Sunset of the Gods

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE





They were all experienced, so the disorientation didn’t hit them too hard when the dome surrounding the displacer stage faded into oblivion as though it had never been and they stood on a ledge in Mount Kotroni’s shadow.

Still, there was a moment when they would have been helpless had there been any hostiles present—assuming, of course, that those hostiles hadn’t been stunned into immobility by their appearance out of thin air. It was why Jason had chosen the side of the hill opposite the side from which the Transhumanists would be overlooking the plain of Marathon, their attention riveted on the battle below and to the east.

That fixation couldn’t be counted on, though, and the all-important element of surprise had to be preserved. Using the Service’s standard hand signals, Jason motioned the others to follow him to the right. They silently worked their way around the hill’s southern slopes, emerging into the morning sun. Jason spared an instant for a glance to the south, where the taller Mount Agrliki loomed beyond the Greek camp, defining the southeast end of the plain. Mere minutes ago, he thought with a sudden chill, his own three-months-younger self had left those slopes and was now flying his invisible aircar toward Athens. He couldn’t let himself dwell on it, lest the sense of strangeness immobilize him.

They rounded the hill and the plain lay spread out before them. To the southeast the ground was choked with corpses, the detritus of the initial clash, where the inward-pivoting Greek flanks had crushed the Persian center a lesser trail of carnage extended northeast of that, following the path of the re-formed, grimly advancing phalanx that was now nearing the improvised Persian line defending the ships, almost directly to the east. Beyond that, the narrow beach was a scene out of hell, with the ships putting out to sea and the shallows choked with frantic men trying to find a ship, any ship, that would take them. On the Persian right, the Greek light troops were hunting scattered Persian stragglers into the great marsh.

The noise from the plain, compounded of the screams of the wounded, the panicked cries of the Persian fugitives, the shouted command, and the tramp of the phalanx’s twenty thousand feet, was horrifying. But Jason knew it was about to rise to a truly hellish crescendo, for this was a lull in the battle, before the final clash.

Jason tried to imagine the exhaustion of the dust- and gore-encrusted hoplites of the phalanx, moving toward what by some accounts was to be the fiercest fighting of the day, where Callimachus and many others would fall. He knew that their exhaustion would allow the Persians to hold out long enough for all but seven of their ships to escape. He also knew—although it almost defied belief—that these same men would turn around later that same morning and march twenty-six miles in armor to Phalerum, where the Persian fleet would find them drawn up on the shore. Jason had to wonder how much of a fight they would really have been able to put up at that point, had it come to that. But after what the Persians had just experienced, they would have no appetite to put it to the test. They would sail away.

Then Jason turned the final corner of the goat-trail they were following. There, on a ledge beyond a boulder, were three Transhumanists—none of whom was Franco—and Pan. He motioned his followers to a halt and crept forward to peer over the boulder.

The Transhumanists, who had a good view of the Persian line that Datis had somehow managed to improvise, were aiming a subsonic projector of the kind he had imagined they would use. It was a small model, with barely enough range. But all that would be required of it would be to induce emotional turmoil in just a few men, here and there in a hastily organized formation of men already badly shaken. That would be enough to dissolve that formation. Off to the side was the Teloi aircar, an open-topped model large enough to carry four passengers besides the pilot, not quite as overdecorated as the “chariots” Jason remembered.

Only three of them, Jason thought. No doubt there had originally been a fourth, but that one—the murderer of Bryan Landry and would-be murderer of Mondrago and himself—now lay near the Greek camp with Mondrago’s sling-pellet in his brain. And they’re preoccupied. This ought to be easy. He signaled the others to slide forward and join him behind the boulder. They noiselessly took up their positions and he prepared to give the signal.

At that instant, at the far end of the ledge beyond the Transhumanist group, an inhumanly tall figure appeared.

One of the Transhumanists cried out. They all whirled to face the new apparition. Pan cowered. Jason, his tactical calculations thrown off, motioned Mondrago and the others to lay quietly as he tried to evaluate the situation’s new dynamics. Da Cunha and Logan stared over the top of the boulder wide-eyed, for this was their first sight of Teloi in the flesh.

Zeus stalked forward. Three other Teloi followed him: a male who somewhat resembled him, another male who seemed more powerfully built than the Teloi norm, and a female who, like Zeus, exhibited the Teloi indicia of aging. Jason didn’t recognize any of the three, but certain hard-to-define qualities about them made him wonder if he was looking at Poseidon, Ares and Hera.

One thing was certain: none of them looked happy, Zeus least of all. And all wore, on the belts of their tunics, laser pistols of the kind that had killed Sidney Nagel on the island of Kalliste shortly before it had exploded, leaving the remnants that would one day be known as the Santorini group.

The Transhumanist who seemed to be the leader—he looked to be one of the varieties gengineered for intelligence and initiative, at the expense of some of the physical attributes—bowed and addressed Zeus in the tone of patently bogus servility Jason had heard Franco use. “Why, greetings, Lord. This is most unexpected.” He looked around in vain for an aircar. “How did you—?”

“The sky-chariot that brought us has departed,” said Zeus, his voice thick with an emotion that made it even more disturbing than Teloi voices normally were. “Aphrodite took it away, for we will not be needing it. We mean to reclaim this one, which we unwisely let you use before we learned of your impious betrayal of us, your gods.”

“Whatever do you mean, Lord?” The Transhumanist’s reverential tone was getting a little frayed around the edges. As a member of one of the upper Transhumanist castes, he was struggling to suppress a heritage of arrogance. “As our leader Franco has repeatedly told you, we wish only to serve you.”

“You lie, as Franco has lied to us from the beginning. He promised to enable the Persians to restore Hippias to power in Athens so he could complete his great work: the raising of a temple almost worthy of me. But now I see your true aim. You mean to give the victory to the Athenians!”

“A minor change in plans, Lord—a mere tactical adjustment.” The Transhumanist’s struggle to maintain his pose of obsequiousness was now comically obvious—or at least it would have been comical under any other circumstances. “Rest assured that our long-term goal is unchanged: leading Athens back into its proper reverence for you.”

“More lies! It is all clear to me now! Your only concern is to establish a cult of this grotesque artificial being Pan which we enabled you to create but which is now under your control. And you intend to commit the ultimate blasphemy by establishing him as a god, for your own selfish purposes!”

Pan looked like he wanted to burrow into the stony soil of the hillside.

Zeus was raving now, his features working convulsively. “You are no better than all other humans—the original stock, and the Heroes we created in an effort to guide the others back to their proper role. You ‘Transhumanists’ claim to be a superior strain, but you are like all the rest: treacherous and disloyal and, above all, ungrateful to us, your creators and your gods! We should never have summoned your species up from apedom!”

A strong shudder convulsed the Transhumanist and his façade of worshipfulness seemed to fall from him and shatter, revealing what lay beneath. Not just his face but his entire body was one great sneer of loathing and contempt.

“Our gods? You senile, decayed, demented fool! You are inferior even to the lesser breeds of humans. You have long since outlived your time—and you have now outlived your usefulness to us, your supplanters—the new gods!” And with motion of almost insect-like quickness, possible only to genetically upgraded reflexes, the Transhumanist reached inside his chiton, pulled out an extremely compact laser pistol, and shot Zeus in the upper chest.

In the late twentieth century, after the invention of the laser but when weapon-grade applications of it had been only a theoretical possibility, people had had peculiar ideas about them. The vision of a blinding but silent beam of light was wrong in every particular; it was invisible in vacuum, and in atmosphere there was only a sparkling trail of ionized air, accompanied by a sharp but not very loud crack as air rushed in to fill the tube of vacuum that had been drilled through it. And a continuous laser beam swinging back and forth and reducing its target to sizzling salami slices was out of the question; even aside from the impossible energy demands, any attempt to do it in atmosphere would have come to grief on the hard facts of thermal bloom. Instead, a pulse of directed energy burned a hole in the victim, with a burst of superheated pinkish steam—the human or Teloi body is, after all, seventy percent water—whose knockback effect now sent Zeus’ body toppling over backwards.

The other two Teloi drew their weapons, as did the two subordinate Transhumanists. There was an intense instant of crisscrossing, crackling beams. One of the Transhumanists went down, as did all the Teloi.

It all happened so quickly that the last Teloi was sinking to the ground before Jason could react.

“Get them!” he snapped, rising to his feet from behind the boulder and activating his “walking stick.” He speared the Transhumanist leader with a series of rapid-fire laser pulses more powerful than those of the pistols. Mondrago and the others opened up at appreciably the same instant, and the Transhumanists died, practically incinerated by multiple laser burns.

Jason turned away toward Pan. But as he did he heard a low, croaking “Jason.” Zeus was still barely alive.

Moved by some impulse, Jason walked over to the Teloi with whom he had once conspired the “imprisonment of the Titans,” and looked down into the nonhuman face. It was contorted with pain, but the strange pale-blue-and-azure eyes held an odd clarity, as though the clouds of insanity had dissipated.

“Jason,” Zeus repeated, though this time it was more a whisper than a croak. “Yes, I do remember you. It was so long ago, when Kalliste exploded and our older generation were trapped forever.” He stated it matter-of-factly—nothing about imprisoning the Titans in Tartarus. All his delusions were gone, burned away by the fires of agony. “You made that possible.”

“I and my two companions,” Jason nodded. “Both of them died to do it. One was Oannes.”

“Yes, I remember him too—one of the Nagommo.” The Teloi’s voice held none of the hate that would once have suffused it at the name of his race’s mortal enemies. Even that was gone now. “And I remember Perseus, who afterwards established my worship at Mycenae as king of the gods. King of the gods!” The huge eyes closed, and Jason thought Zeus had spoken his last. But then they fluttered open, and were empty not just of lunacy but of everything, holding the ultimate horror of absolute nullity as he looked back over thousands of barren, pointless years with the pitiless clarity of impending death. His desolate whisper was barely audible.

“Lies. All lies. No, not even lies. Just . . . nothing.” The Teloi’s last breath whistled out in an oddly humanlike way.

Jason turned away and looked around him. In the usual way of laser firefights, it had been very quiet, without spectacular visual effects. None of the battling thousands on the plain below—none of whom were looking up the hill in any case—had noticed. Besides, even as the Transhumanists were dying, the Athenian war-cry of Alleeee! had arisen again, and the grinding crash as the phalanx had rammed into the Persian holding force.

Jason couldn’t pause to admire the view. He rushed over to where Pan crouched in a fetal position. Grabbing a shoulder, he rolled the being over. Large brown eyes went even wider.

“It’s you!” squeaked Pan. “How—?”

“It’s a long story, and we haven’t got time. What I need to know is this: does the agreement we made a few minutes ago over there on Mount Agriliki still hold?”

“Yes. But now you’re suddenly dressed differently, and you seem somehow changed. And who are these others?”

“Never mind. You said you knew how to pilot this Teloi aircar. I need for you to take us to Athens, as fast as it can possibly be managed while maximizing concealment.”

“Yes . . . yes, that was always the plan. And there is a prearranged landing site—the precinct that’s always been sacred to Zeus, and where his unfinished temple is located. Nobody ever goes there now.”

“Good.” The irony was not lost on Jason, as he glanced at the detritus of the erstwhile king of the gods. “Do you also know how to program the aircar’s autopilot?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then let’s go.” Jason turned to his subordinates. “Put that sonic projector into the aircar’s baggage compartment—it should fit, and we ought not to leave it here. Move!”

They piled into the aircar. Jason had intended to be the last one in, but Mondrago, standing on the rim of the ledge, called to him. “Sir, look down here.”

Jason joined him. He had forgotten the roar of battle from the plain below. But now he followed Mondrago’s pointing finger to the east. The makeshift Persian line had given way, and the battle was dissolving into a chaotic melee on the narrow beach as the Greeks pursued the fleeing Persians through the sands and the shallows as they sought rescue, desperately scrambling aboard the ships that Datis’ last stand had enabled to disembark before it had collapsed in—

“Panic,” Mondrago stated. “The Persians panicked after all, even though the Transhumanists never got a chance to use that sonic projector! Ah . . . what’s funny, sir?”

Jason brought his chuckling under control. “Of course the Persians panicked! I mean, after the hell they had been through in the first stage of the battle, the one we were involved in . . . and remember, this Persian battle-line was a pick-up force of stragglers Datis somehow put together to cover the embarkation. And now they saw that blood-spattered phalanx coming at them again. What could be more natural than panic? So you see . . . it happened anyway!”

Mondrago nodded his understanding. “And because of the ‘prophecy’ that Pan gave Pheidippedes on the road from Sparta a few days ago, the Athenians will attribute it to Pan and sacrifice to him in that grotto every year, just like history says.”

“Exactly. As usual, reality protects itself. Come on, let’s go.”

They departed, leaving the bodies of the would-be gods to the carrion birds.