(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.

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 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 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 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.D. Graduated from the École 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…”