Encounters
by George Gauthier
Chapter 8
Dysania
I had finished a fashion shoot early, stopped off at my local convenience store for a pint of raspberry sorbet, then returned to my apartment. Something was off, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it right away. It did not seem like anything had gone missing.
I soon realized that my gladiator sculpture was not where it should have been. The difference was only a few inches, but it clearly had been picked up, checked out, and returned to the shelf but not exactly where it had been this morning.
A few other things were out of place. For one thing someone had been looking through my collection of Ace Doubles, paperback SF novels from the old days which were printed in an unusual tete-beche format which bound two novels back to back but flipped in orientation so it had two front covers each with a vivid illustration.
I mentioned it to Kyle when I went down for dinner, Chinese takeout, and video of a diving competition. Neither of us cares much for spectator sports except when hot male bodies are on display and moving gracefully and sub-textually homoerotically as with divers, gymnasts, and figure skaters. Modern dance often offers similar attractions.
"It's not something I would expect of our chamber boy. Jaeden has always been so conscientious about his duties. Reshelving my books so carelessly is quite out of character."
"Well you can put your mind at rest on that score. It wasn't Jaeden who cleaned your apartment earlier today. It was Byron the chamber boy who normally works the two lower floors. Jaeden called in sick this morning and asked Byron to switch days with him. Byron told me that in turn Jaeden will pick up Byron's shift tomorrow."
"Tomorrow. So it can't be anthing serious."
"I guess not. All Byron could tell me was that Jaeden reported that he was staying home to with a mild case of dysania, whatever that is."
"Dysania!!"
I chuckled then remarked.
"It's no wonder he could not to get over to his job here in our spooky old mansion, not when he could not even get out of his own bed."
"Huh?"
"Dysania is not a physical illness at all but just a state of mind, namely a disinclination to climb out of bed in the morning. Also known as sleep inertia."
"Really? What brings it on?"
"In Jaeden's case it cannot be laziness. A good guess would be simple fatigue. He likely had a hot date yesterday which ended up in Jaeden's bed. They probably went at it hammer and tongs for hours, slept till morning, then went at it again and again. No wonder Jaeden did not care to get out of bed this morning. Just wait till I see him next. I'll give the little scamp a piece of my mind."
And so I resolved to do, but the very next time Jaeden showed up for his shift he talked and charmed his way back into my good graces.
"OK, it did happen just as you thought, hot date and all. In my defense, let me point out that when I called in, I spoke nothing but the literal truth. I was disinclined to climb out of bed, very much so, which is what dysania is. And I acted responsibly by arranging for a substitute."
"So where did you learn about dysania anyway? That's an obscure diagnostic term if there ever was one.
"From the comic strip "Shoe" when Cosmo calls in sick with dysania."
I could only shake my head at the sang froid and brazenness with which he advanced his excuses. Jaeden is one boy who is very hard to stay mad at for long.
Later I told Kyle:
"I should have known it wasn't Jaeden. Not only is he never messy, he had gone through my Ace Doubles collection a while ago, entirely with my permission."
"You let him borrow them then?"
"I would have, but Jaeden is not much into reading books in print. He prefers to read digital books on his phone or especially his tablet. So he asked if he could catalog my collection by jotting down their titles and authors so he could search for them in the public library with the Libby app or on Amazon for a Kindle edition. Also Project Guttenberg for older books in the public domain."
"He jotted all those titles and authors with pencil and paper? That doesn't sound like our Jaeden at all."
"Of course not. Jaeden is a digital native. Which is why he typed away on the virtual keyboard of his phone. Aided by predictive text, he wrote down the titles and authors in no time."
"I can get by with those small virtual keyboards, but I still feel awkward typing with my thumbs, and I never got the hang of the glide method."
"Except Jaeden uses only a single thumb, the one on his left hand, and the index finger of his right. I tried it experimentally and found that it works really well. So much so that I have decided to do it that way myself from now on."
"Show me."
Genre Fiction
Will and I were resting after six rounds of practice with single sticks. For this exercise we wielded light training sticks made of split bamboo much like the longer version used in kendo training. We practiced lightly clothed dressed only in close fitting shorts like those bikers wear except made of a thinner fabric. Sparring helmets protected our heads which were out of bounds anyway. Finally a protective cup inserted in our shorts protected the fork of our legs.
In most bouts we wore full protective gear but with temperatures already over ninety that afternoon, full gear was out of the question. Which was just fine with most of our neighbors, many of whom fancied one or both of us anyway and were happy to see so much flesh on display.
Each of us could note the light blue marks left by a clinging powder which coated the shafts of our sticks. Those marks were how we kept score, plus any bruises our sparring left on our tanned bodies.
Leaning over the water fountain, I drank nearly a liter of water to replace what I had sweated out during that last round then poured a container the size of a Big Gulp over my head and torso to cool off.
As we sat back and relaxed after our exertions, Will and I got started talking about genre fiction: which kinds we liked or not, which we preferred in print or on the screen. We started off in full agreement that western movies had more to offer than the books or short stories which had inspired them. Who can forget the spectacle of the scenery of Jackson Hole in "Shane" or of Monument Valley in John Ford's many westerns.
"Authors like Louis L'Amour, Zane Grey, and Max Brand have collectively published hundreds of novels but most folks know their work from movie adaptations. The print sales of novels like "Hondo" or "The Big Country pale in comparison to the box office proceeds. I read that "Riders of the Purple Sage" has been adapted for the screen no less than five times, though two of those were silent films."
"So we agree on westerns. What are Dyson's preferences in genre fiction? Is he a fan of murder mysteries the way you and I are?"
"Well...yes and no. He is not much into reading murder mysteries, but he often watches them. He really liked Joan Hickson's Miss Marple mysteries and also that terrific wartime series with Michael Kitchen, er...
"Foyle's War" I supplied the added:
"That's only one TV series which Anthony Horowitz has created. He also wrote the scripts for the first few episodes of "Midsomer Murders". The unctuous Redbird crime family are among his many memorable characters. Another series of mysteries, which is still only in book form, has Horowitz himself appearing as a character."
"Really? How unusual."
"I also watched Horowitz's Alex Rider series which is about spies. The intrigue in the stories is mysterious enough but they are not whodunnits. Teen spy Ryder spends as much of his time trying to figure out what the hell is going on as much as who is behind it."
"The main attraction of the series is the lead actor Otto Farrant who is quite an attractive young man though ten years older than the character in the books who was only fourteen. He is portrayed in the TV series as a high schooler, and, to be fair, Farrant almost looks like one standing five nine with a slim build and fine boned features. Throw in wardrobe, hair style, mannerisms, and voice register, he pretty much nails the impersonation.
"In the books Alex is said to be attracted to girls and they to him, which is something of a disappointment for his gay fans, especially when his high school girlfriend in the early episodes is an overweight and homely black girl, a prime example of woke anti-white prejudice masquerading as color-blind casting.
Anyway, I chuckled at a scene in an early episode when Farrant as Alex Rider confronts a mystery man in a deserted garage. Trying to warn him off he raises his hands and calls out:
"I know Krav Maga."
To which the mystery man, who fortunately is one of the good guys, moves his jacket aside so the boy can see his holstered pistol. His rejoinder to Alex's warning goes":
"And I know shooting people in the head."
"Ha, ha, ha. That's telling him. So you liked it."
"I did."
"One form of genre fiction which really engages Dyson's interest is science fiction, especially hard science fiction, which he prizes for its scientific accuracy or at least plausibility and internal logic. He has no patience with stupidity as when a character announces that radiocarbon dating shows that the alien spaceship is twenty million years old. That dating technique works on organic matter and only goes back about fifty-thousand years."
"He once quoted a line whose source he forgot but which rings true for him:
"Behind every tech billionaire is a science-fiction novel which he read as a teenager."
"So which novel impressed Dyson the most as a teenager."
"Well not anything by one of the literary greats, so not Jules Verne or H.G. Wells or Robert Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke. It's a real potboiler: "Escape Across the Cosmos" by Gardner Fox. Dyson has read the novel six times now. "
"I've read it twice myself. That's the one set in the distant feature where a scientist rebuilds the body of a crash victim into a silicon superman, a being endowed with great energy powers, and dispatches him on a mission to thwart an alien entity. This alien being had consumed all the life in its original universe and was gathering strength to do the same in ours. One scene I found memorable was when the entity tries to trap the hero by slamming shut the great bronze doors of its temple. As he runs toward the exit, the hero gestures and unleashes a wave of energy which melts the great doors allowing him to pass through."
"A real power trip, right? Really heady stuff. Anyway running a close second is Heinlein's 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress' where a computer network installed on the Moon achieves sentience and teams up with the protagonist to thwart a dictatorship trying to take over the entire Earth. Er...this is all private information."
""Don't worry, Will. Dyson's secret is safe with me." I then added:
"Obviously, with science fiction and fantasy I prefer print or electronic editions to the Hollywood versions, despite the realism of CGI. Hence my Ace doubles or digital books. Nothing can beat the vividness and immersive quality of pictures you generate in your own mind."
"Amen."
Undercover Twinks
Once again I have been drafted into service for Mt. Olympus, one of a considerable number of assignments I have had carried out for the Olympians over the centuries, all of them tasks consonant with my talents, looks, and physical capabilities.
Now the Olympians are not some cabal secretly manipulating the levers of power as is supposed of the Illuminati, World Jewry, Communists, or Satanists. They have no interest in governance or empire. They are temporary sojourners who settled here for a time to mix with humanity and currently help us as they could without being as open about it as they had been in antiquity when they took on the identity of the Gods and Heroes of the Ancient Greeks.
The Olympians generally let humanity make it own mistakes, as long as they themselves are not inconvenienced. Which was why, their assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, they are as unlikely to allow humans destroy our planet with a global thermonuclear war, as they are to tolerate the conquest of Solar System by an armada of space aliens.
Their hope for mankind had always been that by the time the Olympians moved on to a new solar system and a new host species, we humans will have advanced geopolitically far enough to achieve world peace technologically far enough to defend ourselves. We would not have to match alien tech and weapons if humans could make it impossible to conquer Earth without endangering the planet's biosphere. Knowing this, any potential conqueror would ride on and find easier prey.
We earthlings had impressed them not only with our rapid development of technology but even more with the extent of our scientific understanding of topics as varied as relativity and quantum theory in physics, the big bang and cosmic inflation in cosmology, plate tectonics in geology, and evolution in the biological sciences. Of course we humans still have a long way to go, but we have learned so much in the few centuries since our Scientific Revolution in the Early Modern Period.
The future looks bright as long as the science minded civilizations can hold off those hostile to scientific inquiry like Islamic civilization and Christian fundamentalists who value technology but not science itself which is not so much a body of knowledge as a method of inquiry fundamentally incompatible with faith or revelation. Nor would I expect much in the way of scientific or technical advance from impoverished third world countries or primitive indigenous peoples of New Guinea, the High Arctic, Amazonia, or steppe, desert, and jungle dwellers.
My new assignment was fairly simple. I would go undercover as a rent boy in New York and smoke out a nest of vicious rapists and killers of teens and young men who were targeting New York's gay neighborhoods.
This would be a return to my old stomping grounds though it has been a good lifetime since I had actually lived in the City. I did not fear I would be recognized. Anyone who had known me in those early days had already passed on.
Despite being the least confrontational and aggressive of us all Hyacinth too had been assigned to the team. He was glad of a chance to prove that he too could be useful and not merely decorative. More a lover than a fighter, he did have the same level of enhancements as I did and his looks were a match for mine. We made good gay-basher bait the both of us.
All four of us stayed in two of the rental apartments in Spuyten Duyvil which are shared by the Olympian community for short visits to the city. No leisurely train ride up the coast. This time I flew. In a plane. Perseus can fly on his own power; I cannot.
For safety we would never be out of contact with each other thanks to the radio telepathy capability of our nanites to connect to cell phone networks. Our protectors Ajax and Percy were also linked in. All of us we well drilled in the use the tactical signals the Olympians had developed over the centuries.
Hyacinth's youth and beauty would let him fit right in to the gay scene especially with a chain and Master lock around his slender neck as he pretended to be the sub to Ajax's dom. Percy, that is the demigod Perseus, was our mission leader and heavy hitter.
As to why the Olympians were getting involved when they had not gone after such infamous serial killers of teens and young men as John Wayne Gacy or Dean Corll (sic), the answer was that the killer or killers had kidnapped two of Apollo's special friends, Luc and Marc. To the Olympians, these latest crimes were personal. Like those taken before them, the two new victims could expect to be held for weeks, suffering unspeakable torments followed by a horrible death. It was essential to locate them fast.
Apollo never seemed more human than when he explained how taken he had been with the two boys, and not just their physical appeal. He had come to respect them as exemplars of all that was best in our species.
"I met them entirely by accident in Central Park where they were working for the Central Park Conservatory as apprentice arborists pruning the park's trees. They are of French Canadian extraction by way northern Maine, barely eighteen, lithe, and cute, and practically glowing with good health and sex appeal. In the heat of summer they wore only shorts, plimsolls, and work gloves. I had sat down watching the two at work, joking and bantering as young males will do."
"A young lady of maybe twenty years had been walking her ginger cat on a leash when it got away from her and chased a squirrel up a tree. Alas, with the leash entangled in a branch, the poor kitty was trapped. Enter the dynamic duo of Luc and Marc as the heroes to the rescue.
With Marc handling the safety rope, Luc climbed the forty-odd feet up to the trapped cat. He set her on his shoulders ignoring the small hurts from her claws and tied the leash around his own neck as a safety strap then climbed back down to the ground. The grateful young lady hugged and kissed them both. Their embarrassment when embraced by a nubile female told me that these were two boys who fancied other males, and very likely each other.
I did not intrude on their moment. I simply nodded and congratulated them for their good work and passed on. That evening they spotted me seated at the bar of my favorite watering hole in Greenwich Village and came up to me."
"Hey, you were that guy in the park!"
"That's right. I am gratified that you remembered me."
"Are you kidding? You are absolutely stunning, virtually a Greek god come down to Earth!"
"So I have been told."
Apollo later told them that the resemblance was the reason he had taken the name of the Greek god as his given name in place of his birth name of Oswald.
"After we introduced ourselves properly Luc and Marc and I hit it off right away. The two embodied everything which attracts us Olympians to your species. Not just physical beauty which after all is the result of hormones working on the libidos of the human bodies we have made for ourselves. It was their character that made me realize their worth. I soon fell in love with those boys. Unpretentious and almost without vanity though fully conscious of how terribly good looking they both were, my friends are hard working, intelligent, intellectually curious, and kind to children and furry animals including a pair of rescue kittens they have taken in."
"As young lovers they have their whole lives ahead of them, long healthy lives. Although I did not rebuild their bodies I used my powers to extend their years of youth though not their lifespans. Those boys will look like twinks well into their thirties, that is if we can save them."
Apollo also told me that autopsies on the more recent victims, showed that the kidnapper or kidnappers kept their victims prisoner for up to a month before disposing of the bodies at irregular dump sites. NYPD police detectives speculated that whoever was doing this ] likely had nothing like a mob burial ground to get rid of the bodies of their victims, so they had always dumped them in the woods. He went on to say:
"I cannot fathom how anyone who is as fancy young human males as the kidnappers must could bring themselves to destroy the beauty which attracts and excites them, much less visit cruel torments on worthy youths like my young friends Luc and Marc. Regardless, once we capture them, I will return the pain they inflicted ten or twenty fold."
I shuddered to contemplate the vengeance which Apollo had vowed to visit on them on behalf of all their victims. He intended to turn them over to the Furies, the chthonic goddesses of vengeance in ancient Greek religion and mythology.
The Furies would torment the criminals relentlessly to the point of death then give them a day off during which Apollo cured them, leaving them to nurture false hopes or dread of worse to come. The process would repeat again and again, as many times as the number of their known victims, which was about two dozen, though still less than either Gacy or Corll had murdered. They would welcome death when it embraced them, leaving nothing of them behind, with their bodies reduced to a cloud of elementary particles by a pillar of subatomic plasma.
[In appearance the Furies were fully human so distinct from harpies who were as much bird as human and equipped with wings and claws on their lower limbs. That was still very different from Ray Harryhausen's demonic harpies in "Jason and the Argonauts". In a memorable scene in that fine motion picture, his harpies tormented a blind man who complained that his daily punishment was unfair. Yes, he was a sinner, but he had not sinned every day, a line which was hard to forget.]
I suppose I should not have been shocked by what Apollo had in mind for these foul rapists, torturers, and murderers, not when his intended punishment was actually moderate in comparison to the eternal torments other deities of this planet like to inflict on those who displease them, often for merely adhering to a rival faith or sect, let alone committing evil deeds. Say what you will about the Olympians, at least their justice does not follow their enemies into the grave.
For this mission I adopted an ambiguous persona halfway between a rent boy trolling for custom and a kept boy at loose ends. I figured that in that guise I would more likely be targeted than Hyacinth since I was without a visible protector like Ajax who was so powerfully built as to make even Jack Reacher think twice before tackling him.
Still you always want an alternate path to your goal. So Hyacinth affected the attitude of a bottom disgruntled by Ajax's trash talk, squirming at how publicly his dom was demeaning him as Ajax chortled at how effectively his training had transformed an overly vain pretty boy into an abject boy toy. The seeming rift in their relationship might tempt Hyacinth to go off with someone who offered him a better deal.
From our many centuries of life experience Hyacinth and myself were very good at detecting lies. Besides the clues from facial expressions, our enhanced hearing lets us detect the telltale tremors of deceit in human voices. They also let us see into the infrared far enough to detect the faint flush of heat in the faces of all but the most pathological of liars. Our nanites also would protect us from incapacitation by taser or a knock out drug in drinks.
In the bar I tried to give off the vibe of one of those manipulative subs who fancies that he is the one really in charge in his relationships. That made my persona vulnerable to an approach from one of the kidnappers.
The plan was that I would cluelessly allow myself be inveigled and taken home hoping to be led to where they held Marc and Luc. Handcuffs would be no problem. With tripled strength I could pull a hand through a locked cuff heedless of broken bones and set my nanites to repairing them. I would then contact my backup and let them know I had found the two boys.
Regardless of nanites, the Olympians have always had the ability to trace all the immortals on earth including enhanced humans like myself.
I see no need to dwell on the sequence of events by which I allowed myself to be taken captive nor is there much point in describing the actual rescue which was almost anticlimactic given the power disparity between the two sides. Suffice it to say that Percy and Ajax burst into the lower basement of a former hardware store and captured the three fiends responsible for the abductions.
The guns and knives of the mortal malefactors proved useless against the Olympians who were not gentle in subduing the foes before taking them away to an undisclosed location and handed over to the tender mercies of the Furies: Alecto whose name means "endless anger", Megaera "jealous rage", and Tisiphone "vengeful destruction'.
Far from being sadistic, the three Furies rather acted from a considerably sterner sense of justice than most Olympians did. Despite the legends, their appearance was that of beautiful young ladies, not the snake haired harridans they were often portrayed as.
The boys had had a rough time of it during the four days they had been missing. Not only had they been repeatedly and brutally raped, the fiends had taken an electric wand to them, snapping sparks where it hurt most. The boys had been flogged twice daily hard enough to draw blood and leave whip marks, though as yet the cat of nine tails had not been used on them, which would have torn their flesh, leaving indelible scars on their bodies. Now Apollo could easily fix them up as good as new, but he had to do so without revealing his powers.
The solution was a fake immersion tank much like the one which fixed up Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars trilogy. Apollo explained that this was frontier medical technology developed by one of his companies and was not yet authorized for medical use. Apollo was risking jail time by giving them access. The boys had to keep this miracle cure a secret or everyone, including Apollo himself, would be in big trouble.
The boys readily believed that Apollo was the super rich sponsor of such research and a tycoon who equally naturally might also have had a serious security team on call, one able to effect a rescue. They saw added proof of their patron's wealth during six days spent recuperating from their ordeal in the luxury of his duplex apartment on Billionaire's Row on Fifty-Seventh Street. Not that they let this display of wealth go to their heads. Gold diggers these boys were not.
As to the fate of their kidnappers, the boys had no wish for either their own plight or the fate of the criminals to become public knowledge. They agreed that it was all for the best that the murderers had not been turned over to the law but had been dealt with privately.
I found that Apollo was right about Marc and Luc. You won't ever find a more worthy pair than they. These were great kids, nice kids, kids who deserved a fair chance at life, and now, thanks to Apollo, they had that once again.
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