Never mind that the events in this "quintessential fiction," as Bray called it, were out of order and somewhat fanciful, like those in the lecture-scroll synopsis; they bespoke the presence of Polyeidus, Polyeidus, whose name I called and recalled, without effect. All his original conviction restored, Jerome Bonaparte Bray heroically concludes his appeal to the Executive Secretary of the Tidewater Foundation with a prospectus of the task ahead: In Year E (#1974/5), assuming the Foundation renews its support, he will reconstruct and reprogram Computer to compose Bellerophoniad, which he now describes as "that exquisite stain on the pure nothingness of NOTES; the crucial flaw which perfects my imitation of that imperfect genre the novel, as the artful Schizura unicornis larva mimes not the flawless hickory leaf (never found in fact), but, flawlessly, the flawed and insect-bitten truth of real hickory leaves." In Year S, Computer will make the final print-out of the complete novel; the Second American Revolution will ensue at once upon its publication, and, like the First, trigger others, this time everywhere; J. B. Bray and H. Mack II will reassume their rightful names and thrones — the monarchies at first of France and England respectively, but eventually the emperorships of West and East; all existing stocks of DDT, pyrethrin, rotenone, and similar barbarous poisons will be destroyed, their manufacture prohibited forever; and the world will be restored to a New Golden Age.
I shivered with sympathy for the vision, loftier than my own in its redemption, not of a man, but of mankind — and for pity of the poor misfortunate visionary, his dreams struck down by a hand-scrawled cover-note to the application as lightly as the humming marsh-gnats I swatted with it:
File. Forget. Throw back in the river. No need to prosecute (or reply). T. A.
There was no aiding J. B. B. (as I thought then) across the eons — though he, perhaps, had aided me. Sadly I reposted Bray's prospectus on the tide and spent the buggy night considering my own history and objectives. In the morning, impatient for the next high tide to bring its message, I strolled the beach, sun-dried, sea-salted, and skipped shells across the water. When I rereached my starting point I found in the wrack along the high-tide line where sandfleas jumped not my familiar jug but, amazingly, a clear glass bottle, unlike any I'd ever seen, wreathed in eelgrass full of sand and tiny mussels. Around the outside, in letters raised in the glass itself, a cryptic message: NO DEPOSIT NO RETURN; inside, a folded paper. Trembling, I removed the cap and tipped the bottle down; the note wouldn't pass through the neck. I cast about for a straight twig and fished in the bottle with it, grunting at each near-catch.
"For pity's sake bust it!" cried a small voice from inside. Seizing the neck, I banged the bottle on a mossed and barnacled rock. Not hard enough. My face perspired. On the third swing the glass smashed and the note fell out: half a sheet of coarse ruled stuff, folded thrice. On its top line, when I uncreased it, I found penned in deep red ink:
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
On the next-to-bottom:
YOURS TRULY
The lines between were blank, as was the space beneath the complimentary close. In a number of places, owing to the coarseness of the paper, ink spread from the letters in fibrous blots. Heartsick, I flung the blank paper down — whereupon it turned at once into a repellent little person, oddly dressed, with a sty in his eye and a smell of urine and stale cakes.
"I swear," Polyeidus said, surveying himself with a sniff: "I tried your cousin Perseus — thought it would be appropriate? And look what I end up. I should stick to letters. How are things? Never mind; I know."
"My life's a failure," I told him matter-of-factly. "I'm not a mythic hero. I never will be. I'm forty years old already. I'm going to die and be forgotten, like the rest."
"Like your brother?"
"Never mind that. How do I get to be immortal fast?"
Polyeidus squinted. "You sure you trust me? Your wife seemed to think I was out to get you last time around."
"Maybe you were. But you didn't."
"Why should I go on helping you whenever you get stuck? You think it's been fun being Old Man of the Marsh all these years?" He swatted his arm. "Goddamn mosquitoes. And seafood makes me break out."
"Evidently you had no choice," I replied. "Zeus stuck you with the job, right? So it's to your interest to get me constellated like Perseus. Who remembers the helper if the hero doesn't make it?"
"Skip the arguments," Polyeidus said. "I already know how the story ends."
I pressed him urgently for that knowledge.
"Never mind. In this part I advise you, that's enough. You want to be a mythic hero, you follow the Pattern. You want to follow the Pattern, you leave town in the Fourth Quadrant, et cetera. You want to leave town and do the second-cycle thing like Perseus, you got to get Pegasus off the ground. You want Pegasus to fly like before, you're wasting your time with me and Athene." Whether I knew it or not, he declared, riding the winged horse had always involved the goodwill of two goddesses, not one, manifested in the beneficences appropriate to each. Athene's bridle was what reined him in and steered him; but what put him in the sky was Aphrodite's sacred herb.
"Hippomanes!"
"What else? As a young man you didn't need to think of that; what you had to go looking for was the bridle. Now you're all bridle and no hip, and believe me, at your age it's not easy to find."
How so? Didn't it grow by full moonlight at the lip of Aphrodite's well, et cetera?
Polyeidus winked. "Those were the days, eh?"
In the Stygian marsh, then, where Perseus had got his gear? Ought I to shut my eyes and follow my nose, not opening the former till I was obliged to —
"Reset. Don't be naïve; it's right under your nose — which doesn't mean you'll sniff it."
I scrabbled in the reeds and rushes.
"O boy," Polyeidus said. "I tell you what: forget about revisiting the places where you did your tricks, okay? This isn't the Perseid. Instead, look up all the women you've ever loved, in order; that's the sort of thing Aphrodite goes for. Somewhere along the line you'll come across the big H. I envy you. When you get the pattern, stick to it. See you in heaven."
I had more to ask: Once refueled, where ought Pegasus and I to fly? Assuming Corinth to be my first searching-place, ought Philonoë to accompany me there, or should I avoid her until her turn came in the series? For that matter, how many women comprised the series, and which ones? I could think offhand of only two — his daughter Sibyl and my wife — for whom I'd felt a considerable degree of passion for any length of time; but there were others — the Amazon lance corporal, for example — who had attracted me powerfully for a short while, and still others with whom I'd disported for an hour or a weekend. Which counted? But Polyeidus was transformed already from that nasty-looking little person to the precious Pattern —
— which I snatched from the mudflat, folded in the manner of the water-message, and fetched home.