Last God Standing (28 page)

“Will he come back the same way?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will I ever see you again?”

“Probably not.”

Herbert-Hasani hugged him. “Remember me. In your world.”

Lando pulled him in closer, hugged him tightly.

“Always.”

Then he released the boy and stepped back.

“Continuity is fluid, Ra,” he said, more roughly than he intended. “Rivers can be redirected. Even the wind can be diverted. Understand?”

“I will protect the boy,”
the sun god said.
“And I will consider the possibilities.”

Herbert-Hasani seemed to stand taller. Smiling, his eyes hidden behind the reflection dancing across his eyeglasses, he raised his left fist.

“I’ll remember you, Lando Calrissian Darnell Cooper!”

And Lando, who still shared LC Cooper’s memories, who in many ways was LC Cooper, turned away, unable to speak around the bothersome lump in his throat.

“You will be ejected from this body and propelled back along the pathway you made during your entry into this reality,”
Amon-Ra said.
“Prepare yourself, Lando Cooper.”

Lando nodded. “I’m ready.”

“Remember the Morning People, Yahweh. Their belief may yet redeem your world.”

Lando faced the infinite darkness. Far below, the alien sun burned, its gravity powerful enough to warp light and space and even time. Above him, the glowing tachyon trail reached into infinity.

We’re specks, he thought. Only flickers.

The shining trail brightened, its shape growing more clearly defined against that greater darkness. Lando felt a jolt, a wrenching shudder, then he was falling, stretching… then weightless, an airy awareness; thought without substance.

Then he was gone.

Aboard the Barque of a Million Years, a man and a boy stood, rarified by the light from a billion stars. The man stood at the Barque’s glimmering edge, eyes closed, his body shining like the sun’s corona for the briefest of instants. The boy watched, afraid to speak. But finally, he did.

“Papa?”

The man took a deep breath, and opened his eyes.

LC Cooper studied the face of his son, so like the face of his father. It was the face to which he had always returned, would always return; a bright beacon after a long passage through the darkness.

“Papa!”

The boy ran into his father’s waiting arms.

LC held his son, and turned golden eyes toward the blue world glimmering in the distance. He set his hand upon the tiller of the Barque and grinned as its familiar heartbeat answered his command. Yahweh wasn’t the only god brave enough to challenge divine destiny. It was time to experience the world he had wrought, from the other side of the tracks.

“Let’s go home.”

“The Light of God is the Human Soul.”

Proverbs 20:27. (More or less)

COLD!

PAIN!

I came back to life just in time to die again. I was enfolded within a freezing silence, an absence of noise, and yet, there was… sound. It was the thumping of my heart. I was alive. And I was dying, my skin burning, my eyes flambéed by a cold so intense it could star in a Robert DeNiro movie. I was floating, kicking in a weightless darkness only slightly less total than the blackness of space. I coughed, gasped and drew fire into my lungs.

I’m drowning. Drowning in the dark.

I struck out, flailing with my arms and legs, trying to move through that freezing black/void/abyss… trying to scream, to speak light into the darkness, and the top of my head slammed into something hard. Calm descended over me like a freezing shroud. After everything that had happened I was going to drown. If I didn’t freeze to death first.

This is what it was all about.

To experience life, human life, mortality. Now mortality had come to collect the bill. It wasn’t fair, but I suppose I wasn’t only person to think that in his dying moments. I opened my arms…

Let it happen.

…and I let the ocean in. It seemed almost acceptable, if not exactly comfortable.

The killer whale appeared out of the darkness, surging toward me like a black and white freight train, only to stop a few inches from my face.

“I’m so happy to see you! I feel terrible about eating your mate!”

Without another word, the orca grabbed me in its jaws and swam forward, propelling me toward a bright circlet of light above us. I hadn’t even seen the light streaming through a hole in the ceiling of white-blue ice above me. The orca put on a burst of speed and we rocketed through the hole, up and into the freezing air. I flipped head over heels and landed on my back in the permafrost. Freezing water and snot blasted out of my mouth and nose.

I rolled over onto my stomach and lay gasping and choking on an outcropping of permafrost only two or three inches above the surface of the icy water.

“You need fire,” the orca said. “You’re really lacking in blubber.”

“Thanks. Thank you.”

“Pleasure. It was the least I could do after killing your friend.”

“Connie… you killed Connie.”

“An accident! I was swimming along, minding my own business, when all this fire and thunder went off over my head. It confused my hunt song: I thought she was a nice, juicy walrus!”

“You… you ate Connie?”

The orca was spy-hopping in and out of the hole in the ice. “Of course not! I dragged her under, not sure what I had. I was so stunned from the explosions it took a moment to realise it was a human. By then it was too late. Her soul, what my kind calls the aieieekeekieeeeiuuuueeek, seemed pretty put out by the whole thing. She flew off, streaming colors like an angry rainbow. Pretty!”

“Where did they go?”

“Who?”

“My playmates. The ones who caused all the explosions.”

“Oh! They left hours ago.”

“Hours?”

Amon-Ra had sent me “back” alright. Months had passed in his world. I’d undergone and recovered from brain surgery, relaunched a hit talk show, bonded with my otherworld son and alienated my wife. But in my world, only hours had passed.

“Or maybe minutes,” Ooieek squeaked. “I’ve never caught the hang of your no-tail trick for measuring time. Did you know I was famous?”

“Which way did they go?” I managed to get to my hands and knees before my legs gave out and I fell on my face. Ares had stabbed me in the back. Now I was bleeding to death. My body was one big bruise and it felt like at least three ribs were broken. Yuri’s attack had shattered Stormface’s protective aura. I could sense nothing of its power in my mind.

Ooieek was frolicking in the frigid water, sliding up onto the ice on her belly, flexing her tail and lifting her massive head, her mouth open in a perky cetaecean “smile”.

“Tadaaaa! Look familiar?”

“Did they separate?” I was trying to summon an Aspect, any aspect that would protect me from the cold. But none of them answered. “Where’d they go?”

Skydaddy? Bringer of Pestilence? Voice Out of the Whirlwind? At least Burning Bush could start a fire.

“I’m sure you’ve seen my work,” Ooieek said. “I’ve even been on television, although they don’t get much of that up here. Watch this!”

Ooieek surface-dived, vanished beneath the frigid water. Then she rose up onto her tail and propelled herself backward, scooting across the water: the aquatic mammalian answer to the “Moonwalk”.

“Humans love this move! I’m the only one of my kind that really does it well. Usually, it’s a dolphin thing!”

“I have to go! I have to find them!”

“I can help.”

The woman who had spoken was standing a few yards away, floating atop a tiny ice floe about two feet wide. She wore a shining white kimono, her long, straight black hair flowing down in a perfect wave nearly to her calves. And she was clearly a goddess.

Mitsuko Leavenworth.

“Jeff Corroder’s assistant?”

“Vice President of Corroder Productions,”
Leavenworth sniffed.
“I got a promotion after we signed you to a contract. I also happen to be Benzaiten. The…”

“…the Shinto goddess of Love. I remember.”

The Japanese
kami
of romantic happiness nodded. Her symbol was the serpent, and a bright red pit viper lay twined around her neck. Its tongue flicked in and out, tasting the frigid air as its emerald eyes regarded me from the hollow of Benzaiten’s throat.

“Corroder’s in on it too. Yuri got to both of you?”

“Corroder is a fool. I was sent in by Holiday to investigate Yuri’s allegiance to you. None of us could believe you’d both relinquished your immortality. I needed to get close to Yuri without alerting him to the threat of the Coming. But when I fully
realized
that the two of you had actually
Descended, it didn’t make sense. True mortality.”

Mitsuko/Benzaiten shook her head, her confusion evident.

“None of us understood. That frightened Holiday. He believed there must be some gimmick, some mitigating reward the rest of us missed.”

“He lied to me. He attacked me! He betrayed everything we sacrificed for!”

“It’s not his fault, Lando. He doesn’t even know that I’m really a goddess.”

But an idea so vast in its implications was unfolding in my mind. That sense of displacement that I experienced in Amon-Ra’s world swept over me once more.

“It was Lucifer’s idea to step down... His idea to assume a mortal life.”

I looked over to where Benzaiten hovered on her floating ice ball, as the horror of Yuri’s true betrayal grabbed me and shook me in its teeth. I remembered the lethal sexuality, the undying glamour he wielded over women and men. I remembered him pushing me to invite Corroder to my sets. And finally, I remembered his face as he struck me with the thunder god’s hammer, his eyes burning like branding irons.

“It was all part of his plan. He tricked you. He tricked me into giving it all away.”

Yuri had lied to me. Yuri had taken sides with the Coming. Yuri was responsible for Surabhi’s death.

Yuri… Lucifer… Evil.

Hatred cracked the ice beneath my feet. Boiling water surged up through the holes in the ice, sending geysers of steam into the air until the land and sea around me disappeared in a curtain of fog. The fog spoke in a Voice.

“Betrayer
.
”

“I seduced him,”
Benaitzen, cried.
“I hid my immortality. That’s when I understood what you had done. Yuri was truly
mortal:
he couldn’t penetrate my disguise.”

I was swallowed up by fog and wrath. That wrath had a name. And a Voice.

“
Defiler
.”

“I was supposed to betray Yuri to get close to you. But we fell in love! I fell in love!”

“Unclean spirits.”

“But it was a trap! I only made him vulnerable to what came next!”

“Take me to him.”

“You don’t understand the true power of the Coming,”
Benzaitan cried.
“Holiday is just a puppet!”

Doom
.

“It’s more powerful than all the remaining pantheons combined! It compelled me to seduce Yuriel. It killed Zeus.
It is God!”

I roared, and the blast from my mouth was the breath of abomination. My anger had unleashed the one Aspect so terrible that its presence had only been hinted at in darkest tenets of the Old Testament. Its eye was glimpsed in the burning clouds over Sodom and Gomorrah; the foam from its mouth had drowned the world, and in its eyes burned the fires of madness.

Once ensconced in my mortal incarnation I had put it away, kept it from my conscious awareness, like a loaded shotgun kept in a forgotten room. I believed the time for such monstrosities long passed. Now, as memories of a million bloody campaigns waged against a billion infidels filled my mind, I welcomed its rage. It was the darkest expression of Abrahamic divinity; the god of the burning stake, the god of the slaveship, whose whistle is the crack of a bullwhip, whose laughter is the scream of a mother sold away from her children. It was the earless god of the concentration camp, its holiest hymn the scream of an atom bomb; the hungry god who stalks the innocent with the flesh of children in its teeth. It was the Deus Ex Machina: the God Out of the Machine. And its presence here meant the end of reason. It could serve only one purpose.

“I command!”

Benzaiten of the Shinto pantheon bowed her head. Her power was the elder, and held no sway over this Aspect. Golden tears streaked her pale cheeks as she looked at me with eyes as empty as those of a rag doll.

“But you’ll destroy the future.”

Nevertheless, she opened her arms and swept me into the folds of her kimono. I tumbled headlong into the Void. But this time I maintained my equilibrium. Bloodlust buoyed me up, binding me with the gravity of its purpose: I was the last god standing, determined to end the divinity game once and for all. I was going to kill my best friend and destroy the God he served.

Or end the world with my last heartbeat.

We came out onto a vast desert. Holiday and his renegades had chosen to wish their God to life in a desolate wasteland. Night was falling, the desert’s colors fading as the last crimson veins of sunlight retreated from the skies. Wrapped within the protective corona of the Deus ex Machina, I felt neither warmth nor cold.

They were standing at the summit of a ridge two football fields’ lengths away. The ridge topped the highest edge of a roughly circular valley like the raised spine of the Earth. Atop the ridge, two figures faced the coming of night, their forms outlined by moonlight. Beyond them, the moon rose, fat and barren, into the darkening sky. Holiday knelt, his arms raised, as if in rapture. At his side, Yuri stood with Thor’s hammer upraised, its head spitting St Elmo’s fire.

They weren’t alone. Below us, on the valley floor seethed a multitude, their shining faces raised in supplication as they awaited the coming of their new God.

They had been drawn from myriad pantheons; supernatural beings infernal and divine littered the stony ground of the valley. I saw the twisted forms of a thousand demons arrayed in every infernal guise ever defined by humankind; a thousand devils, a thousand Beelzebubs crawling, stalking or soaring above the battleground. I saw gods from every known pantheon, African and Tibetan and Chinese, Eskimos and Aboriginals, Asians and Assyrians. Gods and spirits from the Middle-Eastern and Hindu and Celtic and Norwegian and, yes, even the Greeks, thronged on the plain below. I had negotiated with some; others were strangers, their identities lost with the memories of my former divinity. But now their battle Aspects shone with renewed godly force; a golden cavalcade of dispossesed divinities waiting, armed and expectant in the fading light.

And above the gods, soaring in their numberless ranks, flew angels of every Order and denomination. I saw the Zoroastrians; Sraosha, Mithra and Rashna, the Three Guardians of the Soul Bridge of Chinvat. I saw Nakir and Munkar of the Mu’aqquibat, the Inquisitors of the Muslim dead, standing at the ready with quill and scroll and shining scimitar. I saw toothin Cherubim fluttering about the heads of the Muslims, pestering them with their own questions while keeping their eyes cocked toward the darkening West.

I saw Elohim, nearly as bright as the gods themselves, singing hymns I’d never heard before, praising the rising darkness. Above them, closer to the summit, flew the Seraphim, most powerful of the Orders. They sang of the murder of their leader, Seraphiel, a darksong, nearly subterranean in its boundless profundity. And in its strains lurked an outrage that would only be extirpated by revolution; the uprising fomented by the man who stood at the summit of the bowl.

Owen Holiday raised his fists above his head, and a great cheer went up from the horde below. Holiday’s voice rode the winds and rose above even the warsongs of the angels.

“Come, Lord! Your Advent is now! This world has been softened by a just and righteous fear, and they require your guiding might to see them safely into that righteous darkness. Come!”

And the multitudes cried, “Come.”

“We faithful have gathered to break thy word and will upon the backs of an arrogant flock. We! Those demons, feared as the night was feared by ancient men. We have come.”

From the demons rose the roar of a million beasts.

“We come!”

“Those once worshipped as divine, who drew sustenance from the terror which opens the way to you, who would serve as your Generals in the Great War that is to come!”

From the dispossessed gods, a roar that shook the earth.

“We come!”

“Those who served your predecessors in their myriad angelic forms, as messengers…”

From the Archangels, “We come!”

“As protectors…”

From the Cherubim, “We come!”

“As lawgivers…”

From the Thrones, “We come!”

“As enforcers of thy eternal, undying wrath…”

And from the Seraphim, a song, a war cry, “We come! For Holy Holy Holy is the Coming of the Lord!”

There went up another deafening cheer from the gods and demons and angels and powers and principalities.

“It’s coming!”
Benzaiten cried.

I looked to the West, and I saw the moonlight spilling across the sky turn red; the blistering eye-scream of burning blood. I saw the moon turn crimson as a gouged eye, spilling its bloody light across the valley floor and the upturned faces of the gods and demons below.

“Prepare!” Holiday cried. “For hither comes absolution!”

And the beings upon whom that light fell screamed with rapture. Even shielded by the Deus my eardrums throbbed as that cry became a scream of horror.

“It’s killing them!”
Benzaiten screamed.
“The light! It’s killing them!”

The silver light of the Seraphim, too bright to look at under normal circumstances, was consumed by the bloodlight. As its glow fell upon three of them they burst into pearlescent streamers… and vanished.

“Unworthies!” Holiday roared. “Those who wither beneath His appraisal are unworthy of His blessing!”

More Seraphim burst into flame. Some of the most powerful among them tried to fly away and were captured and consumed by glowing red tendrils.

“See?” Holiday crowed. “He judges the faithless! Fear God and give Him the glory!”

There was nowhere to run. Everywhere the red moon’s light fell angels and devils were destroyed. Or transformed. Some were changed into glowing multi-armed forms similar to giant spiders or massive slithering reptiles. I saw Juno of the Roman pantheon transform herself into a hawk a moment before the red tendrils crushed her in their coils. I saw Anansi the West African Trickster assume the shape of a huge lion just as the tentacles struck. In his place a screaming three-headed human infant lay wailing in the dust.

But most of the Seraphim were simply eaten alive as the tendrils grew brighter with each victim. Many of the panicked gods and demons turned to escape, launching into the sky on burning wings, or vanishing from view.

“Stand!” Holiday roared. “Stand or be destroyed as unbelievers!”

“Help them,”
Benzaiten screamed.
“It will kill us all!”

I stepped to the edge of the bowl.

“Holiday!”

The Voice of the Deus Ex Machina turned the heads of the survivors toward me. The gods and angels and demons and powers and principalities looked up at the place where I stood. On the far side of the valley, Yuri and Holiday froze.

And the crimson tendrils stopped.

“Well, the former office-holder stops by for a visit,” Holiday cried. “That’s very Willy Loman of you, Lando. Your alter ego has been rendered obsolete. Didn’t you get the memo?”

Beside him, Yuri’s face devolved into a snarl of such hatred that at first I thought I was looking at someone else.

“Fool!”
he roared.
“You’re wasting precious breath.”
Then he turned to the gods and spirits in the valley below.
“Kill him!”

But the revolutionaries hovered, trapped between the crimson tentacles and the Deus’s shuddering wrath.

“Weak!”
Yuri raved on the hillside.
“Cowards!”

The incarnation of Evil raised the hammer of Thor and sent a blistering fusillade of lightning down among his troops. Some of them evaded the lightning, others were blasted into atoms.

“He means the end of our power! The Rise of the Ape above the Gods!”

Gale force winds swirled around my little peak. The sky filled up with black thunderheads and the earth beneath my feet trembled. Yuri’s hammer summoned a barrage of fire from the heavens. Flaming death fried the air between us. But this time I was prepared. I raised a protective shout from the Deus. Its power caught the flames and held them, stoking their heat with my own until it blazed like a conflagration. Then I flung it back. The firebolt struck the hillside where Yuri stood and cracked it wide open.

Yuri danced across huge slabs of sliding earth, struggling to keep his balance as he careened downhill. He leaped onto a large outcropping of stone, lying prone as the landslide gathered momentum, burying gods and angels, sweeping them out of sight.

“Useless!”
Yuri roared.
“Useless! Useless! Useless!”

The Devil summoned a thunderstorm, filled the valley with wind and thunder and lightning. I lifted my right hand, the Word of his undoing rising to my lips.

Then a bolt of lightning blasted the hillside. The stone platform beneath Yuri’s feet buckled. For a moment, he hung there, supported by nothing more than the roaring wind. Then the entire hill gave way. Yuri dropped the shining hammer, vanishing beneath tons of liquefied dirt and crushed boulders.

“Yuriel!”
Benzaiten shrieked, and vanished.

Yuri had betrayed me. His former incarnation’s great Covenant had been a farce. So why did my heart feel blasted into a thousand pieces?

“It always comes down to this, doesn’t it?”

Holiday stood a few yards away, the crimson moonglow burning in his eyes.

“A single visionary, a lone prophet sent by his God to inform the old god that his day is done.”

I strode forward, spoke a Word of Fire to burn him from my sight. Flame hot enough to melt steel exploded the air around him. Holiday shrugged, and sparks fell from him like burning embers. I raised my right hand, and the skies above us grew thick with moving shapes, not lightning or rain… insects, a Pestilence; every stinging fly and biting flea, every locust, every bee and wasp for miles answered my call and flew to the attack. In seconds, Holiday’s grinning cowboy face vanished beneath a thousand stinging forms.

He laughed. The horseflies and wasps and hornets crawled over his skin and did not bite or sting or harm him in any way. He raised his hands, a living suit of infestation, and the insects lifted above him, swirling around his head. Then they attacked me. The Deus Ex Machina burned many of them to ash, but too many of them got through. They covered me, blocking out the gray sunlight and plunging me into darkness. I was stabbed by a million tiny swords. The pain disrupted my connection to the Deus. Under its crushing weight I fell to one knee. My eyes were stung shut, my throat locked and swelling closed. There were bugs in my mouth, under my eyelids… burrowing beneath my scalp.

Holiday kicked me in the chest, knocked me over onto my back.

“This is just the beginning, Lando. A paradigm shift undreamt of. After all the hard work by your other self and a million other gods before him, after humanity’s long, brave march up from the primordial ooze… fear wins.”

He kicked me again. Something in my side came apart with a wet snap and the buzzing in my ears filled up the world. Blinded and suffocating, I pulled myself toward the edge of the precipice.

“‘Fear is the heart of love.’ You know who said that, Lando? Oh, sorry. You can’t answer me with chiggers in your throat. It was a fella named Ben Gibbard. He’s the lead singer for Death Cab For Cutie, a sweet little indie rock band out of the Pacific Northwest. Ben originally couched that phrase in his song, I’ll Follow You Into The Dark. It was a renunciation of his Catholic upbringing.”

He kicked me again. The insects burrowed deeper into my flesh, stinging harder, their angry buzzing becoming the world.

“But Ben missed the point. Fear should be embraced, Lando. It’s what got us here today.”

He bent and grabbed my hair. Insects crawled up his arm, swarmed around us, caressing him, stinging and biting me. He pulled my head back, forcing me to look him in the eye.

“I am the face of Fear. Look on my works ye mighty and despair. Cause in the end Fear gets the girl, the Golden Fleece and the whole, sad enchilada.”

Then he kicked me in the face. Through one half-blinded eye I saw the assembled host staring up at us. The Pantheons, all the surviving gods and devils and angels ever described by humankind, their shining faces vivid as Greek masks, depicting comedy, tragedy, lust, revenge and terror.

Fear.

They’re waiting to see who wins.

“A new beginning,” Holiday crowed. “But you won’t be here to see it.”

Something Holiday said was rising up in me, filling me up the way the crimson moon filled up the sky.

Fear is what got us here today.

Paradigm shift.

We’ve reached our childhood’s end. We can lie down and die…

Or create the world we want.

Paradigm shift.

And a shifting skein of faces, of people, enemies, family, gods and friends…

We are children playing with the power of Creation.

Paradigm shift.

Faces, the golden God of a world that might have been my home in another life.

Children.

And the Morning People remembered…

Paradigm shift.

I summoned the remnants of the Deus, drew its dying power into myself…

One. Last. Miracle.

I extended my hand over the valley, high over the heads of the assembled hosts where the desperate, frightened faces of the supernaturals stared up at us.

They’re afraid.

Many of them had conspired with Holiday to accomplish my destruction. But they were afraid of him too, afraid of what the Coming represented. It was an opening, a window. I reached… and…

They

Let

Me

In

Through them, I plunge into the river of human consciousness. Through them I am absorbed into the flow of All, allowed entry onto the DNA-encoded information superhighway that defines every god who ever lived. I kick down the unlocked doorways of doubt – doubt can’t help me here – and plunge deeper, past what is known to what is hoped, to what is dreamed and dreaded and adored and hated, falling until I reach the primaevel core of human creativity, linked directly to the collective unconscious; the morphogenetic field; the phenomenon that unites humankind through simultaneously generated ideas and shared cultural symbolisms. It is the sea from which consciousness arises and the river through which it flows. It is the uncharted depths of shared metaphor, the River of Souls: the Eshuum.

There is power here, enough to change the world. It’s intoxicating. I consider hijacking it: I have the powers of a million gods backing me up. I could turn humanity around and make it march to the tune of our choosing for the next thousand years. I could take it all back.

Then I see the Coming.

Up ahead: a great, dark shape nestled among the shadows reserved for mankind’s greatest terrors. Humanity’s newest God hovers at the nexus of thought and deed, the meeting place of dread and action.