The face of the eunuch engineer-priest is an exercise in minimalism. It’s human but possessed of no pores, blemishes, smile lines or any other markers of character. In his all-concealing purple rad suit, a permanent second skin that was grafted to his own on the day he took his vows, only his face is visible, a constellation of eyes, nose and mouth in a square cut-out that is the only gap in rubbery material too thick to permit normal tactile sensation, or even most human eliminatory functions, without divine intervention. Thanks to his weight—typical among his kind, who all tend to the overweight—it also makes him look like a giant grape.
He spreads his hands palms upward, expressing a level of helplessness eloquent in its pious simplicity. “The gods have forsaken us.”
Captain Henryk Fithe regards the little creature with open loathing. Fithe is the engineer-priest’s physical opposite: hard-edged, steel-jawed, battle-scarred, potent, with a uniform pressed until every crease cuts like a sword’s edge. He is also the man’s opposite by nature: a man of action, an advocate of tough decisions, and a champion of the special capacities the brave and forthright use to wrest victory from the moments of most heart-rending despair. Surrender to futility, even a futility mandated by forces greater than himself, has never been in his skill set. “I’ll decide when the gods have forsaken us.”
“Will you, O Captain? Is it not the gods who get to make that decision? Would you not accede to their judgment and withhold your own as the foolishness of a flawed mortal being?”
Fithe rubs the bridge of his chiseled nose between thumb and forefinger. He has never been fond of priests, even the ones whose prayers and sigils have always been necessary, if distasteful, adjuncts to the proper maintenance of starship engines.
It is not, he reflects, just that their rituals are repugnant to him; like most captains, he is as eager to leave matters of faith to their able hands as he is to abandon the specific mechanics of applied astrophysics to their purview.
Nor is it just that he is personally creeped out by their sexual relationship with the engines they serve, the only form of consummation of which they remain capable after the holy sacrifice of their genitalia. (Though he labors in vain to erase the memory of the several occasions when he’s come down to the engine room on one command errand or another, when the ship had been humming along at multiple times the speed of light and everything had been working the way it should have been working, only to find this inhuman little castrato and his fellow devotees of the Church of Hyperspeed writhing in the orgiastic pleasure afforded them by the throbbing light pulses from the divine host; no longer single grapes, they now looked like entire bunches engaged in acts of auto-cannibalism. Few alien monsters glimpsed on even the most savage backwater worlds had ever struck Fithe as being anywhere close to that repugnant.)
No, what Fithe hates, really, is that theirs is an awfully inflexible creed. They’re always so certain, so superior —and he is not the first to damn the malicious sense of humor the gods had demonstrated by making faith such an integral part of interstellar travel. “Details.”
“We’re crippled,” the engineer-priest says simply. “We can barely maneuver, let alone get up to speed—a useless function, given how far we now are from any star system on or off the map. We’ve been flung an unknown distance at so many multiples past the highest speed any human vessel has ever recorded, into a region of space inhabited by no gods we know, perhaps no gods of any kind. Meanwhile, life support has less than forty-eight hours left. That, good Captain, is as near a definition of death as our scriptures provide. If there is a way out, neither faith nor engineering can provide it. Bless the gods.”
“Bless the gods,” Fithe murmurs automatically. “But no more hopeless talk, hear me? I will not accept that outcome until I have no other alternative.”
“It is the outcome, Captain. The numbers . . .”
In a flash, the cutting edge of Fithe’s ceremonial dagger is up against the most vulnerable part of the little reprobate’s throat. “If you need me to say it, you sackless perversion, then very well. No more hopeless talk, with anyone, or I’ll have you executed for fomenting panic. It’s not like you’re essential personnel any longer, if you can’t fix anything. At the bare minimum, you can remain useful by keeping up appearances.”
“. . . yes, Captain. Your orders?”
“Fix what you can, even if it’s just cosmetic. Make things comfortable. Create the illusion of progress. And”—with a shudder of revulsion as he slips the dagger back in its sheath—“feel free to have one of your ceremonies if you have time. I know it won’t change anything, but the sound of you lot in mid-rut may deter any lower-level crewmen from wandering in here and finding out anything we don’t want them knowing about, just yet.”
“No possibility of that. We’re eunuchs. We can’t perform unless the deities indulge us with miracles. And with the engines inoperative . . .”
“Fake it, then.”
The priest is aghast. “You want us to fake a ceremonial orgy? How?”
Fithe sucker-punches him in the belly. A whuff of air escapes the eunuch-priest’s lips, a thin sheen of sweat appears on his soft rounded forehead, and he sinks to his hands and knees, moaning. The captain places his right boot on the man’s buttocks and, with the slightest of nudges, pushes him over, leaving him on his side, gasping for breath, his oversized eyes shut tight in agony.
Fithe, who has been wanting to do that for years, says, “Imagine twenty of you doing that in a pile. I believe it will be persuasive enough.”
* * * *
A smartly executed about-face and Fithe has left the flesh-pit of engineering behind and is on the way to the bridge.
It is a grim journey. The corridors are hazy. The air distribution system has rendered a fine layer of ash, some human, throughout the ship. He can only wonder if some of what he’s breathing now is Nargill, the ship’s cook, with her ready smile and ever-helpful-manner; Peters, the irrepressible exobotanist, always ready with a kind word or a song; Wu, the cantankerous ship surgeon, whose grumpy exterior hid a core of decency as great as any man Fithe had ever known; or the scribes, any of the faceless young men and women who once accepted the removal of their eyes in exchange for the honor of laboring in the ship’s dank scriptoriums, twelve hours out of every twenty-four, painstakingly transcribing the holy writs of Viriianis, the benevolent deity of humanity’s home system, from one scroll to another. The honor they had done that kind-eyed god, with their labors, was another sacrament without which no engine ever built by man could have ever propelled the Faithful any faster than the smallest fraction of C. But they are dead now, or damned in ways that are worse than dead, and so the ship can only crawl at a mere one-tenth of light speed, fully subject to the cursed time dilation and other results of relativity that now render return to a recognizable human space an impossible dream.
The terrible truth is not just that the Faithful might never make its way back home. It’s that home is on the brink of annihilation.
The terrible battle was only hours ago, the last stage of a war that had ripped across the sky for years. In the end, the entirety of the human fleet and its gods had faced off against the Vferm, invaders who had aligned themselves with pantheons even more powerful. The ships of the Holy Church of the Star Brigade and the ships of the heretical enemy had exchanged missile fire for days on end, each side suffering awful losses, each side being revived just as often by divine whim, each side holding on in the dread knowledge that both had committed all their forces to this battle, and that there was no point in retreat even for ships that were on the verge of destruction.
At the point when the engagement entered its most disastrous phase, the Faithful had lost one quarter of its complement to one hull breach or another, just as many to the forces wielded by the gods of the enemy, who had favored hellfire and random punitive transformations into obscene lesser life forms. Fithe had been standing next to Corporal Karl Nimmitz during one such moment, when the glowing hand of something divine had reached through the hull and brushed the young man’s skin, instantly transmuting a two-meter recruit into his own weight in squirming brown rats; he had seen the ship’s crisis counselor Diadem-Troy become a pillar of flies. The corridors of the Faithful had become a menagerie of such vermin, some still trapped inside the uniforms the individuals had worn as human beings; some of the creatures identifiable, some not.
And that was before the enemy’s most powerful god, a thing that was to humanity’s gods what a savant is to an amoeba, had wandered into the battle, a humanoid figure the size of a small planet, striding through empty space the way a man would walk on solid flooring, sweeping away entire formations with irritated gestures. Fithe did not know the being, did not know what it chose to call itself, did not understand why a being so far beyond the concerns of even most of its fellow gods would choose to ally itself with the hated enemy. But whatever it was, it belonged to a pantheon greater than those that had aided Man’s journeys between the stars. Within minutes of its entering the battle and tearing apart most of the lesser deities arrayed before it like so much tissue paper, most of mankind’s lesser gods had fled or been reduced to ash. The most powerful fleet in the history of mankind had been only seconds from being destroyed completely when the enemy god turned his attention to the Faithful, snatched it out of his sky, and flung it as far as he could, at a speed that none of Man’s vessels had ever come close to achieving. This was in fact the same trick friendly gods employed, upon receiving sufficient tribute, to give human vessels the speed they needed to travel to other solar systems in less than the lifetimes mere technology could manage—but friendly gods honored man by merely providing lift to his wings, and this creature had only wanted to banish the Faithful so far from home that no power would ever be sufficient to pilot her back.
Now even the constellations are strangers.
The astrogators have been unable to determine the direction in which the doomed Earth sits.
Fithe turns the corner and encounters a vile, asymmetrical creature dragging itself painfully across the deck with a body that no evolutionary process ever intended. It has four legs on its left side and only a series of boneless flaps on its right; it makes hideous cracking noises with every step, as if even the slightest move causes it agonizing fractures. The trail of slime it leaves behind itself establishes that not all of its organs are sealed in flesh. Fithe, who has seen sights like this often in his years as a starship captain—the price of sometimes contending with gods—nevertheless feels a jolt of horror and pity. Oh, poor thing. Who were you?
It is only when he kneels before it and spots an identity badge pinned to a fragment of uniform that Fithe is able to identify the creature as young Samantha Williams, second-level astrogator: exemplary officer, beautiful woman, best friend to everybody and fantasy sweetheart to any crew member whose gender preference permitted. She’s been among the missing until now.
Sadly, muttering a few words of regret, he draws his dagger and puts her out of her misery. It is the seventh such mercy killing he has had to commit since the battle. Not for the first time, he wonders if he will die not knowing if the human race was allowed a chance to surrender, at least; if instead he will choke out his last breath only suspecting that he was part of the failure that led to Armageddon for the children of Earth. Even now, the enemy fleet and their allied gods might be approaching the home system, in numbers great enough to blot out the stars. . . .
No. He needs to heed the advice he gave the repulsive little engineer-priest. Hopelessness is counterproductive. He needs to keep searching for a way out, for as long as even a single breath remains in his lungs.
So, he leaves the obscene cadaver for the maintenance crews to deal with, and proceeds down the corridor, taking note of the damage wherever he sees it, mentally writing a condolence letter to the families of every identifiable casualty he finds on his way.
When he reaches the bridge, he finds low emergency lighting, a skeleton crew, and the communications officer, transformed into a golden statue that will, until melted down or transformed back into something living, always be frozen in its current half-seated, half-standing position, complete with mouth agape in silent scream. But so many of his most trusted officers are still alive and still waiting for him to come up with a plan for survival: Mordecai, Bender, Stormkiller, Zorin, the whole brave lot, bruised and bloodied but not defeated, and still his to command. Fithe strides among them, aware that on this ship, he is the sole voice of authority, a uniformed god himself, expected to wring hope even from situations capable of driving the great powers of the universe to despair. He does not know what he will say to them until the words come, and when they come, they come with finality. He turns to the ensign, Lars Fouton. “Fetch a goat.”
“Yes, sir,” Fouton quavers. “What if all the goats are dead?”
“Then,” Fithe says meaningfully, “I might have to rely on a virgin.”
Thus indicted, the ensign flees.
Science officer Mordecai, always the voice of caution, draws close, her craggy cheeks wrinkling in a grimace. “What are you planning?”
Fithe shrugs. “I’ve always been a gambling man.”
“But this. Contacting gods you don’t know, who haven’t been vetted by past expeditions . . .”
“Do you have any better suggestions?”
Mordecai’s mouth opens, then shuts. Her silence is wise. In this service, continuing to object after the captain has asked you for better objections is a good way to get yourself excommunicated. Being excommunicated in space is an unpleasant thing. It is not as bad as being spaced, but nobody wants to be cut off from the ship gods, not when so many of ship’s functions require constant divine intervention. An excommunicated man might, for instance, remain at one fixed point in space, while the ship around him goes to ten times light speed . . . and nobody wants to be remembered as a stain on one of his ship’s interior bulkheads.
She does have a point, though. The history of interstellar travel to this point has been a series of careful negotiations between the human and the divine. Some gods will give human vessels safe and speedy passage across their domains in exchange for a heartfelt psalm; others demand higher tribute. Any star map is filled with blacked-out regions bearing the warning that the gods in residence at certain places are too lunatic to be bothered talking to; indeed, the fastest route between some star systems is closer to a zigzag, the best way of avoiding certain local deities who demand too much.
Being the first to make contact with any particular sector’s deity is therefore, by far, the riskiest job in space travel. Ships tasked to do little more than say hello to one interstellar god or another have been known to drift back into more benign regions of space with their crews gone, or mad, or mangled beyond recognition, or transformed into donkeys, or with their faces turned inside-out so that they were stuck looking at their own brains. Easily irritated deities do things like that, one reason why it really makes the most sense to avoid passing through those sectors whenever possible. Fortunately, friendly deities are always willing to steer humanity out of the rougher neighborhoods.
Unfortunately, any deity native to this particular black void remains a total unknown.
Too bad he, or she, is the only option.
Fithe presses a button, and the molybdenum grillwork upon which the bridge crew has long performed such exemplary service slides into its recess. The true floor, an obsidian slab, is thus revealed. The glowing outlines of a pentagram appear on that slab, its scarlet lines formed by transparent aluminum glass offering an unobstructed view of the fires that forever burn at the heart of the ship, and burn still for all the damage the recent battle has done. Fithe presses a button and a baffle appears to obstruct the side closest to him so he can enter. Once he is inside, he feels what he has always felt, on the rare occasions when he entered such a place—a strange, uncharacteristic isolation, reflecting the fact that the outline where he now stands is one of the rare parts of the universe that no divinity can enter. On both prior occasions, which had taken place during his training, he had noted that his heart continued to beat and his lungs continued to expand, and found himself wondering whether this constituted proof that Man might exist without gods. But who would want to spend all his life living inside a pentagram?
A few minutes pass before Ensign Fouton returns with a goat on a leash. It is a scrawny little thing, with the wispy little beard that the gods decreed for creatures of its species, and it is confused, its blinking incomprehension an unwitting vivid reminder of the very expression on the face of the man Fithe has sent to retrieve it. He leads the braying animal across the grillwork to the open side of the pentagram, where he transfers custody to the captain and swiftly departs, with understandable relief.
Fithe attaches the other end of the goat’s leash to the ring at the center of the pentagram. As he does, he can feel the poor animal trembling, and a certain uncharacteristic pity overcomes him. Man, he thinks, has taken any number of goats to the stars, but how little of the wonders of the cosmos do they ever get to see? Just the habitat where they are kept, and the pentagrams where they are sacrificed.
In the long-passed age of reason, who would have guessed that it was the same predicament man would share when he passed beyond the boundaries of his own solar system?
Grimacing, he returns to his command chair. Another button-press and the baffle over the open end of the pentagram withdraws, leaving the ungulate sealed in what is, essentially, a pocket universe all its own.
“You know the procedure,” Fithe says. “If I do succeed in contacting a god, then whatever happens, whatever danger I appear to be in, keep your eyes averted and your mouths shut. I will be entirely responsible for whatever deals are struck here.”
They respond with general assent. And fear? Yes, fear, but the fear of heroes, who have been trained to risk not just their lives but their immortal souls, for the safety of the ship.
Fithe depresses another button on his chair and broadcasts his words out into the pitiless void—the key point, of course, being the hope that it is neither a total void nor exactly pitiless. “O ye mighty unknown to us, hear the pitiful cries of those are but the merest insects to one as splendid as yourself. Insects? Nay. Insect droppings; indeed, the droppings of the even smaller mites that feed on the droppings of insects. Or the crawling bacteria that devour what remains of the droppings when the mites are done with them. Verily, thou god we know nothing about; truly, we inhabit a new dimension of insignificance. Forgive us thus for applying for your aid. We are but travelers from a distance, brought to this place by a wind beyond our comprehension, seeking succor in your infinite mercy. Please accept this offering, insignificant as it is, as a token of our eagerness to know your divine splendor.”
The goat blaats, and Fithe is about to repeat his message.
But then the viewscreen flares with sudden light, light that moves from the screen to the small empty space to at the forefront of the command chair. It is the light of the Big Bang. It is the light of the fires of creation. It is the light of ground-zero nuclear explosions. The visual filters prevent it from actually being any of these things, of course, because if it were, then everybody on the bridge would be leaking vitreous fluid down their cheeks in whatever fraction of a second they had to enjoy the pain before it was followed by vaporization and death. But all the officers gasp and look away and for a moment feel their souls shrivel in the light of a being so far beyond their puny metaphors for highly evolved that they might as well throw out the thesaurus and go back to squeaking like tree shrews.
Then the light dissipates and the god is revealed.
Some gods look like human beings with the bodies of jackals; others look like bearded old white men; still others look like unearthly radiance. At least one, a disagreeable sort, looks like a man with an octopus stuck on his head. This one looks like a very small child, a toddler, albeit one with eyes like coals and a way of looking down at creatures taller than itself. It is not a cute toddler. There are toddlers in the world who, when introduced to us by their parents, prompt a moment of inarticulate stammering and some neutral acknowledgment to the effect that, yes, technically, that certainly does qualify as a child. This is one of them. Its nose is mashed flat against its face, and its scowl is the very definition of pique. It is physically present on the bridge, and it regards the command crew with abject boredom.
“You have trespassed,” it says.
It sounds like a decree being blared from a mountaintop.
“This was not our choice,” Fithe says. “It was forced on us.”
“I am not speaking of your presence. I am speaking of your temerity in trying to engage me. I am not the average mewling filth who considers himself a god. I am the god among gods, the titan among titans, and the sole survivor of the thousands who once sat on thrones in this very sector. I have ground even the greatest of them to dust between my fingers, out of sheer disgust at being classified with them. I will not be appeased by the mere offer of a barnyard animal to slaughter. I will not be flattered by your most expansive language. I am N’loghthl, and the tribute I require in exchange for my assistance may be more than even the most desperate are willing to pay.”
“We are that desperate,” Fithe replies.
N’loghthl strides around the bridge, glancing at the various members of the senior staff. For no apparent reason, his gaze lingers especially long on the security officer, Stormkiller, a man who once stood alone and bloodied against ninety armed opponents and was, thirty seconds later, the last left standing. In just the same amount of time, the infant’s inspection empties the big man’s mind of all reason and memory, and he is left kneeling on the floor, mewling like a baby who wonders where his next ba-ba is coming from. There is no sense that N’loghthl has done this out of malice; it was an unconscious action, much like doodling.
“I have divined your situation,” the infant says. “Your pathetic species is currently about to lose a most final war with another, which is even now less than twenty of your minutes from obliterating your home world. Your last defenses have all been subsumed or destroyed. The gods who your enemies the Vferm have enlisted are so powerful, by any standards you know, that even if I were to return you to your solar system and give you weapons that exceed the sum total of all the destructive power ever wielded by all the combined generations of your miserable species, you would survive for less than an eyeblink against them. They will brush you aside and take all your billions for a hellish afterlife they have constructed especially for that purpose.” He sniggered. “It is nasty. Not as nasty as I could concoct, if I were inclined, but nasty enough.”
“So . . . you are saying you can’t stop them?”
A flicker of annoyance, and another member of the senior staff, navigator Pamela Zorin, is transformed into a glowing orange fungus. N’loghthl thunders: “Have you not paid attention? Of course I could stop them. With my merest eyeblink, I could create a barrier of fire that would incinerate the entire Vferm fleet faster than the most raging sun. With the merest twitch, I could replace the hearts of every Vferm that lives with a pint of owl dung. Just for a laugh, I could turn all their oh-so-powerful gods to vases filled with offal, to be fed to the swine that are all I left remaining of the rulers of Olympus. It would be the matter of a moment for one such as I. It would be no effort at all. You would have saved your species in an instant. If I choose to involve myself. Which I have not done.”
“We shake in awe,” says Fithe. “But if you’ll just hold that thought—”
He jogs across the bridge to where the perspicacious Mordecai sits, scanning the visitor’s power levels, and murmurs, “Is he exaggerating for dramatic effect or telling the truth?”
Not all of Mordecai’s green tinge comes from her instrumentation. Her voice trembles, in the manner of a woman whose very foundations have turned to sand. “Henryk, I don’t know how to put this. . . .”
“Try.”
“Very well. The all-powerful creator posited by Man’s holiest books, who has never been directly observed, would measure a pure one hundred on the Yahweh scale. I remind you, sir: that’s an exponential scale, starting with point one being the baseline possessed by the average individual human being, and every subsequent tenth of an integer, climbing up through point two and point three and so on, reflecting a tenfold increase over the prior measurement. By that yardstick, sir, the most powerful deity ever known to ally with Man measures a mere nine point seven; the most powerful ever confirmed by science, until recently, a seventeen point two. The one the Vferm sprung on us was an unheard-of twenty-three point six. This guy . . . Captain, just from what’s radiating, he’s a solid thirty-one point nine. Almost ten billion times more powerful than the ally the Vferm unleashed earlier—possibly the closest thing we’ve ever seen to true omnipotence. He probably created the entire star cluster we’re in. It’s a wonder we’re not all pillars of salt. He . . .”
“Enough,” Fithe murmurs, having turned a little green himself.
This is uncharted territory, all right. He has found, mixed metaphors be damned, the holy grail of space exploration, the god powerful enough to grant all of mankind’s fondest dreams, the one who, if negotiations go well, can reshape the universe itself to fit what suits human beings. Given the circumstances, it seems of little import that he can also flick a finger and do away with everything Man knows just as easily; after all, that is the fate that awaits in just a matter of minutes anyway. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain.
Taking his seat again, Fithe gazes upon the terrible toddler—whose downy forehead now spits towers of coruscating flame—and says, “Well. It seems we owe you fealty.”
N’loghthl crooks a finger, and counselor Ariana Furby becomes the next target of his wrath. Every bone in the Rigellian colonist’s body is immediately teleported one full meter to her left, while the rest of her body remains where it stands, sinking to the deck like a decompressing accordion, releasing a high-pitched whistle through all available orifices as she descends.
Assured now of everybody’s full attention, N’loghthl says, “I could not care a bucket of paramecium spit for your fealty. That is indeed what I find most irritating about your lot: this impression you’ve picked up, from where even I know not, that intelligences on my level worry even the slightest who you toady to and how. If you were all rendered extinct in the next fifteen minutes—as it appears you are about to be, without my intervention—then I would not lose one moment of godsleep tonight, or indeed at any point until the stars go out. What I do now, I do for my own amusement.”
“Very well,” says Fithe. “What deal would amuse you and still provide us with what we need?”
What follows is a moment of hope. N’loghthl is actually intrigued by that, intrigued enough to stroke his little chin as he contemplates the question. After a moment—a genuine eternity, given the processing time of the average god—he says, “I believe I can propose something.”
“We await, o lord.”
“This is a one-time-only offer. I will brook no petitions, no negotiations, no attempts to haggle on a price I consider fair and just for the service rendered.”
“Understood,” says Fithe.
N’loghthl says, “My end of the bargain will be to return you and this vessel to the outskirts of your home solar system. At the same instant, I will erase the Vferm, their gods, their allies, their very civilization from the universe. One instant, they will exist. The next, they will not. The threat they pose to you shall be extinguished. The worlds they once occupied will be restored to pristine condition, their riches free for the taking. The universe will of course be much depopulated of divine beings, thanks to the recent battle; interstellar travel will therefore become that much more difficult. But some will still exist and might be willing to deal with you in the way that others have in the past. That will be up to them, and of course up to you. But the Vferm will be gone at least, and you will be free to prosper, or not, according to your innate capabilities.
“In exchange for that,” he says, raising his index finger heavenward and leering at them all, in the manner of a poker player about to lay down a royal flush after going all in, “I take . . . the goat.”
For a moment, it appears that he is impossibly about to leave it at that, leaving Captain Fithe and the Faithful crew in the singular position of having made the single greatest deal of all time without really trying. In the general hush, the only sound is what’s left of Counselor Zorin, a sack that wheezes as it inflates and deflates, getting enough air to breathe but not being especially enthused about the prospect. Brilliantly, N’loghthl holds the moment for what seems forever before adding the postscript:
“And”—one finger aloft—“three quarters of all human beings aboard this ship and extant in the universe as a whole.
“As I have said, these terms will not change. Any attempt to alter them will result in me departing with the goat and abandoning your species to its fate. Take the deal and I assure you humanity will live. That is your choice. Lose everything or lose three quarters.
“You may have five minutes of privacy to make your peace with these terms. I will return to hear your decision.”
The god disappears, leaving a burned spot on the deck where he’d stood. And the bridge erupts in pandemonium: Zorin wheezing, Stormkiller babbling, the goat bleating, all others shouting over one another in a desperate attempt to be heard. It is, of course, Mordecai in the forefront; Mordecai, the voice of conscience; Mordecai, the pain in the ass; Mordecai, who has always been of the incomprehensible impression that starship command can be broken down into questions of black-and-white morality. “You can’t do this, Henryk. There are forty billion human beings in the solar system. You can’t sacrifice thirty billion of them just on that creature’s say-so! The blood on your hands alone . . .”
Fithe is resolute. “There will be blood on my hands whatever I do, old friend. If I do nothing, I’ll be responsible for total annihilation. Taking the deal is the only way to save even a few . . . and ten billion is far from being only a few. It’s the population of the Shanghai and Tampa urbmons. Humanity will be able to move on.”
“But your conscience . . .”
“By my math, I have a 75% chance of not even having to worry about my conscience. If I’m one of the 25% saved, then I’ll get therapy. In the meantime, the Vferm will die, their gods will no longer be a problem, and we’ll all have a chance to move on. This is the one deal we have. We don’t have time to go shopping for another one. Unless you have a practical objection.”
Mordecai casts about for a point, any point, capable of deterring her captain from this insane course, and for long seconds, she comes up with nothing . . . but then her eyes widen, with a level of horror that has never been seen on the Faithful bridge, not even during the battle’s manifestations of flies, boils and blood. Whatever it is turns out to be more than the veteran science officer can take. She manages just two words, “the terms, . . .” before the eyes roll back in her skull, she gurgles and falls like a marionette with cut strings. A subsequent examination, in the few minutes that remain, reveals that she is not, as she appears, dead, merely unconscious, having passed out from the shock of whatever she’d been about to say.
And if Fithe is given pause by this, he does not say so—because he is the captain, and the captain, like all leaders, has to be sure.
“Discussion’s over,” he declares. “We’re taking the deal.”
And less than a minute later, N’loghthl returns for his answer. . . .
* * * *
It is now five minutes after that.
The home system, which had been about to know the most epic destruction it has known since the fracturing of Earth and the Moon, is now at peace. The Vferm fleet roaring past the asteroid belt, eager for the sight of the blue planet’s continents reduced to molten slag, is now just a spreading cloud of vapor, which will soon dissipate against the blackness of space. The gods striding alongside them, with their smug expressions and fistfuls of lightning bolts, even with the most powerful one, whose mien had been more than any lower sentient could behold, have similarly gone away, the supreme confidence on their noble faces faltering, to be replaced with a moment of terrible fear as they comprehended the finality of the fate they were about to know. On Earth, Man’s cities still stand, not disturbed by so much as a single rivet. All is well.
In the command chair of the Faithful, Captain Henryk Fithe comes out of the vision he has been granted and knows that the god N’loghthl has indeed abided by the terms of his negotiation. He naturally sits shorter on his command chair than he did before, in part because he has no legs, no buttocks, no genitalia, and indeed no body at all below the second rib or so. His arms are just ineffective little things that end in nubs halfway to the elbow. He remains living, the internal mechanics of life having merely reconfigured themselves to suit his new anatomy, but in volume, he is only 25% of the man he used to be, much as the various members of the crew, and indeed the entirety of the human race, are now only 25% of what they used to be. All around him, on the bridge, the command staff cries out, coming to terms with the precise same realization. The goat, as promised, is gone, its own fate unknown, and not the most urgent thing to think about.
Too late, Fithe understands what Mordecai had perceived: that N’loghthl had not bargained for 75% of humanity, but 75% of all human beings, a very different measurement. The god must have been very amused indeed.
He knows that wherever people exist, they are now screaming, demanding to know why this happened to them, even perhaps wondering which dolt agreed to such terms without due diligence. He also knows that the crisis will test the species more than it has ever been tested before.
But he is the Captain. He is the one they’ll all look to. It will be up to him to assess all factors and come up with a course of action. And in less than five seconds, he has come up with one: a first step, at least, from which all else will follow. Every journey begins with the first step.
Insofar as he can, he starts to wriggle.
ADAM-TROY CASTRO is currently best known for his middle-grade series about the macabre adventures of a very strange, very courageous young boy named Gustav Gloom. The final volume, Gustav Gloom and the Castle of Fear, was released by Grosset and Dunlap in 2016. Adam-Troy’s short fiction has been nominated for two Hugos, three Stokers, and eight Nebulas, and has been selected for inclusion in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. His novel Emissaries from the Dead won the Philip K. Dick Award. Adam lives in Boynton Beach, FL, with his wife, Judi, and a collection of insane cats.
JUDI B. CASTRO retired after thirty years working for the Miami-Dade Clerk of Courts, to among other things wrangle cats and an author husband. She is a well-known SF fan, who has run conventions and presided over her local fan group, the South Florida Science Fiction Society. Serving as first reader and story editor for a number of local writers, her critical input has here led to her first shared byline on a work of published fiction.