With surprising agility, the ancient fury pulled him along up the short stairs to the narrow portico. There she stopped Pavlos and motioned him to be still as she dragged aside a granite stone blocking the doorway.
Clotho looked quickly about the rim of the opening, as if watching for something trying to escape. When finally satisfied she grinned at him and crooked a finger in sly invitation.
“So you wanted to see how it begins, did you? Then look!” she hissed. “No more than a handful of men have ever seen what you now see.”
Pavlos peered into the dimness. Beyond the trapezoid of light cast on the floor by the doorway, the interior was gloomy as a starless night.
Yet, off toward the back, there seemed to be a faint glow. It shimmered with a suggestion of an outline that changed before he could grasp it. His mind struggled, and failed to form a straightforward image.
“It looks like… like a hole. Yes, it’s like a deep hole in space, but with a hint of light at the end. It feels like I’m trying to see through my blind spot.”
“Blind spot… hole in space? Yes! Yes!” she cried.
“You fool! Idiot! You are the smartest of all your race of apes to visit us, and still you don’t recognize this?”
She whacked him on the arm and almost knocked him over. He would have a welt from that blow.
Smartest of all? No, Pavlos thought. I’m merely the latest. I’m probably the first arrival who has heard of Einstein… who knows, at least in abstract, that space has shape and texture, almost like her “cloth.” I’ve heard of black holes and antimatter, and I’ve seen the special effects in those American science fiction films. Perhaps that has prepared me.
But prepared me to do what? To devise glib theories, certainly. I can think of a half-dozen fanciful concepts to explain this, whereas all the other heroes had to think in terms of “miracles” and “magic.”
Big deal, as Frank would say. Perhaps they were better off at that.
The hag pointed at the shimmering, burning blackness at the rear of the building. Pavlos turned to watch her, feeling the cottony numbness pack more fully than ever around his mind.
“That’s where you come from, hero,” she announced with dry satisfaction.
“See the threads? You probably can’t, with them in their natural colors, and not gathered into skeins or bobbins. But if I let them, they would fly free into the sky, to tangle with each other as they liked… each the essence of a human soul, good for a hundred years or perhaps more!
“Some do get away. A few fly off to annoy us. Some become ‘great teachers and leaders’…” Her voice was thick with sarcasm. “We manage to kill them off eventually by finding the part of the tapestry which avoids control, where there is a gap that influences the threads around it. Then we choke it off, at last.”
“But where…?”
“Fool! Look at it! It is a gateway that was pushed into this world… my world… fifty thousand years ago!” Clotho shook her fist into the gloom, menacingly.
“We greeted their emissaries courteously, at first… or as courteously as they had any right to expect. Oh, they were great ones for having ideas. Claimed to be as old as we were and interested in learning from us. They settled down here and soon began meddling with our human pets! They said humans showed promise’!”
Clotho sniffed.
“Oh, you were fairly bright. How you worshiped us! But naturally you lacked the Spark. No ambition at all. No curiosity. And your lives were shorter than this!” She snapped her fingers. “Well, our visitors wanted to let you have some experience with the Spark. They said that maybe if you were given some for a while, along with guidance, you’d start making it yourselves. Hah!
“Oh, we cooperated, for a time, though you never did seem about to learn anything. Finally we started to argue over what kind of experience humans needed.
“Zeus agreed with us… at first… him in his sky tower with his thunderbolts…”
“Zeus!”
“Aye.” She looked at him archly. “He was their leader. A tricky devil, and worse still with the one you now call Prometheus at his side. He was strong, too. Like the time he helped us do in Aesculapius… But he went sissy in the end, like the rest of his folk.”
“You mean the ancient Greek deities all had some basis in—”
“Who said all of them? I’m being kind to a smartaleck hero by telling it in a way he can understand! Like wearing this shape was originally for you humans’ benefit, until we grew accustomed to it and found that it suited our purposes.
“Anyway, who cares what their names were. We killed them all in the end. Or drove them back through their hole. That is all that matters! They got most of us, too; but still we won!”
She crowed and shook her fist at the sky.
“The hole’s still open,” Pavlos pointed out. “Is this other ancient race responsible for the threads?”
Clotho paused to look at him, head cocked, as if torn between ripping him to shreds for his insolence, or rewarding him for being clever.
“Yes!” she hissed. “We can’t close it, or keep them from maintaining a narrow contact with your race. They send a thread of Spark for every human child born, without which you’d all be animals again! Each thread is tied to a life. Break a man’s thread, and he dies!”
Pavlos nodded. “Then you are the Fates, the Norns—”
“True enough. And we use their ‘gifts’ as we wish. We’re making a beautiful tapestry out of the threads. When we’re finished, we’ll wipe out every last one of you, and stuff it down that hole to show them what became of their ‘Grand Experiment’!”
Her laughter was shrill and loud. It grew and grew until Pavlos had to retreat with his hands over his ears. The sound chased him down the steps and out onto the lawn. When it finally subsided, he could still feel the echo vibrating in his bones.
He looked back once, as he trudged in the gathering twilight toward the main temple. Clotho was still inside the smaller building. He caught a glimpse of her, surrounded by a fiery nimbus as she leapt and hopped about the chamber, grabbing nothings out of midair and stuffing them into a bag.
5
Pavlos slowly felt a return to lucidity. He had recollections of wandering in the storeroom in back, searching among the memorabilia… for what, he couldn’t remember. He recalled walking among the great stacks of folded tapestry, drifting dazedly, open to the holographic images that flashed at him from the past.
And he remembered pawing through his pack, in the storeroom, inspecting each item as if for the first time. For an hour he shouted into the transceiver, screaming what would have to be incoherence to his friend the astronaut. Frank never replied.
He had probably been out of line of sight. Or perhaps the ancient mountain was shielded, somehow.
And maybe it was best Frank hadn’t heard him, after all.
For a while he watched Clotho at work, affixing her dyes to overlay the natural colors of the threads she had harvested. Finally, he sickened of her happy labor and went out into the night for a walk.
He had only their word for it that they were immortal.
Pavlos wondered about that. He still had his machete; and except for Moira, they looked like helpless old women. He had never killed before, although he had been willing to in the past, in border skirmishes and on expeditions into lawless lands. Surely he had the will now.
But Clotho had been terribly strong. And then there were the other heroes to consider.