Snake Oil - Waiting For The Galactic Bus - Snake Oil - Waiting for the Galactic Bus Part 3
Library

Snake Oil - Waiting for the Galactic Bus Part 3

"Where are you off to now? Haven't you done enough damage?"

"Got to do the same for his group," Barion Sung back. "Can't have him maundering around thinking all alone."

"Fine . . . just fine. "Coyul dissolved to energy out of compassion for the miserable creature that Barion had just kicked upstairs. Whimpering with a new fear all the sharper for having no clear shape, the creature bowed his besieged head in hairy paws and felt vastly sorry for himself.

"All right," Coyul sighed. "You're a self. Suddenly apart where you used to be part of. I'd have left well enough alone."

The same sympathy kept him from leaving the human, who was weeping now, already trying to make sounds for unguessed meanings.

"It's not all bad. There'll be insights now and then. I suppose there's a chance."

The pathetic human went on sniffling. He didn't seem to know where he was anymore.

"Look, it's not my fault, not up to me to help you at all. He shouldn't have done it. So many other life forms more suited to sentience than you'll ever be. Oh, stop whining, will you?"

The weeping human raised his blunt head at the sound of a distinct reluctant sigh. "All right - here: it's the least I can do."

Weeping made him feel thirsty again. As he bent to drink once more, knowing the reflected image for himself, fear transmuted to something lighter, the ugly sound of his sadness to an even more alien emotion. He couldn't help it. The effort strained his throat that barely had the muscles for laughter.

So much for motivations. Barion wanted to win a science prize, Coyul only to go home and write music, but the thing was done. A great deal of bloodshed, art and religion would be perpetrated in both their names, and neither would be understood at all. As they had done to him, the human modified them to a lesser but more flattering truth he could live with.

Dazed, intermittently sobbing and laughing like a squeaky hinge, the creature deserted the water hole and scampered away toward history and other mixed blessings.

4 - Topside/Below Stairs

The relief ship didn't come.

And didn't come.

A great deal of time went by. The Pole tilted, the ice came and went. Barion's creature moved across the land and oceans, the skies, touched the moon and groped beyond. Barion began with a passionate belief, encouraged to vindication with every advance. Coyul took his own conclusions from the dismal weight of evidence.

Humans were dualistic. Consciously forgotten, the primitive eons still lurked in the subconscious, a huge dark forest against the small bright leaf of civilization. With new language they put new names to the gods of light and dark, put them at a distance but could not escape. Called the dark evil but found it always there inside them, a kind of spiritual schizophrenia. Persisted in seeing existence in terms of this struggle between "good" and "evil," producing a great deal of belief, violence and, now and then, actual thought.

"The darkness will wear away," Barion was certain.

"Sure," said the dubious Coyul. "Any millennium now."

And then a new problem cropped up in which dualism was only an aggravating part. Matter could be neither created nor destroyed. The human brain was matter that generated energy.

At a certain point in its evolution, a residue of personally defined energy began to stockpile, wanting somewhere to continue after physical death and, above all, something to do. Even Coyul had no flippant answer for the quandary. The small body of work their kind had done with the ill-regarded species never included sufficient follow-up on side effects. A few inspection reports on this post-existent energy pool (couched in very cautiously conservative terms) filtered in, were misinterpreted, buried and forgotten in the academic catacombs for irrelevant information and the pressure of more immediate problems at home. Barion never realized -

"They don't die, Coyul. They just go on. And they keep asking about one god or another."

"Me, too. I tell them I'm just waiting to go home. Then I tell them where home is and nobody believes me. For all their violence, they have a remarkable capacity for supine adoration. Throw 'em a grand party; that always works."

Worked for some and for a while. Egypt and Sumer passed. Most of them forgot about gods and creeds after a time and got on out of habit with the kind of life they'd known on Earth. Babylonians came, greased and gauded, brought wine and cheese and loved the party. Britons sang, Irish drank and mourned, Chinese discussed aesthetics, Indians chased phantom buffalo, Jews argued. Their combined energy was incredible, but Barion managed after a fashion, directing by indirection.

Then the Christians started to arrive, simple folk for the most part who didn't want much. Nevertheless, the Apostles had definite and aggressive views, the martyrs felt they were owed the Presence of God and grew sharp with Barion, who was, to them, merely a ubiquitous handyman and certainly dressed like one. Unlike Coyul, Barion dressed for function, inventing denim ages before America popularized it.

Very few had the perception to discern Barion's real power. One who did was a young Nazarene named Yeshua who had problems of his own in what people thought he was and expected of him.

"Sometimes," he admitted to Barion, "I wish I'd minded my own business."

"You wish? Have you met Augustine yet?"

"I've avoided him," said the candid Yeshua. "He doesn't like Jews."

"Well, he's after me all the time about seeing God. And you: where and when does he come into the Presence?"

Yeshua gazed out over the grassy riverbank he and Barion had imagined for a few moments of relaxation. There was a directness to his glance and a stillness that the unsure found disturbing, the pompous insolent. "Just tell him you're . . . You, I guess. Something."

"You were an extraordinarily wise man in your time," Barion said, "and even you had to use parables. You think Augustine, that doggedly passionate saint, would accept what I really am: a student from a galaxy on the other side of the universe and likely to be in a lot of trouble when I'm found? He's growing insistent on seeing you, too. What he thinks you are."

"He'd just be disappointed. They all are. A pity, too. I like being with people." Yeshua rested his chin on drawn-up knees. "There's one friend I'd give anything to see ... talk to. He hasn't come here."

"Judas?" Barion guessed. "He's with Coyul."

"Judas could have understood the truth, but he ran from it."

"You two!" The stentorian voice startled them.

Barion winced. "Speak of saints ..."

"I would speak with you." The short, bull-shouldered man in late Roman dress strode along the bank and halted before them, peremptory as a drill sergeant. His wide-set eyes gleamed with strength and the steely light of the Believer reborn from self-defined sin.

Nothing for it; Barion greeted him pleasantly. "Hello, Augustine."

The Bishop of Hippo brushed the courtesy aside. "Give me no more excuses or subterfuge. Tell me where I may find what I have in life suffered, fought, endured enmity and slander for. Where - is - He?"

"Haven't seen him."

"Oh, not again!"

"I've never seen him." Barion shrugged, choosing his words carefully. Augustine was skilled in debate and played dirty. "But in time you'll understand more than you did."

Augustine bridled: a strong, courageous but narrow man. "I need no nondescript porter in outlandish garb to give me understanding. Where, then, is my Lord, Jesus Christ?"

"Visiting a troubled friend," Yeshua volunteered truthfully.

Augustine, that most embattled of the early saints, subjected Yeshua to disdainful scrutiny from the sensitive face to the provincial garb of Galilee. "And here another riddle. I do not understand, among other mysteries sufficient to drive the Faithful to drink or women, why you people are suffered to remain here. You destroy, you question everything and accept nothing. When Christ offered you salvation, you spit on it and nailed Him to a cross."

"That was a bad day," Yeshua agreed with authority. "I was against it myself."

So it went. Time continued to pass. More people arrived, prejudiced as Augustine. Barion was forced to subdivide his nebulous domain into different realities. Pagans were no problem so long as they had sunlight and greenery, nor the Jews so long as they could suffer and argue and Hasidim didn't have to deal with the new Zionists. If you needed to feel Chosen or Elect, there were miles of exclusive high rises set aside for the purpose, and never a wait for vacancies. Only the most radical few made permanent residence there. A lifetime of extremity was one thing, eternity quite another.

With the Protestant Reformation and its spread to America, Barion's problems became truly complex. In their passion for exclusivism and damning others, they gave his establishment so many names that Barion simply affixed a nonsectarian title that stuck.

Newcomers were greeted: "Welcome to Topside."