A dispiriting place, the Acropolis.
I went slinking down and over to the Plaka, which is the neighborhood in back of it, for some lunch. Human bodies need to be fed again and again, all day long. Swordfish grilled on skewers with onions and tomatoes; more retsina; fruit and cheese. All right. Not bad. Then to the National Museum, a two-hour walk, sweat-sticky and dusty. Where I looked at broken statues and bought a guidebook that told me about the gods whose statues these were. Not even close to the actualities, any of them. Did they seriously think that brawny guy with the beard was Poseidon? And the woman with the tin hat, Athena? And that blowhard—Zeus? Don’t make me laugh. Please. My laughter destroys whole cities.
Nowhere in the whole museum were there any representations of Titans. Just Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite, Poseidon, and the rest of them, the junior varsity, the whole mob of supplanters, over and over and over. It was as if we didn’t count at all in the historical record.
That hurt. I was in one hell of a sour mood when I left the museum.
There was a Temple of Olympian Zeus in town, the guidebook said, somewhere back in the vicinity of the Acropolis. I kept hoping that I would find some clue to Zeus’s present place of residence at one of the sites that once had been sacred to him. A vestige, a lingering whiff of divinity.
But the Temple of Olympian Zeus was nothing but an incomplete set of ruined columns, and the only whiff I picked up there was the whiff of mortality and decay. And now it was getting dark and the body I was inhabiting was hungry again. Back to the Plaka; grilled meat, wine, a sweet pudding.
Afterwards, as I roamed the winding streets leading down to the newer part of the city with no special purpose in mind, a feeble voice out of a narrow alley said, in the native language of my host body, “Help! Oh, please, help!”
I was not put into this world for the purpose of helping anyone. But the body that I had duplicated in order to get around in modern Greece was evidently the body of a kindly and responsible person, because his reflexes took over instantly, and I found myself heading into that alleyway to see what aid I could render the person who was so piteously crying out.
Deep in the shadows I saw someone—a woman, I realized—lying on the ground in what looked like a pool of blood. I went to her side and knelt by her, and she began to mutter something in a bleary way about being attacked and robbed.
“Can you sit up?” I said, slipping my arm around her back. “It’ll be easier for me to carry you if—”
Then I felt a pair of hands grasping me by the shoulders, not gently, and something hard and sharp pressing against the middle of my back, and the supposedly bloodied and battered woman I was trying to help rolled deftly out of my grasp and stepped back without any trouble at all, and a disagreeable rasping voice at my left ear said quietly, “Just give us your wristwatch and your wallet and you won’t get hurt at all.”
I was puzzled for a moment. I was still far from accustomed to human ways, and it was often necessary to peer into my host-mind to find out what was going on.
Quickly, though, I came to understand that there was such a thing as crime in your world, and that some of it was being tried on me at this very moment. The woman in the alley was bait; I was the prey; two accomplices had been lurking in the shadows.
I suppose I could have given them my wristwatch and wallet without protest, and let them make their escape. What did a wristwatch mean to me? And I could create a thousand new wallets just like the one I had, which I had created also, after all. As for harm, they could do me none with their little knife. I had survived even the lightnings of Zeus. Perhaps I should have reacted with godlike indifference to their little attempt at mugging me.
But it had been a long dreary discouraging day, and a hot one, too. The air was close and vile-smelling. Maybe I had allowed my host body to drink a little too much retsina with dinner. In any event, godlike indifference was not what I displayed just then. Mortal petulance was more like the appropriate term.
“Behold me, fools,” I said.
I let them see my true form.
There I was before them, sky-high, mountainous, a horrendous gigantic figure of many heads and fiery eyes and thick black bristles and writhing viperish excrescences, a sight to make even gods quail.
Of course, inasmuch as I’m taller than the tallest tree and appropriately wide, manifesting myself in such a narrow alleyway might have posed certain operational problems. But I have access to dimensions unavailable to you, and I made room for myself there with the proper interpenetrational configurations. Not that it mattered to the three muggers, because they were dead of shock the moment they saw me towering before them.
I raised my foot and ground them into the pavement like noxious vermin.
Then, in the twinkling of an eye, I was once more a slender, lithe middle-aged American tourist with thinning hair and a kindly smile, and there were three dark spots on the pavement of the alley, and that was that.
It was, I admit, overkill.
But I had had a trying day. In fact, I had had a trying fifty thousand years.
Athens had been so hellish that it put me in mind of the authentic kingdom of Hades, and so that was my next destination, for I thought I might get some answers down there among the dead. It wasn’t much of a trip, not for me. I opened a vortex for myself and slipped downward and there right in front of me were the black poplars and willows of the Grove of Persephone, with Hades’ Gate just behind it.
“Cerberus?” I called. “Here, doggy doggy doggy! Good Cerberus! Come say hello to Daddy!”
Where was he, my lovely dog, my own sweet child? For I myself was the progenitor of the three-headed guardian of the gate of Hell, by virtue of my mating with my sister, Tartarus and Gaea’s scaly-tailed daughter Echidna. We made the Harpies too, did Echidna and I, and the Chimera, and Scylla, and also the Hydra, a whole gaudy gorgeous brood of monsters. But of all my children I was always most fond of Cerberus, for his loyalty. How I loved to see him come running toward me when I called! What pleasure I took in his serpent-bristled body, his voice like clanging bronze, his slavering jaws that dripped black venom!
This day, though, I wandered dogless through the Underworld. There was no sign of Cerberus anywhere, no trace even of his glittering turds. Hell’s Gate stood open and the place was deserted. I saw nothing of Charon the boatman of the Styx, nor Hades and Queen Persephone, nor any members of their court, nor the spirits of the dead who should have been in residence here. An abandoned warehouse, dusty and empty. Quickly I fled toward the sunshine.
The island of Delos was where I went next, looking for Apollo. Delos is, or was, his special island, and Apollo had always struck me as the coolest, most level-headed member of the Zeus bunch. Perhaps he had survived whatever astounding debacle it was that had swept the Olympian gods away. And, if so, maybe he could give me a clue to Zeus’s current location.
Big surprise! I went to Delos, but no Apollo.
It was yet another dismal disillusioning journey through the tumbledown sadness that is Greece. This time I flew; not on handsome black-feathered wings, but on a clever machine, a metal tube called an airplane, full of travelers looking more or less like me in my present form. It rose up out of Athens in a welter of sound and fury and took up a course high above the good old wine-dark sea, speckled with tawny archipelagos, and in very short order came down on a small dry island to the south. This island was called Mykonos, and there I could buy myself passage in one of the boats that made outings several times a day to nearby Delos.
Delos was a dry rubble-field, strewn with fragments of temples, their columns mostly broken off close to the ground. Some marble lions were still intact, lean and vigilant, crouching on their hind legs. They looked hungry. But there wasn’t much else to see. The place had the parched gloom of death about it, the bleak aura of extinction.
I returned to Mykonos on the lunchtime boat, and found myself lodgings in a hillside hotel a short distance outside the pretty little narrow-streete
d shorefront town. I ordered me some more mortal food and drank mortal drink. My borrowed body needed such things.
It was on Mykonos that I met Aphrodite.
Or, rather, she met me.
I was sitting by myself, minding my own business, in the hotel’s outdoor bar, which was situated on a cobblestoned patio bedecked with mosaics and hung with nets and oars and other purported fishing artifacts. I was on my third ouzo of the hour, which possibly was a bit much for the capacities of the body I was using, and I was staring down the hillside pensively at, well, what I have to call the wine-dark sea. (Greece brings out the cliches in anyone. Why should I resist?)
A magnificent long-legged full-bodied blonde woman came over to me and said, in a wonderfully throaty, husky voice, “New in town, sailor?”
I stared at her, astounded.
There was the unmistakable radiance of divinity about her. My Geiger counter of godliness was going clickity-clack, full blast. How could I have failed to pick up her emanations the moment I arrived on Mykonos? But I hadn’t, not until she was standing right next to me. She had picked up mine, though.
“Who are you?” I blurted.
“Won’t you ask a lady to sit down, even?”
I jumped to my feet like a nervous schoolboy, hauled a deck chair scrapingly across and positioned it next to mine, and bowed her into it. Then I wigwagged for a waiter. “What do you want to drink?” I rasped. My throat was dry. Nervous schoolboy, yes, indeed.
“I’ll have what you’re having.”
“Parakalo, ouzo on the rocks,” I told the waiter.
She had showers of golden hair tumbling to shoulder length, and catlike yellow eyes, and full ripe lips that broke naturally into the warmest of smiles. The aroma that came from her was one of young wine and green fields at sunrise and swift-coursing streams, but also of lavender and summer heat, of night rain, of surging waves, of midnight winds.
I knew I was consorting with the enemy. I didn’t care.
“Which one are you?” I said again.
“Guess.”
“Aphrodite would be too obvious. You’re probably Ares, or Hephaestus, or Poseidon.”
She laughed, a melodic cadenza of merriment that ran right through the scale and into the infra-voluptuous. “You give me too much credit for deviousness. But I like your way of thinking. Ares in drag, really? Poseidon with a close shave? Hephaestus with a blonde wig?” She leaned close. The fragrance of her took on hurricane intensity. “You were right the first time.”
“Aphrodite.”
“None other. I live in Los Angeles now. Taking a little holiday in the mother country. And you? You’re one of the old ones, aren’t you?”
“How can you tell?”
“The archaic emanation you give off. Something out of the pre-Olympian past.” She clinked the ice-cubes thoughtfully in her glass, took a long pull of the ouzo, stared me straight in the eyes. “Prometheus? Tethys?” I shook my head. “Someone of that clan, though. I thought all of you old ones were done for a long time ago. But there’s definitely a Titan vibe about you. Which one, I wonder? Most likely one of the really strange ones. Thaumas? Phorcys?”
“Stranger than those,” I said.
She took a few more guesses. Not even close.
“Typhoeus,” I told her finally.
We walked into town for dinner. People turned to look at us in the narrow streets. At her, I mean. She was wearing a filmy orange sun-dress with nothing under it and when you were east of her on a westbound street you got quite a show.
“You really don’t think that I’m going to find Zeus?” I asked her.
“Let’s say you have your work cut out for you.”
“Well, so be it. I have to find him.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s my job,” I said. “There’s nothing personal about it. I’m the designated avenger. It’s my sole purpose in existence: to punish Zeus for his war against the children of Gaea. You know that.”
“The war’s been over a long time, Typhoeus. You might as well let bygones be bygones. Anyway, it’s not as though Zeus got to enjoy his victory for long.” We were in the middle of the maze of narrow winding streets that is Mykonos Town. She pointed to a cheerful little restaurant called Catherine’s. “Let’s go in here. I ate here last night and it was pretty good.”
We ordered a bottle of white wine. “I like the body you found for yourself,” she said. “Not particularly handsome, no, but pleasing. The eyes are especially nice. Warm and trustworthy, but also keen, penetrating.”
I would not be drawn away from the main theme. “What happened to the Olympians?” I asked.
“Died off, most of them. One by one. Of neglect. Starvation.”
“Immortal gods don’t die.”
“Some do, some don’t. You know that. Didn’t Argus of the Hundred Eyes kill your very own Echidna? And did she come back to life?”
“But the major gods—”
“Even if they don’t die, they can be forgotten, and the effect’s pretty much the same. While you were locked up under Etna, new gods came in. There wasn’t even a battle. They just moved in, and we had to move along. We disappeared entirely.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
“Yes. Totally out of business. You’ve seen the shape our temples are in? Have you seen anybody putting out burnt offerings to us? No, no, it’s all over for us, the worship, the sacrifices. Has been for a long time. We went into exile, the whole kit and kaboodle of us, scattered across the world. I’m sure a lot of us simply died, despite that theoretical immortality of ours. Some hung on, I suppose. But it’s a thousand years since the last time I saw any of them.”
“Which ones did you see then?”
“Apollo—he was getting gray and paunchy. And I caught sight of Hermes, once—I think it was Hermes—slow and short-winded, and limping like Hephaestus.”
“And Zeus?” I asked. “You never ran into him anywhere, after you all left Olympus?”
“No. Never even once.”
I pondered that. “So how did you manage to stay so healthy?”
“I’m Aphrodite. The life-force. Beauty. Passion. Those things don’t go out of fashion for long. I’ve done all right for myself, over the years.”
“Ah. Yes. Obviously you have.”
The waitress fluttered around us. I was boiling with questions to ask Aphrodite, but it was time to order, and that was what we did. The usual Greek things, stuffed grape leaves, grilled fish, overcooked vegetables. Another bottle of wine. My head was pulsating. The restaurant was small, crowded, a whirlpool of noise. The nearness of Aphrodite was overwhelming. I felt dizzy. It was a surprisingly pleasant sensation.
I said, after a time, “I’m convinced that Zeus is still around somewhere. I’m going to find him and this time I’m going to whip his ass and put him under Mount Etna.”
“It’s amazing how much like a small boy an immortal being can be. Even one as huge and frightful as you.”
My face turned hot. I said nothing.
“Forget Zeus,” she urged. “Forget Typhoeus, too. Stay human. Eat, drink, be merry.” Her eyes were glistening. I felt as if I were falling forward, tumbling into the sweet chasm between her breasts. “We could take a trip together. I’d teach you how to enjoy yourself. How to enjoy me, too. Tell me: have you ever been in love?”
“Echidna and I—”
“Echidna! Yes! You and she got together and made a bunch of hideous monsters like yourselves, with too many heads and drooling fangs. I don’t mean Echidna. This is Earth, here and now. I’m a woman now and you’re a man.”
“But Zeus—”
“Zeus,” she said scornfully. She made the name of the Lord of Olympus sound like an obscenity.
We finished eating and I paid the check and we went outside into the mild, breezy Mykonos night, strolling for fifteen or twenty minutes, winding up finally in a dark, deserted part of the town, a warehouse district down by the water, where the street was no more t
han five feet wide and empty shuttered buildings with whitewashed walls bordered us on both sides.
She turned to me there and pulled me abruptly up against her. Her eyes were bright with mischief. Her lips sought mine. With a little hissing sound she nudged me backward until I was leaning against a wall, and she was pressing me tight, and currents of energy that could have fried a continent were passing between us. I think there could have been no one, not man nor god, who would not have wanted to trade places with me just then.
“Quickly! The hotel!” she whispered.
“The hotel, yes.”
We didn’t bother to walk. That would have taken too long. In a flash we vanished ourselves from that incomprehensible tangle of maze-like streets and reappeared in her room at our hotel, and from then to dawn she and I generated such a delirium of erotic force that the entire island shook and shivered with the glorious sturm and drang of it. We heaved and thrust and moaned and groaned, and rivers of sweat ran from our bodies and our hearts pounded and thundered and our eyes rolled in our heads from giddy exhaustion, for we allowed ourselves the luxury of mortal limitations for the sake of the mortal joy of transcending those limitations. But because we weren’t mortal we also had the option of renewing our strength whenever we had depleted it, and we exercised that option many a time before rosy-fingered dawn came tiptoeing up over the high-palisaded eastern walls.
Naked, invisible to prying eyes, Aphrodite and I walked then hand in hand along the morning-shimmering strand of the fish-swarming sea, and she murmured to me of the places we would go, the things we would experience.
“The Taj Mahal,” she said. “And the summer palace at Udaipur. Persepolis and Isfahan in springtime. Baalbek. Paris, of course. Carcassonne. Iguazu Falls, and the Blue Mosque, and the Fountains of the Blue Nile. We’ll make love in the Villa of Tiberius on Capri—and between the paws of the Sphinx—and in the snow on top of Mount Everest—”
The Millennium Express: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Nine Page 11