The drug was called Absolute Sleep and it lived up to its name within microseconds.
Almost instantly, Zeus was snoring and slobbering against her rubbed-red chest.
It took all of Hera’s divine strength to shove him off, to remove his softening member from her folds, to slide out from under him.
Her unique, Athena-made gown was a torn mess. So was she, Hera realized. Bruised and scratched and pummeled in every muscle, outside and in. The divine seed from the King of the Gods ran down her thigh as she stood. Hera mopped it away with the tatters of her ruined gown.
Retrieving Aphrodite’s breastband from the torn silk, Hera went into Odysseus’ wife Penelope’s dressing room, next to the bedroom where their great marriage bed had one post made of a living olive tree and a frame inlaid with gold, silver, and ivory, with thongs of oxhide dyed crimson stretched end to end to hold soft fleeces and rich coverlets. From camphor-lined trunks set by Penelope’s bath, Hera pulled gown after gown—Odysseus’ wife had been about her size, and the goddess could morph her shape enough to finish the tailoring—finally choosing a peach-colored silk shift with an embroidered band that would hold her bruised breasts high. But before dressing, Hera made her bath as best she could from the copper kettles of cold water set out days or weeks earlier for a hot bath Penelope never had.
Later, emerging into the dining hall again, dressed, walking gingerly, Hera stared at the great, bronzed, naked hulk snoring face-down on the long table. Could I kill him now? she wondered. It was not the first time—or the thousandth—that the queen had held this thought while looking at and listening to her snoring lord. She knew she was not alone in the wondering. How many wives—goddess and mortal woman, long dead and yet unborn—had felt this thought slipping across their minds like a cloud shadow over rocky ground? If I could kill him, would I kill him? If it were possible, would I act now?
Instead, Hera prepared to quantum teleport to the plains of Ilium. So far, the plot was unfolding according to plan. Poseidon, the Earth-Shaker, should be maneuvering Agamemnon and Menelaus into action at any minute. Within hours, if not sooner, Achilles might be dead—slain by the hands of a mere woman, although Amazon, his heel pierced by poison spearpoint—and Hector isolated. And if Achilles killed the woman who attacked him, Athena and Hera had plans for him still. The mortal revolt would be over by the time Zeus awoke, if Hera ever allowed him to awake at all—Absolute Sleep needed an antidote or it would work until these high walls of Odysseus’ home would tumble down in rot. Or Hera might wake Zeus soon, if her goals were fulfilled earlier than planned, and the Lord of Gods would not even be aware that he had been felled by drugs rather than mere lust and a need to sleep. Whenever she chose to waken her husband, the war between gods and men would be over, the Trojan War resumed, that status quo restored, the fait chosen by Hera and her co-conspirators most decidedly accompli.
Turning her back on the sleeping Son of Kronos, Hera walked from Odysseus’ house—for no one, not even a queen, could QT through the concealing forcefield Zeus had set around it—pressed through the watery wall of energy like an infant fighting from its caul, and teleported triumphantly back to Troy.
11
Hockenberry didn’t recognize any of the moravecs who met him in the blue bubble inside Stickney Crater on the moon Phobos. At first, when the chair forcefield clicked off and left him exposed to the elements, he’d panicked and held his breath for a few seconds—still thinking he was in hard vacuum—but then he felt the air pressure against his skin and the comfortable temperature, so he’d taken a ragged breath just as little Mahnmut was introducing him to the taller moravecs who’d come forward like an official delegation. It was embarrassing, actually. Then Mahnmut had left and Hockenberry was on his own with these strange organic machines.
“Welcome, Dr. Hockenberry,” said the closest of the five moravecs facing him. “I trust your trip up from Mars was uneventful.”
For a second, Hockenberry felt a stab of something almost like nausea at hearing someone call him “Doctor.” Except for Mahnmut using the honorific, it had been a long time since… no, it had been never in this second life, unless his scholic friend Nightenhelser had used his title jokingly once or twice in the past decade.
“Thank you, yes… I mean… I’m sorry, I didn’t catch all your names,” said Hockenberry. “I apologize. I was… distracted.” Thinking I was going to die when the chair deserted me, thought Hockenberry.
The short moravec nodded. “I don’t doubt,” it said. “There’s a lot of activity in this bubble and the atmosphere certainly conveys the noise.”
That it did. And that there was. The huge blue bubble, covering at least two or three acres—Hockenberry was always poor at judging sizes and distances, a failure due to not playing sports, he’d always thought—was filled with gantry-structures, banks of machines larger than most buildings in his old stomping grounds of Bloomington, Indiana, pulsating organic blobs that looked like runaway blancmanges the size of tennis courts, hundreds of moravecs—all busy on one task or another—and floating globes shedding light and spitting out laser beams that cut and welded and melted and moved on. The only thing that looked even remotely familiar in the huge space, although completely out of place, was a round rosewood table sitting about thirty feet away. It was surrounded by six stools of varying heights.
“My name is Asteague/Che,” said the small moravec. “I’m Europan, like your friend Mahnmut.”
“European?” Hockenberry repeated stupidly. He’d been to France once on vacation and once to Athens for a classics conference, and while the men and women in both places had been… different… none of them resembled this Asteague/Che: taller than Mahnmut, at least four feet tall, and more humanoid—especially around the hands—but still covered with the same plasticky-metallic material as Mahnmut, although Asteague/Che was mostly a brilliant, slick yellow. The moravec reminded Hockenberry of a slick yellow-rubber raincoat he’d had and loved when he was a kid.
“Europa,” said Asteague/Che with no hint of impatience. “The icy, watery moon of Jupiter. Mahnmut’s home. And mine.”
“Of course,” said Hockenberry. He was blushing and knowing he was blushing made him blush again. “Sorry. Of course. I knew Mahnmut was from some moon out there. Sorry.”
“My title… although ‘title’ is too formal and ostentatious a word, perhaps ‘job function’ would be a more appropriate translation,” continued Asteague/Che, “is Prime Integrator for the Five Moons Consortium.”
Hockenberry bowed slightly, realizing that he was in the presence of a politician. Or at least a top bureaucrat. He had no clue as to what the other four moons might be named. He’d heard of Europa in his other life and he seemed to recall that they were finding a new Jovian moon every few weeks—or so it seemed—back at the end of the Twentieth Century, beginning of the Twenty-first—but the names escaped him. Maybe they hadn’t been named by the time he’d died, he couldn’t remember. Also, Hockenberry had always preferred Greek over Latin and thought that the solar system’s largest planet should have been called Zeus, not Jupiter… although in current circumstances that might be confusing.
“Allow me to reintroduce my colleagues,” said Asteague/Che.