Argos Acrisius was king of Argos. Argos is a small world that, along with many others, orbits the earth in counterpoise to the moon; and along with many others, Argos has a perfect climate except when it goes wrong; also, a problem with the humanity that produced it. Acrisius had a daughter, Danae. At this time she was seventeen and Acrisius knew she was a virgin - what counts for knowledge among humans, eh? In a virtual other place apart from all these circulating worlds there existed, with whatever meaning you choose to give that word, the Oracle. Some people knew that the Oracle was a source of (often puzzling) knowledge from beyond, or above, or from somewhere. Other people knew that the Oracle was a secret organisation, which had a lot of different names according to who named it and what they liked to believe. One of these names was the Heg. However, since the aspirated H had disappeared some time ago from remaining language (apart from in the pronunciation of the letter H itself), the Heg became The Egg. This Egg, they believed, produced the content of the Oracle. Of course most people couldn't give a stuff either way. The Oracle was, you know, the Oracle. The Oracle told Acrisius that one day his grandson would kill him. Okay. He had only the single child, Danae the most beautiful. Acrisius worked out that as long as Danae didn't have a son, then he could live for ever. (Like a lot of Kings his logic wasn't perfect.) So he caused to be built a tiny world of the latest materials, a little coppery sphere spinning on its axis in the weightless zone of Argos, penetrated only by a pipeline running on frictionless bearings, in at one pole and out the other, much narrower than the narrowest human being. This tiny world was guarded by an attribute of the Egg. Even though Acrisius himself wasn't quite sure who or what the Egg was, he knew that you had to trust something somewhere. In this tiny world he imprisoned, all on her own, his only, beautiful daughter Danae. Secluded there, Danae could do all the things that a human being must do to stay alive. And there was more. She had a very small pool the colour of lapis lazuli to swim in. She could run round and round her world's equator (seventeen seconds flat out, she was a fast runner) and had a transverse course which went into the half grav. zone, so she could do parkour tricks and build up her core strength. She got third-order sunlight, which was just as good, and had lots of toys and games. So she was very healthy. And of course, bored as fuck. Gods As well as the Egg, there were also gods. Okay, what was, or is, a god? A god is something you pray to, with unpredictable, often no, results. A god is a person with supernatural powers - with the complication that a supernatural power is by definition non-existent unless you believe in the supernatural. They were of very different personality types, these gods, and provenance. Take, just for instance, the difference between Poseidon and Athene; Poseidon, god of the Ocean, the indescribable and terrifying deep (something that had only existed on the archaic world, that much vaster coppery sphere turning below you about its equator as you looked down on it from the weightlessness of Argos's south pole). Poseidon, behold how he rears from the deep, streaming, glistening, huge sleek-muscled, horse and eel, stallion and leviathon. Standing on the bottom of Ocean, he overtops the masts of ships. Poseidon is why the Gorgon Medusa turned bad. But not now. Horses, sea monsters, they are all to come. And the cosmic origin of bigdik.spam. Athene on the other hand was human sized and very sensible, beautiful but in an Ingmar Bergman way, not Jenna Jameson. Athene was a tall sensible woman with clear grey eyes and a good figure which she didn't exploit (except maybe on Mount Ida, under force majeure). She was the proportionate, the analytical, the moral; and like all such, gods and humans, as well as being very moral, she had her own agenda. The conception of Perseus Zeus saw Danae, desired her and, as a shower of gold, impregnated her. It's hard to understand exactly how this happened. She was as you remember imprisoned in a tiny world, fed only by a pipeline much narrower than a man. But a god, especially Zeus, can take any shape. In Danae's case he did the shower of gold thing. Just as there were many beliefs in Argos about what the Oracle, and what gods were, there were many beliefs about the nature of Zeus. Some felt Zeus, as other gods, was a particularised virtual artefact of culture that gains influence because it is coherent, memorable, and accretes power as power is passively and intuitively attributed to it. They were the old left intellectuals. Some felt Zeus was a mythical being existing at that point where hardware, software, and nature in the form of the basic stuff of the Universe, are the same - or some person, or group, who wished to be taken for such (note how the simulacrum of cutting edge science flips into conspiracy theory. Note how that clip starts with it's references to gold. Isn't that pregnant in itself? That's Zeus for you.) I don't know what relation Zeus had to the Oracle or the Heg - maybe the human mind has inherent limitations which cannot formulate or apprehend such knowledge. But Zeus stuck to conventions and protocols, as does any god with any sense of aesthetics. So he came appropriately, if by stealth. He irradiated the pipeline that ran through the centre of Danae's world, with atoms of gold, millions upon billions of glittering invisibilities; and amongst them, swimming along majestically, one, one sole and alone great Epopsiosean spermatozoa, charged with mortal life and with the energy of the lord of the gods; but clad in the anachronistic armour of Achilles and so camouflaged and shielded from even the most sensitive detector which might record it's cosmic wriggle and thus collapse its waveform instantly and for ever. The exact quantum tunnelling morphology of intromission, the sensation, dreamy or explosive, of this godlike leviathon smaller than a grain of the pollen of Dianthus taking root in the virgin's womb, I, not being one, leave to a woman to describe. The birth of Perseus Pregnant with the Lord of gods, Danae gave birth to Perseus. She'd had all the scans and stuff. And interactive advice. She did it in the pool the colour of lapis lazuli. Everything was fine. But it does have an effect on a young person, being imprisoned in a sphere for nearly a year, and in the course of that year being impregnated by, though it may have been a god, basically something that came through a pipe. Even if that pipe may have morphed itself to seize and wrap her in a golden dream, it's not the same as a lover of flesh and blood. Danae's world was a sphere about fifty metres from pole to pole, and she was inside it. If you were suddenly put in her place at this moment you would be fine as long as you stayed still. When you moved, you'd be subject to strange forces which might do you damage. Departing from the beaten track would be as difficult as learning to fly; which of course you could, because there was a zone where there was no gravity at all, just as there was a path around the equator where the pressure on Danae's golden feet was one earth gravity - not tradition but, given our evolution, what's best for us. Just put yourself inside this sphere for the moment, furnish it how you like, its mosaics and painted urns, its pool of course, it's marble sleeping bower, its flowers and scented shrubs, its birds even, sunbirds and humming birds, and its constantly swirling zephyrs. So there you are, standing in this magical place, the earth beneath you, the daytime sky above you and to your left, or if it is the world's programmed night, the starry nightsky spinning to your right. You can walk, or run, or skip round the equator of your world with no difficulty. But watch the birds. You are a stranger, so they fly from you towards the daytime sky, not the flitted and jinking tracks of birds in the archaic world, but they follow an accelerating spiral, a counter-intuitive helix made more complex by the sweetly, softly buffeting breezes which themselves are not driven by fans, but by the Coriolis effect of the world's spin and the eddies around the architecture and resident biology, and indeed around Danae herself (or you, for it is you who is there at this moment). The little birds are spun faster and faster in the horizontal whirlpool of their own momentum. But by the time they get to the daylight pole, if they bother to fly that far - as one black, emerald and garnet sunbird has - it has tamed its speed and spin against the currents of the air, and hangs there, moveless at the zenith. Then, with a powerful scoop of wings, it begins its journey back to earth. Now is the danger. As always, it's not the falling, it's the stopping that kills you. Except that our jewelled bird is at rest, at the world's pole, in the zero gravity zone about twenty three metres and forty five degrees above you. Until, with a flick of feathers it turns towards you; but rather than diving, a gravitational fall along the path carved by spread wings, the bird is powering its way flat out, wings ablur with every gram of acceleration it can muster so that it can attain the equatorial ground speed of the spinning earth, ease past your head in it's gravity- producing curve, and slow, and land on a sprig of daphne. And if it had not learnt to fly in this world, if it had, just hanging there at the polar axis, tipped forward with a few lazy wing-beats and glided with this momentum, still weightless, to the surface, it would be fine until some item of the scenery too fast approaching, spinning past its belly, thwacked it in its passing, scattering its iridescent feathers, breaking its eggshell skull, leaving it there to be cleared up, still now to the ground, and having recovered, posthumously, the gravitational force of its world. Just add the complication, too much for most computers, that this world is spinning in another which is itself spinning and orbiting the archaic world which is orbiting the sun, and you understand how complex are the brains of even jewelled sunbirds that can master these many interacting forces and turn them into what looks like simple flight. And the same goes for Danae. She had been born on such a world, had known no other but its physical freedoms and dangers. Hence her parkour skills. I won't go into this again. It'll just be something in the background. So here might be the place to say that it would have been easier, and much more economical of space, if Acrisius had imprisoned her in a copper tower rather than a sphere. Then the gravity zone would have been the whole wall of the tower, the daysky and the nightsky a planar circle capping each end. But aesthetics are aesthetics, and it was one thing to have a small coppery planet floating in the daysky of Argos; quite another to have a cylinder. A cylinder would be just wrong. No tower, then. So there sits Danae with her baby boy, Perseus, on her lap, the pair of them smelling of milk and honey and - tamarind? A healthy and potentially joyful young woman; a year into her isolation; but now desperately loving the only other human being who shares her world; and achingly worried about his future. A problem for Acrisius then. Dangerous and undestroyable Acrisius was buggered. In a one to one, his Chief Security Adviser had vehemently denied that there could have been any sort of security breach, since the Council for the Protection of the Social Fabric, which had "learnt lessons" from every alleged security breach up to that point, had put in place rigorous strategies to ensure that every requisite measure to prevent conditions occurring under which such a breach might again occur would be taken before such a breach could actually have occurred. Acrisius shook his head and sighed. To him the facts behind his Chief Security Adviser's word's, which facts he was desperate for those words to reveal, on the contrary became enmeshed and beknotted in a swirl of sub-clauses and conditionals, moods and tenses, and were then carried from sight to end up he knew not where. He knew what he ought to do. He ought to bellow an obscenity, then have the man hanged. On the other hand… "It's beyond me," he said. The CSA shrugged. "It is beyond us, every one, because it is in the hands of the God, the King of All." "How do you mean?" said Acrisius. "Zeus is the father of the child." "How do you know?" said Acrisius. "It is revealed, and recorded." "Yes?" said Acrisius. "Right," said the CSA. "You are suggesting that even if the ultimate father of your daughter's child is Zeus almighty, there has to be some intermediate agency that introduced the, er, male haploid cell into the womb of your daughter, some agency which in turn has its own agents, either human or virtual, that actually did the, er, deed." The King regarded him. "Deeply outrageous as such a suggestion might publicly be deemed." The King studied the man's left ear. The CSA scratched it and went on. "With my intelligence hat on..." the King raised his eyes a degree to the man's thinly populated scalp, "... I would say this - a model only, an instrument of pragmatism, not in any way an attempt to approach the truth..." the King nodded and allowed himself a wisp of an encouraging smile, "...that if we do a meta-analysis of all data which contain second and third order echoes of the source of the eschatological...", the King sighed, " ...the supernatural, the transcendental; there always - appears would be much too strong a word - there is always the residual image, or images, because they are multiple, lensed and reflected, refracted and partial, of..." he brought the last two words out suddenly, as if to the surprise of himself as much as anybody "three sisters". "Three sisters?" said the King. He put a heavy stress on the sis-, as if the qualifying number was above reproach. "We don't know their location, distant no doubt. We don't know their identity. They lurk - no, not exactly lurk, they project, from somewhere which we have yet to locate, spectral forms, that do have locations, albeit imprecise, and quasi-identities. One of these is the Oracle. There are others. We could hypothesise, and it would be no more than a working model, that the three sisters who made the unfortunate prophecy about your sometime death at the hands of your grandson are also responsible, in a way we have yet to ascertain, for the pregnancy of your daughter." "And if we do the obvious?" The King's tone was supposed to sound light and throwaway. The Chief Security Adviser drew his finger across his throat and raised his eyebrows. "Well, maybe not exactly. That sort of thing," said the King. "I said a hypothesis," the CSA spoke musingly, "which is not quite the same as fact. If the hypothesis is wrong, if for instance the three sisters are only themselves a front end, an interface, and at the kernel, the heart of things, there really is Zeus...," "What, really really?" said the King. "...King of Gods, Lord of All." "Zeus? What, literally and truly. Zeus. In the..." the King fluttered his hands anxiously. "Only, again, a hypothesis - not the kind of thing that should get to the common ear - but nonetheless one that it might be unwise to discount." "So?" "The usual, I guess, in the case of the highly dangerous but undestroyable." The CSA turned as if to calm himself with the view of the nightsky where the Archaic World in whose gravitational sea they floated burned a dull coppery orange. An ark, basket, chest, there were all sorts of names for an intended coffin which, launched with a bit of a boost downstream from Argos, would begin its slow, then fiery spiral into the toxic wilderness of the mother planet. "Exile," agreed Acrisius. "Spot of exile never did anybody any harm." Death is downwards Their new world was a small cylinder. There was grav at each end, but not good grav because when you were standing up your feet were heavy and your head was light. Danae - all new world dwellers had the dangers of prolonged weightlessness drummed into them as part of their education - quickly developed a regime for herself, restricted parkour; jumping, swarming and running up the wall through the weightless zone and headfirst down the other side to the ceiling, where grav was exactly the same as on the floor, then pushing off hard with hands and arms, crabbing down the other wall, up and down, back and somersaulting across the spinning no-grav belt in a succession of twists, turns, pikes; and the same sort of thing for the baby, throwing him, dropping him, tough stuff but always within the envelope of his baby ability. Aboard there were basic rations for forty days, and water recycling, and a toilet, but it was a cell, with none of the refinements of the pipeline, let alone her birth world, and it smelt like a cell, like a toilet. It was dimly, uniformly lit, and grim. When Danae wasn't exercising, or playing with Perseus, singing to him, telling him stories, making him make her smile, she looked out of the porthole. Or rather at it. Looking out of the glass disc gave her vertigo, used even as she was to rotation; what with the whole universe turning end over end and the Archaic World spinning below; and precessing a tad, the cylinder was obviously carelessly set, not exactly back to the sun, so the ever so slightly larger hour by hour coppery sphere, more burnt and smudged orange from this distance, looped in a sickeningly wobbly circle across her sight. She looked at the porthole. And she thought furiously. The apparent fate of her and the Zeus-begotten was immutably set in the laws of physics - a fiery sublimation in the burnished cloak of the world below. It was obvious and without alternative. Nonetheless she discounted it absolutely, for the same reason as you can. That is, what is the point, for the teller or the listener - who join together in a common mind if the thing is to live - in wasting energy establishing a story, a heroine, a hero, gods, villains, a series of worlds; if you are going to vaporise the lot in episode 5? Danae's certainty of an entirely different destiny for herself and her son came about by the same process. What would be the point of her existence, the prophecy of her father's death by the hand of her son, her imprisonment, the conception of Perseus at the, whatever it was, of Zeus Lord of all, of her exile? if it were all to come to a sudden not very interesting incineration before the really significant bits had happened. She had no idea what the significant bits might become, how could she have. But of their eschatological essence, in terms of history as it was to be, and truth, and purpose, she was in no doubt. Because they were a given, she didn't give that certainty another thought. This didn't stop her being violently anxious; but it had to be an inner violence, one that wrestled itself into strength; because she could not play the distraught girl, could not infect her baby with such neurosis. It was in this short time that the goddess Athene fell in love with her; in that sense that you do with someone who you feel is more worthy of the best in you than the best in you deserves. Mother and son were lucky. Athene was the only Olympian capable of this sort of love. Not that she gave Danae any indication of what she might do to avoid an immediate end to the story. The fisherman of Seraphos Dictys was a fisherman. The world of Seriphos had a different economy from Argos. The people were seafarers. They would cast off from their world in small sailing vessels, powered by the sun, and trawl the pelagic reaches of peri-solar space. And come back with what they could find. They were tolerant of a wide range of catch, mineral, biological, technical. They were not wholly disreputable, not wreckers; but not reputable either. They were the kind of horny-handed people the respectable would dismiss, in their self-regarding, careless, respectable discourse, as thieves and vagabonds; but be bloody glad to see nosing gently towards them in some shit creek of the continuum when they'd screwed up badly and needed a calm and competent neighbour to get them out of the mess. Dictys still fished. It was vital to keep his hand in, and also to know what was going on at sea so he could hold on to the respect he had earned through a life of quiet leadership. For as well as a fisherman he was Harbourmaster of Seriphos. And brother to the King; Polydectes. They weren't close. Dictys seldom went up to the palace. And the King never went down to Harbour Hovel - which name has a history, but the wife of Dictys made sure that the plain, well-built rooms were nothing like a hovel. And Dictys still spent time at sea. A Danae prayer to Zeus Babyfather almighty, Zeus, overlord, Do what's right for us two, mother and boy, Don't try to get out of what is due to us, Womb and son to the godhead. Talking of which, I know what she thinks, Her the almost all-powerful; But not over you (despite what they say, the easily swayed). She hates your children, got on the first wave of love, And what wife, virtuous, respectable, too cross for allure, would not hate the founder of dynasties, none of hers? She must not kill us against your better will; Me maybe, but not the boy, not this god-sired boy, no, It must be destiny, and a great one at that, What? Burnt out like a powdered ember, Soot, forgetfulness, shame? Never. A name, Perseus, Perseus Eurymedon King of the Lion-gated city Not yet built. A change of gravity Danae was sitting on the ceiling, the uncluttered end of the cylinder, with her boy on her lap, praying this tough prayer to his father, when they were pushed gently against the wall by a new grav, and the longitudinal grav slowly lessened as she moved down the wall to the other end where the porthole was. (Sorry to go on about all this grav, but it was an important thing to them, a bit like "the news", and just as much in need of difficult interpretation). The Archaic World below was spinning more slowly, the universe turning over and over with decreasing frequency, no longer sickening. She put her face to the porthole and looked out, but her view was restricted and she could not see the King of gods anywhere; or anybody else for that matter. After a time all force was gone and they floated, Danae holding on to a bed leg, and then a new grav started, imperceptibly, first pushing mother and child with no more weight than a curl of down beside a feather to the floor, in time a little heavier, but only just. They'd got a tow. Her heart leapt. First with joy. Then with fear. Who, or what, in the limitless reaches? So all her hours were filled with hope and dread. Her father? A giant or monster? Hera with some exemplary torture, first of the mind, then of their bodies, woman and boy; burning poison, jagged blades, indefinite twisting? Or, praise be, Zeus; or some well-wishing immortal, his agent? After a day they were weightless again. Luckily the water came through a tube, though without grav it arrived in a complex airy splash which made Perseus choke, so when her milk was not enough to ease the ration of pap they had been left, Danae took the water into her own mouth, calmed it and then in kisses which they both had to learn, the two of them, gave it to her boy. There was a long time when nothing changed. She jumped around the weightlessness with her son, but became ever sooner weak and breathless, sweat-cold, trembling. So by the time they were pushed quietly against the wall once more, and then the end grav eased in imperceptibly and they could lie on the bed again, her heart, and his, were racing, his as fast as a mouse, and their breath came quick and shallow. Her last memory was a delirium, fangs, racing venom, throats like the flinging void, pouncing eyes, screams impossible without oxygen.