On a hilltop in Arcadia, Darger sat talking with a satyr.
"Oh, the sex is good," the satyr said. "Nobody could say it wasn’t. But is it the be-all and end-all of life? I don’t see that." The satyr’s name was Demetrios Papatragos, and evenings he played the saxophone in a local jazz club.
"You’re a bit of a philosopher," Darger observed.
"Oh, well, in a home-grown front porch sense, I suppose I am." The satyr adjusted the small leather apron that was his only item of clothing. "But enough about me. What brings you here? We don’t get that many travelers these days. Other than the African scientists, of course."
"Of course. What are the Africans here for, anyway?"
"They are building gods."
"Gods! Surely not! Whatever for?"
"Who can fathom the ways of scientists? All the way from Greater Zimbabwe they came, across the wine-dark Mediterranean and into these romance-haunted hills, and for what? To lock themselves up within the ruins of the Monastery of St. Vasilios, where they labor as diligently and joylessly as if they were indeed monks. They never come out, save to buy food and wine or to take the occasional blood sample or skin scraping. Once, one of them offered a nymph money to have sex with him, if you can believe such a thing."
"Scandalous!" Nymphs, though they were female satyrs, had neither hooves nor horns. They were, however, not cross-fertile with humans. It was the only way, other than a small tail at the base of their spines (and that was normally covered by their dresses), to determine their race. Needless to say, they were as wildly popular with human men as their male counterparts were with women. "Sex is either freely given or it is nothing."
"You’re a bit of a philosopher yourself," Papatragos said. "Say–a few of our young ladies might be in heat. You want me to ask around?"
"My good friend Surplus, perhaps, would avail himself of their kind offers. But not I. Much though I’d enjoy the act, I’d only feel guilty afterwards. It is one of the drawbacks of having a depressive turn of mind."
So Darger made his farewells, picked up his walking stick, and sauntered back to town. The conversation had given him much to think about.
"What word of the Evangelos bronzes?" Surplus asked. He was sitting at a table out back of their inn, nursing a small glass of retsina and admiring the sunset. The inn stood at the outskirts of town at the verge of a forest, where pine, fir, and chestnut gave way to orchards, olive trees, cultivated fields, and pastures for sheep and goats. The view from its garden could scarce be improved upon.
"None whatsoever. The locals are happy to recommend the ruins of this amphitheater or that nuclear power plant, but any mention of bronze lions or a metal man causes them only to look blank and shake their heads in confusion. I begin to suspect that scholar in Athens sold us a bill of goods."
"The biters bit! Well, ’tis an occupational hazard in our line of business."
"Sadly true. Still, if the bronzes will not serve us in one manner, they shall in another. Does it not strike you as odd that two such avid antiquarians as ourselves have yet to see the ruins of St. Vasilios? I propose that tomorrow we pay a courtesy visit upon the scientists there."
Surplus grinned like a hound–which he was not, quite. He shook out his lace cuffs and, seizing his silver-knobbed cane, stood. "I look forward to making their acquaintance."
"The locals say that they are building gods."
"Are they really? Well, there’s a market for everything, I suppose."
Their plans were to take a strange turn, however. For that evening Dionysus danced through the town.
Darger was writing a melancholy letter home when the first shouts sounded outside his room. He heard cries of "Pan! Great Pan!" and wild skirls of music. Going to the window, he saw an astonishing sight: The townsfolk were pouring into the street, shedding their clothes, dancing naked in the moonlight for all to see. At their head was a tall, dark figure who pranced and leaped, all the while playing the pipes.
He got only a glimpse, but its effect was riveting. He felt the god’s passage as a physical thing. Stiffening, he gripped the windowsill with both hands, and tried to control the wildness that made his heart pound and his body quiver.
But then two young women, one a nymph and the other Theodosia, the innkeeper’s daughter, burst into his room and began kissing his face and urging him toward the bed.
Under normal circumstances, he would have sent them packing–he hardly knew the ladies. But the innkeeper’s daughter and her goat-girl companion were both laughing and blushing so charmingly and were furthermore so eager to grapple that it seemed a pity to disappoint them. Then, too, the night was rapidly filling with the sighs and groans of human passion–no adult, apparently, was immune to the god’s influence–and it seemed to Darger perverse that he alone in all the world should refuse to give in to pleasure.
So, protesting insincerely, he allowed the women to crowd him back onto the bed, to remove his clothing, and to have their wicked way with him. Nor was he backwards with them. Having once set his mind to a task, he labored at it with a will.
In a distant corner of his mind, he heard Surplus in the room down the hall raise his voice in an ecstatic howl.
Darger slept late the next morning. When he went down to breakfast, Theodosia was all blushes and shy smiles. She brought him a platter piled high with food, gave him a fleet peck on the cheek, and then fled happily back into the kitchen.
Women never ceased to amaze Darger. One might make free of their bodies in the most intimate manner possible, handling them not only lustfully but self-indulgently, and denying oneself not a single pleasure . . . yet it only made them like you the better afterwards. Darger was a staunch atheist. He did not believe in the existence of a benevolent and loving God who manipulated the world in order to maximize the happiness of His creations. Still, on a morning like this, he had to admit that all the evidence was against him.
Through an open doorway, he saw the landlord make a playful grab at his fat wife’s rump. She pushed him away and, with a giggle, fled into the interior of the inn. The landlord followed.
Darger scowled. He gathered his hat and walking stick, and went outside. Surplus was waiting in the garden. "Your thoughts trend the same way as mine?" Darger asked.
"Where else could they go?" Surplus asked grimly. "We must have a word with the Africans."
The monastery was less than a mile distant, but the stroll up and down dusty country roads gave them both time enough to recover their savoir faire. St. Vasilios, when they came to it, was dominated by a translucent green bubble-roof, fresh-grown to render the ruins habitable. The grounds were surrounded by an ancient stone wall. A wooden gate, latched but not locked, filled the lower half of a stone arch. Above it was a bell.
They rang.
Several orange-robed men were in the yard, unloading crated laboratory equipment from a wagon. They had the appearance and the formidable height of that handsomest of the world’s peoples, the Masai. But whether they were of Masai descent or had merely incorporated Masai features into their genes, Darger could not say. The stocky, sweating wagoner looked like a gnome beside them. He cursed and tugged at his horses’ harness to keep the skittish beasts from bolting.
At the sound of the bell, one of the scientists separated himself from the others, and strode briskly to the gate. "Yes?" he said in a dubious tone.
"We wish to speak with the god Pan," Darger said. "We are from the government."
"You do not look Greek."
"Not the local government, sir. The British government." Darger smiled into the man’s baffled expression. "May we come in?"
They were not brought to see Dionysus immediately, of course, but to the Chief Researcher. The scientist-monk led them to an office that was almost Spartan in its appointments: a chair, a desk, a lamp, and nothing more. Behind the desk sat a girl who looked to be at most ten years old, reading a report by the lamp’s gentle biofluorescence. She was a scrawny thing with a large and tightly corn-rowed head. "Tell her you love her," she said curtly.
"I beg your pardon?" Surplus said.
"Tell her that, and then kiss her. That’ll work better than any aphrodisiac I could give you. I presume that’s what you came to this den of scientists for–that or poison. In which case, I recommend a stout cudgel at midnight and dumping the body in a marsh before daybreak. Poisons are notoriously uncertain. In either case, there is no need to involve my people in your personal affairs."
Taken aback, Darger said, "Ah, actually, we are here on official business."
The girl raised her head.
Her eyes were as dark and motionless as a snake’s. They were not the eyes of a child but more like those of the legendary artificial intellects of the Utopian era–cold, timeless, calculating. A shudder ran through Darger’s body. Her gaze was electrifying. Almost, it was terrifying.
Recovering himself, Darger said, "I am Inspector Darger, and this is my colleague, Sir Blackthorpe Ravenscairn de Plus Precieux. By birth an American, it goes without saying."
She did not blink. "What brings two representatives of Her Majesty’s government here?"
"We have been dispatched to search out and recover the Evangelos bronzes. Doubtless you know of them."
"Vaguely. They were liberated from London, were they not?"
"Looted, rather! Wrenched from Britain’s loving arms by that dastard Konstantin Evangelos in an age when she was weak and Greece powerful, and upon the shoddiest of excuses–something about some ancient marbles that had supposedly . . . well, that hardly matters."
"Our mission is to find and recover them," Surplus elucidated.
"They must be valuable."
"Were you to discover them, they would be worth a king’s ransom, and it would be my proud privilege to write you a promissory note for the full amount. However–" Darger coughed into his hand. "We, of course, are civil servants. The thanks of a grateful nation will be our reward."
"I see." Abruptly changing the subject, the Chief Researcher said, "Your friend–is he a chimeric mixture of human and animal genes, like the satyrs? Or is he a genetically modified dog? I ask only out of professional curiosity."
"His friend is capable of answering your questions for himself," Surplus said coldly. "There is no need to speak of him as if he were not present. I mention this only as a point of common courtesy. I realize that you are young, but–"
"I am older than you think, sirrah!" the girl-woman snapped. "There are disadvantages to having a childish body, but it heals quickly, and my brain cells–in stark contrast to your own, gentlemen–continually replenish themselves. A useful quality in a researcher." Her voice was utterly without warmth, but compelling nonetheless. She radiated a dark aura of authority. "Why do you wish to meet our Pan?"
"You have said it yourself–out of professional curiosity. We are government agents, and therefore interested in any new products Her Majesty might be pleased to consider."
The Chief Researcher stood. "I am not at all convinced that the Scientifically Rational Government of Greater Zimbabwe will want to export this technology after it has been tested and perfected. However, odder things have happened. So I will humor you. You must wear these patches, as do we." The Chief Researcher took two plastic bandages from a nearby box and showed how they should be applied. "Otherwise, you would be susceptible to the god’s influence."
Darger noted how, when the chemicals from the drug-patch hit his bloodstream, the Chief Researcher’s bleak charisma distinctly faded. These patches were, he decided, useful things indeed.
The Chief Researcher opened the office door, and cried, "Bast!"
The scientist who had led them in stood waiting outside. But it was not he who was summoned. Rather, there came the soft sound of heavy paws on stone, and a black panther stalked into the office. It glanced at Darger and Surplus with cool intelligence, then turned to the Chief Researcher. "Sssssoooooo. . . ?"
"Kneel!" The Chief Researcher climbed onto the beast’s back, commenting off-handedly, "These tiny legs make walking long distances tiresome." To the waiting scientist she said, "Light the way for us."
Taking a thurible from a nearby hook, the scientist led them down a labyrinthine series of halls and stairways, proceeding ever deeper into the earth. He swung the thurible at the end of its chain as he went, and the chemical triggers it released into the air activated the moss growing on the stone walls and ceiling so that they glowed brightly before them, and gently faded behind them.
It was like a ceremony from some forgotten religion, Darger reflected. First came the thurifer, swinging his censer with a pleasant near-regular clanking, then the dwarfish lady on her great cat, followed by the two congregants, one fully human and the other possessed of the head and other tokens of the noble dog. He could easily picture the scene painted upon an interior wall of an ancient pyramid. The fact that they were going to converse with a god only made the conceit that much more apt.
At last the passage opened into their destination.
It was a scene out of Piranesi. The laboratory had been retrofitted into the deepest basement of the monastery. The floors and roofs above had fallen in long ago, leaving shattered walls, topless pillars, and fragmentary buttresses. Sickly green light filtered through the translucent dome overhead, impeded by the many tendrils or roots that descended from above to anchor the dome by wrapping themselves about toppled stones or columnar stumps. There was a complexity of structure to the growths that made Darger feel as though he were standing within a monstrous jellyfish, or else one of those man-created beasts which, ages ago (or so legend had it), the Utopians had launched into the void between the stars in the hope that, eons hence, they might make contact with alien civilizations.
Scientists moved purposefully through the gloom, feeding mice to their organic alembics and sprinkling nutrients into pulsing bioreactors. Everywhere, ungainly tangles of booms and cranes rose up from the floor or stuck out from high perches on the walls. Two limbs from the nearest dipped delicately downward, as if in curiosity. They moved in a strangely fluid manner.
"Oh, dear God!" Surplus cried.
Darger gaped and, all in an instant, the groping booms and cranes revealed themselves as tentacles. The round blobs they had taken at first for bases became living flesh. Eyes as large as dinner plates clicked open and focused on the two adventurers.
His senses reeled. Squids! And by his quick estimation, there were, at a minimum, several score of the creatures!
The Chief Researcher slid off her feline mount, and waved the inquiring tentacles away. "Remove Experiment One from its crypt," she commanded, and the creature flowed across the wall to do her bidding. It held itself upon the vertical surface by its suckered tentacles, Darger noted, but scuttled along the stone on short sharp legs like those of a hermit crab’s. He understood now why the Chief Researcher was so interested in chimeras.
In very little time, two squids came skittering across the floor, a stone coffin in their conjoined tentacles. Gracefully, they laid it down. In unison, they raised their tentacles and lowered them in a grotesque imitation of a bow. Their beaks clacked repeatedly.
"They are intelligent creatures," the Chief Researcher commented. "But no great conversationalists."
To help regain his equilibrium, Darger fumbled out his pipe from a jacket pocket, and his tobacco pouch and a striking-box as well. But at the sight of this latter device, the squids squealed in alarm. Tentacles thrashing, they retreated several yards.
The Chief Researcher rounded on Darger. "Put that thing away!" Then, in a calmer tone, "We tolerate no open flames. The dome is a glycerol-based organism. It could go up at a spark."
Darger complied. But, true though the observation about the dome might be, he knew a lie when he heard one. So the creatures feared fire! That might be worth remembering.
"You wanted to meet Dionysus." The Chief Researcher laid a hand on the coffin. "He is here. Subordinate Researcher Mbutu, open it up."
Surplus raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.
The scientist pried open the coffin lid. For an instant nothing was visible within but darkness. Then a thousand black beetles poured from the coffin (both Darger and Surplus shuddered at the uncanniness of it) and fled into the shadows, revealing a naked man who sat up, blinking, as if just awakened.
"Behold the god."
Dionysus was an enormous man, easily seven feet tall when he stood and proportionately built, though he projected no sense of power at all. His head was either bald or shaven but in either case perfectly hairless. The scientist handed him a simple brown robe, and when he tied it up with a length of rope, he looked as if he were indeed a monk.
The panther, Bast, sat licking one enormous paw, ignoring the god entirely.
When Darger introduced himself and Surplus, Dionysus smiled weakly and reached out a trembling hand to shake. "It is very pleasant to meet folks from England," he said. "I have so few visitors." His brow was damp with sweat and his skin a pallid grey.
"This man is sick!" Darger said.
"It is but weariness from the other night. He needs more time with the physician scarabs to replenish his physical systems," the Chief Researcher said impatiently. "Ask your questions."
Surplus placed a paw on the god’s shoulder. "You look unhappy, my friend."
"I—"
"Not to him," the dwarfish woman snapped, "to me! He is a proprietary creation and thus not qualified to comment upon himself."
"Very well," Darger said. "To begin, madam–why? You have made a god, I presume by so manipulating his endocrine system that he produces massive amounts of targeted pheromones on demand. But what is the point?"
"If you were in town last night, you must know what the point is. Dionysus will be used by the Scientifically Rational Government to reward its people with festivals in times of peace and prosperity as a reward for their good citizenship, and in times of unrest as a pacifying influence. He may also be useful in quelling riots. We shall see."
"I note that you referred to this man as Experiment One. May I presume you are building more gods?"
"Our work progresses well. More than that I cannot say."
"Perhaps you are also building an Athena, goddess of wisdom?"
"Wisdom, as you surely know, being a matter of pure reason, cannot be produced by the application of pheromones."
"No? Then a Ceres, goddess of the harvest? Or an Hephaestus, god of the forge? Possibly a Hestia, goddess of the hearth?"
The girl-woman shrugged. "By the tone of your questions, you know the answers already. Pheromones cannot compel skills, virtues, or abstractions–only emotions."
"Then reassure me, madam, that you are not building a Nemesis, goddess of revenge? Nor an Eris, goddess of discord. Nor an Ares, god of war. Nor a Thanatos, god of death. For if you were, the only reason I can imagine for your presence here would be that you did not care to test them out upon your own population."
The Chief Researcher did not smile. "You are quick on the uptake for an European."
"Young societies are prone to presume that simply because a culture is old, it must therefore be decadent. Yet it is not we who are running experiments upon innocent people without their knowledge or consent."
"I do not think of Europeans as people. Which I find takes care of any ethical dilemmas."
Darger’s hand whitened on the knob of his cane. "Then I fear, madam, that our interview is over."
On the way out, Surplus accidentally knocked over a beaker. In the attendant confusion, Darger was able to surreptitiously slip a box of the anti-pheromonal patches under his coat. There was no obvious immediate use for the things. But from long experience, they both knew that such precautions often prove useful.
