Myths of the Modern Man (12 page)

“
A chara?” Boudicca turned her face to me when we were alone again.

“
She is a good servant, and a kind woman to the boy. I am not ashamed to call her Friend.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“
Perhaps you have been a slave too long.”

“
Perhaps. Then perhaps you would be ashamed to call me friend, for you are a queen.”

“
Are you not here with me in my tent, with my servants to attend you?”

“
I am grateful, to you, and also to them.”

She grazed her forearm with her chin.

“
You were gentle with my daughters. There is no need to be grateful to me or my servants.”

“
And yet I am.”

“
What kind of servant were you?”

Good question. About time somebody asked me for some ID.

“
I was a personal servant to a wealthy merchant.”

“
What kind of master was he, that you have no marks upon your body,” she said, glancing across the length of my body underneath the blanket.

I knew she had checked out my body while I was being healed, and I tried not to be as obvious in checking out hers, which I was beginning to think she resented, rather expecting me to admire openly.

“
I was one of many servants. He took no interest in us, and cared only that his belly was full and his family and guests cared for. I learned to read from another servant who was a teacher to the master’s children. I learned to wish for freedom because I wanted more than scraps from the master’s table.”

“
That is the Celt in you. You were more a Celt than a servant.”

“
Are you more a warrior than a queen?” I asked, “Or more a woman than a Celt?”

“
Did you learn such riddles to entertain your master’s children?” she replied, without an ounce of Celtic bristling at my impertinence.

She had heard these questions before, I think. Perhaps she had asked them of herself.

“
Here is another riddle,” I ventured, “if life is a test of courage, as you say, and one passes the test, then what is the reward?”

“
I am what I must be. My reward is the same.”

One answer to two questions. I would not have thought a Celt could be so conservative of speech.

CHAPTER 9

Milly buzzed the lab.

“
Yes.” Eleanor growled back in command mode.

“
I have a page for Dr. Ford. Dr. L’Esperance would like to see him in the third level conference room.”

“
Oh, would she?” Eleanor glanced at Dr. Ford.

“
What was that you said about being on top, Cassius?”

“
Please tell her I’ll be right there, Milly,” he replied, smoothly ignoring her sarcasm. Then to Dr. Roberts he added,

“
We’ll finish this another time, Eleanor.”

She knew they would not.

He left the lab. She charted the mission updates, and cleared her throat before recording her voice log. She wondered what he said about Moore, if any of it was true. Eleanor liked to know the truth, selected facts like knives from the drawer, each for a different purpose.

Dr. Roberts put the disk into a protective case and carried her voice log to the small department office where Milly waited to receive it. Milly looked up from her coffee and her discussion to another nameless worker about her upcoming vacation to find Dr. Roberts bringing her the disk herself, instead of by messenger or one of a dozen other lackeys for whom both Milly and Dr. Roberts had contempt. It was the only thing they had in common.

The other office workers quickly drew away and feigned the pressure of overwork, while Milly stood as Dr. Roberts approached, for no other reason that she sensed it was the appropriate thing to do. Dr. Roberts, slightly startled that Milly stood, ended up handing the disk to Milly’s belly button, which had moved. She had never realized Milly actually stood so much taller than she.

She must be six feet.

Their eyes met briefly, for the second time in two years. Dr. Roberts drew away first, wondering suddenly why she had not thought to buzz an assistant back to do this menial thing, and why she suddenly needed to leave her comforting lab for something else, the sound of human voices, perhaps.

“
Milly, tell me…if you can…um, what is your impression of Dr. L’Esperance?”

Milly cocked her head slightly to the side, and slowly released a wry, crooked smile.

“
I really couldn’t say.”

“
Yes,” Eleanor stumbled on sorting out which words for which intentions, “well, I only mean in terms of her…history. She’s certainly very friendly. Perhaps…after this mission, we can all get to know her better.”

Milly looked at her, dubious and disbelieving, and Eleanor knew that she appeared pathetically phony. She hated appearing pathetically phony, and resented the disdain she knew Milly must feel for her now.

The voices she had heard upon approaching the small corral of workstations had silenced, the office staff adopted the guise of efficiency, and would remain so until she left. She knew this. The time for making a skillful exit had passed. Now, any exit would do.

“
Fine,” Eleanor abruptly turned to walk away.

“
When do you want this?” Milly asked her with a trace of irony, holding her gaze even longer now that she had triumphantly won the staring contest, and Dr. Roberts had behaved like a pathetic phony.

Dr. Roberts, deeply embarrassed, wanted only to return to her lab as quickly as possible.

“
As quickly as possible,” she mumbled over her shoulder as she turned on her heel and strode away. She heard the workstations come back to life with low comments, laughing, and a muttered obscenity which she assumed had come from Milly.

There was a wall-sized television screen in the lounge across the hall, and it could be seen from the hall through the partition window, its glare attracting the obligatory glance of passersby in the hall. Some stopped and watched the TV through the window, as the 24-hour news was on and presently a different story had knocked their own Time Dimension Study mission off the airwaves.

Eleanor frowned, catching a glimpse of some fiery blast footage on the TV, from over the shoulders of some people in the hall who blocked her clear view of the TV. What could possibly have knocked her mission off the news? Time travel was earth shattering. It was mind boggling. It was worth weeks of coverage, how could it have been preempted by anything else?

She stepped around Milly’s desk and looked up and down the hall. More people were stopping to take notice, even if only briefly before moving on to their meetings and their schedules and their deadlines. Eleanor elbowed her way to the large window that ran the length of the lounge and separated it from the main hall. People in the crowded lounge sat around the small café tables on their break, eating vending machine snacks and watching thoughtfully the huge screen before them.

The volume of the television sounded muffled in the hall, but through the opened door and with the aid of the ever-present scrawl on the bottom of the screen, the hall viewers gradually understood they were watching the latest volcanic eruption in the Rockies. Wyoming appeared to be decimated in liquid fire under a vast lava flow. Utah appeared to be sinking. The Continental Divide, as someone muttered as an attempt at philosophical levity, was literally living up to its name.

Eleanor stared, growing resentment at the flickering screen making her temples throb. This just in was ruining her thunder. She noted with irony that the fate of her estranged mother and sister had ruined her triumph, and so, in roundabout way, had they. How that would have pleased them.

She noticed the imposing figure of Dr. L’Esperance a short distance away, hanging back from the crowd, hugging herself with tightly folded arms, watching the television and sobbing openly, streams of tears rolling down her high, full cheeks, dropping off her firm jaw.

Barely concealing her contempt, Dr. Roberts walked past her on the way back to the lab. As she walked, she considered again ways to eliminate Dr. L’Esperance, and realized the weirdo might comfortably eliminate herself.

Emotional instability was a usually considered a sin worse than ineptitude, that carried a judgment harsher than corruption. This attitude had not changed in mankind’s makeup for thousands of years.

The emotionally unstable were never on top for long.

CHAPTER 10

Colonel John Moore’s narrative:

It could be lonely at the top. What would Boudicca have done if she could have been empress of Rome? If any woman could have been empress?

Not likely. The Emperor Nero’s mother Agrippina found this out when she attempted to rule Rome through her son. Nero killed mom. That was two years ago, in 59 AD. No, sir, Rome was a military dictatorship, unlike Celtic warrior society. It was an old boy network, a man’s world. Constant struggle for power was the only thing they had in common.

Long after Julius Caesar met his end through treachery, another aspect of military dictatorships, the Roman Empire founded by Augustus Caesar began to write the pages of history as had not been done before by the western world. They were meticulous, brilliant, masterful engineers of one of the greatest, and most treacherous, societies ever to shape itself on this poor disheveled Earth. They gave us laws, government, construction and engineering, and the term Carpe Diem, which they lived with all their vainglorious might, and we only thought we did, palm communicators in our hands.

They had their many gods, but took more seriously their many emperors, who each had a more profound and personal affect on their busy lives. When those emperors died, they were deified. Boudicca would never be deified by her people, though she herself might live a warrior’s life as a kind of personification of the war goddesses to whom Nemain made votive offerings on her behalf. When she died, she would go to Avalon and be about her business there, not hang around some cloud waiting for a petty warlord to ask for her help. She wouldn’t give it to him, anyway.

But the Roman emperors became part of the mosaic, and never truly left their people. After Augustus there was Tiberius, then the fascinating walking corruption that was Caligula, then Claudius, and now, from 54 (though he didn’t know it yet) to 68, the Emperor Nero, who began the first persecution of the first Christians, and became famous for fiddling during the burning of Rome, which did not really happen, but that’s another story.

Emperors soon became gods upon their deaths, and then they became something even more powerful. They became myths. Once deified, the emperors became an even more personal identification with the world of myth and magic than Jupiter or Juno.

We all live with myths, no matter what time we live. We create them, we savor them. Even in my future time, in the 3rd millennium AD, we made myths of sports heroes and celebrities. We call them “the King” or the world’s greatest whatever, or “the woman of the year,” “the man of the century,” or “a legend in her own time.” A “superstar.” We fuse in our minds their simple talents with what we call greatness, and raise them above ourselves to be admired, to be imitated, occasionally to be stalked.

We have never gotten over the seductive magic of myth-making. The Romans knew its power. So did the Celts. However, with time myths about war goddesses eventually died away through the ages, and also myths about monsters, dragons, and Mt. Olympus. More incredible myths, much more dangerous myths have taken their place. That is real course, and the real price, of evolution.

Myths of bigotry and one ethnic people’s natural superiority over another evolved through time. Myths of sexually, of money and power, of good luck. Just one more throw of the dice, just one more lottery ticket. Why not buy a hundred tickets, then the luck, the chances of winning will be increased. There’s a myth for you, convenience store loiterers. Just one more drink, and I’ll be able to do it. If only I were prettier, taller, had more hair, lost weight, then everything would be okay. Call your personal psychic hotline and be told your destiny. Check out your horoscope, and read it like instructions in a model airplane kit. Myths have the power to make us cling to hope, but a kind of hope with no foundation of truth. We destroy ourselves with myths.

Personal belief in myth is occasionally humorous, like Billy O’Malley’s believing he had innate irresistible charm simply because of his Irish parentage. It could also be pathetic, like the gambling junkie who can’t go home until his luck changes, which of course it will when he puts on a different shirt. However humorous or pathetic, myth becomes evil incarnate when a whole nation believes its own myths of self-identity and ultimate destiny, then the result is always, always doom. The Romans proclaimed their greatness, and would not waiver from the glorious vision of Eternal Rome. When they beat their enemies in battle, it was a golden opportunity to join the Empire or else. The recipients of their gift were bludgeoned and slaughtered for their own good. It was a gift you could not take back.

The legionnaires, the world’s first professional soldiers, lived and fought and died with this glorious vision of their own purpose and the majesty of their mission. Quite a vision, indeed. The Fall of Rome made an even more spectacular vision, to my mind. The value of the denarius falling through the floor and barbarians at the gates. Marvelous. Every nation falls when it begins to believe its own line of crap.