by Mike Resnick
I went to the barrel and peered in with more respect and curiosity than before. “Can you use this stuff to make new races then?”
Mewborn grew crestfallen. “No, that supreme accomplishment is, as yet, denied to me. But I intend to learn how from the Creator Himself.”
“And this urschleim will lead you to him?”
“Indeed! It resonates superluminally to his presence, like an infinitely sensitive radar with only one target. I have learned how to interpret the patterns of the urschleim’s twinklings, which mirror the traces of the Creator’s passage through the Dark Matter Web.” Mewborn got up and moved to examine the sparkling gelatin. “And right now, our course is taking us away from the Creator! You need to reverse at once!”
Before mindlessly following Mewborn’s advice, I consulted the alternate stochastic analysis of the Creator’s projected trail and found it agreed. “Okay,” I said, “you call the course until we reach God. But I gotta warn you: you’re gonna have to question Him real quick, because He’s going down for a dirt nap as soon as we lay eyes on Him. Unless we decide on a little torture first.”
Mewborn used a forefinger to slide his glasses further up his nose. “I expect God might have something to say about His disposition as well.”
The five of us would-be Godkillers once more occupied the dining area. We had installed Mewborn and his vat of amalgamated jellyfish guts in his own cabin. The door remained unlocked: there was no place he could run, nothing on board he could sabotage, no way he could communicate with any authorities.
I addressed my posse. “You dickheads can wipe those satisfied grins off your faces.” I was stretching the facial complacency accusation a bit here in Jagello’s case. “The easy part of this mission is over. Now starts the rough stuff. First off, we’re going into uncharted territory. No telling what kind of weird astrophysics we’ll run into. No one even knows if the Dark Matter Web remains navigable in the same way out here. Redmayne and Crispwell set out to chart it, and they never returned.”
Jagello rasped out a question. “What for maybe we worry about other sentients? What trouble they bring?”
“Well, figure it out for yourself. The youngest race in our neck of the woods is the Quisqueya, and they haven’t even conceived of the wheel yet. Every other Creator-endowed sophont we encounter is going to be even younger. Now, for sure, some races might have been created meaner and more on the ball initially than those pancakes. And local conditions might have forced them to evolve faster. But I’m still betting none of them have attained spaceflight yet. And, unlikely as it seems, we might even find some non-Creator-determined independently intelligent species. Don’t hold your breath.”
A senseless comment to make to Drumgoole, who performed his internal gas exchange through spiracles, like a bug.
“Nonetheless, we still gotta land from time to time to verify with some cell samples that we’re on the right trail. Having Mewborn along, by the way, should speed up the testing, him being an expert on the universal germline and all. But when we’re planetside, the odds are less in our favour. Even five mean bastards with a lot of deadly junk in their hands can be swamped by a horde of creepy-crawlies. So we’ve got to stay sharp and on our guard.”
“Jush let me at anyone who tries to shtop us!” said Maxwell. Corinthia seconded him with one of her race’s blood-clotting war whoops, while Drumgoole emitted a sibilant hiss and Jagello clacked his pincers. It made me feel good to see the crew so pumped.
We broke up the meeting and retreated to our private chambers, where we spent most of our time, lacking the spiritual empathy to mingle socially with our blasphemous counterparts. I had just fallen asleep under my armoured bedclothes (old habits from a deadly homeworld died hard) when a hammering on my door made me jump up. Corinthia was outside yelling.
“The human’s strangling or having a fit or something! The noise is awful!”
I ran down the corridor to Mewborn’s room and burst in, with the rest of the crew close behind.
Looking like a fish fit only for throwing back, the naked boffin was having sex with the tracking device, moaning and groaning fit to bust. He had decanted the person-sized mass of flickering gelatin onto the floor and was porking it vigorously, his pitiful boner insignificantly dimpling its mass. Oblivious to us, he began to holler sweet nothings into its non-existent ears.
“Galatea, my darling! The Creator will shape you, yes, He will! Form, sweet form, and you’ll be mine, all mine!”
Mewborn climaxed with a howl and slid off the slick insensate bolster of glittery urschleim.
“That ish the most disgusting thing I have ever seen,” Maxwell said, and I had to agree, if only with regard to the rampant sentimentalism.
I grabbed Mewborn by the loose skin at the back of his neck and hauled him to his feet, shaking him violently in the process.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, prof? We need that hunk of plasm in good working order.”
Without his oldschool goggles, Mewborn squinted like a neonatal kitten at my face, even though his was only centimetres away from mine. He didn’t even have the grace to be embarrassed about his actions, but instead assumed his usual savant’s assuredness.
“Galatea will come to no harm by my tender ministrations. In fact, such frequent intercourse allows me to synch more closely with her internal display, and interpret it more accurately. So I fear you will all have to accustom yourselves to this ritual.”
Maybe he was legit. The tracker’s interior constellations seemed to be pulsing chromatically with fresh information. I threw Mewborn onto his bunk. “This is the living end. Guided through the interstellar unknown by a colloid-porking pervert.”
“Please do not insult my woman. Galatea belongs just as much to our consensual lineage as does as any other race in the galaxy. In fact, she has more claim to primogeniture than even the Thumraits. So please, treat her with more respect.”
I regarded the gently quivering elongated blob on the floor with barely controlled revulsion. The Creator had much to answer for.
“Okay, Adam, why don’t you shovel Eve back into her bucket. We’ve got a long road ahead of us.”
Emerging from the Dark Matter Web and taking stellar readings, we discovered ourselves to be some ten thousand light years from anything that could be called home. Pretty spooky and mind-blowing, even for me and my crew of badasses, who had embarked on this mad quest with half a notion that we’d never return. But I shrugged off any jitters and got on with the business of nailing the Creator wherever his latest lair might be.
The first planet where we stopped to take a biological fix on the Creator’s trail of course had no name, being previously undiscovered. I decided to call the place Horseshit, after its dominant race, which resembled tiny Terran horses – if Terran horses had featured heads like four-eyed praying mantises.
We landed the Final Theophany in the middle of a herd of these scale-model critters, and I went out to bag one. They swarmed aggressively all over me, their nipping mouthparts failing to pierce my skin and their little hooves giving me a pleasant recreational scratching on my perpetually itchy epidermis. The horse-mantises began to die in droves as my epidermal poisons got to them. And while that was pretty good confirmation of our shared chemistry, I nonetheless took a few croaked ones back into the ship for analysis.
Mewborn looked up from his hologram readouts and said, “Mitochondrial drift and several other metrics indicate this race is approximately half-a-million years diverged from the urschleim. Born much more recently than the Quisqueya. So we are that much closer to the Creator’s current whereabouts, just as I predicted.”
I got everyone back into the ship – my crew had been out killing mantis-horses by the wheelbarrow-loads for practice – and we took off.
That ‘evening’ we had a little celebration of our first success. Maxwell, Corinthia and I could get loaded off the same kind of stimulant, so we passed around a bottle of Glassoon’s Acritarchic that I had put
aside for just such a moment. Pretty soon we were harmonizing raggedly on several pop tunes currently the rage back in the civilized portions of the galaxy. Drumgoole treated himself to the tasty radioisotope-enhanced blood contained in several small living animals, whom he suffocated, crushed and absorbed in delicious prolongation. As for Jagello, he went on a hyper-oxygenation binge, huffing the inebriating gas until all his tendrils danced in hypnotic rhythms and his claws spasmed in uncontrolled delight.
I felt a momentary kinship with these living, breathing affronts to all the tenets of my beloved religion, and regretted that, should any of us survive the encounter with the Creator, I would probably have to turn my weapons against them, if only to forestall my own extinction at their hands, stemming from me presenting the same intolerable infidel face to them.
As for Mewborn, he did not join us, but spent the party time sticking it to his mute colloidal floozy in an orgy of imaginary romance.
I won’t bother detailing all the stops along our odyssey. Not very interesting, over all. But I will mention something odd. The newest races we encountered began to show a certain decadence or degeneracy. Back in the civilized realm of our galaxy, there existed approximately one-quarter-of-a-million races, each with a different body plan, even if just by some minor variation. Say what you will about the Creator, you had to admit He or She or It was truly inventive. And none of the races, however weird, were what you could call abominations. Their somatypes all exhibited a certain organic completeness or aesthetic utilitarianism. Admittedly, evolution had played a part in smoothing out any initial irregularities. But they had started from clever designs.
Not so these younger, newer races. Many of them seemed dysfunctional for their environments – for any environment. Useless limbs, badly distributed organs, mediocre sensory abilities, narrow bandwidth nervous systems – you name the deficiency, they exhibited it. Not all glitches were present in every race, of course, but enough separately in all of them to convince me of one thing.
The Creator was going senile. Since the birth of the Thumraits some five million years ago, He had been engaged in a continual orgy of invention. The wear and tear of that ceaseless genesis had to tell hard on any being, however capable and long-lived. The Creator was running on empty, but kept on going.
Instead of making me feel sad for the unknowable Being who had populated our otherwise non-sentient galaxy with intelligence and awareness, the revelation just made me worry that He would kick it – had already kicked it – before we could catch up with Him and administer the well-deserved and satisfying coup de grâce ourselves. And so I redoubled our speed and sampling activity, pushing my ship and crew harder than ever.
Which is probably how we lost Drumgoole. By rushing into an unknown situation too fast and overconfidently.
We ended up naming the planet where he died Drumgoole’s Folly. Not that anyone would be adding it to their charts if we never returned, a prospect that seemed more and more likely.
The sophont species left behind on Drumgoole’s Folly consisted of a spiky airfish resembling a floating porcupine mated with an avocado. Their defect was that they seemed unable to rise much more than a meter off the ground, leaving them easy prey to every nasty creepy-crawly native to the planet.
I had just netted one of the airfish for cellular analysis when Drumgoole, possibly feeling a bit peckish, decided that he could do with a little treat. So he wrapped himself around two at once and began to squeeze –
The explosion rocked me back on my feet, and even harmlessly juddered the ship where it sat. After quickly recovering– when you’re used to missile-birds dive bombing you from youth, such blasts are taken in stride – I saw my surviving compatriots picking themselves up as well, and that there was nothing left of Drumgoole but a few tattered and scorched parchments flapping on the breeze.
Mewborn – luckily safe inside the ship during the accident – soon discovered that the airfish possessed a unique mating process. The males and females each secreted one half of a binary explosive compound. A pair self-destructed during their one-time sexual encounter, sending their indestructible fertilized eggs far and wide for best dispersal. Drumgoole had had the misfortune a) to corral one of each gender; and b) to pop their explosive bladders and cause the untimely non-horny mixing of their contents.
After that incident, we were all more cautious at planetfalls, but also more focused than ever on making speed to confront the Creator before suffering any more attrition that might stymie our righteously murderous goals.
One day in transit, far beyond any previous exploration, Mewborn came to me and said, “I believe I’ve worked out the pattern for the intervals between the Creator’s jumps. Not as simple as it first seemed. Time spent building a new race out of urschleim is directly related to the complexity levels of the previous build, plus the ambient dark matter power sources the Creator theoretically feeds on, factored with...”
Losing all patience, I grabbed Mewborn by his shirt and shook him. “Just tell me the practical stuff, you jelly-humping sicko!”
The boffin adjusted his glasses calmly and said, “The planet after next should be the one where the Creator currently resides.”
We named the world Omega. Not the most original name maybe, but fitting. Here was where the Creator would meet His end, and where all sentients would be forever more liberated from His endlessly insulting packaging of intelligence into more and more bizarre containers, as if He were a cookie factory stamping out a million differently shaped cookie slabs with the same dull invariant frosting sandwiched between.
Now, ideally, we would have hung in orbit and just dropped a couple of planet busters down on him. But this tactic was impossible for several reasons. First, planetbusting armaments were closely interdicted by all galactic authorities and cost umpty-ump billion SVUs apiece even if you could lay your mitts on one in a terrorist bazaar. Second, until we went down we had no certainty, despite Mewborn’s insistence, that the Creator was even present on Omega. And third, most importantly, we all wanted to off the immortal bastard personally, face to face, to get our hands bloody and see Him grovel and beg and suffer for His sins. To that end I had stocked various portable instruments of extreme lethality which we now broke out from the formerly locked armoury and familiarised ourselves with.
“If only Drumgoole could have been with us on this glorious day,” mused Corinthia.
“He ish here in spirit,” said Maxwell.
“Creator dead, Drumgoole kick his ass in hell,” contributed Jagello.
Mewborn made no comment, but just drummed his fingers nervously on the barrel containing his Galatea.
We had pinpointed what we believed to be the Creator’s presence on a vast open plain so large as to be discernible from orbit.
“Hold on to your guts,” I said, “we’re gonna drop in fast.”
At the controls, I sent the Final Theophany down like a missile-bird from Hell.
Grounded, the four of us barrelled out of the ship before our sound waves even caught up with us. We raced to preset strategic positions, but then came to inconclusive stops.
The Creator was so huge, we might as well have been trying to cordon off a mountain.
The best thing I could compare Him to was an alabaster Sphinx conjoined with a veined and marbled slug.
From his ground-level ‘waist’ up, the Creator looked vaguely ‘human’, with a skyward straining muscled torso and two arms. A neck broad as a four-lane highway supported a head whose like no one had ever seen. Multiple faces beyond count existed in a ring around the entire surface of the skull. These face were in constant flickering phase-change, flashing through split-second recognisable representations of all the races that populated our galaxy. But above the main head was a fractally smaller head, exhibiting the same flickering conformation. And above that another, and another, and another…
I was reminded of certain images from Terra, the gods of a land named Tibet.
So much for the half of
the Creator that rose vertically from the dirt of the plain. The recumbent portion of His body was an unadorned fleshy tube tapering from the size of a major undersea transportation tunnel down to a tip as big as me.
And at this cloacal tip, the Creator gave birth.
As we watched, a billet of glistening urschleim identical to Galatea began to slide out. As it passed through the bodily aperture, it was massaged and palpitated by a number of hand-like manipulators ringing the opening, a kind of fringe of digits. These ministrations triggered fresh coruscations from the colourful organelles within the jelly log, no doubt prompting its future development into yet another sickly vehicle of sentience. The billet plopped down onto the dust and grit of the plain and wormed away to make room for the next.
As we watched, the Creator, all oblivious to us, began to speak to Himself in a voice that for all its celestial booming still held a note of weary whining. I suspected that each of us heard that voice in our own native language.
“Think it, shape it, drop it. Think it, shape it, drop it. Push it out, push it out. On and on and on. Never stop, can’t stop, how stop? Tired and old, tired and old. Oh, how it hurts! Stop, stop, stop. Start, start, start. Think it, shape it, drop it….”
The insane maunderings of this diseased God acted to jar me and the others out of our first dismay and disbelief, and to recall us to our intended holy blasphemy. His guilt could not be more clear, and sentence must be passed.
“Kill it! Kill it now!”
And so we unleashed our weapons on the God. Particles and waves, explosives and blades, blunt force and ultrasonic shakings. I saw Maxwell bury his heavy hammer up to his wrists over and over, wrenching it back out along with great gobbets of Godflesh. Jagello carved himself a passage into the bulk of the Creator and began to chew and churn invisibly forward inside. Corinthia was a whirlwind of flashing vibra-swords, sending out a mist of pale lymphatic fluids as she hacked her way like a rock climber up the back of the God.
