After the Gods Die
by Jules
part 1
I pace among tall, white trunks whose roots clutch the arid soil. Daytime constellations shine down through the black leaves at me. Do humans still draw the same geometry in the stars, I wonder? Or have they come up with new stories to reflect their reimagined history?
As I ponder constellations, the ring-shaped space-station hanging in the sky explodes. A brief, white sheet of light blanks the rest of the stars from the sky. The herd of shaggy animals around me lifts their heads, wondering. They are dark as their own rippling shadows on the grass. When the stars return, all that is left of the space station is a glittering ring of debris.
I’ve waited hundreds of years for this.
My vision blurs. My head feels heavy. The metal horns that spiral my skull and augment my brain will be nothing but useless chunks of metal within days. They are living off me now, rather than the power of the space station. I blink slowly at the stars. The herd around me has disappeared into the forest.
I could find them again. Before the station exploded, I probably would have. Instead, I get to my feet and let my inner sense lock onto an all-purpose tool-tracker made by the same people who built the space station and made me what I am. I don’t have to tell my augments what I want. Their algorithms know almost before I do. I feel my fingers twitch as the augments tug my limbs toward the edge of the forest. I follow the circuits in my head down to the muddy trickle of a river.
I find who I am looking for on a dry tributary where there used to be a city. Silt covers most of the cobblestones. Striated drifts fill doorways and windows. A stand of dry, twisted trees stand half-buried and leaning, festooned with strands of silk that throw off shards of color.
This man is not like me. He carries this ancient tool for building and breaking around his neck like a talisman of authority: a glassy green cabochon set in a complicated twist of metal and lights. I see the confidence it gives him in the way he stalks through ancient courtyards patched with thorn. He passes under the blue shadows of arches half worn away. None of his armed followers walk the way he does. Difficult to tell whether they are more watchful of him or of the man-sized arachnids that live in this place.
Strands of silk waft from archways. They cast chips of bright color into the air. The followers climb and gather strands while the man with the symbol of power gives orders. These are the remnants of yesterday’s webs, yesterday’s city, a dry river. They carry glass swords. I remember when the people in my city used to make them, almost a millennium ago, before the star people arrived.
When I approach, the others look to him. He sees them looking, calls me stranger, and focuses the greenish light of his talisman on me. The augments know this dance: he needs to show his followers who is strongest, because strength is his hold over them.
Green flecks dance around his hands. I recognize this as a setting used for mining and demolition. He strikes with enough force to knock down a wall. My augments absorb the force and turn it back on him. He isn’t expecting that and slides back on his feet, sending up a cloud of silt. He shakes his head and charges forward again, trying to grapple rather than knock me down. The metal and refined glass in my limbs sap my strength for a short burst of resistance that startles him into caution. We circle, fingers locked. Flashes of light meet between us.
He shows me a mouthful of teeth. The snarl dissolves into a smile, a handspan from my face. I don’t need the metal in my brain to return one of my own.
He is panting. “I’ve never met anyone who—”
I shove him away so the crystal arachnid that drops from the eave overhead does not plunge its hooks into his back. It lands heavily, which would have stunned me without the shield my augments throw out to protect me. I look up into pink compound eyes and think that I liked his face better. My body is so tired. My shield flickers and fails. Sliver-thin hairs stick in my palms when I try to keep its jaws away from me. The touch of its legs is dry and prickly and somehow dusty. He plunges a glass sword into its translucent guts: a thrust from the side that knocks the arachnid off me and sends its legs curling into death.
He’s saved my life and saved face with his followers, so he can grasp my hand, help me up, and call me friend. I suggest we get out of the ruins. What did we expect the crystal arachnids to do when we were stumbling around their territory and plucking at their strands of silk? Red sunlight flashes on short, glassy blades as we move beyond the shade of the wrecked buildings.
“I’m Gil. No one has fought me to a standstill before.” His dark eyes are intent.
“I am called...” I have to dredge up the memory. “Nemiva.”
“Took a while to remember your name, did it?” He digs an elbow into my ribs.
No one has called my name in hundreds of years. The forest creatures know my scent and my footsteps.
Gil pulls a fragment of mirror from his vest and flashes a signal ahead of us. An answering glimmer comes from the river. They know friends approach, and that their leader wants a celebration.
They live closer to the shallow, muddy trickle of the main river, in long, low houses made of cut stone pulled from other structures. I suppose they moved in closer as the tributaries dried.
The red sun sinks low. Stars grow brighter, and with them the debris still spreading in a ring. Gil drinks beer from a leather mug until his eyes unfocus. In the dead of night, when the others have gone to rest, Gil pulls me aside. He doesn’t have to hide his distress with me. Not after the way we fought to a standstill. He tells me that the gods gave up their crown and smashed it with a flash that blinded the sky from horizon to horizon.
He weighs his talisman in his hand. Where have the gods gone? Who is he, without their might? He wants to make the women’s eyes open wide and the elders’ mouths speechless. He took his might for granted until it began to fade.
So I tell him, “I can show you how to turn the river from dust to water. You can turn the plain black with grass and leaves again. You can make the flowers bloom like opening eyes.”
“I’d have power over the land itself.”
“You could give water back to the land,” I say carefully.
He makes an expansive gesture with his arms. Same difference.
* * *
Gil rouses his village — and me — early that morning. He gathers them in the early dawn, while their scrawny clucking birds peck around their feet. He tells them that with my knowledge and his strength, we will be able to build grander cities even than the ruins along the river. They applaud for him, but they look confused. How can a small collection of humans drinking from a few pools and wells hope to do such a thing? Gil does not burden them with details.
Gil and I skirt the edge of the ruined city with its banners of silk and ascend into what Gil calls the land of hills and ghosts. The remnants of a broken road leads us high above a narrow canyon carved into the hills by long-ago water flow. Red sunlight flashes from shallow pools below.
From overhead, the bottom of the canyon looks like a better road than our broken trail, but Gil knows better than to set foot there. “No one returns from the canyon,” he tells me. “No one knows whether the lost fell from crumbling ledges or followed passages that never came back to the sun.” He is satisfied with traveling up above.
My ancestors built a tower along the road with a glass signal-mirror to communicate with cities downriver. The tower is a hump of stone in an age’s worth of scrubby weeds, but the speckled mirror remains, signaling one long stroke up at the sky. Gil recognizes the glass as the same kind in his signaling mirror.
The magenta sky is clear, speckled with daystars from horizon to horizon. On the mountainside, tall herd-creatures with long, slender legs and sway-backed spines go about their business. They are nearly indistinguishable from their rippling shadows that stretch up the ridge beyond them. That is where we must go, and up farther still.
We see the craters and shades before we enter the battlefield. The ground is blackened. Dust blows in circles. A handful of days ago this would have been suicide. Now the space station that gave the combatants their power-source is gone. I say this to myself as much as to Gil. Both he and I have seen the flare of battle-lights reflected on cloudy nights: green and red and green again. He says he called them ghost lights and he isn’t wrong. I find myself running my hand along the spiral horn beside my temple.
Gil stays beside me. He can believe in gods and in the star people; in ghosts and in me.
I know the words for the artificial life-forms that are scattered across the perimeter, but I am fiercely glad the words don’t matter anymore. They twitch. They scrabble metal limbs against the soil. My augments analyze their drained circuits and leaking tubes and try to insist that I repair them. My own hands twitch, then fall still. Without the space station, they have neither purpose nor direction. The circuits in my brain broadcast alarm at half of the former combatants. Those are the enemy faction. There are towers with red globes on stalks, now dull and drooping along the ground.
The reason their colony existed lies in lumps and pebbles across the battlefield. Gil bends at the knees and pries up a chunk of the smooth, almost waxy stone. It is translucent and seems to glow when he holds it to the light. My augments inform me that these fragments are nothing compared to the deposits deep underground. I am tempted to shut down all the augments and stop them from living off me.
“We mixed it with sand to make our mirrors hyper-reflective, or strong glass for buildings and swords,” I tell him. Further refined and combined with other elements, the star people could make spacecraft from it. Or create domes to colonize inhospitable planets. Or sell it to farther-flung beings and become incomprehensibly rich. If not for this, our planet would still be a string of numbers in a far-flung solar system to them. Gil is drawn to it and gathers as much as he can carry.
One of them picks itself off the ground like a snake and fires at us. I sense the power building in its circuits an instant before it follows the directive from almost a thousand years ago. My augments put up a green shield that is no longer strong enough to absorb the force, but the blast is refracted enough to miss us.
The tower tries to send a signal to the others around us. A mat of cables stirs. Lights twinkle. I feel the metal and refined glass circuits in my horns and hands disrupting the signal: first one avenue, then another, then the same tower glows again, getting ready to fire on us.
Gil drops his armload of stone. He charges forward and uses both hands to drive his glass sword through the remains of the globe with a shattering, popping sound like a dropped jar full of fish sauce. He turns around and grins at me: he’s slain an enemy without using his talisman. Then he turns around to put his foot on the tower-stalk to yank his sword free. I keep smiling even though he doesn’t see. I don’t know why.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by Jules
