Lesser Gods (12 page)

I tried to resolve myself to the truth it was about to kill me, and hope in the real world of my apartment, my heart and brain would hold on long enough for the medics to keep me from departing for that great SupeR-G game in the sky.

I took a deep breath and started to step out to meet my fate when a faint voice shouted far in the distance, “White Knight? Dormouse?”

It was Alice.

“White Knight? Dormouse?”

Had she lost her sanity? Most certainly. No one in her right mind would holler when the Jabberwocky was around. And then I realized that no one in their right mind would be in this SupeR-G in the first place. I’m crazy, therefore I am.

“Hell-oooohhhhhhhhh,” Alice continued to call. “Where arrrrrrrrre you? White Knight? Dormouse? Is it safe to come out?”

The creature behind the tree thrashed around, its tail smashing into the oak I was hidden behind, uprooting it and spinning the Dormouse and me to the side like bowling pins, slamming us into the brush with a bone-jarring crash of armor, flesh, and foliage.

I lay dazed on my back wondering if the Jabberwocky had heard my armor clanking. But it ignored the noise of my fall, if it noticed it at all, instead concentrating on Alice’s voice which called again. “White Knight? Where are you?”

Finally I sat up, collecting my helmet where the Dormouse still resided. “Alice must have lost her marbles,” I whispered, rising to my feet. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“No, no,” the Dormouse replied, standing up in my helmet and shaking a paw at my nose. “You must help her. That’s the White Knight’s — that’s your job: To battle the Jabberwocky.”

With that the creature in my helmet pulled himself to his full six inches, standing ram-rod straight as he broke into verse once gain, this time making grand gestures to go with his oration from my helmet.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!

“The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

“Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun

“The frumious Bandersnatch!

“He took his Vorpal sword in hand:

“Long time the manxome foe he sought —”

“This is all very nice,” I interrupted. “But I’m headed out of here so I can keep body with soul — something not likely to happen if I battle the Jabberwocky. “ I pushed my way back onto the path and headed in the direction opposite that taken by Alice and now the Jabberwocky.

“You must understand,” the Dormouse protested. “Your job is to slay the Jabberwocky and to save Alice.”

“Not in my job description, my friend,” I replied.

“But —”

“I’m here to… Hey, you’re not Huntington, are you?” I studied the small creature in front of me, trying to discern if it could possibly be the man whose photograph I’d seen in my apartment.

After a few seconds, I gave up. Fur, whiskers, and a totally different body concealed the human characteristics of the being I held in my helmet. Besides which, I was pretty certain that if anyone here was Huntington, it would be the monster tracking us, not the tiny mouse that rode with me.

“You’ve got to help her,” the creature insisted yet again. “It’s your job.”

“Right.” I snickered grimly. “Like I’m going to win in a wrestling match with ten tons of claws and teeth.”

“But the Vorpal sword can defeat the creature. It’s part of the game.”

“My what?” I asked stopping in my tracks. This was a crazy SupeR-G after all. Perhaps I had some power I hadn’t realized. “So how could I defeat the Jabberwocky?”

“Your Vorpal sword, there in the sheath at your side. It can defeat the beast.”

I gazed down at my belt and saw there was a sword of some sort on my left side. I grasped the ruby encrusted hilt, almost afraid of what I might be armed with. I drew the blade that gave a metallic ring as it was unsheathed.

The polished edge of the sword shimmered in the dim light, glistening as if it had a beam of sunlight trapped just beneath its surface. I tested its weight and balance. The blade hissed through the air, almost as if it were a living thing, with almost no effort on my part. If ever there was a magic blade, this is it.

“You see!” the Dormouse cried, jumping from the helmet and standing on its hind legs in the lush moss underfoot.

“It does seem… magical.”

“The Vorpal sword can defeat the Jabberwocky. And that is your job. To defeat the monster and save Alice.”

“You’ve seen this done before?”

“Well… No. But I’ve heard —”

“Does the phrase ‘fools live to fight another day’ mean anything to you?”

The Dormouse started to protest. But before I could re-sheath the sword and race away from the field of battle, I heard Alice’s distant scream.

I tried to ignore it. I tried to wrestle with my conscience and prevail.

But this time I could not. There was something about her, about a damsel in distress — or perhaps it was simply the programming of the game.

At any rate, I found myself turning toward her cries and hoped I would be more successful with the Jabberwocky than I had been in battling my heroic tendencies. I hurried down the path, feeling like a cow climbing the last ramp in a slaughterhouse.

Jacque Thuriot de La Tribunat

My Emperor had rewarded me with a week’s vacation at his lunar getaway. I’m paid well, but not well enough to ever go to the Moon — except through the generosity of the state. This was my fifth such vacation, and I never tired of it.

I made the long, and thankfully uneventful, trip from Earth in just two hours and 25 minutes on a French-made hyperdrive shuttle. I begun my day in Paris; now I was bouncing along the lunar surface, my tired muscles feeling like they had new life in the low gravity.

I squinted at the distant horizon. The gray mountains jutted upward at steep angles, their surfaces almost dazzling in the raw sunlight, contrasting sharply to the bleak, colorless black of space. For a moment I realized how alien the place was, something I almost took for granted. “Funny how quickly the abnormal becomes the norm,” I mused.

“Pardon, Commander?” Durant asked, his voice crackling over the radio.

“The Moon,” I replied. “Its landscape seems almost — commonplace.”

“Only because you’ve spent some time away from Earth. It warps your esthetic tastes.”

I chuckled. “Perhaps so, my friend.
Peut-être
.” I glanced toward my space-suited companion whose grinning face was barely visible inside the silvered glass helmet. When I’d first visited the moon, it had been to escape the pressures of my job for a few days — and to get away from my now-divorced wife. But now I found myself coming back again and again, even though the emperor would have sent me to any spot on Earth, or perhaps even to Mars if I’d asked for such locales. The Moon had a pull I couldn’t understand.
L’amour de la lune.

The Emperor maintained a less-than-modest apartment near the Voltaire Lunar observatory, allowing me to catch less expensive flights aboard government supply ships, a perk of my job and rank.

“Just three hours from now,” Durant said, breaking into my train of thought, “and I’ll have made my return trip to
Terra firma
. I’ll be breathing air that smells like damp earth and grass instead of urine and sweat.”

I laughed as I hopped over a boulder that blocked my path, waiting to speak until I regained my footing on the powdery surface. “Yeah, but I bet you’ll miss the joys of pseudo-meat and greenhouse fruit.”

“Pseudo-meat and greenhouse fruit?” Durant laughed. “
Ouais, c’est ça
.” We bounced along for a time and then he spoke. “Seriously, wouldn’t you rather be back on Earth. Tahiti maybe? I hear the natives still parade around topless. That would have to be better than this wasteland where every space-suited woman looks like a two-hundred pound gorilla, wouldn’t it?”

I thought it over a moment and made no reply.

Ralph Crocker

Bravery and stupidity are the nearly identical points forming the horns of a dilemma upon which many a man has been impaled. But, for once in my life, I looked very brave, even felt very brave, as I dashed toward the cry of Alice’s voice.

So, a heavy dose of stupidity propelling me toward my fate, with shimmering Vorpal sword in hand, I hurtled down the winding trail in pursuit of the Jabberwocky. It took thirty seconds of armor clanking to reach a ledge overlooking a wooded clearing where, on the grassy meadow below, Alice stood, cornered by the beast. Behind her was a second cliff overlooking the ocean, waves crashing far below her. The Jabberwocky blocked any avenue of escape she might have had, standing on its hind legs with its ridged back toward me, its tail flicking back and forth like a cat, as it waited to pounce on a mouse. The creature swayed back and forth, playing with its victim, laughing as Alice emptied her revolver harmlessly into the its rough hide.

I suppose that would have been the end of Alice, had I not noisily clinked and clanked down the winding path, raising a din like a fork churned a garbage disposal. By the time I reached the clearing, the beast had turned its attention to the mass of plate and bolts chugging toward it. As it whirled about to face me, its massive tail swept through the air, narrowly missing Alice who stepped back, placing herself dangerously close to the edge of the abyss, as she dodged the scaled appendage.

Sunlight glinted off the Jabberwocky’s right eye; its other eye missing, a dark, empty socket where once an orb had been. I realized then that the monster must be Huntington.

“So we meet again,” the creature snarled, confirming my suspicion. “You may wish you hadn’t been so quick to follow me into this SupeR-G.”

“I would be the first to admit I am having second thoughts. Maybe you could return me to Vietnam.”

The creature laughed a horrid, bubbling, rumbling gargle of a chuckle before speaking. “I hope you’ve brushed up on your swordsmanship — the last White Knight I fought wasn’t much of a challenge — though he proved a tasty morsel. You look a little stringy.”

I said nothing, trying to decide if there was enough room between us to permit a hasty retreat back into the brush before he caught me. By my calculations there was not; I’d be a White Knight sandwich before I could make my escape. So I decided to at least go down with my pride intact, sword in hand, fighting.

The Jabberwocky circled me cautiously, making me hopeful that perhaps the sword I held really was a potent weapon. Without warning he sprang forward, the ground shaking underfoot as he crashed nearly on top of me, raking my side with his claws as I dodged, ineffectively slashing the air with my sword.

I backed away as the creature lumbered around for another attack. Glancing down, I saw that his claws had penetrated my armor, ripping my clothing underneath and grazing my skin with jagged scratches that already throbbed and bled profusely, despite their superficiality.

But all was not lost. With a smidgen of hope welling up inside me, I noted that my sword had struck him after all, and had left a gash in the creature’s arm — and an even uglier look on its face.

“Well, done,” the dragon’s voice boomed.

“Purely accidental,” I protested quite truthfully. “No hard feelings, I hope.”

He circled around and I realized he was trying to back me toward the edge of the cliff, thereby limiting my ability to maneuver.

To counter this, I ran forward, yelling and swinging my sword as if to initiate an attack, then swerved to the side at the last moment as his huge paw smashed downward, rattling the earth where I would have been had I continued forward.

Almost beside him now, I dived under his spread hind legs and slashed at his belly with my sword as I passed, releasing a torrent of green blood.

He roared in pain. “You’ll pay for that!”

I cringed at the thought that I most likely would, and pay dearly at that.

He turned to face me and I jumped aside in time to avoid being bowled over by a scaled tail, which flashed past, almost taking me by surprise. But I miscalculated my landing, managing to clear the tail but stumbling and losing my footing, falling in a jumble of man and armor.

I struggled to rise, then saw him striking like a giant snake; thinking better of standing, I rolled out of the way as his jaws snapped shut just inches from my head. I continued rolling like a barrel of tin cans, finally stopping on my knees and hands to rise as quickly as I could and then retreat from the creature.