Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14

by Gardner Dozois

  Some believed his priests and messengers. More believed ours. But all were distressed or frightened or made angry by hearing messengers proclaim two Gods at one time, so that instead of knowing the truth, they had to choose to believe.

  Omimo’s great army was now only four or five days’ march away.

  Angels came to us saying that a young general, Mesiwa, was bringing a thousand soldiers of the peace up from the rich coasts south of the city.

  He told the angels only that he came to fight for “the one true God”. We feared that meant Omimo. For we added no words to our name, since the word itself means the only truth, or else it means nothing.

  We were wise in our choice of generals, and decisive in acting on their advice. Rather than wait for the city to be besieged, we resolved to send a force to attack the eastern army before it reached Ghari, meeting it in the foothills above the River of Origin. We would have to fall back as their full strength came up, but we could strip the country as we did so, and bring the country people into the city. Meanwhile we sent carts to and from all the storehouses on the southern and western roads to fill the city’s granaries. If the war did not end quickly, said the old generals, it would be won by those who could keep eating.

  “Lord Drowning’s army can feed themselves from the storehouses along the east and north roads,” said my mother, who attended all our councils.

  “Destroy the roads,” Tazu said.

  I heard my mother’s breath catch, and remembered the oracle: The roads will be broken.

  “That would take as long to do as it took to make them,” said the oldest general, but the next oldest general said, “Break down the stone bridge at Almoghay.” And so we ordered. Retreating from its delaying battle, our army tore down the great bridge that had stood a thousand years. Omimo’s army had to go around nearly a hundred miles farther, through forests, to the ford at Domi, while our army and our carters brought the contents of the storehouses in to the city. Many country people followed them, seeking the protection of God, and so the city grew very full. Every grain of ze came with a mouth to eat it.

  All this time Mesiwa, who might have come against the eastern army at Domi, waited in the passes with his thousand men. When we commanded him to come help punish sacrilege and restore peace, he sent our angel back with meaningless messages. It seemed certain that he was in league with Omimo. “Mesiwa the finger, Omimo the thumb,” said the oldest general, pretending to crack a louse.

  “God is not mocked,” Tazu said to him, deadly fierce. The old general bowed his forehead down on his thumbs, abashed. But I was able to smile.

  Tazu had hoped the country people would rise up in anger at the sacrilege and strike the Painted God down. But they were not soldiers and had never fought. They had always lived under the protection of the soldiers of peace and under our care. As if our doings now were like the whirlwind or the earthquake, they were paralyzed by them and could only watch and wait till they were over, hoping to survive. Only the people of our household, whose livelihood depended directly upon us and whose skills and knowledge were at our service, and the people of the city in whose heart we were, and the soldiers of the peace, would fight for us.

  The country people had believed in us. Where no belief is, no God is. Where doubt is, foot falters and hand will not take hold.

  The wars at the borders, the wars of conquest, had made our land too large. The people in the towns and villages knew no more who I was than I knew who they were. In the days of the origin, Babam Kerul and Bamam Ze came down from the mountain and walked the fields of the centre lands beside the common people. The common people who laid the first stones of the great roads and the huge base stones of the old city wall had known the face of their God, seeing it daily.

  After I spoke of this to our councils, Tazu and I went out into the streets, sometimes carried in litters, sometimes walking. We were surrounded by the priests and guards who honoured our divinity, but we went among the people, meeting their eyes. They fell on their knees and put their foreheads to their thumbs, and many wept when they saw us. They called out from street to street, and little children cried out, “There’s God!”

  “You walk in their hearts,” my mother said.

  But Omimo’s army had come to the River of Origin, and one day’s march brought the vanguard to Ghari.

  That evening we stood on the north balcony looking towards Ghari hill, which was swarming with men, as when a nest of insects swarms. To the west the light was dark red on the mountains in their winter snow. From Korosi a vast plume of smoke trailed, blood colour.

  “Look,” Tazu said, pointing northwest. A light flared in the sky, like the sheet lightning of summer. “A falling star,” he said, and I said, “An eruption.”

  In the dark of the night, angels came to us. “A great house burned and fell from the sky,” one said, and the other said, “It burned but it stands, on the bank of the river.”

  “The words of God spoken on the birthday of the world,” I said.

  The angels knelt down hiding their faces.

  What I saw then is not what I see now looking far off to the distant past; what I knew then is both less and more than I know now. I try to say what I saw and knew then.

  That morning I saw coming down the great stone road to the northern gate a group of beings, two-legged and erect like people or lizards. They were the height of giant desert lizards, with monstrous limbs and feet, but without tails. They were white all over and hairless. Their heads had no mouth or nose and one huge single staring shining lidless eye.

  They stopped outside the gate.

  Not a man was to be seen on Ghari Hill. They were all in the fortress or hidden in the woods behind the hill.

  We were standing up on the top of the northern gate, where a wall runs chest-high to protect the guards.

  There was a little sound of frightened weeping on the roofs and balconies of the city, and people called out to us, “God! God, save us!”

  Tazu and I had talked all night. We listened to what our mother and other wise people said, and then we sent them away to reach out our minds together, to look over our shoulder into the time that was coming. We saw the death and the birth of the world, that night. We saw all things changed.

  The oracle had said that God was white and had one eye. This was what we saw now. The oracle had said that the world died. With it died our brief time of being God. This was what we had to do now: to kill the world. The world must die so that God may live. The house falls that it may stand. Those who have been God must make God welcome.

  Tazu spoke welcome to God, while I ran down the spiral stairs inside the wall of the gate and unbolted the great bolts—the guards had to help me—and swung the door open. “Enter in!” I said to God, and put my forehead to my thumbs, kneeling.

  They came in, hesitant, moving slowly, ponderously. Each one turned its huge eye from side to side, unblinking. Around the eye was a ring of silver that flashed in the sun. I saw myself in one of those eyes, a pupil in the eye of God.

  Their snow-white skin was coarse and wrinkled, with bright tattoos on it. I was dismayed that God could be so ugly.

  The guards had shrunk back against the walls. Tazu had come down to stand with me. One of them raised a box towards us. A noise came out of the box, as if some animal was shut in it.

  Tazu spoke to them again, telling them that the oracle had foretold their coming, and that we who had been God welcomed God.

  They stood there, and the box made more noises. I thought it sounded like Ruaway before she learned to talk right. Was the language of God no longer ours? Or was God an animal, as Ruaway’s people believed? I thought they seemed more like the monstrous lizards of the desert that lived in the zoo of our house than they seemed like us.

  One raised its thick arm and pointed at our house, down at the end of the street, taller than other houses, its copper gutters and gold leaf carvings shining in the bright winter sunlight.

  “Come, Lord,” I said,
“come to your house.” We led them to it and brought them inside.

  When we came into the low, long, windowless audience room, one of them took off its head. Inside it was a head like ours, with two eyes, nose, mouth, ears. The others did the same.

  Then, seeing their head was a mask, I saw that their white skin was like a shoe that they wore not just on the foot but all over their body. Inside this shoe they were like us, though the skin of their faces was the colour of clay pots and looked very thin, and their hair was shiny and lay flat.

  “Bring food and drink,” I said to the children of God cowering outside the door, and they ran to bring trays of ze-cakes and dried fruit and winter beer. God came to the tables where the food was set. Some of them pretended to eat. One, watching what I did, touched the ze-cake to its forehead first, and then bit into it and chewed and swallowed. It spoke to the others, gre-gra, gre-gra.

  This one was also the first to take off its body-shoe. Inside it other wrappings and coverings hid and protected most of its body, but this was understandable, because even the body skin was pale and terribly thin, soft as a baby’s eyelid.

  In the audience room, on the east wall over the double seat of God, hung the gold mask which God Himself wore to turn the sun back on its way. The one who had eaten the cake pointed at the mask. Then it looked at me—its own eyes were oval, large and beautiful—and pointed up to where the sun was in the sky. I nodded my body. It pointed its finger here and there all about the mask, and then all about the ceiling.

  “There must be more masks made, because God is now more than two,” Tazu said.

  I had thought the gesture might signify the stars, but I saw that Tazu’s interpretation made more sense.

  “We will have masks made,” I told God, and then ordered the hat priest to go fetch the gold hats which God wore during ceremonies and festivals. There were many of these hats, some jewelled and ornate, others plain, all very ancient. The hat priest brought them in due order two by two until they were all set out on the great table of polished wood and bronze where the ceremonies of First Ze and Harvest were celebrated.

  Tazu took off the gold hat he wore, and I took off mine. Tazu put his hat on the head of the one who had eaten the cake, and I chose a short one and reached up and put my hat on its head. Then, choosing ordinary-day hats, not those of the sacred occasions, we put a hat on each of the heads of God, while they stood and waited for us to do so.

  Then we knelt bareheaded and put our foreheads against our thumbs.

  God stood there. I was sure they did not know what to do. “God is grown, but new, like a baby,” I said to Tazu. I was sure they did not understand what we said.

  All at once the one I had put my hat on came to me and put its hands on my elbows to raise me up from kneeling. I pulled back at first, not being used to being touched; then I remembered I was no longer very sacred, and let God touch me. It talked and gestured. It gazed into my eyes. It took off the gold hat and tried to put it back on my head. At that I did shrink away, saying, “No, no!” It seemed blasphemy, to say No to God, but I knew better.

  God talked among themselves then for a while, and Tazu and our mother and I were able to talk among ourselves. What we understood was this: the oracle had not been wrong, of course, but it had been subtle. God was not truly one-eyed nor blind, but did not know how to see. It was not God’s skin that was white, but their mind that was blank and ignorant. They did not know how to talk, how to act, what to do. They did not know their people.

  Yet how could Tazu and I, or our mother and our old teachers, teach them? The world had died and a new world was coming to be. Everything in it might be new. Everything might be different. So it was not God, but we, who did not know how to see, what to do, how to speak.

  I felt this so strongly that I knelt again and prayed to God, “Teach us!”

  They looked at me and talked to each other, brr-grr, gre-gra.

  I sent our mother and the others to talk with our generals, for angels had come with reports about Omimo’s army. Tazu was very tired from lack of sleep. We two sat down on the floor together and talked quietly. He was concerned about God’s seat. “How can they all sit on it at once?” he said.

  “They’ll have more seats added,” I said. “Or now two will sit on it, and then another two. They’re all God, the way you and I were, so it doesn’t matter.”

  “But none of them is a woman,” Tazu said.

  I looked at God more carefully and saw that he was right. This disturbed me slowly, but very deeply. How could God be only half human?

  In my world, a marriage made God. In this world coming to be, what made God?

  I thought of Omimo. White clay on his face and a false marriage had made him a false God, but many people believed he was truly God. Would the power of their belief make him God, while we gave our power to this new, ignorant God?

  If Omimo found out how helpless they appeared to be, not knowing how to speak, not even knowing how to eat, he would fear their divinity even less than he had feared ours. He would attack. And would our soldiers fight for this God?

  I saw clearly that they would not. I saw from the back of my head, with the eyes that see what is coming. I saw the misery that was coming to my people. I saw the world dead, but I did not see it being born. What world could be born of a God who was male? Men do not give birth.

  Everything was wrong. It came very strongly into my mind that we should have our soldiers kill God now, while they were still new in the world and weak.

  And then? If we killed God there would be no God. We could pretend to be God again, the way Omimo pretended. But godhead is not pretence. Nor is it put on and off like a golden hat.

  The world had died. That was fated and foretold. The fate of these strange men was to be God, and they would have to live their fate as we lived ours, finding out what it was to be as it came to be, unless they could see over their shoulders, which is one of the gifts of God.

  I stood up again, taking Tazu’s hand so that he stood beside me. “The city is yours,” I said to them, “and the people are yours. The world is yours, and the war is yours. All praise and glory to you, our God!” And we knelt once more and bowed our foreheads deeply to our thumbs, and left them.

  “Where are we going?” Tazu said. He was twelve years old and no longer God. There were tears in his eyes.

  “To find Mother and Ruaway,” I said, “and Arzi and Lord Idiot and Haghag, and any of our people who want to come with us.” I had begun to say “our children”, but we were no longer their mother and father.

  “Come where?” Tazu said.

  “To Chimlu.”

  “Up in the mountains? Run and hide? We should stay and fight Omimo.”

  “What for?” I said.

  That was sixty years ago.

  I have written this to tell how it was to live in the house of God before the world ended and began again. To tell it I have tried to write with the mind I had then. But neither then nor now do I fully understand the oracle which my father and all the priests saw and spoke. All of it came to pass. Yet we have no God, and no oracles to guide us.

  None of the strange men lived a long life, but they all lived longer than Omimo.

  We were on the long road up into the mountains when an angel caught up with us to tell us that Mesiwa had joined Omimo, and the two generals had brought their great army against the house of the strangers, which stood like a tower in the fields near Soze River, with a waste of burned earth around it. The strangers warned Omimo and his army clearly to withdraw, sending lightning out of the house over their heads that set distant trees afire. Omimo would not heed. He could prove he was God only by killing God. He commanded his army to rush at the tall house. He and Mesiwa and a hundred men around him were destroyed by a single bolt of lightning. They were burned to ash. His army fled in terror.

  “They are God! They are God indeed!” Tazu said when he heard the angel tell us that. He spoke joyfully, for he was as unhappy in his doubt as
I was. And for a while we could all believe in them, since they could wield the lightning. Many people called them God as long as they lived.

  My belief is that they were not God in any sense of the word I understand, but were otherworldly, supernatural beings, who had great powers, but were weak and ignorant of our world, and soon sickened of it and died.

  There were fourteen of them in all. Some of them lived more than ten years. These learned to speak as we do. One of them came up into the mountains to Chimlu, along with some of the pilgrims who still wanted to worship Tazu and me as God. Tazu and I and this man talked for many days, learning from each other. He told us that their house moved in the air, flying like a dragon-lizard, but its wings were broken. He told us that in the land they came from the sunlight is very weak, and it was our strong sunlight that made them sick. Though they covered their bodies with weavings, still their thin skins let the sunlight in, and they would all die soon. He told us they were sorry they had come. I said, “You had to come. God saw you coming. What use is it to be sorry?”

  He agreed with me that they were not God. He said that God lived in the sky. That seemed to us a useless place for God to live. Tazu said they had indeed been God when they came, since they fulfilled the oracle and changed the world; but now, like us, they were common people.

  Ruaway took a liking to this stranger, maybe because she had been a stranger, and when he was at Chimlu they slept together. She said he was like any man under his weavings and coverings. He told her he could not impregnate her, as his seed would not ripen in our earth. Indeed the strangers left no children.

  This stranger told us his name, Bin-yi-zin. He came back up to Chimlu several times, and was the last of them to die. He left with Ruaway the dark crystals he wore before his eyes, which make things look larger and clearer for her, though to my eyes they make things dim. To me he gave his own record of his life, in a beautiful writing made of lines of little pictures, which I keep in the box with this writing I make.