Sunset of the Gods (2 page)

“Actually, I do,” Jason cut in rudely.

“Ahem! Yes, of course I realize you are not entirely unacquainted with these matters. Well, at any rate the council, despite your lack of respect for its members—which you’ve never made any attempt to conceal—is quite capable of seeing the potential hazards of any extratemporal intervention that might come in conflict with the Teloi. The consequences are incalculable, in fact.”

“Then what
are
you talking about?”

“We are intensely interested in the role played in subsequent history by those Teloi who were
not
trapped in their artificial pocket universe when its dimensional interface device was destroyed—or ‘imprisoned in Tartarus’ as the later Greeks had it. The ‘New Gods,’ as I believe they were called.”

“Also known as the Olympians,” Jason nodded, remembering the face of Zeus.

“And by various other names elsewhere, all across the Indo-European zone,” added Rutherford with a nod of his own. “They were worshiped, under their various names, for a very long time, well into recorded history, although naturally their actual manifestations grew less frequent. And as you learned, the Teloi had very long lifespans, although they could of course die from violence.”

“So you want to look in on times when those ‘manifestations’ were believed to have taken place? Like the gods fighting for the two sides in the Trojan War?”

“The Trojan War. . . .” For a moment, Rutherford’s face glowed with a fervor little less ecstatic than that which had once raised the stones of the monastery. Then the glow died and he shook his head sadly. “No. We cannot send an expedition back to observe an historic event unless we can pinpoint exactly when it took place. Dendrochronology and the distribution of wind-blown volcanic ash enabled us to narrow the Santorini explosion to autumn of 1628 b.c. But after all these centuries there is still no consensus as to the date of the Trojan War. It is pretty generally agreed that Eratosthenes’ dating of 1184 b.c. is worthless, based as it was on an arbitrary length assigned to the generations in the genealogies of the Dorian royal families of Sparta. On the other hand—”

“Kyle. . . .”

“—the Parian Marble gave a precise date of June 5, 1209 b.c. for the sack, but it was based on astronomical computations which were even more questionable. Other calculations—”

“
Kyle.
”

“—were as early as 1334 b.c. in Doulis of Samos, or as late as 1135 b.c. in Ephorus, whereas—”

“
KYLE!”

“Oh . . . yes, where was I? Well, suffice it to say that even the Classical Greeks couldn’t agree on the date, and modern scholarship has done no better. Estimates range from 1250 to 1180 b.c., and are therefore effectively useless for our purposes. The same problem applies to the voyage of the Argonauts, the war of the Seven against Thebes, and other events remembered in the Greek myths. And, to repeat, the gods tended not to put in appearances in the full light of history. There is one exception, however.” Rutherford paused portentously. “The Battle of Marathon.”

“Huh?” All at once, Jason’s interest awoke. It momentarily took his mind off the irritation he felt, as usual, around Rutherford. “You mean the one where the Athenians defeated the Persians? But that was much later—490 b.c., wasn’t it?”

“August or September of 490 b.c., most probably the former,” Rutherford nodded approvingly. The faint note of surprise underlying the approval made it less than altogether flattering. “By that period, it is difficult to know just how widespread
literal
belief in the Olympian gods was. And yet contemporary Greeks seem to have been firmly convinced that Pan—a minor god whose name is the root of the English ‘panic’—intervened actively on behalf of the Athenians.”

“I never encountered, or heard of, a Teloi who went by that name,” said Jason dubiously.

“I know. Another difficulty is that Pan—unlike most Greek gods, who were visualized as idealized humans—was a hybrid figure with the legs and horns of a goat and exceptionally large . . . er, male sexual equipment.”

“That doesn’t sound like the Teloi,” said Jason, recalling seven-to-eight-foot-tall humanoids with hair like a shimmering alloy of gold and silver, their pale-skinned faces long, narrow, and sharp-featured, with huge oblique eyes under brows which, like their high cheekbones, tilted upward. Those eyes’ strangely opaque blue irises seemed to leak their color into the pale-blue “whites.” The overall impression hovered uneasily between exotic beauty and disturbing alienness.

“Nevertheless,” said Rutherford, “the matter is unquestionably worth looking into. And, aside from the definite timeframe involved, there are numerous other benefits. For one thing, the more recent date will result in a lesser energy requirement for the displacement.”

“Well, yes. 490 b.c. is only—” (Jason did the mental arithmetic without the help of his computer implant) “—twenty-eight hundred and seventy years ago. Still, that’s one hell of an ‘only!’ Compared to any expedition you’d ever sent out before ours—”

“Too true. But the importance of investigating Teloi involvement in historical times is such that we have been able to obtain authorization. It also helped that the Battle of Marathon is so inherently interesting. It was, after all, crucial to the survival of Western civilization. And there are a number of unanswered questions about it, quite aside from the Teloi. So we can kill two birds with one stone, as people say.”

“Still, I don’t imagine you’ll be able to send a very large party.” The titanic energy expenditure required for displacement was tied to two factors: the mass to be displaced, and the temporal “distance” it was to be sent into the past. This was why Jason had taken only two companions with him to the Bronze Age, by far the longest displacement ever attempted. Since the trade-off was inescapable, the Authority was constantly looking into ways to reduce the total energy requirement, and the researchers were ceaselessly holding out hope of eventual success, but to date the problem remained intractable. This, aside from sheer caution, was why no large items of equipment were ever sent back in time. Sending human bodies—with their clothing, and any items they could wear or carry on their persons, for reasons related to the esoteric physics of time travel—was expensive enough.

“True, the party will have to be a small one. But the appropriation is comparable to that for your last expedition. So we can send four people.” Rutherford took on the aspect of one bestowing a great gift. “We want you—”

“—To be the mission leader,” Jason finished for him. “Even though this time you have to
ask
me to do it,” he couldn’t resist adding, for all his growing interest.

Rutherford spoke with what was clearly a great, if not supreme, effort. “I am aware that we have had our differences. And I own that I may have been a trifle high-handed on the last occasion. But surely you of all people, as discoverer of the Teloi element in the human past, can see the importance of investigating it further.”

“Maybe. But why do you need me, specifically, to investigate it?”

“I should think it would be obvious. You are the nearest thing we have to a surviving Teloi expert.” Jason was silent, as this was undeniable. Rutherford pressed his advantage. “Also, there is the perennial problem of inconspicuousness.” Rutherford gazed at Jason, who knew he was gazing at wavy brown-black hair, dark brown eyes, light olive skin, and straight features.

Jason, despite his name, was no more “ethnically pure” than any other inhabitant of Hesperia or any other colony world. But by some fluke, the Hellenic contribution to his genes had reemerged to such an extent that he could pass as a Greek in any era of history. It also helped that he stood less than six feet, and therefore was not freakishly tall by most historical standards. It had always made him valuable to the Temporal Regulatory Authority, which was legally interdicted from using genetic nanoviruses to tailor its agents’ appearance to fit various milieus in Earth’s less-cosmopolitan past. The nightmare rule of the Transhuman movement had placed that sort of thing as far beyond the pale of acceptability as the Nazis had once placed anti-Semitism.

“If we were sending an expedition to northern Europe,” Rutherford persisted, “I’d use Lundberg. Or to pre-Columbian America, Cardones. But for this part of Earth, you are the only suitable choice currently available, or at least the only one with your—” (another risibly obvious effort at being ingratiating) “—undeniable talents.”

Jason turned around, leaned on the parapet, and looked out over the breathtaking panorama once again. “Are you sure you really want me? After my latest display of those ‘talents.’”

Rutherford’s face took on a compassionate expression he would never have permitted himself if Jason had been looking. “I understand. Up till now, you have taken understandable pride in never having lost a single member of any expedition you have led. And this time you returned from the past alone. But that was due to extraordinary and utterly unforeseeable circumstances. No one dreamed you would encounter what you did in the remote past. And no one blames you.”

“But aside from that, aren’t you afraid I might be just a little too . . . close to this?” Once again, Jason clenched his fist to prevent his hand from straying to his pocket.

Rutherford smiled, noticing the gesture. “If anything, I should think that what you know of Dr. Sadaka-Ramirez’s fate would make you even
more
interested.”

Deirdre
, thought Jason, recalling his last glimpse of those green eyes as she had faded into the past.
Deirdre, from whom it is practically a statistical certainty that I myself am descended.

He turned back to face Rutherford. “Well, I don’t suppose it can do any harm to meet the other people you have lined up.”

CHAPTER TWO

Seven decades earlier,
Aaron Weintraub had held the key.

Before that, time travel had been merely a fictional device. That it could
never
be anything more than that had been as certain as any negative can ever be. Over and above its seemingly preposterous physics, the concept self-evidently violated the very logic of causality. The classic statement was the “Grandfather Paradox”: what was to prevent a time traveler from killing his own young, childless grandfather? In which case, how could the time traveler have been born? And who, therefore, had killed the grandfather? No; this was one case in which the dread word
impossible
was pronounced without hesitation or doubt. Physicists and philosophers were at one about that. Reality protected itself.

Then Weintraub had embarked on a series of experiments to verify the existence of the temporal energy potential which he had postulated (to the near-unanimous hoots of his colleagues) as a necessary anchor to hold matter in time. If it existed, theory predicted that it could be manipulated. And Weintraub had proceeded to do precisely that. Subatomic particles had appeared in his device a few microseconds
before
the power was turned on and remained for a certain number of nanoseconds, and then vanished for the same number of nanoseconds
after
the switch was thrown. And nothing would ever be the same again.

But temporal energy potential had proven to be very resistant to manipulation. Subatomic particles sent back microseconds in time were the limit—and they only tolerated such unnatural treatment for nanoseconds before indignantly snapping back to their proper time. The physicists had heaved a qualified sigh of relief, the philosophers an unqualified one; Weintraub’s discovery, however revolutionary in theory, was clearly devoid of practical applications, including the murder of grandfathers-to-be. Reality still protected itself.

Or so it had seemed for twenty years. Then Mariko Fujiwara had persuaded the by-then aged Weintraub that he had been traveling a dead-end road. Their joint experiments had confirmed her intuition: no energy expenditure could manipulate temporal energy potential to any significant degree; but a tremendous yet finite one, properly applied, could
cancel
it altogether, breaking the anchor chain, as it were, and setting an object adrift in time. That terrific energy surge sent the object three hundred years into the past before it became controllable. But beyond that it
was
controllable, and the object, living or otherwise, could be sent to a predetermined temporal point in the past. (
Not
the future, for temporal energy potential was in an absolute sense nonexistent beyond the constantly advancing wave-front known as “the present.”) There the object would remain until its temporal energy potential was restored—very easy to do, for reasons relating to its already-known stubbornness. A temporal retrieval device that could be so miniaturized as to be easily surgically implantable, and that drew an insignificant amount of energy, sufficed to bring the object back to the location (relative to the planetary gravity field in question) from which it had been displaced, after a total elapsed time identical to that which it had spent in the past.

Neither Weintraub nor Fujiwara had been the kind of sociopath common in the fiction of the twentieth century, when science had first become scary: the “mad scientist” who would pursue his reckless experiments to the bitter end with fanatical if not suicidal perseverance, heedless of the consequences to himself or the world. They had recognized, and been duly terrified by, the mind-numbing potentialities of what they were doing. Moreover, they had been products of a society which had recoiled from the Transhumanist madness just as Europe had once recoiled from the seventeenth century’s savage religious wars into the eighteenth century’s mannered
ancien regime.
True to the twenty-fourth century’s almost Confucian-like ethos, they had concluded that if reality no longer protected itself, someone else had to—preferably the bureaucratized intellectual elite committed to safeguarding the integrity of the human heritage that had almost been lost.

Thus the Temporal Regulatory Authority had been born. The safest course would have been not to use the Fujiwara-Weintraub Temporal Displacer at all, but the temptation to settle history’s controversies and resolve its mysteries by direct observation had been irresistible. So the Authority had been given exclusive jurisdiction of all extratemporal activity. Its legal monopoly had been confirmed by its possession of the only displacer in existence—an exclusiveness that hardly needed to be legislated, given the installation’s colossal expense and power requirements, which placed it beyond the reach of any private individual or group. And even if some other organization
had
been able to build and operate such a thing, it could never have done so unnoticed, barring some as-yet-elusive breakthrough.