The Age Of Zeus (45 page)

"Though not completely. Not yet. All at once, the professor told me, the rat desisted in its efforts to batter through the sink bowl, let out a spine-tingling squeal of pain, and then went quiet. Moments later, blood came oozing out from beneath the bowl's rim. Xander tentatively stepped off, lifted the bowl, and peeked in. The rat was lying on its side, stone dead. The blood was gushing out from all its orifices. It was only then that Xander realised his professor was standing nearby and had borne witness to the whole escapade. A week later, Xander was sent down. The gates of the university were closed behind him. He was out on his ear."

"But that wasn't the end of it."

"Sam, it was barely even the beginning. Xander wasn't about to let a small thing like being turfed out of one of the most prestigious higher-education establishments in the world stand in his way. Not now that he had a goal in life: besting his old man.

"For several months he moped around the house, not doing much, brooding. I kept encouraging him to go out, have some fun, be with friends. What I failed to appreciate was that Xander had no friends. With all his shenanigans, moving from school to school, and then his intensive work habits at university, he'd not got round to making any. Least of all did he have a girlfriend, despite there not being any shortage of potential candidates. He was a handsome lad, and wealthy. Young ladies would throw themselves at him - and then bounce off, rebuffed by his indifference. His hair had started silvering prematurely, as mine did, but that didn't make him any less attractive. It lent him a distinguished, wiser-than-his-years air. But he did not capitalise on his many personal assets. He did not, as they say these days, 'get a life.' He refused to. He just stayed at home, and he was this awkward presence on the property, like a human thundercloud constantly hanging overhead and darkening the atmosphere.

"And still we would clash, he and I. A lot of the time we were civil to each other and you could almost have mistaken us for close acquaintances. Not friends, and definitely not father and son, but two people who shared a grudging mutual liking. Largely, though, we were at war. That ideological stuff again. Not simply about my line of work any more. Broader-ranging subjects. Politics. Religion. The state of the world. The ultimate fate of humankind. The big questions. Whatever stance I took on a topic, Xander would automatically take the opposite stance, regardless of whether he believed in it or not. After a while it didn't seem to matter to him if he was spouting nonsense, so long as the nonsense ran contrary to my opinion. The practice of opposing me became so ingrained, it turned into his reality, and he could no longer tell the difference between what he was pretending to think just to be antagonistic and what he genuinely thought.

"If, therefore, I said I thought the human race would survive, because our ingenuity and knowhow would enable to us to meet all the challenges thrown up by overpopulation, environmental degradation and the rest, Xander would flatly disagree, saying we were doomed. If I said, being something of an optimist, that I could foresee a time when liberal democracy would be universal, there would be a supreme governing world body and war would become a thing of the past, Xander would insist that history would continue on in its current, shambolic, violent way until eventually we wiped ourselves out. Almost in the same breath, however, he might add that some form of pan-national rule could be humankind's salvation. If someone powerful enough was in charge, if some strict global authority took control, then order could be maintained, problems curbed, and the future ensured."

"He wasn't above contradicting himself."

"Nor above espousing an orthodoxy that ought to have been abhorrent to someone with his heritage. My parents were refugees, you know. They quit Austria just before the
Anschluss
, in the nick of time. I reminded Xander of that fact often - how his grandparents had had to leave behind everything they knew, home, possessions, and quite a few of their loved ones, and seek sanctuary in this country, and then had had to watch helplessly as friends and relatives were rounded up and taken away by the Nazis, never to be heard from again. A powerful leadership of the kind he was advocating, running the world by force, was not simply morally repugnant, it was an insult to his own ancestry. His notion of saving the world by enslaving it was the one thing he said that truly irked me, the one thing guaranteed to make me lose my temper with him, and so it goes without saying that it was the viewpoint he voiced the most often and the most vehemently. He'd found a chink in my armour and kept stabbing his sword there."

"Was that what you had your final argument about? The one that led to Xander storming out and never coming back?"

"That? No. That was about money, of all things. Xander turned twenty-one, and at that point came in line to inherit a substantial trust fund which I had been building up for him. I, however, was not convinced he should have it, so I set about amending the terms of the trust so that it would remain under my custodianship for a further four years. By that time, I reckoned, Xander would have conquered his inner demons and be mature and responsible enough to handle being quite so rich.

"When he got wind of what I was trying to do, he went berserk. He threatened to sue me. He engaged the services of a firm of vicious Inner Temple Rottweilers and warned me that if I didn't let him have the money he would drag me through the High Court and make sure that the case was highly publicised, that every reader of every newspaper and lifestyle magazine in the land knew what a rotten father I was and how miserable I had made his life, how I callously plied my evil trade and how I laughed at the suffering my weapons brought to the world. This was no mere bluster, either, I had no doubt on that score. Xander would do it. He'd do it all, and worse. He'd expose me to the full glare of public scrutiny, and the consequences would be grim, both for me personally and for Daedalus.

"So I had no choice. No choice at all but to be blackmailed by my own son into handing over a small fortune in gilts, blue-chip stock and property."

"How much in total?"

"People are so fascinated with figures, aren't they?"

"Only the large ones."

"I'd estimate the fund was worth something in the region of one hundred million sterling."

"Phew."

"Enough, more than enough, to leave Xander in a very comfortable position for the remainder of his life. So what did he do with it? He only went and cashed in the lot, incurring, I might add, a hideous amount of capital gains tax along the way. And then, bank account groaning with readies, he disappeared. Just disappeared. For five years there was neither sight nor sound of him. I put out feelers, asked people who might know where he was if they'd seen him, even hired a private investigator for a while.

"But Xander was gone. He had vanished utterly. That much money can buy you a great deal of privacy and anonymity if you use it right. It can also buy you the time and the wherewithal to carry out further scientific research and to perfect certain methods you have already established."

"He was carrying on with his genetic manipulation experiments?"

"Clearly he was. At some undisclosed location - I suspect in South America, where laws are generally lax and lawmakers bribable, but possibly China - Xander got very busy. And made great strides. And the results are now in evidence for all to see."

"The Olympians."

"The Olympians. I imagine the non-human monsters were Xander's earliest successes, his prototypes and his first concrete results - splicing various different animal species together or super-enhancing existing ones. Once he'd made them work, and they didn't die as that rat had, similar hybridisation techniques with human subjects would be the next step."

"For example, the Minotaur."

"That malodorous beast over there, yes. It would have been a man once, as your instinct told you, Sam, until Xander got his hands on him. Who? Who was the person that now resides within that bull-like form? I've no idea. The same with all the other humanoid monsters, and with the Olympians themselves. Who used they to be, before? I do not know. Volunteers, one must assume, if not all then at least some of them. You'd have to ask Xander himself for the full answer.

"All I know is, at the Olympians' very first public appearance, when they gatecrashed that General Assembly session of the United Nations, I recognised Zeus and fathomed immediately what my son had been up to during those five wilderness years. It was obvious to me, too, what he intended to do thereafter, and sure enough the world was soon under the jackboot of the kind of powerful, authoritarian leadership he'd spoken of so often and with such relish.

"What's more, what was worse as far as I was concerned, was that Xander had dressed himself and his cronies in the guise of the Greek pantheon, from the weaponry right down to the ringleted hair and the peplos gowns. It was a personal insult, a direct slap in the face to me. 'Here,' he was telling me, 'these are the myths you love, Dad. Look what I've done with them. See how I've perverted them. See what I've turned them into.'

"I'm not ashamed to admit that it was when this sank in - the way my son was making a mockery of something dear to me - that I felt for the first time true loathing for him. That is not a thing a parent will do lightly, hate their own offspring. You can resent your kids, be exasperated by them, wish they were less spiteful, be driven to distraction by them, but beneath it all you keep on loving them. But not me, not any more.

"Now I hated Xander. I hated him beyond all compare. Beyond all enduring. It was agony to me that I hated him so much. It made me physically unwell. But there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't help myself. I wanted to wring the vile, contemptuous, ungrateful little wretch's neck. And that feeling only got worse as the Olympians began rampaging all over the earth, behaving far more intemperately and irresponsibly than their mythical exemplars ever did. Gods unfettered. Deities who treated humans with no more care or respect than we do ants. The Obliteration... I watched the reports of that with sickness in my heart, more so than anyone else, I'm sure. Not only was it unspeakably appalling, but to some extent I was to blame. I was to blame for that and for all of the Olympians' acts of bloodshed. Because the Olympians' ringleader, their progenitor, was my son. My own flesh and blood, who had spurned me, who had used money I'd given him to finance this grandiose exercise in super-powered fascism, and who was, as a happy by-product of his mission to 'save' the planet, rendering my business empire increasingly invalid and driving it almost to the brink of bankruptcy."

"So you decided to fight back."

"Absolutely I did."

"You couldn't just have tried to unmask him publicly instead? Gone on telly and told everyone the truth about the Olympians?"

"Would anyone have believed me? And might Xander simply not have had me silenced if I had? Besides, that was not my way. I knew what I must do. Where Xander had used biotechnology, I would use plain old technology. Where he had turned people into living weapons, I would give people weapons. Where he had enhanced them from the inside out, I would do it from the outside in. Whatever he had achieved, I would achieve too, in inverted form. I would take him on at his own game and I would win!"

"Which brings us to where we are now."

"In the throes of Titanomachy II. And not doing too badly so far, either. Tell me, Sam, what was it that made you finally twig? About Xander, I mean. Was it something I said? What about the mural? Did that have anything to do with it?"

"There is a whole fathers-and-son theme in evidence here, Mr Landesman. You and Xander, the mural - it's all there. But what actually made something click in my brain was Zeus quoting Sophocles on TV."

"Ah, Xander's classical education showing through. He did pay attention in some of his lessons other than biology."

"Not only was it a line about wishing not to be have been born -"

"A sly dig."

"- but it was from a play about Oedipus."

"A tragedy centring on a son who, among other things, murders his father."

"A veiled threat from Xander to his own father."

"Not so veiled, if you're the person being threatened and the threat is couched specifically for you alone to understand."

"Dez also noticed that you and Zeus talk alike."

"The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, much though the tree might wish it otherwise."

"And the two of you are physically similar. The resemblance is there if you look for it. So it was a combination of all those things, but the Sophocles line was the key, the rope that lassoed them all together."

"Well, now that everything is out in the open and we've cleared the air, Sam, what next? What do you propose to do?"