Sunset of the Gods (7 page)

“Fascinated? Most people are repelled by the concept.”

“I know. I’d be less than honest if I didn’t say
I
was, just a little, at first. But at the same time there’s something exciting about it—the way it almost takes you beyond the ordinary human experience. I mean . . . what’s it
like?
”

“There’s really nothing transcendent about it. It’s very utilitarian—just an extremely convenient way of accessing information in various forms and recording sensory impressions. That’s as far as exemptions from the Human Integrity Act ever go, even in cases like ours where there’s clearly a legitimate need.” Jason laughed grimly. “Anything more is altogether too reminiscent of the Transhuman movement for most people’s taste.”

“Yes, I know. And of course they did many terrible things. And yet . . . I sometimes wonder if we’re right to automatically reject all their goals. Surely there must have been some power in their ideals, at least at first, before the movement took power and grew corrupt. Perhaps some of the things they sought could be made to benefit the human race without resorting to their extreme methods.”

Jason gave her an appraising look and ran over in his mind what he knew of her people’s history.

They had been among those who had left Earth on slower-than-light colony ships in the early days of the Transhuman movement’s rise to power, fleeing what they could see coming. The bulk of colonizers had gone to the nearer stars. The settlers of Arcadia, however, wishing to exile themselves even
more
irrevocably, had dared the thirty-five-light-year voyage to Zeta Draconis, most of that time spent in suspended animation. They had awakened to find that the second planet of that binary system’s Sol-like primary component was a hospitable world, fully deserving of the name they had bestowed on it. And there they had remained in the utter isolation they had sought.

Meanwhile the near-Earth colonists had returned to Earth on the wings of the negative-mass drive they had invented, blowing in like a fresh wind that had begun the toppling of the Transhumanist regime. Only
afterwards
had the main body of the human race reestablished contact with Arcadia.

Thus, Jason reflected, this woman came of a society that had opted out of history and avoided the entire titanic, blood-drenched drama. Now, of course, in this day of faster-than-light travel, the Arcadians had reentered the mainstream of human society and subscribed to its dominant ethos. But perhaps they—and she—could not be expected to feel exactly the same thing the rest of humanity felt at the sound of the word “Transhuman.”

“You won’t find many people who’ll agree with you,” he said mildly.

“I know,” she acknowledged. “And I’m not even sure
I
agree with it, if you know what I mean. It
certainly
isn’t something I feel strongly about. I just can’t help wondering.” She fell silent, and remained so for a few moments before speaking up again.

“Com . . . Jason, I hope you won’t mind if I ask you another question.”

“Go right ahead. As you pointed out, we’re going to be working together. We shouldn’t have any secrets.”

She took another sip and laughed nervously. “One thing I almost wish you
had
kept a secret: what happened to Dr. Sadaka-Ramirez’s TRD.” She shivered.

“Please don’t let that prey on your mind. Rutherford was telling the truth when he said it doesn’t generally happen, and that in fact it had
never
happened before. People of past eras have no way to detect implanted TRDs. It was her misfortune that the Teloi did.” Jason halted his hand almost before it began to stray.

“And now we’re going in search of the Teloi. . . .”

“The surviving Teloi, if any,” he corrected. “If we do encounter them, they’ll be in a far less powerful position than they were in the Bronze Age. Furthermore, this time their existence won’t take us by surprise.”

“I keep telling myself that. But there’s something I’m puzzled about. Why couldn’t she have been rescued?”

“Rescued?”

“Yes. It seems as though it would be possible—at great expense, admittedly—to send a second expedition back to the time just after your departure, carrying a new TRD for her, timed the same as those of the expedition members.”

“Temporal energy potential doesn’t work that way. You’re linked to the time from which you come. Such a TRD would have returned to the time from which we brought it—but
she
wouldn’t have, because she didn’t come from that time.” Jason took a long pull on his Scotch and soda. “And besides, you misunderstand. She didn’t remain because she had to. We succeeded in retrieving her TRD. The self-sacrifice of Dr. Nagel, our third member, made that possible. She could have held it in her hand and returned. But she chose to stay.”

“Why?” Chantal’s question was barely audible.

“Very simple: she fell in love.” Jason laughed shortly. “You know the old cliché about the hero getting the girl. Well, in this case the Hero did. Remember what I was telling you about the origin of demigods? She got herself a prime specimen: Perseus. Yes,” he added as Chantal’s eyes grew round, “
that
Perseus. One of the female skeletons Schliemann found in the shaft graves at Mycenae must have been her.”

“I suppose he never knew what she had given up for him,” Chantal whispered.

“You know, I never thought of it from that angle. But then, I’m not a woman.”

“So,” Chantal said after a thoughtful silence, “when you came back, I suppose her TRD appeared on the displacer stage with you . . . as did Dr. Nagel’s corpse.”

“Neither. Dr. Nagel’s remains, TRD and all, were taken inside the Teloi pocket universe just before its access portal was atomized. And as for Dr. Sadaka-Ramirez’s TRD. . . . Remember I mentioned that I spent time as a prisoner in the pocket universe? We all did—and she spent more time there than Dr. Nagel and I. And the Teloi kept the time-rate there slower than in the outside universe—it helped them seem immortal to their human worshipers. And the atomic timers of the TRDs. . . .” Jason saw that she had grasped it. He grimaced. “I was the first time traveler in the history of the Temporal Regulatory Authority to return behind schedule. I don’t mind telling you I was nervous about appearing on the displacer stage at an unforeseeable moment! Fortunately, Rutherford had gone to great lengths to keep the stage clear.”

Chantal wore a look of intense concentration. “If, as you say, Dr. Sadaka-Ramirez was in the pocket universe longer than you—”

“Precisely. At some completely unpredictable time, her TRD will be found on the floor of the displacer stage.”

Chantal looked at him very thoughtfully. “I’ve noticed that whenever this subject comes up you have a habit of reaching for something in your pocket.”

“You are extremely observant. Just before my displacement back to the present she burned her last bridges by giving me her TRD.” Jason brought out the little plastic case and opened it, revealing the tiny sphere. “Still there, I see.”

“But sometime you’ll open the case and it won’t be. It will be on the displacer stage. And you’ll have a kind of closure.”

“You’re as perceptive as you are observant—uncomfortably perceptive, in fact. Not that I’m complaining. It will be a highly useful quality where we’re going.” He regarded her with new eyes. “This isn’t the most tactful thing to say, Chantal, but I think I may have underestimated you.”

“People sometimes do.”

“I’ve had my doubts about your ability to hold up under the conditions we’re going to be experiencing,” he told her bluntly. “I’ve also had doubts about your usefulness. But to some extent, that last has been wishful thinking on my part.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Then let me put it this way. I hope your specialized field of knowledge will turn out to be irrelevant to our mission. In other words, I hope we’ll find that by 490 b.c. every last Teloi on Earth is dead and only remembered in myth. You’d probably consider them fascinating. I consider them abominations.”

“You’re very forthright. Actually, the same sort of doubts about what I can contribute have been worrying me. If you get your wish about the Teloi, I’ll try to make myself as useful as possible, and not be a burden.”

“I can’t ask for more than that. And every member of an expedition is always needed. You can never foresee everything that’s going to come up, and you never know what talents and abilities are going to come in handy.”

“Thank you for the reassurance.”

“Not at all. Let’s have another round. By the way, have you ever tried any authentic Greek wine in the present day?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well, you’d better drink as much of that Chablis as you can while you’ve got the chance.”

The day came, and they entered the vast dome that held the thirty-foot-diameter displacer stage, surrounded by concentric circles of control consoles and instrument panels. Rutherford gave each of them the handshake he always bestowed before withdrawing to the glassed-in mezzanine that held the control center. As he turned to go and the others climbed onto the stage, Jason spoke. “Uh, Kyle, I’d like you to keep something for me.”

“I rather thought you might.” Rutherford took the plastic case that would have been very hard to explain in the fifth century b.c.

Jason took his place on the stage and waited.

CHAPTER SIX

No one had ever succeeded
in putting the sensation of temporal displacement into words. Words are artifacts of human language, and this was something outside the realm of natural human experience.

There was nothing spectacular about it—except, of course, from the standpoint of the people in the dome, to whose eyes the four of them instantaneously vanished with a very faint
pop
as the air rushed in to fill the volume they had occupied. As far as they themselves were concerned, there were no such striking visual effects. There was only a dreamlike wavering of reality, as though the dome and the universe itself were receding from their ken in some indescribable fashion. And, as though awakening from that dream, they were left with no clear recollection of having departed from the dome and no sensation of time having passed. Instead, crowding out the dream-memories, as the waking world will, was the dirt road they stood on, with the rising sun just clearing a ridge of hills and spreading its bronze illumination across the body of water that lay close to their right and the island of Salamis that could be glimpsed across that gulf. There was no one else in sight.

As predicted, Jason recovered from the disorientation first. Mondrago wasn’t too far behind him. The other two both pronounced themselves ready to travel not too long thereafter.

“All right,” said Jason, “let’s cover as much ground as possible as early as possible. It’s going to get hot later, at this time of year.” As they hitched up the sacks holding their belongings and set their faces eastward toward the sun, Landry cast a wistful look over his shoulder at the barely visible hump of the acropolis of Eleusis to the west.

“Maybe we can find time for a side trip later, Bryan,” Jason consoled him.

They proceeded along the Sacred Way with the aid of their four-and-a-half-foot walking sticks, skirting the Bay of Eleusis, as the sun rose higher into the Attic sky whose extraordinary brilliance and clarity had been remarked on by thousands of years of visitors, even during the Hydrocarbon Age when Greece had been afflicted by smog. Looking about him, Jason could see that the deforestation of Greece was well advanced since he had seen it in the seventeenth century b.c. Presently the road curved leftward, turning inland and leading over the scrub-covered ridge of Mount Aigaleos, which they ascended in the growing heat. They reached the crest, turned a corner, and to the southeast Attica lay spread out before them, bathed in the morning sun. In the distance—a little over five miles as the crow flew, with the sun almost directly behind it—was the city itself. Like every Greek
polis
, it
clustered around the craggy prominence of its acropolis, or high fortified city . . . except that this one would forever be known simply as
the
Acropolis. It wasn’t crowned by the Parthenon yet, but Jason knew what he was looking at, and what it meant.

He let Landry pause and stare for a few moments.

As those moments slid by, the sun rose just a trifle higher, and its rays moved to strike a certain cleft in the rocks. For a split second, Jason got a glimpse of—

At first his mind refused to accept it.

Mondrago must have been looking in same direction. He ripped out a non-verbal roar, grasped his walking stick in a martial-arts grip, and sprinted for the cleft.

Chantal’s eyes had been following Landry’s in the direction of Athens. Neither of them had seen it. Now they whirled around, wide-eyed.

“Stay here!” Jason commanded, and ran after Mondrago, who was already out of sight.

He scrambled up to the cleft and looked left and right. Mondrago was just vanishing from sight behind a boulder. Jason followed and caught up with him in a tiny glade where he stood, gripping his walking stick like the lethal weapon which, in his hands, it was. He was looking around intently and, it seemed, a little wildly.

“Gone?” Jason asked, approaching with a certain caution.

“Gone,” Mondrago exhaled. He relaxed, and something guttered out in his eyes.

“Did you see what I saw?”

“Depends on what you saw, sir.”

“I
think
I saw a short humanoid with wooly, goat-like legs and, possibly, horns.”

“On the basis of a very brief glimpse, I confirm that. Doesn’t seem likely that we’d both have the same hallucination, does it?”

“It’s even less likely that we’d actually see something corresponding to the mythological descriptions of the god Pan.”

“I don’t know, sir. You saw some actual Greek gods on your last trip into the past—or at least some actual aliens masquerading as gods.”

Jason shook his head. “Even if any of the Teloi are still around eleven and a half centuries after I encountered them, what we saw was definitely not one of them. It also bore no resemblance to any nonhuman race known to us in our era. And speaking of nonhuman races . . . I couldn’t help noticing your reaction to this particular nonhuman.”