The Younger Gods

by David Eddings

  “Oh?”

  “You and I were drifting in a strange place where there wasn’t much light at all.”

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘drifting’?” Ara asked.

  “We seemed to be just floating up in the air,” Omago replied, “except that there wasn’t any air.”

  Ara put down her large spoon. “I think that maybe everybody has one of those ‘floating’ dreams every now and then.” She smiled. “I suppose that it might mean that we’re all secretly envious of birds. They can fly, but we can’t.”

  “I wasn’t really thinking about birds, Ara, and I’ve never had a ‘floating dream’ before. Anyway, everything around us seemed to be moving toward an extremely bright light—so bright that it hurt my eyes just to look at it.”

  “It must have been the sun, then.”

  Omago shook his head. “It was even brighter than the sun, Ara—much, much brighter. Anyway, everything kept moving faster and faster as it rushed toward that bright light. Then the light started to shrink down, growing smaller and smaller until it wasn’t any bigger than my thumbnail, but it was still growing brighter. Then everything went darker than night, and for some reason that I couldn’t understand at all, you and I both said ‘Now!’ and the light was there again, but it definitely wasn’t shrinking anymore. It was growing larger and larger so fast that I couldn’t even keep track of it. The light almost seemed to be exploding and spreading out, shoving the darkness aside as it went.”

  Ara was suddenly cold all over. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. “Just how long did that last, dear heart?” she asked, trying to keep her voice calm and ordinary.

  “I couldn’t really say, Ara. It was still expanding—or growing, maybe—when I suddenly woke up. Something very strange was going on. It’s very, very cold in the sleep chambers of this fort, but I was covered with sweat as if I’d been out in my fields in the middle of summer.”

  Ara smiled. “I’d say that your dream was very useful, then, dear, dear Omago. You were feeling cold, and your dream warmed things up for you.”

  “It definitely made me feel warmer. Anyway, before I woke up, that immense light had started to spin off bits and pieces that whirled out in bright little chunks, spinning and flying. They seemed to remind me of stars, for some reason.”

  “Maybe you should talk with Dahlaine, dear Omago. He might be willing to pay a lot for a dream like the one you just had.”

  Omago smiled faintly. “Will it be long before breakfast?” he asked. “I think I should walk around just a bit and see if I can shake off what’s left of that dream.”

  “You have about a half hour, dear heart,” Ara replied. “Go out in the open and throw the dream away. Don’t forget to put on your fur cape, though.”

  Omago nodded and went out of Ara’s kitchen.

  “How did he do that?” Ara demanded out loud. “We agreed that he wouldn’t remember any of this for years and years. He’s supposed to be an ordinary man, but no ordinary man is going to have dreams about something that happened millions of years ago.”

  There had been a certain practicality in Omago’s decision to transform himself into an ordinary human with no memories at all of his real identity. The man-creatures were a recent development, and, unlike most other creatures, it appeared that they were able to think at a much more complex level than the other living creatures on this particular world. Omago had decided that the best way to understand the man-creatures would be to duplicate their experiences and abilities by living out the life of an ordinary human here in the Land of Dhrall. He might have been able to try it elsewhere, but this world and this particular region were most important right now.

  Omago’s description of his dream had raised certain memories for Ara. Her mind went back to the time before time when she’d been awareness only, with no body. Her awareness had moved about the universe through endless eons, searching, searching for something—anything—that might dispel her dreadful loneliness.

  And then Omago’s awareness had reached out to her, and she’d no longer been alone.

  For eons uncountable they had drifted together, growing more attached to each other as they searched for other awarenesses. But as far as they’d been able to determine, there were none.

  And then, with no warning whatsoever, there was light—a light so intense that Ara could not bear to look at it. “What is that thing?” she demanded.

  “I couldn’t really say, dear heart,” Omago’s awareness replied. “I’ve never seen anything like it before.”

  “Make it go away.”

  “How? It’s millions of times larger than anything I’ve ever seen before, and other things that are also bright seem to be joining it. I think that something very important is about to happen.”

  “Why now, and not before?”

  “I’m not sure that there’s a difference between now and before, Ara.”

  “That just changed, dear Omago. That bright thing makes ‘now’ very important.”

  “I think you might be right, dear Ara. Something just started that didn’t exist before.”

  “Is it my imagination, or is the bright thing growing smaller—and even brighter?”

  Omago gasped. “Come away!” he shouted in the silence of her mind. “We can’t stay here! We’ll be destroyed if we do!”

  “We’ll be what?”

  “We’ll cease to exist. Come with me—now!”

  And quite suddenly, Ara was no longer only thought. She had a tangible body, and Omago had one as well. He reached out and took her hand in his, and they turned and fled from the now tiny bright light.

  And then, for some reason neither of them understood, they both said, “Now.”

  And time began as the tiny light stopped being tiny and suddenly flared out to enormity, engulfing the darkness as it went.

  Then Omago seized Ara’s new form and carried her away, and she suddenly realized that they were moving even faster than the light.

  In time—now that time existed—the light slowed, and the vast light began to break into smaller pieces Omago called “suns,” but Ara called them “the children of the light.” That seemed nicer than “suns” to Ara, but she chose not to make an issue of it with Omago. Then, in the endless eons that plodded along in time, the various suns also bore children that Omago called “worlds.” Eventually, of course, the worlds also had children. Trees and grass came first, but then other living things began to appear, primarily in the oceans of the various worlds. Life, as Ara understood it to be, began in worlds uncountable in the vastness of the universe.

  The universe continued to expand, but Ara and Omago concentrated their attention on a specific world and on what appeared to be a subcontinent that Ara named “Dhrall.” It was a nice-sounding name that didn’t really mean anything. “I think that might be a perfect place for a bit of experimentation, dear heart,” she said to Omago. “This form you’ve given us seems to be most practical. Creatures that resemble us would probably be able to do many things that other creatures would find quite impossible.” She held up one of her hands. “This alone would give our creatures an enormous advantage over creatures that only have feet. How were you able to invent hands when the time came for us to have bodies as well as awareness?”

  Omago smiled. “Think back, dear heart,” he told her. “We were in a very dangerous place, and we needed to leave—in a hurry. I wanted something that I could use to grab hold of you and pull you off to safety. If you’d like, we could call them ‘Ara-grabbers,’ I suppose.”

  “Not if you want me to say anything to you for the next million years, you won’t,” Ara replied tartly.

  “I was only teasing, dear,” Omago replied. He looked down at the land they called Dhrall. “I think it might be quite a long time before we’ll be able to experiment, though. That land below is still at a very primitive level of development. I don’t think any life-forms will appear on this world until the fire-mountains go to sleep.”

  “You’re prob
ably right, dear heart,” Ara agreed. “This might be a good time for some exploration. This particular part of the world might be very nice after it cools down, but I think it might be a good time for us to find out what the rest of this world looks like, don’t you?”

  “That might take a long time, my love,” Omago replied a bit dubiously.

  “Not if I fly, it won’t.”

  “You’re going to sprout wings?”

  “Why would I want to bother doing that? I’ll just set my body aside and go exploring with my awareness.”

  Omago blinked. “I never thought of that,” he admitted. “Are you sure that you can separate yourself from your body, though?”

  “We’ll find out in just a moment or two. I won’t be long, dear heart. I don’t think I’ll really need to count pebbles or anything like that. All we need right now is a general idea of the shape of the various other bits and pieces of land here on this world. Take a nap or something. I’ll be back in a day or so.”

  Ara felt a tremendous sense of freedom when she separated her awareness from her body. It was a nice enough body, but the limitations it imposed on her mind had been almost intolerable. Now she was free again, and she soared off into the sky.

  The sea that lay to the west of the Land of Dhrall was extensive, but Ara’s awareness found no signs of life there. “Ah, well,” she sighed. “It looks as if we’ll have to start from the beginning.”

  That took some of the joy away. It appeared that this particular world was barren, totally devoid of any form of life.

  When she reached the land mass on the western side of the empty sea, she saw no signs of plants of any kind. There were mountains, however, but many of them were spouting fire miles and miles into the air.

  “Oh, stop that,” she told the mountains irritably.

  And they did.

  That startled Ara more than a little. “Good babies,” she told them and then turned toward the south. If she could stop these eruptions with just a word, this plan she and Omago had devised might not be as difficult as it had previously seemed.

  The land to the south was far less rugged than the land to the west had been, and Ara saw no telltale columns of smoke rising into the air. Evidently there were no fire-mountains down here—or if there were, they had exhausted their supply of molten rock.

  “That’s more like it,” Ara said with a certain satisfaction.

  She roamed about in the sky for several days and found even more regions with no fire-mountains. After another few days, she turned north to return to the Land of Dhrall. Omago was probably starting to worry, so it was time to go home.

  2

  “Where have you been?” Omago demanded when Ara’s awareness returned to the Land of Dhrall and rejoined her body. “I was starting to think that I’d lost you forever.”

  “You’re not going to get away from me that easy, dear heart,” she replied. “Actually, you’ll never get away from me at all, so don’t even think about it. We’ll still be locked together when the universe is old and grey. I more or less found out what we needed to know. There are fire-mountains in other parts of this world, but not as many, and they aren’t spitting fire nearly as far up into the air as the ones here in the Land of Dhrall are. I’d say that this is the newest part of this world.”

  “Did you encounter any life-forms at all?”

  “Not on dry land. I sensed a few very primitive forms of life in the seas, but they’ve got a long way to go before they’ll start coming up on dry land.”

  Omago looked out across the rolling sea. “We seem to have come here at the right time, then. We might want to experiment just a bit. We’ve seen many forms of life on other worlds, and they have characteristics that might be very useful. If we really want to, I’m sure that we could create a creature with wings and a level of intelligence that no bird-thing will ever have. Then we could also create an intelligent creature with gills, and that one could live out its life in the sea.”

  Ara shook her head. “No, dear heart,” she said. “We know exactly what kind of creature we want here, and wings or gills wouldn’t fit, and they could cause problems later on. Our creatures should resemble us. Our body-forms will prove to be the best, I think, so let’s not start tampering.”

  “Oh,” Omago said then, “this part of the world already has a life-form much like some of those we’ve encountered on other worlds.”

  “Could you be just a bit more specific, dear heart?” Ara asked. “Exactly what is this creature?”

  “It’s primarily a bug, dear,” Omago replied. “It has six legs, a sort of shell to keep other creatures from eating it, and a tendency to live in caves. I very briefly touched what passes for a mind, and this bug-creature is very ambitious. It wants this entire world, and it’s creating children by the thousands to take this world for it. It calls itself ‘the Vlagh,’ which most probably means ‘mother.’ I’m quite sure that any creatures we make will have to deal with it.”

  “I’ve been considering this for quite some time now, dear heart,” Ara said to Omago some time later. “You and I aren’t limited to this particular world. Things have a way of popping out when we least expect them, and if some emergency breaks out on another world, we could very well have to go deal with it no matter what’s in the wind here.”

  “It’s possible, I suppose,” Omago conceded. “I take it that you’ve come up with an answer?”

  “I think we need children, dear heart,” Ara replied.

  Omago’s face suddenly turned bright red.

  “Is there some sort of problem with that?” Ara asked with wide-eyed innocence.

  Omago blushed even more, and Ara laughed with pure delight. “Are we having some problems with the idea, dear, dear Omago?” Then she fondly touched his face. “We don’t necessarily have to do it that way, you know. We have alternatives available to us. I can call them up with a snap of my fingers—and they wouldn’t be of much use if they were infants anyway. Once they’re in place, you and I can sort of fade back and let them deal with any ordinary problems while you and I take care of more extraordinary ones.”

  “I don’t know, dear heart,” Omago said a bit dubiously. “If we give them absolute power, they could make some disastrous mistakes.”

  “Not if we put some limitations on them, they won’t. ‘No killing’ should probably be at the top of the list, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Of course, if we don’t permit them to kill, that would mean that they won’t eat.”

  “We can get around that if we have to,” Omago said. “They can absorb light instead of food.”

  “Very good,” Ara agreed. “Then too, they’ll need to be awake all the time as well. Emergencies crop up without much warning, so I don’t think they should need sleep.”

  “No creature stays awake eternally, Ara.”

  “I’ll work on that and see what I can come up with.”

  “It won’t work, dear heart,” Omago said when Ara described her concept of the god creatures who would rule the Land of Dhrall.

  “What’s the matter with it?” Ara demanded.

  “Females are very pretty, but I think we’ll need males as well.”

  “What for? They aren’t going to have children.”

  “Would you be contented if I wasn’t around?”

  “Bite your tongue!” Then Ara felt just a little foolish. “For some reason it just never occurred to me that we’d need males as well as females.”

  “Something else too, dear,” Omago continued. “I think we should give some serious thought to producing ordinary creatures who’ll closely resemble these gods. We want the gods to have a sense of responsibility. That in itself will keep them from wandering off.”

  “Now that’s a very good idea, Omago,” Ara agreed. Then something came to her. “You do realize that we’ll be creating an entirely new species, don’t you?”

  “So?” Omago replied blandly.

  “You’re making this ve
ry complicated, dear heart,” Ara complained.

  “That’s all right, Ara. Complications make things much more interesting, don’t they?”

  Ara glared at him for a moment, but then she laughed.

  3

  Ara was quite sure that Omago’s form and hers should also be the forms of the gods of the Land of Dhrall. “The time may come when we’ll need to speak with them, dear heart,” she told her mate, “and they won’t be disturbed if we resemble them to some degree. Then, when we create their worshipers, they should also resemble their gods—and us as well.”

  “Not a bad idea at all,” Omago agreed. “The time may come some day off in the future when we’ll need to blend in with the worshipers and their gods, and it’ll be much easier if we all have the same number of arms and legs. Shall we begin?”

  “Why don’t you make the bodies, dear? Just the general shape. I’ll build their faces, and then we can both work on their characteristics. We’ll want them to have individual identities and personalities, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You’re very creative, Ara,” Omago observed.

  “Details, dear heart. Fine art grows out of details. In a certain sense what we’re about to conjure up will be fine art. They’ll need awareness as well as bodies, and we’ll want them to think like we do as well as resemble us.”

  “A thought before we begin,” Omago said then. “They should probably have memories when they become conscious. I think they should believe that they’ve always been here, and that this day is just an ordinary day like one of several million others.” Then he frowned. “They may think that they’ve lived for thousands of years, but you and I will both know better. They will live for a long, long time, but eventually the years will catch up with them, and they’ll need to sleep for quite some time to refresh their minds.”

  “Who’s going to mind the Land of Dhrall when they drift off to sleep, dear one?” Ara protested.

  Omago scratched his cheek. “If we do this right and don’t permit any weaknesses to crop up, I’d say that they’ll be good for about twenty-five eons, and then they’ll have to sleep for the same amount of time.”