I turn stupidly, blink away sweat again, and look down at Helen. She’s dirty, her gown is bloodied, and her hair is unkempt. I’ve never seen anyone or anything so beautiful. She hugs me and I gather her in with both arms.

She pulls apart. “Are you badly hurt, Hock-en-bear-eeee?”

“What?”

“Are your injuries severe?”

“I’m not hurt,” I say. She touches my face then and her hand comes away red with blood. I raise my hand to my temple—a deep cut there, another in my hairline—see the bloody fingers on both of my hands, and realize that I’ve been wiping blood away, not sweat. “I’m fine,” I say. I point to the smoking rubble. “Hector? Andromache?”

“They weren’t there, Hock-en-bear-eeee,” Helen shouts over the screams and babble. “Hector sent his family to Athena’s temple. The basement is safe there.”

I look through the smoke and see the tall roof of the temple standing. Of course, I think. The gods aren’t going to bomb their own temples. Too much fucking ego.

“Theano is dead,” says Helen. “And Hecuba. And Laodice.”

I repeat the names stupidly. Athena’s priestess, the woman with the cold blade at my balls just hours ago. And Priam’s wife and daughter. Three of my Trojan Women dead already. And the bombardment’s just begun.

Suddenly I whirl around in panic. The noise is wrong. The blasts have stopped.

Men and women in the streets are pointing skyward and shouting. Four of the five chariots have already disappeared and now the fifth, Ares’ bombardment chariot, I think, flies north and winks out of existence, obviously QTing back to Olympos. All this damage—I look around at the tumbled buildings, smoking craters, bloodied bodies in the streets—from just one god’s attack with one bow and a few of Apollo’s arrows. What next? Biological attack? The Shining Archer—probably recovering up there in the healing tanks right now—is famous for firing plague into the people below.

I grab the medallion at my neck. “Where’s Hector?” I ask Helen. “I have to find Hector.”

“He went back out through the Scaean Gate with Paris, Aeneas, and his brother Deiphobus,” says Helen. “He said he has to find Achilles before all hearts flag.”

“I have to find him,” I repeat. I turn toward the main gate, but Helen pulls me back and around.

“Hock-en-bear-eeee,” she says, and pulls my face down to hers and kisses me there in the shoving, screaming street. When her lips leave mine, I can only blink stupidly, still bent to her kiss. “Hock-en-bear-eeee,” she says again. “If you must die, die well.”

Then she turns and strides back up the street without once looking back.

53

The Equatorial Ring

Daeman was only a little surprised to see that the Prospero hologram can stand and walk. The magus picked up his staff and walked slowly to the dome-window of the room. When he lifted his face to watch the stars march by, the pale light emphasized the wrinkles on his throat and cheeks. All this onslaught of old age in recent days made Daeman queasy—and even queasier considering what they’re discussing at that moment. He tried to imagine a world in which his friends and he—his mother!—grew old like Savi, like this mottled and wattled hologram. The horror of it made him shudder.

Then he remembered the horror of the tanks, the blue worms, and Caliban’s dining table.

Wouldn’t it be easier just to kill the monster? Leave the firmary intact?

No, Daeman realized through his hunger and fatigue. This place was an obscenity any way one looked at it. The entire belief system of the Five Twenties was based on the conviction that people went to the rings after one hundred years, joining the post-humans up here in comfort and immortality. Daeman thought of the gray, half-eaten corpses floating out there in the thin, stale air, and could only snort a laugh.

“What is it?” asked Prospero, half turning from the view.

“Nothing,” said Daeman. He felt like weeping or breaking something. Preferably the latter.

“How can we destroy the firmary?” asked Harman. The taller, older man was shivering from his illness. His face was even paler than Daeman’s and sheened slick with sweat.

“How indeed?” asked Prospero. He leaned on his staff and looked at them. “Did you bring explosives, weapons—other than Savi’s silly little pistol—or tools?”

“No,” said Harman.

“There are none up here,” said Prospero. “The post-humans had evolved themselves far beyond wars and conflicts. Or tools. The servitors did all work up here.”

“They’re still working,” said Daeman.

“Only in the firmary,” said the magus. He crossed slowly back to the center console. “Have you given thought to the hundreds of human beings floating helpless in the firmary tanks?”

“My God,” whispered Harman.

Daeman rubbed his cheek, feeling the beard there. It was an oddly satisfying sensation. “We can’t use the faxnodes in the healing tanks to get back to Earth,” he said, “but presumably those people already in the tanks could be faxed back to the portals from which they came.”

“Yes,” said Prospero. “If you can convince the servitors to do so. Or if you were to take over the fax controls yourselves. But there’s a problem with that.”

“What?” said Daeman, but even as he asked the question he saw the problem clearly.

Prospero smiled grimly and nodded. “For those who’ve just been faxed up to the tanks, or those finished with their blue-worm healing process, fax return is possible. But for those hundreds midway in the healing process . . .” His silence said everything.

“What can we do?” asked Harman. “There will be new people faxing in and healed ones faxing out, hundreds in the process.”

“If Prospero’s right and we can take over the fax controls,” said Daeman, “we could shut off the incoming, then continue to fax down the healed as the process is finished, until all the tanks are empty. We’ve both been in the tanks. How long does the Twenty healing usually take—twenty-four hours? Forty-eight for serious injuries like being eaten by an allosaurus?”

“You weren’t being ‘healed’ for that,” said Prospero. “They were rebuilding you from scratch, using your updated memory codes from the fax grid banks, stored DNA, and organic spare parts. But you are correct, even the slowest healing cases require no more than forty-eight hours.”

Daeman opened his hands and looked at Harman. “Two days from the time we take over the firmary.”

“If we can take over the firmary and control the fax process,” Harman said doubtfully.

The magus leaned on the back of his chair. “I can do nothing, but I can give information,” said the old man. “I can tell you how the fax controls work.”

“But we won’t be able to fax down ourselves?” Harman asked again. Obviously the thought of using the sonie worried him.

“No,” said Prospero.

“Can we reprogram the servitors to handle the faxing?” asked Daeman.

“No,” said the magus. “You will have to destroy or disable them. But they are not programmed for conflict.”

“Neither are we,” laughed Harman.

Prospero stepped around his chair. “Yes,” he whispered. “You are. With human beings, no matter how civilized you may appear, it is just a matter of reawakening old programming.”

Daeman and Harman looked at one another. Harman shivered again in his blue thermskin suit.

“Your genes remember how to kill,” said Prospero. “Come, let me show you the instrument of destruction.”

Prospero’s hologram couldn’t manipulate the virtual controls in the center console himself, but he showed Daeman and Harman how to use their hands on and in the complex glowing toggles, shunts, slides, switches, and manipulators.

An image misted into solidity above the console, then rotated in three dimensions for their inspection.