The Complete Short Stories

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Aerial surveys suggest that this creature – if one can call it that – which straddles a line along the Red Sea and across south east Europe, is non-living, at least as we understand life. It may be merely coincidence that it somewhat resembles an eight-footed lizard, so that we do not necessarily have to worry about the thing being malignant, as some tabloids have suggested.’

  Not all the vile jargon of that distant day is now understandable, but we believe ‘aerial surveys’ to refer to the mechanical flying machines which this last generation of the Godless possessed. Black Gersheimer continues:

  ‘If this thing is not live, it may be a piece of galactic debris clinging momentarily to the globe, perhaps like a leaf clinging to a football in the fall. To believe this is not necessarily to alter our scientific concepts of the universe. Whether the thing represents life or not, we don’t have to go all superstitious. We must merely remind ourselves that there are many phenomena in the universe as we conceive it in the light of Twentieth Century science which remain unknown to us. However painful this unwanted visitation may be, it is some consolation to think that it will bring us new knowledge – of ourselves, as well as the world outside our little solar system.’

  Although terms like ‘galactic debris’ have lost their meaning, if they ever had one, the general trend of this passage is offensively obvious. An embargo is being set up against the worship of the Huge God, with a heretical God of Science set up in his stead. Only one other passage from this offensive mish-mash need be considered, but it is a vital one for Showing the Attitude of mind of Gersheimer and presumably most of his contemporaries.

  ‘Naturally enough, the peoples of the world, particularly those who are still lingering on the threshold of civilisation, are full of fear these days. They see something supernatural in the arrival of this thing, and I believe that every man, if he is honest, will admit to carrying an echo of that fear in his heart. We can only banish it, and can only meet the chaos into which the world is now plunged, if we retain a galactic picture of our situation in our minds. The very hugeness of this thing that now lies plastered loathsomely across our world is cause for terror. But imagine it in proportion. A centipede is sitting on an orange. Or, to pick an analogy that sounds less repulsive, a little gecko, six inches long, is resting momentarily on a plastic globe of the Earth which is two feet in diameter. It is up to us, the human race, with all the technological forces at our disposal, to unite as never before, and blow this thing, this large and stupid object, back into the depths of space from whence it came. Good night.’

  My reasons for repeating this Initial Blasphemy are these: that we can see here in this message from a member of the World Darkness traces of that original sin which – with all our sacrifices, all our hardships, all our crusades – we have not yet stamped out. That is why we are now at the greatest Crisis in the history of the Orthodox Universal Sacrificial Church, and why the time is come for a Fourth Crusade exceeding in scale all others.

  The Huge God remained where he was, in what we now refer to as the Sacred Sea Position, for a number of years, absolutely unmoving.

  For mankind, this was the great formative period of Belief, marking the establishment of the Universal Church, and characterised by many upheavals. The early priests and prophets suffered much that the Word might go round the World, and the blasphemous sects be destroyed, though the Underground Book of Church Lore suggests that many of them were in fact members of earlier churches who, seeing the light, transferred their allegiances.

  The mighty figure of the Huge God was subjected to many puny insults. The Greatest Weapons of that distant age, forces of technical charlatanry, were called Nuclears, and these were dropped on the Huge God – without having any effect, as might be expected. Walls of fire were burnt against him in vain. Our Huge God, to whom all honour and terror, is immune from earthly weakness. His body was Clothed as it were with Metal – here lay the seed of the Second Crusade – but it had not the weakness of metal.

  His coming to Earth met with immediate Response from nature. The cold winds that prevailed were turned aside about his mighty flanks and blew elsewhere. The effect was to cool the centre of Africa, so that the tropical rainforests died and all the creatures in them. In the lands bordering Caspana (then called Persia and Kharkov, say some old accounts), hurricanes of snow fell in a dozen severe winters, blowing far east into India. Elsewhere, all over the world, the coming of the Huge God was felt in the skies, and in freak rainfalls and errant winds, and month-long storms. The oceans also were disturbed, while the great volume of waters displaced by his body poured over the nearby land, killing many thousands of beings and washing ten thousand dead whales into the harbours of Colombo.

  The land too joined in the upheaval. While the territory under the Huge God’s bulk sank, preparing to receive what would later be the Sacred Sea, the land roundabout rose Up, forming small hills, such as the broken and savage Dolomines that now guard the southern lands of Ittaland. There were earthquakes and new volcanoes and geysers where water never spurted before and plagues of snakes and blazing forests and many wonderful signs that helped the Early Fathers of our faith to convert the ignorant. Everywhere they went, preaching that only in surrender to him lay salvation.

  Many Whole Peoples perished at this time of upheaval, such as the Bulgarians, the Egyptians, the Israelites, Moravians, Kurds, Turks, Syrians, Mountain Turks, as well as most of the South Slavs, Georgians, Croats, the sturdy Vlaks, and the Greeks and Cypriotic and Cretan races, together with others whose sins were great and names unrecorded in the annals of the church.

  The Huge God departed from the world in the year 89, or some say 90. (This was the First Departure, and is celebrated as such in our Church calendar – though the Catholic Universal Church calls it First Disappearance Day.) He returned in 91, great and aweing be his name.

  Little is known of the period when he was absent from our Earth. We get a glimpse into the mind of the people then when we learn that in the main the nations of Earth greatly rejoiced. The natural upheavals continued, since the oceans poured into the great hollow he had made, forming our beloved and holy Sacred Sea. Great Wars broke out across the face of the globe.

  His return in 91 halted the wars – a sign of the great peace his presence has brought to his chosen people.

  But the inhabitants of the world at That Time were not all of our religion though prophets moved among them, and many were their blasphemies. In the Black Museum attached to the great basilica of Omar and Yemen is documentary evidence that they tried at this period to communicate with the Huge God by means of their machines. Of course they got no reply – but many men reasoned at this time, in the darkness of their minds, that this was because the God was a Thing, as Black Gersheimer had prophesied.

  The Huge God, on this his Second Coming, blessed our Earth by settling mainly within the Arctic Circle, or what was then the Arctic Circle, with his body straddling from northern Canada, as it was, over a large peninsula called Alaska, across the Bering Sea and into the northern regions of the Russian lands as far as the river Lena, now the Bay of Lenn. Some of his rear feet broke far into the Arctic Ice, while others of his forefeet entered the North Pacific Ocean – but truly to him we are but sand under his feet, and he is indifferent to our mountains or our Climatic Variations.

  As for his terrible head, it could be seen reaching far into the stratosphere, gleaming with metal sheen, by all the cities along the northern part of America’s seaboard, from such vanished towns as Vancouver, Seattle, Edmonton, Portland, Blanco, Reno, and even San Francisco. It was the energetic and sinful nation that possessed these cities which was now most active against the Huge God. The weight of their ungodly scientific civilisation was turned against him, but all they managed to do was blow apart their own coastline.

  Meanwhile, other natural changes were taking place. The mass of the Huge God deflected the Earth in its daily roll, so that seasons changed and in the prophetic books we read how the grea
t trees brought forth their leaves to cover them in the winter, and lost them in the summer. Bats flew in the daytime and women bore forth hairy children. The melting of the ice caps caused great floods, tidal waves, and poisonous dews, while in one night we hear that the waters of the Deep were moved, so that the tide went out so far from the Malayan Uplands (as they now are) that the continental peninsula of Blestland was formed in a few hours of what had previously been separate Continents or Islands called Singapore, Sumatra, Indonesia, Java, Sydney, and Australia or Austria.

  With these powerful signs, our priests could Convert the People, and millions of survivors were speedily enrolled into the Church. This was the First Great Age of the Church, when the word spread across all the ravaged and transformed globe. Our institutions were formed in the next few generations, notably at the various Councils of the New Church (some of which have since proved to be heretical).

  We were not established without some difficulty, and many people had to be burned before the rest could feel the faith Burning In Them. But as generations passed, the True Name of the God emerged over a wider and wider area.

  Only the Americans still clung largely to their base superstition. Fortified by their science, they refused Grace. So in the Year 271 the First Crusade was launched, chiefly against them but also against the Irish, whose heretical views had no benefit of science; the Irish were quickly Eradicated, almost to a man. The Americans were more formidable, but this difficulty served only to draw the people closer and unite the Church further.

  This First Crusade was fought over the First Great Heresy of the Church, the heresy claiming that the Huge God was a Thing not a God, as formulated by Black Gersheimer. It was successfully concluded when the leader of the Americans, Lionel Undermeyer, met the Venerable World Emperor-Bishop, Jon II, and agreed that the messengers of the Church should be free to preach unmolested in America. Possibly a harsher decision could have been forced, as some commentators claim, but by this time both sides were suffering severely from plague and famine, the harvests of the world having failed. It was a happy chance that the population of the world was already cut by more than half, or complete starvation would have followed the reorganisation of the seasons.

  In the churches of the world, the Huge God was asked to give a sign that he had Witnessed the great victory over the American unbelievers. All who opposed this enlightened act were destroyed. He answered the prayers in 297 by moving swiftly forward only a comparatively Small Amount and lying Mainly in the Pacific Ocean, stretching almost as far south as what is now the Antarter, what was then the Tropic of Capricorn, and what had previously been the Equator. Some of his left legs covered the towns along the west American seaboard as far south as Guadalajara (where the impression of his foot is still marked by the Temple of the Sacred Toe), including some of the towns such as San Francisco already mentioned. We speak of this as the First Shift; it was rightly taken as a striking proof of the Huge God’s contempt for America.

  This feeling became rife in America also. Purified by famine, plague, gigantic earth tremors, and other natural disorders, the population could now better accept the words of the priests, all becoming converted to a man. Mass pilgrimages were made to see the great body of the Huge God, stretching from one end of their nation to the other. Bolder pilgrims climbed aboard flying aeroplanes and flew over his shoulder, across which savage rainstorms played for a hundred years Without Cease.

  Those that were converted became More Extreme than their brethren older in the faith across the other side of the world. No sooner had the American congregations united with ours than they broke away on a point of doctrine at the Council of Dead Tench (322). This date marks the beginning of the Catholic Universal Sacrificial Church. We of the Orthodox persuasion did not enjoy, in those distant days, the harmony with our American brothers that we do now.

  The doctrinal point on which the churches split apart was, as is well known, the question of whether humanity should wear clothes that imitated the metallic sheen of the Huge God. It was claimed that this was setting up man in God’s Image; but it was a calculated slur on the Orthodox Universal priests, who wore plastic or metal garments in honour of their maker.

  This developed into the Second Great Heresy. As this long and confused period has been amply dealt with elsewhere, we may pass over it lightly here, mentioning merely that the quarrel reached its climax in the Second Crusade, which the American Catholic Universals launched against us in 450. Because they still had a large preponderance of machines, they were able to force their point, to sack various monasteries along the edge of the Sacred Sea, to defile our women, and to retire home in glory.

  Since that time, everyone in the world has worn only garments of wool or fur. All who opposed this enlightened act were destroyed.

  It would be wrong to emphasise too much the struggles of the past. All this while, the majority of people were peacefully about their worship, being sacrificed regularly, and praying every sunset and sunrise (whenever they might occur) that the Huge God would leave our world, since we were not worthy of him.

  The Second Crusade left a trail of troubles in its wake; the next fifty years were, on the whole, not happy ones. The American armies returned home to find that the heavy pressure upon their western seaboard had opened up a number of volcanoes along their biggest mountain range, the Rockies. Their country was covered in fire and lava, and their air filled with stinking ash.

  Rightly, they accepted this as a sign that their conduct left much to be desired in the eyes of the Huge God (for though it has never been proved that he has eyes, he surely Sees Us). Since the rest of the world had not been Visited with punishment on quite this scale, they correctly divined that their sin was that they still clung to technology and the weapons of technology against the wishes of God.

  With their faith strong within them, every last instrument of science, from the Nuclears to the Canopeners, was destroyed, and a hundred thousand virgins of the persuasion were dropped into suitable volcanoes as propitiation. All who opposed these enlightened acts were destroyed, and some ceremonially eaten.

  We of the Orthodox Universal faith applauded our brothers’ whole-hearted action. Yet we could not be sure they had purged themselves enough. Now that they owned no weapons and we still had some, it was clear we could help them in their purgation. Accordingly, a mighty armada of one hundred and sixty-six wooden ships sailed across to America, to help them suffer for the faith – and incidentally to get back some of our loot. This was the Third Crusade of 482, under Jon the Chubby.

  While the two opposed armies were engaged in battle outside New York, the Second Shift took place. It lasted only a matter of five minutes.

  In that time, the Huge God turned to his left flank, crawled across the centre of what was then the North American continent, crossed the Atlantic as if it were a puddle, moved over Africa, and came to rest in the South Indian Ocean, demolishing Madagaska with one rear foot. Night fell Everywhere on Earth.

  When dawn came, there could hardly have been a single man who did not believe in the power and wisdom of the Huge God, to whose name belongs all Terror and Might. Unhappily, among those who were unable to believe were the contesting armies, who were one and all swept under a Wave of Earth and Rock as the God passed.

  In the ensuing chaos, only one note of sanity prevailed – the sanity of the Church. The Church established as the Third Great Heresy the idea that any machines were permissible to man against the wishes of God. There was some doctrinal squabble as to whether books counted as machines. It was decided they did, just to be on the safe side. From then on, all men were free to do nothing but labour in the fields and worship, and pray to the Huge God to remove himself to a world more worthy of his might. At the same time, the rate of sacrifice was stepped up, and the Slow-Burning Method was introduced (499).

  Now followed the great Peace, which lasted till 900. In all this time, the Huge God never moved: it has been truly said that the centuries are but seconds in
his sight. Perhaps mankind has never known such a long peace, four hundred years of it – a peace that existed in his heart if not outside it, because the world was naturally in Some Disorder. The great force of the Huge God’s progress halfway across the world had altered the progression of day and night to a considerable extent; some legends claim that, before the Second Shift, the sun used to rise in the east and set in the west – the very opposite of the natural order of things we know.

  Gradually, this peaceful period saw some re-establishment of order to the seasons, and some cessation of the floods, showers of blood, hailstorms, earthquakes, deluges of icicles, apparitions of comets, volcanic eruptions, miasmic fogs, destructive winds, blights, plagues of wolves and dragons, tidal waves, year-long thunderstorms, lashing rains, and sundry other scourges of which the scriptures of this period speak so eloquently. The Fathers of the Church, retiring to the comparative safety of the inland seas and sunny meadows of Gobiland in Mongolia, established a new orthodoxy well-calculated in its rigour of prayer and human burnt-offering to incite the Huge God to leave our poor wretched world for a better and more substantial one.

  So the story comes almost to the present – to the year 900, only a decade past as your scribe writes. In that year, the Huge God left our Earth!

  Recall, if you will, that the First Departure in 89 lasted only twenty months. Yet the Huge God has been gone from us already half that number of years! We need him Back – we cannot live without him, as we should have realised Long Ago had we not blasphemed in our hearts!

  On his going, he propelled our humble globe on such a course that we are doomed to deepest winter all the year; the sun is far away and shrunken; the seas Freeze half the year; icebergs march across our fields; at mid-day, it is too dark to read without a rush light. Woe is us!