He gestures and goes into his sleeping quarters in the back of the tent and I stand here like the fool I am, speechless in every sense, stunned at this wild veering away from the plotline of the Iliad.
Achilles has to be persuaded to stay, even if he doesn’t join in the fighting, so the Iliad works itself out this way—the Trojans winning again and the Greeks in full retreat with all of their great commanders wounded—Odysseus, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Diomedes, all of them—then, feeling sympathy for his friends while knowing that Achilles will never join the fight, Patroclus will put on Achilles’ golden armor and rout the Trojans back until, in single combat with Hector, Patroclus is killed, his body violated and desecrated. That will bring Achilles out of his tent, filled with killing wrath, thus sealing the fate of Hector and Ilium and Andromache and Helen and all the rest of us.
He’s really leaving? I can’t quite grasp this. Not only didn’t I find the fulcrum and change things, now the entire Iliad has run off the rails. More than nine years I’ve been a scholic here, watching and observing and reporting to the muse and never once has there been a deep rift between the events in this war and Homer’s reporting in the poem. Now . . . this. If Achilles leaves, which he shows every indication of doing come the dawn, the Achaeans will be defeated, their ships burned, Ilium saved, and Hector, not Achilles, will be the great hero of the epic. It seems unlikely that Odysseus’ Odyssey will ever happen . . . and certainly not the way it’s sung now. Everything has changed. Just because the real Phoenix wasn’t here to give his real speech? Or have the gods been tampering with this fulcrum before I had a chance to? I’ll never know. My chance to persuade Achilles and Odysseus in council, my clever plan, is lost forever.
“Come, old Phoenix,” Patroclus says, taking my arm as if I’m a child, leading me to a side room in the great tent where my cushions and coverlets are laid out. “It’s time to go to bed. Tomorrow’s another day.”
31
Jerusalem
“What is it?” asked Harman. He and Daeman were standing in the shadow of the Western Wall in Jerusalem, just a few steps behind Savi, and all three were staring up at the solid beam of blue light that stabbed vertically into the darkening sky.
“I think it’s my friends,” said the old woman. “All nine thousand one hundred and thirteen of my friends—all the old-styles that were swept up in the final fax.”
Daeman looked at Harman and realized that they were both doubtful about Savi’s mental condition.
“Your friends?” said Daeman. “That’s a blue light.”
Savi tore her gaze away from the beam—it was illuminating the top of the ancient buildings and walls around them now, bathing everything in blue glow as the daylight faded further—and she looked at them with what might have been a rueful smile. “Yes. That beam of blue light. My friends.” She gestured for them to follow and began leading them away from the courtyard, away from the wall back the way they came, away from the base of the shaft of blue light.
“The posts told us that the final fax was a way of storing us while they cleaned up the world,” continued Savi, her voice soft but still echoing in the narrow alleyways here. “The plan was, they explained, to reduce our codes—we were all fax codes to the post-humans, even then, my friends—reduce our codes and put us in a continuous neutrino loop for ten thousand years while they tidied up the planet.”
“What does that mean?” said Harman. “Tidy up the planet?”
They walked under a long archway and Daeman could just barely see Savi’s face as she smiled again. “Things got messy toward the end of the Lost Age,” she said. “Messier after the rubicon. Then came the Demented Times. Freelance ARNists were bringing back dinosaurs and Terror Birds and long-extinct botanic forms, screwing up the planet’s ecology even as the biosphere and datasphere were beginning to merge into the self-aware noosphere—the logosphere. The post-humans had already fled to their rings by then—the Earth’s sentient noosphere didn’t trust them any longer—and for good reason, the posts were experimenting with quantum teleportation, opening portals onto places they didn’t understand, opening doors they shouldn’t have opened.”
Harman stopped as they came out onto a broader street. “Would you make sense, Savi? We don’t understand two-thirds of what you’re talking about.”
“How could you?” asked Savi, looking at Harman with an expression of either pain or severe displeasure. “How could you understand anything? No history. No technology. No books.”
“We have books,” said Harman, his voice defensive.
Savi laughed.
“What does all this talk of dinosaurs and noospheres have to do with the blue beam?” asked Daeman.
Savi sat on a low wall. The breeze had come up and it whistled through broken tiles on the rooftops. The air was cooling quickly. “They needed to get us out of the way while they cleaned things up,” repeated Savi. “A torus of neutrinos, they said. No mass. No muss. No fuss. Ten thousand years for them to tidy up the earth. Less than a blink of an eye for us old-styles. So they said.”
“But they left you behind,” said Harman.
“Yes.”
“By accident?”
“I doubt it,” said the old woman. “Very little the posts did was by accident. Perhaps they had some purpose for me. Perhaps they were punishing me for digging into histories better left buried. That’s what I was, you know—an historian. Cultural historian.” She laughed again for no reason that Daeman could fathom.
“So neutrinos are blue?” asked Daeman. He was determined to get a straight answer.
She laughed again. “I very much doubt it. I don’t think neutrinos have any color . . . or charm. But that blue beam appears every Tisha b’Av, every Ninth of Av, and something tells me that the rest of the old-style humans—all my friends—are stored and coded in that blue beam. I don’t think that machine is generating the beam. I think the Earth passes through the neutrino beam every year at this point on its orbit, and that machine merely makes the beam visible.”
“But it hasn’t been ten thousand years,” said Harman. “Only fourteen hundred, you say, since the final fax.”
Savi nods tiredly. “And things haven’t been tidied up much since the final fax, have they, my young friends?” She stands, lifts her backpack, and starts down the narrow street before suddenly freezing.
“A voynix!” says Daeman. “Now we won’t have to walk back to the sonie. We’ll have it fetch a carriole and . . .”
The voynix, an iron-and-leather silhouette in the western archway ahead of them, suddenly retracted its manipulatives and clicked cutting blades into place. Then it charged directly at them, running along the side of the building on all fours like a frenzied spider.
Savi had been wildly rummaging in her pack since Daeman had pointed, and now she brought out the black plastic-and-metal device—a gun, she’d called it—and aimed it at the charging voynix.
Daeman was too shocked to move. He was the closest to the scuttling voynix, still eight feet up the wall and loping on all fours, but the creature seemed focused on Savi and was hurtling right past Daeman. Suddenly the evening air was torn by a noise—RRRIIIIPPPPPPPPPP—as if wooden paddles were being dragged against stone slats, and the wall flew apart in a spray of masonry chips, the voynix was thrown backward and down onto the cobblestones, and Savi stepped forward, aimed, and fired again.
Scores of fingertip-sized holes appeared in the voynix’s carapace and metallic hood. Its right arm flew up as if it was going to throw something at them, but then more flechettes struck it and the arm became unhinged, tore off, flew backward. The voynix struggled to its feet, one cutting blade still whirring.