Buronto stepped ahead of Sam to a door they had passed twice during their circumnavigation of the chamber. “I’m going to get it over with.”
So you can kill the slugs for fun, Sam thought. So you can gleefully romp through rivers of nice, thick, orange blood.
Buronto twisted the knob, almost broke it off. The door hummed, lifted to reveal a shimmering blue chamber hung with webs and permeated with mists. There seemed to be darker hulks concealed in the fog, looming like icebergs. As Sam watched from the hall, Buronto stepped through the doorway, rifle at ready.
XVI
Buronto stepped further into the chamber. At ten feet, the mists started to close in on him. At fifteen feet, they concealed his legs, his hips, the back of his head.
The floor was spongy, pores beginning to open in it. It bounced as he stepped on it.
“I’m here!” the giant shouted defiantly.
A muffled echo was the only answer.
Then the floor heaved, and the room was alive.
It bucked, swayed, and Buronto went down. Wildy, he blasted it, boring holes through the sponge, holes that immediately healed over and were full again. He tried to stand, but the body of God served as a mat for no creature. Down he went, floor seeming to un-gel and clutch at him. He sank into it, kicked and tried pulling free.
Sam leaned against the wall, gripping himself with his arms. This God was more powerful than the last, undrained. It was able to heal Itself where the other whimpered and died. More powerful, but ruling this vastly shrunken universe: one ship and spoors. He watched Buronto’s flesh peel away under the acidic touch of the floor that now resembled a tongue. All in silence, all deadly and still. A play seen through other eyes. And God was winning…
But, Sam hoped, in winning, God would also lose.
Buronto struggled to his feet again, fighting mightily against this much superior force, fighting with panic. Half his face was a bloody pulp. He held the beam on the floor, screaming steadily. Here comes the devil to the gates of Heaven, cursing and spraying foam, tossing the lightning bolts of his black power to tumble down the equal blackness of the divine light…
The floor bucked again. Buronto fell. And this time, he did not get up. The floor frothed, boiled about him, and when the foam steamed away, there were only fragments of steaming, bubbling bone. No worry now about how to handle Buronto. Now all he had to worry about was whether or not the trick had worked. It should have — given one fact as a truth! God must be, like the other God, a sado-masochist by nature, liking to give pain — the omnipotent fist ringed with smiling lips. Surely, the very nature of God demanded that He be a liker of pain and a giver of much of it. If this was true in this case, as it had been with the God Hurkos had killed, then the problem was over. God was now insane.
Only one way to know for sure. Take out the earplugs…
Grabbing them, he ripped them free. The rush of sound almost knocked him down. But no Racesong. Racesong was dead. This was nothing more than a mad, ugly babbling. God had been crushed — mentally, not physically.
Steps in consideration of a program to drive a god over the brink: 1) Assume the god is somewhat insane already (sadistic, masochistic, and a bit paranoid); 2) Bring a killer into the presence of the god, and invite the god to murder the man; 3) The god commits the murder, but in grasping for the radiation of pain, in searching hungrily for the issuance of tortured suffering, the god encounters joy at pain and exultation over oncoming death. Because the god is killing a masochist, not a normal creature.
Sam had gambled that Buronto’s joy at dying only for the pain — not for some great cause — would be too alien for the Central Being. It was accustomed to the purpose of the race and would assume any race to have a purpose. A confrontation with a creature like Buronto, one enjoying the pain and dying without cause or reason, would disrupt the divine creature’s basics for reasoning. It would throw Its tight, compact scheme of things to the blazes. And there would be nothing to take their place. Once the idea of purposelessness had planted itself, insanity lay only a breath away.
Perhaps that’s part of our superiority, Sam thought, trying to catch his breath. Perhaps man’s purposelessness, our aimless wandering, keeps us strong and sane enough to handle all things. Men, living as best suits us at the moment, outlive all great causes and plans.
Stumbling, so very tired, he moved back the way he had come, back toward the hole in the hull.
Around him, slugs weaved, inundated by the babble.
Racesong was gone.
Some of them moved toward him, menacingly waving rifles, but turned away or dropped the guns in confusion. There was no hypnotic command to kill. No submelody demanding murder. They were lost without the Racesong, without a guiding voice. They could see no real reason to kill now. They were beginning the same long climb man had almost finished. Gradually, they would become saner.
He passed the bodies Buronto was responsible for.
A hundred yards from the hole they had made, he became aware of a slug following him. He turned, stared at it.
It mewed, not angrily.
He turned.
It moved next to him, mewing.
“Go away, dammit!” he shouted.
It mewed, mewed, somehow crossing language barriers with the question it was asking — the question that still lurked somewhere in his own soul.
“Leave me!”
Mewing, water through a flute…
“There will be more gods,” he said, vomit suddenly touching the back of his throat. He threw up on the wall, leaned heavily against the gray metal. He gagged, cleared his throat. “There will be more rungs falling down the ladder now.” He was talking to a hundred ghosts, living and dead, to Gnossos, Hurkos, Buronto, Coro, Lotus, Crazy, all the dead people in the gore-splattered streets of Hope. They tumbled before him, insubstantial. “There will be more gods. But the ladder is structured like a pyramid, each rung smaller than the last, each god more provincial, less awesome. We’ll whip them, sooner or later. We’ll swat them like flies, those awful, ponderous universe-rulers. We are not property, damn it! We are not property! Dammit, dammit, dammit!”
The slug touched him, called sweetly in hissing tones.
“I am not yours,” Sam spit through tightened lips. He turned and staggered toward the hole again.
The slug followed.
At the hole, he turned to it, his face flushed with an anger that had suddenly become undirectable.
It mewed.
“Dammit!” he roared. “Dammit to hell — if there is a hell. Man is his own god. He has to be, if there was ever any purpose.” His mouth quivered, his eyes streamed tears. “And I am not your god!”
He fell through the hole and onto the grass. The slug did not follow.
In the city, the gutters were clogged with the flow of blood as it poured silently into the sewers. The stars were bright. The sky was without a roof. And darkness spoke to the wind.
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Fear That Man Page 15
