So, he leaves the obscene cadaver for the maintenance crews to deal with, and proceeds down the corridor, taking note of the damage wherever he sees it, mentally writing a condolence letter to the families of every identifiable casualty he finds on his way.
When he reaches the bridge, he finds low emergency lighting, a skeleton crew, and the communications officer, transformed into a golden statue that will, until melted down or transformed back into something living, always be frozen in its current half-seated, half-standing position, complete with mouth agape in silent scream. But so many of his most trusted officers are still alive and still waiting for him to come up with a plan for survival: Mordecai, Bender, Stormkiller, Zorin, the whole brave lot, bruised and bloodied but not defeated, and still his to command. Fithe strides among them, aware that on this ship, he is the sole voice of authority, a uniformed god himself, expected to wring hope even from situations capable of driving the great powers of the universe to despair. He does not know what he will say to them until the words come, and when they come, they come with finality. He turns to the ensign, Lars Fouton. “Fetch a goat.”
“Yes, sir,” Fouton quavers. “What if all the goats are dead?”
“Then,” Fithe says meaningfully, “I might have to rely on a virgin.”
Thus indicted, the ensign flees.
Science officer Mordecai, always the voice of caution, draws close, her craggy cheeks wrinkling in a grimace. “What are you planning?”
Fithe shrugs. “I’ve always been a gambling man.”
“But this. Contacting gods you don’t know, who haven’t been vetted by past expeditions . . .”
“Do you have any better suggestions?”
Mordecai’s mouth opens, then shuts. Her silence is wise. In this service, continuing to object after the captain has asked you for better objections is a good way to get yourself excommunicated. Being excommunicated in space is an unpleasant thing. It is not as bad as being spaced, but nobody wants to be cut off from the ship gods, not when so many of ship’s functions require constant divine intervention. An excommunicated man might, for instance, remain at one fixed point in space, while the ship around him goes to ten times light speed . . . and nobody wants to be remembered as a stain on one of his ship’s interior bulkheads.
She does have a point, though. The history of interstellar travel to this point has been a series of careful negotiations between the human and the divine. Some gods will give human vessels safe and speedy passage across their domains in exchange for a heartfelt psalm; others demand higher tribute. Any star map is filled with blacked-out regions bearing the warning that the gods in residence at certain places are too lunatic to be bothered talking to; indeed, the fastest route between some star systems is closer to a zigzag, the best way of avoiding certain local deities who demand too much.
Being the first to make contact with any particular sector’s deity is therefore, by far, the riskiest job in space travel. Ships tasked to do little more than say hello to one interstellar god or another have been known to drift back into more benign regions of space with their crews gone, or mad, or mangled beyond recognition, or transformed into donkeys, or with their faces turned inside-out so that they were stuck looking at their own brains. Easily irritated deities do things like that, one reason why it really makes the most sense to avoid passing through those sectors whenever possible. Fortunately, friendly deities are always willing to steer humanity out of the rougher neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, any deity native to this particular black void remains a total unknown.
Too bad he, or she, is the only option.
Fithe presses a button, and the molybdenum grillwork upon which the bridge crew has long performed such exemplary service slides into its recess. The true floor, an obsidian slab, is thus revealed. The glowing outlines of a pentagram appear on that slab, its scarlet lines formed by transparent aluminum glass offering an unobstructed view of the fires that forever burn at the heart of the ship, and burn still for all the damage the recent battle has done. Fithe presses a button and a baffle appears to obstruct the side closest to him so he can enter. Once he is inside, he feels what he has always felt, on the rare occasions when he entered such a place—a strange, uncharacteristic isolation, reflecting the fact that the outline where he now stands is one of the rare parts of the universe that no divinity can enter. On both prior occasions, which had taken place during his training, he had noted that his heart continued to beat and his lungs continued to expand, and found himself wondering whether this constituted proof that Man might exist without gods. But who would want to spend all his life living inside a pentagram?
A few minutes pass before Ensign Fouton returns with a goat on a leash. It is a scrawny little thing, with the wispy little beard that the gods decreed for creatures of its species, and it is confused, its blinking incomprehension an unwitting vivid reminder of the very expression on the face of the man Fithe has sent to retrieve it. He leads the braying animal across the grillwork to the open side of the pentagram, where he transfers custody to the captain and swiftly departs, with understandable relief.
Fithe attaches the other end of the goat’s leash to the ring at the center of the pentagram. As he does, he can feel the poor animal trembling, and a certain uncharacteristic pity overcomes him. Man, he thinks, has taken any number of goats to the stars, but how little of the wonders of the cosmos do they ever get to see? Just the habitat where they are kept, and the pentagrams where they are sacrificed.
In the long-passed age of reason, who would have guessed that it was the same predicament man would share when he passed beyond the boundaries of his own solar system?
Grimacing, he returns to his command chair. Another button-press and the baffle over the open end of the pentagram withdraws, leaving the ungulate sealed in what is, essentially, a pocket universe all its own.
“You know the procedure,” Fithe says. “If I do succeed in contacting a god, then whatever happens, whatever danger I appear to be in, keep your eyes averted and your mouths shut. I will be entirely responsible for whatever deals are struck here.”
They respond with general assent. And fear? Yes, fear, but the fear of heroes, who have been trained to risk not just their lives but their immortal souls, for the safety of the ship.
Fithe depresses another button on his chair and broadcasts his words out into the pitiless void—the key point, of course, being the hope that it is neither a total void nor exactly pitiless. “O ye mighty unknown to us, hear the pitiful cries of those are but the merest insects to one as splendid as yourself. Insects? Nay. Insect droppings; indeed, the droppings of the even smaller mites that feed on the droppings of insects. Or the crawling bacteria that devour what remains of the droppings when the mites are done with them. Verily, thou god we know nothing about; truly, we inhabit a new dimension of insignificance. Forgive us thus for applying for your aid. We are but travelers from a distance, brought to this place by a wind beyond our comprehension, seeking succor in your infinite mercy. Please accept this offering, insignificant as it is, as a token of our eagerness to know your divine splendor.”
The goat blaats, and Fithe is about to repeat his message.
But then the viewscreen flares with sudden light, light that moves from the screen to the small empty space to at the forefront of the command chair. It is the light of the Big Bang. It is the light of the fires of creation. It is the light of ground-zero nuclear explosions. The visual filters prevent it from actually being any of these things, of course, because if it were, then everybody on the bridge would be leaking vitreous fluid down their cheeks in whatever fraction of a second they had to enjoy the pain before it was followed by vaporization and death. But all the officers gasp and look away and for a moment feel their souls shrivel in the light of a being so far beyond their puny metaphors for highly evolved that they might as well throw out the thesaurus and go back to squeaking like tree shrews.
Then the light dissipates and the god is reveal
ed.
Some gods look like human beings with the bodies of jackals; others look like bearded old white men; still others look like unearthly radiance. At least one, a disagreeable sort, looks like a man with an octopus stuck on his head. This one looks like a very small child, a toddler, albeit one with eyes like coals and a way of looking down at creatures taller than itself. It is not a cute toddler. There are toddlers in the world who, when introduced to us by their parents, prompt a moment of inarticulate stammering and some neutral acknowledgment to the effect that, yes, technically, that certainly does qualify as a child. This is one of them. Its nose is mashed flat against its face, and its scowl is the very definition of pique. It is physically present on the bridge, and it regards the command crew with abject boredom.
“You have trespassed,” it says.
It sounds like a decree being blared from a mountaintop.
“This was not our choice,” Fithe says. “It was forced on us.”
“I am not speaking of your presence. I am speaking of your temerity in trying to engage me. I am not the average mewling filth who considers himself a god. I am the god among gods, the titan among titans, and the sole survivor of the thousands who once sat on thrones in this very sector. I have ground even the greatest of them to dust between my fingers, out of sheer disgust at being classified with them. I will not be appeased by the mere offer of a barnyard animal to slaughter. I will not be flattered by your most expansive language. I am N’loghthl, and the tribute I require in exchange for my assistance may be more than even the most desperate are willing to pay.”
“We are that desperate,” Fithe replies.
N’loghthl strides around the bridge, glancing at the various members of the senior staff. For no apparent reason, his gaze lingers especially long on the security officer, Stormkiller, a man who once stood alone and bloodied against ninety armed opponents and was, thirty seconds later, the last left standing. In just the same amount of time, the infant’s inspection empties the big man’s mind of all reason and memory, and he is left kneeling on the floor, mewling like a baby who wonders where his next ba-ba is coming from. There is no sense that N’loghthl has done this out of malice; it was an unconscious action, much like doodling.
“I have divined your situation,” the infant says. “Your pathetic species is currently about to lose a most final war with another, which is even now less than twenty of your minutes from obliterating your home world. Your last defenses have all been subsumed or destroyed. The gods who your enemies the Vferm have enlisted are so powerful, by any standards you know, that even if I were to return you to your solar system and give you weapons that exceed the sum total of all the destructive power ever wielded by all the combined generations of your miserable species, you would survive for less than an eyeblink against them. They will brush you aside and take all your billions for a hellish afterlife they have constructed especially for that purpose.” He sniggered. “It is nasty. Not as nasty as I could concoct, if I were inclined, but nasty enough.”
“So . . . you are saying you can’t stop them?”
A flicker of annoyance, and another member of the senior staff, navigator Pamela Zorin, is transformed into a glowing orange fungus. N’loghthl thunders: “Have you not paid attention? Of course I could stop them. With my merest eyeblink, I could create a barrier of fire that would incinerate the entire Vferm fleet faster than the most raging sun. With the merest twitch, I could replace the hearts of every Vferm that lives with a pint of owl dung. Just for a laugh, I could turn all their oh-so-powerful gods to vases filled with offal, to be fed to the swine that are all I left remaining of the rulers of Olympus. It would be the matter of a moment for one such as I. It would be no effort at all. You would have saved your species in an instant. If I choose to involve myself. Which I have not done.”
“We shake in awe,” says Fithe. “But if you’ll just hold that thought—”
He jogs across the bridge to where the perspicacious Mordecai sits, scanning the visitor’s power levels, and murmurs, “Is he exaggerating for dramatic effect or telling the truth?”
Not all of Mordecai’s green tinge comes from her instrumentation. Her voice trembles, in the manner of a woman whose very foundations have turned to sand. “Henryk, I don’t know how to put this. . . .”
“Try.”
“Very well. The all-powerful creator posited by Man’s holiest books, who has never been directly observed, would measure a pure one hundred on the Yahweh scale. I remind you, sir: that’s an exponential scale, starting with point one being the baseline possessed by the average individual human being, and every subsequent tenth of an integer, climbing up through point two and point three and so on, reflecting a tenfold increase over the prior measurement. By that yardstick, sir, the most powerful deity ever known to ally with Man measures a mere nine point seven; the most powerful ever confirmed by science, until recently, a seventeen point two. The one the Vferm sprung on us was an unheard-of twenty-three point six. This guy . . . Captain, just from what’s radiating, he’s a solid thirty-one point nine. Almost ten billion times more powerful than the ally the Vferm unleashed earlier—possibly the closest thing we’ve ever seen to true omnipotence. He probably created the entire star cluster we’re in. It’s a wonder we’re not all pillars of salt. He . . .”
“Enough,” Fithe murmurs, having turned a little green himself.
This is uncharted territory, all right. He has found, mixed metaphors be damned, the holy grail of space exploration, the god powerful enough to grant all of mankind’s fondest dreams, the one who, if negotiations go well, can reshape the universe itself to fit what suits human beings. Given the circumstances, it seems of little import that he can also flick a finger and do away with everything Man knows just as easily; after all, that is the fate that awaits in just a matter of minutes anyway. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Taking his seat again, Fithe gazes upon the terrible toddler—whose downy forehead now spits towers of coruscating flame—and says, “Well. It seems we owe you fealty.”
N’loghthl crooks a finger, and counselor Ariana Furby becomes the next target of his wrath. Every bone in the Rigellian colonist’s body is immediately teleported one full meter to her left, while the rest of her body remains where it stands, sinking to the deck like a decompressing accordion, releasing a high-pitched whistle through all available orifices as she descends.
Assured now of everybody’s full attention, N’loghthl says, “I could not care a bucket of paramecium spit for your fealty. That is indeed what I find most irritating about your lot: this impression you’ve picked up, from where even I know not, that intelligences on my level worry even the slightest who you toady to and how. If you were all rendered extinct in the next fifteen minutes—as it appears you are about to be, without my intervention—then I would not lose one moment of godsleep tonight, or indeed at any point until the stars go out. What I do now, I do for my own amusement.”
“Very well,” says Fithe. “What deal would amuse you and still provide us with what we need?”
What follows is a moment of hope. N’loghthl is actually intrigued by that, intrigued enough to stroke his little chin as he contemplates the question. After a moment—a genuine eternity, given the processing time of the average god—he says, “I believe I can propose something.”
“We await, o lord.”
“This is a one-time-only offer. I will brook no petitions, no negotiations, no attempts to haggle on a price I consider fair and just for the service rendered.”
“Understood,” says Fithe.
N’loghthl says, “My end of the bargain will be to return you and this vessel to the outskirts of your home solar system. At the same instant, I will erase the Vferm, their gods, their allies, their very civilization from the universe. One instant, they will exist. The next, they will not. The threat they pose to you shall be extinguished. The worlds they once occupied will be restored to pristine condition, their riches free for the
taking. The universe will of course be much depopulated of divine beings, thanks to the recent battle; interstellar travel will therefore become that much more difficult. But some will still exist and might be willing to deal with you in the way that others have in the past. That will be up to them, and of course up to you. But the Vferm will be gone at least, and you will be free to prosper, or not, according to your innate capabilities.
“In exchange for that,” he says, raising his index finger heavenward and leering at them all, in the manner of a poker player about to lay down a royal flush after going all in, “I take . . . the goat.”
For a moment, it appears that he is impossibly about to leave it at that, leaving Captain Fithe and the Faithful crew in the singular position of having made the single greatest deal of all time without really trying. In the general hush, the only sound is what’s left of Counselor Zorin, a sack that wheezes as it inflates and deflates, getting enough air to breathe but not being especially enthused about the prospect. Brilliantly, N’loghthl holds the moment for what seems forever before adding the postscript:
“And”—one finger aloft—“three quarters of all human beings aboard this ship and extant in the universe as a whole.
“As I have said, these terms will not change. Any attempt to alter them will result in me departing with the goat and abandoning your species to its fate. Take the deal and I assure you humanity will live. That is your choice. Lose everything or lose three quarters.
“You may have five minutes of privacy to make your peace with these terms. I will return to hear your decision.”
The god disappears, leaving a burned spot on the deck where he’d stood. And the bridge erupts in pandemonium: Zorin wheezing, Stormkiller babbling, the goat bleating, all others shouting over one another in a desperate attempt to be heard. It is, of course, Mordecai in the forefront; Mordecai, the voice of conscience; Mordecai, the pain in the ass; Mordecai, who has always been of the incomprehensible impression that starship command can be broken down into questions of black-and-white morality. “You can’t do this, Henryk. There are forty billion human beings in the solar system. You can’t sacrifice thirty billion of them just on that creature’s say-so! The blood on your hands alone . . .”
Cosmic Powers Page 12