My skin feels cold. My self-indulgence with Helen last night, my long impersonation of Paris, has already changed something important in the flow of things. If the Muse had known the details of the Iliad—which she didn’t—she would have known at once that I had taken Paris’s place in bed with Helen.

“Did you report the discrepancy to the Muse?” I ask softly. Nightenhelser would have gone off shift when darkness fell. Since I was missing, he was the only scholic on duty last evening. It was his duty to report such oddities.

Nightenhelser chews the last of his bread slowly. “No,” he says at last, “I didn’t dictate that to the word stone.”

I let out a breath. “Thank you,” I say.

“We’d better go,” says the other scholic. The restaurant is filling up with Trojan men and their wives waiting for a seat. As I drop coins on the table, Nightenhelser grips my forearm. “Do you know what you’re doing, Hockenberry?”

I look him in the eye. My voice is firm when I respond. “Absolutely not.”

Once on the street, I go the opposite direction from Nightenhelser. Stepping into an empty alley, I pull up the cowl of the Hades Helmet and touch the QT medallion.

It is sunrise on the summit of Mount Olympos. The white buildings and green lawns reflect the rich but lesser light here. I’ve always wondered why the sun seems smaller on and around Olympos than in the skies above Ilium.

I had envisioned the chariot stand near the Muse’s building, and that’s where I have arrived. I hold my breath as a chariot spirals down from the morning sky and lands not twenty feet from me, but Apollo steps out and strides away without noticing me. The Hades Helmet still works.

I step onto the chariot and touch the bronze plate near the front. I had watched the Muse carefully as she flew us across the caldera lake the other day. A glowing, transparent keyplate comes into existence inches above the brass. I touch the icons there in the sequence I’d watched the Muse use.

The chariot wobbles, rises, wobbles again, and steadies itself as I move the glowing, virtual energy controller next to the readouts. I twist it left and the chariot banks left fifty feet above the summit grass. I touch the forward-arrow icon and the chariot leaps ahead, flying south over the blue lake. To any god watching, it should look like an empty chariot flying itself, but no god is visible to watch.

Across the lake, I gain a bit of altitude and try to find the right building. There—just beyond the Great Hall of the Gods.

Some goddess—I do not recognize her—cries out from the front steps of the huge building and points toward my seemingly empty chariot, but it’s too late—I’ve identified the building I want: huge, white, with an open doorway.

I’m getting the knack of the chariot controls now and I dive within twenty feet of the ground and accelerate toward the building. I have to lift the left side of the chariot almost perpendicular to the ground—I do not fall, there is some artificial gravity in the machine—as I zip between the giant columns at forty or fifty miles per hour.

Inside, the space is as I remember it: the giant vats filled with bubbling, violet liquid, green worms roiling around the unconscious, floating, healing gods. The Healer—the giant centipede-thing with metallic arms and red eyes—is on the opposite side of Aphrodite’s reconstruction vat, preparing to remove her from it, I presume; his red eyes look my way and his many arms quiver as the chariot rushes into the quiet space, but he is not between me and my target and I accelerate forward before he or anything else can stop me.

It is only at the last second that I decide to jump rather than to stay with the chariot. It must be the memory of Helen, the night with Helen—the renewed pleasure of life in those hours with Helen.

The Hades Helmet still shielding me, I leap from the speeding chariot, land hard, feel something bruise if not break in my right shoulder, and then I tumble to a stop on the floor as the chariot flies directly into the reconstruction vat, smashing plastic and steel, throwing violet liquid a hundred feet into the air of the giant room. Something—either part of the chariot or a huge shard of vat glass—slices the giant centipede Healer in two.

Aphrodite’s body rolls out onto the floor in a wave of violet liquid and a coiling mass of writhing green worms. The other vats—including the one holding Ares in his nest of worms—rock but do not break or tumble.

Claxons, alarms, and sirens go off, deafening me.

I try to rise, but my head, left leg and right shoulder ache terribly and I sink back to the floor. I crawl to one side of the room, trying to stay out of the violet goo. I’m afraid of what the chemicals will do to me, but more afraid that the outline of my body will be visible in the flood if I can’t get away from it. Black spots dance in my vision and I realize I’m going to pass out. Gods and floating robot-machines are rushing into the great healing chamber.

In the seconds before I lose consciousness, I see mighty Zeus stride in, his cloak billowing, his brow furrowed.

Whatever’s going to happen next will have to happen without me. I set my forehead against the cool floor, close my eyes, and let the blackness wash over me.

22

The Coast of Chryse Planitia

“I killed my friend, Orphu of Io,” Mahnmut told William Shakespeare.

The two were walking in neighborhoods along the bank of the Thames. Mahnmut knew that it was the late summer of 1592 a.d., although he did not know how he knew. The river was busy with barges, wherries, and low-masted rivercraft. Beyond the Tudor buildings and ramshackle tenements on the north bank rose a profusion of London’s steeples and a few contorted towers. A hot haze hung over the river and behind the slums on either side.

“I should have saved Orphu, but I could not,” said Mahnmut. He had to walk quickly to keep up with the playwright.

Shakespeare was a compact man, in his late twenties, soft-spoken and dressed in a more dignified manner than Mahnmut would have expected from an actor and playwright. The young man’s face was a sharp oval, showing a hairline already receding, sideburns, and a wisp of a beard and thin mustache—as if Shakespeare were tentatively experimenting with a more permanent beard. His hair was brown, his eyes a grayish-green, and he wore a black doublet from which the wide, soft collars of a white shirt were visible, white drawstrings hanging down. There was a small gold hoop in the writer’s left ear.

Mahnmut wanted to ask Shakespeare a thousand questions—what was he writing now? what was life like in this city that would soon be overwhelmed by the plague? what is the hidden structure of the sonnets?—but all he could talk about was Orphu.

“I tried to save him,” explained Mahnmut. “The Dark Lady ’s reactor shut down and then the batteries went dead less than five kilometers from the coast. I was trying to find an inlet in one of the many caves along the cliffs—someplace we could hide the sub.”

“The Dark Lady?” asked Shakespeare. “This is the name of your ship?”

“Yes.”

“Pray continue.”

“Orphu and I were talking about the stone faces,” said Mahnmut. “It was night—we were approaching the coast at night, under cover of darkness, but I was using the night-vision scope and was describing the faces to him. He was still alive. The ship was providing just enough O2 for him.”

“O2?”

“Air,” explained Mahnmut. “As I say, I was describing the great stone heads to him—“

“Great stone heads? Statues?”

“Stone monoliths each about twenty meters tall,” said Mahnmut.

“Did you recognize the statue’s visage? Was he someone of your acquaintance, or perhaps a famous king or conqueror?”

“It was too far away for me to see details of the faces,” said Mahnmut.