He’s there, disguised as Dolops, son of Clytius, who has some days left before being killed by Hector if Homer is right. Not bothering to morph into into any shape other than gawky Hockenberry, I pull off the Hades Helmet cowl and run to the other scholic.
“Hockenberry, what . . .” Nightenhelser is shocked by my unprofessional behavior and by the reaction of other Achaeans nearby. Drawing attention to oneself is the last thing a scholic wants. Except, perhaps, to be burned to cinders by a vengeful Muse. I have no idea why our Muse is wiping out all the scholics this day, but my guess is that I’ve somehow caused this slaughter of the innocents.
“We have to get out of here,” I say, shouting over the din of rushing reinforcements, neighing horses, and rumbling chariots. It looks from this dusty vantage point that the entire center of the Greek lines has given way.
“What are you talking about? This is an important day. Hector and Paris are . . .”
“Fuck Hector and Paris,” I say in English.
The Muse has QT’d into solidity high above the Trojan lines where Nightenhelser and I often station ourselves, another muse driving her flying chariot as she leans over the side and scans the troops with her enhanced vision. Morphing will not save us mortal scholics this day.
As if to demonstrate this, the Muse named Melete—“my” Muse—raises her palms and fires a coherent beam of energy earthward, striking a Trojan foot soldier named Dius, who should be alive to be bossed around in Book 24 according to Homer, but who dies this day in a flash of flame and a whirlwind of smoke and heat. Other Trojans flinch away, some fleeing back toward the city, not understanding this goddess’s wrath on a day of victory ordained by Zeus, but Hector and Paris are a quarter of a mile to the southeast, leading their charge, and don’t even look back.
“That wasn’t Dius,” gasped Nightenhelser. “It was Houston.”
“I know,” I say, returning my enhanced vision to normal scope. Houston was the youngest and newest of the scholics. I’d barely spoken to him. He was probably on the Trojan lines today because I’d gone missing.
The Muse’s chariot banks sharply and flies directly toward us. I don’t think the bitch-Muse has seen us yet—we’re standing amidst hundreds of milling men and horses—but she will in a few seconds.
What do I do? I can pull the Hades Helmet on and run like a coward again, leaving Nightenhelser to die just as I failed Blix and the others. There’s no way this single cowl can hide us both from the goddess’s divine vision. Or we can run—toward the black ships. We won’t get twenty yards.
The chariot drops lower and cloaks itself so that it’s hidden from the view of the surging Greeks and Trojans below. With our nano-altered vision, Nightenhelser and I can still see it coming on.
“What the hell?” cries Nightenhelser, almost dropping his recording wand as I embrace him, throwing both arms and one leg around him like a skinny foot soldier trying to rape this burly bear of a man.
Arm around the big scholic’s neck, I grab the QT medallion and twist.
I have no idea if this will work. It shouldn’t. The medallion is obviously designed to transport just the person wearing it. But my clothes come with me when I QT, and more than once I’ve carried something else from place to place through Planck space, so perhaps the quantum field established for teleportation includes things my body is in touch with or that my arms surround.
What the hell indeed. It’s worth a try.
We pop into existence in darkness, tumble down a hill, and roll apart. I look around wildly, trying to determine where we are. I hadn’t had time to visualize a destination properly—I’d simply willed myself elsewhere and quantum-teleported us both . . . somewhere.
Where?
There’s moonlight, so it’s just light enough for me to see Nightenhelser staring at me in alarm, as if I might jump him again at any second. Ignoring that, I look at the sky—stars, sliver of moon, Milky Way—and then at the land: tall trees, a grassy hillside, a river running by.
We’re definitely on the Earth—the ancient Earth of Ilium at least—but it doesn’t feel like the Peloponnese or Asia Minor.
“Where are we?” asks Nightenhelser, getting to his feet and brushing himself off. “What’s going on? Why is it night?”
The opposite side of the ancient world, I think. I say, “I think we’re in Indiana.”
“Indiana?” Nightenhelser takes another step away from me.
“The Indiana of 1200-plus b.c.,” I say. “Give or take a century or so.” I’ve hurt my arm and leg again rolling down the hill.
“How’d we get here?” Nightenhelser has always been a mellow sort, mildly grumpy in his rambling, rumbling, ursine way, but never really angry about anything. He sounds angry now.
“I QT’d us.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Hockenberry? We were nowhere near the QT portal.”
I ignore him and sit on a small rock, rubbing my arm. There aren’t many hills in Indiana, even in my other life there, but there were hilly, wooded, rocky areas around Bloomington, where Susan and I lived. I believe that, in my panic, I visualized . . . well, home. I wish to hell the QT medallion had moved us through time as well as space and plunked us down into late Twentieth Century Indiana, but something about the pure darkness of the night sky and the purely clean smell of the air here tells me otherwise.
Who’s here in 1200 b.c.? Indians. It would be ironic if the QT medallion had whisked us away from imminent death by our Muse’s hand—literally—only to bring us to the New World where we’ll be scalped by Indians. Most of the tribes didn’t scalp their victims before the white men arrived, drones on the pedantic part of my professor’s brain. Although I seem to remember reading somewhere that sometimes they took ears as proof of their kill.
Well, that makes me feel better. You can always trust a murderer to have a good prose style, so the saying goes, and a professor to come up with something depressing when you’re already depressed.
“Hockenberry?” demands Nightenhelser, sitting on a nearby footstool-sized rock—not too close to me, I notice—and rubbing his own elbows and knees.
“I’m thinking, I’m thinking,” I say in my best Jack Benny voice.
“Well, when you’re finished thinking,” says Nightenhelser, “maybe you could tell me why the Muse just killed young Houston.”
This sobers me, but I’m not sure how to respond. “There are things going on with the gods,” I say at last. “Plots. Intrigues. Pacts.”
“Tell me about it,” says Nightenhelser, meaning it both in irony and as a serious request.
I raise both hands, palms up. “Aphrodite was trying to use me to assassinate Athena.”
Nightenhelser stares. He manages—barely—not to drop his jaw.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I say. “Why me? Why use Hockenberry? Why give him the power to QT by himself and the Hades Helmet to hide under? And I agree—it doesn’t make any sense.”
“I wasn’t thinking that,” says Nightenhelser. A meteorite slices across the star-filled sky above us. Somewhere in the forest beyond the hill, an owl makes its not-quite-hooting noise. “I was just wondering what your first name was.”
It’s my turn to stare. “Why?”
“Because the gods discouraged use of first names and we were afraid of getting to know each other well because scholics were always being . . . disappeared and replaced by the gods,” says the big man, bearlike even in shadow-darkness. “So I want to know your first name.”
“Thomas,” I say after a second. “Tom. Yours?”
“Keith,” says the man I’ve known slightly for four years. He stands up and looks at the dark woods. “Well, what now, Tom?”
Insects, frogs, and other night critters are making noise in those black woods. Unless they’re really Indians sneaking up on us.
“Do you know how to . . . I mean, have you camped a lot . . . I mean . . .” I begin.