I’ve seen scholics who displease the Muse, much less the more important gods. Some years ago—the fifth year of the siege, actually—there was a scholic from the Twenty-sixth Century, a chubby, irreverent Asian with the unusual name of Bruster Lin—and even though Bruster Lin was the brightest and most insightful scholar amongst us, his irreverence was his undoing. Literally. After one of his more ironic comments—it was about the mano a mano combat between Paris and Menelaus, winner take all, that would have settled the war on the outcome of that single combat. The one-on-one fight to the death between Helen’s Trojan lover and her Achaean husband—although staged in front of two cheering armies, with Paris beautiful in his golden armor and Menelaus fearful with his eye full of business—was never consummated. Aphrodite saw that her beloved Paris was going to be hacked into worm meat, so she swooped down and spirited him off the battlefield back to Helen, where, like effete liberals in every age, Paris was more the happy warrior in bed than on the battlefield. So it was after one of Bruster Lin’s amusing comments on the Paris–Menelaus episode, that the Muse—not amused—snapped her fingers and the billions upon trillions of obedient nanocytes in the hapless scholic’s body aggregated and exploded outward in one giant nano-lemming leap, shredding the still-smiling Bruster Lin into a thousand bloody shreds in front of the rest of us and sending his still-smiling head rolling toward our feet as we stood at attention.
It was a serious lesson and we took it to heart. No editorializing. No making merry with the serious business of the gods’ sport. The wages of irony is death.
The Muse opens her eyes and looks at me now. “Hockenberry,” she says, her tone that of a personnel bureaucrat from my century about to fire a mid-level white-collar worker, “how long have you been with us?”
I know the question is rhetorical, but when queried by a goddess, even a minor goddess, one answers even rhetorical questions. “Nine years, two months, eighteen days, Goddess.”
She nods. I am the oldest surviving scholic. Or, rather, I am the scholic who has survived the longest. She knows this. Perhaps this official recognition of my longevity is my elegy before explosive termination by nanocyte.
I had always taught my students that there were nine Muses, all daughters of Mnemosyne—Kleis, Euterpe, Thaleria, Melpomene, Terpsichorde, Erato, Plymnia, Ourania, and Kalliope—each one granted, at least by later Greek tradition, control of some artistic expression such as flute or dance or storytelling or heroic song—but in my nine years, two months, and eighteen days serving the gods as observer on the plains of Ilium, I’ve reported to, seen, and heard of only one Muse—this tall goddess who sits in front of me now behind her marble table. Still, because of her strident voice, I’ve always thought of her as “Kalliope,” even though the name originally meant “she of the beautiful voice.” I can’t say this solo Muse has a beautiful voice—it’s more klaxon than calliope to my ear—but it’s certainly one I’ve learned to jump to when she says “frog.”
“Follow me,” she says, rising fluidly and walking out the private side door of her white marble room.
I jump and follow.
The Muse is god-sized—that is to say, over seven feet tall but in perfect human proportions, less voluptuous than some of the goddesses but built like a Twentieth Century female triathlete—and even in the lessened gravity here on Olympos, I have to scramble to keep up as she strides across the close-cropped green lawns between white buildings.
She pauses at a chariot nexus. I say “chariot” and it is vaguely chariotlike—low, roughly horseshoe shaped, with a niche in the side allowing the Muse to step up into it, but this chariot lacks horses, reins and driver. She grips the railing and beckons me up.
Hesitantly, heart pounding wildly now, I step up and stand to one side as the Muse taps her long fingers across a gold wedge that might be some sort of control panel. Lights blink. The chariot hums, crackles, becomes suddenly girdled by a latticework of energy, and rises off the grass, twirling as it climbs. Suddenly a holographic pair of “horses” appears in front of the chariot and gallop as they seem to pull the chariot through the sky. I know that the holographic horses are there for the Greeks’ and Trojans’ need for closure, but the sense that they are real animals pulling a real chariot through the sky is very strong. I grab the metal bar along the rim and brace myself, but there is no sense of acceleration even as the transport disk jigs and jags, swoops once a hundred feet above the Muse’s modest temple, and then accelerates toward the deep depression of the Lake of the Caldera.
Chariot of the gods! I think and blame the unworthy thought on fatigue and adrenaline.
I’ve seen these chariots a thousand times, of course, flying near Olympos or above the plains of Ilium as the gods shuttle to and fro on their godlike business, but I’ve always seen them from my vantage point on the ground. The horses look real from that angle and the chariot itself seems far less substantial when you’re in one, flitting a thousand feet above the summit of a mountain—volcano, actually—that itself rises some 85,000 feet above the desert floor.
The summit of Olympos should be airless and ice-covered, but the air here is as thick and breathable as it is some seventeen miles lower where the scholic barracks huddle at the base of the volcanic cliffs, and rather than ice, the broad summit is covered with grass, trees, and white buildings large enough and grand enough to make the Acropolis look like an outhouse.
The figure eight of the Lake of the Caldera at the center of the summit of Olympos is almost sixty miles across and we zip across it at near-supersonic speed, some forcefield or bit of godly magic keeping the wind from tearing our heads off at the same time it muffles the sound. Hundreds of buildings, each with acres of manicured lawn and gardens around it, gods’ homes, I presume, surround the lake, while great three-tiered autotriremes move slowly across the blue waters. Scholic Bruster Lin once told me that he estimated that Olympos was the size of Arizona, its grassy summit equaling approximately the surface area of Rhode Island. It was strange to hear of things here being compared to states on that other world, in that other time, from that other existence.
Clinging to the thin railing with both hands, I peek out beyond the mountaintop. The view is breathtaking.
We are high enough that I can see the curve of the world. To the northwest, the great blue ocean extends to that inverted cusp of horizon. To the northeast runs the coastline, and I fancy that even from this distance I can see the great stone heads that mark the boundary between sea and land. Due north is the scythe of the unnamed archipelago just visible from the shoreline a few miles from our scholic barracks, then nothing but blue again all the way to the pole. To the southeast I can see three other tall volcanic summits thrusting above the horizon, obviously lower than Olympos’s summit but, unlike climate-controlled Olympos, white with snow. One of them, I guess, must be Mount Helicon, home to my Muse and her sisters, if sisters she has. To the south and southwest, for hundreds of miles, I can make out a succession of cultivated fields, then wild forests, then red desert beyond, then perhaps forest again, until land blends with clouds and haze and no amount of blinking or rubbing of eyes can resolve the detail there.
The Muse sweeps our chariot around and descends toward the west shoreline of the Lake of the Caldera. I see now that the white specks I noticed during our crossing of the lake are huge white buildings, fronted with columns and steps, graced with gigantic pediments, and decorated with statuary. I am sure that no scholic has seen this part of Olympos . . . or at least seen it and lived to tell the rest of us about it.