Sunset of the Gods

CHAPTER FIFTEEN





In the early afternoon August heat, Jason was grateful for the shade of the foliage as he scrambled up the slopes of Mount Kotroni.

As he neared the crest, a level clearing opened out before him. At that moment, the tiny blue light began flashing again.

He looked around and saw nothing where the sensor assured him he should. But experience-honed instinct caused him to take cover behind a boulder and take a fighting grip on his short sword. No sooner had he done so when he heard a faint, whining hum. And he saw dust swirling upward from the clearing, as though from the ground-pressure effect of grav repulsion.

Above the ground, now that he knew what to look for, he recognized the shimmering effect of a refraction field, which achieved invisibility by disrupting the frequencies of light and causing them to “bend” or “slip” around the field and whatever was within it. It was cutting-edge technology in Jason’s world.

And I never saw the Teloi using it, he thought, puzzled.

Then the dust settled, and the field evidently was switched off, for an aircar appeared out of nowhere, settling to the ground—and Jason’s puzzlement turned to shock.

It was a small model, little more than a flying platform with a transparent bubble and two seats, for the pilot and one passenger. This one held only the pilot—a human, who proceeded to raise the canopy and emerge. And it was not one of the overdecorated, somehow Art Deco-reminiscent Teloi designs Jason remembered. He recognized it as a Roszmenko-Krishnamurti model, a few years old as his own consciousness measured time.

Until this instant, he had been able to tell himself that Franco’s claims of radically superior time-travel technology were mere braggadocio, or perhaps an attempt at disinformation. Now he knew he could no longer take shelter in that comfortable assumption. The Transhumanists had temporally displaced this aircar—along with all their personnel and God knew what else—almost twenty-nine centuries. The Authority couldn’t have done that without an appropriation request that would have precipitated an all-out political crisis. The Transhumanists had done it using a displacer so compact, and drawing so little power, that it could be concealed somewhere on Earth’s surface.

Rutherford has to be told about this! He cursed himself for not having somehow managed to leave word at the message-drop on Mount Pentelikon.

The pilot stepped to the ground and, with his back to Jason, fumbled for a hand communicator. Jason suddenly realized that, after the man reported in, his own window of opportunity to take any action would vanish. Without pausing for further thought, he bunched his legs and launched himself over the boulder.

It was fairly artless. Jason hit the totally surprised Transhumanist from behind, smashed him over prone. His sword-holding right arm went around the man’s neck, while his left hand grasped his left wrist and pulled that arm up behind his back.

But this Transhumanist was one of the genetic upgrades designed for, among other things, strength. His free right arm went up behind Jason’s neck while his legs sent both of them surging upwards until he had Jason practically piggy-back. Then, with a further surge, he threw Jason over his right shoulder.

Jason’s trained reflexes took over for him. He kept his grip on his sword, and hit the ground in a roll which brought him back up to his feet even as he whirled to face his enemy. The Transhumanist was already rushing him, hands outstretched in what Jason recognized as one of the positions of combat karate.

Jason’s options suddenly became very simple. He had hoped to take the man alive, but he had no desire to have blade-stiffened hands smash through his rib cage and pull out his lungs. With a twisting motion, he evaded those hands while driving his sword into the Transhumanist’s midriff. Then he dropped to his knees, wrenched the sword point-upward inside the guts in which it was lodged, and rammed it straight up. Blood gushed from the Transhumanist’s mouth as he fell to his knees and toppled forward, pulling the sword out of Jason’s hand by his sheer weight.

Jason retrieved his sword, wiped off the blade, and used the pommel to smash the communicator the Transhumanist had never had a chance to use. Then he examined the aircar. It was, as he had thought, a standard model aside from the decidedly non-standard invisibility field. He activated its nav computer and brought up its last departure point on the tiny map display.

It was a point in the heights just east of Tegea, just over ninety miles to the southeast as the crow or the aircar flies.

Just about where Pheidippides swore that Pan appeared to him, came the thought, bringing with it a flash of understanding.

Jason summoned up his implant’s clock display. He really needed to be getting back to camp. But at the aircar’s best speed he could cover the distance in less than half an hour. And this had to be looked into.

He had neither time nor tools to bury the Transhumanist’s body, but he didn’t want to leave it to be found. With difficulty, he hauled it into the passenger seat and tied a heavy stone to it. Then he set the computer to retrace its last course, lowered the canopy, activated the invisibility field, and took to the air.



Jason’s route took him over Mount Pentelikon and just north of Athens, but he was in no mood to appreciate the view, and at any rate the outside world appeared in blurry shades of gray when viewed from inside the field. He flew on into the dim-appearing afternoon sun. Soon he was over the island of Salamis, and the waters where ten years from now the navy that was now only a gleam in Themistocles’ eye would scatter the fleets of Xerxes. Then the waters of the Saronic Gulf were beneath him. He stopped, hovered only twenty feet above the waves, and made certain there were no boats nearby whose crews might have noticed a body appear out of nowhere in midair and fall into the sea. He raised the canopy and pushed his deceased passenger out.

Resuming his flight, Jason went feet-dry over the Argolid. He did not permit himself to glance to the right, toward Mycenae and the bones that lay buried there. Instead, he spent the few remaining minutes of flight wondering just what the aircar had been doing landing on Mount Kotroni. No answer came to him, and none would now be forthcoming from the former pilot.

Approaching the end of the route, Jason resumed manual control of the aircar. Zooming the map display to its largest scale, he narrowed the landing site down to a flat area on a ridge overlooking the road from Sparta. He set the aircar down as gently as possible, to minimize the telltale dust-swirl. After satisfying himself that there was no one about, he deactivated the invisibility field and stepped out and walked to the edge of the ridge.

Looking cautiously down, he could see the winding road. On a lower level of the ridge, two humans were observing the road from concealment. Above them, but slightly lower than Jason, Pan crouched behind a boulder.

To Jason’s right was a smooth, gentle slope which allowed easy access to Pan’s position. He slipped very quietly down the slope, taking advantage of the fact that he was facing the sun and therefore casting his shadow behind him. He worked his way close behind the obviously preoccupied Pan and, with an adder-sudden movement, his left arm went around the being’s neck, forcing the chin up. With his right arm, he pressed the edge of his sword against the exposed throat. It wasn’t much of an edge—these swords were primarily for thrusting—but it would do.

“Quiet!” he hissed. The two Transhumanists below, their attention riveted on the road, hadn’t noticed. “Don’t make a sound.”

Pan remained rigid but did not struggle. “What are you going to do with me?” he whispered.

Which, Jason realized, was a very good question. He hadn’t formulated a plan, and when he thought about it he wondered why he hadn’t simply killed Pan outright. Arguably, it would be the rational course—at least Mondrago would have so argued.

“What are you here for?” he whispered back, temporizing.

“I’m waiting for the Athenian runner who is returning from Sparta. He should be passing here soon. I am to accost him and ask him why the Athenians fail to honor me, and promise to aid them nevertheless in the coming battle by causing the Persians to flee in terror. And at the height of the battle, I am to appear to the Athenians, so they will believe they owe me their victory.”

“And are you going to do it.”

“I must!” The whisper held a quavering squeak. “I have been ordered to.”

“Do you always follow orders?”

“I have no choice!” For an instant Pan’s voice rose almost to a full squeak. Jason pressed his sword-edge harder against the hairy throat, and Pan subsided into a dull whisper. “You don’t know what it’s like!”

“You mean they torture you?”

“They don’t need to. My entire existence is torture! Only they have the power to deaden it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How could you? Franco and his people came to this country fifteen years ago and persuaded the Teloi to help them create me, knowing this was the year they would need me to be available. They used . . . medicines to make me mature faster,” Pan explained, coming as close as fifth-century b.c. Greek could to the concept of artificial growth accelerants. “They needed the help of the Teloi to do all this.”

Jason nodded unconsciously. Of all the perversities forbidden by the Human Integrity Act, species modification—genetic tinkering which introduced genes not native to the original human genome—was the ultimate obscenity. The Transhumanists, of course, had had no compunctions about it. But even they had never developed it to the level that must have been required to create a thing like Pan. Evidently, though, they and the Teloi together had been equal to the task.

“But,” Pan continued, still struggling with the limits of the language, “the parts of me that are not human could not be made to really fit. And my forced growth made it worse. Almost everything I do, especially walking, is unendurable . . . or would be without the medicines they constantly give me.”

Again, Jason understood. It was one of the reasons species modification was regarded as such a unique abomination. The human organism was a totality. It was not designed to support, say, a digitigrade walking posture. Pan was a living mass of incompatibilities—a biological wrongness. And applying growth accelerants to such a ramshackle skeleton must have made it even worse, especially considering that the Transhumans and their Teloi allies probably hadn’t bothered with any of the usual precautions.

Yes, Pan would never be free of pain, or at least discomfort, for a second of his waking life—and how would he ever sleep?—without chemical analgesia. He surely would have long since escaped into madness had it not been for the drugs that only his creators could supply . . . or withhold.

Now Jason understood how they controlled him. And from what he had heard in Pan’s whisper, he dimly sensed how much the twisted being must hate them.

Killing Pan now would be the merciful thing to do as well as the expedient one.

Only, thought Jason as his grip tightened on the sword-hilt, he might be a valuable source of information on the Transhumanists.

“Listen,” he said, improvising, “you can get away from them. You can get help from the Temporal Regulatory Authority.” Of necessity, he said the last three words in English.

“How?” whispered Pan in a tone of dull scorn.

“Well. . . .” This was no time for a lecture on the physics of time travel, even had it been possible in the language. “After I return to my own time, I’ll come back to this time with soldiers to kill those two men down there—it can be a few minutes after this point in time, in fact—and I’ll bring with me the medicines you need.” Once Rutherford knew what was at stake, Jason was sure he could get an appropriation for such an expedition, and a waiver of the rules to allow him to bring back a substantial supply of advanced medications.

“Can you take me to your time?”

“No.” Jason found he could not lie. “You are of this era. There can be no travel forward in time.”

“But you travel forward in time!”

“No.” How to explain temporal energy potential? “I only return to the time from which I came, and where I belong. You belong here, and must remain here. But we can free you from your dependence on Franco and the Teloi.”

Afterwards, Jason was always certain that Pan wavered for a heartbeat before stiffening convulsively. “No! I can’t trust you! They created the agony that is my life, and only they can grant surcease from it. I must do as I am told.”

At that moment, before Jason could reply, one of the Transhumanists below—from whom Jason had never entirely taken his eyes—rose to his feet and gestured at the road from Sparta. In the distance was a tiny, running figure.

The sight of that figure—Pheidippides, returning with the news that the Spartans would be delayed—distracted Jason for a fraction of a second, causing him to lower his sword. That was enough. With the strength of desperation, Pan broke free of him and scrambled recklessly downhill despite Jason’s efforts to catch him by his caprine legs. Jason could only watch, cursing under his breath, as he joined the Transhumanists.

He really ought, Jason knew, to return to his aircar while the Transhumanists’ attention was riveted on the road and get back to Marathon. But curiosity held him. He compromised with caution by ducking behind the boulder and watching as Pheidippides reached a point almost directly below. He saw one of the Transhumanists manipulate a remote control unit. A concealed device by the side of the road erupted into a flash of light and a thunderclap of sound. With a cry, the runner staggered and fell to his knees. While his eyes were still dazzled, one of the Transhumanists shoved Pan forward and up into plain sight. When Pheidippides could see again, the “god” stood on the ridge looking down at him.

“Pheidippides of Athens,” said Pan in more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tones, “why have the Athenians failed to worship me?”

Pheidippides groveled in the dust of the road. “We do, Great God, we do,” he stammered frantically.

“No. My sacred grotto on the slope of the Acropolis is neglected, save by a few. The smoke of sacrifice does not rise from my altar there.”

“We will neglect you no longer, Great God. I swear it! After I tell what I have seen, we will make amends. We will offer sacrifice.”

“It is well. Continue on your journey, and assure the Athenians of my affection for their city. Tell them also that I know the peril in which Athens now stands, and that I mean to come to its aid very soon, because I trust that your promise to me will be kept.”

Pheidippides looked timidly up. “Aid us how, Great God?” he dared ask.

“You know, Pheidippides, the power I possess to arouse unreasoning fear in men,” Pan replied obliquely. “Now go, and complete your errand, and bear my words to the Athenians!”

The hidden Transhumanist touched his remote again, and the bogus thunder and lightning sent Pheidippides flat on his face with a wail. Pan scurried back to join his two handlers. After a few moments, Pheidippides cautiously looked up and rose to his feet. Still blinking, he cast nervous glances all around. Then a slow smile awoke on the young face—a smile of serenely confident hope, the kind of smile rarely seen among Athenians these days. The smile broadened into a grin as he resumed his run.

The Transhumanists crouched, preparing to leave as soon as the runner was out of sight, and Jason dared delay no longer. He retraced his steps, flung himself into the aircar, reactivated the invisibility field, and set his course back to the clearing on Mount Kotroni, overlooking the Greek camp on the plain of Marathon.

Once in the air, he had leisure to reflect wryly. Of course I didn’t kill Pan. History says Pheidippides claimed to have met him on the road.

Only . . . if I had killed him, then maybe Pheidippides would have hallucinated him anyway, as historians think he did.

He shook his head and flew on, with the westering sun behind him.