Gods of Green Mountain (39 page)

"Before we can decide just what you are--how long ago was it that you landed here?"

"Ah, Dray-Gon, how can I say? I have tried through the years to measure your fleeting years, as compared to my calendar. But I have never quite figured out the schedule. Your days are but fleeting blinks to my eyes, and your nights but a brief shadow. It seems to me out there only grayness. But I can tell you by my calendar that I have been here for six years, plus two months."

"But that is incredible!" cried Dray-Gon. "Not possible at all that such a short time has passed! You were here when our very first, most ancient ancestors walked upon the upper and lower borderlands...always your ship was here beyond the Scarlet Mountains."

The God smiled, and snuffed out the smoking thing he toyed with in his hand, and in his mouth. "My dear small friend, you are measuring my time by your own standards. Your years are but minutes to me. Your Scarlet Mountains are to me just a pile of rocks."

"But this is too perplexing, too overwhelming. I cannot relate to so much difference in time and size!"

"No, nor could I," said the God in a kindly way, "without the aid of my thinking machine, which you may have noticed as flashing colored lights on the wall. However, in order for it to give answers, it has to be fed facts, and the true facts I don't have to give. However, this machine did serve me well, and also you, for it was the machine that signaled out a slight difference. I would never have heard the slight tappings you made with your hammer. The calculator sees and hears and notes down every little nuance of difference--you little fellows tugged it into awareness, and it sounded an alarm that something was nibbling at one of the ship's legs. It guided me to the source of irritation, and I reached out and sucked you up with a vacuum, and deposited you beneath a microscope. With my eyes alone, you are as tiny little insects, without much form.

"And while you and your friends were under my microscope, talking and jabbering in tiny pipsqueaks, I recorded your conversations, then fed them into the computer brain, and it translated your words and taught them to me."

"To be so quick to learn is a godly thing in itself," said Sharita as she inched her chair closer to Dray-Gon's and reached for his hand. But he pulled his hand sharply away and refused to look at her.

"But, Lord God, something bothers me still. If our days are but seconds to you, how is it that we can communicate at all? I, and my companions should be old men before you finish a sentence."

"You are a quick little fellow, for sure, and you are right. To make it simple, I have sublimated my body in a state of dormancy, with the assistance of some very rare drugs and complex machines. I have speeded up my bodily processes, so they are racing now at an even keel with yours. So I too am growing old as I speak. These same drugs and machines were used to accomplish the opposite effect when I and my copilot searched for other worlds, or else we would have gone back to our families so changed no one would recognize us. And what you see on the screen before you are thought projections of myself, my voice an audio projection."

"Then you are not really like us at all?" Sharita asked.

"What you see is a faithful reproduction of what I am, and my way of acting. I am, as you have observed before, very much like all of you."

Again the princess spoke up: "But where is the other God--your copilot?"

Now the God's expression pained, and his voice came sad and melancholy. "Shortly after we landed here, a sickness overtook my companion, very much like your 'dim-despairs.' It saddened him with hopelessness. He was disconsolate when he thought of his wife and children who were dead. He saw nothing here to cheer him, and he grew tired of saying to me the same things and eating each day the same foods and drinking the same liquids. He knew sooner or later our supply would give out. So he gave up, he refused to eat, and in time he weakened into death.

"I buried him out there," and the image in the glass wall gestured. "I carried him out and dug a grave, and piled upon his grave to mark the spot a giant stack of red rocks. I believe you refer to his grave as your 'Scarlet Mountains.' "

In appalled horror, Sharita screamed and almost fainted into Dray-Gon's arms. He held her, looking beyond her head into the eyes of Arth-Rin, and then Raykin. They had crawled through a grave! Through so many twisting, narrow tunnels, like arteries and veins, and had come upon a larva-like maggot! The eaters of men after death!

Sharita was sobbing, and he tried to console her, whispering soft little words to steal the horror from what they had done innocently. "Take me away!" sobbed the princess. "Put me in my tent and on my bed. Let me sleep. Let me forget."

The God rose to his feet and lifted his hand in a gesture that dismissed them, and he vanished.

Dray-Gon lifted and carried the princess back to her tent, and laid her down. "Don't go," she pleaded. "Lie down with me, and hold me in your arms, and help me forget. I don't want to remember what we did, and where we were. Take the horror away, Dray-Gon."

After a while they slept. Wrapped in each other's arms, and they had found a kind of peace in belonging to each other.

Sharita awakened and looked at Dray-Gon asleep at her side and shuddered with the overwhelming complexities of it all. Lying there, she thought back to the crystal palace that was home, and her father and mother waiting there anxiously for her return. In a deluge of homesickness, she wanted them more than she wanted anything else except...Here she turned on her side and softly kissed Dray-Gon's lips. He muttered something sleepily. What she understood as a name, not hers but the servant girl's: "Ray-Mon."

She got up and went into the tent that served as their kitchen and prepared herself a snack to eat, which she carried out so she could sit in a chair facing the thick wall where the image of the God was now sitting again.

Daintily, self-consciously, she ate while he closely watched her without speaking, but his eyes kept meeting with hers, and she saw something wistfully longing in them, something shadowed and hurting.

She asked: "You must be very lonely. I wonder how it is you survive, when your friend gave up and died."

He smiled then, which somehow reminded Sharita of her father. "Princess, I have sat here and asked myself that same question. And yes, I am lonely, very lonely, but for some reason I kept on wanting to live, even if I lived out long, long years by myself. I kept telling myself there is a reason and a purpose for everything that happens in one's life, and I was here for a special purpose, that would be revealed at some point. And of course, now I know what that purpose is. For if I seem as a god to you, every one of you come as a miracle to me. In my world that was, there were many beautiful women, and we had legends of great beauties who drove men to madness and wars in order to possess them. I have never believed this kind of divine and perfect beauty existed anywhere, and women like that were but a myth--yet you yourself are of such a beauty that legends are made of. Are there many like you in El Dorraine?"

Now how could she answer a question like that? It had been reported to her always, from those who considered themselves connoisseurs of beauty, that she was uniquely one of a kind, a different and new kind of species. "I don't know. I have not seen all the women in El Dorraine, though it has been said I am the only one colored as I am--just as Dray-Gon is the only one colored as he is. His skin is bronze, with hair so deeply red, it is almost as dark as yours. My great-grandfather was of a different sort too. But is one flower in a garden more beautiful than the others?"

The God sat silent, thinking about that as he looked her over from head to toe, and to himself he thought, yes, in some gardens there grew only one rose.

"You do not look happy, princess, though but a while ago, I saw you and your captain, Dray-Gon, look at each other with eyes of love."

"Love is like a garden too: there are always a few thorns there," said Sharita, with eyes dark and troubled. "Sometimes lovers play too many games and unnecessarily complicate things. And then too I am in very serious trouble. Awhile back, I caused a man's death--and when I looked at him dead and bleeding, I was glad he was dead. When I go back to my father's council room, I will have to tell of that, and it is our first and most important law, that we never kill another person, even in self-defense. And the man who died didn't have any weapon but his hands and his body, and I had a knife that he tripped and fell on. But even so, I was the instrument of his death, and our laws are very strict."

"But you are the king's daughter--his only child, so you have said. The law will pass lightly over you."

Sharita shook her head. "No. I will be judged just as any other. My father would lean over backward to see that justice is impartial."

"And if found guilty, what would be your punishment?" asked the God, leaning forward and looking at her with intense concern.

Sharita turned her eyes away, thinking of the punishment. "We don't take a life for a life. I would be banished to live outside of the cities, in the wildlands, with the other criminals. And those men have turned to animals who steal women from the cities when they can, and use them brutally. To live out there, and to be used in such ways, I would prefer to be dead."

The God rose to his feet. "No! Tell the men in the council room that I will tear down their cities if they do such to you!"

The princess rose to her feet as well, and walked very close to the wall of glass, and tried to peer at the God more closely. On his side, he saw her grow larger and larger--until she seemed even larger than himself. She raised her arms and put both her palms flat on the glass as if she would touch him. A faint whisper of a smile flickered on her face.

"No, I won't tell them that, for the people would turn against my father, and would hate him. And for another reason, I won't use you to back me up."

"Why not?" the God asked angrily. "Let us say that fate placed me here just to save you from such dire chastisement for an accidental murder!"

The princess looked at the image in the glass with very soft eyes. "You are not a god but in size. You are only a man from another world. I can see it in your eyes as you look at me. But I won't tell the others; when we go back, I will swear you are God!"

Taken aback in surprise, the God almost laughed. "But little princess, you have come here for an answer. Are you expecting me, only a man, to give you the answer to a riddle only a god could solve?"

She looked him over, as observantly as he had looked her over, and said; "I think you are a kind and very wise man, like our Es-Trall; somehow you will come up with just the right answer to save us all."

Farewell
to Green Mountain

F
or many days the delegation of twenty visited with the God. He talked and they listened; they questioned and he answered. They asked as many questions as they had. One day he called them all together and said he had solved the doubt about the death of Bari-Bar.

Held spellbound, they listened as he expounded his theory that left them breathless with wonder. Oh, such a wise man he was indeed! Truly a god, so that even the princess bowed her head and went down on her knees for giving to them such a perfect solution.

"I am sorry I doubted you," she said most humbly. "You are truly a god to have such wisdom. We would never have thought of that!"

But he was one contrary God! Completely unsatisfied to have them believe he was more than just a man of another size and color and from another world. Nothing he said would convince them otherwise now. He was far too wise to be just a man, and if he tried to deny his lordliness, they allowed for this, for even Gods would have their foibles and inconsistencies!

"But Gods are immortal!" thundered out the God in his most terrible and mighty voice, not reduced in scale so it wouldn't deafen them. "I will lay me down and die one day...and you will see, I was but a
man
after all!"

So they prepared to leave, and grievously sorry, the God sat and watched them fold their shimmering tents, and pack their supplies on horshetback, and round up the puhlets, and he pleaded with them to return again, for the years were long and lonely for him here all alone. His blue eyes met sadly with the violet, almost blue eyes of the princess. "Most especially I would see you again, Sharita, and when you have children, bring them along, for I am sure one day you will make an easy road to my home."

Then he added, in a less serious tone, "Now, I myself have one last question, for on the balance scales of our conversations, I am heavily weighted on the answering side. Explain to me how it is, that in your entire world of red-haired people with greenish skins, there is only one little person with skin of saffron cream and hair not silver or gold, but in between, hair that glistens almost opalescent."

"Lord God," said Sharita, "I will speak, since that is a very personal question about me, and the others would be embarrassed to answer." She could see their flushed faces. "This is a question that has perplexed our people since I was born, for they would have me be the same as all others--even Dray-Gon is less different than I am." She smiled at her captain, and held tight to his hand as she continued. "Of course, there is no real answer, for we are for certain only human, whereas you are in doubt about yourself. Our most wise man, Es-Trall, has a hypothesis. And since we have no other explanation, our educators consider it, at least those who make an attempt to look over and beyond the ruts of familiarity.