Dan Simmons: Olympos

Nightenhelser and I bought this place where I’m sitting and writing this now. We’re partners. (Please note—I mean business partners, and good friends, of course, but not partners in the strange Twenty-first Century use of that word when it came to two men. I mean, I didn’t go from Helen of Troy to Nightenhelser of Ardis Town. I have problems, but not in that particular arena of confusion.)

I wonder what Helen would think of our tavern? It’s called Dombey & Son—the name was Nightenhelser’s suggestion, far too cute for my taste—and it gets a lot of business. It’s fairly clean compared to the other places strung along the riverbank here like shingles overhanging an old roof. Our barmaids are barmaids and not whores (at least not here or on our time or in our tavern). The beer is the best we can buy—Hannah, who is, I’m told, Ardis’s first millionaire of the new era, owns another company that makes the beer. Evidently brewing was something she learned about when studying sculpture and metal pouring. Don’t ask me why.

Do you see why I hesitate to tell this epic tale? I can’t keep my storytelling on a straight line. I tend to wander.

Perhaps I’ll bring Helen here someday and ask her what she thinks of the place.

But rumor has it that Helen cut her hair, dressed up like a boy, and went off on the Delphi adventure with Hector and Thrasymedes, with both men following her around like puppies after a bone. (Another reason I hesitate to begin telling this epic tale—I was never worth a damn with metaphors or similes. As Nightenhelser once said—I’m trope-ically challenged. Never mind.)

Rumor has it, hell. I know Helen is with the Delphi Expedition. I saw her there. She looks good in short hair and with a tan. Really good. Not like my Helen, but healthy and very beautiful.

I could tell you more about my place and more about Ardis Town—what politics looks like when it’s in its infancy (just about as useless and smelly as an infant) or what the people are like here, Greeks and Jews, functioned and non-functioned, believers, and cynics… but that’s not part of this tale.

Also, as I will discover later this evening, I’m not the real teller. I’m not the chosen Bard. I know that makes no sense to you now, but wait just a while here, and you’ll see what I mean.

These last eighteen years have not been easy for me, especially not the first eleven. I feel as scarred and pitted psychologically and emotionally as old Orphu of Io’s shell is physically. (He lives up the hill at Ardis most of the time. You will see him a little later, too. He’s going to the play tonight, but he always has an appointment with the kids each afternoon. That’s what tipped me off to the fact that even all my years as scholar and scholic did not make me the chosen one to tell this particular tale when the time comes to tell it.)

Yes, these last eighteen years, expecially the first eleven, have been tough, but I guess I feel richer for them. I hope you do when you hear the tale. If you don’t, it’s not my fault—I abdicate in the telling, although my memories are free for anyone who wants to borrow them.

I apologize. I have to go now. The afterwork crowd is coming in—the daytime tannery shift is just getting off, can you smell them? One of my barmaids is sick and another has just eloped with one of the young Athenians who chose to come here after Delphi and… well… I’m shorthanded. My bartender comes in for the evening shift in forty-five minutes, but until then, I’d better draw the beers and slice the roast beef for the sandwiches myself.

My name is Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., and I think the “Ph.D.” stands for “Pouring His Draft.”

Sorry. Humor never was, except for a few literary puns and belabored jokes, my strong point.

I’ll see you at the afternoon storytelling, before the play.

Seven years and five months after the Fall of Ilium:

On the day of the play, Harman had business in the Dry Valley. After lunch, he dressed in his combat suit and thermskin, borrowed an energy weapon from the Ardis House armory, and freefaxed down there.

The excavation of the post-humans’ stasis dome was going well. Walking between the huge excavation machines, avoiding the down-blast of a transport hornet hauling things north, it was hard for Harman to believe that eight and a half years earlier he’d come to this same dry valley with young Ada, the incredibly young Hannah, and the pudgy boy-man Daeman in search of clues about the Wandering Jew—the mystery woman he discovered was named Savi.

Actually, part of the blue stasis dome had been buried directly under the boulder where Savi had left her scratched clues leading them to her home on Mount Erebus. Even then, Savi had known that Harman was the only old-style human on Earth who could read those scratches.

The two supervisors on the stasis-dome excavation here were Raman and Alcinuous. They were doing a good job. Harman went down the checklist with them to make sure they knew which gear was destined for which community—the bulk of the energy weapons were destined for Hughes Town and Chom; the thermskins were going to Bellinbad; the crawlers were promised to Ulanbat and the Loman Estate; New Ilium had made a strong bid for the older flechette rifles.

Harman had to smile at this. Ten more years and the Trojans and Greeks would be using the same technology as the old-styles, even using the pavilion nodes to fax everywhere. Some of the Delphi group had already discovered the node near Olympus… the ancient town where the Games were held, not the mountain.

Well, he thought, the only solution was to stay ahead of them—in technology and everything else.

It was time to go home. But first Harman had one stop he wanted to make. He shook hands with Alcinuous and Raman and freefaxed away.

Harman had come back to the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu, the place where he had been given his life back seven and a half years earlier. He freefaxed not to the Bridge itself, but to a ridgeline across the valley from the bridge and the high ruins on the terrace of Machu Picchu. He never tired of looking at the ancient structure, the green habitation globules hardly visible from this distance, but he’d come back not just out of sentiment.

He was to meet someone here.

Harman watched the early afternoon clouds shift up the valley from the direction of the waterfall. For a while, the sunlight turned the mists to gold, half obscuring the ruins of Machu Picchu, making them appear as half-glimpsed stepping-stones there beyond the old Bridge’s span. Everywhere Harman looked, life was winning its anti-entropic battle against chaos and energy loss—the grass on the hillsides, the canopy of trees in the mist-shrouded valley, the condors circling slowly on thermals, the tatters of blowing moss on the suspension cables of the Bridge itself, even the rust-colored lichen on the rocks near Harman.

As if to distract him from thoughts about life and living things, a very artificial spaceship rocketed from south to north across the sky, its long contrail slowly breaking up in the jet steam high above the Andes. Before Harman could be sure of the make and model of the ship, the gleaming speck was gone over the northern horizon behind the ruins, trailed by three sonic booms. It had been too large and too fast to be one of the hornets hauling gear north from the Dry Valley. Harman wondered if perhaps it was Daeman, returning from one of their joint expeditions with the moravecs, plotting and recording the decreasing quantum disturbances between Earth-system and Mars.

We have our own spacecraft now , thought Harman. He smiled at his own hubris at even thinking such a thing. But the thought still made him warm inside. Then he reminded himself that we have our own spacecraft, but we can’t yet build our own spacecraft.