We descend near the largest of the giant buildings, the chariot touches down, and the holographic horses wink out of existence. Several hundred other sky chariots are parked helter-skelter on the grass.
The Muse removes what looks to be a small medallion from her robe. “Hockenberry, I have been ordered to take you somewhere where you cannot be. I have been directed by one of the gods to give you two items that might keep you from being crushed like a gnat if you are detected. Put these on.”
The Muse hands me two objects—a medallion on a chain and what looks to be a tooled-leather hood. The medallion is small but heavy, as if it is made of gold. The Muse reaches forward and slides one part of the disc counterclockwise from the rest. “This is a personal quantum teleporter such as the gods use,” she says softly. “It can teleport you any place you can visualize. This particular QT disk also allows you to follow the quantum trail of the gods as they phase-shift through Planck space, but no one—except the god who gave me this—can trace your path. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I say, my voice almost quavering. I shouldn’t have this thing. It will be my death. The other “gift” is worse.
“This is the Helmet of Death,” she says, tugging the ornate leather headpiece over my head, but leaving it folded around my neck like a cowl. “The Hades Helmet. It was made by Hades himself and it is the only thing in the universe that can hide you from the vision of the gods.”
I blink stupidly at this. I vaguely remember scholarly footnotes about “the Helmet of Death,” and I remember that Hades’ name itself—in Greek, Äidès was thought to mean “the unseen one.” But as far as I knew, Hades’ Helmet of Death was mentioned only once by Homer, when Athena donned it to be invisible to the war god, Ares. Why on earth or Olympos would any goddess loan this thing to me? What are they setting me up to do for them? My knees go weak at the thought.
“Put the helmet on,” orders the Muse.
Clumsily, I tug up the thick leather. There are devices embedded in the material, circuit chips, nanotech machines. The helmet has clear, flexible eyepieces and mesh material over the mouth, and when I’ve pulled on the full cowl, the air seems to ripple strangely around us, although my sight is otherwise unaffected.
“Incredible,” says the Muse. She is staring right past me. I realize that I’ve achieved the goal of every adolescent boy—true invisibility, although how the helmet shields my entire body from sight, I have no idea. My impulse is to run like hell and hide from the Muse and all the gods. I stifle the impulse. There has to be a catch here. No god or goddess, not even my minor Muse, would give a mere scholic such power without safeguards.
“This device will shield you from the sight of all the gods except the goddess who authorized me to give it to you,” the Muse says quietly, staring at the empty air to the right of my head. “But that goddess can see and track you anywhere, Hockenberry. And although sound, scent, even heartbeat is muffled by the medallion, the gods’ senses are beyond your understanding. Stay close to me in the next few minutes. Tread lightly. Say nothing. Breathe as lightly and shallowly as possible. If you are detected, neither I nor your divine patroness can protect you from the wrath of Zeus.”
How do you breathe lightly and softly when you’re terrified? But I nod, forgetting the Muse cannot see me now. When she waits, still staring slightly askance as if seeking me with her divine vision, I croak, “Yes, Goddess.”
“Put your hand on my arm,” she orders brusquely. “Stay with me. Do not lose contact with me. If you do, you will be destroyed.”
I put my hand on her arm like a timid debutante being escorted at a coming-out party. The Muse’s skin is cold.
I was once in the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. The guide said that clouds sometimes formed under the roof hundreds of feet above the concrete floor. You could take the VAB and set it in one corner of this immense room we find ourselves in now and you’d never notice it sitting there like a cast-off child’s toy block in a cathedral.
One says “gods” and you think of the meat-and-potato gods, the main gods—Zeus, Hera, Apollo, and a few others—but there are hundreds of gods in this room and most of the room is empty. Seemingly miles above us, a gold dome—the Greeks had not discovered the principles of a dome, so this was in contrast to the classically conservative architecture of the other great buildings I have seen on Olympos—acoustically directs conversation to all corners of the breathtaking space.
The floor looks to be made of hammered gold. Gods lean on marble railings and look down from circling mezzanines. The walls everywhere sport hundreds upon hundreds of arched niches, each holding a white marble sculpture. The statues are of the gods present here now.
Holograms of Achaeans and Trojans flicker here and there, many of them showing life-sized, full-color, three-dimensional images of the men and women as they argue or eat or make love or sleep. Near the center of the room, the gold floor steps down to a recess larger than any combination of Olympic-sized swimming pools, and in this space flickers and floats more real-time images from Ilium—broad aerial views, close-ups, panning shots, multiple images. One can hear the dialogue as if the Greeks and Trojans were in this very room. Around this vision pool, sitting in stone thrones and lounging on plush couches and standing in their cartoonlike togas, are the gods. The important gods. The meat-and-potato, known-by-grade-schoolers gods.
Lesser gods move aside as the Muse approaches this center pool, and I hurry to stay with her, my invisible hand tremulous on her golden arm, trying not to squeak my sandals or trip or sneeze or breathe. None of the deities seem to notice me. I suspect that I will know very quickly if any of them do.
The Muse stops a few yards from Pallas Athena and I stay so close to her that I feel like a three-year-old child hugging his mother’s skirt.
There is a fierce argument under way, even as Hebe—one of the minor goddesses—moves among the others, pouring some sort of golden nectar into their gold goblets. Zeus sits on his throne and it is obvious to me at a glance that Zeus is the king here, he who drives the storm clouds, god among gods. No cartoon image, this Zeus, but an impossibly tall reality whose bearded, oiled, and palpably regal presence makes my blood turn to frightened sludge.
“How can we control the course of this war?” he demands of all the gods even while he stares daggers at his wife, Hera. “Or the fate of Helen? If goddesses such as Hera of Argos and Athena, guardian of her soldiers, keep intervening—such as this stopping Achilles’ hand in the act of drawing the blood of the son of Atreus?”
He turns his storm-cloud gaze on a goddess lounging on purple cushions. “Or you, Aphrodite, with your constant laughter, always standing by that pretty-boy Paris, driving away evil spirits and deflecting well-cast spears. How can the will of the gods—and more important, of Zeus—be clear, even here, if you meddling goddesses keep protecting your favorites at the expense of Fate? Despite all your machinations, Hera, Menelaus may yet lead Helen home . . . or perhaps, who knows, Ilium may prevail. It is not for a few female gods to decide these things.”
Hera folds her slender arms. So frequently in the poem is Hera referred to as “the white-armed goddess” that I half expect her arms to be whiter than the other goddesses’ arms, but although Hera’s skin is milky enough, it’s no visibly milkier than that of Aphrodite or Hera’s daughter Hebe or any of the other female gods I can see from my vantage point here near the image pool . . . except for Athena, that is, who looks strangely tanned. I know that these descriptive passages are a function of Homer’s type of epic poetry; Achilles is referred to repeatedly as “swift-footed,” Apollo as “one who shoots from afar,” and Agamemnon’s name is usually preceded by “wide ruling” or “lord of men”; the Achaeans are “strong-greaved” and their ships “black” or “hollow” and so forth. These repeated epithets met the heavy demands of dactylic hexameter more than mere description, and were a way for the singing bard to meet metric requirements with formulaic phrases. I’ve always suspected that some of these ritual phrases—such as Dawn stretching forth her rosy fingertips—were also verbal placeholders, buying the bard a few seconds to remember, if not invent, the next few lines of action.