The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [150]
“Usually,” Failstaff said. “There are exceptions.”
“For example, not everybody is such a complete dink that they make their wings out of wax,” Asmodeus said.
Briskly, Failstaff walked Julia through the enormous diagram on the table in front of them, sketching arcs and connections with his thick, soft fingers. The diagram showed the primary narratives of the major and minor religious traditions, collated and cross-referenced—and color-coded!—to highlight areas where they overlapped and confirmed one another. Apparently if you’re enough of a power nerd, there is nothing that cannot be flowcharted.
“The hubristic scenario, the pride that challenges the gods and leads to the death of the challenger, is only one of a number of possible scenarios. And usually the bad outcome can be traced to poor preparation on the part of the principals. It does not at all imply that it is categorically impossible for a mortal to gain access to divine power.”
“Hm,” Julia said. “Theoretically.”
“No, not theoretically,” Asmodeus said sharply. “Practically. Historically. Technically the process is called ascension, or sometimes assumption, or my favorite word for it is translation. They all mean the same thing: the process by which a human being is brought bodily into heaven, without dying, and accorded some measure of divine status. And then there’s apotheosis, which is related, whereby a human actually becomes a god. It’s been done, tons of times.”
“Give me examples.”
“Mary.” She ticked off a finger. “As in Jesus’s mom. She was born mortal and ended up divine. Galahad. Arthurian legend. He was Lancelot’s son. He found the Holy Grail and was taken directly up into heaven. So was Enoch—he was an early descendant of Adam’s.”
“There’s a couple of Chinese generals,” Gummidgy said. “Guan Yu. Fan Kuai. There’s the Eight Immortals of Taoism.”
“Dido, Buddha, Simon Magus . . .” Pouncy chimed in. “It just goes on and on.”
“Or look at Ganymede,” Asmo said. “Greek legend. He was a mortal, but of such great beauty that Zeus brought him up to Olympus to be a cupbearer. Hence the project name.”
“We think cupbearer was probably a euphemism,” Failstaff added.
“No kidding,” Julia said. “Okay, I get the point. Not everybody ends up like Icarus. But these are just stories. There’s immortals in Highlander, but that doesn’t mean they’re real.”
“Those aren’t gods,” Failstaff said. “Sheezus, have you even seen the movie?”
“And these aren’t just ordinary mortals you’re talking about. They were all special in some way. Like you said, Enoch was a descendant of Adam.”
“And you’re not?” Asmo said.
“Galahad was inhumanly virtuous. Ganymede was inhumanly beautiful. Which I don’t think anybody here exactly qualifies for either. You all seem pretty human to me.”
“Very true,” Pouncy said. “Very true. It’s an issue. Listen, for the moment we’re talking proof of concept. We’re in initial trials. We’re nowhere near drawing definitive conclusions yet. We just don’t want to rule anything out.”
Like a professor showing around a prospective graduate student, Pouncy took Julia on a tour of the parts of the East Wing she hadn’t been allowed into before. She passed room after room stuffed with the paraphernalia of a hundred churches and temples. There were raiments and vestments. There were altars and torches and censers and miters. There were a thousand flavors of incense.
She picked up a bundle of sacred staffs tied together with twine—she recognized a bishop’s crosier among them, and a druidical shillelagh. This was a different class of hardware from what she was used to handling, to the say least. It looked like rubbish to her. But who could tell for sure without testing? Maybe this was the industrial-strength stuff. Maybe this really was the big iron, the magical equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider. You couldn’t rule it out till you’d ruled it out. Could you?
So Julia joined Project Ganymede. She pitched in with the others, doing what nerds do: she sliced and diced, organized and spreadsheeted,