Olympos
Dan Simmons
Language: English
Pages: 912
ISBN: 0380817934
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Beneath the gaze of the gods, the mighty armies of Greece and Troy met in fierce and glorious combat, scrupulously following the text set forth in Homer's timeless narrative. But that was before twenty-first-century scholar Thomas Hockenberry stirred the bloody brew, causing an enraged Achilles to join forces with his archenemy Hector and turn his murderous wrath on Zeus and the entire pantheon of divine manipulators; before the swift and terrible mechanical creatures that catered for centuries to the pitiful idle remnants of Earth's human race began massing in the millions, to exterminate rather than serve.
And now all bets are off.
murdered his friend Patroclus.” “Do the gods offer peace terms?” asked Priam. The old man’s voice was whispery, his tone almost wistful. 62 ✦ DA N S I M M O N S “Athena offers more than peace terms,” said Penthesilea, rising to her feet. “She—and the gods who love Troy—offer you victory.” “Victory over whom?” called Deiphobus, moving to his father’s side. “The Achaeans are our allies now. They and the artificed beings, the moravecs, who shield our cities and camps from Zeus’s thunderbolts.”
knowledge of unified quantum theory since we piggybacked in on the Olympians’ quantum tunnels,” said Cho Li. The Callistan seemed to be the expert on technical things. “Most of what we know about quantum gravity, for instance, we’ve learned in the last eight standard months.” “And what have you learned?” asked Hockenberry. He didn’t expect to understand the science, but he was suspicious of the moravecs for the first time. Retrograde Sinopessen, the transformer with spider legs, answered in his
“Then why haven’t the gods won this war?” asked Hockenberry. “It seems that your technology has sort of stalemated them . . . even Zeus’s aegis.” Beh bin Adee, the rockvec commander, answered. “The gods use only the slightest fraction of the quantum energy in play on and around Mars and Ilium. We don’t believe they understand the technology behind their power. It’s been . . . loaned to them.” “By whom?” Hockenberry was suddenly very thirsty. He wondered if the moravecs had included any
goldbrown curls and a boy’s first attempt at a sketchy beard. The cart stopped. Hector unlocked the cage and reached through the semipermeable forcefield to drag Dionysos up onto the first step of the pyre’s staircase. Achilles also laid his hand on the small god’s neck. “Deicide,” whispered Cassandra. “God murder. Madness and deicide.” Helen and Priam and Andromache and the others on the reviewing balcony ignored her. All eyes were on the pale god and the two taller, bronzed mortals on either
world that was too busy surviving to weep. He thought of the incredible play he’d just read—Romeo and Juliet—and wondered if some things and follies were universal to human nature even after almost two millennia of self-styled evolution, nano-engineering, and genetic manipulation. Perhaps I shouldn’t have allowed Ada to get pregnant. This was the thought that haunted Harman the most. She had wanted a child. He had wanted a child. More than that, uniquely after all these centuries, they had both