“All right,” she said. “You’re right. We shouldn’t be losing our tempers just now. But I didn’t start—”
“Didn’t you?” the stranger said.
Kathy shrugged. “Well, never mind it now.” She turned to Forrester. “You know who we are now, don’t you?”
Forrester nodded very slowly. How else could the man have come through the cordon of Myrmidons and seen them in the darkness? How else would he have dared to face up to Dionysus—confident that he could beat him? And how else could all this argument have gone on without anyone hearing it?
For that matter, why else would the argument have begun—unless the stranger and Kathy were—
“Sure,” he said, as if he had known it all along. “You’re Mars and Venus.”
He could feel cold death approaching.
CHAPTER TEN
William Forrester sat, quite alone, in the room which had been given him on Mount Olympus. He stared out of the window, a little smaller than the window in Venus’ rooms, at the Grecian plain far below, without actually seeing. There was no vertigo this time; small matters like that couldn’t bother him.
The whole room was rather a small one, as Gods’ rooms went, but it had the same varicolored shifting walls, the same furniture that appeared when you approached it. Forrester was beginning to get used to it now, and he didn’t know if it was going to do him any good.
He peered down, trying to discern the patrolling Myrmidons around the base and lower slopes of the mountain, placed there to discourage overeager climbers from trying to reach the home of the Gods. Of course he couldn’t see them, and after a while he lost interest again. Matters were too serious to allow time for that kind of game.
The Autumn Bacchanal was over, a thing of the past, on the way to the distortion of legend. Forrester’s greatest triumph had ended—in his greatest fiasco.
He closed his eyes as he sat in his room, the fluctuating colors on the walls going unappreciated. He had nothing to do now except wait for the final judgment of the Gods.
At first he had been terrified. But terror could only last so long, and, as the time ticked by, the idea of that coming judgment had almost stopped troubling his mind. Either he had passed the tests or he hadn’t. There was no point in worrying about the inevitable. He felt anesthetized, numb to any sensation of personal danger. There was nothing whatever he could do. The Gods had him; very well, let the Gods worry about what to do with him.
Freed, his mind turned over and over a problem that seemed new to him at first. Gradually, he realized it wasn’t new at all; it had been somewhere in the back of his thoughts from the very first, when Venus had told him that he had been chosen as a double for Dionysus, so many months ago. It seemed like years to Forrester, and yet, at the same time, like no more than hours. So much had happened, and so much had changed.…
But the question had remained, waiting until he could look at it and work with it. Now he could face that strange doubt in his mind, the doubt that had colored everything since his introduction to the Gods, that had grown as his training in demi-Godhood had progressed, and that was now, for the first time, coming to full consciousness. Every time it had come near the surface, before this day, he had expelled it from his mind, forcefully getting rid of it without realizing fully that he was doing so.
And perhaps, he thought, the doubt had begun even earlier than that. Perhaps he had always doubted, and never allowed himself to think about the doubt. The floor of his mind seemed to open and he was falling, falling.…
But where the doubt had begun was unimportant now. It was present, it had grown; that was all that mattered. He could find facts to feed the doubt and strengthen it, and he looked at the facts one by one:
First there was the angry conversation between Mars and Venus, on the night of the Bacchanal.
He could still hear what Mars had said:
“…worse than your predecessor.”
And then he’d shut Venus up before she gave away too much—realizing, maybe, that he had given away a good deal himself. That one little sentence was enough to bring everything into question, Forrester thought.
He had wondered why it had been necessary to have a double for Dionysus, but he hadn’t actually thought about it; maybe he hadn’t wanted to think about it. But now, with the notion of a “predecessor” for Venus in his mind, he had to think about it, and the only conclusion he could come to was a disturbing one. It did more than disturb him, as a matter of fact—it frightened him. He wanted desperately to find some flaw in the conclusion he faced, because he feared it even more than he feared the coming judgment of the Pantheon.
But there wasn’t any flaw. The facts meshed together entirely too well to be an accidental pattern.
In the first place, he thought, why had he been picked for the job? He was a nobody, of no importance, with no special gifts. Why did he deserve the honor of taking his place beside Hercules and Achilles and Odysseus and the other great heroes? Forrester knew he wasn’t any hero. But what gave him his standing?
And, he went on, there was a second place. In the months of his training he had met fourteen of the Gods—all of them, except for Dionysus. Now, what kind of sense did that make? Anyone who’s going to have a double usually trains the double himself, if it’s at all possible. Or, at the very least, he allows the double to watch his actions, so that the double can do a really competent job of imitation.
And if an imitation is all that’s needed, why not hire an actor instead of a history professor?
Vulcan had told him: “You were picked not merely for your physical resemblance to Dionysus, but your psychological resemblance as well.”
That had to be true, if only because, as far as Forrester could see, nobody had the slightest reason to lie about it. But why should it be true? What advantage did the Gods get out of that “psychological resemblance”? All he was supposed to be was a double—and anybody who looked like Dionysus would be accepted as Dionysus by the people. The “psychological resemblance” didn’t have a single thing to do with it.
Mars, Venus, Vulcan—even Zeus had dropped clues. Zeus had referred to him as a “substitute for Dionysus.”
A substitute, he realized with a kind of horror, was not at all the same thing as a double.
The answer was perfectly clear, but there were even more facts to bolster it. Why had he been tested, for instance, after he had been made a demi-God? In spite of what Vulcan had said, was he slated for further honors if he passed the new tests? He was sure that Vulcan had been telling the truth as far as he’d gone—but it hadn’t been the whole truth. Forrester was certain of that now.
And what was it that Venus had said during that argument with Mars? Something about not killing Forrester, because then they would have to “get another—”
Another what?
Another substitute?
No, there was no escape from the simple and obvious conclusion. Dionysus was either missing, which was bad enough, or something much worse.
He was dead.
Forrester shivered. The idea of an immortal God dying was, in one way, as horrible a notion as he could imagine. But in another way, it seemed to make a good deal of sense. As far as plain William Forrester had been concerned, the contradiction in the notion of a dead immortal would have made it ridiculous to start with. But the demi-God Dionysus had a somewhat different slant on things.
After all, as Vulcan had told him, a demi-God could die. And if that was true, then why couldn’t a God die too? Perhaps it would take quite a lot to kill a God—but the difference would be one of degree, not of kind.
It seemed wholly logical. And it led, Forrester saw, to a new conclusion, one that required a little less effort to face than he thought it would. It should