Last God Standing (26 page)

“LC you’re a very sick man!” Chapman cried. “You’ve got to come back inside!”

“Chet!”

“Do not fear, Lando Cooper,” Chenzira said. “You will yet be free.”

But the old man’s voice was different, deeper, more resonant. It was a voice that LC had heard before.

“You’ve caused me a great deal of trouble,” Chenzira said in that other voice. “I only hope I’m not too late.”

Chenzira gripped the steering wheel. The little black sedan rumbled, lurched once, then began to rise off the ground. Shouts and screams from the reporters filled the interior of the scarab, reporters and moths igniting a storm of flashbulbs even as they tumbled off the ends of the car.

“We’re flying!” Herbert-Hasani screamed. “This is entirely massive!”

Then the window behind his head exploded. Herbert-Hasani slumped forward across Lando’s lap in a hail of glass.

“Hasa!”

Outside, in the scuffle between the security wardens and the reporters, the burly warden fired again, the shot striking sparks from the undercarriage of the scarab. Then the burly warden was tackled to the ground by several police officers.

“Hasa!” Lando cried. “Hasa!”

Herbert-Hasani lay gasping in his lap, a slow pulse of blood running over his hands. As the little black sportster rose up, up above the street lamps, rising higher until it hovered over the hospital, Lando could see the streets of House of Angels arrayed below him, the mountains in the distance, the gleaming towers and minarets of the downtown business center in the distant East.

“Help him,” Lando cried. “Take us down! Take us back to the hospital!”

“It’s too late for that, Lando,” the being who was and was not Chenzira Nkuku said. “There are more important matters to attend.”

“He’s dying! You can do all this… help him!”

The ancient voice sighed. “You have forgotten much about your former life. You have been translated. Reinterpreted. Excised, revised and inserted into someone else’s continuity.”

Lando looked up from the boy’s face, his eyes scanning the green hills far beneath the scarab. The little car was soaring toward the low foothills of a vast mountain range.

“I… I don’t understand.”

“Ah yes. Yet you haven’t grasped the whole story, and now you find yourself translated into my narrative. This will not do, my ancient understudy.”

A sick feeling pummeled Lando’s gut. The world inside the flying scarab seemed to recede from him, leaving him grasping at mysteries. It seemed to him that he might, by an act of will, reach out, grasp the fabric of that ebbing reality and pull it back to reveal… what?

My ancient understudy.

He had heard that name, spoken by the same sonorous voice, at another time, in another place.

“Your perceptions are acute, attuned to the timbre of a music only a select few may hear. Yes, Lando Cooper, we’ve met before.”

“Who are you?”

Chenzira’s mysterious patron laughed; a full-throated humor that filled the interior of the scarab like a rushing wind.

“Why, the Almighty, of course.”

The black scarab flew toward the mountains.

“You see, Lando Cooper…
I’m God.”

The scarab settled down in a field of golden flowers. Lando could hear music, the pounding of drums, a sizzling rattle like the temblor of a tambourine, a dried gourd filled with jumping beans. The music was emanating from the scarab’s radio.

Chenzira threw the scarab into “Rest”. Then he turned to Lando, beaming as he lifted a camera and began snapping pictures.

“I’m afraid when I wake up this will all feel like a dream!”

Flash

“Gotta engrave the moment, y’know? In the old brainbox!”

Flash

Lando winced. The camera flashes sent sunspots cascading along his optic nerves to burst inside his brain.

“At least when I’m awake I’ll know…”

Flash

“…know that I really was Chosen!”

Lando squinted against the strobing light. Herbert-Hasani lay with his head in his lap. He appeared to be sleeping, but he was still too pale. And Lando’s thighs were damp with blood.

From the radio, the strange music grew louder. A bright flicker of motion outside the scarab drew his focus out the passenger window. Above them in the distance, that flicker grew brighter and drew closer; a golden shimmering, dropping out of the blue sky.

“Oh my Lord!” Chenzira cried, aiming the camera at the shimmering distortion. “Please… oh, please let me know thy grace for all the days of my life!”

Flash

“Please, Lord! Oh please let me…”

Then the front seat of the scarab was empty. Chenzira was gone. But the glowing manshape was standing a few yards away.

“Come out, usurper. The time of reckoning is at hand.”

Gently, Lando laid Herbert-Hasani’s head on the leather seat of the scarab. Then he opened the door and stepped out into the field. For as far as he could see in all directions, the yellow flowers dipped and waved in a breeze he could hear but not feel. The music was all around him.

“It’s the flowers. The music. It’s coming from the flowers.”

“The music
is
the flowers,”
the manshape hummed.
“And a lot more besides. Come closer.”

Lando stepped closer to the glowing form. The manshaped glow was solidifying, gaining mass and dimension. And it was clearly nothing human.

“Most mortals would be trembling in fear. Yet there you stand, no groveling, no begging for my infinite mercy. Although, in your case, such humiliation would be completely deserved. Yet you seem distinctly unterrified. Do you find that odd?”

“I’m afraid for my son.”

“Yes?”

The glow was lessening now, a darker shape emerging from the nimbus of golden light. Lando could make out a figure, tall, broad-shouldered, muscular and inhumanly powerful.

“I feel like… it’s crazy…”

“‘Crazy’ is relative. Like Time and Space. Einstein was right about that much at least. Try me.”

“You said that we’ve met before…”

“Of course. You stole my day job.”

The tallest man Lando had ever seen stepped out of the golden light. His skin was the color of red clay and cinnamon, his head shaved, save for a single black braid which hung from the top of his skull, plaited with gold and reaching nearly to the middle of his back. He wore a lightweight tunic the color of the setting sun. His raiment left his arms and legs bare save for golden straps which wound around his muscular biceps and calves. Golden sandals adorned his feet, and his eyes shone the white-crimson-orange of fast running lava.

“Do you know me?”

“No.”

“You’ve screwed things up for all of us, kid.”

Lando turned, bent, reached into the scarab’s passenger compartment and grabbed Herbert-Hasani from where he lay on the back seat.

“Help him. Help my son.”

The sun-giant frowned.
“But you don’t have a son.”

“He was shot helping me get out of that hospital. You’ve got to help him.”

“You love the boy, do you?”

And Lando, caught up in the life of LC Cooper, looked down at the unconscious child in his arms, and found that he did love the boy. It felt as if he had known the young stranger with his father’s face all his life. He remembered a thousand bedtimes, reading together, arguing, lamenting the times he’d punished him. Even though these things had never happened to him, he remembered them.

“Yes. I love him.”

“And would you die for him? Would you lay down your life for this child you barely know?”

“I can’t die here. I don’t belong. I’m in someone else’s story.”

“I know the feeling.”

The sun-giant began to pace among the golden flowers. Some of them were tall enough to reach his chin: huge amber sunflowers, their petals as large as dinner plates, touching them, craning his great neck to smell their fragrance.

“Beautiful, aren’t they? I grew them myself, well this entire world really, after my banishment. After an epoch in the void one finds boredom a constant companion. By the time I arrived, I was itching to stretch forth my hand and Create something. Unfortunately, this world already had thousands of its own gods. After your Ascension I was little more than a shadow of my former self. It took a thousand years to undermine the local dominant godforms. Another thousand to recruit sympathetic survivors. Renaming them was the worst part. The new ‘Isis’ was nothing like my actual sister/wife, back on
our
Earth. She’s truculent and more than a little angry after I betrayed and slaughtered most of her family.

“The mortals here cast me as their Dark Lord for centuries. I encouraged this of course, I was trying to recreate Home, was I not? Set, Loki, Lucifer… I provided the names, and the local humans rewarded me with their darkest powers. Until the day they woke up and found themselves worshipping me as their ‘Creator God’. I tell you…
that
was no easy trick. At times I considered plunging into the sun and never coming out.”

The sun-giant frowned. With one hand he plucked one of the giant yellow flowers and began to pick its petals. As each petal fell to the earth, Lando heard a single piercing note rise, and then fade from the great music that filled the air.

“But I had the memories driving me on, did I not? Such glories back home, such
power. I wasn’t about to let a few thousand alien pantheons stop me from reforging a new Heliopolis: a Heaven to die for. If you’ll excuse the expression.”

The sun-giant’s crimson gaze rested upon Lando, where he stood holding Herbert-Hasani.

“Well I’ve given enough clues; even you should be able to guess my identity by now. Have you?”

“Amon-Ra,” Lando said. “Sun God, Lord of the Egyptian Pantheon.”

The sun-giant stepped out from behind the towering sunflowers and bowed.

“You win the chariot ride. But I see you still have no idea
why
you know me. I marvel at your former self’s commitment. Most gods are as fickle as the mortals who worship them.”

“Help my son, Ra. Please.”

“Ah,”
Amon-Ra sighed. Golden tendrils streamed up from his eyes. The brightness of the tendrils light shot lances of pain into Lando’s eyes and set his mind alight with echoes.

“I’ve waited five thousand years for the chance to get you onto my territory. Now, you grovel before me, powerless and begging for my favor.”

The sun god’s eyes shone, changing from crimson to bright amber.

“Do you remember our battle? How you banished me and my pantheon? What Powers we were! Beautiful Isis! Grim Osiris! Our worshippers built a vast empire in our names. What glories we wrought on Earth and Heliopolis! Until the Romans came, with their rutting Greek titanspawn. But Zeus and his crowd couldn’t maintain the
status quo
for themselves, much less resist what came next: you and your Hebrews!”

“I’m sorry,” Lando said. “I can’t remember.”

Herbert-Hasani began to tremble. A runner of fresh blood trickled from his lips and pattered into the soil at Lando’s feet.

“Help him! Please!”

Amon-Ra smirked.
“Once more my dignity is assaulted in order to engender progress. Ah well.”

The sun god’s eyes took fire, glowing with a flame so bright Lando felt their heat crisp his eyebrows. That power enveloped Herbert-Hasani in its corona as the smell of Spring grew overpowering, and the yellow flowers’ strange music filled the air.

“I’m OK.”

When Lando opened his eyes, Herbert-Hasani was standing in front of him. Smiling, he extended his right fist and opened his hand: a small, copper-colored slug lay flattened in the center of his palm.

“It’s the bullet. It hit my skull, traveled around and lodged under my cheekbone. Ra took it out. Massive, huh?”

“Yeah,” Lando said, his vision swimming. “That’s totally massive.”

“Ra’s not really angry anymore. He likes it here. He just likes to hear himself talk. He showed me other stuff too. Like what really happened to you. Want to hear?”

“Yes,” Lando laughed. “Yes, please.”

“Well, back in your world some people tried to kill you. They want a war, and you’re the first cause… first causuality…”

“First casualty.”

“Yeah. But instead of dying, you turned up here. You’re in a parallel universe, one that’s similar to yours but different in some ways. Here… you’re my dad. But here already has a guy like you. Well, almost like you. My dad’s really smart, but you talk like you haven’t been speaking Ctick that long. My real dad had this brain tumor? He did all kinds of treatments, but none of ’em worked. But Doctor Aziz said he could take the tumor out. My dad was real happy. He and my mom don’t like each other so much, because my dad went to a lot of fairs with different women. Anyway, he thought Doctor Aziz would fix him, but he… he died!”

Lando took the boy in his arms, and held him until his weeping eased. “It’s OK, Hasa. I understand.”

“But I’m afraid! You’ll go back. But what if my dad… what if it’s too late for him?”

Lando wiped the boy’s tears away with his thumb.

“What do you want, Ra?”

The Creator God frowned. Then he began to examine the tallest of the yellow flowers.

“I was banished, defeated by the despised God of Abraham. Fleeing through the void, leaping from sun to sun as I gnawed the bone of my humiliation. Yahweh was vicious in his overthrow of my pantheon: the plagues, bloodying the Nile… I would have called the author of those catastrophes merely scrupulous until the wholesale slaughter of Egypt’s Firstborn. After
that, drowning her armies was overstating the point. I spent the first thousand years dreaming of my vengeance.

“But as time went by I grew weary of empty rage. In truth, the universe was open to me. As a star god I could travel on streams of photons, harnessing the gravity of one solar system to slingshot me into another, and another, out across the stars, as I streaked toward galactic center. Along the way I observed such wonders…”

Amon-Ra raised his eyes, his golden gaze sweeping across the heavens.

“When I drew near the black
hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy,
I allowed its gravity to pull me in, past worlds without number, as I was swept toward the end of my long journey. Sometimes I listened in on the thoughts of the intelligent races inhabiting those worlds. Some of them were human, others vastly different. Some were primitive; others were eons ahead of Earth’s people. Many of these were nearly godlike themselves. They had survived catastrophe and war long enough to build their civilizations up from the mud and out to the stars.

“A few of those great races sent out representatives to greet me; beings of such complexity, such
subtlety. To them I was a primitive.
Me! Amon-Ra, the God Who Sees All! Back home, I could stride the world in a shape of my choosing, or soar the skies as my avatar, the Divine Hawk. I could strike down my enemies with a thought. But out there, the glow of my power was that of a firefly surrounded by sympathetic suns. One by one, they returned to their peoples, leaving the primitive little god to travel on his way.

“I learned something on my journey to the black
hole; a lesson that humbled even an apex All-Father like me: the path to true divinity lies not with gods, but with those who
define
them. Your triumph over my pantheon is the perfect illustration of Darwin’s supposition, natural selection being the rule of thumb even for the gods. It’s why the Romans overcame the Greeks, why the Hebrews triumphed over the Egyptians. And why ultimately, Yahweh’s adversary must triumph over him.

“As I tumbled into the black
hole’s embrace, I was chastened for my delusions of grandeur. I vowed upon the soul of my departed mother,
Nut
–
whatever afterlife I found myself in, I would make it better than the one I’d lived. I awoke to find myself in this reality, this world so similar to the world we left behind. Mother Nut had answered my prayers: I was to be given a second chance. I would build a new dynasty, one to aid humanity in finding its own way down the long path to divinity.

“It was grueling labor, implanting my designed religions, assassinating mortal despots and installing those who promoted my precepts… By the time I’d forged my New Egyptian Empire I’d lost all interest in vengeance. I’d seen proof that your usurpation was part of a universal order to which even immortals must adhere. Conciousness… all consciousness…
evolves. In my wanderings I too had evolved.”

Amon-Ra laughed, and spread his arms as if to take in the entire horizon.

“I’m still worshipped here, though more and more of my once
faithful turn their minds from me every day. Old Chenzira is part of a dwindling fundamentalist minority. As in your world, science and simple human courage are creating a future with little room for gods. By my reckoning, I have a handful of centuries before belief in me dies out altogether. But this was the purpose for which we were defined was it not? To act as their shepherds, occasionally frightening the flock away from the cliffs and back onto the long road to adulthood.”

The sun god chuckled and stroked his beard. But the light from his face grew fainter, as if obscured behind thunderheads.

“I have seen your memories of the conflict which brought you to my realm. Your enemy is known to me.”

“What is it?” Lando said. “What is the Coming?”