I shouldn’t do it, it’s foolish, and it’s mostly because I’m afraid to face Achilles, but all through Cassandra’s oral quiz, I’d found myself curious about the little robot back on Olympos. I’d seen odd things on Olympos before, of course—not counting the gods and goddesses, who are weird enough—odd things such as the giant insectoid Healer. But something about the little robot, if that’s what it is, had struck me. It didn’t seem part of either of the worlds I’ve been dividing my time between over the past nine years—neither of Olympos nor of Ilium. The little robot seemed more of my world. My old world. The real world. Don’t ask me why. I’ve never seen a humanoid robot except in sci-fi movies.

Besides, I tell myself, I have an hour before having to present Achilles to Hector. I tug on the Hades Helmet and quantum teleport back to the Great Hall of the Gods.

The little robot and the other devices, including the big crab-thing, are gone, but Zeus is still here. And so are more of the gods. Including the war god, Ares, who was last seen healing in the tank next to Aphrodite.

Mother of Mercy, where’s Aphrodite now? She can see me, even when I’m wearing this helmet. She ordered the Muse to give the helmet to me only because she could track me down any time she wants. Is she out of the tank already? Jesus Christ.

Ares is roaring at all the gods while Zeus sits on his throne. “Madness rules below!” cries the god of war. “I’m gone for a few days, and you let the war get out of hand. Kaos rules! Achilles has killed Agamemnon and taken command of the Achaean armies. Hector is in retreat when victory for the Trojans was royal Zeus’s command.”

Agamemnon dead? Achilles in command? Holy shit. We’re not in the Iliad anymore, Toto.

“And what of the automata I brought to you, Lord Zeus? These . . . moravecs?” demands Apollo, his voice echoing in the huge hall. I see more gods and goddesses filling the mezzanines above. The swimming pool viewing screen cut into the floor is showing scenes of madness and murder on the Trojan battle lines and in the Argive camp now. But my focus is on the huge, powerfully built, white-bearded Zeus where he sits on his golden throne. His wrists are massive, like something sculpted out of Carrara marble by Rodin. I’m close enough to see the gray hairs on Zeus’s bare chest.

“Calm down, Apollo, noble archer,” rumbles the god of all gods. “I’ve ordered the moravec automata eliminated. Hera has destroyed them both by now.”

Can this get worse? I wonder.

Right then, Aphrodite enters the hall between Achilles’ mother, Thetis, and my Muse.

40

Equatorial Ring

Daeman screamed all the way up.

Savi and Harman could have been screaming as well—should have been screaming—but Daeman could hear only his own screams. As soon as their chairs took off vertically and then began to pitch over as they rotated around their axis of lightning—Daeman facedown 10,000 feet above the green Mediterranean Basin and screaming all the way—two great restrictions began to push in on him: one the pressure of acceleration, but the other a constant, all-over pressing-in that had to be some kind of a forcefield. It not only held him tight on the red cushions of his hurtling chair, but it pressed against his face, chest, into his mouth, into his lungs.

Daeman still screamed.

The three chairs continued to rotate counterclockwise around the thick bolt of white energy, and suddenly Daeman was facing up at the stars and rings. He continued to scream, knowing that the chair would continue rotating, that this time he would fall out, and that now the fall would be from tens of thousands of feet higher.

He didn’t fall, but he screamed down at the Earth as they flew higher. Their trajectory seemed almost flat now, almost parallel to the surface of the planet so far below. It was night over Central Asia, but towering cumulus stretching hundreds of miles was lighted from within, quick flickers of lightning illuminating the red landmass glimpsed between the pearly cloud cover. Daeman didn’t know it was central Asia. The chairs rotated around again, showing him the stars and rings and a quite visible thin layer of atmosphere—below them now!—and the sun seemed to rise again in the west, prisming across that meniscus of atmosphere in bright red and yellow streamers.

They were out of 99 percent of the atmosphere now, but Daeman didn’t know that. The forcefield fed him air, kept him from being torn apart by g-forces, and allowed a pocket of air into which he could scream. He was getting hoarse by the time he realized that they were approaching the e-ring.

The ring wasn’t what he’d always imagined, but he was too busy clutching the arms of his chair and screaming to notice this. Daeman had always visualized the posts’ e- and p-rings as being made up of thousands of glowing glass castles through which one could see the post-humans partying and doing whatever post-humans do. It wasn’t that way at all.

Most of the glowing objects they were rising toward so quickly, the wiggling, writhing thread of lightning still pitching up and away from them as they rode it higher, were complex structures of struts and cables and long glass tubes, more like antennae than orbital houses. At the end of some these structures were glowing globes of energy, each with pulsing black spheres at their center. Other structures supported giant mirrors—each stretching miles across, Daeman realized through his screaming—which were reflecting or beaming blue or yellow or dull-white shafts of energy to still other mirrors. Gleaming rings and spheres, looking to be made of the same energy-matter and exotic materials as Atlantis, fired lasers and pulsed attitude thrusters in studied bursts that opened and spread in glowing cones of particles. None of the spheres or rings or structures looked like they could be homes for post-humans.

The Earth’s horizon became noticeably curved, then curved further, like a bow being slowly bent. The sun set again in the west and the sky exploded with stars only slightly less bright than the glowing ring structures above. Far below Daeman—hundreds of miles, at least—he could see a range of snow-topped mountains glowing in the starlight and ringlight. Farther to the west, near the sharp-curved limb of the world, an ocean gleamed. Suddenly the rotation of the chairs slowed and Daeman craned his neck and looked up.

Set amidst the moving gantry-structures and mirrors moved a mountain with a glowing city wrapped around it.

Daeman paused in his screaming as the chairs tilted forward more wildly and the forcefield pressed him down into the cushions and straight-backed chair more fiercely, and in that second of pause he noticed that the torquing shaft of energy along which they were sliding ended in that glowing city on the giant slab of rock.

This city was not made of energy-stuff. It seemed to be made of glass, and each of the hundred thousand glass panes and facets was illuminated from within. It looked like a giant Japanese lantern to Daeman. Just as he realized that their twisting triangle of chairs was going to crash into one of the tallest circular spires on the near end of that orbiting mountain, his chair pitched completely over and the forcefield squeezed the breath out of him as they decelerated hard enough to make his vision go from red to black and back to red again.

They hadn’t slowed enough. Daeman screamed a final time, his voice completely hoarse now, and then they slammed into the building that must have been a hundred stories tall.

There was no crash of breaking glass, no fatal sudden stop. The building wall warped and absorbed them and funneled them down a long glowing cone, as if they’d dived into yielding yellow rubber, and then the funnel spat them out into a room with six glowing white walls. The shaft of energy disappeared. The chairs flew different directions. The forcefields went off.