Ada stepped closer. “Daeman, did you ever wonder where they came from?”
“Who, my dear?”
“The voynix.”
Daeman laughed heartily and honestly at this. “Of course not, my lady. The voynix have always been here. They are permanent, fixed, eternal—moving, sometimes out of sight, but always present—like the sun or the stars.”
“Or the rings?” asked Hannah in her soft voice.
“Precisely.” Daeman was pleased that she understood.
Harman pulled a heavy book from the shelves. “Daeman Uhr, Ada informs me that you are quite the lepidopterist.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Butterfly expert.”
Daeman could feel himself blush. It was always pleasing to have one’s skills recognized, even by strangers, even by less-than-sane strangers. “Hardly an expert, Harman Uhr, merely a collector who has learned a bit from his uncle.”
Harman came down the ladder and carried the heavy book to a reading table. “This should interest you then.” He opened the artifact. Page after glossy page showed colorful representations of butterflies.
Daeman stepped closer, speechless. His uncle had taught him the names of about twenty types of butterflies and he had learned from other collectors the names of a few of the others he’d captured. He reached out to touch the image of a Western Tiger Swallowtail.
“Western Tiger Swallowtail,” said Harman and added, “Pterourus rutulus .”
Daeman did not understand the last two words, but he stared at the older man in amazement. “You collect!”
“Not at all.” Harman touched a familiar gold and black image. “Monarch.”
“Yes,” said Daeman, confused.
“Red Admiral, Aphrodite Fritillary, Field Crescentspot, Common Blue, Painted Lady, Phoebus Parnassian,” Harman said, touching each image in turn. Daeman knew three of those named.
“You know butterflies,” he said.
Harman shook his head. “I’ve never even really considered that the different types have names until this minute.”
Daeman looked at the man’s blunt hand. “You have the reading function.”
Harman shook his head again. “No one has that palm function any longer. No more than they have comm function or geo-positioning or data access or self-fax away from nodes.”
“Then . . .” began Daeman and stopped in true confusion. Were these people taunting him for some reason? He had come to spend the weekend at Ardis Hall with good intentions—well, with the intention of seducing Ada, but all in good humor—and now this . . . malicious game?
As if sensing his growing anger, Ada put her slim fingers on his sleeve. “Harman doesn’t have the reading function, Daeman Uhr,” she said softly. “He has recently learned how to read .”
Daeman stared. This made no more sense than celebrating one’s ninety-ninth year or babbling on about the Atlantic Breach.
“It’s a skill,” Harman said quietly. “Rather like your learning the names of the butterflies or your fabled techniques as a . . . ladies’ man.”
This last phrase made Daeman blink. Is my other hobby so well known?
Hannah spoke. “Harman has promised to teach us this trick . . . reading. It might come in handy. I need to learn about casting before I do more of it and burn myself.”
Casting ? Daeman knew fishermen who used that word. He could not imagine how it could have anything to do with burning oneself or acquiring the reading function. He licked his lips and said, “I have no interest in these games. What do you want from me?”
“We need to find a spaceship,” said Ada. “And there’s reason to believe that you can help us.”
6
Olympos
When my shift ends on the night of Achilles’ and Agamemnon’s confrontation, I quantum teleport back to the scholic complex on Olympos, record my observations and analysis, transfer the thoughts to a word stone, and carry it into the Muse’s small white room overlooking the Lake of the Caldera. To my surprise, the Muse is there, talking to one of the other scholics.
The scholic is named Nightenhelser—a friendly bear of a man who, I had learned over the last four years of his residency here, lived and taught college and died in the American Midwest some time in the early Twentieth Century. Seeing me at the door, the Muse finishes her business with Nightenhelser and sends him away, out her bronze door toward the escalator that spirals its way down off Olympos to our barracks and the red world below.
The Muse gestures me closer. I set the word stone on the marble table in front of her and step back, expecting to be dismissed without a word, as is the usual dynamic between the two of us. Surprisingly, she lifts the word stone while I’m still there and closes her hand around it even as she closes her eyes to concentrate. I stand and wait. I confess that I am nervous. My heart pounds and my hands, clasped behind my back as I stand in a sort of professorial parody of a soldier’s “at ease” position, are sweaty. I decided years ago that that the gods cannot really read minds—that their uncanny perception of mortals’ thoughts, heroes and scholics alike, comes from some advanced science in the study of facial muscles, eye movements and the like. But I could be wrong. Perhaps they are telepathic. If so—and if they bothered to read my mind during my moment of epiphany and decision on the beach after Agamemnon’s and Achilles’ showdown—then I am a dead man. Again.
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.”