Ilium by Dan Simmons Read Free Book Online Page B

there and closes her hand around it even as she closes her eyes to concentrate. I stand and wait. I confess that I am nervous. My heart pounds and my hands, clasped behind my back as I stand in a sort of professorial parody of a soldier’s “at ease” position, are sweaty. I decided years ago that that the gods cannot really read minds—that their uncanny perception of mortals’ thoughts, heroes and scholics alike, comes from some advanced science in the study of facial muscles, eye movements and the like. But I could be wrong. Perhaps they are telepathic. If so—and if they bothered to read my mind during my moment of epiphany and decision on the beach after Agamemnon’s and Achilles’ showdown—then I am a dead man. Again.
    I’ve seen scholics who displease the Muse, much less the more important gods. Some years ago—the fifth year of the siege, actually—there was a scholic from the Twenty-sixth Century, a chubby, irreverent Asian with the unusual name of Bruster Lin—and even though Bruster Lin was the brightest and most insightful scholar amongst us, his irreverence was his undoing. Literally. After one of his more ironic comments—it was about the mano a mano combat between Paris and Menelaus, winner take all, that would have settled the war on the outcome of that single combat. The one-on-one fight to the death between Helen’s Trojan lover and her Achaean husband—although staged in front of two cheering armies, with Paris beautiful in his golden armor and Menelaus fearful with his eye full of business—was never consummated. Aphrodite saw that her beloved Paris was going to be hacked into worm meat, so she swooped down and spirited him off the battlefield back to Helen, where, like effete liberals in every age, Paris was more the happy warrior in bed than on the battlefield. So it was after one of Bruster Lin’s amusing comments on the Paris–Menelaus episode, that the Muse—not amused—snapped her fingers and the billions upon trillions of obedient nanocytes in the hapless scholic’s body aggregated and exploded outward in one giant nano-lemming leap, shredding the still-smiling Bruster Lin into a thousand bloody shreds in front of the rest of us and sending his still-smiling head rolling toward our feet as we stood at attention.
    It was a serious lesson and we took it to heart. No editorializing. No making merry with the serious business of the gods’ sport. The wages of irony is death.
    The Muse opens her eyes and looks at me now. “Hockenberry,” she says, her tone that of a personnel bureaucrat from my century about to fire a mid-level white-collar worker, “how long have you been with us?”
    I know the question is rhetorical, but when queried by a goddess, even a minor goddess, one answers even rhetorical questions. “Nine years, two months, eighteen days, Goddess.”
    She nods. I am the oldest surviving scholic. Or, rather, I am the scholic who has survived the longest. She knows this. Perhaps this official recognition of my longevity is my elegy before explosive termination by nanocyte.
    I had always taught my students that there were nine Muses, all daughters of Mnemosyne—Kleis, Euterpe, Thaleria, Melpomene, Terpsichorde, Erato, Plymnia, Ourania, and Kalliope—each one granted, at least by later Greek tradition, control of some artistic expression such as flute or dance or storytelling or heroic song—but in my nine years, two months, and eighteen days serving the gods as observer on the plains of Ilium, I’ve reported to, seen, and heard of only one Muse—this tall goddess who sits in front of me now behind her marble table. Still, because of her strident voice, I’ve always thought of her as “Kalliope,” even though the name originally meant “she of the beautiful voice.” I can’t say this solo Muse has a beautiful voice—it’s more klaxon than calliope to my ear—but it’s certainly one I’ve learned to jump to when she says “frog.”
    “Follow me,” she