The Younger Gods

by David Eddings

  “There goes our grand plan,” Ara observed.

  “Not really, dear one,” Omago said with a sly grin. “All we’ll need is a second generation to take over when the elders start to snore. We decided that four gods would be sufficient, but it seems that we were wrong. We’ll need eight instead. The first four will tend to things for about twenty-five eons. Then they’ll go to sleep, and the second four will take over. If they pass it back and forth like that, they should all survive for a long, long time, and that’s what this has been all about. You and I must not be tied down here. We have other responsibilities as well as this one. Let’s get started, dear heart. This might take a while.”

  Omago was nice enough not to protest when Ara declared that she would name the gods—both the elders and the youngsters. Omago was not particularly poetic, but Ara could weave names by the dozens. After much thought, she named the elder gods Dahlaine, Zelana, Veltan, and Aracia. There was a musical quality about those names that Ara found very attractive. The younger gods—when the time came for them to wake up—would be Balacenia, Vash, Enalla, and Dakas.

  Omago carefully planted those names in the minds—and false memories—of the assorted gods, and then he stepped out of sight and stirred the awareness of the four elders.

  “What’s going on here?” the grey-bearded, but still only three or four minutes old, Dahlaine demanded.

  “I was just about to ask you that same question, big brother,” the goddess Zelana declared. “As I remember, I was looking at a range of mountains, but they’re not there anymore.”

  “I’m not sure that I’m right, Dahlaine,” the youthful Veltan declared, “but it seems to me that you called us together to warn us about something you called the Vlagh.”

  “Ah,” Dahlaine replied, “now it comes back to me. I’ve spent many, many eons watching insects. I pretty much understand the ones that have been around for a long, long time, but this Vlagh insect seems to have a number of troublesome ambitions.”

  “That’s absurd, Dahlaine,” the goddess Aracia declared. “Bugs can’t think coherently enough to have anything even remotely resembling ambition. All she wants to do is lay eggs—by the thousands.”

  “Exactly,” Dahlaine replied. “The Vlagh seems to think that if she lays enough eggs, her children will run out and steal the world from us. She seems to think that the whole world rightfully belongs to her.”

  “Not while I’m around, she won’t,” Veltan declared. “If she even tries to usurp any part of my domain, I’ll tie all six of her legs into a knot so tight that it’ll take her years to get unraveled.”

  “Can we watch, baby brother?” Zelana asked with some show of enthusiasm.

  “Feel free, big sister,” Veltan replied. “If the Vlagh comes south, I’ll climb all over her.”

  Ara smiled. The memories Omago had planted in the minds of these newly created godlings had convinced them that they’d been around for eons and eons instead of just the few minutes that they’d really been here. “Everything seems to be working the way we want it to, dear heart.” She sent her thought to her mate. “The false memories you gave them are firmly in place. Do you think we should make the younger ones as well right now?”

  “We don’t really need them right now, Ara,” Omago replied.

  “When do you think we should start making their worshipers?”

  “Let’s hold off on that for a while,” Omago said. “I think these elders will need some time to adjust before we make the ordinaries who’ll worship them. There are enough animals here to make these elders know that they aren’t the only life-form in this world.”

  “Are we pretty much finished here?” Ara asked.

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Maybe we should drift around and have a look at the other lands on this world,” Ara suggested. “If there are people in those lands, we might need people here as well.”

  “Let’s go look then,” Omago agreed.

  Omago was more than a little reluctant to set his body aside and revert to awareness only when they left the Land of Dhrall to look at the other lands.

  “It’s much, much faster, dear heart,” Ara advised. “There are several limits involved if you drag your body along. All we need to do is look, and our awareness can take care of that.”

  “It just seems so unnatural to do it that way,” Omago complained.

  “What’s ‘natural’ got to do with anything?” Ara demanded. “You and I are from another time and place, so the rules of this time and place don’t apply to us. Just try it, Omago. I’ve done this before, remember? There are—or may be—things we need to know before we make any decisions, so let’s get on with it.”

  “All right.” Omago surrendered.

  Ara smiled. “See? That wasn’t too hard at all, was it?”

  They separated their awareness from their bodies and crossed the rolling sea lying to the west of the Land of Dhrall.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Omago’s thought silently asked.

  “Where?” Ara asked.

  “Right at the edge of the water,” Omago replied. “I don’t think it’s an animal of any kind.”

  “It’s standing on its hind legs,” Ara agreed, “and it does have hands. I don’t think any animals have hands. What’s it doing down there?”

  “I think it might be trying to kill a fish-creature,” Omago replied. “That’s probably why it’s carrying that long, pointed stick. It’s probably hungry, but very primitive. Let’s move on, dear heart. There might be more advanced people in other lands. If they’re all as primitive as this one, I think we can hold off on providing the gods of the Land of Dhrall with worshipers.”

  They drifted on down toward the south, and when they reached the land beyond the sea, they saw a fair number of collections of what appeared to be rude huts.

  “Shelters,” Omago surmised. “Protection from bad weather. If they’re intelligent enough to build things like that, they almost have to be people.”

  “And that smoke says that they’ve discovered fire,” Ara added. “They may have found out that fire will protect them from cold weather.” Then she peered down at a fair-sized collection of huts. “What in the world is that one doing?” she demanded. “It appears to be a female, and it’s got part of some other animal propped up over an open fire.”

  “It smells quite interesting,” Omago added. “I’d say that the she-thing found a way to make animal flesh taste better.”

  “Now that’s something that never occurred to me,” Ara said. “Raw meat would probably taste a lot like blood.” She considered the notion and decided to try it when they returned to the Land of Dhrall. “I know that you’d rather wait a while before we made worshipers for the gods we’ve already created, but if the Vlagh tries to usurp the Land of Dhrall, we’re going to need people. The gods we just created aren’t permitted to kill, but it seems that people don’t have that kind of restriction. They might not want to eat the children of the Vlagh, but killing doesn’t always involve eating.”

  “I think you’re right, dear heart,” Omago agreed. “I thought it might be best to wait a while before we introduced worshipers, but that might have been a serious mistake.”

  They drifted on farther to the south and saw that the people of that area ate roots and berries and other forms of plant life as well as animal flesh.

  Ara was quite certain that they should create man-things as well as gods to inhabit the Land of Dhrall, and, unlike the gods, the man-things would need food. Raw food would keep the man-things alive, but food that had been placed in the vicinity of fire would almost certainly taste better.

  That thought alone opened all kinds of doors for Ara.

  THE

  VISITOR

  1

  It was bitterly cold at the head of Long-Pass, and even the shaggy bison-hide robes Chief Tlantar Two-Hands of the Matan Nation had provided us didn’t entirely keep the chill away. I’d found a fairly well protected place in Gunda’s fort, and afte
r the sun had gone down and I’d finished eating supper, I decided that it might not be a bad time to catch up on my sleep. The Malavi had held back the Creatures of the Wasteland, so there was nothing much for me to do, and, though I wouldn’t admit it to my outlander friends, the days and days of running down along that tired old mountain range and through Long-Pass itself had taken a lot out of me. Evidently, the years were catching up with me.

  I drifted off to sleep, and, as had been happening more and more frequently here lately, I had a dream of the time when I was very young and I was living in the lodge of Chief Old-Bear. In those days the only thing on my mind had been Misty-Water, Old-Bear’s beautiful daughter, and in my dreams I saw her again and again, and just the sight of her made me go weak all over. Even when I was asleep and dreaming, I knew that one day something would happen that would come very close to destroying me. I always pushed that aside, though, and fixed my attention entirely on my vision of she who would one day be my mate.

  “Wilt thou hear me, brave warrior?” the now familiar voice of my “unknown friend” reached out to me. I knew who she really was now, but just her interruption of my dream irritated me.

  “Now what?” I demanded harshly.

  “Be nice,” she scolded me.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I had something else on my mind just now. Was there something you wanted to tell me?”

  “Nay,” she replied. “I come to thee to ask, not to tell.”

  “That’s unusual. Is there a problem of some kind?”

  “One whom thou dost know quite well hath done that he was not supposed to do as yet.”

  “I suppose you could spank him and send him to bed without any supper,” I suggested. She still had me a bit irritated.

  “I don’t find that particularly amusing, Longbow,” she told me, lapsing out of her antique formality. Her familiar voice confirmed what I had come to realize back at Mount Shrak.

  “I’m sorry,” I apologized. “Just exactly was it that this friend of ours did that he was not supposed to do?”

  “He dreamed,” she retorted, and her irritation was fairly obvious.

  “One of those dreams?”

  “Not exactly, no. He didn’t cause a flood or set fire to a mountain as the children do. He reached back instead and discovered his true identity. He’s not supposed to do that yet.”

  “And why is that?”

  “You don’t need to know that, Longbow.”

  I shrugged. “Then I guess I won’t need to talk with him. Those are the rules, unknown friend. If you don’t talk to me, I won’t talk to Omago.”

  “How did you know—” She left it hanging.

  “You’re fairly obvious, Ara. Omago’s your mate, and that’s why you’re so upset. Why is it that Omago’s not supposed to know who he really is?” Then something came to me. “You two have been mated since the beginning of time, haven’t you?”

  “Before the beginning of time, actually,” she replied. “Time began when we both said ‘now’ at the same moment. That’s when everything started—and that lay at the core of Omago’s dream, and he’s not supposed to know about it yet. That was the whole idea behind what he was trying to accomplish. We needed to know about the true nature of you man-things, so Omago blotted out all his memories of the past so that he could live the life of an ordinary man-thing. But now he’s sneaking around things he’s not supposed to know about. Curiosity is one of his great failings.”

  “Just exactly when was it when you two ordered time to begin? I mean, how many years?”

  “There’s no word for that number, Longbow. A million millions doesn’t even come close.”

  “Just exactly what was happening back then that you two found so important?”

  “It was when the universe began.”

  “The universe has always been there, hasn’t it?”

  She shook her head. “There wasn’t anything back then. Not even Omago and I existed in our present forms. We were awareness only, and it took us a long, long time to even find each other. We can talk about that some other day. The important thing right now is that one of our children will try to do something that’s forbidden, and she will cease to exist when she does that. I fear that Omago will not be able to bear her obliteration.”

  “We’re talking about Aracia here, aren’t we?”

  “I did not say that.”

  “You didn’t have to. It is fairly obvious, you know.” Then I suddenly saw where this was going. “She’s going to try to kill the little girl named Lillabeth, isn’t she?”

  “I do fear that you are correct.”

  “She can’t do that!”

  “I know, and her attempt will obliterate her.” There was a kind of agony in her voice.

  “Can’t you stop her? As far as I can determine, there’s nothing that you can’t do.”

  “That’s in the world of things, dear Longbow. I can’t do that in the world of thought. When Aracia tries to destroy Lillabeth—or Enalla, actually—she’ll step over the forbidden line.”

  “And she’ll die?”

  “She can’t die, Longbow. She’ll just cease to exist.”

  “Isn’t that what dying means?”

  “No. It goes quite a bit farther.”

  “And it’s that you’re afraid of, isn’t it, Ara?”

  “How did you come to know who I am?”

  “You’re extremely upset, so you’ve been letting some things slip. I probably should have realized that from the very beginning. You are Aracia’s mother, after all, and just the thought of her obliteration is tearing pieces out of your heart.”

  “I think that maybe it’s Dahlaine who needs a good spanking. His ‘Dream’ idea seems to be working quite well, but it appears that it’s setting off some other Dreams that aren’t supposed to happen just yet.”

  “Such as the one I’m having right now?”

  “This one’s altogether different, my son.”

  “Maybe someday you’ll get around to telling me just exactly how it’s different, Mother.”

  All right, it was a silly thing to say, but it was just too good an opportunity to let slip by. “Am I supposed to go to my room now?” I asked her.

  “No. You’re supposed to go to the place where Omago’s sleeping and try to keep him from going all to pieces.”

  “I’ll get right on it, Mother.”

  “Will you stop that?” she flared.

  “Anything you say, Ara.”

  BE

  NO

  MORE

  1

  Your presence there should conceal Enalla and me from Aracia, Little-Me,” Balacenia told me while we drifted through the chill air above Aracia’s silly temple.

  “I’m not sure that I follow you, Big-Me,” I told her. “If everybody’s right, the Beloved’s older sister has had her mind turned off by the bug-woman they call Alcevan. If her mind isn’t there anymore, she won’t recognize anybody, will she?”

  “That’s one of the things we need to find out, Eleria,” Big-Me replied. “If Aracia’s mind is still working to some degree, we might be able to pull her out of Alcevan’s grasp.”

  “I wouldn’t get my hopes up too much, Big-Me,” I told her. “That stink Alcevan’s using on Aracia is probably about the same as the one that showed up in Tonthakan in Dahlaine’s part of the world. If we had Ox and his war-axe here, he could probably solve the problem for us.”

  Big-Me shook her head. “The others and I have talked it over already,” she said. “Alcevan could very well turn out to be the key that’ll lock the Vlagh away permanently, so we don’t want anybody to kill her just yet.”

  “Why not just send for Veltan?” I asked. “If he took the Vlagh to the moon and left her there, she’d never be able to come back, would she?”

  “I’m not sure that Veltan could do that, Eleria. That might step over the line that we don’t want Aracia to cross. We all love Veltan too much to take any chances.”

  “Just what do you want m
e to do, Balacenia?” I asked her.

  “What happened to ‘Big-Me’?” she asked with a faint smile.

  “There’s nothing wrong with ‘Balacenia,’” I told her. “It’s a very pretty name, and I like to use it every now and then when I’m talking with you. Just what do you want me to do?”

  “Why don’t you just tell Enalla—who’ll appear to be Lillabeth—the stories about the pink dolphins you played with when you were younger?” She paused. “You do know that it was the time you spent with those dolphins that separated us so much that we’ll probably never be able to merge again, don’t you?”

  “The Beloved didn’t mention it,” I replied, “but I’d more or less come to realize it myself. Don’t worry about it so much, Big-Me. We might not be such a bad thing, you know. There will be two of us during the next cycle, so we’ll be able to get a lot more done. Don’t forget that Longbow’s mine, though.”

  “You love him, don’t you?”

  “Of course. I think we all love Longbow, don’t we?”

  Balacenia sighed. “We may all love him, but you’re the one who owns him.”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘owns.’ Nobody owns Longbow. I think that if we got right down to it, we’d find that he owns us. I wouldn’t let my hope of pulling Aracia back to normal build up too much, Big-Me. You don’t have to mention this to the others, but I’m almost positive that we’ve lost Aracia permanently. Little Stinky has her pretty much tied down.”

  “Stinky?” Big-Me said with a little laugh. “That does identify Alcevan, doesn’t it? You’re absolutely perfect, Little-Me.”

  “I don’t know about ‘perfect,’ Big-Me. I do have my share of faults, you know. Anyway, ‘Stinky’ sort of came to me from nowhere, and I scraped it off the wall. Sometimes I have trouble finding the right word when I’m using people-talk. I still speak—and think—in the language of the pink dolphins.” I paused, as I almost always do. Then I said, “Isn’t that neat?”