The First Immortal

by Leo Lukas

  Was he even able to call up the clear fever just like that? Intentionally, even when he wasn't up to his neck in trouble?

  Boryk closed his eyes and listened inside himself.

  Nothing ...

  But wait, yes, there was something! Deep down, at the bedrock of his very being, a tiny flame flickered, hardly more than a glowing spark. And yet that tiny flame contained immense potential. It held the promise of a mighty conflagration. He concentrated his willpower, tried to fan the flame. And it worked! Heat rose within him, boiled up, pulsed like lava in his veins. Boryk burned stronger than ever before, surprised himself, actually overwhelmed by the power of his desire. Even if he had wanted to, he couldn't stop it now or even rein it in a little. As though a dam had burst, the fever spilled over him and swept away all obstacles.

  Boryk stood there with his legs apart and arms akimbo, and shouted, "Wake up and come out of your huts, people of the sea! Boryk of the Garden of Everwas has come down to you from Heaven so that you may honor him, pay homage to him, and serve him!"

  And they obeyed.

  The festival lasted three days and nights because Boryk's fever didn't ebb away until then. He ate and drank like he had never eaten and drunk before. He let himself be served in every conceivable way, but he didn't sleep, not for a minute.

  The people who lived along the seashore called themselves Genesists. They knew of the custom of the Holy Quest but hadn't practiced it in a long time. It was probably due to the considerable surplus of women in their village. This was exactly the opposite of the Garden of Everwas where there were six or seven men for every woman. Since boys were so rare here, they didn't want to expose them to the dangers of the mountain. So instead of the ritual for becoming a man, there was a procession of boats every spring solstice.

  Boryk picked up these pieces of information in passing while he devoted himself to the joys of the orgiastic celebration. He didn't get the impression that the Genesists struggled greatly against his wishes. Instead, they almost seemed to have been waiting for him. He didn't need to keep them under his constant influence at all as they did most of it voluntarily, even with great enthusiasm. The girls and women scrambled to do his bidding. The fathers brought their daughters to him, the husbands their wives, and all felt honored when he chose them and bestowed his favors upon them. Boryk slept with dozens, and his manly power never failed.

  At the end of the third day, he sensed that the frenzy was beginning to abate, and he sent the Genesists back to their huts with the command to forget everything that had happened. He climbed for about two hours up the mountain, found a sheltered spot, and immediately fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  The hangover that struck him when he regained consciousness had an intensity that matched that of the fever frenzy. Never had Boryk suffered through anything nearly so horrible. Never had he felt so awful.

  He was extremely sorry for what he had done. There was no excuse for it. It couldn't be said that he was out of his mind, had lost his senses, wasn't himself. No, for the entire time he had felt more self-aware, more genuine, more real than ever before. The true Boryk had come out, the man and master, lusting for power, domineering, egotistical, and ruthless. Yes, the Genesists had made it alarmingly easy for him, but that was no excuse. He had committed a heinous crime. He hadn't just taken advantage of one woman, not of just one girl, but of an entire village! Whatever the Creative Divinity had intended with the Holy Quest, surely that couldn't be it?

  Boryk briefly considered going back to the Sea of Geneset and begging for forgiveness, offering to atone, to settle his debt as much as was possible. But he quickly rejected the idea. He had taken the Genesists' memory of the orgy away, after all. Another sin in itself. They were victims who didn't even know what injustice had been done to them. If he appeared before them, they probably wouldn't even believe him. This ugly gnome, this weak little stripling, was supposed to have put them all under his spell? They would think he was a braggart, a mad boaster. To prove his claims, he would have had to employ his uncanny power again. He didn't want to, however, and besides, he couldn't have done it anyway, not in this wretched condition.

  Boryk fought it out in his mind the entire day, heaping self-reproaches on himself. The hangover was so bad that he thought the only relief would be to die. But opting for suicide, throwing himself into an abyss, didn't seem right to him, either. If he wanted to preserve at least a minimum of self-respect, he couldn't evade his responsibility, but had to find some other way of atoning.

  Finally, he resumed climbing. Nothing better occurred to him. Half-numb from his headache, he dragged himself to the highest peak and entrusted himself to the column of smoke. He landed in the corridor and let the horrible all-seeing light play over him.

  He realized after a few seconds that the ghostly light had suddenly gone out, and right next to him opened a door that he hadn't even noticed before.

  An invisible hand drew him inside. He floated along a passageway that had an oval cross-section, like many tunnels in the Silver Mountain. A portion of the wall slid to the side, opening up another passageway. The ghostly hand shoved Boryk into a large room that was almost as high as the cave in which the Vertical Village had been built. This hall was as good as empty, however, if one didn't count the strange pictures and many small lights on the walls. A single piece of furniture stood almost precisely in its center, a kind of floating couch, but about four meters wide.

  On the sofa rested a giant. Female.

  She looked like a human woman inflated to more than double size, and was of indeterminate age. She was rapped in a thin, stained and spotted, worn and faded dressing gown. Aside from the relatively small head, she seemed very corpulent: rolls of fat hung from her naked thighs. In one hand she held a control pad, in the other a bulbous bottle containing a red fluid.

  "I was starting to fear nobody else would ever come again," she said, drawling and somewhat unclearly, as though she were tipsy. "Seems people in the biospheres are ignoring my commandments more and more often these days." She laughed shrilly and sucked the red liquid through a tube. "And the few who have passed through the scanner recently don't have even a trace of para-ability. You'll understand, my boy, that we're quite extraordinarily pleased about you."

  Boryk didn't understand any of it. But just to be safe, he nodded—so vigorously that he turned a somersault in the weightlessness until the invisible hand stabilized him again.

  "Who ... are you?" he asked.

  "I am your creator. The one who created everything. Heaven and Hell, the entire world. Do you like it?"

  "Y-yes. Yes, of course. Very much!"

  "As well you should. I won a design prize for it. Won a contest with thousands of participants! Not least due to the original concept of the two biospheres, the judges thought. That's why I could build it, the world, and personally go on board as the commander and guide it on its course. I was even given a tremendously valuable present so I could watch over it on its very long flight."

  The giant patted her chest, where a kind of amulet showed through the thin fabric. "But I wasn't a very good guardian. Or else I was just unlucky, who knows. No one's still alive who can criticize me or complain. Nobody. Just me."

  Tears ran down her cheeks. "They're all dead. They died because of the plague we couldn't stop. Seventy thousand men and women. Can you even imagine how many that is? Seventy thousand selected, highly gifted Lemurians. The plague ate their brains until they went insane and killed each other. It would have destroyed the entire ship if I hadn't put a stop to it. The children born on board were defective, poor, sick little worms in spite of all the hygienic measures. The pathogens were all over, everywhere. There was no other option; I had to decontaminate the biospheres. I let the flood come over them, but my spirit here in the control room floated over the waters ... Why am I telling you this, anyway? You would have been taught the story."

  The blood roared in Boryk's ears. He had never heard many of the words that the giant
used before. Others, however, he knew all too well.

  And therefore, because they found no mercy in my eyes, I destroyed them, drowning them in the waters of the Flood. Then I spoke: Let us make people in our own image. As man and woman I created them, as bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, and into their noses I blew my breath of life. Thus they became living beings. I set the people in the Garden of Everwas, which I had laid down for them between the sea and the high mountain, and gave them the command: Be fruitful and multiply, and have dominion over the earth!

  The giant sucked at the bottle again. "I wanted to start all over again from the beginning, you understand. So I cloned your people from my own genetic material. Only smaller, half as large, due to the limited resources. At the time it seemed like a clever idea to me. I had also hoped that as a result of genetic changes you would be more resistant to cosmic radiation that our inadequate shields can't completely block. But—please don't be angry with me—you weren't exactly a resounding success."

  Boryk's head spun, and not as an after-effect of the now gradually dissipating hangover. Everything within him rebelled at the realization that the world had been created exactly as he had learned from the Jittri—and at the same time completely differently. Who would have thought that the pronouncements of the Holy Writ were to be taken literally? Boryk had believed in the Creative Divinity, but as an endlessly distant entity that had as good as nothing to do with earthly concerns. Now he stood—floated, rather—in front of her. And she had turned out to be not at all lofty and all-powerful, but sad to the point of arousing pity. She was less a divine ruler than a miserable, blubbering washerwoman who had looked into the winemug too often and was no longer quite right in the head.

  "The plague was already within me, and so you carry it within you as well. A part of my immunity you inherited from me," again she reached for the amulet between her massive breasts. "But your brains are weak and most of them don't have any parapsychological abilities. They are so desperately needed if I want to take this ship to its destination! At least you, little one, are the first in years to offer a certain glimmer of hope. On your second passage, the scanner registered an astonishingly high reading in the ultra-high frequency spectrum, even if slightly deviant from the norm. But I'm confident I can make something out of you."

  Her pudgy fingers flitted across the control pad. At once, rectangular containers like oversized glass coffins emerged from the walls around Boryk. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. In each one lay a human being, although the containers seemed to have been made for giants. The bodies floated in transparent jelly. Cables and tubes connected them to the rear wall.

  "This is my entire harvest, everything I have," mumbled the goddess, whose flat head was even smaller than Boryk's. "The total yield of centuries. Enough to keep the ship and the computer functioning and more or less on course, but not nearly enough to intentionally decelerate or even land. Maybe you're the one who'll start turning things around and more psi-gifted ones like yourself will come after you. Did you have a really good fling in Biosphere Two?"

  If by that she meant whether Boryk had made his contribution to reproducing his kind, she was more than correct. He blushed with shame. He really had spilled his semen in a large portion of the female population on the shore of the Sea of Geneset. Some would bear his children in five months time. Despite his regret for his behavior, that thought filled him with a certain pride. At the same time, he had a dark foreboding that he would never see any of his offspring if he went along with the giant goddess's plans.

  During her long speech, he had debated whether to confess his sins to her. As creator of this world and author of the Holy Writ, she stood even higher than the Majittri, right? From whom else could Boryk ask forgiveness if not from her? But something held him back. If she were really all-knowing, she would already be aware of the events in Heaven and Hell. And if not, it might turn out to be a serious mistake to tell her every detail.

  "That being as it may," she continued after taking another swallow, "I'll draw some sperm from you anyway. Perhaps I can rouse myself enough to use it to start a new in-vitro program. If only I weren't so lethargic ... That comes from weightlessness, you know? Oh, you don't understand practically anything. Enough chattering. It's time to go beddie-bye!"

  All the glass coffins slid silently back into the wall. Only a single, empty one remained.

  Boryk suddenly understood what fate was intended for him. And what the prophecy of the Holy Writ really meant: To Hell they shall venture and undergo the trial so that My gaze shall fall benevolently upon them and I shall separate the weeds from the grain, the spoiled from the chosen.

  Ever since he was little, he had hoped to be one of those chosen someday. Now that his most heartfelt wish was fulfilled, he was not in the least happy about it.

  "But ... if I lie down in that," he stammered, "then ... my life will be over. I just can't. I have to go back; my Mama and Fosse and the others are waiting for me in the Garden of Everwas, and I also promised Duani of the Silver Mountain ... "

  The giant laughed echoingly. "Oh, you're so sweet! It's really cute that you're trying to discuss it with me. Unfortunately, all this won't do you any good, little man. You're needed up here so your brain's para-abilities can help control the neutrinos. But look on the bright side: you won't die, you'll just go to sleep. A deep and sound sleep, for a long time. In a certain sense you'll be just as immortal as I am."

  With her last words she played with the control pad. Boryk felt the invisible hand reach for him and drag him in the direction of the container where the jelly and the tubes shimmered unappetizingly.

  No, not for anything in the world did he want to get into it!

  "Stop waving your arms and legs like a beetle that fell on its back! You'll just hurt yourself—hitting the edges and bleeding all over the control center. Realize that it's no use. Hey, I'm your ancestral mother! You pray to me, or have you forgotten? So be thankful that I granted you life and understand that I'm now taking back some of it. Obey!" she suddenly roared. "Remember who you're facing here, little monkey! I am the Naahk of this ship, and I and only I give orders here! Enough of this—get in!"

  Her brutal authority might have had its effect on his predecessors, and they crawled into the caskets intimidated, submissive, and humble. Boryk, however, had ruled just recently, if not like a god at least like an utterly all-powerful Maffan, three days and three nights long. Even if he was ashamed of what he had done with the Genesists—the feeling of power still swelled up within him. The other, earlier, just a little younger Boryk never would have dared to rebel against the giant. The new, grown-up one, however, who had endured the ritual and climbed the volcano cliffs, who had outrun the Digger, gone through Hell and returned, this Boryk stood up to the so-called goddess.

  He called up the clear fever and the heat rose within him, filling him. "Let me go! Put that glass coffin back where it belongs!"

  The giant stared at him in disbelief. Her fingers paused on the control pad. Beads of sweat formed on the grossly obese face. The nearly empty drinking bottle slipped out of her hand and floated away through the hall. "Say that again!"

  "You will release me from these claws that I can't see and which you probably control with the pad. And you will make the holder slide back into the wall!"

  He sensed that she could be influenced, though it would be far more difficult than it had been with Rautsh, the Matekten, or the Genesists. Boryk mobilized all his strength, pumping the fire of his fever straight in her direction. Even so, she was able to resist his will. She fought doggedly and silently. The giant fingers continued to move, very slowly but they still moved. As soon as Boryk relaxed a little, he moved a bit closer to the coffin. If he gained the upper hand, the movement stopped. And so in stages he was jerked closer to his fate. Instinctively he sensed that he would be finished once he sank into the jelly and the tangle of tubing.

  He knew he couldn't let that happen.

  It wasn't eno
ugh to give her an order. She defended herself against it with the knowledge that she was the Naahk, which meant something like supreme Guardian. For an unthinkably long time, she had been used to having everything else beneath her. In fact, she simply refused even to think about any other position, let alone accept it. If he didn't want to end up in the terrible glass coffin, he had to smash her self-confidence. He had to break her will first before he could force her to his.

  He began to insult her, to curse her, aiming at the sensitive places she herself had revealed to him earlier. "Some beautiful goddess you are!" he mocked. "Ugly as sin, bloated, and so fat that you can hardly move. You hide yourself up here because you know your creations would spit at you in disgust. Not even Gujnar would get himself off with you, and that's saying something! And you're a failure, too. You couldn't save what was entrusted to you—you even became a murderer of those you were supposed to protect. Yes, a murderer! You should be ashamed, you murderer!"

  His hate-filled rant showed its effect. The glass-sided drawer slid back into the wall—only to come back out immediately. At least he wasn't moving towards it for the moment. He even felt that the invisible hold on him was loosening.

  Sweat and tears mixed on the Naahk's face. Her lower lip trembled. Saliva flowed from the corners of her mouth. "It's possible there's some truth in your accusations," she replied hoarsely, "even though I always acted according to my best knowledge and conscience. But that doesn't have anything to do with this. You don't have a chance. Even if you won this duel with your para-abilities—where would you go to escape me? My arm reaches everywhere in this ship. I have an army of robots at my command that would run you down no matter what hiding place you crawled into. And don't forget that I have all the time in the world!"