Still, as Hera begins to retort to her husband, I am looking at her arms. “Son of Kronos—dreaded majesty,” she says, white arms folded, “what in the hell are you talking about? How dare you consider making all of my labors pointless? I’m talking sweat here—immortal sweat—poured out launching Achaea’s armies, stroking these male hero’s egos just to keep them from killing each other before they kill Trojans, and taking great pains—my pains, O Zeus—in heaping greater pains on King Priam and the sons of Priam and the city of Priam.”
Zeus frowns and leans forward on his uncomfortable-looking throne, his huge white hands clenching and unclenching.
Hera unfolds her arms and throws up her hands in exasperation. “Do what you please—you always do—but don’t expect any of us immortals to praise you.”
Zeus stands. If the other gods are eight or nine feet tall, Zeus must stand twelve feet high. His brow is more folded than furrowed now, and I am using no metaphor when I say that he thunders:
“Hera—my dear, darling, insatiable Hera! What has Priam or the sons of Priam ever done to you that you have become so furious, so relentless to bring down Priam’s city of Ilium?”
Hera stands silent, hands at her side. This seems only to increase Zeus’s royal fury.
“This is more appetite than anger with you, Goddess!” he roars. “You won’t be satisfied until you knock down the Trojans’ gates, breach their walls, and eat them raw.”
Hera’s expression does nothing to deny this charge.
“Well . . . well . . .” thunders Zeus, almost spluttering in a way all too familiar to husbands across the millennia, “do as you please. But one more thing—and remember it well, Hera—when there comes a day that I am bent on destroying a city and consuming its inhabitants—a city you love, as I love Ilium—then don’t even think about attempting to oppose my fury.”
The goddess takes three quick steps forward and I am reminded of a predator pouncing, or some chess master seeing his opening and taking it. “Yes! The three cities I love best are Argos and Sparta and Mycenae of the wide ways, its streets as broad and regal as ill-fated Ilium’s. All these you can sack to your vandal’s heart’s content, My Lord. I will not oppose you. I will not begrudge your will . . . little good it would do me anyway, since you are the stronger of us two. But remember this, O Zeus—although I am your consort, I am also born of Kronos and thus deserving of your respect.”
“I never suggested otherwise,” mutters Zeus, taking his hard seat again.
“Then let us yield one to the other on this point,” says Hera, her voice audibly sweeter now. “I to you and you to me. The lesser gods will comply. Quickly now, my husband! Achilles has left the field for now, but a mewling truce makes quiet the killing ground between Trojans and Achaeans. See that that the Trojans break this truce and do first injury, not only to their oaths, but to the far-famed Achaeans.”
Zeus glowers, grumbles, shifts in his chair, but orders the attentive Athena—“Go quickly down to the quiet killing ground between Trojans and Achaeans. I order you to see that the Trojans are the first to break the truce and do injury to the far-famed Achaeans.”
“And trample on the Argives in their triumph,” prompts Hera.
“And trample on the Argives in their triumph,” Zeus orders wearily.
Athena disappears in a QT flash. Zeus and Hera leave the room and the gods begin to disperse, speaking softly amongst themselves.
The Muse beckons me to follow with a subtle flick of her finger and leads me out of the assembly hall.
“Hockenberry,” says the Goddess of Love, reclining on her cushioned couch, the gravity—light as it is—giving emphasis to all her silky, milky-weighted voluptuousness.
The Muse had led me to this other room in the Great Hall of the Gods, this darkened room with only the double glow from a low-burning brazier and from something that looked suspiciously like a computer screen. She had whispered to me to remove the Helmet of Death and I was relieved to take the leather hood off, but terrified to be visible again.
Then Aphrodite had entered, assumed her position on the couch, and said, “That will be all until I summon you, Melete,” and the Muse had stepped out through a secret door.
Melete, I thought. Not one of the nine muses, but a name from an earlier era, where the muses were thought to be three: Melete of “practicing,” Mneme of “remembering,” and Aoide of . . .
“Hockenberry, I was able to see you in the Hall of the Gods,” says Aphrodite, blinking me out of my scholic reverie, “and if I had pointed you out to Lord Zeus, you would be something less than ashes now. Even your QT medallion would not have allowed you to escape, for I could follow your phase-shift path through time and space itself. Do you know why you are here?”
Aphrodite is my patroness. She’s the one who ordered the Muse to give me these devices. What do I do? Kneel? Prostrate myself on the floor in the presence of divinity? How do I address her? In my nine years, two months, and eighteen days here, my existence has never been acknowledged by a god before, not counting my Muse.
I decide to bow slightly, averting my eyes from her beauty, from the sight of pink nipples showing through thin silk, of that soft cusp of stomach sending shadows into that triangle of dark fabric where her thighs meet.
“No, Goddess,” I say at last, all but forgetting the question.
“Do you know why you were chosen as scholic, Hockenberry? Why your DNA was exempted from nanocyte disruption? Why, before you were chosen for reintegration, your writings on the War were factored into the simplex?”
“No, Goddess.” My DNA is exempt from nanocyte disruption?
“Do you know what a simplex is, mortal shade?”
Herpes virus? I think. “No, Goddess,” I say.
“The simplex is a simple geometric mathematical object, an exercise in logistics, a triangle or trapezoid folded on itself,” says Aphrodite. “Only combined with multiple dimensions and algorithms defining new notional areas, creating and discarding feasible regions of n-space, planes of exclusion become inevitable contours. Do you understand now, Hockenberry? Do you understand how this applies to quantum space, to time, to the War below, or to your own fate?”
“No, Goddess.” My voice does quaver this time. I can’t help it.
There is a rustling of silk and I glance up long enough to see the most beautiful female in existence rearranging her fair limbs and smooth thighs on the couch. “No matter,” she says. “You—or the mortal who was your template—wrote a book several thousand years ago. Do you remember its content?”
“No, Goddess.”
“If you say that one more time, Hockenberry, I am going to rip you open from crotch to crown and quite literally use your guts for my garters. Do you understand that?”