A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  Yes. For God’s sake. For Skysinger’s sake.

  And in the time she had remained absorbed, her dear broodfoster had died—for the glory of God; and Red—

  He never wanted to be a Fisher at all! He feared it so! Now he had succumbed to the mysterious lure that marked so many of those with a vocation to the Service, the “savagery” he had so condemned.

  How had she permitted her life to go off on such a tangent? What else had occurred while her attention had fixed so steadily upon Skysinger? Who were all those crowds of strangers? Why were her chambers guarded? (Had there been a slight tinge of sarcasm beneath Gimp’s dutiful blandness? “Where are your guards, Great Lady?”

  “I cannot take you to them, Great Lady.”) Well, she knew where to start peering out the answers, She might as well make use of the privileges she had apparently acquired. She marched from her room.

  “Guard!” she flashed. “Fetch me—” She broke off and stared. The cavernous interior of the temple had become a bedlam of stroboscopic color. Priests and other Servants scurried about, slipping and iridescing frantically. For a big blue eye just about filled the arched portal over the pier, and a long questing pseudopod of colorless ropy muscle was worming its way hither and thither over the stone floor, dripping mud and frondy weeds, pushing into side-passages, probing . . .

  Oh yes. She’d dared absent herself for two, going on three, nights, and without sending any word.

  “You I’ll get to later,” she blitzed at Skysinger. “Guard, fetch me the High Priest!” But the young he only continued to goggle at the manifestation above the altar, his eyestalks quivering.

  The manifestation blinked twice at Wink’s peremptory remark, than narrowed dangerously. But the tentacle ceased its wanderings and retracted, carefully backing out the way it had come, bowling over only a few more Servants in the process. Then the eye itself gradually withdrew, finally to sink into the Lake, staring at her all the while.

  “Well?” Her right middle foot tapped. The guard scurried off.

  Old Mottling Swiftly Changing greeted her with, “What have you brought down upon us? God is angered! We are doomed!”

  “Dim that! We’re nothing of the kind. I have questions.”

  So. She felt used. She felt a fool—twice a fool. While Skysinger had assumed the center and become the purpose of her existence—despite Yd’s constant protestations to the contrary, Yd had always made Yd’s expectations felt—the orthodox priests had taken steps to defend against what they saw as a threat to their status. They had created for her a special title—one separate from the standard hierarchy—and isolated her from the populace. The guards allegedly were necessary to protect her from the demands of the importunate rabble; idle gawkers and tourists, the priests had characterized them. In fact, she suspected, her escort had probably often “protected” her from seeing old friends and people with legitimate business or with requests she would have been glad to undertake. (What harm could lie in taking prayers to Skysinger? God though Yd may not be, still Yd had vast wisdom.) They had kept her ignorant of events on the ground that she who communed with God ought not soil her semidivine mind with such mundane, trifling matters. The Servants had always carried out God’s commands, relayed by her, with the same pious alacrity with which their predecessors had done so throughout innumerable centuries; but they had usually managed to twist them subtly to their own advantage. For example, most of the skittering throngs out there were outlander males and females, come on pilgrimage to the City of God, in hopes of gaining entrance to God’s Beach to deposit and fertilize eggs, and of acquiring mana thereby. But since their clutches would be brooded by the local Yds, it meant an ever-escalating concentration of the desired characteristic here in the City of God—and under the effective control of the priesthood. Had Skysinger intended this? She doubted it. It seemed to her that quite often Yd evinced insufficient concern about all the ramifications and effects of Yd’s schemes. How much did Yd really care about her people? Or was Yd so consumed by Yd’s obsession with vengeance that none of the secondary consequences mattered to Yd at all?

  But first she must deal with immediacies.

  “You were right about one thing, venerable one,” she told the priest wryly. “When I am communing with God my mind is so free of common, trifling thoughts that I completely lose contact with mundane reality.”

  “It is good that your ladyship is pleased with her prodigious evolution,” said Mottling Quickly Changing.

  “I am not pleased,” she flared. “Nor have I evolved, prodigiously or any other way. I have simply lost track of the time. Henceforth, priest, you will make it your business to see to it that I have time to live my real life every now and then. And let there be regular times when the people may come to see me!

  “And send all those people back home! Tell them to breed on their own beaches, according to the word of God. Do not seek to molt so swiftly into a shell too large for you, old priest!”

  “You forget yourself, Green-Eyed She.” Dull red lightnings flickered around his words. “You forget to whom you speak.”

  “You forget to whom you speak. You saw God at the Gate. Yd was looking for me . . . not in anger, but in anxiety, for when Yd saw me, Yd returned peacefully into the Lake. Consider what Yd might have done had Yd not seen me, had Yd, for example, conceived that, for some reason, I was being kept from Yd. Consider that, and keep that image firmly in mind. Now, do you remember the blasphemous words of God, that you told me of four years ago when I was but a novice? Or have you managed to shut your inner eyes against their light entirely? For I remember them.

  “And now consider what would happen if the populace happened to glimpse such words. How long would they continue to support and obey the Servants of God—if God is not God? How long would the outlying tribes and clans of tribes continue to submit to the domination of the City of God and its priest, if our visible, tangible god is proven no less false than their invisible, insubstantial ones, who never accept the challenge to contest for supremacy? They would say, ‘Of course our gods would not accept a challenge from a mortal creature, no matter how gargantuan and great.’ “So consider carefully both of those things. And know this also.” She softened the harshness of her colors. “I am no enemy to you. All in all, I appreciate my life quite as much as you do yours. While a few small things must change, those things I have mentioned, I would grieve to alter it to any large degree. I do not want your office, or any other. I believe that the City of God should continue to rule the tribes of mortals and the Servants of God should continue to rule the City, for it has always been so, and it is right. But if I do not get my way, there will begin to appear in the City glimmerings of dangerous reflections!”

  “Great Lady, the words of her who communes with God are always observed with boundless reverence, and it is the privilege of the devout to obey them.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  Skysinger offered obstacles of a different nature.

  “Where were you, Morsel? I feared something had befallen you.”

  “Something had—four years had passed in but a handiful of days! How could you have done this to me? Did it never occur to you that I might have a life of my own to tend? Ever you claim we are friend and friend, but you treat me as a god would treat a votary.”

  “Little Green-Eyes, you show me nonsense. Many and many a time have I told you to do as pleased you, to live your life as you would, to give me only such time as you might without hardship; for I have lived many long millennia before you came, small one, and I shall continue to live many long centuries after you go, and my patience is vaster than my body, deeper than my lake.”

  “Oh, indeed, such were your hues and shapes; but your thoughts were far other. And how can a poor small mortal mind venture so close to the thought of a god without perceiving it, without bending before its strength? No, the truth is, you have dealt with me as you have dealt with my people: you have captured us, and tamed us, and forged us into that which
we were not, and made tools of us, weapons for your coming war of vengeance against the Evil One.

  “Who is the Evil One, O Skysinger, Prisoner of the Lake?”

  “You know that,” replied Skysinger, surprised. “I have told you that story many times . . .”

  “But I am only a mortal hatchling, Great One, and my understanding is small. Please tell me who is the Evil One.”

  Yd sensed a trap, of course, but decided Yd might as well feed her the lines she wanted, anyway.

  “Yd is my ancient enemy, First One, Lord of Mother Sea.”

  “And what makes Yd evil?”

  “That, too, I have explained. Yd is so because—”

  “I mean, how is Yd evil? What characteristic is it that designates Yd as such?” Skysinger heaved a windy sigh; big bubbles drifted up and burst upon the surface for several dozen square meters around the boat.

  “That Yd destroyed those whom I loved, that Yd will destroy any sapient life form other than itself, including yours; that Yd cannot brook otherness, much less competition; that Yd cannot perceive the equal reality and validity of any other entity; that Yd cannot therefore understand the pain of another; that Yd seeks only Yd’s own ends. This latter is, perhaps, the natural goal of all beings, and is not evil in an absolute sense; but it certainly makes Yd uncomfortable to share a planet with.”

  “And whose ends do you seek, Skysinger?”

  Yd had seen it coming. “My own, Morsel, and, and”—Yd increased brightness in order to override her attempted interruption—“I honestly believe I seek the ends of nature, of evolution if you will. (You recall what I have said of my observations of the way creature-kinds grow and change and die, just as individual beings do.) In making this alliance with your small kind, I have established your supremacy over all the world—not only merely over other tribes of your species, but over all living things on the planet. No, Morsel, not yet, perhaps, in fact; I realize that. You are still simple and weak, and have yet to extend your hegemony over all the ways of the world, and the life therein, and the very elements themselves. But that night will come, countless generations hence, Green Eyes, when this one small world will fail to contain you. I can see it as clearly as I see the stars. If. If you can destroy First One in the meantime. By yourselves, you cannot do it. Without my counsel, you may perhaps eventually, slowly, have begun to venture out upon the face of Mother Sea in vessels, millennia from now—and First One would become aware of you, and would inevitably put an end to you, and Yd would remain lord of all Yd surveys until sky and world end. With my assistance, you might possibly have a chance. And who better to ally with you in that cause than I? Am I not the Enemy’s enemy? Yet by myself, I have no better chance than you.

  “Since this war, one way or another, is inevitable, ought we not to devise the best odds for ourselves that we can muster? I do not guarantee our success, even as allies; but together we have the greatest hope.”

  “And what of my people, in the meanwhile?” Wink flared out. “In our unnumbered thousands since the beginning of time we have shaped and constrained our lives to fit your huge designs. We have worshipped you as God, and what other nameless gods may have gone unworshipped for that reason? What of my friend Red-Footed He, who has fallen into the trap he feared, and reverted to savagery in your service? What of those weary hundreds of outlanders who made a pilgrimage of who knows what trials and privations, because the priests chose to skew slightly their interpretation of a divine whim, and because you concerned yourself not with its consequences? And what, O Skysinger, of me? While I have conversed with you upon subjects great and petty, while I have soothed your moods and tempers with my songs, while I have thought how to please you and given no thought to anything else—all my friends have died, or gone, or changed. Gleam not to me of sky-high speculation and epic adventures I will never live to see! Even as you have no-one else to call you by a friend’s name, so there is now no-one left to call me Wink!”

  Yd’s coded pulsing slowed and a rosy aura suffused even Yd’s bone-and-sienna symbols. “With your permission, then, small one, I shall use and preserve that name of friendship . . . if you accord me the name of friend?”

  Wink admitted defeat at last. “You know, Skysinger, that it is my everlasting honor that you have chosen to share with me some small portion of your thoughts, just as if we were really equals. If you grant me friendship, can I do less? But surely in your wisdom you understand that no matter how high a grace it may be to see my name in your colors, still I miss the same name in the old familiar spectra of my lost comrades.”

  To her surprise, and indignation, silver laughter rippled beneath the waves.

  “What a species I have undertaken to raise! Wink, try not to keep your inner eyes squeezed so tightly closed. Open them now and look at your thoughts; is your sorrow a soul-hunger or only a petulant melancholy?” When she remained dark Yd continued. “I know your people better than you know yourselves; I have had hundreds of generations to observe you; you, Morsel, have had but the first part of a single lifetime. And I have observed that only Yds truly love; the most profound attachment a he or a she can feel is a kind of shellbound sentimentalism. I have thought about it and it seems to me that it is because the hes and shes never touch; only the Yds touch. The Yds devote their lives to caring for people; the hes and shes devote themselves solely to abstract concepts, ideals, group-identities. This trait promises well for you in the time to come, in the plans I have for you; but do not try to dazzle me with the glare of your profound yearning for your friends. Your yearning, Green-Eyes, is but a nostalgia for the way things once were, and can never be again; for none of your kind accepts change gladly. Why this should be, I’m not certain; it may have something to do with the fact that your childhood moltings into larger carapaces are such traumatic experiences for you. It is the only thing about you that makes me doubt your complete suitability for the great project. But change and adaptation are the very substance of my species, and perhaps each of us can complement the other smoothly enough to promote our success in the grand alliance.

  “No; dim it; don’t interrupt. Consider honestly, little friend. You are angry with the priest, and you are angry with me, and for all I know you may be angry with the weather, because we have all conspired against you to steal your wonted life away. But who, I ask, has come out here every night, storm or starlight, to study and sing and philosophize? Who wakens her poor hardworking rowers earlier and earlier every twilight? Who is it who neglected her shoreside life—and for what cause, pious devotion to duty? I think not. I believe you find me quite as entertaining as I find you. Is it not so?” But Wink stubbornly refused to emit a spark. “Don’t be foolish,” Skysinger admonished. “I will confess to every charge you level that speaks of my manipulation and control of your species; but I am innocent of any ruination of your personal life, small one. That you must confess yourself, if you think it has been ruined.”

  It was true. She had to admit it—at least to herself, if not to Yd. Discovering all the changes that had taken place in her absence—her absence of mind—had proven quite a shock; but that shock was now slowly diminishing. She missed the ways of her childhood, but no-one could remain forever a hatchling under the care of a broodfoster Yd. Exactly how much did she truly care what those barbarian pilgrims in the City of God did in their spare time, or where they did it? And, with Red-Footed He the way he was now, they had nothing to say to one another.

  As for Longstalks, she had loved Yd as much as any he or she had ever loved a broodfoster. But Yd was only an Yd, after all.

  Would she indeed return, if she could, to the nights when she was a novice in the choir, and nothing more?

  No. Upon reconsideration, she would really rather continue to discuss light opera with Skysinger.

  “. . . Good,” Skysinger said some hours later, after they’d thrashed it all out and renegotiated their arrangement. “Because you and I are just beginning our work together, Green-Eyes. I shall keep in mind your
admonishment to take greater care of the consequences of my demands; but you, Wink, and your people, must accustom yourselves to the occasional changes we will make. I hope you have not too mortally offended the priests, because I have one or two little notions I’d like them to try out as soon as may be. For one thing, I have thought about it and it seems to me that what this Lake needs is a shipyard over on the far end. It’s none too soon. No, I know you don’t know what a shipyard is; I’ll explain it all when I give you the plans to relay to your artificers and crafters. And when the priesthood calms down, why don’t you talk to them about establishing a Corps of Beacon-Runners?—What is that? Why, that is a way of letting the people of the City of God learn swiftly of whatever interesting may happen, even in the farthest bounds of your tribe’s dominance; do you see? And another thing, Wink, can’t you get the priests to work out a better educational system? I have thought about it and it seems to me . . .”

  And on they shimmered and shone at one another, rippled and rayed, scheming, coruscating, arguing aglow, long into the nights, while the stars above sang a waiting song . . .

  The rowers dipped their oars slowly, in time to the stately pulses of the dirge: deep purple, grays, blues, white. A single large bark glided after the lead boat, carrying priests and choristers.

  But the ancient, awesome old High Priestess was not quite dead, not quite yet. Her spectrum was still as pure as ever.

  “God!” she called out, piercingly violet. “I pray you appear unto your servant!”

  A surge beneath the waves rocked the boats.

  “What’s all this, Morsel?”

  “A state occasion, Great One. A grand sacrifice. I am High Priestess. I officiate.”

  “Good, I could use a snack. I am delighted that you are healed of your recent illness, Wink, and can take part once more in these social functions. I missed you.”