Twiceborn

by C. L. Kagmi

  But she does love the spindly black trees and the turquoise sky and the sun, a burning copper penny like the ones the humans use for simple trades. She loves the silver grasses and the silver fish and the little brown birds, imported with the humans from their homeworld, who peep and make such wonderfully sweet music like that of the native whistling salamanders.

  She loves the humans, most of the time.

  Who could not love the young parents who bring their babes to her for blessing, whose illnesses she cures with a touch or a ritual to redirect the laws of the Void?

  Who could not love the young couples who come to her, eyes shining with their mutual desire, to propagate their species with her blessing?

  Yet she finds herself more and more these days resenting these little ones, who have what she never could. In their small, finite worlds, they have each other.

  Sheanna is alone.

  She has never seen loneliness in the mind of her sister, queen mother of the ice-world. She has never seen a trace of any such thing in any other deity. And that precisely is the problem. There are other divinities, but who can share her loneliness as the humans share their love?

  She cannot, cannot be more like the humans than like her divine siblings. Such a thing would be impossible.

  The humans tell tales of laughably made-up gods making love to mortals; these are symptoms of the mortal lust for perfection.

  And yet—must all of those tales be entirely wrong?

  Sheanna wonders, as she blesses another young couple with shining eyes, if a Goddess can commit blasphemy.

  “Something has gone off,” the handmaiden Anna whispers. “Have you noticed?”

  “Off? Off how?” the servant named Rachel returns.

  “She stares. She sits for hours in the sanctuary, staring. She used to hate staying in there unless it was required. She’d always be out among the fields and the flowers.”

  Sheanna has been wandering the halls, to quell her restlessness. She grew tired of gazing upon her own perfect form in a mirror after her lavender-scented bath, grew curious about the servants’ quarters and whether their lives are like her own. So she has wandered, silent as air and desiring to make herself unseen, until she heard these voices.

  “I thought perhaps she was maturing.”

  “I’m concerned,” comes Anna’s voice.

  “What did it look like,” Rachel asks, “when the others went wrong?”

  A long pause. “Like this.”

  And for the first time in her memory, Sheanna is afraid.

  She was not afraid when creation blazed into being with violence and chaos that has not been seen since; why should she be afraid now? She knows that her fear is foolish, knows that this is wrong. Knows that the immortal Divine of which she is a spark fears nothing.

  But neither does the immortal Divine lust after human company. Neither does it resent the creatures it has nurtured so lovingly into existence. There is something wrong with her. Even the handmaidens see it.

  This is more frightening than any death.

  She looks back, back to the first fires of creation, seeking some resolution to her troubles. But she finds no answer there. If anything, looking back upon this ancient story makes her feel more wrong. More separate from what she once was. The mind now contained within her animal form does not match the mind that sparked those fires.

  She returns to herself to feel the flaw still very present, spreading like a crack in her mind.

  When the others went wrong.

  Sheanna cannot ask her handmaidens, for deities never ask mortals for knowledge; it is the mortals who ask the deities. Yet she finds she does not know of whom or what they speak. How is this possible?

  What is wrong with her?

  She cannot ask her sister or the other entities among the stars, for their confusion would only make her panic worse. What would they do, confronted by a flawed god?

  There is another, less rational reason she cannot ask them; she cannot name it just yet. Sheanna is beginning to feel another human emotion.

  She is beginning to know shame.

  Marcus comes to her in the dawn of his thirtieth year, and asks her blessing on his decision to take holy orders.

  The relief that wells up within her brings with it greater shame. She will never have to marry this man to another woman.

  To any woman. Sheanna is not a woman, and is shocked to have thought of herself as such. She is not of this body at all; rather, these bodies are of her.

  Marcus bows before her throne with the other initiates, fifty of them filling the room. Their scratchy robes of plain brown burlap are a sign of their devotion. These new priests shall act as her emissaries wherever humans dwell on this world, and she pretends she has good reason to post Marcus here, with her.

  He sacrifices for me, she thinks. Feels it not as the Divine, but as a woman.

  Knows that she is slowly and inexorably going mad.

  In an eyeblinks’ time he will be dead, and perhaps then the madness will pass.

  The thought causes anguish like a knife in her chest, and Sheanna looks down to see if she is bleeding. An eyeblinks’ time will bring a worse madness, she now knows, but resolves not to let it show. Whoever heard of a deity in mourning?

  This should be as easy as breathing, but it’s not.

  She wonders whether she could make him live forever. Knows this would be a crime against order too enormous to contemplate. Knows it could bring the destruction of all.

  Yet still she wants to do it.

  They need me to perform my duty. She looks out across the sea of prostrate heads. Tries not to single out Marcus’ for attention.

  They need me to be here, aloof.

  What will happen if Sheanna leaves her throne?

  What does happen when Divinity goes mad?

  Sheanna is sitting on the soft silver grass at the banks of the stream behind the temple. The breeze is gentle and the air is warm and sweet with the thousands of scents of the forest.

  She is holding a little salamander in her hands. The thing is too primitive, too low to communicate with divinity directly, as yet. It knows her only as a larger being, sees her beautiful long-fingered hands as a terrifying predator’s jaws. The tiny salamander’s heart races in the way that humans’ do when they are afraid, and it struggles to escape her grasp.

  She begins to peel it.

  The milky blue blood of her world’s native life, copper-based, runs sticky down her hands. Human blood is red and thinner, she knows, and suddenly resents the humans for being different from this life, for being not her own.

  “My Lady?”

  It is Marcus’ voice.

  She is frozen to the spot. Begins to realize that she has committed a crime. Knows that divinities do not torture, do not kill, throws the writhing thing away from herself in horror. Feels herself falling as though the ground has disappeared. No longer knows what she is but feels that somehow, she is not Divine.

  Her hands are shaking and her face a mask of naked terror.

  Marcus’ faith is shaken. She is right; a goddess should not be cruel or afraid. He stands as though frozen.

  But where the goddess has vanished from view he sees a woman, and goes to one knee kindly as he would beside any woman in distress.

  “My Lady,” he says carefully, “what troubles you?”

  Great violet eyes turn up to meet his. The eyes that have inspired awe in millions are like a child’s eyes now.

  “Marcus,” she says faintly, “I think that I am going mad.”

  This doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t fit his theology, but how can one doubt the word of the Goddess herself? He will meditate on the troubling meaning of this scene later; perhaps it is a test for him.

  For now, he lays a hand on her arm. It is an unthinkable breach of protocol for which he half-expects to be struck dead; but she looks as though she needs it.

  Her arm is trembling, and as warm as any mortal’s.

  “How can
I help?” he asks her.

  She shakes her head, but seems grateful for his touch. “I do not know.”

  That evening, she wishes herself not to be seen and follows her handmaidens into their quarters again.

  She must know how human women live. She must. She is not a true woman and can never be. She has seen how humans are. If she became one, with her power—there would be casualties.

  And yet. And yet, what is she? How can a divinity be broken? Brokenness is supposed to be an attribute of chemical life; of things run on physical processes, not on perfection.

  Divinity should not be able to malfunction. There should be no mechanism for it.

  And yet she follows her handmaidens into the back of the temple, past doors of woven reeds and curtains of fine silk. Watches, invisible and silent, as her servants brush their hair, strands of it coming out in the brushes they use. As they doff their robes revealing flawed, imperfect bodies.

  “How do you think she is holding up?” one of them asks the other, pulling night robes loose around herself.

  “Better than expected, after the early signs. Still, I fear we’ll have to replace her soon. There may have already been a breach. Brother Marcus came in today looking as though he’d seen something horrifying. He wouldn’t tell me what troubled him. But he’d been down by the river, in her favorite place.”

  The other pauses. Sheanna recognizes a look of great sadness on her face, and the sound of a heavy sigh.

  “Must we? Truly?” It is a sound she knows well; the sound of parents who have lost a child to some freak accident that not even Sheanna could prevent, the sound of a human whose deep irrationalities make them not want to do what they must and commend the body to the ground.

  “It’s too much of a risk not to,” the other says. “It could go very badly if we don’t.”

  The handmaidens resign, quite unhappily, to sleep.

  She does not know what possesses her to take the keys from the secret place where the handmaidens store them.

  She has known for centuries that it was her solemn duty to pass on the keys to those who serve her in the highest capacities. But she has never wondered what the human-made keys unlock. It seemed unimportant. Now she searches for an answer in her infinite store of knowledge, and finds she does not have it.

  She must know.

  All the buildings on her world were built by humans, for her world’s native life had no need of artificial shelter. The keys open her temple sanctuary, yes, and her private tabernacle quarters. And the servants’ own quarters, and some assortment of closets wherein the supplies for her rituals are stored.

  But there are far more keys here than she has ever seen in use. What else do they open?

  Sheanna herself has never walked all the corridors of her sacred city. She has never desired to, never been beckoned to it by the humans who built the city. And before the humans there were no cities, only earth and wind and grass and crawling things whose minds barely shadowed consciousness.

  Now, she feels alone as she walks. Out of place. She is not properly divine, anymore; she is not, cannot be human. She is not of the little salamanders who crawl beneath their orange Sun.

  What is she? Are there none like her?

  She is a child of the Void, a child of herself. Yet she is not animal; is not Divine. She is losing knowledge. Perhaps she never had it. Perhaps she was made defective.

  That, somehow, is comforting. Then it would not be her fault.

  There are so many things about the humans she has never bothered to ask. She has cared for them, and advised them in the ways of her world. They have worshipped her and venerated her. She knows the innermost workings of the human body better than any human ever could; and with her knowledge she can cure their diseases with a touch.

  Their minds had seemed simple and not at all mysterious to her. Nothing that she needed to understand.

  Nothing that she needed to understand, until she began to feel irrational herself.

  Now, feeling irrationality from the inside, she wonders with trepidation what secrets her holy city holds. What have the humans built that she had never bothered to learn about? What secrets have they hidden from her?

  Does she want there to be secrets? Does she want to be finite, small, capable of being wholly encompassed by their world?

  She walks the hallways silent as air, not wishing to be seen. Holds the keys tightly in one hand, silencing vibrations. She walks deeper into the bowels of the temple than she has ever been before.

  She passes her own quarters, vast and beautiful. Passes many rooms whose many purposes are known to her. Rooms devoted to the silent meditations of the monks and nuns; rooms devoted to initiations, to dreams, to healings. Rooms devoted to storage of the sacred grain and beer, to the preparation of the ceremonial feasts. Rooms devoted to storage of linens and candles and herbs.

  At the end of the hall, for a moment she knows disappointment. The rooms she knows continue until she comes up against a stone wall, intricately carved with a depiction of the creation of this world. It is Sheanna herself who holds the sphere with its continents in one hand, overseeing it with an artist’s delicacy, a mother’s love and a lover’s mystery at once. Her robes are inlaid with gold in the carving as in reality, while the copper sun shines bright and furious before her.

  That creation, she remembers. The carving of this wall, she does not. She stares at the frieze, wonders how she has no memory of seeing it before.

  Wait—the outer edge of her own body in the engraving is no mere impression in the rock. It is a seam, deeper than the other lines.

  Sheanna looks down at the keys in her hand; back up at the image of her as creator-goddess. Will one of these keys open the hidden seam?

  Yes! The slight part between the lips of her engraving hides a small, dark hole. She tries a dozen keys in it before one clicks and turns.

  And the whole stone image of her body sinks back into the wall, recedes, silent as a whisper, to reveal a dark passage behind the wall in the rough shape of her.

  Sheanna steps inside.

  She has not been in total darkness since the beginning. On her land, the moon and the stars always give enough light for her to see. She finds it thrilling and revels in that which is beyond rare: the sensation of something ancient and new. She walks a few meters without sight, fingers trailing along the rough wall of the passage for guidance, until—

  until the floor disappears from under her and suddenly she

  is falling—

  A brief fall and an undignified tumble, down stairs of stone like those at the temple’s front. She manages to stop herself a dozen steps down by splaying hands and feet out to wedge between the walls of the staircase. Dizzy and disoriented, she stops to evaluate herself.

  She feels no pain. She can’t. Her body works as before. It is not designed to break.

  But the fall disturbs her. Why couldn’t she sense what lay ahead? Why was she not able to stop the fall through sheer force of will?

  Surprise is no excuse—she has always been mentally prepared when performing miracles, this is true, but the Divine should not need preparation to work magic. The laws of physics themselves should be hers to control.

  Is she only, only becoming human? What a relief that would be. She could live a lifetime as a human. Better that than as a mad god.

  Uneasy now with the darkness, she creeps to her feet again. Raises a hand, and wills it to radiate light.

  In the sudden-sharp light of her handheld sun, she sees that the stairs continue downward for a dozen meters. This takes her well below ground level. Sheanna glances back up the stairs, into where the passage ends in blackness. Wonders if this is what humans feel when they feel fear.

  Curiosity and pride are stronger than fear, if that’s what this is, and she continues down the steps.

  The bottom of the staircase looks like a solid wall, but now she knows better. The stone face is carved with intricate symbols whose meanings are unknown even to her. Thi
s bothers her tremendously. What secret language have humans made and hidden from the unwary gods?

  She casts about her palm-light until she sees a pinpoint of blackness deeper than the surrounding shadows; a keyhole. Tries thirteen keys before one fits.

  She wonders, as a door-shaped portion of the wall sinks into a recess, how often her human servants have come this way. How many things do they know that she does not? An unnatural bluish-gray light spills into the corridor where the stone has parted, revealing a burnished metal floor beyond.

  She imagines Rachel and Anna walking with their same silent demureness, down this secret passage hidden even from their god. Feels anger rising at their secrets; she never asked to know about this, because she did not know that there was anything to ask about. Her subjects should have told her all their secrets; she has watched over them day and night, and now she feels betrayed.

  Sheanna steps onto the cold metal floor, still barefoot, for gods have no need for shoes. Steps further into the light, looking down at herself to survey the damage from the fall. Her golden robes have become scuffed and smeared with rock dust in her tumble down the stairs.

  She looks up and stops dead. Is filled for the first time with what the humans must call dread.

  There is a box made of glass like a crystal coffin, surrounded on all sides by artificial lights in a dozen colors. The lights change and pulse at random, in patterns which she knows must convey meaning but which are inscrutable to her.

  Sheanna is lying under the crystal coffin, connected to dozens of tubes and wires.

  It is a perfect replica of her. No statue or engraving, this; the nude figure breathes as she watches, its brown skin as soft and perfect as her own, cheekbones as high, hair as dark. If those eyes were to open she knows that they would be her perfect violet, and the first thing she wonders is—

  How many times?

  How many times had they replaced her? How had they done it; what was this creature below the glass? What was she, a goddess with ten billion years of memories?