Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “Let us go to meet them together,” I said.

  The medusa put us down on red soil studded with boulders of pitted limestone. The conical roofs of low round tombs pressed upon the borders of the abandoned village, where piles of gray stone marked collapsed houses. Stalks of purple asphodel drooped in the fields, past their first bloom; thus I knew the season was late spring.

  We walked uphill, following a road that skirted the village. The shimmering medusa followed at a discreet distance, hovering incongruously a meter or so above the dry weeds and bright wildflowers. I stubbed my toe viciously within the first few meters, suppressing a curse, and thereafter walked with a limp that I tried to hide from my companions.

  We had walked perhaps half a kilometer before we saw people hurrying down the mountain to meet us—at least a dozen nervous young men with oiled black hair, tall, broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted, brown as raisins and naked except for tight loinstraps around their middles. They carried long shields of cowhide and brandished iron-tipped spears. Behind the men were others, women and children, who seemed shy of us. I could not see them well.

  I was impressed by the discipline of these young men—they stood firm in the face of a sight that what would have terrified me, a 21st-century Englishman! For as harmless as Troy and Redfield and I might have appeared in person, we were backed by the apparition of the medusa, bigger than a bireme, shimmering in midair. Then I reflected that to these people the miraculous was, if not routine, at least real.

  They shouted at us, something incomprehensible. I replied in Greek, the language of their enemies.

  What else could I do? Greek was the only language we could possibly share—although classical Greek (and who is sure of its pronunciation?) was no more like the Doric of their time than demotic is like the language of the New Testament. (To tell the truth, for all my supposed expertise, it had been decades since I had studied my language without the aid of electronics.)

  I had said, “Eimaste fili sas,” which I hoped meant, “We are your friends.” And meanwhile I fiddled desperately with my translator.

  My words had no noticeable effect on the armed young men, whose spears were tilted at a uniform angle in our direction. Clearly they had not understood me, and they were becoming increasingly tense. There was movement behind them; one of them glanced backward and said something, and there was a sudden hurried scuffle aside. The soldiers hastily transferred their weapons to their left hands and struck their foreheads with their right fists, arching their backs in exaggerated poses of attention.

  Through the gap in their ranks a woman stepped toward us. She was perhaps thirty years old, a natural beauty but heavily made-up: her green eyes were boldly shadowed and outlined, her full lips reddened, her high-boned cheeks rouged. Her dress was of fine wool dyed in reds and yellows, with short sleeves and a flounced skirt—it was a costume familiar from the statuettes and seal impressions and frescos of an earlier age, most striking in that it left her breasts bare. Her sleek black hair was in ringlets, and on her head was a tiara of flat gold that looked very ancient.

  “Poia eiste? Apo pou?” she demanded in a voice ringing with authority. Her accent was strange indeed, filled with sibilance and hard vowels, but the words were simple Greek, and plain enough: “Who are you? From where?”

  She had not addressed me, however. Her words and her attention were directed wholly at Troy.

  “Apo ’ouranos kai ’thalassa,” said Troy, in a voice remarkably like the woman’s own. “From heaven and the sea.”

  At that I must have gaped a bit, and not just at the bad grammar, for Troy whispered harshly at me, “Be prepared to do your bit. And don’t flinch when Blake does his.”

  “Eiste i Aphrodite? Eiste o Posidon?” The woman’s voice was full of skepticism bordering on scorn.

  “Nai, eimaste,” said Troy firmly, just as Redfield thrust out both his hands and lofted something small and silvery into the air over the heads of the little party who faced us—as if tossing coins.

  First to the left and then to the right the morning sky was ripped by flashes of lightning, followed instantly by ear-splitting crashes and searing pyrotechnic screams. Despite Troy’s warning, I flinched. Indeed, without her firm grip on my arm I might have flung myself upon the ground. Which was no pose for a god—the role we had undertaken to play.

  No matter. None of the Eteocretans noticed my behavior. All but their priestess (she was clearly that) had wheeled to face the new threat behind and beside them. Despite their terror, they shouted as bravely as they could and brandished their spears at the sky.

  A diffuse shadow moved over the ground from behind us, and I guessed that our medusa had come up to hover closer above us. The priestess lifted her eyes to it, studied the thing for a long moment, then lowered her gaze to Troy. “I Aphrodite,” she said dryly, and raised both arms over her head. She shifted her attention to Redfield, and moved minimally in his direction. “O Posidon.” Then she glanced at me. “Kai…?”

  “O Ermes,” Troy said. She glanced at me. “What’s the word for messenger?”

  “Try mandatophoros,” I whispered, bemused. Perhaps Troy was persuasive as “the Aphrodite,” the Foam-Born, and Redfield convincing as “the Poseidon,” the Earth-Shaker, but I found it difficult to picture myself as the winged-sandaled Hermes, Messenger of the Gods.

  “O Ermes enai mandatophoros mas,” Troy said loudly.

  The priestess looked at me sidelong and said, “O Ermes”—was that a wince?—then lowered her arms, rather hastily I thought, and turned back to Troy. “Emai i Diktynna.”

  Troy immediately raised her own arms. I hastily followed suit, and Redfield was even quicker than I. “I Diktynna,” said Troy, and lowered her arms slowly. Redfield and I repeated the name, or title—“I Diktynna”—and did as Troy had done.

  This tribute evidently placated the Diktynna, for she graced us with a cautious smile. Then, in strange and rapid Greek that I could barely follow, she addressed me. I consulted my translator. After a long moment it spoke—and I realized she had invited us to dinner.

  A further difficult exchange of sentences established that dinner was to be atop the seven-hundred-meter spire of rock that thrust out of the mountain before us. My long-unexercised legs, already wobbling after the short walk from our landing place, wobbled more severely at the mere thought of an hour of climbing to come.

  “Offer her a lift in the medusa,” said Troy. “Make it sound good.”

  I did my best with the translator, using lavish (and I hoped understandable) references to the comforts of our heavenly chariot. After much discussion among Diktynna and her escorts, the Cretan priestess—a woman of curiosity and evident intelligence—accepted our invitation with great dignity … and with barely disguised excitement.

  The medusa took us aboard and instantly lifted us into the air. In the translucent cells below the observation chamber moved the shadows of its fishy alien crew. What would Diktynna possibly make of them?

  Ahead were pine-clad mountains riven by a vertical gash, a deep ravine through which poured a crystal stream. We climbed toward the steeply rising cliffs. From terraced vineyards and gardens a few women and young children looked up at us gape-mouthed as we passed over them; men and boys watched us from the precipitous goat pastures above.

  Then we were soaring straight up the crag beside the deepest of the shadow-filled ravines, to the falcon’s eyrie upon which perched the living village—its houses barely distinguishable from the dark rock, were it not for a dozen fragrant threads of woodsmoke that rose from its stepped crest.

  Far below us I saw the blue gulf (its name in our era was Mirabello) studded with graceful ships and caiques, and the strips of wagon road that followed the coast to the east and across the narrow isthmus to the south. White towns stood out on a few hilltops, but even whiter were the bones of long-abandoned Minoan villas, moldering among olive groves and vineyards and cornfields gone to wild-flower.

  Diktynna stood uprigh
t in the observation dome of the medusa as it lifted us ever higher into the clear island air. She maintained a stem and bright-eyed demeanor, superbly aloof from her extraordinary circumstances.

  What passed through her mind? She spoke Greek, a form I suspected was closer to Mycenaean than Doric, and surely she was familiar with Mycenaean beliefs. The Mycenaeans worshipped Poseidon, even Hermes, and Aphrodite as well, who was a manifestation of the Great Goddess.

  But on Crete, Diktynna was the Great Goddess herself, a deity of trees and mountain peaks and wild animals. Although the woman with us was no more supernatural than we were, she was holy. Thus the name of the goddess was a title; it had come down to her, I was sure, from the great Minoan civilization which had been crushed by earthquake and volcanic eruption … and corrupted by the invasion of foreigners.

  21

  Night and fire.

  In the flaring light of rude clay lamps the rough walls were even harder to distinguish from the weathered rock of the pinnacle upon which the village perched. The stars and a gibbous moon in the velvet heavens above us were as bright as the stars of our lost home on Mars. Somewhere out of sight, over the rooftops, hovered the medusa, our sky-borne chariot.

  The Diktynna had managed to disappear shortly after we landed upon the rock, but her villagers had taken good care of us since. While the sun was still above Mount Dikte to the west they brought sheep down from the pastures and slaughtered lambs for us on a killing floor at the edge of the cliff. The carcasses now roasted on spits; the entrails, cleaned and stuffed with wild greens, boiled merrily in water jars set upon piles of coals. We were seated outdoors (no inner room could possibly have accommodated all who insisted upon seeing us) on benches covered with rugs of tightly-woven wool, dyed red and blue and embroidered with flowers and birds. Soon (its rich aroma had long advertised it) hot bread emerged steaming from beehive ovens, and from giant storage jars came handfuls of black olives shining with oil, and chunks of strong white cheese dripping with whey, and wine by the jugful, strong and young and tasting of herbs.

  Wide-eyed children brought us these things in clay bowls and stood close in front of us, peering at us as we ate. I could almost hear their thoughts; “Do the gods eat thus? With fingers and lips and teeth and tongues? Exactly like our parents!” Old men thrust especially tasty morsels at us, which we consumed with much lip-smacking and nods of pleasure, and old women pressed us with fragments of oozing honeycomb, watching us as avidly as their children.

  At first I understood not a word of what was said to us, except when some oldster, stating the obvious, essayed the Greek word for “bread” or “meat” or “wine.” But even without my translator we communicated: they made us understand we were the best entertainment they had had for a long time, a grand excuse for a party. I entered what words I could catch into the machine, all the while questioning our hosts closely for equivalents, and thus began assembling a primitive vocabulary of a tongue of which I had previously seen only a few fragments and a single skimpy example, long ago.

  At last, to the evident disappointment of our hosts, we could eat no more; soon thereafter, musical instruments appeared. An old man struck a lyre made of horn and tortoise shell, strung with gut, and someone else shook a rattle much like an Egyptian sistrum, and two young men pounded vigorously on drums made of polished cedar wood stretched with spotted hide. After the rhythm section had gotten well started we heard the sound of a flute, skirling dizzily above the hiss and thump of the rattles and drums.

  A shaft of yellow light fell into the little plateia, one edge of which was a cliff. A curtain had been moved aside in a nearby house, and in the backlit rectangle of the doorway an adolescent boy appeared. He held a double wooden flute to his lips, and his fingers did a rapid dance on the stops.

  We had not met this boy before. Perhaps fifteen years old, he was slender, black-haired, and wild-eyed—a beautiful creature, clad simply in a brief linen loincloth, with a golden dagger at his belt. The people of the village seemed to be fascinated by him, and watched him with respect. For a moment he stood rimmed in the light from the doorway, enjoying their attention; then, without interrupting his playing, he moved to join the other musicians. An urgent memory took me, as I recalled Redfield coming out of the darkness on Mars, playing his reed flute to celebrate the wedding of Bill and Marianne; Redfield and the boy were well matched, each as wild and dangerous as the other.

  From the same house, which I knew must be the shrine of the Goddess, four young women now emerged. Although none of the other village women we had seen affected this style, they wore flounced skirts and open bodices like Diktynna’s, echoes of the ancient civilization. The women linked arms and began to dance, while the musicians played even more energetically.

  The music, rapid and piercing but pitched true, spilled out in sinuous rills. It was like nothing I had heard before. At the same time it hinted teasingly at the music of half a dozen Middle Eastern cultures of our era—at once restless, tireless, hypnotic, provocative, rococo.

  The music slowed. The women were suddenly joined by four young men in the minimal ancient costume that, it seemed, ritual demanded—embossed leather straps like codpieces, and not much more. The men and women held hands and formed a circle, and for a few minutes did an intricate and stately dance together. Painted eyes flashed, red lips smiled, black ringlets flew.

  Memory teased me: there was a passage in the Iliad … but I could not bring it to mind. After all, this was not some high ceremony from the age of the great palaces; this was a simple village dance.

  The tempo picked up again, and shortly the women ran off. Someone tossed a leather ball into the circle of men, who caught it with laughter and shouts and began throwing it back and forth. Their feats of spinning and leaping, of balance and sleight-of-hand—even if they seemed more impressive than they really were, in the tricky light—were a dazzling, well-practiced routine.

  Now memory pressed upon me more strongly; this was not a scene from the Iliad but was straight from the Odyssey. During Odysseus’s visit to the Phaeacians he had been entertained by ball-playing young men who “moved in their dance on the bountiful earth, while the other youths stood at the ringside beating time, till the air was filled with sound.” Just so.

  The dancing continued with changes of tempo and melody and an occasional change of cast. Finally, the original dancers all vanished, to be replaced by less skillful if no less enthusiastic volunteers from among the villagers, men and women and the littlest of children. And the most daring by far were the oldest, no doubt remembering their glory days.

  We visitors “from heaven and the sea” were thoroughly lulled by food and drink. When the music abruptly ended, the silence startled us awake again.

  The curtain of the simple shrine opened and for the first time since the festivities had begun, Diktynna appeared. Her dress was a new one, of the same pattern; her golden crown was gone, and her hair was tied at the nape of the neck with a complexly knotted scarf. The boy who had been playing the flute was by her side.

  The little procession moved a few steps to the middle of the lamp-lit square; the boy and the leading dancers, male and female, were carrying small painted clay chests. Diktynna briefly raised her arms in the ritual gesture of worship. Looking first around her and then at us, she said—in Greek that now sounded limpid to my ears—“My friends, we have been honored by the presence of these heavenly guests. Therefore let us make them friendly donations, as is only proper.”

  She eyed me, and the expression on her face can only be described as mischievous. “First, to Hermes, the Ambassador of the Gods, whose feet—so sure, so swift when treading upon the clouds, as I have often heard the Achaians claim—were sorely taxed by our rocky paths today.”

  One of the women stepped forward and placed a small clay chest upon the ground in front of the bench where I sat, lifted its lid, and stepped back. I hesitated—then reached in and drew out a pair of embossed high-laced sandals, beautifully made of supple
golden cowhide. I held them up for the appreciation of the crowd. The gesture was greeted with a murmur of approval; I heard a name repeated and several people looking at a gnarled man, the one who, I supposed, had made them.

  After a few seconds of urgent consultation with my translator, I came forth with a speech I hoped would be adequate: “Blessed hosts, I thank you for these beautiful sandals, and I promise I will never be without them in time of need. Moreover, so sturdily and cleverly are they fashioned”—I gave the suspected craftsman a nod—“that I hereby confer upon them the property of extended life, so that they shall remain in perfect condition so long as I have need of them—which, judging from past experience, may well be for hundreds or thousands or even countless numbers of years to come.”

  Diktynna received this pronouncement with her eyebrows raised to new heights of skepticism (I also caught sidelong glances from Troy and Redfield), but the villagers responded with murmurs of wonder and, I thought, appreciation, “Most eloquently spoken… Giant-slayer,” Diktynna remarked, applying to me yet another of the titles of Hermes—the least apt yet.

  She turned her wide gaze upon Redfield. “O fearful Poseidon, Earthshaker, ruler of wind and wave”—to my ears, her cool tone seemed to convey even richer irony—“on this visit, if not always in times past, you have displayed benign restraint in the exercise of your undoubted might. For which of course we are most grateful. Now in the days of our glory, we would naturally have sacrificed hecatombs of oxen in your honor and presented you with whole ships full of treasure. Alas”—she allowed herself a dry and diffident cough—“times and circumstances change. What we can give you, you do not need … but who better than you can appreciate its uses?”