Odds and Gods

by Tom Holt

  ‘Oh marvellous,’ Pan said. ‘Look, grab his legs and let’s go and have a coffee. We’ll all feel much better with a nice hot drink inside us.’

  Mrs Henderson narrowed her eyes, until it was hard to imagine any but the most anorexic of photons scriggling its way through to her retina.

  ‘Won’t do it?’ she said. ‘How very strange.You did offer him money?’

  Julian nodded impatiently and would have said something sarcastic had he not foolishly got in the way of Mrs Henderson’s eye. She made him feel uncomfortable. Sure, he still knew deep down that he was the only possible candidate for Senior Partner of the World, but something at the back of his mind was telling him that, nevertheless, his hair was uncombed and his socks smelled.

  ‘A great deal of money?’

  ‘A very great deal of money,’ said Julian, with feeling. ‘More than I earn in a month.’

  ‘How very odd.’

  Julian got up and walked to the window. From Mrs Henderson’s office, you could see all the kingdoms of the earth on a clear day. ‘Not that it matters,’ he said. ‘There are more ways of killing a cat.’

  Although he had his back to Mrs Henderson, he could feel death rays on the back of his collar, and realised that he’d said the wrong thing. Of course, Mrs Henderson kept cats. Probably three of them, with matching names. Meeny, Miny and Mo would be a fair bet. And they’d have their own little baskets and their own little saucers with their names on, and birthdays and favourite chairs with smelly old blankets on them; and anybody crazy enough to kick one of Mrs Henderson’s cats was definitely not long for this world, and very likely on dubious ground for the next.

  ‘More ways,’ he said, ‘of sorting out our problem than the obvious one,’ he therefore said. ‘How come,’ he added, without looking round, ‘my godfather owns this place, anyway?’

  Mrs Henderson shrugged. ‘I needed some capital,’ she said, ‘he wanted somewhere to retire to. At the time it seemed a perfectly sensible arrangement. And it has been, too, until lately.’

  Julian sat down on the window-seat and gazed out over the cloud-meadows, marking them off in his mind’s eye into a grid plan of building plots. ‘So what happened to change your mind?’ he asked.

  ‘Well.’ Mrs Henderson paused for a moment, marshalling her thoughts. ‘I suppose you could say there’s been a lot of latent friction between us for some time. Your godfather has, well, ideas about how this establishment should be run. I have my own ideas. They are the correct ones. I have devoted a lot of time, energy and money to this project, and I have no intention of seeing it come to nothing.’

  A twinkle of light appeared in Julian’s mind. ‘You want to raise the fees,’ he said.

  ‘Among other things, yes.’

  ‘And he wasn’t happy with that?’

  ‘Correct.’

  Wow, Julian thought. For that, she’s prepared to murder a god. He turned slowly round and looked at her, dispassionately. Yes, she would have made one hell of a lawyer.

  ‘Of course,’ she went on, ‘this wilfulness on his part suggests most strongly to me that your poor godfather is, let’s say, a wee bit confused in his mind these days, perhaps not quite up to looking after his business affairs. It’s for that reason I really would welcome his being examined by a doctor. For his own good, of course. But if he won’t co-operate, then really, perhaps the euthanasia approach might well be the kindest thing.’

  ‘For his own good.’

  ‘The welfare of the residents is, naturally, my one and only consideration.’ She smiled. ‘All the residents, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  When I am master of the universe, Julian memorandised to himself, Mrs Henderson’s permanent welfare will be one of my first considerations. It would be a positive pleasure devising something that would be in her best interests, ideally with nine dozen six-inch nails playing a prominent role.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, wrenching his mind back from this agreeable digression. ‘If he’s disappeared, so much the better. All we need is for him to stay disappeared for the prescribed period of time and we can legally presume that he’s dead. That ought to be—’

  ‘But he’s a god,’ Mrs Henderson interrupted. ‘Surely—’

  ‘So?’ Julian grinned. ‘Everybody is equal in the eyes of the law, remember. And the law says that someone who can’t be traced after a certain period of time is legally dead. End of problem.’

  ‘And if he does turn up within the time?’

  ‘Easy. We get him certified. It’s what we in the legal profession call Catch-44.’

  ‘I see.’ Mrs Henderson rubbed her nose with the knuckle of her left forefinger. ‘And meanwhile?’

  ‘Meanwhile,’ Julian said, ‘I hold his power of attorney.’ He sat down opposite her and crossed his legs. ‘Exactly what level of fee increase had you in mind?’

  ‘Let me get you some tea,’ said Mrs Henderson.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  To get from the Pinfold Gap Service Area to the Garden of the Hesperides, you can follow one of two routes: the easy, long way, or the quick, difficult one.

  ‘Turn off here,’ Osiris said. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

  The easy, long way is overland to Folkestone, ferry to Ostend, through Germany and Austria to what used to be called Pomerania, then turn right and on down through Armenia to the Caucasus, follow your nose and you’re there. When you find yourself falling over backwards trying to see the tops of the mountains, you know you’ve arrived. There’s even a chair-lift to the top, although it’s not a hundred per cent reliable; it was installed in 1906 and the only maintenance they’ve got around to doing is one coat of paint on the railings at the bottom and a dab of grease on the ratchet once every change of General Secretary.

  ‘Are you sure you—?’

  ‘’Course I’m sure,’ Osiris replied. ‘I’ve got the map, haven’t I?’

  The other way is overland to Greater Pinfold, leave the van in the car park opposite the church, scramble three quarters of the way up Pinfold Fell to the small cave that very few people know about, and summon a demon, using the handy implements provided. The demon then does the rest. In theory.

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been simpler,’ Sandra interrupted, ‘just to phone his office and make an appointment?’

  The two gods and Kurt Lundqvist looked at her. ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ Pan replied.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘For one thing,’ Pan said, ‘he hasn’t got an office. For another, he’s not on the phone. For a third, he doesn’t keep appointments. Satisfied?’

  Sandra frowned. ‘Funny sort of a lawyer,’ she said. Pan shook his head.

  ‘Not in context,’ he replied. ‘You wait and see.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sandra thought for a moment. ‘So what exactly do you have to do if you want to see him, then?’

  Osiris and Pan looked at each other. ‘It’s a long story.’ Pan said.

  ‘I expect we’ve got time.’

  There was a rumbling from the driver’s seat. It could have been thunder in a tin-panelled canyon, or Sandra’s boyfriend talking.

  ‘Signpost,’ he said. ‘Greater Pinfold, half.’

  It took two divine brains a comparatively long time to work out that he meant half a mile. ‘That’s fine,’ Osiris said. ‘Once we’re in the village, go along the main street and then just keep heading uphill. You can’t miss it.’

  ‘Why hasn’t he got an office?’

  The two gods exchanged glances and then turned to Lundqvist, who was occupying the time in honing the edge on his Sykes-Fairbairn combat knife on the sole of his boot.

  ‘You explain it,’ they said.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right, then.’

  The gods, Lundqvist explained, created the first man and the first woman.

  Their motives for doing so are lost in the mists of comparative religion, and speculation is now probably futile. The most convincing
explanation is that at the time they were destruct-testing the maxim ‘everybody makes mistakes’.

  The first man was called Epimetheus, and the first woman was called Pandora. Contrary to what the scientists would have you believe, neither of them was four feet tall, hairy, stooped and equipped with a jaw like a snowplough; although Epimetheus did have a mole on his nose and Pandora’s black hair had a grey wave running across it from the moment she came to life, the result of Athene neglecting to wait till the paint was completely dry.

  And there they were, just the two of them; and it occurred to the gods that, apart from comprising a complete set of first editions, they weren’t much use for anything.

  ‘They’re not supposed to be any use for anything,’ Athene replied, when this point was drawn to her attention. ‘They’re just supposed to be. They’re,’ she added, ‘the meaning of the universe.’

  The other eleven gods looked at her.

  ‘Man,’ she said, looking away, ‘is the measure of all things.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘Man,’ said Athene, ‘defines the cosmos. Man is the independent life force, entirely separate from the Creator and possessed of free will, who by the very act of observing causes all things to exist, simply by virtue of being susceptible of objective observation.’

  There was a short pause.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Vulcan, god of fire, metal and (in due course) cordless screwdrivers. ‘So what’s the other one for?’

  Venus, goddess of love, frowned, wrinkling her lovely nose. ‘Which one do you mean?’ she said, and sneezed. She had just been created herself from the sea-spray crashing against the rocks of Paphos, and towelling robes and electric hair-dryers were still several giant conceptual leaps away in the future.

  ‘The shorter one with the round bits sticking out,’ Vulcan replied. ‘By the way, is it meant to look like that, or did you take it out of the oven too early?’

  ‘Easy,’ Athene replied. ‘She tells Man what to do.’

  There was another silence, marred only by the distant groaning of tectonic plates and the grating sound of Time running in.

  ‘I thought you said he’s got free will,’ said Mars, god of war.

  ‘Sure.’ Athene turned round slowly and gave him a long, cool stare. ‘And he freely decides to do what he’s told. If he knows what’s good for him, that is.’

  ‘Ah. Right. Yes, that sounds pretty logical to me,’ said Mars, briefly usurping Athene’s prerogative as goddess of wisdom. ‘So, do we cut a tape or break a bottle of wine or something, or is that it?’

  ‘That’s it for now,’ Athene said. ‘We just let them get on with it.’

  ‘With what, Thene?’

  Athene gave her new sister a glance of disapproval. ‘Venus,’ she said, ‘I think you and I need to have a little talk.’

  To begin with, there were the inevitable minor glitches. For one thing, Venus completely misunderstood Athene’s whispered explanation of her new duties, with the result that Mars spent the first few days of human history dragging the first humans off each other before they gouged each other’s eyes out; while Vulcan rather shamefacedly admitted that while installing the digestive system and associated plumbing he’d had the blueprints upside down and read the scale as inches rather than centimetres. It was, however, too late to do anything about that now, and fortuitously the system as installed did actually work, just about.

  It wasn’t until much later that the real design faults began to show up.

  Apollo, god of the sun, was the first to notice; and for a day or so he was inclined to ignore his misgivings. It was too improbable for words. Surely not . . .

  But no. He was right. He was going to have to tell the others.

  ‘Cheerful little sods, aren’t they?’ he therefore observed casually over dinner. ‘I mean, to look at them, you wouldn’t think they had a care in the world.’

  He reached for the salt, and in doing so became aware of eleven pairs of eyes fixed on him.

  ‘Cheerful?’ Mars said.

  ‘That’s the way it looked to me,’ Apollo replied, a slightly defensive tone creeping into his voice. ‘Of course I could be wrong. Probably am. But . . .’

  ‘Of course they aren’t cheerful,’ Athene replied quickly. ‘They can’t be, they’re mortals. Creatures of a day. Out, out, brief candle. Don’t say silly things like that, Pol, or you’ll upset people.’

  Nevertheless, first thing the next day, Athene crept out of Heaven by the back door and hurried down to Earth. Disguising herself as a clothes moth (an inept disguise, since there were as yet no clothes, but she was flustered) she buzzed through the lazy summer air and hovered for a while outside the mouth of the cave where the mortals had taken to cowering during the hours of darkness.

  Inside, she could hear giggling.

  Not, she had to admit, an auspicious start; but it was probably just a freak occurrence. Any minute now they’d start snivelling and bemoaning their lot, like they were supposed to do. She spread her wings and, since she was missing breakfast, spent a thoughtful quarter of an hour in a mimosa bush.

  When she returned, the first thing she noticed was a smell. A delicious smell. So enchanting was it that before she knew what she was doing she’d flown straight into the bole of a tree and knocked herself silly.

  It was the smell of cooking; to be precise, mushrooms and fried tomatoes.

  The gods, it should be explained, ate their food raw and drank rainwater. After all, when you’re immortal the risk of catching some fatal disease from raw food is minimal; and since there’s no way a god can die of starvation, meals were in any case little more than a ritual observance designed to while away half an hour of endless, all-the-shops-are-shut-and-it’s-raining Eternity.

  Nothing but salad for the rest of Time. Small wonder that the gods were all as miserable as sin; small wonder, too, that they regarded this as the proper state of affairs. Happiness wasn’t a concept they could easily get their heads around.

  Athene uncrumpled her wings, adjusted a bent antenna and took off. Something would have to be done about this.

  About a week later, Epimetheus and Pandora were just waking up from a nice lie-in and wondering whether to breakfast on plantain fried in honey or glazed eggplant with cinnamon when there was a knock at the cavemouth. They looked at each other.

  ‘Visitors,’ said Epimetheus.

  ‘Oh goody,’ replied his wife. ‘Just think, Ep, our first guests! Isn’t this wonderful?’

  ‘Rather,’ said our common ancestor, jumping up and running to the cavemouth. ‘Gosh, life’s fun.’

  Outside the cave stood a tall figure in a blue uniform, with a peaked cap. There was, Epimetheus subconsciously noticed, a strange, almost unfinished look about him; almost as if he’d been called into being by someone who had a vague idea of what he should look like, but insufficient detailed knowledge to complete the job. Epimetheus couldn’t help feeling that, viewed from the back, he wouldn’t be visible.

  ‘Sign here,’ said the man.

  ‘Certainly. How do I do that, exactly?’

  The man showed him, and Epimetheus followed suit enthusiastically, until the man took the pen and clipboard away from him. Then he handed him a parcel.

  It was big, and chunky, and it rattled excitingly when you shook it. It also said Do Not Open This Parcel on the label in big red letters, and if Epimetheus hadn’t been so completely carried away with the delirious excitement of it all, he might have wondered how the hell he could read the writing, bearing in mind the fact that he was only sixteen days old and writing hadn’t been invented yet.

  ‘Hey, what are we supposed to do with this?’ he asked the man, except that the man wasn’t there any more. He shrugged, grinned with pleasure and took the parcel back into the cave.

  Seven minutes later, of course, they’d opened the parcel.

  ‘What is it?’ Pandora asked.

  Epimetheus shrugged again. ‘Hang on,’ he said, ‘there’s writing on th
e side here.’

  ‘What’s writing?’

  ‘This is.’

  ‘How absolutely wonderful.’

  The writing said:Congratulations!You have been chosen as a lucky winner in our special grand gala free-to-enter Prize Draw!!

  Please accept this wonderful alarm clock radio (batteries not included) as your special introductory gift, absolutely free!

  All you have to do to be allowed to keep your wonderful new free gift is to select six items of your choice from the enclosed catalogue, crammed with exciting special offers chosen with you in mind, and let us have your order plus your cheque within seven working days. So hurry!

  ‘Gosh,’ said Pandora, after a long pause. ‘What’s a catalogue? ’

  ‘This is, I suppose,’ Epimetheus replied, lifting a thick glossy book out of the carton. He flicked a couple of pages and whistled. ‘Hey,’ he whispered, ‘you wait till you see what’s in here!’

  The very next day, the order arrived: an electric blender (plug not supplied), a video recorder, a washing machine, a power drill, a microwave oven and an exercise bicycle. And, tucked in with the packaging, an invoice for three thousand, six hundred and thirty dollars, ninety-five cents (including delivery and packaging).

  By the afternoon of that day, there was a certain coolness in the atmosphere at the cave. Epimetheus, if asked to account for it, would have explained by saying that Pandora had cracked the jug on the blender, jammed the washing machine and broken the exercise bicycle by over-vigorous use. Pandora’s version would have been that Epimetheus had made a complete mess of wiring up the plugs and plumbing in the washing machine, with the result that all the appliances had blown themselves up and the floor of the cave was an inch deep in suds and soapy water. In addition, there had been a degree of asperity in the discussion as to who was going to pay the bill.

  It occurred to neither of them to ask where the electricity supply and the mains water had come from; partly because they were innocents living in the first dawn of the Golden Age, but mostly because they were too busy arguing over whose fault it was that Epimetheus had used the electric drill to drill slap bang through the middle of a power cable; after which, anything to do with the electricity supply was pretty well academic.