I should add that none of the occupants looked even remotely human.
If I’d had my way, we would have left it at that. I suggested to Abe that it was time to announce what he had. Report the results. Show it to the world. But he was averse. Make it public? he scowled. Jerry, there’s a world full of busybodies out there. There’ll be protests, there’ll be cries for an investigation, there’ll be people with signs. Accusing me of playing God. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to reassure the idiots that there’s no moral dimension to what we’re doing.
I thought about that for several minutes and asked him if he was sure there wasn’t.
He smiled at me. It was that same grin you got from him when you’d overlooked some obvious detail and he was trying to be magnanimous while simultaneously showing you what a halfwit you are. “Jerry,” he said, “what have we done other than to provide life for thousands of generations of intelligent creatures? If anything, we should be commended.”
Eons passed. Tens of thousands of subjective years, and the settlements went nowhere. We knew they were fighting; we could see the results. Burned out villages, heaps of corpses. Nothing as organized as a war, of course. Just local massacres. But no sign of a city. Not anywhere.
Maybe they weren’t as bright as we thought. Local conflicts don’t stop the rise of civilization. In fact there’s reason to think they’re a necessary factor. Anyhow, it was about this time that Mac’s plane went down. Abe was hit pretty hard. But he insisted on plunging ahead. I asked whether we would want to replace him, but he said he didn’t think it would be necessary. For the time being, we had all the capability we needed.
“We have to intervene,” he said.
I waited to hear him explain.
“Language,” he added. “We have to solve the language problem.”
“What language problem?” I asked.
“We need to be able to talk to them.”
The capability already existed to leave a message. No, Phil, we didn’t have the means to show up physically and conduct a conversation. But we could deposit something for them to find. If we could master the languages.
“What do you intend to do?” I asked.
He was standing by a window gazing down at Crestview, with its single large street, its lone traffic light, Max’s gas station at the edge of town, the Roosevelt School, made from red brick and probably built about 1920. “Tell me, Jerry,” he said, “Why can none of these creatures make a city?”
I had no idea.
One of the species had developed a written language. Of sorts. But that was as far as they’d gotten. We’d thought that would be a key, but even after the next few thousand local years, nothing had happened.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Abe said. “They haven’t acquired the appropriate domestic habits. They need an ethical code. Spouses who are willing to sacrifice for each other. A sense of responsibility to offspring. And to their community.”
“And how would you propose to introduce those ideas, Abe?” I should have known what was coming.
“We have a fairly decent model to work with,” he said. “Let’s give them the Commandments.”
I don’t know if I mentioned it, but he was moderately eccentric. No, that’s not quite true. It would be closer to the mark to say that, for a world-class physicist, he was unusual in that he had a wide range of interests. Women were around the lab all the time, although none was ever told what we were working on. As far as I knew. He enjoyed parties, played in the local bridge tournaments. The women loved him. Don’t know why. He wasn’t exactly good-looking. But he was forever trying to sneak someone out in the morning as I was pulling in.
He was friendly, easy-going, a sports fan, for God’s sake. You ever know a physicist who gave a damn about the Red Sox? He’d sit there and drink beer and watch games off the dish.
When he mentioned the Commandments, I thought he was joking.
“Not at all,” he said. And, after a moment’s consideration: “And I think we can keep them pretty much as they are.”
“Abe,” I said, “what are we talking about? You’re not trying to set yourself up as a god?” The question was only half-serious because I thought he might be on to something. He looked past me into some indefinable distance.
“At this stage of their development,” he said, “they need something to hold them together. A god would do nicely. Yes, I think we should do precisely that.” He smiled at me. “Excellent idea, Jerry.” He produced a copy of the King James, flipped pages, made some noises under his breath, and looked up with a quizzical expression. “Maybe we should update them a bit.”
“How do you mean?”
“‘Thou shalt not hold any person to be a slave.’”
I had never thought about that. “Actually, that’s not bad,” I said.
“‘Thou shalt not fail to respect the environment, and its creatures, and its limitations.’”
“Good.” It occurred to me that Abe was off to a rousing start. “Maybe, ‘Thou shalt not overeat.’”
He frowned and shook his head. “Maybe that last one’s a bit much for primitives,” he said. He pursed his lips and looked again at the leather-bound Bible. “I don’t see anything here we’ll want to toss out. So let’s stop with twelve.”
“Okay.”
“The Twelve Commandments.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s try it.”
“For Mac,” he said. “We’ll do it for Mac.”
The worlds we’d been working with had all been numbered. He had a system in which the number designated location, age, salient characteristics. But you don’t care about that. He decided, though, that the world we had chosen for our experiment should have a name. He decided on Utopia. Well, I thought, not yet. It had mountain ranges and broad seas and deep forests. But it also had lots of savages. Smart savages, but savages nonetheless.
We already had samples of one of the languages. That first night he showed them to me, and played recordings. It was a musical language, rhythmic, with a lot of vowels and, what do you call them, diphthongs. Reminded me of a Hawaiian chant. But he needed a linguistic genius to make it intelligible.
He called a few people, told them he was conducting an experiment, trying to determine how much data was necessary to break in and translate the text of a previously unknown language. Hinted it had something to do with SETI. The people on the other end were all skeptical of the value of such a project, and he pretended to squirm a bit but he was offering lots of cash and a bonus for the correct solution. So everybody had a big laugh before coming on board.
The winner was a woman at the University of Montreal. Kris Edward. Kris came up with a solution in five days. I’d have thought it was impossible. A day later she’d translated the Commandments for him into the new language. Ten minutes after he’d received her transmission, we were driving over to Caswell Monuments in the next town to get the results chiseled onto two stone tablets. Six on each. They looked good. I’ll give him that. They had dignity. Authority. Majesty.
We couldn’t actually transport the tablets, the Commandments, physically to Utopia. But we could relay their image, and their substance, and reproduce them out of whatever available granite there might be. Abe’s intention was to put them on a mountaintop, and then use some directed lightning to draw one of the shamans up to find them. It all had to be programed into the system, because as I said the realtime action would be much too quick for anyone to follow. I was, to say the least, skeptical. But Abe was full of confidence that we were on track at last.
We had a flat on the way back with the tablets. The spare was flat too. Maybe we should have taken that as a sign. Anyhow, by the time we’d arranged to get picked up, and got the tire changed, and had dinner, it had gotten fairly late. Abe was trying to be casual, but he was anxious to start. “No, Jerry,” he said, “we are not going to wait until morning. Let’s get this parade on the road.” So we set the tablets in the scanner and sent the transmission out.
It was 9:46 p.m. on the twelfth. The cylinder flashed amber lamps, and then green, signaling success, it had worked, the package had arrived at its destination. Moments later we got more blinkers, confirming that the storm had blown up to draw the shaman onto the mountain.
We looked for results a few minutes later. It would have been time, on the other side, to build the pyramids, conquer the Mediterranean, fight off the Vandals, get through the Dark Ages, and move well into the Renaissance. If it had worked, we could expect to see glittering cities and ships and maybe even 747s. What we saw, however, were only the same dead-end settlements.
We resolved to try again in the morning. Maybe Moses had missed the tablets. Maybe he’d not been feeling well. Maybe the whole idea was crazy.
That was the night the quake hit.
That’s stable ground up in that part of the world. It was the first earthquake in Crestview’s recorded history. Moreover, it didn’t hit anything else. Not Charlie’s Bar & Grill, which is at the bottom of the hill on the state road. Not any part of the Adams Ranch, which occupied the area on the north, not any part of the town, which is less than a half mile away. But it completely destroyed the lab.
What’s that? Did it destroy the cosm? No, the cosm was safely disconnected from the state of Colorado. Nothing could touch it, except through the cylinder. It’s still out there somewhere. On its own.
But the whole thing scares me. I mean, Mac was already dead. And two days later Sylvia drove into the tree at about sixty.
That’s okay, you can smile about it, but I’m not sleeping very well. What’s that? Why would God pick on us? I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t like the idea of someone doing minor league creations. Maybe he resented our monkeying around with the Commandments.
Why do you think he didn’t say anything to Moses about slavery? What, you’ve never thought about it? I wonder if maybe, at the beginning, civilization needs slaves to get started. Maybe you can’t just jump off the mark with representative democracy. Maybe we were screwing things up, condemning sentient beings to thousands of years of unnecessary savagery. I don’t know.
But that’s my story. Maybe it’s all coincidence. The quake, the plane crash, Sylvia. I suppose stranger things have happened. But it’s scary, you know what I mean?
Yeah, you think I’m exaggerating. I know the God you believe in doesn’t track people down and kill them. But maybe the God you believe in isn’t there. Maybe the God who’s actually running things is just a guy in a laboratory in another reality. Somebody who’s a bit less congenial than Abe. And who has better equipment.
Well, who knows?
The scotch is good, by the way. Thanks. And listen, Phil, there’s a storm blowing up out there. I don’t like to impose, but I wonder if I could maybe stay the night?
Copyright © 2004 Cryptic, Inc.
**********
Alex Shvartsman is a writer, translator and game designer, with more than 30 short
stories to his credit. He recently edited the anthology Unidentified Funny Objects.
REQUIEM FOR A DRUID
by Alex Shvartsman
My job that morning was to banish a demon, but I was determined to finish my cup of coffee first.
I sipped my java in front of Demetrios’ warehouse in Sunset Park, enjoying the panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline and the New York harbor. Next to me, Demetrios was shaking like a leaf.
“What in the world are you thinking, Conrad?” Demetrios spoke in his typical rapid-fire fashion. “You’re just going to go in there, alone, to face this infernal thing? Without any help or backup from others at the Watch? Without even a priest? This is all kinds of crazy.”
“I can handle it.” I said, trying to project casual confidence. “You did ask for this to be resolved quickly, and it’s not like I haven’t dealt with an occasional demon before.”
In fact, I’ve never even seen any demons. I’m not in any way equipped to deal with a supernatural being of that magnitude. That’s the bad news. The good news is, I’ve never heard of a demon showing up in Brooklyn. Even if one arrived, it wouldn’t be slumming in Demetrios’ warehouse. And if, by some miracle, a major baddie decided to take up residence here, Demetrios wouldn’t have survived the encounter long enough to come crying for my help. Something else was going on, but if the guy with a checkbook wanted to believe the job to be extremely dangerous, who was I to dissuade him?
“Quickly, yes,” said Demetrios. “You wouldn’t believe how far behind this has made us fall with the deliveries. My customers are screaming bloody murder. On top of everything, there’s a shipment of Sumatran persimmons that is already beginning to rot. So I hope you really know what you’re doing. I don’t relish the thought of having to scrape what’s left of you off the container walls.”
“That’s the Demetrios I know and love. Sentimental to the end. Here, hold this.” I handed him the empty foam cup and headed for the entrance.
The warehouse was packed with every kind of package and crate imaginable. Huge metal shipping containers clustered in the center, with just enough room left to maneuver them in and out. Around the edges, mountains of smaller parcels occupied every available nook and cranny, arranged in an order apparent only to Demetrios and his staff. There was plenty of room to hide for whatever was haunting the building.
Since I didn’t know what sort of trouble to expect, I brought as many weapons, charms, and amulets as I could carry without making my reliance on such tools apparent. I’ve made a lot more enemies than friends over the years and having any of them learn the truth would be incredibly dangerous.
Far as I know, I’m unique. Only one out of every 30,000 people is born gifted. They can See magic and cast it. I can See perfectly; casting is another story. Not even my superiors at the Watch know about my disability. I suspect they wouldn’t keep me around if they ever found out. So I pretend to be a badass wizard and do my job well, giving no one cause to think otherwise. One day I hope to find a cure for my condition. Or, failing that, at least a damn good explanation.
I worked my way through the labyrinth of packages until I heard faint growling sounds emanating from a few aisles over. I pulled out a revolver loaded with silver bullets doused in holy water. Cliché, I know, but in my experience only the most effective solutions get to become clichés in the first place. Weapon drawn, I advanced slowly toward the noise. I turned the corner of a ceiling-high shelving unit stocked with wooden crates and found myself face to face with a Lovecraftian nightmare.
The creature was shaped like a ten-foot-tall bulldog, with several rows of jagged teeth protruding from its oversized mouth. It stared at me with cold fish eyes and emitted a low rumble from deep within its ugly-as-sin belly. Definitely not a demon. I smiled in relief as I studied the telltale shimmer barely visible around the critter’s frame.
“Nice doggie,” I told it as I rummaged through the inner pockets of my trench coat. Moving very slowly so as not to spook it, I withdrew a plastic pill bottle filled with orange powder.
“Want a treat?” I said in a soothing voice as I holstered the revolver and struggled momentarily with the childproof cover.
Annoyed with my apparent lack of desire to run away terrified, the critter let out a thunderous roar that, I hoped, Demetrios could hear outside. While it was busy posturing, I took a pair of quick steps forward and flung the contents of the pill bottle at its midsection.
The monstrous visage quivered, gradually losing its shape, and disappeared. At my feet lay a furry little animal that looked like an ugly koala bear, knocked out cold by the sleeping powder. The Sumatran changeling snoring on the ground before me was a harmless creature. Its kind project images of big, scary monsters in order to repel predators, but they’re all bark and no bite. Poor thing must’ve gotten into the persimmon shipment and munched the long journey away, happy in the container full of its favorite snacks. The potent orange mix would keep the changeling dormant until I could get it to a buddy of mine at the Bronx Zoo who cared for a m
enagerie of supernatural animals.
I checked the rest of the building to make sure there were no more changelings. Also, just to be nosy. Demetrios ran the city’s largest shipping company that handled arcane imports and I was always curious to know what he was up to. After a sufficient amount of time spent wandering the aisles I took off my trench coat and wrapped it gently around the changeling. Carrying the bundle under my arm, I exited the warehouse.
“That was one nasty hellspawn.” I smiled at Demetrios, who was pacing nervously outside. “See, it even made me break a sweat.”
“Is it gone now? Did you banish it?” he demanded.
“It will not be bothering you again,” I said with utmost confidence.
Demetrios was thrilled to pay me handsomely for a morning’s work, and all it cost me was a vial of sleeping powder. What’s more, he would tell anyone who cared to listen about how I went one-on-one with a demon and won. So grows the legend of Conrad Brent.
When I drove off from Demetrios’ parking lot, I noticed another car pulling into traffic behind me.
I was being followed by amateurs. The black Lincoln Town Car lingering in my rearview mirror had stalked me along the congested Brooklyn streets without any grace or subtlety. Its driver must have thought he was very clever, always keeping one or two vehicles between us. I made a few turns, just to be sure. The Lincoln stayed with me, conspicuous as a polar bear in the desert.
Sensing my concern, my car’s various magical protections began to activate. To say that my car didn’t look like much would be an understatement. It was an ’84 Oldsmobile with crooked bumpers, a few months overdue for a car wash. On the inside though, it sported more nasty tricks than the Batmobile. It had the best defensive enchantments money could buy, and a few that were literally priceless. All of them woke up as the car prepared itself for a possible confrontation. Some of the arcane shields interfered with the radio, which only served to annoy me further. I pulled over and watched the Lincoln pull into a parking spot a few yards behind me.
Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 1 March 2013 Page 8