Selma did not answer this for many long seconds. Her hand clutched at her gown, and she frowned, pacing first a step away, then a step closer. “Is that what you were taught?” She turned to study me more closely. “Well, time has passed. It’s only to be expected that the story would change.”
I did not want to hear such words. One by one my ideas of the world had shattered, beginning that night I watched Kaphiri make his way up the road to Temple Huacho. I felt unbalanced and angry, and I did not try to hide it. “She is the wounded goddess. She was nearly destroyed when she warred with the dark god.”
Selma nodded, and there was a great sadness in her eyes. “That much is true.”
True? How could anyone ever know what was true? But my curiosity won out. Selma was ancient. She spoke as one who had lived in the beginning of the world, and I wanted to know what she knew. “Please tell me the story, as you learned it.”
“I did not learn it. I lived it. But I will tell you.”
For several seconds she was silent, gathering her thoughts. Then she began to speak:
“It is not true that the god pursued her from out of the darkness. They came together. Please do not think too highly of them. They were beings of great intellect and great power, but also of great arrogance. They were lovers. But as with any arrogant creature, they were also competitors. They set out to create a project together, a world of their own, where they might play games until the end of time. Would you ever presume to make a world, Jubilee? No? Ah well, neither would I.
“But together the god and the goddess created this world. They spun it out of the mass of a lifeless planet that had the misfortune to form too close to its sun, so that its atmosphere was a thick blanket of poisonous vapor over a surface hot enough to melt soft metals. They tore that failed planet apart, and with its debris they built a new world in the shape of a ring because it was an efficient design, with more surface area than the planet they had destroyed, but still with room in the long core for the machinery of their creation.
“And their new world was beautiful. No one could deny that.
“So they invited people from other worlds to come play in their creation. They even made avatars that they could inhabit when it pleased them. These avatars were ordinary players in all respects, except that one resembled the favored form of the goddess, and one resembled the god, and they would host these deities on rare occasion.”
She was telling me about myself. It was not a truth I wanted to know, but how could I deny it? The goddess had come to me. She had inhabited me. She had used me as her avatar. “Then you—”
(…and me too…)
—were made as a toy?”
“That description is painful… but not unfair.”
“And you were not born of parents?”
“I have said I was made.”
“Then you were a mechanic? You were never human at all? And I… I am the same as you.”
“No, Jubilee, you misunderstand both your own history and the skill of the goddess. I am no mechanic, and neither are you. The goddess would never inhabit a simple mechanic. I am human—though I was made and not born—and if you are the same as me, then you are utterly human too.”
“And Yaphet?”
She looked at me closely. “Is this the name of your lover?”
I nodded, too frightened to speak.
“They made him too. But all the other players they brought from other worlds.”
I wondered how many other worlds there might be, and how a goddess might move between them… but the silver was rising, and there were many things I needed to know.
I told her, “There have been two more players made since the beginning.” I glanced over my shoulder, and Kaphiri was still there. He met my gaze, but he looked confused. I realized then that Selma could not see him, for if she could, she would have surely called out to this avatar of her lover. And he could not see her, or he would be looking at her, and not at me.
Turning back around, I told her of Kaphiri, and of Jolly. She seemed mystified by this news. Then I described how the goddess had come to me, warning that some fragment of the dark god was hidden in the Cenotaph, and that I must find a way to remove him, and heal that wound.
Selma looked stunned, and shaken. “Then the war is not over.”
“I guess not.”
“And the flood is caused by the god after all.”
“It’s what she said. But how is it you didn’t know this? If you were there in the beginning?”
“I do not have the sight of the goddess. It’s been many centuries since she came to me. I thought the war long past.”
“But you must know how I can heal the wound in the world? You must have ideas?”
“He is a god, Jubilee.”
“But surely he is broken? Surely he is less than a god now?”
“She did not tell you what to do?”
“No! She is wounded, and very weak. Players say the silver is her fever dream and only rarely is she conscious.”
Selma did not answer; she did not even move. She stood there frozen, so that I feared the ancient machinery she inhabited had failed. “Don’t go,” I pleaded. “Not yet.”
Her eyes blinked, and they were shining with tears. “Jubilee, you have explained so much to me.”
“Then return the favor please, and tell me, why was there a war?”
She answered with a long, sad sigh. “You and I, Jubilee, and your lover Yaphet, and my lover, all of us are ordinary players. We are not the goddess and we are not the god, and their sins are not our sins. Do you understand this?”
I nodded, though I was too dazed by then for any true understanding.
“Their arrogance betrayed them. They became jealous of one another, and they began to argue over whose world this really was, for the god had made its mechanical structure, but the goddess had given it beauty and life. Their conflict grew violent, and the goddess sought to evict him from the world. In retaliation, he told her he would dissolve the biosphere, so that he might build it over again and prove he could bring beauty to a world as well as she. The players they had cajoled into populating their world were forgotten, no more than discarded toys, their lives of no value in the schemes of our failed deities.”
“So they fought?”
“And both lost.”
“And the world was broken?”
“I thought the world was finished. But looking at you, I know it lived longer than I expected. Do you know the age of the world?”
“Many tens of thousands of years, I think.”
Again she looked stunned. “So long? I recorded this persona on what I thought would be the last night of the world. It was an act of vanity, or of anger. A great flood of silver had consumed the land, a flood that dwarfed all floods before it. I did not think any players would survive that night.”
“The goddess found a way to turn back the flood.”
“By the look in your eyes I will guess this cure was almost as evil as the affliction.”
“She caused almost all the silver to be destroyed, and the players died of hunger and war. Only a few survived it, but of those few some had lovers, and there were babies. Still, it must have been hundreds of years—maybe thousands—before all the players could be reborn, and by then the silver was on the verge of flood again. This cycle has happened many times… at least seven times that we know of… because the wound has never been healed. But how can I make a god—even a wounded god—leave the world?”
“I do not know.”
“But you must know! She lived within you, didn’t she?”
“She did not tell me how to murder her.”
Murder.
Murder again.
“Death is my role,” I whispered.
“What are you saying?”
I was speaking to myself as much as to her. “It’s what Kaphiri told me. Death is my role.”
“Jubilee, do you know how to murder a god?”
I shook my head. But then a new thought came to me, and though it repulsed me, I could not let it go. “Tell me, did the goddess make the kobolds? Do you know?”
“What is a kobold?”
“They are beetlelike mechanics that grow in the ground wherever a plume of nutrients awakens the kobold motes that are everywhere in the world.”
“I have not heard of mechanics like these.”
I nodded. “I am not surprised, for it is said they did not exist at the beginning of the world. They were made later, in a time when the world was on the verge of starving to death… by a player who could survive the silver.”
“Like this Kaphiri you have described?”
“Maybe it was him. But I think it was someone more clever.”
Fiaccomo had defied death in the silver, seducing the goddess and stealing her creative powers to bring the first kobolds into the world. So it was said. Ki-Faun twisted this gift, making a kobold that could erase not just a player, but the very memory of that player from the silver so he never would be born again…
Was the goddess aware that players had stolen this knowledge from her mind? Did she guess what might be done with it?
Death is my role.
My heart was beating hard, and it took some time to understand that the voice calling my name was a real voice, and not the whispering of some ancient version of myself. “Jubilee,” Yaphet crooned, his mouth beside my ear. “Come back to me. Come back, please.”
I shoved the savant away, and I turned to him, crying against his shoulder and whispering, “I’m afraid. I’m afraid.” Over and over again. I did not want to know what I knew, or what I had to do. I did not want anything but to hide in Yaphet’s arms.
We spent the remaining hours of that night together. All those who have lovers will know how it was between us. There is no choice in love. Though we were in the house of Kaphiri, and though my heart was sick with fear, we had comfort between us, and I still treasure those hours above all others in my memory, which has grown very full indeed.