“Then fight me now, God of Feces,” shouts Achilles and begins to advance, sword and shield ready.

Zeus holds up one hand. Achilles is frozen in place. Time itself seems to freeze.

“I cannot kill you, my impetuous little bastard,” mutters Zeus, as if to himself, “but what if I blast your flesh from your bone and then rip that very flesh into its constituent cells and molecules? It might take a while for even the quantum universe to reassemble you—centuries per-haps?—and I don’t think it could possibly be a painless process.”

Frozen in midstride, Achilles knows that he is still able to speak but does not.

“Or perhaps I could send you somewhere,” says Zeus, gesturing toward the ceiling, “where there is no air to breathe. That will be an interesting conundrum for the probability singularity of the celestial fire to solve.”

“There is no place outside the oceans with no air to breathe,” snarls Achilles, but then he remembers his gasping and weakness on the high slopes of Olympos just the day before.

“Outer space would give the lie to that assertion,” says Zeus with a maddening smile. “Somewhere beyond the orbit of Uranus, perhaps, or out in the Kuiper Belt. Or Tartarus would serve. The air there is mostly methane and ammonia—it would turn your lungs to burned twigs—but if you survived a few hours in terrible pain, you could commune with your grandparents. They eat mortals, you know.”

“Fuck you,” shouts Achilles.

“So be it,” says Zeus. “Have a good trip, my son. Short—agonizing—but good.”

The King of the Gods moves his right hand in a short, easy arc and the paving tiles beneath Achilles’ feet begin to dissolve. A circle opens in the floor of Odysseus’ banquet hall until the fleet-footed mankiller seems to be standing on flame-lighted air. From beneath him, from the horrific pit below filled with surging sulfurous clouds, black mountains rising like rotten teeth, lakes of liquid lead, the bubble and flow of hissing lava, and the shadowy movement of huge, inhuman things, comes the constant roar and bellow of the monsters once called Titans.

Zeus moves his hand again, ever so slightly, and Achilles falls into that pit. He does not scream as he disappears.

After a minute of gazing down at the flames and roiling black clouds so far below, Zeus moves his palm from left to right, the circle closes, the floor becomes solid and is made up of Odysseus’ handset tiles once again, and silence returns to the house except for the pathetic baying of the starving hound named Argus out in the courtyard somewhere.

Zeus sighs and quantum teleports away to begin his reckoning with the unsuspecting gods.

Prospero stayed behind as Moira led Harman around the marble balcony with no railing, up a moving flight of open iron stairs, then around again, up again, and so until the floor of the Taj became a circle seemingly miles below. Harman’s heart was pounding.

There were a few small, round windows set into the booklined wall of the endlessly rising and inward-curving dome. Harman had not seen them from below or from outside, but they allowed light in and gave him an excuse to pause for breath and courage. They stood in the light for a minute as Harman stared out at the distant mountain peaks shining icily in the late morning light. Masses of clouds had filled the valleys to the north and east, hiding the ripple-crevassed glaciers from view. Harman wondered how far he was looking beyond the peaks and glaciers and massing clouds to the dusty and nearly curved horizon be-yond—a hundred miles? Two hundred miles? More?

“It’s all right,” Moira said softly.

Harman turned.

“What you did to wake me,” she said. “It’s all right. We’re sorry. You really did have no choice. The mechanisms to incite you were in place before your father’s father’s great-great-grandfather was born.”

“But what are the odds that I would be descended from this Ferdinand Mark Alonzo Khan Ho Tep of yours?” said Harman. He could not hide the regret in his voice—nor did he want to.

Surprisingly, Moira laughed. It was Savi’s laugh—quick and spontaneous—but lacking the edge of bitterness Harman had heard in the older woman’s amusement. “The odds are one hundred percent,” said Moira.

Harman could only show his confusion in silence.

“Ferdinand Mark Alonzo made sure that when the next line of old-style humans were being… readied and decanted,” said Moira,”that some of his chromosomes would be in all males of the line.”

“No wonder we’re feeble and stupid and inept,” said Harman. “We’re all a bunch of inbred cousins.” He’d sigled a book on basic genetics less than three weeks earlier—although it seemed like years ago. Ada had been sleeping next to him while he watched the golden words flow from the book down his hand, wrist, and arm.

Moira laughed again. “Are you ready to go the rest of the way up to the crystal cabinet?”

The clear cupola at the top of the Taj Moira was much larger than it had appeared from below—Harman guessed it was at least sixty or seventy feet across. There were no marble walkways here and the iron-stairway escalators and black-iron catwalks all ended at the center of the dome, everything glowing in the sunlight from the clear windows encircling the Taj’s pointed cupola.

Harman had never been so high—not even on the tower of the Golden Gate at Machu Picchu seven hundred feet above the suspended road-way—and he’d never been overwhelmed by such a fear of falling. This platform was so high that he could look down and hide the entire circle of the marble floor of the Taj with his outstretched hand. The maze and the crypt entrance on the main floor were so far below that they looked like the microcircuit embroidery on a turin cloth. Harman forced himself not to look down as he followed Moira up the last stairway out onto the web of catwalks to the wrought-iron platform in the cupola itself.

“Is that it?” he asked, nodding toward a ten—or twelve-foot-tall structure in the center of the platform.

“Yes.”

Harman had expected this so-called crystal cabinet to be another version of Moira’s crystal sarcophagus, but this thing looked nothing like a coffin. It was faceted with glass and metal geodesic struts the color of old pewter. The word “dodecahedron” came to mind, but Harman had learned that from sigling rather than from reading and wasn’t sure if it was the correct term. The crystal cabinet was a multifaceted, twelve-sided object, roughly spherical except for the flat faces, made of a dozen or so slabs of clear glass or crystal framed by thin struts of burnished metal. Scores of multicolored cables and pipes ran from the walls of the cupola into the black metal base of the thing. Scattered on the platform near the cabinet were metal-mesh chairs, odd instruments with dark screens and keyboards, and micro-thin slabs of vertical clear plastic, some five or six feet high.

“What is this place?” asked Harman.

“The nexus of the Taj.” She activated several of the screened instruments and touched a vertical panel. The plastic disappeared as a holographic virtual control panel took its place. Moira’s hands danced on the virtual images, there was a deep sound from the walls of the Taj, and a golden liquid—not yellow but liquid gold, apparently no thicker than water—began pouring into the base of the crystal cabinet.

Harman walked closer to the dodecahedron. “It’s filling with liquid.”

“Yes.”

“That’s crazy. I can’t go in there now. I’d drown.”

“No, you won’t,” said Moira.

“You expect me to be in that cabinet when it has ten feet of this golden liquid in it?”

“Yes.”

Harman shook his head and backed away, stopping six feet from the edge of the metal platform. “No, no, no. That’s too crazy.”

“As you will, but it is the only way you can gain the knowledge of these books,” said Moira. “The fluid is the medium which allows the transmission of the contents of these million volumes. Knowledge you will need if you are to be our Prometheus in the struggle against Setebos and his kind. Knowledge you will need if you are to educate your own people. Knowledge you will need, my Prometheus, if you are to save your beloved Ada.”