It’s time to trigger the Device, tightbeamed Orphu. Whatever it does, it’s preferable to letting them destroy us without a fight.
I’d trigger it if I could, said Mahnmut. It didn’t have a remote control. And I was too busy building our gondola to jury-rig one.
Lost opportunities, sent Orphu with a rumble. To hell with it. We gave it a good try.
I’m not giving up yet, said Mahnmut. He paced back and forth, feeling around the edge of the metal door through which they’d come in. It was also sealed by forcefields. Perhaps if Orphu still had his arms, he could rip the door free. Perhaps.
What does Shakespeare say about the end of things like this? asked Orphu. Did “Will the Poet” ever bid adieu to the Youth?
Not really, said Mahnmut, feeling the walls with his organic fingers. They parted on pretty sour terms. The relationship sort of petered out when they found they were having sex with the same woman.
Was that a pun? asked Orphu, his voice severe.
Mahnmut was startled into motionless. What?
Never mind.
What does Proust say about all this? asked Mahnmut.
Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure, recited Orphu of Io.
Mahnmut didn’t like French—it always felt like a too-thick oil between his gears—but it was in his database and he could translate this. “A long time, I have laid me down to sleep at an early hour.”
After two minutes twenty-nine seconds, Mahnmut said over the tightbeam, The rest is silence.
The door opened and a goddess two meters tall stepped into the room, closing and sealing the door behind her. She carried a silver ovoid in both hands, its small black ports aimed at both of them. Mahnmut instinctively knew that rushing her would do no good. He backed up until he could reach out and touch Orphu’s shell, knowing full well that the Ionian couldn’t feel the contact.
In English, the goddess said, “My name is Hera and I’ve come to put you foolish, foolish moravecs out of your misery once and for all. I’ve never liked your kind.”
There was a flash and a jolt and an absolute blackness descended.
42
Olympos and Ilium
My impulse is to QT away from Olympos the second I see Thetis, Aphrodite, and my Muse enter the Great Hall, but I remember that Aphrodite must have the power she gave me of seeing and tracking pertubations in the quantum continuum. Any hasty quantum exit now may attract her attention. Besides, my business here is not quite finished.
Sliding sideways, putting tall gods and goddesses between me and the women entering, I tiptoe behind a broad column and then back out of the Great Hall. I can hear Ares’ angry shouts, still demanding to know what’s been happening on the Ilium battlefield in his absence, and then I hear Aphrodite say, “Lord Zeus, Father, still recovering from my terrible wounds as I am, I have asked to leave the healing vats and come here because it has been brought to my attention that there is a mortal man loose who has stolen a QT medallion and the Helmet of Death forged for invisibility by Lord Hades here himself. I fear that this mortal is doing great harm even as we speak.”
The crowd of gods bursts into an uproar of shouted questions and babble.
So much for any advantage I might have had. Still shielded by the Helmet’s field, I run down a long corridor, turn left at the first junction, swing right down another corridor. I have no idea where I’m headed, knowing that my only hope is to stumble onto Hera. Sliding to a stop in another junction, hearing the roar increase from the Great Hall, I close my eyes and pray—and not to these swinish gods. It’s the first time I’ve prayed since I was nine years old and my mother had cancer.
I open my eyes and see Hera crossing a junction of corridors a hundred yards to my left.
My sandals make slapping noises that actually echo in the long marble halls. Tall golden tripods throw flame-light on the walls and ceilings. I don’t care about making noise now—I have to catch up to her. More roars echo down the hallways from the agitated assembly in the Great Hall. I wonder for an instant how Aphrodite will hide her complicity in arming me and sending me out to spy on and kill Athena, but then realize that the Goddess of Love is a consummate liar. I’ll be dead before I get a chance to tell anyone the truth of the matter. Aphrodite will be the hero who warned the other gods of my treachery.
Walking quickly, Hera suddenly stops and looks over her shoulder. I’d paused anyway and now I teeter on tiptoe, trying not to give away my position. Zeus’s wife scowls, looks both ways, and slides her hand across a twenty-foot-high metal door. The metal hums, internal locks click open, and the door swings inward. I have to scurry to slide into the room before Hera gestures the door closed behind her. An even greater roar from the Great Hall covers the sound of my sandals on stone. Hera pulls a smooth gray weapon—rather like a seashell with deadly black apertures—from the folds of her robe.
The little robot and the crab-shell are the only other things in the room. The robot backs away from Hera, obviously expecting what is to come next, and sets an oddly human-looking hand on the huge, crack-shelled figure, and for the first time I realize that the other object must also be a robot. Whatever these machines are, they aren’t part of Olympos—I’m convinced of that.
“My name is Hera,” says the goddess, “and I’ve come to put you foolish, foolish moravecs out of your misery once and for all. I’ve never liked your kind.”
I’d been pausing before she spoke. This is, after all, Hera, wife and sister to Zeus, queen of the gods and the most powerful of all of the goddesses with the possible exception of Athena. Perhaps it was the “your kind” part of “I’ve never liked your kind.” I was born into the middle of the Twentieth Century, lived into the Twenty-first Century, and I’ve heard that sort of phrase before—too many times before.
Whatever the final reason, I aim my baton and taser the arrogant bitch.
I wasn’t sure the 50,000 volts would work on a goddess, but it does. Hera spasms, starts to fall, and triggers the ovoid in her hands, blasting the glowing ceiling panels that illuminate the room. It goes absolutely dark.
I retract the taser electrode and thumb another charge ready, but it’s pitch-black in the windowless room and I can’t see a thing. I step forward and almost trip over Hera’s body. She seems to be unconscious, but still twitching on the floor. Suddenly two beams of light shaft across the room. I pull the Hades Helmet cowl off and see myself in the twin beams.
“Get that light out of my eyes,” I say to the little robot. The lights seem to be coming from his chest. The beams shift.
“Are you human?” asks the robot. It takes me a second to realize that he’s spoken in English.
“Yes,” I say. My own language sounds strange in my mouth. “What are you?”
“We’re both moravecs,” says the little form, moving closer, the twin beams shifting to Hera. Her eyelids are already fluttering. I stoop, pick up the gray weapon, and slide it into my tunic pocket.
“My name is Mahnmut,” says the robot. His dark head doesn’t even come up to my chest. I don’t see any eyes set in the metallic, plastic-looking face, but there are dark bands where the eyes might be, and I have the sense he’s staring at me. “My friend is Orphu of Io,” he adds. The robot’s voice is soft, only vaguely male, and not metallic or robot-sounding in the least. It . . . he . . . gestures toward the cracked shell that takes up fifteen or more feet of space across the room.