Ye Gods!

by Tom Holt

  Ms. Fisichelli hopped that Hi! would disappear and be replaced by something rather less disconcertingly jovial, but it didn’t. She dragged her attention back to the manual. Operating the keyboard.

  Oh, very clever. Each of the fingertips of the statue’s outstretched hands was a key, and to operate the upper case you stood on its toes. Tentatively she touched the left index finger. The shield flickered, and then read: Error!!!

  Marvellous. She looked back at the manual and pressed the left middle finger. At once, a whole shieldful of words appeared, and a little green dot of light flashed on and off underneath them. That, the manual explained, was the Cursor. Ms. Fisichelli wondered idly what the Curse might turn out to be, and studied what the manual had to say about selecting a functions menu.

  After a few minutes of bewildered concentration, she decided that what she wanted was Feedback Input Scan, and pressed the appropriate finger. The shield responded immediately. It now read: Hiya!!!!

  Wouldn’t it be easier, Ms. Fisichelli asked herself, to try and muddle through with a card index and a notched stick? Probably not. The manual now advised her to press the right ring fingertip and the left big toe simultaneously. She did.

  Ouch!

  Ms. Fisichelli apologised instinctively and looked down. No, she’d done it right. She glanced back at the screen, which now said: Only kidding!!!

  Oh-for-crying-out-loud. If this was the state of the art in Olympian micro-electronics, perhaps now was the time to consider converting to Zen Buddhism.

  Fun, this, isn’t it!?

  Painstakingly, Ms. Fisichelli selected the necessary fingertips to type in No.

  The shield gave her a puzzled look and read Error!!! but she ignored it and went back to the right ring fingertip and the left big toe stage. She then remained aloof while the thing went through its tired little joke. Clearly you had to be something of a micro-electronics wizard if you wanted to input humour of your own into this gadget.

  By this stage the shield read Ready!! which was apparently what it should do. Unfortunately, the next page of the manual was missing.

  ‘Oh nuts!’ said Ms. Fisichelli, uncharacteristically. She tried reading on, but it was hopeless. There was only one thing to do. Feeling slightly self-conscious, she stood on both the statue’s feet and grabbed both its hands.

  The result was incomprehensible but gratifyingly large-scale. The shield shimmered with a brilliant coruscation of messages in all the known languages and alphabets, alive, dead and intermediate. The statue said bleep, not once but many times. Its left ear began printing out.

  After a while, things appeared to settle down, until there were only four words left on the shield. They were: All right, you win.

  Ms. Fisichelli beamed, and then wondered what to do next. Fortunately, the shield told her.

  Vocal input acceptable, it said. Speak now.

  ‘Er,’ she said.

  The statue’s lips quivered, then parted.

  ‘Hi!’, said the statue.

  Ms. Fisichelli’s jaw swung open and she forgot what she was going to say next. Probably just as well.

  ‘C in a circle Copyright,’ the statue went on, in a clear, high monotone, like a Dalek newsreader. ‘Olympian Software dlc. Unauthorised use of programme material shall render the user liable to civil and criminal penalties. ’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Error!!’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Error!!’

  ‘Scumbag!!’

  ‘Ready!!’

  ‘Oh.’ Ms. Fisichelli wondered about that for a moment, and then decided that maybe you were supposed to lose your temper with the doggone thing. ‘Look . . .’

  ‘Input mode selected,’ said the statue. ‘Receiving,’ it added helpfully. Ms. Fisichelli took a deep breath and started to talk, on the grounds that if the blasted thing said ‘Ready!!’ just one more time she would quite probably scream.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’m terribly sorry to bother you like this, but none of the other divining instruments seemed to work, and I tried conjuring but of course you need an assistant for that really, and mine just turned into an eagle and left, so I wasn’t able to get through that way and I was at my wits’ end and then I suddenly thought, Wait a minute, I thought, there’s always the Holy Icon, why don’t I try that, and if you say “Error!!” at me I shall melt you down and have you recast as a bedstead, so be very careful.’

  ‘Processing data,’ said the statue, ‘please wait.’

  ‘Sure.’

  The statue bleeped a couple of times, coughed and sighed. ‘Input request command,’ it said. ‘Receiving.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What seems to be the problem?’ said the statue.

  Ms. Fisichelli relaxed and smiled. ‘Right, then,’ she said. ‘It’s sort of like this. You know I do prophesies, right?’

  ‘Receiving,’ said the statue. ‘Oh, sorry, forgot. Yes?’

  ‘Well, usually the prophecies come from Apollo, because, well, that’s his job, OK? But the last couple of days I’ve been getting these prophecies, well, more sort of prophetic utterances, and I’m sure they can’t be from him, because - well, I just sort of know they’re not, OK? Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. And of course, they’re all like sort of riddles and I can’t make head or tail of them and I thought perhaps, well, you might . . .’

  ‘Input,’ said the statue. ‘Or rather, shoot, oh stuff this, input.’

  ‘You’re sure it’s no trouble?’

  ‘That’s what I’m here for, receiving, continues, please wait, ready.’

  ‘The first one,’ said Ms. Fisichelli, ‘came to me in my bath last night. I was just sort of, you know, sitting there, when suddenly I could hear myself saying this, well, thing.’

  ‘Gee.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Error,’ said the statue. ‘Mine, not yours. Apology. Input. Open fire. Shit. Shoot. Sorry.’

  ‘Er,’ said Ms. Fisichelli. ‘Oh yes. Well, what I must have said was . . .’

  ‘Input?’

  ‘Sorry,’ replied Ms. Fisichelli. ‘It’s just a bit embarrassing saying it out loud. I mean, it all sounds so funny, if you see what I . . .’

  ‘Correlates,’ said the statue, sympathetically. ‘Ignore error and continue.’

  ‘Thanks. It went something like: When that the Seed of the Pig conspires with the Door-Half-Open,

  Then shall the Ducks’-Foe-Dwellers despair of their humourless purpose,

  As Zippo, loosed from his bonds, devours a bacon sandwich.

  That’s what it said, anyway,’ Ms. Fisichelli added. ‘Really.’

  The statue bleeped thrice and burped. ‘Computing,’ it muttered. ‘Data input up tree. Memory circuits active. Proceeding to foot of our stairs. Ready.’

  ‘You mean you can understand all that stuff?’

  ‘Confirming. Comparative values follow. Please wait.’ The lights in the statue’s eyes went out and then came on again. ‘For Door-Half-Open, read When is a door not a door, when it’s a jar, search, find First Joke, equivalents search to read, output equivalent Gelos Prometheus. For Ducks’-Foe-Dwellers, read Nice weather for ducks, find sun is foe of ducks, correlate sun-dwellers, output gods. For Zippo, read Fire-Producer, find Prometheus, correlates. For Seed of Pig read Jupiter is a Pig, find Jason Derry, correlates, bleep. Bacon sandwich does not copy, suggested correlation Prometheus is hungry, eats bacon sandwich, search completed, ready for new input.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Ms. Fisichelli, ‘aren’t you clever. Well, the other one went:Remember that Mother knows best how to deal with the Smiter of Centaurs;

  That swords cannot cut what is stronger than steel that is tempered in cocoa;

  Tough though the whites may be, the boil-wash may now be dispensed with.’

  The statue made no noise of any description for a very long time. Then it sniggered, and said ‘Computing. Offspring of canine female. Ready.’

  ‘Yes. but . . .’

  ‘C
omparative values found,’ the statue continued. ‘For Smiter of Centaurs read Jason Derry, for difficulty rating read falling from chopped-down tree. For unit comparative value, read Jason Derry may be a right little tearaway but he’s afraid of his mother, programme ends, exit.’

  The lights in the statue’s eyes went out, the shield ceased to shine, the little pieces of metal fell from the eyesockets and landed with a soft tinkle on the ground. Ms. Fisichelli stooped and put them back in their matchbox. That, it seemed, was that for this evening. She could take a hint. She put the matchbox and the manual back in her bag, switched off the lights and crept back up to the main gallery. Then she rummaged in her coat pocket for her skeleton key, unlocked the staff canteen door, and (ultimately) left the building.

  A useful night’s work, she said to herself, and just as soon as I can get hold of Apollo I’d better tell him all about it. Pity, though, she thought, that the statue hadn’t waited to hear the third prophecy.

  ‘Ungrateful little sod.’

  ‘I am not an ungrateful little sod. Anyway, what the hell have you ever done that I should be grateful for?’

  Sharon made a rude noise. ‘Oh yes?’ she said. ‘All right, who was it warned you about the snakes in your pram, then? If it wasn’t . . .

  ‘Nobody warned me,’ Jason replied angrily. ‘I just knew . . .’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Sharon, who was not very ladylike, even for an eagle. ‘If I hadn’t swooped down and made shrieking noises at you, you’d have been fast asleep. As it was, you nearly swallowed your sucker and I had to get it out of your throat with my claw. You bit me.’

  ‘Good.’

  Sharon raised one foot and made a sort of pawing movement with it before putting it back on the ground. ‘And what about that time when you were three and you got stuck halfway up that big fir tree looking for phoenix nests . . .’

  ‘I wasn’t stuck,’ Jason interrupted, ‘just resting, that was . . . Hang on,’ he said, as an unpleasant thought struck him, ‘Are you trying to tell me you’ve been sort of watching over me or something ever since I was a kid?’

  ‘Since before you were born, more like. Nasty little brat you were then, too.’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Talk about a messy little brute,’ Sharon remembered. ‘When you weren’t up to your elbows in lion’s blood you were all smeared with melted chocolate. Always stuffing yourself, even then.’

  ‘Look . . .’

  ‘When I remember the fuss you used to make whenever you had to have a bath! We could hear you in the next street; it was like someone killing a pig.’

  Jason growled dangerously. ‘Now look . . .’ he said.

  ‘And I’ll never forget.’ Sharon continued. either oblivious or unconcerned, ‘that time when your mother left you in your pram outside the post office with the shopping bag, and when she got back . . .’

  A true Hero, they say, will never strike a woman; so it was fortunate for Jason’s blood pressure that Sharon was, at least to a certain extent, an eagle. If challenged, he reckoned, he could always say that he’d been aiming for the aquiline bits.

  ‘Ouch!’

  Jason lowered his hand, feeling that sort of furiously angry guilt that is usually reserved to small children. ‘It’s your fault,’ he half-snarled, half-whimpered. ‘You started it.’

  ‘Didn’t,’ Sharon snuffled.

  ‘Did.’

  ‘Didn’t.’

  ‘Did.’

  ‘Didn’t didn’t didn’t.’

  Jason was just about to rebut this line of argument when he caught sight of himself in the brightly-polished shield he’d used to fight the Gorgon with. What he saw, he recognised immediately as an idiot.

  ‘Look,’ he said gently.

  ‘Didn’t!’

  ‘All right,’ Jason shouted, ‘you didn’t bloody well start it, whatever it was. Only for pity’s sake stop that bloody whimpering and tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘Shan’t.’

  Gods give me strength, Jason muttered under his breath, and then revoked the request at once. They’d already done that, and look where it had landed him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘all right?’

  ‘You hurt me,’ Sharon whined, and rubbed her ear vigorously. It would have been more effective if it had been the right ear, of course; but pain is an extremely transient condition for supernaturals, and in some areas they have extremely short memories. This can, in fact, be very inconvenient sometimes; for example, when they break a leg.

  ‘Well, well,’ Jason said. ‘Something attempted, something done has earned a night’s repose. Now, will you please tell me . . .?’

  ‘All right,’ Sharon said sullenly. And she told him.

  She told him about the great plan to restore Gelos and thereby dislodge the gods for ever, and how he was an integral part of it, and how it was so important that he develop in the right way to fulfil his destiny that Prometheus had sent his own eagle to be born and grow up as the objectionable girl next door, where she could keep an eye on him nudge him in the right direction, drop heavy hints about hostile snakes in prams and so forth; how . . .

  ‘I knew it!’ Jason was furiously angry now, more so than he could ever remember being. ‘Isn’t that just bloody typical! That’s my whole life, that is.’ He toyed with the idea of drawing the Sword and splitting the Earth’s crust with it, laying the Nether Kingdom open to the sunlight, out of pure pique. ‘I mean, that’s just bloody marvellous, isn’t it? On the one hand, I’ve got Mum and Dad pushing me around, making me be a Hero and kill monsters and steal golden apples and all that crap; and now I find that Prometheus and your bloody lot have been doing exactly the same all along, only different. Why can’t the whole bloody lot of you just bugger off and leave me in peace?’ He jumped on the Gorgon-reflecting shield, denting it beyond economic repair, and kicked it away, Sharon folded her arms and looked at him, reminding him very much of his mother.

  ‘All my life,’ he went on, ‘it’s been nothing but do this, do that, and nobody gives a flying fuck what I want or what I think about anything. Well, that does it, I’ve had enough.’ He looked around for something else to break, and eventually lit upon a life-size marble statue of a plumber, which he decapitated. ‘At least that explains why Mum’s been trying to push me off on you for as long as I can . . .’

  Through the red cloud of rage that was fogging up his mind shone a tiny little ray of confusion. Did it?

  ‘Does it?’ said Sharon.

  ‘Of course it does.’ Doesn’t it . . .?

  Of course it does . . .

  Oh no, not you again . . .

  But . . .

  Sharon seemed to melt suddenly. Her dumpy and exceptionally unerogenous figure blurred in front of his eyes, and grew taller and less broad. And then she wasn’t there, but Mary was; and you could tell that Sharon had never really existed at all, just as a suit of clothes ceases to have any real meaning once the wearer has been removed from inside it.

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ said Mary.

  ‘Don’t be so bloody patronising,’ Jason managed to grumble; but his heart wasn’t in it, being otherwise occupied.

  ‘Sorry,’ Mary said, ‘I didn’t mean to be. Look, Sharon’s gone now, gone for good. She’s served her purpose, you see. There’s just me now.’

  Just me, coming from her, was a contradiction in terms. Even so, that tiny little ray of confusion still glowed in his mind, like a distant lighthouse seen through dense mists.

  ‘The reason for Sharon,’ Mary was saying, ‘was to get you nice and angry, just like you are now. That’s what you had to do. Your mum doesn’t have the faintest idea who Sharon was; neither did Jupiter. No, the whole point about Sharon was that one day you’d get so sick of the sight of her and her nasty, whining voice and her incessant fault-finding that you’d finally have the guts to break free from the power in heaven and earth capable of controlling you.’

  Jason frowned. ‘You mean Jupiter?’

  ‘No.’


  ‘Prometheus? Gelos?’

  Mary shook her head. ‘Your mother,’ she said.

  Jason thought about that. ‘I see what you mean,’ he said. ‘Odd, I’d never seen it like that myself.’

  ‘Well you wouldn’t,’ Mary said, ‘now would you?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘That’s the secret,’ Mary went on. ‘That’s how Jupiter controls you. So, if you were ever to snap out of it and become a free agent, then you’d have to defy her, tell her to go boil her head; and the only thing we could think of that would make you do that was . . . well, a Sharon. And it’s worked, hasn’t it? Actually,’ Mary admitted, ‘it’s gone and cocked itself up, because of course you found out about it before it could happen - before the final showdown, I mean - but the effect’s been the same. Am I right?’

  Jason considered. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly, ‘I think you probably are. But,’ - there was that little speck of light again; not three specks or dots of light, just one - ‘there’s something wrong with all this.’

  ‘Is there?’

  Jason scratched his head. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Most definitely. You see, I’m not a free agent, not a bit of it. I was right the first time. You are pushing me around, just as much as Jupiter’s lot. And,’ - Jason stood up straight, looked the girl of his dreams in the eye and saw nothing there that interested him - ‘I’m having no part of it. Where’s the point?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I said,’ Jason replied, ‘where’s the bloody point? You aren’t Mary, any more than you were Sharon. You designed Sharon expressly to get up my nose, and you’ve designed Mary to be the . . . the . . . well, anyway. What you are, when you get right down to it, is a damn great eagle. And I’m very sorry, but I’m not selling my soul for something in feathers with a six-foot wingspan and little round yellow eyes. My profound apologies, but the deal’s off.’

  ‘Off?’

  ‘Off,’ said Jason. ‘Go look for another Hero, because I’m retiring. Got that?’

  ‘But Jason . . .’

  ‘Don’t anybody Jason me,’ the Hero shouted, ‘ever again. From now on, nobody tells me what to do. Nobody.’