Whatever Gods May Be

by George P. Saunders

  Happy Hour was a daily event that was never missed by the tribe. Indeed, it could not be; for without the miracle treatments which the Stingers dispensed to everyone, the damning powers of the Dark would cut through the tribe life like a knife through hot butter. Only with Thelerick administrations could tribe members be assured of a fighting chance against the Dark plagues. Now, fifty or so patient individuals lined before each Stinger, waiting to receive the life-saving drug that was all that stood between the Dark and death.

  Long before John and Valry Phillips had started migrating with the tribe, the Thelerick aliens for thousands of years had been nursing their small party of people across the globe, feeding it regularly with their powerful antibiotic and antiviral toxins. These daily rituals which John had later given the name of Happy Hour to had continued nonstop for tribe members for centuries. It was truly a blessed people that were under the auspices of the giant Stingers; for only in this small community of a thousand or so individuals could the perpetual pang of agony be mildly reduced - or at least numbed - by the powerfully intoxicating liquor/medicine produced by the great aliens.

  As Valry and Thalick approached the encampment, Happy Hour was just beginning. People waited patiently in line, while each person took his or her turn aboard a Thelerick back and extracted the precious fluid from the massive stinger above. In some cases, where a recipient was too weak to take his treatment orally, the afflicted patient was given a precise and careful injection by the administering Stinger to the largest muscle on the human anatomy. Such techniques produced mildly painful aftereffects for these individuals; the bruise caused by the stinger puncture, no matter how carefully executed by the conscientious Thelerick, was at least the size of a human fist and usually necessitated those who had received such treatments to conduct most of their business on their feet for several days afterwards.

  Still, it was a small price to pay for a daily guarantee against any one of a thousand different diseases that were killing off mankind everywhere else in the world. As it was, the tribe could not successfully ward off every type of contagion the Dark produced, and suffered to the last man and woman from some life-threatening misery that the Stinger toxins were useless against.

  However, since most of these Thelerick-proof plagues demanded both protracted periods of hibernation and proliferation, the tribe was never in any danger of near-instant extermination. Without Happy Hour, of course, this would not have been true. Mankind's ancient enemies such as small pox, typhus, tetanus, influenza, hepatitis, pneumonia and syphilis would have long before taken a devastating and ultimately permanent swipe against the tribe had not the Stingers arrived when they did.

  Valry disembarked off of Thalick and ran over to the nearest line of people. Each tribe member was well over six feet tall, with some of the men topping seven and a half feet. The abnormal size deviations in humanity today were some of the more harmless repercussions of long-term mutation, though it did give a kind of ganglia and disjointed appearance to the species that clearly segregated it from the kind of human Valry was.

  Approaching a familiar and friendly giant, Valry looked up and smiled.

  "Marma, has Phillips done Happy Hour?"

  Marma kneeled down where she was in line to speak to Valry, choosing her words carefully and with great difficulty.

  "No...no, Valry" she said very slowly, after so many years, still battling the strange language that John Phillips had given to the tribe with only minimal success, "Phillips sleep."

  Valry looked towards her father's tent near the stream and nodded.

  "Marma," Valry began, speaking just as slowly as the friendly female giant had done, "Go get Phillips cup. Bring here."

  Marma stared dumbly at Valry for just a moment, then grinned broadly and lumbered away. Valry watched her go then proceeded to touch and pet a few people in Marma's Happy Hour line. This brought on a few groans and grunts - and occasionally a recognizable word of 'thanks' - from the waiting giants, who each kneeled when Valry came near them.

  "Hungry?" she asked loudly so that all the people standing before the other Stingers could hear her.

  "Hungry'." was the thundering reply to her query.

  "I get food!" she yelled, then turned and ran back to Thalick amidst howls of grateful approval.

  She treated them almost like playthings, talking to them as if they were make-believe dolls, but she did so with clear adoration in her voice. They were her children, and she loved them unsparingly. The great span of evolution that separated herself from them did not diminish her devotion to the tribe giants; she had grown up with them, lived with them all of her life, and they had become her family. Each person within it was a brother and sister, or more accurately, a helpless son or daughter to be cared for and looked after always.

  In turn, though the Stingers were recognized' as the great omnipotents that gave life and defended them against the Redeyes, the tribesman looked to Valry Phillips as the spiritual and emotional leader of their lives. Indeed, they could not have helped but worshipped her. When there was death among them, it was Valry who showed more remorse than they could even comprehend. It was Valry, too, who accompanied the Stingers on food expeditions, and brought back enough for all to survive on. More than anything else, though, it was Valry who could understand the strange hisses of the Stingers, and who alone - even more so than the Old One Phillips - could command the great insects to do her bidding.

  Though a totally communal society lacking any form of rank or file, the tribe did have its unspoken godhead, anthromorphosized in the form of Valry Phillips. Her father was regarded with like reverence, though without the unconditional love that was reserved for Valry alone. To the tribe, the Old One Phillips was more like the Stingers; a powerful force that commanded respect and attention, he was feared and obeyed - a being that was distinctly distant and alien...and had no interest in altering that status.

  But Valry was theirs. She was their mother, their comforter, their light in a world of perpetual blackness.

  Given the opportunity, they would die for her in a moment. And though their mutated brains could only comprehend the rudiments of self-sacrifice, they suspected that Valry would die for them as well.

  Valry stopped a few feet from Thalick, then closed her eyes. She stumbled forward, bracing herself against the Stinger's claw. Thalick hissed his concern.

  "I just need some Happy Hour myself," Valry smiled weakly, fighting off dizziness. "We need to feed them, Thalick. Have you found anything nearby?"

  Thalick lowered his tail over his head for the girl's convenience. While she squeezed out the precious toxin, he answered her question.

  FUZZIES. ONE HOUR AWAY Thalick reported, then paused mid-thought. A moment later: SOMETHINGELSE

  Valry could detect the difference in the transmission instantly. Thalick's message contained worry, and this caused her to share the Stinger's uneasiness.

  "What?"

  For a second, all ten Stingers hissed among themselves, even while they continued to engage in Happy Hour. Valry recognized this as a strictly Thelerick interchange which she could not decipher. She was not offended, though; Thalick would most certainly fill her in on what she had missed in the private consultation.

  The hissing died away. Thalick wriggled an antennae, then replaced his enormous tail over his back.

  CITY. MAYBE DANGER. MAYBE REDEYES

  "How far?" Valry asked, her face going pale at the news.

  The tribe was far too exhausted to contemplate another move just yet. It needed food and rest, regardless of a possible vampire city in the vicinity. Still, she knew that if the Stingers thought it was too dangerous to remain in the steamy valley, they would force the people to travel regardless of their weakened condition.

  NOT NEAR. NOT FAR. AFTER FUZZY HUNT, THELERICK GO TO SEE.

  "Good," she nodded, after gulping down a few handfuls of venom, "As soon as Green Belly and One-"

  A scream of terror pierced the air around her. Valry's eyes
widened first with surprise and then fear. For the voice she heard was that belonging to her father.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The world of dreams had been inordinately cruel to John Phillips. It refused to placate his tortured subconscious with the wavy, often forgettable ravings of a soul at rest. The disjointed pictures from his past, for example, were not brief and hazy. They instead flooded his brain with merciless clarity.

  Back into years long gone Phillips would travel nightly, to a place and spot in time he had tried to forget without success. As if the demons of his mind were perfect chronological navigators, they would steer him to the first, numbing days of the crash twenty years before. Once arrived to that distant and horrible shore, the nightmare latched on to its victim and held it hostage to an interminable period of suffering.

  For two decades, the nightmares had haunted the astronaut. They had strengthened in severity since their beginning, adding new, brutal detail to their nightly sojourns to his psyche.

  The day John Phillips buried his wife, a part of him also disappeared forever beneath the earth. Staring down at the small grave, marked by a hastily constructed metal cross, Phillips could not accept that he would never see Cathy's face again. He could not recall when she had always been there, working and talking with him, and most recently, fighting to survive with him on the strange, blasted world they had landed on one month earlier.

  Incomprehensibly, he would have to continue living without her, if not for himself than for his baby daughter even now wailing inside of the ruined Challenger.

  John kneeled down to his wife's grave and caressed the fresh earth. His whole body shook with sobbing. The relentless moan of the alien wind dried his tears quickly, but seemed to numb his lips and throat, so that the only sound he could make was a soft, congested wheeze of despair.

  He had planned on saying something proper over the grave, in tribute to a god he had always believed in up until today. But trying to form words was impossible for Phillips. He just knelt there for awhile, stroking the ground with his mouth hanging slack in disbelief and heartbreak.

  Finally, Valry's insistent bawling brought Phillips to his feet. Pushing the lopsided cross further into the ground, he moved away from Cathy's grave.

  "Feeding time, sweetheart," he said in a whisper. "Don't worry, I know what to do. I'll take real good care of her." At last, Phillips tore his eyes away from the grave and walked towards the shuttle.

  The Challenger had come to rest against the side of an enormous half-rock, half-sand dune formation protruding out of an otherwise flat desert terrain. The land had initially reminded Phillips of the Mojave flatlands where Edwards Air Force base was located. After the first day, however, it had become clear to Challenger's crew that they had crashed nowhere near Edwards, or California or anyplace on an Earth they could remember. But like the Mojave wastes, the ground was generally uncluttered, which had permitted the Challenger to escape extensive damage and possibly complete destruction after it had passed out of the ALC-117 phenomenon. As it was, Challenger lost its nose wheel shortly after a bumpy touchdown, which sent the heavy spacecraft skidding drunkenly into the mired sand dune it now rested against. Overall, however, even with the extensive instrumentation damage caused by the Hall, the shuttle had performed well.

  One month ago, Phillips had considered the forced landing to have ended miraculously. Since that time, he had revised this estimation, more often than not cursing the ship for not having blown up.

  Phillips stared at the blackened hull of the shuttle, sprinkled in places by green and orange corrosion. The huge rockets that had once propelled it over all the continents of Earth in only eight minutes lay cold and dead. Robbed of former glory, Challenger looked like a collapsed bird in the sand, too weak and too demoralized to ever consider flight again. Even in the wake of almost suicidal sorrow, Phillips still thought in terms of survival, recognizing that if he or Valry were ever going to leave this shattered planet and return to Earth (wherever that was!), it would not be with the aid of fifteen tons of scrap metal that Challenger had become.

  John entered the shuttle through a squeaky, dilapidated hatch that was partially torn away from its hinges. He looked at it for a moment, remembering how such damage was inflicted.

  The rat attack had taken place the day after the crash. With the appearance of the seven foot tall monstrosities, both he and Cathy no longer clutched to the feeble conviction that they had landed somewhere on Earth. Even the most remote parts of their home world did not harbor creatures like these. Wherever ALC-117 had delivered them, they knew it was nowhere near the planet of their origins.

  ALC-117 had held special terror for Phillips while still orbiting Earth and he believed that nothing would ever frighten him so much again. The rats had managed to supersede even ALC-117 for fear quality. More than Cathy, who was largely distracted with giving birth to Valry after the crash and attempting to remain too busy to be terrorized, Phillips was crossing new thresholds of horror that were threatening to snap his sanity. Even the arrival of his daughter failed to distract Phillips from an overwhelming sense of dread and certainty that this new, horrible world they were on was a place of infinite evil.

  As those first miserable days and weeks passed, Phillips often spent most of his time on the flight deck, staring out the windows at the malevolent sky that had yet to show a sun. His mind was too beleaguered with violent premonitions to rationalize what had happened, and even Cathy's patient-efforts to instigate scientific analysis or conjecture were met mostly with a blank glare from her husband.

  Despite his black incommunicable moods, Phillips was still able to function quite efficiently. He constructed an electric grid, spanning several square yards around the Challenger, which promised to electrocute anything that even gave a thought to invading the premises. He also. went to work on consolidating all the food stores and rationing Challenger's water supply. According to his best projections, Cathy and he, along with the baby, could survive on the Challenger's concentrates for several months. Neither Phillips nor Cathy ventured to guess what they would do after their food ran out. After seeing a sample of this world's zoo life, they both reasoned that if they were forced to search for water and sustenance away from the Challenger's protection, their chances for survival would be practically zero. These depressing inevitabilities remained unspoken between John and Cathy, however, and for an entire month they were able to exist from day to day by working out stringent routines to follow.

  Since Cathy's duties revolved around primarily nursing Valry and recovering from the ordeal of her delivery, she had little problem in adjusting to the extraordinary conditions around her. Even when the rats had attacked the ship, Cathy was more fascinated than fearful. Her highly disciplined mind had already constructed several hypothesis as to where ALC-117 at taken Challenger. Her favorite theory, which Phillips was wont to consider, was that they had passed through an interstellar portal of some sort. Since no stars appeared at night, there was no way to support her fantastic premise by identifying familiar constellations. But she was convinced that ALC-117 had been simply a great, big doorway to the distant stars, and at times she almost seemed enthusiastic that Challenger had been allowed the opportunity to embark on such a unique voyage.

  How they were going to get home had never been one of Cathy's major concerns. She reasoned logically that returning to Earth was a dim likelihood, but she did believe that there had to be a variety of other life forms on this world aside from the nomadic rat packs. On a final note of optimism, she emphasized that with an atmosphere similar to Earth's, this planet may well support some kind of intelligent race.

  Cathy turned out to be partially right.

  There were other things on this planet aside from house-size rats. Tragically, she did not live long enough to enjoy being proven correct.

  Phillips walked over to Valry's makeshift crib and took a bottle of cloudy liquid hanging nearby. He smiled sadly, appreciating his wife's foresight in producing a
milk substitute for Valry from the panoply of dairy concentrates. She had rarely used the bottle to feed her baby, but had insisted that John learn, just in case...

  Valry quieted instantly following the nursing, and John dutifully checked diapers, replaced soiled sheets and even provided a raspy lullaby for her listening pleasure. A few minutes later, and Valry was again asleep, leaving John alone with his battered thoughts.

  He had buried Cathy only an hour after she had been killed. That had been awhile back, because now Phillips noticed that the sky was already darkening. No wonder Valry had been crying for so long, he thought miserably to himself; he had not left his wife's gravesite for almost five hours.

  He still couldn't believe she was dead. It had happened so quickly. Staring out the porthole on Challenger's lower deck, John could still see the grizzly events of this morning.

  Even before the dull, beginnings of daylight could be seen peeping through the thick, sooty clouds that never dispersed, Cathy put Valry in John's care and had left the ship. She was on break; although John was a handy husband, the responsibilities of motherhood could never be equally shared. The work was mainly hers. Now, she had a few minutes to herself. She had started a garden of sorts a few days earlier, mainly out of curiosity, and had tendered a patch of ground tenderly for the sake of a few grains of frozen alfalfa from the botanical experiments aboard Space Lab. John was given the challenging duty of rocking Valry to sleep.

  It was the last time he would ever see Cathy alive.

  His wife's scream was so brief that Phillips almost didn't even hear it. He ran to the hatchway and hopped outside looking around frantically. What he saw would leave him partially mad for the rest of his life.

  The light was still so bad that John could barely make out the crumpled figure of his wife on the ground. However, he had no difficulty in seeing the small, horror on top of her, ripping out her throat. A wild, panicked scream blasted out of Phillips, that was almost as terrifying as the howl the red-eyed demon released when it saw Phillips. For just a moment, both man and monster stared at one another.