Authors: John Koetsier
The rest of the day was a blur of training. High-tech weapons in far-future milieus, low-tech in bucolic settings with antique people and huge, odiferous horsepower. I almost felt at home in those settings after spending weeks in ancient Kish.
After so long away from the team and so long away from Livia I felt I had almost too much to tell. But for the day, I gave myself fully to the training. After returning from my solo mission and spending time in s.Leep, I could not believe how good my muscles and joints felt — and how relatively achy and slow I had gotten in Kish. With s.Leep, everything worked and moved so freely and powerfully, so much better than after ordinary natural rest, that it was a simple joy to run and fight and train.
Sort of like getting a powerful machine as a gift and using it just for sheer pleasure, like a new toy.
Evenings, however, after training, were given to conversation and companionship: the kind I had not known I had needed before but missed while solo for six weeks. And, of course, time with Livia.
I told her more than ever before, that first evening, of my hopes and fears, my beliefs about the gods in general and Hermes in particular, and the hopes that I had of understanding whatever tangled reality we were embedded in … and extricating ourselves from it. And I told her about the biggest news of the past six weeks: meeting the enemy, meeting someone like myself. Livia was fascinated by this, asking repeated questions about the man I had fought, his face, his features, and what he said, making me tell and re-tell everything.
Finally, after the third or fourth time, she stopped me.
“I almost feel like I know this person,” she said. “The way you describe him, with his long hair and small nose, and ear with a cleft in the top … I seem to remember him. Not from here … not from any of the fighters who we have trained with, but from the city.”
Together, we sifted through our almost-memories of living in the city of the gods, seeking the answer to the identity of the enemy. It was difficult, frustrating work, since those faint memories were buried so deeply it was difficult to tell actual memory from imagination or hope, and I came up entirely blank. But Livia felt that she knew this man, and the feeling was uneasy.
“He was an enemy of some sort. He was against something in our city, in some way. But I can’t remember any details of how or why, or really anything else about who he was. I do have a vague impression he was a leader of some kind of opposition group, but not the top leader.”
I didn’t know what to make of that, exactly, but it made sense.
And then I was finished talking and I reached out and touched Livia, brushing my fingertips over her face. She pulled me close, and we gazed at each other, eye to eye. I kissed her gently, on her left cheek, low along her jawline, whispering her name. Then again, higher, warming her cheek with my breath and whispering her name both tenderly and savagely. And a third time, higher, now on her left brow. Slowly, with infinite patience, I kissed the only woman I had ever loved on her forehead, still lightly, still gently, still whispering in delighted devotion that single word, and then continuing on down her other cheek.
I pulled a little apart, and looked into her eyes, and felt her breath on my lips. Smiled. She smiled back, then moved closer, and we breathed each other’s breath, and I bent down. Our lips touched and my heart sang as we kissed gently, then passionately, then sweetly and lovingly.
After hours or minutes — neither of us knew — we came up for air and sat, holding each other, on the floor of the remote corridor we had sought out for privacy. This kissing and this relationship was doing things to our bodies and our minds and our hearts that neither of knew, exactly, how to handle or how to control.
But we knew that it was good, and we knew we liked it.
The next morning it was back to training and we moved through modules on middle-modern weapons: 20th-century guns with explosive shells propelling bullets of steel and lead, and artillery, and motorized transport in vehicles with internal combustion engines burning ancient fossil fuels. Plus, as always and ever, extensive hand-to-hand combat.
Tonia and Helo threw themselves into a fight with exceptional vigor and injured themselves almost simultaneously in the process of attacking each other, her foot breaking while dislocating his knee. We laughed and pulled them apart as they tried to continue single-footed, still game and almost grinning despite the pain, and threw them into their varipods early, wishing them a good night’s s.Leep while they cursed their luck at missing the evening feast.
After the feast, when everyone dispersed, I took Livia away, kissed her briefly this time, and asked her if she was ready to leave this place, with me. She saw the grin on my face, knew I did not yet mean in any permanent way, and punched me on the chest, hard. I laughed, grabbed her hand, and took her back to the hall of feasting.
Everyone was gone and we had the place to ourselves. Just like last time, I walked up to the servitor’s entrance and waited at the side. When one came out, I slipped inside, pulling Livia after me. She looked around wonderingly at the long row of servitors as I walked with her to the far wall. I waited confidently, and as expected, one came up to us, arm outstretched.
I reached out, took the machine’s cold hard hand in my own, and uttered the words I had been thinking since I heard them from the lips of a man who knew me, and who I killed, thousands of years in the past and just a few days ago, outside the gates of the ancient city Ur.
“And protect,” I said.
And the servitor turned, faced the wall, uttered a series of beeps and touched four nondescript spots on the unmarked surface. Within seconds, a door appeared on the wall. Steeling ourselves for whatever might lie ahead, we opened the door and stepped through into darkness.
As we stepped through the doorway, lights flickered on and we found ourselves in the same room we had just left, in a sense, but reversed, a mirror image … and this kitchen had only five or six niches filled with servitors, with another twenty or more standing empty. Suddenly grasping what might be the layout, we walked over to the sliding servitor entrance. It whisked open, and we found ourselves in a new, large room. As the lights flicked on, first nearby and then off into the distance, we saw that it was a room the same size and shape as the hall of feasting, but with controls and desks and screens filling most of the space, with only a small area left over for eating.
“I think we’ve found the control room,” I said to Livia. “The question is, is anybody home?”
And we rushed forward to explore the entire space, moving quickly but quietly through the room. Arriving in darkness might be a sign that this facility was unattended, but it was also possible that this particular moment just happened to be a sleep cycle. But the room was empty of any sign of habitation. No loose documents, no garbage, no food or drink stains on desks.
No dust either, so the servitors must be maintaining this side as well, I thought.
“We have to do a quick sweep through the entire space,” Livia said. “Who knows who or what else might be here.”
So we walked out of the hall-like control center. Quietly stepping into the s.Leep rooms, I saw empty, open varipods. Ignoring an odd, unsettling feeling, I walked out again quickly and we moved through to where, in our version of this place, the massive training rooms could be found. In the place of mock battlefields with water and alpine and space environments was a huge single room, perhaps a mile long, filled with massive machines gently humming, quiescent for the moment but seemingly poised and ready, waiting to spring into action.
“Perhaps these are the engines that transport us through time and space,” guessed Livia.
I nodded, and we returned to the control room, the hall of feasting. A servitor popped out, awaiting an order, but we ignored it as we searched through the area.
“I don’t remember,” I said, an ache starting deep in my head, “how to even turn these computers on.”
I sat at a desk, a large one towards the front of the room, and rested my hands on its surface. Immediately, a large image flared to life in front of me, seemingly hanging in mid-air. It was a projection, not quite translucent, but I could dimly see Livia behind it, and it was some kind of access screen.
“You need to enter a password of some kind,” said Livia, coming around to my side of the desk.”
“There’s only one that I know that might work,” I replied, and, addressing the image, repeated the words that had gained us access to this place.
Immediately the screen brightened and became more solid, and I could see something like a computer interface, though not one I recognized. We had some experience with electronic intelligences through handling modern weapons, even spacecraft, but none of us were experts.
“This system access is probably being logged somewhere,” Livia said. “We need to be brief.”
“And we need to be in s.Leep in just a few minutes,” I replied, wondering how to best spend our time.
At the bottom left of the screen I saw what looked like a sheaf of documents. A gesture brought them to the center, and more gestures, I discovered, opened them. I started rifling through the documents, quickly, looking for something, anything, that would tell us more about the reality in which we were immersed.
Some of them seemed to be a form of computer code which neither Livia nor I could understand, and others were equally incomprehensible lists of numbers and totals. In frustration I swept them all back to the corner. Something in my gesture triggered a different response, and a series of pictures appeared. Livia gripped my shoulder and I moved my hand towards one, which grew to fill the entire screen.
She gasped, and I froze.
It was an image of two people on a tropical beach, rising up out of the water. The water was an impossible shade of blue and the sky a deeper reflection of the same color. White sand bars shimmered in the distance, while palm trees waved gently in the too-real, slightly moving image. But it was not the natural beauty in the scene that captured our attention: the man in the image was me, and the woman was Livia. We both looked a little older, a little more worn than what I saw in the mirror or Livia’s face, but happy, and in love. And neither Livia nor I had ever been on that beach in our short, violent lives.
Abruptly I swept the images to the side with a quick gesture — how did I know how to do that — and got up.
“We must get back,” I said to Livia. “It will be about the time already to be getting into our pods. We do not want to be missed.”
In some state of shock we retraced our steps to the servitors’ kitchen, first the lonely one with just a few solitary machines, and then to our own. Stepping into the hall, the hall of feasting that we had known for supposedly all our lives, we heard the lights-out bell and quickly made our way to the varipods.
I kissed Livia briefly, both of us still confused and wondering, and we slipped into our pods just as they were closing, and slept.
The next day I, Livia, and the whole team threw ourselves deeper into the training than we had ever done before. Most were luxuriating in the feeling of extreme capability that was our birthright as scientifically modded and improved homo sapiens. I — and I think Livia too — were simply trying to escape having to think about and deal with an increasingly complex and confusing existence.
There were too many levels: each mission, our life here, our lives before, and the certain knowledge that something, maybe everything, was a lie. Something in this limited little existence that the “gods” in general and Hermes specifically had engineered was hidden from us. We only had part of the picture, and maybe not anything even approaching a correct part. The ambiguity and uncertainty, the not-knowing-ness was the worst part. I had no idea if I was some kind of slave being punished for infractions in a prior life, or a clone (the word and concept popped, fully formed, into my brain) being used to accomplish a purpose “I,” or the original me, did not want to bother himself with.
So I turned off the questions and spent myself in extreme physical feats, taking on one, then two, then three at a time in hand-to-hand combat, holding nothing back in reserve and sparing no one, least of all myself. I remembered the fight with that man at Ur, and knew that I might have to face someone even better in the future. So I pushed my body to the absolute limit, determined to win, focusing on attacks and strategies that did not assume a speed or strength advantage over my enemy.