How Like A God

by Brenda W Clough

  “Funny thing,” Edwin said. “I remember everything up to the actual fall.

  Just as well, I guess.”

  “Shall I tell you why that is? Because the worst injury was your head.”

  “What, this?” Edwin touched the head bandage with his uninjured right hand.

  “It’s just a scalp wound. The doc said so. Fourteen stitches, though—a personal best for me.”

  “When I got to you, Ed, it was a dent in your skull. About this big.” Rob made a circle with his fingers and thumbs. “And-and squishy. You must have hit a rock.”

  “Oh, you must be mistaken, Rob,” Edwin said with maddening assurance. “Cranial trauma like that? I would’ve been herniating, bleeding into the brain with a burst aneurysm or an epidural hematoma. People don’t survive injury like that without immediate surgery to relieve the pressure inside the skull. And a brain injury usually entails obvious neurological consequences. I mean, here I am talking quite connectedly to you, sound as a dollar, at least on the cognitive front. Scalp wounds are way messy—that must have confused you.”

  “I’m not telling this the right way,” Rob said, frustrated. “Look. When I nailed Gil I stripped him of everything. The power, and the eternal life too. I had to do it. He was too dangerous to let run around with it.”

  Edwin blinked up at him. “Did you kill him?”

  “Not outright.” When he thought back on it Rob was appalled at his own serene cruelty. “I should have. To suddenly be an ordinary average person, after all these centuries—he’ll go nuts. It’s worse than how he did it to

  me. At least I had a week or so to gear up to speed. Gil lost it all in one instant.”

  “And out there in the desert alone—the poor old guy, Rob, he’ll freeze! And starve!”

  “No he won’t. The shepherds will take him in. Ed, don’t distract me. I climbed down and found you dying from a massive head injury. I swear it—it’s absolutely and objectively true. I had to save your life the only way I could. And I had it on me: the magic sea flower that confers eternal life. So I gave it to you.”

  Edwin lay and stared consideringly at him for a long moment. When it became obvious he wasn’t going to speak Rob said impatiently, “Oh, spit it out,

  Ed. We’ve been through so much, you can be up front with me.”

  “I think,” Edwin said gently, “that you’ve taken some pretty heavy hit points, Rob. Obviously you’ve defeated Gilgamesh, but it’s cost you. It must have been brutal. Look at those bruises. And you haven’t come to an accomodation with the tiger side of yourself, am I right? If you had to kill him, it’s perfectly normal to suffer emotional stress, and feel a need for a coping mechanism … You don’t agree with me.”

  Rob covered his sore face with his hands, partly in frustration but also to hide his unwilling smile. “Be fair, Ed. Have I ever told you anything that wasn’t the plain and simple truth? But there’s an easy way to prove this

  one. Back in Kazakhstan Dr. Mitchells said your pelvis was broken. That’s why you’re strapped to this body board. Let’s get him to look at it again.”

  He got up.

  In the cramped airplane cockpit Dr. Mitchells refused point-blank to leave the copilot’s chair. “There’s no necessity whatever to check the injury.

  The less stress we put on the break the better. I never saw a plainer fracture. He’ll probably need surgery, and be bedridden for months.”

  Rob was nettled by his self-satisfied tone. “I don’t agree with your diagnosis,” he said deliberately.

  The doctor glared at him. “And who awarded you an M.D.? You want him to scream, is that it? I tell you, Meg, there are some sick people in the world.”

  The pilot glanced over her shoulder at Rob. “Oh, be a sport, Bill. Go check him out—maybe there’s something really wrong.”

  “No such luck,” the doctor growled, grabbing his medical bag.

  Back in the cargo bay Edwin was restless. “Maybe we should wait for an X ray,” he said nervously. “Or an MRI. You know, Rob, it’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just that you see things in a more creative way sometimes.”

  “Creative,” Rob repeated, with a straight face. “Very tactful, pal. I appreciate it.”

  Ignoring all this, the doctor knelt and threw the blanket back. Underneath, what remained of Edwin’s blood-boltered clothing hung in tatters from where the doctor had cut things away. The bulky splints on his right leg immobilized it from hip to ankle. Black padded nylon straps snugly criss-crossed his body from armpits to knees, binding him immoveably to the body board. “This ought to hurt,” Mitchells said. “If it doesn’t, it’s another goddam mystery.” He worked his fingers into examination gloves and delicately probed the hipbones.

  “You’re going to tickle me,” Edwin fretted.

  Mitchells sat back on his heels for a moment. “That’s not right,” he muttered. He put a palm on the point of either hip and leaned, rocking the dish of bone with his full weight. “Could it be that… Damn it! Wait a minute though. You felt something, didn’t you?”

  The layer of grime stood out starkly on Edwin’s stubbled face as he went suddenly pale. “Not a thing,” he said in a stunned tone. “It’s just—I’m thinking, that’s all.”

  With brusque angry motions the doctor began unbuckling the nylon straps. “It’s got to be broken. It was broken when we strapped you down! Here, sit up, will you?”

  Rob helped the doctor hoist Edwin up, maneuvering the clumsy splinted arm and leg into position. Edwin sat on the edge of the board looking merely bewildered. It was obvious the action gave him no trouble at all.

  Hopelessly, the doctor flexed his good leg in several directions. Then he stood up and announced, “Okay. There’s no pelvic fracture. I give up. I do not understand. The sooner you two get out of my life, the happier I’ll be.” He turned and marched back to the cockpit.

  Rob sat down in his own canvas seat. “Ed, I’m truly sorry. I know the last thing you wanted was to get sucked in like this.”

  Edwin rubbed the back of his neck with his good hand. Loosened dust pattered down all around him. “What I wouldn’t give for a cup of coffee.

  And a shower. I still can’t believe this is happening. Tell me more, Rob.

  Tell me everything. How did you get the thing away from Gilgamesh? Is it connected to your own weirdness? How did you give it to me?”

  Rob stuck for a moment, trying to surmount his usual difficulty in putting the experience into words. Finally he said, “You swallowed it, Ed. Like a piece of candy.”

  Edwin leaned his bandaged forehead on his hand. “No, Rob. You can’t do the inexplicable explanation bit any more. This time I really have to understand. Let’s rewind a bit, and go through it in order. When I left the

  cave, go back to that. Who said or did what, next?”

  “He … I—” For a moment Rob wanted to beg off, just repeat that it was too hard to explain. But hadn’t he just promised Edwin he’d help him cope?

  No one had been there to tell Rob the score last year, but at least he

  could help Edwin find a balance now. “Well, we—we discussed conquering the

  world.”

  Edwin watched him narrowly from under the head bandage. “The two of you were going to take over the world. Like Pinky and the Brain.”

  “Um, not quite. He was going to take over his bit, Europe and Asia, while I managed the Americas. And then we were going to have a war, just for kicks.”

  Edwin raised his eyebrows so high, the dried blood and dirt fell off his brow in flakes. “I can’t dismiss old Gil as a wacko with delusions of grandeur. I’ve seen too much now. Rob, truly—did he have that caliber of power?” Rob nodded, and Edwin slowly added, “Do you?”

  “Gil told me he was a god. And—and that I’m one too.”

  Rob could hear the edge of anxiety, the shameful plea for reassurance, in his own voice. But Edwin didn’t fail him. “I have some slight acquaintance with God,” he said gravely, “and
I can assure you there’s not much resemblance. Besides, didn’t the epic poem say that Gilgamesh was only

  partly divine?”

  “Two-thirds god and one-third man,” Rob recalled.

  “Well, there you are,” Edwin said with satisfaction. “That’s flat-out impossible, the way DNA replication works. He’d have to be one-half, or maybe three-quarters. The ancient Sumerians wouldn’t have a clue about the Mendelian laws of inheritance. So Gil planned to rule the world. Obviously you didn’t go along with this ambitious agenda.”

  “No. In fact we, uh …”

  “Disagreed. Vehemently. You fought him.” Edwin pointed at Rob’s plaid shirt, which hid the bruises completely. “How?”

  “In our … There’s a place you can get to, Ed. If you get sufficiently weird. It’s your own place, individual as a fingerprint, sort of … like your own personality, expressed as an environment.” Edwin’s blank expression drove Rob to greater clarity. “Like the way a Web page is you, expressed on the Internet. I told you about mine. How Gil left me an e-mail there.”

  “Right, I remember that.”

  “So when we fought, he dragged me into his own head.”

  “Holy Mike!” Edwin pulled the laptop out of his briefcase and powered it up. “I wish I could’ve seen it—what was it like in there?”

  “It was a desert, exactly like the country we drove through. Just looking at it, you’d know Gil was really bad news. And he tried to nail me. But I wiggled out, back to the cave, and that’s when I got so dinged up.”

  Without looking up from the keyboard Edwin shook his head. “You’re abridging, Rob. I can tell. But how’d you get the drop on him?”

  Edwin was hunt-and-pecking notes on with one hand, his right. Rob noticed that the left hand in its shoulder-to-knuckle splint kept trying to help too, particularly with the space bar. Without mentioning it he withdrew the pain blocker from Edwin’s head. Edwin didn’t seem to feel a change. Rob said, “I saw how he did it. Pulled me into his own head. So I did the same. Pulled him into me.”

  “What’s it like there?” Edwin asked, as he had before.

  But this was utterly impossible for Rob. The strange joy and power, the sense that he had truly come together in that place—he knew it was a ridiculously inadequate description of that glory and beauty to say, “It was like New York City … I’m sorry, Ed. If I were a poet, or a songwriter, if I had the words …”

  “It’s okay.” Edwin’s glance was speculative but full of sympathy. “Maybe we’ll work on that later, bud. Right now let’s stick to the straight narrative. What did you do to him? How did you take away his power?”

  Recounting the vivid unreality of the battle was like trying to grasp a dream. “I got him down,” Rob said slowly, “and then I, I unzipped him. The two things, they were like beads inside his tummy: a pearl and a ruby. And I took them out. But I knew from the epic that eternal life was the pearl.”

  “And this is the pearl you had me swallow like candy.” Edwin sat staring at his computer screen, his splinted leg sticking awkwardly out to one side. “Darn it, I have to cook up a way to get a better grip on this. An inarticulate fellow like you is the worst possible observer. Rob, does this mean you have Gil’s power? Is it a sandwich, or a virus? I mean, do you now have twice as much as before?”

  “I guess so. I haven’t tried anything much with it.”

  “But won’t it be twice as hard to ride herd on?”

  “Probably. I should’ve given the red jewel to you too, but you wouldn’t have liked it.”

  “I’m very glad you didn’t,” Edwin agreed. “This pearl bit is going to be plenty weird enough, as it were.”

  “Let me see your arm.” Rob began picking at the adhesive tape on the splint. “There’s only one more vital thing for you to know, Ed. You’re not in my situation. You’re not stuck with this. I gave it to you, and I know how to take it away again. If having eternal life gets on your nerves, I can unzip you and take the pearl out—though I’d like you to put up with it until your bones all knit together, first. Any time you want out, you just say.” He ripped the fastening tape free and began unwinding the cloth bandage.

  “I see a problem with that, Rob. I may well outlive you, and if I do I’m in dutch.” Edwin’s grin was still a little crooked. “I do not at all want to live forever. I’d rather do my threescore and ten and then die in peace.

  But it does occur to me that an astronaut who can’t get killed might be really useful on a space mission. So don’t predecease me until after I come back from Mars, and then you can have the immortality back again with my blessing.”

  “Right. When the photon torpedoes need new dilithium crystals you could just step out into warp space and install them.”

  “You’re no Trekkie—photon torpedoes don’t take dilithium crystals!” Edwin’s laugh had something of its old exuberance now.

  “Okay, how does it feel?” Rob let the splints drop in a tangle of padding and bandage strips.

  Edwin flexed the arm without difficulty. “I can see the fracture sites,” he said, pointing. A livid bruise near the crook of his elbow and another near the wrist were all that remained of the injuries. Already the marks looked yellow and old, fading at the edges. “I wonder if the bone would sustain pushups yet?”

  “Give it another couple hours,” Rob suggested. “Shall I start on your leg now? That splint doesn’t look comfortable.”

  “Dr. Mitchells is going to be so pissed,” Edwin said, shaking his head ruefully. “Sure, get it going. I’ll start rolling up some of these bandages. Maybe if we put them neatly back into his bag you can convince him it was all a bad dream.”

  Part Four

  CHAPTER 1

  On the first afternoon in May, Rob arrived at Edwin’s apartment. He had walked all the way from the bus terminal. Now he ran up the stairs two at a time, the old duffel bag on his shoulder and the laptop carrier in hand. He rang the bell and then turned the doorknob. Edwin didn’t bother to lock the door when he was at home.

  Stepping into the hallway, Rob almost ran into a young woman. With an effort he kept his mouth from dropping open. She was not tall, but stunningly beautiful, with a mass of dark curly hair and fiery brown eyes under delicate eyebrows. The moment she saw him, the butterfly eyebrows slanted together. “You,” she said. “I recognize you. You must be that world-class louse, Rob Lewis!”

  Rob clutched his laptop to his chest. “Holy mackerel. And you must be Carina. Ed’s told me so much about you.”

  “Edwin,” Carina declared, “hasn’t the common sense God gave a hen. And you take him on a rock-climbing vacation in the Ural mountains! He could have gotten really hurt—of all the stupid, ill-considered expeditions, and in March, no less! Nobody with two brain cells to rub together visits Central Asia in winter. You could have frozen to death!”

  Rob recognized the rock-climbing story they’d agreed on. In the face of her righteous fury he could only shrink. “I’m very sorry,” he mumbled. “I’ll never do it again, I promise.”

  “Oh dear!” A stricken look spread over her tanned face. “And I promised Edwin faithfully I wouldn’t yell at you! I’m sorry. You have to excuse me—I have to make a phone call.”

  She darted into the bedroom and banged the door. Rob went more slowly into the messy living room. Dressed in jean shorts and a baseball T-shirt, Edwin

  was working out on his Lifecycle to the pounding beat of Van Morrison. The latest issue of Journal of Microbiology was clipped open on the book stand, and he was eating a large slice of apple pie from the pan. He picked up the remote and powered the stereo’s volume down. “Hi, Rob, want some?”

  “You don’t have to pack in the calories any more, you know! Ed, have I caused trouble between you and your girl?” Rob moved a pair of rollerblades from a chair to the floor before sitting down.

  “Impossible. What, did Carina lay into you? Ignore it. She has a lot on her mind. I think we’re going to tie the knot at last.”

&nbs
p; “Congratulations! She’s a gem—that Polaroid you have of her at the lab doesn’t nearly do her justice.”

  Edwin raised his dark eyebrows in mock alarm. “You didn’t tell her that, did you?”

  “I wouldn’t have the nerve!”

  “She hates it when people judge her by her looks.” Edwin grinned, remembering. “In fact, at the ceremony, be sure and tell her that her wedding gown makes her look intellectual.”

  Rob laughed. “I’ll do that, and I’ll tell her you told me to! When is it

  “In August sometime. She’s calling her folks now to coordinate calendars.

  You see, we have to do it after July twentieth.”

  Edwin’s voice suddenly quivered with suppressed excitement. Rob asked, “And what’s so important about that day?”

  “This came yesterday over the net.” He put the pie pan down and scooped a piece of paper from a table to pass over. It was a printout of an e-mail message:

  Eddie!!! The list’s FINALLY been handed down from on high! I spent all morning chasing it down, they DON’T want it all over the place yet, but YOU’RE ON IT!!!!! The official wheels will start turning next week. You can tell your family of course, but don’t steal the President’s thunder, okay? There’ll be a White House announcement, on July 20, natch. CONGRATULATIONS!!!!! Jeremy

  P.S. Bring me back a souvenir—how about a T-shirt? “My college roommate went to Nix Olympica, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt!” :):):):):):):)

  “July twentieth,” Rob said, thunderstruck. “I remember, that’s Apollo Day.

  Does that mean—”

  “A good day to make the Mars announcement, don’t you think?”

  “So you’re in!” Rob shook Edwin’s free hand with both his own. “Congratulations again! You’ve been having a very busy week!”

  “I’ll be busier yet. I have to move to Houston to do astronaut training.

  You want to take over my apartment lease here?”

  “No, I… Gosh, I didn’t realize you’d have to move. And you’ll be in space for years.” Rob’s heart sank a little.