Prometheus appeared crestfallen and said, “It was only a bit of fun,” then lapsed into silence, leaving them all trying to guess which was “only a bit of fun,” the betting or the bequest of knowledge.
“Anyway,” said Prometheus so sharply they all jumped, “the point is that you have exceeded all my expectations.”
They ate for a moment in silence, with Jack’s thoughts drifting to other things, such as the Guild, whether Chymes was done trying to poach the investigation and, more important, whether he should sleep on the landing outside Pandora’s bedroom. Pandora, still unconvinced by Prometheus’ fatalist stance, spoke again.
“Your viewpoint is depressingly callous. Are you saying that there’s nothing we can do to improve ourselves?”
“Of course there is. There’s lots you can do.”
“Such as…?”
“Try to be pleasant to one another, get plenty of fresh air, read a good book now and then, depose your government when it suspends the free press, try to use the mechanism of the state to adjudicate fairly, and employ diplomatic means wherever possible to avoid armed conflict.”
“But there will still be wars!”
“Of course. There will always be wars. It has been in your nature ever since—”
Prometheus broke off suddenly, put up a hand to quiet everyone and sniffed the air. “Do you smell burning?”
They all inhaled. Prometheus was right—there was a faint smell of burning hair, or, as it turned out, fur.
“The cat!” yelled Madeleine. Ripvan had fallen asleep too close to the fire and had started to singe. Jack ran into the living room and snatched him out of harm’s way, tossing the half-cooked mog from hand to hand like a hot potato. He placed her on a chair and fanned her with a magazine. Ripvan thought it was a game and purred loudly, completely unaware of the excitement she had caused. Jack left Ripvan on the chair, collected up the plates and stacked them by the sink. When he turned back, Pandora was sitting in his place—next to Prometheus.
“I think I was sit—”
“What about coffee?” said Madeleine. “We can have it in the living room.”
She got up, and they all followed her, except Jack, who filled the kettle, and Ben, who went back to reading Conspiracy Theorist .
Prometheus sat next to Pandora on the sofa and stared into the fire with a look of deep distraction and loss.
“You were saying…?” she prompted.
Prometheus sighed deeply. “It wasn’t important.”
But Pandora liked answers and didn’t want to let it go. “You said it has been in our nature ever since…?”
Prometheus looked up into her intelligent face, and his eyes glistened as a sad and distant memory surfaced in his consciousness.
“There was a woman once—Careful, Jack! ” A second later there was a crash from the kitchen as Jack tripped over a stool. “I had put those parts of the human id that I thought undesirable into a large jar and sealed it tightly. I hoped to keep intolerance, sickness, insanity, vice and greed away from mankind. But”—he paused—“there was this woman who opened it against my wishes and let them out to taint the race I had created.”
“Pandora?” asked Pandora, who knew a bit about her erstwhile namesake.
Prometheus flinched at the sound of her name. “Yes, Pandora. She was a woman of extraordinary beauty, the most rare and radiant maiden who ever walked upon this globe. Her skin was as soft as silk, and her eyes shone like emeralds. Her dark and flowing hair tossed joyfully in the wind as she ran, and her laughter was like cherubs singing in the morning breeze.”
“Hmm,” responded Pandora. “I heard she was a bit of a trollop.”
“Oh, she was,” replied Prometheus hurriedly. “She was as vain, foolish, mischievous and idle as she was beautiful.”
“And yet you fell in love with her?”
Prometheus nodded. “I loved her, and she betrayed me. I had no idea she was sent by Zeus to cause trouble to the human race. Alas, I was wrong. The ills were let out of my jar, and you can see the result.”
“But hope remained,” said Pandora, attempting to raise the spirits of Prometheus, who seemed to have lapsed into depression.
“Delusive hope,” corrected Prometheus quietly. “I had placed it there as a sort of insurance policy. Delusive hope, by its lies, dissuades mankind from mass suicide.”
“And where is she now?”
“I have no idea. After I was sentenced, my brother—fool that he was—married her to avoid a similar fate.”
“And you never saw them again?”
“They kept in contact for a bit, but you know how it is—just cards on my birthday for the first three hundred years and then nothing at all. The last I heard of them was in 1268, when Epimetheus was working as a cobbler and Pandora made a living as a translator. I have tried to find them since my release, but to no avail. I have difficulty traveling without a passport.”
“And the jar?” inquired Pandora, still curious.
He shrugged. “It’s invulnerable to any form of destructive power, so it must still be somewhere. But where that might be, I have no idea.”
“Coffee!” announced Jack, wondering whether sitting between Pandora and Prometheus wasn’t taking it too far. It was, so he sat with Madeleine. They all talked animatedly with Prometheus into the night. Pandora told him about studying for her degree in astrophysics; Prometheus mentioned that he thought Robert Oppenheimer had done the same as he—stolen fire from the gods and given it to mankind. The difference between him and Oppenheimer, he added dryly, was that Oppenheimer was never punished. Pandora told him about Big Bang theory, and he told her that Zeus had created the constellations; it was a lively argument and they had just got around to discussing human self-determination when Madeleine announced that she was going to bed and pulled on her husband’s hand to make him join her.
“I’ll stay for a little longer,” said Jack.
“It’s perfectly okay, Jack,” said Prometheus. “I’m not going to sleep with your daughter.”
His directness caught Jack on the hop, and he laughed at his own stupidity.
“Terrific!” he said at last. “I’m going to bed.”
Pandora and Prometheus continued talking as the fire gradually burnt itself down. Prometheus pointed out the flaws in evolutionary theory, such as how a bird could possibly have evolved wings without having useless appendages for thousands of years that would have hindered its survival. Pandora countered by saying that rule number one of the cosmos was that unlikely things do happen. Indeed, given the time scale involved and the size of the universe, unlikely things, paradoxically enough, become quite commonplace.
“What do you think?” asked Jack as he took off his shirt in the bedroom.
“About what?”
“Pandora and Prometheus.”
“Science meets mythology. It’ll be interesting to see what conclusions they draw before the night is out. I’ll be fascinated to hear what Prometheus has to say about the fossil record.”
“Hmm,” said Jack as he climbed into his pajamas and pushed the inert form of Ripvan off his side of the bed. The cat fell to the floor with a thump—and without waking.
Jack slept well that night, curled up with Madeleine like two spoons in a drawer. Below them in the living room, Prometheus and Pandora talked into the small hours, while barely a mile away, in Granny Spratt’s garden, the beanstalk creaked and groaned to itself as it grew, like a bamboo plantation in the tropics.