Short Fiction Algis Budrys (best large ereader TXT) 📖

She paused. “I, too, am one of your worshippers. Wherever there are human beings, throughout the Universe, you are worshipped.”

He looked at her more closely. There was a lift to one black-winged eyebrow that was less reverent than a god might like, though a man could have no quarrel with it. She stood gracefully on sandaled feet, dressed in a single white garment girdled around her waist by a belt made of the same metal in which the monsters were cast. He saw that the clasp was shaped into a profile of his own face. And he saw from the wear that it showed that it was old⁠—older than she could be, older perhaps than this court. This⁠ ⁠… shrine? He wondered how many priestesses had worn that belt.

How many of his priestesses.

He frowned and got down, feeling the touch of the day-warmed stone on his bare feet. He was dressed, he saw, in a black kilt and nothing else. He returned his glance to the worshippers and saw that the men were dressed similarly, and that the women wore flowing, calf-length, translucently light robes like Adelie’s.

There was motion at one corner of his eye, and he turned his head sharply to see the arms of the couch sweeping down, folding and bending against its sides. Now he saw that he had been cradled in the arms of a great black metal beast. It crouched atop the dais. Its head was bent supplicatingly, bright oily metal barely visible at the joinings of its mechanical body.

He glanced quickly up at the monsters atop their columns. “Are they all like that?” he asked Adelie.

An old man’s gruff voice answered him from the other side of the beast-couch. “They won’t spring down to devour you⁠—you needn’t be afraid of that.” Two men came into view, one old, one young and very slim. The old one rapped the couch with his knuckles. “This tended you in your sleep. It is made in the shape of the most ferocious race that ever rivaled Man. It is now extinct⁠—as are all those others up there, for the same reason.”

The thin young man⁠—very pale, very long of limb⁠—stretched his broad, tight mouth into a smile that covered half his face without mirth. “Not the most ferocious, Vigil.”

“Your kind will learn about that,” the old man snapped.

“Not from you and yours,” the slim man said lightly.

Greaves turned to Adelie, who waited, poised, while old Vigil and the young man quarreled. “Tell me the situation,” Greaves said.

Adelie’s lips parted. But the old man interrupted.

“The situation is that you have been awakened needlessly and would best go back to sleep at once. My daughter and these fanatical sheep⁠—” he waved an angry arm at the standing worshippers⁠—“have forced me to permit this. But in fact Humanity neither needs you nor wants you awake.”

“Oh, on the contrary,” the young man said. “Humanity needs its gods very badly at this hour. But you are only a man, not so?”

Greaves looked from one to the other⁠—the leather-skinned old man with his mop of ringleted white hair, the young one who was human in appearance but somehow claimed some other status. “Who are you two?”

“I am Vigil, your guardian, and this is⁠—”

“I am Mayron of The Shadows,” the young man said, and he held himself as carelessly as before, but his face looked directly into Greaves’s. “See my eyes.”

There was nothing there. Only darkness speckled by pinpoints of light; thick, sooty darkness like oil smoke, and sharp lights that burned through it without illuminating it.

“Mayron that was First of Men,” Vigil said bitterly.

“Mayron that is First of Shadows,” the empty-skinned thing replied proudly, and began to weep great, black tears that soon emptied it, so that the skin drooped down into a huddle on the pave and a black cloud in the shape of a man stood sparkling in the dusk before Greaves. “Mayron that will again be First of Men, when all men are shadows. Mayron that is already First of many men. And which of us is a god, David Greaves?”

Adelie’s face glowed with excitement. Her red lips were parted breathlessly. The crowd on the tiers had loosed a great, wailing moan, which hung over the court of conquered monsters as the first stars became visible on the far horizon.

Greaves took a deep breath. He could feel his body tensing itself, the muscles rippling, as though his hide needed comfort.

“Which of us is a god, man?” Mayron repeated softly, his voice coming from the entire cloud. “What is it you can do against me, you whose entire virtue rests on doing nothing?”

“That would depend on what was expected of me at this moment,” Greaves said.

“This moment?” Mayron chuckled. “At this moment, nothing.”

“In that case, get out of my court and come back when there’s something to do.”

Mayron laughed, throwing his head back, the laughter high and insolent. “How like a god! How very like the real thing.”

Greaves frowned. “If you were a man, once, you might remember how that feels.” But the laugh had bothered him.

“Oh, I remember, I remember. And tomorrow we fight, man.” Laughing, Mayron bent and picked up the skin he had discarded. He crumpled it by the waist in one fist, and brandished it negligently at the worshippers. They shrank back with a moan of horror as he strode toward the far wall. At the wall, he flipped the white, fluttering thing over, and as a cloud passed through the stone. Perhaps on the other side he put on his human form again. Greaves could not tell. The sun was down, and only a little light glowed on the far horizon. The torches guttered in the court of monsters, and the worshippers were hurrying up the steps, out through the temple and away.

III

Greaves, Adelie and Vigil stood beside the beast-couch. “All right,” Greaves said. “Now there are things I want to know, and I want no quarrels, Vigil.”

“And by what right do you order me