Dan Simmons - Olympos

“My dear Mahnmut, you must know by now that we don’t want to interfere with you, the old-styles, our new guests from Greece and Asia… with none of you. Have we thus far?”

Mahnmut said nothing.

Moira touched his shoulder. “But with this… project. Don’t you sometimes feel as if you’re playing God. Just a little bit?”

“Have you met Dr. Hockenberry?” asked Mahnmut.

“Of course. I spoke to him only last week.”

“Odd, he didn’t mention that,” said Mahnmut. “Thomas volunteers here at the dig at least a day or two every week. No, but what I meant to say was that the post-humans and the Olympian gods certainly ‘played God’ when they re-created Dr. Hockenberry’s body and personality and memories from bits of bone, old data files, and DNA. But it worked out all right. He’s a fine person.”

“He certainly seems to be,” said Moira. “And I understand he’s writing a book.”

“Yes,” said Mahnmut. The moravec seemed to have lost his train of thought.

“Well, good luck again,” said Moira, holding out her hand. “And do give my best to Prime Integrator Asteague/Che when you see him next. Do tell him that I so enjoyed the tea we had at the Taj.” She shook the little moravec’s hand and began to walk toward the line of trees to the north.

“Moira,” called Mahnmut.

She paused and looked back.

“Did you say you were coming to the play tonight?” called Mahnmut.

“Yes, I think I will.”

“Will we see you there?”

“I’m not sure,” said the young woman. “But I’ll see you there.” She continued walking toward the forest.

Seven years and five months after the Fall of Ilium:

My name is Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., Hockenbush to my friends. I have no friends alive who call me that. Or rather, the friends who once might have called me that—Hockenbush, a nickname from my undergraduate days at Wabash College—have long since turned to dust on this world where so many things have turned to dust.

I lived fifty-some years on that first good Earth, and have been gifted with a bit more than twelve rich years in this second life—at Ilium, on Olympos, in a place called Mars although I didn’t know it was Mars until my last days there, and now back here. Home. On sweet Earth again.

I have much to tell. The bad news is that I have lost all the recordings I have made over the past twelve years as both scholic and scholar—the voice stones I handed to my Muse with each day’s observation of the Trojan War, my own scribbled notes, even the moravec recorder I used to describe the last days of Zeus and Olympos. I lost them all.

It doesn’t matter. I remember it all. Every face. Every man and woman. Every name.

Those who know say that one of the wonderful things about Homer’s Iliad is that no man died nameless in his telling. They all fell heavily, those heroes, those brutal heroes, and when they fell they went down, as another scholar said—I’m paraphrasing here—they went down heavily, crashing down with all their weapons and their armor and their possessions and their cattle and their wives and their slaves going down with them. And their names. No man died nameless or without weight in Homer’s Iliad .

If I tried to tell my tale, I would try to do as well.

But where to start?

If I am to be the Chorus of this tale—willing or unwilling—then I can start wherever I choose. I choose to start it here, by telling you where I live.

I enjoyed my months with Helen in New Ilium while that city rebuilt itself, the Greeks helping after the agreement with Hector that the Trojans would help them build their long ships in return, once the city’s walls were up again. Once the city lived again.

It never died. You see, Ilium—Troy—was its people… Hector, Helen, Andromache, Priam, Cassandra, Deiphobus, Paris… hell, even that ornery Hypsipyle. Some of those people died, but some survived. The city lived as long as they did. Virgil understood that.

So I can’t be Homer for you and I can’t even be Virgil telling the tale from the time of the fall of Troy… not enough time has passed for that part to become much of a story, although I hear that might be changing. I’ll be watching and listening as long as I am living.

But I live here now. In Ardis Town.

Not Ardis. A big house has gone back up on the broad meadow far up the hill a mile and a half from the old fax pavilion, a big house very near where Ardis Hall once rose, and Ada lives there yet with her family, but this place is Ardis Town, no longer Ardis.

There are a few more than twenty-eight thousand of us here in Ardis Town now, according to the last tax census—taken just five months ago. There is a community up on the hill, scattered around Ada’s new home of Ardis House, but most of the town is down here, spread along the new road that runs from the fax pavilion down along the river. Here is where the mills are, and the real marketplace, and the tanners’ smelly buildings, and the printing press and paper, and too many bars and whorehouses, and two synagogues, and one church that might best be described as the First Church of Chaos, and some good restaurants, and the stockyards—which smell almost as bad as the tannery—and a library (I helped bring that into being) and a school, although most of the children still live in or around Ardis House. Most of the students in our Ardis Town are adults, learning to read and write.

About half our residents are Greek and half are Jewish. They tend to get along. Most days.

The Jews have the advantage of being fully functioned; that is, they can freefax wherever the hell they want to go whenever the hell they want to do it. (I can do that as well… not fax, but QT. It’s in my cells and DNA, you know, written there by whoever or Whoever designed me. But I don’t QT as much any more. I like slower forms of transportation.)

I do help Mahnmut with his Find Will project, at least once a week if I can. You’ve already heard about that. I don’t think he ever will find his Will, and I suspect he believes that also. It’s become a sort of hobby for him and Orphu of Io, and I help out in the same spirit of “what the hell.” None of us—not even Mahnmut, I think—believes that Prospero, Moira, Ariel, any of the Powers That Be… even this Quiet we keep hearing so much about… are going to allow our little moravec to find and recombine the bones and DNA of William Shakespeare. I don’t blame the Powers That Be for feeling threatened.

The play is going on up at Ardis this evening. You’ve heard about that as well. Many of us in Ardis Town are going up the hill to it, although I confess the hill is steep, the road and stairs are dusty, and I may pay fivepence to ride up in one of the steam coaches that Hannah’s company runs. I just wish the damned things weren’t so noisy.

Speaking of finding and not finding someone, I don’t believe I’ve told you how I found my old friend Keith Nightenhelser.

The last I’d seen of my friend, he’d been with a prehistorical Indian tribe in the wilderness of what would once be Indiana—say in three thousand more years. It was a hell of a place for him and I felt guilty because I’d put him there. The idea was to keep him safe during the war between the heroes and the gods, but when I went back to look for old Nightenhelser, the Indians were gone and so was he.

And Patroclus—a very pissed-off Patroclus—was wandering around there somewhere as well, and I suspected that Nightenhelser had not survived.

But I freefaxed to Delphi three and a half months ago when Thrasymedes, Hector, and his crowd of adventurers interdicted the Delphi blue beam and lo and behold, in about the eighth hour of people emerging stunned from that little building—it reminded me of the old circus act where a tiny little car would drive up and fifty clowns would climb out—about eight hours into the people, mostly Greeks, emerging from that building, here comes my friend Nightenhelser. (We always called each other by our last names.)