Gods of Green Mountain (48 page)

The roots of the marvel plants reached down deep into the inner-earth, and spread their webby network of absorbing tentacles, bringing moisture to the dry, crusty surface. When the deluges came from the worst blustering storms, the roots caught and held the water, and seeped it out later to the top surface--and now there was dampness to change what had been desert land. At last! The suns shone on the new wetness, and vapor rose to form soft, billowing white clouds, the kind of clouds they had never seen before: a kind of shield between the earth and the relentless sunlights from dual glowing stars.

Years passed before the star-flowers pushed back the bays of Gar and Sol, nibbling upon them, then taking great bites, then huge mouthfuls, until the bays were eventually swallowed up by the spreading green growth. The blue ice of Bay Gar melted ever so slowly, and trickled into the waiting gullies and ravines, filling the underground rivers to overflowing, until they, at long last, came to the surface. The melting ice caps caused the planet to tip bit by bit, until all that melting water emptied into the sunken plains of the bay of Sol. So they had an ocean now. Their first, and their last. It was the king's comment that one ocean was enough, considering the size. "And just think," he said to his first grandson, Star-Far, "that ocean floor was once Bay Sol, and your mother and father traveled across that bay to meet with Gods, and they crawled through a god's grave to get to his home."

The boy's blue eyes grew very large. "Is the God still living there?" he asked, very awed, as he was always awed when the God was mentioned. "Will I see him one day?"

"Certainly," said the king, "he has requested often to see you--since you were conceived in his very home. He knows you have his blue eyes, and your mother's beautiful hair and saffron cream skin, and he was much impressed."

Star-Far was impressed with himself too when he looked in a mirror. Was it true, what everyone said, that he was the most handsome man alive? For he didn't think of himself as a boy anymore, now that he had reached the age of twelve. That was Far-Awn's age when he found the star-flowers growing in Bay Sol. That was a man's age in old El Sod-a-Por, but not much of an age now, he had to sadly admit. Now he was just a boy and forbidden he was to marry until he was twenty. When he looked at his grandfather, he couldn't believe his incredible age--so old--but not nearly as old as Es-Trall!

Far-Awndra was an oceanside city, with sea breezes to stir Sharita's long silver-gilt hair, with waving depths of amber, when she held her second son in her arms. His small head was covered with dark, almost black ringlets, and his violet, almost blue eyes were turning to a dark plum color. "Sharita," Dray-Gon complained, "when are you going to have a son that looks like me? Now we only have one child left to go...and that must be a girl exactly like you! See if you can't plan things a bit better from now on, for if she comes looking like me, I'm going to be really disappointed!"

"Well, his skin is your color," said Sharita in defense of this small dark-haired son that already had her heart, but she understood her husband's desire to have a son exactly like himself. "Let us go to Es-Trall and make him change that law forbidding only three children per married couple--after all, we don't live under city domes now, so we can't overpopulate our planet."

But Es-Trall shook his wizened head. "No!" he flatly stated. "If I relax the law for you two, then others will demand more children, and in no time our planet will be overcrowded. Though I admit I am very sorry, for the two of you produce remarkable children--each different from any species yet."

"Species?" questioned Dray-Gon. "Are we species now, instead of men?"

"Merely a way of speaking," said Es-Trall quickly.

"Look around, and you'll see what I mean. Once all of us had only red hair and purple eyes."

While the new queen and her king rejoiced in the birth of their second son, the retired king and queen wandered on a long journey to look over their changed world, to visit with the God in his lofty green home. And indeed, it was a changed world, incredible to Ras-Far when he looked down at the ground from the airship window.

Out of the star-flowered plants, a variety of other life had developed. New types of bushes and scrubs, trees thick and chunky, and other trees tall and slender, and numerous insects followed, and birds of all colors to feed on them, and soon other types of animals to catch what they could. "Look down there, La Bara--can you believe any of what you see?"

La Bara shook her head, just as amazed as Ras-Far. She didn't talk incessantly now, for her beauty, youth, and vigor were draining away. She was growing old much quicker than her husband...and to think she was but eighteen when he married her, and Ras-Far had been already in his first years of old age, though not in appearance. In appearance he hardly changed from what he had been then. That this was so puzzled her, and saddened him, so that he said to her in a very kind voice, "Perhaps, dear, it is time we went home." La Bara nodded; she had met the God once, that was enough. "I think when we reach home, Ras-Far, I will lay me down to sleep." Tears came in her husband's eyes. "Darling, no! Not yet!--stay awhile longer, please."

But a longing for sleep brings it on, and no more would La Bara annoy her husband with too much talk, and now he could only wish that she were here to do just that.

However, Ras-Far was to see the God in his great green home many times over. When they first began their great explorations and developments, the father of Sharita had gone on every journey that was made to visit and converse with their great and wise God--once only a man, for he kept insisting on saying that, as insistent as they were persistent in not believing. For they would have him what they wanted to believe he was. Once a century Ras-Far traveled that way to pay his respects, for it had been figured out, more or less, the relationship of the God's time, in comparison to theirs.

And indeed, a hundred years was for all of them an endless, long wait for such a momentous occasion. But to their God it was a matter of but days. Ras-Far began to suspect that a delegation of magistrates of high officials of state could be somewhat offensive if they came more often than ten days apart. Then, most regretfully, he ordered the visits spaced even further apart, for something was happening as the years passed, something strange and unexpected. This made the former king smile to himself a bit uneasily. There were times when he just wasn't comfortable when he looked at his own personal calendar and figured out his tremendous age, and as for Es-Trall--who was ever going to believe it?

Ras-Far spoke to his daughter when he returned home. "You and Dray-Gon must go on the next visit, and forget all your official responsibilities. As incredible as this may sound, the God does not look well to me. It seems to me, though speak of it to no one else, that he is not as sharp of wit as he was."

It was true these delegations from the capital city extracted so much from the God that often he felt a bit depleted and drained when the minute questioners departed. He would sit for hours, not moving, restoring himself and wondering about the changes that time was giving to the "ant"-size men that had first visited him. They were no longer insect-size, but growing steadily larger.

And surely, when he looked out of his round window, it seemed to the God that the red rocks mounding the grave of his countryman, the ones they called their "Scarlet Mountains," were not as lowly as once they had been. Even his intelligent small worshippers had casually mentioned his "Green Mountain" home was not the tremendous monumental ship it had once seemed to be. "Our wise man, Es-Trall, has theorized the quality of life and death and decaying matter is changing and enlarging the size of our small world and peoples much more quickly than he had anticipated."

"Cannot Es-Trall himself come at least once to visit me?" asked the God rather peevishly. "It seems it could be arranged, even if he is so old he might break like a stick. You could transport him carefully."

It was King Dray-Gon he talked to this time, and Dray-Gon laughed. "Lord God, not I, not my wife, not even you can tell Es-Trall what to do with his time. He has every second of his days filled to the brim, and in odd moments of his schedule, he falls asleep. He refuses to take the long sleep, for he is keeper of the records since Sal-Lar died."

The king looked at his wife, who sat very silent and subdued, studying the imaged face of the God in the wall of glass. "Why do you look so sad, lovely Sharita?" asked the God, the question Dray-Gon was too polite to ask.

"I don't know. It is just that sitting here, looking at you, I fear this may be the last time we meet." For it was true; in the sky blue of the God's eyes, so like her first son's, there was a haunted, shadowed look, the same look she had observed in her mother's eyes before they were closed permanently.

"So we have met, and we have looked, and we have talked over many things, but we have never touched, except spiritually. Isn't that enough?" asked the God.

Sharita held tight to Dray-Gon's hand as they headed home, toward Far-Awndra, and thought to herself, no, it wasn't enough. How horrible to be only an image in a wall of glass, beyond the reach of a hand to clasp yours.

The mighty God of indescribable size had the very same thought in mind as he sat alone after the departure of his royal guests. Heavily he sighed, and made his decision. They didn't need him now, though once he knew from the tales of their history that they had needed him desperately. Now he could do them a favor. He knew better than they that all the curses of weather, charred and blackened earth, and dry land that wouldn't produce could be laid on his doorstep. He sat there, quiet, pondering, refusing to lift his hand and push the button that would energize his ship by pulling up strength from the earth beneath the silver legs. A revitalizing strength, which, withheld, depleted his mechanical, calculating brain behind the racing colored lights, so that one by one the lights faded and went dark. Now, without that energy supplied to him, his own life could no longer be sustained.

Now the ship's energizers did not jet-stream air, hot and cold, out in blustering torrents of winds to skim over the poles and harass the minute people, and their cities, and ruin their glowing green fields--which were difficult to ruin now, and that made him faintly smile, a little enviously.

Slowly, bit by bit, he was dying. He so longed and yearned to see the bright, hot light of his own single yellow sun. He fell asleep and dreamed of the silver moon and how it had lit the nights on
his
planet, and he could see again a girl he had strolled with there in his youth. Sometimes, if he could meditate deeply enough, he could almost feel the bite of twangy mountain air in his nose, and smell the briny air of the sea. Ah, that was a dream he would never realize. His world was gone, under the water, and an ocean had sprung up in its place.

Still, El Dorraine had suns and moons, three of them. Often he had watched them flitter briefly by in the gray blackness. Even two tiny suns, and three grape-size moons, would be a little reminiscent of his own larger ones. So, when he felt his time was near, he donned his silver suit, put on his protective helmet and all the other gear that would help him breathe in the thin air outside of his green ship. Then he opened the door, rusty with disuse. He lowered the ladder and most carefully descended to the ground. He didn't want to jar the land and split it open with earthquakes. Though as careful as he was, those living in far away Far-Awndra felt their earth quiver as the winds rose and blew. Sharita was combing her long, long hair, and her hands stilled, and the sentence half-spoken froze on her tongue.

The God was thinking of her as for the second time, in the while he had been a guest on this small planet, he walked on the surface of El Dorraine. Very lightly he treaded a distance from his ship, and with utmost ease, he lowered himself down on the ground, stretching out beside the long pile of red rocks that he had stacked there himself.

When he had himself settled fully, the way he wanted to be, he opened the visor of his helmet. The thin air of El Dorraine entered his lungs and nourished him not. His blue eyes caught the bright gleamings of the twin suns as they hurried by, and he saw the rise of the triple moons, and there were faint, rainbowed sun-risings and sunsets. Over and over again repeating, up then down, the moons spinning about themselves as they made the larger orbit around the planet--and they all came and went so fast, so very fast! He grew weary of watching, and closed his eyes, very tired. The now and then warmth he felt on his skin, then the chills of the quick nights, too short for him to really sleep and fall into dreams of his own world, his own people and then, of his own God.