The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (43 page)

The lizard swooped down, blocked the children from view. Orne tried to close his eyes, could not. There came a shriek cut off with abrupt finality. Unable to stop, the
shriggar
hit the green wall,
melted into it
!

The older child lay sprawled on the floor still clutching her bucket and toy shovel. A red smear spread across the stones beside her. She stared across the room at Orne, slowly got to her feet.

No matter what Bakrish said, this can't be real,
thought Orne. Yet he felt an odd wash of relief that the
shriggar
had vanished.

The child began walking towards Orne, swinging her bucket. Her right hand clutched the toy shovel. She stared fixedly at Orne. He brought her name into his mind:
Maddie, my sister, Lurie. But she's a grown woman now, married and with children of her own.

Flecks of sand marked the child's legs and cheeks. One of her two blonde braids hung down partly undone. She looked angry, shivering with an eight-year-old's fury. About two metres away she stopped.

“You did that!” she screamed.

Orne shuddered at the madness in the child voice. She lifted the bucket, hurled its contents at him. He shut his eyes, felt coarse sand deluge his face, pelt the silver dome, run down his cheeks. Pain coursed through him as he shook his head, disrupting the microfilaments against his scalp. Through slitted eyes he saw the dancing lines on the green wall leap into wild motion—bending, twisting, flinging. Orne stared at the purple frenzy through a red haze of pain. And he remembered the guru's warning that any life he called forth here would contain his own psyche as well as its own.

“Lurie,” he said, “please try to…”

“You tried to get into my head!” she screamed. “But I pushed you out!”

Bakrish had said it:
“Others will reject your half out of hand because they have not the capacity.”
This dual create had rejected him because her eight-year-old mind could not accept such an experience. And Orne realized that he was taking this scene as reality and not as hallucination.

“I'm going to kill you!” screamed Lurie.

She hurled herself at him, the toy shovel swinging. Light glinted from the tiny blade. It slashed down on his right arm.
Abrupt pain!
Blood darkened the sleeve of his gown.

Orne felt himself caught up in a nightmare. Words leaped to his lips: “Stop that, Lurie! God will punish you!”

Movement behind the child.
He looked up.

A toga-clad figure in red turban came striding out of the green wall: a tall man with gleaming eyes, the face of a tortured ascetic—long grey beard parted in the
sufi
manner.

Orne whispered the name:
“Mahmud!”

A gigantic tri-di of that face dominated the inner mosque of Chargon.

God will punish you!

Orne remembered standing beside his father, staring up at the image in the mosque, bowing to it.

The Mahmud figure strode up behind Lurie, caught her arm as she started another blow. She turned, struggling, but he held her, twisted the arm slowly, methodically. A bone snapped with sickening sharpness. The child screamed and screamed and…”

“Don't!” protested Orne.

Mahmud had a low, rumbling voice. He said: “One does not command God's agent to stop His just punishment.” He held the child's hair, stooped, caught up the fallen shovel, slashed it across her neck. The screaming stopped. Blood spurted over his gown. He let the now limp figure fall to the floor, dropped the shovel, turned to Orne.

Nightmare!
thought Orne.
This has to be a nightmare!

“You are thinking this is a nightmare,” rumbled Mahmud.

And Orne remembered: this creature, too, if it were real, could think with his reactions and memories. He rejected the thought. “You
are
a nightmare!”

“Your create has done its work,” said Mahmud. “It had to be disposed of, you know, because it was embodied by hate, not by love.”

Orne felt sickened, guilty, angry. He remembered that this test involved understanding miracles. “This was a miracle?” he demanded.

“What is a miracle?” demanded Mahmud.

Abruptly, an air of suspense enclosed Orne. Prescient fear sucked at his vitals.

“What is a miracle?” repeated Mahmud.

Orne felt his heart hammering. He couldn't seem to focus on the words, stammered: “Are you really an agent of God?”

“Quibbles and labels!” barked Mahmud. “Don't you know about labels? An expediency! There's something
beyond
your labels. Where the zone of the word stops, something else begins.”

A tingling sense of madness prickled through Orne. He felt himself balanced on the edge of chaos. “What is a miracle?” he whispered. And he thought back to Emolirdo:
words
 …
chaos
 …
energy. Psi equals miracle! No. More labels. Energy.

“Energy from chaos moulded into duration,” he said.

“Very close for words,” murmured Mahmud. “Is a miracle good or evil?”

“Everybody says miracles are good.” Orne took a deep breath. “But they don't have to be either. Good and evil are all tied up in motives.”

“Man has motives,” said Mahmud.

“Man can be good or evil in his miracles by any definition he wants,” said Orne.

Mahmud lifted his head, stared down his nose at Orne. “Yes?”

After a moment of tension, Orne returned the stare. Success in this test had taken on a deep meaning for him. He could feel the inner goading. “Do you want me to say that men create gods to enforce their definitions of good and evil?”

“Do I?”

“So I've said it!”

“Is that all you have to say?”

Orne had to force his attention on to the meanings of words. It was like wading upstream in a swift river. So easy to relax and forget it all. His thoughts showed a tendency to scatter.
Is
what
all I have to say?

“What is it about men's creations?” demanded Mahmud. “What is it about any creation?”

Orne recalled the nightmare sequence of events in this test. He wondered:
Could this psi machine amplify the energy we call religion? Bakrish said I could bring the dead to life here. Religion's supposed to have a monopoly on that. And the original Mahmud's certainly dead. Been dead for centuries. Provided it isn't hallucination, this whole thing makes a peculiar kind of sense. Even then
 …

“You know the answer,” said Mahmud.

Orne said: “Creations may act independently of their creators. So good and evil don't apply.”

“Ah-hah! You have learned this lesson!”

Mahmud stooped, lifted the dead child figure. There was an odd tenderness to his motions. He turned away, marched back into the writhings of the green wall. Silence blanketed the room. The dancing purple lines became almost static, moved in viscous torpor.

Orne felt drained of energy. His arms and legs ached as though he had been using their muscles to the absolute limit.

A bronze clangor echoed behind him, and the green wall returned to its featureless grey. Footsteps slapped against the stone floor. Hands worked at the metallic bowl, lifted it off his head. The straps that held him to the chair fell away. Bakrish came round to stand in front of Orne.

“Did I pass this test?” asked Orne.

“You are alive and still in possession of your soul are you not?”

“How do I know if I still have my soul?”

“One knows by the absence,” murmured Bakrish. He glanced down at Orne's wounded arm. “We must get that bandaged. It's night and time for the next step in your ordeal.”

“Night?” Orne glanced up at the slitted windows in the dome, saw darkness punctured by stars. He looked around, realized that shadowless exciter light of glow globes had replaced the daylight. “Time goes quickly here.”

“For some … not for others.”

“I feel so tired.”

“We'll give you an energy pill when we fix the arm. Come along.”

“What's next?”

“You must walk through the shadow of dogma and ceremony, Orne. For it is written that motive is the father of ethics, and caution is the brother of fear…” he paused “… and fear is the daughter of pain.”

There was a nip of chill in the night air. Orne felt thankful now for the thickness of the robe around him. A cooing of birds sounded from the deeper shadows of a park area ahead. Beyond the park arose a hill outlined against the stars, and up the hill marched a snake-track of moving lights.

Bakrish spoke from beside Orne. “The lights are carried by students. Each student has a pole, and on its top a translucent box. The four sides of the boxes each show a different color: red, blue, yellow and green.”

Orne watched the lights. They flickered like weird phosphorescent insects in the dark. “What's the reason for that?”

“They show their piety.”

“I mean the four colors?”

“Ah. Red for the blood you dedicate to your god, blue for the truth, yellow for the richness of religious experience, and green for the growth of that experience.”

“So they march up the mountain.”

“Yes. To show their piety.” Bakrish took Orne's arm. “The procession is coming out of the city through a gate in the wall over here. There will be a light for you there. Come along.”

They crossed the park, stopped by a narrow open gate. Bakrish took a pole from a rack beside the wall, twisted the handle and light glowed at the top. “Here.”

The pole felt slippery smooth in Orne's hand. The light above him was turned to cast a red glow on the people passing through the gate: a student, then a priest, a student, then a priest … Their faces carried a uniform gravity.

The end of the procession appeared. “Stay behind that priest,” said Bakrish. He urged Orne into the line, fell in behind.

Immediately, prescient fear tugged at Orne's energy. He stumbled, faltered, heard Bakrish grunt: “Keep up! Keep up!”

Orne recovered his balance. His light cast a dull green reflection off the back of the priest ahead. A murmuring, shuffling sounded from the procession. Insects chittered in the tall grass beside their trail. Orne looked up. The bobbing lights wove a meander line up the hill.

The prescient fear grew stronger. Orne felt fragmented. Part of him cowered sickly with the thought that he could fail here. Another part groped out for the chimera of this ordeal. He sensed tremendous elation only a heartbeat away, but this only piled fuel on his fear. It was as though he struggled to awaken from a nightmare within a nightmare, knowing that the pseudo-awakening would only precipitate him into new terror.

The line halted. Orne stumbled to a stop, focused on what was happening around him. Students bunched into a semi-circle. Their lights bounced multicolored gleams off a stone stupa about twice the height of a man. A bearded priest, his head covered by a red three-cornered hat, his body vague motions under a long black robe, stood in front of the stupa like a dark judge at some mysterious trial.

Orne found a place in the outer ring of students, peered between two of them.

The red-hatted priest bowed, spoke in a resonant bass voice: “You stand before the shrine of purity and the law, the two inseparables of all true belief. Here before you is a key to the great mystery that can lead you to paradise.”

Orne felt tension, then the impact of a strong psi field, realized abruptly that this psi field was different. It beat like a metronome with the cadence of the priest's words, rising with the passion of his speech.

“… the immortal goodness and purity of all the great prophets!” he was saying. “Conceived in purity, born in purity, their thoughts ever bathed in goodness! Untouched by base nature in all their aspects!”

With a shock, Orne realized that this psi field around him arose not from some machine, but from a blending of emotions in the massed students. The emotions he sensed played subtle harmonies on the overriding field. It was as though the priest played these people as a musician might play his instrument.

“… the eternal truth of this divine dogma!” shouted the priest.

Incense wafted across Orne's nostrils. A hidden voder began to emit low organ notes: a rumbling, sonorous melody. To the right, Orne saw a graveman circling the ring of students and priests waving a censer. Blue smoke hung over the mass of people in ghostly curls. From off in the darkness a bell tinkled seven times.

Orne felt like a man hypnotized, thinking:
Massed emotions act like a psi field! Great God! What
is
a psi field?

The priest raised both arms, fists clenched. “Eternal paradise to all true believers! Eternal damnation to all unbelievers!” His voice lowered. “You students seeking the eternal truth, fall down to your knees and beg for enlightenment. Pray for the veil to be lifted from your eyes.”

There was a shuffling and whisper of robes as the students around Orne sank to their knees. Still Orne stared ahead, his whole being caught up in his discovery.
Massed emotions act like a psi field!

A muttering sound passed through the students.

What
is
a psi field?
Orne asked himself. He felt an answer lurking in a hidden corner of his mind.

Angry glances were directed at Orne from the kneeling students. The muttering grew louder.

Belatedly, Orne became aware of danger. Prescient fear was like a klaxon roaring within him.

Bakrish leaned close, whispered: “There's a trail into the woods off to your right. Better start working towards it.”

At the far side of the kneeling crowd a student lifted an arm, pointed at Orne. “What about him? He's a student!”

Someone lost in the mass of people shouted: “Unbeliever!” Others took it up like a mindless chant.