The darkness deepened and the creatures of myth jostled and tumbled on the stage, and overflowed on to the plain. They mingled with one another, old enemies exchanging gossip, old friends clasping hands, members of the same pantheon embracing or looking warily upon their rivals. They mixed with us, too, the heroes selecting women, the monsters trying to seem less monstrous, the gods shopping for worshippers.
Perhaps we had enough. But Leor would not stop. This was his time of glory.
Out of the machine came Roland and Oliver, Rustum and Sohrab, Cain and Abel, Damon and Pythias, Orestes and Pylades, Jonathan and David. Out of the machine came St. George, St. Vitus, St. Nicholas, St. Christopher, St. Valentine, St. Jude. Out of the machine came the Furies, the Harpies, the Pleiades, the Fates, the Norns. Leor was a romantic, and he knew no moderation.
All who came forth wore the aura of humanity.
But wonders pall. The Earthfolk of the middle twelves were easily distracted and easily bored. The cornucopia of miracles was far from exhausted, but on the fringes of the audience I saw people taking to the sky and heading for home. We who were close to Leor had to remain, of course, though we were surfeited by these fantasies and baffled by their abundance.
An old white-bearded man wrapped in a heavy aura left the machine. He carried a slender metal tube. “This is Galileo,” said Leor.
“Who is he?” the Procurator of Pluto asked me, for Leor, growing weary, had ceased to describe his conjured ghosts.
I had to request the information from an output in the Hall of Man. “A latter-day god of science,” I told the Procurator, “who is credited with discovering the stars. Believed to have been a historical personage before his deification, which occurred after his martyrdom by religious conservatives.”
Now that the mood was on him, Leor summoned more of these gods of science, Newton and Einstein and Hippocrates and Copernicus and Oppenheimer and Freud. We had met some of them before, in the days when we were bringing real people out of lost time, but now they had new guises, for they had passed through the mythmakers’ hands. They bore emblems of their special functions, symbols of knowledge and power, and they went among us offering to heal, to teach, to explain. They were nothing like the real Newton and Einstein and Freud we had seen. They stood three times the height of men, and lightnings played around their brows.
Then came a tall, bearded man with a bloodied head. “Abraham Lincoln,” said Leor.
“The ancient god of emancipation,” I told the Procurator, after some research.
Then came a handsome young man with a dazzling smile and also a bloodied head. “John Kennedy,” said Leor.
“The ancient god of youth and springtime,” I told the Procurator. “A symbol of the change of seasons, of the defeat of summer by winter.”
“That was Osiris,” said the Procurator. “Why are there two?”
“There are many more,” I said. “Baldur, Tammuz, Mithra, Attis.”
“Why did they need so many?” he asked.
Leor said, “Now I will stop.”
The gods and heroes were among us. A season of revelry began.
Medea went off with Jason, and Agamemnon was reconciled with Clytemnestra, and Theseus and the Minotaur took up lodgings together. Others preferred the company of men. I spoke a while with John Kennedy, the last of the myths to come from the machine. Like Adam, the first, he was troubled at being here.
“I was no myth,” he insisted. “I lived. I was real. I entered primaries and made speeches.”
“You became a myth,” I said. “You lived and died and in your dying you were transfigured.”
He chuckled. “Into Osiris? Into Baldur?”
“It seems appropriate.”
“To you, maybe. They stopped believing in Baldur a thousand years before I was born.”
“To me,” I said, “you and Osiris and Baldur are contemporaries. To me and all the people here. You are of the ancient world. You are thousands of years removed from us.”
“And I’m the last myth you let out of the machine?”
“You are.”
“Why? Did men stop making myths after the twentieth century?”
“You would have to ask Leor. But I think you are right: your time was the end of the age of myth-making. After your time we could no longer believe such things as myths. We did not need myths. When we passed out of the era of troubles we entered a kind of paradise where every one of us lived a myth of his own, and then why should we have to raise some men to great heights among us?”
He looked at me strangely. “Do you really believe that? That you live in paradise? That men have become gods?”
“Spend some time in our world,” I said, “and see for yourself.”
He went out into the world, but what his conclusions were I never knew, for I did not speak to him again. Often I encountered roving gods and heroes, though. They were everywhere. They quarreled and looted and ran amok, some of them, but we were not very upset by that, since it was how we expected archetypes out of the dawn to act. And some were gentle. I had a brief love affair with Persephone. I listened, enchanted, to the singing of Orpheus. Krishna danced for me.
Dionysus revived the lost art of making liquors, and taught us to drink and be drunk.
Loki made magics of flame for us.
Taliesin crooned incomprehensible, wondrous ballads to us.
Achilles hurled his javelin for us.
It was a season of wonder, but the wonder ebbed. The mythfolk began to bore us. There were too many of them, and they were too loud, too active, too demanding. They wanted us to love them, listen to them. Bow to them, write poems about them. They asked questions—some of them anyway—that pried into the inner workings of our world, and embarrassed us, for we scarcely knew the answers. They grew vicious and schemed against each other, sometimes causing perils for us.
Leor had provided us with a splendid diversion. But we all agreed it was time for the myths to go home. We had had them with us for fifty years, and that was quite enough.
We rounded them up, and started to put them back into the machine.
The heroes were the easiest to catch, for all their strength. We hired Loki to trick them into returning to the Hall of Man. “Mighty tasks await you there,” he told them, and they hurried thence to show their valor. Loki led them into the machine and scurried out, and Leor sent them away, Herakles, Achilles, Hector, Perseus, Cuchulainn, and the rest of that energetic breed.
After that many of the demonic ones came. They said they were as bored with us as we were with them and went back into the machine of their free will. Thus departed Kali, Legba, Set, and many more.
Some we had to trap and take by force. Odysseus disguised himself as Breel, the secretary to Chairman Peng, and would have fooled us forever if the real Breel, returning from holiday in Jupiter, had not exposed the hoax. And then Odysseus struggled. Loki gave us problems. Oedipus launched blazing curses when we came for him. Daedalus clung touchingly to Leor and begged, “Let me stay, brother! Let me stay!” and had to be thrust within.
Year after year the task of finding and capturing them continued, and one day we knew we had them all. The last to go was Cassandra, who had been living alone in a distant island, clad in rags.
“Why did you send for us?” she asked. “And, having sent, why do you ship us away?”
“The game is over,” I said to her. “We will turn now to other sports.”
“You should have kept us,” Cassandra said. “People who have no myths of their own would do well to borrow those of others, and not just as sport. Who will comfort your souls in the dark times ahead? Who will guide your spirits when the suffering begins? Who will explain the woe that will befall you? Woe! Woe!”