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“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. Phaëthon. 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 translation. They all mean the same thing: the process by which a human being is brought bodily into heaven, without dying, and accorded some measure of divine status. And then there’s apotheosis, which is related, whereby a human actually becomes a god. It’s been done, tons of times.”
“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 brought him up to Olympus to be a cupbearer. Hence the project name.”
“We think cupbearer was probably a euphemism,” Failstaff added.
“No kidding,” Julia said. “Okay, I get the point. Not everybody ends up like Icarus. But these are just stories. There’s immortals in Highlander, but that doesn’t mean they’re real.”
“Those aren’t gods,” Failstaff said. “Sheezus, have you even seen the movie?”
“And these aren’t just ordinary mortals you’re talking about. They were all special in some way. Like you said, Enoch was a descendant of Adam.”
“And you’re not?” Asmo said.
“Galahad was inhumanly virtuous. Ganymede was inhumanly beautiful. Which I don’t think anybody here exactly qualifies for either. You all seem pretty human to me.”
“Very true,” Pouncy said. “Very true. It’s an issue. Listen, for the moment we’re talking proof of concept. We’re in initial trials. We’re nowhere near drawing definitive conclusions yet. We just don’t want to rule anything out.”
Like a professor showing around a prospective graduate student, Pouncy took Julia on a tour of the parts of the East Wing she hadn’t been allowed into before. She passed room after room stuffed with the paraphernalia of a hundred churches and temples. There were raiments and vestments. There were altars and torches and censers and miters. There were a thousand flavors of incense.
She picked up a bundle of sacred staffs tied together with twine—she recognized a bishop’s crosier among them, and a druidical shillelagh. This was a different class of hardware from what she was used to handling, to the say least. It looked like rubbish to her. But who could tell for sure without testing? Maybe this was the industrial-strength stuff. Maybe this really was the big iron, the magical equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider. You couldn’t rule it out till you’d ruled it out. Could you?
So Julia joined Project Ganymede. She pitched in with the others, doing what nerds do: she sliced and diced, organized and spreadsheeted, drew up checklists and then checked the hell out of them. The magicians of Murs chanted, drank, sacrificed, fasted, bathed, painted their faces, consulted the stars, and huffed odd gases from bubbling liquids.
It was hard to assimilate the sight of the solemn, gawky Gummidgy ululating and tripping on peyote, topless and in full face paint, but as Pouncy pointed out, in the context of their present field of study, this was what rigor looked like. (Asmodeus swore, in hushed tones, glittering with suppressed merriment, that Pouncy and Gummidgy were running Bacchic sex rituals on the sly, but if she had proof she declined to make it available to Julia.) They had to find out if there was a magical technique behind all this messy crap, and if there was, who knew, maybe it would make the stuff in the three-ring binders look like bar mitzvah magic.
At the point when Julia joined Project Ganymede, Pouncy didn’t have much to show by way of results, but he’d seen enough to keep hoping that it wasn’t a complete waste of time, all red herring and no white whale. Apparently Iris had been trying a new transcription of a Sumerian chant the other night when something like a swarm of insects issued—no other word really applied—from her mouth. It hovered in the middle of the room for a second, buzzing fiercely, and then broke a window and disappeared outside. Iris couldn’t speak for two days afterward. The thing had scorched her throat coming out.
There were other hints too, scattered manifestations of something, nobody even had a theory as to what. Objects moving by themselves. Glasses and pots shattering. There were those phantom giant footsteps that had woken Julia up. Fiberpunk—the fireplug metamagician—had fasted and meditated for three days, and on the morning of the fourth he swore he’d seen a hand in a ray of sunshine, felt it reach down and gently touch his pudgy face with its hot fingers.
But nobody else could make it happen. That’s what was frustrating. Magic wasn’t a perfect linear grid or anything, but compared with magic religion was just chaos, a complete junk pile. Sure, it was plenty ritualized, and formalized, and codified, but the rituals didn’t deliver consistent, reproducible results. The thing about real magic was, once you learned a spell, and you cast it properly, and you weren’t too tired, and the Circumstances hadn’t shifted while you weren’t looking, then it worked, generally speaking. But this religious stuff didn’t give good data. Pouncy was convinced that if they could drill down far enough, parse the underlying grammar, they’d have the basis for an entirely new and radically more powerful magical technique, but the further down they drilled the more chaotic and less grammatical it got. Sometimes it felt like there was some capricious, mischievous presence on the other side that was pressing buttons and pulling levers at random, just to piss them off.
Pouncy had the patience for it, to sit and wait out the noisy data until the patterns emerged, but Pouncy was a singular individual. So while he and his acolytes pored over sacred texts, and filled hard drive after hard drive with chaotic pseudo-data, Asmodeus took a smaller group out into the field in search of a shortcut. She went looking for a live specimen.
Pouncy wasn’t thrilled to find Asmo leading a splinter movement, but she stood up to him with the icy firmness of a seventeen-year-old corporate vice president. There was, she explained, although everybody already knew, a population of magical beings on Earth. It was a modest population, as Earth wasn’t an especially hospitable environment for them. Magically speaking, the soil was rocky and bitter, the air thin, the winters harsh. Life on Earth for a fairy was analogous to life in the Arctic for a human. They survived, but they did not thrive. And yet some few remained—the Inuits, by analogy, of the magical world.
Among those few there was a hierarchy. Some were more powerful, some less so. At the bottom were the vampires, seedy serial killers from whose population the non-sociopaths had been bred hundreds of generations ago by natural selection. Empathy was not a survival trait among the strigoi. They were not well liked.
But above them were any number of orders of fairies and elementals and lycanthropes and one-off oddities, leading up the power chain. And this was where Asmodeus saw her opportunity: if she worked her way up the ladder, patiently, rung by rung, who knows where she might get. She might not get all the way to gods, but she might meet somebody who knew somebody who had the gods’ fax number. It beat fasting.
To begin with they kept things local: day trips to hot spots within easy striking distance. Enough of Provence was still farmland and parkland that they could still ferret out indigenous sprites, minor river sirens, even the odd wyvern without much trouble. But that was small-fry. As July turned to August, and the hills around Murs lit up with lavender fields so idyllically beautiful they looked like something you’d see on a calendar in a dentist’s office, Asmodeus and her handpicked team, which now included Failstaff as well, disappeared into the field for days at a time.
Their efforts were not at first conspicuously successful. Asmo would knock on Julia’s door at three in the morning, dead leaves in her hair and holding a two-thirds-full bottle of Prosecco, and they would sit on Julia’s bed while Asmo described a night of fruitless bullshitting in Old Provençal with a bunch of lutins—basically the French equivalent of your common leprechaun—who kept trying to crawl up under her (admittedly invitingly short) skirt.
But there was progress. Failstaff kept a special room, neatly swept, with a white tablecloth set with fresh food, as a kind of honeypot for local spirits called fadas, who would come bearing good luck in their right hands, bad in their left. Asmo woke her up crowing about having gotten an audience with the Golden Goat, a being usually seen only by shepherds, and from a distance.
It wasn’t all good luck and Golden Goats. One night Asmo came back with wet hair, shivering in the early autumn chill, after a drac, in the middle of an otherwise perfectly civil interview, had abruptly pulled her right into the Rhône. The next day she saw the thing in the supermarket in the shape of a man, stocking its shopping cart with jars of anchovies. It winked at her merrily.
Plus somebody was stealing their hubcaps. Asmo thought it must be a local trickster-deity called Reynard the Fox. He was supposed to be some kind of anti-gentry, anti-clerical hero of the peasantry, but she just considered Him a pain in the ass.
One morning Julia saw Failstaff at breakfast looking as grim as she’d ever seen him. Over espresso and muesli he swore to her that he’d seen a black horse with a back as long as a school bus, with thirty crying children mounted on it, match speeds with them last night as they drove home in the van. It paced them for two solid minutes, sometimes trotting on the ground, sometimes galloping along up on power lines or across the treetops. Then it leaped straight into a river, kids and all. They stopped and waited, but it never came back up. Real, or illusion? They searched the papers for stories about missing kids, but they never found anything.
