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nothing left to hope for." Frowning at the creature, he drew Buglet closer.
"Please tell us who you are and what you want."
"Relax." With a bland baby-smile, it nodded at a hard steel bench. "I
suppose you must be bewildered, but really I mean you no harm. Sit there, and
I'll explain myself."
Uneasily, they sat.
"I'm a god a botched god." With a startling show of power, it bounded off
the floor and dropped lightly onto a tabletop before them. "A failed
creation."
The fat pink face grinned wryly.
"Though the Creators were rebuilding their own genes from gener-ation to
generation, they never fully overcame their preman limita-tions. Sometimes
they blundered. When old Huxley Smithwtck set out to make the stargods, his
first attempts went badly wrong. Most of them had to be destroyed often in
haste. I was more fortunate.
"He saved me for study at first, to find what he had done wrong. He soon
discovered that I was too feeble to harm him, and I tried hard to persuade him
that I might be useful, or at least amusing. I think he developed a certain
liking for me. In the end, he kept me with him as a sort of court
jester though I was never good for anything, except sometimes to divert him
from the cares of god-making.
"Certainly old Hux had troubles enough. That was an age of con-fusion,
with the rebel premen trying to destroy the Creators and all the better beings
they had made. He had grown up in hiding. When he escaped to space, carrying
the seed for greater gods, I was left behind. I'm still here.
"My main defect is not the deformity you see." Pipkin raised the mighty
arms and danced a quick pirouette to display the mis-matched, bright-furred,
sexless body. "It's lack of power. My perceptions are reasonably acute."
Facing them again, the creature lifted a thick finger to its squinted
eye, which opened to show only blank whiteness.
"Though I'm half blind to common light, I can see and feel through the
folds of the multiverse far enough considering my size. Yet it took all my
transvolutionary power just to rotate those few cubic me-ters of stone and
bring you inside. The best of my meager abilities has always been required
just to stay concealed and stay alive.
"A dismal life for a god I"
A god, Davey decided; he must be male in his own mind, at least. His
situation, as he put it, seemed bleak enough; yet the green, seeing eye had a
sardonic glint, as if he ridiculed himself.
"For all these centuries I have been shut up here, a hapless specta-tor,
observing the history of the multiverse. The expansion into space after space.
The battles of the mumen against every sort of alien danger. Most
amusing though now and then depressing the follies of the later gods." His
laughter tinkled, a tiny bell. "Watching them, sometimes I feel fortunate."
Muscular gold-furred fingers gripping the table edge, he swung himself to
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sit there, regarding them shrewdly with his seeing eye.
Buglet gulped. "We do thank your Divinity "
"Call me Pipkin," he squeaked. "Just Pip, for short. Old Hux did. I'm no
kin to His Benign Semi-Divinity, Quelf."
"Pipkin, then." She smiled uncertainly. "Can you really help us? Please!"
"No altruist." Curt with impatience, he made a face of pink distaste.
"Can't afford to be. Might have pushed you off the rocks to drown, but I
didn't want Quelf's people swarming over the island, looking for the bodies.
You're still a problem for me."
"We didn't mean to be."
"All an accident." He shrugged, great shoulder muscles rippling beneath
the fur. "Water getting into the lower levels. Out to look for leaks.
Otherwise, might not have found you at all. Had been watching Quelf, of
course half my entertainment." Green eye closed, he raised himself on his
hands, the tiny body swinging quickly back and forth.
Davey looked away and back again, still afraid his gaze might give
offense.
"We we're desperate." He showed his empty hands. "Quelf wants to ship us
off to die on Andoranda V or more likely kill us now for trying to get away "
"I can't hide you here," Pipkin shrilled. "Not for long. Quelf's own dull
underlings would never find us, but now he has brought in Belthar's space
commander. A very able muman clone. I'll have to send you somewhere "
"Before you decide, there's something we must we must ask you." Buglet
hesitated, as if unnerved by Pipkin's strangeness. "You see, I think we're
more than premen."
Pipkin's swinging body froze.
"I think I think we're Eva Smithwick's Fourth Creation. Lately, I've been
getting memories I think she planted in us. If you were here  " She had to get
her breath. "If you were here when she was, perhaps you know what we really
are."
Pipkin's emerald eye blinked and stared again.
"We need to know," Davey begged. "To find ourselves."
"I was already in hiding, even then," Pipkin piped at last. "Eva never
even guessed that I still existed. But of course I was observing her. I saw
her discovering that the gods had been a blunder. Too much power, with too
little love for the older creations. I watched her efforts to create the
ultiman "
"The Multiman?"
"A preman label." The baby-head nodded. "She was trying to design the
ultimate man. A new being with all the power of the gods  perhaps with
more along with greater love for all the lesser folk. With wisdom and justice
enough to rule his share of the multiverse."
Pipkin's laughter jingled.
"Eva was still half preman, really only a preman would have dared what
she did. She tried hard enough. Her problem was that the gods didn't want to
be restrained or replaced by any better being. They didn't give her time."
"Do you think " Pain caught Davey's throat. "Do you think we could really
be ultimen? Buglet, anyhow?"
"If you were, you wouldn't need to ask." Pipkin shrugged. "Or perhaps you
are, if you think you are. As for me, I could only guess."
"What would you guess?"
"I did watch Eva's desperate race to complete her last creation. I
observed several schemes to conceal her new creature from the re-turning gods.
One was to make it latent, hide it in the genes of the premen. Since I've met
you, my guess would be that you do carry the ultiman in your genes."
"Then what can we do?"
"If you want another guess, all I can give you is the obvious." The lone
green eye squinted quizzically at Buglet and back at Davey. "Perhaps your
children will be ultimen if you survive to bear them." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]