The Age Of Zeus

by James Lovegrove

  "How? With all those arguments over the dinner table, rehashing stories from the myths?"

  "That helps reinforce the indoctrination."

  "Indoctrination? You've brainwashed them?"

  Zeus rolled his eyes. "That makes it sound like something from an old spy movie. With psychedelic lights and whirly music and a sinister reverbed voice repeating statements over and over - is that how you think it was done? Much subtler than that, Sam. And more sophisticated."

  "Some kind of hypnotic suggestion, though."

  "Implantation of concepts at a somatic level, yes, while the subject is in a state of deep relaxation. The ideas take root and propagate in the unconscious, growing until they overtake the conscious mind and turn subjective reality into objective. Bolstered by neurolinguistic programming techniques, it's surprisingly effective. Here, listen to this."

  He went over and switched the laptop on. While the machine booted up, Sam's gaze strayed towards the door. She could make a run for it, but where would she go? The stronghold itself remained a prison. Part of her, besides, itched to know the full story behind the Olympians. She might as well stay put until Zeus had revealed all.

  With a few keystrokes Zeus triggered a playback of an audio recording. It was his own voice, reciting part of a myth.

  "...Actaeon made the grave error of approaching the lake where you were bathing and spying on you from a thicket. Can you see the lake? The thicket? Your keen instincts alerted you to his presence, however - a tiny snap of a twig underfoot - and in outrage you changed the mortal voyeur into a stag. He's changing now. Now he is a stag. Can you picture his antlers? Actaeon's own hunting hounds then set on him and gave chase, and soon caught up with their transformed master and tore him to pieces. You can hear the dogs' savage snarls, the sound of his flesh ripping, hear his screams..."

  Zeus hit Stop. "I have over a hundred hours' worth of material stored here," he said, "culled from the major literary sources, each section filed according to which member of the Pantheon it pertains to. Those questions and observational remarks that break up the narrative? That's NLP. It forces the subject to visualise events in the story, making them more immediate and anchoring memory recall to these specific verbal stimuli. But beyond simply having the Olympians listen to stories about themselves while in a trance state, I availed myself of gene number VMAT2, popularly known as the 'god gene.' It's a gene encoded with an integral membrane protein that carries neurotransmitters around the immune system. Tests have shown that it's also responsible for rendering humans susceptible to belief in mystic forces and a higher power. Manipulation of VMAT2, a sneaky bit of reassignment, made my Olympians compliant, more liable to believe in themselves as gods. It gave them a sense of their own transcendence. Because, of course, genetic engineering is what this is really all about."

  "So your dad said," said Sam. "He told me about your rat."

  Zeus chuckled, recollecting. "Ah yes, the rat. It was quite a thing. Scared the life out of me at the time, but with hindsight it was my eureka moment. That was when I understood that I could actually make this whole thing work, that the theoretical was practicable. Most of my five wilderness years was spent advancing and perfecting the processes which had led to the creation of that freakishly strong rat. I isolated and cross-spliced and developed and tested and tested and tested once again until anything was within my reach, anything at all. I became a choreographer of the genome. More artist than scientist, I could make those chromosomes and nucleotides dance and prance and cavort. I could enhance and improve any living thing. A housecat with the speed of a cheetah? No problem. A chimpanzee with the strength of a silverback gorilla? Easy. A brown trout with the aggression and killer instinct of a great white shark? A breeze."

  "A trout that thinks it's Jaws?"

  "You should have seen it, Sam. It attacked anything in its tank that moved. It had no idea it wasn't a fearsome pelagic predator. Its self-delusion was entire. A river fish that was utterly convinced it was some kind of piscine god."

  "But isn't it a bit of a leap from tinkering around with animals to giving human beings super powers?"

  "Not really," said Zeus. "If I can augment animals, why not humans too? It has long been my belief that we all of us possess untold, hidden abilities. Embedded somewhere in us, latent, right down at the most primal level, are extraordinary faculties. In the past some people have been able to tap them, and then perform what have generally been regarded as miracles, astonishing feats of strength, telekinetic manipulation, healing, endurance, bilocation, pyrokinesis, and more. Some have been hanged for doing so, or drowned on ducking stools, or of course crucified. Others have been hailed as divine and worshipped. Finding and identifying the genes that generate these paranormal abilities was the task that preoccupied me over the five years. The result was... well, I've no need to tell you what the result was. You know full well."

  "Where were you at the time you were doing all this?" Sam asked. "Your father thought South America."

  "And how right the old man was. South America is the ideal continent for those who wish to go about their business unmolested by the law and unhampered by rules, ethics bodies, oversight committees and the like. You can buy anything, south of Mexico. Stump up enough money and whatever you need, whatever you desire, it's yours. A fully equipped lab. Animal test subjects. Even..."

  "Even...? You were about to say human test subjects, weren't you?"

  Zeus smiled. Bared his teeth, at any rate. "Prostitutes and feral gang kids from the favelas - who was going to miss them? Certainly not the local law enforcement, who shoot them as a matter of course and are only too happy to save bullets and supplement their income by abducting them to order instead."

  Sam's stomach turned. "Are you sure you weren't adopted and your real father was a Nazi vivisectionist?"

  "Playing the Jewish card again, Sam? Didn't work last time, won't now. Just because my father was of the Tribe, doesn't mean I am. Judaism is matrilinear, and Mum was Greek. Greek Orthodox, for what it's worth. Although for my dad it was enough that she was Greek, him with his passion for all things Hellenic."

  "A passion his son seems to have inherited."

  "No," Zeus corrected her, "he shoved all that stuff down my throat. I couldn't give a damn about Greek myths."

  "Except where it suits your purpose."

  "Well, yes."

  "Your father was well aware that you chose the Greek pantheon, out of all the other pantheons, deliberately. To piss him off."

  "He'd have been stupid not to realise that."

  "And, by the way, one of the Titans you killed on Bleaney" - remember, no bodies equals no proof - "was him. Your own father."

  Not even a flicker in Zeus's expression. "You say that like it's a bad thing."

  "Patricide usually is."

  "Usually. Now, shall I continue, or are you going to keep on sidetracking me?"

  "I'm not sure I want to hear any more, now that I know where the human portions of your monsters came from."

  "Squeamish?" said Zeus. "Squeamishness is a luxury no true pioneer can afford. Suffice it to say that I gave those whores and street kids the kind of power and invincibility they'd hitherto thought they could get only through a needle or a firearm. They were my foundation stones. On them and on countless dumb animals I built the edifice of a grand dream. A dream of saving humankind from itself. This dream."

  "And getting one up on your father at the same time."

  "A fortunate corollary."

  "As well as gaining absolute authority for yourself. Misunderstood misfit Xander Landesman, appointing himself supreme leader of the world. Revenge of the dropout."

  "Your obstreperousness is one of the things I like most about you, Sam. It's quite endearing. Exasperating, but endearing."

  "Maybe we should just cut this short," Sam said. "If the only reason you've brought me here is to brag on about how clever and ruthless you've been, with your dancing DNA and your Greek myth storytime audiobook, then
maybe -"

  "Sam!" Zeus burst out. "Heavens, woman, just stop and think for a second. You're not here so that I can crow about my achievements."

  "And not here to be killed either. So, what, then?"

  "Could I make it any more obvious? Why not ask yourself why I had Hermes pluck you from the battlefield. It was because I had a feeling about you, Sam, based on what Dionysus and Aphrodite told me about you and my own subsequent researches, after your identity became apparent. And my hunch has been confirmed over the past few weeks. You're stubborn and obstinate and awkward in every way, not to mention resourceful and smart. That makes for a worthy foe. It also makes for a worthy ally."

  "Ally?"

  Then she saw it, and everything in her seemed to sink. Not just her heart, her whole self, as though her soul was draining out of her, seeping onto the floor.

  "Godhood, Sam," said Zeus. "I'm offering you your very own apotheosis. Transformation from mortal to divine. Exaltation. I'm asking you to join us and become an Olympian."

  69. COUNCIL OF WAR

  Argus pinpointed Poseidon's whereabouts. Hermes fetched him. The twelve Olympians sat in session in the naos of the main temple. Zeus presided. Sam looked on from the sidelines.

  A council of war.

  "We go nuclear," said Athena. "Argus has control over the world's atomic arsenals. It's high time we took advantage of that. We bomb London. That'll halt this thing in its tracks. You know this, O Zeus."

  "I can't countenance it, O Athena the Owl-Eyed," said Zeus.

  "Why not? I'm the one you consult when it comes to tactics. Have I not advised you well in the past? Have I not helped steer you successfully around countless potential pitfalls? So this is what I am recommending now. Wipe out London with one of Britain's own ICBMs, and this new insurgency we're seeing will melt away - gone in a flash."

  She hadn't always been Athena. Once, she had been a brilliant business strategist, a consultant whom corporations hired at staggering expense to tell them how to get one over on the competition and expand their own interests. Then she tried to play off two rival pharmaceutical giants against each other, for the sheer pleasure of manipulating them both, and got caught at it.

  "I agree with my stepsister," said Dionysus. "Why must we exert ourselves over and over again quashing these uprisings when there's a far less effortful option open to us? All Argus need do is think it, and the deed is done."

  Dionysus had been a vintner and bon viveur who hosted lavish, booze-sodden parties that could last for days. The good times ended for him after one of his guests killed another with a broken bottle in a drunken brawl.

  "Typical!" barked Ares. "You're soft in every way, Dionysus. Soft and lazy. I, myself, will gladly take on these mortals hand to hand on the slopes of fair, snow-capped Olympus. The clash and clangour of combat is my music. Bloodshed and screams are my meat and drink."

  Before he was enlisted into the Pantheon, Ares had been a soldier, a good one, born for discipline and killing, if a little too apt to sacrifice the former in the name of the latter. His involvement in a massacre of civilians in some west African hellhole town prompted a dishonourable discharge and a descent into alcoholism. There were frequent arrests for affray, until Xander Landesman came along.

  "And I will fight alongside my stepbrother," Apollo declared. "My arrows stand ready to pierce a thousand mortal breasts." He and Ares clasped fists, a sinewy display of shared philosophy.

  Apollo used to be an Olympic-class archer, a toxophilite of the first rank, until he took a bribe from a betting syndicate and blew a contest he should have won easily. The scandal was hushed up but his career never hit the bullseye again.

  "I'm minded to side with Athena and Dionysus on this one," said Hades. "In the thick of combat isn't a place I'm too comfortable being, and there's something rather elegantly fitting about using one of the mortals' own weapons of mass destruction against them. So much death in the space of a handful of seconds - I find the idea positively thrilling."

  An embalmer by trade, Hades had been noted among his peers in the field of mortuary science for the skill and care he took over his work. With cosmetics brush and restorative wax he could render even the most unsightly corpse viewable. He prided himself on having saved many a family the distress of a closed-casket funeral. Unfortunately, it emerged that his affinity with dead bodies didn't end with smartening them up and making them look lifelike. A colleague caught him in the morgue one night, lavishing the wrong kind of attention on a recently deceased lingerie model on the slab. Vocational oblivion beckoned, but so did Xander Landesman.

  "Perhaps," argued Aphrodite, "we should offer them one last chance. Set a deadline. Give them until, say, next Monday to reconsider and pull back, then if they don't comply, attack. Isn't it better to show forbearance and allow their better natures a chance to shine through?"

  Aphrodite had previously been a madam running one of the most exclusive bordellos on the planet, a harem-like haven for playboys, plutocrats and princelings. Her abiding philosophy was that the relationship between prostitute and client was a sacred one, akin to true love, and in support of that, money was never mentioned on her premises. Credit cards were silently swiped and exorbitantly debited, and from there on in it was l'amour all the way. This didn't save her, though, when the inevitable police raid and prosecution for brothel keeping came. Her clients, showing anything but love, turned on her in order to protect themselves, and she had been facing a lengthy stint behind bars, until a certain arms dealer's son approached her with a tempting proposition.

  "Hardly," sniffed Poseidon. "They don't have better natures, O Protectress of Births. Haven't you realised that yet? Give even an inch of ground and they'll think you're weak. Gods cannot be seen to be weak. Say the word, Zeus, and I'll capsize every warship out there."

  So said a man who'd been a keen amateur yachtsman and also a shipping magnate who routinely overloaded his cargo vessels in order to maximise profits. Dozens of crewmen were lost at sea as his freighters foundered in rough weather, shipped water and sank. Eventually his avarice left him with nothing, no fleet of any kind except his own private 30-foot schooner, and when that was repossessed in order to help offset his legal defence team's costs, he knew he was going under. Xander Landesman threw him a lifeline.

  "I wouldn't dismiss my wife's proposal so quickly," said Hephaestus. "Aphrodite is sensitive to what goes on in the hearts of men -"

  "The hearts and the loins," Ares interjected.

  "- and," Hephaestus went on, ignoring him, "she is right to hope that maybe, in this case, people will come to their senses before it is too late. However," he added, "should that not happen, I have something up my sleeve that will assist us in the conflict. Athena suggested I build this particular item, and I think, once you see it in action, you'll be impressed, both by her foresight and my dexterity."

  He'd been a sculptor, an expert in metalcraft, praised for the way he could replicate the texture and flow of organic objects with inorganic materials. But as with many an artist, he was flawed, temperamental, prone to bouts of rage and depression. Like the stuff he worked with, he was either cold and inflexible or incandescently hot and dangerous. He lost friends, fell from grace, his creative fire sputtered out - and then, at the hands of the man who would be Zeus, he was forged anew in the crucible of science.

  "In my view," said Demeter, "in this summer heat, we must reap when the harvest is ripe."

  "And that means...?" said Apollo.

  "Mortals are corn. You be the scythe."

  "That's what I thought it meant."

  Demeter was an ex-doctor, a member of the caring profession who grew complacent and stopped caring. Stopped caring to the extent that she neglected the patients whose health she was responsible for, especially the elderly ones. Many of them were left permanently damaged, and some even died, as a consequence of treatable conditions she'd failed to diagnose. She was struck off the medical register. Then came a chance to redeem herself.

>   "Demeter and I," said Hera, "see eye to eye on this, as on so many matters. Cerberus will enter the fray at my command, as will Typhon, Scylla and, it goes without saying, the Harpies. You must make the decision, my husband, but I'm sure you will make the correct one."

  Hera had been a veterinarian, good with animals, but that wasn't Xander's only criterion for choosing her. She'd been married no less than four times by the age of thirty-five, always to unfaithful men, and he'd wanted someone who was familiar with the burden of the wronged wife - who even took a perverse pleasure from it.

  "I am He Who Presides Over Contests," said Hermes. "If it is your will, Zeus, I shall preside over this one too, this clash between us and the mortals. Wherever you ask me to be, there shall I go."

  Hermes had been Darren Pugh. His predecessor had been a getaway driver, of all things, a criminal who'd turned informant and had to go into witness protection. But Hermes the second, the replacement, was the erstwhile Darren Pugh. The elusive, slippery traitor.

  Sam watched them as they debated, and superimposed over all of them was her knowledge of the people they had been, the lives they had led before Xander Landesman approached them with the tantalising prospect of godlike powers. What a sorry bunch. Losers, perverts, cheats, crooks, the lowest of the low, and Xander had taken them and elevated them to the highest of the high.

  And now he was offering her the same opportunity.

  "What do you say, Sam?" he had asked her in the Temple of Apotheosis, a few hours earlier.

  Her immediate reply had been, "You've just described to me a dozen or so utter scumbags, and you're asking if I'd like to join them?"

  "'Scumbags' they may have been, but they were also uniquely suited to the roles I'd planned for them to play. Each had the requisite characteristics, a background in tune with the abilities I intended to give him or her. Each, too, was in dire straits, at low ebb, with very limited future prospects."

  "You made them an offer they couldn't refuse."