"Not to me," Sam said. "I've no interest in forgetting who I am."
"Really, Sam? Strikes me there's a lot of past baggage you'd gladly let go of if you could. Your parents' deaths. You boyfriend's death. Your miscarriage. Your stalled police career. Perhaps also the Titans' abject failure in realising their objective. All that, I could whisk away from you, as though you were a soul in the afterlife drinking from the river Lethe, whose waters remove all remembrance of a person's time on earth. I could rid you of the pain you carry around inside you, the deep-seated traumas that have left you as you are — reserved, aloof, untrusting, cynical."
"I am none of those things!"
"You may not think so, but you do not see yourself as others see you. Have you ever loved anyone? Truly?"
"Not that it's any of your business, but yes."
"Adrian Walters?"
"Ade."
"One man. And before him? After?"
She nearly said Ramsay's name, but didn't.
"And was it love?" Zeus said. "Or more of a convenient arrangement? Ade was in the same line of work as you, therefore comfortably within the parameters of what you knew and understood. He was also inferior to you in professional terms, so not likely to threaten your self-image in that respect."
"You can't know any of that."
"I've done my homework, with Argus's assistance. I can read you, Sam, same as I read all of the candidates I chose for apotheosis. I can see into you. It's a gift I have. You're a smart but inhibited woman, with so much anger inside you, a well of frustration and aggrievedness. And I can save you from that. I can tap that well, relieve the pressure. I can unshackle you from your self-made chains, open you up to who you truly are and what you'd truly like to be. Come on, admit it, isn't that just the least bit tempting? The possibility of absolute freedom, absolute selfhood, a life lived without constraint or regret?"
Not tempting, no. Not at all.
Well, perhaps slightly.
"It does hurt," Zeus said. "It takes several days, it involves courses of injections and infusions, and the physiological alterations these cause are unpleasant while they are happening. But does the athlete not endure great hardship as he trains to become the best in his field? Does the ballerina not go through agonies as she distorts her feet and builds up calluses? If we are to become sublime, do we not have to pay first in sacrifice and suffering? You will sit in that chair and experience a sometimes unbearable level of discomfort and distress. The restraints may be necessary from time to time, if only to stop you harming yourself or me in the throes of change. And you will listen to the myths constantly while the procedure is in progress, until the transformation is complete and you are no longer Sam Akehurst but someone else, a greater being, superior in every way."
"Who?" said Sam. "Who would I become?"
"You are interested, aren't you?"
"No. Hypothetical question. Which goddess do you think I'm most like?"
"Well, it's a matter of serendipity more than anything. We have a vacancy. It just so happens that you'd be ideal to fill it."
"Artemis." She knew it. She'd known it all along, somehow.
"Artemis," Zeus confirmed. "The cool, calculating, vicious huntress. Lethal in a fight, and not one who likes to be slighted or wronged. That was a portion of her file I played to you just now. Artemis's revenge on Actaeon, who had the temerity to spy on her and saw her in her nakedness. Artemis was a virgin — inapplicable in your case, obviously, but for the ancient Greeks that was how they conceptualised her subsidiary function as divine patron of chastity and virtue. She was their idealised notion of feminine justice, untouched, untouchable, to be admired from afar but not to be roused to fury."
"The previous Artemis had dark hair."
"I believe there's such a thing as hair dye."
"She was a good three inches taller than me."
"Once you have her spear in your hands, no one will notice the height difference."
"I can't even use a spear."
"Apollo will teach you, and I will see to it that you have an aptitude for the weapon."
"And I'm no killer."
"Oh, and what were you doing in that suit my father designed if it wasn't killing? Did you not hunt down our monsters? Kill them?"
"And 'feminine justice'?"
Zeus widened his eyes. "To someone who was once a female detective sergeant, do I have to make the parallel any plainer? Sam, you are Artemis. Nobody could be the new Goddess of the Hunt better than you. You were made for it."
"Except…"
"Yes?"
"It seems like some kind of sick joke," Sam said. "I loathe Artemis. I've loathed her for so long. Since Hyde Park."
"Where this Ade of yours died."
"She killed him. Her and Apollo."
"From the accounts I've read, she didn't kill him. Neither did Apollo. He drowned. He died in the Serpentine, in a stampede, saving a girl's life."
"A stampede Artemis and Apollo caused. If it wasn't for them, he'd never even have been there."
"But did Artemis's spear go through him? Did one of Apollo's arrows? No. If anything killed him, it was his own bravery."
"But I hate her. I hate you all."
"And isn't it time to give that up?" Zeus said gently. "Where has it got you? Nowhere. Imagine if you were one of us instead. Helping shape the world. Making the future brighter, safer, better. Hating no one except those who would oppose you. Being part of the greatest force for good humankind has ever known."
A last counterargument, all Sam could muster at that moment amid the turmoil she was feeling: "Why didn't you use all this as a force for good?" She meant the chair, the serums in their phials. "Your advances in genetic engineering. Didn't it ever occur to you that, rather than make a handful of people gods, you could make everyone gods? Demeter can heal. Damn it, with a thousand like her, a few hundred even, you could set up hospitals all over the planet and cure every known disease. And think, if everyone could teleport like Hermes, there'd be no need for mechanical transport any more. No buses, no cars, no trains — no pollution. Poseidon — an army of Poseidons could irrigate deserts, make it so that crops can grow anywhere, help end famine and drought. You yourself — couldn't a host of people harnessing lightning solve the world's energy problems somehow?"
"Sam, ideas like those did flit through my mind briefly, once, before I dismissed them as the pure naivety they are. Could I have turned everyone on earth into a god? Should I? Well, apart from the impracticality and inordinate expense of attempting to do that, what do you think the result would be? Chaos. Utter chaos. People teleporting willy-nilly everywhere? What would happen to privacy, crime levels, the principles of territory and international borders? Hordes of Demeters curing all ills? So what about the population explosion that would ensue? Where would we find room for those billions of people who don't die when they're meant to?
"Say we decide to dole out the strength of a Hercules. Who to? A select few? Who'd choose that select few? So let's be democratic and give it to everyone. But if everyone is as strong as Hercules, what's the point? All it'll lead to is an exponential rise in property damage and personal injury, people literally not realising their own strength, breaking things and each other. Over and above all that, who would control this world of gods? How would it be policed? Someone even more powerful would be needed to oversee it, gods' gods. Which gets us back to where we are now."
He gesticulated with both hands, clutching empty air.
"It just doesn't work, Sam. It's not feasible. I recognised that from the start. What I could do to people needed to be done with precision and great forethought. It couldn't be universal, it had to be specific, targeted, a laser not a blunderbuss. Don't change everyone. Change a few who can change things for everyone else."