“Yet they keep changing the rules,” Zeus complained. He leaned back on his velvet couch, surveying the worlds and times that flickered outside of the castle-sized picture windows, drank his wine, and idly fingered the divine spider plant on the bronzed table by the divan.

Christ just smiled. Then he said, “I don’t know what you’re complaining about.”

“Oh, the Crucifixion?” Zeus said. “I’ll grant you that was no fun.”

“Yet the whole concept was,” Christ said nostalgically. “There were great moments, moments when I thought I almost got through to them. Jerusalem wasn’t Olympus—but the saga was there, the excitement and educational contrasts.”

The two of them sat quietly for a moment (that lasted for centuries), each lost in his own thoughts, watching the nights and dawns flicker off and on across the earth and all of the earths below and around; for outside of the god-place, times and spaces blew gently past the windows, and the paths in the stately gardens outside connected worlds.

Such a place doesn’t exist in usual terms, of course, but in—well, extraordinary terms, in palaces of the psyche; in an inner world that is as separated and personified as you and I and as all of the readers of this book. So in that sense, Zeus and Christ and Mohammed and all of the gods do all sit conversing. And in that sense, Oversoul Seven goes out seeking the gods.

Castle or not, however, nothing could conceal the fact that this was an old gods’ home. Zeus kept dozing. Christ now and then had nightmares about the Crucifixion. And in one of the courtyards, Mohammed flashed his fiery sword, but none of the attendants even pretended to get out of the way anymore, or played scared, so that Mohammed just kept flailing away at the infidels, cutting the bodies in half or into a zillion pieces which were all in the next moment magically repaired. It was enough, dear Allah, to take the joy out of killing. Mohammed sighed, and Allah, mechanically clapping on the sidelines, was bored.

No one there, Zeus thought, had anything really left but memories.

“But what memories!” Christ answered aloud. “Still; pathetic. They’re still fighting about me on Earth, even now. And waiting for the Second Coming. That’ll be the blessed day. I’d really have to be crazy to go back there.”

Zeus lifted his still black, thicker-than-forest eyebrows and said with a thunderous-enough laugh, “Come on, now. You love it. They still think of you, and it’s the only thing that keeps you going. Admit it.”