Chapter 17. In which our narrator makes the Gods very angry. Very angry indeed!

So (I said to Blake), about four thousand years ago I was looking in on one of my herd villages in Greece. What, Blake? Okay, I started domesticating my own breed of human beings somewhere between nine thousand and ninety-five hundred years ago. You have ... eighty-three minutes left to live. How much detail do you want me to go into here? Okay, good. So, four thousand years ago I was making my rounds, and when I went to check on my village in Greece, they weren’t there.

Every single one of them, man, woman, child, and toothless grandma, was on the road to Athens, of all places. In their minds I could see that they were going to the temple of Zeus to pay tribute. Now this sort of thing was a direct violation of my orders, but I couldn’t move them. I could get into their minds and tell them to turn around, but they wouldn’t do it. Something was controlling them.

I have to tell you that scared the living bejeezus out of me. I had been in complete control of my herds for over five thousand years at that point, and believe me I knew what I was doing. If there was something out there that could get a whole herd village to completely ignore me, that was a force to be reckoned with. So I tagged along for the ride to see what was going on.

Now, mind you, I figured this “Zeus” thing was a scam, just like all religions. I mean, I had seen countless religions across the eons. Humans populations are prone to catching religion the way that individual humans are prone to catching the common cold. It always starts out innocently enough, you know, like that little Vonnegut ditty:

Tiger got to hunt. Bird got to fly.
Man got to sit and wonder “why, why, why?”
Tiger got to sleep. Bird got to land.
Man got to tell himself he understand.

People just get tired of wondering “why”, or, just as often, tired of their kids pestering them with “why”, and they just make up any old thing to fill in the gaps of their understanding. That’s how fairies, sprites, demons, dryads, nymphs, monsters, and, yes, gods, come into “existence”. For some reason the god-memes are particularly virulent, and once a particular god-meme catches hold somewhere, power-hungry schemers use the meme to scam the guileless. And that in a nutshell, my friends, is how religions start. Trust me, I’ve seen it happen too many times to make a mistake about this.

But apparently I had made a mistake this time. My villagers had patiently waited their turn to enter the temple for about half a day. Of course, I could have entered the temple at any time, just by observing someone who was already in there, but I was still trying to figure out what had been done to my tribe. But instead I ran out of time. That evening, my villagers were ushered in, and I finally got to see who was scamming them so well that I had lost control of them. I expected to see some icon or statue of this “Zeus” character surrounded by priests, but that’s not what I saw.

What I saw was a freaking God! “Zeus” was really there. And he was so powerful. And so magnificent. And so awesome. And so glowy bright. And... Fuck! He almost trapped me! I got out of my villagers’ minds and tried to figure out what the hell had happened.

Only the fact that I was “just observing” had saved me. If I had been actually riding one of those villagers I would have been as completely enthralled as they were. This Zeus was some kind of direct mind controller, and he was moving in and taking over!

After this fiasco, I managed to do some discreet poking around throughout the rest of Greece and found the same thing everywhere. By carefully limiting my time observing through any one human, I was able to find out what was going on. I discovered that there were twelve of these so-called “Gods” and that they had established a base of operations on Mount Olympus, far to the north of Athens, but they had temples, like the ones in Athens, all over the place.

These creatures, whatever they were, had real power, real magic as far as I was concerned. But I knew that they were not real Gods, that they were some kind of interlopers. How did I know they were not the real thing? Well, for one thing, I had been through this part of the world hundreds, if not thousands, of times in the previous seven thousand years and there had never been any hint of their existence before. Yet they claimed that they had founded and controlled Greece from its very beginning, and they made their followers believe it! Those claims were just as ludicrous as their claims to have created the whole universe, but their followers believed them with a fierce fanaticism.

I began to see that Greece was just a beginning for these “gods”. If nothing were done to stop them, they would eventually take over the whole world. And among humans, who could stop them? Any human that stood in the presence of one of these “gods” for more than a second or two was completely enthralled. They had no way to even think of fighting back.

And if these “gods” did take over the world, what would happen to me? I would have no refuge. Every human mind would be enslaved, including whichever human mind I happened to be living in at the time. If they were to find me and catch me unaware they’d own me.

The way I saw it there were two possible outcomes. The better case would be that I would just become one of their blissed out conquests. I’d live out a natural human lifespan and die, without ever swapping into another body again. The worse case would be that they would somehow discover, perhaps because I had told them, that I am a body-hopping spirit. Then for the rest of eternity I would be some kind of pet, maybe some kind of hunting dog, doing their bidding, enforcing their will, amusing my Masters and Mistresses with my cute little body-hopping antics.

I would love to claim that I wanted to save humanity just because it’s the right thing to do. And it’s true that what these bastards were doing sickened me. But the truth is, saving humanity was just a way to save myself.

Over time I found more ways to spy on them. Somewhere in my second century of observing them, I noticed that it took a couple of seconds for them to actually bewitch someone new. It took me more decades to work up the nerve, but eventually I decided to see what I could learn in that two-second window. I scoured my worldwide herd looking for someone who was a talented sketch artist. When I found my artist, I then found someone who was in the presence of one of the Olympians. In the riskiest move I had ever attempted in my whole multi-millennial life, I swapped my artist into that thrall’s body and swapped her back out again immediately.

The risk? Whenever I do one of these body swaps, I am involved. I have to go into the body. The risk for me is that I could have been wrong. I could have been enthralled instantly. But I wasn’t; my harebrained scheme actually worked. I was able to get the artist’s mind in and out in less than that time limit, that window of risk. Then I asked her to draw for me what she had seen.

This is what she drew. Look at it ... Yes, Blake, that’s right. It’s the classic “Roswell Gray” space alien:

• short

• grayish skin

• spindly arms, legs, body

• huge, bald head

• huge dark eyes

That’s what the “Greek Gods” really look like. Like something out of the National Inquirer.

It was as much a shock to me as it was to you just now, but for different reasons of course. You are seeing something that you have always thought of as a comical hoax, and now you’re realizing that maybe it isn’t. For my part, back in the Bronze Age, it was almost the opposite shock. I never really doubted that the “Greek Gods” looked like ... well... “Greek Gods”, but I was hoping that my artist would see some sceptre or wand or magic talisman that allowed them to cast their spells. I was expecting to see more than what a thrall sees. Instead I was seeing less. Just some kind of puny, man-like animal, not even wearing clothes, much less wielding magical tools.

It had taken me centuries to get that drawing, and now it felt even worse than useless. There was nothing to attack, nothing to steal. Just these puny creatures that somehow made everyone think they were gods.

To make a long story short, since I see that we now have only ... forty-seven minutes. Eventually, centuries later, I gave up on the idea of stealing their secrets. I decided that I was going to have to kill them. Now it became clear how I might be able to take advantage of that two-second window. These creatures were clearly not built for fighting. I imagined that a battle-tested swordsman could cut through one of those child-like bodies more easily than he could cut through another warrior’s neck. But how and when?

Truth to tell I worked on this for almost a whole human lifetime before taking action. I knew I was only going to get one shot and I wanted to get them all. My only chance would be a single event in which all twelve “gods” would be in close proximity to a human with a sword all at the same time.

It sounds impossible, but as it turns out it happened fairly frequently. One of the dastardly things these evil creatures loved to do was to take two Greek city-states, sometimes ones that didn’t even share a border, and set them off against each other until they started a war. I don’t know what they got out of it. Maybe they just liked literal blood-sport. Maybe they would place bets with each other on the winners and losers. Maybe they fed on the tears of orphans and widows.

In any case, one thing that you could always count on after one of these bloodbaths was that the “gods” would celebrate with the survivors. All the able-bodied soldiers on both sides would march to the foot of Mount Olympus to be “rewarded” for their “valor”. The soldiers would form up in rank and file, twelve abreast and as long as it took. Then each rank in succession would step forward and let the “gods” bliss them out, each soldier in front of one of the twelve gods.