Harry Turtledove - After the downfall

"You've seen another world. You must have had a god — or maybe gods — of your own there."

"Ja. I was just thinking about Him, in fact. He doesn't answer."

"Then why are you here now?"

He shrugged. It was a damn good question. But, again… "I don't know." Did the Omphalos have anything to do with the God Who was also Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? The ancient Greeks wouldn't have said so. Whether they were right — again, Hasso didn't know.

Drepteaza didn't want to leave it alone. "And," she continued, "you spent all that time with the goddess on earth. If you don't know more about such things than most people, who does?"

"I know a good bit about Velona — what a lover can know in the time we were together. A lover who has to learn a language first, I mean." Hasso corrected himself. "About the goddess… All I know about the goddess is that she frightens me. She's… bigger than I am."

"Well, yes," Drepteaza said. "Of course. That's what makes her a goddess. Whether she's big enough to eat Bucovin… She thinks she is. So far, she's proved wrong, but she keeps trying."

Thinking you were bigger than you really were was one of the worst mistakes you could make. Not even Hitler could argue with that, not any more. If you got into a war with the two biggest countries with the two strongest economies in the world — mm, chances were you wouldn't be happy with the way things turned out. And chances were Hitler wasn't, if he was still alive.

"Is that all you need to be a god?" Hasso asked. "To be strong?" He hadn't thought about it in those terms before. Back in his own world, he'd taken for granted the answers other people gave him. He had more trouble doing that here, because he was hearing different things from different people.

Maybe they're all wrong, he thought. But how can I know? How do I make up my mind? He'd never imagined there could be such a thing as too much freedom, but maybe there was.

And Drepteaza looked at him in surprise. "What else is there, Hasso Pemsel?"

Another alarmingly keen question. Hitler and Stalin ruled their countries as virtual gods because they were strong. Some people would say one of them was good and some the other, but who would say they both were? Nobody. Maybe it was true for beings genuinely supernatural, too. Why wouldn't it be?

One reason occurred to him. "A god should be good, too, yes?" That, to him, needed to count more for real gods than for the self-made variety.

"What is good?" Drepteaza asked, and, like Pilate asking about truth, she didn't wait around for the answer.

Reports about the Lenello raiders came back from the west. They plundered and killed, and then they withdrew. How much Bucovinan harassment had to do with that, Hasso couldn't tell. He couldn't tell how much good his gunpowder would have done, either.

He took another lover, a woman named Gishte. He didn't think she was any more excited about him than Leneshul was, but she was more polite about it. That would do — for a while, anyhow.

He made damn sure he never took another bath with Drepteaza. It wouldn't have meant anything to her. That wasn't the point. It would have meant much too much to him. As things were, he played back memories of her nakedness as if he'd been a frontline Signal cameraman filming it on the spot.

All sorts of crazy thoughts went through his head. What would happen if he got enough gunpowder to blow up the castle here? Falticeni and Bucovin would never be the same. Of course, he would also blow himself up, and he didn't want to do that. If he were suicidal, he never would have sat on the Omphalos. He would have fought on till he got killed. It probably wouldn't have taken long.

Rautat made sure he had plenty of beer and mead and even wine. Gishte liked that; she got lit up whenever she saw the chance. That told Hasso some of what she really thought of him, though she didn't slip even when she was drunk.

"What good does drunk do you?" he asked her one morning before she started drinking hard.

"What good does sober do me?" Gishte returned, a counter-question for which, like so many here, he had no good answer. He did hope she wasn't drinking because she was going to bed with a Lenello — or somebody who looked like one. When he came right out and asked her about that, she shook her head. "No, you're not so bad, and the priestess told me I didn't have to screw you if I didn't care to. I just like to get drunk, that's all."

What was he supposed to say to that? Plenty of Lenelli liked to get drunk, too — Scanno came to mind. So did plenty of Germans. As for the Russians, the less said about that, the better. It didn't stop them from beating the snot out of the Wehrmacht. Sometimes it even helped. Waiting in the trenches, you'd hear them getting plowed and yelling and shouting and carrying on, and then they'd come at you not caring if they lived or died. An awful lot of them did die, which too often didn't stop the rest from overrunning your position.

He'd seen so many drunken Grenye in Drammen, he'd figured all drunken Grenye drank to avoid comparing themselves to Lenelli. Didn't Indians do that kind of thing in the United States? Drinking because you liked to get drunk seemed too… ordinary to fit in with being a native.

Maybe I have to start thinking of them as people, Hasso thought. Short, squat, dark, mostly homely people who don't look like me.

Gishte wasn't homely, though she was a long way from gorgeous. He'd bedded gorgeous — he knew about that. The thought of Velona, and of losing Velona, stabbed at him again.

Next to Velona, Drepteaza wasn't gorgeous, either. Well, who was, dammit? Velona turned movie stars plain. With Drepteaza, it didn't seem to matter so much. That was partly because Drepteaza had one hell of a shape of her own, as Hasso had every reason to know.

And it was partly because Drepteaza was interesting. She didn't have the live-wire aura that Velona wore like a second skin, but who did? She also didn't go off like nitro-glycerine if she got angry. She was… good people.

Yeah, she's good people, Hasso jeered at himself. And she doesn't want thing one to do with you, not that way, even if you have seen her naked.

"Hey, don't pour down all of that by yourself," he told Gishte, and he got drunk, too. Why the hell not? He couldn't think of a single reason. Making love with Gishte when they were both smashed was fun, too. He thought so at the time, anyway. And, when you were smashed, you didn't give a rat's ass about anything but right then.

The bad news about a bender was, you had to come down from it. Drepteaza eyed Hasso as if he were something the cat was trying to cover up. "Have a good time yesterday?" she asked at breakfast the next morning.

"Gnurf," he answered, squinting at her through eyes as narrow as he could make them. Wan winter sunlight and torches he usually wouldn't have tried to read by seemed much too bright today.

"You need something better than porridge," she said, and spoke in Bucovinan to a serving woman. The woman came back with a bowl of strong-smelling soup.

"What is it?" Hasso asked suspiciously.

"Tripe and spices," Drepteaza told him. "It takes the edge off things."

Feeling like a man defusing a bomb, he tried it. But the bomb had already gone off, inside his head. The soup did help calm his sour stomach. He thought the mug of beer he downed with it went further toward reconciling him to being alive. To his own surprise, he did get to the bottom of the bowl of soup. "Thanks," he said to Drepteaza in Bucovinan. "Better."

She looked at him like a Feldwebel eyeing a private fresh from the Russian front who'd just painted Paris red… before Paris fell again. "You're not going to be worth much the rest of the day, are you?" She sounded more resigned than critical.