Chasing Orion Read Online Free PDF Page A

and use those teeny-weeny bulbs that are in flashlights. It could really be beautiful. So I had spent a lot of time thinking about the electrical details, but then I realized that I didn’t actually have a story. Somehow my mythology book had gotten lost in the move. And I needed to figure out a good story. All the constellations had mythological stories connected to them. It was just as if ancient people looked up into the night and saw some kind of picture and then decided they had to make up a story to go with it. It was like their religion, and they figured the gods must have put all that glitter up there. None of it Christian, of course, but they had as many gods and as many versions of gods getting mixed up with people and animal stories as there are kinds of religion today. I only knew the basic outlines of most of the myths.
    I asked the librarian, who was still padding around in golf socks, where the Greek mythology section was. She pointed toward the opposite corner and said turn left at the poster of — duh! — Zeus. So I did. I had to walk back through the rows of bookshelves, and when I got to the very last row, where the 290s were, I caught sight of something squashed in the corner. If the something had not been reading a book, I would have thought it was a bag of laundry.
    How should I explain this? The laundry bag looked up when she heard me and blinked at me through round glasses with thin wire rims. Her hair sprung out in a dark electrified frizzle from her head, and she had the palest skin I ever saw. There was something about her shape, too, that suddenly reminded me of a mushroom. Her skin was maybe the color of one of those very white mushrooms — cultivated mushrooms, and not one of the wild ones that grow in the woods.
Yes, a mushroom exactly,
I thought.
    “Hi,” she said softly, in a voice I instantly thought of as very mushroom, if indeed they ever spoke.
    “Hi,” I said, and turned back to looking at the books on the shelf. I looked for maybe a minute, and then I heard the soft voice again.
    “If you need one of the ones I’m using, feel free.” I looked over and saw that she had a huge stack of books on the floor beside her. She was sitting on one of those beanbag things, more or less growing out of it rather than sitting. “What are you looking for?”
    “Myths about the sky.”
    “Oh, yeah, here’s one.” She held out a book. The title was
Myths and Constellations
. “It’s not altogether accurate.”
    “It isn’t?”
    “No, it claims that the earliest references to the mythological significance of constellations are in the
Iliad,
seventh century BC. But actually there are cuneiform references from six thousand years ago.”
    “Oh!” I said. What else could I say? I wasn’t sure what cuneiform was, but I certainly had the feeling that I was speaking to a form of life that was higher than fungal. Then she smiled. It was a fragile smile, and it made her face pretty. “There’s another beanbag right there, if you want to sit down.”
    “Thanks,” I said, and dragged the beanbag over so I would be closer to the pile of books. Then I sank down into the fake leather puffiness and opened the book she gave me. I began reading the story of Callisto and Arcas. Not exactly a jolly tale. Callisto has been romanced by Zeus, who had to disguise himself because his wife, Hera, was jealous. She gives birth to a son, Arcas. Hera finds out and is so ticked off that she turns Callisto into a bear. One day her son sees her and doesn’t recognize her as his mother. He raises his bow to shoot her. But Zeus, looking down from Olympus, sees what is about to happen and saves the day and magically turns Arcas into a little bear. Then he grabs both mother and son by their tails and hurls them out into the sky.
    The Mushroom looked over at what I was reading. “Oh, Callisto. Sad. Matricide always is . . . intentional or not.”
    “You mean killing his mother?”
    “Yeah, but luckily he