No Other Gods (20 page)

             
He dwindled to a dot, still inside his armor, and disappeared. Joining German in the depths of the sun.

             
We headed outsystem, away from heaven and hell, toward cold dark calm empty space. Resting our battered, sore bodies. Thinking about the two we left behind.

             
And falling, one day nearly a week later, into deep s.Leep.

To our fallen comrades. We knew them, we loved them, we’ll remember them.

             
- adapted from a Canadian Army toast to fallen comrades

Slowly, dreamily, I
woke like rising from the warm gentle embraces of a calm tropical sea. The pod hissed and softly clicked, and lights gently blinked. I stretched, yawned, and rolled luxuriously. In the pain, even agony, of endless hours at extreme high boost, I had almost forgotten what it was like to be healthy and strong and well. I felt so good I could almost purr like a kitten.

             
Then I fully awoke and remembered Drago and German. I snapped back to reality and climbed out of the pod. First up, as usual.

             
I padded down the familiar corridor, and entered the hall of feasting. So large, and so empty: so few left now. Slowly companions joined me: Kin, Tonia, Sama, Helo. And Livia, always Livia.

             
After we had limped back to Sunstation in a damaged ship running on our one remaining undamaged power plant, I had spent almost no time with Livia alone. No time for an embrace, no time to talk, as we made good an exit that felt like an escape. And then the long days spent transiting outsystem before falling asleep and waking up here … we spent grieving for our lost, and had no heart for the things that needed to be said. Now as I glanced around the table, and my eyes lingered on Livia’s, I saw that the time would soon come.

             
“We are home.” Predictably, it was Livia who spoke first, smiling at each of us around the table.

             
That smile said many things. It was a welcome, and a warm welcome, back home. A return to the familiar, and, if not safe, at least somewhat predictable, comfortable. But the smile was tempered by a grief still raw, too near to fully comprehend, and by an awareness of further danger in the future. Most of all, though, it was a smile of togetherness. We were a team, a group, a tribe. We were one, and we belonged, and Livia was reminding us of that. In this way we could endure anything.

             
We simultaneously raised glasses the servitors had brought and filled, lifted them in silent memorial to our fallen, and then fell to our meals. We ate, not in silence, but in quiet, with a few stories and some gentle laughs. It was the first time we had eaten together in weeks, and we enjoyed it. But there was an edge to our dining: Hermes would soon appear, and we would be given fresh instructions. I prepared myself for both flattery and bad news: a new mission, even more dangerous than the last.

             
Soon enough he appeared, playing the full god act with rippling quicksilver, fog, deep thudding sound, and little bolts of lightning. Even for just the six of us. Hermes appeared in the air, double life-size, and smiled — a sly smile, I thought, the insider’s smile of someone who knows something that others do not. 

             
“Welcome home, warriors of the gods. You have done well. And yet, there is more to be done. But time and space is safe for the moment, and that is thanks to you saving the solar system. Indeed, the rebels’ longtime goal was to cause our sun to explode in a massive nova, ending all human existence.”

             
I thought that highly unlikely — and I noted his use of the word “our” — but did not change my expression. Head slightly down, almost bowed, expression respectful. Or perhaps even empty.

             
“You have earned a rest. And you will get it. But first there is another urgent mission, another attempt to wrench history from what it has been, what it ought to be, and what it will be again.”

             
I stirred and attracted Hermes’ attention.

             
“Yes, Geno?”

             
“My lord, you control time and space. You can put us anywhere, and anywhen. Surely we can take a week to rest, recuperate, regenerate?” I made sure to be very respectful in my tone and demeanor.

             
Hermes smiled. I couldn’t help but think, condescendingly.

             
“Theoretically yes, Geno. Practically speaking, what if you ceased to exist in the interim? Not because you were killed or incapacitated, but simply because you had never existed in the first place?”

             
I raised my eyebrows.

             
“You see the challenge. We are fighting against those with powers approaching — not equal! — but approaching our own. And there is little time for dalliance.”

             
He glanced at Livia as he spoke, and I wondered if his words carried more than they ought. But he continued.

             
“Four days. Rest. Relax. Train. And be ready!”

             
Then with appropriate pyrotechnics he disappeared from our view, and we sat in silence and continued our meals.

Later that night I debriefed with Livia.

             
“I think all the others are beginning to realize that we are tools in the hands of the gods, running from battle to war, from danger to death. And that there is no end here but
the
end. Death, and no waking up.”

             
I was bitter and my spirits were low. Livia reached out her hand, and touched my face. Lifted up my chin, and looked into my eyes.

             
“But we will beat them at their own game,” she said. “I
do
remember.”

             
“I remember a city,” Livia said. “I remember a tower. I remember a life. And I do not believe that we were always warriors, always fighting. Once we were gods. Once we were like them.”

             
That night we spoke long and deep about what each of us remembered, and what we thought it meant. In some ways Livia’s recollected memories matched mine; in other ways they differed. But most did not contradict, and together we built up a shared understanding of our world before the endless now of the hall. Truthfully, it was tattered and sketchy, and worse, uncertain on many particulars.

             
But it was something. And it was more than either of us had on our own.

             
We remembered the city, and Livia remembered actually living in the city — a kind of a paradise, a built utopia. A magical place where nothing went wrong, no-one did dirty or hard labor, and all that one could want or need was available in abundance. But, Livia remembered, the city and its inhabitants came to face an existential threat of some kind, perhaps a division or civil war. I remembered the city too, but I remembered long times filled with hard, difficult work. No sweat labor and no fighting, but scientific and engineering work, in my rooms in the glass tower at the center of the city. I remembered days and nights filled with theories and experiments, prototypes and failures.

             
“Perhaps the two are related,” I said to Livia. “Perhaps the city, supposedly so magical, wonderful, and peaceful was threatened by an enemy, outside or in. And perhaps I was working on an effort to protect it.”

             
Who the enemy was, however, and exactly what each of us did in response, we could not answer. I had a feeling, however, that the very place we were now residing in was one of the artifacts I had created in my labors. And I had a ghost of a memory that there was a place we could go for more answers.

             
“I’m convinced, Livia, that there is an engineering or mechanical level somewhere attached to this hall. Perhaps even a control center. If it exists, we have to find it. The key to everything must be there.”

             
I pored through my memories, struggling, pushing myself to know what I did not remember, to relearn. If I had been an engineer or scientist of a sort, back in the city, and if I had been involved in the planning and creation of the project in which I was now completely embedded, there must be some fragment of memory about this place. Something of its design and construction. Or, so I told myself. If so, however, long hours did not reveal it to me. Eventually we called it a night and returned to our varipods.

             
The next morning, I awoke with the answer.

             
Naturally, I could do nothing with it immediately. First we ate, then trained for hours on ancient and medieval weapons. All of us, I felt, were sufficiently up to speed on modern weapons, thanks to our last mission. But swordfighting and archery? You lost those reflexes quickly. So it was only in the middle hours of the afternoon, after training, after showering, and after another meal together, that I disbanded the group for some personal R&R time. And finally was able to talk to Livia.

             
“I know,” I told her as soon as all the others had disappeared to s.Leep and other diversions. “I know where the control center is.”

             
“What?” Livia replied. “Where is it? And how did you remember?”

             
“Last night when we were talking and thinking, it wasn’t coming to me. There was nothing there, and I felt like I was trying to solve a puzzle with no pieces. But somehow during the night, in my pod, I remembered. And in the morning I knew.”

             
“The home we know here has two unequal quadrants, separated by the hall of feasting. On the one side, we have our pods and sleepchambers. On the other, we have the armories, training rooms, terrain tactics fields, sims, and shooting ranges. The living space is large, designed for perhaps a thousand people, as we originally had, but the training rooms and ranges and tactics fields dwarf them, probably by a factor of a thousand to one. We needed all that space for training and tactics and actual learning in arctic, tropical, rainforest, steppe conditions. You name the terrain; we’ve trained in it.”

             
“All this I know, but you said you remembered something else.” Livia was getting impatient.

             
“What I remembered,” I said, rushing along,” is that the space we know is only half of this entire place — the south wing. There’s another section entirely, the north wing … and it is a mirror image of these two quadrants. One huge, for engineering and mechanical … and one small, for control, oversight, and operations planning. They all connect in the hall of feasting.”

             
I drew a quick sketch for us on a tablet. Huge space for training at bottom left, connected at its top right corner to the bottom left corner of the hall of feasting. Which in turn connected at its bottom right corner to the sleeping spaces.

             
“This is what we know, and here is where we live, when not on mission.”

             
Then I drew a mirror image of the bottom part of the table on top: huge engineering and mechanical section off the top right of the hall; small command and control center off the top left.

             
“Those are the sections that I remembered, somehow, in the middle of the night. I remembered thinking they looked like a non-symmetrical flower, wondering idly what it should smell like, and feeling silly about the whole thing. Maybe that’s what tied the memory in.”

             
“This is great, G,” Livia said as she looked over the sketch. “But how do we get into the other sections?”

             
“That’s the part I don’t remember,” I said with a grimace.

             
Livia and I went to the hall, checking to ensure that no one else was around. We had decided not to share our memories with all the others — thinking it too strange, too odd, and too potentially disruptive, especially with no proof. There was no way the gods would appreciate us meddling in their business and purposes, and the more who knew that all might not be quite as it seemed, the greater chance of being discovered and punished, in some way.

             
We preferred not to think how.

             
The hall of feasting was a fairly simple room. Think long rectangle, floor paved with large grey flagstones, ceiling high and arched, with thick wooden beams for rafters hung with lamps that looked like dancing flames but did not smoke and never burned out. Walls of rough-hewn wood between stone pillars, long trestle tables at the back and sides, smaller, round tables near the front and middle. A raised dais at the front where Hermes appeared. And four portals that we knew of.

             
At the back, the side opposite the dais, two large entrances: one from the sleeping pods, one from the training rooms. Each entrance was at the corner of the room, where the corner would have existed if the walls continued and met. This was the side that we now knew to be the south side. Between them, in the middle, access to the privies. And, halfway to the dais on the right-hand side, a half-door through which mechanical servitors came bringing food and drink, and left bearing dishes and waste.

             
“If the design at the north end of the hall was the same as the south, entrances to the mechanical/engineering and control quadrants would be at the front corners on either side of the dais,” I mused.

             
We strolled up to the front and tried not to look ridiculous as we examined unbroken walls and unsuspecting corners for evidence of hidden openings, knocking on the wood and stone, listening for any hollow sounds. Nothing looked or sounded the least bit suspicious, but whether that was due to the gods’ skill at concealment, our ineptitude at discovery, or the simple fact that there were no concealed entrances, we could not tell.

             
Just as we were strolling back down the hall, defeated, the half-door to the kitchen opened, and a servitor popped out, carrying some tidbits of food and drink. Servitors were basically boxes on wheels, about waist-high, with flat surfaces for carrying trays, and appendages (arms?) like thick metal mesh. They said nothing and did nothing but deliver food and take away remains. Even when knocked over (I had seen it a few times when the hall was full, after long, drink-filled feasts), they did not respond. They simply pushed themselves upright with their long extensible arms, whirred their wheels, and returned through the half-door.

             
Livia and I picked a few items off the servitor, putting them on a convenient table, and it left. Not knowing quite what I was doing or why, I followed. I had always felt an odd attachment to the awkward-looking servitors. Some kind of parental pride, almost, though I had no idea why. Whenever they were knocked around, something tugged at my heart. Now the servitor reached the half-door, and it opened with a hiss.

             
This door was unlike the door to the privies, which swung open, or the entrances to the hall from the sleeping and training areas, which were just wide open portals. Recessed into the wall, this door was metal and square: only about a meter and a half in both height and width. Instead of swinging out or in, it opened upwards — pulled on a track of some sort, I supposed. The servitor passed through, and I caught a glimpse of an immense kitchen: ovens, tables, and machines and tools for food preparation. Then the door whisked back down; I was staring at a smooth metal surface.

             
“You think the entrance might be in there?” Livia said.

             
“Somehow, I do,” I answered.

             
I could not articulate why or how, but somehow I knew the key to our prison was inside that kitchen. And somehow we had to get inside that room and find it. But not tonight.

             
The next day was filled with training. After a brief morning meal we attacked each other in the training rooms to the point of bloodshed and beyond. Tonia and Helo were seriously injured, and had to be carried back to their varipods for healing. Both came back with fire in their belly a few hours later, angry at being bested, and we continued long into the evening.

             
Swords, spears, arrows. Melee tactics, coordinated charges, and refreshers on fighting from horseback. Mongol warriors of medieval times were generally considered the best mounted fighting forces in history, and I wanted all my people to be superior to them in horse handling, firing on the gallop, and sword-fighting from the saddle. Towards the end of the evening we constructed a small ballista: I wanted to be ready and able to make the most of available materials and make our own higher powered weapons when and where possible.

             
That night, during a long feast filled with meat and mead and all good things we desired, I heard Hermes’ voice in my ears. Startled, I turned and looked at my companions. They all continued without pause; it seemed I was the only one.

             
“Be ready, Geno. We do not have much more time.”

             
That was all. I took it to be a bad sign in the war that the gods must be waging, and was glad we had trained hard this day. I warned my companions that we may not have two more days of training, and retired for the night.

             
But I did not go to my pod, and I did not go to sleep. After the feasting had died down and all had left the great, empty, echoing hall, I returned. I walked in, sat at a table near the vertically sliding kitchen door, and waited. Shortly, the door hissed open, and I jumped into action. The servitor barely made it out, and I was sliding past, under the wall, and into the room beyond. The door snicked down, and I was in a place I had never been before.

             
Or perhaps I had: there was something vaguely familiar about the kitchen.

             
It was a long rectangle stretching away from the great hall. Where the hall was all rough-hewn natural wood and stone, the kitchen was all steel and glass: modern, shiny surfaces. Easily cleanable, a thought rose from the back of my head. Along the right side was a long row of servitors, backed into niches in the wall and stacked two high. They were dark and silent, except for a small row of pulsing lights on their left top corners. On the left were ovens and stoves of some sort, I supposed, and down the middle were long tables with sinks and faucets. Food preparation space, I presumed.