The Age Of Zeus (61 page)

"They have no idea, do they?" Sam said. "The rest of them."

"Not a clue. Only one person in the whole wide world knows the truth about the Olympians. Me. Make that two people now. Although, the knowledge won't remain yours for long."

"Ah. You are going to kill me after all."

Zeus shook his head wonderingly, bemused. "Don't you see, Sam? Don't you get it? I have no wish to kill you. Not any more."

"You don't?"

"Nor harm you in any way. Right now, all I want to do is make myself understood to you. Will you hear me out?"

"Do I have an alternative?"

"Not as such."

"Then go ahead, talk."

68. AN AUDACIOUS LIE

"M
y father must have told you all about me," said Zeus. "How else could you have known that someone called Xander Landesman ever existed? Not that he does any longer. I had Argus wipe every trace he could find of that person from the public record. There may be scraps of paper here or there in some national archive confirming that a Xander Landesman once walked the earth, but nothing easily located. From the databases that people habitually consult, he is gone. That was necessary to do before the Olympians went public, partly so that my wretched father couldn't stand up and say, 'Wait. That's not Zeus. That's my son.'"

"He still could have," said Sam. "Why not? Even if you'd left nothing to prove Xander was alive, plenty of people would surely remember him - schoolmates, teachers, staff at your father's house. Your dad could've found someone to back him up."

"I'd disappeared for five years, and come back looking nothing like I used to. My hair was long and had gone completely silver. I'd grown a beard. And memories are short. I'd passed through various educational establishments like a poltergeist, causing plenty of havoc but never staying long enough to leave a lasting impression. Also, the turnover of staff
chez
Landesman was quite rapid. I was counting on all that preventing people from recognising me, and I calculated that my father would realise he'd have difficulty backing up his claims about Zeus's true identity and so would refrain from making them."

"Maybe he'd be too embarrassed to, as well, after you Olympians started throwing your weight about."

"That would be for him to say. As for other people, past acquaintances - well, after five years, if it ever occurred to anyone to wonder what became of Xander Landesman, they'd no doubt assume from the absence of evidence that he was dead. Another poor little rich boy gone off the rails, lost to some addiction or other. Another privileged life flushed down the gold-plated toilet. More to the point, who'd care who Zeus really was, who'd even think to ask, when Zeus was so self-evidently
the
Zeus? With those powers, who else could he be?"

"OK," said Sam. "I'll buy that, just about. You gambled that nobody would connect Xander and Zeus, or be able to, and it paid off."

"It did, and that was crucial to the success of the whole enterprise. The same applied with the rest of the Pantheon. As long as they looked and acted like the gods of Greek myth, as long as they could do what those gods used to, few would think to look past that and probe deeper. Fewer still would consider that these gods might formerly have been ordinary people. And anyway, as with me, Argus had purged the relevant records, leaving the electronic slate wiped clean. It was an audacious lie, presenting ourselves to the world as deities, but if told convincingly and with impressive feats to back it up, it was a lie that could easily be swallowed."

"Especially if only one person involved knew it was a lie."

"And I've maintained the deception assiduously," Zeus said. "None of the other Olympians even suspects that I am anything other than king of the Pantheon, the Cloud-Gatherer, God Of Gain, and all the rest. I've made sure of that."

"How? With all those arguments over the dinner table, rehashing stories from the myths?"

"That helps reinforce the indoctrination."

"Indoctrination? You've brainwashed them?"

Zeus rolled his eyes. "That makes it sound like something from an old spy movie. With psychedelic lights and whirly music and a sinister reverbed voice repeating statements over and over - is that how you think it was done? Much subtler than that, Sam. And more sophisticated."

"Some kind of hypnotic suggestion, though."

"Implantation of concepts at a somatic level, yes, while the subject is in a state of deep relaxation. The ideas take root and propagate in the unconscious, growing until they overtake the conscious mind and turn subjective reality into objective. Bolstered by neurolinguistic programming techniques, it's surprisingly effective. Here, listen to this."

He went over and switched the laptop on. While the machine booted up, Sam's gaze strayed towards the door. She could make a run for it, but where would she go? The stronghold itself remained a prison. Part of her, besides, itched to know the full story behind the Olympians. She might as well stay put until Zeus had revealed all.

With a few keystrokes Zeus triggered a playback of an audio recording. It was his own voice, reciting part of a myth.

"...Actaeon made the grave error of approaching the lake where you were bathing and spying on you from a thicket. Can you see the lake? The thicket? Your keen instincts alerted you to his presence, however - a tiny snap of a twig underfoot - and in outrage you changed the mortal voyeur into a stag. He's changing now. Now he is a stag. Can you picture his antlers? Actaeon's own hunting hounds then set on him and gave chase, and soon caught up with their transformed master and tore him to pieces. You can hear the dogs' savage snarls, the sound of his flesh ripping, hear his screams..."

Zeus hit Stop. "I have over a hundred hours' worth of material stored here," he said, "culled from the major literary sources, each section filed according to which member of the Pantheon it pertains to. Those questions and observational remarks that break up the narrative? That's NLP. It forces the subject to visualise events in the story, making them more immediate and anchoring memory recall to these specific verbal stimuli. But beyond simply having the Olympians listen to stories about themselves while in a trance state, I availed myself of gene number VMAT2, popularly known as the 'god gene.' It's a gene encoded with an integral membrane protein that carries neurotransmitters around the immune system. Tests have shown that it's also responsible for rendering humans susceptible to belief in mystic forces and a higher power. Manipulation of VMAT2, a sneaky bit of reassignment, made my Olympians compliant, more liable to believe in
themselves
as gods. It gave them a sense of their own transcendence. Because, of course, genetic engineering is what this is really all about."

"So your dad said," said Sam. "He told me about your rat."

Zeus chuckled, recollecting. "Ah yes, the rat. It was quite a thing. Scared the life out of me at the time, but with hindsight it was my eureka moment. That was when I understood that I could actually make this whole thing work, that the theoretical was practicable. Most of my five wilderness years was spent advancing and perfecting the processes which had led to the creation of that freakishly strong rat. I isolated and cross-spliced and developed and tested and tested and tested once again until anything was within my reach, anything at all. I became a choreographer of the genome. More artist than scientist, I could make those chromosomes and nucleotides dance and prance and cavort. I could enhance and improve any living thing. A housecat with the speed of a cheetah? No problem. A chimpanzee with the strength of a silverback gorilla? Easy. A brown trout with the aggression and killer instinct of a great white shark? A breeze."

"A trout that thinks it's Jaws?"

"You should have seen it, Sam. It attacked anything in its tank that moved. It had no idea it wasn't a fearsome pelagic predator. Its self-delusion was entire. A river fish that was utterly convinced it was some kind of piscine god."

"But isn't it a bit of a leap from tinkering around with animals to giving human beings super powers?"

"Not really," said Zeus. "If I can augment animals, why not humans too? It has long been my belief that we all of us possess untold, hidden abilities. Embedded somewhere in us, latent, right down at the most primal level, are extraordinary faculties. In the past some people have been able to tap them, and then perform what have generally been regarded as miracles, astonishing feats of strength, telekinetic manipulation, healing, endurance, bilocation, pyrokinesis, and more. Some have been hanged for doing so, or drowned on ducking stools, or of course crucified. Others have been hailed as divine and worshipped. Finding and identifying the genes that generate these paranormal abilities was the task that preoccupied me over the five years. The result was... well, I've no need to tell you what the result was. You know full well."

"Where were you at the time you were doing all this?" Sam asked. "Your father thought South America."

"And how right the old man was. South America is the ideal continent for those who wish to go about their business unmolested by the law and unhampered by rules, ethics bodies, oversight committees and the like. You can buy anything, south of Mexico. Stump up enough money and whatever you need, whatever you desire, it's yours. A fully equipped lab. Animal test subjects. Even..."

"Even...? You were about to say human test subjects, weren't you?"

Zeus smiled. Bared his teeth, at any rate. "Prostitutes and feral gang kids from the
favelas
- who was going to miss them? Certainly not the local law enforcement, who shoot them as a matter of course and are only too happy to save bullets and supplement their income by abducting them to order instead."

Sam's stomach turned. "Are you sure you weren't adopted and your real father was a Nazi vivisectionist?"

"Playing the Jewish card again, Sam? Didn't work last time, won't now. Just because my father was of the Tribe, doesn't mean I am. Judaism is matrilinear, and Mum was Greek. Greek Orthodox, for what it's worth. Although for my dad it was enough that she was Greek, him with his passion for all things Hellenic."

"A passion his son seems to have inherited."

"No," Zeus corrected her, "he shoved all that stuff down my throat. I couldn't give a damn about Greek myths."

"Except where it suits your purpose."

"Well, yes."

"Your father was well aware that you chose the Greek pantheon, out of all the other pantheons, deliberately. To piss him off."

"He'd have been stupid not to realise that."

"And, by the way, one of the Titans you killed on Bleaney" -
remember, no bodies equals no proof
- "was him. Your own father."

Not even a flicker in Zeus's expression. "You say that like it's a bad thing."

"Patricide usually is."

"Usually. Now, shall I continue, or are you going to keep on sidetracking me?"

"I'm not sure I want to hear any more, now that I know where the human portions of your monsters came from."

"Squeamish?" said Zeus. "Squeamishness is a luxury no true pioneer can afford. Suffice it to say that I gave those whores and street kids the kind of power and invincibility they'd hitherto thought they could get only through a needle or a firearm. They were my foundation stones. On them and on countless dumb animals I built the edifice of a grand dream. A dream of saving humankind from itself.
This
dream."

"And getting one up on your father at the same time."

"A fortunate corollary."

"As well as gaining absolute authority for yourself. Misunderstood misfit Xander Landesman, appointing himself supreme leader of the world. Revenge of the dropout."

"Your obstreperousness is one of the things I like most about you, Sam. It's quite endearing. Exasperating, but endearing."

"Maybe we should just cut this short," Sam said. "If the only reason you've brought me here is to brag on about how clever and ruthless you've been, with your dancing DNA and your Greek myth storytime audiobook, then maybe -"

"Sam!" Zeus burst out. "Heavens, woman, just stop and think for a second. You're not here so that I can crow about my achievements."

"And not here to be killed either. So, what, then?"

"Could I make it any more obvious? Why not ask yourself why I had Hermes pluck you from the battlefield. It was because I had a feeling about you, Sam, based on what Dionysus and Aphrodite told me about you and my own subsequent researches, after your identity became apparent. And my hunch has been confirmed over the past few weeks. You're stubborn and obstinate and awkward in every way, not to mention resourceful and smart. That makes for a worthy foe. It also makes for a worthy ally."