Whatever Gods May Be

by George P. Saunders

  Phillips looked up at the sky.

  The Dark segments were still present, but there was something...different about them. Phillips recognized the difference at once. They had stopped moving against the gray clouds completely, and were now stationary slabs of black, undulating and malevolent.

  And they were larger, too.

  Something else was happening . Phillips watched, fascinated, only mildly aware of the screams of terror around him from the traumatized tribesmen, and the concerned hisses from the Stingers nearby.

  The Dark was coming together again. No, that wasn't quite it either, Phillips corrected himself. It was actually expanding, like a great oil spill across the sky. Phillips' heart sped up with renewed fear and shock.

  She is mine.

  Phillips brought his hands to his head and screamed. The Stinger upon which he rested hissed curiously below him, but did not intrude upon his private torment; it, too, could detect a wrongness about the valley, the air and the sky above.

  Preoccupied with trying to understand what precisely the deviation was, it did not attempt to pry into Phillips' thoughts.

  She is mine, the voice continued demonically.

  "No," Phillips whined like a baby, his whole body shaking with fear.

  She is mine.

  Phillips closed his eyes. Even awake, the dreams would not abandon him. But no, he admitted soberly to himself, this was no dream. The voice was real and deliberate - and more monstrous than anything his own imagination could have conjured up.

  Suddenly a face appeared before him. Phillips stared on in fascination. It was a beautiful face; the face, perhaps, of an angel. It was smiling at him, almost lovingly. Phillips also wanted to smile... except something deeper than instinct, perhaps it was his soul, told him that this was a visage of hate and loathing. Phillips watched the mouth move, and listened to the voice speak again.

  Valry is mine.

  Phillips closed his eyes, fighting back the urge to leap off of his Stinger, and running blindly around the valley, screaming to deafen himself against the unearthly litany on the winds.

  At last, almost unexpectedly, the words came out of his mouth in a whisper.

  "Go to hell."

  The voice stopped. The confused, terrified grumblings of the tribesman again filled the air. The Stingers, like Phillips, however, remained silent. For they were listening to a new sound. A horrible sound that could not be explained but existed nevertheless. Powerful, drumming, it echoed off the canyon walls, rumbling over the world like an approaching avalanche.

  The sound grew louder. It did not diminish. The Great Stingers instinctively moved backwards, their busy antennae probing the skies futiley for a dozen unanswerable reasons to what was now taking place.

  Phillips listened momentarily to the Thelericks puzzled hisses. They would not be able to identify the source of the cacophonic evil exploding overhead.

  How could they?

  For the sound of laughter, Phillips knew, was not one a Thelerick Stinger could easily have recognized or imitated. Laughter was a gift to man from gods.

  And devils.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  An hour passed before Thalick was completely successful at disentangling himself from the web-trees. The great spiders, watching their homes being shredded, did little more than crawl around or on top of Thalick as he extricated himself from the sticky coils. The Stinger regretted the needless destruction; he understood how long the spiders had worked at constructing their webs, but under the circumstances, he was forced to rash action. The storm had died down in the crater valley, and since Valry could not be detected in the near vicinity, Thalick had to assume the worst.

  Either the girl had miraculously survived the tornado, or she had been killed shortly after he had flown overhead to safety. Though he was still suffering from the massive damage to his underside from the light bolt, he was more agonized over the possibility of Valry being dead.

  His one good antennae told him two Stingers were approaching along with an odd number of humans. Had they found him in his former, bound-up condition, covered with spider dung, he would have experienced something very close to embarrassment - at least from a Stinger's perspective, anyway. Now that he was free, he thought about waiting for Slow Charlie and One Claw to arrive before descending into the crater once again. Impatience, however, won over. He did not hesitate a moment longer.

  Stepping carefully around the hissing spiders who were crawling beneath his feet and doing everything possible to be a nuisance, Thalick made his way awkwardly out of the forest of webbing. He had not even considered killing the spiders once; after all, it had been his fault that their homes had been smashed up. The insects were certainly entitled to a little recompense. This they derived by clamoring all over Thalick's charred armor, analyzing him to see if he was at all edible. Deciding unanimously that he was not - and lacking any other form of defense to rid their webs of the monster - the spiders proceeded to further defecate on the clawed invader with the greatest enthusiasm.

  Thalick endured the humiliation while increasing his speed away from the web cities. Pulling free at last from the sticky remnants, he hissed a tone of relief. The spiders scattered and crawled up the rubbery trees that supported their webs. A few bolder ones released a strange sounding growl of disgruntlement as a farewell, but for the most part, all concerned were content to forget the unfortunate incident.

  The moan of the Light Storm had all but dissipated and one glance at the sky over the crater told Thalick that the overcast was returning to its familiarly bland configuration. There would be no danger of a recurring funnel for at least another day. Thalick lost no time in moving to the edge of the crater's lip and surveying the interior.

  The topography of the valley had been changed dramatically. Small pot marks at irregular intervals still smoked from the light-bolt impacts, and several tons of charred earth had been lobbed in great gobs against the crater walls. Thalick could feel the scorching heat rising from below. It was not a very consoling indication that Valry could have survived such ghastly temperatures.

  Thalick's one functioning antennae probed the area, but as he had suspected somewhat miserably, no trace of Valry could be detected. If the girl was still alive, he realized, she would not be found down in the crater's furnace-like interior.

  Still, Thalick knew that such a sketchy probe would not do, and without further delay, he scrabbled and hopped down the slope into the steamy mud. A thin layer of smoke enveloped him as he approached the base and the ground beneath him became soft and warm. There was still a million volts worth of residual electrical energy that the crater had retained; another sorry factor Thalick had to acknowledge which was not favorable for the girl's survival. The Stinger was barely aware of the sizzling currents oscillating between the crater walls that made the air sputter and crackle. He did notice with some momentary contentment that the spider droppings were being melted off his body, replacing the green issue with a light film of black char

  Suddenly, his one antennae perked up and twitched. The scent was weak and barely perceptible, but it was present nevertheless. Thalick whirled on himself and followed his blood-hound antennae to the Valry trace. His eight eyes abruptly came to rest on a small, chopped out hole in the crater wall. Hissing excitedly, he raced over to the cave entrance.

  Another smell touched his senses - one which shattered all former hopes he may have had in finding Valry safely entombed within. The odor was as loathsome as it was recognizable. Redeye.

  The vampire, like the girl, was no longer in the cave, but Thalick guessed that both of them could not have departed more than an hour before.

  The marks and scents of Valry were strong, even with the equally overwhelming stench of the pursuing vampire. Thalick stood at the edge of the precipitous hole and gazed down into the grotto. The river gleamed like starlight under the intermittent sparks from the day seeping through from the surface as the current ran ever so slowly west towards the sea. There was no
sign of the girl or the monster that had presumably followed her into the adjoining cavern. Only slightly reassuring to the Stinger was the absence of spilled blood in the area. If Valry would have suffered even the slightest injury, Thalick would have detected the ominous earmarks at once. The fact that no encounter had obviously taken place did not preclude the possibility that the vampire had snared the girl later on. This foreboding likelihood was excellent since the Stinger could already determine that the subterranean waterway extended for miles in total blackness. It was the vampire's natural medium and one which Valry could not possible stand a chance for survival in for an indefinite period of time.

  Nevertheless, as there was at least a glimmer of hope, Thalick would follow Valry's trail until he caught up to her. There was a twofold purpose to the journey as well, though the Stinger had already prioritized Valry's predicament as being foremost. The fireball that had originally motivated both he and the girl to start on their disastrous mission was due west - the direction that the river and Valry along with her monstrous shadow had inadvertently taken. If he continued along the river's edge, the termination point would probably lead him to the beach area that he and Valry had originally arrived at before the storm had driven them inland. As concerned as he was about Valry's safety, that part of Thalick which acknowledged a task unfulfilled made the job of following her all the more compelling.

  Preparing to descend the twenty food drop into the shaft, Thalick suddenly was transfixed where he stood.

  A clear, piercing whine slice through his senses. In a fraction of a second, the alarm ceased. But its urgent appeal tore at the Stinger's soul.

  The collective transmission from the other Thelerick's still with the tribe was as grim as it was unbelievable.

  Thalick emerged from the cave and listened to the incoming signals. His one antennae wriggled with amazement.

  As the transmission from the Thelericks with the tribe concluded, Thalick began to feel the throes of a very common human frailty -- indecision. The message received was essentially an SOS, a distress call by his comrades to return immediately. There was good reason; for the pictorial implants Thalick disassembled were graphic and bloody. The tribe was in imminent danger, and even with the combined Thelerick force to protect it, success in deterring the threat did not look promising.

  Thalick was now faced with a grave, personal dilemma. If he returned now, he would have to abandon his search for Valry. By doing this, he knew that this was his special child's death warrant which he alone was signing. If he disregarded the panic signals from the tribe, many human lives would be lost that might otherwise be saved by his presence there. The numbers and facts received were damning; for truly, not one Stinger could be spared in the next few hours.

  LITTLE ONE Thalick hissed and cried out in the only way a Stinger could.

  MY LITTLE ONE – THALICK …LOVE YOU

  The Stinger then exited the cave as quickly as he could, and raced up the hot, muddy slope of the crater. But at the top, he did turn around once more before he left. His body was quivering, and the composure so admirable in a Thelerick Stinger had disappeared altogether. Pacing and clapping his claws together in private torment, Thalick hissed out over the decimated interior of the valley floor, using a human phrase he had always heard before, yet failed to understand until this moment.

  LITTLE ONE, Thalick called out again. FORGIVE ME…

  * * *

  The mother Birdog stayed at the rear of her cave as the pups silently suckled. The expression on the man's face told her that he had suffered a great loss; she could sympathize with him, for the wave had come very close to rising up to this cave where her babies lay helpless, and flooding it. Miraculously, the waters had receded just in time, much to the anxious Birddog’s relief. The man's flying cave however, had not been so fortunate. The Birdog offered commiserative whimpers towards Zolan's direction, but he seemed very distant. Now, as the Birdog had done so often in the past, the man could only stare out at the sea in silent anguish, wondering, hoping, or even cursing it for the theft of something dear and precious.

  The storm had completely subsided, and now there was only the usual breeze wafting through the cave entrance from the beach below. The smell of wet, aged sod and sand was strong, and would not disappear for several days. The waterspouts and tidal waves had churned up the shallow shelf-bottom considerably, displacing long-since buried plankton and other organic matter and driving it inshore. The residue of these natural escavations now lay strewn on the beach in the form of tangled seaweed and strange, bubble shaped growths that resembled bloated jellyfish. Indeed, much of the sea growth radiated an eerie quality of animation that left a certain amount of ambiguity as to their classification. Staring at the stuff piled on the beach, Zolan felt no compulsion to hazard a guess as to what was animal or plant, or dead or alive; only one thing was ramming itself home, and that was he was trapped on this gloomy, cloud covered, monster-infested planet for an indefinite period of time.

  Zolan had hoped that the Rover would have revived itself in time to take protective action when the wave struck. For hours, his eyes did not leave the sea line. If the Rover had not been crushed by the turbulent forces underwater, conceivably it could have still functioned to such an extent that would have allowed it to resurface. The ship was an awesome creation; it had thus far survived anything the Hall could throw at it, surely it could stand a chance against a few metric tons of seawater.

  But Zolan knew that since the outer hatch of the ship had been left open, the Rover's lower levels had most certainly received extensive flooding. If the brain core was still unable to initiate sealing procedures by the time that happened, then the drive units would be ruined. Furthermore, if the Rover had failed completely to even respond to the internal emergencies, than the flight deck and central computers would have been completely vulnerable to water intake. And if this was the case, there was now no surprise that the Rover had yet to be seen.

  "Dalka-dalka," the Birdog barked. Zolan turned his head slowly to regard his furry benefactor. He smiled grimly and snapped his fingers at her. The Birdog carefully nuzzled the pups back against the wall, then ambled over to where Zolan was leaning against the cave entrance. She shoved her head into his hand and Zolan obliged her with a scratch to her ears.

  Well, he thought to himself with forced optimism, at least he wasn't completely alone. Never, on any of the planets he had been to up till this moment, had he encountered such a naturally, trusting and affable creature like this mother Birdog. There was obviously a highly developed intelligence behind the deceptively-oafish features and could therefore, not be labeled as a mere animal. Had he the time or inclination, Zolan was sure that a common language could have been found that would have improved communication between the Birdog and himself.

  Zolan sighed unhappily; perhaps, that time would be made available to him permanently. For without the Rover, he would never leave this world.

  The Birdog groaned with pleasure as Zolan continued to be attentive to one particularly itchy ear. In the back of her mind, she was considering the problem of providing the man with food. She was sure that he would not be receptive to a diet similar to hers or what the pups consumed. And, since she was not a predator, the thought of pursuing and killing game would never have entered into her imagination.

  The Birdog abruptly pulled her head away from Zolan's hand and stared at him. She then looked outside at the sky and beyond to the City where the rats had come to attack the man's Ball. It would be dark very soon; much too late to provide her human guest with a meal. The man, she realized sadly, would have to sleep on an empty stomach tonight. She had the feeling, though, that the man had little thought of food at the moment. Still, he would need to be attended to sooner or later and the problem was one that could not be ignored.

  There was one solution. Several days back, the Great Stingers and their following of sick humans had inhabited the lower valleys of the mountains in the east. Their arrival had been
announced with excitement by the Birdog colony; for where men and Stingers were, a large supply of tortoise bones were certain to be nearby. Adverse to hunting and even consuming meat products, Birdogs were not closed to gnawing on a clean Fuzzy bone where one could be found, and these were considered terrific delicacies that were rare and greatly appreciated. The Stinger colony would certainly have an abundance of meat, as well as Fuzzy bones, and it was here, the mother Birdog realized, that her unfortunate visitor needed to be.

  Tomorrow, she would make the journey with the man across the Place of Craters and deposit him to the nearest Stinger. She would miss her newfound friend, but it would be unfair for her to keep him much longer, and she doubted whether he would have been receptive to the idea anyway.

  Zolan moved away from the cave door as the temperature was beginning to drop to uncomfortable levels. He was still very wet, and he was not sure how he was going to get warmer before nightfall arrived. There was no way to build a fire here, and besides this would probably not be tolerated by his host and terrify the pups inside. Up to now he had been worried about surviving on this new planet for years to come; a ridiculous concern, considering the fact that he might not make it through the first night alive.

  Zolan watched the muffled light from the cloud cover slowly dim out. He knew there would be no stars tonight. The planet obviously existed under the perpetual shadow of overcast skies, and judging from the ruins he had seen earlier, there must have been one hell of a catastrophe in this world's past that not only wiped out a civilization or two, but also pummeled the atmosphere as well. Zolan recalled his encounter with the rats earlier; if they were any indication of what was left here, he knew his stay was going to be unpleasant indeed.

  Zolan huddled up into a ball and tried to keep his teeth from chattering. He only had to look towards the mother Birdog for her to see what needed to be done. She walked over, to the man, and took one of his boots in her giant mouth. Zolan watched puzzled.