by Tom Holt
Mrs. Derry stopped kneading and dusted her hands off purposefully. ‘He’s very angry with you, Jason,’ she said.
‘So?’ Jason said wearily. It had been a long day, his head was buzzing and his knuckles were sore. He wanted a cup of tea, a nice warm bath, and bed.
‘Jason,’ his mother said.
Now some names, as we know, have meanings. Dorothy means Gift of God, Winifred means White Wave and Stephen means Crown. Jason, to the best of our knowledge, doesn’t mean anything. Except, of course, when said in a significant tone by somebody’s mother.
‘Mum,’ Jason complained, ‘I’m tired. Can’t it wait?’
‘Your father,’ said Mrs. Derry, ‘is very angry with you.’
‘Tough,’ Jason replied. ‘But I really couldn’t care less. I’ve had it up to here with him, and . . .’
‘Jason,’ Mrs. Derry said, ‘you mustn’t disobey your father. It’s not right.’
‘Mum . . .’ Jason was on the point of pleading.
‘Now you promise me you won’t do it again,’ said Mrs. Derry, ‘and we’ll say no more about it, all right?’
‘Mum,’ Jason said - it took a lot of strength of will to say it, too - ‘I can’t do what Dad says. It’s wrong.’
‘Jason,’ said Mrs. Derry sternly. ‘That’s nonsense and you know it. He’s your father.’
Jason wanted to object. He wanted to say that Attila the Hun had had a son, and so had Genghis Khan; that there was a flaw in the logic of her argument you could drive a very large vehicle through without even clipping your wing mirrors; that what Jupiter wanted him to do was as gross a betrayal of his mortality as it was possible to get; that Jupiter had sent a god - his own half-brother - to kill him today, and if that hadn’t dissolved the filial contract, he wanted to know what would. What he actually said was ‘Mum . . .’
‘He’s your father,’ Mrs. Derry said again. ‘And he’s worried about you.’
That was almost too much - almost - for Jason. He was about to say that if he was worried about his son’s safety, why was he sending divine assassins to have him forcibly stellified, but somehow he didn’t. Instead, he said ‘Look . . .’ Which was a change from ‘Mum . . .’ but not an improvement on it.
When the gods first designed Heroes, they intended them to be a special reserve category of super-mortals with all the good mortal features souped up to competition standard and all the bad mortal features either sublimated or omitted. The design team assigned to the job had obviously enjoyed it, because they took a pride in their work that was notably absent from the standard production mortal. The everyday hatchback model, on leaving the showroom, has inbuilt design flaws: cowardice, greed, spite, frailty, appalling power-to-weight ratio and fuel consumption, and a tendency to measles. Not so Heroes; they are godlike in their strength and prowess, but most ungodlike in that they exhibit nobility, courage and altruism; seek to alleviate the sufferings of mankind instead of scoring five points (ten for a double Woe Score) for them; right wrongs; succour rather than sucker the weak; generally speaking, don’t bicker like tired, spoilt children at every opportunity. In fact, Heroes are such a successful design concept that not long after the first batch were released, the gods realised that they’d cocked it up again and recalled the whole issue with almost indecent haste. Something had to be done.
What was done was this. Into each Hero, a tragic flaw was introduced, individually tailored to self-destruct the Hero just as soon as he began to show signs of getting too big for his seven-league boots. Achilles his pride; Oedipus his curiosity; Hamlet his indecision; David Gower his tendency to flap at deliveries aimed at his leg stump - each Hero has been deliberately sabotaged to prevent him making that final leap across the terminals of the sparkplug from imperfect to perfect. Jason, of course, was no exception.
‘Mum . . .’ he said.
‘Jason,’ said his mother, ‘what is that dog doing in my kitchen?’
The words ‘what dog?’ froze on Jason’s lips. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘yes. That’s Cerberus.’
‘Outside.’
‘But Mum . . .’
‘Outside.’
‘But Mum . . .’
‘Outside.’
Miserably, Jason grabbed hold of Cerberus by one ear and led him out to the garage.
‘Good dog,’ Jason said guiltily. ‘Stay.’
Cerberus gave him a threefold look that reflected perfectly what Jason was himself thinking at precisely that moment, right down to the three dots. But Jason could only shrug his shoulders and look extremely silly.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘But what can I do?’
He closed the door, locked it and went back into the house, trying to ignore the stereophonic whimpering and scratching noises coming from the garage.
‘I don’t mind your bringing them back dead,’ said his mother. ‘Alive is another matter. First thing in the morning you’re taking him up the kennels.’
Jason could have said ‘But Mum’ again, but he felt it was beginning to lose its impact. So he tried sulking instead. Eighteen years of experience told him that it didn’t work, but so what? They’d said the same thing about Edison and the light bulb.
‘Now, then,’ said Mrs. Derry cheerfully, ‘now that we’ve got that sorted out, you can have a biscuit. I made some Melting Moments. You know how you like Melting Moments.’
Jason nodded resignedly. Yes, he liked Melting Moments and would do what he was told. Pity about the human race, but whoever said life was fair?
‘Another thing,’ said Mrs. Derry as she made more biscuits. ‘Sharon’s coming round for her tea tomorrow, so don’t be late home.’
‘Mum . . .’
Mothers since the creation of mankind have learned that the best way to stifle objections from their offspring is to stuff biscuits in their mouths. Nobody, not even Lenin, can preach rebellion effectively with a mouth full of Melting Moment. ‘Six-thirty sharp,’ she said. ‘I’m doing lamb with pearl barley. You like lamb with pearl barley,’ she reminded him.
‘Yes, Mum.’ In a sudden access of memory, Jason seemed to recall himself breaking into the Underground, conspiring to overthrow Jupiter, duffing up two gods and rounding it all off by pulverising fifty crack Hell-troopers. Or did he? All of a sudden he became aware that the memory can play strange tricks. Very probably he’d imagined it all.
‘Goodnight, Mum,’ he said.
‘Mind you brush your teeth.’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘Goodnight, Jason.’
‘ ’Night, Mum.’
When he got to his room, he noticed that all his Mars posters had disappeared and that someone, probably the Revenue, had been and impounded all his personal records. He found some of them later in a large cardboard box on top of the wardrobe, and the rest of them the next morning neatly packaged up in black dustbin bags outside the back door.
It wouldn’t have been much of a consolation to Jason even if he’d known, but Hercules had had more or less the same trouble with his wife. The most notable occasion was on his return after the completion of the Twelve Labours, to find that in his absence Megara of the Fair Ankles had given half his clothes to a jumble sale, put a further quarter in the loft and washed and ironed the remaining quarter, thereby destroying at a stroke the carefully-compiled ambience of thirty years of blood, toil, tears and sweat. Mythology records that, at this point, Hercules lost his rag good and proper and settled his family’s hash once and for all with several hearty blows of his club. This is all, of course, pure nonsense. Mythology, it should be remembered, is composed largely by men. What actually happened, apart from a few unheeded protests, was nothing at all, and the reason why Megara fades out of the Hercules legend at this point is that while Hercules was away killing monsters and averting evils, Megara had happened to meet a rather nice insurance broker who, although shorter, punier and incapable of dealing with any form of hostile wildlife bigger than a money-spider, was at least there at weekends and public holidays.
As Jason slept, a number of very insistent dreams came and stood beside him. He swatted them with a back issue of Model Railway Enthusiast and went back to sleep.
‘Gel.’
‘Here, Pro. Fire away.’
‘Trouble.’
‘What?’
‘Big trouble.’
‘All right, so it’s big trouble. What?’
Telepathic communication is actually much faster than this. It belts through the air at a simply alarming rate, just like the new information technology that so nearly reproduces it, and so we can legitimately omit Prometheus’s resumé of the scene between Jason and Mrs. Derry, logging back in at the point when Gelos says ‘Oh shit!’, without having abridged more than three seconds of actual time.
‘Oh shit!’
‘Exactly,’ agreed Prometheus. ‘Now what do we do?’
‘Nothing for it, is there?’
‘You mean . . .?’
‘That’s right,’ thought Gelos gravely. ‘The eagle has landed.’
In the sick-bay of the sun, Aesculapius was doing more business in one afternoon than he had done for the last fifty years.
‘Right,’ he said briskly, ‘this may hurt a little.’
Nobody knows exactly why doctors say that. It can’t be to set the patient at his ease, because anybody above the age of three knows from bitter experience that the words are the invariable prologue to agony, just as ‘You may feel a little bit woozy for the next twenty-four hours’ means that you’re going to spend the next three days bumping into things and feeling like an LSD addict after a particularly bad trip, and ‘It’s just for a few routine tests’ means that it’s now too late to see about some life insurance. Perhaps they do it on purpose, just in case you weren’t actually scared rigid to start with.
Mars shut his eyes and braced his few remaining rigid components. There was a click, a flare of therapeutic orange flame, and the noise of a god complaining.
‘You can put your clothes back on now,’ said Aesculapius.
‘Want to bet?’ Mars replied.
‘That will do,’ said Aesculapius. ‘Next, please.’
Mars dragged himself off the couch and Pluto took his place.
‘Now then,’ said the heavenly physician, ‘what seems to be the trouble?’
Pluto scowled at him. ‘Did you do anatomy at medical school?’ he asked. Aesculapius nodded.
‘Very well then,’ Pluto replied. ‘Look at my skeleton and start counting the gaps.’
Aesculapius ignored him and started prodding him about. ‘Hm,’ he said at last, ‘we’ve got a few bones missing here and there, I see. And what have we been getting up to to get ourselves in this state, then?’
‘I’d rather not discuss it,’ Pluto said. ‘A dog was involved.’
Aesculapius, being a doctor, is at perfect liberty to ignore anything anyone says to him. ‘We’ll have to see what we can do about that,’ he said briskly. ‘Wait there.’
He went to the bone cupboard, picked out a number of bones from the stock, and tried them for size. They more or less fitted, roughly as an 11/16 inch bolt will fit a 15 mm thread if you ease it into place with a lump hammer. He fitted them quickly and fairly accurately and told Pluto to stand up.
‘Ow,’ said Pluto. Aesculapius helped him to his feet, told him to practise, and advised him that he might possibly experience some slight discomfort for the next forty-eight hours. Then he shooed him out and sat down for a quiet half-hour with a cup of Bovril and a gynaecological journal.
Outside his surgery, Mars and Pluto compared notes.
‘It’s not good, is it?’ Mars said.
‘Distinctly worrying,’ Pluto agreed. ‘What I want to know is how that confounded Derry boy managed it.’
‘Well,’ said Mars, ‘in my case he sort of drew back his left hand like this . . .’
‘No, no,’ said Pluto, wincing slightly, ‘that’s not what I meant. How did he get the power to fight with gods? Mortals can’t fight with gods, not usually; it’s just not possible, like wrestling with the wind. We’re in a different dimension to them - unless, of course, they have help.’
‘Help,’ said Mars bitterly, ‘isn’t usually hard to find, is it? I have scars to prove it.’
‘Oh, I agree with you,’ Pluto said. ‘In the past, one of us has always been only too glad to give his or her pet champion a helping hand against the rest of us. But not in this case, surely. We’re all united; nobody has anything at all to gain from enabling Derry to fight with us. So, either he has the ability himself, without the need for any assistance which means that he’s a bigger god than any of us - or else someone very big indeed is helping him out. And the only Person that big is . . .’
‘Exactly,’ said Mars. ‘And Jupiter may be . . .’ He looked anxiously around him, ‘but he’s not as crazy as all that. He’s more worried by all this than any of us. That can only mean that the boy did manage to get through and make contact with . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Pluto hurriedly. ‘It really isn’t looking terribly good, is it?’
‘Quite right,’ said a third voice. ‘And while we’re on the subject, you both think I’m crazy, do you?’
The two gods looked round and saw Jupiter standing behind them. He hadn’t been there five seconds ago, but really, that is neither here nor there. When you’re dealing with an omnipresent supreme being, even looking behind the sofa and turning on all the taps is a complete waste of time.
‘Anyway,’ said. Jupiter briskly, ‘I’ve solved everything, with no help from any of you clowns, as usual. All our troubles are over; you can get back to loafing about and looking decorative. Put your collar straight, Ma. You look like you’ve just been let out of prison.’
And Jupiter vanished. Mars turned to Pluto and shrugged.
‘What we need right now,’ he said, ‘is a drink.’
Pluto nodded.
‘Or two drinks.’
‘Quite right.’
Having come to this eminently reasonable conclusion, they left the sick-bay and were crossing over the road to the bar when they were knocked down by Phoebus Apollo, who was test-driving a 1960s Volkswagen Beetle converted into a chariot drawn by four winged dragons.
Jason was woken from deep sleep by a sound uncannily like a large bird tapping on his window with its beak.
Being half-divine, Jason could sleep through most things, but not this. After a period of semi-consciousness, during which he was troubled with dreams involving huge thrushes knocking snails out of brightly-coloured shells, he pulled himself out of bed, groped hazily for the Sword of Who The Hell Cares, Anyway, and tottered to the window. He pulled aside the curtain and saw a large bird tapping on the glass.
‘Shoo,’ he said.
The bird refused to shoo. He noticed that it was in fact an eagle, and although one eagle looked pretty much like another to him, he made an intuitive assumption and opened the window six inches.
‘What do you want?’ he asked.
The eagle replied by thrusting a talon in the crack and shrieking. With a sigh, Jason opened the window fully and the eagle hopped in, shook the rain out of its feathers and turned into an extremely beautiful young woman.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Sorry if I woke you. Have you got a moment?’
Jason nodded and waved vaguely at a chair. It had rather a lot of socks on it, some of them of considerable maturity, but the girl affected not to notice them.
‘I’m Eagle,’ she said, ‘but you can call me Mary.’
Jason nodded again. He was fresh out of words.
‘I’m a friend of Prometheus,’ the girl went on. ‘And Gelos. Gelos isn’t actually called Gelos, by the way; or at least he is, but it’s not his real name. Really he’s called Thing.’
Jason nodded a third time, as if this was the most logical thing he had ever heard. The girl smiled at him, crossed her legs and went on.
‘What they want to know is, would you do them a small favour? It’s to do with what Thing - that�
�s Gelos - was telling you about earlier on; you know, Jupiter and the diversionary tactics? I’m sorry to bother you with it now, but there have been gods watching the house most of the night, and I’ve only just managed to get rid of them.’
Jason’s befuddled expression must have seemed to the girl like a request for an explanation of how she had managed that, because she coloured slightly. ‘Oh, it was easy,’ she said. ‘I just told each of them in turn that I’d meet them in ten minutes behind the . . .’
‘Ah.’
‘So,’ said the girl, ‘what they’d like you to do is . . .’
‘No,’ Jason said. ‘Sorry.’
The girl stared at him. ‘Sorry?’
‘Yes.’
‘No,’ said the girl, ‘I meant sorry meaning what was that you said.’
‘I said sorry.’
‘Before that.’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’ the girl frowned. ‘Why?’
‘I’m busy tomorrow,’ Jason replied. ‘Another time, maybe.’
This seemed to have a strange effect on the girl. First she peered closely at her arms and then her legs; then she got up and looked at herself in the mirror. Having apparently satisfied herself that all was well, she came and sat down again.
‘No, but seriously,’ she said, ‘what we’d like you to do is . . .
‘Really, no,’ Jason answered. ‘No can do. Out of the question.’
‘But . . .’
‘In fact,’ Jason went on, ‘I hate to do this, but I’m afraid the whole thing’s off. I’ve thought it over, and the fact is that I’m not going through with it. After all, Jupiter is my father, and it really isn’t . . .’
‘He tried to kill you.’
‘Well yes, there is that,’ Jason admitted. ‘In a sense there’s something in what you say, but . . .’
‘He sent Mars, and Pluto, and a hundred Hell-troopers.’
‘The Hell-troopers were just for fun, surely,’ Jason said. ‘I mean, you can’t be expected to take an opponent seriously when he pops up out of the ground at you like one of those fast-motion films of a tree growing.’