CALL ME TITAN ROBERT SILVERBERG In Memoriam: RZ “HOW DID YOU GET LOOSE?” THE WOMAN WHO WAS APHRODITE asked me.
“It happened. Here I am.”
“Yes,” she said. “You. Of all of them, you. In this lovely place.” She waved at the shining sun-bright sea, the glittering white stripe of the beach, the whitewashed houses, the bare brown hills. A lovely place, yes, this isle of Mykonos. “And what are you going to do now?”
“What I was created to do,” I told her. “You know.”
She considered that. We were drinking ouzo on the rocks, on the hotel patio, beneath a hanging array of fisherman’s nets. After a moment she laughed, that irresistible tinkling laugh of hers, and clinked her glass against mine.
“Lots of luck,” she said.
* * * *
That was Greece. Before that was Sicily, and the mountain, and the eruption. . . .
The mountain had trembled and shaken and belched, and the red streams of molten fire began to flow downward from the ashen top, and in the first ten minutes of the eruption six little towns around the slopes were wiped out. It happened just that fast. They shouldn’t have been there, but they were, and then they weren’t. Too bad for them. But it’s always a mistake to buy real estate on Mount Etna.
The lava was really rolling. It would reach the city of Catania in a couple of hours and take out its whole northeastern quarter, and all of Sicily would be in mourning the next day. Some eruption. The biggest of all time, on this island where big eruptions have been making the news since the dinosaur days.
As for me, I couldn’t be sure what was happening up there at the summit, not yet. I was still down deep, way down, three miles from sunlight.
But in my jail cell down there beneath the roots of the giant volcano that is called Mount Etna I could tell from the shaking and the noise and the heat that this one was something special. That the prophesied Hour of Liberation had come round at last for me, after five hundred centuries as the prisoner of Zeus.
I stretched and turned and rolled over, and sat up for the first time in fifty thousand years.
Nothing was pressing down on me.
Ugly limping Hephaestus, my jailer, had set up his forge right on top of me long ago, his heavy anvils on my back. And had merrily hammered bronze and iron all day and all night for all he was worth, that clomp-legged old master craftsman. Where was Hephaestus now? Where were his anvils?
Not on me. Not any longer.
. . .
