Tom Holt (30 page)

'What Prometheus situation? I thought you'd...'

'It was a wash-out,' Mars replied quickly. 'So now...'

'You messed it up, you mean?'

'Yes.'

'How?'

'Flair,' Mars replied. 'Either you've got it or you haven't.'

'Right.' Minerva stood up briskly and marched out of the sun-lounge. Oh dear, said Mars to himself, it's going to be one of those meetings.

He found Apollo in the library, Diana in the gym and Neptune beside the swimming-pool, and then rushed off to find Demeter, who wasn't in the kitchen. Instead he found Pluto, making himself a cup of tea.

'Board meeting,' he announced.

'You don't say?' Pluto replied. Well, well.' The spoon writhed between his fingers, hissed and slithered away behind the sink.

Demeter turned out to have been in the kitchen garden, weeding the sunflowers. 'What's a board meeting?' was her reaction, and when he explained she asked if this would be a good time to raise the issue of rainfall allowances for the cloud-shepherds. As he chased off to round up the rest of the quorum, Mars found himself speculating as to why he bothered.

'Ye gods!' he muttered under his breath.

Clang.

'Now,'
Jason said, 'Will you explain?'

The Earth shook. Slowly, very slowly, painfully slowly, the Titan flexed muscles that hadn't moved since before the destruction of Atlantis. He wiggled his toes, scattering topsoil in a whirling cloud.

'Only,' Jason went on, 'so many downright weird things have been happening lately, with me all mixed up in them, that unless someone lets me in on it all pretty soon...'

Imagine the sound -- the last thing we want is endless product liability lawsuits, and so we will only tax one area of sensory perception to its uttermost limits at a time -- the sound of a glacier scoring its way across a landscape at forty miles an hour instead of its usual mile every four thousand years. That's Prometheus getting to his knees.

The next sense we will dislocate with sheer vastness is sight. Imagine a mountain rearing up in front of your eyes, stretching, complaining, and then standing upright. That's Prometheus getting to his feet.

And finally, imagine the sort of earthquake you'd get if some gigantic and malevolent deity squeezed the Earth like an enormous spot, sending molten magma spouting out of all its half-healed volcanoes, faults and fissures. That's what it felt like to be standing in the Caucasus when Prometheus landed after he'd jumped up, punched the air and yelled 'Yo!' at the top of his voice.

'When you've quite finished,' Jason said.

The Titan looked down at the tiny dot below him, and grinned. 'Sorry,' he said, 'I'd love to stop and chat for a bit, but I have to get going. Ask the eagle, she'll tell you.'

Then, with a stride that arched over mountains, the Titan walked off. Far away, Jason could hear a sound like someone very tall and strong punching the palm of his hand with his fist and saying 'Right!'

'Be like that; Jason said, and started to walk down the mountain. He had gone about thirty yards when a foot the size of York Minster landed beside him.

'Jason Derry?'

Metaphor is tricksy stuff. It is not actually possible to jump out of one's skin; but it is possible to try. Jason tried.

'It is you, isn't it?' The voice was slightly muffled, but that was because the words had to travel through a lot of thick cloud before they reached Jason's ears. 'Has he gone?'

Jason looked up. By craning his neck until he felt something give, he could just see, far up in the sky, a belt buckle. 'Sorry?' he said. Then, for no reason at all that he could see, his lips arched into a grin and he felt a laugh creep cough-like across his lungs. No need to ask who the tall person was.

'Prometheus,' said the voice of Gelos. 'Has he gone yet?'

'Yes.'

'Which way?'

Jason blinked. 'I'd have thought you'd be able to see him from up there.'

'You know how it is,' said the voice. 'My eyes aren't what they were. I can't pick out little tiny details any more. Look, time's pressing rather; we've only got five minutes before the orbits are lined up, so...'

Jason may have been small compared to Gelos, but by now he was so fed up that mere size really didn't matter. 'Right, Buster,' he said grimly. 'Tell me what's going on or I'll ...' He stared up at the mountain of toecap that rose high above his head. 'Or I'll give you a chiropody session you'll never forget. You hear me?'

Gelos chuckled. 'I won't tell you; he said, 'but you can watch.'

A hand -- we can tell it was a hand because we're far enough away to see it all in proportion; to Jason it was just a very big pink thing -- reached down and very gently flicked Jason up into its own palm. 'Which way?' the voice repeated.

With a monumental effort Jason hauled himself up out of a ravine that was in fact Gelos's life line. 'Straight ahead,' he said. 'Head for that tall mountain over there.'

The enormous thing lurched forward. 'Which mountain?'

'The one you just trod on.'

'It's all right,' said Gelos, 'I can see him for myself now. Hey, Pro!'

Far away, Jason could see the Titan. He seemed to have grown; so, in fact had Jason. Actually, all that had happened was that his brain had adjusted the field of view and proportion registers of his brain to enable him to cope with the scale on which he was now operating. Under normal circumstances this would have taken several million years of evolution, but we can only assume that Jason was a quick learner. Anyway, he could see Prometheus, and above him he could see Gelos, and below him very much below him -- he could see the world. There was just about enough room on it for them both to stand, although very soon there wouldn't be.

'Hold tight, Jason Derry.' It sounded as if both giants had said it at the same time; and that wasn't as remarkable as it might have been, since now that Jason could see them both clearly, he noticed that they looked extremely alike. Sort of like twins; or reflections in a mirror. No, let's stop pussyfooting. They are
exactly
alike.

And now there was only one of them.

'Excuse me; said Jason.

'Yes?' There were two voices; but both speaking in perfect harmony and coming from one throat. The two giants had merged.

'Oh,' said Jason. 'Nothing.'

'Excuse us; said the giant(s), 'but we need our hands free, so if you wouldn't mind...'

Jason felt himself travelling through the air at devastating speed; and then what he could now perceive was a hand put him in what he was able to recognise as a shirt pocket. The pocket of a very big shirt; so big that the gaps between the weave of the cotton were large enough to fly an airliner through. Fortunately, the fibres of the cotton were as wide as the average motorway, and so there was no danger of falling through; and through the weave, Jason had a splendid view of what happened next.

High above his head he could see the stars; not as little points of light but as huge balls of fiery gas. The planets of the solar system were so big that he felt he could reach out and touch them. But what he mostly noticed was the other Earths.

We know them to be Betamax worlds, but Jason didn't. He just thought they were a lot of identical -- fairly identical -- copies of the thing he remembered having seen on globes. One of these globes was swinging down through the firmament, dragging a moon behind it like a very fat lady with a very fat dog on a lead. The giant(s) reached out a hand, grabbed hold of it, closed his/their fingers round it and said, 'Gotcha!'

'Excuse me.'

'Yes?'

'What are you doing?'

The giant(s) smiled. 'Saving the world,' he/they said.

'Ah; Jason said. 'Right.'

'Not this one, of course,' the giant(s) went on. 'The other one.'

'Fine.'

'This one; said the giant(s), tossing the Betamax world up in the air and catching it, 'is a right little tinker.'

'Really?'

'Here; said the giant(s), 'look for yourself.'

'No, really,' Jason said. 'I'm quite happy to take your word for it.'

The giant(s) laughed. 'You wanted to know what was going on, you look and see for yourself. Here, catch.' And the giant(s) threw the planet to Jason.

Who, to his everlasting amazement, caught it.

According to ancestral belief, Delphi is the dead centre of the world; or, as the ancient Hellenes so quaintly put it, the earth's navel. On a hot day in high season, however, armpit might be a more fitting description.

Betty-Lou Fisichelli plodded from her office across the road from the museum up towards the temple site to post the day's messages in the usual place. Not that there was anything much:
Is this a good time to invest in Far Eastern unit trusts?
and
Congratulations! You have been selected as a lucky finalist in our prize draw
didn't seem to her to be crammed with arcane significance and could probably wait. Nevertheless, a good Pythoness doesn't take it upon herself to edit; only to relay.

When she finally reached the Treasury of the Athenians, she found it deserted except for forty-six French tourists, a three-headed dog and an eagle. Oddly enough, the tourists didn't seem able to see the dog or the eagle, but nothing tourists failed to notice surprised Ms. Fisichelli any more. What did surprise her was that the eagle was there at all.

'You!' she said.

The eagle looked down at its talons and made a very slight but deprecating gesture.

'How you've got the nerve to show your beak here; Ms. Fisichelli went on, 'after the way you ...' She tailed off. The dog was looking at her.

In fact, there was no anthropomorphic message in the dog's stare; it was just a doggy stare, plain and simple. But Ms. Fisichelli was nervous around dogs at the best of times, and a doggy stare in triplicate was not her idea of good vibes.

'Be that as it may.' She pulled herself together. 'Well, if you've got anything to say, I'd be grateful if you got on with it. My time is not without...'

The eagle gestured with its head towards the tourists, who were stating at her. They seemed uneasy, and none of them had asked her to take a photograph of them beside a pile of fallen-down masonry; in Delphi, this is tantamount to ostracism. Ms. Fisichelli sighed, and led the way up the hill.

On top of the hill at Delphi there is a large Roman race track, trimmed tastefully with bushes. There, Ms. Fisichelli sat down heavily on a stone (did we mention that the hill is steep?) and said, 'Well?'

The eagle looked at the dog, who wagged its tail as if to suggest that it was incapable of speech and none of this had been its idea anyway. It's amazing what can be communicated with a few inches of mobile fur-covered appendix.

'Hi, Betty-Lou,' said the eagle.

'Mary,' replied Ms. Fisichelli, coldly affable. 'How've you been keeping?'

'Oh, fine, fine,' said the eagle. 'Look, I guess I owe you an explanation.'

'I guess you do.'

'Well,' said the eagle. It shifted its grip on the rock and winced. 'Look, would it be easier for you if I became human for a bit?'

'That's entirely up to you,' said Ms. Fisichelli. 'Far be it from me to dictate...'

'Thanks,' said Mary, shedding her feathers and donning a pale blue sun-dress with small pink flowers. 'My talons were killing me; she explained.

'So then,' Ms. Fisichelli said. 'You were about to say something.'

'Yes,' Mary replied. 'Look, you've probably guessed or been told, I'm Prometheus's eagle. You know, the one who was given the job of ripping the poor guy's liver out every morning and evening as part of his punishment...'

'I'm a graduate of six universities,' Ms. Fisichelli interrupted. 'I do know my basic mythology, thank you.'

'Sorry.' Mary repressed an urge to spring into the air, spread her wings and scream; she picked at her thumbnail instead. 'Well, Pro and I... When you've known someone as long as that, you can't help sort of getting to understand a guy, and besides, what the gods did to him was wrong. He was only trying to help the mortals, and they stomped him. The gods don't like us, Betty-Lou, they...'

'By us,' Ms. Fisichelli said, 'do you mean humans, or eagles?'

'Neither,' Mary said, 'only themselves. You know about the First Joke, don't you? And how they want to do away with comedy and take the world over again?' Ms. Fisichelli nodded. 'And you don't think someone ought to stop them? Godsdamnit, Betty-Lou, can you imagine for one moment what that would be like? A world with no laughter in it? We just couldn't survive.'

Mary realised as she said this that Ms. Fisichelli had managed to survive for over thirty-five years in this cold hard world without having a lot to do with humour; probably she kept out of its way, and if she couldn't do that she sort of stepped over it. But that, Mary felt, proved her point.

'Well,' she went on,
'we
couldn't survive, anyway. So Pro asked me if I'd help him, and I said yes. And so I sort of became his assistant, did all the leg-work for him. It was fun; I enjoyed it. For one thing, he showed me how I could make myself human again; in fact, several humans. That's cool, except there's some of me give me a pain in the butt, but never mind. I don't have to live with me, after all.'