by Alessandro Benedetti
The gathering was as strange as you could imagine.
Osiris, the oldest of them all (just technically, since it is not easy to assign an age to immortal beings), was sitting at one edge of the immense table. He coughed a couple of times and declared the meeting open:
“Gentlemen, for the first time since a couple of million years we have all gathered, looking for a solution to our problem; now, in my opinion our best option would be a compromise. Despite our differences, we and the Cygnus divinities are in the same boat and share the same troubles. Remember what has happened on our own Earth — every time a new religion flourished, several other gods were progressively abandoned and very nearly starved to death. I say we cannot take this risk again and should rather strike a bargain with our extrasolar colleagues; after all, there are enough potential believers for everyone! Yes, Ares, do you want to say something?”
“Indeed, I do”, roared Ares, enraged like the god of war he was. “I say there can be no agreement between us, the true gods of an ancient planet, and those charlatans, those upstarts… No conciliation is possible; no agreement should be reached, and no quarter shall be given. Gentlemen, I say there is only one way: war!”
A loud scream echoed his words and filled the majestic hall, as all the gods ever worshipped, by whatever culture in any age on Earth, were angrily shouting and clamouring for —metaphorical— blood.
It must be said that most of them would appear to their believers as anthropomorphic as a wave function, had there been some Earthmen around: very unlikely, however, over the surface of an asteroid just created from nothing, thousands of light years away from our planet.
Every divinity, then, Greeks and Romans, Thor and the Asgardians, the Indian Trimurti with all the minor gods, even Allah and Jahaveh were crying with all the breath they had, or rather signalling through sudden changes of millions of volts in their energy spectra, a single word: WAR.
In such a pandemonium, Buddha quietly sat, whereas most of the Sumerian gods were shaking their heads and Quetzalcoatl tried calming his colleagues by reminding them of the possibility of death by entropy for the whole Universe, alas to no avail…
His was only a faint voice in a sea of cursing, so that there was no need to vote in order to take a decision.
It had all started about a century before, when the first human beings had escaped from the cage of the solar system.
Granted, it had not been easy: three of them had not awaken from the dreamless sleep of hibernation and were now forever orbiting outside the Kuyper belt. The long sleep had taken its toll on the rest of them, but they had reached the outskirts of the Cygnus constellation.
And what they found they could not believe: an extremely evolved species, alien even to the mere concept of violence and survival of the strongest, was anxious to meet them, exchange ideas, collaborate and peacefully share the known universe.
An exchange of technology, notions, opinions and, more importantly, people quickly followed, and inevitably missionaries opened the way for the numerous beliefs of Cygnus to Earth and vice versa, not unlike St Brandan landing in Ireland or Bodhidharma reaching Japan.
Right in the middle of this idyllic scenario — or maybe precisely because of it: no one likes to be supplanted by a foreign upstart—, the ancient Earth gods took offense at their counterparts on Cygnus.
After the failure of the peace meeting, therefore, war was declared and the gauntlet thrown down on their extra-terrestrial rivals, challenging them to a most singular battle.
The battlefield was a planetoid, entirely devoid of life and placed inside a huge static field completely opaque to every type of radiation or matter: nothing, not even a neutrino, was permitted through. Nothing, that is, apart from a narrow wavelength, through which a video and audio signal was transmitted, amplified and broadcasted so that billions of people on both worlds could watch the final battle and support their respective divinities.
And what they did see, they would remember for a long time: the terrestrial army, nearly at full strength —only Buddha and a few others were missing, having decided to seek refuge in a different continuum— and reinforced by Satan with thousands of his devils, facing countless foreign divinities.
Just an instant of absolute silence, then they threw themselves into the fray, launching at each other tons of radioactive matter and streams of neutrinos, striking again and again with X-rays, heavy particles, all the arsenal available to creatures as almighty as them, which means pretty much every possible form of energy.
On Earth and in the Cygnus constellation both populations saw giants lifting supermassive rocks, throwing thunderbolts, fighting to the death without mercy: they witnessed the fall of Odin and Venus, Satan and Vishnu together with hundreds of others.
And when it was all ended, over the killing field covered by dying gods, the magnetic fields weaker and weaker, the wavelength shifting more and more to the red, Allah and Osiris accepted the surrender of the alien gods.
They screamed in triumph, their fists raised, their bodies soiled with blood, or rather burned tons of hydrogen in massive flares which irradiated in the gamma portion of the spectrum.
But their justified enthusiasm did not last much longer, as they saw the static field compressing quicker and quicker and at the same time their energy vanishing, the temperature dropping down to absolute zero, the electrons collapsing in on the nuclei: the stars were agonising, the fields were fading away, entropy was running wild…
“Somebody betrayed us”, Osiris tried to say, “but who… and why…”, but he could not finish.
Many light years away, an Earthman and a Cygnus creature watched the needle of an instrument going down and down until zero, then they smiled and shook hands: Ragnarok, the twilight of gods, was complete.
~
Bio:
Alessandro Benedetti is an Italian physicist, in love with science and enamored with letters, happily married with two kids. Having grown up on a steady diet of Dick and Bradbury, he works at the European Commission and couldn’t be happier.
