Re-Crossing the Styx

Re-crossing the Styx

By Ian R. Macleod

(Read the full text in The Best Year’s Science Fiction Anthology 2011, edited by Gardner Dozois)

It seemed like there were more corpses than ever as he led the morning excursion to the ruins of Knossos in Crete, with the Glorious Nomad anchored off what remained of the city of Heraklion. At least fourteen out of the forty two heads he counted on the tour bus looked to be dead. Make that double, if you included their minders. The easiest way to tell the dead apart from the living was by a quick glance at their wigs and toupees. Not that the living oldies didn’t favour such things as well, but the dead were uniformly bald – hair, like skin, seemed to be something the scientists haven’t fully got the knack of replacing – and had a particularly bilious taste in rugware. The lines of bus seats Frank faced sprouted Elvis coxcombs, dyed punky tufts and Motown bechives. The dead loved to wear big sunglasses, as well. They shunned the light, like the vampires they somewhat resembled, and favoured loose-fitting clothes in unlikely combinations of manmade fabrics. Even the men put on too much makeup to disguise their pasty skins. As the tour bus climbed towards the day’s cultural destination and Frank took the mike and kicked into his spiel about Perseus and the Minotaur, a mixed smell of corrupted flesh, facecream and something like formaldehyde waffled over him.

The September sun wasn’t particularly harsh as Frank, Glorious Nomad lollipop in raised right hand, guided his shuffling bunch from sight to stairlift to moving walkway. Here is the priest-king fresco and here is the throne room and here is the world’s first flush toilet. The only other tour group were from the Happy Minstrel, another big cruise vessel berthed at the old American naval base at Souda Bay. As the two slow streams shuffled and mingled in their frail efforts to be first to the souvenir shop, Frank couldn’t help but worry that he was going to end up with some of the wrong guests. Then, as he watched them some more – so frail, so goddamn pointless in their eagerness to spend the money they’d earned back in their discarded lives as accountants from Idaho or lawyers from Stockholm or plant hire salesmen from Wolverhampton – he wondered if it would matter.

Re-crossing the Styx. Photo by Elena

He corralled what seemed like the right specimens back on the bus without further incident, and they headed on toward what today’s itinerary described as A Typical Cretan Fishing Village. The full place looked convincing enough if you ignored the concrete berms erected as protection against the rising seas, and the local villagers did local villager as well as anyone who had to put on the same act day after day reasonable could.

Afterwards, Frank sat under an olive tree in what passed for the harbourfront tavern, took a screen out from his back pocket and pretended to read. The waiter brought him stuffed olives, decent black decaf and a plate of warm pita bread. It was hard, sometimes, to complain.