"Oh, I know you did," Zeus said. "You've been telling us that constantly. Trouble is, no one has been listening. You're like Cassandra, blessed with the gift of accurate prophecy, cursed with the inability to convince others that what you're saying it true. It's been amusing, and heartbreaking, watching you try and trip us up, make us admit we're not gods. Thwarted every time. Coming up against a wall of incomprehension again and again."
"They have no idea, do they?" Sam said. "The rest of them."
"Not a clue. Only one person in the whole wide world knows the truth about the Olympians. Me. Make that two people now. Although, the knowledge won't remain yours for long."
"Ah. You are going to kill me after all."
Zeus shook his head wonderingly, bemused. "Don't you see, Sam? Don't you get it? I have no wish to kill you. Not any more."
"You don't?"
"Nor harm you in any way. Right now, all I want to do is make myself understood to you. Will you hear me out?"
"Do I have an alternative?"
"Not as such."
"Then go ahead, talk."
68. AN AUDACIOUS LIE
"My father must have told you all about me," said Zeus. "How else could you have known that someone called Xander Landesman ever existed? Not that he does any longer. I had Argus wipe every trace he could find of that person from the public record. There may be scraps of paper here or there in some national archive confirming that a Xander Landesman once walked the earth, but nothing easily located. From the databases that people habitually consult, he is gone. That was necessary to do before the Olympians went public, partly so that my wretched father couldn't stand up and say, 'Wait. That's not Zeus. That's my son.'"
"He still could have," said Sam. "Why not? Even if you'd left nothing to prove Xander was alive, plenty of people would surely remember him — schoolmates, teachers, staff at your father's house. Your dad could've found someone to back him up."
"I'd disappeared for five years, and come back looking nothing like I used to. My hair was long and had gone completely silver. I'd grown a beard. And memories are short. I'd passed through various educational establishments like a poltergeist, causing plenty of havoc but never staying long enough to leave a lasting impression. Also, the turnover of staff chez Landesman was quite rapid. I was counting on all that preventing people from recognising me, and I calculated that my father would realise he'd have difficulty backing up his claims about Zeus's true identity and so would refrain from making them."
"Maybe he'd be too embarrassed to, as well, after you Olympians started throwing your weight about."
"That would be for him to say. As for other people, past acquaintances — well, after five years, if it ever occurred to anyone to wonder what became of Xander Landesman, they'd no doubt assume from the absence of evidence that he was dead. Another poor little rich boy gone off the rails, lost to some addiction or other. Another privileged life flushed down the gold-plated toilet. More to the point, who'd care who Zeus really was, who'd even think to ask, when Zeus was so self-evidently the Zeus? With those powers, who else could he be?"
"OK," said Sam. "I'll buy that, just about. You gambled that nobody would connect Xander and Zeus, or be able to, and it paid off."
"It did, and that was crucial to the success of the whole enterprise. The same applied with the rest of the Pantheon. As long as they looked and acted like the gods of Greek myth, as long as they could do what those gods used to, few would think to look past that and probe deeper. Fewer still would consider that these gods might formerly have been ordinary people. And anyway, as with me, Argus had purged the relevant records, leaving the electronic slate wiped clean. It was an audacious lie, presenting ourselves to the world as deities, but if told convincingly and with impressive feats to back it up, it was a lie that could easily be swallowed."
"Especially if only one person involved knew it was a lie."
"And I've maintained the deception assiduously," Zeus said. "None of the other Olympians even suspects that I am anything other than king of the Pantheon, the Cloud-Gatherer, God Of Gain, and all the rest. I've made sure of that."
"How? With all those arguments over the dinner table, rehashing stories from the myths?"
"That helps reinforce the indoctrination."
"Indoctrination? You've brainwashed them?"
Zeus rolled his eyes. "That makes it sound like something from an old spy movie. With psychedelic lights and whirly music and a sinister reverbed voice repeating statements over and over — is that how you think it was done? Much subtler than that, Sam. And more sophisticated."
"Some kind of hypnotic suggestion, though."
"Implantation of concepts at a somatic level, yes, while the subject is in a state of deep relaxation. The ideas take root and propagate in the unconscious, growing until they overtake the conscious mind and turn subjective reality into objective. Bolstered by neurolinguistic programming techniques, it's surprisingly effective. Here, listen to this."
He went over and switched the laptop on. While the machine booted up, Sam's gaze strayed towards the door. She could make a run for it, but where would she go? The stronghold itself remained a prison. Part of her, besides, itched to know the full story behind the Olympians. She might as well stay put until Zeus had revealed all.
With a few keystrokes Zeus triggered a playback of an audio recording. It was his own voice, reciting part of a myth.
"…Actaeon made the grave error of approaching the lake where you were bathing and spying on you from a thicket. Can you see the lake? The thicket? Your keen instincts alerted you to his presence, however — a tiny snap of a twig underfoot — and in outrage you changed the mortal voyeur into a stag. He's changing now. Now he is a stag. Can you picture his antlers? Actaeon's own hunting hounds then set on him and gave chase, and soon caught up with their transformed master and tore him to pieces. You can hear the dogs' savage snarls, the sound of his flesh ripping, hear his screams…"
Zeus hit Stop. "I have over a hundred hours' worth of material stored here," he said, "culled from the major literary sources, each section filed according to which member of the Pantheon it pertains to. Those questions and observational remarks that break up the narrative? That's NLP. It forces the subject to visualise events in the story, making them more immediate and anchoring memory recall to these specific verbal stimuli. But beyond simply having the Olympians listen to stories about themselves while in a trance state, I availed myself of gene number VMAT2, popularly known as the 'god gene.' It's a gene encoded with an integral membrane protein that carries neurotransmitters around the immune system. Tests have shown that it's also responsible for rendering humans susceptible to belief in mystic forces and a higher power. Manipulation of VMAT2, a sneaky bit of reassignment, made my Olympians compliant, more liable to believe in themselves as gods. It gave them a sense of their own transcendence. Because, of course, genetic engineering is what this is really all about."
"So your dad said," said Sam. "He told me about your rat."
Zeus chuckled, recollecting. "Ah yes, the rat. It was quite a thing. Scared the life out of me at the time, but with hindsight it was my eureka moment. That was when I understood that I could actually make this whole thing work, that the theoretical was practicable. Most of my five wilderness years was spent advancing and perfecting the processes which had led to the creation of that freakishly strong rat. I isolated and cross-spliced and developed and tested and tested and tested once again until anything was within my reach, anything at all. I became a choreographer of the genome. More artist than scientist, I could make those chromosomes and nucleotides dance and prance and cavort. I could enhance and improve any living thing. A housecat with the speed of a cheetah? No problem. A chimpanzee with the strength of a silverback gorilla? Easy. A brown trout with the aggression and killer instinct of a great white shark? A breeze."