There was much celebration inside and when the heralds announced the outcome to the tens of thousands in the central plaza and marketplace outside, the cheers echoed back off the new, low walls of New Ilium.
It was outside on the terrace that Hector came up to her. After a few words of greeting and comments on the chilled wine, he said, “I want so badly to go, Helen. I can’t stand the thought of this expedition leaving without me.”
Ah, thought Helen, this is the reason for Andromache’s no vote. Aloud she said, “You cannot possibly go, noble Hector. The city needs you.”
“Bah,” said Hector, swallowing the last of his wine and banging the cup down on a building stone that had not yet been set in place. “The city is under no threat. We’ve seen no other people in twelve months. We spent this time rebuilding our walls—such as they are—but we shouldn’t have bothered. There are no other people out there. Not in this region of the wide Earth, at least.”
“All the more reason for you to remain and watch over your people,” said Helen, smiling slightly. “To protect us from these dinosaurs and Terrible Birds our tall Ardisian tells us about.”
Hector caught the mischief in her eye and smiled back. Helen knew that she and Hector had always had this strange connection—part teasing, part flirting, part something deeper than a husband and wife’s connection. He said, “You don’t think your future husband will be adequate to protect our city from all threat, noble Helen?”
She smiled again. “I esteem your brother Deiphobus above most other men, my dear Hector, but I have not agreed to his marriage proposal.”
“Priam would have wished it,” said Hector. “Paris would have been pleased at the thought.”
Paris would have puked at the thought, thought Helen. She said, “Yes, your brother Paris would be happy to know that I married Deiphobus… or any noble brother in Priam’s line.” She smiled up at Hector again and was pleased to see his discomfort.
“Would you keep a secret if I tell you?” he asked, leaning close to her and speaking almost in a whisper.
“Of course,” she whispered back, thinking, If it is in my interest to do so.
“I plan to go with Thrasymedes and his expedition when it sails,” Hector said quietly. “Who knows if any of us will ever return? I will miss you, Helen.” He awkwardly touched her shoulder.
Helen of Troy set her smooth hand over his rough one, squeezing it between her soft shoulder and her soft palm. She looked deeply into his gray eyes. “If you go on this expedition, noble Hector, I will miss you almost as much as will your lovely Andromache.”
But not quite so much as Andromache will, thought Helen, since I will be a stowaway on this voyage if it costs me the last diamond and the last pearl of my sizeable fortune.
Still touching hands, she and Hector walked to the railing of the Council palace’s long stone porch. The crowds in the marketplace below were going mad with happiness.
In the center of the plaza, exactly where the old fountain had stood for centuries, the mob of drunken Greeks and Trojans, milling together like brothers and sisters, had pulled in a large wooden horse. The artifact was so large that it wouldn’t have fit through the Gaean Gate, if the Scaean Gate still stood. The lower, wider, topless gate, hastily erected near the place where the oak tree had stood, had no problem swinging wide for this effigy.
Some wag in the mob had decided that this horse was to be the symbol for the Fall of Ilium and today, on the anniversary of that Fall, they planned to burn the thing. Spirits were high.
Helen and Hector watched, their hands still touching lightly—silently but not without communication to each of them—as the mob set the torch to the giant horse and the thing, made mostly of dried driftwood, went up in seconds, driving the mob back, bringing the constables running with their shields and spears, and causing the noblemen and women on the long porch and balconies to murmur in disapproval.
Helen and Hector laughed aloud.
93
Seven years and five months after the Fall of Ilium:
Moira quantum teleported into the open meadow. It was a beautiful summer’s day. Butterflies hovered in the shade of the surrounding forest and bees hummed above clover.
A black Belt soldier moravec approached her carefully, spoke to her politely, and led her up the hill to where a small, open tent—more a colorful canvas pavilion on four poles, actually—flapped gently in the breeze from the south. There were tables in the shade of the canvas and half a dozen moravecs and men bent over them, studying or cleaning the scores of shards and artifacts laid out there.
The smallest figure at the table—he had his own high stool—turned, saw her, jumped down, and came out to greet her.
“Moira, what a pleasure,” said Mahnmut. “Please do come in out of the midday sun and have a cold drink.”
She walked into the shade with the little moravec. “Your sergeant said that you were expecting me,” she said.
“Ever since our conversation two years ago,” said Mahnmut. He went over to the refreshment table and came back with a glass of cold lemonade. The other moravecs and men there looked at her with curiosity, but Mahnmut did not introduce her. Not yet.
Moira gratefully sipped the lemonade, noticed the ice that they must QT or fax in from Ardis or some other community every day, and looked down and over the meadow. This patch ran a hilly mile or so to the river, between the forest to the north and the rough land to the south.
“Do you need the moravec troopers to keep away rubberneckers?” she asked. “Curious crowds?”
“More likely to interdict the occasional Terror Bird or young T-Rex,” said Mahnmut. “What on earth were the post-humans thinking, as Orphu likes to say.”
“Do you still see Orphu much?”
“Every day,” said Mahnmut. “I’ll see him this evening in Ardis for the play. Are you coming?”
“I might,” said Moira. “How did you know that I was invited?”
“You’re not the only one who speaks to Ariel now and again, my dear. More lemonade?”
“No, thank you.” Moira looked at the long meadow again. More than half of it had its top several layers of soil removed—not haphazardly, as from a mechanical earthmover, but carefully, lovingly, obsessively—the sod rolled back, strings and tiny pegs marking every incision, small signs and numbers everywhere, trenches ranging from a few inches in depth to several meters. “So do you think you’ve found it at last, friend Mahnmut?”
The little moravec shrugged. “It’s amazing how difficult it is to find precise coordinates for this little town in the records. It’s almost as if some… power… had removed all references, GPS coordinates, road signs, histories. It’s almost as if some … force … did not want us to find Stratford-on-Avon.”
Moira looked at him with her clear gray-blue eyes. “And why would any power… or force… not want you to find whatever you’re looking for, dear Mahnmut?”
He shrugged again. “It’d be just a guess, but I would say because they—this hypothetical power or force—didn’t mind human beings loose and happy and breeding on the planet again, but they have second thoughts about having a certain human genius back again.”
Moira said nothing.
“Here,” said Mahnmut, drawing her over to a nearby table with all of the enthusiasm of a child, “look at this. One of our volunteers found this yesterday on site three-oh-nine.”
He held up a broken slab of stone. There were strange scratches on the dirty rock.
“I can’t quite make that out,” said Moira.
“We couldn’t either at first,” said Mahnmut. “It took Dr. Hockenberry to help us know what we were looking at. Do you see how this forms IUM and here below US and AER and here ET?”