Pavlos looked down, avoiding her gaze.
Moira glared for a moment, then shrugged again.
“We were surprised, three heroes ago, to learn of gunpowder. The last hero told us of steamships. Clotho added some new pigments to see what wars would match the scale of your new toys. The pattern of the weave became more uniform.”
She looked pensive for a moment.
“I will admit that I’ve become curious, these last few years. The number of new threads Clotho collects shows a massive birthrate, as if you humans were testing our power, somehow.
“And there have been times when I have seen things in the air, like the rocs of elder days; things that fly growling through the sky. I have recently come to think that they might not be natural, but something caused by man. Are they these ‘planes’ you spoke of? They fly so swift and free”—her expression grew distant—“much as I once flew, before the war that brought down Zeus’s sky tower and ended the glory of my race.
Pavlos hardly paid attention to her words; he remembered something she had said earlier:
“Clotho added some new pigments to see what wars would match the scale of your toys.”
No wonder we’ve gone so long without nuclear war, he thought. In our natural hues we’re too sensible to go that far. Now, though…
Pavlos shook himself away from that thought. He looked up at Moira. “Where do you fit into all this?” he asked. “Your name, I know—”
“Means ‘Fate,’ yes. Another of your nations called me Nemesis.” Her eyes seemed to shine, as she remembered. “When we agreed, at first, to the experiment proposed by the emissaries from the Other Place, I was the one who was the most enthusiastic. I worked with the emissary whom you now call Prometheus. I weeded and pruned. I ran to and fro across the globe, tending mankind like my own personal garden.
“You needed so much work, in the beginning.” Moira smiled distantly. “It is true that the Spark of Imagination and Ambition needs practice. Your ancestors were always hiding from it, or misusing it terribly. They wasted it on ‘magic tricks’ and mental powers for which they were simply unready. It took us long to suppress those powers deep within you, until such a time as you were ready for them.
“Yet still I remember the most precocious of my children. Aesculapius, who had so much Spark of his own that he had to be destroyed. Alcestis, who spontaneously invented self-sacrifice, something we had never known. And sweet Odin, who visited me when I was Mimir, sitting by the gateway beneath the Great Tree, long before the terrible war, and offered me his eye in exchange for wisdom.”
Moira frowned.
“Then came the day when Zeus declared you ready, and my sisters became afraid. Even I, your eldest mother, who was Gaea and Demeter and Amaterasu, thought you were unripe and dangerous.
“I helped my elder siblings pull down the sky tower and drive Prometheus into the Gateway. The last I saw of him was his smile. He winked at me, then disappeared. Within a day, the threads began arriving; and Clotho found she no longer had the power to end your race, merely to warp it.
“To do even that much we had to make our transumptive personas almost real. To gain control over the potency of the threads, we were forced to weave ourselves into the tapestry, giving, for this epoch, our very lives into yarn to be woven therein.
“Is it any wonder, then, that my sisters and I grow bored or bitter at the passage of time? There was a sweetness that I once knew, in wearing this form, but now I cannot remember it. Now even a rare visitor excites in me no more than a vague unease… and a wish that somehow this labor could come to an end.”
Pavlos began to speak; but something powerful stopped him as he looked at her distant, unfocused gaze. It was as if his ancestors had reached out to stifle him with a warning. Something of the experience of his forebears told him it was better to stay small and quiet during the confession of a goddess.
As if to verify this, Moira’s eyes shifted to gaze upon his. They were now steely and alert. If lightning had flashed from them he would not have been surprised.
“So get thee up, thou lean-thighed Athenian, and bring toys to demonstrate them,” she said. “You will get to ask of us one great reward, as heroes are privileged to do, before giving us your mind and becoming immortal in our memories.
Pavlos hurriedly swept the items on the floor together and stuffed them into his pack. At this stage disobedience was the farthest thing from his mind.
7
“This is your life!” the Fate cried. Atropos held a tiny bobbin in her hand. She grinned at him and raised her shears high. They glinted in the half-light already streaming in from the predawn sky.
“Look at it! Do you see the colors? Some of Clotho’s pigments scraped off this one, as they sometimes do. Or more likely such a strong thread shook them off by itself! And you doubted yourself a hero.”
Pavlos squinted. The thread was almost invisible. By rights it should be, in order to fit into a tapestry with five billion others. But he was beginning to understand the odd way in which subjectivity operated here.
He squinted, tilting his head from left to right, and did catch an occasional flash of color. He found it hard to pay attention, though. Irrelevant memories interfered with his concentration.
He recalled the prideful ownership of his first knife… the time he was lost in the woods for two days and came home with a wounded fox kit that became his pet for a year…
There was the shame of being caught cheating on a third grade exam… the glory of serving on the honor guard at an all-Europe Boy Scout Jamboree… his first love… his first expedition across the Deccan of India… his third love… his mission for NATO…
Suddenly he recognized what was happening to him. He tore his gaze from the tiny thread, and the flood of memories cut off at once. He threw his head back and laughed richly.
“A hero’s reaction.” Clotho nodded. Even Lachesis looked up at him from her innumerable bobbins and regarded Pavlos for a moment. She gave his laughter a dim, satisfied smile that lasted only an instant. Then the dour expression returned and she went back to work.
“Just remember this, hero,” Atropos said as he subsided to a broad grin. “I hold the shears. You will now pay the price heroes must, by giving us your mind and memory. Do not be tempted by rash thoughts. You already know that you cannot harm us, but if you try, and do any more damage to the tapestry than you did last night, I can snap your thread as quickly as I cut this one… or this one… or this one…”
The shears flashed, and each severed thread gave off a tiny spark as it expired.
“Stop!” Pavlos cried.
Atropos arched her brows.
“Yes, yes, I understand,” Pavlos said, hurriedly. “You don’t have to kill anyone else to demonstrate your power!”
The crone smiled. “They were doomed, anyway. But you will have a form of immortality, living forever in the minds of my sisters.”
A dubious home for all eternity, Pavlos thought. I’d rather spend it in a cesspool.
“What was this about a reward?” he asked. “Don’t I get some sort of prize for cooperating?”
Lachesis grumbled. She bent forward over the loom, muttering to herself. Atropos smiled. Clotho put her arm around her elder sister’s shoulder, then grinned at Pavlos.
“Poor Lachesis. She hates this part. It always makes more work for her.
“Yes, hero. You may choose anything that is in our power to give… providing it does not thwart our purpose, or change your commitment to us, and takes no more than a twentieth part of the day to fulfill.”