Gardener took me to this place. She called it the “Gathering,” and those assembled there were “Members of the Gathering.” She said the place could as well be called Heaven, Valhalla, Olympus, or Glaspfifel, and those assembled could be called gods, spirits, essences. Regardless of title or size, she said each one of them, arose from a mortal source: Human, Gentheran, Quaatar, K’Famir, or any of a thousand others. Large gods arose from numerous sources, and small gods arose from few, size having nothing to do with potency. Any race of mortal beings may give rise to one god or many, and if, by chance or intention, an entire world is struck by a giant comet wiping out an entire living race, the Members associated with that race wink out like blown candles, at once both absent and unremembered.
Each Member, the Gardener said, can think only what its mortal source thinks, and each source visualizes its Member(s) differently. Earthians speaking of their gods: “Him” or “Her” or “Them,” visualize very large persons, perhaps of great age, to denote wisdom, or strength, or power. Gentherans visualize kindly uncles and keen-minded aunts. K’Famir and Frossians and Quaatar visualize huge, fanged creatures with curved knives in each of their several manipulators, squatting above bloody altars. Though many mortals speak with authority concerning what their Members want—“Our Father wants us to sacrifice a bullock,” “Kali demands we garrote a passerby”—the desires and demands of the gods are always determined by the desires and demands of the people. Whatever the prophet or priesthood comes up with, the gods parrot. The Members of the Gathering think only what their source thinks: bloody, painful, happy, kindly, arbitrary, logical, sadistic, nurturing—every god is always what the people suppose it to be.
Gardener says few mortals have ever seen the Gathering, and those who have seen any of it have seen only a tiny fraction of the whole. Even if mortals could gain access to the place and observe its continuous and eternally erratic movements as it sorts and re-sorts itself, they would be no wiser, for the Gathering is a spiritual mirror of the whole universe in which all mortal races are reflected through their deities.
Whenever a previously planet-bound race achieves space travel, they carry some or all of their gods with them into space. As soon as those deities emerge through the gravitic barrier around their home planet they are drawn inexorably to the Gathering. So when the Gentherans left their original home world, Gentheran Members appeared in the Gathering. So when the Earthians left their world to set up their little colonies, Earthian Members appeared. The Gentheran Members were few, very strong, and mostly cheerful, so said Gardener. The Earthian Members, on the other hand, covered the entire spectrum from horrid to happy, from bloodthirsty to benevolent, from sadistic to solicitous, and were, counting all the little saints of this and that, so very numerous that some of the oldest Members of the Gathering considered the arrival to be more an invasion than an advent.
The Gardener told me that a Quaatar Member, known to his inventors and worshippers as Dweller in Pain, was one of the most annoyed. DIP took an instant dislike to each and every Earthian Member, though it could give no reason for doing so. Members know only what their sources know, and no mortal Quaatarian knew why it disliked humans. It was a received aversion, passed down from generation to generation. Even if no prior reason had existed, the dislike might have arisen anew from the fact that many of the Earthian Members were rather jolly, and the Quaatar, being sadomasochists of the most elemental sort, did not approve of jolly. Pain, honor, blood, and death were the components of their ethos. Agony was their meat and drink, beginning in infancy when baby Quaatar, moving swiftly to avoid being eaten by their elders, often lost body parts in the process; continuing in youth through an endless series of rite-of-passage battles and on to the precedence trials of adulthood, events of ever-increasing excruciation until death intervened. In Quaatar male society, abhorrence of strangers and infliction of pain was the norm. Loathing the foreign or inferior and torturing the loathed was considered the usual thing. So Gardener told me, pointing out, as she did so, a few little Earthian gods with similar tendencies. “That is the god of jihad,” she said. “That is the god of crusades. They are identical except for their names.”
She explained that the Gathering is a sloshing sea of fluctuating factions, each wavelet betraying an ephemeral or lasting association. By the time mortal races leave their home planets, many of their gods have already amalgamated with one another. Small tribal godlets are often thrust together through shared execrations. All Death-Honor-and-War gods, for example, are identical. The people may fly different flags, but their gods are happy to drink blood from both sides of the battle. All Sun, Harvest, or Forest divinities are analogous. Even when similar mortal races arise on planets remote from one another, similar gods find one another easily.
The oldest deities of the Gathering, those originated by the Pthas, a source billions of years old and wise past belief, had set boundaries for the Gathering: Whatever the mortal races might do among themselves, their gods might not interfere with the sources of other Members. When detected, the penalty for such an attempt was instant eradication.
That “when detected” was a narrow but advantageous loophole, for, as the Gardener said, the right-hand tentacles, palps, or scravelators of the Members of the Gathering were only rarely aware of what the countersegmental organs were up to. Further, no part of the Gathering, including the oldest and wisest, was diligent in finding such things out. Even though the gods of the Pthas had instructed that neutrality or beneficence should govern the Gathering, there was no routine enforcement of that dictum. The Gardener
