Bug
God’s First Gift To Her People, 3:
Up… up… up…
Bug
God…
Someone said.
*****
The vizier felt the world turning below him, felt the
onward rush of time towards midnight – towards the new day.
*****
Who
is that? Bug God wondered, but she could spare no energy for
asking.
Up… up… up…
*****
“We will do nothing,” Tiger God said.
But he did not take his eyes off the sky.
*****
Bug God faltered, struggled, flapped her tiny wings in
the cold cold dark thin air still so far away from the stars.
Bug
God…
Someone said again.
This time, Bug God answered, sparing the tiniest
amount of her energy from the continued, slow climb up to the stars.
“What?”
Bug God asked
*****
The bugs of the world were growing restless,
concerned. There was no God in the tree,
there was no word from Bug God, the vizier was merely sitting there, and it was
getting on towards midnight. Nobody knew what would happen. Never before had
Bug God left the tree, never before had Bug God’s carapace not simply faded
away into dust on the branch of the throne.
The vizier could feel the sussurance of concern before
he heard it or saw it: the rustling of wings, the clicking of jaws, the
scraping of carapaces, the tapping of lets, all stirred the air and made it
spin and dance and swoop around him, and in those breezes the vizier read the
fear growing in the people.
Bug
God, what have you done? the vizier wondered. But he walked
to the edge of the branch, slowly, taking one small step at a time. He knew
that his motion would be seen by those near him, that it would run the risk of
converting fear into panic: what was needed was reassurance, now, and merely moving would not provide that – but
moving too quickly would be certain
to crest the wave of concern into a full onslaught of rioting, and he did not
want to do that.
Nor did he know what he would say, yet. The flower
from which Bug God had emerged last night was noticeably wilting. Each time
before, each day at midnight, he had been there to see the old Bug God crumble
into dust just as the new one emerged from the flower, her wings damp with
night-dew, her eyes opening onto the world she would rule for the next 24
hours. Never before had the flower changed, other than the shifting of the
pedals as the new Bug God emerged.
The vizier trembled a little.
*****
Tiger God, without taking his own eyes of the sky,
murmured to Bird God: “Where is she now?”
Bird God, too, stared straight up, keen eyes peering
into the vast sky. “She is still climbing up, even more slowly now. I am amazed
that she can still be going. I don’t know how she is doing it.”
Tiger God kept staring up as Monkey God said:
“Something is not right.”
“I feel it too,” Bird God said. “Something wrong.”
Tiger God let their words die out, let the night again
be taken over by the crackles and hisses and taps and shuffles of the billions
of bugs gathered around the tree, bugs worried for their god and their home and
their lives and their world. Tiger God could hear the vizier’s slow steps out
to the end of the branch, so good was his hearing. His fur bristled with the
air’s rapture as the bugs spun it around.
“It is fine,” Tiger God said.
The other two then took their eyes off the sky to look
at him, startled.
“How can you say that?” Monkey God asked.
“Can you not feel what is in the air?” Bird God
demanded.
“Yes,” Tiger God said. “A new day is almost here.”
*****
Bug
God, you have flown higher and farther than any living being ever has before,
the voice told her.
Bug God could hardly keep her wings moving. She felt
each tiny increment of height throughout her rapidly weakening body, felt it
wrack her with the absence of anything around her. The stars! They were still
so far away.
“I cannot reach them,” she said, meaning it as a
question.
You
can,
the voice told her. But not the way you
are going.
*****
The vizier stopped to stroke the pedals of the flower.
Two of them fell off and began to waft down gently below the branch. The
pedals, as flower pedals will, drifted here and there and back again, sometimes
lifting on an air current, sometimes pirouetting in place. The vizier,
horrified at what he had done, stepped back, only two see more pedals flutter
off: three four five ten, the flower was falling apart and then it did fall
apart, seeming almost to explode into a white brilliance, the tiny iridescent
shards ballooning out and then starting to fall down.
The vizier stood still as stone, trying
to decipher this event.
The petals formed a slowly widening, lightly dancing
cloud just below the branch, descending with tiny steps, hesitantly, as though
afraid of where they might land and what might be waiting for them.
*****
Monkey God held himself tightly with his long furry
arms, alternating between watching the flower on the branch suddenly puff up
into a cloud of pedals, watching the sky where he could see nothing but stars
and darkness, and watching Tiger God, who calmly stared up into the sky as
though he had said and felt nothing.
Bird God plucked several feathers from the edge of his
chest in annoyance, lifted his left claw, lifted his right, then settled back
in. He flapped his wings and shook his
head. Having done all that, he finally said: “She has no right.”
“We are gods. We each of us do what we want,” Tiger
God said, softly.
“We should have done something,” Bird God said.
“Perhaps it is not too late,” Monkey God said
hopefully.
“We need to act!” Bird God said. He tried to make it
sound commanding but it came off as a plea. Both Monkey God and Bird God were
aware that they were not actually talking to each other, but to Tiger God.
“She can’t do this,” Monkey God said.
Tiger God looked away from the sky then and at them.
“We are gods,”
he said. “What can’t we do?”
*****
Bug
God it is time to turn away the voice said.
Bug God could not speak; even if she had had the
energy to spare, the air was gone and she could force none of it through her tracheae.
But in her mind she said I will not turn
away from the stars.
The
stars do not lie that way, for you, Bug God.
I can see them Bug God thought desperately. Her wings buzzed in a frantic motion as she
sought any purchase in this emptiness.
You
have gone as far as you needed to, she was told.
Bug God folded her wings.
You
have done what you needed to do, she was told.
Bug God let her legs go limp, stopped clawing for
purchase.
See
what you have wrought, Bug God.
Bug God let herself turn downward at the world, saw in
a billion facets the curve of the earth below her, the oceans spreading out
endlessly to either side, glowing silver with moonlight, saw the dark
continents anchored to the core of the earth by pillars of rock, the trees and
flowers and mountaintops each shimmering here and there with tiny flecks of
light reflected back into the sky.
She saw the tree she had lived on her whole life, saw
the massive gathering of bugs there, saw the vizier cowering, saw the flower
gone, its pedals spreading out in a canopy over her people.
You
have reached the stars, Bug God, she was told.
how, Bug God wondered. how is that true when I am not yet at their level?
You are at their level, the voice said. For you have become one.
The words echoed in her mind as Bug God began to
fall.
*****
“See, there,” Tiger God said.
He was pointing towards the tree, where the first of
the flower petals were starting to land on the bugs below. The immediate reaction
was alarm, and the fear spread through the bugs almost visibly. The flower the flower the flower he flower
the flower he flower the flower he flower the flower he flower the flower he
flower the flower he flower the flower was repeated by a billion tiny
voices as more and more petals landed.
Monkey God and Bird God could not speak: they were
enraged and fearful, far more so than the bugs. Their minds boiled with
thoughts of what could be done even now to stop what was happening. Bug God…
Bug God… she had given up her post and left the world, and once one god falls,
they knew… neither Monkey God nor Bird God wanted to admit they were aware of
what this meant.
“It is a new day,” Tiger God said. He looked up.
*****
The vizier looked down at the ground, saw the bugs
begin to race in circles and rise up in clouds and trample each other. He did
not know what to do. The flower was gone! Bug God was gone! He could not look
at the apocalyptic vision below, did not know what to do, and cast his eyes
upward, the last place he had seen his salvation.
*****
They
will not need you anymore, the voice said, and it was like a
blanket was wrapped around Bug God. She felt warm and safe and secure even as
her body fell faster and faster and faster. She saw with surprise and pleasure
that her legs, her body, her wings were beginning to glow.
You
have reached the stars, Bug God the voice said and
wished her farewell.
*****
“They will not need us anymore,” Tiger God said, and
because he was looking up he saw it before the other two gods, before anyone
except
*****
The vizier’s eyes locked on it at once: A brightly
glowing speck that grew in intensity rapidly even as it began to trace a line
across the sky, a trail of glimmer behind it stretching off into the night sky.
“Look…” the vizier said, and something in his voice
carried enough power to reach the bugs nearest him, who – dazed and distressed
already by the disintegration of the flower and the events of the night –
paused a moment and looked where the vizier was indicating with his antennae.
They stilled and pointed, too, and one by one by one
through a billion bugs, each bug stopped worrying about the flower, about its
neighbors, about its life, and stared up into a night sky speckled with a
thousand different tiny glows, and one bright arc of a golden light stretching from
directly above the tree out across the immensity above them.
As the bugs watched, the line grew and grew and grew,
and they slowly understood what was happening, knew that Bug God was up there,
was the one making the glow, was slowly burning away and leaving herself behind
in this thrilling flare.
The trail, they realized, was coming almost directly
at the tree, making its way more directly tan it seemed – the shimmer seeming to
be a curve only because of its height and the immense length of it, and the
bugs were frozen in that moment, every eye watching Bug God’s final flight,
watching as the last of the Bug Gods slowly pierced the night sky, glowing with
the intensity of a new star even as she faded from the world.
The bugs felt, as their god scintillated from the
heavens, a sense of freedom blow over them. The flower petals were stirred up
and drifted away. Had someone asked them – but who would, ever? – each bug
would have said that it felt suddenly like it was the master of its own fate,
that it was able to determine what course it might take. Around the world,
every other living thing felt a slight stirring of this same feeling: that
perhaps it was their own destiny to
make for themselves, and they could decide how their lives would unfold, rather
than having each moment dictated to them by some unfathomable force. The bugs
stared up at the sky and saw their god giving herself back to them and everything
else in the world began to ask their own god to give itself up to them, too –
to let them be the gods of their own selves.
The trace burnt so brightly over the world!
And then it was over. The coruscating line stopped
growing longer. After a moment, then, it began to fade, little by little, until
it was gone.
Only the stars remained, as they had been before: beautiful, cold,
and somehow both impossibly far away, and closer than you could imagine.
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