by Steve White
No high-energy emissions, Jason thought with an unconscious nod. “But what about the one Perseus killed?”
“For the same reasons, they probably were not in continuous contact with the one on duty at the portal. Perhaps he reports in at regular intervals. But until he fails to do so, they have no cause for alarm.”
Jason breathed a little easier. It seemed to hold up.
“At the same time,” Oannes continued serenely, “it is also possible that they have been observing us all along, and are merely allowing us to penetrate deeper into their stronghold so that we can be more easily captured.”
It was, Jason thought, a remark that could just as easily have been left unsaid.
“You know, Oannes, it’s too bad you’ll never be able to return with us to our time. There’s a man named Rutherford I’d like to introduce you to. You and he have a lot in common.”
“I am gratified to learn of the evolutionary heights your race will attain in the future.”
“That’s how Rutherford himself would see it,” Jason sighed.
Nagel was not amused. “So we could be walking into a trap!”
“Perhaps.” Oannes’ serenity was unruffled. “But if so, the trap is not of a highly advanced nature. I have … means of perceiving such things.”
Jason looked at him sharply. Was he referring to one of the “tools” hanging from his harness? Or—a possibility that had never occurred to him before—did the alien have a brain implant similar to his own, but equipped with sensors that could detect any automatic energy weapons or gravitic capture fields or any such high-tech security systems? He wondered how tactful it would be to ask.
He was still wondering when an open space appeared up ahead.
They emerged onto a terrace encircling a vast open well whose top and bottom were lost in shadows. Jason began to appreciate the concept of a “minimum volume” as applied to artificially created pocket universes.
Perseus halted, and looked around openmouthed. But then he stepped forward onto the terrace. Jason could not imagine what was keeping the Hero going, in an environment even more disorientingly alien to him than it was to his companions. But, he reflected, Perseus had had a lot of practice at adjusting to the unimaginable lately.
Jason checked his display. Deirdre’s TRD still lay dead ahead. He looked across the chasm and saw an entryway of hangarlike proportions. Nothing could be made out in the obscurity beyond.
“We’ll have to circle around,” he told the others. He led the way through the archway and began to move along the rail that encircled the edge of the seemingly bottomless shaft. An updraft blew against his face. The breeze was welcome after their tension-filled trek through this warm place.
In fact, it was so refreshing that it slowed his responses just a trifle. Or maybe it was the fact that the faint whine behind them was a little higher-pitched than he had heard in his previous encounters with Teloi flying platforms. Those had been moving with self-consciously godlike stateliness. The Teloi who now zoomed out of the corridor from whence they’d come and whipped around the corner was in a hurry.
In fact, he was clearly as surprised by them as they were by him. He instinctively swerved to avoid them, while applying a braking thrust that raised the whining to a jagged scream. The platform skidded against the railing, sending them scattering in all directions. Jason hit the floor and rolled out of the craft’s way just before it came to a halt. Then he sprang to his feet, drawing his sword-dagger, ready to spring at the Teloi—male, somewhat more heavily built than the norm, bearded like Hyperion but in some indefinable way younger-seeming that the others Jason had seen—who stood in the “chariot” and regarded them with the expression of pitiless gravitas that seemed habitual with his race. Jason gathered himself for a leap.
The Teloi touched something on the platform’s little control panel … and Jason could not move.
Capture field , he thought in his despair.
It was a common tool of twenty-fourth-century police forces. Utilizing the control of subatomic forces that made artificial gravity possible, it held the major muscles of the limbs in an unbreakable grip, while leaving functions like breathing and speech unimpaired. But those twenty-fourth-century police weapons involved a directional beam, or a two-dimensional field across an entrance. Apparently the Teloi, in the course of their immemorial history, had learned how to generate a spherical capture field. Jason could still turn his head, and he saw Nagel and Perseus pinned in the field’s immaterial but irresistible embrace. No doubt the field had an inner boundary within which the platform’s occupant was unaffected.
A handy security system for a vehicle , he grudgingly approved. And since this Teloi didn’t activate it until now, Oannes didn’t detect it.
Speaking of which … He looked around again. Just where is Oannes?
The Teloi alighted from his slightly-the-worse-for-wear “chariot” and gave them a look whose curiosity spoiled its imperiousness. “Who are you?” he demanded. “And how did you gain entry into regions which are forbidden to mortals?”
Jason tried to formulate a response, balancing the need to withhold information against his desire to say something defiant or even smart-ass. But Perseus saved him the trouble. The Hero’s voice rang out like a clarion.
“I am Perseus, descendant of the divine-born Hero Danaos! And I claim as much right to be here as those gods who have brought the lady Deianeira here, ignoring the proper boundary between the living and the dead!”
“What?” It was the first time Jason had ever seen a Teloi taken aback. The unhuman face went slack with amazement. “You are Perseus ?”
“Yes!” The Hero pressed what he perceived as his advantage. “And besides being descended from the god-born Danaos, I am of divine birth myself. Yes, my mother Danaë was looked on with favor by a god. I claim the hospitality of the immortals, for I am the son of Zeus!”
The Teloi recovered his self-possession. But he did not resume his race’s usual look of cold remoteness. Instead, his wide mouth quirked upward and a smile gleamed through his beard.
“This is all very interesting,” he said in a voice beneath which amusement bubbled. “Especially inasmuch as I am myself Zeus.”
Chapter Fifteen
In the silence, Zeus—Jason decided to think of him as that, since it was the name he went by in this culture—reached back into his “chariot” and withdrew an overelaborate but basically tube-shaped object Jason had seen before.
“A head of the Hydra!” Perseus gasped.
“Yes. You know what it can do. So I release you from that which I laid upon you before.” Zeus touched another of the controls, and deactivated the capture field. Jason’s large muscles were free again. But as an aftereffect he knew was characteristic of the field, they initially collapsed in a series of mild spasms. All three of them fell, willy-nilly, to their knees before the “god.”
“So, Perseus,” said Zeus in a tone Jason found hard to interpret, “who are your companions?”
The genetically enhanced Hero rose unsteadily to his feet before Jason could even consider trying. “These are Jason and Synon, from Aetolia.” Jason silently prayed that Perseus would leave it at that. As so often happens, his prayers went unanswered. “They, like me, come in search of the lady Deianeira. Certain of the Old Gods brought her down here into the realm of the dead before her proper time.”
“Ah, yes!” Zeus’ strange eyes turned and met Jason’s in a moment of shared understanding.
Yeah, he knows , Jason thought. He doesn’t even need to scan Sidney and me for TRDs to know we’re time travelers like Deirdre. Hyperion knew that much at Tiryns.
But the Teloi didn’t pursue the matter. Instead, he manipulated another of his vehicle’s controls. “I have summoned my fellows,” he explained. Then he turned back to Perseus. “So, my son, you have explained why the others are here. But you have not explained why you are here. You may have attached yourself to these men’s quest, but I cannot believe you di
d not start out on a quest of your own. I know your kind—the kind we have begotten on mortal women—too well.”
Perseus’ head drooped. “I was sent by Polydectes, king of Seriphos. He holds my mother’s life in his hands—my mother Danaë, whom you once loved!”
Whom you once drugged unconscious and put into a lab! Jason thought searingly. And yet … was it his imagination, or did the Teloi’s features waver, just for a moment, into an expression he had never seen on their kind? But then the moment was past, and that unhuman face smoothed itself out.
“What does Polydectes want of you in exchange for Danaë‘s safety?” Zeus asked.
“He commands me to bring him a head of the Hydra,” Perseus mumbled, seemingly reduced to unaccustomed humility by the magnitude of what he was saying.
“A head of the Hydra!” Zeus let a tiny smile escape him for a split second, then remembered himself. “Polydectes presumes too much. It is a common failing of mortals. Or perhaps he merely wishes to send you to your death by compelling you to presume too much. We will deal with him in due course.”
Perseus looked the Teloi full in the face. “Let me deal with him, Father!”
“I am sure you would, Perseus. But I still feel that you have not fully answered my question. I sense there is something more to your presence here in the company of these men, whose only motive is to recover Deianeira … and, I suspect, an article that belongs to her. Something even stronger than your desire to protect your mother from Polydectes’ lust.”
Perseus’ eyes fell anew. “You see through to my innermost heart, Father. Yes, I have a reason of my own for seeking Deianeira, and you know it well. I love her—and I know she loves me!”
Jason’s jaw fell.
Once again, Zeus demonstrated that a Teloi could smile, if only slightly.
“Help me, Father,” Perseus pleaded, quivering with the intensity it took to force himself to beg.
“I cannot, Perseus.” Jason wondered if what he saw in the unhuman face was really sorrow.
“But, Father, I have nowhere else to turn! Not even the sea god Oannes could help me.”
No! Jason groaned inwardly. But it was too late.
The disturbing alien eyes flashed with sudden alertness. “What did you say?”
“He led us here,” Perseus explained in his innocence. He looked around, puzzled. “But now he has vanished. I wonder where he could have gone?”
“I think I know,” said Zeus grimly. He seemed about to say something else, but then there was a distant whining hum as though from several of the “chariots,” and a glow of approaching lights appeared in one of the archways. Zeus went expressionless. “It is out of my hands, Perseus. I cannot help you. No one can. Not now.”
Before anyone could say anything else, several Teloi swept into view. Their leader exchanged a few words with Zeus in an unknown language, finishing on a peremptory note. Zeus turned back to the humans. His face wore … what? Was it reluctance? Jason was still trying to decide when the “head of the Hydra” came up, and paralysis took him.
*
They were fitted with a kind of handcuffs and transferred with unfeeling efficiency to three of the flying platforms, which swept away through the hangarlike opening on the far side of the terrace. Lying on the vehicle’s floor by the feet of the Teloi driver, unable to move a single voluntary muscle, Jason could only catch occasional glimpses of the inconceivable expanses through which he was being whisked.
Finally, the “chariot” settled to a landing. Jason was unceremoniously offloaded. By chance, he was left at an angle from which he could see that he lay on the floor of a roofless, nearly cubical chamber. He heard rather than saw Nagel and Perseus being dumped beside him. Then the Teloi departed with a whine and a flash of running lights, and it became apparent that their prison cell wasn’t roofless after all. The roof rumbled shut above them, leaving them in dim lighting from the ubiquitous wall panels, awaiting the painful tingling of renewed sensation.
Perseus was despondent, believing himself “turned to stone” permanently. He therefore reacted with surprise when he was the first to be able to stand up. It didn’t surprise Jason at all. He wondered if the resentment he felt might have something to do with what the Hero had said about Deirdre. At least he had the satisfaction of recovering before Nagel.
Barely had the historian struggled to his feet when the roof above their heads slid away with a grinding roar. A flying platform descended. It held Hyperion and a smaller figure—human, wearing a lost look.
“Deirdre!” Jason yelped, forgetting Perseus’ presence.
It didn’t matter. The Hero didn’t hear the name. He stumbled forward, his eyes eloquent.
Deirdre blinked a few times and looked around, as though awakening to her surroundings. She gave Jason a smile. But then her eyes met Perseus’—and her expression changed to something Jason had to sternly remind himself he had no right to resent.
Hyperion clearly recognized that look for what it was, for he gave a satisfied nod. He touched his control panel, causing Perseus’ handcuffs to fall away, and motioned come . Before Jason, in the midst of his whirling emotions—and his struggle to understand those emotions—realized what was happening, the Hero stepped onto the platform and took Deirdre’s hands … and the platform rose upward from the pitlike chamber.
Jason’s paralysis broke. “Stop!” he shouted, and rushed forward. But the “chariot” swooped away and was gone. Then a second vehicle appeared above them and began to descend.
This one was very different from the “chariots”: large and bulky, with a minimum of the usual baroque decorative motifs. It carried two Teloi, neither of whom Jason recognized. It also bore a machine that Jason was fairly sure he recognized, despite its alien origin. Form, after all, follows function … and this included a recliner with a helmetlike object overhanging one end.
The platform settled to the floor, almost filling the cell. One of the Teloi held a paralysis beamer on the humans, while the other beckoned.
“I’ll go first,” Jason sighed. Before Nagel could argue, he stepped onto the platform, settled onto the Teloi-sized recliner, and allowed the helmet to be fitted onto his head. His captors strapped him in and began fiddling with the controls.
“Wait a minute—” Jason began, suddenly alarmed.
But the Teloi, unlike the Temporal Regulatory Authority’s technicians, were clearly unconcerned with the effect of imposing new language patterns by direct neural induction on a brain that was not cushioned by drugs … at least not when that brain was merely a human one. They ignored him and activated the machine.
Jason managed not to scream too much before he fainted.
*
He awoke lying on a pallet in a room that was small on the Teloi scale. Nagel was on another pallet beside him, still unconscious and very obviously still suffering from the indescribable dreams that had held Jason in thrall. At first he felt relief at having escaped from them. But after assessing his condition—nausea, splitting headache, black depression—he decided the dreams hadn’t been so bad after all.
But there was no going back to sleep. He concentrated on exploring the new language that had been brutally and unnaturally forced on his brain.
It was worse than any such adjustment he had ever had to make before. There were, he decided, two reasons. The other languages he had acquired this way had been human and, for that matter, Indo-European. The tongue that now resided uncomfortably in his mind was altogether alien, with a structure and a body of assumptions that had begun to diverge the moment the first proto-Teloi and the first proto-human had begun to utter something more meaningful than grunts. And in the second place, those human languages had belonged to societies less advanced than his, and therefore had contained no concepts beyond his horizons. The Teloi language, on the other hand, was peppered with words that were mere noises to him, for he had no referents. It was unsettling.
Nagel finally awoke, even more wretched than Jason. They were gi
ven food—nothing startling, just the local human fare—but not allowed the rest or the antidepressants they would have gotten in Australia. They were forced to their feet and conducted through one oddly proportioned hall after another, finally emerging into a large octagonal chamber with walls and floor of a shiny, silver-veined black. A round table rose from the center of that floor like a natural outcropping, with Teloi-sized chairs arranged around its gleaming top. Only half of those chairs were occupied: a semicircle of about a dozen Teloi of both sexes. Hyperion sat at the center. Jason also recognized Eurymedon … and Zeus.
“Now we can talk,” said Hyperion in the language Jason now more or less understood.
“May we sit down?” asked Jason. He hadn’t had an opportunity to practice with the language, accustoming his vocal apparatus to it. He was sure his pronunciation must be nearly incomprehensible, so he spoke with great care.
Hyperion evidently understood him. Just as evidently, he was taken aback by something other than automatic, cringing subservience. And, it occurred to Jason, this was the first time the Teloi had dealt with humans inside their private universe.
“If you wish,” Hyperion said indifferently. Jason settled uncomfortably onto one of the outsized chairs, directly across the table from Hyperion. Nagel followed suit.
“So,” said Jason after as long a pause as he calculated he could get away with, “what do you want to talk about?”
“This should be obvious, even to you. We have given you our language, using the same technology we have used to give ourselves the languages your species has evolved in its various cultures, so that we can converse without the limitations of the primitive local language you already know. So let us proceed. I trust you will not waste our time by denying you are time travelers from this world’s remote future.”
Jason considered doing just that, if only to annoy the Teloi. He reluctantly concluded that the emotional satisfaction involved was outweighed by the chance of obtaining information by playing along. Besides which, he had to admit, if only to himself, that it was a great relief to be able to communicate in a civilized language—even though he had to concentrate to understand Hyperion, despite the effort the Teloi was making to speak slowly and distinctly.