by Tad Williams
An idea began to tickle at him. He sat up, suddenly more sober than he had been a few minutes earlier, "Tell me something, good Eumaeus," he began abruptly. If these things were machines, that was all the more reason why there should be rules, logic . . . answers. It was up to him to discover what they were. "Tell me how people in your country ask the gods for help."
Penelope rebuffed him again that evening, starting the audience as though Paul were the kindly beggar she had sent away the day before, but then veering rapidly into a wife's tragic leave-taking, bidding him farewell on his journey to Troy with many promises as to how she would keep his home and his possessions safe, and would raise his infant son to proper manhood.
I've definitely done something to catch her in a loop, he thought. It was hard to watch the woman he had chased for so long weeping bravely over something that bore no relationship to current reality, even the skewed reality of the simulation network, but it confirmed him in his intentions. I could go on like this forever, he decided, and it wouldn't change anything.
"Why can your spirit not rest, my lord and husband?" she asked suddenly, changing tack again. "Is it that your bones lie unmourned on some distant beach? That the gods who opposed you have tried to hide your name and your deeds? Do not fear—not all gods are your enemies, and there are those who will avenge you. There are others who will bring your memory and good name back from those foreign lands. A man waits to speak to me even now, to tell me of your life and deeds while you have been far from me, and someday your son, sensible Telemachus, will be able to avenge your wrongful death."
He felt a moment of interest until he realized that the man she spoke of was himself, that she had folded that version into this scenario where he was his own ghost.
I was right the first time, he thought miserably. This could go on and on. I started this loop, somehow—I have to end it. A chilling thought came to him: But what if this is all there is to her? What if she's just a broken machine—nothing more than that?
Paul shook it off—he simply couldn't afford to consider the possibility. The quest to find this woman was almost the only thing that gave his life meaning. He had to believe that his recognition of her meant something. He had to believe.
Two more days passed.
Gripped by a strange sort of loyalty, Paul gave Penelope one last chance to recognize the truth, such as it was, but again, after oscillating through Paul-as-ghost and Paul-as-beggar, she once more settled on the idea he was about to leave for Troy and would not hear otherwise. Time after time she bade him a sadly loving farewell, then moments later began her leavetaking all over again. The only thing she did not seem to consider, he noted, was the scenario that all the other Ithacans seemed to be performing—that his character, Odysseus, had returned in secret, much aged, but alive and well, from the Trojan War. He thought that was probably significant, but wasn't certain how. In any case, he was now determined to smash the puzzle rather than to waste the rest of his life trying to solve it.
The ancient slave Eurycleia, he was unhealthily gratified to discover, still regarded him with the true belief of a faithful folktale servant. When he had finished telling her what he wanted, she recited his instructions back to prove she had them memorized.
Avoiding the brawl of suitors and the backstairs treachery of the maids and house slaves, he spent the rest of his time walking the island, the dream-Ithaca. He visited Eumaeus again; then, following the swineherd's directions, he took a long walk through the bee-droning hills to a small rustic temple on the far side of the island. The place gave every indication of having been ignored a long time: a faceless, time-rounded statue standing in a niche dusted with the remains of long-dead narcissus flowers, surrounded by cypress branches so dry they had lost their scent.
As he stood praying before the forgotten shrine in the hollow of the hillside, the air heavy and silent but for the constant breathing of sea, he prayed aloud for himself too, just to be on the safe side. True, this was all a simulation, the painstaking creation of people as human as himself, so for all intents and purposes he was praying to some team of gear engineers and graphic designers, but his boss at the Tate had often warned him never to underestimate the sneakiness and self-obsession of artists.
He woke disoriented from a dream about Gally, and for a moment could not remember where he was.
He groped around. Sand lay beneath him, and there was a faint, dying light in the west where the sun had gone down behind the hills. He had fallen asleep on the beach, waiting.
The lost child in his dream had worn the guise of the still-unmet Telemachus, a handsome, dark-ringleted youth who nevertheless wore Gally's urchin squint. The boy had been rowing a small boat on a dark river through drifting mists, calling Paul's name. The urge to reach out to him had been powerful, but some dream-paralysis had prevented Paul from moving or even answering as the boy faded into a cloud of white nothingness.
Helpless tears were on his cheeks now, cool in the evening wind off the ocean, but through his misery he felt a kind of vindication: surely this dream of Gally on the river in the lands of Death must mean he was doing the right thing. Paul sat up, his wits returning with sleep's retreat. The beach was empty but for a few fishermen's boats, their owners long since gone to their evening meals. Sea and sky were quickly becoming a single dark thing, and the fire he had built with so much labor earlier in the afternoon was now guttering. Paul sprang forward and fed it with cypress twigs as he had been told, and then with larger pieces of driftwood until the flames began to mount high again. By the time he had finished, the sun was entirely gone, the stars blazing from a sky undulled by the pervasive ambient light of Paul's own age.
As if they had been waiting for everything to be correctly arranged, voices now came to him down the beach.
"There, where the fire is burning—see, mistress?"
"But this is most strange. Are you certain it is not bandits or pirates who have made a camp there?'
Paul stood. "This way, my lady," he called. "You don't have to worry about bandits."
Penelope came out of the darkness, shawl wrapped tightly around her, the firelight revealing her look of deep unease. Eurycleia, older and shorter of leg, nevertheless followed close behind.
"I have brought her, master," the slave announced. "As you asked."
"Thank you." He was certain there was something more poetic he should say, but he had no skill for this sort of thing. His personal translation of Homer would just have to be the utilitarian sort.
Penelope laughed nervously. "Is this some conspiracy? My oldest and dearest servant, have you betrayed me to this strange man?"
"So you still don't recognize me?" Paul shook his head. "It doesn't matter. I won't hurt you, I promise. I swear it by all the gods. Please, sit down." He took a breath. It had seemed so sensible when he had planned it—his decision to stop fighting the simulation, to enter instead into its spirit and thus find a painless way to jog this woman back into sanity, to make her useful to him, as her own alter ego had clearly intended her to be. "In fact," he said, "I'm going to ask the gods for help."
Penelope gave one sharp glance to Eurycleia, then settled herself gracefully on the sand. Her dark shawl and darker hair, the few strands of gray invisible in the starlight, surrounded the pale, mistrustful face with a mantle of shadow. Her wide eyes seemed holes cut directly into the night.
The slave woman handed Paul a bronze knife wrapped in a cloth. He produced a bundle of his own and unwrapped the spindly hindquarters of a butchered black sheep—the wage he had earned from Eumaeus' brother-in-law for an afternoon's work fixing a paddock. It seemed a paltry sacrifice to Paul, but Eumaeus—to whom he had gone first in hope of pig flesh to sacrifice—had assured him that a black ram was the only correct choice, and Paul had bowed to the man's clearly superior knowledge.
While Penelope watched in silent trepidation, Paul made a pyre of sticks atop the fire, then did as Eumaeus had told him, cutting the meat and fat away from the ram's t
highs. He placed the bones on the pyre and the flesh and fat on top of them. Within moments the sacrifice was sending up plumes of greasy smoke, and as the wind changed direction, he caught not only the alluring scent of cooked meat, but something deeper, older, and altogether more disturbing—the smell of burnt offerings, of ransom paid in fear, the scent of human submission to a powerful and pitiless universe.
"I do not understand," Penelope said faintly. Her great eyes followed his every move, as though he were a wild beast. "What are you doing? Why am I here?"
"You think you don't know me," Paul replied. He tried to keep his voice even but he was beginning to feel an odd elevation, something he had not expected. The dream of poor, dead Gally, the snapping flames on the windy beach, the woman whose face had so long been his only talisman sitting across the fire from him, all combined to make him feel as though he might at last be on the brink of something real—something important. "You think you don't, but the gods will bring back your memory." He felt certain now that he was doing the right thing. The exhilarated rush in his head proved it. No more drifting—he was instead seizing the simulation by its own rules and making it work for him. "They will send someone who will help you remember!"
"You are frightening me." Penelope turned to Eurycleia, who Paul felt sure would reassure her, but the slave looked as unhappy as her mistress.
"Then just tell me what I need to know." Paul stepped back from the fire and spread his arms. The wind tugged at his thin garment, but he felt only the heat of the flames. "Who are you? How did we get here? And where is the black mountain you told me about?"
She stared at him like a cornered animal.
It was hard to be patient when he wanted to shout. He had waited so long—had been pushed and tugged and flung from place to place, always passive, always the one acted upon. He had stood by helplessly while the boy, his only real friend in this bizarre universe, was killed before his eyes. Now that helplessness was finally ending. "Then just tell me about the black mountain. How do I find it? Do you remember? That's why I came here. That's why you sent me here!"
She crouched lower. A strafing of sparks leaped out of the fire and swirled away on the wind.
"No? Then I have to ask the gods." He would use the logic of her own world against her. He would make something happen.
As he lowered himself to the sand, Eurycleia piped up nervously. "Surely that is sheep's flesh, my lord. A black ewe, my lord?"
He began to slap his hands against the ground in slow rhythm, striking the sand with his palms as old Eumaeus had instructed him. "It's a ram. Quiet—I have to remember the words."
The slave woman seemed restless and upset. "But such a thing is an offering to. . . ."
"Sshhhh." He slowed his beat upon the ground, and then intoned in rhythm.
"Hail to thee. Invisible, Aedoneus, son of Chronos the Eldest, Brother of Zeus the Thunderer, Hail! Hail to thee, Lord of the Dark Pillars. Hades, Monarch of the Underworld, King of the Silent Realm, Hail. Take this flesh. Lord of the Fertile Depths, Take this offering. Hear my prayer. . . ."
He paused. He had invoked the God of Death, which surely in this place was as good as any graveyard or dying Ice Age child.
"Send me the bird-woman!" he shouted, still drumming the tattoo on the sand. "Tell her I want to speak to her—I want this woman Penelope to see her!" The words seemed awkward, out of keeping with the poetry of the invocation, and he reached to summon the dream-woman's own words. "Come to us! You must come to us!"
Silence fell. Nothing happened.
Furious, Paul began to drum another tattoo on the sand. "Come to us!"
"M–My lord," Eurycleia stuttered, "I thought you meant to ask the help of Athena the Counselor, who has long looked favorably on your family, or of great Zeus—I thought perhaps even you meant to beg forgiveness of ocean-lord Poseidon, who many say you have somehow offended, and who thus murderously hindered your journey back to us. But this, master, this. . . !"
The last beat of his fingers upon the sand continued to reverberate—a noiseless echo that he could nevertheless feel pulsing away into the deeps. The bonfire flames seemed to have slowed, as though their light traveled to him through deep water, or along some kind of hindered and decaying transmission.
"What are you saying?" His impatience was tempered by a throb of worry—the slave's fear was powerful and genuine. Her mistress Penelope seemed beyond terror, her features slack and still except for her eyes, which stared feverishly from the winding-sheet white of her face. "What are you trying to tell me, old woman?"
"Master, you should not offer prayers for . . . such things as this to . . . to the Earthbound!" Eurycleia gasped, fighting for breath. "Have your years . . . in foreign lands robbed you of your . . . of your memory?"
"Why shouldn't I? Hades is a god, isn't he? People pray to him, don't they?" The feeling in his stomach was rapidly becoming a deep, nauseating chill.
The old slave flapped her hands, but she seemed to have lost the ability to speak. The earth beneath Paul's feet seemed taut as a drum, a breathing membrane pulsing to a slow, distant rhythm. But the pulse was growing stronger.
It's not a mistake—I know it's not a mistake . . . is it?
Even as he felt the clutch of doubt, she was there.
Her counterpart Penelope lurched to her feet, staggering backward on the suddenly unstable sands as the bird-woman's form took shape in the smoke, a monochrome angel in wispy gray, the vast wings trailing away into invisibility. The apparition's face was curiously formless, like the rain-eroded statue of the Earth Lord himself in its niche on the other side of the island. But still, from her expression of disbelieving shock, Penelope in some way recognized her own image, even in this insubstantial duplication.
The smoky face turned to him. "Paul Jonas, what have you done?"
He didn't know what to say. Everything he had planned, all he had thought might happen, was coming unstuck. The surface of the earth now seemed only a skin over some impossibly deep pit, and something moved there, something as vast and inescapable as regret.
The angel shivered, roiling the smoke. Even in this spectral form, he could clearly see the lines of the bird-woman from the giant's castle, and despite his terror, he ached for her. "You have called out to the One who is Other," she said. "He is searching for you now."
"What are you talking about?"
"You have called to him. The one who dreams it all. Why did you do that—he is terrible!"
Through his confusion, Paul finally realized that he had been listening for long moments to Penelope moaning in terror. She had fallen to the ground and was throwing sand on her own head, as though she would bury herself. He pulled her upright, in part wanting to help, but also furious that her recalcitrance should have brought him to this. "Look! This is her!" he shouted at the smoke angel. "You sent me to her, but she couldn't tell me where to go. I wanted her to tell me how to reach the black mountain."
The apparition was no more willing than Penelope to meet her double's eyes: when Paul thrust his erstwhile wife toward her, the angel twitched away, a ripple passing through her entire body and deforming her wings. "We do not. . . ." The face of smoke writhed. "We should not. . . ."
"Just make her tell me. Or you tell me! I can't stand this anymore!" Paul could feel a growing presence, simultaneously beneath his feet and behind his eyes, a pressure building all around that made the very air seem about to burst. "Where is your bloody black mountain?" He shoved Penelope toward the apparition again, but it was like trying to force together two repelling magnets. Penelope tore free from him with animal strength and fell to the sand, weeping.
"Tell me!" Paul shouted. He turned to the angel. "Why won't she tell me?"
The specter was beginning to dissipate. "She has told you. She has told you what she knows in the only way she can. That is why I sent you to her. She is the one who knows what you must do next."
Paul grabbed at her, but the angel was truly smoke: she dissolved in his c
lawing fingers. "What does that mean?" He turned and seized Penelope instead. He shook her, his anger threatening to overspill, the bursting tension of the night like a great dark blood clot in his head. "Where am I supposed to go?"
Penelope screamed in pain and terror. "Why do you do this to me, my husband?"
"Where do I go?"
Penelope was weeping and shuddering. "To Troy! You must go to Troy! Your comrades await you there!"
Paul let go of her, staggering as though he had been struck with a great stone, the realization a searing pain in his heart.
Troy—the only thing she had said that did not speak of the end of the story, the only answer that did not fit with the rest of the simulation. Through the cloud of confusion caused by his presence, Penelope had been telling him what he needed to know all along . . . but he hadn't listened. Instead he had brought her here, the woman he had sought for so long, and then tortured her, after promising the gods he would not harm her. He had called up something none of them dared face, when she had already told him several times what her other self could not.
Whatever he had summoned from the dark regions below, it was he himself who was the monster.
His eyes blurry with tears, Paul turned from the fire and stumbled away across the drumhead sands. He tripped on the huddled form of Eurycleia, but did not stop to find out if she was alive or dead. The thing that had frightened even the winged woman seemed very near now, achingly so, as close as his own heartbeat.
Searching for me, she said. He tripped and fell, then wobbled to his feet again like a drunken man. The Earthbound, they called him. He could feel the breathing vitality of the soil beneath him. A part of him, a tiny, distant part, shrilled that it all had to be illusion, that he must remember he was in some kind of vast virtual game, but it was a pennywhistle in a hurricane. Every time his feet met the ground he felt the dark thing's presence, as alarming and painful as if he ran on a hot griddle.
