Achilles grimaces, twists his hair free, looks sullen, but resheaths his sword. Watching Athena and him is like watching two living forms amidst a field of statues. “I can’t defy both of you, Goddess,” says Achilles. “Better if a man submits to the will of the gods, even if his heart breaks with anger. But it is only fair then that the gods hear the prayers of that man.”
Athena twitches the slightest of smiles and winks out of existence—QTing back to Olympos—and time resumes.
Agamemnon is ending his harangue.
Sword sheathed, Achilles steps into the empty circle. “You drunken wineskin of a man!” cries the man-killer. “You with your dog’s eyes and your deer’s heart. You ‘leader’ who’s never led us into battle or gone into ambush with the best of the Achaeans—you who lack the courage to sack Ilium and so must sack the tents of his army for plunder instead—you ‘king’ who rules only the most worthless husks among us—I promise you this, I swear a mighty oath this day—“
The hundreds of men around me take in a breath almost as one, more shocked by this promise of a curse than if Achilles had simply cut Agamemnon down like a dog.
“I swear to you that someday a great yearning for Achilles will come to all the sons of Achaea,” shouts the man-killer, his voice so loud that it halts dice games a hundred yards away in the tent city, “to all of them, throughout your armies here! But then, Atrides, stricken to your soul though you’ll be, nothing you do will save you—scythed like so much wheat by the man-murdering Hector. And on that day you will tear out your own heart and eat it, desperate, raging that you chose to do such dishonor to the best of all the Achaeans.”
And with that Achilles turns on his famous heel and strides from the circle, crunching across seashore gravel back into the darkness between the tents. I have to admit—it was one hell of an exit line.
Agamemnon crosses his arms and shakes his head. Other men speak in shocked tones. Nestor steps forward to give his in-the-days-of-the-centaur-wars-we-all-pulled-together speech. This is an anomaly—Homer has Achilles still in the argument when Nestor speaks—and my scholic mind makes note of it, but most of my attention is far, far away.
It’s at this instant, remembering the murderous gaze that Achilles had turned on Athena in the instant before she wrenched his hair back and cowed him into submission, that a plan of action so audacious, so obviously doomed to failure, so suicidal, and so wonderful opens before me that for a minute I have trouble breathing.
“Bias, are you all right?” asks Orus standing next to me.
I stare blankly at the man. For a minute I cannot remember who he is or who “Bias” is, forgetting my own morphed identity. I shake my head and push my way out of the circled throng of glorious killers.
The gravel crunches under my feet without the heroic echo of Achilles’ exit. I walk toward the water and once out of sight, throw off the identity of Bias. Anyone seeing me now would see the middle-aged Thomas Hockenberry, spectacles and all, weighted down in the absurd garb of an Achaean spearman, wool and fur covering my morphing gear and impact armor.
The ocean is dark. Wine dark, I think, but fail to amuse myself.
I have the overwhelming urge, not for the first time, to use my cloaking ability and levitation harness to fly away from here—to soar over Ilium a final time, to stare down at its torches and doomed inhabitants a final time, and then fly south and west across that wine-dark sea—the Aegean—until I come to the not-yet-Greek Isles and mainland. I could check in on Clytaemnestra and on Penelope, on Telemachus and Orestes. Professor Thomas Hockenberry, as both boy and man, always got along better with women and children than he did with male adults.
But these proto-Greek women and children here are more murderous and bloodthirsty than any adult males Hockenberry had known in his other, bloodless life.
Save the flying away then for another day. In fact, put it behind me altogether.
The waves roll in one after another, reassuring in their familiar cadence.
I will do this thing. The decision comes with the exhilaration of flying—no, not of flying, but in the thrill of that brief instance of zero gravity one achieves when throwing oneself from a high place and knowing that there is no going back to solid ground. Sink or swim, fall or fly.
I will do this thing.
4
Near Conamara Chaos
Mahnmut the Europan moravec’s submersible was three kilometers ahead of the kraken and gaining, which should have created some sense of confidence in the diminutive robotic-organic construct, but since kraken often had tentacles five kilometers long, it didn’t.
It was an aggravation. Worse than that, it was a distraction. Mahnmut had almost finished with his new analysis of Sonnet 116, was eager to e-mail it to Orphu on Io, and the last thing he needed now was to have his submersible swallowed. He pinged the kraken, verified that the huge, hungry, jellied mass was still in flagellant pursuit, and interfaced with the reactor long enough to add another three knots to his ship’s speed.
The kraken, which was literally out of its depth here so close to the Conamara Chaos region and its open leads, flailed to keep up. Mahnmut knew that as long as they were both traveling at this speed, the kraken would be unable to extend its tentacles to full reach to engulf the submersible, but if his little sub were to encounter something—say a big wad of flashlight kelp—and he had to slow, or worse yet got fouled in the glowing strands of goo, then the kraken would be on him like a . . .
“Oh, well, damn,” said Mahnmut, abandoning any attempt at simile and speaking aloud to the humming silence of the submersible’s cramped environmental cavity. His sensors were plugged into the ship’s systems and virtual vision showed him huge clumps of flashlight kelp dead ahead. The glowing colonies were floating along the isothermal currents here, feeding on the reddish veins of magnesium sulfate that rose to the ice shelf above like so many bloody taproots.
Mahnmut thought dive and the submersible dived twenty klicks deeper, clearing the lower colonies of kelp by only a few dozen meters. The kraken dived behind him. If a kraken could grin, it would be grinning now—this was its killing depth.
Mahnmut reluctantly cleared Sonnet 116 from his visual field and considered his options. Being eaten by a kraken less than a hundred kilometers from Conamara Chaos Central would be embarrassing. It was these damn bureaucrats’ fault—they needed to cull their local subseas of monsters before they ordered one of their moravec explorers back to a meeting.
He could kill the kraken. But with no harvester submersible within a thousand klicks, the beautiful beastie would be torn to shreds and devoured by the parasites in the flashlight kelp colonies, by salt sharks, by free-floating tube worms, and by other kraken long before a company harvester could get near it. It would be a terrible waste.
Mahnmut pulled his vision out of virtual long enough to look around his enviro-niche, as if a glimpse of his cluttered reality could give him an idea. It did.
On his console desk, along with the leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare and the Vendler printout, was his lava lamp—a little joke from his old moravec partner Urtzweil almost twenty J-years ago.
Mahnmut smiled and re-engaged virtual along all bandwidths. This close to Chaos Central there would have to be diapirs, and kraken hated diapirs . . .
Yes. Fifteen klicks south by southeast, an entire belchfield of them, rising slowly toward the cap ice just as languidly as the wax blobs did in his lava lamp. Mahnmut set his course to the nearest diapir rising to a lead and added five more knots just to be safe, if there was such a thing as safety within tentacle range of a mature kraken.