From Oblivion's Ashes

by Michael E. A. Nyman

  “The second civilization doesn’t. It doesn’t believe in imaginary people, and therefore, doesn’t waste anything. Which civilization does Darwin favor? Before you answer, understand that in twenty thousand years of civilization, evolution has yet to provide us with a truly secular civilization, and when it tries, it is usually overwhelmed by those that aren’t.

  “What’s tricky about that argument,” God said triumphantly, “is that even if I’m not real, and there is no God, evolution implies that we’re still all better off continuing to believe anyway. Evolution doesn’t have opinions. It’s straight-up science. If belief wasn’t an evolutionary disadvantage, then the believers would have been killed off or out-competed long ago. You see what I mean? God and Darwin: teammates. And Nietzsche can go fuck himself.”

  “Still doesn’t actually prove anything,” Scratchard said. “And I’m afraid I’ll need actual evidence before I’ll believe in something so improbable as a deity. I applaud your tenacity, however. You’re wasted in theological discussions. I hear that Easter Bunny pays better.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “I will,” Scratchard said, feeling elated for the first time in a while. “And another thought just occurred to me. People back in New Toronto don’t know you’re on this flight, do they?”

  God glowered at him. “I didn’t tell anyone, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That means they can’t create any narratives where you sacrificed your life for all humanity. You just disappeared when the going got tough, and that’s all they have to know. Future religious crisis averted! I’ve been worried for nothing.”

  God considered this. “That does seem likely. Call it a silver lining?”

  “Are you kidding?” Scratchard said. “This is wonderful news. As long as you’re with me, and they don’t know about it, we’re home free. Sorry about attacking you earlier. It turns out that it was all unnecessary.”

  “Apology accepted, Nicholas,” God said with a heavy sigh. “Now, since we’re all cleared up on whether or not I’ve got a right to be here, I think I’d like to travel in silence for a little while.”

  “Fine by me,” Scratchard said.

  Both men fell silent, and in the ensuing quiet, Great Big Sea played Walk on the Moon, then followed up with a series of poetic anthems that seemed to cleanse the room. Scratchard glanced over at God, who sat in a sullen silence. The Almighty was lost in his own thoughts, looking troubled and oblivious to Scratchard’s regard.

  For some reason, this stole all Scratchard’s self-satisfaction, and he began to feel inexplicably guilty, like a man who’d just kicked a puppy. Time passed, and as the silence stretched, the sense of shame grew, and then shifted to annoyance.

  Partway through the song Demasduit Dream, Scratchard spoke up.

  “You know,” he said, “I didn’t actually try to murder you.”

  “Hmm?” God looked over at him, shaking off his thoughts.

  “I did the math,” Scratchard said, steering the blimp as the view below left Lake Ontario behind and returned to the rolling green and misty gray of New York State, just a few hundred kilometers south of the Canadian-American border.

  “What math?” God asked.

  “Before the injection,” Scratchard explained, “my calculations showed about a seventy-six percent chance for a synthesis of some kind, based on the data we were able to get off of zombie-Frank, with an additional ten percent chance of there being absolutely no effect. That left only a fourteen percent chance of your becoming infected and dying.”

  God hesitated, trying to put this all together.

  “So what you’re saying,” he asked carefully, “is that you only fourteen percent tried to murder me?”

  “Give or take a percentile, yes,” Scratchard said.

  “Wow,” God said sourly. “I’m touched. Knowing that you only want me fourteen percent dead makes all the difference in the world, Nicholas.”

  “Well,” Scratchard said, “the truth is that an eighty-six percent likelihood from Nicholas Scratchard is pretty safe odds. I never doubted that you’d come through, meaning that in my heart, the number was ninety-five at least.”

  God didn’t deign to answer. Instead, he returned to his quiet introspection.

  “My mother was religious, you know,” Scratchard said, staring straight ahead out the window as he steered. “Not to the point of zealotry, mind you, but she believed. Used to read to me as bedtime stories from a Children’s Bible.”

  “She sounds like a lovely woman,” God said, sounding uninterested.

  “Oh no, you’d have hated her,” Scratchard said, reaching up to scratch his chin. “Everybody did. Smart as a whip and good-looking, but she had a tongue that could eviscerate a man at twelve paces. My father lasted the longest, but finally, when he couldn’t take it any more, he left us when I was eight. He died in a car accident three weeks later.”

  God turned to look at him now, but didn’t speak.

  “I remember my mother’s face when she told me,” Scratchard said. “You could tell she was sad, but she reminded me that my father was in Heaven, and that we’d just have to move on. She taught chemistry part-time in an English boarding school while waiting for her doctorate to be acknowledged. It was a year before she’d let herself date again. I think she blamed herself for my father’s death.”

  Again, God held his silence.

  “She was so lonely,” Scratchard continued. “I knew she was lonely. She tried meeting men at work, at school, at church… in the end, they’d say one thing wrong, she’d tear them to pieces, and they’d never come back. She knew it was her own fault, but she couldn’t seem to tame her darker side. I was the only person in the world who was immune. With me, she could be harsh, but never cruel. Nothing was ever too good for me. Her conviction in my future was one of the cornerstones of my academic career.”

  “Nicholas,” God said gently, “you don’t have to-”

  “All through my life,” Scratchard said, “she’d tell me that there was a purpose to it all, that God wanted us to hang on through the worst, and the sun would rise one day. What I didn’t tell her was that the boys in her chemistry class had taken to smashing my possessions as a way of getting back at her for the way she treated them. I had this brand new telescope for my birthday, and this tall, ginger boy threw it out a window. I told her that I’d been careless, and…”

  He paused, shifting uncomfortably as the words stuck in his throat.

  “… and she forgave me,” he finished. “Bought me a new one, in fact. She had faith in me, God. She believed me when I said that it was my own fault. Or maybe she didn’t. She was a pretty smart woman. Either way, she had to dip into her own scholarships to pay for it. How she made up for it, I’ll never know.”

  He smiled, looking upwards into the other dimension of his memory.

  “I don’t know if I ever had any faith in God,” he said, “but I had faith in her. She was the central figure in my life, the broken angel that cared for me. No matter what I did, no matter what my challenges, she was there to help me through. Her willpower was astounding. She picked up tenure at Princeton University in America, a rare woman of science in the field of chemistry. Because of her, academia became as familiar to me as my own bedroom, and I flourished. I had my choice of Harvard, MIT, UCLA… they all wanted me, and my mother was so proud.”

  He paused, and God kept silent, sensing difficulty in what came next.

  “I… I was at MIT,” he said, haltingly, “working on my second doctorate, when I got the news. They found her and the empty bottle of pills in the bathtub. The window was open, so that she could look out over the green grass and gardens of the Princeton grounds, which were visible from her apartment. It was as if she’d planned her own death, arranged to make it as beautiful as she possibly could. A half-empty bottle of white wine was next to the tub, and there were several burnt candles. And on the stool next to her within arms reach…”

  He shook his head, and his voic
e became cold.

  “…was her Bible,” he finished. “It was open and marked to Psalm 25:16.”

  “ ‘Turn to me, and be gracious to me,” God murmured. “For I am lonely and afflicted.’ I know it well.”

  “But she wasn’t afflicted,” Scratchard said, his face suddenly twisted. “She was a beautiful, strong woman, a genius in her field. And she had faith. She believed in a better place and the existence of a God that loved her, and with the Bible only an arms reach away, it failed to save her. I’ll never know what impulse pushed her that last, fatal inch in her final moments, but I do know that her faith broke just before it ended. Just before my mother died, she accepted entropy.”

  “That was where you started to hate me,” God said softly.

  “You think this is about you?” Scratchard asked, turning on him with contempt. “This has nothing to do with you, old man. This is about the end of belief and the inevitable failure of faith. Don’t you understand? You are nothing more than a crazy old man caught up in a flawed delusion that killed my mother long ago.”

  “Nicholas…”

  “No!” Scratchard laughed, and wiped away a tear. “No, don’t even start. There’s nothing for you to say. I’d get better results by falling into a bucket of fortune cookies. But as for you… You should consider what this means for you. A failure. Not just a delusion, but a deluded delusion, which really is irony personified. Maybe, instead of being God, you’ll find more validation spending your last hour of life thinking of yourself as Napoleon. Or an alien. Or Julius fucking Caesar.”

  The anger that leaked through his words hung in the air after he finished speaking, and again, the silence between them was like a vast gulf between worlds. To distract himself, Scratchard checked all the instruments and gauges. The Vaccine had a strong tailwind behind it, pushing it eastwards at twice the speed they’d planned. They would be arriving in Bangor sooner than expected.

  The quiet grew, lasting ten minutes, then fifteen. During it all, God sat in silence, hardly moving, staring down at the floor like a chastened child who was reviewing all the events that had brought him to this moment. He looked old! Or rather, he looked older than usual, like a crucial piece of what had made him thrive was now gone, and all that was left was a tired and regretful man clinging by the fingernails to the fixtures on death’s door.

  After a while, Scratchard found that he couldn’t take it anymore.

  “It’s not that you’re a bad guy,” he offered, out of nowhere.

  God didn’t answer him.

  Feeling vaguely absurd, Scratchard collapsed back into his chair with a sigh, poured himself some more scotch, and lit up a cigarette.

  He was surprised to see God holding out his own, empty glass towards him.

  Without a word, Scratchard poured him a drink.

  “I knew a story once,” God said, looking like a man trying hard to remember. “Actually, I know lots of stories, but this one…”

  He took a sip of scotch.

  “There was this boy,” he began. “Though he was very intelligent, and he never wanted for anything, he was still a very, average boy in many ways, except one. He had the most wonderful imagination. He had no brothers or sisters, and his parents, though they loved him, were very, very busy in their jobs and careers. But oh…! His imagination. It was the most astonishing thing.

  “When, at night, his parents would tuck him in, he would close his eyes, and it was as if the inner lining of his eyelids became the high definition, panoramic view of the most perfect movie theatre you have ever seen. And in this self-created, lucid dreamscape, the boy found he could do anything. He could fly, and feel the wind against his face and the pull of inertia on his body as he moved up above the trees, across waters, through canyons, and over cities of archaic and modern design. He could imagine bold companions, powerful nobles, beautiful maidens, and strange lands filled with trinkets and treasures and fragrances and secrets and dark alleys and sun temples, ranging from the dusty heat of desert oases to the frozen cliffs of northern ice fortresses. He would do battle with fierce and terrible enemies, visit other worlds, and dive down to the darkest depths of the ocean, safe inside a protective, invisible globe that surrounded him.

  “As the boy grew older, his imagination only grew more vibrant and informed, as the expanding world around him became fuel for his private worlds. Now, Roman legionnaires would join his quests through swamps and badlands, along with Knights and Gunslingers and Samurai. The women he saved or met became ever more complex, more sophisticated, and were the luminous keepers of secrets. Their love, chaste though it was, was a thing to be greatly prized, when he proved himself worthy to deserve it, and their passion, like rain in the desert. Sometimes, they might join him, fighting or journeying or flying alongside him as Amazons or sorceresses or Officers in some far and future military service.”

  God stopped to take another sip of his scotch.

  “A great gift,” he said, “this boy’s imagination. For in all other ways, he was a very ordinary boy, wholly unremarkable in a very ordinary life. Not that it seemed to matter. Real life, and the plodding, predictable people who inhabited it, paled in comparison to his nightly exploits. Occasionally, he would try to form connections, but how could he? How could the ordinary, unremarkable, mundane activity of the real world compare to his imaginative one. In the real world, people talked of sports or cars or of the banal interactions with the opposite sex. Women, in particular, were a disappointment. Utterly uninterested in him, they were caught up in what seemed to the boy to be trivial, superficial matters. How could they compare to the goddesses that touched his hand at night, or laughed at storms or falling stars. By day, he would learn of math, or where to sit in the lunchroom so as to not get bullied, or how to talk to people so that they would not call him a freak. By night, he would fly starships, fire bolts of pure energy from his fingertips like liquid jets, and dance on lava fields with elementals.

  “Now, in the uninteresting tapestry of his unremarkable life, it has to be remembered that the boy was intelligent. Not exceptionally so, but he was smart enough to gain acceptance to a rather average university and acquire skills that would allow him to pursue a rather ordinary life as a middling accountant. Life itself never got its hooks into him, and he found he could take it or leave it. No television show, no Hollywood movie, no pathos in live theatre, could match the sheer richness that his imagination provided. And so he spent most of his days ignoring and ignored by his coworkers. His parents passed away, and all he had in his life was a tiny, little apartment, a substantial savings account which he hardly used, and the endless universe of his amazing mind.”

  “Interesting,” Scratchard said, feeling mildly diverted as the end approached. “Even relatable, I suppose, although the double-etched nature in this so-called ‘gift’ is pretty ham-fisted. Is this story another one of your parables? Or was there an actual case model in reality that served as a template?”

  “Oh, the boy was real enough.” God answered.

  “Really. So what happened to him?”

  “The outbreak happened.”

  God drained the last of his glass and held it out for a refill.

  For a second, Scratchard didn’t move as he tried to digest the answer, so God wiggled the glass a little. Looking vacant, Scratchard poured.

  “The boy, now an old man, left his apartment to purchase some milk one afternoon,” God continued in a soft voice, “and found the dull, boring world around him had changed. Everywhere he looked, people were screaming, becoming undead, or devouring others. For the first time ever, the sheer surreal intensity of the real world exceeded the visceral potency of his imagination, and like a coma victim awakening from a long sleep, he wandered through the hellscape, a witness, as person after person, man, woman, and child, were consumed by a world gone mad.”

  God drained his scotch in one gulp.

  “But not him,” he said. “Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, he walked like a phantom among th
e dead, unable to save even one member from a race of strangers. Invisible to the dead, he watched as one by one, the little people of the world, who’d never been able to hold his interest, wept and screamed and begged and fought and whimpered their way into oblivion. And in the pyrrhic wind of their loss and pain, the man’s imaginary shroud was ripped away, and for the first time in his miserable life, he could see.”

  “That would be when your mind snapped,” Scratchard murmured.

  “He thought of his parents,” God said, ignoring him, “but he did not know them. He thought of his schoolmates, but he could not remember a single one. He thought of his coworkers, but they were empty faces, hollow shells where people should have been. He thought of a whole world of people, each with their own special, imaginative realms like his, each with hopes and dreams, and he knew that he knew them not at all. Each life, as complex, as desperate, as unique, as mysterious, and as devastated as the Library of Alexandria, was lost to him now. The fact that some of them still walked was little more than a grim mockery of the choices he’d made.”

  And God smiled, his eyes wet with tears.

  “And that,” he said, “was when I realized that I was God. It explained so much. Why I dreamed new worlds. Why I was immune. But most of all, it explained the sudden explosion of… crushing aloneness I felt at that moment for a people I hardly knew. It was memory, you see? A memory from the beginning of time when I was the only living entity in existence, and the… the endless emptiness... it reminded me…”

  He shook his head, and his voice became small.

  “How alone I was.”

  The journey continued in silence after that, and time passed with a surreal kind of cadence, as if it had jettisoned mathematics in favor of a more subjective component. They ate their food with a minimum of conversation, not out of awkwardness or shame, but from a certainty that there was nothing else that needed to be said.