Sunset of the Gods - By Steve White Page 0,1

crashingly vulgar in their rarefied world of arcane erudition. “And now that you’ve gotten all the irritating affectations out of your system, answer the question. Why were you so eager to catch me?”

“Well,” said Rutherford, all innocence, “I naturally wanted to know if your convalescence is complete. I gather it is.”

Jason gave a grudgingly civil nod. In earlier eras, what he had been through—breaking a foot, then being forced to walk on it for miles over Crete’s mountainous terrain, and then having it traumatized anew—would have left him with a permanent limp at least. Nowadays, it was a matter of removing the affected portions and regenerating them. It had taken a certain amount of practice to break in the new segments, but no one seeing Jason now would have guessed he had ever been injured, much less that he had received that injury struggling ashore on the ruined shores of Crete after riding a tsunami.

The scars to his soul were something else.

“So,” he heard Rutherford saying, “I imagine you plan to be returning to, ah, Hesperia without too much more ado, and resume your commission with the Colonial Rangers there.”

“That’s right. Those ‘special circumstances’ you invoked don’t exactly apply any longer, do they?” Rutherford’s expression told Jason that he was correct. He was free of the reactivation clause that had brought him unwillingly out of his early retirement from the Temporal Service, the Authority’s enforcement arm. He excelled himself (so he thought) by not rubbing it in. Feeling indulgent, he even made an effort to be conciliatory. “Anyway, you’re not going to need me—or anybody else—again for any expeditions into the remote past in this part of the world, are you?”

“Well . . . that’s not altogether true.”

“What?” Jason took a deep breath. “Look, Kyle, I’m only too well aware that the governing council of the Authority consists of snobbish, pompous, fatheaded old pedants.” (Like you, he sternly commanded himself not to add.) “But surely not even they can be so stupid! Our expedition revealed that the Teloi aliens were active—dominant, in fact—on Earth in proto-historical times, when they had established themselves as ‘gods’ with the help of their advanced technology. The sights and sounds on my recorder implant corroborate my testimony beyond any possibility of a doubt. And even without that. . . .” Jason’s hand strayed involuntarily toward his pocket before he could halt it.

“Rest assured that no one questions your findings, and that there are no plans to send any expeditions back to periods earlier than the Santorini explosion.” Rutherford pursed his mouth. “The expense of such remote temporal displacements is ruinous anyway, given the energy expenditure required. You have no idea—”

“Actually, I do,” Jason cut in rudely.

“Ahem! Yes, of course I realize you are not entirely unacquainted with these matters. Well, at any rate the council, despite your lack of respect for its members—which you’ve never made any attempt to conceal—is quite capable of seeing the potential hazards of any extratemporal intervention that might come in conflict with the Teloi. The consequences are incalculable, in fact.”

“Then what are you talking about?”

“We are intensely interested in the role played in subsequent history by those Teloi who were not trapped in their artificial pocket universe when its dimensional interface device was destroyed—or ‘imprisoned in Tartarus’ as the later Greeks had it. The ‘New Gods,’ as I believe they were called.”

“Also known as the Olympians,” Jason nodded, remembering the face of Zeus.

“And by various other names elsewhere, all across the Indo-European zone,” added Rutherford with a nod of his own. “They were worshiped, under their various names, for a very long time, well into recorded history, although naturally their actual manifestations grew less frequent. And as you learned, the Teloi had very long lifespans, although they could of course die from violence.”

“So you want to look in on times when those ‘manifestations’ were believed to have taken place? Like the gods fighting for the two sides in the Trojan War?”

“The Trojan War. . . .” For a moment, Rutherford’s face glowed with a fervor little less ecstatic than that which had once raised the stones of the monastery. Then the glow died and he shook his head sadly. “No. We cannot send an expedition back to observe an historic event unless we can pinpoint exactly when it took place. Dendrochronology and the distribution of wind-blown volcanic ash enabled us to narrow the Santorini explosion to autumn of 1628 b.c. But after all these centuries there is still no consensus