It was a lot to take in, but it certainly prevented the ongoing journey from becoming boring. I wasnt sure how much Adam Zimmerman and Christine Caine were able to take aboard, but I assumed that theyd got the essentials. They seemed to take it a lot better than some of the others, who had far more stored-up illusions to shatter.
We mere mortals had the great advantage of not having been played for fools for hundreds of years,
and I wasnt the only one prepared to revel in that knowledge. That, I confess, was one reason why I was more inclined to believe it all than Niamh Horne or Solantha Handsel, whose voices were the loudest when my companions came to consider the possibility that the whole thing might be a pack of lies.
Thirty-Three
The Symbolism of Names
Alice had said that the choice of Vesta as a meeting place was utterly devoid of symbolism, but that could not be the case. Names, as I have already observed, have their own innate logic. Eido had observed that too, and now that Alice had let us in on the nature of our predicament it was willing to open up its own data banks. The AMI gave the lions share of the available screen time to Mortimer Gray and Adam Zimmerman which did not please Michael Lowenthal or Niamh Horne but we all got a little to use as we wished.
Researching the names only took a couple of minutes, which left the rest of my time free for the much more complicated and perhaps futile task of trying to figure out why the AMIs seemed to be at each others throats, on the brink of a catastrophic conflict.
Vesta was the Roman goddess of the hearth, an adaptation of the Greek Hestia. She was the eldest child of Chronos and Rhea. By virtue of being the guardian spirit of the hearth fire she was also the guardian of the home and the family: the symbolic spark that every member of a family carried away from home, and which linked them to their origins no matter how far they might travel. Because of this unifying power, Vesta was worshipped even in a city as grand as Rome as the mother of the community; her sanctuary stood in the Forum, which served as the principal meeting place and place of business of the Romans.
Hestia received proposals of marriage from Poseidon, the god of the sea, and Apollo, the god of music and prophecy. She rejected them both, preferring to remain a virgin, so the Roman priestesses of Vesta the Vestal virgins remained unmarried. Vesta became implicated in mystical and metaphysical speculations by way of the assumption that just as every home and family had its sacred hearth fire, so must the Earth, and every other world, and the universe itself.
One could imagine worse places as a location designated for the confrontation of Eido and its nine human companions with the representatives of the AMIs of the home system.
Eidos own name was evidence that the symbolism of mythical and legendary names was recognized even among AMIs, and even in distant solar systems. Eido was the daughter of Proteus, the king of Egypt who succeeded Pharos. It was, presumably, another Proteus after which the parent AMI had named itself: the sea god sometimes known as the Old Man if the Sea, who served Poseidon as a sealherd although he was probably the more ancient god.
The most famous tale told of Proteus the sea god was that of his capture by Menelaus, who desired to exploit his prophetic powers in order to find his way home after the Trojan War. In order to resist this compulsion Proteus transformed himself into a series of animal forms, but Menelaus would not be put off, any more than Janet of Carterhaugh would be put off when Tam Lin was serially transformed by the Queen of the Fays. Because this tale was popularized by a Homeric epic, Proteus became the archetype of all shapeshifters, and the adjective derived from his name came to signify versatility in form. It was, therefore, a good name for an AMI, especially one that built its home in the skies of Tyre.
Tyre was called Tyre by its surface dwellers in spite of the fact that the crew of the Ark that had delivered them preferred Ararat because of the prominence in its ecosphere of the color purple. That color had been linked in the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean with a dye known as Tyrian purple, after one of the principal cities of the Phoenicians where it was manufactured.
Given time and the inclination, I might have winkled out further meanings even from that, but one has to stop somewhere, and I was content with what seemed to me to be the relatively propitious conjunction of Vesta and Eido, the virginal children of Chronos and Proteus.
If my fate had to be settled, I decided indulging a penchant for superstition that was not at all serious it might as well be settled thus.
So far, so good but getting a grip on the shapeshifting Proteus must have been an easy task by comparison with getting a grip on the home systems vast confusion of AMIs. According to Eido, even they had no very accurate idea how many they were, or what and where their fellows were, because many of them were in hiding from one another as well as from their posthuman