“How’d we get here?” Nightenhelser has always been a mellow sort, mildly grumpy in his rambling, rumbling, ursine way, but never really angry about anything. He sounds angry now.
“I QT’d us.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Hockenberry? We were nowhere near the QT portal.”
I ignore him and sit on a small rock, rubbing my arm. There aren’t many hills in Indiana, even in my other life there, but there were hilly, wooded, rocky areas around Bloomington, where Susan and I lived. I believe that, in my panic, I visualized . . . well, home. I wish to hell the QT medallion had moved us through time as well as space and plunked us down into late Twentieth Century Indiana, but something about the pure darkness of the night sky and the purely clean smell of the air here tells me otherwise.
Who’s here in 1200 b.c.? Indians. It would be ironic if the QT medallion had whisked us away from imminent death by our Muse’s hand—literally—only to bring us to the New World where we’ll be scalped by Indians. Most of the tribes didn’t scalp their victims before the white men arrived, drones on the pedantic part of my professor’s brain. Although I seem to remember reading somewhere that sometimes they took ears as proof of their kill.
Well, that makes me feel better. You can always trust a murderer to have a good prose style, so the saying goes, and a professor to come up with something depressing when you’re already depressed.
“Hockenberry?” demands Nightenhelser, sitting on a nearby footstool-sized rock—not too close to me, I notice—and rubbing his own elbows and knees.
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” I say in my best Jack Benny voice.
“Well, when you’re finished thinking,” says Nightenhelser, “maybe you could tell me why the Muse just killed young Houston.”
This sobers me, but I’m not sure how to respond. “There are things going on with the gods,” I say at last. “Plots. Intrigues. Pacts.”
“Tell me about it,” says Nightenhelser, meaning it both in irony and as a serious request.
I raise both hands, palms up. “Aphrodite was trying to use me to assassinate Athena.”
Nightenhelser stares. He manages—barely—not to drop his jaw.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I say. “Why me? Why use Hockenberry? Why give him the power to QT by himself and the Hades Helmet to hide under? And I agree—it doesn’t make any sense.”
“I wasn’t thinking that,” says Nightenhelser. A meteorite slices across the star-filled sky above us. Somewhere in the forest beyond the hill, an owl makes its not-quite-hooting noise. “I was just wondering what your first name was.”
It’s my turn to stare. “Why?”
“Because the gods discouraged use of first names and we were afraid of getting to know each other well because scholics were always being . . . disappeared and replaced by the gods,” says the big man, bearlike even in shadow-darkness. “So I want to know your first name.”
“Thomas,” I say after a second. “Tom. Yours?”
“Keith,” says the man I’ve known slightly for four years. He stands up and looks at the dark woods. “Well, what now, Tom?”
Insects, frogs, and other night critters are making noise in those black woods. Unless they’re really Indians sneaking up on us.
“Do you know how to . . . I mean, have you camped a lot . . . I mean . . .” I begin.
“You mean, will I die if you leave me here alone?” asks Nightenhelser . . . Keith.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. Probably. But I suspect my chances are a hell of a lot better here than back on the plains of Ilium. At least while the Muse is on the warpath . . .”
I guess that Keith is fixated on Indians right now as well.
“Plus I have all my little scholic tech-toys and gear. I can make fire, use the levitation harness to fly if I have to, morph into an Indian if necessary, even use the weapon taser. So I guess you should QT back to wherever you have to go and do whatever you have to do,” says Nightenhelser. “Fill me in later on the details . . . if there is a later.”
I nod and stand. It seems strange . . . wrong . . . to leave the other scholic here alone, but I don’t see any choice.
“Can you find your way back?” he asks. “Here, I mean. To fetch me.”
“I think so.”
“Think so? Think so?” Nightenhelser rubs his hand through his wild hair. “I hope you weren’t the chairman of your department, Hockenberry.”
I guess the era of first names is over.
There’s no place in the universe that I’d less rather be than Olympos. When I arrive, the inhabitants of this mountaintop are gathered in the Great Hall of the Gods. Making sure that the cowl of the Hades Helmet is pulled on tight and that I throw no shadow, I slip into the huge Parthenon-style building.
In my nine-plus years as scholic, I’ve never seen so many gods in one place. On one side of the long hologram pool sits Zeus, high on his golden throne, larger than I have ever seen him. As I’ve mentioned, the gods are usually eight or nine feet tall except when they take mortal form, and Zeus usually towers over them by three or four feet, a divine adult to their cosmic children. But today Zeus is twenty-five feet tall or taller, each of his muscled forearms as long as my torso. I fleetingly wonder what this does to that conservation of mass and energy the other scholic tried to teach me about years ago, but that’s not important now. Staying back against the wall, away from the milling gods, and not making any noise or movement or sneeze that will betray me to all these refined superhero senses—that’s important.
I thought that I knew all the gods and goddesses by name, but there are scores here that I don’t recognize. Those that I do know, the gods and goddesses who have been most involved in the fighting at Troy, stand out in the crowd like movie stars at a meeting of minor politicians, but even the least of these gods is taller, stronger, handsomer, and more perfect than any human movie star I remember from my other life. Nearest Zeus, opposite him across the hologram pool—which divides the room like a long moat now—I can see Pallas Athena, the war god Ares (obviously out of his healing tank, which was not damaged when I destroyed Aphrodite’s), Zeus’s younger brothers—the sea god Poseidon (who rarely comes to Olympos), and Hades, ruler of the dead. Zeus’s son, Hermes, stands near the pool, and the guide and giant killer is as lean and beautiful as statues I’ve seen of him. Another son of Zeus, Dionysus, the god of ecstatic release, is talking to Hera and—contrary to his public image—he has no goblet of wine in his hand. For a god of ecstatic release, Dionysus looks pale, feeble, and dour—like a man in only the third week of a twelve-step program. Beyond them, looking older than time, is Nereus, the true sea god, the Old Man of the Sea. His fingers and toes are webbed and there are gills visible below his armpits.
The Fates and the Furies are here in force, milling by accident or design between the gods and the goddesses. These are gods—of sorts—yet sometimes they have regulatory power over the other gods. They are not as human in appearance as the regular gods and goddesses, and I confess I know almost nothing about them except that they don’t live on Olympos, but on one of the three volcanoes far to the southeast, near where the muses reside.
My Muse, Melete, is here, standing with her sisters, Meneme and Aoide. The more “modern” muses are also in the crowd—the real Kalliope, Polymnia, Ourania, Erato, Kleis, Euterpe, Melpomene, Terpsichore, and Tahleia. Just beyond the muses are the A-list goddesses. Aphrodite is not among them—that is the first thing I notice. If she were, I would be as visible to her as these divinities are to me. But her mother, Dione, is in attendance, speaking to Hera and Hermes and looking very serious indeed. Near that group are Demeter—the goddess of crops—and her daughter Persephone, Hades’ wife. Behind them I can see Pasithea, one of the Graces. Farther back, as befits their lesser place, are the Nereids, nude to the waist, lovely, and treacherous-looking.