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Excerpt
Assault On The Gods
By
Stephen Goldin
“I hope, for His sake, that God does not
exist—
because if He does, He has an awful lot to
answer for.”
—Philip K. Dick
Chapter One
“Just as a child needs its parents, so does
an immature
society need its gods. Freedom is always hard to bear,
and the weight of self-responsibility can only be carried
after a certain level of sophistication has been attained.”
—Anthropos,
The Godhood of Man
The road, if such it could be called, was a
simple track along which the local equivalent of horses—six-legged
beasts called daryeks—could pull rickety wooden carts. The ruts worn
by wagon wheels were several centimeters deep in water, while the
rest of the road was mud. With no traffic at night, Ardeva Korrell
had the trail entirely to herself. The planet Dascham had no moon
and the overcast sky blocked out the stars, so her universe was a
darkness broken only by the light of the small electric lantern she
carried as she trudged along on foot.
“In the ideal world,” she mused to no one in
particular, “a spaceship captain would not have to serve as her own
shore patrol as well.” And she sighed. Dascham was about as far from
the ideal world as she ever hoped to get. She might as well wish for
a ship of her very own, a competent crew, and the respect due her
rank and experience. They were all equally distant from reality.
The dark clouds overhead threatened rain—not
unexpected, since it rained every night in the inhabited parts of
this planet. A biting wind accompanied the clouds and chilled her
spirit, despite the spacer uniform that insulated all but her head.
“I hope Dunnis and Zhurat are drunk,” she said.
“It will give me such pleasure tomorrow to yell into their hung-over
ears and give them penalty duty.” The thought warmed her for a
moment then died as her religious training came to the fore.
“‘Vengeance eases frustrations only in the insecure mind,’” she
quoted. “‘Sanity does not require the evening of natural
imbalances.’ I know, I know. But I sometimes think life would be a
lot more fun if I were a little less sane.”
She thought of her warm, if cramped, cabin back
aboard Foxfire, and about the books waiting for her there.
This slogging through mud towards a shantytown to retrieve two
drunken crewmen was not her idea of a pleasant way to spend a cold,
damp night on an alien world. But it was necessary. She’d told them
she wanted them back in four hours; when six had gone by without
their return, she knew she’d have to take disciplinary action. Being
a female captain put her in a precarious enough position without
letting the crew take advantage of her.
At least she wouldn’t have to walk back. The
Daschamese had generously provided the ship with a small cart for
transportation to and from the village, but the two errant
crewmembers had taken it with them into town. The only other
transportation short of Shanks’ mare was Foxfire’s lifeboat,
wasteful for a two-kilometer jaunt.
So she walked, with mud sucking at her boots as
she lifted each foot, thinking alternately about her bed and books
aboard ship and about what she could do to Dunnis and Zhurat if she
were a less-sane, vengeance-seeking person.
* * * *
She came upon the town suddenly. One moment the
glow of the lantern showed nothing around her but open fields and,
in the next, crude hovels that served the Daschamese as houses
surrounded her. The ground underfoot, no better for being within the
village, had been churned up from the volume of traffic that crossed
over it daily.
To Dev, the settlement looked haphazard,
squalid, and depressingly medieval—in short, identical to the three
others she’d seen since Foxfire arrived on Dascham a week
ago. Huts, rather than houses had been built out of a reedy material
resembling bamboo; large chinks in the walls were filled in with
mud—hardly the warmest possible arrangement. Little wonder, then,
that the Daschamese wore heavy, coarse clothing. Something had to be
done to keep pneumonia from wiping out the race. The roofs, thatched
with what appeared to be twigs, probably only kept out
ninety
percent of the water. Dev wondered whether the
Daschamese would die if moved to a temperate climate; even their
broad, flat feet seemed adapted to walking in mud.
Dev shook her head. It depressed her to see
intelligent beings living in such physical poverty. Something was
missing from their racial character, a sense of pride and
accomplishment. Probably due to those gods they worshiped; the
religious taboos were so strict they barely allowed the people a
subsistence living. “Gods fit the minds of those who serve them,”
Anthropos had once observed. It made her wonder about the health of
the Daschamese intellect.
The village was dark and preternaturally quiet.
Dev estimated the population at several thousand, yet after dark
there was little indication the region was even inhabited. It was
the gods again, naturally—strict taboos against being outside after
dark, except under cirtain circumstances. To be sure, even the
dismal Daschamese had their nightlife, but it was a pale pleasure
compared to those of human civilization. It was a rule of the
Universe that warm-blooded protoplasmic creatures could be affected
by fermented beverages. It was also a rule that intelligent minds
often sought relief from oppressive realities by indulging in some
form of mind-alteration. The combination of those two rules meant
there would be the equivalent of a bar on any world a human being
could tolerate.
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