Gods of Earth (38 page)

“What happened to the Thei?” he whispered.

“After the year two by the Theogenics Calendar, I was no longer tended. I can report only my own observations, and what is recorded in poems and songs that I have heard.”

“Tell me.”

“I begin with the
Theopolemein
,” the Oracle answered, “song of the war between gods and men. It is composed in Common.”

And the Oracle began to sing.

When the Oracle fell silent, Hexus curled up on the floor and wept. The epic poem was slander, the lies of the victors—of this he was certain. But some dim outline of what it claimed must be true: there had been a war against himself, and against his brothers and sisters. He had been one of the first vanquished in this struggle. He had fallen in battle against Wervool, greatest of the demigods. His siblings had taken their revenge and destroyed Wervool, but thereafter all the gods were bound or lost in other battles. The world was devastated. Men fell into brutishness.

He wept until he felt empty of tears, and then lay on his back and stared at the dark above, the back of his right hand lying on the Stalker’s forehead, so that he looked with three eyes.

What should he do? This body was failing him (at this thought a pang pierced his gut, the terror and despair of what remained of the Stalker) and he would need to find some way to repair it. He needed to somehow be made whole again.

“Oracle, what remains of the Theogenics Guild?”

“I do not know.”

“Does the Hand that Reaches still stand?”

“I do not know.”

“Does Theopolis still exist?”

“That city has been renamed Disthea. It remains.”

He stood. “I go there now.”

“It appears that the makina will seek to prevent your leaving.”

“What?” Hexus asked, startled. But then he saw the statue on the far side of the room lift one thin leg carefully forward and swing its arms in a slow stride. It took even, hard, clinking steps toward him.

“Makina,” Hexus said. “I did not know that you are one of the Makine. Speak to me.”

The metal form marched forward. Hexus backed away.

“I have searched for something that remains of the Penultimate Age. This Oracle and you are all that I have found. Speak.”

The statue continued forward, gaining on him, until it was a pace away.

“Do you still dwell below the mountains?” Hexus implored. “Do you still grow on the heat of the Earth? What came of your ancient dream of Diaspora among the stars? Did your kin ascend to distant suns?”

The statue swung one arm at him with lightning speed, the limb bending fluidly like a whip. The heavy metal bit viciously into Hexus’s left arm, seeking to wrap around him.

Hexus screamed in rage and twisted space, unwrapping the arm, then stumbled back, out of range of the makina’s metal limbs.

“Is all the world a wasteland of idiotic violence now?” Hexus shouted.

He crouched over and pressed his palms together. Space bound around him in a tight, safe cocoon. He fell into darkness as light bent around it. The makina struggled to strike and bind him, flailing its limbs through the air. Hexus pushed through and past it, then turned, stepped back into space, reached into the volume inside the makina, and folded it around. The metal man exploded
into tiny pieces of shining, writhing black and gray fragments. They fell clattering on the floor and squirmed about, seeking to rejoin together. Hexus walked among them, right palm held out and open, and with his mind crushed each in turn into a smoking slug of charred metal.

“Makine!” he shouted when finished. They would have eyes and ears here, he knew. If they had set a body here for some purpose, they would have others, probably winged eyes like bats clinging in the darkness above. They did everything redundantly.

“Makine!” he screamed in rage. But he did not know what else to say. In the Penultimate Age, the Makine had been distant, indifferent, an affront to humanity, but never a foe to the Theogenics Guild. Why would they attack him? All the world had fallen into madness. All who remained in it were wantonly murderous.

He burst open the doors and stepped out into the sunlight. The gorilla sat in the grass a wary distance from the Oracle, hunched over and chewing the stem of a reed. She blinked despondently as a relentless swarm of insects buzzed around her head, biting her, even flying into her eyes.

“Come here!” he demanded. And this time the voice of Hexus sounded imperious and deadly. The gorilla dropped the stem and approached, her head low. She bowed at his feet.

“I will give you a tongue again, soon, when I learn how,” he told it. He waved his hand and killed all the insects that bit at her. “And I will make it so that no man ever kills the soulburdened again. Do you understand? I am sickened by this stupid filthy time. I will bring back the Penultimate Age, and then free my siblings and reforge the Dawn of the Ultimate Age. And when humanity has ascended, I will give the Earth to the soulburdened.”

He looked out toward the south, where lay the city once called Theopolis, which had been his home when mortal.

“And you shall be my first champion. I name you Apostola.”

The gorilla just stared.

“Come with me.”

He started walking south. Toward Disthea.

After one day on foot, they came to an ancient road, still gleaming and smooth, though crowded on each side with forest. They stole two more horses from what looked to be merchants—Hexus did not bother to hide himself or bind the men, but just knocked them flat and without a word mounted one horse, and instructed Apostola to mount the other. They rode on, hooves clacking on the road.

There were more villages here, lining the highway. It surprised Hexus to see that some civilization survived here in the south. The people were not sick with pollution. Some children ran in the orderly fields of corn. The homes were upright and square and painted bright colors. He passed the villages without attempting to hide himself or the ape, filled still with his determined rage. But though people stared at the gorilla, they made no threats. These people, Hexus realized, must be accustomed to the occasional traveler, even a traveler accompanied by one of the soulburdened.

On the fourth day they came to a small city crowded against the coast. They stopped on the top of a hill overlooking the town. The sky turned a dark purple, reflected in the still darker sea, as the sun set. The path of the gleaming road was visible into the distance, lit gold in the low rays of the waning day. The road went through the town and then out over the sea and continued into the horizon. They could discern in the growing dark the white towering legs of a bridge that held the road above the water. Hexus sat on the horse and waited, unmoving, his arm out before him, until the daylight was gone. He peered out over the sea, expectant.

And then he shouted once with joy. Far out, where the road touched the horizon, he could see a dim glow in the water.

“Lights still burn in Theopolis,” he told the gorilla. “Something remains, Apostola. Something remains.”

They rode down. In the small coastal city, they dismounted and walked slowly, leading the horses. People passed them at a respectful distance, but did not approach. Hexus began to hope that there might be more of civilization left than he had come to fear. Perhaps in this south there remained a few pockets of something of the great ages.

He searched for a small place with few people to resist his will, where they could get food and rest until the morning. They walked close to the dark walls of buildings, looking into the windows of homes and inns and shops as they passed. A few people, then none, walked the street. It grew unusually quiet. The gorilla sniffed warily. The smell of sewage rose from cracks along the side of the street.

They came upon two dark buildings, with shattered windows in the sills of which filthy gray shards of glass stood like teeth. As they passed the alley between the buildings a faint wet crack sounded out behind Hexus. He turned. The gorilla stood frozen before him, eyes gaping, and she suddenly bellowed, appalled and surprised. The rusting metal point of a crude spear thrust straight through her chest. Hexus opened his mouth to howl in rage but something grabbed his hair from behind. A sharp, thin pain cut across his throat. He felt warm blood splash over his hands.

The gorilla fell on her face, and he fell back against the wall. Two albino men—twins—strode before them. One, with long white hair, immediately began to search the saddles of the horses. The other, totally hairless, stood looking down at Hexus, and wiped on a dirty cloth the knife he had used to cut the Stalker’s throat.

No, Hexus tried to growl. I will not begin again. I will not lose all my postmortal memories and begin again.

But no voice came out. His windpipe was severed. Blood gurgled and frothed from his slit throat. Black dizziness swept over him—he’d suffered a fatal blood loss—but the will of the god kept
the body moving. He put his hand to his neck. The blood splashed over the god’s eye but the throat wound closed roughly. He rose. He struck the man with the knife to the ground with a thought. The knife clattered across the road.

Hexus fought the black tide of unconsciousness that pounded at the Stalker’s mortal body. He managed to set his feet firmly apart, and faced the other man.

The albino pillaging the saddles turned and saw Hexus. He put one boot on the gorilla that lay on the ground between them and yanked the spear out of her back, then aimed the wet point at the god.

Hexus tore the clothes from the man, then sent the spear flying. He grabbed space in and around the man and curled it over, pressed it, reforged the topology of the human body. The man hissed and struggled to scream as his flesh bent and twisted. His bones snapped like dry sticks. His skin was stretched into a broad disk with his face in the center, and then folded over to form a ball, and grafted crudely to itself with a thick, long scar. The mouth was driven through the flesh, making a hole. Eyes, nose, ears, limbs, anus, white hair, fingers, and nails had been stuffed into the interior of a hollow globe of flesh with a single orifice, ringed with splintered teeth. The fleshy white sphere of skin rolled on the ground, helpless, alive, seething and twisting. With unbounded horror and agony, two red eyes peered through inverted lips at Hexus.

Hexus found his voice.

“I damn you, waste of a man,” he growled. “I damn you.”

He reached over and closed the wounds of the gorilla and then, with a thought, hammered her heart back into motion. Then he toppled over, unable to keep the Stalker standing.

The other albino had found his knife, and he rushed now at Hexus. Hexus lifted his arm and this attacker froze, dropped his knife, and fell to his knees.

Hexus placed his right hand on the head of his killer.

“I’ll not forget,” he whispered. And then he reshaped the killer’s brain. In his rush he had to bludgeon his mind into the killer. The effect was destructive and weakening, but he put his memories inside the aching skull of the screaming man. Then he clasped hands with him, and—

… the eye shifted.

Both the Stalker and the killer moaned.

And then Hexus stood and looked down at the dying Stalker.

He remembered the most of his awakening and journey. He had moved. He had transmogrified the brain of the killer and moved his divine flesh.

A thousand possibilities exploded upon him, with the realization that he could move his soul like this. He had indefinite time now, to find a way to be whole again. If necessary, he could move again, and again.

“Die in peace, Stalker,” Hexus said.

The Stalker looked at the gaping hole in his right palm. Then his life faded.

Hexus looked down at his new, alien hands, and at the god’s eye in its new place. He had expected a seething riot of passions inside the killer’s mind, but found only a simple, unreflective being there, without conscience and without any concern for what might happen the day after tomorrow. Incurious, even more ignorant than the Stalker, it had lived as a simple, stupid animal with speech. The lowest soulburdened dog was wiser.

The killer resisted Hexus. Not in any subtle way, but with a simple brute redirection of energies. Hexus could easily fight him, but it robbed his motions of any grace, making him twitch and twist as he corrected the body continuously. And the fast violence of the transfer of memories had damaged the brain. His limbs trembled as the mind struggled to remain coherent.