Sunset of the Gods (19 page)

Again, Jason understood. It was one of the reasons species modification was regarded as such a unique abomination. The human organism was a totality. It was not designed to support, say, a digitigrade walking posture. Pan was a living mass of incompatibilities—a biological
wrongness
. And applying growth accelerants to such a ramshackle skeleton must have made it even worse, especially considering that the Transhumans and their Teloi allies probably hadn’t bothered with any of the usual precautions.

Yes, Pan would never be free of pain, or at least discomfort, for a second of his waking life—and how would he ever sleep?—without chemical analgesia. He surely would have long since escaped into madness had it not been for the drugs that only his creators could supply . . . or withhold.

Now Jason understood how they controlled him. And from what he had heard in Pan’s whisper, he dimly sensed how much the twisted being must hate them.

Killing Pan now would be the merciful thing to do as well as the expedient one.

Only,
thought Jason as his grip tightened on the sword-hilt,
he might be a valuable source of information on the Transhumanists.

“Listen,” he said, improvising, “you can get away from them. You can get help from the Temporal Regulatory Authority.” Of necessity, he said the last three words in English.

“How?” whispered Pan in a tone of dull scorn.

“Well. . . .” This was no time for a lecture on the physics of time travel, even had it been possible in the language. “After I return to my own time, I’ll come back to this time with soldiers to kill those two men down there—it can be a few minutes after this point in time, in fact—and I’ll bring with me the medicines you need.” Once Rutherford knew what was at stake, Jason was sure he could get an appropriation for such an expedition, and a waiver of the rules to allow him to bring back a substantial supply of advanced medications.

“Can you take me to your time?”

“No.” Jason found he could not lie. “You are of this era. There can be no travel forward in time.”

“But
you
travel forward in time!”

“No.” How to explain temporal energy potential? “I only return to the time from which I came, and where I belong. You belong here, and must remain here. But we can free you from your dependence on Franco and the Teloi.”

Afterwards, Jason was always certain that Pan wavered for a heartbeat before stiffening convulsively. “No! I can’t trust you! They created the agony that is my life, and only they can grant surcease from it. I must do as I am told.”

At that moment, before Jason could reply, one of the Transhumanists below—from whom Jason had never entirely taken his eyes—rose to his feet and gestured at the road from Sparta. In the distance was a tiny, running figure.

The sight of that figure—Pheidippides, returning with the news that the Spartans would be delayed—distracted Jason for a fraction of a second, causing him to lower his sword. That was enough. With the strength of desperation, Pan broke free of him and scrambled recklessly downhill despite Jason’s efforts to catch him by his caprine legs. Jason could only watch, cursing under his breath, as he joined the Transhumanists.

He really ought, Jason knew, to return to his aircar while the Transhumanists’ attention was riveted on the road and get back to Marathon. But curiosity held him. He compromised with caution by ducking behind the boulder and watching as Pheidippides reached a point almost directly below. He saw one of the Transhumanists manipulate a remote control unit. A concealed device by the side of the road erupted into a flash of light and a thunderclap of sound. With a cry, the runner staggered and fell to his knees. While his eyes were still dazzled, one of the Transhumanists shoved Pan forward and up into plain sight. When Pheidippides could see again, the “god” stood on the ridge looking down at him.

“Pheidippides of Athens,” said Pan in more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tones, “why have the Athenians failed to worship me?”

Pheidippides groveled in the dust of the road. “We do, Great God, we do,” he stammered frantically.

“No. My sacred grotto on the slope of the Acropolis is neglected, save by a few. The smoke of sacrifice does not rise from my altar there.”

“We will neglect you no longer, Great God. I swear it! After I tell what I have seen, we will make amends. We will offer sacrifice.”

“It is well. Continue on your journey, and assure the Athenians of my affection for their city. Tell them also that I know the peril in which Athens now stands, and that I mean to come to its aid very soon, because I trust that your promise to me will be kept.”

Pheidippides looked timidly up. “Aid us how, Great God?” he dared ask.

“You know, Pheidippides, the power I possess to arouse unreasoning fear in men,” Pan replied obliquely. “Now go, and complete your errand, and bear my words to the Athenians!”

The hidden Transhumanist touched his remote again, and the bogus thunder and lightning sent Pheidippides flat on his face with a wail. Pan scurried back to join his two handlers. After a few moments, Pheidippides cautiously looked up and rose to his feet. Still blinking, he cast nervous glances all around. Then a slow smile awoke on the young face—a smile of serenely confident hope, the kind of smile rarely seen among Athenians these days. The smile broadened into a grin as he resumed his run.

The Transhumanists crouched, preparing to leave as soon as the runner was out of sight, and Jason dared delay no longer. He retraced his steps, flung himself into the aircar, reactivated the invisibility field, and set his course back to the clearing on Mount Kotroni, overlooking the Greek camp on the plain of Marathon.

Once in the air, he had leisure to reflect wryly.
Of course I didn’t kill Pan. History says Pheidippides claimed to have met him on the road.

Only . . . if I
had
killed him, then maybe Pheidippides would have hallucinated him anyway, as historians think he did.

He shook his head and flew on, with the westering sun behind him.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Mount Agriliki rose
two thousand feet to the southwest of the plain of Marathon, with the Athenian camp backed up against its lower slopes. Jason found a clear ledge about halfway to the summit and shielded from the view of those below. He doubted if the Transhumanists had a means of locating it when it was powered down. Of course they might have installed some kind of beacon that had enabled them to track its flight, but concealing the aircar was worth a try. He might well want to use it again, and what Rutherford didn’t know wouldn’t cause him to have a stroke.

He scrambled down the forested slope in the late-afternoon shadows. He slipped into the camp without difficulty, as nobody was being particularly careful about guarding its mountain-protected rear when the Persians were bottled up on the plain.

Mondrago, who had not been required to account for Jason’s absence, greeted him with relief. They found a relatively private spot toward the rear of the camp and Jason recounted his story.

“It would be nice to think you stranded them there on that ridge in the Peloponnese,” Mondrago remarked when Jason was finished. “I can’t believe the Transhumanists could have displaced more than one aircar almost twenty-nine hundred years into the past.”

Jason shook his head dourly. “They must be able to call in Teloi aircars, even if those are restricted to flying at night because they lack invisibility fields. In fact, they must be using them already. The aircar I took can only carry two, and I saw four: the pilot I killed, two more on the Tegea heights, and Pan.”

“And that nauseating little mutant is still alive!” said Mondrago venomously. The look he gave Jason was accusing.

“I’m still hoping to turn him. I’ve told you how much he resents his own existence.”

“He should. And I’ll bet it’s not just the things you told me about.” Mondrago grinned nastily. “That gigantic dong of his must have been designed for nothing but show. It probably hurts him to piss.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Jason admitted with a grimace.

“So what’s the plan?”

“I’m just going to have to improvise. Remember, they’ll be bringing him here before the battle—come to think of it, that must have been what their aircar was doing on Mount Kotroni, scouting out a suitable landing spot. Maybe that will be my chance.”

“You say they’re going to have him appear here so he can take credit for spreading panic among the Persians. That sounds like they’re planning to create the panic themselves. I can think of ways that might be possible.”

“So can I,” nodded Jason. Such effects could be achieved in ways involving focused ultrasonic waves affecting the human nervous system, sent along a laser guide-beam. And the Teloi might have other techniques.

“Well, then, sir,” Mondrago continued, his tone changing to one of formal seriousness, “has it occurred to you that maybe this is why the Greeks end up winning the battle?”

“You mean, that the Transhumanist intervention has
always
been part of history? That
it’s
the reason Western civilization survives?” Jason knew his voice probably reflected his unwillingness to believe it.

“Can you rule out the possibility? And if it’s true, and if our theories about time travel are correct, you won’t be able to undo it. Something will prevent you—maybe something lethal. And if those theories
aren’t
correct. . . .” Mondrago left the thought dangling.

Jason drew a deep breath. “Remember when we were at the Athenian Assembly? This is sort of the opposite side of the coin from that. Once again, I don’t deny that there are risks involved. But if the opportunity presents itself, I plan to try again to offer Pan our help in exchange for his cooperation.”

Mondrago looked disgusted.

Pheidippedes half-ran and half-staggered into the camp the following night. He had paused only briefly at Athens to impart the news he now brought to the army. In the immemorial way of armies everywhere, Rumor Central promptly conveyed that news to everyone.

“Carneia!” old Callicles snorted, with his patented eloquent spit. “The Spartans are celebrating Carneia, their holy festival—quite a big festival, I’ve heard—and they can’t march until the moon is full!”

Mondrago shared his feelings. “Greatest warriors in history!” he muttered to Jason in an English aside. “More like the greatest party animals!”

“Mark my words,” Callicles continued, “if that bastard Cleomenes was still running things in Sparta, he wouldn’t let any stupid ‘period of peace’ stop him. But now he’s dead, and the Spartans are shitting in their chitons with fear that they may have offended the gods by throwing those Persian emissaries down that well, not to mention burning that sacred grove at Argos. So they’re being very careful to observe their religious holidays—and never mind that we Athenians get butt-fucked by the Persians while they’re doing it!”

A pair of men passed within earshot, heading toward the tents of the Aiantis tribe. One of them paused. In the light of the campfires, Jason saw he appeared to be in his mid-thirties, beginning to go prematurely bald. “But,” he called out to Callicles, “if they set out at the full moon and march as fast as Pheippides says they promise to, shouldn’t they be here in a week? Surely we can hold the Persians at bay that long.”

Jason expected a scornful reply accompanied by another expressive spit. But Callicles’s “Maybe you’re right” was no worse than grudging. He sounded as though he knew the man, at least by reputation.

“Come on!” the man’s companion called. “We’re already late.”

“Coming, Cynegeirus.” The man waved to them and hurried on.

“Who was that?” asked Jason.

“Fellow named Aeschylus, from Eleusis,” said Callicles. “Writes plays.”

Jason stared at the retreating back of the man who was to become Greece’s greatest dramatist—but whose epitaph would say nothing about that, only that he had fought at Marathon. And the familiar tingle took him.

“You’ve heard of this guy?” Mondrago asked him.

Jason nodded. “In our era he’s going to be known as the Father of Tragedy.”

“He seemed pretty cheerful to me.”

“He may not be quite as much so after what is going to happen to the man with him—his brother Cynegeirus.” Jason shook himself, recalling what Landry had told him. In the final phase of the battle, on the beach, Aeschylus would watch as Cynegeirus had a hand chopped off as he tried to grab the stem of an escaping Persian ship, a wound from which he would subsequently die. “I’ve got to go. The generals must be meeting now to decide where we go from here, and I want to get that meeting on my recorder—there have always been a lot of unanswered questions about it.”

“They’re going to just let anybody listen in?” Mondrago sounded scandalized by such sloppy security.

“Maybe not. But I’ll never know if I don’t try.” And Jason slipped away through the camp.

Security almost lived down to Mondrago’s expectations—indeed, it was a barely understood concept in this place and time. In the heat of the August night, Callimachus and the ten
strategoi
were meeting under an open tent. Herodotus had claimed that command of the army had been rotated among those ten tribal generals, one on each day, and that as the day of battle had approached the others had handed command over to Miltiades on their allotted days. Mondrago had scoffed at that, declaring roundly that no army could or would have tried to function under such a nonsensical system. He had turned out to be right. Their initial impression—that Callimachus the war archon was in actual as well as honorary command, assisted by Miltiades as
primus inter pares
among the
strategoi
—had proven to be correct. Mondrago, whose sole intellectual interest was military history, had mentioned the names “Hindenburg” and “Ludendorff.”

Jason had a great deal of experience at making himself inconspicuous. He now brought all the subtle techniques he had learned to bear as he moved among the campfires and approached the open tent. He saw Pheidippides walking groggily away from that tent, where he must have finished rendering his formal report and would now doubtless collapse into a very long sleep that no one would begrudge him. Jason continued on in his unobtrusive way toward that tent and its murmur of voices, working his way inward until he could see the figures within, illuminated by flickering torchlight, and his implant’s recorder function could pick up the voices.