Therefore, someone had to call time-out until we could be sure.
The leash had been tugged. I followed.
"Diane," said I, as we stood in the shade of her Skimmer, "you say that I mean something to you, as me, as Karaghiosis."
"That would seem to follow."
"Then hear me. I believe that you may be wrong about the Vegan. I am not sure, but if you are wrong it would be a very big mistake to kill him. For this reason, I cannot permit it. Hold off on anything you've planned until we reach Athens. Then request a clarification of that message from the Radpol."
She stared me in both eyes, then said, "All right."
"Then what of Hasan?"
"He waits."
"He makes his own choice as to time and place, does he not? He awaits only the opportunity to strike."
"Yes."
"Then he must be told to hold off until we know for sure."
"Very well."
"You will tell him?"
"He will be told."
"Good enough."
I turned away.
"And when the message comes back," she said, "if it should say the same thing as before-what then?"
"We'll see," I said, not turning.
I left her there beside her Skimmer and returned to my own.
When the message did come back, saying what I thought it would say, I knew that I would have more trouble on my hands. This was because I had already made my decision.
Far to the south and east of us, parts of Madagascar still deafened the geigs with radioactive pain-cries-a tribute to the skill of one of us.
Hasan, I felt certain, could still face any barrier without blinking those sun-drenched, death-accustomed, yellow eyes…
He might be hard to stop.
It. Down below.
Death, heat, mud-streaked tides, new shorelines…
Vulcanism on Chios, Samos, Ikaria, Naxos…
Halicarnassos bitten away…
The western end of Kos visible again, but so what?
… Death, heat, mud-streaked tides.
New shorelines…
I had brought my whole convoy out of its way in order to check the scene. Myshtigo took notes, also photos.
Lorel had said, "Continue on with the tour. Damage to property has not been too severe, because the Mediterranean was mostly full of junkstuff. Personal injuries were either fatal or are already being taken care of.-So continue on."
I skimmed in low over what remained of Kos -the westward tail of the island. It was a wild, volcanic country, and there were fresh craters, fuming ones, amidst the new, bright sea-laces that crisscrossed over the land. The ancient capital of Astypalaia had once stood there. Thucydides tells us it had been destroyed by a powerful earthquake. He should have seen this one. My northern city of Kos had then been inhabited from 366 B.C. Now all was gone but the wet and the hot. There were no survivors-and the plane tree of Hippocrates and the mosque of the Loggia and the castle of the Knights of Rhodes, and the fountains, and my cottage, and my wife-swept by what tides or caught in what sea-pits, I do not know-had gone the ways of dead Theocritus-he who had done his best to immortalize the place so many years before. Gone. Away. Far… Immortal and dead to me. Further east, a few peaks of that high mountain range which had interrupted the northern coastal plain were still poking themselves up out of the waters. There was the mighty peak of Dhikaios, or Christ the Just, which had overlooked the villages of the northern slopes. Now it was a tiny islet, and no one had made it up to the top in time.
It must have been like this, that time so many years ago, when the sea near my homeland, bounded by the Chalcidic peninsula, had risen up and assaulted the land; in that time when the waters of the inland sea had forced them an outlet through the gorge of Tempe, the mighty convulsions of the thing scoring even the mountain walls of the home of the gods itself, Olympus; and those it spared were only Mr. and Mrs. Deukalion, kept afloat by the gods for purposes of making a myth and some people to tell it to.
"You lived there," said Myshtigo.
I nodded.
"You were born in the village of Makrynitsa, though, in the hills of Thessaly?"
"Yes."
"But you made your home there?"
"For a little while."
"'Home' is a universal concept," said he. "I appreciate it."
"Thanks."
I continued to stare downward, feeling sad, bad, mad, and then nothing.
Athens after absence returns to me with a sudden familiarity which always refreshes, often renews, sometimes incites. Phil once read me some lines by one of the last great Greek poets, George Seferis, maintaining that he had referred to my Greece when he said, "… A country that is no longer our own country, nor yours either"-because of the Vegans. When I pointed out that there were no Vegans available during Seferis' lifetime, Phil retorted that poetry exists independent of time and space and that it means whatever it means to the reader. While I have never believed that a literary license is also good for time-travel, I had other reasons for disagreeing, for not reading it as a general statement.
It is our country. The Goths, the Huns, the Bulgars, the Serbs, the Franks, the Turks, and lately the Vegans have never made it go away from us. People, I have outlived. Athens and I have changed together, somewhat. Mainland Greece, though, is mainland Greece, and it does not change for me. Try taking it away, whatever you are, and my klephtes will stalk the hills, like the chthonic avengers of old. You will pass, but the hills of Greece will remain, will be unchanged, with the smell of goat thigh-bones burning, with a mingling of blood and wine, a taste of sweetened almonds, a cold wind by night, and skies as bluebright as the eyes of a god by day. Touch them, if you dare.
That is why I am refreshed whenever I return, because now that I am a man with many years behind me, I feel this way about the entire Earth. That is why I fought, and why I killed and bombed, and why I tried every legal trick in the book, too, to stop the Vegans from buying up the Earth, plot by plot, from the absentia government, there on Taler. That is why I pushed my way, under another new name, into the big civil service machine that runs this planet-and why Arts, Monuments and Archives, in particular. There, I could fight to preserve what still remained, while I waited for the next development.
The Radpol vendetta had frightened the expatriates as well as the Vegans. They did not realize that the descendants of those who had lived through the Three Days would not willingly relinquish their best areas of coastline for Vegan resorts, nor yield up their sons and daughters to work in those resorts; nor would they guide the Vegans through the ruins of their cities, indicating points of interest for their amusement. That is why the Office is mainly a foreign service post for most of its staff.
We had sent out the call of return to those descendants of the Martian and Titanian colonies, and there had been no return. They had grown soft out there, soft from leeching on a culture which had had a headstart on ours. They lost their identity. They abandoned us.
Yet, they were the Earthgov, de jure, legally elected by the absent majority-and maybe de facto too, if it ever came to that. Probably so. I hoped it wouldn't come to that.
For over half a century there had been a stalemate. No new Veggy resorts, no new Radpol violence. No Return, either. Soon there would be a new development. It was in the air-if Myshtigo was really surveying.
So I came back to Athens on a bleak day, during a cold, drizzling rainfall, an Athens rocked and rearranged by the recent upheavals of Earth, and there was a question in my head and bruises on my body, but I was refreshed. The National Museum still stood there between Tossitsa and Vasileos Irakliou, the Acropolis was even more ruined that I remembered, and the Garden Altar Inn-formerly the old Royal Palace-there at the northwest corner of the National Gardens, across from Syndagma Square, had been shaken but was standing and open for business, despite.