Gods of the Greataway

by Coney, Michael G.

  “My name is Shenshi.” The voice was dead and expressionless. “Remember that. The rest, you may be happy to forget.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” Dad Ose was still panting from his sprint. “Now talk. Why do you pretend to speak the word of God?”

  “Because I am God.”

  “You? God?” Amazed by her temerity, the priest struggled for words.

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  She’s crazy, thought Dad Ose. A poor crazy old woman. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. One must have compassion. He searched within himself for the appropriate emotion, and the Macrobes helped him.

  “I feel sorry for you, Shenshi,” he said eventually.

  “You really don’t have to.”

  “Let me give you the advice of one who has lived for almost five hundred years and seen much.”

  “I’ve lived for almost one hundred and fifty thousand years.”

  “God is an old, old man riding a horse cloud. He is normally good and kind, but if anyone ever takes his name in vain, by God he smashes them. So I advise you to be careful whose name you take, Shenshi. God is everywhere, listening.” He tapped the stonework. “Walls have ears.”

  “You profess to many religions, Dad Ose. Have you ever heard of the Blessed Shu-Sho?”

  Dad Ose had. According to the Sacred Tapes, the Blessed Shu-Sho had come into prominence in the 80th millennium, performing miracles and sparking a religious revival. And now he came to think of it, giving Mankind the Rock symbol, one of which hung around his neck at this very moment. “I’ve heard of her,” he said, smiling.

  “She was my mother.”

  “What!” This was too much. Compassion can only be taken so far. The old woman deserved to be thrashed for such heresy. Dad Ose found himself stepping forward, his intentions not entirely clear, but certainly with a view to laying a rough hand on this disgraceful old hag.

  And something obstructed him.

  Almost blind with temper, he bumped into a solid object that deflected his hand, then brought him to a sudden stop. It seemed to be some kind of a column covered with thick, coarse hair.

  A drop of moisture fell on Dad Ose’s head. He brushed it off, puzzled. It was warm and slightly viscid. Shenshi appeared to be standing in some kind of a large cage, surrounded by these dark columns — eight of them. Dad Ose shook his head, suddenly feeling dizzy. What was happening? Where had the columns come from?

  He looked up.

  The columns canted over and joined around the edges of a hairy canopy about seven meters off the ground and almost as high as the church roof. Fluid dripped from one side of it. And now Dad Ose realized that the fluid fell vertically through the wind and that Shenshi’s robe was still, whereas his own flapped erratically around his legs — and at last he felt a twinge of alarm.

  Then the canopy moved, and he could see the joints and the segments. And his mind snapped into focus, and he realized that Shenshi stood directly beneath a monstrous spider. The fluid was dripping from the creature’s jaws as it began to stoop toward him.

  Bawling with horror, he flung himself to the ground. He drew his knees up to his body and covered his head with his arms and felt another drop of moisture fall onto the back of his hand. It began to eat at his flesh, corrosively.

  He heard Shenshi say, “I’m sorry you had to meet Arachne.”

  “Make it go away!”

  “She’s gone. She only comes when she’s needed. She’s not needed now, I think. I’ve sent her back to her home happen-track. Stand up, Dad Ose, and forget about it.”

  Dad Ose stood and forgot.

  *

  He rejoined Manuel at the church entrance. The young man was gazing north, where the giant shape of the Dome rose from the plain, dominating the valley, tall as the distant mountains and crowned with clouds. Man-made and ancient, it was an unquestioned feature of the landscape. Manuel was the only inhabitant of Pu’este who had ever been inside it, and now it looked as though he might have to enter it again, because Zozula and the Girl lived in there, and God’s word was law …

  “Well?” asked Manuel.

  “There was nobody there,” admitted the priest.

  “I knew there wouldn’t be. What have you done to your hand?”

  Dad Ose glanced at the angry burn. “I spilled some hot wine on it yesterday.”

  “I’ll leave you now, Dad. Thanks for letting me use your church.”

  “I hope you find Belinda, Manuel. It’s time you had a steady girl. Maybe she’ll cure this wanderlust of yours.”

  At that moment the clouds around the Dome swirled suddenly, and a peculiar phenomenon occurred. Neither Manuel nor Dad Ose could actually say they saw a flash of bright light from near the apex of the Dome, but they could both truthfully say that they remembered such a flash. It was a fairly common occurrence, believed to be caused by the sneeze of the fire god, Agni.

  “Bless you, Agni,” responded Dad Ose.

  “No,” said Manuel, who knew better. “That was the Celestial Steam Locomotive.”

  “The what?”

  “Never mind,” said Manuel, knowing it would take too long to explain and that Dad Ose wouldn’t believe him anyway.

  THE DREAMERS IN THE DOME

  The Domes were designed to last as long as Earth itself; they are still out there now — huge and silent, but not quite empty. Their populations have fluctuated over the ages — and changed, too. They were built around the middle of the 56th millennium, in response to a growing demand for passive entertainment, and some people, even back then, spent their life from the cradle to the grave in the Domes, being entertained.

  If that seems a trivial purpose for such gigantic structures, remember this: During the Great Retreat caused by the Nine Thousand Years’ Ice Age, the Domes provided safe havens for the remnants of the human race. And as the Earth grew older, the Domes gave shelter from another disaster: the dwindling of the atmosphere’s oxygen, due to the extinction of most species of oceanic photosynthesizers.

  So the purpose of the Domes had changed as Mankind itself had changed. Now only a handful of people — known as Wild Humans — were adapted to the thin air outside the Domes. The majority of humans lived inside them, sustained by solar power and the life-support systems built millennia ago.

  But they — the Dome’s inhabitants — had changed too.

  *

  A raccoon-nurse brought Zozula the news.

  “Another of the neotenites has died. I’m so sorry, Zozula.” She was crying. Like all Specialists in the Dome, she was devoted to the sleeping humans in her charge and took the occasional death as a reflection on her competence.

  “It wasn’t your fault. Were there any symptoms?”

  “No. He just … died. It was completely unexpected.”

  “It’s the fourteenth death in three days.”

  “I know. I know.” The nurse made little washing movements with her hands.

  “I’ll call a special meeting of the Cuidadors,” said Zozula. “And I’ll check the normal mortality rate with the Rainbow. This may be nothing unusual; perhaps mortality goes in cycles.”

  “Our own lives are short,” said the nurse, gratefully. “We don’t know these things.”

  “I’m sure we’ll find the answer,” said Zozula with a confidence he did not feel.

  The meeting of Cuidadors took place one day later in the Rainbow Room. The Cuidadors were True Humans, custodians of the Dome, sometimes called Keepers.

  Sharp-tongued Juni was there, and Postune the engineer. Pallatha the agriculturalist sat next to Ebus the psychologist. Shrewd Helmet, the electrician, murmured to Selena the zobiologist and geneticist, who had come from the People Planet specially for the meeting.

  Zozula called the meeting to order. “Fellow Cuidadors,” he began formally, “I hardly need to remind you of our sworn duty, but recent events make it appropriate. We are here in this Dome — as were our ancestors — for the sole purpose of looking after ten thousand
sleeping human beings, who cannot be awakened because their bodies have evolved into a form unsuitable for normal life Outside.”

  They didn’t know what had gone wrong with the breeding program, so long ago. They inherited the pathetic creatures they called neotenites, and from time to time Selena replaced them when they got sick and it seemed they might die. But meanwhile their minds were immortal, living on in that part of the Rainbow called Dream Earth. Their duty was to work toward the day when they were able to set the breeding program right, produce True Human bodies for all those minds, and repeople the Earth.

  “And recently we have suffered a severe setback. Fourteen neotenites have died so suddenly that we were not able to replace them before their minds, deprived of life support, were snuffed out, too.”

  Juni asked, “What’s fourteen, when we have ten thousand here?”

  “It’s fourteen failures by us,” Selena answered her. “And it could be the tip of the iceberg. What’s happened these last three days could be the beginning of the end of the human race.”

  “There are many other Domes,” said Ebus.

  “I’ve contacted them,” said Zozula. “The problem’s widespread. The neotenites are dying.”

  “I suppose it couldn’t be some ancient disease that has resurfaced?” said Pallatha.

  “Not in all the Domes at once.”

  Suddenly Helmet said, “It’s Dream Earth. That’s the problem. They’ve lost all incentive in there. Wouldn’t you, if you could have everything you wanted, forever?”

  “Let’s ask the Girl,” said Ebus. He pressed a button on the table. “If anyone knows about Dream Earth, she does.”

  The Rainbow Room was vast; a kilometer long, half a kilometer wide, half a kilometer high. A distant figure sat at a console, watching a three-dimensional display. She stood and began to walk toward them, slowly, painfully. She was a neotenite — the only waking, walking neotenite on all of Earth. Her legs were plump, her body gross and her face round. She was a big baby, big as an adult, but with her physical characteristics arrested at the infantile stage. That was what had happened to the human race. The only True Humans left were the Cuidadors, and they could no longer breed true.

  “In another generation, people like her will be in charge of the Dome,” said Juni. “Can you imagine that?”

  “If there are any people like her left,” Zozula pointed out.

  “If not, the Specialists will take over,” Helmet said, glancing at Juni.

  She reacted, as he’d known she would. “I’d destroy the Dome rather than see the human race come to that,” she snapped.

  A Specialist stood nearby and he must have heard, although he gave no sign of it. He was Brutus, a huge gorilla-man whose ancestors had been created in the Whirst Institute. He was a brilliant geneticist and Selena’s assistant; he was also a man of infinite compassion. Suddenly he walked away from them, away across the Rainbow Room, took the arm of the Girl and helped her toward the table.

  Juni flushed. “He’s touching her.”

  “He has the decency,” said Selena. “Did we?”

  The Girl sat down, smiling at them uncertainly. She had no name, although in the Ifalong she, like Manuel, was destined for glory. Then she would find a name, and a world would be named after her.

  “Girl,” said Zozula gently, “you’ve heard we’ve lost some neotenites recently. Helmet suggests their minds have lost incentive because they have all they want in Dream Earth. What do you think?”

  She replied, “I lived in Dream Earth for thousands of years before Eulalie died and you brought me out here to operate the special effects.” Zozula’s face became suddenly expressionless. Eulalie had been his much-loved wife of many centuries. “I never lost incentive. Life isn’t so easy in there. Certainly you can have whatever you want by making a smallwish, as they call it. But a smallwish expends psy, and there’s a limit to how much psy you can expend before you have to wait for it to regenerate. Most of the people in there are living quite normal lives between smallwishes. Dream Earth has become much more like real life, recently.”

  “Why do you say ‘recently’?” asked Pallatha.

  The Girl turned pink. “Oh, I … cleaned Dream Earth up, the last time I was in there. It was bursting at the seams. People had been using smallwishes to create other people. They’d create imaginary friends and enemies, and prostitutes and such, and other people would believe in these creations, and their psy would reinforce them. It got so that nobody knew who was real and who was imaginary. I put all that right.”

  “Tell them about Bigwishes, Girl,” said Zozula.

  “That was built into the original Dream Earth program. Over a period of about fifty years you can accumulate enough psy to make a Bigwish, which means you can change yourself into whomever you choose. You forget most of what happened in your previous life and start off with a whole new personality.” She sighed, looking down at herself. “With it goes whatever Dream body you like. My last Dream Persona was a Marilyn, and they’re very beautiful.”

  “You haven’t noticed anything unusual in there, these last three days?” asked Pallatha.

  “No.”

  Zozula said suddenly, “How about the Celestial Steam Locomotive?”

  “I … I’d rather not talk about it.” She shivered.

  “Forget the Locomotive, Zo,” said Juni. “It’s an obsession of his,” she explained to the others. “It’s nothing, really. It’s just a collection of smallwishes that looks like an ancient steam train.”

  “All right, all right,” said Zozula. “So Dream Earth seems to be in order. What does that leave us with?”

  There was a long silence.

  *

  It was like a huge morgue. There were shelves as far as the eye could see, stretching off into the distance. They were tiered one above the other and the floor was transparent, so you could look down and see another infinity of shelves, and look up and see the same.

  And a body lay on each shelf, but the bodies were not dead. Tubes were embedded in them and coupled to fixed pipes, and at the junction of pipe and tube was a meter to show the rate of flow. From the heads ran wires, color-coded, leading the thoughts of the minds away into that corner of the Rainbow that people called Dream Earth.

  Until recently, the Girl had occupied one of those shelves. Now, following Zozula, she lumbered along the transparent floor, looking up, looking down, feeling a sudden vertigo and thinking: This was me. Oh, my God.

  Zozula, leading the way, felt not vertigo but oppression. Suppose, he thought, all these neotenites awakened, all at once, and arose and attacked us, all of them, all these gross babies swarming over us, furious because we don’t know how to give them proper True Human bodies … But he kept his thoughts to himself, because he was a Cuidador and therefore must appear fearless and wise.

  “This is the latest fatality,” said the racoon-nurse.

  She was either a woman or a baby girl, according to the way you chose to regard her. She was a little over a meter and a half long. She was naked, unwrinkled and unmoving. A nurse was in the process of uncoupling her from an autopsy machine.

  “There’s nothing wrong with her,” said the nurse. “Not physically. Her brain simply stopped working.”

  “You mean the mind died first, and then the body?” said Zozula.

  “That’s right, sir. The body died because the mind simply stopped giving signals to it. All the organs shut down.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Zozula. “A mind can’t die.”

  “The autopsy machine showed the same cause for the other deaths. It’s been happening ever since I’ve been working here,” said the nurse. “But only occasionally; perhaps once every five years.”

  “There are only ten thousand neotenites here! Even at that rate, they could all be dead in — ” Zozula struggled with the unusual concept of mental arithmetic “ — a few thousand years!”

  The Girl said, “You’ll be dead too, Zozula.”

  “At l
east I’ve enjoyed a good life.”

  “It’s not so bad in Dream Earth.”

  “It’s not real!”

  “It seems real.”

  “Girl, I have a duty to these people. I will not go down in history as the Cuidador who allowed them to die. When you’ve lived among us a little longer, you will begin to realize the demands of our high calling, and I hope a little of our sense of duty will rub off on you.” Zozula had mounted his high horse. “Now we have a catastrophe on our hands. The solution must lie in Dream Earth, where their minds are. We must talk to Caradoc.”

  “Now that’s a good idea,” said the Girl.

  *

  They returned to the Rainbow Room and the Girl seated herself at the console. Her fingers played over the tactile surfaces — clumsily, because she had not yet learned all the skills of her predecessor, the late Cuidador Eulalie. But the mists began to form, and soon a huge image appeared in the center of the room.

  He was a young man of princely bearing, dark and handsome, dressed in glittering chain mail and holding a sword. Beside him stood his princess, fair-skinned and beautiful. They were Caradoc and Eloise, dwellers in Dream Earth, and for various reasons they were the only such dwellers to be able to communicate with the real people in the Dome. Caradoc was unusual in other ways. He had a mind of staggering brilliance, and had only recently been placed in Dream Earth by Zozula, in an attempt to investigate the inner workings of the Rainbow.

  Eloise didn’t really exist. She was Caradoc’s smallwish, somebody he had known on real Earth who had died, and whom he had re-created because he loved her. She didn’t exist, but nevertheless she stood at his side, smiling, ready to talk with warmth and intelligence because that was the way Caradoc had known her in real life.

  “Hello, Zozula. Hello, Girl,” said Caradoc, sheathing his sword. “Can I help you?”

  Zozula explained the problem of the dying neotenites.

  Caradoc frowned. “Dream Earth is huge. After all, it includes the Dream Earths of all the other Domes. It would be very difficult to trace the deaths of a few minds among a million or so. And there are still probably five million humanoid smallwishes here, in spite of the Girl’s work.”