But all they’d learned from half a year’s hard spelunking and deep-ocean diving was that Asmodeus’s spellwork performed slightly better once you got half a mile underground, and that the most probable explanation for that was that spelunking got Asmodeus really excited.
They pushed on into astrology and ocean magic and even oneiromancy—dream magic. Turns out you can cast some truly amazing shit in your dreams. But after you wake up it all seems kind of pointless, and nobody really wants to hear about it.
They worked with the Earth’s magnetic field, using apparatus cribbed from some Nikola Tesla drawings, right up until the night when Failstaff almost flipped the planet’s magnetic poles, whereupon they dropped that whole line of investigation and backed away slowly. Gummidgy spent a sleepless week developing a witheringly abstract hypothesis related to cosmic rays and quantum effects and the Higgs boson, which in the end even she only half- understood. She swore she could prove it mathematically, but the calculations required were so involved that they would have required a computer the size of the universe, running for a length of time that would have taken them past the projected heat-death of the universe, to work them out. It was pretty much the definition of moot.
That’s when they turned to religion.
At this Julia pushed her chair back from the table. She could feel her intellectual gag reflex about to kick in.
“I know,” Pouncy said. “But it’s not what you think. Hear us out.”
Failstaff began unrolling a huge, closely annotated diagram that was almost as big as the table.
Religion had never been a subject that interested Julia. She considered herself too smart to believe in things she had no evidence for, and that behaved in ways that violated every principle she’d ever observed or heard plausibly spoken about. And she considered herself too tough-minded to believe in things just because they made her feel better. Magic was one thing. With magic you were at least looking at reproducible results. But religion? That was about faith. Uneducated guesses made by weak minds. As far as she knew, or thought she knew, her views on this matter were shared by the other Free Traders.
“There was a piece missing,” Pouncy went on. “We thought we’d gone back to first principles. But what if we hadn’t? What if there were principles before the first principles we’d gone back to?
“We were assuming, until it could be proved otherwise, that there were bigger energies out there, far bigger, and that there was a technique by which those energies could be manipulated. Humans have not, so far as we know, in the modern era, gained access to those energies. But suppose there were another class of beings who did have access to them. Maybe not humans
“Another class of beings,” Julia said flatly. “You’re talking about God.”
“Gods. I wanted to find out more about them.”
“That’s insane. There’s no such thing as gods. Or God. You know, Pouncy, one of the things I love about the fact that I didn’t go to college is that I didn’t have to sit around a freshman dorm getting high and arguing about shit like this.”
But Pouncy was not withered by her scorn.
“‘Once you’ve eliminated the possible, whatever remains, however impossible, must be the truth.’ Sherlock Holmes.”
“That’s not actually the quote. And it doesn’t mean that gods are real, Pouncy. It means you need to go back and check your work, because you screwed it up somewhere.”
“We checked it.”
“Then maybe you should give up,” Julia said.
“But I don’t give up,” Pouncy said. His eyes had a wintry, sleety gray to them that was distinctly un– Abercrombie & Fitch. “And neither do they.” He indicated the others sitting around the table. “And neither do you. Do you, Julia.”
Julia blinked and held his gaze to indicate that she would keep listening, but that she made no promises. Pouncy went on.
“We’re not talking about monotheism. Or at least not in its latter-day form. We’re talking about old-time religion. Paganism, or more precisely polytheism.
“Forget everything you ordinarily associate with religious study. Strip away all the reverence and the awe and the art and the philosophy of it. Treat the subject coldly. Imagine yourself to be a theologist, but a special kind of theologist, one who studies gods the way an entomologist studies insects. Take as your dataset the entirety of world mythology and treat it as a collection of field observations and statistics pertaining to a hypothetical species: the god. Proceed from there.”
Fastidiously at first, with rubber gloves and tweezers and haughty distaste, as if they were handling the intellectual equivalent of medical waste, Pouncy and the others took up the study of comparative religion. Much as Julia had done with magic back in her apartment above the bagel store, they began combing the world’s religious narratives and traditions for practical information. They called it Project Ganymede.
“What the hell were you hoping to find?” Julia said.
“I wanted to learn their techniques. I wanted to be able to do what gods did. I don’t see any real distinction between religion and magic, or for that matter between gods and magicians. I think divine power is just another form of magical praxis. You know what Arthur C. Clarke said about technology and magic, right? Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Turn it around. What is advanced magic indistinguishable from? Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from the miraculous.”
“The fire of the gods,” Failstaff rumbled. Jesus, he was a true believer too.
But despite herself—and she took care not to show it—Julia felt her curiosity stirring. She reminded herself that she knew these people well. They were as smart as she was, and they were at least as big intellectual snobs as she was. She probably wasn’t going to come up with a lot of objections that they hadn’t already thought of.
“Look, Pouncy,” she said. “I know enough about religion to know that even if there are gods, they don’t exactly hand out holy fire like candy. There’s only one way this story ends. It’s Prometheus all over again. Phaethon. Icarus. Pick your sucker. You fly too close to the sun, the thermal energy from the sun overwhelms the weak attractive forces that allow the wax in your wings to maintain its solid form, and down you go, into the sea. No fire for you. And that’s if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky you end up like Prometheus. Birds eat your liver forever.”
“Usually,” Failstaff said. “There are exceptions.”
“For example, not everybody is such a complete dink that they make their wings out of wax,” Asmodeus said.
Briskly, Failstaff walked Julia through the enormous diagram on the table in front of them, sketching arcs and connections with his thick, soft fingers. The diagram showed the primary narratives of the major and minor religious traditions, collated and cross-referenced—and color-coded!—to highlight areas where they overlapped and confirmed one another. Apparently if you’re enough of a power nerd, there is nothing that cannot be flowcharted.
“The hubristic scenario, the pride that challenges the gods and leads to the death of the challenger, is only one of a number of possible scenarios. And usually the bad outcome can be traced to poor preparation on the part of the principals. It does not at all imply that it is categorically impossible for a mortal to gain access to divine power.”
“Hm,” Julia said. “Theoretically.”
“No, not theoretically,” Asmodeus said sharply. “Practically. Historically. Technically the process is called ascension, or sometimes assumption, or my favorite word for it is
“Give me examples.”
“Mary.” She ticked off a finger. “As in Jesus’s mom. She was born mortal and ended up divine. Galahad. Arthurian legend. He was Lancelot’s son. He found the Holy Grail and was taken directly up into heaven. So was Enoch—he was an early descendant of Adam’s.”
“There’s a couple of Chinese generals,” Gummidgy said. “Guan Yu. Fan Kuai. There’s the Eight Immortals of Taoism.”
“Dido, Buddha, Simon Magus . . .” Pouncy chimed in. “It just goes on and on.”
“Or look at Ganymede,” Asmo said. “Greek legend. He was a mortal, but of such great beauty that Zeus
