Roger Zelazny - If at Faust You Don't Succeed

Odysseus was sitting on the front porch of his house when Achilles came to ask his help. Odysseus lived by himself in a marble house near a tributary of the Styx. Asphodel grew in the moss on his front lawn.

The place was shaded with the inevitable black poplars, which one gets very tired of after a while, in Hades and elsewhere. It was a gloomy day, like all the other days in Hades. It was just chilly enough so you weren't comfortable sitting outside, but not cold enough to be invigorating. Odysseus had a fire going in the living room, but it threw very little heat. Not that it mattered: the dead can never get warmed up properly anyway. Odysseus brought Achilles into the kitchen and offered him a breakfast of dates and porridge. They weren't real food, of course. But the dead are attached to the habits of the living and go right on eating, and even plan elaborate banquets. Eternity goes on for a very long time, and food is a way of passing it.

Sex is a way of passing time, too, even though dead people can't be properly said to have sex, ectoplasm being devoid of sensation as well as immaterial. But sex is something they used to do, so they go on doing it after death, or at least going through the motions.

Odysseus was currently unmarried. He and Penelope had split up long ago. Odysseus had always had his suspicions about what she'd really been up to with the suitors during the twenty years he was away fighting Trojans. For a while he kept the family together for the sake of the boy, Telemachus. But then Telemachus found his own archetype, nothing big, but quite steady, and now he lived in another section of Hades and had as his friends the sons of other famous men.

So Odysseus was alone, and he had little to occupy him. He did his exercises faithfully every day.

Sometimes he visited his friend Sisyphus. Sisyphus was still rolling the big boulder up the mountain. He didn't have to do it. He had been set free long ago. But, as he said, it gave him something to do, and, above all, it kept his archetype alive.

Sometimes Odysseus went to visit Prometheus, one of his oldest friends, who was still spread-eagled on a rock, with a vulture eating away his liver. Prometheus had been a difficult case for the gods. Setting him loose would have endangered everybody, since the world still wasn't ready for personal freedom. And the guy wouldn't promise to shut up about his ideas. Again, a modus vivendi, so to speak, might have been worked out—sooner or later, all of the dead compromise their values—but Prometheus was interested in keeping up his reputation. Recently he had turned moody and some days wouldn't even talk to Odysseus. People said that his only friend was his vulture.

So Odysseus was bored. He used to go out hunting ghost deer with Achilles or Orion, but that sport soon palled. The main disadvantage of a ghost deer was that you couldn't kill it. And even if you could, you couldn't eat it.

Odysseus was in a receptive mood when Achilles came over and told his problems. Odysseus suggested that they go at once and talk to Dis, king of Tartaros, in the black palace he shared with Persephone.

Dis had his own problems. He was engaged in jurisdictional disputes with the Roman chthonic deity Plutus, who had recently become the chief deity of the Roman underworld, and had pulled strings to be declared a separate deity in his own right and not subsumed under the Hades concept. Because of this ruling, Dis immediately lost control of a large section of the classical underworld, and no longer had jurisdiction over the Latins who had formerly been his subjects. In one way he was glad to see them go.

Latin dead had never gotten along well with the Greeks. On the other hand, losing the Latins diminished his kingdom, and shrank his archetype.

Problems, problems. And then suddenly there were Achilles and Odysseus, demanding justice.

"What do you expect me to do about it?" Dis said. "I don't have any power up there. To hell with Dis, that's what they say. They've got new constructs."

"There must be something you can do," Achilles said. "If you're so ineffectual, you should step down and let somebody else rule Hades. I've got a good mind to bring it before the Hellenic General Assembly at the next Bylaws of Hades meeting."

"Hell, no, don't do that," Dis said. "Let me think about this. Do you know who took her?"

"There was "a demon involved," Achilles said. "Alecto told me that. He was one of those spirits from the cycle that came after ours."

"Which side is this demon on?" Odysseus asked.

"Alecto said he represented Darkness or Badness," Achilles said. "I can't remember which."

"Darkness," Odysseus mused. "I suppose that equates with Badness? In that case we know which party to apply to for redress. I've never been able to understand the distinctions between Good and Bad.

People only started making them some centuries after our time."

"Beats the hell out of me too," Dis said. "But people seem to like the Good and Bad stuff."

Odysseus said, "Meanwhile, there's a wrong here we must right. If you'll give us a provisional reality card so we can get out of here, and your authority to act for the classical infernal construct in this matter, Achilles and I will bring this matter to the attention of the proper authorities."

"All right, you've got it," Dis said. He felt pleased with himself. One of the most important things about having authority is being able to delegate responsibility. Now it was up to Odysseus to right this wrong.

After Odysseus received permission from Dis to accompany Achilles to the world of the living, he decided to seek out Tiresias, the most notable magician of the ancient world. Tiresias would know what they had to do and how they could get where they were going.

The two heroes set off for the grove of Persephone, with its black poplars and aged willows, at the point where two rivers of Hades, Phlegethon and Cocytus, flowed into the Acheron. There they dug a trench and poured in the blood, heroically desisting from drinking it themselves. Whenever dead people came by asking for some, they turned them down. They wouldn't even give a sip to Agamemnon, their old commander-in'chief, who drifted by, drawn by the scent. This blood was for Tiresias alone.

Dark and oily, the blood lay in the trench. Then it suddenly frothed, then diminished, drunk by an unseen presence. Immediately after that Tiresias appeared, a slight figure in a long gray wool mantle, his face painted with ochre and blue clay, his dank white hair hanging down over his eyes.

"A very good day to you, gentlemen. Thank you very much for the nice sacrifice. Some of Dis' private store, isn't it? Lovely stuff! Don't have any more, do you? Too bad! Well then, what can I do for you?"

"We seek Helen of Troy," Odysseus said. "She has been unlawfully abducted from her husband, Achilles, here."

"Somebody always seems to be stealing the fair Helen," Tiresias said. "Do you know who did it?"

"We are told it was a demon from the new age," Odysseus said. "But we do not know his name or where to find him. We need your advice and assistance."

"All right," Tiresias said. "The demon's name is Azzie and he is part of the new Dark-Light overview which has captured the minds of mankind."

"We will go seek him out!" Achilles said.

"You're going to find it a different world out there," Tiresias said. "You will have to go to the main place from which Evil is commanded, which is called Hell, and make your enquiries there. I can provide you with a Traveling Spell, as long as you have Dis' permission to use it. As a matter of fact, I happen to know who Helen is with at present."

"Tell us!" cried Achilles.

Tiresias cleared his throat and turned toward the trench, now drained of blood.