The rest of you? I need to hear from everyone here. It's truly all or nothing, everyone or no one in this attempt.

PODALIRIUS.

We'll have to leave our sick and wounded behind, and there will be thousands more of these by nightfall. The Trojans will slaughter them. Perhaps do worse than mere slaughter in their frustration if any of us gets away.

NESTOR.

Yes. But such are the vagaries of war and fate. I need to hear your votes, Noble Chiefs of the Achaeans.

THRASYMEDES.

Aye. We go for it all tonight. And may the gods watch over those left behind and those captured later.

TEUCER.

Fuck the gods up the ass. I say yes, if our fate is to die here on this stinking beach, I say we defy the Fates. Go tonight at fall of true dark.

POLYXINUS.

Yes.

ALASTOR.

Yes. Tonight.

LITTLE AJAX.

Aye.

EUMELUS.

Yes. All or nothing.

MENESTHIUS.

If my lord Achilles were here, he'd go for Hector's throat. Maybe we can get lucky and kill the son of a bitch on our way out.

NESTOR.

Another vote for breaking out. Echepolus?

ECHEPOLUS.

I think we'll all die if we stay and fight another day. I think we'll all die if we try to escape. I for one choose to stay with the wounded and offer my surrender to Hector, trusting in the hope that some shards of his former honor and sense of mercy have survived. But I will tell my men that they can make up their own minds.

NESTOR.

No, Echepolus. Most of the men will follow their commander's lead. You can stay behind and surrender, but I'm relieving you of your command and appointing Amphion in your place. You can go straight from this meeting to the tent where the wounded wait, but speak to no one. Your brigade is small enough and it is on Amphion's left on the line...the two can merge with no confusion or need to reposition troops. That is, I am promoting Amphion if Amphion votes to fight our way out tonight.

AMPHION.

I so vote.

DRESEUS.

I vote for my Epeans-we fight and die tonight, or fight and escape. I for one want to see my home and family again.

EUMELUS.

Agamemnon's men told us, and the moravec things confirmed it, that our cities and homes were empty, our kingdoms now unpopulated-our people stolen away by Zeus.

DRESEUS.

To which I say fuck Agamemnon, fuck the moravec toys, and fuck Zeus. I plan to go home to see if my family is waiting. I believe they are.

POLYPOETES.

(Another son of Agasthenes, co-commander of the Lapiths from Argissa) My men will hold the line today and lead the fight out tonight. I swear this by all the gods.

TEUCER.

Couldn't you swear by something a little more constant? Like your bowels?

(Laughter around the circle) NESTOR.

It's agreed, then, and I concur. We'll do everything in our power to hold back the Trojan onslaught today. To that end, Podalirius, oversee the serving out of all rations this morning except for what a man can carry in his tunic tonight. And double the morning's water rations. Go through Agamemnon's and dead Menelaus' private stores, pull out anything edible. Commanders, tell your men before this morning's battle that all they have to do today is hold-hold for their lives, die only for their comrades' lives-and we will attack tonight at true dark. Some of us will reach the forest and-Fates willing-our homes and families again. Or, failing that, our names will be written in gold words of glory that will last forever. Our children's grandchildren's grandchildren will visit our burial mounds here in this accursed land and say-"Aye, they were men in those days." So tell your sergeants and their men to breakfast well this morning, for most of us will eat dinner in the Halls of the Dead. So tonight, when it's true dark and before the moon arises, I will authorize our favorite pugilist-Epeus-to ride up and down our lines, shouting apete-just as they do to start the chariot races and footraces at the Games. And then we'll be off to our freedom!

(And that should have been the end of the meeting-and a rousing end it was, for Nestor is a born leader and knows how to wrap up a meeting with action items and energy, something my department chair at Indiana University never understood-but, as always, someone breaks the perfect rhythm of the perfect script. In this case, that someone is Teucer.) TEUCER.

Epeus, noble boxer, you never told us the end of your story. Whatever happened to that Olympics boxer who stunned his opponent and then ran out of the arena?

EPEUS.

(Who as everyone knows is more honest than wise) Oh, him. The Olympics priests hunted him down in the woods and killed him like a dog.

The Achaean chieftains have dispersed, gone back to their lines and their men. Nestor has left with his sons. The healer Podalirius has put together a detail of men to sack Agamemnon's tent in a search for food and wine. I'm left alone here on the beach-or at least as alone as one can be when pressed cheek to jowl with thirty thousand other unwashed men all reeking of sweat and fear.

I touch the QT medallion under my tunic. Nestor did not ask for my vote. None of the Achaean heroes so much as looked at me during that entire debate. They know I don't fight and they seem to like me no less for it-it's the way these ancient Greeks treat men who like to dress up in women's clothing and paint their faces white. There is no dishonor there in most of these men's eyes, only dismissal. I'm a freak to them, an outsider, something less than a man.

I know I'm not going to stay until the bitter end. I doubt if I'll stay during today's battle since the air here will grow dark with volleys of arrows in the next half hour. I don't have the morphing gear and impact armor that I had as a scholic-I haven't even donned the metal or leather armor that's so available from Achaean corpses all around me. If I stay, I doubt I'd last the day-the last two days have been a series of craven hours and timid cowering for me here, near the back of the line, near the tent where the wounded are dying. If I were to survive the day, my chances of surviving the attack on the Trojans after dark would be near zero.

And why would I stay? I have a quantum teleportation device hanging around my neck, for Christ's sake. I could be in Helen's chambers in two seconds, relaxing in a hot bath there in five minutes.

Why would I stay?

But I'm not ready to go. Not quite yet. I'm no longer a scholic and there may be no purpose to being a scholar here, but even as a war correspondent who will never be able to report his observations, this last glorious day of a lost glorious epoch is too interesting to miss.

I'll stay for a while.

The horns are blowing everywhere. No one's had time for those promised big breakfasts yet, but the Trojans are attacking all along the line.

64.

To know that everything in the universe-everything in history, everything in science, everything in poetry and art and music, every person, place, thing, and idea-is connected, that is one thing. To experience that connection, even incompletely, that is quite another.

Harman was unconscious for most of nine days. When he wasn't unconscious, he was awake only briefly and then screaming in pain from a headache beyond all capacity of his skull and brain to contain it. He threw up a lot. Then he would lapse into coma again.

On the ninth day he awoke. The headache rolled over him, worse than any headache he had ever experienced, but no longer the scream-maker of his nine-day nightmare. The nausea was gone and his stomach was empty. He'd later realize that he'd lost more than twenty-five pounds. He was naked and lying in the bed on the second floor of the eiffelbahn eiffelbahn cablecar. cablecar.

The cablecar is designed and decorated mostly in art noveau, he thought as he staggered out of bed and pulled on a silk dressing gown that had been thrown over the arm of the overstuffed Empire-era armchair next to the bed. He wondered idly where in the world anyone was raising worms to make silk-had it been one of the servitors' duties these long centuries of human idleness? Was it being artificially created in some industrial vat somewhere, the way the post-humans had created-recreated, actually-his race of nano-altered human stock? Harman's head hurt too much to ponder the thought now. he thought as he staggered out of bed and pulled on a silk dressing gown that had been thrown over the arm of the overstuffed Empire-era armchair next to the bed. He wondered idly where in the world anyone was raising worms to make silk-had it been one of the servitors' duties these long centuries of human idleness? Was it being artificially created in some industrial vat somewhere, the way the post-humans had created-recreated, actually-his race of nano-altered human stock? Harman's head hurt too much to ponder the thought now.

He paused on the mezzanine, closed his eyes, and concentrated. Nothing. He remained in the cablecar. He tried again. Nothing.

Staggering slightly, dizzy now, he went down the wrought-iron metal staircase to the first floor and collapsed into the only chair at the table near the window. The table was covered with white linen.

Harman said nothing as Moira brought out orange juice in a crystal glass, black coffee in a white thermidor, and a poached egg with a bit of salmon on the side. She poured the coffee into his cup. Harman lowered his head slightly to allow the heat from the coffee to rise against his face.

"Come here often?" asked Moira.

Prospero came into the room and stood in the brilliant and despicable morning light that was streaming in through the glass doors. "Ah, Harman...or should we call you New Man? It is a pleasure to see you awake and ambulatory."

"Shut up," said Harman, ignoring the food, sipping the coffee gingerly. He knew now that Prospero was a hologram, but a physical one-a logosphere avatar forming himself from microsecond to microsecond with matter being beamed down from one of the mass-fax-accumulators in orbit. He also knew that if he tried to strike or attack the old magus, the matter would turn to untouchable projection faster than any human reflexes.

"You knew that my chances of surviving the crystal cabinet were about one in a hundred," said Harman, not even looking at Prospero. The light there was too bright.

"A little better than that, I think," said the magus, mercifully drawing the heavy drapes.

Moira pulled a chair over and sat at the table with Harman. She was wearing a red tunic, but otherwise showed the same hardy adventure clothing she had been wearing in the Taj.

Harman looked unblinkingly at her. "You knew the young Savi. You attended the Final Fax Party in the New York Archipelago at the flooded Empire State Building, and you told her friends you hadn't seen her, but you'd actually visited Savi at her home in Antarctica just two days before."

"How on earth do you know that?" asked Moira.

"Savi's friend Petra wrote a short essay about their attempt-mostly hers and her lover Pinchas'-to find Savi. It was printed and bound up right before the Final Fax. Somehow it found its way into your friend Ferdinand Mark Alonzo's library."

"But how would Petra have known that I visited Savi before the New York Archipelago party?"

"I think she and Pinchas found something Savi had written when they went through her Mount Erebus apartments," said Harman. The coffee did not come back up on him, but it didn't help his throbbing headache much either.

"So you know everything about everything now, do you?" asked Moira.

Harman laughed and regretted it almost immediately. He put down the coffee cup and held his right temple. "No," he said at last, "I know just enough to know that I don't know much of anything about anything. Besides, there are forty-one other libraries sprinkled around the Earth whose crystal cabinets I haven't visited yet."

"That would would kill you," said Prospero. kill you," said Prospero.

Harman wouldn't have minded at that moment if someone had killed him. The headache put a pulsing corona around everything and everyone he tried to look at. He sipped more coffee and hoped that the nausea wouldn't come back. The cablecar creaked along, although he knew that it was traveling at more than two hundred miles per hour. Its slight swaying back and forth did nothing to keep his stomach settled. "Would you like to hear all about Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel? Born in Dijon on December 15, 1832 A A.D. Graduated from the ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures in 1855. Before coming up with the idea for his tower at the 1889 Centennial Exposition, he'd already designed the movable dome of the observatory at Nice and the framework for the Statue of Liberty in New York. He..."

"Stop it," snapped Moira. "No one likes a showoff."

"Where the hell are we?" asked Harman. He managed to get to his feet and shove back the drapes. They were passing through a beautiful wooded valley, the car moving along more than seven hundred feet above a winding river. Ancient ruins-a castle of some sort-were just visible along a ridgeline.

"We've just passed Cahors," said Prospero. "We should be swinging south toward Lourdes at the next tower switching station."

Harman rubbed his eyes but opened the glass door and stepped out. The forcefield deployed along the leading edge of the flat-sided cablecar kept him from being blown off the balcony. "What's the matter?" he asked back through the open door. "Don't you want to head north and visit your friend's blue-ice cathedral?"

Moira looked startled. "How could you possibly know about that? There was no book in the Taj with that..."

"No," agreed Harman, "but my friend Daeman saw the beginnings of that-the arrival of Setebos. I know from the books what the Many-Handed would do after he arrived in Paris Crater. So he's still here...on Earth, I mean?"

"Yes," said Prospero. "And he is no friend of ours."

Harman shrugged. "You two brought him here the first time. Him and the others."

"It was not our intention," said Moira.

Harman had to laugh at that, no matter how much it made his head throb. "No, right," said Harman. "You open an interdimensional door into darkness, leave it open, and then say 'It was not our intention' when something really vile comes through."

"You've learned much," said Prospero, "but you still do not understand all that you will have to if..."

"Yeah, yeah," said Harman. "I'd listen to you more closely, Prospero, if I didn't know that you're mostly one of those things that came through the door. The post-humans spend a thousand years trying to contact Alien Others-changing the quantum setup of the entire solar system in the process-and get a many-handed brain and a retread cybervirus from a Shakespearean play instead."

The old magus smiled at this. Moira shook her head in irritation, poured some coffee into a second cup, and drank without comment.

"Even if we wanted to drop by and say hello to Setebos," said Prospero, "we could not. Paris Crater has no tower-has not had one since before the rubicon virus."

"Yeah," said Harman. He went back in, but stood looking out while he lifted his own cup and sipped coffee. "Why can't I freefax?" he asked sharply.

"What?" said Moira.

"Why can't I freefax? I know how to summon the function now without the training wheels symbol triggers, but it didn't work when I got up. I want to jump back to Ardis."

"Setebos shut down the planetary fax system," said Prospero. "That includes freefaxing as well as the faxnode pavilions."

Harman nodded and rubbed his cheek and chin. A week and a half of stubble, almost a real beard, rasped under his fingers. "So you two, and presumably Ariel, can still quantum teleport, but I'm stuck on this stupid cablecar until we get to the Atlantic Breach? You really expect me to walk across the ocean floor to North America? Ada will be dead of old age before I get to Ardis."

"The nanotechnology that grants your people functions," said Prospero, his old voice sounding sad, "did not prepare you for quantum teleportation."

"No, but you you can QT me home," said Harman, looming over the old man where he now sat on the couch. "Touch me and QT. It's that simple." can QT me home," said Harman, looming over the old man where he now sat on the couch. "Touch me and QT. It's that simple."