Tom Holt

by 4 Ye Gods!

  'Hi, Betty-Lou,' said the eagle.

  'Mary,' replied Ms. Fisichelli, coldly affable. 'How've you been keeping?'

  'Oh, fine, fine,' said the eagle. 'Look, I guess I owe you an explanation.'

  'I guess you do.'

  'Well,' said the eagle. It shifted its grip on the rock and winced. 'Look, would it be easier for you if I became human for a bit?'

  'That's entirely up to you,' said Ms. Fisichelli. 'Far be it from me to dictate...'

  'Thanks,' said Mary, shedding her feathers and donning a pale blue sun-dress with small pink flowers. 'My talons were killing me; she explained.

  'So then,' Ms. Fisichelli said. 'You were about to say something.'

  'Yes,' Mary replied. 'Look, you've probably guessed or been told, I'm Prometheus's eagle. You know, the one who was given the job of ripping the poor guy's liver out every morning and evening as part of his punishment...'

  'I'm a graduate of six universities,' Ms. Fisichelli interrupted. 'I do know my basic mythology, thank you.'

  'Sorry.' Mary repressed an urge to spring into the air, spread her wings and scream; she picked at her thumbnail instead. 'Well, Pro and I... When you've known someone as long as that, you can't help sort of getting to understand a guy, and besides, what the gods did to him was wrong. He was only trying to help the mortals, and they stomped him. The gods don't like us, Betty-Lou, they...'

  'By us,' Ms. Fisichelli said, 'do you mean humans, or eagles?'

  'Neither,' Mary said, 'only themselves. You know about the First Joke, don't you? And how they want to do away with comedy and take the world over again?' Ms. Fisichelli nodded. 'And you don't think someone ought to stop them? Godsdamnit, Betty-Lou, can you imagine for one moment what that would be like? A world with no laughter in it? We just couldn't survive.'

  Mary realised as she said this that Ms. Fisichelli had managed to survive for over thirty-five years in this cold hard world without having a lot to do with humour; probably she kept out of its way, and if she couldn't do that she sort of stepped over it. But that, Mary felt, proved her point.

  'Well,' she went on, 'we couldn't survive, anyway. So Pro asked me if I'd help him, and I said yes. And so I sort of became his assistant, did all the leg-work for him. It was fun; I enjoyed it. For one thing, he showed me how I could make myself human again; in fact, several humans. That's cool, except there's some of me give me a pain in the butt, but never mind. I don't have to live with me, after all.'

  Ms. Fisichelli remained unimpressed. 'So?' she said.

  'So,' Mary went on, 'we found this hero, an actual son of Jupiter, someone who'd actually have the nuts to defy the gods and cut the chains at the proper moment and ... pardon me, have you got the right time there, please?'

  Ms. Fisichelli showed Mary her watch-face.

  'That's good,' Mary said, 'because any minute now, Pro's going to be set loose and he's going to put a stop to this down-with-laughter thing once and for all. And once that happens, Betty-Lou, there's going to be big trouble.'

  'So I should think,' said the Pythoness, loyally.

  'For the gods, I mean.' Mary shrugged. 'Me; she said, 'I can't see what Pro's worried about. If you ask me, they've got it coming. But he says no, they're the gods, you've got have them, so long as they don't interfere too much. Without gods, he says, who could we blame for things? He wants to save them.'

  'Save them?' Betty-Lou gasped. 'What from?'

  'Themselves, mostly,' Mary said. 'You see, right now, they're having a board meeting. Have you the faintest notion what that means?'

  Betty-Lou shook her head.

  'Think of the end of the world,' said Mary, 'with added bickering, and you'll get the idea. Once they discover what's happened, Jupiter is going to be very, very angry. He's going to want to start saying it with thunderbolts. Now these days, you can't do that; you start spraying thunderbolts about the place, you're going to set off all the nuclear early-warning systems the superpowers aren't supposed to have any more, and the next thing you know it'll be goodbye, Earth. And the gods will be so busy falling out with each other and accusing each other of cutting bits out of the Sunday papers and leaving the top off the toothpaste that they won't notice what's happening and stop it. And if the Earth ceases to exist, then so do the gods. This is the world they're tied to; when it goes, so do they. Not us; Mary added, 'them. When all the dust settles, it'll be them who aren't there any more. We'll be all right.'

  'Why?'

  'Reality bifurcation,' Mary said.

  Ms. Fisichelli frowned; for a moment she'd thought Mary had said Reality Bifurcation. 'Pardon me?'

  'It says,' Mary replied, 'in Article Seven of the Universal Charter of Possibility that it's impossible for the gods to destroy the Earth -- the Number One Earth -- except at the ordained time and through the proper channels. There's, oh, forms that've got to be filled in, that sort of thing. Public enquiries. Notices posted up outside town halls. What I mean is, they can't just do it by accident. So what'll happen is that an alternative world will come into being on which they do manage to destroy themselves -- and the world too, of course; pretty short-lived world, huh? -- and then it'll just happen. Only they won't be here any more. The Probability Police will see to that. I'm telling you, those guys are mean. You think death's a tough baby, you wait till you meet Sergeant Kawalski.'

  Betty-Lou sagged like an Easter egg on a radiator. 'You can't be serious,' she said. 'They're the gods, Mary; nobody can push the gods around.'

  'Don't bet on it,' Mary said. 'Just think what happened to Woden.'

  Ms. Fisichelli fell silent and gnawed her lip, for Mary undoubtedly had a point. One of the first things young astrotheological students are told is the story of how, shortly after Woden, chief god of the now defunct Nordic pantheon, offended against the Possibility regulations by restoring his dead son Balder to life on a Sunday without a resuscitation certificate in a residential area, he was abducted by three large, anonymous men in a blue and white chariot. His severed head was later found outside the palace of Offa, King of the East Saxons (who shortly afterwards abandoned the beliefs of his forefathers accepted Christianity and made a pilgrimage to Salt Lake City); the rest of his body was never recovered. The kidnappers were later identified as Possibility Policemen. Although nobody has ever been able satisfactorily to establish what actually happened to Woden, it is thought that they made him an Offa he couldn't refuse.

  Ms. Fisichelli thought about it, and shuddered, until she resembled a brightly-dressed blancmange on a speeding trolley. 'But he wasn't a proper god, surely,' she said at last. 'And anyway...'

  She fell silent; somehow or other she had contrived to run out of anyways.

  'It's serious,' Mary said. 'That's what Pro thinks, anyway.'

  Ms. Fisichelli frowned. 'So just what am I supposed to be able to do about it?' she said.

  'Easy,' Mary replied. 'Just get Apollo down here before he has a chance to go to the board meeting.'

  'Apollo-?' Ms. Fisichelli's eyebrows shot up like share prices in April. 'Why him?'

  Mary grinned. 'You'll see,' she said. 'Do you think you can get in touch with him? Quickly, I mean? Without all that fooling around?'

  Ms. Fisichelli shook her head. 'No,' she said. 'You know as well as I do how we go about invoking him. If you're right, there just isn't time...'

  Mary looked at her.

  'All right then,' Ms. Fisichelli said, 'so there is a way. But it's more than my job's worth...'

  Mary looked at her again. These things are cumulative. 'Betty-Lou,' she said, 'just what do you think your job'll be worth if Apollo ceases to exist?'

  'Well...'

  'Betty-Lou.'

  The Pythoness hesitated just a moment longer; then she shrugged.

  'What the hell,' she said, 'you can only be turned into a weevil once, I guess. You win'

  Mary smiled, as the Pythoness took a step to one side and prepared her mind for what was to follow.

  There are many different ways of s
ummoning gods. You can sacrifice goats, or burn incense, or say mantras, or any combination of the three. There are also complex invocation rituals, some of which we have seen; you can leave messages on the architraves of temples, or use the statue. By and large the gods don't really mind being summoned in any one of these ways, because the summons is not binding, and they can use the divine equivalent of leaving the phone off the hook. But if you use the one method which they have to obey, regardless of where they are and what they might be doing at the time, you are guaranteed to get a god, quite possibly a god in his pants and socks and without his teeth in, and almost certainly a very angry god. Nothing, after all, gets up the nose of an omnipotent being like being told what to do.

  What you do is, you put two fingers in your mouth and you whistle.

  Largely as a result of the enormous quantum increase in philosophical productivity caused by the introduction of the new technology, many of the fundamental maxims that make up the structure of the modern astrophilosopher's world model have required amendment and expansion. For example, Descartes' immortal conclusion cogito ergo sum was recently subjected to destruction testing by a group of graduate researchers at Princeton led by Professors Montjuic and Lauterbrunnen, and now reads, in the revised version to be found in the Shorter Harvard Orthodoxy:

  (a) I think, therefore I am, or

  (b) Perhaps I thought, therefore I was; but

  (c) These days, I tend to leave all that side of things to my wife.

  Developments such as this have in turn served to make academics working in the divinity subjects more commercially aware, and many of them now retain the services of specialist ecclesiastical lawyers, accountants and, of course, agents. The leading firm of ecclesiastical representatives is, needless to say, Alfred Furbank of New York and London, whose Mr. Kortright represents (among many others) Betty-Lou Fisichelli. Mr. Kortright is, understandably, a very busy man, and when he received two simultaneous calls from clients in mid-flight on his way to the annual Theological Trade Fair in Frankfurt, he wished that he had been able to find a suitable assistant to whom he could delegate. However, the qualities required of a successful ecclesiastical agent are rarely met with.

  'Who?' he asked again.

  'The Pythoness of Delphi on red,' replied the New York switchboard, 'Aleister Crowley on blue. He's on a pay phone. They're both holding.'

  Kortright shuddered slightly. Against his better judgment, the New York office had recently installed one of those gadgets that plays callers piped music while they're holding, and some fool of a managing partner had chosen the Dies Irae as a suitable tune. Something to put the fear of God into 'em, he'd said.

  He pressed the button. 'Right,' he told New York. 'Put on Fisichelli, tell Aleister no, not till I get the money, and then no more calls until we touch down. If anyone else calls in with a burning bush, tell them to call the fire department.'

  Click.

  'Betty-Lou, hi there, how's the prediction business?'

  'Mr. Kortright?'

  'Here.'

  'Mr. Kortright, can you get me access to all the major networks, please? There's something very important I have to tell the world. From Apollo.'

  I didn't think it could get worse, Kortright thought, but I was wrong. 'Betty-Lou,' he said, 'we've all got something very important we've got to tell the world. Some of us do it by shooting the president, some of us take overdoses, some of us just make do with the phone-ins. The competition for air time is very great at all times.'

  'But this is important,' Betty-Lou said. 'It's a genuine message from the gods. Or at least one of them; she remembered. 'He's putting himself in jeopardy speaking out like this; you have no idea how much trouble he'll be in when Jupiter finds out. The least we can do is make sure people hear him.'

  'Are you sure about that, Betty-Lou?' said Kortright. 'I mean, it sounds to me like it'd be a very bad idea, from his point of view. And yours,' he added. 'There's this thing called credibility, you know, and I've been working very hard to build yours up. One little slip, like you going on the Johnny Carson Show saying you've been hearing voices and you'll think Joan of Arc had it easy. It won't just be the English who roast you alive, it'll be Newsweek and...'

  'Mr. Kortright,' said Betty-Lou firmly. 'You have to arrange for me to broadcast to the world. If not...'

  'Yes?' said Kortright impatiently. 'Go ahead, worry me.'

  'Well, I hate to do this, but you have to understand...'

  'What?'

  'If you'll just look out of your window, Mr. Kortright.' Kortright glanced out of the window. In the air just above the wing of the Lear jet, he saw what looked remarkably like an elderly car with a team of four winged horses attached to it by means of a complicated arrangement of transmission parts and drive-chains. In the driver's seat was what Mr. Kortright instinctively recognised as a very angry Sun-God, who was aiming at him with a bow of burning gold.

  'Mr. Kortright?'

  'Here.'

  'What do you think you can do?'

  Mr. Kortright looked at his watch. 'Give me fifteen minutes, OK?' he said. 'We can syndicate it through one of the big agencies. They'll send someone over to do the actual interview. Oh and Betty-Lou...'

  'Yes, Mr. Kortright?'

  'Do you think you could ask your friend with the bow to back off slightly? Only one of his horses is trying to eat the wing of this jet, and if I crash there won't be any interview at all. You got that?'

  'I'll see what I can do, Mr. Kortright.'

  Kortright pressed the button, leaned back in his seat, screamed, and then pulled himself back together. When you started seeing god yourself, it was time to move over more towards the administration side of the business.

  He called up London office.

  'Get me Danny Bennett,' he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Jason looked about him.

  Far above, he could just make out four enormous pink bars that seemed to be clamping the sky to the Earth. The Caucasus had vanished, and he appeared to be standing in the streets of a city, though not any city that he could recognise. It was snowing bitterly, but for some reason the snow didn't settle on him; in fact, each single snowflake somehow contrived to jink out of his way at the last minute and land somewhere else. He had the strange feeling that wherever this was, he was really somewhere else.

  'Where am I?' Jason asked.

  'You know,' said a voice beside him, 'I never expected to hear anyone actually say that. It's only people in books...'

  'Yes,' Jason said, 'but where in god's name actually am I, and we'll leave the literary niceties till later. And who are you?'

  'Prometheus,'

  }

  the voice or voices replied,

  'Gelos,'

  saying the names together,

  'and you're on the world you're holding in your hand.

  It's hardly an original device, I we know, but there, it's your fault for wanting to know what's going on.'

  'Ah,' Jason replied. 'So I now know what's going on, do I? Thank you so much.'

  'Jason,' said the voices or voice, 'the world you are standing on is a world which actually exists. Its technical name is Betamax 87659807 and it is the same as your world in most material respects. It is your world; or it could be. Your world could be merged with it, and nobody would know. Now there are some differences, as you will shortly find out, but once the merger had happened nobody would remember them. It would be as if everything had always been like this, and anyone who remembered otherwise would be sent somewhere quiet and restful with high walls until he was well again. Now the gods want your world merged with this one, and they've been trying to bring the merger about for a very long time. I we would like you to have a look at this world and let me us know what you think of it.'

  Jason shrugged. It was like, he decided, those offers you get from the timeshare companies where you go along and listen to their spiel, and afterwards they give you a portable television. The only element lacking, so f
ar as he could tell, was anything resembling a portable television.

  'Where are we now, then?' he asked. 'I don't recognise this at all.'

  'This is the street where you live, or would have lived, or will live, in Anglia, which is, was or will be what they call England,' he/they said. 'And the date is December the twenty-fourth. Sorry if this all seems needlessly Dickensian, but we haven't got much time, so we wanted to get in as much culture shock as possible. This is a world where Prometheus never stole the Joke from Heaven, and where the gods never retired. Right, roll 'em.'

  As Jason stood there recovering from the above conversation, which put him in mind of a multiple choice English grammar exam, he looked up and saw a small knot of miserable-looking people trudging up the street. They wore grey homespun overcoats and grey knitted scarves, and they were getting drenched in slush by a passing oxcart. The leader of the party was carrying a collecting tin, with For The Gods; Please Give Fearfully written on it. The party stopped outside one of the dilapidated thatched houses that made up the street and started to sing.

  'We wish you a Saturnalia,' they sang

  'We wish you a Saturnalia

  We wish you a Saturnalia

  And a pious New Year.'

  'No Christmas, you see,' he they said in Jason's ear. 'No Donations of Constantine, no Christianity, ergo no Christmas.'

  'Huh,' Jason replied, and for two pins he'd have added 'Humbug.' Christmas always bored him rigid, partly because he was a Hero and lived on a higher plane of background experience, and partly because his family always gave him socks. Something about the song troubled him, however. 'Shouldn't it be "We wish you a happy Saturnalia," though?'

  'No such thing as a happy Saturnalia.'

  The singers had finished their song and the door of the house opened. A terrified-looking man poked his head round, thrust two gold coins into the tin, and slammed the door. The leader ticked a name off a list and they moved on down the street. Outside the next door they sang;