The Argonauts left the girl's secret place and followed her down a narrow passage where a belt had once run through the walls, apparently carrying freight from one section of the island to another. Finally, the girl opened a trap in the bulkhead and dropped through. Jason followed her and shouted in fear as he suddenly found himself clinging to a narrow catwalk far above a mist-shrouded landscape. The others joined him, somewhat more cautiously, and they examined the scene below.
It was a vast forest, the bases of the trees invisible in a rolling mist that seemed to descend from sprinklers above, the treetops ghostly in the reddish light from panels in the ceiling. Jason guessed that the catwalk was there for the servicing of the lights and sprinklers.
The girl pulled at Jason's sleeve and gestured toward one end of the narrow walkway. She scampered off, unconcerned with the dizzying height, and the others followed, Hercules making the catwalk creak ominously. Orpheus glanced back and saw the big man's face and knuckles white as he gripped the fragile railings. Natives of a high-gravity world like Tiryns, he thought, would naturally fear heights.
The girl picked up a coil of rope, one end of it securely fastened to the catwalk, and tossed it over the side. She climbed over the rail and slid down into nothingness, swallowed up by the mist. In a moment they saw the rope being tugged at and heard the girl call in her incomprehensible language from somewhere far below. Orpheus glanced back at Hercules and saw his great Adam's apple bob as he gulped for breath. But he squared his enormous shoulders and clenched his jaw, glaring at Orpheus in defiant determination. Orpheus chuckled inwardly in sheer admiration of the man's courage but bit his cheek to avoid smiling.
In a moment it was Orpheus' turn to gulp, as Jason and Atalanta, forest-dwellers both, climbed easily over the rail and slid into oblivion. Orpheus hung his lyre quiver-like across his back and shoulders, gripped the rope securely, and followed them. The only thing keeping him moving was the realization that Hercules would be descending upon him shortly, and he thought he should be on the ground and well away from the rope when that happened.
Something came out of the fog and swept past him--a reptilian creature with bat's wings. Orpheus clung to the rope and watched it glide by. It turned its long head and regarded him with cold and unintelligent eyes. Orpheus hurriedly climbed down the rope into the treetops; he felt somewhat safer amid the foliage, but no more at ease, for the tree itself seemed alien and bore no resemblance to any he had seen on his travels. As he descended behind Jason and Atalanta, he half-listened to their discussion.
"These leaves are bizarre," said Atalanta, "and I don't mean the colour--I'm not sure what colour they are, in this reddish light--I mean the shape and the texture. And I suppose these cones are the seeds."
"Could they have changed over the years, isolated in this place?"
"I don't think so. I think it's always been like this. Normal vegetation couldn't grow in this light, and the lights wouldn't have changed; there was no one to change them. And every tree that I know of would rot in this constant mist."
The farm in the other part of the island now seemed normal in every way. Overgrown and neglected, but normal.
"This part of the island was constructed just to preserve this landscape," she said. "I’m sure of it."
They had reached the base of the tree and stepped down onto the soggy ground, where the girl was waiting for them. They could hear Hercules descending noisily above.
"We have finally found the realm of Artemis," Atalanta said. "But it's the wildest and most alien place I've ever seen."
The girl seemed perfectly at home in the alien wood. As soon as Hercules had planted his broad feet on the ground, sighing with relief, she began to tug at Jason's arm again. He gestured for her to lead on, but he drew his bow and nocked an arrow. Atalanta did the same, and Hercules drew his sword. Orpheus felt decidedly naked with only his lyre for protection. If they met some dangerous creature, what would he do? What kind of light would drive away an alien beast? What kind of sound? He might only enrage it. Then he began to wonder how this constant mist would affect his precious instrument and decided to tuck it under his cloak and depend on his hero companions for protection, as they pushed on through the dripping forest.
They were skirting some kind of bubbling mud-pool, watching their step carefully to avoid slipping on the muddy bank, when Atalanta cried out. Something was rising out of the mud with a great snorting and bubbling--some sort of slug, it seemed, of enormous size, with tusks. It reared up and bellowed at their intrusion, and others rose beside it, muddy water cascading off their slippery bodies. Though the girl shouted a warning and tried to stop them, Jason and Atalanta let fly their arrows, which thudded into the creatures' bodies but did not penetrate. They brushed away the irritants with flipper-like limbs, bellowed again, and subsided into the mud pool once more.
A vine began to move as Orpheus brushed by, and he darted back with a cry. It undulated up the trunk, and thousands of tiny legs appeared from beneath it. It seemed endless, like a cross between a centipede and a rope. As Orpheus stared, he realized it was a series of creatures, each one clinging to the tail of the one before it to create a great linear colony. How did it feed, he wondered. Did it separate into a hundred caterpillars to strip trees of their leaves? Did it strangle prey like a snake? He shook his head in perplexity and pushed on, fearing to be separated from the others.
They worked their way deeper into the swamp until they could barely see for the mist. Atalanta called out and Orpheus came running up to see what the others were already bending over--a clutch of leathery eggs in a nest of grass and mud. There was a hiss and they turned to see a great reptilian head rise from the murky waters behind them. Behind it came a huge body topped with a leathery sail stretched between erect spines. It blundered forward on legs barely different from paddles, but armed with formidable claws, and it opened its mouth to hiss at them, revealing rows of curved teeth, like daggers. The Argonauts backed away as it lurched forward onto the bank.
"If you take the right eye, I'll take the left," Jason said. "Maybe we can hit its brain."
Atalanta nodded dumbly, eyes wide, mouth open. The archers nocked their arrows.
When she saw the arrows pulled back to their limit, the girl cried out and rushed into the line of fire. The lizard hissed and nodded furiously but did not attack her. It lurched forward and placed its great body on the nest.
Atalanta lowered her bow and signalled Jason to do likewise. "You're right," she told the girl. "It's just protecting its eggs. You're a better daughter of Artemis than I am."
The girl smiled, seeming to understand.
"Look," Atalanta went on, speaking to Jason. "Those claws are for digging out nests; it probably never comes out of water except for that. And those teeth are for catching fish, or whatever passes for fish here. We're in no danger from this thing unless we disturb its eggs."
They turned and went on through the marsh, leaving the vigilant dragon in peace.
"Does anyone have any idea where the girl is taking us?" Orpheus asked.
"To see the Earthborn Men, I assume," Jason said. "That's what you asked for with your pictures."
"I thought you were supposed to kill the dragon, yoke the bulls, and sow the dragon's teeth, so the Earthborn Men would pop up out of the ground," Atalanta laughed, and turned to Orpheus. "Or am I supposed to take all that symbolically."
"I certainly hope so. I don't think the girl would let us kill the dragon. And I don't know what constitutes a brazen bull in this place, unless it's those mud-wallowing tuskers back there..."
Hercules snorted. "I'm beginning to think the whole story is a lot of brazen bull."
They found themselves standing before a wall. The girl led them into a cave and in a moment, they found an elevator door opening before them. At her urging, they stepped inside, and the car began to descend.
The elevator car was transparent, as was the shaft in which it rode. They could see the interior of each level as they passed. The first was filled with throbbing machinery and great hissing pipes, illuminated by a few red lights. Then there was a shimmering underwater world, shafts of light descending into the depths. Fish darted by, and the Argonauts jumped back with a shout of surprise as the dragon--or its mate--loomed into view and sped in pursuit of its dinner, graceful and efficient in its own realm.
For a time, the Black Sea was visible outside, ablaze with stars. The Argo drifted into view, and Orpheus tapped his lyre.
"Can you hear us, Athena?"
Her shimmering form appeared beside them, as the girl stared in astonishment.
"This girl," said Orpheus, "is Medea. Or so we believe. She appears to be taking us to the Earthborn Men."
"Be careful. They are extremely dangerous. Your best bet would be to kill them as they sleep. Awakened, their power may be beyond even mine."
"I would find it difficult to murder men in their sleep," Jason said.
Athena turned on him and her grey eyes blazed. "You would do well to heed my warning, Jason. The Earthborn Men are responsible for the deaths of millions. The Guardians would have killed them long ago if we were capable of harming human beings." She began to fade, and finally vanished as the ship revolved away. The elevator continued to descend.
"I fail to see the distinction," Orpheus muttered. "Kill them yourselves or send men to kill them. I wonder if she’s not as mad as Circe."
The Argonauts' legs collapsed beneath them, and they fell to the floor as the car came to a halt. They struggled to their feet in the powerful gravity, except for Hercules, who looked down at them in puzzlement. The elevator doors slid open; there was a biting blast of frigid air that sent them sprawling again, and their breath smoked in their faces.
Hercules stepped bravely out into the icy blast. His feet shot out from under him, and he crashed to the floor. The girl exploded in laughter, but the others were too busy trying to stand up to think of the humour of the situation.
"What is this?" Jason crawled out onto the cold floor.
"It's ice," Atalanta laughed. "You've never seen it before?"
"So, this is ice," Jason mused. "And water does turn to steel, as Chiron said. Maybe there really are worlds of ice."
"Worlds of ice?" Orpheus repeated. "There are wandering rocks that are mostly ice. But worlds?"
"And this must be snow." Jason brushed a handful of white crystals from the floor. He cried out in shock and jumped back. "By Hera! There are people in the floor."
The others gathered round. A naked man lay stretched out in a transparent coffin set into the floor, surrounded by tubes and wires, eyes closed, and features composed, as if in sleep. He seemed to have been preserved in death, and the freezing had apparently done something awful to his body, for his skin was white.
"Look. Another one," Atalanta said. "This one's turned black."
"No," said Orpheus. "They're Earthborn Men. Of different colours. And look how tall they are."
The girl tugged at Jason's hand, urging him to follow. Treading carefully and rubbing their hands together to warm them, they followed her the length of the chamber. Doors slid open at their approach, and with a great sense of relief, they entered a warmer chamber, brightly lit and gleaming with metal. The walls and floor were divided into empty cubicles.
"Are they waiting for new occupants?" Orpheus wondered. "Or were the old occupants removed?"
"Or were they revived--awakened like the girl wants us to do? Perhaps they were the ancestors of her people."
"Perhaps the bones we discovered in the first corridor belonged to them," Hercules suggested.
The girl was once again urging them onward. Another door slid open at their approach, and they entered a dark room. Their footfalls echoed a great distance, and so it must have been bigger than the first two, but they could see almost nothing. It was not cold, and there was one red light burning at the far end, barely illuminating their path. They found it burning over another door, which did not open at their approach, but there was at least a bit of illumination.
As Jason and Hercules tried to pry the door open, Atalanta went to the wall and wiped away the dust that clouded the glass panel beside her. She screamed and stepped back, colliding with Jason.
"What is it? What's wrong?"
"Look."
They brushed away the dust of centuries from panel after panel. The chambers in the walls were filled with human skeletons. There must have been a hundred men, women, and children entombed there.
"It’s the Halls of Hecate, all right," Orpheus said. "These are their catacombs."
Jason shook his head. "Why not bury them in space, or in the ground, or even feed them to the fish? These people died in their sleep and rotted in these chambers when the freezing machines failed. Others died and remained preserved because the machines still function."
"And their colleagues, for some reason," Orpheus added, "did not awaken them. I don't know how long it’s been, but I think the machinery may be failing chamber by chamber."
The girl had been frantically tugging on Jason's arm. She dragged him bodily to the door, where he found a tiny window. He rubbed away the dust and peered inside. There were more hibernation chambers, lit by an eerie blue glow. Orpheus found a small box on the wall beside the door and pried it open. Tiny red and green lights blinked inside.
"It's a lock," he said, opening a panel in the side of his lyre and pulling out a length of wire. He plugged it into the box and, after a few taps of his fingers on the keys, he tapped one final key and the door flew open.
Cold air washed over them, and the girl rushed in, jumping up and down and clapping her hands in her excitement. The others followed, feeling the floor vibrate with the throb of machinery and hearing the walls gurgle with circulating fluids.
The girl was standing beside a glass coffin, peering inside with a rapt expression. The Argonauts drew near and found the sleeping beauty, or at least what appeared to be a beauty, judging from what they could see in the tangle of wires, blinking lights, and tubes flowing with liquids. Her features were as flawless and perfect as those of a goddess, but her hair and flesh were all but colourless.
"If the girl expects us to wake this woman," Hercules said, "she's doomed to disappointment. Her flesh is well preserved, but she's obviously dead."
"No," said Atalanta in a voice tinged with wonder, "she lives."
"Nonsense. She's the colour of a corpse. And she's not breathing."
"Her breast rises. Very slowly. Watch."
Orpheus watched for long minutes. "It's a fine breast, no doubt, but... Apollo! You're right!"
The Argonauts looked about in astonishment. There were only five such coffins in the small room. The walls were covered in blinking lights. There were seats and workstations and screens and keyboards.
"Why these five, out of hundreds, still alive?" Orpheus wondered.
"This is why." Orpheus was peering through a door into the next room. He tapped a panel beside it, experimentally, and jumped as the door slid open. He stepped through it and the others followed. This room, too, was small and filled with blinking lights. There were five comfortable chairs in a semicircle around the main console, facing a huge port that afforded a view of the stars.
"This is not an island," Orpheus said. "It's a ship!"
"A ship!" Hercules guffawed. "I admit it bears a passing resemblance to some ships, but look at the size of the thing. Why the sails would have to be..."
"There were no sails," Orpheus said firmly. "The ancient Belters told of great ships, the size of islands, with blazing suns in their bellies. They ranged so far that the sun itself appeared no bigger than a star. That's why there are no mirrors: where they travelled there was no sunlight. They used powerful magnetic fields to scoop up the dust of space and burn it in their furnaces. The dust came so thick and fast at their unimaginable speed that finally it acted as a brake, slowing them down as they approached their journey's end, and when they finished their explorations, they had gathered enough fuel to return. Ram-ships, they were called."
Hercules bellowed with laughter, then cut short his guffaw at the sight of the others' serious faces.
"Do you really believe this, Bard?"
He nodded. "It's the greatest Argosy of all. We have only been paddling about the shores of the Black Sea; they crossed it, and the knowledge they will have gathered would be a prize indeed. For us, even the knowledge of this ship is a prize greater than any golden fleece. Look at it!"
"Then, the realm of Artemis," Atalanta suggested, "really is an alien forest. The Earthborn Men brought back samples of the flora and fauna from wherever it was they travelled to among the stars."
"This must be the ship's bridge," Jason added. "And the five survivors must be the bridge crew. This part of the ship must have its own power supply."
"That would explain why the systems did not fail," Orpheus admitted. "But not why they were not awakened. I would think the bridge crew would be a high priority." He stepped closer to the port. "This is wrong. Judging by this powerful gravity we must be close to the outside of the ship. But this view is not rotating." He peered at some buttons and lights on the console, then tapped one.
The external view disappeared, to be replaced by a series of views of the ship's interior. The Argonauts recognized the mist-shrouded forest of the sleepless dragon, the overgrown farmland of Medea's people, and some darkened corridors, but there were other views they had never seen: huge ducts that must have been power conduits of some sort, enormous artefacts that might have been engines or generators, and other views that were simply beyond their comprehension. Finally, the external view appeared again, the sun blazing as it appeared from behind the bulk of the ship, and the Argo's great sail drifting into view.
Athena flickered into existence beside them. "Where are you?" she demanded. "Have you found the Earthborn Men?"
"Yes," said Jason.
"Alive or dead?"
"Mostly dead. Only a few seem to have survived."
"Show me."
The Argonauts stepped aside to show her the chamber in which the bridge officers lay entombed in their survival crypts. Lights in the walls seemed to respond to her presence; they blinked madly, and the machinery began to hum.
"Orpheus," Athena said. "Plug your lyre into that port."
He sat down at a workstation, grateful for the support in this powerful gravity, and found the chair adjusting itself to his spine. He plugged his lyre into a port at the station. Words and numbers flashed on the screen too swiftly for the eye to follow, but Athena appeared to understand. Orpheus found the keys of his lyre clicking madly beneath his motionless fingers and realized that the goddess was controlling the instrument.
"Now, Orpheus," the goddess said, "I will display a series of numbers on the screen. You will enter them."
"Yes, Goddess. But shouldn't Jason be doing this? The oracle says that Jason shall raise the Earthborn Men."
"It hardly matters at this point. It's just a series of numbers."
"It was only a thought. What numbers?" They appeared on the screen and Orpheus tapped them out, hesitantly. Something about this whole procedure did not seem right.
Suddenly there was a piercing screech, rising and falling, and a blaring horn. Orpheus clapped his hands over his delicate ears and leaped from the keyboard as if it had bitten him. Jason and Atalanta drew their bows and nocked arrows, ready for attack. The girl clutched at Hercules's powerful thigh as if clinging to a tree; he placed his huge hand on her head to comfort her, and with the other he drew his great sword.
A flickering form appeared before them--a goddess with piercing dark eyes and long black hair. Everyone instantly recognized her as Hecate.
"Proper resurrection procedures have not been followed," she said in a commanding tone. "Please refer to instructions. Failure to follow instructions will result in the death of hibernating crew-members."
"Ignore her," Athena said. "Continue."
Jason stepped forward and confronted Athena. "Goddess, I think we're killing them."
"That is why you are here, Jason. That is the purpose of your quest. Orpheus, follow my instructions."
"But these people have been asleep for Hera knows how long. They're the last five people alive from their day. They must have knowledge far beyond..."
"They are dangerous. Their very presence means death."
"How can you do this?" Atalanta demanded. "You can't kill human beings. Not unless you're completely mad."
"I cannot kill, but you can. And they are not human beings. They are monsters. They are the greatest murderers in history."
"No!" The goddess Hecate threw up her hands before Athena. "These crew-members are not carriers. They were never exposed to the virus. Your Argonauts are more dangerous to my crew than my crew to them."
Artemis and Selene appeared, flickering into view beside her--the triple goddess in all her manifestations. "These creatures are under my protection, Athena," said Artemis. "They must not be killed." Selene turned to the girl and spoke to her in her own language. The girl rushed to Jason's side and tugged at his arm, pleading.
Athena's image blazed with light and power. Her voice rose to a thunderous roar. "Everyone knows that Hecate is a goddess of witchcraft and death, Selene the goddess of madness, and Artemis of plague and pestilence. I am the goddess of knowledge and wisdom and truth. I say this is a death-ship, its crew a death-crew. I say..."
Athena's image began to fade as the ship's great bulk revolved to block her connection. Orpheus turned to Jason with a question in his eyes. The girl rushed to the side of her sleeping beauty's crypt and, with her eyes, begged Jason for her life. He turned to Hecate, who seemed to be in charge of the sleeping crew.
"Are these Earthborn Men a threat to us? Yes or no?"
"No, Jason. You are immune. All the survivors and their descendants are immune. If you were not, contact with the girl you call Medea would already have killed you."
"Are we a threat to them?"
"Yes, you are. But in your blood is the antidote to the disease that killed their crew, and you can save them. In any event, they can no longer remain in stasis. My sisters and I are barely able to keep them alive; only Athena's threat awakened us to full power, and we have used up much of our reserves. Without the Earthborn Men themselves to repair our systems, we will cease to function, and they will die."
"Then we must awaken them, whatever the consequences. Orpheus is right. The Golden Fleece is knowledge, and the Earthborn Men have it."
Orpheus sat down at the keyboard and followed Hecate's instructions. The siren died and blessed silence reigned, much to everyone's relief. The lights flashing on the panels all about them changed pattern, warm air flooded the chamber, and slowly the glass coffins began to open. A thought flashed through Jason’s mind: what if Athena was right? But it was too late now; the giants' limbs were stirring.