Ilium Read online

  Her hand stays wrapped in Achilles’ hair, bending his head back and making him swivel away from frozen Agamemnon and his minions.

  “I’ll never yield!” shouts Achilles. Even in this frozen air that slows and mutes all sound, the man-killer’s voice is strong. “That pig who thinks he’s a king will pay for his arrogance with his life!”

  “Yield,” says Athena for the second time. “The white-armed goddess Hera sped me down from the skies to stop your rage. Yield.”

  I can see a flicker of hesitation enter Achilles’ crazed eyes. Hera, Zeus’s wife, is the strongest ally of the Achaeans on Olympos and a patroness of Achilles since his odd childhood.

  “Stop this fighting now,” orders Athena. “Take your hand off your sword, Achilles. Curse Agamemnon if you must, but do not kill him. Do what we command now and I promise you this—I know this is the truth, Achilles, just I see your fate and know the future of all mortal men—obey us now and one day glittering gifts three times this will be yours as payment for this outrage. Defy us and die this hour. Obey us both—Hera and me—and receive your reward.”

  Achilles grimaces, twists his hair free, looks sullen, but resheaths his sword. Watching Athena and him is like watching two living forms amidst a field of statues. “I can’t defy both of you, Goddess,” says Achilles. “Better if a man submits to the will of the gods, even if his heart breaks with anger. But it is only fair then that the gods hear the prayers of that man.”

  Athena twitches the slightest of smiles and winks out of existence—QTing back to Olympos—and time resumes.

  Agamemnon is ending his harangue.

  Sword sheathed, Achilles steps into the empty circle. “You drunken wineskin of a man!” cries the man-killer. “You with your dog’s eyes and your deer’s heart. You ‘leader’ who’s never led us into battle or gone into ambush with the best of the Achaeans—you who lack the courage to sack Ilium and so must sack the tents of his army for plunder instead—you ‘king’ who rules only the most worthless husks among us—I promise you this, I swear a mighty oath this day—“

  The hundreds of men around me take in a breath almost as one, more shocked by this promise of a curse than if Achilles had simply cut Agamemnon down like a dog.

  “I swear to you that someday a great yearning for Achilles will come to all the sons of Achaea,” shouts the man-killer, his voice so loud that it halts dice games a hundred yards away in the tent city, “to all of them, throughout your armies here! But then, Atrides, stricken to your soul though you’ll be, nothing you do will save you—scythed like so much wheat by the man-murdering Hector. And on that day you will tear out your own heart and eat it, desperate, raging that you chose to do such dishonor to the best of all the Achaeans.”

  And with that Achilles turns on his famous heel and strides from the circle, crunching across seashore gravel back into the darkness between the tents. I have to admit—it was one hell of an exit line.

  Agamemnon crosses his arms and shakes his head. Other men speak in shocked tones. Nestor steps forward to give his in-the-days-of-the-centaur-wars-we-all-pulled-together speech. This is an anomaly—Homer has Achilles still in the argument when Nestor speaks—and my scholic mind makes note of it, but most of my attention is far, far away.

  It’s at this instant, remembering the murderous gaze that Achilles had turned on Athena in the instant before she wrenched his hair back and cowed him into submission, that a plan of action so audacious, so obviously doomed to failure, so suicidal, and so wonderful opens before me that for a minute I have trouble breathing.

  “Bias, are you all right?” asks Orus standing next to me.

  I stare blankly at the man. For a minute I cannot remember who he is or who “Bias” is, forgetting my own morphed identity. I shake my head and push my way out of the circled throng of glorious killers.

  The gravel crunches under my feet without the heroic echo of Achilles’ exit. I walk toward the water and once out of sight, throw off the identity of Bias. Anyone seeing me now would see the middle-aged Thomas Hockenberry, spectacles and all, weighted down in the absurd garb of an Achaean spearman, wool and fur covering my morphing gear and impact armor.

  The ocean is dark. Wine dark, I think, but fail to amuse myself.

  I have the overwhelming urge, not for the first time, to use my cloaking ability and levitation harness to fly away from here—to soar over Ilium a final time, to stare down at its torches and doomed inhabitants a final time, and then fly south and west across that wine-dark sea—the Aegean—until I come to the not-yet-Greek Isles and mainland. I could check in on Clytaemnestra and on Penelope, on Telemachus and Orestes. Professor Thomas Hockenberry, as both boy and man, always got along better with women and children than he did with male adults.

  But these proto-Greek women and children here are more murderous and bloodthirsty than any adult males Hockenberry had known in his other, bloodless life.

  Save the flying away then for another day. In fact, put it behind me altogether.

  The waves roll in one after another, reassuring in their familiar cadence.

  I will do this thing. The decision comes with the exhilaration of flying—no, not of flying, but in the thrill of that brief instance of zero gravity one achieves when throwing oneself from a high place and knowing that there is no going back to solid ground. Sink or swim, fall or fly.

  I will do this thing.

  4

  Near Conamara Chaos

  Mahnmut the Europan moravec’s submersible was three kilometers ahead of the kraken and gaining, which should have created some sense of confidence in the diminutive robotic-organic construct, but since kraken often had tentacles five kilometers long, it didn’t.

  It was an aggravation. Worse than that, it was a distraction. Mahnmut had almost finished with his new analysis of Sonnet 116, was eager to e-mail it to Orphu on Io, and the last thing he needed now was to have his submersible swallowed. He pinged the kraken, verified that the huge, hungry, jellied mass was still in flagellant pursuit, and interfaced with the reactor long enough to add another three knots to his ship’s speed.

  The kraken, which was literally out of its depth here so close to the Conamara Chaos region and its open leads, flailed to keep up. Mahnmut knew that as long as they were both traveling at this speed, the kraken would be unable to extend its tentacles to full reach to engulf the submersible, but if his little sub were to encounter something—say a big wad of flashlight kelp—and he had to slow, or worse yet got fouled in the glowing strands of goo, then the kraken would be on him like a . . .

  “Oh, well, damn,” said Mahnmut, abandoning any attempt at simile and speaking aloud to the humming silence of the submersible’s cramped environmental cavity. His sensors were plugged into the ship’s systems and virtual vision showed him huge clumps of flashlight kelp dead ahead. The glowing colonies were floating along the isothermal currents here, feeding on the reddish veins of magnesium sulfate that rose to the ice shelf above like so many bloody taproots.

  Mahnmut thought dive and the submersible dived twenty klicks deeper, clearing the lower colonies of kelp by only a few dozen meters. The kraken dived behind him. If a kraken could grin, it would be grinning now—this was its killing depth.

  Mahnmut reluctantly cleared Sonnet 116 from his visual field and considered his options. Being eaten by a kraken less than a hundred kilometers from Conamara Chaos Central would be embarrassing. It was these damn bureaucrats’ fault—they needed to cull their local subseas of monsters before they ordered one of their moravec explorers back to a meeting.

  He could kill the kraken. But with no harvester submersible within a thousand klicks, the beautiful beastie would be torn to shreds and devoured by the parasites in the flashlight kelp colonies, by salt sharks, by free-floating tube worms, and by other kraken long before a company harvester could get near it. It would be a terrible waste.

  Mahnmut pulled his vision out of virtual long enough to look around his enviro-niche, as if a glimpse
of his cluttered reality could give him an idea. It did.

  On his console desk, along with the leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare and the Vendler printout, was his lava lamp—a little joke from his old moravec partner Urtzweil almost twenty J-years ago.

  Mahnmut smiled and re-engaged virtual along all bandwidths. This close to Chaos Central there would have to be diapirs, and kraken hated diapirs . . .

  Yes. Fifteen klicks south by southeast, an entire belchfield of them, rising slowly toward the cap ice just as languidly as the wax blobs did in his lava lamp. Mahnmut set his course to the nearest diapir rising to a lead and added five more knots just to be safe, if there was such a thing as safety within tentacle range of a mature kraken.

  A diapir was nothing more than a blob of warm ice, heated by the vents and gravitational hot zones far below, rising through the Epsom-salt sea toward the ice cap that had once covered 100 percent of Europa and which now, two thousand e-years after the cryobot arbeiter company arrived, still covered more than 98 percent of the moon. This diapir was about fifteen klicks across and rising rapidly as it approached the surface cap.

  Kraken did not like the electrolytic properties of diapirs. They refused to foul even their probe tentacles with the stuff, much less their killing arms and maws.

  Mahnmut’s sub reached the rising blob a good ten kilometers ahead of the pursuing kraken, slowed, morphed its outer hull to impact strength, pulled in sensors and probes, and bored into the glob of slush. Mahnmut used sonar and EPS to check the lenticulae and navigation leads still some eight thousand meters above him. In a few minutes the diapir itself would mush into the thick cap ice, flow upward through fissures, lentinculae and leads, and bubble slush ice in a fountain a hundred meters high. For a short time, this part of Conamara Chaos would look like Lost-Age America’s Yellowstone Park, with red-sulfur geysers geysing and hot springs boiling. Then the spray trail would disperse in Europa’s one-seventh Earth gravity, fall like a slow-motion slushstorm for kilometers on either side of each surface lenticula, and then freeze in Europa’s thin, artificial atmosphere—all 100 millibars of it—adding more abstract sculptural forms to the already tortured icefields.

  Mahnmut couldn’t be killed in literal terms—although part organic, he “existed” rather than “lived,” and he was designed tough—but he definitely did not want to become part of a fountain or a frozen chunk of an abstract sculpture for the next thousand e-years. For a minute he forgot both the kraken and Sonnet 116 as he worked the numbers—the diapir’s ascent rate, his submersible’s forward progress through the slush, the fast-approaching cap ice—and then he downloaded his thoughts to the engine room and ballast tanks. If it worked right, he would exit the south side of the diapir half a klick before glob impact with the ice and accelerate straight ahead, doing an emergency surface blow just as the tidal wave from the diapir fountain was forced down the lead. He would then use that 100-klick-per-hour acceleration to keep him ahead of the fountain effect—essentially using his submersible like a surfboard for half the distance to Conamara Chaos Central. He’d have to make the final twenty klicks or so to the base on the surface after the tidal wave dissipated, but he had no choice. It should be one hell of an entrance.

  Unless something had blocked the lead ahead. Or unless another submersible was coming out-lead from Central. That would be embarrassing for the few seconds before Mahnmut and The Dark Lady were destroyed.

  At least the kraken would no longer be a factor. The critters refused to rise closer than five klicks to the surface cap.

  Having entered all the commands and knowing that he’d done everything he could think of to survive and arrive at the base on time, Mahnmut went back to his sonnet analysis.

  Mahnmut’s submersible—which he had long ago named The Dark Lady—cruised the last twenty kilometers to Conamara Chaos Central down a kilometer-wide lead, riding on the surface of the black sea beneath a black sky. A three-quarters Jupiter was rising, clouds bright and cloud bands roiling with muted colors, while a tiny Io skittered across the rising giant’s face not far above the icy horizon. On either side of the lead, striated ice cliffs rose several hundred meters, their sheer faces dull gray and blunted red against the black sky.

  Mahnmut was excited as he brought Shakespeare’s sonnet up.

  SONNET 116

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit impediments; love is not love

  Which alters when it alteration finds,

  Or bends with the remover to remove.

  O no, it is an ever-fixed mark

  That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

  It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

  Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

  Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

  Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

  Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

  But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

  If this be error and upon me proved,

  I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

  Over the decades he had come to hate this sonnet. It was the kind of things humans had recited at their weddings way back in the Lost Age. It was smarmy. It was schlocky. It wasn’t good Shakespeare.

  But finding microrecords of critical writings by a woman named Helen Vendler—a critic who had lived and written in one of those centuries, the Nineteenth or Twentieth or Twenty-first (the record time-stamps were vague)—had given Mahnmut a key to translating this sonnet. What if Sonnet 116 was not, as it had been portrayed for so many centuries, a sticky affirmation, but a violent refutation?

  Mahnmut went back through his notated “key words” for support. There they were from each line—“not, not, no, never, not, not, not” and then in line fourteen—“never, nor,” and “no”—echoing King Lear’s nihilistic “never, never, never, never, never.”

  It was definitely a poem of refutation. But refutation of what?

  Mahnmut knew that Sonnet 116 was part of “the Young Man” cycle, but he also knew that the phrase “the Young Man” was little more than a fig leaf added in later, more prudish years. The love poems were not sent to a man, but to “the youth”—certainly a boy, probably no older than thirteen. Mahnmut had read the criticism from the second half of the Twentieth Century and knew these “scholars” thought the sonnets to be literal—that is, real homosexual letters from the playwright Shakespeare—but Mahnmut also knew, from more scholarly work in previous eras and in the later part of the Lost Age, that such politically motivated literal thinking was childish.

  Shakespeare had structured a drama in his sonnets, Mahnmut was certain of that. “The youth” and the later “Dark Lady” were characters in that drama. The sonnets had taken years to write and had not been produced in the heat of passion, but in the maturity of Shakespeare’s full powers. And what was he exploring in these sonnets? Love. And what were Shakespeare’s “real opinions” about love?

  No one would ever know—Mahnmut was sure the Bard was too clever, too cynical, too stealthy ever to show his true feelings. But in play after play, Shakespeare had shown how strong feelings—including love—turned people into fools. Shakespeare, like Lear, loved his Fools. Romeo had been Fortune’s Fool, Hamlet Fate’s Fool, MacBeth Ambition’s Fool, Falstaff . . .well, Falstaff was no one’s Fool . . . but he became a fool for the love of Prince Hal and died of a broken heart when the young prince abandoned him.

  Mahnmut knew that the “poet” in the sonnet cycles, sometimes referred to as “Will,” was not—despite the insistence of so many of the shallow scholars of the Twentieth Century—the historical Will Shakespeare, but was, rather, another dramatic construct created by the playwright/poet to explore all the facets of love. What if this “poet” was, like Shakespeare’s hapless Count Orsino, Love’s Fool? A man in love with love?

  Mahmut liked this approach. He knew that Shakespeare’s “marriage of two minds” between the older poet and the y
outh was not a homosexual liaison, but a true sacrament of sensibilities, a facet of love honored in days long preceding Shakespeare’s. On the surface, Sonnet 116 seemed to be a trite declaration of that love and its permanency, but if it truly was a refutation . . .

  Mahnmut suddenly saw where it fit. Like so many great poets, Shakespeare began his poems before or after they began. But if this was a poem of refutation, what was it refuting? What had the youth said to the older, love-besotted poet that needed such vehement refutation?

  Mahnmut extended fingers from his primary manipulator, took up his stylus, and scribbled on his t-slate—

  Dear Will—Certainly we’d both like the marriage of true minds we have—since men cannot share the sacramental marriage of bodies—to be as real and permanent as real marriage. But it can’t be. People change, Will. Circumstances change. When the qualities of people or the people themselves go away, one’s love does as well. I loved you once, Will, I really did, but you’ve changed, you’ve altered, and so there has been a change in me and an alteration in our love.

  Yours most sincerely,

  The Youth

  Mahnmut looked at his letter and laughed, but the laughter died as he realized how this changed all of Sonnet 116. Now, instead of a treacly affirmation of unchanging love, the sonnet became a violent refutation of the youth’s jilting, an argument against such self-serving abandonment. Now the sonnet would read—

  Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  Admit (these so-called) “impediments”: love is not love

  Which “alters when it alteration finds,”

  Or “bends with the remover to remove,”

  O no!

  Mahnmut could hardly contain his excitement. Everything in the sonnet and in the entire sonnet cycle now clicked into place. Little was left of this “marriage of true minds” type of love—little except anger, accusations, incriminations, lying, and further infidelity—all of which would be played out by Sonnet 126, by which time “the Young Man” and ideal love itself would be abandoned for the slutty pleasures of “the Dark Lady.” Mahnmut shifted consciousness to the virtual and began encoding an e-note squirt to his faithful interlocutor of the last dozen e-years, Orphu of Io.