by Steve White
“No, lord,” Deirdre answered. Acrisius had proven enlightened enough to include “Deianeira” in the drinking. “We’ll go to Lerna instead. It’s no further, and a cousin of my late husband lives there.” In fact, they had chosen the small seaside town on the western coast of the Gulf of Argos, across from Nauplia, for its inconspicuousness. Nauplia was literally in the shadow of Tiryns, where they’d learned a formidable warlord had established himself. Lerna, of immemorial antiquity even in this age, was a backwater whose only claim to mythological fame in later times was the Lernean Hydra that Hercules killed as one of his twelve labors. Come to think of it, Jason reflected, they would be passing the swamp on whose outskirts that nine-headed monster was supposed to have inhabited a rock outcropping that Rutherford had shown them… .
“Well,” Acrisius said heartily, “I wish you a safe journey. You can walk it in a day.” It was about ten miles, Jason thought, summoning up a map that, to him, seemed to float translucently in midair about a foot from his face. “You’ll probably want to get an early start, to arrive in Lerna before nightfall. There are bandits at large in the swamps. In fact, I’ve heard some odd stories… .” Acrisius shook his head. “No. Never mind. Just be alert. Would you like me to send some men with you?”
“Thank you, lord, but that won’t be necessary.” Jason would have liked to ask about those “odd stories,” but Acrisius was obviously disinclined to discuss the subject. They soon made their goodnights and made their way to their guest quarters. When the only reasonably safe artificial light-source was oil lamps, there were only four things to do after dark. Two—drinking and talking—they had already done. As for the third, Deirdre was still being discouragingly professional. That left sleeping.
Jason could tell from Nagel’s body language that the historian wanted to talk in private. But there was no privacy in Acrisius’ “palace” (at which the most impoverished resident of twenty-fourth century Earth would have turned up his nose), and standard Service procedure dictated that they use the local language at all times; paranoia was apt to rear its ugly head when strangers were overheard conversing among themselves in an unknown tongue. So he gave Nagel a cautionary gesture. It would have to wait until they were on the road.
*
“Something is not right,” Nagel muttered the next morning, when they were out of sight of Argos.
The countryside through which they followed the road—more accurately, the well-traveled trail—to Lerna was no longer strange to them, after their earlier walk to Argos. Ahead, though, lay the swamps. From a distance, at least, it didn’t look all that different from what Rutherford had showed them.
“What do you mean?” Deirdre asked Nagel. “What’s not right?”
“A number of things—for example, that business about the Heroes being born of gods, as though it was something of relatively recent date. I’m still not sure what to make of that. We’ve always assumed that the ruling houses of much later historical times simply gave themselves divine genealogies. Now, it seems the idea of heroic demigods goes back much further than we’d imagined. Indeed, it’s turning out that a good many things go back further than we’d imagined. But what really disturbs me is Acrisius’ description of the god Hyperion.”
“Why? He was just talking about something purely imaginary.”
“Was he?” Jason inquired absently, while most of his attention was absorbed by his computer implant.
“Why, of course he was!” exclaimed Deirdre indignantly. “What do you even mean by that?”
“Well, he said he heard about it from his grandfather—”
“The unreliability of early childhood memories is well established. And why are we even talking about this … this—?”
“That’s not the point,” said Nagel. His tone stopped them by its very quietness, for he was too puzzled to summon up his usual asperity. “The point is that what Acrisius heard simply confirmed his preconceptions of what gods are supposed to look like. And it is not how the Greeks of historical times visualized their gods.”
“Uh … you mean the platinum-blond hair? But didn’t the Classical Greeks often describe the gods, and also their mortal offspring, that way?”
“In some cases.” Nagel smiled tightly. “Certain racist ideologues of the early twentieth century read a great deal into that. But in fact, it merely reflected an enduring aesthetic bias. The Greeks in all eras tended to idealize the occasional blond among them. In this, as in everything else, the Greek gods were simply humans writ large. Humans— that’s the operative word. Nowhere is there any suggestion that they thought of the gods as having the aspect of alienness to which Acrisius alluded. Bigger than humans, yes, and more beautiful than humans—but beautiful in a human way.” Nagel frowned disapprovingly. “These people’s visualizations simply don’t have the right … flavor.”
Damned disobliging of them , Jason thought. Don’t they know it’s their job to conform to your preconceptions? “Isn’t it possible,” he asked aloud, “that it wasn’t until later times that they changed their beliefs, and started thinking of the gods as idealized humans?”
“Yes,” Deirdre chimed in. “Didn’t early civilizations tend to picture their gods as weird-looking? Sometimes even half man and half animal?”
“Yes—the Egyptians, for example,” Nagel conceded. “I would have no trouble with monstrous-looking deities. But I know of no early society whose gods looked like tall, beautiful humans but not quite . Furthermore, most religious systems—for reasons too obvious for discussion—place direct physical manifestations by the gods in a safely remote past. From what we’ve heard, these people have no problem believing that the gods have walked among them, begetting demigods, in the last few generations … and still do, although with less frequency.”
“So what’s the answer?” asked Deirdre with a mixture of impatience and grudging interest.
“I don’t know,” Nagel admitted. “Oh, by the way, on the subject of mythological genealogies … remember Acrisius’ mention of his great-grandfather Danaos, who was a ‘Hero,’ or demigod? Well, according to those genealogies, that was Acrisius’ great-grandfather.” Nagel subsided into frowning preoccupation.
As it turned out, he was so preoccupied he forgot he was not walking on a paved road. He stepped into a hole and twisted his ankle. So they had to stop by the roadside for a while and await his whining convalescence, while Jason mentally composed the piece of his mind he was going to give Rutherford on the subject of the Authority’s standards of fitness for low-tech survival. Finally they were able to resume their walk, but only at Nagel’s limping pace.
It will be dark before we get to Lerna , Jason muttered to himself. Already, the sun was setting, and they had only reached the swamp.
It was, he thought, the one area they had seen that would be more or less unchanged in the late twenty-fourth century: the same spur of red rock jutting out over a miasma of reedy marsh crossed by winding streams—fuller now than in Jason’s lifetime—overlooked by weeping willows. The rock outcropping supported a stretch of solid ground for the road to traverse, even as Jason recalled from Rutherford’s whirlwind tour.
“Come on,” he called out in the twilight, unable to keep an edge of impatience out of his voice. We’ve got to reach Lerna before nightfall. If we’re still on the road, we’ll have to make camp, and you heard what Acrisius said about—”
Naturally, the bandits attacked at that moment.
They charged out from under the rock outcropping where they’d lain concealed: half a dozen of them, ragged and shaggy-maned, wielding clubs and knives and screaming so as to paralyze their victims with fear.
In Nagel’s case, at least, it worked. He froze up. Jason ran between him and the oncoming bandits, bringing up his walking stick. It wasn’t long enough to be a proper quarterstaff such as he had learned to use in the Middle Ages, but he gripped it that way: left hand in the middle, right hand about a quarter of its length from one end. He spun it this way and that, forci
ng the bandits to step back momentarily before rushing him. One of them lifted his club high while another came in from the side with his knife. Jason slid his left hand down the shaft from the middle to meet the right hand, and smashed his staff down on top of knife-man’s head. There was a sickening thud and a crack of snapping teeth as the bandit’s jaws were driven together by the force of the blow. He hadn’t even hit the ground before Jason recovered and brought his staff around and into the belly of the club-wielder. The latter’s wind whooshed out and he doubled over. As his face went down, Jason brought a knee sharply up into it, simultaneously using one end of the staff to punch him behind an ear with lethal preciseness.
Taking a split second to look around, Jason saw that Nagel had snapped out of it and was bringing his staff clumsily up. Deirdre, on the other hand, used hers to thrust at a bandit who was rushing at her, grinning. His grin disappeared, as did the center of his face, when the end of Deirdre’s staff punched into it with a crunch of bone and cartilage.
The sight of a woman fighting back was evidently a shocking surprise. The remaining attackers, who hadn’t reached their quarry yet—they were too stupid for a coordinated attack—hung back, mouths agape. The only sound was the squalling of Deirdre’s would-be rapist. Jason decided that the sight of cold steel—oh, all right, bronze—would probably suffice to send them running, now that they’d lost their numerical advantage. He dropped his staff and reached for his sword-dagger.
“Enough of this.”
The voice was deep and had an odd timbre to it. And it came from above.
At first the sheer, inexplicable wrongness of it held Jason motionless, even though the bandits had gone to their knees and dropped their weapons. A moment passed before he could look up in the direction from which that impossible voice had come.
A platform of some kind was descending with a faint humming sound Jason hadn’t noticed before. It was a lovely thing of oddly curving lines and oven odder ornamentation, made of some unidentifiable metal alloy. And it was none too large even for its one passenger. As Jason watched, that passenger stood up and leaned on a low railing, clearly illuminated in the twilight by the running lights.
He was wearing robes not unlike those of the local royalty, but richer than anything they’d seen, with colors that seemed to shimmer and change. He was, Jason estimated, at least seven and a half feet tall. His hair was a shining, wavy mass of gold-shot silver, and his face was pale. That face was long, tapering to a narrow chin. His high cheekbones tilted upward in a way that was mirrored by the long eyebrows over his huge, oblique eyes. His nose was long, thin and sharp, but with flaring nostrils. His mouth was wide, thin-lipped, and set in lines of sublime haughtiness. There was something odd about his ears… .
And he was holding an unfamiliar-looking object. It fitted over his hand, and was fashioned to resemble a face. But to Jason, the way he held it screamed weapon.
As the three of them gaped upward, he brought the object to bear on Deirdre. It soundlessly flashed ruby light. Deirdre toppled forward to the ground.
As the tube swung toward him, Nagel’s shock turned abruptly to terror. He turned and ran toward Jason. He’d almost made it when the weapon flashed again. His face was instantly leached of expression, and he fell as Deirdre had.
Jason recognized the thing for what it was, however curious its design: a neural paralyzer, its energy pulse carried on a laser guide beam which was the source of the flash. He also knew what his only possible option was. He dropped, with his legs bunched up in the direction of the weapon, and tried to roll behind Nagel’s motionless form.
He didn’t complete the roll before his legs went horribly numb. He gasped, unable to move them, and forced himself not to move anything else. He wanted the weapon’s wielder to think he, like his companions, was unable to move a single voluntary muscle—as he would have been if that beam had struck his head or torso.
So he lay perfectly still. Fortuitously, his head was at an angle from which he could, out of the corner of his left eye, watch what now transpired.
The platform settled to the earth. The bandits bowed low, murmuring worshipfully. The tall being surveyed them with cold contempt and spoke in that disturbing voice.
“So I myself must intervene to save you from two men and a woman?”
The bandits groveled. “We are worms,” moaned the one who seemed to be the leader. “Worthless worms!”
“Too true. Since you are useless for any other purpose, place the woman in my chariot. The men, and their belongings, you may have despite your bungling.”
For the tiniest of instants, rebelliousness flickered in the bandits’ expressions. They’d undoubtedly hoped to keep Deirdre themselves, partly for the usual reason but also to vent their feelings concerning their comrade’s ruined face. But the instant passed. They meekly did as they were commanded, picking up her stiff form and transferring it to the “chariot,” which then departed without another word from its occupant.
Jason continued to feign helplessness as he watched the bandits’ leader order one of his followers back to their encampment with the one whom Deirdre had injured. Then the remaining two examined the sacks and whooped with delight when they discovered the windfall of treasure the sacks contained. As they did so, Jason very slowly moved his right hand atop the hilt of his sword-dagger, which he had been careful to cover with his body. He had barely finished doing so when they drew their doubtless-stolen bronze knives and turned their attention to their paralyzed captives.
As Jason had hoped, they decided to have fun with Nagel first.
His legs were starting to experience the painful tingling which presaged the wearing-off of the paralysis. But he still couldn’t quite move them. He would have to take two men without the use of his legs. Luckily, they stood over Nagel with their backs to him, only a few feet away. And one end of his staff lay just barely within arm’s reach.
With a pouncing leopard’s abruptness, his left arm shot out and grasped the staff. With all his strength, he swept it around in an arc to catch the bandit leader behind the knees. With a curse, the man went down, colliding with his companion and knocking him over as well.
Dropping the staff, Jason used his left arm to roll himself over, toward the bandits who were trying to disentangle themselves from the heap in which they had fallen. The leader staggered to his feet just as Jason rolled up to those feet—and thrust upward with his blade, between the chief’s legs.
The shriek of agony was still in progress when Jason whipped his sword out and pushed the body away, into the other bandit who had stumbled erect and was rushing in. He fell over Jason, who almost choked on the sour body odor that enveloped him. But, legless though he was, he managed a wrestling hold and pulled the struggling bandit over atop himself. He got his left arm around the man’s throat, pulled back on the chin, and with his right arm brought his blade across the hairy throat in a slash that left the head flopping loosely, connected to the body by little save the spinal column itself. He pushed the blood-spurting corpse away and, with another shove of his left arm, rolled himself over to the writhing body of the bandit chief, whose squalling he ended with another throat slash.
After that, he massaged his legs into sensibility, then staggered over to Nagel and worked frantically and a little roughly to bring the historian around. They had to get away, lest the bandits should return, and find a place among the swamp’s fringes to make camp. Afterwards, there would be time to confront the incomprehensible nightmare from which they would not be able to awaken for another three months.
Chapter Six
I think I know what has happened,” said Nagel from across the campfire. “At least I have a theory.”
They sat under a rocky ledge at the base of one of the hills fringing the swamp. Jason had helped Nagel to its shelter, after which he had barely had time to gather firewood in the gathering dusk. Afterwards, they had consumed in silence the rough bread and rougher wine that Acrisius had given them for their journey.
And now, Nagel was the first to broach the subject of the unthinkable. Jason had to respect him for that.
“What theory is that?” There was, of course, no need to ask what Nagel was talking about.
“I listened when Ms. Sadaka-Ramirez—”
” ‘Deirdre ,’ Sidney,” Jason broke in wearily. “I think we can be on first-name terms now. If nothing else, it will save lot of syllables.”
“Very well—when Deirdre was describing those old fictional treatments of time travel she had read. All of them had to somehow deal with the Grandfather Paradox. Some of them did so by theorizing that travel into the past isn’t really travel into our past at all. They postulated an infinity of alternate timelines.”
“The ‘many-worlds hypothesis,’ ” Jason nodded. “It’s been flatly disproved.”
“But it must be true!” Nagel leaned forward, and the firelight revealed the terrible urgency in his face. “We’ve proved it! Time travel really involves travel sideways as well as backwards, into a parallel world, superficially similar to ours but where our myths are real. And we’re in it now! There’s no other explanation. In fact,” he pressed on, warming to his subject, “perhaps the peculiar qualities of this world allow occasional, uh, spontaneous transferences into ours, thus accounting for our ideas about mythical beings.”
“I’ve been back as far as the thirteenth century A.D.,” Jason reminded him. “While I was in the Middle Ages I never saw any unicorns or dragons or anything like that. Just gritty normalcy.”
“Well … suppose the differences between the universes grow less marked with the passage of time, due to a gradual fading out of the supernatural in this world. Thus, the two worlds are effectively identical in recent times, and were pretty much so in Medieval times. But now, with this unprecedented expedition, we’ve gone back into an age when the gods of the ancient pantheons were real—and we’ve fallen afoul of one!”