Gate of the Gods: Book 5 of The Windows of Heaven

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  Everything now seemed perilous, despite the fact that the Ancient Enemy had erased himself from human history in a reactionary fit that the Monster and its masters had exploited perfectly. They now had total liberty to reshape humanity’s perception of history. What troubled them were the massive chaos screens obstructing their view of where this liberty would lead them over the long-term.

  Nor could they pool their resources as before, since their human proxies could no longer bridge the new language barriers. The maddening thing about it was that those very barriers each bore the individual sub-cognate code imprints of the Monster, and its allies, like signet seals pressed into wax! Except the “wax” was human mind—something exceedingly fragile on some levels, yet harder than tempered steel on others, once it set.

  Normally, Pahn’s folk could not have stamped their individual codes onto human minds so deeply, on so large a scale. It took the unique conditions created by the Enemy’s “fit.” They had not predicted the side effects on human language or to the sensory and cognitive factors feeding the mind’s perception of meaning—something Pahn now realized En-Ki’s forces did not understand terribly well yet.

  The Monster now had a creeping fear that what had seemed a superb exploitation would soon prove a mere short-term tactical gain, crafted to snare them into a long-term strategic burden. They could not afford any new strategic burdens, as outnumbered as they were! It raised the question of whether the Enemy’s “reactionary fit” was really just bait for a trap. What if En-Ki’s hosts had just spent most of their limited energy forcing their marks indelibly onto the human psyche, only to leave themselves exposed and depleted in the end?

  Still, En-Ki’s victory was substantial, almost total, in fact.

  The Cults of Inana-Ishtar, Shamash, and Ninurta had quietly grown strong again even among the Akkadians of Kish. En’Tarah-ana’s death to the premature aging ravaging most of post-Deluge humanity had ensured the brevity of the M’El-Ki’s influence there. Roving clans and city-dwellers alike habitually inbred within small groups, while poorer atmospheric protection against solar rays accelerated the breakdown of their creation codes.

  Kish’s saardom had fallen to lesser men, while in the north, Asshur ruled as a deity in the city named for him, as well as at Ninuwa, and Kalhu. Suinne had even fathered children, naturally and spiritually, his sons and converts building a delta cult center east of Eridu, which they called “The City” or Ur in their polyglot tongue of Khaldini-Akkadian, and Kengiru.

  The humans all thought similar things, but in wildly different language forms that often defied bridging. Costly, attention-consuming experiments like Ur only underscored the problem, rather than solved it. Even those who spoke a corrupted pidgin form of the Old Speech only communicated superficially. For En-Ki’s control over humanity to be coordinated enough to execute the Plan demanded that all the machine parts function in unison. That had barely been possible in the olden world, given the complexities of using a single language with minor dialect variants. With no common language base, it might be impossible to coordinate things!

  Even so, En-Ki had achieved too many key goals to take Pahn’s fears too seriously. Why should he? Pahn was just a Watcher!

  Yet Pahn’s role in the Plan was far from insignificant, and En-Ki knew it. As “Lugalbanda,” the Monster, with Gilgamesh, had defeated Surupag, and scattered its tiny “E’Yahavah cult.” Some, with Yoqtani, had moved eastward, while most had wandered west. The Kengiru of the Sumar now only remembered the name of the Ancient Enemy as slurred Huwawah; completely redefined as nothing more than a ravaging flood monster—especially since Gilgamesh and Enkidu had later forayed west into the Cedar Mountains, and killed that hairy disciple of Palqui.

  Not long after that, the Monster had abandoned its longtime human host, upon discovering tumors on the man’s brain. “Lugalbanda” had quietly left Uruk one morning in a small boat. The Monster had taken its host up into the glaciers of the Eastern Mountains, and left him to die in the snow. Since then, it had remained unclothed, drawing power from the occasional willing gate-sentinel, if lucky, and the poorer fare of human and even animal thought activity when not so fortunate.

  En-Ki’s plan to re-harness human creative potential advanced. Yet each advance seemed plagued by corresponding setbacks! Pahn took seriously the fact that most orders of heavenly beings lacked the creative capacities found in even weak humans; the only creatures E’Yahavah had ever vested with such a close reflection of his own image. Of course, Pahn’s kind were extraordinary mimics, quickly emulating, and mind-projecting images of every form; from people, to animals, to forces of nature, and simulating every behavior from affection, to cruelty, to sexuality and its deviations, to parenting, mourning—even eating.

  Those few with the mimicry skill and energy reserves could even project replicated nerve impulses of touch into carefully prepared human minds, implanting illusions of any sensory experience to a degree where most such humans could not tell them from the real thing. The stimulation felt as intense for the Monster’s kind as for the human subjects. Pahn prided itself on being one of a select group with this skill still free to roam.

  The Monster used to find it addictive, toying with human emotions and bodies that way; first emulating warmth and giving them pleasure, and then suddenly changing the stimulus to intense cruelty and pain, just to see the funny faces they made during the violent contortions of the shift. Doing that sequence in reverse often created the perfect willing slave, but either way, such predictable responses soon became boring.

  Pahn’s shining masterpiece—the closest thing he would ever know to actually creating, rather than just copying, art and music—had been a simple kiss so perfectly fabricated that it had almost caused a girl who truly loved her husband to leave him. The Monster still wondered what Tiva’s response would have been, had she been able to see herself kissing thin air on that buried forest trail of the World-that-Was, as anyone else would have seen, had they come along at that time. It made the Monster want to be more than it ever could be. That shortfall also made it into a most angry Monster.

  While Pahn’s folk could duplicate music and other arts down to the finest detail, once heard, felt, or seen, only Shining One, of all their kinds, had ever created music himself.

  Music especially fascinated Pahn, at least the reproduction of it to mechanical perfection, as he had done back in vanished Grove Hollow for Tiva, claiming it as its own. Not that it appreciated beauty all that much—more the mathematical symmetries of sound, and their mechanical effects on human experimental subjects. Such things had vast utilitarian potential. Beauty and ugliness had become much the same thing for the Monster. Some of the music it had mimicked originated with Shining One, but most the Monster had heard from human players.

  Music and the kiss had almost made Pahn feel what it must have been like to be human—to be a potential lordling.

  The Monster mulled on this in its bitterness, to keep itself from falling dormant. How limited even the great Kherubar were in their capacity to invent, despite their vast power, and their abilities to emulate things invented by others!

  Their leader, Shining One, was not Pahn’s first choice. Pahn had become “the Monster” in slow, nuanced transitions during events that led up to what the infamous “Scribe of Heaven” had once dubbed “the Second Insurrection.” The Watcher that had once haunted Grove Hollow, with its comrades, had long imagined it could successfully reproduce its kind physically by using human women. They had even gambled that their progeny could fulfill the Great Promise, winning reconciliation for Pahn, and its fellow Watchers, with E’Yahavah.

  That plan had always been naively misconceived.

  All the Watchers had proven was the impossibility of bridging the genetic limits of the created kind in any viable way. No amount of tinkering within the diversities of the human genome, or adding foreign elements, had made any lasting difference! Their greatest triumphs each ended as failures.

  Even their m
ost sophisticated, semi-viable products, the so-called “Elyo,” and other monsters engineered in sunken Aztlan, had still required human genetic templates. They were engineered oddities, not evolving life forms. They were all either sterile or capable of producing only deformed, less viable offspring than even themselves—things Pahn’s peers had dejectedly called “meat-pies” in the end. Even the mighty Elyo had not a sixth the lifespan of a common man—those not killed in battle had all died of massive cancers before reaching the youthful age of sixty years.

  Rumor even had it among the lower orders that Shining One had duped the Watchers of the Second Insurrection to attempt the destruction of the human gene pool so that the promised Monster-Slayer could never be born. Pahn seriously doubted that story. Creation codes had too many redundant features for such an attempt to do more than accelerate genetic entropy, although the Monster had to admit it had certainly succeeded in doing that, judging by steeply falling human lifespans.

  To prevent the Monster-Slayer, however, required more than mere genetic entropy; fundamental humanity would need to be permanently unmade and replaced in the codes. Even the most bizarre experiments of Ardis and Aztlan had demanded a human genetic foundational code. In the end, it became evident that, for all of their intelligence and diligence, the Watchers simply lacked the creative element to innovate on that level, because E’Yahavah had simply designed them that way. They were servants by design, and monsters by choice—not creators!

  Even their uncanny ability to copy had failed them in the end—they could mimic everything human, they simply could not reproduce themselves with the needed qualities humans had in abundance. That simple fact made Pahn burn with a fury eternity itself could not extinguish.

  Having rejected the purpose the Creator had made for it, Pahn could produce nothing else in the end, except a rancid sense of futility.

  In the wake of the Deluge, Shining One had approached the few Watchers of the Second Insurrection to escape imprisonment as a savior, offering them new purpose. He had shown them that it was unnecessary for them to reproduce themselves biologically; that it was only needful for the world to believe that they had, and to institutionalize that belief somehow, in order for them to regain control. In a world that believed such a thing, Pahn’s kind could goad even the Enemy’s men into committing atrocities that only discredited the Enemy in the end.

  “Sleep” again approached, but Pahn shook it off by recycling its final colophon transcription sequence. What was I thinking? Ah, yes, shaming the Enemy using his own human instruments…

  Shining One had shown them many tactics. Since the victory at Bab’Eluhar, the Monster had begun developing a fiction it called “racial superiority,” despite the self-evident fact that only one human race existed, and that tribal or cultic successes or failures lay only in how well a tribe or cult’s ideas matched reality. Pahn’s test suggestions that some people were less human than others bent already-flawed human governments into starting the very atrocities the Enemy hated most.

  Pahn’s former master sometimes used human surrogates to execute sentence against those deemed morally responsible for crimes. Whenever this happened, it had nothing to do intrinsically with the blood or race of those guilty. It was just crime and punishment—even when a particular tribe proved guilty, and suffered for a given sin as a tribe. In the wake of such events, Pahn had tried suggesting to the humans that it was really more about bloodlines than ethics. Since men tended to avoid responsibility for their own actions anyway, this was easy.

  The suggestion seemed plausible to humans because their basic social divisions usually fell along clan lines. The ideas of the parents inevitably communicate to the children, whether the ideas have any validity or not. This meant that the Enemy’s responses also seemed to fall along clan lines often enough that the many exceptions hardly drew enough attention to matter. The illusion that the issue was “racial” thus easily survived scrutiny because real scrutiny was almost nonexistent. It had worked well so far.

  Instead of last-resort actions against tribes that willingly cultivated contagious horrors (by the Enemy’s standard); human leadership guided by notions of racial superiority multiplied those same horrors based on an entirely imaginary idea. That was why Pahn had advised En-Ki to encourage the concept of racial superiority whenever possible at Kish. The knife cut both ways, too. It enabled the delusion that some people were more-than-human. Half-divine lugals were a solid basis for authority to humanity’s useful idiots. The exquisite irony here was that humans, the lesser creators, were always such pliable morons.

  This fiction allowed the Monster’s kind to control the maximum number of people with the minimal output of effort—something Pahn sensed they would need to optimize more efficiently in the future. It only hoped that En-Ki would notice the problem, too, before it became too late to act.

  Even if not, Pahn, and its few remaining associates to evade the imprisoning Abyssu, could hardly part with their new savior, now that no other viable option remained for them. After all, Shining One had first discovered how to bend truth and reality away from E’Yahavah’s intent, and to invert them for his own ends. Yet it still frustrated Pahn that even Shining One had to keep learning new ways of doing this effectively, by watching and cultivating the humans. The rebels had no other way to sustain the momentum they had regained in their war of rebellion, since the Deluge.

  Only now, Pahn feared their ability to learn from the humans must eventually stall, due to what it now suspected had been an Enemy ruse all along. This not only left the humans unable to communicate effectively, but also impeded their necessary cognitive skills for creative thought at this extremely crucial time.

  Only longevity, and power from their eternal state, enabled the Monster’s kind to grow in experience from the raw insights they mimicked from mortal men. That thing the Enemy called evil, which Pahn had also once dreaded—which Shining One first crudely invented—found refinement as a weapon only through the accumulation of human creativity used in its service. Eternal minds imitated each new human insight into a growing pattern, living forever to build upon what they learned from these flickers of human ingenuity for evil. The Igigi then fed the collective result back into each new generation of men, as fertilizer, to intensify the effect of pushing their Creator ever further away.

  Once they could keep the Creator at a sufficient distance, Shining One would then introduce a completely new reality, with a completely new set of moral and physical laws. The atrocities would end, and a golden age would dawn.

  In the New Reality, Pahn and the other rebel heavenly kinds would be masters, not servants, and Shining One would be the “First among Equals,” while lesser beings like man would serve the greater. Everyone—even the serving humans—would be free to love whomever they wanted, however they wanted to love them, and to define that love any way they wished.

  That was how it was supposed to work in theory, anyway. It drove all the petty temptations projected by monsters of lesser rank and skill than Pahn, at the slowly expanding human race, on a tedious individual scale. If things kept on this way, though, more and more of their limited number must eventually take on such dull duty. The more the Monster ruminated to keep its mind from going dormant; the clearer and more dismal everything became.

  The decisive victory Pahn had imagined at Bab’Elu—where magnified human openness to Watcher mind-projection enabled more thorough thought control—was in growing doubt for another reason beyond unexpected language barriers. A century and a half of mounting evidence suggested that more children each generation were born cognitively normal. Increasing numbers of them showed the same built-in barriers against undue influence from the Monster’s kind that humans had always had—by design. This meant that Bab’Elu’s largest gains were likely limited only to one brief generation of hallucinating idiots!

  This forced the Igigi to cultivate an ever-shrinking commodity. It meant they must engineer extreme conditions necessary for breaking down those
built-in barriers to their influence in every new human generation, perpetually! It had taken them two thousand years to achieve such cultivation universally on the World-that-Was, where everyone spoke a variation of the same language. That had made communication and control easy by comparison to now. It became clear to Pahn that this cycle would become an enormous drain on their limited time and energy, growing more complex and demanding as the centuries passed!

  It was not enough to control humanity; humanity must be a useful commodity worth the time and effort to control! Unfortunately, it now appeared to Pahn that Shining One—the “savior” who now styled himself as En-Ki—god of the world—had jumped at the Enemy’s bait! Worse, there were no alternatives!

  Conversely, the Ancient Enemy retained twice as many Eternals in his service as En-Ki had, and gathered for another counter-offensive from somewhere the Monster and its compatriots could not detect, but felt shifting and settling beneath them as uneasy tectonic plates below a ten-dimensional landscape. That counter-offensive could break out at any time, or it might shift and settle for many queasy centuries. There was no knowing, except for the ultimate endgame, too horrendous to contemplate.

  Pahn began to drift off into dormancy, his information matrix transcribing automatically onto the five-dimensional surfaces of a handy inter-space layer.

  An aurora surge nearby startled the Monster back to its senses, decrypting its partially transcribed codes back to half-operational status. Something big was almost on top of it, but Pahn could not risk going beyond the lower dimensions and using its higher time-sight to look ahead on the temporal landscape to see what it was. The recent Enemy counter-attack that had thrown the Monster clear of Gilgamesh had also severed it from the gate-creature it had harnessed off and on since ditching Lugalbanda’s body.

  Could the Enemy counter-attack happen so soon?