Chapter Two
McGivern finally came— was finally allowed to come— the next evening. I was practicing in the broad-jump pit when I sensed him standing under the old olive trees that stood by the stadium, quietly watching... patiently watching, as of old. McGivern’s sight was always uncommonly keen, another reason I dreaded his arrival.
He was probably waiting to catch his breath. Vehicles, save my own, were banned in the precincts; he’d had to come climbing up the Sacred Way like any other pilgrim.
I swung my halteres and made my leap. The halteres were dumbbell-shaped hunks of iron, used by the classical athletes to aid them during the standing broad jump. The idea was to let them swing from your arms during the windup to help you gain momentum as you made your leap; then, once airborne, you threw them back behind you to gain additional push.
The physics of it seemed dubious to me, but Phayllus of Croton supposedly jumped fifty-five feet in this way— a record for the standing broad jump, greater than that set by any non-altered running broad jumper.
Phayllus’s record was safe with me: I made about eight feet. I frowned, brushed the dust from my knees and retrieved my halteres. Better stick to running, I thought. This was my best score of the evening.
I picked up my towel and strigil and walked to where I knew McGivern was waiting. His thin, gangling figure was in shadow as he stood under a twisted olive tree; I was very close before I could see his remembered features. Bushy yellow hair, beaklike nose, thin reptilian lips. Wise, wise eyes.
Like me, he looked about twenty-two. Like me, he was older. Dressed in a dark gray that gave his youthful body an air of premature gravity.
One biographer who preferred to forgive me my sins called McGivern the Mephistophilis to my Faustus. I preferred the high priest to my Kassandra.
He was rich, whatever rich means these days. He was perhaps the wealthiest person in our part of the galaxy, saving only me. He’d got ten percent of everything I’d made, and he’d invested it wisely, while I’d spent mine founding colleges and rebuilding temples. Someday, I supposed, he’d surpass me.
Not that it would mean anything. It wasn’t as though wealth could be held in any form that wasn’t temporary, as ephemeral as fog, as dew. I had people and machines to keep track of my dew for me, to keep moving it from clover to clover, hedging so I couldn’t lose it all. Brian McGivern, I knew, kept track of his own funds. Habit, I suppose: a shame to let his talents go to waste. It was the thing he did best. The thing that gave him meaning. In my more maudlin moments I envied him.
I choose to cancel the United Nations, McGivern had said once, in my name. And he’d done it.
He was not, I suppose, a nice man. A financial genius, perhaps the last one ever. We had always liked one another, even when he found himself compelled to disapprove.
That he was here at all meant he thought it was important.
The idea that anything could be as important as that unsettled me.
Some vague uncertainty stopped me about ten feet away from him. He eyed me with care but without compassion, without enthusiasm. His way. You will make a revolution, he’d once told me with that same precise, analytical look. You will destroy the world.
Sounds good to me, I’d answered.
I looked at him and brushed dust from my elbows.
“Hello, Brian,” I said.
He nodded, once. “Hello, Doran.”
McGivern was standing on a slight eminence surrounding the stadium and I had to look up at him. “How long has it been?” I asked. Ritually.
A match flared briefly, gleaming on the silver of the olives above his head, and he lit his short cigar. His answer, when it came, was as dry of feeling as old desert bones, as the dusty spring Kassotis. “I hear you’re an alcoholic these days.”
I considered the idea for a moment. “It’s too early to tell,” I said. “Give it another few years and we’ll know.”
He accepted this without reaction. “You kept me waiting. Six months.”
“I was on a boat most of that time.”
He answered me silently, without a motion or a word. Cigar smoke tainted the air.
“And you didn’t come alone,” I said. “I would have seen you gladly if you hadn’t come for a... purpose.”
“It’s an important purpose, Doran.”
The hell with your purpose, I thought. I said, “Let’s step over to the benches and sit down.”
We moved to the long benches of the stadium and sat on the old gray stones. McGivern’s body was young but his movements suggested age, a kind of carnal complacency. It was a phenomenon I worked hard to avoid, every day here in the stadium. While I scraped the oil and sweat from my legs with the strigil, he looked around curiously, noting the sheen of the gray stones in moonlight, the grassy, vacant, ghost-filled oval of the stadium.
He reached into his pocket. “A cigar?” he asked.
“I’ve given it up,” I said and grinned at him. “It’s no fun now that it’s safe.”
He nodded and put the cigar case away. “My people have their presentations ready.”
“Have them recorded,” I said. “I’ll view them when I can.”
He tilted his head to look at me. His smile was wry, amused. “You’ll disappoint them. They wanted to see you in person.”
“I hope you’re comfortable in the hotel,” I said.
McGivern retained his owlish smile; he knew I was changing the subject. “Ismenos and Helen are treating us very well,” he said. “First-class personal service. Very old-fashioned, very comforting.”
They were an unusual couple, I knew: glittering figures during the Decadence of a few centuries ago, who’d had the good sense, or luck, to give it up before it killed them. They worked at the hotel/restaurant not because of any economic need but because they loved the work for its odd demands and for the chance it gave them to meet the far-traveled.
I wandered down the hill to eat at their restaurant every so often, careful to ask Ismenos’s opinion about the wine list and to compliment Helen on her lamb. They never seemed impressed by me; I received the same service as everyone else. I’d brought Branwen once and she’d fallen in love with the place immediately. Before the evening was out, she was playing dominoes with Ismenos in the light of a candle stuck in an old Metaxa bottle. Both of them playing like Greeks, shouting and slapping the table with the dominoes as they played, laughing loudly between gulps of wine.
“Be sure to ask for the local olives,” I said. “Ismenos is proud of them.”
“I’ll do that.”
“They give good service. They’re used to diplomats. Diplomats and very rich tourists.”
“Do you get many diplomats these days?” he asked.
“Not many. I’m fading into irrelevance. As I hoped I would. It’s been years since anyone’s tried to kill me.”
“And the tourists?”
“I try to schedule their tours for times when I’m not here.”
He drew on his cigar. Its red eye regarded me dispassionately. “For the modern Apollo, you aren’t very forthcoming with your favors.”
I frowned into the darkness for a while. I had private reasons for living at Delphi, and they had nothing to do with my turning god or oracle. I also knew it was pointless to try to convince anyone else of that.
“Even the original Apollo was open for business only one month out of the year,” I said. I felt his eyes on me and brushed imaginary dust from my knees. “Besides,” I went on, “I have nothing to tell them anymore.”
“You’re needed.”
“I lecture every other autumn on literature and history. Once I did a special seminar on the history of the blues. I don’t do physics these days. I don’t even keep up.”
“You’re the authority, Doran. You have a better grasp of— ”
“I don’t owe them anything,” I interrupted.
His face was hard in the moonlight, not young anymore, as craggy as the heights of Rhodini above us. His ancient eyes gazed at me as steadily as those of Minos, judging. “You owe me, Doran,” he said. “I built this world of yours. Not my fault you don’t like it.”
I gave no answer. It was all too true. And so I gave way. “I’ll see your presentations,” I said. “Your vanishing kangaroos. For all the good it’ll do.”
“Thank you,” he said. He didn’t sound as though he meant it.
“Who’s on your team?”
“Not my team, Doran.” He stretched his legs out to the stone bleachers in front of him. “Not mine at all. This is a project assembled on the highest levels of the government of Kemp’s Planet. All I did was to organize the delegation that came to Earth.”
“You are the highest level of the government of Kemp’s Planet.”
McGivern smiled thinly. “Don’t your people keep your dossiers up to date these days?” he asked. “I’ve sold my interest. I’m just a gray eminence they consult when they need a particular problem solved.”
“Don’t congratulate yourself. You haven’t solved this one yet.”
He drew on his cigar confidently. “I will,” he said. A gust of wind rustled the trees above us, stirring the dust in the stadium. The breeze spilling down the Arkoudorhema to the sea.
I was getting tired of this fencing. My rapier was rusty. “Who’s on the team then?”
“A lot of people you know. Al-Qatan. Pierce Hourigan. Mary Liddell.” His eyes were focused carefully on the opposite bank of the stadium as he spoke the names of my former students. There was no emphasis on the last, no self-congratulatory tip of the hat to himself for setting his careful hook. He went on with the names of other people I didn’t know personally, only by reputation.
“And a man named Ruyter’s in charge of the first survey team,” he said. “You wouldn’t know him, I think. They’re on the planet now, gathering systematic data, conducting field surveys. Preparing the ground for you, and for the others.” He stuck the cigar into his mouth and inhaled, but it was dead. He took it out and looked at it incuriously. Another wind stirred the dust of the field; I brushed away grains that had adhered to the sweat on my eyebrows.
“Can we get Zimmerman?” I asked. “He was brilliant. I know he’s on Kemp’s.”
“Zimmerman?” McGivern frowned. He kept the cigar in his hand, gesturing with it, pointing up to Hyampeia and my house. “He’s in his house, one like yours, but larger. He won’t come out. His house says he’ll speak only to you.”
“The hell with him then.”
“You can afford to say that. I can’t.”
The breeze chilled my body and I stood up, starting the walk home. McGivern flicked the cigar away and followed. I made my way out of the stadium, hearing his shoes crunching the gravel behind me. “Mary Liddell,” I said. “Is she still... ?”
“A Diehard?” he said. “Yes.”
The hell with her too, I thought violently. I don’t owe her anything either.
I heard McGivern’s sudden gasp and I looked up to see the giant forms half-hidden in the trees, standing silently, watching us. McGivern gave a little nervous laugh.
“You know what I thought I saw?” he said quickly. “I thought they were...” His voice faded away as his eyes adjusted to the shade and he saw that what he had first taken for a trick of the shadows was not a trick, but reality.
“Hush,” I told him. “Not a word.” Moving slowly, I walked into the deeper shadows where the silent forms waited.
“Hey anthropos,” the first said in greeting. Hello, man.
The voice was bass, inflected harshly, oddly hesitant. I held up my hand.
“Hey kentauros,” I said in greeting. “Ti esti kainon?”
The centaur shook his heavy head, then bent to sniff my palm. He reached out a huge hand, astonishingly gentle, and touched my cheek, letting me have his scent: grass, earth, sweat, hair, his own alien uniqueness, part human, part other. He looked at me soberly.
“Ti pascheis, o phile?” What’s wrong, my friend?
He had smelled the trouble on me, the uneasiness in my mind. A perspicacious assembler of odors, my gray-haired phantom.
“Nothing. A visitor. An old guest-friend, come unexpectedly.” The centaur shook his head again, disbelieving, the trees whipping over his shade in the blustery wind. Moon dapples shimmered over the broad shoulders, the hollows of the clavicle and throat, the grizzled hairs among the brown that furred him from the neck down. His head was long, as was the sensitive nose; there was a sagittal crest that anchored heavy muscles for chewing vegetation, but from the waist up he was recognizably human.
“He smells bad, this guest-friend. Has he brought you trouble?”
I grinned. I had never liked McGivern’s cigars either. “He’s a messenger. Not a bad sort. No trouble I can’t deal with.”
The centaur bent down, his spine as supple as a sapling, until his forehead almost touched the stony soil; then he straightened, flinging back his mane. He had registered his unease but would not pursue the matter further. “Very well,” he said. “Philodice has come to sing for you. Have you the time?”
I glanced at the other vision, silver-haired, her eyes opalescent in the dim light. She held a lyre to her breast as though it were a child. “I will spare it gladly,” I replied. “Does she wish to use the theater?”
“If you please, O man.”
I bowed. We held hands to cheek again before I turned and went back to McGivern. “Follow,” I said and led him down the zigzag path to the amphitheater, hearing the tentative clopping of their hooves behind us.
“My god,” McGivern murmured, pitching his voice so only I could hear. “Is that one of your projects?”
“No. Not mine,” I said, looking over my shoulder at the four-legged shapes that followed from out of the trees. “One of the old gene-splicers, centuries ago, made their tribe.” I saw Philodice’s nimble feet come sprightly down the path, striking shadows on the stone. “Their designer gave them cloven hooves to better handle this terrain. That was clever of him, I thought.”
“I supposed that all those creatures were hunted down and killed.” He had promulgated that policy himself; he sounded miffed.
“Not creatures, Brian,” I said. “Most of those experiments were conducted with human DNA; it was more convenient. Philodice and Chiron are our cousins.”
“Obviously they have a human intelligence.”
“Intelligence, anyway. Their social structure and personalities are a lot more human than equine— they don’t have the dominant stallion and boss mare the way horses do— but I don’t think I’d go so far as to call them human. Not yet. With any luck, not ever.”
McGivern offered no comment on my misanthropy. We turned into the theater, clambering down over the ancient benches. “Here,” I said. “The sound is best about here.” We sat. I could tell that McGivern was having a hard time refraining from looking over his shoulder.
“How many are there?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Tens of thousands, I think, counting the feral ones; their population’s growing now that the planet’s depopulated. There are other things too besides centaurs. I’ve seen satyrs on Parnassus, but they won’t let me come near. And I’ve seen other things in other places.” I re-called red, hungry, jackal eyes and tried not to shudder. McGivern spoke thoughtfully.
“They could repopulate the earth,' he said. “They could outnumber us.”
“They might already. There are only twenty million people on earth now and untold numbers of... of our construct cousins.” The creations of our dreams and legends— creatures of Olympus and Faerie and every bright world of our young imagining now populating the earth after man had abandoned it, existing furtively in their own youth, living in the wild, abandoned places like weeds springing up between the stones of man’s ancient habitation. And in the end, I hoped, taking their ground and challenging man— and challenging one Other I knew— for possession of their mother world.
I heard the sound of Philodice’s hooves walking down the low cypress-bordered path that led to the stage and I put my hand on McGivern’s arm to silence him. “I’m sorry you don’t know Greek,” I said, “but I think you’ll appreciate most of this. Blue spot. Recorder on. File under Philodice, Songs of the Centaurs, Volume II.” The light sprang up at my command and moved to the edge of the stage to await her.
She came onto the stage warily, her dark eyes wide with apprehension. Her face was long and delicate, the cheekbones high, her hair silver, shining blue in the light of the spot. Her bare breasts, very human, rested proudly amid the delicate light floss that covered her torso; her mane and tail had been braided with fresh flowers. She struck the lyre— just once— and sang, the chord hanging in the air behind her words.
Tade nun etaiprais, she sang, tais emaisi terpna chalos aeiso. Tell everyone that today, at this moment, for the pleasure of my soulmates, I shall sing.
Sappho, that little fragment. Her voice was alto, and clear, but with overtones that were never produced by any human throat. The sound was earthly, yet strange; it gnawed with delicate little teeth at parts of the human soul long buried, bringing them out of the earth to shine like spun gold. Suddenly the world was strange again, looked at through the sight of something other than human, something both less and greater. I could feel the hairs at the back of my neck prickling, and I glanced at McGivern. His face was deeply disturbed, mingling awe and a kind of inchoate fear.
She struck the lyre again and sang again. This time she accompanied herself on the instrument, plucking the strings with her delicate hands. You know this place; then fly from Krete and come to us. Sappho again, a hymn to Aphrodite. The tune was Philodice’s, all her own, sung on a scale that sounded strange to my ears. The song ended: Fill our golden cups with love and purest nectar.
The last chord hung in the silence. Then Philodice trotted in a quick, nervous circle, casting an apprehensive glance up high. I realized that she was seeking Chiron, who was standing guard above us, ready to signal flight if flight were needed. Then her eyes lowered, giving me a quick, shy glance, after which she bent low to the ground in what I had come to recognize as the centaur gesture of decision. She straightened, threw her head back and began to pluck the lyre again, and her voice gently filled the amphitheater, echoing from the old stones.
I listened in rising astonishment. This was something entirely new, not anything I had taught her. The directness of emotion and language were Sappho’s, but the sentiment and phrases were all her own.
How may I find courage enough, she sang, to frame a plea to Cyprian Aphrodite? Yet even the gentle thyme and the fragrant clover taste of bitterness, for my love is far away. Foam-born! Come from your pleasant island and relieve my heart of its anguished throbbings....
The song went on, the eerie, weirdly evocative voice filling the deep space of the theater. Philodice turned her head, and for a moment there was the ghost of another standing below me, the curve of her silver hair over a cheekbone the same, the same look in a dark eye. I will not take your gift. That was how it had ended.
The lament died away, the last chord hanging among the stones in the suddenly still air. Philodice curveted nervously in the spotlight. I rose and made my way down the gray seats to stand before her. Without Chiron close by, her wary eyes flickered left and right, her dainty feet trod anxiously in place. I reached up and touched her shoulders, brushing back the tousled silver mane.
“Had I known you would sing tonight,” I said, “I would have made a crown of flowers for your brow. As it is, I can only give you my joy. Your song was wonderful. Make me another.”
Philodice blushed to the tips of her breasts. “Thanks, o man,” she stammered. Then she flicked her tail, turned and fled the stage. The blue spot followed as far as it could and hovered, uncertainly awaiting her return. I told it to turn itself off. Above the amphitheater I could see Chiron silhouetted against the stars; he raised a hand in farewell, then followed his pupil. I stood on the stage for a long moment, recalling the song, the singer, the phantom fragment of memory. McGivern made his way down to join me.
“That was something,” he said. “Scary, somehow. I wonder why.”
I blinked the memory away, shaking my head to clear it. “That last one was different,” I said. “It’s the first song she’s ever made by herself. The others were songs I’d taught them.”
McGivern looked at me in surprise. “How long have you known they were here?” he asked.
“I first saw them a hundred years ago. North of here, in Thessaly. I couldn’t get close to them, although I made as many recordings as I could. They had the beginnings of a language, the beginnings of a culture, the beginnings of a simple technology based on what they could steal from old human dwellings— tableware mostly; they don’t have use for much else. Chiron, that old one— his grandfather, Chiron the Elder, was the first I got close to. He was about a year old, I think; he’d got caught in a thunderstorm with his mother in the Cirrhan hills. She was killed by lightning; he had a leg and some ribs broken by a falling limb. I brought him here and taught him Greek. You have to start young with speech, and Chiron was young. That was eighty years ago. He taught his children and neighboring young ones and then sent them out as teachers to other tribes. His own folk come here mostly for healing. Broken limbs and dentistry.'
“And they sing their thanks,” McGivern said.
“Yes.”
“And the lyre? You showed them how to make it?”
“It’s an easy instrument to build. A tortoise shell, strings made from their own hair, a framework, a plectrum. Pythagoras went a long way with it when he invented musical theory.”
McGivern looked at me with a probing smile. “It’s also the instrument of Apollo, as I recall.”
“He stole it, you might remember, from Hermes.” I walked out of the theater, down toward the temple, and McGivern followed.
There was a lot I didn’t tell him. Branwen’s part, for one thing; it was she who had first taught them music and old Aeolian lyrics. Hymns to nature and the gods, songs of love and the dance, songs whose subjects they could grasp. Branwen’s brother David was living among them, north of here; he’d made their study his life’s work.
Neither did I tell McGivern of my hopes. The centaurs, I thought, would eventually come to outnumber us on this planet. Their sophistication and knowledge would increase and then, when they were ready, some descendant of Chiron would challenge us and give us a run for our money.
None too soon, I reckoned. The human race needed shaking up, and the thoughts and attitudes of our inhuman cousins, alike enough to cause a responsive stirring in our minds; unlike enough to bring fresh light on everything we held dear, a needed antistrophe to our own stagnation.
We passed the vast temple; here my way would part from McGivern, he going down to the town, I to my eyrie. I began to think about opening a bottle of wine tonight. A deep purple-red, the color of dreams and fantasy. “Bring your people tomorrow morning,” I said. “I’m usually up at dawn, so bring them whenever they can assemble their data. I’d esteem it a favor if you didn’t mention Chiron and Philodice to them. Or to anyone else.”
His eyes were sober. “I won’t,” he assured me. “I don’t ever want them to become a tourist attraction.” He shook his head. “My God! I still can’t believe it.”
“Goodnight, Brian.”
He held out his hand. I shook it.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. I turned to begin my long climb and then I heard his voice.
“I hope I’ll be able to see them again, these four-legged children of yours.”
I looked back. “I don’t know how possible that is. You want to take me away from them, you see.”
I began the climb. McGivern stood silent behind me for a moment, and then I heard him turn and move away.