by Tom Holt
‘Then what’s going to happen?’ Jason asked. ‘Does that mean that Thing is going to take over?’
‘Perish the thought!’ Prometheus replied. ‘That would be a very serious mistake, and Thing knows it. He’s going back into retirement, where he belongs. Going to write a novel, he tells me, and I wish him the very best of luck. No, what we’ve decided on is that Jupiter will carry on as Supreme Being in name only, with Apollo as a sort of Prince Regent. That way, Pol being Pol, the gods will spend all their time bickering with each other and they’ll leave the mortals in peace. It’ll mean the end of the Game, for one thing, and that can’t be bad.’
‘What Game?’ Jason asked.
‘And if Apollo ever does show any signs of getting above himself,’ Prometheus went on, ‘then we’ll have Mrs. Apollo to keep him under control.’
‘Mrs. Apollo?’
‘Mary,’ Prometheus explained. ‘As you know better than anyone, the only thing capable of dominating a male with unlimited physical strength is a female with a comparable amount of mental strength. I don’t think it’ll take Mary very long to get Apollo properly trained, do you?’
‘Oh,’ said Jason. ‘So Mary’s . . .’
‘Yes,’ Prometheus replied. ‘It’s not what was fated, I know, but you take it from me, you’ve had a very lucky escape there. Bear in mind that Mary is also your Sharon.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Jason. ‘That’s a very good point. Thank you.’
‘Well, then.’ Prometheus yawned and stretched. The sun was starting to sink behind the Caucasus mountains. In the distance, Apollo and Mary were going for a quiet stroll, talking pleasantly of this and that. A couple of Forms in white coats were trying their best to persuade Jupiter that it was safe to come down from his tree. ‘That more or less wraps it up, then,’ Prometheus said. ‘Thanks for everything, Jason. We couldn’t have done it without you. Or rather, you couldn’t have done it without us.’
‘Will the world be a better place?’ Jason asked.
Prometheus shook his head. ‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘It always amazes me, the way the old place quickly gets back to normal no matter what you do to try and improve it. No, you can make it worse, no problem, but it’s virtually impossible to improve it. I tried, remember. I gave them fire, and yet millions of people are still cold. I taught them agriculture, and millions of them are still starving. I gave them laughter, and yet the majority of them are still as miserable as income tax. I can only imagine it’s how they like it, deep down.’
‘And what are you going to do?’ Jason asked.
‘Me?’ Prometheus grinned. ‘I’m going to have a holiday, what the hell do you think? After that, I don’t know. I might have a shot at sorting out the gods a bit more, but I doubt it. Anyway, I mustn’t keep you any longer. Thanks again.’
He smiled and then grew, until they lost sight of his head, then his body, and then finally his kneecaps in the clouds. And then he simply wasn’t there any more, and Jason and Mrs. Derry discovered that what they were actually looking at was a mountain.
‘Right,’ said Mrs. Derry. ‘Let’s be getting home. I could do with a cup of tea, and you could do with a bath.’
‘Mum . . .’
‘A bath,’ Mrs. Derry repeated, ‘and no arguments.’
‘But Mum, I had one this morning . . .’
‘Jason,’ said Mrs. Derry.
Just then, a helicopter appeared in the sky. In it were Betty-Lou Fisichelli and her agent, a camera crew, and a glass tank containing a frog. The frog seemed agitated, and Ms. Fisichelli was doing her best to comfort it by saying that it was all going to be all right, that Apollo would soon turn him back into human shape and then give him the most incredibly historic interview of all time, just so long as he minded his manners and promised never to coin the phrase Olympusgate as long as he lived. The frog lashed out at the glass wall of its prison once or twice with its hind legs, said ‘Rivet’ bitterly, and then nodded its head.
‘It’s been a long day,’ said Mrs. Derry. ‘Did you understand what that man was saying about aggravation and your Dad and all that?’
Jason considered for a moment. For the first time in his life he had a vague, shadowy idea of what was going on. It was the beginning of wisdom.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Good, here’s George with the cart. Come on, Mum, in you get.’
In his Lear jet, thirty thousand feet above Nebraska, Mr. Kortright was speaking to Nostradamus on Blue.
‘It’s a neat idea, sure,’ he said, ‘and I like it in principle. But you’ve got to ask yourself, maybe you’re aiming your stuff at the wrong slice of the market, okay? I mean, do the people really want to know about Napoleon? Do they really give a two-cent fuck about the advent of nuclear war? That sort of thing just kind of depresses people, Nos, you know? Why do you always have to be so goddam gloomy?’
There was an agitated buzzing from the end of the wire. Kortright sighed, murmured something about maybe having lunch Thursday, and replaced the receiver. He ate a pickled onion.
‘Odin for you on Red, Mr. Kortright.’
Kortright swallowed a few shreds of peel and picked up the phone. ‘Odin,’ he said, ‘how’s tricks? Afraid you missed the boat again this time, but we’ll keep trying for you, you know that.’
The receiver turned into a serpent in his hand and Kortright put a broad, friendly smile on his face. Nobody likes having a disgruntled client.
‘Look, I’ve been thinking,’ he said. ‘What we need for you is a brand new vehicle. You know, launch you from an entirely different angle. I mean, we’ve tried blood and human sacrifice and all that; how about making you, well, cuddlier? You know,’ said Kortright, keeping a straight face in spite of himself, ‘lovable. We could say you originally came here from another planet and you got stranded, and we’re trying to fix it so’s you can go home . . .’
The serpent glowed blue and sprouted another head. Kortright made a comforting gesture with his hands.
‘Okay,’ he said soothingly. ‘We’ll put that one on ice for now. What you really need,’ he went on, ‘is a Gospel.’
There was an interested hiss from the serpent.
Kortright thought for a moment, and then smiled.
‘With a good Gospel,’ he said, ‘we could go places with you. We could get sponsorship, you know? Commercial backing. We could make the big time.’
The serpent coiled itself round Kortright’s ankle and started to eat his shoelaces. This was, the agent told himself, a good sign.
‘How about something like this?’ he said. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Kawaguchi Integrated Circuits, and all rights in the Word were reserved, so that unauthorised publication thereof in any form of cover or binding or electronic data retrieval system other than that supplied by the publisher rendered the user liable to civil and criminal prosecution . . .’
The serpent bit him.
Jason Derry leaned back, wiped the soap suds out of his eyes and reached for the rubber duck.
On the one hand, he said to himself.
1 It’s a myth that Prometheus was rescued by Hercules. That’s what they want you to believe . . .
2 So to speak. If you do find yourself enjoying what follows, we recommend that you seek professional help.
3 Otherwise it’d have got burnt.
4 polecat
5 Traditionally, when on Earth the gods adopt mortal guise. Because of the confusion this tends to cause, however, there is a convention that they leave one of their divine attributes visible to give at least some warning to reasonably perceptive mortals. Thus, if a large woman with an owl on her shoulder runs over your foot with her trolley in the supermarket, it is wise not to say anything you might later regret.
6 Fortuitously now the Kavkad branch of the Standard Chartered Bank.
7 Which meant they could send probes to the moon but the astronauts were unable to sell their stories to the tabloids afterwards.
8 About fifteen feet six inches. Pluto’
s main fear was that one day he’d stick like it.
9 The direct result of the gods’ refusal to allow the Forms to attend the Celestial Christmas Outing to Weymouth; now better known as the Winter of Discontent.
10 It is a little-known fact that all Heroes really want out of life is power, glory, victory, wine, sex, money, respect, adventure and chocolate, not necessarily in that order. The celebrated Bellerophon, who tamed the winged horse Pegasus and killed the murderous, death-dealing Chimera, wanted jam on it as well; but so what, jam’s cheap.
11 Promises made by gods to mortals are binding on the gods, but the gods reserve the right to interpret the terms of the promise.
Promises made by gods to other gods are also binding on the parties concerned; but this is effectively a dead letter, since a god can always point to the relevant Betamax world on which the promise actually was fulfilled and thus justifiably claim to have carried out his pledge.
Promises made by gods to themselves actually are binding, partly because the Possibility Police insist, partly because gods, being immortal, have to live with themselves rather longer than the rest of us.
12 He was a young Greek god, which helped.