Raising The Stones (44 page)

Each representative had administrative assistants, and the administrative assistants had aides and senior and junior researchers, readers, chaplains, haruspices, oracles, and the like. Over time, a very nice system had developed by which persons actually interested in religion as religion (rather than religion as a system of social control, religion as politics, religion as warfare, or religion as spectacle) met over luncheon from time to time to read their scholarly research to one another, while clerks and aides got on with the endless and self-generating paperwork, for so it was still called, despite the fact there was little or no paper involved.

Matters requiring, or pretending to require, decision were referred to the Official Advisory, or OA, which was simply shorthand for those originally selected persons, or their successors, who had been actually charged with advising the Authority. The Religion Advisory, en toto, including the panels and all the subordinates, consisted of several thousand individuals. The Religion Advisory, OA, consisted of about thirty, give or take a few who might be back on planets of origin receiving instruction or have died and not yet been replaced.

No one remembered, offhand, when the OA had last met, though virtually everyone knew that the reason for the meeting had been a discussion of the Voorstod problem. The site of that meeting had been the Great Library of the Advisory, where, it was presumed, any future meetings would also occur. On ordinary occasions, the library was empty or scantily occupied by research fellows or, very rarely, visited by scholars.

Which explained the dogged and martyred attitude of the messenger who did, at last, find Member of Authority, Member of the Advisory, and Notable Scholar, Notadamdirabong Cringh, at one of the long, silent tables in said library. Cringh was deeply involved with a dusty, huge, and very old real book, over which the information stage scanner was laboring with difficulty, and he did not at first see the messenger standing before him with flushed cheeks and an air of frayed annoyance.

“Aaah, yes,” he said at last, when the messenger’s active fidgeting drew the attention of his aide, who nudged him. “Aaah, yes.”

“Message, Notable Scholar. For the Scholar’s eyes only.” The messenger held out his skin snip, and Cringh allowed a few dermal cells to be dragged from a finger in return for a square, metallic object, which he recognized, after regarding it thoughtfully for a few moments, as an envelope. It probably contained real paper with words on it. He could not recall having seen an envelope actually in use before, though he had, of course, seen them in museums and read of their being used.

How very interesting, he told himself, squinching his eyelids into a net of tiny wrinkles, pursing his lips into another such net. Notadamdirabong Cringh was an old, extremely wrinkled man. He liked to think his interior was younger than his exterior by a number of decades, despite the illogicality of that wish. He rubbed his hand across his totally bald and equally wrinkled head and asked himself why anyone would go to the trouble of sending a written message in a tamper proof envelope, when one might equally well place a personal message into the Archives directed to Scholar Cringh’s identity and personal attention.

How intriguing! He could think of several possible answers.

Perhaps because it was known that other persons might see, either by intention or accident, messages placed in the Archives for private viewing only. It wasn’t supposed to be possible, but it was possible, everyone knew that. Some people were unbelievably nosy and would actually go out of their way to see messages directed to other people!

Perhaps because the person sending the message did not have access to Scholar Cringh’s identity number. Though that seemed unlikely. The identity number was right there in the roster for all System to see.

Perhaps because the person sending the message was a decorative hobbyist, a what-you-call-it, calligrapher, someone who enjoyed making words on paper.

Perhaps because the delivery of an actual message carried more psychic weight than the delivery of a mere Archives message.

Perhaps because the writing of the message had some spiritual significance of which Cringh had been heretofore unaware.

Perhaps …

“Aren’t you going to open it?” Cringh’s favorite aide asked, from behind his left shoulder.

“You spoil all the fun,” grunted Cringh. “I was going to figure it out, first.”

“It might be urgent,” the aide said, purring. Her name was Lurilile. She was willowlike in her grace and ferretlike in her abilities. She had a face like a corrupted angel. She was from Ahabar, though no one knew that but herself and those who had sent her. Queen Wilhulmia knew her, of course, and was deeply concerned about her presence upon Authority.

“Urgent, maybe …,” Lurilile suggested again. “… what’s inside?”

Cringh nodded, slowly. The one thing he hadn’t thought of was that it might be urgent.

He touched the envelope, which recognized his cellular structure as being compatible with the delivery instructions, and opened along a seam, emitting a tiny hiss of damp air and a small unpleasant smell.

“Ninfadel?” shuddered Lurilile, in the tone of one detecting a fart.

Cringh shook his head as he examined the contents. “Chowdari,” he said. “From Reticingh, who was in his bath at the time. Or so he says. Though why he should think I care where he was at the time rather escapes me.”

“So?”

“So, there’s a copy of a report in here that somebody named Shanrandinore Damzel gave to the Circle of Scrutators, plus a set of questions Reticingh came up with. Reticingh wants to know what I think of them. We. What we think of them. Unofficially.”

“We, the six High Baidee members of the Religion Advisory? Or we, the three Baidee members of the Theology Panel? Or we, the whole panel?”

“We, the whole OA. However, Reticingh stresses that it is an unofficial request.”

“How can anyone ask something of the Official Advisory unofficially?”

“One wants to say it would make no difference. Nothing ever happens when they’re asked officially, anyhow.”

“Shit,” sneered Lurilile, puckering her lips and making kisses at him. “Everyone knows that.”

“Might be kind of fun to find out if the OA can think.”

“Might be kind of fun to find out if the OA is alive.”

“That, too.”

“Though, if taking bribes is evidence of life, we know parts of it are burgeoning.”

Cringh smiled sweetly. His colleagues from Phansure were not serious enough about religion to feel guilty about buying and selling it. On the other hand, his colleague the Bishop Absolute from Ahabar certainly was. As were some of the xeno-theo-whats-its. Lurilile had been trying for almost a year to find out who, and Notadamdirabong wasn’t going to tell her. He liked having her around too much to give her what she wanted.

“Be interesting to find out,” he said again, pulling himself out of the chair he’d been sitting in for several hours.

“Not going to read it here?”

“In my suite, I think. Besides, it’s nearly dinner time.”

“Wouldn’t want to miss that,” purred Lurilile, with a delicate, elbow punch into the Notable Scholar’s well-padded ribs. “No sir. Can’t miss dinner.”

Cringh smiled sweetly once more. Actually, he had already leafed through the document enough to have seen the page upon which someone had set down a series of brief, though elegantly lettered, questions.

1. How does one define God?

2. How does one know if a God is real?

3. Does a God have to create a race of intelligent creatures in order for that race to consider Him/Her a God?

4. Can a God adopt a people who already exist?

5. If a people become holy because of the influence of something, is that something likely a God?

6. If the answer to the foregoing is “no,” then what should we call it?

And finally, the questions Cringh immediately recognized as at the crux of the matter, from the view point of the Baidee:

7. Could the Overmind have created or allowed the creation of some smaller, lesser Gods or pseudo-Gods for any reason at all?

8. If the Overmind could not have done so, then shouldn’t we immediately dispose of any smaller things of that description we might happen to discover?

“Unofficially, of course,” said Cringh to himself, leaning rather more heavily than was absolutely necessary upon Lurilile. Sometimes he called her Abishag. He had forgotten exactly where he’d encountered that name during his studies, in some ancient volume or other. He connected it to Voorstod, somehow, which meant he had probably read it while researching Voorstoder beliefs, which meant Abishag must have been an ancient tribal beauty mentioned in the tribal scriptures. A young woman obtained to warm the bed of an old, cold chieftain, as he recalled. A chieftain not too distantly related to the ancient chieftains of the Voorstoders. Equally old and cold, no doubt.

“What are you thinking?” Lurilile wanted to know.

“I’m thinking things could get very lively around here quite shortly,” he said. “For a change.”

“Oh, goody,” she replied.

•
At Settlement Three
on Hobbs Land there had been deaths. A couple of the more violent and contentious of the inhabitants, one of them a Soames brother, had decided to leave Hobbs Land, a decision with which the settlement had been in complete agreement and sympathy. However, before the two could get themselves gone, they had happened upon an excuse for a fight, and the fight had ended with both dead. All in all, thought most of the people of Settlement Three, good riddance.

However, there were two bodies to dispose of. For some reason, it did not seem to anyone that the proper place to put the two bodies was in the Settlement Three graveyard.

“We think they ought to go up on the escarpment,” said Topman Harribon Kruss to Dern Blass, with no effort at all toward explaining himself or thinking up a logical reason for the course he was suggesting.

“On the escarpment,” repeated Dern, casting a look at Spiggy and Jamice, who happened to be with him.

“It’s very nice up there,” said Spiggy, apropos of nothing. “I agree, it would be nice to have a memorial park up there. Burial space near the settlements could be put to better use.”

“Memorial park,” repeated Dern, remembering not to try and make sense out of it.

“For everybody,” agreed Jamice, nodding her head. “One nice cemetery up there for all the settlements. Among the topes. It’s only a daywatch away, by flier.”

“Right,” said Topman Kruss, as he left to go make arrangements. “I knew it would be all right.”

Out of curiosity, Dern attended the interment. The two bodies were laid to rest in shallow graves in the wedge-shaped space between two of the long, strange mounds Volsa had discovered. Several cats, who had come along in the flier, scattered into the surrounding forest and emerged with dead ferfs in their jaws, which they dropped into the graves as they were being filled.

“Those two people never did get along, did they?” Dern asked the Topman, indicating the two graves. “Seems to me I saw reports about their orneriness all the time.”

“They always fought. Each other or somebody else,” said Harribon. “Lately, you know, people who don’t get along sort of get up and leave. Have you noticed that? I’ve had four leave from Three, including these two; five or six left Four; and so on. These two were going to emigrate, but they got overtaken by bellicosity before they had a chance.”

“I have noticed a number of departures lately,” Dern agreed.

“Not in Settlement One,” said Harribon. “All their departures took place years and years ago, shortly after the settlement was started. Funny thing. That’s one of the things I was most interested in about Settlement One. I thought their low hostility-high productivity record might be explained by the mix of people they had. Dracun and I were going to find out about that, but then things happened and it slipped my mind for a while. Then later on I remembered it and looked it up. The rest of us settlements had people coming and going, some of them not fitting in, a constant flux. Settlement One lost a few people during the early years, and then they didn’t lose any more. It made me curious, so I checked out a few of the families who left. Osmer was one. He came in about year twelve, stayed a few years, then left. Couple of years after he left here, he was executed for killing a dozen Glottles. His family moved on somewhere else after that.”

“Almost like he was sorted out to start with,” suggested Dern.

“Almost like that, yes,” said Harribon. “Well, the rest of us have been getting sorted out lately.” He pointed at the graves. “People like these guys somehow just can’t stop fighting. Mad at the universe, they are. Born that way, I guess.”

“So it doesn’t work for everybody,” mused Dern.

“It?”

“Don’t go dumb on me, Kruss. You know what I mean. In Settlement Three, the God Elitia doesn’t work for everyone.”

Harribon gave him a long, level look. “In Central Management, the God Horgy doesn’t work for everybody. Ninety-nine percent of everybody, but not all.”

“Be interesting to see what happens in Voorstod, won’t it,” said Dern. “You heard about that?”

Harribon nodded. “Sal Girat told me. I’ve been going over to keep company with Sal quite a bit lately. She says her mother went to Voorstod. Also Sam. Plus the little Wilm girl. Only reason I could figure for the little Wilm girl to go was … well. Is that what they went for?”

Dern shrugged elaborately. “All I know is what I feel in my bones, Topman.” He turned back to the burials to see a large orange cat drop a final ferf into the grave be fore the last few spadefuls of earth covered it. Spiggy was watching the cat curiously.

“There,” yowled the cat. “That does it.”