The Devoured Earth (51 page)

With that feeling came a thought, a certainty, that life was the only material that mattered to the universe. Everything else was detritus, a by-product of life’s creation. He was the eye of the universe turned inward on its many realms, a spark of intelligence that illuminated what might otherwise have been an empty void.

To be the pinnacle of creation was one thing, and a very important thing indeed, but to be
at all
required direction, movement, purpose. It required something to push against. As he swam through the universe, he encountered resistance, and the resistance, once overcome, made him stronger. As his strength grew, so did his hunger and his need to move. He rode an avalanche of needs and urges that led him from realm to realm in search of new worlds, new pastures, new feeding grounds.

To see and to eat were the same thing. Appetite and appreciation were inseparable. The all-seeing eye of the universe was simultaneously the all-devouring mouth, and that was right. That was good. That was the way things worked.

To be one of a kind was just fine, as long as there was plenty to see and eat. And where
will
resisted him in force, he knew his feasting would be finest…

Skender understood it all in a flash. He raised his eyes and gazed on the visage of Yod, which now seemed not aloof and alien at all but resolute and worthy of awe. Who was he to question the motives and morals of a being so far beyond him that to it he was little more than a speck? A morsel to be swallowed and forgotten. Humans didn’t ask wheat if it was bothered by its imminent consumption. Why would Yod? Its perceptions of the universe were so far superior to humanity’s that Skender seemed barely alive in comparison. It saw so much; it
was
so much. And it must continue to be. Would Skender hesitate to take the last piece of fruit from a tree in order to save a starving man’s life?

No, Skender thought. He wouldn’t.

As though tugged by a string, his right hand came up to offer himself to Yod in order that the eye of the universe would never close.

The glast got there first. Stepping in front of Sal and Shilly, who were staring with rapturous adoration at the figure towering over them, the glast took hold of one of Yod’s hands and bit down on it, hard. Yod flinched away, too late, and in a wild, sudden rush, lost its human form. The glast dropped lifeless to the ground with the sound of glass shattering as Yod’s Homunculus body ballooned in an explosion of strange growths. Mawson’s head rolled helplessly away.

The hypnotic suggestion holding Skender in its thrall evaporated in a rush. He blinked, confused. Shilly dropped to the ground, and Sal crouched over her with one hand upraised to ward off the creature expanding at a furious rate above him. Skender could see no sense to the manifold forms it assumed one after another in an insane progression. Parts of it were sinuous, others angular; furred skin replaced feathers, which had previously been scales. All vanished from view as fast as they appeared, reabsorbed and turned into yet another shape and colour. The air was full of a terrible sound, like a thousand butchers working at once.

Something very much like the crown of a tree appeared, then an immense clawed foot, easily ten metres long. Tentacles waved in another quadrant. The expanding thing already blotted out half the sky, yet floated in the air as weightlessly as a balloon. Skender quailed as its shadow fell over him, fearing what would happen if it became heavy again.

A long coiled shape with a spiky head caught his eye as it wiggled into being then was gone again. He recognised that instantly: the water-snake that had killed Kemp. From that realisation, the truth emerged and combined with his thought about balloons.

Skender picked up a knife left lying on the battlefield and ran with its point upraised towards the base of the thing. Sal and Shilly were barely visible beneath the Homunculus’s expanding boundary. As Skender grew closer, he saw the constant transformations occurring on small scale as well as large. Every square centimetre of the unnatural skin shifted through all possible textures. A knothole that looked disturbingly like a mouth unfolded into a dense flower of butterfly wings, which in turn became a single crystalline eye, blinking myopically at him. He wondered how far the transformations went, and if by looking closely enough, he would see pores opening and closing like tiny mouths.

When he was within arm’s reach of the ballooning mass, he reached up with his blade and cut into it.

It didn’t explode or suck him into its empty depths. A rustling sound spread out from where his knife had slashed the skin. It sounded to Skender as though a flock of birds was alighting around him, brushing him with their wings. The furious expansion ceased and the rustling sound grew louder. Within a single heartbeat it was deafening. Skender backed away with his hands over his ears, abandoning the knife in the process. The surface of the thing undulated like the sea, rising and falling at the whim of forces he didn’t have a hope of understanding. The rip widened, exposing nothing within but darkness. There was no blood.

It began to shrink. Still the transformations continued, but with less urgency, than before. Common themes came and went: whole patches of striped fur that lasted a full second; a field of regularly spaced teeth; three perfectly formed sets of mandibles that looked big enough to bite Skender’s head in two, but which did nothing more threatening than clatter in imperfect synchrony.

What is it
? Sal asked through the Change when Skender bent down to help him and Shilly to their feet.

The glast
! he shouted back. There was no time to explain properly, although Sal should have guessed by now. He had told Skender about his conversation with the glast in the Ice Eaters’ secret chamber. The glast had bitten the Homunculus in order to kill Yod and take over that body, just as the snake-glast had taken over Kemp. But the Homunculus was no ordinary body. It gave the mind within a home representative of that mind’s self-image. What image would a glast have of itself, given that it had inhabited thousands of creatures in its long lifespan? And what would happen if it tried to assume all those images at once?

Skender didn’t know what might have happened had that chain reaction been allowed to continue unchecked. Each one had been literally no more than skin-deep, but even so the Homunculus might not have been able to expand quickly enough to keep pace. Perhaps it would have popped of its own accord, or else grown so thin all over that it would have evaporated into nothing.

The rustling sound began to ebb. The shadow retreated. Skender looked back over his shoulder and found that the glast was already half its former bloated size. He stopped, and so did Sal and Shilly. They stared in awe as the Homunculus shrank down to the height of Yod before the glast had killed it; then it shrank even further.

A human shape resolved out of the chaos. Skender recognised the features immediately. It was Kemp. Not the glassy white-on-black being that the glast had turned him into, but Kemp exactly as he had been before his death: white-skinned, tattooed, and as naked as the day he had been born. Even before the transformation finished, the imitation Kemp looked around and flexed its hands, arms and shoulders as though testing their strength. Its eyes were the only aspect that looked different: they were as black as the Void Beneath.

One last wave of non-human textures rippled across the glast’s new body, then the process ceased. The calm left in its wake was broken only by the sound of Panic combat blimps coming in to land. The glast knelt down on one knee before Sal, Shilly and Skender and lowered its head.

‘Thank you,’ it said in a voice that matched Kemp’s perfectly in terms of timbre and pitch but was utterly unlike Kemp’s in qualities more difficult to measure.

‘What for?’ asked Skender.

‘We should be thanking you,’ said Shilly, shakily. ‘You killed Yod.’

‘Is it dead?’ asked Sal with a frown. ‘You told me that everything you’ve ever killed was still inside you. Is that the case now too?’

The glast stood, unconscious or unashamed of its nakedness. The cold didn’t seem to bother it either.

‘I thank you because you have released me from my curse. I kill to live, yes, and have grown rich in experience for it. But each body was imperfect in its own way; each was insufficient to my long-term needs. This body, however, can be all the things I have ever known.’ In a series of startling transformations, the glast became a giant eagle, a horse, a monstrous crabbier, and a translucent blob Skender could not identify. Then it was Kemp again, exactly as it had been a moment earlier. ‘I can communicate with you. I can walk among you as one of you. I am truly of the world, now.’ It bent down and picked up the head of the man’kin, Mawson. ‘Can you see my future, man’kin? Do you know my new fate?’

‘
The future remains clouded
,’ replied Mawson with no sign of rancour at the way he was being treated.
I
am still disconnected
.’

The glast nodded in understanding, not satisfaction, and to Sal it said, ‘Yes. The one you called Yod is inside me now. But you need have no fear of it, or of me. It is dead, and I have no interest in conquest. My appetites are very different.’

‘What
do
you want?’ asked Shilly.

‘I fear,’ said the glast, ‘that you would not understand.’

‘Try us,’ said Skender as the survivors gathered around them to see what manner of creature the glast had become.

* * * *

The alien regarded the crowd with curious eyes. The conflict was over. It had survived. It had, in fact, snatched total victory from its rival, assuming not only effective control over the territory in dispute but also everything its rival had held dear: its memories, its personality, its
self
. Had the creature the humans and their allies called Yod suspected that its defeat would be so complete? The alien believed so. Yod had been more than just cautious. It had been
frightened
. The alien saw it in its mind, in the memories it had absorbed from the fallen creature. In all the world-lines Yod had infected, there had been just this
one
visited by another alien, another creature unique in all the universe, whose power exceeded Yod’s.

And in the end, Yod had had no defences. It had capitulated just as surely as everything else consumed by the alien — which refused to feel shame or regret for its actions. It had, after all, only taken one life. When members of a species numbered thousands or millions, that was no great loss. When a species consisted of just one, extinction was inevitable, but Yod was guilty of genocide on uncounted worlds. Looked at from a particular perspective, its fate might even appear to be just.

The alien had no desire to mete out justice. Its motivations were purely selfish. Yod had threatened the world it had found, the world that it would make its home. It didn’t want to be protector or ruler or god, but it would take action when its contentment was threatened.

It reached into the life of the one called
Kemp
and found words that went some way towards explaining how it felt.

‘I want to explore,’ it told the beings waiting patiently for an explanation. ‘To experience. While this body lasts, I can roam as I will, in whatever form I choose, without taking a single life. Until now I have been a parasite, feeding off this world in a way different only in scale to that which Yod planned. Now, I can be a symbiont. We hold the potential for each other’s mutual destruction as an unspoken truth, and we will proceed to live unfettered.’

A light blossomed at the base of the scar in the crater wall. The alien directed its attention to the source of the light, and found the singularity called the Flame exposed for all to see. The arcane walls that had previously protected it melted away now the threat of Yod was eradicated.

The being the humans called Goddess stood before it, radiant in the glow of the entrance to the Third Realm. A young male human with no hair blinked and sat up beside her, as though waking from a deep sleep. Another human, a female inhabited by a parasite — clearly visible to the alien’s senses as a swirling, many-tentacled mass clumping in knots around the young woman’s braincase — backed nervously away. One of the three young humans standing before the alien hurried uphill to check the condition of his mate, who remained unconscious on the floor of the Tomb.

Two ghosts flickered like mirages in the grey daylight, barely visible even to the Homunculus’s superior eyesight.

The alien looked down at Mawson; it had rescued the man’kin’s head from the wreck of the balloon in order that it could act as a barometer of the world’s connection to the Third Realm. ‘Is your vision clearing now?’ it asked the head. ‘Are you coming unstuck?’

‘
I perceive… potential
,’ was the reply.

Better than nothing, the alien decided. Turning back to the two remaining humans standing directly before it, the alien told them, ‘You stand at the dawn of a new age in this world’s long history. The seed of a revitalised world-tree has been planted. All it requires is the impetus to grow — the
permission
, if you will, and the direction. In times past, such was granted by those you would have called gods. Here and now, the moment is entirely in your possession. You are your own gods.’