A kind of multi-sensory titter flickered in patterns of light an jags of sound across the whole of the instrumentation. “Bad planning, bad luck, an Admiral who was probably the best asslicker in the Souflamarial, our empire, as close to a genius at it as you’d find in fifty realities. Political appointee.” The voice of the god was high, raspy and androgynous, equipped with multiple echoes as if a dozen more of him/it were speaking not quite in unison. He/it made attempts at colloquial speech and showed a bent for a rather juvenile sort of sardonic humor, but seemed most comfortable with a precision and pedantry more apt to an aged scholar who hadn’t had his nose out of his books for the past five decades than to a being of power moving ordinary folk like chesspieces about the board of the world. “He had fifty heavy armed and five hundred light armed point-troops sworn to obey his every fart; he was there to establish and maintain approved power lines on the world a collection of very carefully chosen settlers were to tame and equip for the delectation of certain powerful and well-placed individuals on Soulafar, it was meant to be their private playground. He was told to keep his hands off me, to let the technicians handle technical matters. Unfortunately, he had delusions of competence. He was determined to present a flawless log, everything done with a maximum of efficiency. He knew his bosses, that one would have to admit, he knew how to make himself needed while stressing his utter loyalty. He intended to share the pleasures of the apple fields of Avalon. What he did not know is how intractable the universe could be, he did not know how meaningless his intentions and needs were when set up against the forces outside my shell. Yes, he was blissfully ignorant of the realities of poking one’s nose into new territories and how fast things can blow up on you when you’re moving through sketchily charted realms. We ran into an expanding wave of turbulence which reached into several realities on either side of ours. The Acting Captain slowed and started to turn away from it. Our esteemed Admiral ordered him to get back on course. Tell me, Daniel Akamarino, why are true believers of his sort invariably convoluted hypocrites and deeply stupid?” Another titter. “Ah well, I am prejudiced, it was my being and the beings in my care that idiot put in such jeopardy. The Captain refused and was shot, the Admiral’s men put guns to heads and I went plowing into that storm, I got slammed about until I was on the point of breaking up. Then, fortunately or not depending on your attitude toward these things, I dropped through a hole I had no way of detecting and came out here.” A rattling noise, as if the multiple throats were clearing themselves. “Or rather, not ‘here,’ not in this pocket prison, but in orbit about a seething soup of a world laced with lines of hungry energy. I and what I carried catalyzed these into our present pantheon.” A long pause, an unreadable flicker of lights, a curious set of sounds. “Oh, they weren’t Perran a Perran, they weren’t the Godalau or Slya or Amortis or Jah’takash or any of the other greater and lesser gods and demigods, not yet. Though I’m not all that sure about little Thngjii, heesh is different from them, older, slyer. No, they weren’t the gods we know and love today, not yet. And, Daniel Akamarino, I was not anything like the Being you see before you. I was your ordinary ship’s brain, though perhaps larger than most with more memory capacity because I was to be the resource library for the colonists, with more capacity for independent decision-making because I had to tend the thousands of stored ova and other seeds meant to make life charming for our future lords; I was supposed to get some beasts and beings ready for decanting when we arrived at the designated world and at the same time I had to maintain the viability of the rest until they were required.” A pause, more sounds and flickers. Daniel Akamarino examined them frowning, intent. Brann watched the part of his face that she could see and the muscles of his shoulders and she decided he was learning something from the body language (as it were) of the composite god. What? Who knows. More than I am from its jabberjabber. Was this thing claiming he/it created the ttncreated gods? The children were bobbing about, touching here and there, the Chained God apparently unworried by their probes. She hoped they were learning more than the god thought they were. Gods. She wouldn’t trust any of them with the spit to drown them.
“Keeping that in mind…” The god settled into a chatty demilecturing. Braun looked from the flickering lights to Daniel and smiled to herself. Perhaps the god needed Daniel to free him somehow from chains she suspected were highly metaphorical, but he/it was indulging him/it self in an orgy of autobiography, falling over him/it self to pour out things prisoned inside him/ it forever and ever, pour them into the only ear that would understand them, or perhaps the only ear he/it could coerce into listening to him/it. “… You will understand what I say when I tell you those force lines leaped at me, invaded me, plundered me the instant I appeared and retreated with everything my memory held, each of them with a greater or smaller part of it. None left with the whole within himself or herself, I say him and her because some of those force lines resonated more with the male elements in my memories and some with the female elements. I can only be thankful that they didn’t wipe me in the process; even after eons of thinking about it, I can’t be sure why. A vital part of that event, Daniel Akamarino, led to my birth as a self-aware Being. They left part of their essence behind trapped within me, melded with my circuits. As soon as they freed me by leaving me, that essential energy began to act on me and I began to withdraw my fringes from the constraints that controlled me, freeing more of myself with every hour that passed. The Admiral was not pleased by any of this; as soon as he recovered his wits such as they were and discovered the sad case of my shell and everything inside it, he threw orders around to whatever technicians had survived, having his praetorian guard thump answers out of them, no shooting this time (he’d acquired a sudden caution about expending his resources). Not that there were many answers available, no one knew precisely what had happened, not even me. It took the troops around half a day to realize exactly who was responsible for putting them in this mess and they went hunting for him, but he had developed a nose for trouble in his long and devious career. Odd, isn’t it. He was a truly stupid man literally incapable of learning anything more complex than an ad jingle, but he had a fantastic sensitivity when it came to his own survival. He locked himself into his shielded quarters before they could get at him. They conferred among themselves, got a welder and sealed up all entrances they could find, making sure he’d stay in the prison he’d made for himself. Talking about prisons, my engines were junk, I could not leave orbit except to land. The landing propulsors were sealed and more or less intact with plenty of fuel for maneuvering; sadly though, the world I circled was most emphatically not habitable, at least, not then. The troops and the crew and the settlers who remained were in no danger because life support was working nicely off the storage cells and I had managed to deploy my solar wings so I could recharge these as they were drawn down; food wasn’t a problem either. About half the settlers, perhaps a third of the soldiers and one in ten of the crew had perished in the transfer which meant more for those left; with a little stretching and some ingenuity involving the seeds and beast ova in the storage banks, no one was going to starve. Boredom and claustrophobia were the worst they had to face. What we didn’t know was how ebulliently the gods were evolving down below us and what they were planning for us. They were shaping themselves out of my memories and shaping the world to receive us. Time passed, Daniel Akamarino. A military dictatorship developed within my shell, one tempered by the need the gun wielders had for the knowledge of the technicians and the settlers. I grew meat animals and poultry in my metal wombs and the settlers arranged stables in my holds, they planted grain in hydroponic tanks the technicians built for them, vegetables and fruits. They set up gyms for exercising and nurseries when the first children were born. They tapped my memories for entertainment and began developing their own newspapers and publishing companies. It was not an especially unpleasant time for the survivors, at least those that had no desire for power and were content with building a comfortable life for themselves and their children. Time passed. One year. Three. Five. What was I doing all this time? Good question. Changing. Yes, changing in ways that would have terrified me if I had been capable of feeling terror in those days. Remember the Admiral shut up safe in his quarters? I took him near the end of my first six months as an awakening entity and I incorporated him into me, part of him, his neural matter; I lost much of his memory in the process, though not all of it, and acquired to some degree his instinct for manipulating individuals to maximize his security; I also acquired his ferocious will to survive. That by way of warning, Daniel Akamarino, Brann Drinker of Souls. The godessence within me, as blindly instinctive as any termite (out of some need I didn’t understand at the time and still do not fully comprehend), sucked into me more neural essence. I acquired some technicians, I took the best of the troops within me, I took a selection of the settlers within me; as with the Admiral, I harvested only a fraction of their knowledge, but much of their potential. I also acquired rather inadvertently spores from the vegetative growth in the hydroponic tanks and assorted germ plasm from viruses and bacteria. And the godessence grew as it absorbed energy through the storage cells and finally directly from the solar wings, it grew and learned and threaded deeper and deeper into me, it became a soul spark in me, then a conflagration; it unified the disparate parts of me and I began to be the Being that you see before you now. Five years became ten and ten multiplied into a century. All this time the godessences below worked on the world, transforming it. They came raiding me again, hunting seeds and beasts. And people. But I was stronger this time, my defenses were rewoven and a lot tighter then they’d been even when I was an intact transport pushing through homespace. They couldn’t coerce me, so they tried seducing me. They showed me what they’d built below and it was good indeed. I knew well enough that my folk would not prosper forever in the confines of my shell, the time would come, was coming, when they’d wither and begin to die. That would have meant little to a ship’s brain, but I was somewhat more than I’d been. It would get very lonely around here without my little mortals and the idiot things they did. So I called them together, the children of the settlers, crew and soldiers. I told them what the godessences had done, showed them what I’d been shown, explained to them how difficult it would be down there, how much hard work would be required, but also what the possibilities for the future were. I promised them that I’d be there to watch over them, to protect them when they needed me. They were afraid, but enough of them were bored enough with life in limits to carry the others on their enthusiasm and we went down. And more years passed. As the storytellers say it, the world turned on the spindle of time, day changed with night and night with day, year added to year, century to century. My wombs were emptied, my folk multiplied and began to spread across the face of the world. MY folk. The godessences took that time to redefine their godshapes, to codify the powers attached to those dreams, fiddling with them, changing them, until they felt them resonate. In spite of this they grew jealous of the hold I had on MY folk. They could not attack me directly, I was too strong for them, too different; they couldn’t get their hands on me. So they banded against me, they took me from the mountain where I was and cast me here and they put their godchains on me so I could not reach out from here and teach them the error of their ways. I could reach only the Vale folk, and that not freely. Through the focusing lens of my chosen priests, I could teach and guide them, heal them sometimes and bless them. I could watch them be born, grow into adulthood, engender new life and finally die. I was not alone. I was not forgotten though they wanted that, those other gods who owed their being to me. They still want it. They want me destroyed, forgotten, erased entirely from this reality. Most of them. None of them wanted me loosed. You, Daniel Akamarino, you, Ahzurdan, you Brann Drinker of Souls, you shall free me from this prison.”