“Agreement to the third level,” Aaw trilled.
The Qualeewoohs winged their way beyond the palace, heading south, back toward the great desert.
Chapter 22
Zeus decided he couldn’t meet Maggie for dinner in the nude. He had to wear something. So he colored himself with golden pigments, and had his service droids paint to vivid blue lightning bolts across his broad chest, meeting just below his navel. Then he had his droids braid his long hair in tight knots, weaving metallic blue beads into it.
When he finished, he put on his eye shadow and mascara, painted his lips, sprayed his hair with lightly scented pheromones, and put on his only article of clothing—a bracelet for his right thigh, which emitted a soft pink, pulsating light. In the darkness, it would draw Maggie’s eyes downward, focusing them in regions of delight.
At last he checked himself in the mirror, just as the serving druids arrived with dinner. For the evening’s repast, he’d chosen a number of dishes that could be eaten lukewarm—one pudding to be eaten on the chest, one saucy meat dish to be eaten on the navel, and a sticky compote of fruit to be eaten … elsewhere.
Zeus selected three potent wines from Felph’s own vineyards, began spiking each with a capsule of Delight, a drug to lift the mood, alleviate fears, leave one giddy and euphoric. It was simply a concoction of natural amino acids found in the human body—a distillation guaranteed to make a woman feel as if she were living the best and brightest moment of her life.
Yet Zeus frowned as he dropped two capsules into the first bottle of wine. Maggie hadn’t reacted as strongly to the drugs last night as other women did. Perhaps it had to do with her pregnancy. The hormones in a woman’s body at such times might dilute the natural effects of the Delight. Zeus was not sure. He doubled the dose, putting it in a delicious pink wine. If Maggie didn’t react to one of the weaker wines, he’d bring out this bottle as a last resort.
For music, he ordered the players—a set of twelve portable droids that each had speakers mounted inside—to set the mood for the evening by playing Asplund’s Symphony to Erotica in D-minor, a magnificent arrangement composed around the different stages of foreplay, leading to a musical climax most women found enormously arousing, whether they were with a sex partner or not.
Once the feast, the drinks, and the music were chosen, he sent the service droids ahead to arrange things. He ordered them to hide in various parts of the garden, so the music would float ethereally from the distance, while food droids appeared one by one, wheeling in from different directions.
Last of all, he sent a droid out with a simple mat, something to let him and Maggie make love in a warm, dry environment, should she want it that way. If not, there was always the pond.
Zeus checked himself in the mirror one last time, then strode through the corridors of the palace out to the North Garden.
The pebbles on the garden path crunched softly beneath his bare feet. Air perfumed by a million roses stroked the hairs of his bare chest, hardening his nipples, playing between his legs.
Already, the strains of Symphony Erotique began rising from the garden—a stirring serenade of violins and violas over bassoons, a sound of flowers opening, of release.
As usual with Zeus, when a passionate mood took him, his focus narrowed. He’d been daydreaming about this tryst all afternoon. As he strode along in the starlight he did not notice the towering columns of roses along his path, the magnificent draping flowers, larger than plates, nodding from perfect vines.
He did not even hear the symphony, or the sound of the gravel crackling under his feet. Instead, his mind filled with images of Maggie in the starlight, her tender lips, his hands stroking her red hair, the full mounds of her breasts.
Only barely did he keep from breaking into a run. Eagerly he rounded a corner among the high hedgerows, following the scent of spiced meats, came in full view of the peacock fountains.
Things were not as he’d expected.
A table sat beside the pool, a circular table large enough for ten. Above it stood a wooden gazebo, with soft dark netting. In the netting hung tiny lights, like dozens of fireflies.
Maggie sat at the table—along with Gallen, a young stranger, Hera, Arachne, Athena, and the bears. Only Herm was not at the table. They all spoke softly, enjoying a sumptuous meal. None of them seemed to have noticed him.
Zeus turned, creeping to run back for some clothes, when Hera called, “Oh, My Sweet, we’ve been waiting for you!”
Zeus was trapped under the gaze of them all, naked. He could not hide his arousal, dared not put his hand in front of him to cover himself, lest it draw more attention to his state.
“I… uh,” Zeus stammered.
“Come back here. I know, you thought we would dine alone,” Hera called, her voice muted from under the gazebo. “But Father arrived early, so I invited everyone.”
Zeus found that his arousal had ceased, so he turned slowly. Zeus was more embarrassed by the presence of Gallen than of the young stranger. Then Zeus understood. All this was planned to humiliate him. The cloth over the gazebo was a sound-muting net, so he would not have heard their voices on approach. The tiny lights, no brighter than starlight glimmering off the dim pools, worked as camouflage.
From the exultant grin on Hera’s face, from the cruel smile Arachne bore, he knew Hera had contrived this. She’d lured him here, naked and aroused, before the others. Herm, Arachne, Maggie, Hera—all of them played the Game against him.
Arachne flashed two fingers. Two points, then. They’d played the Game. Hera won.
Zeus smiled, even as he fumed. Well done, my love. You played me like a puppet, and I danced to your tune. In spite of his chagrin, Zeus could not help but be proud of his wife.
“I love your new look,” Arachne called to Zeus. “So … manly.”
There was nothing to do now but try to seem nonchalant. Perhaps most embarrassing was Gallen’s reaction. His jaw had dropped in such a way Zeus knew it went against all his principles to appear naked in public. Ah well, thank the heavens for a bit of body paint. At least he hadn’t come totally nude.
The stranger beside Gallen said, “Well, I must say I don’t care for it at all, Zeus, you’re taking this nudity entirely too far.” Only then did Zeus recognize his father’s clone.
“If you looked as fine as I do,” Zeus told him, “you’d run naked, too. I must say, Father, a young body has not strengthened your appeal.”
“Oh, don’t say that,” Arachne grinned. “He looks very handsome. I’ve thought of nothing but incest all evening.”
Lord Felph smiled appreciatively, and Zeus saw that Arachne was trying to appease the old man. She wanted to head off any arguments before they began.
Felph must have recognized it, too, for he made certain to get in the last word. “At the very least, consider wearing a breechcloth. If you look in the historical archives, you’ll find that they reached the height of fashion under the Beeorso Dominion. You’ll see some tremendous examples of what can be done with a simple piece of cloth.”
“Well, Father,” Zeus said to change the subject, “I see that you had a successful expedition.” He decided then and there that if his father didn’t want him naked, he’d damned well run around naked for the next three hundred years.
“If you call getting eaten by sfuz successful, then, yes, I suppose this was an astonishing triumph. I don’t doubt that at least a hundred of them are sucking the marrow from my bones at this very moment.”
“Successful, I mean, in that Gallen and Athena at least made it home alive, and you did find some sfuz.”
“Oh, yes,” Felph laughed. “Gallen fought gloriously. I do believe that he might actually be capable of making his way down to the bottom.”
“Not likely,” Gallen said, “with so many.”
“Ah but you see their limitations,” Felph said. “They are not very bright.”
Zeus took a seat next to Hera, and she smiled at him, a sweet, confident smile. Perfectly l
ovely. She reached down and grasped his knee, then massaged his leg.
“Perhaps they are stupid, but we shouldn’t be over confident,” Gallen considered. “Athena said that, considering how long it took a hunting party to find us, she thinks we were at least a dozen kilometers from their nesting site. Who knows how many of them there are? Or what they’re capable of.”
Lord Felph frowned a bit, an old man’s gesture that seemed out of place on his fresh young clone. “Time, space, nature, self. I wonder what the Qualeewoohs discovered that would make them believe they conquered those?”
“Who knows?” Gallen asked. “Certainly, the Waters don’t give the sfuz such power.”
“Perhaps that is only because the sfuz aren’t wise,” Athena cut in. “Whatever transformation the Waters work upon them, it may not change the way the creatures think, nor affect their basic natures. The sfuz are hunters of the deep tangle. They live down in the shadows, and hunt the upper boughs by night. That is their nature. It may be that they could do more—conquer space, leap through time, but just do not desire it.”
“Perhaps they do things we never imagine,” Arachne put in, and every head turned to her. “Imagine that if a sfuz looked up from the tangle on a clear night, and saw the light of a star, and longed to be there. If it had drunk from the Waters and conquered space, it might find itself there in an instant—and in that instant, it would be consumed in fires it had never imagined. Thus ends the sfuz.” Arachne looked pointedly at Zeus. Don’t get burned, she was telling him. No one else seemed to notice.
“So travel between space may be practiced among the sfuz—” Gallen put in, “to their own detriment.”
“It is always a danger to those who do not recognize their limits,” Arachne said.
At that moment, Orick chose to ask a question, one that had always bothered Zeus. “I don’t understand all of this. If the Qualeewoohs are immortal, and if they’ve conquered space, then why don’t they show themselves?”
Felph leaned both elbows on the table, folded his hands, and stared deeply into them. “I believe that the ancient Qualeewoohs live, but not in physical bodies. They’ve abandoned those.
“Some on this planet understand the folklore better than I, but Qualeewooh belief goes something like this: Qualeewoohs say life is something one `flies through.’ That is all that they do, they fly through life toward some distant destination. Their journey, they say, began long before birth, and will continue long after this life. They move toward ‘the Enlightenment,’ a moment in one’s life where light, where pure intelligence and its attendant powers, become infused into them, in that moment when the image of what we desire to become is engraved into our flesh.
“When that moment comes, an exchange will be made, the new body for the old.” Orick said, “It sounds to me like they’re talking about the resurrection.”
“Perhaps it sounds to you as if their doctrine is the same as yours, Orick,” Felph countered, “but only because we are filtering their doctrine first into human terms, then comparing it to something we understand. However, the Qualeewoohs see a thousand shades of differentiation between your concepts and theirs.
“The Qualeewoohs see this life as a time of preparation, a time during which they must ‘soften their bones,’ so when Enlightenment strikes, they will gain the full effect of it.
“Now, this is the most interesting part of their beliefs, as far as I’m concerned: they say ‘The Waters of Strength’ are ‘The Strong Blow’ toward Enlightenment. The Waters were designed to ‘Shape Bone’ toward Enlightenment.”
Felph drew silent for a moment, then sighed. “I do not know if I can explain this any better, but the Waters of Strength quite literally are meant to transform one into Qualeewooh gods.
“And, Orick, while you may take comfort in the thought of resurrection, the Qualeewoohs have no similar concept. For them, the Enlightenment is not a comfort. The act of attaining godhood is destructive. Just as you must destroy a block of wood to carve it into a work of art, even so, the elders of the Qualeewooh believe our hopes, our desires all will be pared away, until we each become equal with the divine image. But what that divine image is, even the Qualeewoohs don’t know.
“But I do know that the Qualeewooh gods aren’t physical beings in the sense that you and I are familiar with.”
“If they are not physical beings, what else could they be?” Orick asked.
Lord Felph shrugged. “A good question. I don’t believe in beings of pure energy—not in the sense that the Qualeewooh gods are spoken of. Energy beings—if they do evolve or exist at all—are too ephemeral. Born on lightning, they would die on lightning, and none of us would be the wiser.
“But there are types of matter that we cannot detect, or that we can detect only dimly. Some theorists believe that as much as ninety percent of all matter is undetectable to mankind through our instruments. The Qualeewooh seem to have a word for it. They call it ‘dim matter,’ and it is in this invisible matter that they say their ancestors yet live.”
“You’re talking about interdimensional travel again,” Maggie said.
“Precisely,” Felph said.
“Wait a minute,” Gallen said. “I don’t see how this is possible, to transmit a body from this dimension to another. I mean, I’m not a technologist, but …”
“Think of it this way,” Maggie said. “Suppose you take a person’s memories, his personality, and you download that into an AI. Even though that person may die, his or her personality, experiences, and ambitions live on, right?”
“Right,” Gallen said.
“Then imagine that we download those memories into a clone. In our parlance, we say that the person is revivified, right? The person is still alive, still the same in all important ways.”
“Right,” Gallen said, obviously not certain where Maggie was going.
“But imagine for a second that those same memories are downloaded into an android, a machine that thinks and feels in every way as if it were human. Is it still the same person?”
“No,” Gallen said. “An android is still just an ambulatory storage facility.”
“But the android doesn’t know that. Many people have been downloaded into machine bodies, and they seem to like it. They aren’t troubled by disturbing dreams, they don’t have to deal with the emotional side of life. In short, to them life seems better without dealing with emotional issues.”
“Yes, but such people lose their humanity,” Gallen said. “In time they forget how to feel, how to relate to other humans.”
“So they end up going to Bothor,” Orick said, “where they don’t have to deal with regular folks. We’ve been there.”
“Well,” Maggie said, “some theorists say we can’t travel to other dimensions in our physical bodies, but we could create artificial bodies in another dimension, then download our personalities into those new bodies. It wouldn’t be much different from being an android.”
“No,” Felph said. “You’ve got the analogy right, but you’ve just missed it. If I understand the Qualeewoohs, they consider this life to be the experiment. They say they existed as dim matter before this world, and they’ve come here to gain experience in our dimension. Their goal is to take that experience back to the dim worlds. There are lessons they can learn here in mortality they can’t learn elsewhere.”
“Such as?” Orick asked.
Felph shrugged. “I don’t really care. It has to do with self-testing, preparation for greater knowledge. Qualeewooh mumbo jumbo.”
“If the Qualeewoohs are telling the truth,” Maggie said, “have you considered the possibility that they really are creatures who’ve somehow traveled to this dimension? That the ‘Waters of Strength’ might just be the ticket home?”
“Odd as it sounds, I’ve considered that,” Felph said, “but it appears to me that they evolved here. I can’t credit that theory.”
“But you’re convinced the Qualeewoohs have learned to transport their consciousness betwe
en dimensions?” Maggie asked.
“I … am persuaded that they’ve done something,” Felph said. “What that is, I can’t guess. But when I wear a Qualeewooh spirit mask to bed at night … You know, the Qualeewoohs have never revealed the secrets to making those masks. The masks seem to be made of nothing special—skin, metals, a few plant fibers and paints,” Felph’s voice grew silent, and he bit back his words as if afraid to speak them. Still, he spoke, and his voice was both frightened and respectful, “but even using the same materials, I cannot duplicate the effect. There is something about a Qualeewooh having worn the mask that makes it viable, that makes it receptive to messages. It’s almost as if … by communicating from one Qualeewooh to another, the mask itself becomes a living thing, an ear that still hears, though its master has passed on.”
Zeus had been watching this whole exchange, but as Felph fell into his reverie, Zeus got a chill down his back. He knew people who used the masks. Several local hermits would not steep at night without the masks on their faces, for they said the voices of the Qualeewooh Masters soothed them, even though they did not always understand the words spoken.
Yet in the past, Lord Felph had refused to let Zeus wear a mask. Like many other things, he considered it to be dangerous. The masks often had mind-altering effects on people. Zeus considered. I should wear one tonight.
Lord Felph suddenly looked up, just as a fireball crossed the sky, lighting the heavens. “You know,” Felph said, “it’s damnably late. Why isn’t Herm here?”
Hera, who had kept her hand on Zeus’s knee for the past few minutes, suddenly moved it higher up Zeus’s thigh. “I asked some of the droids to find him and invite him here for dinner,” Hera said. “But that was hours ago.”
Felph glanced at the servant Dooring, who’d just come to bring dessert. “Dooring, what did Herm say when you invited him to dinner?”
“The droids couldn’t find him,” Dooring answered. “As far as I can tell, he isn’t in the palace.”
Felph raised a brow. “Has he left the grounds?”
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