Authors: Nisi Shawl
“No doubt these facts had a bearing on the defeat of the drive for our extermination, midam.” She nodded, eyes and hands suddenly intent upon disentangling some snarl in my hair. I continued my conjectures silently for a moment as we skimmed over the still sea.
I myself could see the advantages of maintaining some sort of gene pool. I asked her whether there were any mortals who had been made into gods. I had in mind those who had been “taken up” before me, and of whom I had never heard or seen anything during my time with the gods.
She answered me with irritating equivocation. “Yes. Well, no, not really, although in a way, yes.” I begged saucily for her to be more explicit.
“You know how we grow ourselves again, after we are dead?” I did. “Well, sometimes that is done with mortal flesh, and we turn them into a god that way.” I thought it a rather crooked path to immortality, but I could not disapprove of it when I reflected upon the sort of god that Obelk the rat-trader would make.
I thought again of the foodholes and those who held command over them when I went for the first time to one of Nyglu’s mudrooms. At all his homes he had these moist, dark retreats.
While reviewing here what he had written (more material was available for my scrutiny now that Amma had made the mortal origins of the gods explicit), I asked him his opinion of Kimp Sinn.
He seemed unsure at first of how to answer. “It works well enough, I think,” he equivocated, paddling his webbed feet in a dark pond.
“Well enough at what?” I asked impatiently. I sat cross-legged atop a table of long stone slabs, the driest spot I could find. “What is this city of the gods supposed to
do?”
“It—you see, it provides a goal for the ambitious, and even for the less motivated an example—” he broke off and glanced up at me shyly “—of the beauty of our relationship.”
“Our
relationship?” I asked incredulously. We spoke Modal Society, but business still formed the main basis of our intercourse, as far as I was concerned.
“I speak generally, of course,” Nyglu hastened to assure me. “Of the relationship between mortals and the gods, the gentle mentoring, the poignant reminder of our slower yet always inevitable decline, experienced in miniature before our eyes by your own people.”
“Oh.” From the divine vantage, all our petty strivings, Obelk’s and my mother’s and those of me myself must look equally vain, foolish and pointless, and harmless on the whole. “How old are you, Nyglu?” Another of my tactless questions, with a wholly unexpected answer.
Nyglu flopped down on his knees before me. “What matters the difference in our years, charming child? My love for you is ageless.”
I felt lost. Was this a scene from some play in my repertoire? My lines, what were they? Cautiously, I extended my hands. It took a moment for the god to look up from his submissive pose. Then he seized my palms in his slippery grip and touched them several times with his sticky tongue. I withdrew quickly, disguising my disgust.
“Amma,” I managed to pant out in my fright and confusion. “She must not discover us.” And I felt this to be true, no mere excuse for separating myself from him.
“Oh, sweetness, surely not,” he said, his voice sad with longing at the loss of contact. “I can conceal our involvement from her. Trust me. Trust in my powers. Oh, Shiomah, we could make each other so happy.” I didn’t think so. But I let him touch me, just a little. Just a little more.
It was not too long after this that I progressed to the point where Amma felt I was of some use to her in her dramas. I played first for her the role of Juusli, a young god who rebels against the ennui of immortality by refusing to behave in a socially responsible manner. Among Juusli’s foibles was a refusal to allow her body to age into puberty. The piece was years in the making, so Amma had my growth temporarily halted.
Weyando came back to play the part of Jez, a more conventionally minded contemporary of Juusli’s. No mention was made of the way that I had provoked Lizore’s speculative outburst, but he did not bring his eggson’s eggwife’s daughter to play with me again.
The part of Jez’s spouse, whom Juusli spends much of the piece trying to seduce, was filled by a beautiful bioserv that Amma referred to as a dryad. Amma spent much time with this pale and lovely creature, giving it detailed instructions covering every nuance of its role. The dryad would try to follow her directions exactly, and if the results were not desirable, Amma would once more go over the entire action, changing it if necessary.
Sometimes I believed that the dryad performed poorly on purpose, simply to deprive me of my mistress’s time. Professional pride kept me from following its example.
We spun around the globe, recording different parts of the story in different areas: ruins, deserts, the homes of friends, jungles, lakes, glaciers…. I saw that the sea
was
large, that mortals counted for nothing against the world’s immensity. And that though outnumbered six-hundred-to-one, the divine five thousand leave more of a mark upon the earth than the mortal three million, because they are more able to work on the world’s scale.
There was a valley along a dead, dry river. All soil had been stripped from the land by some bored deity, and the bedrock had then been chiseled into tunnels and spires, a maze for the wind. Low, shuddering groans and high sounds that yearned to become music played around us there. Haunting murmurs and keening whistles accompanied every scene. It was easy to portray Juusli’s essential loneliness in this land that mourned for itself.
Once I looked up from the action of one of these scenes and saw to my surprise that tears fell from Amma’s eyes. When she signalled an end to the session, I followed her to the other edge of the plateau we worked upon. As we walked she seemed oblivious to me, but reaching the drop-off she stopped and called me to her.
Her tears left starry trails on her indigo skin, shining like her hyalescent hair. “Your performance is quite moving, Shiomah,” she told me in a low, steady voice. “I am proud.” So was I, for the scene just completed had been rather difficult. Juusli was struggling with the ghosts of her dead selves as they urged her to fling herself to another death. The difficulty lay in creating the physical impression of resistance while wrestling with the air. Departing from her usual procedure, Amma had chosen to screen-animate these devils after the recording, rather than manufacture bioservs which would only be demolished during their plunge into the canyon below. I was glad to have met this challenge so well, but I didn’t think Amma cried for joy in my competence. I waited and hoped for an explanation.
Instead she asked, “If I were to assure you, Shiomah, that you would be given immortality if only you jumped over the edge of this plateau, would you do it?”
I thought of my mother, tossed high into the air, dead, no doubt, before she hit the ground. “No.” I paused, weighing my position. “Of course I would have to, if you commanded me to, wouldn’t I?”
“But you have already answered my question,” she stated, dismissing mine. “Here is another. If I asked you to throw me down there, would you?” I started to speak, but she continued. “If I did not tell you to, but asked, with no authority.”
I could not picture autocratic, arbitrary Amma with no authority, though I tried. “What would become of me, if I did?” I inquired.
My mistress laughed, all melancholy suddenly gone from her manner. “You funny thing! So selfish, so practical. Never mind. I will not ask you to kill me, for you would surely find it an annoying task.” Taking my hand, she returned with me to the others.
A later sequence was recorded on Nyglu’s estate. Before his current obsession took hold of him, Nyglu had been fascinated with the order of amphibians, as his personal appearance showed. Perhaps this is why mortals associated him with rivers, and with fresh water in general. He certainly associated himself with it. Pools, bogs, swamps, and wet places of all sorts made up the bulk of his “grounds.” When we visited he still took great pride in showing the estate to his visitors, pointing out the particular species he had reconstructed from his studies. Some were immense and ugly, others small and subtle, effacing themselves into the dark, decaying backdrop.
There were also experiments, whims come to life. My favorites were the triphibians, a sort of winged salamander. Mottled scarlet and sky blue, one came and perched briefly on my arm then skimmed away. Seeing my delight, Nyglu hatched three eggs for me, and I spent my free time feeding and observing the larvae. Soon I had tame triphibians of my own, but I had to leave them behind when we went to the moon. Nyglu promised that they would be mine again when we returned.
The dryad was packed away in her trunk, and we coptered off to meet Amma’s sky shuttle. Weyando stayed behind; his character, Jez, didn’t appear in the final scenes. As we floated away from the world, its immensity was belittled.
We spent a long time in orbit because of a hitch in the preparations for our landing. An ancient resort on the moon’s surface was to have been restored to habitability without destroying the period flavor of the setting. Some too authentic material used in the repairs had ruptured and released most of the complex’s air. The old oxygen machines below the surface had long since been dismantled, and regular flights to and from Earth had stopped decades ago, at the end of the last space craze. It was a couple of days before more air was brought up. Trouble arose, due, in part, to our long confinement on board the shuttle.
In preparing me for the profession she had chosen for me, that of acting roles in her creations, Amma had given me access to all sorts of old cubes and reels. After I used up all the sleep tapes, she even taught me to read; not pictos like mortal writing, but words composed of letters, like these. While examining some written antiquities during the delay, I learned with real shock that the Earth had once been almost literally covered with mortals.
I ran to Amma in her cabin, craved to see her, was quickly admitted. What atrocity, I demanded of my mistress, had reduced the mortal population fifty-thousand-fold? As I asked this, I actually clutched Amma’s elbow to stop her from turning away from me. She froze.
I whipped my hand away, startled at what I had just done. I had tried to use force to press my will upon a divinity.
But when she again faced me, she was smiling. Sadly. As if she had expected this to happen, while at the same time hoping that it never would. As though I had pleased and pained her both, at once. “I will answer you, Shiomah,” she said, “but first I am going to show you something. Something I ought to have shown you long ago.” She extended her left hand.
Not for the first time I noticed that the sides of her fingers and the edges of her palm were lined with numerous shining dots. “Activation of one of these circuits,” she told me, “will wipe out a selected memory in your brain. I have chosen your mother’s name.” She let this sink in, then went on.
“Activation of a second will deprive you of the use of the centers of conscious volition. And the third,” she promised, “will prevent the operation of your autonomic systems. Do you understand me?”
I nodded. “Yes, midam.”
“Now. There was no disaster, no epidemic, no mass murder of mortals. The current population, my dear, is a result of time and care and thoughtful planning.” She made gestures with her hands like a prince in a story, dispensing coins to a crowd. “Birth-control, ample food,
lebensraum
—the ancient fifty billion never had it so good.” I still had a lot to learn.
It was difficult after the revelation of these threats to reassume the role of Juusli, a character whose last motivation is fear. With relief I removed my pressure suit in the simulated vacuum of the closing act, the heroine succumbing to the hallucinatory call of dust sirens. It was an ambiguous ending, with Juusli unharmed, drifting away with the sirens (specially made bioservs, of course), leaving a sparkling trail of palpable looking dust.
When we returned to Earth, Amma let me age again, though more slowly than mortals are accustomed to do. She used me in other, smaller works, or in the social games she played with the other gods. Sometimes she devoted her enormous energies to my training, sometimes she seemed merely to relax and enjoy my company. Her attentions were far from constant. I would be ignored for months, a year at a time, then taken up again without, apparently, a beat skipped.
One afternoon, when I had been with her nearly fifteen years, she fancied she would make love with me. My body was that of a fourteen-year-old, an awkward, pudgy beauty, but she was attracted. How can the gods ever tire of such pleasure?
In time our desire was heightened by a burgeoning love. My adoration was natural, inevitable even. I think I had only been waiting to release it until I received some sign from her.
As to why she loved me I can only say that not even mortal passions are easily subjected to analysis. Amma’s love was fierce—and ridiculous, on the face of it. I still had pimples, at times. My nose was too long. I thought perhaps she confused me with Juusli, the first character she had created for me.
No deity questioned Amma’s absorption with me. Such fascinations were not unheard of. Sometimes the infatuated god went as far as actually regrowing the mortal undeified, merely in faithful reduplication of the beloved original.
Those foolish gods. They should have known that this would not be enough for Amma.