Hockenberry apologizes for deceiving Odysseus, for bringing him to the hornet so that the moravecs could shanghai him. Odysseus waves away the apology. “I thought of killing you, son of Duane, but to what purpose? Obviously the gods have ordained that I come on this long voyage, so it is not my place to defy the will of the immortals.”

“You still believe in the gods?” asks Hockenberry, taking a long sip of the powerful wine. “Even after going to war with them?”

The bearded war planner frowns at this, then smiles and scratches his cheek. “Sometimes it may be difficult to believe in one’s friends, Hockenberry, son of Duane, but one must always believe in one’s enemies. Especially if you are privileged to count the gods amongst your enemies.”

They drink a minute in silence. The ship rotates again. Bright sunlight blots out the stars for a moment and then the ship turns into its own shadow once more and the stars reappear.

The powerful wine hits Hockenberry in a wave of warmth. He’s happy to be alive—he raises his hand to his chest, touching not only the QT medallion there but the thin line of disappearing scar under his tunic—and he realizes that after ten years of living amongst the Greeks and Trojans, this is the first time he’s sat down to drink wine and schmooze with one of the serious heroes and major characters of the Iliad. How strange, after teaching the tale to undergraduates for so many years.

For a while the two men talk about the events they’d seen just before leaving Earth and the base of Olympos—the Hole between the worlds closing, the one-sided battle between the Amazons and Achilles’ men. Odysseus is surprised that Hockenberry knows so much about Penthesilea and the other Amazons, and Hockenberry doesn’t find it necessary to tell the warrior that he’d read about them in Virgil. The two men speculate on how quickly the real war will resume and whether the Achaeans and Argives under the leadership of Agamemnon again will finally bring down the walls of Troy.

“Agamemnon may have the brute strength to destroy Ilium,” says Odysseus, his eyes on the turning stars, “but if strength and numbers fail him, I doubt he has the craft.”

“The craft?” repeats Hockenberry. He has been thinking and communicating in this ancient Greek for so long that he rarely has to pause to consider a word, but he does so now. Odysseus has used the word dolos for craft—which could mean “cleverness” in a way that would draw either praise or abuse.

Odysseus nods. “Agamemnon is Agamemnon—all see him for what he is, for he is capable of nothing more. But I am Odysseus, known to the world for every kind of craft.”

Again Hockenberry hears this dolos and realizes that Odysseus is bragging of the very same character trait of cleverness and guile that made Achilles say of him—Hockenberry had been there to hear this during their embassy to Achilles months ago—“I hate that man like the very Gates of Death who… stoops to peddling lies.”

Odysseus had obviously understood Achilles’ implied insult that night, but had chosen not to take offense. Now, after four gourds of wine, the son of Laertes was showing pride in his cleverness. Not for the first time, Hockenberry wonders—Will they be able to bring down Troy without Odysseus’ wooden horse? He thinks of the layers of this word, dolos, and has to smile to himself.

“Why are you grinning, son of Duane? Did I say something funny?”

“No, no, honored Odysseus,” says the scholic. “I was just thinking about Achilles …” He lets his voice drift off before he says something that will anger the other man.

“I dreamt of Achilles last night,” says Odysseus, rotating easily in the air to look at the near-sphere of stars around them. The astrogation bubble looks both ways along the Queen Mab’s hull, but the metal and plastic there mostly reflect the starlight. “I dreamed that I talked to Achilles in Hades.”

“Is the son of Peleus dead then?” asks Hockenberry. He opens another gourd of wine.

Odysseus shrugs. “It was just a dream. Dreams do not accept time as a boundary. Whether Achilles breathes now or already shuffles amongst the dead, I do not know, but it’s certain that Hades will someday be his home—as it will be all of ours.”

“Ah,” says Hockenberry. “What did Achilles say to you in the dream?”

Odysseus turns his dark-eyed stare back on the scholic. “He wanted to know about his son, Neoptolemus, about whether the boy had become a champion at Troy.”

“And did you tell him?”

“I told him I did not know, that my own fate has carried me far from the walls of Ilium before Neoptolemus could enter battle there. This did not satisfy the son of Peleus.”

Hockenberry nods. He can imagine Achilles’ petulance.

“I tried to comfort Achilles,” continues Odysseus. “To tell him how the Argives honored him as a god now that he was dead—how living men would always sing of his feats of bravery—but Achilles would have none of it.”

“No?” The wine was not only good, it was wonderful. It sent liquid heat blossoming out from Hockenberry’s belly and made him feel as if he were floating more freely even than zero-g would allow.

“No. He told me to stuff those songs of glory up my ass.”

Hockenberry splutters a sort of laugh. Bubbles and beads of red wine float free. The scholic tries to bat them away, but the red spheres burst and make his fingers sticky.

Odysseus still stares out at the stars. “The shade of Achilles told me last night that he’d rather be a peasant sod buster, his hands covered with calluses not from the sword but from the plow, staring up an oxen’s ass ten hours a day, than to be the greatest hero in Hades, or even the king there, ruling over the breathless dead. Achilles doesn’t like being dead.”

“No,” says Hockenberry, “I could see that he would not.”

Odysseus pirouettes in zero-g, grabs the back of the chair, and looks at the scholic. “I’ve never seen you fight, Hockenberry. Do you fight?”

“No.”

Odysseus nods. “That’s smart. That’s wise. You must come from a long line of philosophers.”

“My father fought,” says Hockenberry, surprised at the memories flooding in. As far as he can tell, he’s not thought of or remembered his father in the last ten years of his second life.

“Where?” asks Odysseus. “Tell me the battle. I may have been there.”

“Okinawa,” says Hockenberry.

“I don’t know of this battle.”

“My father survived it,” says Hockenberry, feeling his throat tightening. “He was very young. Nineteen. He was in the Marines. He came home later that same year and I was born three years after that. He never spoke of it.”

“He didn’t brag of his bravery or describe the battle to his boy?” asks Odysseus, incredulous. “No wonder you grew up to be a philospher rather than a fighter.”

“He never mentioned it at all,” says Hockenberry. “I knew he was in the war, but I found out about his actions on Okinawa only years later, by reading old letters of commendation from his commanding officer, a lieutenant not much older than my father when they fought. I found the letters, and medals, in my father’s old Marine trunk after he died. I was already close to having my Ph.D. in classics then, so I used my research skills to learn something about the battle in which my father received a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.”

Odysseus doesn’t ask about these odd-sounding prizes. Instead, he says, “Did your father do well in battle, son of Duane?”

“I think he did. He was wounded twice on May 20, 1945, during a fight for a place called Sugar Loaf Hill on the island of Okinawa.”

“I don’t know this island.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” said Hockenberry. “It’s far away from Ithaca.”

“Were there many men in this fight?”

“My father’s side had one hundred and eighty-three thousand men ready to be thrown into the battle,” says Hockenberry. He is also looking out at the stars now. “His army was carried to the island of Okinawa in a fleet of more than sixteen hundred ships. There were a hundred and ten thousand of the enemy waiting for them, dug into rock and coral and caves.”