If I hadn’t just seen what I have seen, I’d think the old bastard was bluffing. Now I know better.

Athena gets to her feet, not more than a yard from the edge of the Tartarus Pit, and says, “Our Father, son of Kronos, who art in the highest throne of heaven, we know your power, Lord. Who can stand against you? Not us . . .”

All the immortals seem to be holding their breath. Athena’s temper is legendary, her diplomacy skills frequently lacking—if she says the wrong thing now . . .

“Even so,” says Zeus’s gray-eyed daughter, “we pity these mortals, my doomed Argive spearmen, acting out their little roles on their little stage, dying their terrible deaths, drowning in their own blood at the end of their little lives.”

She takes another two steps, so that the tips of her sandals are hanging over the edge of the black pit. Somewhere thousands of feet below her in the lightning-lashed Tartarus darkness, something large bellows in pain and fear. “Yes, Zeus,” continues Athena, “we will keep clear of the war as you command. But grant us—at the very least—permission to offer our mortal favorites tactics that may save them, so that they all won’t fall beneath the lightning of your immortal wrath.”

Zeus looks at his daughter a long moment and I for one can’t read his eyes. Fury? Humor? Impatience?

“Tritogeneia—third-born child—dear daughter,” says Zeus, “your courage has always given me a headache. But do not lose heart, for nothing of the lesson I showed you here today flows from anger, but only seeks to show all gathered here the consequences of their disobedience.”

And having spoken, Zeus steps down from his throne and his personal chariot flies in between the giant pillars, his pair of bronze-hooved horses—real, I see, not holograms—landing near him, their golden manes streaming behind them. Strapping on his golden armor and lifting his whip from its stand, Zeus climbs aboard his battle car, cracks the lash, and I watch the matched team and chariot roll across marble and then take to the air, circling the hall once a hundred feet above the gods’ and goddesses’ heads before flying out between the pillars and disappearing in a crack of quantum thunder.

Slowly the gods and goddesses and lesser sorts file out of the hall, murmuring and plotting among themselves, none—I’m sure—planning to obey their lord and king.

And me—I just sit here for a while—invisible and glad to be so. My jaw is hanging slack and I am breathing shallowly, like a whipped dog on a hot day. It feels like I’m drooling slightly.

Sometimes, up here on Olympos, it’s hard to believe completely in cause and effect and the scientific method.

25

Texas Redwood Forest

Daeman was all alone now, just him and the sonie in the forest clearing, and he didn’t like it.

After Savi left, Odysseus had told his endless, pointless story and walked into the woods at the end of it. Hannah had waited a minute and then gone after the old man. (Daeman had known immediately that morning that Hannah and the bearded man had slept together the night before—his sex radar was seldom wrong.) A few minutes later, Ada and the other old man, Harman, had said they were going for a short walk and then disappeared under the trees in the opposite direction. (Daeman knew that they’d had sex the night before as well. Evidently he and the old witch, Savi, were the only ones not having any fun.)

So now Daeman was alone in the forest glade, leaning against the hull of the landed sonie and listening to leaves stirring and branches breaking in the dark woods and not liking it one bit. If an allosaurus appeared, he was ready to leap into the sonie—but what then? He didn’t even know how to access the holographic controls, much less how to activate the forcefield bubble or fly away. He’d be an hors d’oeuvre on a plate for the dino.

Daeman considered shouting into the woods, calling for Savi or any of the others to return, but immediately thought better of it. Were dinosaurs and other predators attracted to noise? He wasn’t going to experiment to find out. Meanwhile, he was acutely uncomfortable—not just from the anxiety, but from the need to go to the toilet. The others may have scampered off into the forest with the tissues Savi had provided, but Daeman was a civilized human being; he’d never gone to the toilet without . . . well . . . a toilet, and he wasn’t going to start now. Of course he didn’t know how many hours it would be until they got to Ardis Hall, and Savi was talking as if she wasn’t even going to stop there, just drop off Hannah, Ada, and the preposterous impostor calling himself Odysseus, and then head on to the Mediterranean Basin or wherever it was. Daeman knew he couldn’t wait that long.

He realized that he was discouraged more than frightened. Everyone had seemed surprised yesterday when he volunteered to go with the old woman and Harman on their preposterous expedition, but no one had guessed his real reason for choosing that alternative. First of all, he was afraid of the dinosaurs around Ardis Hall. He wasn’t going back there. Second, all that talk of faxing being a sort of destruction and rebuilding of people had made him extremely nervous. Well, who wouldn’t be, so shortly after waking up in the firmary and knowing that your real body had been destroyed? Daeman had faxed almost every day of his life, but the thought of stepping into a faxportal now, knowing that it was going to break down his muscles, bones, brain, and memory, and then just build a copy somewhere else—if the old woman was telling the truth—well, that idea bothered the hell out of him.

So he’d opted for traveling on the sonie for a few more days, facing neither Ardis dinosaurs nor fax destruction of his atoms or molecules or whatever.

Now he just wanted a toilet and a servitor or his mother to make him supper. Perhaps he would demand that the old woman drop him off at Paris Crater after Ardis. It wasn’t that far away, was it? Even though he’d got a glimpse of Harman’s scribbles—his “map”—Daeman had no concept of the world’s geography. Everything was as precisely as far away as everything else—a faxportal step.

The old woman stepped out of the forest, saw Daeman alone, leaning against the floating sonie, and said, “Where is everyone?”

“That’s what I was wondering. First the barbarian left. Then Hannah went after him. Then Ada and Harman walked off that way . . .” He gestured toward the tall trees on the opposite side of the glade.

“Why don’t you use your palm?” said Savi, and smiled as if something she’d said amused her.

“I already tried,” said Daeman. “On your ice-thingee. At the bridge. Here. It doesn’t work.” He raised his left palm, thought of the finder function, and showed her the blank rectangle of white floating there.

“That’s just the immediate locator function,” said Savi. “Just an arrow-guide once you’re close to something, like inside a library hunting for a volume but in the wrong aisle. Use farnet or proxnet.”

Daeman stared at her. From his first glimpse of the old woman, he had doubted her sanity.

“Ah, that’s right,” said Savi, still smiling that unamused smile. “You’ve all forgotten the functions. Generation after generation.”

“What are you talking about?” said Daeman. “The old functions like reading don’t work anymore. They went away when the post-humans left.” He pointed to the rings crossing in the patch of blue sky above.

“Nonsense,” said Savi. She walked over, leaned against the sonie next to him, and gripped his left arm, turning it palm toward her. “Think three red circles with blue squares in the center of each.”

“What?”

“You heard me.” She continued to hold his wrist.

Idiocy, thought Daeman, but he visualized three red circles with blue squares floating in the center of each.