How Like A God

by Brenda W Clough

  “You’re horribly spoiled, Ed. Believe me, this is miles better than Central

  Park.”

  “And you’re going to do your sleeping like a baby bit, too, I can tell.”

  “You want me to make you sleep?”

  “Oh, no thanks!”

  Rob had to laugh at his tone. Contrary to expectation, Edwin began to snore almost immediately, a small comfortable noise like a young pig. Rob lay with his shoulders wedged against the roof of the Rover, his back in the sleeping bag pressed against the bulge of Edwin’s shoulder in its sleeping bag. There was a simple comfort in lying so close to another human being.

  It had nothing to do with sex. Some primitive, almost childlike hunger, unfed since he last slept beside Julianne, was assuaged now by just the contact, the warmth of another person. How could I ever be a hermit, he reflected drowsily. Stupid idea. I need people too much. And he fell asleep.

  As they drove the country continued rough, but very gradually dropped, a slope that eventually would terminate hundreds of miles to the north and west at the Aral Sea. After a day or two, the road became a mere track, and sometimes vanished altogether under windblown sand. Only once in the distance did they see nomad shepherds with their flocks. There were no signs or postings to mark the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, but they were somewhere in that area when the country flattened out into a wild and dry plateau. Wind-hewn hills crowded it on the eastern side. “And look at that!” Rob exclaimed.

  “Let me just get her out of this sandy bit… okay. So what is that?”

  “Looks like the desert beyond this plateau’s been hit by a hammer.” Even from miles away the deep dimple in the land was visible. It looked like a gigantic cereal bowl set in the ground, half full of sand.

  Edwin cut the engine. “Let’s look at Anatoly’s map. He didn’t mark the site of the nuke test—I’m sure the exact spot is still way classified—but I think we’ve found it.”

  They got out and spread the various maps out on the hood of the car. “It would help if our maps were drawn to the same scale,” Rob grumbled.

  “And used the same artistic conventions, eh? It’s taken me weeks to figure out the chicken scratches the archaeologists used … As near as I can figure it, we’re very close to the old site. It should be right around here someplace, at the edge of these hills.” He scratched at his unshaven chin, where a sprinkle of dark stubble showed too uneven to ever make a decent beard.

  Leaving Edwin to mutter and calculate mileage and direction, Rob walked a little way off. If you bring two magnets together, he thought, they don’t have to touch. As soon as they’re near enough they affect each other, to attract or repel. I had the entire population of the western hemisphere pouring through my hands. If there’s another power of that caliber around here, it should have spotted me long ago. I should have spotted it. He reached out, searching, and the desert all around felt as desolate as it looked.

  “I have no desire to see Ground Zero,” Edwin announced. “Do you? Okay then, I think the old dig is around that way. If we can’t find any ruins afer a few passes, we may have to assume that Anatoly was right, and they got nuked to rubble.”

  The plateau was seamed with ravines and gullies. There was no road at all now. For another hour Edwin eased the Rover along in low gear, heading east to skirt the plateau. “The terrain’s getting too rough,” he finally said.

  “I hate to think what Rev. Pallet would say if we broke his baby’s axle.

  And the land’s changed so much, this old British map isn’t much use. But we’ve got to be real near.” He cut the engine and looked sideways at Rob. “Can’t you get weird, and find it?”

  “I ought to be able to. I can’t understand it. There doesn’t seem to be anyone here. Maybe that atom bomb killed them.”

  Edwin sighed and undipped his compass from the dashboard. “Okay, where weirdness fails, orienteering may save the day. Let’s take a little hike.”

  The wind was a little less strong now, and the sky overhead burned clear and blue. In the brilliant midday desert sunshine, the rocks and rosy-pink sand looked entirely ordinary. Decades of wind and weather had eroded any scars from the bomb test away. With his gift for living in the moment,

  Edwin seemed to be enjoying the exercise after driving so long. But Rob was too worried to relax. It occurred to him that he might be too late. Time ran at a different rate in inner space. How long had those messages been waiting there for somebody powerful enough to receive them? As long, perhaps, as it took for Aqebin to crumble into ruins? He hunched up in his green down parka and bent his head into the wind as they clambered up a long slope of reddish scree.

  At the top Edwin consulted his compass again. “Do you think this could be the place? We’ve come far enough around the plateau.” The pebbly ridge sloped downhill again to a flat place about the size of a football field.

  The wind whipped sand up into little dust-devils over it. Beyond, the ground dropped sharply down again in a cliff, so that the space was like a terrace in the side of the hill. Eying in the middle of the flat was a long finger of rock, half buried in sand-drift.

  Rob’s breath hissed between his teeth as he sucked it in. “I’ve been here before,” he whispered.

  Edwin stared. “You have? Then this is it?”

  But Rob was already moving, sliding down the shallow slope to the bottom.

  He walked up to the fallen rock. It was worn almost shapeless, but surely once it had been an obelisk.

  Edwin caught up, his papers flapping in the wind as he pulled them from an inner pocket. “The Brits said there was a stele,” he said, turning the pages with gloved fingers. “They translated the inscription. You want to see?”

  “Sure.” Rob leaned to look.

  The picture was a precise hand-drawn copy of rows of wedgy characters. The English was noted underneath:

  The [city] of eagles, fed by [a large number, a thousand?] rivers and beloved of Ishtar, builded this temple and [consecrated] it to myself, the great [one], who knows all his subjects may do, powerful to sway the [hearts of] men, king who is mighty [like? as?] a god.

  Rob didn’t think the old inscription was especially informative. “When I saw it,” he said, “the stone was new, standing up.”

  “You know, weird is a good word for this whole thing.” Edwin knelt and dusted the surface off. “No writing here now. Maybe the inscription’s on the underside.”

  “No.” Rob pulled off his mitten. Touch was the trigger, his own skin to the stone. He squatted and put his bare hand gingerly on the cold gritty surface. The shock made him jerk back.

  “Wow! Did you see that? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” Rob sat down, deliberately relaxing himself. If he didn’t calm down he’d be sick, just like on the first day of kindergarten. “I know where to go. This thing told me. Another little e-mail. Let’s get back to the car.”

  Edwin pulled off his glove and touched the stone himself. “Hmm. Either it doesn’t work for anyone but you, or you’ve already emptied the box and there’s no more mail left inside. Darn it, I wish I’d tried it first! All right, let’s go.”

  When they got back to the dusty Rover Edwin said, ” Shall I drive?”

  “Better let me.” Rob took the offered keys. He felt certain of the route now, but it was not the sort of certainty that he could direct someone else to follow. He steered the Land Rover slowly north and east, deeper into the hills.

  Edwin shaded his eyes to peer ahead. “Is it my imagination, or is it beginning to be a road again?”

  If it was a road, it was not much more than a footpath, winding uphill around the shoulder of a steep barren slope. There was no doubt an hour later when it ended, though, on a natural balcony of dust-colored rock.

  There was just room to carefully turn the Rover around, ready to descend again. From this height they could see for miles north and west. All the way to the horizon the country was lifeless, a desolation of pink rock and wind-driven sand. T
he indifferent emptiness was crushing, awesome.

  “And look! It ;s going to be an underground city!” Edwin pointed at a dark cleft in the rock and bounded joyfully out of his seat.

  Rob went around to dig the big camping lantern out of the back. “Wait up, Ed.”

  Edwin stopped and looked back. “Rob. Do you know what’s inside?”

  Once more Rob extended himself, feeling all around, bringing the full power of his unnamed weirdness to bear. “No.” Perhaps they were all dead years ago. You could set up quite elaborate automatic answering systems—look at Edwin’s voice-mail at NIH.

  “But you’re nervous about it. Very natural.”

  Rob forced himself to smile. “Not nervous, exactly.”

  “Fine, don’t admit it. Do the raw courage thing instead.” He came and took the flashlight out of Rob’s grasp. “The two of us together can cope with anything. Let’s go in, shall we?”

  CHAPTER 9

  Out of the wind the cave seemed almost warm. They paused to pull off hats and gloves, and let their eyes adjust to the dark. The sound of the wind had been a constant presence for so long that the quiet now rang in their ears. The narrow gap in the hill was obviously a natural formation, like the rock platform outside. “But look,” Edwin said. He bent and tilted the lantern so that it shone at a low angle across the gritty floor. In th-e glow the imprint in the sand could be clearly seen: an ordinary human footprint. “Not aliens,” Edwin sighed in disappointment. “Let’s see where it went.”

  The passageway went deep into the hill, twisting and turning. The roof was so low Rob could easily touch it. Around a final corner, and it ended abruptly in a small cavern scarcely bigger than Edwin’s NIH office. Edwin flicked the beam around the dark little space. “Empty,” he said. “Is this all? What a bummer.”

  “No,” Rob gasped. The tarnhelm trick, how stupid of him not to think of it!

  “There’s someone—sitting right there!”

  And there was. Rob couldn’t tell how he was seeing it in the dark, but a towering figure sat enthroned on a ledge of the unhewn rock only ten feet away, a living man in the dress of men five thousand years gone. A robe fringed with gold wrapped his legs. His splendid brown chest was bare except for a massive pectoral necklace set with rubies. He had a black and elaborately curled beard, but no mustache. Long black hair hung in gleaming corkscrew curls down his back, and his eyes were huge in his face, black and brilliant. He was a statue from the ancient Mesopotamia museum exhibit come to life.

  Rob thrust Edwin behind him so roughly the lantern fell with a clatter.

  This was a sophisticated illusion, he could tell: not much different from appearing as somebody’s best friend. And who could say what lay behind? Instinctively he responded in kind, flinging up a false seeming of his own.

  The homeless man, of course—rags, and a piece of string for a belt, and his familiar threadbare blue toggle coat over all. It was a standoff, facade faced with facade.

  “I can’t see anything,” Edwin grumbled at his back.

  “You don’t see him?”

  “See who? You better not have bust my flashlight, Rob. Wait a minute, here

  we go.” The light flickered and steadied as Edwin turned the lantern all the way up. “Holy Mike!” The light dipped wildly as Edwin fumbled it again.

  Rob didn’t look around. “Keep behind me, and set that light down before you break it.”

  A new voice spoke, low and hoarse: “Perhaps we should drop the masks, eh?” Its sound was jolting, like a hidden door suddenly flung open.

  “I will if you will,” Rob said warily.

  “Agreed.”

  Edwin jammed the lantern into a crevice, and drew in a long breath of wonder. The magnificent god-king had shrunk. A skeletally thin figure, very short by modern standards, sat slumped on the ledge. The long hair hung lank and thin in black streaks over his shoulders, and the beard straggled.

  His ribs showed, and the yellow-brown skin stretched tight over his knobbly elbows and knee joints. He wore sandals and a ragged brown robe. Only the huge eyes were the same, eerily big and sharp. “You are not doing it right,” he croaked pettishly. “Illusion is supposed to make you look grander and more impressive, not less. That is not the way it should be done.”

  “I see,” Rob said, very taut.

  The skeletal man frowned sourly up at him. Their faces were scarcely ten feet apart. “So you have youth. And beauty, though not of the Asian style.

  It does not impress me. Tell me your name.”

  “Tell me yours first,” Rob said.

  The man smiled. “I am that I am.”

  “No way!” Edwin exclaimed, his eyes kindling.

  “You understand him, Ed?”

  “Yes, and he’s lying!”

  Rob didn’t understand how Edwin could know this, but he said, “You want to try again?”

  “Speak with respect,” the skeletal man said, still smiling so that all his yellowish teeth showed. “For I am your father.”

  Rob could feel Edwin’s uneasy gaze prickling on the back of his neck. “My father passed away in 1989. He was a retired civil engineer.”

  “I seduced your mother,” the man suggested.

  Rob folded his arms. He couldn’t fathom the motive behind this rigmarole.

  “I’m the living image of Dad. Everyone says so. We even wore the same shoe size.”

  “I think then you must guess my name,” the man said grumpily. “You are not doing this right. And who is that?” He glanced at Edwin.

  “A friend.” Danger signals shivered down Rob’s spine. He didn’t want to tell Edwin’s name. Though he couldn’t avoid giving his own. “My name is Robertson Michael Lewis. And I bet I can name you. You are Gilgamesh son of Lugalbanda, once king of Uruk in Mesopotamia.”

  Edwin’s mouth opened in astonishment. The skeletal man’s eyes got even wider. “My name is still spoken,” he said, pleased. “And my epic is still sung!”

  “I have the book out in the car.”

  “Later on you must show it. How did you know me?”

  “Yeah,” Edwin interjected. “That was some stunt, even for you!”

  “I recognized you right away when I read the book,” Rob said slowly. “I knew that Gilgamesh was someone with the power—like me. I told you that,” he added to Edwin.

  “I thought you were being metaphorical! And the plant,” Edwin said, struck by another thought. “The magical undersea plant that gives immortality. I read about it on the plane. The story said you lost it to a snake.”

  “A story is only a story,” Gilgamesh said, baring his teeth in a skeletal smile again.

  “Holy Mike! That means you’re maybe five thousand years old! You wouldn’t by any chance consider visiting NIH, would you?”

  Rob had to set his teeth to keep from laughing out loud. Gilgamesh stared at Edwin with annoyance. “Silence,” he rasped. Rob could feel the subtle crackle of power, and when Edwin opened his mouth no words came out.

  “I don’t feel that’s necessary,” Rob said mildly. He had never seen that trick before. But merely seeing it done was disproportionately informative. With a mental gesture he easily undid Edwin’s dumbness. “Although you might consider taking the hint,” he suggested.

  “Right,” Edwin gulped.

  “Oh, you are a bold one,” Gilgamesh said to Rob. “I will give you your true title then. Not slave, nor son—but brother.”

  The whispery creaking voice held for Rob the note of truth. Here was

  someone with exactly his abilities, an equal, just as he had once wished for. “I’ve been looking for you,” Rob said in a low tone.

  “Now that sounds right.” Gilgamesh nodded in approval, the black strings of hair shifting on his shoulders and chest. “You alone fully understand, then. I am a king and the son of a king, monarch of humanity’s first city, the mightiest hero of my age. Tell me: How do I come to the desert, my subjects only a few nomad shepherds?”

  Rob looked
into his own heart, and knew the answer. “You couldn’t stand it. The pressure, dealing with all the people, all around. You had to get away, to where it was empty.”

  “Very good! One insect, a hundred even, I can smash, but it becomes a weariness.” Rob began to speak—that hadn’t been quite what he’d meant—but Gilgamesh was already going on. “Even the shepherds here were too near. I made the overlords of this land drive them farther off.”

  “You had them drop an H-bomb?” Rob said, horrified.

  “Is that what it is named? The noise was impressive. But recently I decided it was time to turn again. I felt a need for a companion, an equal, an Enkidu as of old. And …”

  The rasping voice trailed away. Gilgamesh stared at Rob out of his huge glittering eyes, and raised a bony hand in an inviting gesture. Rob could feel the blood draining away from his face. “Oh my god.” It burst out of him in a sob. “Oh my god. You did this to me. This power is from you.”

  Gilgamesh clapped his bony hands together. “Oh, well done. Very good. Yes, I divided my godhead with you. Half— a fair sharing, remember that. We are equal, and exactly alike. Except for the immortality, of course—that is mine alone. It should be very diverting.”

  “You mean—you did this to me, you trashed my life, broke up my family, drove me almost insane, for a diversion? Just to amuse yourself?” A pure and towering fury filled Rob, making his voice crack. Through his down sleeve and all the thermal layers he felt Edwin’s restraining clutch on his arm.

  “You talk as if this were a whim,” Gilgamesh said. “Since we are brothers I will admit to you what I would tell no other. It is a solitary business, being divine.”

  Again Rob felt the prickle of recognition. The same horrible isolation had oppressed him. The weirdness could sever a man from his fellows like a sword. You became too strong, too different, no longer on the same level as other people. Rob himself had only broken out by luck—with Edwin’s help. And the epic had told of the death of Enkidu, how in spite of all his power Gilgamesh had been helpless to save his best friend. Over the thousands of years, and through the dozens of translations from language to language to