Far Thoughts and Pale Gods Read online

  “How big is the ship now?”

  “Four hundred kilometers across. Built rather like a volvox, if you know what that is.”

  “How do you keep from going back yourself?”

  “We have special equipment to keep us from separating. When we started out, we thought it would shield us from a mutata, but it didn’t. This is all it can do for us now: it can keep us in one piece each time we jump. But not the entire ship.”

  I began to understand. The huge bulk of ship I had seen from the window was real. I had never left the grab bag. I was in it now, riding the aggregate, a tiny particle attracted out of solution to the colloidal mass.

  Junipero touched the tank, and it returned to its random flow. “It’s a constant shuttle run. Each time we return to the Earth to see who, if any, can find their home there. Then we seek out the ones who have the disrupters, and they attack us—send us away again.”

  “Out there—is that my world?”

  The old woman shook her head. “No, but it’s home to one group—three of them. The three creatures in the bubble.”

  I smiled. “I thought there were a lot more than that.”

  “Only three. You’ll learn to see things more accurately as time passes. Maybe you’ll be the one to bring us all home.”

  “What if I find my home first?”

  “Then you’ll go, and if there’s no one to replace you, one of the crew will command until another comes along. But someone always comes along, eventually. I sometimes think we’re being played with, never finding our home, but always having a Juniper to command us.” She smiled wistfully. “The game isn’t all bitterness and bad tosses, though. You’ll see more things, and do more, and be more, than any normal woman.”

  “I’ve never been normal,” I said.

  “All the better.”

  “If I accept.”

  “You have that choice.”

  “‘Junipero,’” I breathed. “Geneva.” Then I laughed.

  “How do you choose?”

  The small child, seeing the destruction of its thousand companions with each morning light and the skepticism of the older ones, becomes frightened and wonders if she will go the same way. Some­one will raise the shutters and a sunbeam will impale her and she’ll phantomize. Or they’ll tell her they don’t believe she’s real. So she sits in the dark, shaking. The dark becomes fearful. But soon each day becomes a triumph. The ghosts vanish, but she doesn’t, so she forgets the shadows and thinks only of the day. Then she grows older, and the companions are left only in whims and background thoughts. Soon she is whittled away to nothing; her husbands are past, her loves are firm and not potential, and her history stretches away behind her like carvings in crystal. She becomes wrinkled, and soon the daylight haunts her again. Not every day will be a triumph. Soon there will be a final beam of light, slowly piercing her jellied eye, and she’ll join the phantoms.

  But not now. Somewhere, far away, but not here. All around, the ghosts have been resurrected for her to see and lead. And she’ll be resurrected, too, always under the shadow of the tree name.

  “I think,” I said, “that it will be marvelous.”

  So it was, thirty centuries ago. Sonok is gone, two hundred years past; some of the others have died, too, or gone to their own Earths. The ship is five hundred kilometers across and growing. You haven’t come to replace me yet, but finally, I’m dying, too, and I leave this behind to guide you, along with the instructions handed down by those before me.

  Your name might be Jennifer, or Ginepra, or something else, but you will always be me. Be happy for all of us, darling. We will be forever whole.

  Afterword

  Years later, I would bring back the Sinieux, the nested snakes of “Scattershot” in my novel, Anvil of Stars, give them a conceptual upgrade, and call them the Brothers.

  Petra

  “Petra” is the most extravagant of my theological fantasies, perfect, I think, for an animated feature. Cute gargoyles come to life, as in Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame. The sex angle is dicey even for the modern Disney, but I’d be willing to compromise a little to see a splendidly animated feature about a world in which, for whatever reason, God’s laws no longer apply.

  Matt Howarth did a lovely comic adaptation of “Petra” for the program book of the Philadelphia World Science Fiction convention in 2001, where I was Guest of Honor.

  This was the first story I sold to Omni under the editorial surveillance of Ellen Datlow. Ben Bova, my worthy editor at Analog, and at this point in charge at Omni, was not enthusiastic, but once again I was about to benefit from an editor moving on …

  Ben passed the reins of fiction editing to Ellen, and she bought and published “Petra.” Ellen seems to like bent theology. So do I.

  I strongly suspect that God has a sense of humor and doesn’t mind, either.

  “‘God is dead, God is dead’ … Perdition! When God dies, you’ll know it.”

  —Confessions of St. Argentine

  I’m an ugly son of stone and flesh, there’s no denying it. I don’t remember my mother. It’s possible she abandoned me shortly after my birth. More than likely she is dead. My father—ugly beaked, half-winged thing, if he resembles his son—I have never seen.

  Why should such an unfortunate aspire to be a historian? I think I can trace the moment my choice was made. It’s among my earliest memories, and it must have happened about thirty years ago, though I’m sure I lived many years before that—years now lost to me. I was squatting behind thick, dusty curtains in a vestibule, listening to a priest instructing other novitiates, all of pure flesh, about Mortdieu. His words are still vivid.

  “As near as I can discover,” he said, “Mortdieu occurred about seventy-seven years ago. Learned ones deny that magic was set loose on the world, but few deny that God, as such, had died.”

  Indeed. That’s putting it mildly. All the hinges of our once-great universe fell apart, the axis tilted, cosmic doors swung shut, and the rules of existence lost their foundations.

  The priest continued in measured, awed tones to describe that time. “I have heard wise men speak of the slow decline. Where human thought was strong, reality’s sudden quaking was reduced to a tremor. Where thought was weak, reality disappeared completely, swallowed by chaos. Every delusion became as real as solid matter.” His voice trembled with emotion. “Blinding pain, blood catching fire in our veins, bones snapping and flesh powdering. Steel flowing like liquid. Amber raining from the sky. Crowds gathering in streets that no longer followed any maps, if the maps themselves had not al­tered. They knew not what to do. Their weak minds could not grab hold …”

  Most humans, I take it, were entirely too irrational to begin with. Whole nations vanished or were turned into incomprehensible whirlpools of misery and depravity. It is said that certain universities, libraries, and museums survived, but to this day we have little contact with them.

  I think often of those poor victims of the early days of Mortdieu. They had known a world of some stability; we have adapted since. They were shocked by cities turning into forests, by their nightmares taking shape before their eyes. Oracular crows perched atop trees that had once been buildings, pigs ran through the streets on their hind legs … and so on. (The priest did not encourage contemplation of the oddities. “Excitement,” he said, “breeds even more monsters.”)

  Our Cathedral survived. Rationality in this neighborhood, however, had weakened some centuries before Mortdieu, replaced only by a kind of rote. The Cathedral suffered. Survivors—clergy and staff, worshipers seeking sanctuary—had wretched visions, dreamed wretched dreams. They saw the stone ornaments of the Cathedral come alive.

  With someone to see and believe, in a universe lacking any other foundation, my ancestors shook off stone and became flesh. Centuries of stone celibacy weighed upon them. Forty-nine nuns who had sought shelter in the Cathedral were discovered and were not entirely loath, so the coarser versions of the tale go. Mortdieu had had a surprising
aphrodisiacal effect on the faithful.

  Conjugation happened.

  No definite gestation period has been established, for at that time the great stone wheel had not been set twisting back and forth to count the hours. Nor had anyone been given the chair of Kronos to watch over the wheel and provide a baseline for everyday activities.

  But flesh did not reject stone, and there came into being the sons and daughters of flesh and stone, including me. Those who had fornicated with the inhuman figures were cast out to raise or reject their monstrous young in the highest hidden recesses. Those who had accepted the embraces of the stone saints and other human figures were less abused but still banished to the upper reaches. A wooden scaffolding was erected, dividing the great nave into two levels. A canvas drop cloth was fastened over the scaffold to prevent offal raining down, and on the second level of the Cathedral the more human offspring of stone and flesh set about creating a new life.

  I have long tried to find out how some semblance of order came to the world. Legend has it that it was the archexistentialist Jansard, crucifier of the beloved St. Argentine, who, realizing and repenting his error, discovered that mind and thought could calm the foaming sea of reality.

  The priest finished his all-too-sketchy lecture by touching on this point briefly: “With the passing of God’s watchful gaze, humanity had to reach out and grab hold the unraveling fabric of the world. Those left alive—those who had the wits to keep their bodies from falling apart—became the only cohesive force in the chaos.”

  I had picked up enough language to understand what he said; my memory was good—still is—and I was curious enough to want to know more.

  Creeping along stone walls behind the curtains, I listened to other priests and nuns intoning scripture to gaggles of flesh children. That was on the ground floor and I was in great danger, people of pure flesh looking on my kind as abominations.

  But it was worth it.

  I was able to steal a Psalter and learned to read. I stole more books; they defined my world by allowing me to compare it with others. At first I couldn’t believe the others had ever existed; only the Cathedral was real. I still have my doubts. I can look out a tiny round window on one side of my room and see the great forest and river that surround the Cathedral, but I can see nothing else. So my experience with other worlds is far from direct.

  No matter. I read a great deal but I’m no scholar. What concerns me is recent history—the final focus of that germinal hour listening to the priest. From the metaphysical to the acutely personal.

  I am small, barely three English feet in height, but I can run quickly through most of the hidden passageways. This lets me observe without attracting attention.

  I may be the only real historian in this whole structure. Others who claim the role disregard what’s before their eyes, in search of ultimate truths, or at least Big Pictures.

  So if you prefer history where the historian is not involved, look elsewhere. Objective as I try to be, I do have my favorite subjects.

  In the time when my history begins, the children of stone and flesh were still searching for the Stone Christ. Those of us born of the union of the stone saints and gargoyles with the bereaved nuns thought our salvation lay in the great stone celibate, who had come to life along with all the other statues.

  Of smaller import were the secret assignations between the bishop’s daughter and a young man of stone and flesh. Such assignations were forbidden even between those of pure flesh; and as these two lovers were unmarried, their compound sin intrigued me.

  Her name was Constantia, and she was fourteen, slender of limb, brown of hair, mature of bosom. Her eyes carried the stupid sort of divine life common in girls that age. His name was Corvus, and he was fifteen. I don’t recall his precise features, but he was handsome enough and dexterous: he could climb through the scaffolding almost as quickly as I. I first spied them talking when I made one of my frequent raids on the repository to steal another book. They were in shadow, but my eyes are keen. They spoke softly, hesitantly. My heart ached to see them and to think of their tragedy, for I knew right away that Corvus was not pure flesh and that Constantia was the daughter of the bishop himself. I envisioned the old tyrant meting out the usual punishment to Corvus for such breaches of level and morality—castration. But in their talk was a sweetness that almost masked the closed-in stench of the lower nave.

  “Have you ever kissed a man before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “My brother.” She laughed.

  “And?” His voice was sharper; he might kill her brother, he seemed to say.

  “A friend named Jules.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Oh, he vanished on a wood-gathering expedition.”

  “Oh.” And Corvus kissed her again.

  I’m a historian, not a voyeur, so I discreetly hide the flowering of their passion. If Corvus had had any sense, he would have reveled in his conquest and never returned. But he was snared and continued to see her despite the risk. This was loyalty, love, faithfulness, and it was rare. It fascinated me.

  I have just been taking in sun, a nice day, and looking out over the buttresses.

  The Cathedral is like a low-bellied lizard, the nave its belly, the but­tresses its legs. There are little houses at the base of each buttress, where rainspouters with dragon faces used to lean out over the trees (or city or whatever was down below once). Now people live there. It wasn’t always that way—the sun was once forbidden. Corvus and Constantia from childhood were denied its light, and so even in their youthful prime they were pale and dirty with the smoke of candles and tallow lamps. The most sun anyone received in those days was obtained on wood-gathering expeditions.

  After spying on one of the clandestine meetings of the young lovers, I mused in a dark corner for an hour, then went to see the copper giant Apostle Thomas. He was the only human form to live so high in the Cathedral. He carried a ruler on which was engraved his real name—he had been modeled after the Cathedral’s restorer in times past, the architect Viollet-le-Duc. He knew the Cathedral better than anyone, and I admired him greatly. Most of the monsters left him alone—out of fear, if nothing else. He was huge, black as night, but flaked with pale green, his face creased in eternal thought. He was sitting in his usual wooden compartment near the base of the spire, not twenty feet from where I write now, thinking about times none of the rest of us ever knew: of joy and past love, some say; others say of the burden that rested on him now that the Cathedral was the center of this chaotic world.

  It was the giant who selected me from the ugly hordes when he saw me with a Psalter. He encouraged me in my efforts to read. “Your eyes are bright,” he told me. “You move as if your brain were quick, and you keep yourself dry and clean. You aren’t hollow like the rainspouters—you have substance. For all our sakes, put it to use and learn the ways of the Cathedral.”

  And so I did.

  He looked up as I came in. I sat on a box near his feet and said, “A daughter of flesh is seeing a son of stone and flesh.”

  He shrugged his massive shoulders. “So it shall be, in time.”

  “Is it not a sin?”

  “It is something so monstrous it is past sin and become necessity,” he said. “It will happen more as time passes.”

  “They’re in love, I think, or will be.”

  He nodded. “I—and One Other—were the only ones to abstain from fornication on the night of Mortdieu,” he said. “I am—except for the Other—alone fit to judge.”

  I waited for him to judge, but he sighed and patted me on the shoulder. “And I never judge, do I, ugly friend?”

  “Never,” I said.

  “So leave me alone to be sad.” He winked. “And more power to them.”

  The bishop of the Cathedral was an old, old man. It was said he hadn’t been bishop before the Mortdieu, but a wanderer who came in during the chaos, before the forest had replaced the city. He had set himself up a
s titular head of this section of God’s former domain by saying it had been willed to him.

  He was short, stout, with huge hairy arms like the clamps of a vise. He had once killed a spouter with a single squeeze of his fist, and spouters are tough things, since they have no guts like you (I suppose) and I. The hair surrounding his bald pate was white, thick, and unruly, and his eyebrows leaned over his nose with marvelous flexibility. He rutted like a pig, ate hugely, and shat liquidly (I know all). A man for this time, if ever there was one.

  It was his decree that all those not pure of flesh be banned and that those not of human form be killed on sight.

  When I returned from the giant’s chamber, I saw that the lower nave was in an uproar. They had seen someone clambering about in the scaffold, and troops had been sent to shoot him down. Of course it was Corvus. I was a quicker climber than he and knew the beams better, so when he found himself trapped in an apparent cul-de-sac, it was I who gestured from the shadows and pointed to a hole large enough for him to escape through. He took it without a breath of thanks, but etiquette has never been important to me. I entered the stone wall through a nook a spare hand’s width across and wormed my way to the bottom to see what else was happening. Excitement was rare.

  A rumor was passing that the figure had been seen with a young girl, but the crowds didn’t know who the girl was. The men and women who mingled in the smoky light, between the rows of open-roofed hovels, chattered gaily. Castrations and executions were among the few joys for us then; I relished them too, but I had a stake in the potential victims now and I worried.

  My worry and my interest got the better of me. I slid through an unrepaired gap and fell to one side of the alley between the outer wall and the hovels. A group of dirty adolescents spotted me. “There he is!” they screeched. “He didn’t get away!”