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emotions were quicker, cheaper and somehow, to Pan’s way of thinking at least, infinitely tawdry. And there was no romance any more, no glamour. You couldn’t bribe Paranoia with a sacrifice of firstling lambs, or appease Claustrophobia with a hymn and a prayer. All right, Lyssa and Hecate wouldn’t have taken a whole lot of notice either, but at least you’d have had the feeling of getting a personal service, provided by trained professionals. And say what you liked about the gods, they’d had style.
    Once.
    ‘Thanks,’ Pan said, leaning forward and putting his hand on the doorhandle. ‘Anywhere here will do.’
    ‘Okay.’ The cabbie drew up, looked at the meter and asked for his fare. Pan stared at him. It wasn’t the best he’d ever done, but it was still good enough.
    ‘Hey, mac, no offence. So maybe it’s a bit on the high side. Let’s just talk it over, and . . .’
    Stare.
    ‘The ride’s on me, okay?’
    Stare.
    ‘Look.’ The taxi driver was sweating. ‘How’d it be if I gave you fifty bucks and we forgot the whole thing?’
    ‘Done.’
    Perks, Pan thought, folding the money into his pocket and cloppity-clopping his way up Wall Street; one of the few fringe benefits. And am I prostituting my Art, putting the wind up tradesmen? Yes. Good.
    Wall Street. Again. It was as bad, he felt, as appearing on chat-shows. He pushed open a pair of huge smoked glass doors and trudged in.
    His mind wasn’t on the job and he overdid the stare he gave the security guard. He felt a bit guilty as he walked on, leaving the poor man cowering under the front desk with a paper bag over his head.
    He overdid the elevator, too. As soon as he got out of it, the wretched thing bolted straight up to the thirty-second floor and stayed there. It was gone midnight before the maintenance men were able to talk it down.
    It was, he realised, because he was feeling depressed and bad-tempered after talking to Kortright. And the reason it had got to him so badly was that what Kortright had said was true. He was indeed over the hill. Over Everest, even. Maybe it was time he retired, like all the others.
    By now he had won through to the dealing room itself, and he stood in the doorway, looking for a suitable victim. His eye lit on a small, round young man with glasses and just enough hair remaining to thatch a toolshed in Lilliput. He walked over and leaned on the computer terminal.
    ‘Hi,’ he said.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘In twenty minutes,’ said Pan, staring, ‘the dollar is going to fall so far it’ll probably burn up on re-entry.’
    The market maker gazed at him out of round, glazed eyes. ‘Why?’ he said.
    ‘It’s the British,’ Pan replied. ‘The War of Independence was fixed. Results of tests show that George Washington was on steroids.’ He paused, turned up the stare by about three degrees, and bent it into a grin. ‘If I were you, I’d start selling now.’
    ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’
    ‘Don’t mention it.’
    By the time he reached the ground floor, walking down fire stairs that seemed to want to edge away from him, the dollar was so far down you couldn’t have traced it with a metal detector, and switchboards were jamming and systems going down right across the world as the financial rats scrambled to leave the floating ship. As he pushed through the doors and set hoof to pavement, Pan was acutely conscious of the buzz, the high feeling of having scared the recycled food out of tens of thousands of people who’d never done him any harm in their entire lives. It was a good feeling. It was what being a god is all about.
    But, he reflected as he clattered down into the subway, it’s still only a cheap commercial job, and I’m lucky to get that. Dammit, it is time to retire.
    Definitely.
    First thing tomorrow.
     
    ‘The rear crankshaft cotter pin, thirty-six,’ Odin repeated, ‘is connected to the offside flywheel, seventy-two, by a split pin, nine.’ He peered through his bifocals at the