I hesitate again. “I can,” I say at last, “but the Hades Helmet provides invisibility only for one. If I brought one of you to Olympos with me, you’d be seen.”
“Then you must bring something back here that will prove that you have traveled to Olympos,” says Hecuba.
I lift my hands, palms up. “What? Zeus’s chamber pot?”
All five women step back again, as if I’ve shouted some obscenity. I remember that—for very good reason—blasphemy is not the casual sport it was in my time, at the end of the Twentieth Century. These gods are very real, and insulting them has consequences. I glance at the walls and hope the lead really shields us from Olympos’s view—not because of the chamber pot quip, but because we seem to be planning deicide here.
“When I was with Aphrodite during the judgment of the gods,” Helen says softly, “I noticed that the goddess brushed her lustrous hair with a beautiful comb, forged in silver, shaped by some god of craft. Go to her chambers on Olympos and bring it back.”
I start to remind them of what I’d told them—that Aphrodite was currently floating in a healing vat—but then realized that it made no difference. Her comb wouldn’t be in the vat with her.
“All right,” I say, grasping the medallion and lifting on the Hades Helmet. “Don’t wander away while I’m gone.” I had the cowl in place before I triggered the medallion, so my voice must have come from emptiness in the second or two before I QT’d.
I don’t know for sure where Aphrodite’s private chambers are—she probably has one of those white temple-sized homes along the crater lake up here—but I do remember that the time she took me aside, almost seducing me—when she told me that I had to kill Athena—the Muse had brought me to Aphrodite in a chamber just off the Great Hall of the Gods. If it wasn’t her private chambers, it seemed at least an apartment she kept in the great hall, a sort of Olympian pied-à-terre.
I flick into solidity in the Great Hall and hold my breath.
The many mezzanines are empty, the hall is mostly dark, and the giant holographic viewing pool shows only three-dimensional static. But several gods are here, including Zeus, whom I’d thought to be away, sitting on Mount Ida watching the carnage on the Ilium battlefield. The King of Gods is on his high golden throne. Nearby are several other male gods, including Apollo. They’re all ten feet tall or taller. I’m forty feet away, and I’m invisible under the Hades Helmet, but I almost QT away I’m so afraid that they’ll hear me breathing. But their attention is on something else.
In front of and below the throne, in the center of the gods’ circle of attention, looking incongruous here to say the least, are what looks like a giant, pitted, cracked metallic crabshell the size of a Ford Expedition, a couple of futuristic-looking devices, and a small, shiny, vaguely humanoid robot. The robot is speaking—in English. The gods are listening, but they don’t look happy.
38
Atlantis and Earth Orbit
“I don’t understand why the post-humans called this place we’re headed ‘Atlantis,’ “ said Harman.
Savi, at the crawler controls, said, “I can’t say that I ever understood the vast majority of the posts’ actions.”
Daeman looked up from munching slowly on his third of the only remaining food bar. “What’s odd about the name ‘Atlantis’?”
“On the Lost Age maps,” said Harman, “the Atlantic Ocean is the big body of water west of here, beyond the Hands of Hercules. We’re in the basin of what used to be the Mediterranean Sea. It’s not in the Atlantic.”
“It’s not?” said Daeman.
“No.”
“So?” said Daeman.
Harman shrugged and fell quiet, but Savi said, “It’s possible the posts were being whimsical when they named their base here. But I seem to recall that a pre–Lost Age writer named Plato had talked about a city or kingdom called Atlantis in these regions, back when there was water here.”
“Plato,” mused Harman. “I’ve run across references to him in books I’ve read. And an odd drawing I saw once. A dog.”
Savi nodded. “A lot of the meaning of Lost Age iconography has been lost forever.”
“What’s a dog?” asked Harman. He sipped from Savi’s water bottle. The third of the food bar hadn’t been enough to satisfy his hunger, but there was no more food in the crawler.
“A small mammal that used to be very common, kept as a pet,” said Savi. “I don’t know why the posts allowed them to go extinct. Perhaps the rubicon virus targeted dogs as well.”
“Like horses?” said Daeman. He’d thought the huge, scary animals in the turin drama had been pure fantasy until recently.
“Smaller and hairier than horses,” said Savi. “But equally extinct.”
“Why would the posts bring back dinosaurs,” Daeman asked with a real shudder, “and not those wonderful turin horses and these dog things?”
“As I said,” repeated Savi, “much of the posts’ behavior was hard to understand.”
They had awakened shortly after dawn and driven north-northwest all day, rumbling down the red-clay road through fields rich with every sort of crop Daeman was familiar with and many he’d never seen. Twice they’d come to shallow rivers and once a deep, empty permcrete canal, all of which the crawler had crossed easily with its huge wheels and wildly articulated struts.
There were servitors in the fields, and the commonplace look of them reassured Daeman until he realized that many of these servitors were huge—some twelve or fifteen feet tall and half that broad, much larger than the machines he was used to—and as they drove deeper into the Basin, both the crops and servitors continued to look more alien.
The crawler was lumbering between tall green walls of what Savi said was sugarcane, the road not quite wide enough for the crawler and green stalks crunching under the six wheels, when Harman noticed the gray-green humanoid things slipping through the fields on either side. The forms moved so fluidly and quickly that they did not disturb the close-packed cane, flowing like ghost-corpses passing through the tall stalks.
“Calibani,” said Savi. “I don’t think they’ll attack.”
“I thought you said you fixed it so they wouldn’t,” said Daeman. “You know, that D-and-A stuff from the hair you stole from Harman and me.”
Savi smiled. “Deals with Ariel are never certain. But I suspect that if the calibani were going to stop us, they would have done it last night.”
“Won’t the forcefield around the sphere hold them off?” asked Daeman.
The old woman shrugged. “Calibani are more clever than voynix. They might surprise us.”
Daeman shuddered and watched the fields, catching only glimpses of the pale figures. The crawler moved out of the lane between the sugarcane fields and climbed a low hill. The road ran on through broad fields of winter wheat, stalks no taller than fifteen or sixteen inches, entire fields rippling in the breeze from the west. The calibani, at least a dozen on each side of the road, came out of the canefields behind them and loped along through the wheat, keeping a distance of sixty yards or so. Out in the open, they ran on all fours.
“I don’t like the looks of them,” said Daeman.
“You’d probably like the looks of Caliban even less,” said Savi.
“I thought these were calibani,” said Daeman. The old woman never seemed to make sense for long.
Savi smiled, steering the crawler across and over a row of six pipes carrying something from west to east or east to west. “It’s said that the calibani are cloned from the single Caliban, the third element of the Gaiaic Trinity, along with Ariel and Prospero.”
“It’s said,” mocked Daeman. “Everything’s gossip with you. Don’t you know anything from firsthand knowledge? These old stories are absurd.”
“Some are,” agreed Savi. “And even though I’ve been alive 1,500 years or more, that doesn’t mean I’ve been around all that time. So I have to report secondhand things I hear and read.”