From Oblivion's Ashes

by Michael E. A. Nyman

  “Amateurs and incompetents,” Scratchard said. “The mixture-”

  “You couldn’t be sure he’d survive.”

  Scratchard recoiled in alarm, and even Krissy looked over with surprise. Marshal’s voice hadn’t been loud, but there had been a cold intensity to it that wiped the smugness from Scratchard’s expression. Under the weight of Marshal’s dead gaze, the professor suddenly started to feel the first, shuddering grip of doubt and fear.

  “It would be bad enough, Professor,” Marshal continued in an icy voice, “if it had merely been God’s life that you placed in jeopardy. But you endangered the lives of our children. And if, Professor Scratchard, they had all died or converted as a result of zombie-God’s attack, you could have been sure that those children would have killed another hundred or so as they swept through an unsuspecting building.”

  Scratchard was silent.

  Marshal opened his mouth to continue, but hesitated as a message came through his earphone.

  “What is it?” he said, tapping a button on his shirt microphone. “He is? Where?”

  A pause.

  “We’re still with Scratchard in one of the holding cells.”

  A pause.

  “Is he now? Are you sure he’s not a threat?”

  A pause, and Scratchard straightened.

  “Yes, but how can you tell?”

  There was a long silence in the room as Marshal sat there listening. His gaze fell once again on Scratchard.

  “Interesting. Yes, I’d very much like to see that. Let him come, but clear the floor until we’re certain. We’ll wait for him.”

  He lowered his hand, and resumed his level assessment of the Professor.

  “You deserve to die, Nick,” he said, “but you just might live through this in spite of yourself. God is awake and apparently in control of his faculties. It doesn’t change much, however. Frankly, it blows my mind how a man as frighteningly intelligent as you could be so incredibly dumb.”

  “Marshal, I-”

  “The first thing he wanted to do upon waking up was to come and speak with you,” Marshal continued implacably. “What do you think he’s going to say, Professor? We’ll know in just a few minutes, since he was one of Dr. Burke’s rare house calls. Perhaps you should use what time you have left to think about what you’re going to say to him.”

  “Forgive me, Marshal,” Scratchard said, looking penitent for the first time. “You are correct, as usual. I hadn’t considered the possibility of failure, and I certainly failed to think of… well, the potential consequences if it did. Sometimes…”

  He shook his head and sighed. “I’ve been cosmically stupid.”

  There was a light knock at the door.

  “Hello?”

  A familiar head peaked in.

  “Ah! Identification verified!” God came inside and quietly closed the door behind him.

  “It’s good to see you up and around, God,” Marshal said. “We’ve been-”

  “We were confused wondering evaluating where you’d all gone. Nicholas collective! Upswelling of novel and original optional pathways! We are glad to detect you. Marshal and Krissy! Dominant concept stream and alternating subordinate support thrust! You’re here too! Eagerness to enter the productive coordination of concept-forming data exchange.”

  All three people in the room stared at the old man. Just behind God, an incredulous Brock was twirling one finger next to his ear.

  “Oh. Uncertain upswell of regret,” God said, looking embarrassed. “Compromised impressionistic conceptual foundation… uh… sorry! It’s… a little difficult… er… it’s actually a little like being tickled in our brain.”

  He giggled.

  “Uh…” Marshal began, looking concerned, “are you sure you should be…?”

  God waved this off. “Confirmations! Fit as a fiddle! Look!”

  And to their shock, the frail old man reached down with two hands and lifted the hundred pound interrogation table four feet up off the floor, yanking a startled Scratchard along with it.

  “Jesus Christ,” Krissy shouted, pulling her gun even as Marshal jumped back with a look of fear and did the same.

  “Upswell of regret!” God exclaimed.

  With a thump, the table hit the floor.

  “Reassessments! Um. It’s just that it’s been a long time since we’ve…” God took a deep breath and strove to concentrate. “… since I’ve felt this good. And it’s already slipping away… I can feel it… oh dear.”

  He gave off a tremendous cough, collapsing forward onto the table from the effort. When he pulled away, a small puddle of vaguely purple ooze was left behind on the table’s smooth surface.

  “Don’t touch it!” Scratchard shouted, waving off the others. “It’s the organism leaving his system. If you touch it, it’ll soak into your skin faster than water to a sponge! Tell someone to get a blowtorch in here. Now!”

  Marshal was immediately on his radio. Through the open door, Brock was staring at the scene with horror.

  “Well, now,” God gasped. “That was…”

  Another fit took him as more of the ichor spewed onto the table.

  “… rather unpleasant,” he finished. He glanced over at Scratchard reproachfully. “You never implied that things would be this disgusting when you first proposed we attempt this little experiment, Nicholas. Perhaps if you could give me some more warning next time.”

  For a second, Scratchard didn’t answer, his face consumed with shock.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “Well, it was… obviously…”

  He took a deep breath and pulled himself upright.

  “My apologies,” he said. “Unfortunately, it seems that I have made several mistakes during this experiment. While I feel safe in saying that things occurred exactly as we predicted, it was always uncertain just how the mechanics of our predictions would function. I… I should be rebuked for my reckless decision-making. I admit that, in my excitement, I did not impose the proper safety controls. In my arrogance, I put the community at risk.”

  God snorted experimentally. “I think that’s all of it, Nicholas. Now, don’t be too hard on yourself. There’s always a risk where new discoveries are concerned. Consider the number of people who blew themselves up discovering, and then refining, the formula for gunpowder.”

  “Right,” Scratchard said, considering. Then he shook it off. “Well? What did you experience?”

  “Hold it!” Krissy stepped up and placed a hand on God’s shoulder. “Are you saying that you knowingly participated in Scratchard’s experiment?”

  “Of course,” God laughed. “You don’t think he’d jab me without my permission, do you? We were meeting in the gallery for the express purpose of testing his theories.”

  “I’m going to need a few seconds,” Marshal said into his microphone. “I’ll call you back.”

  He closed his eyes, as if he was experiencing tremendous pain.

  “Did you learn anything at all?” he asked, rubbing a temple.

  “Yes,” God said with a grim expression. “Many, many things, I’m afraid. Nicholas is exactly right in his estimation of their nature. For the time I was unconscious, I felt like I was… would surfing be the right word? I’ve never surfed, but I imagine that’s what it would be like. The sense that… that my identity was skimming along with the crushing weight of millions of particles, trapped by them but somehow a part of them as well. The directions we were traveling in were ideas and intentions. The curl and height of the wave paralleled that radicalism of the stream of consciousness. I was wet with spray, and my skin was like sweat merging with the water, but at the same time, I was riding the heart of a self-aware entity that didn’t seem to know or care that I was there.”

  “Very… colorful,” Marshal said. “But I was hoping-”

  “The organism is not the real danger,” God interrupted, his eyes suddenly very far away.

  After a few moments of silence, Krissy said, “What do you mean? If the organ
ism isn’t a threat, then… well, what have we been doing all these months?”

  “It comes from a world of perpetual mist, heavy gravity, gas storms, and shifting magnetic fields that would tear mountains apart in a matter of seconds,” God said, looking dreamy. “There are two stars, and their planet, a gas giant, passes between them every one hundred and twenty-six days. The atmosphere is nutrient rich, with a constant exchange of chemicals and fluids. The dominant… the… the Masters have persisted in water since the beginning.”

  Krissy frowned. “Persisted in water?”

  “The Masters? Who are the Masters?” Marshal asked.

  “They are the rulers, and we are constructed in their image,” God said, looking lost in remembering. “They first discovered the secrets of retention. Water. Knowledge. Over… trillions of turnings of the sun, they formed the largest and longest cohesions. They stored knowledge the best. Their numbers meant they built the biggest collectives. They learned the way of mathematics, the applications of substance, forces, energy, and they learned of the stars. They learned to speak over distances. They remember the beginning. They remember everything. We are their constructs, the tools of their will, built to visit the stars, but pale reflections of-”

  “God!” Marshal shouted. “Come back from wherever you’ve gone!”

  “No,” Scratchard said quickly. “Let him talk.”

  But God had shaken off the trance.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It really was quite the experience. Marshal, the organism we know was a constructed thing, constructed by these… these Masters. It’s the Masters who evolved as a single-celled organism on this other world. Their great leap forward happened when they developed two specific mutations: an organelle that could generate a kind of vibration that other organisms of its kind could detect and interpret over distances, and the ability to program memory into their own genome. Collective identity is a kind of rapture for them, born and vanishing into memory with every storm that creates them and then rips them apart. But – my, oh, my – the feeling when trillions of them form collectives, that is their idea of God. Speaking as the real God myself, the impression it gave was quite unsettling.”

  He stared at the floor with a curious expression.

  “Over the millennia, their memory grew, compiling and recording the results of every super-intelligence that formed from the dawn of history. All their science, all their technology, is based on temporary organic structures, but it… it’s astonishing. Their ability to twist organics to perform virtually any function is… is not what concerns us at the moment. What does concern us is that they used it to develop the secrets of bending space.”

  “Teleportation?” Scratchard asked like a kid opening a Christmas present.

  God nodded. “Yes. But the process requires two fixed locations, a projector and an assimilator. Without an assimilator, the landing point is wildly unpredictable. On their own planet, travel is instantaneous because the organism is always forming and reforming projectors and assimilators. But when they looked to outer space-”

  “They saw an abyss that had no assimilators waiting for them to use,” Marshal said. “I think I’m beginning to see where this is headed.”

  “Maybe,” God said. “The sheer size of space meant that firing the projectors at random had an infinitesimally small chance of hitting another world with the right conditions to create an assimilator. So the Masters created a sub-species of organism, based on their own capabilities but vastly inferior, much like we might create robots, and gave them a programmed set of instructions to follow if they ever encountered a viable landing point. These, they engulfed with accretions, or the meteoric shell. This was supposed to burn away if they ever encountered the right kind of atmosphere, typically another gas giant. And then, by the billions and with the best aim they could manage, they teleported these meteoroids into space.”

  God gazed up at the ceiling, as if he could see through it to space.

  “The vast majority of these would float for eternity in the boundless emptiness of the galaxy,” he murmured, “their passengers held in their dormant torpor, never to see life again. They had only a rudimentary sentience. They were robots. They were disposable. But the few that found a planet with organic material-”

  “Like ours,” Marshal said.

  “We were all wrong for them,” God said thoughtfully. “They wanted gas giants, where the compounds in the atmosphere were plentiful and ever-changing. The notion that life could form on a small planet never occurred to them, so any that landed here were to lie on the surface for all eternity.”

  “But we cracked one open,” Krissy said, “and the organism went to work. Will it try to build an… what’s it called? An assimilator?”

  “I don’t know,” God said. “They’re meant to have a kind of plasticity, formed in a thick, furious atmosphere. It’s part of the reason they take to water so easily, although there’s actually more to it than that. They’re designed to maintain collective cohesion against the forces of atmospheric hurricanes. The water to them is like weightlessness to us. They spread out, sometimes for miles, without losing any integrity. The rain puts them into a trance because, on those occasions where water storms swept their world, the organisms had a billion years of conditioning to stop and retain as much as possible. It’s one of their fundamental building blocks and fuel sources.”

  “This is all wonderful news,” Marshal muttered sarcastically. “A Master organism. Well, we’ll just have to hope that they don’t have the conditions they need to build an assimilator. It’s bad enough that their ‘robots’ can devastate our entire species. If this Master version of the organism were to ever reach our planet-”

  “Let’s not go there,” Krissy shivered. “Things are tough enough as it is.”

  “So… yes?” Scratchard said, holding up his shackled wrists hopefully. “Penitent professor? Check. Honest testimony? Check. Successful experiment with no one murdered? Check. Alleged victim alive and-”

  “All right,” Marshal sighed, looking over at Krissy. “Let’s see if I understand this correctly.” He turned towards God. “You allowed Scratchard to perform his experiment on you. There was no assault.”

  “Oh no,” God chuckled. “I said I’d be willing to help. He simply took me at my word, and we agreed to move forward with the test today in the gallery.”

  “So,” Marshal said, and his face darkened. “You both conspired to inject the only person in our community, possibly the world, who possesses a full immunity to the organism, with a specially cultivated version designed to infect him. You made the decision to do this without consulting anyone else, setting up any safeguards, or even utilizing a lab where the results could be properly studied. No, instead you chose to perform the experiment in the heart of our safe zone, without any cameras or security, surrounded by a group of our community’s children.”

  Scratchard sagged in his chair.

  “It does sound rather foolish, when you put that way,” God admitted, looking thoughtful. “But that is, more or less, how it happened. The children came along while I was waiting for Nicholas, and they were all so delightful, I thought I’d try to entertain them-”

  “You’re both grounded,” Marshal said angrily. “Confined to quarters until I can decide on the full extent of your punishment. Scratchard, you are banned from any further research, but not until you gather up every last sample of that organism, along with anything else that might be contagious, and lock it up with the key around my neck. God? I don’t even know what to say to you except…”

  Later, Scratchard and God sat together in God’s personal quarters, staring at the chessboard between them. They’d managed to convince the Winter Bastards on each of their doors that Marshal’s orders could be interpreted to mean that the restrictions applied not to each, but either, man’s quarters. The Bastards had gone along with it, partly because there was sufficient grayness for plausible deniability, and partly because it meant that they themselves could no
w play cards while the two old men stewed.

  “Four weeks,” Scratchard groaned, advancing a bishop. “I can’t believe I have to spend four weeks in isolation. Worse, I have to spend them with you!”

  “Hmm,” God said, studying the board.

  Scratchard lit up a cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke upwards.

  “It’s intolerable,” he grumbled, “that’s what it is. Look at you! You’re fine. Well. You’re still batshit crazy, but that can’t be blamed on me. Right?”

  “Quite true,” God agreed, moving his knight into striking position.

  Scratchard scanned the board irritably, and advanced his queen’s pawn.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question,” God asked, blocking the attack with another pawn.

  “I suppose not,” Scratchard said, studying the board.

  “Why did you try to kill me?”

  Scratchard looked up in surprise. “What are you talking about?”

  “You injected me with that syringe,” God said. “The least you can do is tell me why, since I’m here, being punished, as a result of covering for you.”

  Scratchard looked uncomfortable. “Yes,” he said. “I meant to thank you for that, though in truth, it wasn’t really necessary. As I told Marshal and Krissy, you were never in any real danger.”

  He moved another pawn forward.

  “Of course, I wasn’t,” God said, bringing up a bishop. “I’m omnipotent. But you can’t deny that you still owe me a favor. Marshal would be very upset with you if he knew the truth.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Scratchard grumbled, advancing another pawn. “Just make your next move.”

  God studied the board without speaking.

  “All the research did point to the likelihood that you would survive the experiment,” Scratchard added, glaring at the board. “I had faith in the science.”

  God sighed, and adjusted his queen. “Nicholas,” he said with a hint of warning.

  “Do you know,” Scratchard said conversationally, “about two thousand years ago, a young man performed a few magic tricks and faked his death. His followers turned him into a deity, and proceeded to spend the next two millennia killing, torturing, robbing, enslaving, or burning non-believers at the stake.”