Whatever Gods May Be

by George P. Saunders

  Of course, the coming of the Little One had changed everything. Man was now at least crawling hopefully for new life again. Phillips did not live to see the miracle of learning he had left behind, but what he had accomplished was enough to sow and harvest the beginnings of a new civilization. From that original surviving mass of wandering nomads that Thalick and the other Stingers had salvaged, the city of New Phillips had sprung into being.

  Zolan clipped Thalick's tail sharply and instructed the Stinger to bypass New Phillips completely. He did not want to be seen today. Though he usually enjoyed his rare jaunts into town, which took place every fifty years or so, Zolan had decided against a public appearance this morning. He regretted the decision, for he knew the people of this world adored him - as he did them; had he or the Stinger entered either New Phillips or Zolansville, both would have been treated as gods. The Guardian and the Master, as Thalick and Zolan had been titled through the ages, were living legends as two of the three Lords (Phillips held the third, posthumous distinction) who had battled the Dark and won. Festivities and celebrations, along with a slew of religious rituals, would have spanned for days.

  But there could be no distractions. Not today.

  Zolan fought off another pang of regret. For a few moments, as he stared at the mud huts and caves of New Phillips sprinkled on the slopes of the towering mountains, Zolan wished that he could share Thalick's gift of immortality. Though Zolan's own world had discovered the secrets to prolonging life indefinitely, Death was an adversary that Man even in that advanced society could still not overthrow. Man, wherever he could be found in the Universe, was still basically the same. Whether he had just learned the fine art of spearing some hapless fish with a stick, or stumbled on a new way to touch the stars, Man still bore the inescapable yoke of mortality. Not often did Zolan envy the Stinger's deathless existence; he had always considered it with a commixion of pity and revulsion previously. But today, for just an instant, he felt that an eternity of watching a world rebuild itself would indeed be fantastically wonderful, and worth the burden of perpetual consciousness.

  WE GO BACK NOW Thalick interrupted Zolan's thoughts.

  "No, not yet. A little further, Bug," Zolan responded firmly.

  New Phillips came and went. The high mountains that paralleled their journey grew more rolling and less steep, and by mid-afternoon, the distant roar of the nearby sea could barely be heard by Thalick.

  Then, all at once, the desert ended. What took its place was a salt flat, stretching out to the horizon.

  Thalick scanned the white wasteland ahead. Not even a lonely weed or dying scrub bush could be spotted by the Stinger. Overhead, one squawking buzzard circled around the two friends; it had not been a good day for the bird, and before Thalick and Zolan appeared, it had decided to head back for more promising grounds in the desert. One look at Zolan, however, changed the buzzards mind immediately; it squawked hopefully and continued to circle. Thalick scanned the ugly bird, then hissed with disgust. He certainly did not want to go trekking through miles of drab salt land. The temperature was already far from healthy for Zolan; like it or not, the old man would have to be taken home.

  "I know what you're thinking, Bug. But you must trust me this one last time. Please." Zolan said, a hoarse whisper creeping into his voice.

  Thalick was about to argue -- then something stopped him. Maybe it was the sound of Zolan's voice; so strange this time --so final.

  Thalick twitched uncomfortably then lurched forward.

  FOUR

  An hour passed. The mountains soon vanished and only a great white sheet of ground stretched ahead. Thalick noticed that Zolan had grown unusually quiet since he had entered the salt beds. It was as if the man was actually searching for something out here, though the Stinger figured this was quite unlikely. Thalick was no stranger to these parts; he knew there was absolutely nothing out here that could possibly interest Zolan. As far as he was aware, the man had never even seen this part of the world before. The Stinger felt suddenly very silly; why did he have the nagging suspicion that Zolan knew something that he did not?

  Suddenly Zolan raised himself to a standing position on the Stinger's back and pointed to the horizon.

  "There," he said quietly.

  But Thalick had seen it a split second ahead of Zolan. And what he saw was quite impossible. Lush and green, it was a striking contrast to the surrounding harshness of hot salt and rock that comprised everything up to the skyline.

  Zolan sat back down quickly after his announcement, sighing deeply as if a great relief had just passed through him. For his part, the Stinger was too flabbergasted to hiss or communicate anything to his friend. He had not roamed this part of the world in a hundred years but he distinctly remembered that no oasis was here last time around.

  Thalick had to admit, though, that it's presence didn't bother him so much as Zolan's obvious lack of surprise in finding it here.

  As he drew nearer, the Stinger could discern that the vegetation was oddly non-mutant; palm trees waved lazily to a light breeze rustled overhead, while thick mesquite and shrubbery lined the perimeter of the glade below. Towards its furthest point away from Thalick, the oasis sloped onto an up thrust of ground which joined a rolling hilly area that weaved erratically out to the horizon. Thalick surmised that considerable seismic activity had battered this part of the desert very recently; from such a shake-up, underground springs or aquifers had probably been ruptured which would account for so much undergrowth.

  Sound explanations all; but why did Thalick have the feeling that Zolan knew something he didn't?

  Suddenly, a flock of colorful birds shrieked out of the palm limbs above and scattered in all directions. Their disgruntled alarm was directed to all concerned, for immediately, the place became a frenzy of movement. Furry things appeared and disappeared quickly amidst the low brush as the birds squawked overhead. A cat-like creature snarled an epitaph of dire consequences towards Zolan, but on taking a second look at Thalick, wisely decided against a confrontation and raced up to higher ground and vanished.

  Nature dispersed at Thalick's approach but the Stinger felt there was something distinctly unnatural about the oasis. No sensations of danger registered within him, but the strangeness of the place caused his antennae to go rigid with worry and alertness.

  CAUTION, ZOLAN, Thalick relayed as Zolan lowered himself to the ground from a claw.

  The old man shuffled over to where the green shrubbery formed thickest. Over the hedges, he could see a small lagoon or well inside the glade. Licking his lips thirstily, Zolan proceeded to hack his way through the bushes. Suddenly, the Stinger hissed sharply from behind.

  Zolan instinctively stepped backwards upon hearing Thalick's warning.

  "What is it, Thalick?" he rasped, turning to look at the Stinger. But before Thalick replied, Zolan had turned back around to see for himself what had alerted his friend.

  Two large eyes peered back at the man.

  Zolan snorted more with surprise than fear, for the eyes belonged to those of a human child.

  Zolan stared at the boy for a long time before moving slowly forward. Thalick followed close behind and was seconds later towering over both humans. Without due hesitation, the Stinger proceeded to examine the youth with noisy, clinical interest, while his subject simply froze where he stood in panicked shock.

  Zolan relaxed and repressed the urge to chuckle; the expression on the boy's face was probably not unlike what his own had been when he first beheld Thalick so long ago. Though the Stinger was familiar to the men of Earth, he was today regarded with more awe than he had been five centuries ago before the Little One's arrival. Before, he had lived with Man on a daily basis; today, however, Thalick was rarely seen by humans, staying discretely out of sight as he policed the boundaries of New Phillips and Zolansville. Therefore, a child of ten or twelve - the age approximately of the boy Zolan was now staring at - only knew of Thalick and Zolan as religious icons of babbling grandfathers t
hat were supposed to stay spiritually nonthreatening and invisible.

  As the boy's eyes indicated, contact with a living fairytale was a difficult thing to stomach all at once. The boy gulped and blinked but didn't say a word.

  JUST BOY, Thalick transmitted to Zolan.

  "I can see that," Zolan snapped back, "I've still got eyes, you know."

  The boy jumped as Zolan spoke. His clothes, which were only an assortment of animal furs representative of the standard ware for humans, were blood-stained and tattered. The boy had obviously experienced some kind of struggle not too long before.

  Suddenly, Zolan caught the smell. Sickeningly familiar, even after so many years, the pungent odor of the Redeye told Zolan that quite a different fate had befallen the mauled youth in front of him.

  Thalick provided the answer to Zolan's unspoken question. Though the boy's thoughts were jumbled and barely decipherable, the Stinger had been able to glean a few recent facts as to his origins.

  BOY ESCAPE, ZOLAN. FROM REDEYE CITY. GREAT LUCK. NO HAPPEN OFTEN

  "It's never happened at all, Bug," Zolan said, a bit mystified.

  BOY HERE IN GREEN PLACE FOR ONE, MAYBE TWO WEEKS, Thalick rifled on. NO BAD HURT, BUT AFRAID-AFRAID.

  Thalick was incapable of expressing superlatives, so for emphasis he repeated the word which demanded the most amount of attention.

  Zolan considered this news with a snort. "Has he been ... " Zolan trailed off, not finishing the question. If he received an affirmative answer from Thalick, Zolan knew that the boy would have to be killed instantly.

  But the Stinger's hiss was confident.

  NO. NO CONTAMINATION. NO CHANGE TO HAPPEN. BOY HUNGRY, SMALL HURT. I FIX

  Zolan sighed with relief. The boy had been with the vampires, but had somehow avoided being fed upon. Long ago, someone Zolan had loved dearly had not been so fortunate. The Redeye infection worked quickly and was untreatable. Not even Thalick's godlike powers could reverse the ghastly process of metamorphosis, and in the rare instances where a Redeye victim had not been immediately devoured, but left to writhe in transformation, destruction was the only possible alternative. Fortunately, the boy appeared untouched in this respect, but how he managed to escape from the vampires was amazing enough. It would, however, explain why he had survived here in the oasis for as long as he had; with the smell of Redeye on you, everything shunned you reverently.

  As Thalick was no longer providing him with any more information, Zolan took up his own interrogation with the boy.

  "You were with the Redeyes, boy," he said gruffly, "That means you were in the City. Is that right?"

  Zolan was a growler by nature, but if anything, he felt only pity for the blood-covered child in front of him. Aware of his gruffness, Zolan attempted a toothy smile to put the boy at ease. This turned out to be a dismal failure because he had so few teeth remaining. The boy cringed, but this time found his voice.

  "Yes," the boy whispered in a frightened tone.

  Zolan stepped forward and put both hands on the boy's shoulders. The boy shook at his touch, but permitted the gesture.

  "I'm not going to hurt you," he said, then looked at Thalick. "We're not going to hurt you, I mean.

  The boy stared at Zolan blankly for just a second, before returning full, terrified attention to the Stinger.

  "What else do you have for me, Bug?" Zolan asked Thalick figuring that the Stinger's method of extracting information would be less uncomfortable for all concerned.

  BOY SHOCK BAD, ZOLAN. THINKING BAD. BUT THALICK KNOW MORE. BOY FROM ZOLANSVILLE. SURVIVOR FROM RAID LAST MONTH. ATTACK ON ZOLANSVILLE. REDEYE COME TO KILL. REMEMBER, ZOLAN----?,

  Zolan closed his eyes and nodded.

  Three weeks earlier, the town of Zolansville had suffered its first attack from the Redeyes in almost a hundred years. By the time Thalick had arrived on the scene that same day, several hundred people lay dead and dismembered in the streets. Most had been half-eaten where they had fallen. It had been a careless, daytime raid by the vampires, precipitated out of desperation; even so, it had been executed with stunning success. Those who hadn't been killed instantly were dragged off to be enjoyed and savored at leisure either in the tunnels beneath the desert or back in the Redeye City.

  Thalick had pursued and destroyed as many of the vermin as he could find, but even with such efforts, his bulldozing purge met with little success. The Redeyes knew their terrain well and were able to dodge the enormous Thalick with relative ease, even as they concurrently gorged themselves on their abducted human booty.

  Throughout his attack on the Redeye lair, Thalick was continuously subjected to the horrible screams of human survivors. Disembowelment was the standard practice for Redeyes at feeding time, attended to with great care and speed. It happened to be the most excruciating form of execution for those involved, as various internal organs were removed with surgical precision - and feasted on in full view of the tormented owners.

  Not once had Thalick been able to rescue these mangled unfortunates; each occasion he had arrived too late, only to confront faces choking in agony after the ghastly feedings. In such hopeless cases, Thalick unhesitatingly finished the job the Redeyes had mercilessly begun. Distasteful as he found the act, killing was a function that the Stinger performed with icy exactness. Gratitude was an emotion unfamiliar to Thalick, but on that horrible day beneath the Redeye City, something like it possessed him whenever he had the opportunity to end the torment of the dying - or worse than dead.

  The herding in of nearly three hundred humans through twenty miles of underground tunnels had been effortless for the Redeyes thanks to the Jumpers. Hideous creations that had thrived on Earth for as long as their masters, the Jumpers were enormous long-tailed spawns from the radioactive gene-pool that had inundated the planet for eons. The Jumpers had been readily domesticated by the Redeyes when they had first arrived through the Dark, providing the vampires with a useful slave market, efficient transportation - and when human flesh wasn't available - at last for food. Like their bloodsucking cohorts, the Jumpers were also dying out rapidly, and only a fistful remained in the world today. However, one Jumper was a formidable weapon, and it had only taken five of the beasts to cattle-flog the kidnapped Zolansvilleans into the Redeye City.

  Three weeks had passed since that grizzly day, and Zolansville had meanwhile rebuilt itself and buried its dead. Since Thalick had not returned to the city with a single survivor, it was generally assumed that not one victim of the massacre-kidnapping remained alive. For several days afterwards, Thalick had even backtracked through the tunnels that led from the desert into the city, raiding the Redeye City whenever possible and searching for possible injured or escaped refugees that might miraculously have escaped. Alas, however, such heroic efforts turned up nothing but gutted corpses. Thalick filled in the tunnels, then departed the sad town to allow it to mourn. After another week, it was gradually accepted that not one lost loved one could ever be expected to return home again.

  But now, amazingly, one lone boy had managed to survive. Zolan searched the memories of his dreams, trying to recall if the boy was part of the visions he had been having for the past year. But he could remember nothing; if indeed his dreams were the instruments of future prophecy, then in this instance, they had failed to take into account the random - and miraculous - appearance of this child who had somehow escaped the greatest enemy Mankind had ever known.

  "What's your name, boy?" Zolan asked.

  The boy's lips trembled with the effort, but at last a name was formed.

  "Tom."

  "Tom," Zolan said gruffly, then turned to Thalick behind him and snapped, "You got that, Bug? His name is Tom. Say hello to Tom, Bug."

  Thalick was busy producing a concentrated protein mixture for the boy, so was able to offer only a perfunctory hiss of acknowledgment to Zolan's ridiculous proposal. Since Zolan's brain was the only one that could decipher Stinger transmissions, it was preposterous for Thalick to do anything that the
boy could recognize as a gesture of greeting. Tom continued staring at the Clawed Horror in front of him; he was not shaking anymore, but he was far from relaxed.

  "The Guardian won't hurt you, Tom. You know that," Zolan chuckled, trying to put the boy at ease, "And neither will I."

  Zolan turned to Thalick and whispered "Get out of sight, would you, Bug? Just for a little while. You're scaring the hell out of him."

  Thalick walked backwards until he was completely out of the glade. Shoveling himself into the ground, he covered himself up until only two claws, two antennae and a hooked tail remained above the sand.

  "You see, boy?" Zolan cajoled through a wheeze. "You have nothing to worry about. Why, ol' Bug here is probably more nervous than you are."

  With the Stinger at a respectable distance, the boy calmed noticeably. This time when Zolan reached out to touch his shoulder, Tom even managed to give the old man a nervous smile.

  "Are you Old Grizzly?" Tom asked suddenly.

  "Old Grizzly::" Zolan snorted diffidently. "Is that what I'm being called these days?" Old Grizzly indeed. What was the world coming to? For five hundred years he had always been referred to as Master. Obviously, things had changed quite a bit since last he had visited either New Phillips or Zolansville.

  Old Grizzly: Zolan played with the name in his mouth several times while feeling and stroking his mangy beard. Well, he was rather grizzled, there was no doubt about that. Suddenly, Zolan began laughing. He reached out an mussed up Tom's hair.

  "Yep, I'm Old Grizzly, Tom." he said, then winked at the boy. "But you can call me Grizz." Pointing a thumb towards Thalick, he added in a clearly confidential tone: "Only my best friends call me that, you know."