Sunset of the Gods

by Steve White

  “I rather thought you might.” Rutherford took the plastic case that would have been very hard to explain in the fifth century b.c.

  Jason took his place on the stage and waited.

  CHAPTER SIX

  No one had ever succeeded in putting the sensation of temporal displacement into words. Words are artifacts of human language, and this was something outside the realm of natural human experience.

  There was nothing spectacular about it—except, of course, from the standpoint of the people in the dome, to whose eyes the four of them instantaneously vanished with a very faint pop as the air rushed in to fill the volume they had occupied. As far as they themselves were concerned, there were no such striking visual effects. There was only a dreamlike wavering of reality, as though the dome and the universe itself were receding from their ken in some indescribable fashion. And, as though awakening from that dream, they were left with no clear recollection of having departed from the dome and no sensation of time having passed. Instead, crowding out the dream-memories, as the waking world will, was the dirt road they stood on, with the rising sun just clearing a ridge of hills and spreading its bronze illumination across the body of water that lay close to their right and the island of Salamis that could be glimpsed across that gulf. There was no one else in sight.

  As predicted, Jason recovered from the disorientation first. Mondrago wasn’t too far behind him. The other two both pronounced themselves ready to travel not too long thereafter.

  “All right,” said Jason, “let’s cover as much ground as possible as early as possible. It’s going to get hot later, at this time of year.” As they hitched up the sacks holding their belongings and set their faces eastward toward the sun, Landry cast a wistful look over his shoulder at the barely visible hump of the acropolis of Eleusis to the west.

  “Maybe we can find time for a side trip later, Bryan,” Jason consoled him.

  They proceeded along the Sacred Way with the aid of their four-and-a-half-foot walking sticks, skirting the Bay of Eleusis, as the sun rose higher into the Attic sky whose extraordinary brilliance and clarity had been remarked on by thousands of years of visitors, even during the Hydrocarbon Age when Greece had been afflicted by smog. Looking about him, Jason could see that the deforestation of Greece was well advanced since he had seen it in the seventeenth century b.c. Presently the road curved leftward, turning inland and leading over the scrub-covered ridge of Mount Aigaleos, which they ascended in the growing heat. They reached the crest, turned a corner, and to the southeast Attica lay spread out before them, bathed in the morning sun. In the distance—a little over five miles as the crow flew, with the sun almost directly behind it—was the city itself. Like every Greek polis, it clustered around the craggy prominence of its acropolis, or high fortified city . . . except that this one would forever be known simply as the Acropolis. It wasn’t crowned by the Parthenon yet, but Jason knew what he was looking at, and what it meant.

  He let Landry pause and stare for a few moments.

  As those moments slid by, the sun rose just a trifle higher, and its rays moved to strike a certain cleft in the rocks. For a split second, Jason got a glimpse of—

  At first his mind refused to accept it.

  Mondrago must have been looking in same direction. He ripped out a non-verbal roar, grasped his walking stick in a martial-arts grip, and sprinted for the cleft.

  Chantal’s eyes had been following Landry’s in the direction of Athens. Neither of them had seen it. Now they whirled around, wide-eyed.

  “Stay here!” Jason commanded, and ran after Mondrago, who was already out of sight.

  He scrambled up to the cleft and looked left and right. Mondrago was just vanishing from sight behind a boulder. Jason followed and caught up with him in a tiny glade where he stood, gripping his walking stick like the lethal weapon which, in his hands, it was. He was looking around intently and, it seemed, a little wildly.

  “Gone?” Jason asked, approaching with a certain caution.

  “Gone,” Mondrago exhaled. He relaxed, and something guttered out in his eyes.

  “Did you see what I saw?”

  “Depends on what you saw, sir.”

  “I think I saw a short humanoid with wooly, goat-like legs and, possibly, horns.”

  “On the basis of a very brief glimpse, I confirm that. Doesn’t seem likely that we’d both have the same hallucination, does it?”

  “It’s even less likely that we’d actually see something corresponding to the mythological descriptions of the god Pan.”

  “I don’t know, sir. You saw some actual Greek gods on your last trip into the past—or at least some actual aliens masquerading as gods.”

  Jason shook his head. “Even if any of the Teloi are still around eleven and a half centuries after I encountered them, what we saw was definitely not one of them. It also bore no resemblance to any nonhuman race known to us in our era. And speaking of nonhuman races . . . I couldn’t help noticing your reaction to this particular nonhuman.”

  Mondrago’s face took on the carefully neutral look of one being questioned by an officer. “I was startled, sir.”

  “No doubt. But what I saw went a little beyond startlement.” Jason sighed to himself. This could no longer be put off. He should, he now realized, have brought it up that day in the exercise room. But his hopes had led him to avoid the issue. He paused and chose his words with care. “As I mentioned to you once before, I studied your record during our orientation period. Among other things, I learned that you served with Shahanian’s Irregulars in the Newhome Pacification.”

  “I did, sir,” Mondrago said stiffly. His expression grew even more noncommittal.

  As far back as the end of the twentieth century, the end of the Cold War had led to a proliferation of PMCs, or “private military companies” like Executive Outcomes and L-3 MPRI, offering customized military expertise to anyone who could pay. This had proven to be a harbinger of the future. The need of fledgling extrasolar colonies for emergency military aid had soon outstripped the response capabilities of the chronically underfunded armed services, leading to a revival of the “free companies” of Earth’s history, although in a strictly regulated form. The need arose in large part from the recurring failure of human colonists to recognize until too late that a new planetary home was already occupied by a sentient race, simply because that race lacked all the obvious indicia of civilization. Civilization, it had turned out, was a statistical freak. Tool-using intelligence, however, was not. Neither was the capacity to feel resentment at the environmental disruption that even the most minimal terraforming unavoidably caused.

  Newhome, DM-37 10500 III, had been a case in point. The autochthones had been physically formidable to a degree that was exceptional for tool-users: steel-muscled hexapods whose three pairs of limbs could all be used as legs, propelling their quarter-ton mass faster than a cheetah. The forward pair could also be used as arms, the middle pair as relatively clumsy ones. The saberlike claws, the whiplike tail, and the tusklike fangs were, on some basic level, more frightening than the proficiency that the beings had acquired with captured and copied firearms. The colony had survived, thanks to imported professional soldiers who had inculcated the natives with a certain respect for the human race. But it had been too close for comfort, and an accommodation had been worked out under which human developments were restricted to geographically and ecologically distinct enclaves. By all accounts, the natives were now avid customers for the products of human civilization, and would soon be as peaceable and corrupted as one could wish.

  During the fighting, though. . . .

  “I’ve read some pretty harrowing accounts of that fighting,” said Jason. “Some of them were almost unbelievably so.”

  “You can believe them, sir.”

  “You say that like a man who knows whereof he speaks. And I seem to recall a couple of comments in your record. . . .”

  Mondrago’s features remained immobile, and his eyes stare
d fixedly ahead. But they burned. “They used a captured M-47 AAM launcher to shoot down one of our transport skimmers. Some of the men survived and were taken, including a couple of friends of mine. We did a search-and-rescue sweep and found them . . . or what was left of them. I won’t try to describe what had been done to them. Another time, we were a little too late responding to a distress call from a terraforming station. These weren’t soldiers like my friends. There were women and children—although you could barely tell. We made those filthy alien vermin pay the next time we hit one of their villages.”

  A quaver had crept into Mondrago’s tightly controlled voice by the time it reached the word alien.

  “Yes,” Jason nodded. “All this was touched on in those comments I mentioned. There were other comments in later stages of your career, whenever your duties brought you into contact with nonhumans. Never enough to actually get you in trouble, but. . . .” Jason met Mondrago’s eyes squarely. “There’s always been a possibility that we’d encounter aliens on this expedition. On the basis of what’s just happened, I’d say that possibility has to be upgraded to a strong probability. Are you going to be able to handle that in a disciplined manner?”

  The fire had gone out in Mondrago’s eyes, and the stiffness had melted from his expression. He spoke with his usual insouciance, something short of insolence. “I was under the impression that protecting this party from aliens was what I was here for, sir.”

  “Wrong! You’re here to protect the party from whatever I tell you to protect it from. And I have no intention of provoking any unnecessary conflicts with anybody, human or otherwise. That’s not our purpose.” Jason spoke quietly, but Mondrago unconsciously came to something resembling a position of attention. “Compared to some of the outfits you’ve served in, I’m sure the Temporal Service seems like a mildly well-supervised excursion agency. But you’ve read the Articles, including the provisions concerning the authority of a mission leader.”

  “I have, sir.”

  “Good, because it’s not just boilerplate. Let me explain a little history to you. On Earth, about five and a half centuries before our time, a sailing ship or a military unit overseas was effectively out of communication with its home base. The commander therefore had to be granted a very high degree of authority to act on his own initiative—and to enforce discipline. Then electronic communications came in, and brought with them—”

  “Micromanagement.”

  “No argument. But now the pendulum has swung back. With no such thing as faster-than-light ‘radio,’ messages have to be sent on ships, and a captain in the Deep Space Fleet is about as much on his own as a wet-navy skipper before they had the telegraph, and his legal status reflects that. With us, it’s even more extreme. The ‘message-drop’ system gives us a not-very-satisfactory way to send information to our own time, but there’s absolutely no way we can get information—or instructions—back. The Temporal Service may look like a loose-jointed quasimilitary organization, with no formal rank structure and everybody on a first-name basis, but in the crunch, a mission leader has legal enforcement powers that Captain Bligh would have envied. And I will have my orders obeyed, even if they cause you trouble because of the way you feel about aliens. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I thought it would be. You’re military, and you understand the necessity for this. The civilian members of extratemporal expeditions can’t be expected to, and we prefer not to rub their noses in it unless it’s absolutely necessary, which it usually isn’t.” Deciding that he had struck the right balance, Jason turned away. “Now let’s get back to Drs. Landry and Frey. They’re probably getting worried.”

  The two academics did in fact look jittery, but they still waited by the roadway. Thank God, Jason breathed inwardly. They’re the kind that can follow orders. He’d had altogether too much experience with the other kind.

  “What happened?” asked Landry, not unreasonably.

  Jason never kept secrets from expedition members unless he had to. He forthrightly described what he and Mondrago both believed they had seen and had tried unsuccessfully to catch. His listeners’ excitement—Landry’s at the possible grain of truth in a Greek myth, Chantal’s at a possible unsuspected nonhuman race—was palpable. He firmly squelched it.

  “For now we’re going to have to file this away under the heading of ‘unexplained mysteries, to be deferred until later.’ And we won’t mention this incident to any of the locals. Clear? Now let’s get going.”

  They descended into the rocky lowlands of Attica and walked on along the dusty road, past clumps of marjoram and thyme, and asphodel-covered meadows. They began to encounter people, but no one took any particular notice of them, save for an occasional glance occasioned by the oddity of a woman traveling abroad. But Chantal had wrapped her himation modestly around her head and face, so no one looked scandalized.

  In this era long before automobiles, there could be little “sprawl.” Besides which, there was something to be said for living within the protection of the walls. So the city was sharply defined. Landry had mentioned that historical demographers estimated its population at this time at a little over seven thousand, and that of the entire polis or city-state of Attica as maybe a hundred and fifty thousand counting slaves and resident foreigners.

  “Athens was almost the only ‘city-state’ that really was one,” he explained as they approached the walls. “Most of them were almost completely rural, with a little asty, or town, of not more than two or three thousand at the center of the agros, or countryside. So ‘city-state’ is a completely misleading translation of polis.”

  “Then why did the term become so well established?” inquired Chantal.

  “Because we historians have always fixated on Athens, which was atypical to the point of being sui generis. It became—or ‘will become,’ I suppose I should say—even more atypical after the Persian Wars in the Periclean era, as the capital of an empire of ‘allied’ states, with a previously unheard-of population of over thirty thousand for the city itself and maybe as many as half a million for the entire polis.”

  They entered Athens through the Dipylon Gate, whose fortifications lacked the moat and forward defenses that would be added later, after this era’s thoroughly unimpressive wall had been destroyed by the Persians in 480 b.c. and afterwards rebuilt. The man they were seeking was destined to be the driving force behind that rebuilding, and much else besides.

  They passed through the labyrinthine alleys of the malodorous potters’ quarter known as the Ceramicus, although in truth it was as noted for its cheap whores as for its ceramics. A number of the former were in evidence, or at least the women they saw had to be assumed to be such, for Athens’s sixth-century b.c. lawgiver Solon (one of the most consummate misogynists ever to draw breath, according to Landry) had laid it down that any woman seen in public alone was presumed to be a prostitute. Only the direction-finding feature of Jason’s computer implant enabled them to find their way through that maze, for they knew in general that their destination was south—and, unfortunately, downwind—of the Ceramicus, away from the potteries and whorehouses but near the Hangman’s Gate outside of which was the dumping ground for the bodies of executed criminals and suicides. And the streets (by courtesy so called) still teemed with dogs, goats, pigs, and their fleas.

  In addition to all the actual stenches, Jason detected a psychic one—that of fear. He had been in cities living under the threat of invasion before.

  As they traversed the winding, unpaved, filth-encrusted alleyways, Jason frequently glanced at his followers. He knew from experience the difficulty twenty-fourth-century people had in adjusting to the urban aromas of antiquity, and those aromas were a particularly ripe combination in this part of Athens. Mondrago looked stoical, and the other two seemed to be holding up reasonably well.

  “What made him decide to live in this area?” asked Chantal. Her tone implied that there must be more desirable neighborhoods.

  �
��Politics,” Landry chuckled. “He’s of aristocratic birth, though not from a politically prominent family. But his pitch is to the poorer elements, so he moved here from the family estates so he could be closer to his constituency. It was also a good location for an attorney—yes, he was the first man in history to parley a legal practice into a political career. And finally, it’s within walking distance of the Agora, where all the political and legal business is conducted. As far as we know, he’s still living here now even though three years ago he was elected Eponymous Archon—the head of state for a year.”

  “A year? Then what’s he doing now?” Chantal wondered.

  “It is believed that at the time of Marathon he was strategos, or general, of his phyle, or tribe, called the Leontis. You must understand, this is an elective office. Every year each of the ten tribes into which the Athenian citizenry is divided elects a strategos, who can be reelected an unlimited number of times. The official commander-in-chief is the polemarch, or War Archon, who is elected by the whole citizen body.”

  “More lack of military professionalism,” Mondrago commented with a sniff.

  Political prominence naturally made him easy to find. Jason’s first inquiry—which incidentally confirmed that they could make themselves understood in the Ionic dialect—yielded directions to a house larger than any of those nearby. It looked like it had been extended as its owner’s political prominence had waxed. Still, it had the same basic look as all the others: built of plaster-covered mud brick, with rooms organized around three sides of a small courtyard, the fourth side facing the street with the main door in its wall. All the larger windows faced inward to overlook the courtyard; only narrow slits faced the street. From within came the sound of flute and cithara music.

  Jason was wondering if it would be good form to knock on the door when a sound of voices came from around a corner of the street. A small group appeared, clustered around a man in his mid-thirties to whom they were talking animatedly. Never mind sandals and chitons; Jason knew political networking when he saw it.