The Second Randall Garrett Megapack. Randall Garrett

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СКАЧАТЬ even really humanoid. His home is a planet where his type of goatlike life evolved. Neither Pluto nor Neptune is humanoid, either; they’re a little closer than Pan, but not really very close when you get a good look. The rest of the Gods are humanoid—but not human.”

      “Wait a minute,” Forrester said. “Venus is human. Or, any­how, she’s a replacement, just the way I was slated to be a replacement for Dionysus.”

      Diana drained her cup and clapped her hands together on it. The cup vanished. Forrester did the same to his own. “Correct,” she said. “Venus just—just disappeared once. They got an Etrus­can girl to replace her. She’s not the only replacement, either.”

      Forrester stared. “Who else?”

      “You tell me.”

      He thought the list of Gods over. “Zeus,” he said.

      Diana smiled. “Yes, Zeus is a long way from the great hero of the legends, isn’t he? Using the old calendar, Zeus died in about 1100 B.C., not too long after the close of the Trojan War. As far as anybody knows, Neptune did the actual killing, but it’s pretty clear that the original idea wasn’t his.”

      “Hera’s,” Forrester guessed.

      “Of course,” Diana said. “What she wanted was a figurehead she could control—and that’s what she got. Though I’m not sure she’s entirely happy with the change. If the original Zeus was a little harder to control, at least he seems to have had an original thought now and again.”

      Forrester sat quietly for a time, waiting for the shock to pass. “What about Dionysus?”

      Diana shrugged. “He—well, as far as anybody’s ever been able to tell, it was suicide. About three years ago, and it drove Hera pretty wild, trying to find a substitute in a hurry. I suspect he was bored with the wine, women and song. He’d had a long time of it. And, too, he’d had some little disagreements with Hera. As you may have gathered, she is not exactly a safe person to have as an enemy. He probably figured she’d get him sooner or later, so he might as well save her the trouble.”

      “And Hera had to rush to get a replacement? Why couldn’t there just have been some sort of explanation, while the rest of you ran things?”

      “Because the rest of us couldn’t run things. Not for long, anyhow. It’s all a question of power.”

      “Power?” Forrester said.

      “Everything we have,” Diana said, “is derived, directly or indirectly, from the workings of one machine. Though ‘machine’ is a long way from the right word for it—it bears about as much resemblance to what you think of as a machine as a television set does to a window. There just isn’t a word for it in any language you know.”

      “And all the Gods have to work the machine at once?”

      “Something like that.” Diana came back from the window and sat down facing him again. “It operates through the nervous systems of the beings in circuit with it, each one of them in contact with one of the power nodes of the machine. And if one of the nodes is unoccupied, then the machine’s out of balance. It will run for a while, but eventually it will simply wreck itself. Every one of the fifteen nodes has to be occupied. Otherwise—chaos.”

      Forrester nodded. “So when Dionysus died—”

      “We had to find a replacement in a hurry. The machine’s been running out of balance for about as long as it can stand right now.”

      Forrester closed his eyes. “I’m not sure I get the picture.”

      “Well, look at it this way: suppose you have a wheel.”

      “All right,” Forrester said obligingly. “I have a wheel.”

      “And this wheel has fifteen weights on it. They’re spaced equally around the rim, and the wheel’s revolving at high speed.”

      Forrester kept his eyes closed. When he had the wheel nicely spinning, he said: “Okay. Now what?”

      “Well,” Diana said, “as long as the weights stay in place, the wheel spins evenly. But if you remove one of the weights, the wheel’s out of balance. It starts to wobble.”

      Forrester took one of the weights (Dionysus, a rather large, jolly weight) off the wheel in his mind. It wobbled. “Right,” he said.

      “It can take the wobble for a little while. But unless the balance is restored in time, the wheel will eventually break.”

      Hurriedly, Forrester put Dionysus back on the wheel. The wobble stopped. “Oh,” he said. “I see.”

      “Our power machine works in that sort of way. That is, it requires all fifteen occupants. Dionysus has been dead for three years now, and that’s about the outside limit. Unless he’s replaced soon, the machine will be ruined.”

      Forrester opened his eyes. The wheel spun away and disappeared. “So you found me to replace Dionysus. I had to look like him, so the mortals wouldn’t see any difference. And the psychological similarity—”

      “That’s right,” Diana said. “It’s the same as the wheel again. If you remove a weight, you’ve got to put back a weight of the same magnitude. Otherwise, the wheel’s still out of balance.”

      “And since the power machine works through the nervous system—”

      “The governing factor is that similarity. You’ve got to be of the same magnitude as Dionysus. Of course, you don’t have to be an identical copy. The machine can be adjusted for slight differences.”

      “I see,” Forrester said. “And the fifteen power nodes—” Another idea occurred to him. “Wait a minute. If there are only fifteen power nodes, then how come there were so many different Gods and Goddesses among the Greeks? There were a lot more than fifteen back then.”

      “Of course there were,” Diana said, “but they weren’t real Gods. As a matter of fact, some of them didn’t really exist.”

      Forrester frowned. “How’s that again?”

      “They were just disguises for one of the regular fifteen. Aes­cul­a­pius, for instance, the old God of medicine, was Hermes/ Mercury in disguise—he took the name in honor of a physician of the time. He would have raised the man to demi-Godhood, but Aesculapius died unexpectedly, and we thought taking his ‘spirit’ into the Pantheon was good public relations.”

      “How about the others?” Forrester said. “They weren’t all disguises, were they?”

      “Of course not. Some of them were demi-Gods, just like yourself. Their power was derived, like yours, from the Pantheon instead of directly through the machine. And then there were the satyrs and centaurs, and suchlike beings. That was public relations, too—mainly Zeus’ idea, I understand. The original Zeus, of course.”

      “Of course,” Forrester said.

      “The satyrs and such were artificial life-forms, created, maintained and controlled by the machine itself. It’s equipped with what you might call a cybernetic brain—although that’s pretty inadequate as a description. Vulcan could СКАЧАТЬ