Gulliver's Fugitives - Keith Sharee [71]
She had to help him or lose this chance to get into CephCom.
“No, it doesn’t have to at all! That’s not you. That was never a person at all, that was a programmed automaton. That man didn’t have-free will, he didn’t have his own brain or his own thoughts. He was just a mass of pre-approved reactions and feelings created by the stupid thought police! You didn’t even exist as a man until you became Odysseus.”
“But I can’t actually do what Odysseus did,” he said. “I can’t do all those impossibly great things he did at Troy, or in the Cyclops’ cave. So in what way can I be Odysseus?”
“Who are you to say what’s possible? Who gave you the authority?” asked Troi. “The arrogant people on the other side of that wall think they have that authority—and that’s what makes them so foolish. That’s the gap in their armor!”p>
Troi let him think about it for a moment. They watched the Nummo twins throw a rope across the whitewater.
“You say it’s impossible,” Troi went on. “Didn’t you also say, last night, that I’m a seer? That I’m not like other women, that I’m not a human? That shouldn’t be possible either, should it? But I’m going to prove it’s true. Concentrate on a feeling, and I’m going to tell you what it is, right now.”
Odysseus stared at the river.
Troi strained her perception to its limits. She picked up a feeling so complete it was nearly a visual image. He was walking under a great open sky and someone small was sitting on his shoulders, shouting or laughing with joy.
“You’re going back to a pleasant memory. Being with someone you loved. Your little boy. Your son, riding on your shoulders. Am I right?”
He turned to look at her in wonder.
“Now you know I’m a seer,” she said. “I really am from another world, as you said I was. I’m no more an ordinary human than Calypso or Circe. I’ve been to countless worlds and most everything I’ve seen would be called impossible by the people on the other side of that wall. And as a seer I know that you really are Odysseus, no matter what you tell yourself otherwise. You’re that very same hero of Homer’s stories—how and why, I can’t say, but you are. You will come through this alive, and we’ll meet again when it’s all over, just like you said last night. I already know how this story has to go.”
Odysseus ran his hand through his gray-flecked beard.
“I was right,” he said. “You really are from some other world. Like Circe or Calypso.”
Troi felt a change taking place within him. She had supplied the support he needed to get back into character, and he was doing it with a vengeance. He was dropping doubts that had always been with him, doubts that he could ever overcome his personal agony and become who he wanted to be.
She left him so he could prepare himself. She sat on a rock from which she could watch him.
He stood near the river and gathered all the personal strength and will he possibly could. He was Odysseus now more than ever, just in time for his peregrination to end, just in time to come home and restore order where evil now reigned.
At the river’s edge he bent over, scooped up dirt with his hands, and rubbed it into his clothes. Troi was baffled for a moment, then remembered that in The Odyssey, when this man returned home to Ithaca, he disguised himself as a beggar.
He looked up at the cliff. Lomov gave him the “ready” signal. The other Dissenters moved away from the cliff.
There was a moment of stillness, a sort of inner deep breath taken collectively by the Dissenters, an invocation and gathering of the emotional power of their mythoi. Troi could feel them tuning like an orchestra, two dozen people of all different races and cultures ready to merge into one sustained chord.
Then Odysseus returned Lomov’s signal.