Collected Short Fiction, page 732
“We mean to keep it secure.” The god’s voice crashed and boomed against the vault. “Our people have been instructed to extirpate that outrageous blasphemy since we first heard of it. The Thearchy has always loyally denied it, and over the centuries every outspoken believer has been burned alive.
“Yet the heresy persists. My good son Quelf discovered it among the surviving premen on his first visit to their reservation. Of course, he found no admitted believers—they have become too cunning for that. But, under expert interrogation, many confessed that they had listened to rumors of a demon race—hiding here on Earth, perhaps among the premen themselves.”
“So that’s why they are being removed?”
“The final solution, when it is carried through.” The nimbus brightened with divine satisfaction. “One privately suggested by Quelf himself. As his due reward, we granted him all the remaining preman lands and allowed him to flood them with a pleasure lake. In keeping, however, with our ancient treaty obligations and the honor of the Thearchy, the premen will not be harmed—not so long as they respect our plans.”
“I see.”
“Resettling them on Andoranda V is our son’s ingenious idea. Located in a most remote involution of the multiverse, the planet is so far from Earth that no escaping preman is likely to find his way back here. Although it offers the premen an environment where they can survive, a fortunate accidental feature of the biocosm prevents the reproduction of Terran life. This will be the last preman generation.”
Without expression, Ironlaw nodded.
“A final solution,” he agreed. “I see no further problem.”
“The plan has run into trouble.” The nimbus paled with Belthar’s scowl. “Our son informs us that several premen have escaped, in spite of all his vigilance. He is most concerned about a young pair known as Davey Dunahoo and Jondarc. They derive from the vilest scum of the reservation, but they were clever enough to impress the pilot goddess, Zhondra Zhey, who induced the reservation agent to take them into his home.
“Typical premen, they had no gratitude. When they learned about our plan, they robbed their friends and ran away. They were able to kill a muman guard who overtook them at the lake. Our son has been unable to track them beyond that point. He now reports that he feels impelled to withdraw most of his forces to guard his own person from their unknown powers.”
“Surprising.” The general’s cool gray eyes opened wider. “Are you suggesting that these young premen are the legendary demons?”
“We suggest nothing.” Belthar’s voice crashed louder, and crimson flushed his nimbus. “We simply order you to discover and destroy them.”
“Is that necessary?” Ironlaw stiffened. “My own mission, based on these satellites, has always been space defense. The civilian church has always been able to keep order on Earth—”
“Our son suggested that you might object.” Belthar cut him off. “At his suggestion—to free you for this most urgent mission—we are replacing you with your clone deputy. You will of course return to duty here as our space commander when those demons are dead.”
“I see, sir.” He came to attention, with a dutiful salute. “I’ll undertake the mission.”
“We expect you to complete it.” Belthar smiled, giant teeth gleaming through the nimbus like the fangs of some muman warrior. “You will be in full command of the hunt, with authority to ask all aid from the Thearchy, the agency, and even the space command. Your deputy has already received his own instructions, and you will leave at once for Earth.”
HIS SHUTTLE LANDED on the new field beneath the south towers of the Lord Quelf’s enormous, but unfinished, palace on the mesa above the still-filling lake. In plain gray civilian garb, with due care to shake hands gently and to hide his quarter-ton of weight, he might have passed himself for a truman farm expert or factory manager.
Calling first at the palace, he was questioned and searched by an army of church officials and Quelf’s police before they let him into the white marble throne-room. He waited there an hour before the tall, black half-god came striding in with his muman guards and truman girls. Though a shocked sacristan was hissing instructions to kneel, he stood at attention to report.
“Military clone Ironlaw, at your command, sir.”
“The required style is ‘Your Benign Semi-Divinity,’ ” the sacristan whispered. “Your manner is offensive.”
He stood fast, facing Quelf.
“My father says you’re his best.” Quelf eyed him critically. “No special excellence is evident to me, but you are to find and kill those fugitive heretics. If you fail, I’ll see that you never return to space.”
“I understand.”
Quelf’s underlings were a little more civil. A bright-scaled military muman took him in a skimmer to follow the trail of the fugitives and inspect the point on the lakeshore where they had left their murdered pursuer.
The reservation agent and a fat Polarian monk showed him the tiny mud town of Red Rock. Its single rutted street was empty now, its people already transferred to a camp at the shuttle field to wait for their removal to Andoranda V.
“There was heresy here,” the monk announced. “We’ve uncovered an infidel chapel.”
Grim with his own outrage, he led them down into a tiny cave dug beneath the floor of the abandoned trading center. The place had a stale reek of preman filth and preman death, and dark blood was drying over the torn pages of an old preman book lying on a cloth-covered box. Ironlaw bent to inspect a curious wood carving hung on the raw earth wall above the box, the image of a naked preman nailed to a cross.
“We found one heretic dead here,” the plump monk said. “An old man known as El Yaqui, who owned the trading post. His knife in his heart. I suppose he didn’t want to leave his small dead god.”
“I never suspected him,” the agent added. “Though I knew the fellow well. The last of his family, which the church had removed from a remote mountain valley. The last believer, I imagine, in his curious deity.”
The old infidel had always been secretive, and the agent doubted that he had taught the fugitives his dying faith. The mother of the fugitive boy had been a woman in El Yaqui’s house. He had let the pair sleep in a barn, had sometimes thrown them food, but that was long ago, before the visiting goddess was seized with her unaccountable whim to befriend them.
At the agent’s mansion, Ironlaw looked into the rooms where the two had lived. Speaking to the family, he noticed the young son’s apprehension. Under his inquiry, the boy broke down, confessing in tears that he had forged truman documents for the pair and aided their escape.
The Polarian monks, Ironlaw learned, had come to survey the historic sights that would be flooded by the lake. The fugitives, in their last days on the reservation, had been laborers employed by a group digging through the battle debris of the Space War into ruins of a building believed to have been the actual workshop of the Creators, where the gods themselves were made.
Abject now, fearful for his son, the agent told what he knew about the preman belief in a Fourth Creation. The making of the gods had been a blunder—so the heretics insisted. To repair their error, the Creators had shaped a greater being, one designed to crush the gods and become the future master of the multiverse. A thousand years in hiding, this mythical ‘Multiman’ had been expected by every generation of the premen to appear and restore their lost greatness.
“A pathetic little legend,” the agent finished. “But it’s the reason our Lord Quelf wants those premen hunted down. Years ago, I heard the boy threaten him with the Multiman—he was only a naked child, but furious because Quelf had killed his pet dog. If there is any real cause for Quelf’s concern, it is the possibility that they found something in that dig on Creation Mesa. Something dangerous to him.”
Ironlaw questioned the surgeons who had examined the dead muman. She had died an instant after firing a death-bolt from her crest. The autopsy showed that death was due to a similar bolt, as if her own fireball had been reflected back against her by some cause they could not explain.
Her null-G belt was missing. He estimated the power that should have been left in its cells and called for weather records. There was only a slight possibility, he concluded, that the winds had carried the fugitives to the farther lakeshore, none that they had been lifted much beyond.
Visiting the truman settlements nearest the lake, he found no trace of new arrivals who might be the missing pair. He ordered their descriptions posted and returned to narrow the search.
“They’re somewhere near,” he told the armored officers of his gathering force. “We’ll search the shore and the islands in the lake.”
THE CREATURE PERCHED on a high sandstone bench, peering down at them with a single bright-green eye. Only half human, it looked monstrous. Its arms and shoulders were immense, the lower body dwarfed, giant hands brushing doll’s feet. Naked, except for parti-colored fur, yellow-and-black, it seemed sexless. The head was pink and bald and baby-like, the left eye squinted shut, white teeth flashing through an impish grin.
“What—” Davey stopped to gulp. “Who are you?”
“Call me Pipkin.” Its shrill little bird-voice was grotesquely too fine and too high. “I mean you no harm.”
Davey had stepped ahead of Buglet and stooped for a throwing rock, but after a moment he let it fall. He stood perplexed, looking for a boat or a skimmer or a path the creature could have followed down the cliffs.
“Well, Pipkin?” He thought it might resent his stare, but he felt fascinated by its utter strangeness. “What do you want?”
“This is my home.” It beckoned at the cliff. “I ask you to enter.”
Following its gesture, he saw a passage into the fractured sandstone that he had somehow overlooked before. The opening was smoothly oval, twice the creature’s height, the edges oddly bright.
“Why?” Buglet caught his hand, and he felt her trembling. “What will happen to us?”
“You are in danger her, and I don’t want attention.” It swept a huge yellow arm toward the wheeling skimmers in the south. “We’ll all be safer inside.”
Davey shook his head, frowning doubtfully.
“We must trust him,” Buglet whispered. “Let’s go in.”
The creature stood aside, and they scrambled past it toward the entrance. As they came near, Davey felt an unexpected shift of weight and balance, as if he had been caught by a null-G field. He was lifted, drawn into the tunnel, swept a long way through it. Never touching the glowing wall, he was tossed out into the dank chill of a long cavern lined with rough concrete.
He stumbled when his weight came back; before he got his balance, Buglet and the creature were floating down beside him. The blue shine faded from the tunnel walls behind them; a gray fog filled it; suddenly there was only a vanishing oval glow on the gray concrete.
“Nothing magical.” Pipkin grinned at his gaping wonder. “A single effect of atomic rotation. The null-G belt rotates atoms beyond the reach of gravity. The passage is formed by another rotation, into transvolutionary space.”
Still dazed, Davey stared around. They stood on a long ramp in a pool of gray light that seemed to come from nowhere. Rusty metal rails ran along the ramp, and enormous broken concrete piers loomed beyond it, where he thought enormous machines must once have been installed. He had a sense of vast unlit space above and beyond.
“An old fort,” the creature was piping. “Built during the Preman Rebellion to protect Creation Mesa. Destroyed in the Space War, when the gods returned. Nuclear missiles were assembled and stored in this area.
“But come along.”
Agile on tiny feet, it danced down the ramp. The patch of light followed, as if the creature itself were the source. Davey caught Buglet’s hand, and they hurried after it, breathless to keep ahead of the dark. Beyond a narrow passage, they came into a smaller, brighter, cleaner chamber.
“A ready room, used by the defenders.” The creature waved at metal seats and tables, at bunks on concrete shelves. “A temporary shelter for you. You’ll find food and water through the door.”
“This seems too good—” Davey shivered. “We were trapped out there, with nothing left to hope for.” Frowning at the creature, he drew Buglet closer. “Please tell us who you are and what you want.”
“Relax.” With a bland baby-smile, it nodded at a hard steel bench. “I suppose you must be bewildered, but really I mean you no harm. Sit there, and I’ll explain myself.”
Uneasily, they sat.
“I’m a god—a botched god.” With a startling show of power, it bounded off the floor and dropped lightly on a tabletop before them. “A failed creation.”
The fat pink face grinned wryly.
“Though the Creators were rebuilding their own genes to extend their capacities from generation to generation, they never fully overcame their preman limitations. Sometimes they blundered. When old Huxley Smithwick set out to make the stargods, his first attempts went badly wrong. Most of them had to be destroyed—often in haste. I was more fortunate.
“He saved me for study at first, to find what he had done wrong. He soon discovered that I was too feeble to harm him, and I tried hard to persuade him that I might be useful, or at least amusing. I think he developed a certain liking for me. In the end, he kept me with him as a sort of court jester—though I was never good for anything, except sometimes to divert him from the cares of god-making.
“Certainly old Hux had troubles enough. That was an age of confusion, with the rebel premen trying to destroy the Creators and all the better beings they had made. He had grown up in hiding. When he escaped to space, carrying the seed for greater gods, I was left behind. I’m still here.
“My main defect is not the deformity you see.” Pipkin raised the mighty arms and danced a quick pirouette to display the mismatched, bright-furred, sexless body. “It’s lack of power. My perceptions are acute enough.”
Facing them again, the creature lifted a thick finger to its squinted eye, which opened to show only blank whiteness.
“Though I’m half blind to common light, I can see and feel through the folds of the multiverse as far as any being can. Yet it took all my transvolutionary power just to rotate those few cubic meters of stone and bring you inside. The best of my meager abilities has always been required, just to stay concealed and stay alive.
“A dismal life for a god!”
A god, Davey inferred, he must be male. His situation, as he put it, seemed bleak enough; yet the green, seeing eye had a sardonic glint, as if he ridiculed himself.
“For all these centuries I have been shut up here, a hapless spectator, observing the history of the multiverse. The expansion of the trumen into space after space. The battles of the mumen, against every sort of alien danger. Most amusing—though now and then depressing—the follies of the later gods.” His laughter tinkled, a tiny bell. “Watching them, sometimes I feel fortunate.”
Muscular, gold-furred fingers gripping the table edge, he swung himself to sit there, regarding them shrewdly with his single seeing eye.
Buglet gulped. “We do thank Your Divinity—”
“Call me Pipkin,” he squeaked. “Just Pip, for short. Old Hux did. I’m no kin to His Benign Semi-Divinity, Quelf.”
“Pipkin, then.” She smiled uncertainly. “Can you really help us? Please!”
“I’m no altruist.” He made a face of pink distaste. “Can’t afford to be. Might have pushed you off the rocks to drown, but I didn’t want Quelf’s people swarming over the island, looking for the bodies. You’re still a problem for me.”
“We didn’t mean to be.”
“All an accident.” He shrugged, great shoulder-muscles rippling beneath the fur. “Water getting into the lower levels. Out to look for leaks. Otherwise, might not have found you at all. Had been watching Quelf, of course—half my entertainment.”
Green eye closed, he raised himself on his hands, the tiny body swinging quickly back and forth. Davey looked away and back again, still afraid his gaze might give offense.
“We . . . we’re desperate.” He showed his empty hands. “Quelf wants to ship us off to die on Andoranda V . . . or more likely kill us for trying to get away—”
“I can’t hide you here,” Pipkin shrilled. “Not for long. Quelf’s own dull underlings would never find us, but now he has brought in Belthar’s space commander. A very able muman clone. I’ll have to send you somewhere—”
“Before you decide, there’s something we must . . . we must ask you.” Buglet hesitated, as if unnerved by Pipkin’s strangeness. “You see, I think we’re more than premen.” Pipkin’s swinging body froze.
“I think . . . I think we’re Eva Smithwick’s Fourth Creation. Lately, I’ve been getting memories I think she planted in us. If you were here—” She had to get her breath, “if you were here when she was, perhaps you know what we really are.” Pipkin’s emerald eye blinked and stared again.
“We need to know,” Davey begged. “To find ourselves.”
“I was already in hiding, even then,” Pipkin piped at last. “Eva never even guessed that I still existed. But of course I was observing her. I saw her discovering that the gods had been a blunder. Too much power, with too little love for the older creations. I watched her efforts to create the ultiman—”
“The Multiman?”
“A preman label.” The baby-head nodded. “She was trying to design the ultimate man. A new being with all the power of the gods—perhaps with more—along with greater love for all the lesser folk. With wisdom and justice enough to rule his share of the multiverse.”
Pipkin’s laughter jingled.
“Eva was still half preman, really—only a preman would have dared what she did. She tried hard enough. Her problem was that the gods didn’t want to be restrained or replaced by any better being. They didn’t give her time.”
“Do you think—” Pain caught Davey’s throat. “Do you think we could really be ultimen? Buglet, anyhow?”
