"You tell me."
He thought the list of Gods over. "Zeus," he said.
Diana smiled. "Yes, Zeus is a long way from the great hero of the
legends, isn't he? Using the old calendar, Zeus died in about 1100 B.C.,
not too long after the close of the Trojan War. As far as anybody knows,
Neptune did the actual killing, but it's pretty clear that the original
idea wasn't his."
"Hera's," Forrester guessed.
"Of course," Diana said. "What she wanted was a figurehead she could
control--and that's what she got. Though I'm not sure she's entirely
happy with the change. If the original Zeus was a little harder to
control, at least he seems to have had an original thought now and
again."
Forrester sat quietly for a time, waiting for the shock to pass. "What
about Dionysus?"
Diana shrugged. "He--well, as far as anybody's ever been able to tell,
it was suicide. About three years ago, and it drove Hera pretty wild,
trying to find a substitute in a hurry. I suspect he was bored with the
wine, women and song. He'd had a long time of it. And, too, he'd had
some little disagreements with Hera. As you may have gathered, she is
not exactly a safe person to have as an enemy. He probably figured she'd
get him sooner or later, so he might as well save her the trouble."
"And Hera had to rush to get a replacement? Why couldn't there just have
been some sort of explanation, while the rest of you ran things?"
"Because the rest of us couldn't run things. Not for long, anyhow. It's
all a question of power."
"Power?" Forrester said.
"Everything we have," Diana said, "is derived, directly or indirectly,
from the workings of one machine. Though 'machine' is a long way from
the right word for it--it bears about as much resemblance to what you
think of as a machine as a television set does to a window. There just
isn't a word for it in any language you know."
"And all the Gods have to work the machine at once?"
"Something like that." Diana came back from the window and sat down
facing him again. "It operates through the nervous systems of the beings
in circuit with it, each one of them in contact with one of the power
nodes of the machine. And if one of the nodes is unoccupied, then the
machine's out of balance. It will run for a while, but eventually it
will simply wreck itself. Every one of the fifteen nodes has to be
occupied. Otherwise--chaos."