Atlas closed his eyes just a moment too long, and then said. “Yes. Zeus, highest among the gods, came to Leda as a swan. She was married to Tyndareus, who was one of the kings of Sparta—”
“Spartans had two kings at all times,” Darling interrupted. “They felt it stabilized their political system. Tyndareus was the stronger of the two kings of his day.”
Atlas waited until his cousin was done before pressing on, trying to sweep me into the cadence of his story. “As the myth goes, Leda had four children, two by Zeus and two by Tyndareus, a boy and a girl each. Helen and Polydeuces emerged from an egg, and Clytemnestra and Castor were birthed as mortals.”
“Quadruplets?” Mike asked.
“Possibly, but the myth aligns Castor and Polydeuces as twins, as it also aligns Helen and Clytemnestra. Perhaps Zeus visited Leda more than once.”
I grimaced.
“Tyndareus seemed to take pride in the story that two of his royal heirs might have been fathered by a god,” Atlas said. “He appeared to favor all four equally, and trained them as he would any Spartan child. Castor and Polydeuces were the heroes of Sparta, and Helen and Clytemnestra had suitors asking for their hands before they were considered old enough to marry.”
“And that would have been…?”
“Age of first menstruation,” Darling said, as she drew her knife straight through the center of her fish. “Fourteen or fifteen.”
“Nope,” I said. “Just nope.”
“It was what it was.”
“Do you remember what you were like at fourteen?” I asked her. “Nope.”
“Yes.” Darling glared at Atlas, who was suddenly busy with his phone. “I remember.”
“Helen had hundreds of suitors,” Atlas continued, as if Darling and I hadn’t spoken. “Tyndareus declined them all on her behalf. All of these suitors were powerful men, and many scholars believe that Tyndareus was using Helen’s marriage to further Sparta’s political reach.
“Some of those suitors did not appreciate being used. Helen was kidnapped by Theseus—”
“Stop,” I said, as one of the names I couldn’t remember finally clicked in my memory. “Him. Who’s Theseus?”
Atlas paused. It was not, apparently, one of those questions that made me look especially intelligent. “I think I mentioned him at dinner the other night,” he said mildly. “Theseus is one of the best-known figures of the Heroic Age. He is said to be like Helen, the child of both a god and a mortal. He became King of Athens, but he is best known for completing heroic trials.”
“He killed the Minotaur,” Speedy said.
“Right!” Now I could place the name. “He was the Labyrinth dude.”
“David Bowie?” Mike asked, completely deadpan.
“No, his name was Theseus,” Atlas said. “He promised to rid Athens of a monster that took a tithe of seven boys and seven girls every seven years. This monster, the Minotaur, was imprisoned in an elaborate maze beneath the city of Crete. Theseus was able to navigate the maze and kill the beast.”
“Only because he was helped by Ariadne,” Darling cut in. “The King of Crete’s daughter. She told him how to best the monster and beat the Labyrinth. After he succeeded, Theseus took her and her younger sister, Phaedra, from Crete, but abandoned Ariadne on an island and married Phaedra instead.”
“Man,” I said. “Real class act, there.”
“It was not the first time he had done such a thing,” Darling said. “Theseus had a history of stealing women and then abandoning them. He had many wives, and many more children, but Helen is said to be the last woman he stole.”
“Good for Helen,” I said. “I bet she gave him hell.”
“Perhaps,” Atlas said. “Accounts of what befell her while she was his captive are widely different. Some say she was not kidnapped but instead fell in love with him and went willingly, and even bore him children.”
I laughed, thinking of a king with blood pouring down his face from where his teeth used to be.
Atlas added, “No matter how Helen came to be with him, the stories agree on what happened to Theseus after she was rescued: he was forced from the throne of Athens. Some sources say he was killed, others say he retired in exile, but they are in agreement on that point.”
Rescued. There’s a relief.
“Did Theseus try to stop Helen from leaving?” I asked.
“The myths put Theseus in the Underworld at the time Helen was rescued,” Atlas said. “He had gone to the Underworld to steal Hades’ bride, but was imprisoned on a stone.”
“In stone?” I asked, imagining Theseus waist-deep in something rock-hard for all eternity. Talk about your perfect ironic punishments.
“No,” Atlas said. “The stories say his skin was bound to a stone bench, and he could not remove himself. His cousin, Hercules, finally freed him after many months, but did so by ripping him from the bench. It left Theseus sorely wounded.”
“Some versions of that myth claim that Theseus was castrated in the act,” Darling added, with maybe a titch too much glee. “In those versions, Hercules tore his cousin from the rock with such force that his legs and buttocks came loose, but his testicles were left behind.”
“That is not the most popular version of the Theseus myth, but if myths are grounded in fact, then an injury that resulted in castration would explain why he never took another wife or fathered another child,” Atlas said. “Theseus disappeared from public view after Helen was rescued, and the stories that followed his life ceased around the same time.”
“What happened to Helen after that?” Mike asked.
“She returned to Sparta with Theseus’ mother, Aethra, and all of the women of Aethra’s household. Aethra stayed with Helen for most of her adult life as punishment for having played a role in the abduction.”
“And then came Helen’s marriage to Menelaus,” I said. This is where my Wikipedia searches had picked up: I knew that Helen and Menelaus had taken over as King and Queen of Sparta and had ruled for ten years before the whole Trojan War thing got underway. It was nice to know that Evil Dude’s Surprisingly Nice Mom—sorry, Aethra—had been wrong and Helen was able to stay in the country she had loved.
“Yes,” Atlas said. “As happened with Theseus, no one knows whether Paris kidnapped her or if she went willingly. There are different accounts, and all are said to be true.”
Strange, that. Makes you wonder.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I’ve committed more than my fair share of crimes in my life, but I’ve never actually planned any of them. Turns out that when you’re killing time before you break into a museum, things slow down to a crawl.
So we went to look for ghosts.
Kos has been settled and resettled over the millennia. Unlike Athens, its Asklepion is a unique site set apart from most other buildings, both old and new. Kos is believed to be where modern medicine was first…uh…
Look, I’m in medical school, and I know the majority of medical discoveries tend to come with a body count. Let’s just say that Kos was where Hippocrates introduced the idea there might be some questionable ethics involved in cutting patients apart just to see what would happen.
The Asklepion at Kos is huge. It’s set on the side of a hill, and the view is absolutely killer. Speedy, Mike, and I had ditched the Contentious Cousins back in the city, and it was great to stand alone, quietly, with friends, on top of this marvelous old ruin.
Sorry. Almost alone. Believe it or not, a lot of people still travel to the Asklepion to ask the gods for healing. There weren’t many of them, but those tourists who had come seeking miracles? You don’t travel all the way to an ancient site on an out-of-the-way Greek island for a mild case of eczema. My doctor brain was silently shouting at their loved ones to get them to a fucking hospital!
I have a hard time dealing with human misery. There’s just so much of it, in so many different forms. All we want to do is live out our lives in peace, and when circumstances mean we can’t do that, we crat
er the peace of those who care about us. When one person suffers, everyone who is connected to them through love suffers, and everyone connected to them suffers, and so on until the love runs out.
Love doesn’t run out. That’s the best and worst thing about it.
To top it all off? I know for a fact that death isn’t the end of things. Do you know how refreshing it’d be to tell some of these people that it’ll all be okay and soon you’ll be able to build your own private Kardashian cave-pool?
But, you know. Then I’m a crazy lady. [12]
“Anything?”
Mike’s question brought me back down to earth, and I realized that, yes, I had let my mind wander but, no, I sort of forgot I was supposed to be looking for ghosts and just got pissed off at the futility of the human condition instead.
I settled on saying, “Not so far.”
Speedy groaned, the deep heaving sigh of someone who’s tired of suffering fools. “Go up and to the left,” he said. “Try again at the Avato.”
“The whatnow?”
“A meditation center,” Mike replied.
“A hallucination station,” Speedy snapped. “The Greeks thought the god Asklepios would appear to them in dreams, so they set aside a room at the temple for dream-healing.”
“As I said,” Mike said, smiling. “A meditation center.”
We scaled the old staircase, mostly walking backwards so we could watch Kos drop away below us.
We took the opportunity to wave to those members of Goon Squad 2.0 who had tailed us to the Asklepion.
One of them waved back.
I laughed. “Morons.”
“Maybe,” Speedy said. “Or maybe they don’t care.”
I glanced around the Asklepion and spotted a local tour guide an easy distance away. “Shitty place for an ambush. Too open. Too many tourists to tell the cops exactly what happened.”
Mike nodded. “They’ll either wait for us to go somewhere with fewer people, or more of them so nobody’s stories will be the same.”
“How about we hit the market after this?” I asked them. “Pick up some new souvenirs, lose some unwanted ones?”
Speedy chuckled.
The Avato was a nice place. It probably had a roof on it at some point, but that was long gone. What remained were a bunch of reconstructed columns sticking straight up and supporting nothing but the open air, and the ubiquitous chunks of former buildings lying around. Speedy prodded me until I lay down on one of these, and told me to focus.
“Concentrate.” He poked me between the eyes. “You got those beads on you?”
I did: I had strung them on a sturdy hemp lanyard and was wearing them as a necklace. (Yes, I was wearing a priceless artifact. I thought I might need a physical connection with the dead queen. Sorry.) I yanked them from where they had been hiding under my shirt, and let them dangle on their cord.
“Good,” he said. “Helen’s willing to talk to you, so maybe that’ll be your backstage pass to meet the rest of the ancient ghosts.”
“She’s not talking to me, Speedy. She’s shoving her adolescence into my head.”
“So? See if you can get Archimedes to start showing up in your dreams. Then we can all go home and you can review the data at leisure.”
“There are so many assumptions crammed up the butt of that idea,” I sighed.
“Try. I’m getting sick of this country.”
“I can’t go to sleep on command,” I told him.
Mike settled himself beside me on the rock in the lotus position. “Do as I do,” he said. “You don’t have to sleep, but you should relax.”
“Right,” I said, and turned myself into an upright pretzel.
We meditated, Mike and I, our eyes closed and our faces tilted up towards the afternoon sun. Speedy kept watch on the edge of the rock, sometimes sitting upright like a chubby gray meerkat.
(All right, I might have peeked a few times. What? We were surrounded by bad ‘uns.)
Mike was good to me. He called it after an eternity of ten minutes.
“Nothing,” I said.
Speedy sighed and flumped flat on the rock.
Mike knelt on the rock and slowly turned in that aikido shuffle that makes me wonder how he has any knees left. “Question for you,” he said, once he had completed his circle. “Would you feel the presence of ghosts if one has already been around you?”
“Don’t follow,” I said, as I dug into my bag for some water.
“If Helen’s here, then—”
“Oh!” Speedy launched to his feet. “Good one. Maybe Helen’s already here, and she’s got you desensitized to other ghosts.”
I blinked at the open stretch of hillside. “If Helen is here, and if she’s that powerful,” I muttered, “why can’t I see her? God, this is the culture problem again, I just know it!”
“Call your husband,” Speedy said.
“Wouldn’t do any good,” I said. “That chip in his head doesn’t come with an autotranslate program. You’re the only one who can communicate with her, and you can’t see her, either.”
“He could see her,” Speedy snapped. “And he could pipe in their conversation via your phone, so I could hear it and translate it.”
I tried to shoot this one down, but he made a damned good point. “Fine,” I said, and hit the button on my ring.
Let me tell you about cyborgs and the out-of-body experience.
Everybody in OACET can take themselves out of their native headspace and put it into a spectral avatar. Mike says it’s basically astral projection, in which the mind can travel outside of the body, and he says monks and mystics have been doing this for ages. Cyborgs do this by using electromagnetic fields; I have no idea how the monks and mystics do it. Sparky and I use it to keep in touch when we’re apart (see: really amazing cyborg phone sex).
But…
When cyborgs go out-of-body? Their avatars can see ghosts. All ghosts, not just the super-powerful ones that us psychics can perceive when our brains are rooted in flesh like normal. We think it’s because their implants help them tune into whatever frequency the ghosts exist on. Uh…the spectrum in which the ghosts exist…
Sorry. The metaphysics is (are?) confusing to begin with, and the language starts tripping it all up. What I’m trying to say is that the implant removes the barriers between the living and the dead, and lets one speak with the other.
I know, right!? It’s a really big fucking deal. In my opinion, it’s an even bigger deal than the implant allowing the cyborgs to connect to any and all networked machines. Machines are this tiiiiiiny little dot on the timeline of human evolution, but life and death have walked with us hand-in-hand that whole freakin’ way.
This has given me, Sparky, and the rest of the gang conniptions. We’re trying really, really hard to keep the worlds of the living and the dead separate. Knowing there’s an Afterlife is the ultimate spoiler, and we’re not about to wreck that for anyone.
(Do not get Mike talking about this stuff. Still waters run deep, and down near the bottom there are hidden rapids: Mike is fanatical about keeping the Afterlife a secret. He says that life is about the journey, not the destination. Religion and belief, despite their balls-out screaming litanies of flaws, have helped provide a path for everyone from the most devout follower to the most hardcore atheist, and this path is—arguably—taken as a matter of choice. Throwing proof of an Afterlife in there would shatter the ideas that serve as the foundation of those paths. Yeah, they could be rebuilt over time, but who are we to destroy humanity as we know it? [13])
So we try to keep the ghosts a secret. We’re not too worried about anyone in OACET accidentally spotting our ghosts—by our, I mean those ghosts who are native to the United States and who American psychics can see without too much effort—because our ghosts follow a…dress code of sorts. Unless they’re in a place where they feel secure, like my house, our ghosts tend to appear as small blue winged pixies when they’re on this side of the mortality line.
&nb
sp; Dressing up like creatures of myth is apparently a time-honored tradition among ghosts. They want to keep their existence a secret, too, and the living are much less likely to associate “blue thing” with “dead human” when they can confuse it with “elf” or “chromatically-challenged leprechaun”.
Greece has this enormous catalogue of screaming monster-horrors. Also, nymphs. I guess I expected anyone hanging around the Asklepion to look like one of those.
A few moments after I pressed the hidden button on my ring, Sparky arrived in the usual pop of bright green light before he resolved himself into a green facsimile of my husband.
“Hey, Sweetie,” he began, and then stopped cold. He straightened, his avatar changing from my casually-dressed husband to a besuited politician in the blink of an eye. “What am I looking at?” he asked.
“You tell us.”
“Four ghosts. Three men and one woman. One man in an old-fashioned business suit, two in some sort of armor. The woman is wearing a toga. She’s their leader; the way the others are standing means they’re deferring to her.”
Eh, so much for dress codes.
“Oh, good,” I said. “She’s the one we want to speak to. We’re about ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure that’s Helen.”
“Helen…Helen of Troy?”
Do you know how hard it is to get Sparky to crack when he’s in politician mode? I grinned like a freakin’ lunatic.
“Yeah, she started showing up in my dreams after that hot guy sold me her beads… Never mind, it’s a whole long story,” I said. “I’m pretty sure we should start calling her Helen of Sparta, though.”
“Ah.”
And then he bowed. Bowed. Like you would to a royal—
Right. I’m not too smart.
I stood and bowed, too. And, since all psychics can see and hear a cyborg’s digital avatar, so did Mike.
Speedy, who can also see Sparky’s avatar, began to clean himself with loud slurping noises.
“What does she look like?” I whispered to my husband. I had to ask: that gangly girl in my dreams wouldn’t be launching ships any time soon. Past-soon. Thing. Goddamn I hate time travel.
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