“All right,” I say. “Let’s see if this works.” I activate the harness.

What must be tons of inert crabshell wobbles, bumps, but then levitates ten inches or so off the marble floor.

“Let’s see if this medallion can haul this much freight,” I say, not caring if the Mahnmut understands me. I hand the taser baton to the little robot. “If the cow stirs before I’m back, or if someone else comes through that door, aim and tap the baton here. It’ll stop one of them.”

“Actually,” says Mahnmut, “I have to go fetch two things they stole from us and I might be better served by that invisibility device you were using. Might it be borrowable?” He hands me the baton back.

“Shit,” I say. The voices are right outside the door now. I loosen my armor, tug off the leathery cowl, and toss it to the robot. Will Hades’ little device work for a machine? Should I tell him that Aphrodite can see him even with it on? No time now. I say, “How will I find you when I come back?”

“Come to the near side of the caldera lake any time in the next hour,” says the robot. “I’ll find you.”

The door opens. The little robot disappears.

With Nightenhelser and Patroclus, I’d simply grabbed them to include them in the QT field, although I’d been dragging the inert Patroclus with my arm around him. Now I lean against the Orphu shell, one arm thrown up over it as far as I can reach, while I visualize my destination and twist the medallion.

Bright sunlight and sand underfoot. The Orphu mass has teleported with me and now floats ten inches off the sand, which is good since there are small boulders beneath it. I don’t think it’s possible to emerge from QT into a solid object, but I’m glad we haven’t picked today to find out.

I’ve come to Agamemnon’s camp on the beach, but the tented area is mostly deserted this late morning hour. Despite the roiling storm clouds overhead, sunlight shafts down across the beach and across the bright tents, paints the long black boats with light, and shows me the Achaean guards jumping back in shock at our sudden appearance. I can hear the roar of battle a few hundred yards beyond the camp and know that the Greeks and Trojans are still fighting out there beyond the Achaean defensive trenches. Perhaps Achilles is leading a counterattack.

“This shell is sacred to the gods,” I shout at the guards who are crouching behind their spears. “Do not touch it upon pain of death. Where is Achilles? Has he been here?”

“Who wants to know?” demands the tallest and hairiest of the guards. He lifts his spear. I vaguely recognize him as Guneus, commander of the Enienes and Peraebians from Dodona. What this captain is doing standing guard in Agamemnon’s camp this day I don’t know and don’t have time to find out right now.

I taser Guneus down and look at the second in command, a bowlegged little sergeant. “Will you take me to Achilles?”

The man plants the butt of his spear in the sand, goes to one knee, and bows his head briefly. The other guards hesitate but then do the same.

I ask where Achilles is. “All this morning, godlike Achilles strode the edge of the surf, summoning sleeping Achaeans and rousing captains with his piercing cry,” says the sergeant. “Then he challenged the Atrides in combat and beat them both. Now he is with the great generals, planning a war, they say, against Olympos itself.”

“Take me to him,” I say.

As they lead me out of the camp, I glance back toward the Orphu of Io shell—it’s still floating above the sand, the remaining guards are still keeping a respectful district—and then I laugh aloud.

The little sergeant glances at me but I don’t explain. It’s simply that this is the first time in nine years that I’ve walked freely on the plains of Ilium in an unmorphed form, as Thomas Hockenberry rather than anyone else. It feels good.

43

Equatorial Ring

Just before they found the firmary, Daeman had been complaining about being starved. He was starved. He’d never gone so long between meals before. The last thing he’d eaten had been a paltry few bites of the last dried food bar almost ten hours earlier.

“There must be something to eat in this city,” Daeman was saying. The three of them were kick-swimming their way through the dead orbital city. Above them, the glowing panes had given away to clear panels and they saw now how the asteroid and its city were slowly turning. The Earth would appear, move across their field of view above them, its soft light illuminating the empty space, floating bodies, dead plants, and floating kelp. “There has to be something to eat here,” repeated Daeman. “Cans of food, freeze-dried food . . . something. ”

“If there is, it’s centuries old,” said Savi. “And as mummified as the post-humans.”

“If we find any servitors, they’ll feed us,” said Daeman, realizing that the statement was nonsense as soon as he said it.

Harman and the old woman did not bother replying. They floated into a small clearing in the wild kelpfields. The air seemed slightly thicker here, although Daeman did not lift his osmosis mask or thermskin cowl to try to breathe it. Even through the mask he could tell the little bit of cold air smelled foul.

“If we find a faxportal,” said Harman, “we’ll have to use it to get home.” Harman’s body was muscled and taut in his blue thermskin suit, but Daeman could see the beginning of wrinkles and lines around the eyes through the other man’s clear mask. He looked older than he had just a day earlier.

“I don’t know if there are faxportals up here,” said Savi. “And I wouldn’t fax again if I could.”

Harman looked at her. The Earth rotated into view overhead and the soft Earthlight dimly illuminated all of their faces. “Will we have a choice? You said the chairs were a one-way ride.”

Savi’s smile was tired. “My code’s no longer in their faxbanks. Or if it is, it’s for delete purposes only. And I’m afraid the same may be true for both of you after the voynix detected us in Jerusalem. But even if your codes are viable, and even if we somehow located faxnodes here, and even if we somehow learned to operate the machinery—those are no common faxportals, you know—and I stayed behind to fax you home, I don’t think it would work.”

Harman sighed. “We’ll just have to find another way.” He looked around the dark city, frozen corpses, and swaying kelp beds. “This isn’t what I expected in the rings, Savi.”

“No,” said the old woman. “None of us did. Even in my day, we thought the thousands of lights in the sky at night meant millions upon millions of post-humans in thousands of orbital cities.”

“How many cities do you think they had?” asked Harman. “Besides this one?”

Savi shrugged. “Perhaps just one in the polar ring. Perhaps no more. My guess now is that there were only a few thousand post-humans when the holocaust hit them.”

“Then what were all those machines and devices we saw coming up?” asked Daeman. He didn’t really care, but he was trying to take his mind off his empty stomach.

“Particle accelerators of some sort,” said the old woman. “The posts were obsessed with time travel. Those thousands of big accelerators produced thousands of tiny wormholes, which they tweaked into stable wormholes—those were the swirling masses you saw at the end of most of the accelerators.”

“And the giant mirrors?” said Harman.

“Casimir Effect,” said Savi, “reflecting negative energy into the wormholes to keep them from imploding into black holes. If the wormholes were stable, the posts could have traveled through them to any place in space-time where they could position the other end of the wormhole.”

“Other solar systems?” asked Harman.

“I don’t think so. I don’t think the posts ever got around to sending probes out of the system. They seeded the outer system with intelligent, self-evolving robots long before I was born—the posts needed asteroids for building materials—but no starships, robot or otherwise.”