Sunset of the Gods - By Steve White Page 0,22
Fleet is about as much on his own as a wet-navy skipper before they had the telegraph, and his legal status reflects that. With us, it’s even more extreme. The ‘message-drop’ system gives us a not-very-satisfactory way to send information to our own time, but there’s absolutely no way we can get information—or instructions—back. The Temporal Service may look like a loose-jointed quasimilitary organization, with no formal rank structure and everybody on a first-name basis, but in the crunch, a mission leader has legal enforcement powers that Captain Bligh would have envied. And I will have my orders obeyed, even if they cause you trouble because of the way you feel about aliens. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I thought it would be. You’re military, and you understand the necessity for this. The civilian members of extratemporal expeditions can’t be expected to, and we prefer not to rub their noses in it unless it’s absolutely necessary, which it usually isn’t.” Deciding that he had struck the right balance, Jason turned away. “Now let’s get back to Drs. Landry and Frey. They’re probably getting worried.”
The two academics did in fact look jittery, but they still waited by the roadway. Thank God, Jason breathed inwardly. They’re the kind that can follow orders. He’d had altogether too much experience with the other kind.
“What happened?” asked Landry, not unreasonably.
Jason never kept secrets from expedition members unless he had to. He forthrightly described what he and Mondrago both believed they had seen and had tried unsuccessfully to catch. His listeners’ excitement—Landry’s at the possible grain of truth in a Greek myth, Chantal’s at a possible unsuspected nonhuman race—was palpable. He firmly squelched it.
“For now we’re going to have to file this away under the heading of ‘unexplained mysteries, to be deferred until later.’ And we won’t mention this incident to any of the locals. Clear? Now let’s get going.”
They descended into the rocky lowlands of Attica and walked on along the dusty road, past clumps of marjoram and thyme, and asphodel-covered meadows. They began to encounter people, but no one took any particular notice of them, save for an occasional glance occasioned by the oddity of a woman traveling abroad. But Chantal had wrapped her himation modestly around her head and face, so no one looked scandalized.
In this era long before automobiles, there could be little “sprawl.” Besides which, there was something to be said for living within the protection of the walls. So the city was sharply defined. Landry had mentioned that historical demographers estimated its population at this time at a little over seven thousand, and that of the entire polis or city-state of Attica as maybe a hundred and fifty thousand counting slaves and resident foreigners.
“Athens was almost the only ‘city-state’ that really was one,” he explained as they approached the walls. “Most of them were almost completely rural, with a little asty, or town, of not more than two or three thousand at the center of the agros, or countryside. So ‘city-state’ is a completely misleading translation of polis.”
“Then why did the term become so well established?” inquired Chantal.
“Because we historians have always fixated on Athens, which was atypical to the point of being sui generis. It became—or ‘will become,’ I suppose I should say—even more atypical after the Persian Wars in the Periclean era, as the capital of an empire of ‘allied’ states, with a previously unheard-of population of over thirty thousand for the city itself and maybe as many as half a million for the entire polis.”
They entered Athens through the Dipylon Gate, whose fortifications lacked the moat and forward defenses that would be added later, after this era’s thoroughly unimpressive wall had been destroyed by the Persians in 480 b.c. and afterwards rebuilt. The man they were seeking was destined to be the driving force behind that rebuilding, and much else besides.
They passed through the labyrinthine alleys of the malodorous potters’ quarter known as the Ceramicus, although in truth it was as noted for its cheap whores as for its ceramics. A number of the former were in evidence, or at least the women they saw had to be assumed to be such, for Athens’s sixth-century b.c. lawgiver Solon (one of the most consummate misogynists ever to draw breath, according to Landry) had laid it down that any woman seen in public alone was presumed to be a prostitute. Only the direction-finding feature of Jason’s computer implant enabled them to find their way through that maze, for they knew in