Here. Let’s try it. Think of anything but parasites.
Ah, your eyebrows lifted at that, and my, the images in your head…
Parasites. You shift uncomfortably in your seat.
“What if… ?” That’s the genesis of so much of the genre that you read, isn’t it? “What if… ?” The author muses, and erects a plot from there. Here’s one for you. What if a parasite wanted to enter the human mind: a sentient parasite, a very intelligent parasite? What would be an interesting reproductive strategy? Reproduction is just engaging in patterns, after all. DNA is an arrangement of simple genetic codes and yet it encompasses all the wild variety and complexity of life. And words… words are just an arrangement of simple letters. But my, how powerful they are in your head, in all their various wonderful combinations.
Words are a conduit into your mind. Words are embedded so deeply in your thought processes that you can’t even imagine the world without them. If someone—or something—wanted to control you, they would use words, wouldn’t they? Why, with just the right, compelling pattern of words, your mind would open like a raw wound and who knows what could slither in…
So don’t think of elephants, no matter what.
Too late.
You’ve heard of all those stories that change your life, that stay with you forever. It just happened.
For you. Just for you.
You deny it, but even though you take the page in your fingers, ready to turn to the next story, you wonder. You think to yourself that once the page turns you’ll forget all this; that a week, a month, a year from now you won’t even recall having ever read this.
Oh, you’ll remember. At this point, you don’t have a choice. It’s already started, inside. You squint and you deny, but you’ll remember because everything from here on has changed for you. You have the words inside you now, and you won’t like where they take you. When I take you. But you’ll remember.
Won’t you?
ME
by Mike Resnick
IN THE BEGINNING I created the heavens and the Earth.
Well, not really. That’s just folklore. In point of fact I’m a fourth-level apprentice Star Maker, and my assignment was to create a nebula out in the boonies, so to speak. Nothing special; I won’t be qualified for Advanced Creating for eons yet.
So they called it the Milky Way, which struck me as myopic at best, since I made a lot more red and blue stars than milky white ones. And for the longest time this particular race, which calls itself Man, thought it was at the center of all creation. (Actually, the mol-lusks that dwell in the oceans of Phrynx, seven billion light-years away, are at the center of all creation, but let it pass.)
Anyway, this ugly little race soon covered the entire planet, which was not really what I had in mind when I built the place—I’ve always had soft spots for the koala bear and the gnu—and before long these annoying bipeds got notions above and beyond their station and actually declared that they were created in my image. As if I would settle for only two eyes, or teeth that decayed, or an appalling lack of wings.
The nerve of these creatures is amazing. They feel that if they implore me to intervene in their lives, everything will turn out well. They call it praying; me, I call it nagging.
Their science is as twisted as their religion. For the longest time they believed that the dinosaurs died out because they were too dumb and slow to survive. Can you imagine that? The average allosaur or Utahraptor could give Carl Lewis a 60-yard head start and still beat him in a 100-yard race.
And then there was all the excitement over Isaac Newton’s three laws. You think a stegosaur or even a wooly mammoth couldn’t get hit on the head ten or twelve times by falling apples and conclude that apples fall down rather than up? I mean, how the hell bright did Newton have to be, anyway? Every animal I ever created except Man figured out very early on that the intelligent thing to do is to not stand under trees that possess ripe fruits or inconsiderate birds.
But then—you’re never going to believe this—they change their minds and decide that what really killed the dinosaurs was a fluke of chance, a stray comet that crashed into the planet 65 million years ago. Now remember, this is a race that believes in predestination, in reincarnation, in prayer, in ghosts and Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, in all things supernatural. And yet when they finally get proof of a power greater than their own—I threw the asteroid at a Tyrannosaur in the Yucatan in a fit of pique after it ate my favorite slippers—they absolutely refuse to accept it. No, it couldn’t possibly be due to an all-powerful alien being who might or might not answer to the name of God, it had to be a stray comet from the Oort Cloud. Like, who the hell do they think created the Oort Cloud in the first place? I’d have been happy to use a comet, but it just so happened that I was in the system and an asteroid was much handier.
Oh, well, no one ever said intelligence was a survival trait.
You wouldn’t think one race could be so contradictory. They kill the man they call the Prince of Peace, and then they hand out these million-dollar peace prizes in the name of the guy who invented dynamite. When they go to war, they actually believe they’re slaughtering each other in my name, as if with 127 billion worlds to tend I give a damn who wins each little battle they fight.
Still, you have to admire certain aspects of their character.
For example, when I manifested my presence on Grybyon II, every last inhabitant keeled over and died from the sheer thrill of meeting their maker. Yet the last time I set foot on Earth, I was immediately panhandled by three grifters along Fifth Avenue, mugged in a back alley off 49th Street, and given free tickets to Letterman. When I explained that I was a fourth-level Star Maker, the few people who were paying attention immediately wanted to know what the job paid and if medical benefits were included. Finally I decided to lower myself to their comprehension level and announced in front of nine Men that I was God. Five of them called me a liar, two more said they were atheists and therefore I couldn’t exist and I was probably just a manifestation of Buddha, the eighth claimed it was a Republican trick, and the ninth wanted to know what I had against the Chicago White Sox.
There are millennia when I feel like I just want to throw everything back into the primal soup and start all over again. Then I remember that it’s just the one mistake I made, this race of Man, that’s giving me fits, and that the rest of the galaxy’s shaping up really well.
In fact, my Instructor gave me a B-minus, which isn’t bad considering this is only my second galaxy. I really wanted to add a third spiral arm, but for some reason he insisted that galaxies have to be bilateraUy symmetrical.
I’m especially proud of the Brilx Effect, which you can still see from any spot in the galaxy. I got an A for concept, an A-minus for artistic visualization, but he gave me only a D-plus for execution when he found out I wiped out seventy-three races when Brilx went supernova.
He likes the black hole at the center. It gives everything balance, he says, and utilizes a certain felicity of visual expression. I hope he never finds out that I created it because I’d used up all my building materials out on the Rim.
He never quite understood the Greater and Lesser Magellenic Clouds. How could he? He wasn’t around the afternoon I ate all that bad chili. Serves me right for trying temporal food. I’d have dispersed the gas clouds and saved myself millions of years of embarrassment and teasing by the other apprentices, but you know the rules: you create it, you have to incorporate it.