Sunset of the Gods

by Steve White

  “Aha!” Mondrago burst out. “So that’s the famous ‘shield signal’ that everybody has always wondered about.”

  “Right,” Jason nodded. “The Greeks will think it’s traitors signaling to the Persian fleet, even though the meaning and purpose of such a signal will be hard to understand, and afterwards no treason will ever be proved. But now we know what it’s really for: to let Franco & Co. know exactly when they can proceed with the ceremony. It’ll make it even more of a belief-strengthening miracle for the true believers when their god appears to them and tells them about the battle just as it’s ending. A very precisely choreographed operation all around.”

  “And one which we’re now in a position to abort!” said Mondrago wolfishly. “You’ve gotten your information out of him. Now let me kill him.”

  Pan stiffened with fear.

  “No!” said Jason, without really knowing why.

  “Why not? Franco will have egg on his face when the ‘god’ doesn’t show up as promised.”

  Which, Jason was forced to admit to himself, made sense. Only. . . .

  All at once, it came to him. He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. But of course he had thought of it before, when he had last spoken to Pan on the Tegea heights above the road from Sparta.

  “Listen, Pan,” he said hurriedly. “We’ve got to go. I just need to know one thing: do you know how to pilot the Teloi aircars that the Transhumanists are using?”

  “Why, yes.” Pan seemed puzzled, as did Mondrago. “They taught me how, in case I should ever need to do it when alone.” He didn’t need to add that he could always be relied on to go to the destination he was ordered. In light of that utter reliability, it made perfect sense that the Transhumanists would have availed themselves of the flexibility of training him to pilot himself. But Jason had had to be sure.

  “Good. Now, if I let you live, I know you’ve got to stay and do as Franco tells you . . . and I know why. But I’m going to do it anyway.”

  Mondrago began to splutter, inarticulate with outrage. Jason shushed him.

  “I’m going to leave you here. But I’m going to stop the Transhumanists from using you as they intend to, over there on Mount Kotroni. And afterwards I’m going to take you to Athens.”

  “How will you accomplish all this?” Pan asked in a tone of dead incredulity, too hopeless even to sneer.

  “Good question,” muttered Mondrago.

  “Never mind that for now. Just remember what I told you before about getting help for you, and freeing you from your dependence on the Transhumanists and the Teloi? Well, I swear to you that I’ll do exactly that, in exchange for your cooperation.”

  “Cooperation in what?” The high-pitched voice was no longer entirely lifeless, for a flicker of eagerness had awakened in it.

  “I’ll want you to appear to the cult members and tell them that you’re no god, and that the Transhumanists are some kind of evil supernatural beings—I’ll leave the details to you—who’ve duped them. Do you agree to my terms?”

  “If you do indeed take me to Athens, and protect me from Franco and the others, I’ll do as you ask.”

  “Good.” At that moment, the tiny blue light began to flash that told Jason a grav repulsion vehicle was approaching. In this era, when such vehicles weren’t supposed to exist, it could mean only one thing. “The Teloi aircar is coming for you. We have to go. Remember what I said.” He got to his feet and motioned the still visibly thunderstruck Mondrago to follow him. Mondrago looked at Pan, and then at his dagger, with obvious longing, but he obeyed.

  The two men hastily ascended the short remaining distance, flung themselves into the Transhumanist aircar, and engaged the invisibility field. As they went aloft they saw, in the ghostly grayish world viewed through the field, an open-topped Teloi aircar flying low for concealment.

  “Well,” said Mondrago with a gust of released breath, “here they come to take Pan over to Mount Kotroni so he can put on his little performance—and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it about it now. What, exactly, was the purpose of all those lies you told him?”

  “I wasn’t lying,” said Jason distractedly as he set a course for Athens. “I meant every word.”

  “What? But how—?”

  Jason turned to meet Mondrago’s eyes, and all the distraction was gone. When he spoke, the bullwhip crack of command was in his voice. “At the present time, you have no need to know that. For now, you will simply follow orders. And any more borderline insubordination on your part will go into my report. Is that clear?”

  Mondrago came to as close to a position of attention as the aircar’s cramped passenger seat permitted. “Yes, sir!” he said with a new snap.

  “Good.” Jason allowed his expression to soften into a smile. “Oh, and by the way, thanks for saving my life. That also will be in my report.”

  With no need to conceal the movements of a vehicle that was, in the present milieu, supernatural, they were at Athens in minutes and were able to pick a landing spot with care.

  While he was doing it, Jason spared a moment to consult his map display.The red dot that marked Chantal’s TRD was still at Themistocles’ house. He ordered his weary body not to go weak with relief. Now, no matter what happened to him and Mondrago, he would be able to scupper Franco’s plan to use Chantal as a mole.

  There was a small clear area just within the city wall near the “Hangman’s Gate.” Jason settled the aircar gently down and made sure no one was in sight. Leaving Mondrago to keep the power on, Jason got out with the invisibility field still activated. To an observer, he would have seemed to step into existence from nowhere. Fortunately, there were no observers. He hastened through the narrow alleys, encountering no one, for all the women and old men and children who currently occupied Athens were either keeping to their homes or milling uneasily about the Agora, waiting for news.

  Reaching Themistocles’ house, Jason pounded on the door. The slave who opened it gasped at the sight of him—either from recognition or from sheer horror at the apparition, encrusted with dust and gore. This was no time for subtlety. While the slave was still goggling, Jason jabbed him in the solar plexus just hard enough to double him over, then wrapped an arm around his throat in a choke-hold that induced prompt unconsciousness. Then he rushed into the house, sending maidservants fleeing screaming as he went to the storeroom where he had left “Cleothera’s” possessions. The jar was still where he had left it. He opened it to confirm the presence of the TRD, then ran from the house and retraced his steps to the open area and the carefully-memorized location of the aircar.

  “Got it!” he told Mondrago as he took the aircar aloft. “We beat Franco to it.”

  “He probably thought he had plenty of time and no need to hurry,” Mondrago opined. “Now he’s going to be shitting rivets.”

  “Maybe.” Jason frowned. “We’ve got to get out of Attica—and not just because the Transhumanists are going to be hunting for us. Themistocles is going to think we’re deserters—and if the house slaves recognized me, he’s going to think I’m a thief as well. I hate that.”

  “So do I. I like Themistocles. I’m glad he survives the battle.”

  “Not everyone does. Callimachus, for example, dies in the final battle on the beach, by the Persian ships, transfixed by so many spears he’s propped up and can’t fall to the ground.”

  “Shit.” Mondrago shook his head at the thought of the gallant old war archon, to whom history would never accord as much credit for the victory as he deserved. “At least Miltiades lives, right?”

  “Right—but he probably would have been better off getting killed.” Seeing Mondrago’s puzzled stare, Jason explained. “Later this year, the Athenians will give him command of their fleet, and he’ll take it around the Aegean on an expedition against islands that collaborated with the Persians. At Paros, though, he’ll be defeated and badly wounded in the leg. On his return to Athens, his political rivals, the Alcmaeonid family, will smell blood. T
hey’ll put him on trial and hit him with a fine of fifty talents—an impossibly large sum—as an alternative to execution. But by then he’ll have gotten gangrene in his wound, and will die shortly after the trial.”

  “Shit!” Mondrago repeated, but in a very different tone. “So these people are going to do that to the man who, along with Callimachus, masterminded the victory of Marathon for them. And you told me how they’re going to ostracize Themistocles after he does the same thing for them at Salamis when the Persians come back ten years from now. And I seem to recall something about making Socrates drink hemlock.” He looked down at the receding maze of Athens. “Tell me again about how these are supposed to be the good guys!”

  Jason was silent for a moment. When he spoke, it was to himself as much as to Mondrago. “Infants are awkward and messy—even the ones who end up growing into worthwhile adults. Democracy in Athens in this era is awkward and messy. But it had to survive this day. Otherwise, the world we come from could never have been.” He fell silent again, then spoke briskly. “Anyway we’re going to have to lay low for a month and six days, and as I said, we’ve made Attica too hot to hold us now, even if there weren’t Transhumanists running around in it looking for us. We’ll need to go somewhere else.”

  Mondrago held his peace about the promises Jason had made to Pan concerning the events of this very day, here in Attica. “Where?” was all he said.

  Jason smiled. “Well, I remember a place I hid out once before.”

  He set a course for the island of Crete.

  The shepherds and goatherds around Mount Ida now spoke the Doric dialect of Greek instead of a Hittite-Luwian language, and Jason noticed the occasional iron tool among them. Otherwise, they were exactly as he remembered their ancestors in 1628 b.c.

  He had brought the aircar over Crete and across the Tallaion Mountains (as the Kouloukounas range was called in this era) and along the Mylopatomas Valley to the upland plain of Nidha, with the snow-capped mass of Ida looming up eight thousand feet above sea level. At least this time he hadn’t had to struggle, lamed by a broken foot, over all that dramatic terrain. A slow circle of Mount Ida had revealed the well-remembered cave, under a looming shelf of rock, where he and Deirdre Sadaka-Ramirez had sheltered.

  He had cut off the invisibility field as he had brought the aircar in for a landing on the nearest piece of level ground he could find, allowing any locals who happened to be around a glimpse of it. Rutherford, he knew, would have had heart failure. But among a profoundly illiterate population like this, any tales would die out after a couple of centuries at most, and never be believed by anyone in the greater world outside this totally ignored backwater of an island. And a little supernatural cachet wouldn’t hurt.

  And so it had proved. They had taken up residence in the cave, believed by some to have been the nursery of the infant Zeus. It, too, was much as he remembered, although this time it didn’t lie under a sky polluted with the ashes of Santorini in the aftermath of the most cataclysmic volcanic explosion in history. After a while the locals had timidly sought them out. A series of hints, haltingly delivered through the barrier of dialect differences, had persuaded them to supply the uncanny pair of strangers with cheese and wine (by courtesy so called) and certain other items, while keeping their presence a secret lest the displeasure of certain baleful deities be called down on the whole region. Jason and Mondrago had certain skills—first aid, for example—that enabled them to repay the favors and in the process acquire even more prestige. And they were both experts in wilderness survival, who quickly improvised bows with which to hunt the wild goats. They passed late August and early September with no great difficulty.

  As September 18 approached, Jason programmed a fairly complex navigational command into the autopilot of the Transhumanists’ aircar. He sent it looping, pilotless, in a circle that brought it around to the opposite side of Mount Ida . . . and then, with all the acceleration it could pile on, directly into the mountainside. After his return, any investigators the Authority might find it worthwhile to send to that mountainside might find a few bits of wreckage that hadn’t been there before.

  Through it all, Mondrago remained stoically silent on the subject Jason had ruled off limits.

  Finally the time came when they stood (it seemed undignified to arrive on the displacer stage sitting on one’s butt) awaiting retrieval. Jason held the little jar stolen from Themistocles’ house tightly in his hand. The digital countdown projected onto Jason’s optic nerve wound down. It was nearing zero when Mondrago finally blurted, “Sir, I just don’t get it!”

  “What don’t you get?”

  “You know what I mean. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about you, it’s that you’re a man of your word. And you told me that you meant what you said to Pan. But all the things you said you were going to prevent—the performances on Mount Kotroni and under the Acropolis—happened over a month ago, back in Attica. So you didn’t keep your promise.”

  “Didn’t I?” Jason grinned. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “What, sir?”

  “We’re time travellers!”

  Mondrago’s bug-eyed stare of realization was the last thing Jason saw before the indescribable unreality of temporal transition took them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  As always, the glare of electric lighting in the great dome was blinding after instantaneous transition from a relatively dim setting—and practically all settings in past ages were relatively dim. It made the disorientation of temporal displacement even worse, affecting even an old hand like Jason. Between the blindness and the dizziness, it was a moment before he became aware of the hubbub among the people behind the ranks of control panels. They had been expecting four people to appear on the stage, not two.

  Blinking the stroboscopic stars out of his eyes, Jason saw Mondrago shamefacedly getting to his feet. “Don’t worry,” he assured him. “Everybody loses his balance the first time.” Looking around the floor of the stage, he spotted Landry’s TRD, covered with the ashes of the crematory furnace. Then he saw Kyle Rutherford advancing toward the stage, his face a question mark.

  “Dr. Landry was killed,” said Jason, pointing at the tiny, ashy sphere on the floor. He offered no further explanation. Rutherford restrained himself from demanding one.

  “And Dr. Frey . . . ?”

  “She remained in the target milieu. Her TRD is in here.” Jason held out the ceramic vase.

  Rutherford stared wide-eyed. Jason had a pretty good idea what he was thinking, after his own last extratemporal expedition. He recalled the words of a probably mythical twentieth century figure with the unlikely name of Yogi Berra: “Déjà vu all over again.”

  “Yes, it was cut out of her,” he said, answering Rutherford’s unspoken question.

  Rutherford went pale. “The Teloi?”

  “No . . . or at least not principally. There are a lot of things you need to know—things that can’t be made public. Can we go somewhere for an informal preliminary debriefing?”

  “Yes . . . yes, of course.” Rutherford started to lead them away, then paused. “But from your choice of words, do I gather that Dr. Frey was alive when you last saw her?”

  “Yes. I left her in the fifth century b.c. still alive. And. . . .” Jason paused, and his face took on a look that caused Rutherford to flinch backwards. “And this time I’m going to get her back!”

  Reducing Rutherford to a state of inarticulate shock had long been an ambition of Jason’s. Now he had achieved it . . . and the circumstances made it impossible for him to enjoy it.

  They sat in Rutherford’s private office. It was more austerely furnished than the one in Athens that he preferred whenever he didn’t need to be in Australia, but like that one it held a display case containing items brought back from the past. And here, also, the prize exhibit was a sword—in this case, a seemingly undistinguished medieval hand-and-a-half sword. A teenaged French peasant girl who believed the saints had told her to liber
ate her people and crown her Dauphin had found it buried behind the altar of the church of Saint Catherine of Fierbois in 1429 and carried it to the relief of Orleans. More to the point, the office contained the necessary equipment for playing the sights and sounds recorded on the tiny disc Jason had removed from his implant through an equally tiny slot in his skull, concealed by a flap of artificial skin. They had corroborated a story Rutherford clearly didn’t want to believe.

  Now Jason and Mondrago—uncharacteristically subdued, unaccustomed as he was to such surroundings—waited while Rutherford shook his head, slowly and repeatedly as though in a semi-daze. Jason wasn’t sure which revelation had hit the old boy hardest: that a surviving Transhumanist underground still existed, or that they were operating an illicit temporal displacer on a higher technological level than the Authority’s, or that they were taking high technology equipment into the past, or the objectives for which they were using their displacer. Now he sat amid the rubble of his well-ordered world.

  “One thing in our favor,” Jason concluded, trying to end on a positive note. “The Transhumanists are limited to sending their varieties that look more or less like normal humans—that’s the only sort we saw—back in time. Their more extreme species variations would be pretty conspicuous in past eras, not to mention the cyborg warriors with grossly obvious bionic parts.”

  “But,” said Mondrago, spoiling the effect Jason had intended, “there’s no reason they can’t have all of those on Earth in the present day, in the various concealed strongholds Franco bragged about.” They all shuddered inwardly, as members of their culture always did at the thought of the grotesque and unnatural abominations the Transhuman movement had spawned, all of which were believed to have been extirpated a century before.

  Rutherford gave his head a final shake, this time a decisive one. “This is terrible! It must be stopped! The potential consequences of what you have discovered are simply incalculable.”