Sunset of the Gods

CHAPTER ONE

Even on Old Earth,
nothing was forever unchanging, as Jason Thanou had better reason than most to know—not even on the island of Corfu, however much it might seem to drift down the centuries in a bubble of suspended time, lost in its own placid beauty.

For example, the Paliokastritsa Monastery had long ago ceased to be a monastery, and the golden and silver vessels were no longer brought there every August from the village Strinillas for the festival of the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ, by a road which had led laboriously up the monastery’s hill between tall oak trees and through the smell of sage and rosemary. Now aircars swooped up to the summit, and the monastery had been converted into a resort, bringing visitors from all around Earth and far beyond it, who stared at the ancient chambers, a few of those visitors at least trying to comprehend what must have been felt by the cenobites who had lived out their lives of total commitment under the mosaic gaze of Christ Pantocrator.

They came, of course, for the incomparable location. From the monastery balcony, one could look out on the endlessness of Homer’s wine-dark sea. Northward and southward stretched the coast, its beaches broken into a succession of coves by ridges clothed in olive and cypress trees and culminating in gigantic steep rocks like the one that the local people would still tell you was the petrified ship the Phaecians, once rulers of this island, had sent to bear Odysseus home to Ithaca and his faithful Penelope.

Now Jason stood on that balcony and wondered, not for the first time, what he was doing here.

He could have taken his richly deserved R&R in Australia, where the Temporal Regulatory Authority’s great displacer stage was located . . . or, for that matter, anywhere on Earth. Or he could have gone directly back to his homeworld of Hesperia—his fondest desire, as he had been telling everyone who would listen. Instead he had come back to Greece . . . but only to this northwesternmost fringe of it, as though hesitating at the threshold of sights he had seen mere weeks ago. Weeks, that is, in terms of his own stream of consciousness, but four thousand years ago as the rest of the universe measured the passage of time.

There were places in Greece to which he was not yet prepared to go, and things on which he was not yet prepared to look. Not Crete, for example, and the ruins of Knossos, whose original grandeur he had seen before the frescoes had been painted. Not Athens, with its archaeological museum which held the golden death-mask Heinrich Schliemann had called the Mask of Agamemnon, although Jason knew whose face it
really
was, for he had known that face when it was young and beardless. Certainly not Santorini, whose cataclysmic volcanic death he had witnessed in 1628 b.c. And most assuredly not Mycenae with its grave circles, for he knew to whom some of those bones belonged—and one female skeleton in particular. . . .

Unconsciously, his hand strayed as it so often did to his pocket and withdrew a small plastic case. As always, his guts clenched with apprehension as he opened it. Yes, the tiny metallic sphere, no larger than a small pea, was still there. He closed the case with an annoyed snap. He had seen the curious glances the compulsive habit had drawn from his fellow resort guests. The general curiosity had intensified when word had spread that he was a time traveler, around whose latest expedition into the past clustered some very odd rumors.

“Is it still there?” asked a familiar voice from behind him, speaking with the precise, consciously archaic diction Earth’s intelligentsia liked to affect.

A sigh escaped Jason. “Yes, as you already know,” he said before turning around to confront a gaunt, elderly man, darkly clad in a style of expensive fustiness—the uniform of Earth’s academic establishment. “And what brings the Grand High Muckety-Muck of the Temporal Regulatory Authority here?”

Kyle Rutherford smiled and stroked his gray Vandyke. “What kind of attitude is that? I’d hoped to catch you before your departure for. . . . Oh, you know: that home planet of yours.”

“Hesperia,” Jason said through clenched teeth. “Psi 5 Aurigae III. As you are perfectly well aware,” he added, although he knew better than to expect anyone of Rutherford’s ilk to admit to being able to tell one colonial system from another. Knowledge of that sort was just so inexpressibly, crashingly vulgar in their rarefied world of arcane erudition. “And now that you’ve gotten all the irritating affectations out of your system, answer the question.
Why
were you so eager to catch me?”

“Well,” said Rutherford, all innocence, “I naturally wanted to know if your convalescence is complete. I gather it is.”

Jason gave a grudgingly civil nod. In earlier eras, what he had been through—breaking a foot, then being forced to walk on it for miles over Crete’s mountainous terrain, and then having it traumatized anew—would have left him with a permanent limp at least. Nowadays, it was a matter of removing the affected portions and regenerating them. It had taken a certain amount of practice to break in the new segments, but no one seeing Jason now would have guessed he had ever been injured, much less that he had received that injury struggling ashore on the ruined shores of Crete after riding a tsunami.

The scars to his soul were something else.

“So,” he heard Rutherford saying, “I imagine you plan to be returning to, ah, Hesperia without too much more ado, and resume your commission with the Colonial Rangers there.”

“That’s right. Those ‘special circumstances’ you invoked don’t exactly apply any longer, do they?” Rutherford’s expression told Jason that he was correct. He was free of the reactivation clause that had brought him unwillingly out of his early retirement from the Temporal Service, the Authority’s enforcement arm. He excelled himself (so he thought) by not rubbing it in. Feeling indulgent, he even made an effort to be conciliatory. “Anyway, you’re not going to need me—or anybody else—again for any expeditions into the remote past in this part of the world, are you?”

“Well . . . that’s not altogether true.”

“What?” Jason took a deep breath. “Look, Kyle, I’m only too well aware that the governing council of the Authority consists of snobbish, pompous, fatheaded old pedants.” (
Like you
, he sternly commanded himself not to add.) “But surely not even they can be so stupid! Our expedition revealed that the Teloi aliens were active—dominant, in fact—on Earth in proto-historical times, when they had established themselves as ‘gods’ with the help of their advanced technology. The sights and sounds on my recorder implant corroborate my testimony beyond any possibility of a doubt. And even without that. . . .” Jason’s hand strayed involuntarily toward his pocket before he could halt it.

“Rest assured that no one questions your findings, and that there are no plans to send any expeditions back to periods earlier than the Santorini explosion.” Rutherford pursed his mouth. “The expense of such remote temporal displacements is ruinous anyway, given the energy expenditure required. You have no idea—”