The Age Of Zeus

by James Lovegrove

  "Wouldn't refuse. It had to be consensual. Otherwise the indoctrination wouldn't take. No form of hypnosis can make a subject do something he or she wouldn't do naturally. That's another movie canard, the idea of the mesmerised victim becoming an assassin or whatever. My Olympians couldn't behave as they do if it wasn't already inherent in their psychologies. Athena's ruthless streak is that of the boardroom schemer she used to be. Ares's warrior aggression has been there since his soldiering days."

  "Did they know, going in, that they would be losing all memory of their old selves?"

  "It was made crystal clear to them that I would be rewriting their conscious minds, erasing their pasts so that they would know nothing about themselves other than that they were gods. All of them were happy with that. It was, I feel, one of the great attractions of the procedure for them. They'd all done things they weren't at ease with, things that had earned them opprobrium and shame. I was giving them the opportunity to start again, afresh, all sins forgotten, like a religious rebirth. That and supranormal powers - an irresistible combination."

  "Not to me," Sam said. "I've no interest in forgetting who I am."

  "Really, Sam? Strikes me there's a lot of past baggage you'd gladly let go of if you could. Your parents' deaths. You boyfriend's death. Your miscarriage. Your stalled police career. Perhaps also the Titans' abject failure in realising their objective. All that, I could whisk away from you, as though you were a soul in the afterlife drinking from the river Lethe, whose waters remove all remembrance of a person's time on earth. I could rid you of the pain you carry around inside you, the deep-seated traumas that have left you as you are - reserved, aloof, untrusting, cynical."

  "I am none of those things!"

  "You may not think so, but you do not see yourself as others see you. Have you ever loved anyone? Truly?"

  "Not that it's any of your business, but yes."

  "Adrian Walters?"

  "Ade."

  "One man. And before him? After?"

  She nearly said Ramsay's name, but didn't.

  "And was it love?" Zeus said. "Or more of a convenient arrangement? Ade was in the same line of work as you, therefore comfortably within the parameters of what you knew and understood. He was also inferior to you in professional terms, so not likely to threaten your self-image in that respect."

  "You can't know any of that."

  "I've done my homework, with Argus's assistance. I can read you, Sam, same as I read all of the candidates I chose for apotheosis. I can see into you. It's a gift I have. You're a smart but inhibited woman, with so much anger inside you, a well of frustration and aggrievedness. And I can save you from that. I can tap that well, relieve the pressure. I can unshackle you from your self-made chains, open you up to who you truly are and what you'd truly like to be. Come on, admit it, isn't that just the least bit tempting? The possibility of absolute freedom, absolute selfhood, a life lived without constraint or regret?"

  Not tempting, no. Not at all.

  Well, perhaps slightly.

  "It does hurt," Zeus said. "It takes several days, it involves courses of injections and infusions, and the physiological alterations these cause are unpleasant while they are happening. But does the athlete not endure great hardship as he trains to become the best in his field? Does the ballerina not go through agonies as she distorts her feet and builds up calluses? If we are to become sublime, do we not have to pay first in sacrifice and suffering? You will sit in that chair and experience a sometimes unbearable level of discomfort and distress. The restraints may be necessary from time to time, if only to stop you harming yourself or me in the throes of change. And you will listen to the myths constantly while the procedure is in progress, until the transformation is complete and you are no longer Sam Akehurst but someone else, a greater being, superior in every way."

  "Who?" said Sam. "Who would I become?"

  "You are interested, aren't you?"

  "No. Hypothetical question. Which goddess do you think I'm most like?"

  "Well, it's a matter of serendipity more than anything. We have a vacancy. It just so happens that you'd be ideal to fill it."

  "Artemis." She knew it. She'd known it all along, somehow.

  "Artemis," Zeus confirmed. "The cool, calculating, vicious huntress. Lethal in a fight, and not one who likes to be slighted or wronged. That was a portion of her file I played to you just now. Artemis's revenge on Actaeon, who had the temerity to spy on her and saw her in her nakedness. Artemis was a virgin - inapplicable in your case, obviously, but for the ancient Greeks that was how they conceptualised her subsidiary function as divine patron of chastity and virtue. She was their idealised notion of feminine justice, untouched, untouchable, to be admired from afar but not to be roused to fury."

  "The previous Artemis had dark hair."

  "I believe there's such a thing as hair dye."

  "She was a good three inches taller than me."

  "Once you have her spear in your hands, no one will notice the height difference."

  "I can't even use a spear."

  "Apollo will teach you, and I will see to it that you have an aptitude for the weapon."

  "And I'm no killer."

  "Oh, and what were you doing in that suit my father designed if it wasn't killing? Did you not hunt down our monsters? Kill them?"

  "And 'feminine justice'?"

  Zeus widened his eyes. "To someone who was once a female detective sergeant, do I have to make the parallel any plainer? Sam, you are Artemis. Nobody could be the new Goddess of the Hunt better than you. You were made for it."

  "Except..."

  "Yes?"

  "It seems like some kind of sick joke," Sam said. "I loathe Artemis. I've loathed her for so long. Since Hyde Park."

  "Where this Ade of yours died."

  "She killed him. Her and Apollo."

  "From the accounts I've read, she didn't kill him. Neither did Apollo. He drowned. He died in the Serpentine, in a stampede, saving a girl's life."

  "A stampede Artemis and Apollo caused. If it wasn't for them, he'd never even have been there."

  "But did Artemis's spear go through him? Did one of Apollo's arrows? No. If anything killed him, it was his own bravery."

  "But I hate her. I hate you all."

  "And isn't it time to give that up?" Zeus said gently. "Where has it got you? Nowhere. Imagine if you were one of us instead. Helping shape the world. Making the future brighter, safer, better. Hating no one except those who would oppose you. Being part of the greatest force for good humankind has ever known."

  A last counterargument, all Sam could muster at that moment amid the turmoil she was feeling: "Why didn't you use all this as a force for good?" She meant the chair, the serums in their phials. "Your advances in genetic engineering. Didn't it ever occur to you that, rather than make a handful of people gods, you could make everyone gods? Demeter can heal. Damn it, with a thousand like her, a few hundred even, you could set up hospitals all over the planet and cure every known disease. And think, if everyone could teleport like Hermes, there'd be no need for mechanical transport any more. No buses, no cars, no trains - no pollution. Poseidon - an army of Poseidons could irrigate deserts, make it so that crops can grow anywhere, help end famine and drought. You yourself - couldn't a host of people harnessing lightning solve the world's energy problems somehow?"

  "Sam, ideas like those did flit through my mind briefly, once, before I dismissed them as the pure naivety they are. Could I have turned everyone on earth into a god? Should I? Well, apart from the impracticality and inordinate expense of attempting to do that, what do you think the result would be? Chaos. Utter chaos. People teleporting willy-nilly everywhere? What would happen to privacy, crime levels, the principles of territory and international borders? Hordes of Demeters curing all ills? So what about the population explosion that would ensue? Where would we find room for those billions of people who don't die when they're meant to?

  "Say we decide to dole out the str
ength of a Hercules. Who to? A select few? Who'd choose that select few? So let's be democratic and give it to everyone. But if everyone is as strong as Hercules, what's the point? All it'll lead to is an exponential rise in property damage and personal injury, people literally not realising their own strength, breaking things and each other. Over and above all that, who would control this world of gods? How would it be policed? Someone even more powerful would be needed to oversee it, gods' gods. Which gets us back to where we are now."

  He gesticulated with both hands, clutching empty air.

  "It just doesn't work, Sam. It's not feasible. I recognised that from the start. What I could do to people needed to be done with precision and great forethought. It couldn't be universal, it had to be specific, targeted, a laser not a blunderbuss. Don't change everyone. Change a few who can change things for everyone else."

  Sam could see the logic in this. It was inhuman logic, but logic nonetheless.

  "So," Zeus said. "What's it to be? What's the answer? Yes or no?"

  Another Landesman presenting her with another life-defining decision.

  "I need time," Sam said. "Time to think."

  Zeus leaned back. Sighed. "I feared you might say that."

  "Just a few days."

  "Sounds like a no to me."

  "No, it's not definitely a no," Sam said, and was surprised to find that this was the truth. It was 99% a no, but somewhere in her that 1% of yes was whispering softly, wheedling, saying, Why not? Why not?

  At last Zeus had relented. A few days. No, pin it down. She had to decide by this coming Saturday.

  Sunday, Sam had said. Three whole days from now.

  Sunday, Zeus had agreed. He couldn't spare her any longer than that. He needed his Artemis, especially with the mortals making their move on Olympus. This lot could be fought off, but if Sam was right and more followed in their wake, then he wanted the full Dodekatheonic complement of Olympians available.

  Now, at the council of war, having heard out his fellow Olympians, Zeus delivered his verdict.

  "I am of the view," he said, "that any attack on Olympus must be met with immediate and devastating counterforce. Let us wait, though, until whoever is coming has got here. Let us let the mortals assemble outside, and let us let them make the opening gambit. That will save us the trouble of going to seek them out and also make us look like the aggrieved party, the provoked rather than the provokers. Surely you can all see the beneficial aspects of that. Athena, a nuclear strike is simply not on. If we need to level a city - well, we've shown we can do that ourselves, haven't we, without recourse to manmade technological armaments. Having Argus assume control of the nuclear arsenals was to prevent their use, not commandeer them for our own purposes. It ill befits us as gods to drop bombs. What mortals can do, we cannot, and vice versa. That," he said, addressing all of them once more, "is my thinking on this. Let none demur."

  None did. Athena looked disgruntled but resigned. The Cloud-Gatherer had spoken. His word was diktat.

  "My daughter," he said, taking her under his arm as the meeting broke up, "don't be downcast. Your great mind will be vital in the coming days, apportioning our resources across the field of battle, deploying your family against the foe. Surely you relish such a challenge."

  A smile played about Athena's serious lips. It seemed she did relish it, as a matter of fact.

  Then Zeus came over to Sam.

  "Three days," he murmured, too low for anyone else to hear. "I shall be patiently waiting."

  "And if the answer isn't the one you want? Isn't this whole thing supposed to be voluntary?"

  "You won't disappoint me," Zeus told her, genially but with the force of conviction. "I know you won't."

  70. THREE DAYS

  Friday.

  British troops, nearly a thousand of them in all, were massing to the south-west and east of Olympus. Satellite imagery showed them bivouacked on the plains north of Larisa and along the coast in the mountain's shadow. American supplies were being airlifted in and distributed. Japanese ships, meanwhile, were cruising through the Straits of Gibraltar, bound once more for the Thermaikos Gulf.

  Internationally, diplomatic efforts were under way to defuse the situation. Plenty of people weren't comfortable with the idea of armies taking action independently of their governments, but the unease was felt most keenly at executive level. Catesby Bartlett flew to New York to try to obtain a UN Security Council resolution forbidding Field Marshal Armstrong-Hall from going through with a siege of the Olympians' stronghold. The Prime Minister's hope was that fear of contravening the will of the UN, and of being branded a war criminal as a result, would deter Sir Neville. However, both America and Russia vetoed the proposal, China abstained from voting, and Bartlett's transatlantic trip was all for naught.

  University students across the globe abandoned their lectures and libraries for a day in order to take part in protest rallies, but with one or two exceptions these took the form of pro- rather than anti-military demonstrations. The vast majority of the world's undergraduates were supportive of the stance taken by Britain's armed forces, which led to the unusual sight of youths carrying placards with crossed-out peace symbols on them and drawings of doves surrounded by a red circle with a diagonal red line through the middle, brandishing these as they chanted slogans such as "Hell yes - make a mess" and "All we are saying is don't give them a chance." On the more liberal campuses, such as Berkeley and Paris, scuffles broke out between the protestors and their professors, who were of the old school and angered that the ideals they themselves had once marched for, back in the day, were being so roundly spurned by the post-Olympian generation. As was often the case with academics, they'd failed to grasp that society around them had changed and they had not changed with it. The times were topsy-turvy now. The enemy was not the Man any more, it was the God.

  Saturday.

  The British troops' numbers were bolstered by the arrival of contingents from France, Australia, Spain, Italy and Russia, along with handfuls of soldiers from Israel and several north African nations, all of whom had come of their own accord, without the express consent (but probably with the tacit approval) of their superiors. Freelancers, among them a couple of dozen RCDC members, swelled the ranks. All at once the landscape around Larisa was smattered with impromptu camps, rows of tents in oblongs like patches of corduroy on a jacket.

  On that afternoon the Harpies spotted British scouts who had crept to within binocular distance of the stronghold in order to reconnoitre. The bird-women swooped, and the scouts were plucked from the ground and carried screaming into the sky, where the Harpies proceeded to tear them apart in a leisurely, almost playful fashion. Limbs were tossed from taloned foot to taloned foot, a gruesome game of catch. Entrails were flung high, snapped up as they fell, gobbled on the wing. The Olympians looked on from the battlements with some satisfaction, not least Hera. Sam, on the other hand, went to her room and stayed there until the whole ghastly spectacle was over.

  Zeus came to her afterwards, to find out if she was any closer to a decision.

  "Not yet."

  "I have no wish to put any pressure on you," he said. "I just want to be sure that you're not prevaricating in the hope that some sort of salvation is going to arrive. Remember Penelope."

  "Penelope?"

  "Odysseus's wife. While her husband was off on his wanderings and widely believed to be dead, she was beset by suitors, so she told them she wouldn't consider marrying any of them until she had finished weaving a shroud for her husband's late father Laertes. Every day she wove a little more of the shroud. Every night she unpicked the work she had done during the day. It was in vain. She was found out eventually. And if this is all some ruse of yours, a way to buy time for yourself, rest assured that it, too, is in vain. Those troops gathering around us will not get within a hundred yards of this stronghold, let alone set foot inside. If what the Harpies have just done hasn't driven home that fact, it ought to have."

  "I still
have one more day."

  "Tomorrow, then. If your answer's yes - and I believe it will be - you won't regret it, Sam."

  "And if it's no?"

  "Then regret will be the least of your concerns."

  It was a long night. And bitterly cold. It never got truly warm up on Olympus, which didn't seem to bother any of the Pantheon but certainly didn't agree with Sam, especially when she couldn't sleep. She piled blankets on herself until there was such a weight of them she could hardly breathe, but still the chill seeped through. There was a chill inside her too, to match. An icy dread.

  How much did she want to live?

  That was what it boiled down to. The alternatives were: agree to become Artemis, or die.

  Being Artemis would mean survival but it would be a kind of half-life at best. Zeus had promised an existence untrammelled by doubt or scruple, absolute godlike freedom. The price, though, would be the loss of everything that she had been up to that point, all her memories, her essential Sam-ness. Wasn't that, in itself, tantamount to death? The other Olympians had embraced the opportunity of oblivion, the chance to forget all their inadequacies and misdeeds, and she could see the allure of that. Her own life hadn't exactly been an unblemished catalogue of triumphs. But had it been so bad that she'd be prepared simply to dump it all and start again as someone else? Wasn't that just a little too easy?

  Then again, wasn't taking the other option, death, also just a little too easy? If nothing else, as Artemis she would have influence. Not to mention power. The same kind of power she had enjoyed while clad in her TITAN suit, had luxuriated in, been exhilarated by. And it would not be just while she had the suit on but all the time. All the time. Power in perpetuity. To be able to spring and strike as she'd seen Artemis do, to wield that spear like a darting needle, to be preternaturally strong, indefatigable, a creature of enhanced senses and reflexes - that would be something, wouldn't it?

  There was a third way, though. Tomorrow was crate delivery day. That was why she'd haggled with Zeus for an extra day in which to make up her mind. Assuming that the helicopter was still coming in as scheduled despite the rapidly changing circumstances on the ground, Sam could always make that desperate leap onto the departing crate and hope to be choppered clear of the stronghold.