Some chambers are open to Odysseus, many are locked, and a few—like the place called the bridge, which they showed him on that first day of his exile in this right-angled Hades—are guarded by the black and thorny artifices called rockvecs or battle ‘vecs or Belt troopers. He has seen these black-thorned things fight during the months they helped protect Ilium and the Achaean encampments against the fury of the gods, and he knows that they have no honor. They are only machines using machines to fight other machines. But they are larger and heavier than Odysseus, armed with their machine weapons, and armored with their built-in blades and metal skin, whereas Odysseus has been stripped of all his weapons and armor. If all else fails, he will try to wrest a weapon away from one of the battle ‘vecs, but only after he has exhausted all his other choices. Having held and wielded weapons since he was a toddler, Odysseus, son of Laertes, knows that they must be learned—practiced with—their function and form understood as any artist understands his tools—and he does not know these blunt, scalloped, heavy, pointless weapons that the rockvecs carry.

In the room with all the roaring machines and the huge, plunging cylinders, he talks to the huge metal crab of a monster. Somehow, Odysseus knows the thing is blind. Yet somehow, he also knows, it finds its way around without the use of its eyes. Odysseus has known many brave men who were blind, and has visited blind seers, oracles, whose human sight had been replaced with second sight.

“I want to go back to the battlefields of Troy, Monster,” he says. “Take me there at once.”

The crab rumbles. It speaks Odysseus’ language, the language of civilized men, but so abominably that the words sound more like the crash of harsh surf on rocks—or the plunge and hiss of the huge pistons above—rather than true human speech.

“We have… long trip… in front of me… us… noble Odysseus, honored son of Laertes. When that is dead… finished… over… we hope to remove you… return you… to Penelope and Telemachus.”

How dare this animated metal hulk touch the names of my wife and child with its hidden tongue, thinks Odysseus. If he had even the dullest of swords or the crudest of clubs, he would bash this thing to pieces, tear open its shell, and find and rip out that tongue.

Odysseus leaves the crab-monster and seeks the bubble of curved glass where he can see the stars.

They are not moving now. They do not blink. Odysseus sets his scarred palms against the cold glass.

“Athena, goddess… I sing the glorious Power with azure eyes, Pallas Athena, tameless, chaste, and wise… hear my prayer.

“Tritogenia, goddess… town-preserving Maid, revered and mighty; from his awful head whom Zeus himself brought forth… in warlike armor dressed… Golden! All radiant!… I beseech thee, hear my prayer.

“Wonder, goddess, strange possessed… the everlasting Gods that Shape to see… shaking a javelin keen… impetuously rush from the crest of Aegis-bearing God, Father Zeus… so fearfully was heaven shaken… and did move beneath the might of the Cerulean-eyed…. hear my prayer.

“Child of the Aegis bearer, Third Born… sublime Pallas whom we rejoice to view… wisdom personified whose praise shall never unremembered be… hail to thee… please hear my prayer.”

Odysseus opens his eyes. Only the unblinking stars and his own reflection return his gray-eyed gaze.

The third day out from Phobos and Mars.

To a distant observer—say, someone watching through a powerful optical telescope from one of the orbital rings around Earth—the Queen Mab would appear as a complicated spear-shaft of girder-wrapped spheres, ovals, tanks, brightly painted oblongs, many-belled thruster quads, and a profusion of black buckycarbon hexagons, all arranged around the core stack of cylindrical habitation modules, all of which, in turn, are balanced atop a column of increasingly brilliant atomic flashes.

Mahnmut goes to see Hockenberry in the infirmary. The human is healing quickly, thanks in part to the Grsvki-process, which fills the ten-bed recovery room with the smell of a thunderstorm. Mahnmut has brought flowers from the Queen Mab’s extensive greenhouse—his memory banks had told him that this was still proper protocol in the prerubicon Twenty-first Century from which Hockenberry, or at least Hockenberry’s DNA, had come. The scholic actually laughs at the sight of them and allows that he’s never been given flowers before, at least as best he can recall. But Hockenberry adds that his memory of his life on Earth—his real life, his life as a university scholar rather than as a scholic for the gods—is far from complete.

“It’s lucky that you QT’d to the Queen Mab,” says Mahnmut. “No one else would have had the medical expertise or the surgical skills with which to heal you.”

“Or the spidery moravec surgeon,” says Hockenberry. “Little did I know when I met Retrograde Sinopessen that he’d end up saving my life within twenty-four hours. Funny how life works.”

Mahnmut can think of nothing to say to that. After a minute, he says, “I know you’ve talked to Asteague/Che about what happened to you, but would you mind discussing it again?”

“Not at all.”

“You say that Helen stabbed you?”

“Yes.”

“And the motive was just to keep her husband—Menelaus—from ever discovering that it was she who betrayed him after you quantum teleported him back to the Achaean lines?”

“I think so.” Mahnmut was not an expert at reading human facial expressions, but even he could tell that Hockenberry looked sad at the thought.

“But you told Asteague/Che that you and Helen had been intimate… were once lovers.”

“Yes.”

“You’ll have to excuse my ignorance about such things, Dr. Hockenberry, but it would appear that Helen of Troy is a very vicious woman.”

Hockenberry shrugs and smiles, albeit sadly. “She’s a product of her era, Mahnmut—formed by harsh times and motives beyond my understanding. When I used to teach the Iliad to my undergraduate students, I’d always emphasize that all of our attempts to humanize Homer’s tale—to make it into something explicable by modern humanist sensibilities—were destined to fail. These characters… these people … while completely human, were poised at the very beginning of our so-called civilized era, millennia before our current humanist values would begin to emerge. Viewed in that light, Helen’s actions and motivations are as hard for us to fathom as, say, Achilles’ almost complete lack of mercy or Odysseus’ endless guile.”

Mahnmut nods. “Did you know that Odysseus is on this ship? Has he come to see you?”

“No, I haven’t seen him. But Prime Integrator Asteague/Che told me he was aboard. Actually, I’m afraid he’ll kill me.”

“Kill you?” says Mahnmut, shocked.

“Well, you remember you used me to help kidnap him. I was the one who convinced him that you had a message from Penelope for him—all that garbage about the olive tree trunk as part of his bed back home in Ithaca. And when I got him to the hornet… zap! Mep Ahoo coldcocked him and loaded him aboard the hornet. If I were Odysseus, I’d sure carry a grudge against one Thomas Hockenberry.”

Coldcocked, thinks Mahnmut. He loved it when he encountered a new English word. He runs it through his lexicon, finds it, discovers to his surprise that it isn’t an obscenity, and files it away for future use. “I’m sorry I put you in a position of possible harm,” says Mahnmut. He considers telling the scholic that in all the confusion of the Hole closing forever, Orphu had tightbeamed him an order from the prime integrators—get Odysseus—but then he thinks better of using that as an excuse. Thomas Hockenberry, Ph.D., had been born into the century when the excuse of I was only following orders went out of style once and for all.