“And Zeus?” I asked. “You never ran into him anywhere, after you all left Olympus?”
“No. Never even once.”
I pondered that. “So how did you manage to stay so healthy?”
“I’m Aphrodite. The life-force. Beauty. Passion. Those things don’t go out of fashion for long. I’ve done all right for myself, over the years.”
“Ah. Yes. Obviously you have.”
The waitress fluttered around us. I was boiling with questions to ask Aphrodite, but it was time to order, and that was what we did. The usual Greek things, stuffed grape leaves, grilled fish, overcooked vegetables. Another bottle of wine. My head was pulsating. The restaurant was small, crowded, a whirlpool of noise. The nearness of Aphrodite was overwhelming. I felt dizzy. It was a surprisingly pleasant sensation.
I said, after a time, “I’m convinced that Zeus is still around somewhere. I’m going to find him and this time I’m going to whip his ass and put him under Mount Etna.”
“It’s amazing how much like a small boy an immortal being can be. Even one as huge and frightful as you.”
My face turned hot. I said nothing.
“Forget Zeus,” she urged. “Forget Typhoeus, too. Stay human. Eat, drink, be merry.” Her eyes were glistening. I felt as if I were falling forward, tumbling into the sweet chasm between her breasts. “We could take a trip together. I’d teach you how to enjoy yourself. How to enjoy me, too. Tell me; have you ever been in love?”
“Echidna and I—”
“Echidna! Yes! You and she got together and made a bunch of hideous monsters like yourselves, with too many heads and drooling fangs. I don’t mean Echidna. This is Earth, here and now. I’m a woman now and you’re a man.”
“But Zeus—”
“Zeus,” she said scornfully. She made the name of the Lord of Olympus sound like an obscenity.
We finished eating and I paid the check and we went outside into the mild, breezy Mykonos night, strolling for fifteen or twenty minutes, winding up finally in a dark, deserted part of the town, a warehouse district down by the water, where the street was no more than five feet wide and empty shuttered buildings with whitewashed walls bordered us on both sides.
She turned to me there and pulled me abruptly up against her. Her eyes were bright with mischief. Her lips sought mine. With a little hissing sound she nudged me backward until I was leaning against a wall, and she was pressing me tight, and currents of energy that could have fired a continent were passing between us. I think there could have been no one, not man nor god, who would not have wanted to trade places with me just then.
“Quickly! The hotel!” she whispered.
“The hotel, yes.”
We didn’t bother to walk. That would have taken too long. In a flash we vanished ourselves from that incomprehensible tangle of mazelike streets and reappeared in her room at our hotel, and from then to dawn she and I generated such a delirium of erotic force that the entire island shook and shivered with the glorious Sturm und Drang of it. We heaved and thrust and moaned and groaned, and rivers of sweat ran from our bodies and our hearts pounded and thundered and our eyes rolled in our heads from giddy exhaustion, for we allowed ourselves the luxury of mortal limitations for the sake of the mortal joy of transcending those limitations. But because we weren’t mortal we also had the option of renewing our strength whenever we had depleted it, and we exercised that option many a time before rosy-fingered dawn came tiptoeing up over the high-palisaded eastern walls.
Naked, invisible to prying eyes, Aphrodite and I walked then hand in hand along the morning-shimmering strand of the fish-swarming sea, and she murmured to me of the places we would go, the things we would experience.
“The Taj Mahal,” she said. “And the summer palace at Udaipur. Persepolis and Isfahan in springtime. Baalbek. Paris, of course. Carcassonne. Iguacu Falls, and the Blue Mosque, and the Fountains of the Blue Nile. We’ll make love in the Villa of Tiberius on Capri—and between the paws of the Sphinx—and in the snow on top of Mount Everest—’’
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”
And what I was thinking was, Zeus. Zeus. Zeus. Zeus.
And so we travel about the world together, Aphrodite and I, seeing the things in it that are beautiful, and there are many of those; and so she distracts me from my true task. For the time being. It is very pleasant, traveling with Aphrodite; and so I permit myself to be distracted this way.
But I have not forgotten my purpose. And this is my warning to the world.
I am a restless being, a mighty thrusting force. I was created that way. My adversary doesn’t seem currently to be around. But Zeus is here somewhere. I know he is. He wears a mask. He disguises himself as a mortal, either because it amuses him to do so, or because he has no choice, for there is something in the world of which he is afraid, something from which he must hide himself, some god greater even than Zeus, as Zeus was greater than Cronus and Cronus was greater than Uranus.
But I will find him. And when I do, I will drop this body and take on my own form again. I will stand mountain-high, and you will see my hundred heads, and my fires will flash and range. And Zeus and I will enter into combat once more, and this time I will surely win.
It will happen.
I promise you that, O small ones. I warn you. It will happen.
You will tremble then. I’m sorry for that. The mind that came with this body I wear now has taught me something about compassion; and so I regret the destruction I will inevitably visit upon you, because it cannot be avoided, when Zeus and I enter into our struggle. You have my sincerest apologies, in advance. Protect yourselves as best you can. But for me there can be no turning away from my task.
Zeus? This is Typhoeus the Titan who calls you!
Zeus, where are you?
Afterword
He wrote a lot of magnificent, unforgettable science fiction, sure, but so did my late and still lamented friends X, Y, and Z, and yet their deaths didn’t have the kick-in-the-belly impact of Roger’s. For one thing, it came so soon. Fifty-eight isn’t an appropriate age for dying—especially when you’re as youthful and vigorous and full of life and creative energy as Roger still was. But I lament him also because he was such a sweet and completely lovable man.
I knew him almost thirty years, and I had hoped to know him thirty years more, and now that is not to be. In all those three decades I never heard him utter an unkind word about anyone. (Nor did I ever hear anybody utter an unkind word about him.) He was a man of great patience, high good humor, and warm goodwill, as I learned when the inordinately punctual Robert Silverberg showed up an hour late for dinner with him two times running, for a different silly reason each time. In all senses of the word he was a joyous man to know.
So I’m going to miss the author of “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” and “... And Call Me Conrad” and all the rest of those wonderful stories, sure. We’ll never know now what marvels of inventiveness were about to emerge from his fertile mind. But most of all I’ll miss my friend Roger. If you live long enough, you’re going to outlive a lot of your friends, and you come to expect that after a time, although you don’t ever quite get used to the frequency and inevitability of the losses. This one, though, is a particularly hard one to accept.