by Payne, Lee
"Their planets are few and barren, the last refuge of the dregs of the universe. Hunted men go there because they know that no crime short of genocide could ever induce a lawman to take the trouble to come in and try to root them out.
"So there they sit, the scum at the bottom of the galaxy after the humanity has been poured out, sunk in violence and degradation, fit only to prey upon each other.
"And there was I, sitting in the dreariest bar in the dreariest spaceport on the dreariest planet in that entire dreary star system, minding my own business, having a little glass of the foul dragon's sweat they call booze."
"From the darkness at the edge of the firelight, one of the twins rolled over and asked, "How did an upstanding fellow like you ever come to be in such an unsavory place?"
"That," snorted the Commodore, "is another story. I shall be happy to tell that story after I have finished telling this story."
"No, no. Spare us. I withdraw the question."
"I was, if you must know, there on a secret mission of considerable importance to the lives and well-being of a great number of honorable and righteous citizens who had turned to me as a last desperate hope for salvation. The poor wretches could offer little in payment but the justice of their cause touched my heart and I . . . "
"The bar, the bar," the twins shouted in unison. "Tell us about the bar."
"What bar? Oh, that bar. It was a terrible place. Did I mention that? Outrageous prices for rotgut booze. So there I was, standing at the bar chatting with a couple of fellows when, as is my custom when making a point or giving a certain phrase an added bit of emphasis, I uttered the exclamation, 'Great Odin's armpit' or 'by Sainted Odin's tooth, or something like that. I am no longer certain exactly which phrase I used. There are a number of them with which I have enlivened my speech since boyhood.
"Anyway, this shriveled little fellow suddenly pops up at my elbow and says, 'Ah ha! So you're the one.' Well, I happen to be, at that moment, at a particularly fascinating point in the story I am telling to these other fellows so I ignore this outburst and continue talking.
"'Ah ha!' he says again. 'So you're the one.'
"He is beginning to annoy me. 'I beg your pardon, you little fart,' says I politely. 'You are interrupting a conversation here.'
"He's bald as an egg, his clothes are in tatters and he has a wild and maniacal look in his eye. 'You're the last one,' he shouts. 'If you'd let me go, I could rest in peace.'
"I realize immediately that the little fellow is quite mad and will have to be handled with tact and understanding. 'What in the seven worlds of Belail are you talking about, you little worm,' says I, hoisting him off the floor by his throat.
"Well, his eyes bug out and he quiets down considerably. 'You,' he gurgles after I set him down, 'you are the last soul in the universe to invoke me, to believe in me. You can set me free. I'm Odin.'
"I look at him and he looks at me. 'Are you trying to get on the wrong side of my good nature?' I inquire. 'Because if you keep to this course, you will surely do so. Odin is a mighty god of power where I hail from, not some grubby little pipsqueak who interrupts honest men in a forsaken dive out beyond the edges of Hell.'
"'Odin,' he says, 'also called Woden, chief warrior god of a 36-member pantheon worshipped by the mighty and warlike tribes of seafaring Vikings in the far north of old Earth back beyond the beginnings of time. Danes and Norse they were, big red-bearded giants of men who needed gods they could respect even when we occasionally dropped an avalanche on top of them or marooned them on an iceberg just to show who was boss.'
"'You're not exactly my idea of a real man's god,' I said. 'Even on a bad day, Odin would have to be at least twenty times your size and a hell of a lot tougher.'
"'I was. I was,' he cries. 'I was the power and majesty of a great people who created me and believed in me. I was the strength in them, the might of great sea kings.' For an instant his eyes flashed and there was fire in him. But then it flickered and he sighed, 'But that was long ago. Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, has come and gone, and with it have gone the gods, the earth and the mighty people who believed in us. We lost, you know. We lost the great battle at the end of time. And new gods came with their own time and I'm all that's left and it's all because of you.'
"'Me?' says I.
"'You're the only one left,' he sighs, 'the only one who still remembers, who still invokes Odin.' Then he draws himself up to his full four and a half feet. 'Look at me,' he shouts. 'I slew Ymir, father of giants, and built the Earth from his carcass. I used to be somebody. Now you're all that's left and I have to follow you across the galaxy from one seedy dump to another. Look at this place. Aren't you ashamed? You're the last one, you half-heathen, and you refuse to die.' Now he was shrieking and sobbing and pounding on the bar.
"He was making me nervous. 'What can I do?'
"'You could buy me a drink,' he says.
"So I bought us a couple of drinks and he explained how I was the last person in the universe who had even heard of him and my belief, feeble as it was, was all that gave him substance and kept him from returning to Asgard and his wife and all the other old forgotten gods.
"We had a few more drinks and he was telling me all about what a great place Asgard was and how beautiful Frigg, his wife, was. So I asked him, what could I do, short of committing suicide, to help him?
"We had gotten to be pretty good friends by this time. I ordered another round and he explained that it's not so much the waiting that bothers him, he's used to that and one more lifetime isn't all that long after ten thousand years or so. But what does bother him is the travelling. I was a pretty active fellow in those days. What he really wanted to do was settle down in one place and kind of relax until he was able to disincorpulate himself and return to Asgard. He also said that by staying in one place, he could conserve the strength he had left and concentrate better on helping me, since I was his last subject, so to speak.
"Well, at that point I didn't much think I was going to be calling on him anymore anyway. I mean, it's one thing to call on a god that's big and powerful if you happen to get into a jam where nothing else seems to work. But how could I ever ask for help from this little shrimp. I mean, he was a nice guy but not my idea of a god.
"So I settled up and went my way and he went his. I haven't seen him since. For all I know, he's still back on that dumpy little planet, though I did give him enough to get himself off to someplace nice. I've been in a few tight places since then and I've thought about calling him, but hell, what good would he be? I don't think he's got a thunderbolt left in him."
Ohan sat completely befuddled by the tale, unable even to formulate an intelligent question about it.
"And it never occurred to you," said one of the twins from inside his bedroll, "that this god of yours might actually have been nothing more than a down-on-his-luck mythologist caging a few free drinks?"
"Certainly. That's why I looked him up at the first library I got to. Did I mention the fact that he only had one good eye?"
"No," said a twin. "You always save that for last. I suppose you had to force him to accept the money for his space fare."
"As a matter of fact I did. He was very reluctant to take it but even gods have to eat. Besides, I had just concluded a rather profitable deal with some businessmen there, recovered some people they had carried off by mistake. I gave the little old fellow a couple of credits."
He turned to Ohan. "Remember, lad, it never hurts to be nice to gods, no matter how shriveled up they are. Even half a thunderbolt might come in handy someday."
Ohan dreamed that night of little one-eyed gods riding horseback through the forest.
Chapter 6
The overgrown road brought them to the lost city. They had investigated a number of ruins along the way but these turned out to be mainly small isolated complexes, connected with the road and the traffic that once passed over it. Only two of the mounds had been associated with others farther off in the forest. In
both these cases, closer examination revealed a small cluster of mounds centered on a much larger one which the scanners found to be a stepped pyramid, flat-topped and crowned by an ornate temple. A laser burn showed both pyramids to be nearly twice the age of the road, 1,200 years for one and 1,400 years old for the other. Each had been built and rebuilt several times with the oldest structures used as a foundation for the newer ones raised on top of them. At the very core of the pyramid they found only a simple raised platform of mud-brick coated with a thin layer of plaster and topped by a wood or thatch building little different from those in which the early people lived. That simple temple had long since turned to dust and been replaced by the stone temples that, layer upon layer, entombed it.
"When your neighbor sets his hut up on a platform higher than yours, watch out," the Commodore said as they watched the computer print a portrait of the long-buried structure. "Next thing you know, your descendents will be spending the next thousand years bowing down to a bunch of kings or gods."
Elor sat before the console, his long fingers playing skillfully across the keyboard guiding the scanners' invisible probes. "Without those kings and gods, there would be none of the pretty artifacts we have come so far to find," he said.
"Oh, I appreciate the multi-headed idols with their jeweled eyes, the crowns, the books of ancient wisdom and all that. I'm just not convinced that any of it did much good for the poor slob who had to haul all these stones up to the top of this pyramid."
"He must get something out of it," Elor replied evenly, "or he wouldn't keep doing it, eon after eon on planet after planet from one end of the galaxy to the other."
"Well, until you college types get all his motives figured out, I'll continue to think that anything beyond a cold beer and a hot wench is beside the point."
Erol had been repositioning a scanner on top of the mound. Now he climbed down and perched on a tree branch above their heads. "If that were the case, you'd still be living with those triplets on Kalnat IV."
"Ah, the triplets." The Commodore's eyes glazed over and his hand stopped in mid-swing, allowing an insect on the tip of his ear to complete its busy probing and fly away with a full load of blood. "And the beer was the coldest," he said as he rubbed the spot where the intruder had attacked.
"Ohan, my boy, if anyone ever offers you a lift to the Kalnat system . . . " He paused and looked at Ohan who began to fidget under his scrutiny. "Ah, well, perhaps you need a bit more seasoning, a little more time under my expert tutelage.
"But what was my point? I'm sure it wasn't the triplets. Confound you, Erol. How is the boy to learn anything if you keep sidetracking every philosophical discussion we . . . Ha! It was the triplets. Take ninety-nine percent of these poor dull savages and transport them to Kalnat IV, and they'd be content. All the kings and gods in all the galaxies in all the universe couldn't give any of these poor drudges half the bliss that the triplets could.
"So why did I leave? That was your question, wasn't it, Erol? Because I'm not your ninety-nine percent. Warm triplets and cold beer indeed! I've seen the common man's heaven and passed it by. I've gambled away the treasures that dynasties of kings have plundered empires to possess. And you ask why?" He glared at Ohan who, startled, shook his head no, then yes, unsure of which question he had been asked.
The Commodore gave him an indulgent pat. "Because I'm an adventurer, lad. If I were a king, I'd be stuck with the same old empire, day after day. If I were a priest I'd have to shine up to the same old gods. Even Kalnat IV and the triplets eventually becomes the same old Kalnat IV, though it would take a long time to exhaust the possibilities."
His eyes took on their far-away look again. Then he snapped back. "But an adventurer, lad, is the fellow who'll throw away heaven so he can take a look at hell. And the point is," he glared up at Erol, "that all the poor saps who gave their lives to build this dirt-covered rockpile would have been just as well-off living in a tree with their old lady, having kids."
With that, he ripped the printout from the computer, folded it with a flourish and stuffed it into Elor's map case.
"But the question remains," Erol said from his tree branch, "why then does he continue, from one end of the galaxy to the other, to leave the trees and build these pyramids?"
The Commodore smiled and spread his hands wide apart. "Hope, of course. Look at me. I left the triplets in the hope that I might find quintuplets next door." He turned to Ohan. "Remind me to have you write that down next time we stop. Hope. It's said to spring eternal."
***
Though he never thought it would happen, Ohan had become so accustomed to riding, he had taken to half-dozing in the saddle as they plodded along. He and his horse had reached an agreement. As long as the animal delivered Ohan to the same place everyone else arrived at by day's end, Ohan didn't argue about the route the horse took in getting there. That was why Ohan, jarred into consciousness by his steed's sudden lack of motion, looked down to see it nibbling at a bush by the side of the road. He was alone.
He turned in panic to look behind him and found his companions stopped in the middle of the road, staring up at an arch. They had reined up on the far side while Ohan's mount, in charge during its rider's absence, had spied some of its favorite forage on the other side and ambled through to browse. After considerable coaxing, and after his horse had its fill of leaves, Ohan managed to return to the group.
As he passed beneath the arch, he could see that the two large pillars that supported it were intact and in relatively good condition but part of the arch itself had fallen and the rest was held in place only by the intertwined branches of the trees around it. Even in disarray it was an imposing structure, unlike any he had seen before.
"Rushed ahead to claim this lost city by right of possession, did you, lad?" Ohan sensed an unfamiliar note in the Commodore's voice. He was speaking more quietly than usual. That, more than the arch itself, sent a shiver down Ohan's spine. "That would make you its vicar, lad. For, since all roads lead here, this is surely Rome."
The twins had dismounted and were examining the pillars. The Commodore's good humor quickly returned. "I suggest we camp here outside the gates, pilgrims, and enter on the morrow. Unless my eyes deceive me, there is writing on these stones to copy."
They set up camp in the middle of the road in the shadow of the arch. Ohan and Leahn went cautiously into the forest to hunt and found a young ground bird and a large patch of edible roots. Twice Ohan thought he saw something—a suggestion of light just beyond the edge of his vision. But when he turned to look, there was nothing there. He put it down to imagination and didn't mention it to Leahn. As they were returning, Ohan bent down to pick some water grass for the horses and Leahn, intent on something behind her, walked into him. She rolled over his back and sat down hard in the middle of the grass patch he was harvesting.
She stared up at him in surprise, then grinned. "Don't mind me. This is my first visit to the big city."
He knelt beside her and they both began to pick the fat blades of grass. "Me too. And it's making me nervous. I guess I'm really a country boy at heart."
"Did you know it was here?"
"I didn't even know the roads were roads. I've heard stories about the giants' cities but I've never seen one."
"Of course, we still haven't seen one. Just that arch. But that was spooky enough."
"Maybe it will be less spooky on a full stomach," Ohan said hopefully.
"I doubt it but I'm willing to try."
The crackling fire guided them back to camp. The twins had used the sonic insect repeller to clean the moss and dirt from the base of one of the pillars. The odd carved figures they found there cast dancing shadows in the firelight.
"Glyphs, children," the Commodore explained as they drew cautiously nearer. "The words of great kings forever emblazoned here to remind lesser mortals of their bold deeds. Only there's nobody left who knows how to read them. Let's eat."
That night Ohan laid his bedroll facing the
half-fallen arch that rose silent and dark against the roof of leaves behind it. He tried to imagine the crowds of people who once passed along the road beneath it, some outward bound on business far away, others entering this great portal of a busy city under the watchful eye of the guards who manned watchtowers on either side. Ohan listened in the sighing stillness for their long dead footsteps but heard nothing. He searched with his mind for their faded images but saw only the warm darkness of the forest and a single strange intruder—the dark form of a half-fallen arch.
Leahn too, watched the arch and tried to sleep. This night spent on the threshold of a lost forest city reminded her somehow of nights long ago before feast days when the dawn promised great wonders if only she could endure the endless night. She drifted off to dreams of warm beds tucked in by loving hands, where in familiar shadows a child listened to mysterious rustling noises downstairs mingled in the cold pine air with the sweet smell of good things being baked and the laughter of people now long dead. In her dream the child began to cry.
***
In the morning the twins cleaned the other pillar, recorded them both and then carefully covered them up again. Elor explained that they were probably looking at stylized portraits of gods and animals, each representing a letter, a sound or a phrase in some ancient language.
"Then there's no way you can decipher it?" asked Leahn.
"On the contrary, my dear," the Commodore said. "It clearly welcomes us to the great city, what's-its-name, built to the everlasting glory of whichever god by the mighty king, whoever-he-was, may his name be blessed forever. That's what they all say, with minor variations. We just don't know whether to read it right side up, upside down or backwards. If we find more glyphs, we might be able to start filling in some of the blanks."
"But you gave the place a name yesterday," Ohan said.
