Gods of Green Mountain (38 page)

"Sharita, you go too fast with so many inquiries. With Gods, you don't make too many requests, you tread carefully. You look beautiful, as always, and he may be listening this very minute, for he has powers beyond imagination!"

The meal over, all hurried out of the tent, and set up the folding chairs in order to be comfortable when listening to the God's long story, for if he considered it long, it would be for them a tale of many days!

Sharita said to Dray-Gon: "But if you told him of Bari-Bar, why hasn't he given you an immediate answer? Why does he keep us waiting so long? Why does he have to stop and consider? Doesn't he
know
?"

The rumbling deep voice of the God was heard chuckling. "Your lovely princess is uniquely all woman! Can it be, all females, large or small, are cast in the same mold? Tall as a mountain, or small as an ant--they are insistent, impatient, and not to be distracted from a determined goal!"

Before her, Sharita saw the image of the God, hazily shimmering in the thick wall of glass, and slightly unfocused. She squinted her eyes to see him better. He was only a man, like any man. Somehow she was disappointed. She rose to her feet, as did all her young men. "Good light to you, Lord God," she greeted in the salutation all Dorrainians used, offering the wish for the best the day could bring. "I don't know of your kind of lordly women--but in our world, we believe that woman is made to balance man. We aim at one goal, while our men would pursue every goal in sight, and all at the same time, if we would let them." She half-turned and threw Dray-Gon a teasing, challenging smile, daring him to deny anything she had just said. But Dray-Gon was too happy to deny anything she would say, at least, not today.

"Princess," began the God, "I will concede your point--men too could all be cast in the same adventuresome goal, and have the need occasionally for some restraint--but only occasionally. And you do have the most remarkable hair--as I watch, it changes color in an iridescent way--quite unbelievable!" Here the God sighed rather wistfully. "And I do admire you, coming on such an odyssey, to seek the truth, and establish the guilt for the demise of Bari-Bar. But even for a god such as I, it takes time to make a considered opinion. To my way of thinking, since it is done and over, the truth may better stay hidden."

Sharita replied: "I too have thought much on the same subject, for it was hinted to me once by a very evil man that those on the lower borderlands deliberately did something to make all of the citizens of Bari-Bar go crazy and kill each other." She didn't look at Dray-Gon as she said this, but straight into the God's eyes. "This was done so the people of Lower El Dorraine would rise up against my father, the king, and snatch the throne from under him--and put Dray-Gon's father, Ron Ka, in
my
father's place."

Dray-Gon gasped, turning to stare at her as if she had stabbed him in the back.

"But I don't believe anything that man said! I believe now that those on the lower borderlands would not condone such a horror--and if such a terrible thing was done, it was done furtively, without the knowledge of Ron Ka or his son. I have traveled a long way with a man I have learned to love and to trust, so if you say to me later on that those of the lowerlands are guilty--I won't believe it!"

Forgetting the presence of the mighty God, Dray-Gon seized the princess by the shoulders and shook her angrily. "Sharita, if Mark-Kan hinted all those things to you, why didn't you tell me? Why did you wait until this moment to speak out?"

She fell against him, pressing her face against his uniformed chest. "I didn't trust you then. I thought you loved someone else. I thought you were only using me to gain power in your own way, through me."

Dray-Gon thrust her away, and stepped backward, his face very pale. "We will settle this later, princess. Now, as your subject, I concede all power and authority to you, and make you the spokesman."

"At ease, Dray-Gon," said the God in a compassionate way, "woman is always contrary, even the most beautiful ones--in fact, they are the most complex, for if you love them for their beauty, they think you don't appreciate their intelligence. And if you love them for their minds, they think they are not feminine and seductive, and you are unappreciative of their beauty. It is best to find one only moderately pretty and only moderately intelligent--and then you can feel secure in your masculinity."

Sharita stomped her foot! "What kind of talk is this, coming from a god? You are supposed to be impartial! Keep this up, and I will believe you are only a man after all--just a big one, of another size and color!"

"How paradoxical you are, princess!" the God complained in bewilderment. "What is it you would have me say? You tell me you love Dray-Gon of the lower borderlands, and you don't believe his people are guilty. Would you have me say your own people of the upperlands are the guilty ones?"

"I will have the truth--whichever way it falls! But the upperlands are not the guilty ones either, for I know them well. They would not have the citizens of Bari-Bar murdered. My own mother is from there!"

The God in the glass shook his head as if annoyed by gnats. His tone of voice peculiar as he spoke again; "In my lowly reasoning, your quest for the truth could have been settled with much less effort. However, since you have traveled so far, and endured so much, I promise to quell your doubts before you leave, after you have told me much more about your historic rise from the depths of dark burrows to your high shimmering cities under glass domes. But first, you must hear my story, and understand just who and what I am. So sit yourselves down, and make yourselves comfortable, and eat and drink when you are thirsty or hungry. But don't fall asleep. Hear every word, and I will try to speak as rapidly as possible, without going into too much detail."

Thus he began:

"Mine is a story a bit different from yours, so perhaps when I have finished my tale, you will need to decide if I am a god at all--or only an ant of another size and color..." and here the manlike god in the glass smiled kindly and sat himself down, and crossed his legs, and lifted something to his lips. He made a small fire, and put it to the stick in his mouth, and blew out smoke.

Oh! A miracle indeed! A god who breathed fire!

"I was born on a large planet," continued the God, "hundreds of light years away from here, using my calendar, not yours. We had only one sun, and only one moon, and our years were divided into twelve sections, and those sections into smaller sections called weeks and days. Unlike you who are evolved from plants, we believed ourselves evolved from animals we called apes. Our planet was much more favored than your small one. We had everything you have here, only much more, with more variety in the terrain. Our storms were as nothing compared to those you describe. And our deserts were small compared to Bay Sol. And our poles of ice were minor, compared to your icelands.

"We had mountains too--green, brown, red--of earth and rocks. We had oceans, lakes, rivers, ponds, streams, and brooks--but on the surface, not just underground. We had rolling plains of lush grasses and broad flat stretches of farmland, fertile land that would grow anything and everything, and only once in a while did we suffer a really severe storm--nothing comparable to what you suffer. There were clouds in our sky to protect us from the strong ultraviolet rays of our single sun, and an ozone layer to keep us from being burned, and gentle rains to water our lands. Oh, by far, it was a more godly place than you have here.

"We had at one time a society similar to yours, and raised great cities, and buried our dead in pointed buildings so the souls of the dead could live on forever in comfort. We surpassed the science of your time, and our genius changed our world for the better.

"Or so we thought.

"In the beginning, there was wilderness all around us, and wild animals, and primitive peoples who waged wars among themselves. We ignored those small primitives, and we the giants made a world that pleased us, ruling over everything and everyone. We were clever, and arrogant, and we felt supreme, like we would always be the conquerors. We used those smaller, more ignorant peoples, and the lands, and the waters, and the animals, and we drained most of the good our world contained.

"But there were some of us more foresighted than others and far wiser, who saw what we were doing, that we were depleting our world. So we tried to restrain the momentum of our scientific rush into the future, but we were as a snowball rushing downhill. We couldn't stop. So we set our sights on other planets, which we could see and examine through our powerful telescopes. We built ships that would jet out with a monumental force from our world, beyond the gravity that kept our earth in place--and we jumped into the black infinity of space.

"While our universe was searched for other inhabitable worlds, stations were constructed, like small moons to encircle our earth, which kept control over the weather. Those eyes in the sky we also used for dominion over the lesser peoples who would pull us down if they could, and destroy us all. From where I am, at this particular point in time, I can't say that I blame them. We thought that with so many space stations we could prevent quarrels and quibblings that were constantly breaking out into minor wars. But it was difficult to punish the offender without destroying the innocent--even when we could discover which was which, and that was seldom.

"Our society squandered themselves on the luxuries of self-gratifications of senses and appetites, and while they did, we who flew those ships into space explored farther and farther until we eventually went beyond our own universe, and into another.

"We had a god too, the God of our ancestors, like you. But when we grew powerful, we relegated our God and his powers to the pages of our books, which we forgot to read. We kept ourselves busy feeding our egos, sparing nothing, for we were certain to find a new and better world than the one we were using up. We contaminated our waters, our air, our earth, so that one by one our animal species began to die off. And then our grain wouldn't grow, and the lesser peoples began to die of starvation, and finally, even we, the controllers, the giants, the all powerful began to feel the gnawing of hunger.

"Then, as if our God of old was at last repelled, he hurled a giant red planet our way. It came out of nowhere, rushing at us to occupy our place in the universe! We couldn't believe it! Everyone watched it coming ever closer, turning our oceans red in reflected color, and pulling up the seas so they flowed over the lands, drowning cities! The red planet spun so close to our green world that the top crust of our earth cracked and split open, before it snapped back into place. By then, everything that had been was gone--or most of it. A little remained. Our largest, most important cities had crumbled into dust, and when the earth opened, it swallowed whole countries! Our lands became ocean bottoms, our mountain peaks islands in the sea, and what had been the bottom of the sea became our lands, and lush plains turned into deserts where nothing would grow.

"Now, you might ask at this point, how I know all of this, and am still alive, sitting here talking to you. And I will answer as truthfully as I can. I was one of those pilots sent out into space to search our universe, and all others that I could enter. My mission was to find an inhabitable planet as good as the one we were forced to leave. And not one single planet did I find that could equal the one we had spoiled.

"With me, was a copilot, a black man with black hair, and dark eyes. We had in our world peoples of many different skin colors, and hair of yellow, black, brown, red, gray, white, and varieties in between, though not one hair color was as spectacular as that which the princess grows on her head--nor was there a skin color nearly as beautiful as that saffron shade. But we had beautiful women too, and handsome men and children that we hoped to save.

"My copilot and I were returning from a space exploration when we saw that red planet hurtling straight at our home, spinning directly into the orbit of our earth--where our families lived! We watched, appalled, as that red planet neared our green world--and we saw our atmosphere and blue oceans turn as red as blood. The red planet barely skimmed by without colliding, but that didn't matter, for the effect of its near passing was utter catastrophe.

"In our spaceship we had to flee or be caught in the magnetism of the red planet's long, burning wake. We jetted away, carelessly using every bit of energy--not really caring anymore what happened to us.

"So excessive was the power we spent wastefully, we shot right out of our galaxy and into another far beyond any we had yet explored. We had only a little fuel left, so we couldn't return to our place in space, and had no desire to. Rather than drift on forever in the perpetual blackness of those outer limits, we settled our ship down on the first likely planet we found.

"Our chosen little planet had a dry, crusty surface. And several times we were forced to try different landing spots, for the legs of our ship, when we extended them, would sink into the hollow earth. We left the footprints of our landing attempts all over the surface of this small, arid planet, and our last jetting fuel blackened the land where we tried to find a secure place to rest down. Finally we did set down here, to our relief, and the earth held us, though I think we tilted this world a bit in so doing. It just happened to be your little star that we found.

"And that is my story. Finished. You may ask questions now, and tell me what you think--tell me now if I am an ant of another size and color, the same as you. Or tell me instead that you believe me still your God."

The twenty young people before him sat stunned and silent with the enormity of what they had just heard. They had seen the charred, blackened land with the crater footprints where this green spaceship had tried to land. They had slept many nights in those very black pits. They had crossed over the barren black lands leveled and charcoaled by the fires of that same ship, fires that had destroyed the trees, and turned them into bony skeletons. It occurred to Dray-Gon that this very God, sitting with his legs crossed, and smoking on a small stick, could be responsible for so much of their evil weather and bad luck.