Clouds massed huge, blue-black over the high place. Lightning flared, thunder crashed. The fire before the altar leaped and cast sparks like stars down the wind. The acolytes led the sacrifice to the waiting priest. His knife glimmered. In the grove below, worshippers howled. Afar, the sea ran white and monsters rose from its depths. “No!” Aliyat wailed. “Stop! That’s a child!”
“It is a beast, a lamb,” Wanderer called back against the noise; but he kept his glance elsewhere. “It is both,” Hanno said to them. “Be still.” Knife flashed, limbs threshed, blood spurted and flowed dark over stone. The priest cast the body into the flames.
Flesh sizzled on coals, fell away from bones, went up in fat smoke. Through the storm, terrible in their splendor, came the gods.
Pillar-tall, bull-broad, beard spilling down over the lion skin that clad him, eyes capturing the fire-gleam, Melqart snuffed deep. He licked his lips. “It is done, it is well, it is life,” he boomed.
Wind tossed the hair of Ashtoreth, rain jeweled it, lightning-light sheened on breasts and belly. Her own nostrils drank. She clasped his gigantic organ as if it were a staff and raised her left hand into heaven. “Bring forth the Resurrected!” she cried.
Baal-Adon leaned heavily on Adat, his beloved, his mourner, his avenger. He stumbled, still half blind after the murk of the underworld; he trembled, still half frozen from the grave. She guided him to the smoke of the offering. She took the bowl filled with its blood and gave him to drink. Warmth returned, beauty, wakefulness. He saw, he heard how men and women coupled in the grove and across the land in honor of his arising; and he turned to his consort.
More gods crowded about, Chushor out of the waves, Dagon out of the plowlands, Aliaan out of the springs and underground waters, Resheph out of the storm, and more and more. Clouds began to part. Distantly gleamed the twin pillars and pure lake before the home of El.
A sunbeam smote the eight who stood on the topheth near the beryl, invisible to priest and acolytes. The gods stared and stiffened. Melqart raised bis club that had smitten the Sea, primordial Chaos, in the dawn of the world. “Who dares betread the holy of holies?” he bellowed.
Hanno trod forward. “Dread ones,” he said calmly, with respect but not abasing himself, looking straight into those eyes, “we are eight from afar in space, time, and strangeness. We too command the powers of heaven, earth, and hell. But fain would we guest you a while and learn the wonders of your reigning. Behold, we bear gifts.” He signalled, and there appeared a treasure of golden ware, gems, precious woods, incense.
Melqart lowered his weapon and stared with a greed that awoke also in the features of Ashtoreth; but her regard was on the men.
27
One by one, they disengaged. That was a simple matter of removing induction helmets and feedback suits. The web of union between them and the guiding, creating computer had already vanished; the pseudo-experience was at an end. Nonetheless, after they had emerged from their booths into the commonplaceness of the dream chamber, it took them silent minutes to return altogether to themselves. Meanwhile they stood side by side, hand in hand, groping for comfort.
Eventually Patulcius mumbled, “I thought I knew something about the ancient Near East. But that was the most damnable—”
“Horror and wonder,” Macandal said unevenly. “Lust and love. Death and life. Was it really like that, Hanno?”
“I can’t be sure,” the captain answered. “The historical Tyre we visited seemed about right to me.” —in a full-sensory hallucination, where the computer drew on his memories and then let the seekers act and be acted on as they would have in a material world. “Hard to tell, after so long. Besides, you know I’d tried to put it behind me, tried to grow away from what was bad in it. This, though, the Phoenician conceptual universe— No, I don’t believe I ever thought in just that way, even when I was young and supposed I was mortal.”
“No matter authenticity,” Yukiko said. “We want practice in dealing with aliens; and this was amply alien.”
“Too much.” Tu Shan’s burly frame shivered. “Come, dear. I want a time gentle and human, don’t you?” She accompanied him out.
“What society shall we draw on next?” asked Svoboda. Her attention sought Wanderer. “Those you knew must have been at least as foreign to the rest of us.”
“No doubt,” he replied rather grimly. “In due course, yes, we will. But first a setting more ... rational. China, Russia?”
“We have plenty of tune,” Patulcius said. “Better we digest this before we think about anything else. Kyrie eleison, to have witnessed the gods at work!” He tugged at Macandal, “I’m exhausted. A stiff drink, a long sleep, and several days’ idleness.”
“Right.” Her smile was fainter than usual. They left.
Wanderer and Svoboda seemed aroused. Their gazes came aglow. She reddened. His breast rose and fell. They also departed.
Hanno took care not to watch. Aliyat had clasped his hand. Now she let go. He spoke dully. “Well, how was it for you?”
“Terror and ecstasy and—a kind of homecomjng,” she said, barely audible.
He nodded. “Yes, even though you started life as a Christian, it wouldn’t be totally foreign to you. In fact, I suspect the program used some memories of yours as input where mine weren’t sufficient.”
“Weird enough, though.”
He stared beyond her. “A dream within a dream,” he murmured, as if to himself.
“What do you mean?”
“Svoboda would understand. Once she and I imagined what kind of future it might be where we dared reveal what we were.” Hanno shook himself. “Never mind. Goodnight.”
She caught his arm. “No, wait.”
He stopped, lifted his brows, stood alert in a fashion weary and wary. Aliyat grasped his hand again. ‘Take me along,” she said.
“Eh?”
“You’re too lonely. And I am. Let’s come back together, and stay.”
Deliberately, he said, “Are you tired of subsisting on Svoboda’s and Corinne’s leavings?”
For a moment she lost color. She released him. Then she reddened and admitted, “Yes. You and me, we’re neither of us the other’s first pick, are we? And you’ve never forgiven me for Constantinople, not really.”
“Why,” he said, taken aback, “I’ve told you I have. Over and over I’ve told you. I hoped my actions proved —”
“Well, just don’t let it make any difference that counts. What’s the point of our living all these centuries if we haven’t grown up even a little? Hanno, I’m offering you what nobody else in this ship will, yet. Maybe they never will. But we are getting back something of what we had. Between us, you and I could help that healing along.” She tossed her head. “If you aren’t game to try, to give in your turn, okay, goodnight and to hell with you.”
“No!” He seized her by the waist. “Aliyat, of course I— I’m overwhelmed—”
“You’re nothing of the sort, you calculating old scoundrel, and well I know it.” She came to him. The embrace went on.
Finally, flushed, disheveled, she said against his shoulder, “Sure, I’m a rogue myself. Always will be, I guess. But—I learned more about you than I’d known, Hanno. It wasn’t a dream while we were there, it was as real to us as—no, more real than these damned crowding walls. You stood up to the gods, outsmarted them, made them take us in, like nobody else alive could have. You are the skipper.”
She raised her face. Tears were on it, but a grin flashed malapert. “They didn’t wear me out. That’s your job. And if we can’t entirely trust each other, if the thing between us won’t quite die away, why, doesn’t that add a pinch of spice?”
