The Godmakers

Chapter Two

“We are about to make a god,” Abbod Halmyrach said.

He was a short, dark-skinned man in a pale-orange robe that fell to his ankles in soft folds. His face, narrow and smooth, was dominated by a long nose that hung like a precipice over a wide, thin-lipped mouth. His head was polished brown baldness. “We do not know from what creature or thing the god will be born,” the Abbod said. “It could be one of you.”

He gestured to the room full of acolytes seated on the bare floor of an austere room illuminated by the flat rays of Amel’s midmorning sun. The room was a Psi fortress buttressed by instruments and spells. It measured twenty meters to the side, three meters floor to ceiling. Eleven windows, five on one side and six on the other, looked out across the park rooftops of Amel’s central warren complex. The wall behind the Abbod and the one he faced gave the appearance of white stone laced with thin brown lines like insect tracks—one of the configurations of a Psi machine. The walls glowed with pale-white light as flat as skimmed milk.

The Abbod felt the force flowing between these two walls and experienced the anticipatory flash of guilt-fear which he knew was shared by the acolyte class. Officially, this class was called Religious Engineering, but the young acolytes persisted in their impiety. To them, this was God Making.

And they were sufficiently advanced to know the perils.

“What I say and do here has been planned and measured out with precision,” the Abbod said. “Random influence is dangerous here. That is why this room is so purposefully plain. The smallest extraordinary intrusion here could bring immeasurable differences into what we do. I say, then, that no shame attaches to any one of you who wishes at this time to leave this room and not participate in the making of a god.”

The seated acolytes stirred beneath their white robes, but no one accepted his invitation.

The Abbod experienced a small sensation of satisfaction. Thus far, things went within the range of his predictions. He said: “As we know, the danger in making a god is that we succeed. In the science of Psi, a success on the order of magnitude which we project in this room carries profound reflexive peril. We do, in fact, make a god. Having made a god, we achieve something paradoxically no longer our creation. We could well become the creation of that which we create.”

The Abbod nodded to himself, reflecting on the god creations in humankind’s history: wild, purposeful, primitive, sophisticated… but all unpredictable. No matter how made, the god went his own way. God whims were not to be taken lightly.

“The god comes anew each time out of chaos,” the Abbod said. “We do not control this; we only know how to make a god.”

He felt the dry electricity of fear building in his mouth, recognized the necessary tension growing around him. The god must come partly out of fear, but not alone from fear.

“We must stand in awe of our creation,” he said. “We must be ready to adore, to obey, to plead and supplicate.”

The acolytes knew their cue. “Adore and obey,” they murmured. Awe radiated from them.

Ah, yes, the Abbod thought: infinite possibilities and infinite peril, that is where we now stand. The fabric of our universe is woven into these moments.

He said: “First, we call into being the demishape, the agent of the god we would create.” He lifted his arms, breaking the force flow between the two walls, setting eddies adrift in the room. As he moved, he felt a simultaneity, a time-rift in his universe with the image awareness within him that told of three things happening together. A vision of his own brother, Ag Emolirdo, came into his mind, a long-nosed, birdlike human standing in pale light on faraway Marak, sobbing without cause. This vision flowed into the image of a hand, one finger depressing a button on a small green box. In the same instant, he saw himself standing with arms upraised as a Shriggar, the Chargonian death lizard, stepped from the Psi wall behind him.

The acolytes gasped.

With the exquisite slowness of terror, the Abbod lowered his arms, turned. Yes, it was a true Shriggar—a creature so tall it must crouch in this room. Great scratching talons drooped from its short arms. The narrow head with its hooked beak open to reveal a forked tongue twisted left, then right. Its stalk eyes wriggled and its breath filled the room with swamp odors.

Abruptly, the mouth snapped closed: “Chunk!”

When it reopened, a voice issued from it: deep, disembodied, articulated without synchronization of Shriggar tongue and lips. It said: “The god you make may die aborning. Such things take their own time and their own way. I stand watchful and ready. There will be a game of war, a city of glass where creatures of high potential make their lives. There will be a time for politics and a time for priests to fear the consequences of their daring. All of this must be to achieve an unknown goal.”

Slowly, the Shriggar began to dissolve—first the head, then the great yellow-scaled body. A puddle of warm brown fluid formed where it had stood, oozed across the room, around the Abbod’s feet, around the seated acolytes.

None of them dared move. They knew better than to introduce a random force of their own into this place before the flickering Psi currents subsided.