“Tell me about some of the shipwrecks.”

Mahnmut shook his head in the vacuum. He knew that Orphu was just trying to take his mind off current realities. “Tell me about your beloved Proust,” he said. “Does the narrator Marcel ever say anything about being lost on Mars?”

“He does, actually,” said Orphu with the slightest hint of a rumble.

“You’re joking.”

“I never joke about À la recherche du temps perdu,” said Orphu in a tone that almost, not quite, convinced Mahnmut that the Ionian was serious.

“All right, what does Proust say about surviving on Mars?” said Mahnmut. In five minutes he was going to deploy the periscope buoy again and bring them up even if the chariot was hovering ten meters overhead.

“In Volume Three of the French edition, Volume Five of the English translation I downloaded to you, Marcel says that if we suddenly found ourselves on Mars and grew a pair of wings and a new respiratory system, it would not take us out of ourselves,” said Orphu. “Not as long as we have to use our same senses. Not as long as we’re stuck in our same consciousnesses.”

“You’re kidding,” said Mahnmut.

“I never kid about the character Marcel’s perceptions in À la recherché du temps perdu,” Orphu said again in a tone that told Mahnmut that he was kidding all right, but not about that particular odd Mars reference. “Didn’t you read the editions I sent you at the beginning of the voyage in-system?”

“I did,” said Mahnmut. “I really did. I just sort of skipped over the last couple of thousand pages.”

“Well, that’s not uncommon,” said Orphu. “Listen, here’s a passage that comes after the growing wings and new lungs on Mars bit. Do you want it in French or English?”

“English,” Mahnmut said quickly. This close to a terrible death from suffocation, he didn’t want the added torture of listening to French.

“ The only true voyage, the only Fountain of Youth,” recited Orphu, “would be found not in traveling to strange lands but in having different eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another person, of a hundred others, and seeing the hundred universes each of them sees, which each of them is.”

Mahnmut actually forgot about their imminent asphyxiation for a minute as he thought about this. “That’s Marcel’s fourth and final answer to the puzzle of life, isn’t it, Orphu?”

The Ionian stayed quiet.

“I mean,” continued Mahnmut, “you said that the first three failed for Marcel. He tried believing in snobbery. He tried believing in friendship and love. He tried believing in art. None of it worked as a transcendent theme. So this is the fourth. This . . .” He could not find the right word or phrase.

“Consciousness escaping the limits of consciousness,” Orphu said quietly. “Imagination outstripping the bounds of imagination.”

“Yes,” breathed Mahnmut. “I see.”

“You need to,” said Orphu. “You’re my eyes now. I need to see the universe through your eyes.”

Mahnmut sat in the umbilical O2 hiss silence for a minute. Then he said, “Let’s try to take The Dark Lady up.”

“Periscope buoy?”

“To hell with them if they’re up there waiting. I’d rather die fighting than choke to death in the mud down here.”

“All right,” said Orphu. “You said ‘try’ to take the Lady up. Is there some doubt that you can get us out of the slime?”

“I have no fucking idea if we can break free of this stuff,” said Mahnmut, flicking virtual switches with his mind, powering the reactor up into the red, arming the thrusters and gyros. “But we’re going to give it a good try in . . . eighteen seconds. Hang on, my friend.”

“Since my grapplers, manipulators, and flagella are gone,” said Orphu, “I presume you mean that rhetorically.”

“Hang on with your teeth,” said Mahnmut. “Six seconds.”

“I’m a moravec,” said Orphu, sounding slightly indignant. “I don’t have any teeth. What were you . . .”

Suddenly the comm line was drowned out by the firing of all the thrusters, the booming of bulkheads creaking and giving way, and a great moaning sound as The Dark Lady fought to break free of Mars’ slimy grip.

18

Ilium

This city—Ilium, Troy, Priam’s City, Pergamus—is most beautiful at night.

The walls, each more than a hundred feet high, are lit with torches, illuminated by braziers on the ramparts, and backlit by the hundreds of fires of the Trojan army camping on the plain below. Troy is a city of tall towers, and most of these are lighted late into the night, windows warm with light, courtyards glowing, terraces and balconies warmed by candles and firepits and more torches. The streets of Ilium are broad and carefully paved—I once tried to slide my knifeblade between the stones and couldn’t—and most are lighted by open doorways, torches set into wall sconces, and by the cooking campfires of the thousands upon thousands of non-Trojan soldiers and their families living here now, allies to Ilium all.

Even the shadows in Ilium are alive. Young men and women of the lower classes make love in the dark alleys and on shadowy terraces. Well-fed dogs and eternally clever cats slip from shadow to shadow, narrow alley to courtyard, loping along the edges of the broad thoroughfares where fruit and vegetables, fish and meat have fallen from the day’s market carts and are theirs for the eating, and then slink back to narrow alleys’ gloom and darkness under the viaducts.

The residents of Ilium have no fear of starvation or deadly thirst. At the first alarm of the Achaeans’ approach—many weeks before the dark ships arrived more than nine years ago—hundreds of cattle and thousands of sheep were herded into the city, emptying farm fields for 400 square miles around the city. More such cattle drives happen regularly, and most of the beef gets to the city despite the Greeks’ halfhearted efforts to interdict. Vegetables and fruits flow easily into Ilium, delivered by the same shrewd farmers and traders who sell food to the Achaeans.

Troy was built where it was so many centuries ago largely because of the huge aquifer under it—the city has four giant wells that always run fresh and deep—but to be on the safe side, Priam long ago ordered a tributary of the River Simois to the north of Ilium diverted and run through easily defended canals and underground viaducts into the city proper. The Greeks have more trouble finding fresh water than do the technically besieged residents of Ilium.

The population of Ilium—easily the greatest city on Earth at this time—has more than doubled since the war began. First into the city for protection came the farmers and goatherders and fishermen and other peripatetic former denizens of the plains of Ilium. Following them came the armies of the allies of Troy—not only the fighting men, but often their wives and children and elders and dogs and cattle.

These allies include different groups: the “Trojans” not from Troy itself—the Dardanians and others from smaller cities and outlying areas far beyond Ilium, including the Trojan-loyal fighters from under Mount Ida and from as far north as Lykia. Also present now are the Adresteians and other fighters from places many leagues east of Troy, as well as the Pelasgians from Larisa in the south.

From Europe have come the Thracians, Paionians, and Kikones. From the south shores of the Black Sea have come the Halizones—dwellers near the River Halys and related to the Chalybes metalworkers of ancient legend. One can hear campfire songs and curses in the city from the Paphlagoes and Enetoi, a people from farther north along the Black Sea who may be the great-great-ancestors of the future Venetians. From north-central Asia Minor have come the shaggy Mysians—Ennomos and Nastes are two Mysian men I’ve spent time with and who will, according to Homer, be cut down by Achilles in the river battle to come—a slaughter so terrible that not only will the Scamander run red for months, but the river will be dammed up by the corpses of all the men Achilles will massacre there, including the unclaimed bodies of Nastes and Ennomos.