Olympus, or what's left of it

I've been on this step a long time. Top one. Olympus, or what's left of it, which is a lot of steps and one working fountain and a view that makes you understand why the gods didn't come back: from up here the world looks finished.

I'm Orochimaru. First human in Olympus. Being first means you sit with your hands on your knees like a man waiting for a bus, and the bus is whoever comes next, and for a very long time nobody did.

Then a blind man came up the steps with his hand out in front of him and a snake round his neck, and I stood up, because the snake looked at me first, and I said the only thing there is to say after that long.

"There you are."

"Everybody says it," he said. "I've stopped being surprised."

He knew my name the way you know a name on a shop. He said he'd been hearing my voice in the rafters since he was eleven and never placed it. He sat down. So here we sat.

Inspired by what I'd done, the world made him a companion. For him, he understood eventually: a thing shaped like the space he'd been walking around with his hand out in front of him for eighty thousand years. And training began. I'm not going to describe the training. Nobody good does.

···

"So," he said one evening. "What's the moral of the story."

"There's no moral."

"There's always a moral. Kids ask."

Honestly, I couldn't tell him. He's been at it since a field outside a wall in Korea, and the snake's seen more than both of us, and none of us could. But I could tell him what won, at the end, because that I have watched from up here: endurance. The length of time you can stand in a room. Openness, and understanding toward others, and staying true to yourself while you do it, which is harder than all three together.

"That's four things," he said.

"And one more. Don't send empty or faked things back to Amazon. You go to prison for that. I'm serious."

"Somebody in the dome did it," he said. "It's the only thing anybody there ever paid for."

I wrote it on the step, for the next one. Signed it the way I sign things up here: Xoxo. Neptun.

"Neptun?"

"First human in Olympus picks his own name. Nobody told me I couldn't."

···

Oh, and the bet. I'd promised him the bet.

The one the Centuries lost, that made them move their whole peaceful people through a nymph's portal into a full world. It was: whoever builds a rocket first gets the land.

That's it. That's the whole bet. So uninteresting I'll spare the details, except that the Venturis built theirs out of pearls and it went up about four feet, and that was enough, and the Centuries, who'd have won in another century, packed.

He laughed. The snake didn't. Then he turned his face down the steps, toward a world that looks finished, and said, to nobody I could see:

"My apology, uncle Ori. That's the genesis. You were in it the whole time, in the box under the bed, not looking."

"Who's uncle Ori?"

"A man with a teashop," he said, and put his hand out in front of him, and found the top step, and stayed.