The Vistor

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Nell said angrily, "Miracles are religion!"

  "It doesn't matter what name you call it," said the small god. "Magic or miracle, sorcery or religion, it's all the same."

  "We didn't slide into magic," Nell argued. "I mean, yes, some did, my own husband did, but the rest of us..."

  "Aside from earning their livings, what did your people do, mostly? Games. Sports. Casinos. Loud machines that went fast. Shopping. Lawsuits blaming others for whatever went wrong. What did they believe in? Conspiracy theories. Racial superiority. Heroes with superpowers. Faith healers. God-loves-you religions. State-supported lotteries. All that enormous energy expended to conquer nothing at all, stadia full of people watching no conquering going on. For every scientist or person in government who really tried to conquer, there were a thousand people buying lottery tickets, drinking beer, watching football, and growing old."

  Nell objected, "We would have outgrown that..."

  The voice grew more conversational. "I think not. Once a face has technology, life is so much easier that conquering loses its urgency. I blame myself for leaving when I did. I could have delayed the acquisition of technology until you had killed your devils. Technology concurrent with devil worship never works out well."

  "Devil worship?" said Arnole, in a skeptical voice.

  "Intelligent races always worship something. It's a kind of yearning that intellect has, to see and worship the eventual goal. It may not always go after the truth, but it always wants a story. People start out with magic, and turn that into religion, and then, if they don't go on to worship the Real One, they settle for a temporary godlet like me, or for any one of a thousand convenient devils. You can tell which by the actions. Those who worship the Real One are problem-solvers. They experiment and pay attention to the result in order to see what's good, what's bad. They work to give every person and creature the good stuff, variety, food, space, cleanliness; and they do it because sane, healthy creatures exposed to complex environments conquer better! They work to eliminate the bad stuff like pollution, extinctions, overpopulation, weapons, because sick starving creatures in impoverished and threatened environments don't conquer at all. Did your race do that? It did not, so you weren't worshipping the Real One, and you certainly weren't worshipping me because I hadn't returned yet.

  "Your leaders worshipped the greed devil when they sold their votes and influence to spread bad stuff; they worshipped the power devil when they valued votes over the health of the planet; they made a pretence of mercy and justice by advocating human rights while they sucked up to dominance devils whose law was torture and whose rule was the enslavement of women."

  They felt the being's sorrow, as it said:

  "There was no cure for it. You were too many, too set in your ways, so ... it was time to start over. Which is what I've been doing this millennium. There is no more oil for dominance devils to use as a weapon. I've put it out of reach. I've reduced the human occupied land area by two thirds, cutting your space but giving more room to the other intelligent races. One aquatic, one arboreal, as it happens. Almost all humans live on this one continent, now, and they are still in the magic-cum-religion stage that requires a certain level of godhood. Bastion worships the Rebel Angels. Chasm worships itself, so far as I can make out. New Chicago and New Kansas have dictators who are becoming icons. Each of the Sierra Isles has its own tutelary deity, as does Everday. One of your first tasks will be to schedule godhood contests between me and the local deity in each place."

  "That's absurd," said Arnole.

  "Not at all. There's a human tradition of god competitions. Moses's god against Pharaoh's gods, for example. I included descriptions of god competitions in several holy books from two to six millennia ago. At any rate, I will win, and I will become deity of all the humans, temporarily one hopes.

  "Before we get to that, however, there's a devil on his way here who wants all of us dead, particularly me. Gohdan Gone, who was once called Baal, was driven out of the middle east millennia ago. Part of him went to Central America, where the Aztecs called him Huitzilopochtli, and part went to the Iroquois in North America, to be fattened in both places by torture and cannibalism, until they were conquered by other men with subtler devils. Gone is still an unsubtle pain drinker, but he's had a long time to ramify, and you'll need to get rid of him quickly, before he changes into something worse..."

  "We don't know how to do that?" cried Dismé.

  "That's why we're bringing him here," the small god said patiently. "So you can learn how. His arrival here is not an accident, it was planned to give you the practice!

  "Once he's dead, you'll need to clean out Bastion. You'll need Tamlar and Hussara to help you do that. Possibly Volian and Wogalkish as well. Be sure you get down to the bottom of the caverns where the devil had its roots. When Bastion is clean, I'd recommend that you settle there. It's centrally located, it will hold a good number of our recruits, and since all of you but Tamlar are basically human, you'll need a humanish place to live and study and enjoy your lives."

  "Not much of that left to enjoy," said Arnole, wearily.

  The small god laughed. "You all have a very long lifetime left, if you don't get killed. Even those of you who are eightyish have at least that long to live again. My contract with you is a fair one. I give you very long life and good assistants. You give me your best effort to start this world over. If I don't succeed this time, my superiors will replace me, and I don't want to fail."

  "As everybody's god, what will you do?" the doctor demanded.

  "You mean immediately?" asked the small god. "I will raise up prophets to make conflicting pronouncements that will inevitably be garbled in transcription, resulting in mutually exclusive definitions of orthodoxy from which the open-minded will flee in dismay. As they flee, I expect you to identify them and move them to Bastion."

  "Recruits?" asked the doctor, raising his eyebrows.

  "Exactly. Also, I will be capricious. I'll reward and punish arbitrarily. I'll peek through bedroom windows and admonish what I see there, sometimes one thing, sometimes the opposite. I will have purposes men know nothing of, and when men begin to catch on to them, I will change them. This will convince some of your people that I am unreliable."

  "We bring those people to Bastion also?" Michael grinned.

  "Precisely. Occasionally, I will do a conspicuous miracle to save one dying child while a thousand children starve elsewhere. This will convince sensible people I am perverse, and they will curse my name. Be sure to recruit those who do, they'll be invaluable. Only by repudiating both devils and small gods will they ever know the Real One.

  "I will be a sham, but not a snob. I will let every man, woman, or child, no matter how greedy or wicked, claim to have a personal relationship with me. In other words, I will be as arbitrary, inconsistent, ignorant, pushy, and common as humans are, and what more have they ever wanted in a god?"

  "The truth!" cried the doctor and Arnole, simultaneously.

  All of them smiled, unable to stop smiling as they felt the being before them laughing. "Oh, tush, they never wanted anything of the kind. Creation has the truth written all over it—the age of the universe, the history of the world—but nine-tenths of mankind either don't know it or think it's a sham, because it isn't what their book or their prophet says, and it isn't cozy or manipulable enough."

  "My people wanted truth," said Nell, stiffly. "My friends."

  "They were a minority. Not many years before the Happening, one of your country's largest religious bodies officially declared that their book was holier than their God, thus simultaneously and corporately breaking several commandments of their own religion, particularly the first one. Of course they liked the book better! It was full of magic and contradictions that they could quote to reinforce their bigoted and hateful opinions, as I well know, for I chose many parts of it from among the scrolls and epistles that were lying around in caves here and there. They're correct that a god picked out the material; they ju
st have the wrong god doing it.

  "The sooner we can separate salvageable skeptics from self-righteous absolutists, the sooner we can move along. Game shows where people betray one another to one group, brain busting challenges to the other. You'll fight the devils and I'll provide distractions, and within a few generations, we'll have them all sorted out."

  "And we're to be killers?" asked Arnole, sadly.

  The voice became gentle. "Only of ignorance, Bertral. You will divide the sheep from the goats and you will encourage the one and shepherd the other. You always had a leaning that way. Each of you will find the fight that suits yourself and your being. You will triumph, suffer, weep, rejoice, possibly die ... If you die, another will rise up in your name, if you don't die, you'll live an extremely long life. You are my angels, for whom an almost heaven waits in Udarsland, with Skulda and Caigo Faience. Your work will be long, however, long and hard before you may rest in it."

  The being turned on her plinth and stretched many wings, the face appearing darkly, as through veils, each of them seeing a different image. Multiple arms beckoned and a man came toward them out of the gardens, a simple, brownish man dressed in a simple, brownish robe. He wore a leather apron, carried a drawknife and bowsaw and bore a great axe on his back.

  "This is your son and brother, Camwar," she said. "Camwar has spent some years preparing for you. Also awaiting you is Tamlar, the only one of you without human parents, a being of another star, sister of those beings who are guiding each of you. I asked for their help, for this is my last chance with Earth."

  The space began to move around them as the being on her plinth receded. The splintered world hurtled toward them as though they were in a kaleidoscope, images whirling to join, spinning outward to disintegrate, vortices of jagged light, horizons of endless time, pinwheels of splendor that rushed at them and receded through which they heard the small god cry, "You will not see me soon again. It is not fitting that gods, however small, consort casually with their servants. I leave you as Guardians for all that live on this world."

  When the dazzlement stopped, they were standing outside the gates of the great maze, their wagon and horses beside them.

  Michael cried, "Where's Dismé?"

  They looked about, and then, suddenly Dismé was there, among them, staring dazedly outward, where their sister Guardian burned in the evening air.

  "Greetings," Tamlar said, with a fiery grin.

  On the other side stood Camwar, beckoning them to follow him, and as they turned, the walls disappeared without a sound. Far to the east, over one of the long north-south ridges came the first rank of the monster host, bloody banners waving.

  45

  not in conclusion

  As he followed Camwar up the slope, Arnole had time for analysis.

  "It is interesting," he said to himself, "that this small god implied devils were made of ignorance, for I have always believed this to be true. Ignorance perpetuates itself just as knowledge does. Men write false documents, they preach false doctrine, and those evil beliefs survive to inspire wickedness in later generations. They are like the spells woven by wizards, lying in wait for the credulous to find them and use them. Conversely, some men write and teach the truth, only to be declared heretic by the wicked. In such cases, evil has the advantage, for it will do anything to suppress truth, but the good man limits what he will do to suppress falsehood.

  "One might almost make a rule of it: 'Whoever declares another heretic is himself a devil. Whoever places a relic or artifact above justice, kindness, mercy, or truth is himself a devil and the thing elevated is a work of evil magic.

  "Magic, yes! How interesting that the small god should describe magic as a normal stage of development. I have seen that, too, though most magic is only pretence or hope under another name. What I do not understand about magic today is where the power comes from? Gohdan Gone does have power! He raises actual monsters who actually kill. Is power given him by those who follow him? Do followers supply the evil their devils use?

  "I am relieved to know there are many ways to wage this battle. I would be lost on the battlefield if that field were only for slaughter. But if that field were also for teaching, and preaching, and evangelizing..."

  Dismé, behind him, was thinking. "She kept me back for a moment to tell me. I'm the only one she told. I can tell Michael or keep it to myself. How strange. One would think she would have told all of us, but she didn't. There's no time to sort it out now. No time to do anything now except...

  "There they are, coming over the ridge! That horde coming at me is what Arnole meant long ago when he told me Rashel was going somewhere I didn't want to go. She is Regimic to her eyeballs, and I'll wager she's inside this battle somehow! We, on the other hand, have been given permission to look for truth! Which Jens and Michael and Arnole have always done, and I suppose Nell, as well. We are to find truth and keep ourselves out of the devil's hands and sort out the people...

  "If we pick only those who flee from falsity, does that include all the good ones? The woman who ran the sweet-shop in Hold, she was a good woman, but she worshipped Gowl. She called him 'My general,' and she had his picture on her wall. If I had to sort her out, where would I put her? Should I try to make her more like us or leave her as she is? Can virtual innocence live at the borders of evil? Live off it, without becoming it? On the other hand, not all who worship the truth will have the kind of minds who can find it. Should they be prevented from supporting those who can? Even those who conquer ignorance will need grocers and tailors and men to build their houses..."

  "Surely it would not really stop ignorance to let ignorance keep a separated half of us? Though, come to think of it, Arnole told me when creatures evolve, the change starts with only a few of them, maybe only one. The change spreads from that small start, and all the others of that one's kind stay as they were while the evolved progeny move on. Is this to be like that? Will our progeny live on, while everyone else stays behind and does what? Die away?

  "There are imperfections in this task. Still, if I must choose, I choose to believe in the side I am standing with. If only the Real One is perfect, then small gods no doubt have imperfections, as we do. I was not like those in Bastion. Arnole wasn't, nor the doctor, nor Michael, and it wasn't simply because we had one mother among us. We may well find others of our persuasion, elsewhere in the world, who worship the Real One, who always have.

  "For this moment, I choose to believe and I choose, oh, I choose not to think of Michael just now. What she said to me! And I haven't even time to think about it..."

  Michael was thinking, "She's beautiful. I've always thought she was beautiful, but she's become more so, somehow. There she goes, look at her, striding along as though it were a summer day in the garden at Faience, not facing horrid enemies on the plains of this strange little world of ours. As soon as we have conquered this mob of miscreants, which we can do merely by laughing them to death, if it comes to that, I'm going to tell her ... What? Oh, what are you going to tell her, Michael? Jiralk? Tell her she's my sister, but I love her as more than a sister? Does her being my sister really matter...?"

  And Nell thought, "This is a strange dream I am having. When I wake, I usually dream about Jerry and the children and the Happening. Where did this detailed strangeness come from. It hangs together so well, one would almost think it was scripted just for me. Well, suppose I were actually here, in this predicament, what would I do? I would certainly depend upon Elnith to do the necessary quashing. It's obvious one old woman—even one with a few well meaning assistants—isn't going to get far without supernatural help, though the being seemed to say our inhabitants aren't really supernatural..."

  And the doctor thought, "I knew it. I've known it all along. He's in love with her. And maybe she with him. Which is only right and proper, I suppose, given their ages and proximity. Why didn't I have the sense to stay out of it, not that anyone's going to be able to stay out of it, and why must I go on feeling! Our angelic sides
are long on ability but short on emotion, while the small god seems to wallow in feelings almost as much as we do. All I've done is drag Dismé into the middle of it. If that army wins, chances are everyone in the world will be in the middle of it, we'll all be devils-food and I suppose that godlet will chuckle over it...

  "No. She will not. I heard what she meant when she said this was her last chance to make this world work. Dividing the population sounds like desperation, but perhaps, with our help, there's some better way we can make it work..."

  He stopped, just short of the crest of the hill and tugged his glasses from their pouch. "What are we up against? Gowl on a white horse. At least the horse was white, when they started, as Gowl was himself. Look at the mess you've made of yourself, General. Spattered and befouled that way. Why did I keep you alive, Gowl. Time after time, you infected or dissipated yourself to the edge of death and I brought you back. Should I ride to you now and ask you to listen to reason, dripping with blood as you are, and with that monster leading you. I think not. No, Gowl. I don't know the end of this, but it is sure you will find an end in it very soon, one way or another."

  Bobly and Bab thought, "Oh, botheration and obfuscation, we hope to heaven lalond and Aarond are as big and powerful as they seemed to be, for we're going to need every hammer blow, every anvil strike. Heavens to Betsy, isn't this an excitement!"

  And Camwar thought, "Now, at last, at the top of this rise, no more work, no more waiting, at last..."

  And Tamlar thought, "Burn, burn, burn, burn, burn..."

  They topped the rise and found themselves on the edge of an eastern facing butte, the rock and clay beneath them falling sheer to the level prairie, several stories down. In front of them, level with the ground and extending all the way to the prairie below, was a ship, or so the doctor thought at first. But then, he had seen pictures of ships and they weren't shaped like that. So very up and down. So very round. With great metal rings around to hold the ... well, they were shaped like barrel staves...