The Age Of Zeus

by James Lovegrove

  A breezy spring morning in the City of Light. Tourists milled beneath the Eiffel Tower, queuing for tickets to travel up in the lifts or posing for photographs with the mighty metal structure behind them. The first hint any of them had that something was awry was a deep, resonant groan like the creak of some immense door easing open on rusty hinges. All looked up. Those standing at a distance, those perhaps peering through camera viewfinders, got the clearest impression of what was going on. The upper section of the Tower had begun to tilt. No, not tilt. To bend. It was angling away from true, bowing to one side like the head of a wilting flower, hundreds of tons of iron girder unstraightening, the tower's outline starting to describe a shallow and then a not so shallow arc. Thin screams issued from up in its framework, and on the ground. People started running - and, from the top of the structure, falling. One moment you were admiring the panorama of the French capital from the summit of its tallest edifice. The next, the floor was tipping beneath you and you had lost your footing and gone sliding over the safety railings. Some in the tower, though, did not plunge to their deaths. They were trapped between the shifting, twisting girders and crushed. A few were killed by two-inch rivets that popped out from their sockets with the force of bullets.

  When the Eiffel Tower finally stopped moving, it was bent double, apex pointing downwards, the tip of the radio transmitter antenna that crowned it now almost touching the ground. Its sweeping uprightness had become an inverted U. What had once been a thrusting erection now drooped in impotence, beyond resurrection, and for several nights running many a Frenchman would find, to his intense dismay, that he was unable to perform satisfactorily for his wife, or for that matter his mistress, and even though he would know where the blame lay, it was still no great comfort.

  But, for now, all that mattered was the tragedy of dozens of tourist corpses strewn below the disfigured Tower or stuck within its iron innards like flies in a spider web.

  Hephaestus was responsible. Hephaestus the stunted, lame blacksmith, telekinetic manipulator of all things metal. From his position in the Parc du Champs de Mars, south of the Tower, he took a moment to survey his handiwork, and was pleased with what he had wrought; more accurately, unwrought. Then Hermes arrived to whisk him home.

  A couple of hours later, visitors to the Mount Rushmore National Memorial were appalled to see Ares and Hercules setting about the carved presidential faces with their fists and feet. First to go was Abraham Lincoln. Roosevelt followed, then Jefferson, and finally Washington. Each solemn granite visage cracked and crumbled from the forehead downward, slumping away in fragments. God and demigod abseiled down the faces on ropes, pounding and stamping until the sculptures were destroyed. A handful of tourists and one tour guide didn't get clear in time and were engulfed by tumbling rubble. Ares and Hercules laughed heartily, schoolboys taking part in an enormous prank.

  At roughly the same time, almost 1,400 miles away, over on the western seaboard of the United States, a wave of gigantic proportions arose in the Pacific and came sweeping into San Francisco Bay. In the space of a minute it grew from nothing to a height of nearly 500 feet. Calm wine-dark sea became a towering, foam-capped wedge of water that swallowed ferries, fishing vessels, police boats and pleasure cruisers whole and rolled onward looking for more. Eventually this super-tsunami collided with the Golden Gate Bridge with an impact as forceful and as deafening as an atomic bomb. The bridge didn't stand a chance, and neither did the occupants of the vehicles that were driving across it at the time. Three-foot-thick steel bracing cables snapped like baling twine. The twin stanchions buckled and toppled from their concrete bases. The entire structure was shunted sideways, snapping free of its anchor points at either end. Parts of the bridge slammed onto Alcatraz Island, whole sections of roadway embedding themselves in the empty prison buildings. Other parts fetched up further inland, borne on the ebb of the super-tsunami to places like Oakland, San Rafael and Fremont. The wave even carried on down as far as San Jose, its last eddies struck with enough power still in them to capsize boats in the marinas in San Mateo and overturn planes on the runway at Moffett Federal Airfield. All of the Bay's coastal areas were ravaged. The eventual death toll reached the mid three figures.

  Poseidon, however, had quit the scene long before the wave he had conjured up was spent. Hermes came to collect him, appearing at his side as if from nowhere and spiriting them both back to Mount Olympus.

  The sun was setting over Rome as Dionysus and Hades arrived there. It was the time of passeggio, when Romans put on their very best clothes and went promenading. To anyone but an Italian it looked like pointless milling about, a continual round of ambling in one direction then doubling back and ambling the other way, pausing now and then to kiss and greet and chat. To the participants, however, it was a dignified social gavotte. The younger ones flirted and gabbled, the older ones ate gelati and exchanged news and views.

  Today there was much to talk about: the Olympians, their monsters, the recent events in France and America. The usually ebullient evening atmosphere was subdued, and there were fewer people out and about than was customary in such clement weather, but the general feeling in the city was that life must go on as normal. Besides, what had happened elsewhere couldn't happen here, could it? Not in Rome.

  But it could, of course, and did. No sooner had Dionysus strode into the Piazza Santa Maria in the Trastevere district than he set to work. With one hand aloft and splayed, he spread his influence among the unsuspecting crowds. It radiated out from him, a powerful sense of intoxication, a surge of heady glee expanding in a circle of which he was the centre point. People began to giggle. Then, quickly, the euphoria turned to rowdiness. Everybody staggered around, bumping into one another. Tempers flared. Fights erupted. Soon the entire square was filled with Romans in their designer finery punching, kicking, biting, headbutting, clawing at one another. Blood flowed. Eyeballs were gouged. Dislodged teeth flew. Bones snapped. Here and there arose the sound of hysterical laughter, as well as hoots like the cries of mad gibbons. Civilised citizens were transformed into a vicious, howling, mauling rabble. It was quite a decline and fall.

  Then came Hades's turn. In another part of Rome, the area around the Trevi Fountain, he removed the black leather gloves that were his constant item of apparel and began to touch people. A finger to someone's cheek, a tap on the side of the head, that was all it took. A moment of skin-to-skin contact, and the person fell down stone dead. Hades glided from victim to victim, repeatedly performing this lethal laying on of hands, so that there were a score of corpses on the ground before it became widely apparent what he was up to. A woman screamed as her husband, for no apparent reason, suddenly collapsed beside her. The scream intensified as the woman saw and recognised Hades, and then it was cut short as the Olympian stroked her bare forearm and she too keeled over, as lifeless as the statues of tritons and horses that presided over the fountain which she and her beloved had just, moments earlier, been admiring.

  There was panic, Romans and tourists fleeing in every direction, trying to escape from Hades. He merely smiled a lipless smile and continued to touch anyone who strayed within his reach. The terror of the crowd was disorderly, confused. Some who thought they were running away from the Olympian were actually running towards him. Hades accounted for a further seventeen lives before the area was entirely vacated and it was just him alone, standing among thirty-odd sprawled bodies, some of them floating in the waters of the fountain. His cadaverous yellowy face was lit up with a gleam of intense satisfaction as he slipped his gloves back on.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, the sun was rising over the Sydney Opera House, lending the white sails of that building a glowing pink blush. Rosy-fingered dawn didn't last long, however. The sun had barely cracked the horizon when clouds started to amass, dark as ink blots in the sky, all but extinguishing the nascent daylight. Growls of thunder pealed overhead. No rain came, but a cold wind hissed along the esplanade that stood between the Opera House and t
he waters of Sydney Harbour. Early-morning joggers turned their heads in alarm. Businesspeople taking the scenic route to their offices, hoping to get a head start on the day's work, anxiously bent forward and quickened their pace.

  Zeus was there, in the shadow of the building. The thunderclouds were his, and so was the lightning that now flickered within them. His to command. He raised both arms and called the lightning down. It zigzagged onto the opera house's roofs. It jagged from the bases of the clouds in blinding white jolts. It struck and struck again, and concrete exploded, the roofs shattered, the roofs caved in like eggshells. Zeus stood, legs apart, and directed the lightning bolts like a conductor conducting a symphony. He orchestrated the building's destruction with dramatic gesticulations and lofty shakes of the head and a look on his face of stern-eyed rapture. To reduce a marvellous specimen of modernist architecture, fourteen years in construction, to a heap of rubble and dust took him a little under five minutes. Some passers-by suffered in the process, either getting hit by falling debris or else fried by wayward lightning bolts. Their deaths were unintentional but hardly a source of regret. These things happened.

  And with that, it was over. There were no further demonstrations of power. A number of the world's great landmarks were gone - besmirched, ruined - along with several hundred human beings. That was the extent of the Olympians' revenge for a handful of dead monsters.

  "It could have been worse," Landesman remarked, and he wasn't being callous or flippant. It could have been far worse. One might even argue that the Pantheon had let the world off lightly. Given what it was in their capacity to do, they had acted with something approaching restraint. They had vented their anger on symbols, emblems of human aspiration and achievement, more than on actual humans.

  A shroud of guilt hung over Bleaney Island nonetheless. For a day or so, nobody could quite meet anybody else's eye. Conversations were curt and choppy. People retreated to their rooms; sedated themselves with television and booze. Sam could see it in faces, almost hear the sound of it - consciences being wrestled with. An inner struggle grinding away. Are these losses acceptable? Should we carry on? Do we have the right to?

  She herself could see no solution other than to press ahead. Giving up now would mean the Olympians had got their way, yet again, and surely the whole aim of Titanomachy II was to prevent that.

  She went to find Landesman. He wasn't in his office, but Lillicrap was next door in his office, a smaller and much less plushly furnished space than his boss's.

  "Be with you in a moment," Lillicrap said, holding up a finger. He scowled at the laptop that sat on the steel-frame desk in front of him. "Just going over some figures."

  Finally he sat back, sighing. "Mr Landesman's personal accounts. We're coming to the end of the tax year. It's a nightmare keeping it all straight. So many different holdings in so many different places."

  "You're his bookkeeper as well as his personal assistant?"

  "I'm Mr Landesman's everything, Miss Akehurst. PA, secretary, general factotum, chief cook and bottle washer. And now aide de camp. Been with him for more than twenty-five years. Quarter of a century! Right from the inception of Daedalus Industries, almost, when I was a graduate fresh out of university, the ink still wet on my diploma."

  "Congratulations on your silver wedding anniversary."

  "Thank you," Lillicrap replied, his tone no less droll than hers. "I think it's safe to say my employer couldn't ever manage without me. I know the man better than anyone. I'm indispensible to him. Which is why this whole business here..."

  Sam's antennae twitched. "What? What about it?"

  "Well, I'm going to be candid, Miss Akehurst - the Titan project, it's been an obsession for Mr Landesman, it's consumed his life for the best part of a decade, and it's also consumed a great deal of his finances."

  "He told us that. Half a billion. Half his worldly wealth."

  "He was being somewhat economical with the truth there. Which is about the only area where he's being economical." Lillicrap took off his spectacles and polished the lenses on one shirttail. His eyes, exposed, looked small and lost. "Mr Landesman... What I'm about to tell you goes no further than this room, of course."

  "Of course."

  Lillicrap replaced his spectacles on his nose, adjusting them until they were immaculately balanced. "Mr Landesman has all but bankrupted himself pursuing this dream of his, this vendetta against the Olympians. I've warned him countless times to be more cautious, less spendthrift. These account spreadsheets I've been preparing for him - they make for grim reading. Will he listen to me, though? Will he hell. Deaf to all my protests. I find it... I find it distressing to see such prosperity, such affluence, being recklessly squandered. It hurts me. It causes me physical pain."

  "Mr Landesman doesn't look at it as squandering," Sam pointed out. "And it is his money. He can do with it as he likes."

  "Granted. All these years, though, I've served as his conscience, the little warning voice that tells him if he's gone too far or if he's in danger of doing so, and always he's paid attention to me and valued my judgement. My advice has got him out of more than a couple of nasty scrapes, believe you me, and steered him clear of numerous others. Until now. Now he simply won't be told. Won't be swayed. And it makes me feel like I'm nothing to him any more. Just another one of his employees."

  Sam didn't know whether to laugh at Lillicrap or pity him. The man clearly loved Landesman. It wasn't some mere romantic attachment, it was a sincere Platonic love buried at a level so deep that not even he himself was aware of it. He adored his boss as a dog adores its master. The master in this case, unfortunately, did not reciprocate. Doubtless Landesman considered Lillicrap nothing more than a useful functionary. He had no idea of the slavish devotion he inspired in his assistant.

  "You said 'vendetta' just now," Sam said, wanting to change the subject, and also curious about the choice of word.

  "Did I?"

  "Did you mean that? This war against the Olympians is somehow personal for Mr Landesman?"

  "No. No, you must have misinterpreted. If that's what I said, it's not what I meant."

  "Oh. OK."

  "Anyway," Lillicrap said, resuming his usual brisk and businesslike demeanour, "you didn't come to speak to me, I'm sure, and you certainly didn't expect to have to stand there and listen to me witter on about my problems. You want to know where our fearless leader is. Last time I saw him, he was in the command centre. Try there."

  Sam did, and found Landesman, alone, standing before the huge mural with his hands clasped together behind his back. He looked as if he'd been in this pose a while. The gods on the wall, each at least 15 feet tall, loomed over him, dwarfing him.

  "Sam," he said, then turned back and resumed his study of the picture. Sam waited. Eventually, after a minute or two of contemplative silence, he spoke again. "What's remarkable about this painting, I find, what's so psychologically intriguing, and why it never fails to fascinate me, is the way Vasari and his collaborator Cristofano Gherardi have managed to make the act of castration seem painless, functional, almost desirable even. There's no blood, for one thing. Not a drop of it in sight. But look at Uranus, too. There he is with the tip of a scythe buried in his crotch, and no trace of anguish on his face, no hint of distress, only a kind of dull, bovine bewilderment. He's supine, hands on the ground beside him, hardly resisting as Cronus digs the blade in. He's looking up at his son more with resignation than anything. It's as if he's at least a half-willing participant in his own unmanning. The other gods are distraught but Uranus himself is just taking it, as if it's unavoidable, just something that needs to be done."

  "Why isn't he fighting back?"

  "Well now, that's the question, isn't it? Maybe all sons emasculate their fathers, maybe that's the point Vasari is making. When, as a father, you bring a son into the world, what you're in effect doing, consciously or not, is acknowledging that your days of usefulness and productivity are numbered. You've sired your replacement, the
boy who is going to grow up into the man who will usurp your position in the world. You raise him, nurture him, teach him, knowing all along that once he reaches adulthood you yourself are going to be superseded, rendered surplus to requirements - your vitality, your vigour as a man, no longer called for. To put it bluntly, every son cuts his dad's balls off sooner or later. Not always knowingly, and certainly not literally, not like Cronus there, or like Zeus later on. But every son does, and every father is more or less complicit in the deed. That's what Vasari is getting at, I believe. That's why Uranus is so passive. Myths are metaphors, and Vasari has chosen to interpret this one in that way. The next generation..."

  He shook his head.

  "Well, enough of that," he said. "You came to ask if you Titans can resume operations."

  "Yes."

  "I've been leaving you lot be, giving you some breathing space so that you can make the necessary inner adjustments. I thought a couple of days would be enough, and it seems it is. Back into action, Sam? Eager for more? But of course, of course. Still plenty of monsters left on the hit-list, not to mention the Olympians themselves. Do you really think everyone's ready?"

  "I do."

  "And you." He looked at her levelly. "Are you ready?"

  She met and matched his gaze. "I am."

  "The Sphinx. It was a humanoid creature. You were there at the kill. Did that trouble you?"

  "It was humanoid, but still a monster. I didn't find that a problem. Not too much. Besides, Rick did most of the work."

  "Rick is experienced in that field," Landesman said. "And I believe he saw in it something of his own personal bête noire, the Lamia, another monster with female-human attributes. Hence it was little trouble for him, pulling the trigger on the Sphinx. It was a dry run, you might say, for his upcoming appointment with the murderer of his son. He's a soldier. In his eyes one can see the look of a man who has come to an accommodation with the act of discriminate killing. And in yours, I can see it too, now. It's there. Faint, but there, discernible. You understand the demands that are being placed on you, the sacrifices you're having to make. You know what all this is doing to you. You realise how it's going to change you irrevocably."