Dr. Jack Leonid's surname originated in myth.  He thought of himself as an eminently practical man, but he wasn't.  A blythe spirit compressed inside the uniform of an upper-management corporate executive was more like it.  His occasional flights of fancy irritated him.  He blamed them on his mother, who had had an irritatingly infectious laugh.
   Once, she had by mistake made biscuits out of baking soda instead of baking powder.  They had the consistency of a hockey puck and tasted like granite.  If you've ever licked a column in a Greek temple, you know the flavor.
   When she had realized what she'd done, she didn't have the decency to be embarrassed or ashamed.  She had broken into laughter -- that laughter -- and taken everybody at the dinner table with her.  You couldn't not laugh when she laughed.
   He was embarrassed that he had laughed, and irritated that he now remembered that experience with affection and warmth.  One loves one's mother, of course.  But, one should not love the silly parts of one's mother.

   His father, now, had been a practical man.  An engineer.  Nothing fanciful about him, at all.  He was numbers and structural stress factors.  He knew how things worked, and when they didn't, why they didn't.  God only knew why a man like that had married a woman like that.
   Jack had disappointed his father because when he went to college, fully intending to become a scientist,  he had ended up in an unpractical discipline which though it contained elements of archeology, was nevertheless by nature rather wispy -- the study of exo-mythology.  The gods of the civilizations of the stars.
   "What's it good for, son?" his father had asked.
   How do you answer a question like that?  There is no answer to a question like that.  His father had been absolutely correct.  The thing is, Jack couldn't help it.  Once he had arrived at university, it was the structure that had drawn him.  Not in an architectural sense, but rather in an esoteric.  He didn't like that he liked the fluted library columns with their whorled capital corners.  It isn't one's fault what one likes.  It's the product of genetics or some unlucky exposure to people who laugh at their own stupid mistakes.
   But, when he took the lower level course in comparative religion, and came across the strange, illogical gods of the Greeks, well, he was drawn to them like iron filings to a magnet.

   He was on Greece at the moment, studying the gods.  Not in Greece.  On it.  A planet in the constellation Leo.  But, when he had been researching his doctoral dissertation, he had been in Greece.  The one on Earth.  That's why he knew what a granite temple column tasted like.  When nobody had been around, he had licked one of them.  He felt guilty about doing it.
   A man should grow away from childhood influences.
   It was there that he had discovered that he was about the same size as the gods.  Again, when nobody was looking, he had stepped up on a statue base and compared himself to Apollo.  He was two inches taller, and roughly the same color. That had struck him as odd, since the statue, being the same color as him, was the wrong color for a Greek.  The sun in that land is strong.  The people are almost Semitic. Well tanned..Why wouldn't their gods be the same color as themselves?

                                            II

   "Why are they identical to the ones on Earth, Jack?"
   His doctoral student often asked obvious questions.  She reminded Jack of his mother.  But, the statues and bas reliefs were identical, alright.  He had measured them down to the length and width of their fingernails. 
   "Why do you think it should be so?" he retorted in the proper, detached, Socratic form.
   "They came here from there or they went there from here," she said pragmatically. 
   It was, of course, the central question.  A hundred thousand lightyears separated this temple from an identical one on the Aegean coast.  It was impossible.  Maddening. 

   "You're not suggesting these figures are photographs from a family album, are you?" he said.  "They are just representations. Non-animal  -- well, some of them are part animal -- anthropomorphizations of a collage of human characteristics.  Somebody made them."
   His doctoral student pursed her pretty lips and said, "I'm not sure exactly what I'm saying, but maybe I am.  Somebody in the 20th century -- was it Bradbury?  Maybe Asimov. -- said that any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic.  I mean, the Aztecs thought the Conquistadors were gods.  A company of Spaniards with blunderbusses defeated the most powerful civilization in the Americas in a matter of months."
   She had a disconcerting ability to present her flights of imagination in a framework that made them look reasonable. 
   "And, they -- these gods -- are a family," she added.  "Or a community of families."

   That, he mused, was true.  The Greek gods resembled an inbred hick town from the hills of West Virginia.  Very similar to the inhabitants of New York City who lived above the forties. Of all the gods ever invented by Man, these were the most human.  It was no wonder that the Romans had adopted them.  The Romans had been engineers, but they were Italians.  The gods they found in Greece were perfect for them.  Food and sex, laughter and tragedy, music and war, fidelity and infidelity, nobility and ignobility.
   He had long waited for one of his students to deliver a dissertation comparing them to an American television soap opera.
   "I mean, what if these objects actually are a family album?"
   His mind came to a sudden halt.
   "What?" he said.
   "Well, what if nobody invented them?  What if these are images of real beings?  Spacefaring people."

                                          III

     He sat alone just before evening, staring at the wine dark sea of the planet Greece.  His perch was on a stone amidst a community of other stones that jutted up from a tiny cliff-face meadow of grass nervous in the wind.  The sun was low, and the stones cast long shadows. They reminded him of the hay bales in an autumn field.  Sepulchural.  A gravestone quality, like a cemetary.  Quiet and patient, done with their business and free of the things of the world.
   What if she was right?
   There was a sound.  He looked up.  It was her.  Some women looked mythical even wearing a flak jacket and Levis.  She sat down on the next stone.

   "They weren't gods," he said, turning back to the sea.
   "I don't think they were, either," she said.
   "Well, then, what were they?" he asked. "Why did they come to Earth and then just leave?"
   "A new beginning, perhaps," she replied. "Variety, you could call it.  An opportunity for the species to discover concepts they, themselves, had never conceived.  That's why they left their children a way of studying the world."
   Science had, indeed, been invented by the Greeks, he thought.  Taken in the context of the age, it was like an intellectual Cambrian explosion.  A titanic departure from all that had gone before.  The Greeks were the event that he thought of as the missing link, the 
black monolith of Arthur C. Clarke that bridged the gulf between animal and Man..

   "Did you know that our Greeks built a temple dedicated to the unknown god?" she asked.
   "Yes," he said.  "They were covering all the bases."
   "Or respecting the god of their gods," she said.
   "You're nuts," he said. 
   "I think you love me," she stated matter-of-factly.
   "I hope not," he heard himself say.
   She laughed.  It was one of those damned infectious laughs.  He had observed it before.  It was one of the qualities of hers that he liked least.
   "Oedipus?" she asked.
   "Probably," he said. "But, I can't kill my father for you.  He's already dead."
   That laugh again.  In spite of himself, a warmth spread through him.
   "How could it be?" he said to the sea.
   "The love or the gods?" she asked.
   "The gods."
   "Oh, that's easy," she said.  "They were just like us.  In fact, they were us.  Want to get married?"
   He thought about that for a long moment, then said, "Oh, hell. Why not?  It's the family curse." 

(C) 2002 Larry Leonard