you stay as our guests, you’ll be ready to leave together after he wakes. After breakfast.”

  “Of course,” Ada said again. There was a seven-hour difference between Paris Crater and Ardis—it was not yet dinnertime back at Ardis Hall—but like all fax travelers, they were used to adapting to local times.

  “We’ll show you to your rooms,” said Marina, leading the way across the room with her twin servitors floating beside her.

  The “rooms” were actually small domis, elaborate suites of their own, one flight up from Marina and Daeman’s place and reached by a broad spiral staircase. Hannah expressed approval of her space but then went out to explore Paris Crater on her own. Harman said his good nights and disappeared into his domi. Ada locked the door behind her, inspected the interesting tapestries, enjoyed the view of the crater from the balcony—the rain had stopped and the moon and rings were visible between scattering clouds—and then went in and ordered a light dinn
er from the servitors. Afterward, she drew a bath and luxuriated in the hot, perfumed water for half an hour or more, feeling the ache of tension leave her muscles.

  She had met Harman only twelve days earlier, but it seemed much longer ago. The man and his interests fascinated her. Ada had gone to a summer solstice party at a friend’s estate near the ruins of Singapore, not because she liked parties—she tended to avoid both faxing and parties when she could help it, traveling almost solely to old friends’ homes for small gatherings—but because her younger friend Hannah was going to be there and had urged her to attend. The solstice party had been fun, in its way, and many of the people interesting, since her friend there had just celebrated her fourth Twenty—Ada had always enjoyed the company of people older than herself—but then she had met Harman, coming across him as he was poking through the estate’s library. The man was quiet, reticent even, but Ada had drawn him out, using some of the tactics her smarter friends had used on her to get her to talk more.

  Ada did not know what to think about Harman’s trick of learning how to read without a function—he had not confessed the ability until another meeting at another friend’s house just six days before the gathering at Ardis Hall—but the more Ada thought about it, the more amazed she was. Ada had always considered herself to be well educated—she knew all the usual folk songs and legends, she had memorized the Eleven Families and all their members, she knew many of the faxnodes by heart—but Harman’s breadth of both knowledge and curiosity left her breathless.

  The map he had laid out in front of Daeman—so underappreciated even by curious, adventurous Hannah—continued to astound Ada. She had never even run across the concept of “map” before Harman had shown her the diagrams less than a week earlier. It was Harman who had explained to her that the world was a sphere. How many of Ada’s friends knew that? How many of them had ever wondered about the shape of the world on which they lived? Of what use was that arcane bit of knowledge? The “world” was your home and the fax network you used to see your friends and their homes. Who ever thought about the shape of the physical structure that lay beneath and beside that faxnet? And why would they?

  Ada knew even from that first weekend around Harman that the man’s interest in the long-departed post-humans bordered on obsession. No, amended Ada, lying in the warm bathwater and moving bubbles up her breasts to her throat with her long, pale fingers, it is an obsession with Harman. He can’t stop thinking about the post-humans—where they are, why they left. To what purpose?

  Ada did not know the answer, of course, but she had come to share in Harman’s passionate curiosity, approaching it as a game, an adventure. And he kept asking questions that would have made any of Ada’s other friends simply laugh—Why are there just a million of us humans? Why was that number chosen by the posts? Why never one more, one less? And why a hundred years assigned to each of us? Why do they save us even from our own folly so we can live a hundred years?

  The questions were so simple and so profound that they were embarrassing—it was like hearing an adult ask why we have belly buttons.

  But Ada had joined in the quest—for a flying machine, perhaps a spaceship to fly up to the rings and talk to the post-humans in person, now for this final fax-era legend of the Wandering Jew—and every day that passed brought more excitement.

  Like Daeman being eaten by an allosaurus.

  Ada blushed, seeing her pale skin redden down to the line of water and bubbles. That had been terribly embarrassing. None of the other guests could ever remember anything similar happening. Why hadn’t the voynix offered better protection?

  What exactly are the voynix? Harman had asked her twelve days earlier in the treehouse complex near Singapore. Where do they come from? Did the Lost Age humans build them? Are they a produce of the rubicon dementia? Did the posts create them? Or are they alien to this world and time and here for their own purposes?

  Ada remembered her uneasy laughter that evening as they sat on the vined terrace, champagne in hand, when he had asked such an absurd question in such serious tones. But she had not been able to answer it then—nor had her friends in the intervening days, although their laughter was more nervous even than her own had been—and now Ada, after a lifetime of seeing voynix every day, looked at them with a curiosity bordering on alarm. Hannah had begun to react the same way.

  What are you? she had wondered just that evening as they had stepped out of their barouche in Paris Crater and left the voynix standing there, apparently eyeless, its rusted carapace and leathery hood wet from the rain, its killing blades retracted but manipulator pads extended and curled, still holding the stays of their carriage.

  Ada stepped out of the water, dried herself, slipped into a thin robe, and told the servitors to leave her. They exited via one of their osmotic wall membranes. Ada went out onto the balcony.

  Harman’s room and balcony adjoined hers on the right, but privacy on the porches was assured by a tightly latticed bamboo-fiber screen that extended three feet out beyond the porch railing. Ada walked to the partition, stood at her rail a moment—looking down at the red-eyed crater below—lifted her eyes to the clearing sky with its stars and moving rings, and then she flung her leg over the railing, feeling the smooth, wet bamboo against the flesh of her inner thigh an instant before she stepped out, barefoot, feeling her way along the thin rim of the partition.

  For a second she was connected to the porch only by the pressure of her toes and fingertips, feeling blindly around the partition on the other side to find the matching narrow ledge, feeling gravity pull her back into emptiness. What would it feel like, to fall so far toward burning magma, to know that I would be dead after a few terrible and totally free minutes of falling? She knew she would never know. If she let go now, if her bare toes and fingers slipped now, she would never remember the next seconds and minutes after she awoke in the firmary tanks. The post-humans did not grant humans memories of their own death.

  Ada pressed her breasts against the edge of the partition, fought to find balance, and swung her left leg around, her bare foot finding the narrow bamboo seam running back to Harman’s porch. She did not dare look up to see if Harman was out on his balcony or at the glass door; all her attention was focused keeping her toes from slipping, her fingers from sliding off the wet and slippery bamboo-three.

  She reached the porch and stepped onto the edge of it, clinging to the railing so tightly that her arms were shaking. Feeling her strength ebbing in the post-adrenaline surge of weakness, she quickly swung her left leg up and over, feeling the robe fall open, scratching the underside of her leg on a seam in the railing.

  Harman was sitting cross-legged on a white-cushioned chaise longue, watching her. His balcony was lighted by a single glass-shielded candle.

  “You might have helped,” she whispered, not knowing why she said it or why she was whispering. She saw that Harman was also wearing nothing but a thin silk guest robe, only loosely sashed.

  He smiled and shook his head. “You were doing fine. But why not just come around and knock?”

  Ada took a deep breath and, as in answer, loosened the belt of her robe and let it open. The air moving in from above the crater was cool, but with currents of warmer air embedded in the breeze as it caressed her lower belly.

  Harman rose, crossed to her, looked her in the eyes, and closed her robe, tying it without pressing his fingers against her. “I am honored,” he said, also whispering now. “But not yet, Ada. Not yet.” He took her hand and led her to the chaise longue.

  When both of them were lying back on it side by side, Ada blinking in surprise and blushing in something like humiliation—whether at the rejection or at her own brazenness she was not sure—Harman reached behind the chair and come out with two cream-colored turin scarves. He folded each so that the embroidered microcircuitry was properly positioned.

  “I don’t . . .” began Ada.

  “I know. But just this once. I think that something important’s about to hap
pen. Let us share this.”

  She lay back on the soft cushion and let Harman adjust the turin across her eyes. She felt him lie back next to her, his right hand lying loosely across her left hand.

  The images and sounds and sensations flowed in.

  11

  The Plains of Ilium

  The gods have come down to play. More precisely, they have come down to kill.

  The battle has been raging for some time now with the god Apollo lashing on the Trojans, with Athena spurring on the Argives, and other gods lounging in the shade of a tree on the nearest hill, sometimes laughing, Iris and their other servants pouring them wine. I’ve watched the Thracian chief Pirous, a bold Trojan ally, kill gray-eyed Diores with a rock. Diores, co-commander of the Epean contingent of the Greeks, went down with only a broken ankle after battled-maddened Pirous threw the rock, but most of Diores’ comrades fell back, Pirous hacked his way through the few who had stayed to guard their fallen captain, and—helpless now, his ankle smashed—poor Diores had to lie there while Pirous rushed in, speared the Thracian in the belly with his long casting spear, and pulled the man’s bowels out, hooking them on the barbed spearpoint and twisting more out while while Diores screamed.

  This was the flavor of the last half-hour’s battle and it was a relief when Pallas Athena raised her hand, received nodded permission from other watching gods, and stopped time and motion in their tracks.

  Now with my enhanced vision—enhanced by the contact lenses from the gods—I can see Athena across the milling no-man’s-land of lances, preparing Tydeus’ son, Diomedes, as a killing machine. I mean this almost literally. Like the gods themselves, and like me, Diomedes the man will now be part machine, his eyes and skin and very blood enhanced by nanotechnologies from some future age far beyond my short life span. In frozen time, Athena sets contact lenses similar to mine in the Achaean’s eyes, allowing him to see both the gods and, somehow, to slow time a bit when he concentrates in the thick of the action, thus—to the unenhanced onlooker’s view—increasing his reaction time threefold. Homer had written that Athena had “set the man ablaze,” and now I understand the metaphor; using the nanotechnology embedded in her palm and forearm, Athena is busy turning the neglible, latent electromagnetic field around Diomedes’ body into a serious forcefield. In the infrared, Diomedes’ body and arms and shield and helmet suddenly blazed “with tireless fire like the star that flames at harvest.” I realize now, watching Diomedes glow in the thick amber of god-frozen time, that Homer must have been referring to Sirius, the Dog Star, rising as the brightest star in the Greek (and Trojan) sky in late summer. It is in the eastern sky this night.