Sunset of the Gods

CHAPTER TEN





Jason awoke to a nauseatingly painful headache. He didn’t want to open his eyes, but to fail to do so was out of the question. He parted his eyelids very cautiously.

The light sent fresh pain stabbing through his head, but it was not quite as bad as he had feared—he could sense that it was dim interior lighting. Lying on his back as he was, all he could make out was a completely nondescript ceiling. He slowly turned his head to the left.

He found himself looking into a pair of brown eyes, somehow like the eyes of an animal, but not quite, for they held something that no animal would ever know. Those eyes looked out at him from under bushy brows of the same dark russet color as the curly hair and beard that framed a face whose expression he could not interpret. The head lowered to look more closely at him, a motion which caused the horns to dip.

Unconsciousness mercifully took him again.



When he awoke again his head was clear. Another difference was that he was sitting up, in a chair to which he was tied. One of the first things he noticed in the light of the oil lamps as his eyes darted around the small, windowless room was that Mondrago was similarly seated and bound to his right, although he was only just stirring from unconsciousness. He also saw a man in local garb walking out the door, holding a hypospray injector by which he and Mondrago had presumably been awakened.

But mostly he noticed that now he was looking into a human face. Human . . . but inhumanly perfect.

It was the man they had seen in the Agora and in the inexplicable cavern under the Acropolis. Now he sat at his ease in a chair of local manufacture. His wavy hair was an unmistakable shade: a unique kind of blond-black, like an alloy of gold and iron. His eyes were large and luminous, the color of amber. His lips were full without being thick. There was no indentation between his brow and the bridge of his ruler-straight nose.

“Well,” he said in his strangely compelling voice, “what are we to do with you?” He spoke in twenty-fourth century Standard International English.

Jason made himself blink with incomprehension before swallowing to moisten his dry throat and speaking in indignant Greek. “What is this barbarian babble? Who are you? And how dare you hold us prisoner? I am a nobleman of Macedon, and this is my retainer. And we are friends of the strategos Themistocles! Release us at once or it will go hard on you.”

The perfect lips quirked in a momentary smile. “It’s no use. Our instruments detected the energy surge your arrival produced. It was just by chance that we happened to be in the vicinity at the time, between Athens and Eleusis.” The man gave an irritated headshake. “And it was an unfortunate chance that you happened to spot Pan. It’s all your fault, you know. We would have preferred to simply avoid you and let you return to your own time, blissfully ignorant. We still wish we could have. If only you hadn’t meddled—!”

Jason had almost stopped listening after the word instruments, for he suddenly recalled what Chantal thought she had seen, and what he had definitely seen in the shrine on the Acropolis north slope. “Who the hell are you?” he blurted, all thoughts of dissimulation forgotten. “You’re brought advanced technology back in time! That is flatly contrary to the regulations of the Temporal Regulatory Authority, besides being a felony under the Revised Temporal Precautionary Act of 2364.”

This time the full lips formed a smirk. “We don’t concern ourselves with either.”

Jason stared at him. “You must be from our future.”

“Evidently not, since we didn’t know you were going to be here in this time-period. If we had known, it would have made things awkward for us, as this expedition is essential to us but, like you, we make it a point to avoid creating possibilities for different time travelers to encounter each other. That’s one rule of the Authority which we follow—an uncharacteristically sensible one. We would have had to go to great lengths to avoid attracting your attention.”

“But if you’re not from our future, how can you be here? The Authority certainly didn’t send you.”

Another smirk. “We have our own arrangements.”

“You keep saying ‘we.’ Will you kindly answer my question and tell me who you are? What’s your name, for God’s sake?”

For an instant the man seemed to weigh the pros and cons of revealing the information. Then he smiled as though pleasurably anticipating the effect his answer would have.

“I am Franco, Category Five, Seventy-Sixth Degree.”

Jason stared. “But that’s a—”

“Yes. I am a genetically upgraded agent of the Transhuman Dispensation.”

“What are you trying to put over on us?” demanded Mondrago, now fully awake. “The Transhuman movement was wiped out a generation before Weintraub discovered temporal energy potential.”

“So you Pugs think.” From history lessons, Jason recognized the Transhumanist acronym for products of uncontrolled genetics—their term for the human race in its natural form. “You truly believe you successfully stood in the way of evolutionary destiny. You merely delayed it. Our inner circles withdrew into concealment, in various hidden places all around Earth and the Solar System, where we have secretly continued our great work.”

“Too bad,” remarked Jason. “We really did think the universe had been cleansed of the Transhuman abomination.”

Franco leaned forward, and his amber eyes glowed as though fervor burned like a flame behind them. “It is you who are the abomination: a form of life that has outlived its time but refuses out of mere parochialism and nostalgia to step aside and get out of the way of its successors. Humanity is clinging to its primordial state—a race of randomly evolved apes—when for centuries it has had the technology to transform itself into a consciously, rationally self-created race of gods—”

“—And monsters.” Jacob shook his head irritably. “Why am I wasting my breath talking to you? I have no idea who you really are, but you’re obviously a liar in addition to being a raving lunatic. The fact that you’re here and now proves that. The Authority has never sent any diehard Transhumanist fanatics into the past, and it never will.”

Franco took on an infuriatingly complacent look. “Who said anything about the Authority?”

“Talk sense! The Authority operates the only temporal displacer in existence.”

“So it pleases the Authority to think. Shortly after Weintraub’s initial experiments, we stole his data—it was pathetically easy, and we were very interested in its potentialities. Our research ran parallel to, but in advance of, Fujiwara’s. She and Weintraub were brilliant, for Pugs, but they followed several false trails. The result was a ‘brute force’ approach to temporal displacement, requiring a titanic installation and a lavish expenditure of energy. We soon spotted the flaws in their mathematics. Our displacer is relatively compact and energy-efficient, and therefore concealable.”

“Are you saying,” said Jason, thunderstruck, “that there are two displacers on Earth in our era?” He wanted to believe it was a lie, because it removed the foundations of his accustomed structure of assumptions. But, try as he might, he could see no other way to account for the presence of unauthorized time travelers with proscribed equipment.

“Only since the Authority’s came into operation,” said Franco, amused. “Ours was the first. We’ll probably build more, as the one we have is getting somewhat overworked. As I mentioned, we have been intensely interested in time travel ever since Weintraub demonstrated that it was a theoretical possibility.”

“Why? I’ve never heard that the Transhumanists had any interest in historical research.”

“We don’t.” Once again Franco leaned forward avidly. “We look to the future, not the past. We don’t want to study history. We want to change it.”

For a heartbeat or two, Jason stared openmouthed. Then he burst out laughing.

“Now I know you’re a lunatic!” he finally gasped. “History can’t be changed! But please don’t let me stop you. I hope you try—I really do. In fact, I hope you try very, very hard!”

“I never said we thought we could change observed history. But have you ever considered how much of the human past is unobserved and unrecorded? There are vast empty stretches of territory and time in which we are constantly changing the past, filling up those stretches with what will, in the end, turn out to have been humanity’s secret history—a history inevitably leading to our eventual triumph at a date which . . . I don’t believe I’ll reveal to you. We call it, simply, The Day.”

“And how, precisely, are you doing that?” Jason inquired, unable to keep a reluctant and horrified fascination out of his voice. In one corner of his mind, he wondered why Franco was telling him all this. Probably the Transhumanist simply felt a need for someone besides his own underlings to brag to. Jason had known enough blowhards, in his own time and others, to be able to recognize the type.

Of course, there was another, more unsettling explanation: Franco thought his revelations could do no possible harm because he had no intention of letting his listeners live.

“We have various techniques. For example, we plant genetic flaws in the unmodified human population by infecting populations with gengineered retroviruses, which by The Day will have rendered those populations vulnerable to a biochemical warfare using tailored proteins or polysaccharides. Another approach is to plant retroactive plagues, spreading mutagens whose genetic time-clocks result in the poisoning of certain vital food supplies on The Day. And there are even more subtle ‘time bombs’ that we plant, some of a purely psychological nature.”

“But,” said Jason with an incredulous headshake, “things like that would be extremely long-term, and require repeated visits to various eras in succession.” Inwardly, he fought to hold at bay an obscene vision of Earth as a rotten apple, seemingly sound on the outside but a writhing mass of worms inside the skin, waiting to break through it.

“To repeat, our temporal displacement technology is less expensive than yours by orders of magnitude. We are therefore less constrained in how far into the past we can go, and how often. This is particularly helpful in my own work: the establishment of cults and secret societies, which we nurture over the centuries by repeated visits from the same, seemingly ageless agent at prophesied times. At those times the agent foretells the next visit, dazzles the faithful with technological ‘magic,’ and gives them enough foreknowledge of the future to confirm the succeeding generations in their faith. As the ages pass and the scientific worldview takes hold, we will begin to reveal the truth to them. By then their loyalty will be practically hereditary, and we will offer them suitable rewards in the new order.”

“A promise which naturally won’t be kept,” Mondrago stated rather than asked.

“Naturally. Promises to Pugs mean nothing. By the time The Day arrives, Earth will be riddled with such cadres, not knowing of each other’s existence. Like all our other projects, it will not contradict recorded history. But recorded history will turn out to have been a mere ornamental façade, behind which real history has been building all along toward a Transhumanist future.”

“And,” Jason said slowly, “I imagine it helps to no end when you have some kind of pre-existing cult to build on.” He wanted to keep Franco talking as long as possible, revealing as much information as possible.

“You’re surprisingly perceptive. Yes, my first appearance in this region was in the late Bronze Age—the thirteenth century b.c. Pan, you see, is a very ancient god. And, since we are not limited by the irrational restrictions you labor under, my genetic code was resequenced by nanotechnological means, altering my appearance to godlike standards, as you’ve doubtless noticed.”

“Actually I hadn’t.”

Franco’s eyes narrowed a few microns and chilled a few degrees, but otherwise he showed no reaction to Jason’s jab.

“At the same time,” Jason went on, “it must limit you that you can’t send any of your radically specialized—and unhuman-looking—gengineered castes back in time. Nor can you send those of your servitors with blatantly obvious bionics. They couldn’t exactly blend, could they?”

“It is a handicap,” Franco acknowledged. “But this was one of those cases in which we were able to make use of recorded history, rather than merely avoiding it. We knew, of course, of the later belief that Pan had intervened at Marathon. It was the perfect opportunity to reinforce our cult’s fervor.”

“And, of course, you’ve been able to show them their god Pan in the flesh. Another of your gene-twisted obscenities, of course—although I didn’t realize that even you were able to produce anything so grotesquely divergent from the human norm.”

“We’re not, at least not without great difficulty. We had help. You see, in the course of my earlier visits to Greece, we acquired allies.” Before Franco could elaborate, a door opened and a handsome but relatively nondescript man came in and whispered to him. He nodded, said “Bring him in,” and turned back to Jason with a dazzling smile. “By a most fortunate coincidence, the leader of those allies is here now.” He stood up and, to Jason’s amazement, went to his knees.

“Greetings, Lord,” he said, oozing a reverence that would not have deceived a child. But it seemed to satisfy the figure who entered, bending low to get through the door and unable to stand up straight without brushing his gold-shot silvery hair against the ceiling. His huge, disturbingly alien eyes stared at Jason, empty of recognition.

“Hi,” said Jason in the Teloi tongue, eliciting a satisfyingly startled reaction from Franco. “It’s been a long time. Well, actually it hasn’t been all that long for me. But for you it’s been almost eleven hundred and forty years.”

Zeus looked puzzled.