by Jerry
“That’s ridiculous! They’re the same ones as we’ve always used. What’s wrong with our birds and fish?”
“According to FAA regulations, all flight-control and navigation systems have to be duplicated,” the CDE said. “Our birds only have a single nervous system. Also, we’re allowing them to fly over water without inflatable life jackets.”
The GOD was completely taken aback. “What’s gotten into them?” he demanded. “They’ve never complained about anything like that before.”
“They’ve never really bothered to check the regulations before, but the controversy over the people has attracted their attention to this project,” the CDE told him. “Our legal people think they’re all at it—all the angelcies are brushing the dust off manuals they’ve never looked at before and going through them with magnifying glasses. We could be in for some real hassles.”
The GOD groaned. “But what do they want us to do? We can’t go loading the birds up with all kinds of duplicated junk. Their power-weight ratios are critically balanced. They’d never get off the ground.”
“I know that. But all the same it’s regulations, and the FAA won’t budge. They also say we have to fit bad-weather landing aids.”
The GOD’s patience snapped. “They don’t fly in bad weather!” he yelled. “They just sit in the trees. If they don’t fly, why do they need aids for landing? It’d be like putting life jackets on the camels.”
“I know, I know, I know. But that’s what the book says, and that’s all the FAA’s interested in.”
“Can we do it?” the GOD asked when he had calmed down a little.
“Only with the penguins, the ostriches, and the others that walk. I called the FAA guy a couple of minutes ago and told him that the only way we could equip all the birds for bad-weather landing was by making them all walk. He said that sounded fine.”
“I’ve never heard of anything so stupid! What’s the point of having birds at all if they’re only allowed to walk? We can’t have planets with walking birds all over the place. The competition would die laughing.”
“I know all that. I’m just telling you what the guy said.”
A few seconds of silence went by. Then the GOD asked, “What’s wrong with the fish?”
“The shallow-water species don’t have coastal radar.”
Pause.
“Is this some kind of joke?”
“I wish it were. They’re serious all right.”
The GOD shook his head in disbelief and slumped back in his chair. “Maybe we might just have to go along without birds and shallow-water fish this time,” he said at last. “Would the rest still work?”
“I’m not so sure it would,” the CDE replied. “The birds were supposed to spread seeds around to produce enough vegetation to support the herbivores. If we reduce the quotas of herbivores, we’d have to cut back on the carnivores, too. And without the birds to keep down the insects, we’d have the Forestry Cherubim on our backs for endangering the trees. With the trees in trouble and no shallow-water fish to clean up the garbage from the rivers, the whole ecosystem would break down. None of the animal species would be able to support themselves.”
The GOD wrestled with the problem in his head. The CDE himself had precipitated the current crisis by introducing the idea of the people in the first place, but there would be nothing to be gained by starting rounds of recriminations and accusations at this point, he thought. What was important was to get the proposal into an acceptable form before the closing date. “The only thing I can think of is that if the animals become unable to support themselves, we’ll have to put them all on welfare. If I call HHS and see if I can fix it, would that solve the problem?”
“Well . . . yeah, I guess it would . . . if you can fix it.” The CDE didn’t sound too hopeful.
The GOD phoned the HHS Director a few minutes later and explained the situation. Would HHS accept a commitment to supplying welfare support for the animals?
“No way!” was the emphatic reply.
“What in he-heaven’s name do you expect us to do?” the GOD demanded, shouting in exasperation. “How can we meet anybody’s regulations when they always conflict with somebody else’s?”
“That’s not our problem,” the HHS Director stated bluntly. “Sorry.”
Another meeting was called early the next morning to discuss the quandary. After all avenues had been explored, there seemed only one solution that would avoid all the conflicts: an azoic universe. All forms of living organisms would have to be deleted from the proposal. The meeting ended on a note of somber resignation.
The Environmental Protection Angel was on the line later that afternoon. Her voice was shrill and piercing, grating on the GOD’s nerves. “Without any plants at all, the levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur compounds from volcanic activity would exceed the permitted limits. The proposal as it stands is quite unacceptable. We would not be able to issue operating licenses for the volcanoes.”
“But the limits were set to safeguard living organisms!” the GOD thundered. “We’ve scrapped them—all of them. There aren’t any living organisms to be safeguarded.”
“There is no clause in the regulations which specifically exempts lifeless planets,” the EPA told him primly. It was too much.
“What kind of lunatics are you?” the GOD raged into the phone. “You don’t need a specific exemption. What do you need protective regulations for when there isn’t anything to be protected? How stupid can you get? Any idiot could see that it doesn’t apply here—any of it. You’re all out of your minds.”
“I’m simply doing my job, and I don’t expect personal insults,” came the reply. “The standards are quite clear, and they must be met. Good day.” The line went dead.
The GOD conveyed the news to Design Engineering, who discussed it with Research. Without the volcanoes there wouldn’t be enough planetary outgassing to form the atmospheres and oceans. Okay, the atmospheres and oceans would have to go. But the volcanoes were also intended to play a role in relieving the structural stresses and thermal buildups in the planetary crusts. How could that be taken care of without any volcanoes? Only by having more earthquakes to make up the difference, the CDE declared. The GOD told him to revise the proposal by deleting the volcanoes and making the crustal formations more earthquake-prone. Everybody agreed that the problem appeared at last to have been solved.
The Department of Highlands, Undulations, and Deserts called the GOD a day later with an objection. “I’m dreadfully sorry, old chap, but we seem to have run into a bit of a problem,” the man from HUD told him. “You see, the mountain ranges you’ve proposed don’t quite come up to the standards set out in our building codes for the increased level of seismic activity. We’d have no choice but to condemn them as unsafe, I’m afraid.”
“What if we do away with the mountains, then?” the GOD growled sullenly.
“That would be perfectly satisfactory as far as we’re concerned, but I rather suspect that you might still have a problem in getting it passed by the Occupational Safety and Health Angelcy. All those fissures opening up and landslides going on all over the place . . . It would be a bit hazardous for the animals, wouldn’t it?”
“But we’ve already gotten rid of the animals,” the GOD pointed out. “There won’t be any.”
“I see your point,” the man from HUD agreed amiably. “But it is still in the jolly old rules. You know how finicky those OSHA types can be. Just a friendly word in your ear. Frightfully sorry and all that.”
The GOD was past arguing.
Design Engineering’s response was to make the planets completely inactive. There would be no mountains, no fluid interiors, no mobile plates—in fact, no tectonic processes of any kind. The planets would be simply featureless balls of solid rock that could never by any stretch of the imagination be considered potentially hazardous to any living thing, whether one existed or not.
The Great Accounting Overseer didn’t like it. “Wha
t do you need them for?” a GAO minion challenged a day later. “They don’t serve any useful purpose at all. They’re just a needless additional expense on the cost budget. Why not get rid of them completely?”
“They’ve got a point,” the CDE admitted when the GOD went over to Engineering to talk about it. “I guess the only reason we put them in is because that’s the way we’ve always done it. Yeah . . . I reckon we should strike them out. No planets.”
But the Dispenser Of Energy wasn’t happy about the idea of a universe consisting of nothing but stars. “It might be budgeted to last for billions of years, but it’s still finite nevertheless,” an assistant of the DOE declared in a call to the GOD. “We are trying to encourage a policy of conservation, you know. This idea of having billions of stars just pouring out all that energy into empty space with none of it being used for anything at all . . . well, it would be terribly wasteful and inefficient. I don’t think we could possibly approve something like that.”
“But it’s just as we’ve always done it,” the GOD protested. “The planets never used more than a drop in the ocean. The difference isn’t worth talking about.”
“Quantitatively, yes, but I’m talking about a difference in principle,” the DOE assistant replied. “The waste was high in the earlier projects, but at least there was a reason in principle. This time there isn’t any, and that does make a difference. We couldn’t give this universe an approval stamp. Sorry.”
A day later Design Engineering had come up with a way to conserve the energy: Instead of being concentrated into masses sufficiently dense to sustain fusion reactions and form stars, the stellar material would be dispersed evenly throughout space as clouds of dust and gas, in which the small amount of free energy that remained would be conserved through an equilibrium exchange between radiation and matter. The DOE was satisfied with that. Unfortunately, the EPA was not; the clouds of dust and gas would exceed the pollution limits.
With two days to go before the closing date for the bid, the GOD called all the department heads and senior technical staff members together to discuss the situation. The ensuing meeting went on all through the night. After running calculations through the computers several times, they at last came up with a solution they were sure had to be acceptable to everybody. Sales forwarded a revised final proposal to the customer, and the company waited nervously for the responses. Miraculously the phone on the GOD’s desk didn’t ring once all through the next day. The proposal was approved, and the final contract was awarded.
Out at the construction site, Gabriel watched despondently as the project at last got under way. All that was left of the original plan was a pinpoint of exotic particles of matter, radiation, space, and time, all compressed together at a temperature of billions of degrees. The bizarre particles fell apart into protons, neutrons, electrons, muons, neutrinos, and photons, which after a while began clustering together through the radiation fluid as he watched. After the grandeur of the previous projects that he had witnessed, the sight was depressing. “I guess we just write this one off, forget about it, and file it away,” he murmured to the GOD, who was standing next to him. “It’s not much to look at, is it? I can’t see this even getting a mention in the report to the stockholders.”
He turned his head to find that the GOD’s eyes were twinkling mischievously. “What’s funny?” he asked, puzzled.
The GOD tipped his yellow hard-hat to the back of his head and grinned in a conspiratorial kind of way as he scratched his forehead. “Don’t worry about it,” he said quietly. “We’ve worked out a new method. It’ll all come out just the way we planned . . . everything.”
Gabriel blinked at him in astonishment. “What are you talking about? How do you mean, everything? You don’t mean the stars, the planets, the oceans, the mountains . . .” His voice trailed away as he saw the GOD nodding.
“And the birds, and the fish, and the animals, all the way through to the people,” the GOD told him confidently. “It’ll turn out just the way we planned it in the original proposal.”
Gabriel shook his head, nonplused. “But . . . how?” He gestured at the expanding fireball, in which traces of helium and a few other light nuclei were beginning to appear. “How could it all come out of that?”
The GOD chuckled. “The research people developed some things called ‘Laws of Physics’ that they buried inside it. The angelcies will never find them. But they’re in there, and they’ll make it all happen just the way we planned. We ran the numbers through the IBM last night, and they work. You wait and see.”
Gabriel looked over his shoulder at the site supervisor’s hut and then gazed back at the embryo universe with a new respect. “I was going to go inside for a coffee,” he said. “But this sounds interesting. I think I’ll hang around a little longer. I don’t want to miss this.”
The GOD smiled. “Oh, that’s okay—you go get your coffee,” he said. “It will take a while yet.”
FILED TEETH
Glenn Cook
I
Our first glimpse of the plain was one of Heaven. The snow and treacherous passes had claimed two men and five animals.
Two days later we all wished we were back in the mountains.
The ice storm came by night. An inch covered the ground. And still it came down, stinging my face, frosting the heads and shoulders of my companions. The footing was impossible. We had to finish two broken-legged mules before noon.
Lord Hammer remained unperturbed, unvanquishable. He remained stiffly upright on that red-eyed stallion, implacably drawing us northeastward. Ice clung to his cowl, shoulders, and the tail of his robe where it lay across his beast’s rump. Seldom did even Nature break the total blackness of his apparel.
The wind hurtled against us, biting and clawing like a million mocking imps. It burned sliding into the lungs.
The inalterable, horizon-to-horizon bleakness of the world gnawed the roots of our souls. Even Fetch and irrepressible Chenyth dogged Lord Hammer in a desperate silence.
“We’re becoming an army of ghosts,” I muttered at my brother. “Hammer is rubbing off on us. How’re the Harish taking this?” I didn’t glance back. My concentration was devoted to taking each next step forward.
Chenyth muttered something I didn’t hear. The kid was starting to understand that adventures were more fun when you were looking back and telling tall tales.
A mule slipped. She went down kicking and braying. She caught old Toamas a couple of good ones. He skittered across the ice and down an embankment into a shallow pool not yet frozen.
Lord Hammer stopped. He didn’t look back, but he knew exactly what had happened. Fetch fluttered round him nervously. Then she scooted toward Toamas.
“Better help, Will,” Chenyth muttered.
I was after him already.
Why Toamas joined Lord Hammer’s expedition I don’t know. He was over sixty. Men his age are supposed to spend winter telling the grandkids lies about the El Murid, Civil, and Great Eastern Wars. But Toamas was telling us his stories and trying to prove something to himself.
He was a tough buzzard. He had taken the Dragon’s Teeth more easily than most, and those are the roughest mountains the gods ever raised.
“Toamas. You okay?” I asked. Chenyth hunkered down beside me. Fetch scooted up, laid a hand on each of our shoulders. Brandy and Russ and the other Kaveliners came over too. Our little army clumped itself into national groups.
“Think it’s my ribs, Will. She got me in the ribs.” He spoke in little gasps. I checked his mouth.
“No blood. Good. Lungs should be okay.”
“You clowns going to talk about it all week?” Fetch snapped. “Help the man, Will.”
“You got such a sweet-talking way, Fetch. We should get married. Let’s get him up, Chenyth. Maybe he’s just winded.”
“It’s my ribs, Will. They’re broke, sure.”
“Maybe. Come on, you old woods-runner. Let’s try.”
“Lord Hammer says carry him
if you have to. We’ve still got to cover eight miles today. More, if the circle isn’t alive.” Fetch’s voice went squeaky and dull, like an old iron hinge that hadn’t been oiled for a lifetime. She scurried back to her master.
“I think I’m in love,” Chenyth chirped.
“Eight miles,” Brandy grumbled. “What the hell? Bastard’s trying to kill us.”
Chenyth laughed. It was a ghost of his normal tinkle. “You didn’t have to sign up, Brandy. He warned us it would be tough.”
Brandy wandered away.
“Go easy, Chenyth. He’s the kind of guy you got to worry when he stops bitching.”
“Wish he’d give it a rest, Will. I haven’t heard him say one good word since we met him.”
“You meet all kinds in this business. Okay, Toamas?” I asked. We had the old man on his feet. Chenyth brushed water off him. It froze on his hand.
“I’ll manage. We got to get moving. I’ll freeze.” He stumbled toward the column. Chenyth stayed close, ready to catch him if he fell.
The non-Kaveliners watched apathetically. Not that they didn’t care. Toamas was a favorite, a confidant, adviser, and teacher to most. They were just too tired to move except when they had to. Men and animals looked vague and slumped through the ice rain.
Brandy gave Toamas a spear to lean on. We lined up. Fetch took her place at Lord Hammer’s left stirrup. Our ragged little army of thirty-eight homeless bits of war-flotsam started moving again.
II
Lord Hammer was a little spooky . . . What am I saying? He scared hell out of us. He was damned near seven feet tall. His stallion was a monster. He never spoke. He had Fetch do all his talking.
The stallion was jet. Even its hooves were black. Lord Hammer dressed to match. His hands remained gloved all the time. None of us ever saw an inch of skin. He wore no trinkets. His very colorlessness inspired dread.
Even his face he kept concealed. Or, perhaps, especially his face . . .