The Shadow of the God

• The Lifecycle of Suns Ch. 1 of 6: Unfinished
• The Lifecycle of Suns Ch. 2 of 6: Exodus

I was walking to the dumpster when the ground shuddered. For minutes, it seemed the earth was poised to split. I froze more than I had in my life to that point, unable to find the instinct to do more.

Trees fell around me, but nothing touched me.

The shaking receded.

Was this an earthquake? Growing up in New York, far from active fault lines, the idea seemed novel, exciting, now that it was over.

Would there be aftershocks? They couldn't be as bad, and I had survived enough. In brief retrospect, it was little more than a vigorous rattling.

I pulled out my phone to brag. The screen would not turn on. I tapped it as though that would convince the battery to release enough electricity for my use. I threw the bag into the dumpster -- there was no use leaving the chore half done -- and stalked back into the house to plug my phone in before work.

The lights were out. The microwave, set for two minutes to warm my oatmeal, was likewise inert, but the bowl was hot enough to be as palatable as oatmeal ever is. The day had dawned. I would read by the sunlight until I had to leave.

I couldn't focus on the print. I put aside my glutinous breakfast and sought to investigate a buzzing, almost below perception. Was there a short in the wiring? That would explain my lack of power. My nerves felt raw, more so because I couldn't figure out the buzzing. I'd had an electrician here a year ago. He certified everything was fine, but I would have to shell out for a better one. I could only hope there would be no fires in the meantime.

Out the window, I noticed my neighbor's lights were off. A few people -- ones I recognized from walking to work on a sunny day, but not in their bedclothes -- stood on the sidewalk, looking toward the south. I shouted to see if they knew what was going on, if the earthquake blew a transformer. They didn't look at me or try to answer.

I dumped the remains of the oatmeal in the garbage, christening the new can liner.

I heard an explosion. It might be another transformer, spurred to its destruction by the earthquake. It was far, though, and I couldn't consider it my problem.

I decided the day was too cold to walk. I didn't have the time anyway and opted to drive the mile.

In my car, the engine wouldn't turn. Had I left my lights on?

I knew then it would do me no good to ask my neighbors for a jump. Their batteries would be as flat. I lost my pretense that this was as simple as a blown transformer or a short in the wall.

I switched into my running shoes, stowing my Oxfords in my bag. I didn't have time to change out of my slacks and blue cotton shirt. To keep the chill off, I threw a hoodie over that since I would look a sight running in a blazer.

The school where I taught was dark, as was every other building I passed. No one nodded to me on the street, as they usually did. They all milled about and looked down the road. I had no time for that.

The school had a generator. The look on the principal's face told me that they had tried all they could. The generator was as useless as our cars.

There could be no school that day. None of the buses would run. It was a safety hazard to have a high school full of students in a dark building. We would have an explosion of teen births nine months after that mistake.

I asked if she would like me to stay to warn the students walking to school. She waved her hand toward the street and said it would not be a problem, that everyone was too occupied with that. I followed the angle of her finger miles.

I saw a curl of smoke far off - far enough that the thing that made it must have been massive - and nod in consolation. The fire department sirens would shriek soon, if they could.

The principal shook her head to point higher.

The saying goes that you must see it to believe it. I needed to believe it to see it. Why would I look to the horizon seeking a new mountain there? Why turn my eyes to its implacable, sexless face caressed by passing clouds?

The principal told me that I ought to join her in riding away from this being. There might be power again a town away or vehicles to take us farther from whatever that was. She found the bolt cutters used to sever unauthorized locks and broke the chain of two bicycles in the racks. She mounted one and nodded to the other. I could barely hear her then, a different sound flooding my ears, and I wished her luck in escaping.

I wanted to get on that bicycle. I watched the future recede where I did that, the right thing, the sensible thing. I could see myself biking north, leafless trees, stalled cars, other refugees. I could not envision coming to another town. That would not happen. Were there still other towns? How could there be?

The buzzing from my apartment was louder now, a mosquito family nested in my ears.

If this creature were a tenth the size, I would have fled. Hundreds of feet instead of thousands, it would have been an incomprehensible monster. The human body has evolved to be as far away as possible from something so sedately predatory. As immense as it was, radical curiosity overwhelmed whatever sensible instinct I had. If it wanted me dead, riding a bicycle even to the point of exhaustion would not have sufficed to evade it. It could have bridged the distance in a few steps.

I followed a woman - black, natural hair, but I couldn't see her face - until she reached Route 9.

Most people walked away from it. Their panicked eyes said they would rather have been running. That wasn't feasible, not when you didn't know how long it would take. I walked toward. Others were doing this, but we would not meet each other's eyes. This suicidal fascination was the greatest shame we ever knew.

Normally, this is an easy walk, a gentle grade past trees and churches. If my car worked, I could be there in minutes. Now, with so many people taking to the roads to flee the god, the journey was a slog. If for the clout of a bigger group, some other pilgrims joined together. We did not look at one another, but this common purpose united us.

Car stalled on the edges of the road, ignored as much as rocks in a stream, the crowd flowing around them. None of us ever touched them, so irrelevant were they.

Some yards away, a boy clutched a satchel. I knew without studying further that this contained a laptop. For a long moment, though, I realized I did not know what a computer was.

I looked to the few buildings on this section of the road, homes and churches vacant. If I went inside, I could no longer see the creature. I would not have to walk from it, but I might be able to quit myself of this march.

No. I would know. This was childish logic, that sticking one's head under the blanket fools the monsters. The church could no longer afford sanctuary.

People looked down at their depleted phones in subdued panic.

We wayfarers barely spoke, but I heard more clearly a buzzing somewhere among them. Like a kazoo, tuneless and juvenile and incessant. An insult to the solemnity. If I could find whoever made this sound, I was confident I could kill them without losing much time on my journey. A prank should not taint this occasion.

It loomed over the horizon. It was as I imagined Everest, a focal point of all vision, sacred and lethal. We are not meant to reach its heights. Those who did ended up lost to the mountain, dying against something that could not care about its murder. Why should it care about us? What had humanity ever done that we deserved its attention? What arrogance to imagine it had ever wasted a thought on us.

I craned my neck to try to see the creature's head, but clouds obscured it now. Its body was human in appearance, impossibly so. My mind lectured me as I would have my students, when I once had students, a million lifetimes and a mile and a half ago-the square-cube law. The size of insects during the Carboniferous and Permian periods, before our ancestors conquered them and the oxygen grew to levels that stunted them. Yet this was human in form, bilaterally symmetrical, a quadruped. Animalia, Chordata, Mammalia, primates, haplorhini, simiformes, homindae, Hominidae, hominini, homo, sapiens.

To keep the idea I could have other thoughts, my mind clung to this taxonomy, this incantation of how the world was once orderly. I traced back where this god diverged from us, but the characteristics were all there.

...homindae, homininae, hominini, homo, sapiens, animalia, chordata...

...hominini, homo, numine, animalia, chordata, mammalia, primates...

I stared long before someone shoved me with their shoulder. I wanted to see it move, but it only persisted in being. It contradicted anything I had ever known, calling into question that I had ever existed. My world could not continue if I looked a mile into the air at something's chest.

As a man of science, I believed in no god before this one. I trusted I would believe in none after.

If only I could have seen it move, I could have pretended I understood its intentions. It gazed unblinkingly at the crowd, I knew without a clear sight of its face. It was not blind. It saw us, but it didn't react to our swarming. It did not care more than anything had ever not cared about us.

How many people had the god killed the moment it landed, crushing a hundred buildings at once, bursting the ground beneath it. I had friends in Rhinebeck. Should I stop to warn them? But how? The notion was too distant even the second it occurred to me. Perhaps they escaped.

No, I knew in my heart that the god caught them sleeping the way the Second Coming was reputed it would. They never had the opportunity to wake. This might have been their blessing. Who else had ever died this way, for the landing of a god?

There was a god on earth for the first time in history. Awe would not allow us anything but the magnetism.

Why were people fleeing it? Was this a rational act? If the god rose from the ground, it would extinguish us, smaller to it than ants are to us. Were we insects? Had we ever been more?

I heard tinny music over the treading of feet, the quiet murmuring. It was a repudiation of the omnipresent buzz. I have never loved a sound more. Was there a day of my life when I had not heard music? it captivated me, even as my mind fixated on the god. The music pulled me with near palpable force. The music wished to rescue me. I pushed myself toward it. A child fell by my heels as I made my way. I may have caused the child, a creature below the heads of the fleeing adults, to stumble. I turned to see if the child had recovered. They were lost, either carried by the current or crushed underfoot. I wanted to think the crowd had saved the child, that our humanity remained despite the terror of the mountainous god. The god's eyes still betrayed no emotion, no guilt or approval. Yet I could not evade the notion that it knew what I had done.

Before I could consider abandoning my search to be sure the devout had not trampled the child, the music grew too close to avoid.

The music had stopped by that time, but the tinny sound, the static, remained unmistakable. The spell of a sound other than the buzzing had broken.

A man held a blue plastic radio. He ground the handle, and the radio grew louder.

I nodded toward the radio, too ashamed to speak because my sin was plain. I was unclean.

He turned the crank again in answer. There was no native electricity, nothing relying on computers, but there was the power we could make with our hands and the sun. The dynamo. The copper. The magnet. These were a magic, weren't they?

The radio, with a haunted voice, reported no electricity in our area. Other reporters as far as Saskatchewan claimed the same. No one seemed to know the cause that was plain to us, the pilgrims and those who fled. Someone who had seen the god could get far enough that they would tell others what they had seen. The world could know the horrible glory.

I knew that would not happen. Once you had seen this, you belonged to the god, no matter how far you hoped to get.

Still miles away, I did some calculations on an envelope -- a bill that I would never pay. To be visible from that distance and become a new mountain, the god must have been at least half a mile tall. I could tell even at this distance, still three miles off, that it would be a great deal taller. The god embedded its legs deep into the ground. The earth beneath it, so close to the Hudson River, swallowed its immensity. Or the god sat, patiently, beatifically, which frightened me more.

Ahead, a fire raged with the noise of crackling and explosions. Burning chemicals and savory undertones of meat permeated the air. I came to its source, the remains of a commercial airliner that must have lost power when the god came to earth, crashing onto 9G. Around the wreckage, bodies were scattered that had tasted little of the original crash but were too close to avoid the explosions.

Kingston had an airfield, but it was personal planes and would have afforded this metallic thunderbird no place to roost. In Rhinebeck, there was the Aerodrome, nothing but old prop planes. It would do no one any good. No, the pilots had seen the god and made the only decision available under the circumstances.

On an ordinary morning -- something that could never come again -- the world would gawk at this tragedy. What was the point in begrudging the god a tiny sacrifice? Those who had died before drinking in the mortal dread of the god embarrassed me. They could not be saved.

A pilgrim stopped before the wreckage to watch the flames. How could they manage with the god's watchful indifference? She turned when I passed by, shamefaced at the indulgence of her idolatry. She resumed her journey by my side.

Something - her searching arms or the spear of some branch - yanked free my bag. My graded papers, my expensive shoes. It fell from me and was gone. I did not miss it.

My hoodie went next, but what was cold anymore? Let me be naked before the god.

Beyond the fairgrounds, I could see the god for all it was. I expected a god to be mighty perfection. The god was round, collops of impossible fat oozing from its trunk, shading the land beneath so that the disaster beneath could scarce be seen. It sat in a crater miles across, hundreds of feet into the dirt, crushing the ground like eggshells around it, showing only the tops of gray thighs with inhuman muscles. River water surrounded it, a moat, with broken pavement and fallen trees forming bridges. Its hands, fingers like uprooted redwoods, rested atop the thighs. They did not move -- no part of the god moved -- but I felt the threat from them, even a mile away, more than the rest. I saw no gender, no penis or breast more pendulous than its heft would imply. What would sex mean for something of this immensity? One god was too many to exist. A species would destroy the very concept that we had ever evolved to believe our sapience.

...haplorhini, simiformes, sanctus, divinus, deus, numens, sapiens, animalia, chordata, mammalia, primates...

In the shadow of the god, a baby hanged from a tree in a sling fashioned of a flannel shirt. It screamed not in the way of infants but ragged gasps of earthborn terror. Had its parent left it in the tree because of the last second of parental instinct? Or was it because they wished no impediment, no burden in the sight of the god? One of these made more sense to me.

It would wriggle free soon, and then it would plummet to the road and the feet of those who walked it. Any one of us could have helped the baby from its inevitable death and walked away from the god. We were all ripe to be saviors.

I passed the baby.

Behind me was a sound, horrible in my ears, but it did not concern me.

Below the pillow white of the clouds was another, dark and angry. Thousands of crows circled the chest of the god, getting in each other's way, plummeting when the exhaustion of flight proved too much. What primordial drive urged them to allow themselves to die ignobly? What could they have thought they had to gain by this?

When we came so close to see the god in its fullness, we relinquished the notion that we had chosen this. The compulsion of our fear compelled us. We were past the opportunity to abandon our pilgrimage. Was that only what I told myself in the waning hours?

Here, there were only pilgrims. All who could flee had and were worse for it. All those who couldn't flee or worship had died. I smelled the ferrous metal tang of blood and vomit, the evacuated bladders and bowels. This was no longer relevant enough for disgust. This anatomical blasphemy could not offend me. If the god cared to be offended, it would have made that clear. I would not dare to assume the god's desires.

I had never heard a sound as loud and unavoidable as the buzzing now. I wished instead I were deaf. Nothing should come between the god and my worship.

My life, what remained of it within my mind, whatever the god had yet to push out, presented no wonder. I lived little better than the beasts of the field, moving in a prescribed order from the cradle to the grave. I looked to those to either side of me, though the effort was enormous. Was it the same with the other pilgrims? Was this the first moment of their lives they were doing more than living until the moment they didn't? Finally, we had a reason. We did not make this choice, but we were part of something we at last understood. The god chose us to witness.

I did not notice when one of our number broke free because noticing would mean taking my sight again from the still god.

The apostate was a teenager, her red hair flowing behind her as she scrabbled over the rubble to get closer. Each throat in the crowd, each bird in the sky, screamed the same insensate warning prayer.

She -- our prophet, our avatar, our apocalypse -- reached out and rested a tiny hand on the flank of the god.

The god looked down on us. Its intentions were plain. It did not favor us.

Frozen, the god's intentions were secret, and we could worship it. A living god further violated the sanctity of our minds.

The buzzing stopped.

Once the god began to raise its... claw? Hand? Paw? Pseudopod? The thrall that drew us ended at once. Hundreds of erstwhile united in veneration shook free and ran. There was no humanity left to us. We had surrendered that when we walked toward the god. We were now conniving animals trying to find our escape. We stomped over one another. We shoved children into the way of our enemies, and our enemies were anyone who wanted to retard an inch of forward progress.

I imagined the god moving as though underwater, but the first impact was swift as lightning. It was not crushing, not this heavy. Not this fast. Not with the aftershock. Not with the heat that burned my hair and scorched my flesh, what was not organic of my clothing adhering to my body.

Those nearest the god were atomized or boiled by the conversation of the river into steam. Their blessing may have been that they did not have time to feel what had happened.

Then it was quiet. The limb returned to its perch. The god's gaze turned away, toward a hundred miles to the north, indifferent.

Some, who would have broken off their arms to get further from the wrath, returned to their worship without hesitation. The surviving birds, too, swarmed the god's chest.

Burning saved me. The pain of it focused my mind away from what would surely have been my fast-coming death. My injury might kill me without treatment. I favored the agony to numbness, as painless flesh was not unblemished but unnerved. I could die, but I would die as myself and not a vapid martyr. I would not be meat on the jagged altar of this god.

Most pushed closer to the god, but the injured, the marked, moved away. We caught one another's eyes, a commiserative calmness that we were not like those who returned. Those closest to the god when the infidel touched it were reduced to their elements. I was on the edge of the blast radius. Those who thronged now were further away, untouched by the holy fire of the impact.

Our adrenaline would ebb soon, and then our trauma might take us. The acolytes didn't notice or care about us. They could not meet my eyes as I passed, but there was an anonymous kindness in their completely ignoring me. They did not want to be near me any longer, even if they didn't know why. I could walk through them without being touched on my raw, bare flesh.

We, the injured, understood that we could go only far enough to escape the crowd. We would not run past the sight of the god.

The god's followers disgusted me, even distantly aware that I was among them minutes before. Nothing in me wanted to shake them from their delirium because I knew it was impossible. Only the scourging of the burns had cured me of zealotry.

I hated them, but I did not hate the god. Something so far beyond my comprehension was not owed any emotion it could not possess. The god didn't hate me or love me, as maybe gods never do. The god was, and that was all that needed to be said. I would not know where it came from or why it had come.

Past the fairgrounds, the crowds thinned. As if by rehearsal, the injured walked through the fairgrounds' gates and fell to the grass. Only here did I feel how cold the air was on my burns.

Others lay around me, as badly off as I was. Many were so much worse that they no longer looked like living beings but hell-bound souls who had scratched their way back to the earth. Some were better, those who had been further from the blast, but close enough that the god had flensed their fervency clean.

One came to me. If I was within a mile of a god, I saw no harm in calling him an angel. He felt my skin, the part unburned, and watched my breathing. He asked if I felt nauseated (no) or weak (yes). He was naked, too, but his skin was only pink. As he put a bunched jacket under my feet to elevate my legs, I understood his nudity was his altruism.

He told me not to move and that I would be okay. I nodded at the lie. He said he would stay close, and I would call him if things changed.

I closed my eyes. Hours passed in fire.

I opened them again, shaken awake. I felt the extent of my burns. Each blade of grass beneath me was a flaming spear.

My angel came over soon and told me that more had died, but I had not. I turned my head to appraise how many were in the field.

More.

I didn't have to ask the question before my angel answered. The god had slammed his fist three times on the pilgrims. The field would fill with those cursed until we were cleansed by fire or eliminated. Still, we came.

I felt the shaking again. It was not from my angel's hands.

Hundreds of feet away, the god broke free of the earth, and I prayed.

... animalia, chordata, mammalia, daemoniacus, stygialis, sanctus, divinus, deus, numens...