Moke felt torn between his loyalty to Calhoun and the desperate urgency in McHenry’s face. Finally, deciding to err on the side of caution, Moke nodded once and mimicked the “shushing” gesture McHenry was giving him. McHenry let go a visible sigh of relief, which didn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense to Moke. If McHenry was some sort of disembodied ghost, what did he need to be breathing for? But there was certainly no way he could pose such a question to the officer, and even if he did, he wouldn’t hear the answer.
And then Moke saw something he really didn’t understand in the least. As McHenry slipped through the bulkhead once more, a pair of darkly feathered birds flapped in through one side of the far wall and passed through the same bulkhead that McHenry had gone through. Quiet as shadows, as empty of substance as smoke, they were there and then they were gone, and so was McHenry.
Moke looked down at Xyon. “Just when you think things can’t get any stranger around here.”
At which point Xyon suddenly flashed perfectly formed, sharp little teeth, took two quick steps, and vaulted upon Moke like an attacking panther.
ii.
Mark McHenry stood just outside sickbay, staring in wonderment at himself, still trying to process how people could possibly be walking through him without even knowing he was there.
“I don’t believe this.”
“It gets worse. Much worse,” came a grim voice from near him.
He turned and found himself staring at the strangest individual he’d ever encountered. He seemed to defy the very concept of life, instead shrouding himself in darkness. He wore a cape with the hood pulled up, and sported a dark red beard with streaks of white and gray. Most strikingly, he had only his right eye. Where the left would have been was just darkness. A man, definitely a man, shrouded in darkness, with a single streak of what appeared to be blood in the right corner.
“Who are you?” demanded McHenry.
“Don’t you mean, What am I?” He spoke in a voice rich with amusement. Except McHenry was absolutely in no shape to be amused.
“I think I know the question I wanted to ask,” McHenry retorted.
“I don’t believe you do, actually,” said the old man, and his voice seemed vaguely patronizing, but also—strangely enough—comforting in a way. As if McHenry was talking to someone who really, truly comprehended all that was going on…and that would be a nice change of pace. All too often, McHenry couldn’t shake the feeling that he was perpetually one step ahead of everything going on. “The ‘who’ of me is of so little importance,” the old man continued. “Of far greater concern to you—or, at least, it should be—is what sort of creature am I, where are we, and how do we get out?”
McHenry tried to come up with some snappy response, but none really suggested itself. His shoulders sagged in defeat as he said, “All right, fine. Any of those questions, then.”
“That would be acceptable. However, I think it would be best if we conducted our discussions in private.”
“Private?” said McHenry, stunned. “How much more private does it have to be? No one can freakin’ see us!”
“He can,” said the old man, indicating someone standing nearby. McHenry looked to see where he was pointing, and was surprised—but somehow not too surprised—to see a wide-eyed Moke standing and staring straight at him.
“How?” demanded McHenry. “How is he able to perceive us?”
“I told you your initial questions were worthless. Already you ask more interesting things. And you shall learn the truth of them…but not here. Come.”
And without another word, the strange man walked straight through the nearest bulkhead.
McHenry did not hesitate to follow him, and found himself passing through an unoccupied quarters. The one-eyed man was just ahead of him, and McHenry said—to himself more than anything—“At least Moke will be able to tell them I’m all right. Not that I’m sure I am all right…”
Immediately the old man turned to face him, and it seemed as if thunderheads were drawing in around him. The room appeared to darken, and even though McHenry was insubstantial, he still felt a sudden drop in temperature. There was a distant rumbling, and the old man said, “It’s too soon. Far too soon. Everyone is not in their ideal position yet. If he speaks of his prematurely, it could have dire consequences.”
McHenry had no reason to believe the man, and yet he instantly did. With but a thought, he slid his way back through the wall and saw that Moke was still standing there. “Don’t tell anyone you’ve seen me, Moke,” he said, and made a great show of giving the universal sign for keeping a secret.
Moke seemed not to comprehend, however, and McHenry repeated the gesture, this time with an even greater show of force. He only wished he could do more in terms of communication than this frustrating pantomime.
But then Moke nodded and clearly appeared to understand what it was that McHenry was trying to put across to him. McHenry grinned, nodded approvingly, said, “Thanks! Hope to see you later!,” and moved back through the bulkhead into the empty quarters.
As he did so, he heard a high-pitched “cawing” almost directly in his ear, and reflexively flinched as what appeared to be two powerfully built black birds—ravens, if he wasn’t mistaken—hurtled directly past him and landed on the shoulders of the old man. Insanely (as if this entire thing wasn’t insane already) they seemed to be whispering in his ear, their beaks clacking together as they “spoke.”
“I see,” said the old man, and “Good.”
“They talk?” asked a stunned McHenry.
The old man allowed a vaguely patronizing smile. “Yes. Just not to you. All right, my pets, well done. Go to, go to.” Obediently, the ravens lifted off his shoulders and flapped away, back out through the wall.
“You said you were going to tell me what’s happening. So fine. How am I walking through walls? Why can no one see you and me.”
Still smiling, the old man appeared to sit. There was no chair under him, but he adopted a distinctively reclining posture nevertheless. “You’ve been imprisoned,” he said, “trapped, as it were, in a sort of…how best to put this? A sideways dimension. Some manner of psychic energy surge catapulted you here, would be the best way to describe it. There are other ways, but they’re far more technical and, frankly, quite boring.”
“All right…that explains why I’m here. Actually, it doesn’t,” he realized, “but it’s probably as close as I’m going to get. But what about you? Why are you in this ‘sideways’ dimension?”
“Ah. I was incarcerated here by my fellow entities…the race whom I believe you know as ‘the Beings.’ ”
“You’re one of them?”
“Not just one. The greatest of them!” he said with a grim smile that indicated massively wounded pride over having been cooped up in this semi-existence. “No one of them could possibly have overcome me and put me here. It took their combined efforts. It was quite a surprise, really. I’d never seen so many of them agree on something before. On the one hand, I should be angry over it. On the other…it’s quite flattering, in a perverse sort of way.”
“You’re flattered that you’re imprisoned?”
“Well, I did say perversely.” The old man chuckled.
“We are a perverse lot, we gods…or Beings, or whatever we’re calling ourselves now. Sex with siblings, sex with mortals, sniping and plotting against each other. And yet, despite all that, we were worshipped. Indeed, our sins were exalted, made the stuff of legend. I’ve always thought humans did so in order to make themselves feel better about their own shortcomings. They reasoned that if we, in our divinity, could be base in our actions, then that excused any sins they might commit. How could they reasonably expect more of themselves than they expected of us?”
“All right,” McHenry said slowly. “That makes sense…even if none of the rest of this does. But that still doesn’t explain—”
“I was the last, you see,” the old man continued, as if McHenry hadn’t spoken.
 
; “The last?”
“The last god to leave the Earth.” His voice seemed to carry the sadness of the ages in it. “I had different priorities, you see. To the rest of my kind…it was all about them. It was all about having the humans of your world worshipping us. They felt that humans were there for us. Only I believed that we were to be there for them. The only one who was anywhere close to my view on the subjects was poor, tragic Apollo…and even he had an ego that superseded his wisdom.
“Eventually, humans had less and less need for us. They turned their interests elsewhere. To gods who were more…unknowable. Or gods who, if abominations were committed in their name, would not be inclined to come down to earth and destroy the perpetrator with bolts of lightning. Besides, I’ve always thought,” he said in amusement, “that they came to know us too well. You cannot worship that which you know; it’s antithetical. Familiarity breeds contempt, not adoration. Instead of being gods, we were more…celebrities. And humans must always tear down their celebrities. It’s just the nature of the species.”
“And…you were the last one to leave?”
“Yes,” the old man sighed. “Curiosity kept me, I suppose. That, and a desire to be a source of inspiration for humans rather than an object of reverence.” He looked to McHenry and amusement twinkled in his eye. “You still need to know who I am, don’t you. You humans—even half-humans, such as yourself. You still need to apply names to everything so you can comprehend it.”
He sagged heavily into a chair. How he could possibly do that, McHenry didn’t know. For that matter, McHenry had no clue why he wasn’t sinking through the floor if he was supposed to be without bodily form.
“I have a variety of names,” he said at last. “Some called me Zeus. Others, Jupiter. The Norse called me Woden. They named days after me, planets after me. Very flattering, actually. The Egyptians dubbed me Amen-Re. Takami-Musubi is what the Japanese called me. Elegant language, Japanese. Elegant people. Always liked them. And so many more, big and small. From nations to tribes, they all knew me.”
McHenry’s eyes widened. “You were…you were a sky god? A creation god? But…you were one of the greatest gods of all! You were…you were big!”
“I’m still big,” rumbled the old man. “It’s creation that’s gotten small.”
“And…how long did you stay around? After the others left?”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “A while. For entities such as I, we don’t tend to pay all that much attention to the passage of time. Monitoring that is much more the province and interest of mortals than us. One century is like five is like ten. It matters little to me. Although I will say that in my last centuries on Earth, there was very little call for most of my incarnations. The name applied to me most often during that time was Klaus.”
“Klaus?” McHenry looked at him dubiously. “I don’t remember any god named Klaus.”
“I wasn’t seen as a ‘god,’ per se. More as a charitable sprite. I must say, I rather liked that time of my life. I dealt with children, mostly. Saint Klaus, I was. Those were good times.”
“Saint Klaus…wait. Santa Claus?” he said suspiciously. “You’re telling me you were Santa Claus?”
“That was one version of it, yes.”
“Santa Claus. With the red suit and the presents and coming down the chimney? You must be joking.”
“Do you find that so difficult to believe?”
“Well…yes! You’re Zeus and Odin and Santa Claus all rolled into one? How ridiculous is that?”
“I feel the need to point out,” the old man said airily, “that someone who is currently existing as a disembodied spirit is hardly in a position to question the little absurdities that life presents. All those names aside, I find that after all this time, I simply prefer to be called the Old Father. It’s certainly descriptive enough.”
“You know,” McHenry said at last, “I really, really hope I’m dreaming all this, because it’s too insane to cope with if I’m not.”
“You’re not,” the old man assured him, and he now had a grim demeanor to him. “Would that you were. But you’re not. This is the truth of it: My brethren, my ‘associates,’ shunt anyone to this dimension whom they believe can cause trouble. Then again,” he said reflectively, “I suppose it’s somehow appropriate that they keep me locked away like this…considering that it was I who had kept them imprisoned for so long.”
“You did?” McHenry began to pace, no longer dwelling on mundane matters such as how he was able to move about in relation to physical objects. “This isn’t exactly the story they were telling us.”
“Well, of course it wouldn’t be, would it.” He snorted derisively. “Do you think they would want you to know? Can’t blame them, really. More than a century, I kept them tightly bottled up, like the Earth legends of genies in lamps…which originated with us, I might add.”
“Of course,” said McHenry with a helpless gesture. “I’m starting to think everything from the common cold to Fermat’s last theorem came from you people.”
“I would not call us ‘people,’ really.”
“It doesn’t matter,” McHenry told him, beginning to feel impatient. He didn’t know why he was impatient. It wasn’t as if he had anything else to do or anyplace else to go. It was probably a holdover from his annoying human condition. “So why did you do that? Keep them under wraps?”
“They wanted revenge. For Apollo.”
“Revenge?”
“Understand, they thought him somewhat the fool,” said the Old Father. There was unmistakable sadness in his voice, although McHenry wasn’t entirely certain for whom the sadness was intended. “But they felt he was ill used by the crew of the Enterprise. However, they also saw opportunity presenting itself: opportunity in the form of Apollo’s assignation with the mortal woman, Carolyn, who was your ancestor. They saw you as a potential bridge to the status and power they once enjoyed. I endeavored to talk them out of it, but they would not listen to reason.
“I knew then what I had to do, in order to stave off potential disaster. I knew, however, I could not do it alone. After all these millennia, even I am not what I once was. I needed an ally…and the only reasonable ally was someone whom the others felt antipathy for, and he for they. Someone who had no love lost between himself and his associates. Wisely or unwisely, I chose my son.”
“Let me guess: He has lots of names as well.”
The Old Father nodded. “Anubis, among the Egyptians. The Greeks called him Ares, the Norse knew him as Loki. Aborigine people called him the Coyote god. Ultimately, his forte was trickery, so really, who better?”
“I thought Anubis was the Egyptian god of death.”
“It’s much the same. Consider those who lie in agony, waiting for the release of death, yet it does not come. Meanwhile newborn infants lie asleep in their beds, just beginning their lives, and they are snuffed out for no apparent reason. Dictators and tyrants lead long, happy lives, while peacemakers and lovers of all who live are cut down in their prime. There is no greater perpetrator of morbid jests than death.”
“I’m living proof of that…maybe,” said McHenry ruefully. “And in exchange for helping you, he was spared the indignity of being stuck away in some between dimension.”
“Exactly so. So I, with the aid of my trickster son, started gathering them up, one by one, shunting them away into another dimension, where they could cause no trouble. Artemis was the last of them…and, damn my sentimentality, I was not able to complete the task I had set out to do.” He shook his head, clearly disgusted with himself. “She begged me, she pleaded. She swore to me that she had learned from observing her departed brother the foolishness of trying to thrust oneself into the affairs of mortals.”
“And so you spared her,” McHenry said tonelessly.
“Aye. I did.”
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “She can be very persuasive when she needs to be.”
“So I let her and Anubis wander free…certain in my fo
olish confidence that I, ever vigilant, would be able to keep the rest of the beings contained. There is nothing so foolish as the pride of an old fool,” he added. “Although really, I should have known. When one has a son whose reputation is based upon trickery, what else can one expect but betrayal?”
“So Artemis pleaded her way out of exile. Hunh.” McHenry actually laughed at that. It was the first thing he’d found amusing about any of this insanity. “Boy. If Artemis had been penned up, my life would be very, very different. I’d be alive like a normal person, for starters. My parents wouldn’t have been driven insane by her presence in my life….”
“I am sorry, lad, for my misjudgment which brought her down upon you,” said the Old Father. “Unfortunately, I know that means very little.”
“No…no, actually, it does mean something,” said McHenry, choosing to be philosophical about the matter. “Especially when you consider that, for centuries, peoples’ lives have been messed up by random calamities. At such times, they’ve always begged deities for enlightenment as to why these things happened. But they’re never really given any concrete answer. This may be the first time that a deity has actually stepped up and said, ‘My mistake. Sorry for the inconvenience.’ It’s appreciated. It doesn’t change anything, but it is appreciated.” McHenry pondered the situation a moment more and then asked, “How did he do it? Or I should say, how did they do it?”
“How did they release the other Beings?” When McHenry nodded, the Old Father grunted in response. “Those damnable gateways.”
“The gateways?” McHenry remembered them all too well. Portals through time, through space, even—it was believed—into other dimensions. They had begun popping up all over the galaxy, like weeds, manipulated by an alien race as part of a galactic power play. One of the blasted gateways had even swallowed Calhoun and Shelby, necessitating their rescue from an ice world that had nearly been the death of them.
The Old Father simply nodded. “It did not occur to me that my wayward son would become bored with the absence of his sparring partners. Nor did it occur to me that Artemis, so humble in her pleadings to me to be spared, so truthful in nature, would be deceitful enough to seduce Anubis over to the idea of releasing the others and turning my punishment back upon me.”