Sunset of the Gods

Sunset of the Gods - By Steve White



CHAPTER ONE





Even on Old Earth, nothing was forever unchanging, as Jason Thanou had better reason than most to know—not even on the island of Corfu, however much it might seem to drift down the centuries in a bubble of suspended time, lost in its own placid beauty.

For example, the Paliokastritsa Monastery had long ago ceased to be a monastery, and the golden and silver vessels were no longer brought there every August from the village Strinillas for the festival of the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ, by a road which had led laboriously up the monastery’s hill between tall oak trees and through the smell of sage and rosemary. Now aircars swooped up to the summit, and the monastery had been converted into a resort, bringing visitors from all around Earth and far beyond it, who stared at the ancient chambers, a few of those visitors at least trying to comprehend what must have been felt by the cenobites who had lived out their lives of total commitment under the mosaic gaze of Christ Pantocrator.

They came, of course, for the incomparable location. From the monastery balcony, one could look out on the endlessness of Homer’s wine-dark sea. Northward and southward stretched the coast, its beaches broken into a succession of coves by ridges clothed in olive and cypress trees and culminating in gigantic steep rocks like the one that the local people would still tell you was the petrified ship the Phaecians, once rulers of this island, had sent to bear Odysseus home to Ithaca and his faithful Penelope.

Now Jason stood on that balcony and wondered, not for the first time, what he was doing here.

He could have taken his richly deserved R&R in Australia, where the Temporal Regulatory Authority’s great displacer stage was located . . . or, for that matter, anywhere on Earth. Or he could have gone directly back to his homeworld of Hesperia—his fondest desire, as he had been telling everyone who would listen. Instead he had come back to Greece . . . but only to this northwesternmost fringe of it, as though hesitating at the threshold of sights he had seen mere weeks ago. Weeks, that is, in terms of his own stream of consciousness, but four thousand years ago as the rest of the universe measured the passage of time.

There were places in Greece to which he was not yet prepared to go, and things on which he was not yet prepared to look. Not Crete, for example, and the ruins of Knossos, whose original grandeur he had seen before the frescoes had been painted. Not Athens, with its archaeological museum which held the golden death-mask Heinrich Schliemann had called the Mask of Agamemnon, although Jason knew whose face it really was, for he had known that face when it was young and beardless. Certainly not Santorini, whose cataclysmic volcanic death he had witnessed in 1628 b.c. And most assuredly not Mycenae with its grave circles, for he knew to whom some of those bones belonged—and one female skeleton in particular. . . .

Unconsciously, his hand strayed as it so often did to his pocket and withdrew a small plastic case. As always, his guts clenched with apprehension as he opened it. Yes, the tiny metallic sphere, no larger than a small pea, was still there. He closed the case with an annoyed snap. He had seen the curious glances the compulsive habit had drawn from his fellow resort guests. The general curiosity had intensified when word had spread that he was a time traveler, around whose latest expedition into the past clustered some very odd rumors.

“Is it still there?” asked a familiar voice from behind him, speaking with the precise, consciously archaic diction Earth’s intelligentsia liked to affect.

A sigh escaped Jason. “Yes, as you already know,” he said before turning around to confront a gaunt, elderly man, darkly clad in a style of expensive fustiness—the uniform of Earth’s academic establishment. “And what brings the Grand High Muckety-Muck of the Temporal Regulatory Authority here?”

Kyle Rutherford smiled and stroked his gray Vandyke. “What kind of attitude is that? I’d hoped to catch you before your departure for. . . . Oh, you know: that home planet of yours.”

“Hesperia,” Jason said through clenched teeth. “Psi 5 Aurigae III. As you are perfectly well aware,” he added, although he knew better than to expect anyone of Rutherford’s ilk to admit to being able to tell one colonial system from another. Knowledge of that sort was just so inexpressibly, crashingly vulgar in their rarefied world of arcane erudition. “And now that you’ve gotten all the irritating affectations out of your system, answer the question. Why were you so eager to catch me?”

“Well,” said Rutherford, all innocence, “I naturally wanted to know if your convalescence is complete. I gather it is.”

Jason gave a grudgingly civil nod. In earlier eras, what he had been through—breaking a foot, then being forced to walk on it for miles over Crete’s mountainous terrain, and then having it traumatized anew—would have left him with a permanent limp at least. Nowadays, it was a matter of removing the affected portions and regenerating them. It had taken a certain amount of practice to break in the new segments, but no one seeing Jason now would have guessed he had ever been injured, much less that he had received that injury struggling ashore on the ruined shores of Crete after riding a tsunami.

The scars to his soul were something else.

“So,” he heard Rutherford saying, “I imagine you plan to be returning to, ah, Hesperia without too much more ado, and resume your commission with the Colonial Rangers there.”

“That’s right. Those ‘special circumstances’ you invoked don’t exactly apply any longer, do they?” Rutherford’s expression told Jason that he was correct. He was free of the reactivation clause that had brought him unwillingly out of his early retirement from the Temporal Service, the Authority’s enforcement arm. He excelled himself (so he thought) by not rubbing it in. Feeling indulgent, he even made an effort to be conciliatory. “Anyway, you’re not going to need me—or anybody else—again for any expeditions into the remote past in this part of the world, are you?”

“Well . . . that’s not altogether true.”

“What?” Jason took a deep breath. “Look, Kyle, I’m only too well aware that the governing council of the Authority consists of snobbish, pompous, fatheaded old pedants.” (Like you, he sternly commanded himself not to add.) “But surely not even they can be so stupid! Our expedition revealed that the Teloi aliens were active—dominant, in fact—on Earth in proto-historical times, when they had established themselves as ‘gods’ with the help of their advanced technology. The sights and sounds on my recorder implant corroborate my testimony beyond any possibility of a doubt. And even without that. . . .” Jason’s hand strayed involuntarily toward his pocket before he could halt it.

“Rest assured that no one questions your findings, and that there are no plans to send any expeditions back to periods earlier than the Santorini explosion.” Rutherford pursed his mouth. “The expense of such remote temporal displacements is ruinous anyway, given the energy expenditure required. You have no idea—”

“Actually, I do,” Jason cut in rudely.

“Ahem! Yes, of course I realize you are not entirely unacquainted with these matters. Well, at any rate the council, despite your lack of respect for its members—which you’ve never made any attempt to conceal—is quite capable of seeing the potential hazards of any extratemporal intervention that might come in conflict with the Teloi. The consequences are incalculable, in fact.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“We are intensely interested in the role played in subsequent history by those Teloi who were not trapped in their artificial pocket universe when its dimensional interface device was destroyed—or ‘imprisoned in Tartarus’ as the later Greeks had it. The ‘New Gods,’ as I believe they were called.”

“Also known as the Olympians,” Jason nodded, remembering the face of Zeus.

“And by various other names elsewhere, all across the Indo-European zone,” added Rutherford with a nod of his own. “They were worshiped, under their various names, for a very long time, well into recorded history, although naturally their actual manifestations grew less frequent. And as you learned, the Teloi had very long lifespans, although they could of course die from violence.”

“So you want to look in on times when those ‘manifestations’ were believed to have taken place? Like the gods fighting for the two sides in the Trojan War?”

“The Trojan War. . . .” For a moment, Rutherford’s face glowed with a fervor little less ecstatic than that which had once raised the stones of the monastery. Then the glow died and he shook his head sadly. “No. We cannot send an expedition back to observe an historic event unless we can pinpoint exactly when it took place. Dendrochronology and the distribution of wind-blown volcanic ash enabled us to narrow the Santorini explosion to autumn of 1628 b.c. But after all these centuries there is still no consensus as to the date of the Trojan War. It is pretty generally agreed that Eratosthenes’ dating of 1184 b.c. is worthless, based as it was on an arbitrary length assigned to the generations in the genealogies of the Dorian royal families of Sparta. On the other hand—”

“Kyle. . . .”

“—the Parian Marble gave a precise date of June 5, 1209 b.c. for the sack, but it was based on astronomical computations which were even more questionable. Other calculations—”

“Kyle.”

“—were as early as 1334 b.c. in Doulis of Samos, or as late as 1135 b.c. in Ephorus, whereas—”

“KYLE!”

“Oh . . . yes, where was I? Well, suffice it to say that even the Classical Greeks couldn’t agree on the date, and modern scholarship has done no better. Estimates range from 1250 to 1180 b.c., and are therefore effectively useless for our purposes. The same problem applies to the voyage of the Argonauts, the war of the Seven against Thebes, and other events remembered in the Greek myths. And, to repeat, the gods tended not to put in appearances in the full light of history. There is one exception, however.” Rutherford paused portentously. “The Battle of Marathon.”

“Huh?” All at once, Jason’s interest awoke. It momentarily took his mind off the irritation he felt, as usual, around Rutherford. “You mean the one where the Athenians defeated the Persians? But that was much later—490 b.c., wasn’t it?”

“August or September of 490 b.c., most probably the former,” Rutherford nodded approvingly. The faint note of surprise underlying the approval made it less than altogether flattering. “By that period, it is difficult to know just how widespread literal belief in the Olympian gods was. And yet contemporary Greeks seem to have been firmly convinced that Pan—a minor god whose name is the root of the English ‘panic’—intervened actively on behalf of the Athenians.”

“I never encountered, or heard of, a Teloi who went by that name,” said Jason dubiously.

“I know. Another difficulty is that Pan—unlike most Greek gods, who were visualized as idealized humans—was a hybrid figure with the legs and horns of a goat and exceptionally large . . . er, male sexual equipment.”

“That doesn’t sound like the Teloi,” said Jason, recalling seven-to-eight-foot-tall humanoids with hair like a shimmering alloy of gold and silver, their pale-skinned faces long, narrow, and sharp-featured, with huge oblique eyes under brows which, like their high cheekbones, tilted upward. Those eyes’ strangely opaque blue irises seemed to leak their color into the pale-blue “whites.” The overall impression hovered uneasily between exotic beauty and disturbing alienness.

“Nevertheless,” said Rutherford, “the matter is unquestionably worth looking into. And, aside from the definite timeframe involved, there are numerous other benefits. For one thing, the more recent date will result in a lesser energy requirement for the displacement.”

“Well, yes. 490 b.c. is only—” (Jason did the mental arithmetic without the help of his computer implant) “—twenty-eight hundred and seventy years ago. Still, that’s one hell of an ‘only!’ Compared to any expedition you’d ever sent out before ours—”

“Too true. But the importance of investigating Teloi involvement in historical times is such that we have been able to obtain authorization. It also helped that the Battle of Marathon is so inherently interesting. It was, after all, crucial to the survival of Western civilization. And there are a number of unanswered questions about it, quite aside from the Teloi. So we can kill two birds with one stone, as people say.”

“Still, I don’t imagine you’ll be able to send a very large party.” The titanic energy expenditure required for displacement was tied to two factors: the mass to be displaced, and the temporal “distance” it was to be sent into the past. This was why Jason had taken only two companions with him to the Bronze Age, by far the longest displacement ever attempted. Since the trade-off was inescapable, the Authority was constantly looking into ways to reduce the total energy requirement, and the researchers were ceaselessly holding out hope of eventual success, but to date the problem remained intractable. This, aside from sheer caution, was why no large items of equipment were ever sent back in time. Sending human bodies—with their clothing, and any items they could wear or carry on their persons, for reasons related to the esoteric physics of time travel—was expensive enough.

“True, the party will have to be a small one. But the appropriation is comparable to that for your last expedition. So we can send four people.” Rutherford took on the aspect of one bestowing a great gift. “We want you—”

“—To be the mission leader,” Jason finished for him. “Even though this time you have to ask me to do it,” he couldn’t resist adding, for all his growing interest.

Rutherford spoke with what was clearly a great, if not supreme, effort. “I am aware that we have had our differences. And I own that I may have been a trifle high-handed on the last occasion. But surely you of all people, as discoverer of the Teloi element in the human past, can see the importance of investigating it further.”

“Maybe. But why do you need me, specifically, to investigate it?”

“I should think it would be obvious. You are the nearest thing we have to a surviving Teloi expert.” Jason was silent, as this was undeniable. Rutherford pressed his advantage. “Also, there is the perennial problem of inconspicuousness.” Rutherford gazed at Jason, who knew he was gazing at wavy brown-black hair, dark brown eyes, light olive skin, and straight features.

Jason, despite his name, was no more “ethnically pure” than any other inhabitant of Hesperia or any other colony world. But by some fluke, the Hellenic contribution to his genes had reemerged to such an extent that he could pass as a Greek in any era of history. It also helped that he stood less than six feet, and therefore was not freakishly tall by most historical standards. It had always made him valuable to the Temporal Regulatory Authority, which was legally interdicted from using genetic nanoviruses to tailor its agents’ appearance to fit various milieus in Earth’s less-cosmopolitan past. The nightmare rule of the Transhuman movement had placed that sort of thing as far beyond the pale of acceptability as the Nazis had once placed anti-Semitism.

“If we were sending an expedition to northern Europe,” Rutherford persisted, “I’d use Lundberg. Or to pre-Columbian America, Cardones. But for this part of Earth, you are the only suitable choice currently available, or at least the only one with your—” (another risibly obvious effort at being ingratiating) “—undeniable talents.”

Jason turned around, leaned on the parapet, and looked out over the breathtaking panorama once again. “Are you sure you really want me? After my latest display of those ‘talents.’”

Rutherford’s face took on a compassionate expression he would never have permitted himself if Jason had been looking. “I understand. Up till now, you have taken understandable pride in never having lost a single member of any expedition you have led. And this time you returned from the past alone. But that was due to extraordinary and utterly unforeseeable circumstances. No one dreamed you would encounter what you did in the remote past. And no one blames you.”

“But aside from that, aren’t you afraid I might be just a little too . . . close to this?” Once again, Jason clenched his fist to prevent his hand from straying to his pocket.

Rutherford smiled, noticing the gesture. “If anything, I should think that what you know of Dr. Sadaka-Ramirez’s fate would make you even more interested.”

Deirdre, thought Jason, recalling his last glimpse of those green eyes as she had faded into the past. Deirdre, from whom it is practically a statistical certainty that I myself am descended.

He turned back to face Rutherford. “Well, I don’t suppose it can do any harm to meet the other people you have lined up.”