Chapter 15

She sat down again and looked down at her lap, afraid to meet the eyes of any of the other three.

"I met them yesterday," she began in a very small voice.

Zeus watched her with a mixture of frustration and affection as she stammered out her confession. This child of his own body, the only child he would ever be allowed to have, made in his own image. She was his clone apart from one small detail. Who would have thought that that one small detail would have made such an incredible difference? Well, the gender, obviously, but it seemed much more radical than that. She resembled him. But not as much as you might think. In her the hard lines were softened, she was round where he was angular, she was golden where he was brown. She was beautiful where he was just nice-looking. Sometimes he looked at her and she took his breath away with her sheer beauty. He marvelled that he could have fathered such perfection.

What he felt for Athena was far stronger than anything he had ever felt for anybody else. Certainly not for Hera, who was the most joyless and self-centred creature he had ever met. And not for those other girls he had briefly tussled with in his youth well, there was one, actually, not considered suitable by his parents. He caught himself before he fell into a reverie about how different his life might have been if he had married that far off, long ago lost girl, and turned his attention back to his wayward daughter.

But if she was as different from him physically as it was possible for a clone to be, she was as like him in character as another pea from the same pod. She was impulsive and headstrong and disobedient exactly as he had been at her age. And as he listened to her story he realised with an inner sigh that he would have done exactly the same. He could never have resisted a plea for help from another human being.

"Why didn't you tell me, instead of rushing off willy-nilly?"

"You'd have said no." Athena's lower lip jutted out stubbornly.

She was right, of course. He would have said no. He could hardly have condoned her going off with an unknown savage.

"And why involve poor Artemis and get her into trouble as well?"

Artemis half-raised herself from her seat, as if to interrupt, then abruptly sat down again.

"Apollo and Aphrodite were busy looking after Hephaestus. You and Hestia wouldn't have let me go. That only left Artemis who knew anything about medicine."

Zeus suddenly choked as he tried to suppress a laugh and turned it into a cough. He could hardly fault her logic.

Athena caught his amusement and relaxed. He wasn't going to be too angry after all.

"OK, so tell me everything that happened."

He only interrupted once, when Athena told him about the whelping bitch. "What!" he barked at Artemis. "How did you know it would work? We haven't tested any of these animals yet. It may not be anything like the dog species at Home."

"I didn't know it would work," Artemis said reasonably, "but I thought there was a good chance. It was unlikely to do any harm, anyway, and both dog and pups would have died without intervention."

"It was her first litter," Athena said excitedly. "They all came out in plastic bags and the mother licked them into shape."

Zeus smiled at her indulgently, then caught himself and became serious again.

Athena finished her tale, judiciously leaving out the bit where Aphrodite deactivated her suit when Pandora wanted to touch her dress. No point in asking for trouble!

"Right, so what are we going to do now?" Zeus sat back in his seat and looked questioningly at them one by one. "We have already broken the golden rule and made contact. Should we follow that up, or should we be more cautious?"

All three girls answered at once in a confusion of excited voices. Zeus made placatory gestures and they gradually subsided.

"OK, I'll go along with it, but we must follow the rules from now on. The first thing we must do is take DNA swabs so we can test them for similarity to us. No-one must talk to them without full suit protection. If they are genetically similar to us, we will be susceptible to their diseases and cannot afford to expose ourselves."

Athena saw Aphrodite pale as she realised the significance of this remark and began to rub her hand against her dress where Pandora had touched it, as if she could rub away any germs that had been left there,

"I'll arrange for a team to visit them later today," said the captain. All three girls looked at him expectantly. "No, not you, Athena."

"Ah, but you have to take Athena," Aphrodite said. "She's the only one who can speak to them."

"Too late anyway," said Artemis. "Here they are!"

Sure enough the entire Tribe, what was left of it, had appeared at the edge of the plateau near the spring. Even the mother dog was there, looking up anxiously at Prometheus, who was clearly carrying her pups in his sack. Athena knew it was the pups because she could hear their little mewling noises and see their wriggling movements through the thin leather. Prometheus was holding the sack very carefully in front of him rather than on his back, so he could make sure they didn't fall out. He looked up and saw her and smiled. Athena smiled back and waved enthusiastically, then got up and began running towards him.

"Shield up?" Zeus asked Aphrodite.

"I'm afraid not," she said demurely. "There didn't seem to be any need once the primitives had gone the other primitives, I mean," she corrected herself. "The aggressive ones."

Zeus gave an exasperated groan and watched as the Tribe walked unimpeded into the camp.