The Mythniks Saga

by Paul Neuhaus

  All ovations before the one that followed paled in comparison. It was the closest I’ve ever been to a mass of people in the throes of religious ecstasy. It was both terrifying and oddly affirming. I was affirmed for like a half a second until I realized that the Church of Reciprocity must certainly be holding the two old gods against their will. The Leader addressed that very topic next.

  “Now I want to assure you of something… Hecate and Hephaestus are not here today against their will. The vessels that contain them are full of nutrients and sustaining medicines. What you see before you are two creatures who are nearly as old as the Earth itself. When you’re a couple of billion years past your prime, I bet you won’t look nearly as good as they do.”

  Laughter and applause.

  “But I didn’t trot these poor old souls out here for you to gawk at. I will tell you that, going forward, I will act as an intermediary for Hephaestus and Hecate. I will share with you their wisdom. I’m certain what they have to tell us will reshape the world. But, again, that’s incidental to today’s… well, ‘miracle’ is the only thing I can call it. I brought Hephaestus and Hecate before you, so they can… reshape the world.”

  I did not like the sound of that. I looked around for anything around me I could lock onto if things went really south. I came up empty. All I really had was myself, Hope and Elijah. If the world was about to be reshaped, I doubted I could stop it.

  “Would you please welcome to the stage a new member of our flock? Someone who has helped me a great deal during her short tenure amongst us. Her name is Keri…” Keri entered from stage right wearing a radiant smile. In front of her, she had both hands out, palms up. She was carrying something and the something was covered by a square of red velvet. The crowd gave her a polite welcome.

  As soon as he saw his daughter, El lunged forward, fully prepared to rush the stage. I caught his arm and pulled him back. When he looked at me, I shook my head. The last thing we needed was to get swarmed by a sea of angry space hippies.

  When Keri reached Nicos, he smiled and pulled the cloth off of her hands. Underneath the cloth was a pinecone. My pinecone. “This,” he said. “Is a pinecone.”

  The crowd laughed.

  “The Visitors had the power to imbue objects with… Well, I guess we’d call it magic. We’d call it magic because we don’t understand the positively sublime technologies of our long-ago caretakers. This pinecone—ordinary though it seems—is one such object. In fact, it was fashioned by the very two beings you see behind me.”

  Shit. Shit. Shit. He was right: Pan’s pinecone had been made by Hephaestus and Hecate. They’d made several such objects during a brief love affair.

  “It’s called a Demizoi which means ‘Partial Life’. Fortunately, we humans now have an analogous, albeit greatly inferior technology. It’s called ‘Virtual Reality’. Inside this pinecone is a miniature world. A world that people can venture into and inhabit. A world which captures the essence of old earth. During the time of the Olympians.”

  How did he know all this? Why was he able to hold the pinecone for so long without disappearing into it? The blood was pounding in my temples.

  “Much as the Christians have their stories of Eden, we have our stories of an ancient, squandered paradise. A world that, through misuse and carelessness, devolved into the mundane and, oftentimes, ugly space you see around you today. Well, that ends now. I—along with my two friends—are here to return you to a world that is your birthright. The unspoiled utopia of better days.”

  He took a step back, placing himself between the two cylinders. He raised the pinecone high.

  I freaked out. I rushed the stage weaving through the thick crowds. It took El a moment, but he followed, matching my pace.

  Hope was freaked out too. “Dora! What is happening?!”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know,” was all I said. My vision was jumbled thanks to the pace of my running. On the stage, I caught the blurry image of twin ropes of blue fire—one from each of the cylinders. They struck the pinecone in Nephus’ hand and the pinecone exploded. A light came from inside and spread so quickly that it blinded everyone there. (Hell, I couldn’t see the edges of the burst. Maybe it blinded the whole world.) Since I could no longer see, I skidded to a stop, plowing into some of the congregants. El plowed into me, and soon we were a tangle of limbs, flailing to get up, and to understand.

  On my back, Hope was wailing. She wasn’t blinded like the rest of us, but she was attuned to subtler energies. For her to cry out like that, something must’ve been very, very wrong.

  For the longest time, all of us there were inside a featureless world of white, but then the glow faded, and our eyesight slowly returned. I knew something was fundamentally different. I could smell it in the air. I don’t attribute many scents to the desert. It’s a clean place so, unless there’s sage or the carcass of a dead animal you tend not to pick up on many smells. Suddenly, that cleanness was gone. In its place, were a whole host of aromas. Alpine air. Pine needles. An ocean not far away. I rubbed my eyes, willing them to quicken their return. I pulled myself out of the tangle and stood. I realized that nearly everyone at the gathering had either stooped or thrown themselves to the ground. I was almost the only one standing.

  I was the only one to see the change that’d befallen the world.

  Nothing had changed as far as the event itself was concerned. The crowd was still there, the towers with the lights and the speakers still stood, Bloop still floated, and the stage was just as I’d seen it last.

  It was everything else that’d changed. The world from inside the pinecone was now the world at large. Rolling, grassy hills. A forest of pine. The sky a vivid blue. The earth had returned to a more primal state. The state it’d been in when I was a child, and the Olympian gods’d ruled from on-high. My jaw dropped open. How far-reaching was this change? How destructive? Could it be reversed? Even though I now had back a world I often longed for, I knew this was an abomination. I knew that it was deeply, deeply wrong.

  Elijah used my standing form as a handhold. He pulled himself up beside me. I looked at him. His eyes were huge. He didn’t have words.

  On my back, Hope was moaning softly. “Dora,” she said. “This is… This is…”

  “I know,” was my only reply.

  All around us, followers of the Church of Reciprocity were standing singly and in groups, gawking at the gift Nicos Nephus had given them. It must’ve been the first time any of them had seen real magic.

  Again, I was forced to prioritize. I shot my eyes toward the stage and saw that Keri was still up there and she was as dumbstruck as the rest of us. I grabbed Elijah by the hand and pulled. “C’mon!” I said and resumed our drive toward the front. I saw a man come in from stage right and head right toward Keri. I picked up the pace because it was a new variable and I couldn’t make out who the guy was. He took her gently by her elbows and spun her toward the wings. “Fuck,” I said. “We gotta get up there before that guy gets Keri out of sight!”

  El didn’t have to be told twice. He was breathing heavily, but he drove forward by sheer force of will.

  We had to weave around two clusters of space hippies. When we got to the other side, I had a better view of the younger Wiener and her handler. Her handler was Calesius, the former stable boy of Olympus. The guy I’d sucked into my pithos and later reconstituted. What the fuck was he doing here?

  Calesius made it to the edge of the stage and then he stopped. He didn’t seem altogether certain where he was going. He looked around, for what I don’t know.

  On the stage, Nicos quietly left. The two metal cylinders were withdrawn, and raucous music began. A new band had filled the riser and the sounds of Grecian music shattered the former desert air. As I ran, I picked up one peculiar detail. In front of the ensemble was Sebastian Squire, the Neo-Olympian. The venture capitalist who built and ran Acadine, the mountaintop retreat made to look like ancient Greece. He was stripped to the waist and his torso
and head were painted in yellow and blue bands. He played the bongos like someone deep in an opium stupor.

  I pulled my eyes away from Squire and back to Calesius. The boy was still looking around, wondering what to do and where to go. Next to him, Keri was docile. Or at least she was docile until she saw Elijah and I. Then she panicked, as if the two of us represented some deep threat. Cal grabbed her by her upper arms and kept her from running back onstage.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said, my palms upraised in front of me. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Pandora!” Calesius said, surprised. “Mr. Wiener! I’m getting her out of here. You can help me.”

  “Getting her out of here? Why?”

  “What do you mean ‘why’?” he replied. “Have you seen these people? Have you seen what they did?”

  He had me there, but I raised one eyebrow. “You’re not one of them?”

  “No. Not anymore.”

  ‘Not anymore’? What did that mean? Before I had a chance to ask, El came forward to embrace his daughter. Keri cried out, drawing the attention of some space hippies nearby. Clearly, the last thing the girl wanted to do was to go to her dad. I put a hand on his chest and pushed him back. “Not now, El. We need to get her out of here and clean out her system. Let Cal see to her.” I turned to Calesius. “Time for a decision,” I said. “What’s the best way out of here?”

  “I was just debating that. I think it’s gotta be through the media area. They’ve got trucks for all the equipment back there. Mobile control rooms. A lot of VIP cars are parked back there too.”

  “Okay, okay. I don’t need a complete breakdown. Lead on.”

  Cal grabbed Keri by the hand and pulled her down the steps away from the stage. The duo then cut left toward a chain-link fence with an open gate. El and I fell in line behind them. As we ran toward the huge white trucks crowned with antennas, I looked again at how much our surroundings had changed. The very quality of the light was different. All of the colors were different. It’d been like going to sleep in one world and waking up in another. Virtual reality had become Reality Reality.

  Cal did an expert job of weaving us through the remote trucks and the stagehands. Along the way, I did something that was maybe ill-advised. I skidded to a stop right next to a big black limousine. I recognized it. It was Sebastian Squire’s limousine. I crouched down to peer into the rear compartment and El grabbed me by the arm. “What’re you doing? Come on!”

  In the rear compartment, I saw Squire’s briefcase. “Gods, I’d really love to have that,” I said.

  Cal doubled back and pushed me gently aside. “I can get it for you,” he said.

  “Great! You have a key?”

  “Yes.” And, with that, he broke the rear left window with his elbow. Reaching through the newly-made gap, he undid the lock, opened the door and crawled into the car. A moment later, he emerged and handed me the case. I was impressed. I started to say something, but he cut me off. “Let’s go. No more stops.”

  He ran off again and El and I followed. Before we were even to the back of the limo, I saw Taylor Chriss standing next to one of the media vans. Unfortunately, he’d seen us breaking into Squire’s car. He was standing next to his huge bodyguard, a guy famous enough in his own right to earn a nickname. “Samoa Joe” they called him. Chriss handed his drink to the bodyguard and shot after us. The movie star does a lot of running in the Improbable Pursuit movies. Turns out it wasn’t Hollywood trickery. He was fast as a motherfucker.

  I stuck my hand into my pocket and my fingers through the rings of my brass knuckles. My plan was to stop, turn and let Chriss slam into my armored fist. By the time I was equipped and ready for the punch, I saw that someone else had had the idea first. Elijah stopped, turned and released a full stream of pepper spray right into the actor’s face. Chriss ran a few more steps before he realized his eyes were on fire, then he stopped so he could claw at them. While he was clawing, I hit him hard as I could with the briefcase. He went down. El gawked at his victim, surprised and delighted. “Come on,” I said. “Celebrate later!”

  We resumed running full-speed and, at last, came to the parking lot of the Parthenon. We stopped again to get our bearings. “Please tell me you have a car,” Calesius said. Keri was docile beside him. As long as neither Elijah or I got too close to her, she was fine.

  I pointed down the road. “At the motel,” I replied. “Don’t run. Walk as fast as you can without looking suspicious.” When we got to the Joshua Tree Motor Inn, we all jumped into the Firebird. El and I in the front; Cal and Keri in the back.

  “Aren’t we even going to check out?” El said, perhaps focusing on the wrong detail.

  “Nope. You can call them from the road if you want.” I spun us out of the parking lot and jetted across the interstate to get onto the other side. The side that’d take us back to Los Angeles.

  5

  Forethought

  The whole drive back was traffic-free—mostly because the majority of the motorists had pulled over to the side of the road to assess the world’s new state. Southern California and Nevada are—or were—barely irrigated deserts. Now, not only were they rich with the scent of pine, the temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees. Most right-thinking humans can’t process a change like that, and the faces I saw as I sped westward testified to that. Fortunately, no one in the car was quizzing me about it. Calesius was stoic, Keri was catatonic, and—once he got off the phone with the motel—Elijah was more concerned with his daughter than with the state of the world. He made repeated attempts to reach out to her, but she recoiled every time. Finally, Cal said, “Now isn’t the right time.”

  “She still has the food in her system, doesn’t she?” I asked.

  “That’s right. It’ll take her a day or two before she’s free of it.”

  “Food?” El said.

  “Yeah, remember I told you the Church of Reciprocity has their own food. Like Herbalife. They put something in it to make their followers compliant.”

  “Lotus,” Cal said.

  I patted the wheel in recognition of an obvious truth. “Of course. Lotus. That makes perfect sense.”

  It didn’t make perfect sense to Elijah. “Lotus? Like the flower?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think Homer meant the same thing by ‘lotus’ that we do today. It’s definitely a plant, although I can’t tell you much more than that. There’s a whole passage in The Odyssey where Odysseus loses half his crew in the Land of the Lotus-eaters. Basically, a bunch of whacked-out goofballs who do nothing but sit around and get loaded all day.”

  “And we can just get it out of her system? Will there be side effects?”

  “No,” Cal replied. “No side effects.” It was a telling comment.

  I looked over my shoulder at the former stable boy. “Back at the Conclave, I asked you if you were one of the space hippies, and you said, ‘Not anymore’. What did you mean?”

  “Not long after I last saw you both, they started feeding me their special food, and I started feeling weird. Not like myself. I guess I must have a higher resistance or something because I was aware of what they were doing. I began pretending to take the meals they gave me. At night, I snuck real food from the kitchens. In time, I was free of the lotus, but I acted like I was as compliant as everyone else. I was biding my time until I could escape. You haven’t seen what Acadine is like when you’re not there. It can be… a scary place.”

  Elijah held out his hand and Cal took it. “Thank you for saving my daughter,” he said.

  Cal nodded. “I like your daughter very much. Or I liked who she was before they poisoned her. I want to get that Keri back.”

  “You and me both,” the elder Wiener agreed.

  Finally, Hope broached the obvious subject. “Speaking of getting things back to normal…”

  “Yes,” Cal said. “The world… It looks like the world I grew up in. I don’t understand. How is it possible?”

  I flashed back to t
he captive Hephaestus and Hecate on the stage, and the moment when Nephus forced them to remake the Earth. (That’s what it’d been after all—force. I couldn’t image the two frail gods working with someone like Nicos.) “Let’s not worry about how it happened right now. Let’s focus on how we can reverse it. Or even if we can reverse it. Hope, do you have any ideas?”

  Hope sighed. The pithos was on Elijah’s lap. “I’ve never seen magic of this magnitude before. Never anything this pervasive. What Medea did when she forged the key to the Tartarus Gate was astonishing, but it was localized. She made a prop. That was the most raw power I’ve ever seen anyone use before, but this… This is beyond the pale. I wouldn’t begin to know how to roll it back.”

  Calesius chimed in. “Zeus would know,” he said.

  “Yeah, Zeus would probably know, but I don’t see him around much anymore. I have no idea how to get in touch with someone who’s fucked off.”

  “Didn’t you talk to Pan after he… fucked off?” Hope said.

  “Yeah, but he came to me. When I was unconscious.”

  “Maybe if we knocked you over the head…”

  “Stay out of this, Wiener. Unless you’ve got something constructive to say.”

  “Sorry.”

  We settled into silence, and I began to worry. How much had the world changed as a result of Nephus’ actions? He’d turned a desert into a pine forest. Would L.A. even be there when we got back? I suppose there was cause for optimism. The highways between Las Vegas and Los Angeles were still there, so hopefully the cities were still there, too. I turned on the radio, flipped the toggle to AM, and dialed-in a news station—a news station in the city of angels. They were still broadcasting, so that was something, anyway. They were broadcasting, but they were panicked. What’d happened near Barstow had definitely happened back west, too. The anchors were so jazzed-up, they were comparing the remaking of the world to 9/11. On some levels, it was a fair comparison, but—as far as I knew anyway, no one had died, so there was that. I’m not one to dog-pile mainstream media, but histrionics don’t help.