The 7th Golden Age of Weird Fiction MEGAPACK®: Manly Banister

by Banister, Manly

  The cave which served the tribe as a storehouse was piled with dried meat. The harvest of grain and cereals was brought in from the fields. The tribe sang its happiness and content for the plenty their god had brought them. Nightly, the hunters danced around the fires. They made up songs to sing as they danced, songs that honored and praised Kor, the god who had come to live with them.

  The interminable chanting of the cave men penetrated to Kor in his cave. He lay trying to think. The thoughts of the thurb mingled with his own incoherent cerebration. He could not understand everything they said in their songs. But enough came through that he knew they worshipped him, and Kor was pleased.

  The first frost arrived. In spite of the sun, shining low in the south now, there was a piercing chill in the air. Soon there would be snow, but Kor did not know this. The temperature of the air was of no concern to him. The hunters stayed away longer now, and returned with less game. Hibernating beasts were holding up in their dens. Migratory animals streamed out of the mountains, into the prairie. Great, hungry carnivore prowled mountain and plain, vied with the thurb for the thinning game. Their screams echoed nightly from the rock walls of the canyon.

  One day a group of hunters returned about noon. They had no meat, though they returned heavy laden. Their burden was the dead body of Throg, son of An-Ga. They bore him upon a litter of poles and interlaced withes. There was blood upon the furs and blood upon the litter. Throg’s body was covered with blood.

  The people of Go stood around the litter and uttered their piercing shrieks of mourning. Kor heard the noise, the weeping, wailing, and lamentation that arose from clustered women and children. Throg had been young. Throg had been handsome. No maiden had known the love-embrace of Throg. Now Throg was dead. No more would he be kind to the old and the weak. No more would Throg share his meat with the sick. No more would the tribe cry out with joy to see him return laden with meat from the hunt.

  Throg was dead.

  Kor came out of his cave. The tribespeople howled a high-pitched dirge over the bloody litter. Kor frowned. The thought was clear in his mind—Throg is dead. Kor went down to where the hunters had dropped the litter at the foot of the talus. He picked his way down the rocky slope. An-Ga knelt at the side of his dead son. Throg’s mother lay upon the dead boy’s breast, weeping and clawing her bald scalp, with reddened finger nails.

  Kor looked a question and read the answer in the mind of a returning hunter. Throg had made a kill—an url—a small, three-toed creature that ran upon the plain with great speed. Only Throg, fleet of foot, could have run to within spearing distance of the nimble url.

  Throg had raced like an url himself, spear poised for the cast. Out of a clump of cane sprang a vicious kther, razor-like claws ripping at the thurb. Forgetting their fear of the kther in the face of peril to their beloved Throg, the hunters had rushed forward and speared the beast. But Throg was dead, clawed to death by the mighty beast.

  Kor knelt, seized the mother by her skin robe and effortlessly tossed her aside. She lay howling on the stony ground. Quickly, Kor felt over the body. He asked himself, why am I doing this? What does it matter to me that Throg is dead? He looked into the eyes of An-Ga, saw the pain and misery there. Kor went over the boy’s entire body. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was conscious of a universe of spinning electrons that darted and danced as tiny motes of supernal light. Kor stood up at last, gestured to An-Ga to go away. The chief crept back from the litter, head bowed. The tribespeople grew tense and hushed.

  Kor held out his hands, looked first at one then at the other. He turned them palms down over the body of Throg. Something like a soundless sigh passed through his mind. Strange words, murmured just over the horizon of his consciousness. He could barely make them out desire is our scourge…need is our blessing…resolve is our armor…will is our weapon…

  Where these words came from, Kor did not know. He was conscious that they flowed like music through his mind, that the dancing electrons kept time with their cadence.

  He said, “Throg!”

  The body on the litter stirred, and a moan rippled through the assembled tribe.

  Kor said, “Throg—get up!”

  Throg stretched, yawned, blinked his eyes. He regarded the fascinated onlookers with puzzlement. He rolled over on the litter, rested on his elbow.

  “The url is mine!” he growled. “Where is it?”

  He got up from the litter, swinging his arms and flexing his muscles. He did not look at Kor. Throg’s mother threw herself upon him, screaming with joy. An-Ga seized his son’s hand. Tears streamed from his eyes. The tribespeople crowded around, crying out with joy.

  Kor looked at them, sensed their emotion. That is why I did it, he told himself. He turned and went back to his cave. No one saw him go.

  * * * *

  The skies turned from sunny to gray, and a thin spindrift of snow whipped through the canyon on the teeth of a bitter wind. The top of the smoking cone was hidden in the cloud cover; trailing mists hid its snowy flanks. The conifers had long ago dropped their cones, and the grass in the canyon was withered and brown. The hunters had given up the chase and spent their time huddled now over fires in the caves.

  One morning, An-Ga brought a thurb girl into Kor’s cave. She was young and comely. Her bald head, freshly oiled for the occasion, gleamed yellow in the daylight streaming in the cave-mouth. Kor sat on a wolf-skin, his feet curled under him in a pose of meditation. An-Ga took away the girl’s deerskin robe and she stood naked before Kor. Her flesh was smooth and firm, her breasts high and well placed. Her body was slim and shapely, her body-hair a soft, pleasing, blonde down.

  An-Ga spoke, but it was difficult for Kor to make out more than part of what he was saying. He gathered that the girl was Eldra, a gift of the tribe to be woman and servant to him.

  “She is the youngest born of my brother Strob,” An-Ga said gravely, “of my own flesh and my own blood. I give her to you to tend your fire, keep your cave, and make you warm in your furs as you lie through the winter night.”

  “I need no servant,” he said. “Go. Return to your people.”

  Eldra could not understand his tongue.

  “Go.”

  The girl went and Kor resumed his position of meditation. Outside, a woman screamed. Wife-beating was a common occurrence in the tribe of Go. Kor did not let the sound disturb him. The scream sounded again, became an unbroken ululation of pure fright. The noise irritated Kor. He got up and went to the cave mouth to look out.

  A few yards away, An-Ga held the screaming Eldra doubled over, her head held forcibly atop a boulder. Beyond An-Ga stood her father, Strob, balancing a huge rock in up-thrust hands. The muscles in his arms and shoulders were knotted with strain. As Kor looked out, Strob hurled the stone downward upon his daughters head.

  Something slipped in Kor’s mind. The boulder slammed sideways and splintered into fragments against the rocky wall of the canyon. An-Ga and Strob looked surprised, then fell on their faces and groveled before Kor. Eldra kept on screaming.

  “We would have punished her, that she displeased our lord. Forgiveness…”

  Kor pointed to the caves of the thurb. Ashamed, the two got to their feet and slunk away. Eldra had stopped screaming. She lay with eyes closed. Kor picked her up and carried her into his cave. He dropped her rudely on the floor and her eyes flew open. She got up, rubbing herself where the drop had bumped her. Kor sat down in his pose of meditation and forgot all about Eldra.

  Eldra was happy to share the cave with Kor. He permitted her to bring water and wash him. His was a handsome body, lean, supple, and muscled. She loved to run her hands over his smooth skin, not hairy like the skins of the cave folk. He even allowed her to make love to him as an indifferent pleasure. He felt the need in her and responded to it. He held no love for her, only magnanimity.

 
Eldra kept the fire burning at the cave mouth during the long winter nights and the short, bitter days. She asked no help of the tribe and received none. She brought billets of wood from the tribal storehouse and stacked them in Kor’s cave. She fetched water in skin bags from the frozen stream, toiling up the steep icy talus with her load. And when she cooked her meals and ate alone, a great wonder grew in her that the god required no food, and she worshipped him.

  While he slept by night, she would sit in the cave mouth, hard by the tiny fire she kept going to frighten away wild beasts. She would listen to the howl of the wind and the lash of snow, and she grew warm inside with the thought that she was guardian of the sleeping god. On clear, starry nights, when the brittle rocks crackled with the frost that had crept into its cracks and fissures, she peered into the mystery of space and wondered what the tiny lights were. She thought perhaps the god could tell her, if only he could speak the language of the thurb. She could teach him, she thought. Why not? Besides, there was something she had to tell him for which signs were not sufficient.

  Eldra had to tell Kor, that when summer came again to the canyon, a child would be born of their union.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  Eldra was a model of efficiency at cave-keeping. She kept their quarters clean, was alert to every move that Kor made. During the long evenings, she fed the fire and talked to him, sang to him, until gradually her words began to have meaning for Kor. He was learning the simple language of the people of Go.

  There was sickness among the tribes that winter, and Kor healed them. When food ran low, he lured a great, slow-moving, fur-covered beast into the canyon for the hunters to slay.

  The weather never grew so cold that the tribespeople would not gather at Kor’s cave for morning worship. Kor seldom went out, now that Eldra could go in his place. He preferred to sleep, or think. Eldra spoke to the people about their god, described his ways, told them the things which Kor told her in his halting speech. These were incoherent snatches of Kor’s fleeting memory, interludes that he remembered, then remembered not, forgotten bits that drifted ghost-like through his mind, which he recited for Eldra’s pleasure, then forgot again.

  There was one of whom Kor had spoken in fragments, arousing Eldra’s jealousy. He called her Soma, and Eldra believed she was a goddess Kor had left behind when he came down from heaven to live among the thurb. She knew he had come from heaven because once, when she had asked him whence he came, Kor had pointed to the stars and had said, slowly: “Far, far away. Up there.”

  Eldra visualized Soma as an evil goddess whom Kor had loved. To punish him for some fancied slight, Soma had cast Kor out of their heavenly home, causing him to lose his memory. Eldra hated the goddess Soma. She built her into an image of evil and told the wondering cave men sheer fabrications of a heavenly struggle among the gods. She told them that the forces of evil, led by the wicked goddess Soma, had conquered the good god Kor and had cast him out. But, she assured them, with the help of the thurb, as evidenced in their proper worship of him, Kor would again one day mount to his rightful place among the stars, and he would lift up the thurb and make of them a mighty nation wielding great power in the world.

  Eldra became the first high priestess to hold office on the world of Karel VI.

  When the last snows melted in the spring, Eldra was already big with child. Kor left his cave and went up the rocky path to the forested plateau above. He had found a pleasant glade there, bright with the first blossoms o spring. In it he would sit for hours and meditate in silence. His conversations with Eldra during the winter had tapped the hidden store of his memory, but no piece could be fitted to another to make sense. Who was Soma? He dreamed of a lovely face with sparkling, sea-green eyes. Whence came this vision? Was this Soma, whom Eldra called the wicked goddess? Why did the vision both delight and trouble him? Perhaps Soma was some sprite of his imagination, whose beauty charmed him. He stared at the ground seeing her there in his mind’s eye. Electrons streamed in whorls of ecstasy through his consciousness. Bright motes of sparkling luminescence swirled around him in the glade, glinted against the background of somber conifers, of leafing underbrush. The swarms of brilliant sparkles cascaded between his palms, a leaping torrent of living flame, and disappeared in to a shapeless bulk that seemed to grow on the turf at his feet. At last the sparkling motes dimmed and died. Kor looked at what he had wrought. The woman was beautiful, her unclad body disposed upon the grass as if she slept. Kor’s heart leaped. She was Soma! From somewhere, his nighted memory had dredged up the matrix for her creation. A sob caught in Kor’s throat.

  “Soma!”

  She seemed about to awaken and spring into flight. A tender smile curved her lips.

  “Soma!”

  She did not move. Kor touched her. The flesh was cold. Soma was dead.

  Kor wept. He destroyed the image and builded again. He could not make her live. Each time he tried, Soma’s body returned as preciously perfect as the dream that inspired her. Each time she was dead, and Kor destroyed her.

  Kor became preoccupied with his problem of creation. He ignored Eldra, refusing to speak to her. Sometimes he passed days and nights alone in the glade. He forbade Eldra to approach him there, and laid upon her the duty of guarding the path up the cliff, that none of the Go might climb up and disturb him. Occasionally, some of the children crept past Eldra’s sharp watch, climbed the path, and peered with wonder at the God as he sat motionless in a cloud of whirling light-specks. They came back and told their elders of the swarm of bright “bugs” that hovered around the god, and hearing them, Eldra boxed their ears and said, “He communes with the gods who dwell in the stars! Let him not find you up there!”

  It was two months before Eldra’s time. In spite of her bulk, she remained furiously active while Kor retired to his glade to create. With greater practice, a facility came into his handling of the creative matrix. He sat in a mist of electrons, moulding, shaping, trying desperately to capture the elusive pattern that would bring his creation to life. A buzzing voice cut across his mental horizon.

  “What are you doing creature?”

  “Go away,” said Kor.

  “What are you, creature?”

  “I am God,” replied Kor. “Can you not see I am creating?”

  He looked up. The glade-was empty except for himself. His glance came back to a wavering patch between two trees, a shimmering spindle of disturbed air that gave him a qualm. Almost, he was afraid.

  “I do not read your voice, creature,” returned the buzzing thought-note.

  The buzz was in Kor’s mind rather than his ears. It was reedy, high-pitched, and brought with it a nervous pseudo-memory that made him tremble. The cloud of spangling electrons hovering around him winked out. Automatically, without conscious thought, Kor touched his knee, his chin. His fingers made signs.

  “You speak the sign language of the Trisz,” said the voice. “What are you doing here?”

  Kor signed a reply, his hands responding to, the subconscious pattern of his thought.

  “I am God. I create. Go away.”

  Kor’s mind, expanded during his creation occupation, had touched the creature at the edge of the glade. That was why the Trisz had stopped there instead of approaching closer. It had felt the influence of his mind. It was puzzled. Perhaps it was afraid.

  The Trisz said, “How comes one so far from the living worlds to know the sign language of the Trisz?”

  “I am God,” Kor replied. “I know everything.”

  “I have heard of God, who is worshipped in many forms throughout the Universe,” said the Trisz. “Are you the same?”

  “I am God,” Kor repeated. “I am the Universe.”

  “Can this be true?” marveled the Trisz. “There seems little difference between you and the aborigines of this world. Where do you come from?”

  “Wh
o needs to come from a place, who is all places at once?”

  “You say you create, then. What?”

  Kor answered with cunning. “I am creating the Universe.”

  “Not this Universe, for it stands created. Do you create another?”

  “Why not? May I not create as many as I please?”

  “Did you create the other universes? The Universe of the Trisz?”

  “By what right do you question me who am God? Begone lest I destroy you!”

  The Trisz swayed nervous, at the edge of the glade. Even after millennia of occupation it found this baffling Universe in many respects an enigma. Could this alien thing actually be God? The Trisz doubted it.

  Kor felt a sense of alarm. An unknown emotion stirred in him. It was hate, but he did not know it.

  “Who are you that come here to disturb me?” he asked the wavering patch between the trees.

  “If you are God, you must know who I am,” retorted the Trisz.

  “God will not be tempted to prove himself. I say I am God. If you do not believe, so much the worse for you.”

  The presence of the Trisz chilled Kor. He had no desire to argue with it. Its probing questions upset his balance, made him fretful and uneasy. He drew his mind back into the confines of his skull, sat stolidly silent.

  He did not hear the child break from the underbrush at the lip of the precipice and run toward him across the glade. The Trisz darted instantaneously. It was a flashing blur that whipped across the grassy space, enveloped the child.

  “If you are God,” it mocked, “save this child!”