Olympus Bound

by Jordanna Max Brodsky

  Hippolyta …

  Crazed barking and the scrabble of claws on the hardwood added to the tumult of confused voices from inside—not just Ruth speaking, but several women.

  Uh-oh, thought Selene as the door swung open.

  Hippo barreled through, throwing all hundred pounds of her shaggy weight onto her mistress; Selene had to hold on to the railing to stop from toppling backward.

  “Hey, girl,” she said as Hippo jumped up to rest her forepaws on her shoulders. “Yeah, I missed you too.” She pressed her face against the dog’s floppy ear and whispered, “And I’m sorry I left you. You never would’ve done it to me.”

  Hippo responded by licking her mistress’s entire face as if it were covered in peanut butter. Selene didn’t mind—it meant she could avoid the women standing in the doorway for a few more seconds.

  She recognized Gabriela Jimenez’s incredulous snort. “You’re shitting me.”

  “Theo?” came a smaller, more hesitant voice. Ruth Willever.

  “Is that …” another woman began.

  Selene dodged away from Hippo’s tongue to see an Asian woman with long graying hair standing at Gabriela’s side, looking utterly bewildered. Selene recognized her as Minh Loi, the astronomer she’d once helped protect from an abusive boyfriend.

  Gabriela crossed her arms over her breasts and stared at Selene. “Oh yeah, that’s her. The one who’s supposed to be dead.”

  Theo sighed. “Yeah, how about you all let us in, and I’ll try to explain. Since, you know, it is Selene’s house and all.”

  That was fast, Selene thought, glad to have regained ownership without a fight. She gently pushed Hippo off her shoulders and strode through her front door.

  Ruth stepped aside. She had a rolling suitcase in one hand and a box of plants under the other arm, as if she was just moving in. Or out.

  She looked from Selene to Theo. “I was just getting my things,” she said quickly. “I’m leaving right now.”

  “Hey, you don’t need to rush off,” Theo said, reaching out a hand to her.

  Ruth took a step back. “No, I do. Look, I don’t know how you did it, Theo, but nothing can surprise me anymore. I’m glad for you. I’m glad you got her back. Please, I have to go.” She bent to give Hippo a quick kiss on the forehead, then hurried down the stairs with her luggage banging behind her. She gave a quick, curious glance at Maryam, who stood silently on the stoop, then rushed down the sidewalk.

  “That woman has the worst luck,” Gabriela said with a sigh. “I mean, she falls for a guy with a dead girlfriend, and then bam. It turns out the girlfriend is like actually immortal, not just sort of immortal. There’s no getting rid of her. Oh, don’t give me that look,” she snapped at Theo. “Minh knows all about Artemis.”

  “I told you it was a secret!” Theo protested.

  “Yeah, I heard you, but you didn’t mean a secret from my fiancée, did you?”

  “Yeah, actually I definitely meant—wait, your what?”

  “I’ll take that as a congratulations,” Gabriela said. “I proposed while you were off bribing the devil or whatever you were doing to get your girlfriend back from the dead.” Her hard stare swiveled back to Selene. “Unless she wasn’t dead in the first place.”

  Selene swallowed.

  “Oh, no. You lying puta …” Despite Minh’s restraining hand on her arm, Gabriela’s words shot out as violently as any slap. “Do you have any idea what Theo went through these last six months?”

  “Gabi, Selene and I have been through all that. I forgave her, okay?”

  “Go right ahead, but I plan to hold that grudge on your behalf for a very long time.”

  “Fine,” Selene said, making her way to the kitchen. “But right now your grudge isn’t going to stop me from getting something to drink.”

  “It better be vodka!” Gabriela called after her. “Because you’re going to need it when I’m done with you!”

  Selene yanked open her fridge. Nothing left but the condiments. Not surprising. Ruth would’ve cleaned it out so nothing rotted while Theo was away. She’s so damn considerate. Selene slammed the door shut and poured herself a glass of water from the tap.

  She heard Theo piling their bags at the foot of the stairs and then making introductions.

  “Maryam is a nun … or was.” He stumbled, settling on, “She’s a friend from Turkey. Maryam, this is Minh Loi. She’s an astronomer at the Natural History Museum,” he went on more confidently. “She helped us work out some of the science behind the Mithras cult’s obsession with the zodiac.”

  “What do you know about multiverses, Miss Loi?” Maryam asked.

  “Stop right there,” Gabriela interrupted. “Hey, Theo, remember how you almost got me killed, twice? Well, don’t try dragging Minh into another one of your schemes, okay, because I will kick your ass right back to the little vanilla suburb you grew up in. She’s going to be my wife. We’re going to have a kid—”

  “I didn’t—”

  “And we were going to ask you to be the sperm donor.” She barreled over Theo’s weak protests. “Except now I’m rethinking, because idiocy could be genetic.”

  “Hey—”

  “And who the hell are you, really, Maryam? Let me guess … From the fact that your eyes are so bright they’re making my hair stand on end, I’d have to say … Athena.”

  Theo groaned.

  Maryam just said, “I admire a wise woman.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you do.”

  “Um, Gabi, honey …” From the tone of Minh’s voice, she’d never really believed her girlfriend’s stories about the Greek gods until now.

  Selene paced back into the hallway. “Yes, we’re real, and yes, I was alive—most of time—and yes, he still had to journey into the Underworld to get me.” She took a long swallow of water while Gabriela and Minh stared at her, openmouthed. “It’s a long story for another day. Right now, I’m going to order some Chinese food, and Minh’s going to answer the Goddess of Wisdom’s questions. We have a portal to another dimension to open.”

  Chapter 51

  GIVER OF GOOD COUNSEL

  Crammed into Minh’s small office at the Hayden Planetarium, Theo watched the astronomer scan through book after book on multiverses. Plenty of scientists, it seemed, had proposed their existence. None of them, however, had any idea how to actually get into one.

  Gabriela, who sat cross-legged on the desk, looked about to kick them all out and lock her fiancée safely inside, but Minh had insisted on helping. It seemed she couldn’t resist an intellectual challenge any more than Theo could. So after eliciting a firm promise that Minh wouldn’t be in any danger, Gabi had relented enough to join in the conversation.

  “But you guys said you did enter another world, right?” she asked, chewing violently on the end of a pen. “In Delphi?”

  “Yes,” Selene admitted. “I went into the Lake of Memory in the Underworld, then followed my brother deeper into the water rather than swimming for the surface.”

  “Soooo … it’s obvious.” Gabi gave her an exaggerated smile. “You just need to kill yourself and jump in the lake again.”

  Theo blew out an exasperated breath. “Could you try to be nice?”

  She shrugged. “Just saying. You did it for her.”

  From her place standing in the corner of the room, Selene glared at her. “I’d kill myself if it would help, but it wouldn’t. When I took the key away from Aion, the gatekeeper, it disappeared. Without the key, you can get into the Underworld, but you can’t get back out.”

  Gabriela didn’t look mollified, but Selene just continued coolly, “I did manage to get out of Delphi, however, by playing the right notes, just like when Theo opened the portal by playing the hydraulis. Music is the real way to move from world to world. ‘The bridge between worlds hangs on lyre strings.’ That’s what the Delphic oracle told me.”

  “She’s right,” Theo said. “That’s why the Orphics sang all those hymns, and why the Orpheus myth says
he used his lyre to escape the Underworld. He played a dirge for Persephone and Hades, and they were so moved they let him take Eurydice and leave.”

  Maryam, who’d spent the last few hours buried in Theo’s research, put down his notebook and strode purposefully over to Minh’s whiteboard. She uncapped a marker and wrote MITHRAISM, ORPHISM, and PYTHAGOREANISM in an engineer’s crisp hand.

  “Wait,” Gabi said. “Why are we still talking about Mithras? Didn’t we get rid of those nutjobs already?”

  “But Zeus needed Saturn inside the storm with Theodore,” Maryam explained. “That’s how he made sure the portal opened into the correct time period.”

  Theo interrupted to interpret for Minh. “Saturn is the Greek Kronos. As in ‘chronometer’ and ‘chronology.’ The God of Time.” The astronomer nodded, still looking a little overwhelmed.

  “But I think Saturn had another role to play,” Maryam went on. “From what I’ve read in the professor’s notebook, the Mithraists, despite their scientific inaccuracies, understood the power of the stars. The Host believed Mithras himself brought his followers closer to the Last Age—and to the reincarnation of Jesus—by shifting the heavens.” Under the “Mithraism” column she wrote REINCARNATION and CELESTIAL SPHERES.

  Theo stood up from his chair and leaned on Minh’s desk, unable to contain his growing excitement. “Orphics and Pythagoreans also believed in some form of reincarnation,” he said. “When I was in the Underworld, I saw the dead passing through portals—like holes in the celestial spheres—in order to go back to the world of the living.”

  Maryam nodded and added the words beneath the other two columns. “The two cults had something else in common. Orpheus the musician. Pythagoras the music theorist.” She added MUSIC beneath ORPHISM and PYTHAGOREANISM.

  “Shit-balls.” Theo snatched up a red marker from the whiteboard. He circled MUSIC and SPHERES and then turned to Maryam and grinned. “That’s it. That’s what we need.”

  “Wait,” Gabi interjected. “What the hell are the Music Spheres?”

  Theo laughed. “Music of the Spheres.”

  Gabi just stared at him, both brows raised.

  “Imagine you have a ball or a piece of wood attached to a string,” he continued. “Like a yo-yo. You swing it around your head in a circle superfast, and it makes a sound, right?” He spun the marker around his head in a futile attempt to demonstrate. “Some Greek cults used it to make a roaring noise in their cult rituals.”

  Gabi moaned. “You mean there are more Greek cults still out there? Spare me, please.”

  Theo ignored her and pressed on. “The Greeks called it a ‘rhombus’ from the word for ‘spinning’—we still use the word for shapes that look like the piece of wood they whirled around. Well, ancient astronomers figured that, just like a wooden rhombus makes a sound if you spin it on a string, then surely the planets, which are infinitely larger, must also make noise when they’re orbiting through the heavens. Remember, in their geocentric model of the universe, each planet had its own celestial sphere. The zodiac and other constellations were on another one. All these spheres are spinning around the earth at different rates. And just like objects on earth, the faster you spin them, the higher-pitched the sound. So, the movement of the heavens creates a Music of the Spheres.”

  Selene pushed herself off the wall, eyes bright. “And you think that’s the melody the hydraulis was playing on Olympus?”

  “Maybe. Remember the prayer to the Tetractys? It says numbers created the universe.”

  “But in the Underworld,” Selene interjected, “Apollo told me music made the world. And can unmake it, too.”

  “Exactly. They’re both right. The Pythagoreans knew that numbers and music are essentially the same thing—numerical ratios underlie each chord. The range of pitches is infinite. It’s chaos. But when you limit it to specific ratios—octaves, fourths, fifths—you get order, beauty, harmony. Our word for ‘cosmos’ is just the Greek ‘kosmos,’ which means ‘order.’ So”—he flourished his marker—“it’s music that takes limitless khaos and restricts it into certain pitches to get limited kosmos.”

  Selene beamed at him. “Music is doing what myth did. Lion-headed Aion wrapped up tight in his snakes. Unbounded Time bound by Kronos himself.”

  Gabi looked fascinated and bewildered at the same time. “Okay, so the Music of the Spheres sounds pretty cool, but no one can hear it, right? How’d the Greeks explain that?”

  “Easy,” Theo said, tossing his marker back on the tray. “The sound of the planets spinning on their spheres would be a constant background noise to every moment of our lives, so humans wouldn’t even perceive it. It’s like how if you live on Broadway, after a while you just don’t notice the traffic noise. Pythagoreans thought only one person could hear the music: Pythagoras himself. He was so wise, so learned, that he could perceive the mathematical perfection of the universe in a way no one else could. That sort of knowledge—the ability to see the patterns that form the world around us—is what makes you a true philosophos, a lover of knowledge. It connects you to the divine.”

  Minh waved her hand for him to stop. “Hold up. I was following you until the ‘divine’ part. I thought this was science, not religion.”

  Gabi poked her on the shoulder. “I thought you were engaged to an anthropologist. Haven’t I been telling you that throughout most of human history those were the same thing?”

  “Gabi’s right,” Theo said eagerly. “The followers of Pythagoras believed only the gods could’ve created the hidden logic that underlies all of nature. So accessing that logic could bridge the gap between mortal and god. Even the Christians believed something similar, although it’s gotten corrupted over time. Remember the line from the New Testament, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God’?”

  Gabi and Maryam nodded encouragingly, although he could tell he’d lost Selene the minute he started talking about Christianity. He plowed on anyway. “You hear Christians say it all the time: ‘Jesus is the Word.’ But the New Testament was originally written in Greek, and the real line goes something like, ‘In the beginning was the Logos.’ Which can just as easily be translated as ‘logic.’ So it’s not that God—or Jesus—created the world. It’s that logic did. Numbers. Math. So only by tapping into that mathematical pattern of the universe can man achieve salvation.”

  Selene looked to their resident nun for confirmation.

  “It’s an unorthodox interpretation,” Maryam said stiffly. “But it’s not wrong.”

  Selene grinned. “Good. So if Theo’s right, and the Music of the Spheres is the most important manifestation of this divine pattern, then that’s the melody that opens the portal.”

  Gabi scrubbed her face with uncharacteristic weariness. “Okay, stop, stop. All very interesting, but since the universe isn’t geocentric, and there’s no such thing as celestial spheres, this is all useless. There is no Music of the Spheres. Right?”

  Theo froze. He slumped into a chair and squeezed the bridge of his nose beneath his glasses.

  “Right?” repeated Gabi, looking at Minh.

  The astronomer gave her lover a smile of pure glee. “Wrong. The heavens are singing.” She bent over her computer. “Pythagoras was wrong about the spheres, but he was right that music created the universe.”

  Theo scooted his chair closer, barely restraining himself from looming over her shoulder to see better.

  Minh typed away for a moment, then sat back while the twang of a science fiction laser gun issued from her speakers. The sound dropped slowly in pitch, like an airplane crossing the sky, then settled into a low roar before climbing once more into a bright hiss, growing louder and louder until it stopped abruptly.

  “That,” Minh said with a satisfied smirk, “is the tune sung by the Big Bang.”

  Gabi leaned over to plant a kiss on her cheek. “Did I mention to y’all that my fiancée is a genius?”

  “Many times, no doubt.” Minh gave a self-deprecating snort. “But a
colleague of mine over at the University of Virginia deserves the credit. Of course, it’s been transposed fifty octaves upward and sped up by a factor of three trillion. The real sound would be far too deep for human hearing.”

  “Um.” Theo felt like an idiot for questioning her, but that was, after all, a scholar’s job. “I thought there was no sound in space.”

  “Not anymore, that’s true. But when the universe began, it was full of a superbright fog of gas, dense enough for sound waves to travel through. Remember, I said the sound created the universe. It’s not just some fun by-product.”

  “Explain,” demanded Selene.

  Minh took a deep breath. “Okay. The universe starts as a hot, dense fog of gas, right? Well, over time the universe expands. As it thins, it also cools, leaving us with the cold, black space we know today. But remember, when astronomers look through telescopes, they’re not just looking into the distance; they’re also looking into the past, because it takes so long for the light from the stars to reach us. When you look at something a distance of thirteen billion light-years away, you’re seeing what it looked like thirteen billion years ago. So, with certain telescopes, we can actually look all the way back to the fog of the universe at the very beginning of time.”

  “Khaos,” Selene said softly. “You’re seeing khaos.”

  “Uh, yes, sort of. It’s not something you see exactly, because it travels to us as microwaves, not visible light. When we look at the sky, the closest things we can observe beyond our solar system are the individual stars here in our galaxy. Then whole other galaxies hurtling away from us. Then fainter and fainter galaxies until finally you see, so to speak, a bank of crackling static, like a TV tuned to an empty channel. We call it the cosmic microwave background.” She stood and picked up a marker. “Starting in the 1990s, astronomers discovered that the CMB contains patches of low and high density.”

  Gabi winked at Theo. “I love when she uses the whiteboard.”

  Minh rolled her eyes, but Theo caught her smiling. She sketched a long, sinusoidal wave across the board. “Those differences in density in the CMB—in the fog of the primordial universe—are actually the peaks and troughs of sound waves left over from the original Big Bang. Sound moves like a slinky: It pushes some molecules together, then pulls others farther apart. When I talk—or sing—the air molecules from my mouth push together other air molecules to get the sound to your ear. If there hadn’t been any sound waves in the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe would be spread out evenly—just an enormous, thin cloud of dust. But instead, the sound waves pushed some of the matter together, creating dense patches. Remember how the sound I played for you got louder and louder? That’s because over millions of years, the differences in density got more extreme.”