by Tom Holt
‘Ouch,’ Apollo replied.
‘Oh hell, sorry,’ Mary replied. ‘I’m just so clumsy sometimes you wouldn’t believe it. My mother used to say to me . . .’
Prometheus had seen them and was hurrying over. He looked the same, but there was somehow something different about him; if he had been a tune he’d be in stereo instead of mono.
‘Pol, my boy,’ he shouted, ‘good of you to come. Just in time, too.’
‘Hello, Uncle Pro,’ replied Apollo resignedly. ‘Look, if I’d known it was all going to get as messy as this . . .’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Prometheus said. ‘And anyway, everything is going to be fine. We’ve got the eagle, the dog and the Derry boy . . .’
‘Hello,’ said Jason, sheepishly. Meeting new gods for the first time always made him a little bit bashful.
Apollo nodded briefly and smiled a tight-lipped smile and then resumed his search for knowledge. ‘Look, Uncle Pro,’ he started to say; but Prometheus silenced him with a gesture of his hand.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing to worry about. If Jupiter starts getting violent, Jason here will threaten to tell him the Joke.’
‘What joke?’
‘The Joke, idiot.’
Apollo’s eyes widened like balloons in the course of being inflated. ‘You mean to say he knows the Joke?’
‘Most of it,’ Prometheus replied. ‘All of it except the punch line.’
‘Ah. But even so . . .’
‘It’s all right, don’t worry,’ Prometheus replied. ‘I made sure that neither part of the Joke would be volatile without the other.’
Apollo thought of something. ‘How come you know the Joke, Uncle Pro?’
‘Uncle Pro doesn’t know the Joke,’ said Prometheus, ‘but I do.’
Apollo didn’t understand at first; then the truth dawned on him. He backed away. ‘You mean you’re . . .’
‘Thing.’
‘Yes.’ Apollo said, ‘Begins with a G. . . On the tip of my tongue . . .’
‘No, you fool, that’s my name,’ Prometheus snapped. ‘It has pleased me to call myself Gelos and play at being a mere Form for a number of years, but in fact I’m your great-uncle, brother of Cronus and Rhea. Do you believe me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well,’ said Prometheus, ‘just in case you don’t . . .’
He narrowed his eyes and gave Apollo a good long stare. Suddenly Apollo started to laugh, until he could feel his lungs straining to bursting point. In fact he was just about to black out when the laughter stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
‘Again for the sake of convenience,’ Prometheus continued, ‘I’m sharing bodies with my old friend Prometheus at the moment. Minds, too. We’ve always had similar tastes in minds, Pro and I, haven’t we, Pro? Yes, ever since I can remember, except I like mine a bit less cluttered. Well, we won’t go into that now; it takes all sorts. I was only going to say. Later, Pro, all right? Please yourself, then. Sorry, Pol, as I was saying . . .’
But before he could continue, his head snapped upwards. Apollo followed his gaze and saw something high up by the sun. He recognised it.
‘What is it?’ Mary said.
‘Jupiter’s coming back,’ Prometheus replied. ‘Right, everyone - action stations.’
‘What might those be, exactly?’
‘Er, you know, get ready and everything.’
‘I take it,’ Apollo said, ‘that you do have a plan.’
‘A plan, yes.’
‘A plan of battle,’ Apollo said. ‘Stratagems and so forth.’
‘Sort of.’
‘And are you going to let us into the secret, or are we - ouch! For pity’s sake, woman, mind what you’re doing with that knife. You could do someone an injury.’
‘It’s all right, Mary,’ Prometheus said, ‘you can put it away now. Apollo won’t desert us at a time like this.’
‘Won’t he though!’ Apollo turned to make a dash for his chariot, only to feel the beginnings of another big laugh clogging his windpipe. ‘All right,’ he sighed, ‘you win.’
‘Let’s hope so, anyway,’ Prometheus replied. ‘Now then, Pol, you and I and Mary and the dog will form the rearguard, and the rest of us . . .’
‘That only leaves me,’ said Jason.
‘The rest of us will form the front line contingents. Ready, Jason?’
‘No.’
‘Here they come.’
Strictly speaking, of course, it wasn’t necessary for Jupiter to come at all. But if there was one thing the Sky-Father loved it was melodrama, and if there was going to be a big fight, he wanted to be there in person, pitching in and watching the bodies go splat. Sitting in the sun hurling thunderbolts was a poor substitute, he always felt, for actually getting to grips with an enemy’s intestines.
His list of priorities was quite clear in his mind. Family first; Apollo and that ungrateful little git Jason Derry - he had something really hot in mind for him. Then, once the first flush of exuberance had worn off and been replaced with nice, grim resentment, he’d sort out Prometheus and that damn eagle. That would leave the highlight of the proceedings, his Uncle Thing, till last. Uncle Thing was the part he was looking forward to most.
As he roared through the air like a vindictive meteor, he quickly ran through the fundamentals of anatomy in his mind. A mental picture of his antagonists with little dotted lines and pairs of scissors drawn all over them draped itself across the retina of his inner eye and he made no effort to get rid of it.
Behind him streamed the selected elite of the divine special services unit. There was no point in cluttering the place up with rookies and idiots, not now that the demolition programme had been shelved indefinitely. For killing bolshy immortals you need quality, not quantity; and the Forms hurtling Earthwards in Jupiter’s wake were the sort of abstraction that only a very powerful and extremely unbalanced mind could conceive of. Even he got the creeps just thinking about them, and yet they were merely personifications of the contents of his own head. Now that was scary.
Was he mad, Jupiter asked himself, as he zoomed through the Earth’s atmosphere in a cloud of blue flames. He thought it over and decided that yes, he quite probably was. He only needed to look over his shoulder to know that his mind was so unhinged it was a miracle it didn’t fall out of his ear.
Ah well. Too late to do anything about that now.
‘And what,’ Jason was asking, ‘will the rest of you be doing while I’m . . .?’
And then he saw the flames, and Jupiter at the head of his unspeakable squadron, and realised that he was on his own. Only he could do anything about all this, fix things so that never again would Jupiter be able to command that the world be destroyed. And why? Nobody seemed to know. Because it was fated. Brilliant.
There was a screaming sound - it was just the air being torn apart by the violence of their passing, but it sounded much worse. Jason squared his shoulders, drew the Sword of - I couldn’t give a toss what it’s supposed to be called, he said to himself, I shall call it Freckles - and took one step forward. He wouldn’t mind doing this sort of thing if only people would tell him what was going on.
‘Hiya, Dad,’ he said.
Jupiter stopped in mid-air, and the shock-waves caused by his sudden loss of momentum sent clouds scudding across the skies of four continents.
‘Hi there, Son,’ Jupiter replied. ‘You’re for it this time.’
‘Am I?’
‘Oh yes,’ replied Jupiter. ‘I mean, this isn’t your parking in a no-parking zone. This is where you and life part company. Sorry, lad, but there it is.’
‘Oh well,’ Jason said. ‘In that case, knock knock.’
‘You what, Son?’
‘Knock knock,’ Jason repeated. ‘You’re meant to say “Who’s there?”’
Jupiter felt as if the air had given way under his feet. ‘Now steady on, lad,’ he said. ‘Let’s neither of us get carried away and say things we might regret later.’
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br /> ‘Say “Who’s there?”’
‘Certainly not,’ Jupiter replied. ‘Got you now, haven’t I?’
‘Who’s there?’ Jason said. ‘Cassivelaunus. Cassivelaunus who?’
And then he dried.
Any stand-up comedian will tell you it’s a horrible feeling, and when your audience is a Sky-God with an army of very bad ideas at his back, it can get really hairy. Jason opened his mouth and nothing came out of it.
‘Go on, then,’ Jupiter said, folding his arms and tapping his toe on a wisp of water vapour. ‘Cassivelaunus who?’
‘Er . . .’
‘Cassivelaunus who?’
‘Do you know the one about the travelling salesman who goes into this, um . . .’
‘I asked you a question,’ said Jupiter. ‘Cassivelaunus who?’
And then Jason remembered. He couldn’t say the punch line because he didn’t know it. The dog did. He turned, whistled, and called, ‘Here, boy!’ as loudly as he could. The dog stayed exactly where he was.
‘Is that it?’ Jupiter asked. ‘Cassivelaunus Here-Boy? I’ve found funnier things in Christmas crackers.’
‘Here, boy!’ Jason yelled. ‘Cerberus! Bad dog!’ The dog stood there and wagged his tail at him. Then, very slowly, it faded away.
Jason turned round and looked at his father. He smiled, and while he did so his brain was improvising furiously.
‘Well?’
‘Er,’ said Jason, ‘Cassie, the lawn is badly in need of mowing. Um . . .’
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
‘Cassie, the lawn is badly in need of mowing,’ said Jupiter slowly, relishing every word. ‘That’s it, is it?’
‘And let it be a lesson to you,’ said Jason. ‘Now, if you’ve quite finished . . .’
‘Oh no,’ Jupiter said. ‘I haven’t even started yet.’
The Sky-God grinned, and for some reason that was the final straw. All the aggravation that had been building up inside Jason ever since this whole tiresome business had started suddenly came to the surface and exploded. There was something about Jupiter just then, Jason decided, that didn’t only get up his nose, it went right the way through and half way down his throat. With a yell so blood-curdling you could have made black puddings with it, he swung the Sword Freckles round his head and charged.
Jupiter didn’t stand a chance. The Forms standing behind him recognised this before he did, and before Jupiter had so much as raised his arm in a fruitless attempt to shield his face, the slowest of them was ploughing through the cumulo-nimbus and motoring nicely. As it rushed sunwards it could just hear the sound of somebody very large a long way away saying ‘Ouch!’ It didn’t stop to find out who.
Jason, meanwhile, was getting nicely into his rhythm. He had split the Helmet of Authority, sliced the thunderbolts into mortadella, shattered the Breastplate of Power and was just about to make an end of it when . . .
‘Jason!’ said a voice behind him. ‘You stop that immediately, you hear me?’
Jason sighed very, very deeply and lowered his sword. ‘Yes, mum,’ he said.
‘So now you see.’
Jason nodded. He supposed that it made sense, after a fashion. Or at least, if it didn’t absolutely make sense, it was at least less glaringly nonsensical than a lot of things which passed for components of that great pile of unwashed laundry known for convenience as The Truth. Perhaps a better way of looking at it was that if it wasn’t true it was at least what all the protagonists believed to be true. In such circumstances as these, Jason was beginning to realise, an untruth tends to become indistinguishable from the real thing, simply through the action of protective mimicry.
‘Well then,’ he said. ‘Did you get all that, Mum?’
‘No,’ said Mrs. Derry.
Jason sighed. He would have to explain.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘what Prometheus was saying was that the reason why it was—’ Language, Jason realised, was a large part of the problem, because words say what they want to say, not what you want them to say - ‘why it was fated from the start that I’d be the only one who could, like, stand up to Dad and sort all this lot out . . .’ He paused; somewhere his sentence had wrapped itself round his legs, like a fast-moving dog on a long lead. ‘The reason why it had to be me,’ he ventured, ‘is that . . . Well, in the beginning, there was this word, right . . .’
‘I think what Jason’s trying to say,’ Prometheus interrupted, ‘is that Jason is unique in history because he has more of one particular quality than anyone else who’s ever been, and it was this quality, this power, that was required in order to make the whole thing work.’
‘Oh yes?’ said Mrs. Derry politely. She had only the vaguest notion who this tall man was, and she wasn’t sure she liked him. But he seemed to be saying that her son was a very special and important person, and she agreed with that. Like all mothers, she had known that from the very beginning, but it was nice to find someone who agreed with her.
‘Let me put it this way,’ Prometheus said. ‘Some people say that love is the most powerful force in the Universe. Well, you can take it from me that it isn’t. Others say, rather more plausibly, that it’s fear, greed, hope or faith that makes the world go round. They’re wrong, too. As for those who say that what fuels and drives the Universe is the laws of physics, all I can say is that they’re living in a world of their own. No, the most powerful and significant force in the Universe, the one thing that gets things done and makes things happen, is aggravation.’
‘Aggravation?’
‘Aggravation. Why is it, do you think, that all the little atoms move about within their molecules, bashing into each other like so many Christmas shoppers and creating the effect known to scientists as Brownian motion? Is it love, do you think, or fear, or belief in the Supreme Being? Like hell it is. The plain truth of the matter is that if you put more than two or three atoms together in a confined space for any length of time, sooner or later they’re going to get on each other’s wick, and then they start hurling themselves about and colliding with each other. They also shout a lot, but since the science of physics is in its infancy, nobody has yet constructed an instrument sensitive enough to monitor the voices of millions of tiny atoms debating with each other whose turn it is to do the washing up. Probably just as well, if you ask me.’
‘I see,’ lied Mrs. Derry. ‘But what’s that got to do with . . .?’
‘When Gelos and I,’ Prometheus went on, ‘came to the conclusion that something was going to have to be done about Jupiter if he wasn’t going to get completely out of hand, we realised that the only thing powerful enough to stand up to him was a really massive dose of raw aggravation. Faith wasn’t enough. It would just about be possible, if the world was allowed to lie fallow, if you like, for a thousand odd years so that it could build its faith reserves up to the maximum, to generate a faith field strong enough to repel Jupiter once, but it could only be once; after that, he would be able to come back once he’d licked his wounds and found another Betamax world to replace the one Jason disposed of for us, and have another go. No, somebody was going to have to sort out Jupiter himself, and for that purpose, only aggravation would do. So we set about creating the perfect aggravation conductor. We designed Jason.’
‘Well,’ said Mrs. Derry, ‘that’s fascinating. And now Jason and I must be getting along. Come on, Jason . . .’
‘The specifications,’ Prometheus continued, ‘were for a Hero who was at least as big and as strong and as brave as one of the old-time Big Three, Hercules, Theseus and Achilles - in other words, a son of Jupiter - but who had spent his entire life being put upon, shoved about and generally pushed around. That way, we could build up the necessary reservoir of aggravation, and then when the time was right we could prime it, so to speak, by letting him know just to what extent he’d been pushed around all these years, and further by giving him the impression that not just his mother and his father but everyone, on all sides, had been using him as a
sort of human combination hammer, tin-opener and mole wrench. Finally we would put him in a position of enormous stress and fail him. That was what all that nonsense with the dog was for. There’s no way we would have dared entrust the Joke or any part of it to him, let alone to a three-headed dog. We just let him think we had. We set him up good and proper. Sorry about that, Jason.’
‘That’s all right,’ Jason said automatically. He had in fact been intending to pull Prometheus’s head off and use it as a football ever since the truth of the matter had dawned on him, at that crucial moment when Cerberus had disappeared. Somehow, though, now that it came to it, he wasn’t in the mood. So what?
‘Anyway,’ Prometheus said, ‘we all saw what happened. Jupiter never knew what hit him. The combination of Jason’s irritation and his own massive aggravation buildup, caused by the failure of his attack on Earth, led to the most almighty outburst of pure, undiluted aggro, and Jupiter just fused out. It was like putting a vastly excessive current through a five-amp plug. Jason, of course, is a superb natural conductor of aggravation, and so it just went through him like water through a pipe.’
There was a long silence.
‘What you mean is,’ Mrs. Derry said at last, ‘our Jason saved the world.’
‘Exactly,’ Prometheus said. ‘He lost his cool and thereby saved the world.’
‘And what about Dad?’ Jason asked. ‘Not that I’m all that bothered, not after what he was going to do to me - well, to all of us, really, but . . .’
‘You mustn’t blame him,’ Prometheus said. ‘The sad truth is that Jupiter’s been more or less off his rocker for a very long time now, pretty well ever since I stole the first Joke from heaven all those years ago. You see, unlike most of the gods he actually did care about the world, and - misguidedly, in my opinion - he felt very strongly that in order to survive, mortals need an unshakable faith in the gods. When I snookered him on that score, there was a huge build-up of aggro inside him, and as we’ve seen he just can’t handle it. Something gave way inside his head, and he’s been missing on at least two cylinders ever since. What’s happened today has, I’m afraid, finally done for the poor old devil. His supreme being days are well and truly over, I fear.’