"There is so much that we must talk about, my long-lost husband -- so very much!"
"She beckoned him to her stool. When he had lowered himself onto it, she knelt with careful grace on the stone flags at his feet. Like everyone else in this place, she smelled of wool and olive oil and woodsmoke, but she also had a scent that seemed to Paul particularly her own, a whiff of something flowery and secretive.
"Oddly, she did not embrace him, did not even call back the slave-woman Eurycleia to bring wine or food for her long-lost husband, but Paul was not disappointed: he was far more interested in answers to his many questions. The lamp flame flickered, then stabilized, as though the world drew breath and held it. Everything about her called to him, spoke of a life he had lost and was desperate to regain. He wanted to clutch her to him, but something, perhaps her cool, slightly fearful gaze, prevented it. He was dizzied by events and did not know where to start.
"What . . . what is your name?"
"Why, Penelope, my lord," she said, a wrinkle of consternation appearing between her eyebrows. "Has your trip to death's dusky kingdom robbed you even of your memories? That is sad indeed."
Paul shook his head. He knew the name of Odysseus' wife already, but he had no interest in playing out a scenario. "But what is your real name? Vaala?"
The look of worry was rapidly becoming something deeper. She leaned away from him, as though from an animal that might at any moment turn violent. "Please, my lord, my husband, tell me what you wish me to say. I do not wish to anger you, for then your spirit might find no rest at all."
"Spirit?" He reached his hand toward her but she shied away. "Do you think I'm dead? Look, I'm not -- touch me."
Even as she moved gracefully but decisively to avoid him, her expression suddenly changed, a violent alteration from fear to confusion. A moment later a deep mournfulness came over her -- a look that seemed to have no relationship to the prior reactions. It was startling to see.
"I have kept you with my womanish worries long enough," she said. "The ships strain at their anchor ropes. Bold Agamemnon and Menelaus and the others impatiently await, and you must sail across the sea to distant Troy."
"What?" Paul could not make sense of what had just happened. One moment she had been treating him as though he were her husband's ghost, the next she was trying to hurry him off to the Trojan war, which must be long over with -- otherwise, why was everyone so surprised to see him still alive? "But I have come back to you. You said you had much to tell me."
For a moment Penelope's face froze, then thawed into yet another new and quite different expression, this one a mask of pained bravery. What she said made almost no sense at all. "Please, good beggar, although I feel certain that Odysseus my husband is dead, if you can give me any tale at all of his last days, I will see that you never go hungry again."
It felt as though he had stepped onto what he thought was a sidewalk only to discover it was a whirling carousel. "Wait -- I don't understand any of this. Don't you know me? You said that you did. I met you in the giant's castle. We met again on Mars, when you had wings. Your name was Vaala there."
At first his sometime wife's face curdled into a look of anger, but then her expression softened. "Poor man," she said tolerantly. "Shouldering just a few of the many indignities that tormented my resourceful husband has driven away your wits. I will have my women find a bed for you, where my cruel suitors will not make your life a misery. Perhaps in the morning you can offer me better sense." She clapped her hands; the aged Eurycleia appeared in the doorway. "Find this old man a clean place to sleep, and give him to eat and drink."
"Don't do this to me!" Paul leaned forward and clutched at the hem of her long dress. She jerked away with a momentary blaze of real fury.
"You go too far! This house is full of armed men who would be only too happy to kill you in hopes of impressing me."
He clambered to his feet, not certain what to do next. Everything seemed to have crashed down around him. "Do you really not remember me? Just a few minutes ago you did. My real name is Paul Jonas. Doesn't that mean anything to you?" Penelope relaxed, but her formal smile was so stiff as to look painful, and for a moment Paul thought he saw something terrified fluttering behind her eyes, a trapped creature struggling for escape. The hidden thing faded; she waved him away and turned back to her tapestry. Outside the chamber he turned on the old woman. "Tell me -- do you know me?" "Of course, my lord Odysseus, even in those rags and with your beard so gray." She led him down the narrow stairs to the first floor.
"And how long have I been gone?"
"Twenty terrible years, my lord."
"Then why does my wife think I am someone else? Or think I'm just now leaving for Troy?"
Eurycleia shook her head. She did not seem overly perturbed. "Perhaps her long sorrow has sickened her wits. Or perhaps some god has clouded her vision, so she cannot see you truly."
"Or maybe I'm just doomed," Paul muttered. "Maybe I'm just meant to wander around forever."
The old woman clicked her tongue. "You should be careful of your words, my lord. The gods are always listening."
He lay curled on the packed earth of the kitchen floor. The sun had set and the cold night wind off the ocean crept through the huge, draughty house. The ash and dirt on the floor were more than offset by the welcome heat of the oven, which pulsed out at him through the stone, but even being warm when he might have been outside, chilled to the bone, was not much comfort.
Think it through, he told himself. Somehow you knew it wouldn't be so easy. The serving-woman said, "Maybe a god has clouded her vision." Could that be it? Some kind of spell or something? There were so many possibilities within this world, and he had so little real information -- only what Nandi Paradivash had told him, with many deliberate omissions. Paul had never been much good at solving puzzles or playing games as a child, far happier just daydreaming, but now he felt like cursing his childhood self for slackness. No one else was going to do it for him, though.
As Paul thought about what he had become -- a thinking game-piece, perhaps the only one, on this great Homeric Greece gameboard -- a realization came to him, muffled and yet profound as distant thunder. I'm doing this all wrong. I'm thinking about this simworld like it's real, even though it's just an invention, a toy. But I need to think about the invention itself. What are the rules of how things work? How does this network actually function? Why am I Odysseus, and what's supposed to happen to me here?
He struggled to summon up his Classics lessons from school days. If this place, this simworld, revolved around the long journey of Homer's Odyssey, then the king's house on Ithaca could only come into it at the beginning of the tale, when the wanderer was about to leave, or at the end when the wanderer had returned. And as realistic as this place was ñ as all the simworlds he had visited were -- it was still not real: perhaps every possible contingency could not be programmed in. Perhaps even the owners of the Otherland network had limits to their budgets. That meant there would have to be a finite number of responses, limited in part by what the Puppets could understand. Somehow, Paul's appearance here had triggered several contradictory reactions in the woman currently called Penelope.
But if he was triggering conflicting responses, why had the serving-woman Eurycleia immediately recognized him as Odysseus returned in disguise from his long exile, and then never deviated from that recognition? That was pretty much as it had been in the original, if his long-ago studies had served him properly, so why should the servant react correctly and the lady of the house not?
Because they're a different order of being, he realized. There aren't just two types of people in these simulations, the real and the false -- there's at least one more, a third sort, even if I don't yet know what it is. Gally was one of those third types. The bird-woman, Vaala or Penelope or whatever she's really called -- she must be another.
It made sense, as far as he could think it through. The Puppets, who were completely part of the simulations, never had any doubt about who they were or what was happening around them, and apparently never left the simulations for which they had been created. In fact, Puppets like the old serving-woman behaved as though they and the simulations were both completely real. They were also well-programmed; like veteran actors, they would ignore any slipups or uncertainties on the part of the human participants.
At the other end of the spectrum, the true humans, the Citizens, would always know that they were inside a simulation.
But there was apparently a third type, like Gally and the bird-woman, who seemed to be able to move from one simworld to another, but retained differing amounts of memory and self-understanding in each environment. So what were they? Impaired Citizens? Or more advanced Puppets, some kind of new model that were not simulation-specific? A thought struck him then, and even the smoldering warmth from the oven could not stop his skin pimpling with sudden chill.
God help me, that describes Paul Jonas as well as it describes them. What makes me so sure I'm a real person?
The bright morning sun of Ithaca crept into almost every corner of the Wanderer's house, rousting the usurped king from his bed by the oven not long after dawn. Paul had little urge to linger, in any case -- knowing the kitchen women were virtual did not much soften their harsh words about his raggedness and dirtiness. Old Eurycleia, despite her workday already having reached full gallop as she saw to the demands of the suitors and the rest of the household, made sure that he received something to eat -- she would have brought him far more than the chunk of bread and cup of heavily watered wine he accepted, but he saw no purpose in rousing envy or suspicion in the household. He found himself chewing the crusty bread with some pleasure, which made him wonder how his real body was being fed. Despite the frugal meal and his best efforts to be unobtrusive, several of the maids had already begun to whisper that they should have one or another of their favorites among Penelope's suitors drive this filthy old man out of the house. Paul did not want to fight with any of the interlopers -- even assuming he had been given the strength and stamina to outduel one of those strapping warriors, he was tired and depressed and wanted no part of any more struggles. In an effort to avoid controversy entirely he took his heel of bread and went out to walk on the headlands and think.
Whatever else the creators of this simulation might have planned, Paul thought, they had done a very fine job of capturing the Mediterranean world's astonishingly clear, bright light. Even early on this hot morning the rocks along the cliff seemed as crisply pale as new paper, the reflected glare so fierce that he could not stand too close to them. Even with the sun behind him, he had to shade his eyes.
I've got to learn the rules of this thing, he thought as he watched the seagulls wheeling below him. Not Greece, but the whole network. I have to make sense of it or I'll just wander forever. The other version of Vaala, the one that spoke first in my dream, then through the Neandertal child, said that I had to get to a black mountain.
"It reaches to the sky," she had told him, "covers up the stars . . . That is where all your answers are." But when he had asked her how he could find it, she had answered, "I don't know. But I might know, if you can find me." And then the dream-version of Vaala had sent him here, to search for what seemed herself in another guise -- but that was where the whole thing fell apart completely. How could she know . . . but not know? What could such a thing mean? Unless, as he had guessed the night before, she was neither normal person or simulation, but something else. Perhaps she had meant that in different simulations she had access to different memories?
But in this Penelope version of her doesn't seem to know anything at all, he thought sourly. She doesn't even know she's a version -- doesn't know that she's the one who sent me here.
He stooped and picked up a flat rock and skimmed it out into the stiff ocean breeze; it splashed long seconds later at the base of the rough cliffs. The wind shifted direction and jostled him a step nearer the precipice, still healthily distant from the edge, but enough to make his groin tighten at the thought of the long fall.
There's so much I don't know. Can really I die from something that happens here in a simulation? The golden harp told me that even though nothing was real, things could hurt or kill me. If this is all a simulation network, the message was right about the first part, so I should assume it told the truth about the second part too, even though it doesn't make much sense. Nandi certainly acted as though we were both in real danger in Xanadu . . .
A skirl of primitive music came from somewhere behind him, breaking his concentration. He sighed. Questions and more questions, seemingly without end. What was that other Greek myth, a many-headed, dragonlike creature -- the hydra? Cut off a head and two more would grow from the stump, wasn't that how it had gone? He would have thought that meeting Nandi and the Venetian woman Eleanora would erase all the mysteries that plagued him, but the more he chopped away at the questions, the more rapidly he created a dense bouquet of new hydra-heads. It was like some tangled modernist tale about conspiracy theories gone out of control, a fable about the danger of paranoid thinking.
The flute shrilled again like a child trying to attract his attention. He frowned at the distraction -- but it was all distraction these days. Even the messages apparently meant to help him were dubious. A dream-version of Vaala had sent him here to meet another version of herself that did not know him. He had received assistance from the golden harp he had found in a giant's castle, but it had not actually spoken to him until he was in the Ice Age, where the harp had become a gem.
So was the castle a dream, or another simulation? And who sent me that harp-message in the first place? If it was Nandi's people -- they're the only ones I've heard of who might try to warn someone like me ñ then why hadn't Nandi ever heard of me? And who is this bird-woman Vaala, and why am I so bloody, painfully certain I know her?
Paul took the last of his bread from a fold of his tattered robe, chewed and swallowed it, then continued along the hillside, wandering in the general direction of the insistent flute. As he followed the hill path down, the music was submerged in an angry baying which rapidly grew louder. It had only just begun to intrude itself on his distracted thoughts when a quartet of huge mastiffs burst into view, speeding up the trail toward him in full cry, red mouths wide, voices full of excitement and bloodlust. He halted in surprise and sudden fear and took a few steps backward, but the hill behind him was steep and without shelter and he knew he could not hope to outrun these four-legged monsters.
As he bent, clawing the ground for a branch to use as a weapon and slow down the inevitable for at least a few moments, a loud whistle shrilled across the hillside. The dogs pulled up a dozen meters from Paul, circling and barking angrily, but came no closer. A lean young man appeared from around a stone farther down the hill and examined Paul briefly, then whistled again. The dogs snarled as they retreated, unhappy at giving up a kill. When they reached the young man he gave the nearest a light smack on the flank and sent them all trotting back down the slope. He beckoned for Paul to follow, then lifted a flute to his lips, turned and sauntered back down the path after the swiftly-vanishing dogs, tootling away merrily if not exactly musically.
Paul had no idea what any of this was about, but was not about to offend someone who was on good terms with such large, hostile animals. He followed.
A flat area between the hills came into view around the next bend, a great open space with a few buildings on it, but what Paul at first took for another large dwelling, a crude version of the palace upon the hill, turned out to be a compound for animals -- specifically swine. A large walled area had been sectioned off into sties, and each open-roofed apartment had a contingent of several dozen pigs. Hundreds more lolled around outside the sties in the wide space between the compound's walls, as indolent as rich tourists on a Third World beach.
The young man with the dogs had disappeared somewhere, but an older man with a slight limp now appeared from the shade of one of the compound's higher walls, the sandal he was repairing still dangling from his broad hand. His beard was almost completely gray but his heavy upper body and corded arms suggested he retained most of the vigor of his younger days.
"Come, old fellow," he called to Paul, "you were lucky that my boy was with the dogs when they went after you. I'm glad of it too, of course -- don't need any more problems around here, and it would have been a shame to see you chewed up and swallowed. Come have some wine with me and you can give me any news you have."
This man and his speech rang a bell of some kind for Paul, but he could not tell what it reminded him of; once again he cursed himself for having paid so little attention to Homer when he'd had it, first at Cranleigh, then again at university.
Still, how was I supposed to know? I mean, yes, if someone had warned me, "Say, Jonas, one day you're going to get chucked into a live version of The Odyssey and have to fight for your life there," I would probably have hit the books a bit harder. But who could have guessed?
"You are kind," he said aloud to what he guessed must be the chief swineherd -- the pork production foreman, as it were. "I didn't mean to upset your dogs. I'm afraid I'm a stranger here."
"A stranger? From that ship that landed at Phorcys' Cove, I'll be bound. Well come, then -- all the more reason. Never let it be said that Eumaeus did not offer hospitality to a stranger."
Paul felt sure he had heard the name, but simply knowing he should recognize it was absolutely no help at all.
The swineherd's hut was modestly appointed, but it was still pleasant to get out of the sun, already quite hot long before noon, and to let the dry dust settle. The watered wine Eumaeus offered was also welcome. Paul took a long swallow, then a second, before he felt ready to make conversation.
"So tell me the truth, stranger," Eumaeus said. "You are from that Phaecian ship that stopped in the cove barely long enough to take on fresh water from the spring, are you not?"
Paul hesitated, then nodded. There had definitely been something in the Odyssey about the Phaecians -- he remembered that much, at least.
"You come at a sad time, if this is your first visit to Ithaca." Eumaeus belched and rubbed at his stomach. "In other days, I could have offered to dine you on fatted hog, but all I have to spare is suckling pig, and a lean, small one at that. The suitors who are encamped in my master's house are emptying his larders. Still, beggars and strangers come in Zeus' name, and you will not go away hungry."
The swineherd continued to ramble on in this vein for no little time, emphasizing the viciousness of Penelope's unwanted suitors and the shame of how the gods had treated his master, Odysseus. Paul dimly remembered that he was supposed to be disguised in some way -- one of the gods had changed Odysseus' face so he could return to his home without his enemies realizing it was him -- and wondered why the slave Eurycleia had been able to recognize him but the swineherd could not.
After perhaps an hour of preliminary chat his host slaughtered two young pigs and cut up their flesh to roast on sticks over the fire. Despite the swineherd's kindness, Paul found himself growing impatient and angry. I could spend weeks wandering around here, with all the noble old servants rhapsodizing about their noble missing master, but meanwhile I'm going to be sleeping on the floor in my own house. He caught himself and grinned tightly. In the house of the character I'm playing. But the fact remains, I have to do something.
Eumaeus served him barley meal and skewers of roasted pork. As he ate, Paul made desultory conversation, but he did not remember enough of the epic to be able to say much that interested the swineherd. After a while, assisted by the food, several generous bowls full of wine, and the afternoon heat, he and Eumaeus lapsed into a surfeited silence not much different than that of the animals outside. A dim memory tickled at Paul.
"Doesn't the king have a son? Tele . . . something?"
"Telemachus?" Eumaeus belched gently and scratched himself. "Yes, a fine lad, the very image of his father. He has gone to search for our poor Odysseus -- I believe he has snuck away to see Menelaus, his father's comrade at Troy." As he went on to describe Telemachus' ill-treatment at the hands of the suitors, Paul could not help wondering if the son's absence was part of the simworld's scenario, or whether it might somehow be more personal. Was it supposed to have been Gally? The thought was painfully sobering, and for a moment Paul was looking at himself as though from outside -- lolling in the reek of an imaginary swineherd's cottage, drunk on watered wine and unwatered self-pity. It was not a pleasant sight, even in his imagination.
Don't be stupid, he told himself. The system wouldn't have any way of knowing Gally was traveling with me unless he came into this simulation with me, and he didn't. The bastards killed him in Venice. Whatever his confusion about his own state, it was hard to doubt what had happened to Gally -- the horrible, shocking finality of it had been too great.
But as he thought about the boy, he began to wonder again how the whole system worked. There were Citizens and Puppets, that was clear, but did everyone else, the Gallys and the Penelopes, fall into a single category? The bird-woman was here, but there was also a version of her on Mars. And what about the one that appeared to him in dreams? If there were somehow multiple versions of her, could they never co-exist, never share their knowledge with each other? They must have some common thread, otherwise how could the Neandertal dream-spirit have known about her other self here on Ithaca?
And what about his pursuers, those two ghastly creatures that had hounded him from simulation to simulation. Were they real people?
The last moments in Venice came back to him, the bizarre confusion of events -- Eleanora, a real woman, but appearing as a ghostly spirit in her own simulation, the Finch-thing and Mullet-thing, tracking him down again, heartless and inexorable as some kind of virus . . . and the Pankies.
My God, where do they fit in? Paul wondered. They looked like Finch and Mullet, but they weren't -- sort of like the different versions of my bird-woman. But there's only been one version of her in any simulation I've been in, either a real character, like Penelope, or sort of a dream version. The Pankies and their doubles both showed up at the same time in Venice . . .
It was hard to forget the strange expression that had crossed Undine Pankie's vast, flabby face -- something almost automatic, so instinctive as to seem mechanical. Then she and her tiny husband had simply left -- walked off, vanishing into the catacombs like two actors who had discovered themselves to be in the wrong play.
It was odd how often important things -- especially having to do with the mystery woman -- seemed to happen around the dying and the dead. The Venetian crypts, the dying Neandertal boy, the exhumed cemetery on the Western Front. Death and the dying. Although there had been the maze at Hampton Court, too. Mazes and cemeteries -- what was it with these people, anyway?
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 leavetaking, 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 always 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 moving or even answering as the boy faded into a cloud of white nothingness.
"Helpless tears were on his cheek 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 thighs. 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 a 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 any more!" 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 clawing 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.
"A disjointed idea sent him hurrying along the beach to the fishermen's boats. He grabbed the nearest and shoved it down the slick strand, filling the air with panicky curses when it stuck, until at last it skimmed free into the shallow tide. He clambered up over the side and in.
"Not touching the earth any more. His thoughts were like a deck of cards knocked from a table. Big thing. Dead thing. But it can't find me now. It was impossibly strange, whatever it was -- could a mere simulation do that?
"He lifted the oar in the bottom of the boat and began to drive himself out onto the wine-dark sea. He looked back, but all he could see of the beach was the dying flame of his fire. If Penelope and Eurycleia were still there, they were lost in shadow.
"The waves grew higher, lifting the front of the small boat with every swell, setting it down again with a smack. Paul set down the oar so he could get a better grip on the sides of the boat.
"Troy, he thought, clutching at prosaic things in the grip of great horror. A black mountain. Is there a mountain near Troy . . . ?
"Another swell almost knocked him overboard and he gripped the boat even more tightly. Although there were no clouds above him, nothing between him and the diamond-bright stars, the waves were lashing the little craft harder and harder. One passed beneath him and lifted the entire boat up, up, until he thought it would spin him over and dump him out. As he pivoted slowly at the apogee of his rise, he saw that a wave of unnatural shape was rising before him, higher than any others, a dark mass touched with luminescence at its edges -- a figure ten times his own height, the ocean itself taking the form of a bearded man with a crown. For a moment he thought that the thing the angel had called Other had found him, and he gave himself up to despair.
"A thunderous voice made the bones of his skull quiver. "Wily Odysseus," it boomed, "mortal man, you know that I, Poseidon, am sworn to destroy you. Yet you leave the safety of your island home and return to my domain. You are a fool. Your death is deserved."
" The great sea-king lifted his hand. The waves now rushing toward Paul's boat were like mountains. Paul felt his frail craft lifted, slowly at first, then jerked up into the air and tossed high.
"He clung to the hull as he spun, and could hold no thought except, I am a fool, it's true -- a bloody, miserable fool . . .
"The ocean, when he fell from the heights and struck it again, seemed hard as stone. His boat burst into fragments and Paul was sucked down into crushing wet blackness.
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