The Race for God (14 page)
Authors: Brian Herbert
Tags: #Comics & Graphic Novels, #General, #Fiction, #Religious
Their lovemaking was like an eternal storm of creation and the surging power of the seas. Great undulating, pulsing waves and tides throbbed incessantly, rising and falling in an aquatic thunder of movement. Presently it became as the gentle rhythmic movement of water, turning eventually into a sea of smooth glass, calmness beneath the heavens.
Gutan saw the waves of the sea marching shoreward, like endless battalions of soldiers . . . retreating and advancing, ever-punishing the surface of the planet, wearing it away over many eons. With his father’s eyes he turned and looked up at the hills along the shore, realizing that all of this would give way someday to the relentless forces of the sea and its ally, the rain.
In his mind, Gutan saw the cycles of oceans, rivers and lakes that condensed through sunlight into clouds, bringing invincible rain that battered mountains flat over millions of years. His vision became a single drop of water, teeming with microscopic life. The drop splayed into an ocean, with dead and decaying materials moving to the upper strata of water. Sunshine streamed in to provide the feeding substances for floating and drifting plants, and the plants in turn were fed upon by tiny floating and drifting animal organisms. Small fish and crustaceans received nourishment from the animal organisms, and they in turn nourished the larger life forms. It was a self-reproducing cycle of life and death, with death and decay integral to the continuance of life.
He realized that the beauty and majesty of birth could never exist without death.
It was a cosmic energy dance, of vibrating molecules, atoms and quantum particles that pulsed briefly, became still, pulsed again and became still once more, ad infinitum, in a perpetual rhythm of the ages. The old made way for the new.
Gulls cried out, swooped gracefully over the lovers, and flew out to sea across blue-green water. Gutan felt drawn to follow the birds in their majestic flight, to soar with them toward the horizon.
Gutan felt he shouldn’t be here on the beach with his parents, that he was uninvited, an intruder. His mother and father had always seemed so sedate and passionless, like the corpses in the mortuary at which the family toiled. Gutan always had trouble imagining that his parents ever made love, and if they did, it should have been a reasoned, controlled procedure, nearly clinical. Certainly not this furious, primitive outburst.
A feeling came into Gutan’s loins, and a surging explosion of red bonded the man and woman. The image faded, and presently a new one took its place. Someone in a room, standing naked on a green and brown Floriental carpet. It was a bedroom, with the mahogany leg of a bed occupying the upper right corner of his frame of vision. He looked down on a belly, bloated and with a birthmark on one side, but beautiful even so. It was his mother’s belly, in pregnancy. Gutan swooned.
Foggy, unidentifiable images slid slowly through his brain. He was a lifeboat in a raging rainstorm at night, fighting to reach the safety of a shore he couldn’t see. He wasn’t in the boat; he
was
the boat, and his plight angered him. He had a right to make shore, and this storm dared to interfere! He reached a point where he had to float across a narrow waterway, and something pushed him, aided him.
He found himself lying on his side in a small room illuminated by a single bulb. Inexplicably the bulb threw shadows on the wrong side, against the wall behind it, and Gutan picked out his own boat shape from others. He became a child, small and coughing water from its lungs. Something hit him in the center of his back, hard. A switch beneath the bulb spun without being touched, and the glow of light dimmed sharply but held for a fraction of a second, as if between realms and protesting the passage from light to dark. Finally it succumbed, and Gutan tumbled through blackness.
Something hit him again and he cried. He faced a dawn sky that was a spectacle of golden orange against eggshell blue. From far away, a rooster crowed.
His eyes followed the subtleties of change in the new day’s sky, and he felt his senses tingle. He beheld an ancient day, felt the permanence of cosmic eternity and the fragility of flesh.
Remnants of the stormy night dwindled in his memory, scattered by the loveliness he beheld. It seemed to him that endings were strung together with beginnings, that events could be recaptured and replayed, made right where they had been wrong.
He saw a turreted playhouse on one side, in a backyard he used to roam, in days when the yard seemed so large that he must have been small. The dark-haired woman came into view again, his mother on the steps of the old house that was later torn down. She wore a sleeveless white dress, and called to him without making a sound. The house vanished, and she stood silhouetted against eggshell-blue sky.
He rode a tricycle on the front driveway, going around in circles. Faster and faster, threatening to tip over, at the brink of possibility. He had all his fingers then, before the accident.
A car horn bleated.
Suddenly he was rolling backwards on the tricycle, circling much faster than he had gone forward. People, faces, and flashes of color whirred by, carried in the whining wind of Mnemo. His tricycle evaporated and he was a helpless baby once more, thrashing his arms and crying.
His mother and father appeared, and they spoke to him in an inexplicably familiar, ancient dialect. Gutan cooed and babbled, and his utterances blended perfectly with theirs.
It was a hundred centuries before Krassos, when Gutan’s father, Tyrus, was in command of one-of the ships in Hanno the Magnificent’s Dartellian fleet. Gutan’s father spoke of distant islands, and he carried a small pouch full of Dartellian coins.
Gutan was known as Ahiram then.
They were exquisite golden coins, and Ahiram was allowed to touch one. It glinted like sunlight from every angle, and the smoothness of its surface was incomparable. He became older, a boy holding the coin again. It belonged to him now, and he set it on a piece of cloth. He was at a table with his parents and a faceless sister, and he tasted the sweet boiled cabbage and heavily seasoned roast goose his mother had prepared. He dipped emmer wheat bread into pungent mustard paste and stared into the face that wasn’t a face.
Something in the mustard. He couldn’t get enough of it. As he devoured all in sight, his sister’s head became a skeleton skull seen from the back. He heard weeping, and images fled so rapidly across his brain that they left a trail of pain.
He absorbed the flavors and odors of baked river perch with sour grape tartar sauce . . . of ostrich eggs, ghee and curly leaves of endive . . . of lemon wedges and a pungent coriander paste mixed with Afsornian honey . . . of crisp ta-bread and sweet camel’s milk. He was no longer of Dartellia, no longer of that place or time.
He was the nameless ancestor of those people, and he looked through billions of eyes at them and at the future not so far beyond, where Gutan sat in a mnemonic memory machine. It was the dream of a dreamer again, the tricycle in circles backward and forward. It was hope. He was on the beach once more with his parents, in the explosion of color from his father’s loins, and this event was at the center of everything.
He radiated outward from an infinitesimal point, like wavelets from a flung pebble, and he locked in place in the mind of the little man in the machine.
From there he receded again with screaming, uncontrolled speed, to the hoary ancestors of ancestors, and their memories threatened to burst his cellular structure. Panic swamped him. He tried to direct his hands to remove the seat harness and breathing tube, and his hands seemed to move. But nothing changed. He wanted to scrape all the filthy, electrically conductive gel from his body!
He had to escape the rampaging machine! He screamed, an echoing howl through the deepest chambers of existence.
Wars inundated him, and he relived lives in microseconds. He was mutilated and died countless times. Red and gold Bureau of Loyalty officers goose-stepped over him, trampled him. Black-uniformed troops followed, their battle medals and weapons glinting in the sun. They gave way to blue legions, and waves of banner-carrying religious fanatics, and barbarian horsemen and more legions, and scabby armies with catapults that hurled fireballs. They rolled on without end, across the flaming horizons of every planet. They buried continents in fire, muck, and water. He believed the entire history of civilization was flashing before his eyes as he died, as Professor Pelter must have seen it.
A robed man knelt outside a burning city, cradling a dead girl-child in his arms. Gutan was the man, in dirty, bare feet, and his heart pounded out of control.
From the edge of the planet, approaching inexorably, came mindless masses of marching armies, feet beating rhythmically. They came in rainbow uniforms with a cacophony of metal raspings and poundings.
Clump-clump-clump! Clump-clump-clump! Clump-clump-clump!
From behind the armies hurtled a giant platform of parallel white lines that skimmed over their heads, swooped across their path and dipped one corner near Gutan. He stepped aboard with the girl-child and instantly their bodies dilated across the entire platform. They were spread-eagled, facing one another eye to eye, life touching death. Gutan saw through the dead girl’s eyes in reverse, penetrated the back of her skull to the armies beyond.
Clump-clump-clump! Clump-clump-clump! Clump-clump-clump!
Gutan and the child were larger than the armies, and on their platform they flew circles over the armies, swooping low and scattering them in all directions.
The platform knifed into the sky and away, with Gutan and the girl.
The dead eyes were all Gutan could see. They were motionless and disconnected from their sockets, with cells flaking and falling away. He wanted to press his body tighter against hers, to feel the receding warmth of her life. But only a faint tracing of the eyes remained of her.
The image of her eyes receded and he couldn’t remember what they looked like. A familiar throbbing began, where his severed finger had been. Cold, ever so cold. Gutan saw the planet behind him in greens, browns and blues, and armies were regrouping there. Icy pain shot from the finger void up his arm, into his brain. It was worse than ever before, beyond enduring.
He screamed.
Gutan’s platform spun away and hurtled with him into dark infinity. He barely made out a pinpoint of light in the frozen distance, far, far ahead.
Chapter 6
It is possible to see from one universe to the next, but only from the bubble of a skinbeating entity. Skinbeaters travel by whipping along the microthin electromagnetic skins that separate universes, and in so doing they occupy tiny portions of both universes at once. The process creates an invisible bubble around the entity, a bubble that is a vibrating window between the universes. Life forms contained by the bubble can see into either universe, and no portion of the bubble interior is inaccessible to them. When skinbeating ceases, the bubble dissipates and the skinbeating entity slips off track into the universe of origin.
—Teachings of Tananius-Ofo,
Crystal Library, Vol. 25
It was not quite mid-morning, and McMurtrey made his way down a spiral staircase toward Assembly Level B. The stairway was adjacent to an elevator bank, but for short ascents and descents McMurtrey preferred stairs. His elbow was much better now, and he hardly thought about it.
Partway down the steps, McMurtrey had to lunge for a handrail.
The ship jerked violently, first one way and then another.
With considerable effort he made it to a landing, and from there the ship ceased its aberrancy and he progressed at a regular pace down the remaining steps, keeping one hand on the railing.
He passed through a doorway into a wide corridor. There, in the midst of a knot of people, Johnny Orbust and Zatima were engaged in spirited debate over the role of women in religion. Orbust contended that women belonged at home, and he quoted the Apostle Nop from IX Thicor:
“‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.
“‘And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.’”
“That’s your religion, not mine!” Zatima shouted.
“It’s no different from yours. Nop also speaks of the veils women must wear, and the fact that women wear their hair long as a natural veil before God.”
“My hair is short!”
“And you are an abomination, an evil mutation!”
McMurtrey saw the shiny silver Snapcard in Orbust’s hand, though Orbust tried to conceal it by clutching it tightly.
“My denomination, the Sivvy, is very progressive,” Zatima said. “It is correcting the mistakes of men.”
“According to Haria, your holy/civil law, a woman is only worth half a man on the witness stand. It takes the testimony of two women to counter the testimony of just one man. Why hasn’t that ‘mistake’ been corrected yet?”
“It will be,” Zatima said. She appeared uneasy, didn’t seem able to counter Orbust’s Snapcard-boosted knowledge. Apparently she wasn’t aware of the card.
McMurtrey saw weaknesses in each side. If he mentioned the card to Zatima, that would shut Orbust down abruptly. But Orbust had a gun, and he seemed unstable. McMurtrey recalled as well his own conversation with Zatima, when she admitted being a rarity in her religion. She stood in quicksand, arguing the rights of women in her faith. But McMurtrey dared not criticize Zatima either, for she had that Nandu, maybe ParKekh, warrior with her. And the hand of this one always remained near his sword.
McMurtrey continued on to Assembly Room B-2, arriving there a few seconds before the appointed time. He found a middle-row seat, among three rows of bolted-down chairs, arranged around an expanse of empty floor at the center. The room was uncarpeted, and the chairs had no cushions, creating a cold austerity.
Across unseen speakers, Appy’s tones seemed particularly harsh as he listed the names of the tardy.
McMurtrey noticed Kelly Corona already seated, changed places to be next to her.
They compared experiences, learned that each had been saved by a tether during takeoff. In hushed tones, Corona informed him that she had heard Appy and Shusher arguing with one another, one into each of her ears. She told him of the lavender light from the wall opening in the strange room, and of her suspicion that one bathed in this light became privy to the private comlink between Appy and Shusher.
“If everything isn’t a monstrous farce,” she said, “I’ve been bathed in holy light.”
“Weird,” McMurtrey said.
“I’m hearing them again!” she whispered. “They’re still arguing!”
McMurtrey couldn’t hear anything other than Corona and the voices of the pilgrims in the room.
“I’m getting a better sense of what Shusher is saying” Corona said excitedly. “From his tones, I think. Somehow I know he’s saying that Appy’s personality stinks. He’s calling Appy an asshole!”
“Appy does have a difficult personality,” McMurtrey agreed.
He watched Tully slip into a front row seat.
“Shusher whines—that’s his language . . .” Corona fell silent, and she had an intense cast to her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” McMurtrey asked.
“I just . . . I just realized what Shusher said before I tumbled out of the lavender-lit room! It was an angry whine that ebbed and flowed . . . no way to duplicate the sound for your ears. But now I know what it meant!”
“Yes?” McMurtrey leaned toward her.
“He said, ‘Silence!’”
“Then it’s just as Appy said: Shusher requires quiet.”
“I was past the off-limits signs Appy warned us about—on the highest mezzanines. I must have made intrusive noises across their comlink.” She paused. “They’re at it again. Shusher just said something I can’t make out, I guess it’ll get easier as I hear more. Appy is responding that Shusher is more stupid than a camel. They really despise one another. You felt the ship being jolted a few minutes ago?”
“Yeah. I was in the stairwell.”
“That was them fighting over the speed controls. Appy was madder than hell, said if they went too fast it would damage the skins between universes, whatever that means, and T.O. would penalize them. They call God T.O., for Tananius-Ofo.”
“Tananius-Ofo. That’s the name of the planet where God is, the name of the place we’re going.”
Corona grunted, continued: “Appy mentioned a race, and a ‘pleasure program’ he wanted to win. He said Shusher’s stupidity was going to cost them victory.”
“Wow.”
“Anyway, Shusher said something—about God not liking Appy, I think—and suddenly the ship smoothed out. Maybe the comment put Appy in shock, or they worked out a speed compromise I didn’t hear. They have overlapping responsibilities and powers, and maybe God prefers to let them fight it out most of the time. Sometimes it’s best that way with children.”
“Children at the controls of this ship?”
“Maybe,” Corona said. “Who knows what the definition of a child is to them. All I know is this ship has big problems. Oh! I’m losing the connection. Or they’ve stopped communicating.”
Corona squinted one eye, had a perplexed expression on her face. She put a forefinger in each ear, rubbed around in the entrances to the ear canals. “Strange sensation of pressure changing,” she said. “Whenever the voices come and go.”
Past Corona to the right, a window dominated one wall, showing a giant purple and blue nebula hanging in space like an artist’s rendition, so delicate and lovely it almost didn’t seem real to McMurtrey. Large blue and white stars were set in the midst of glowing, veiny swirls of mysterious purple and blue clouds, clouds that were thick at the center of the nebula and delicate veils at the edges.
“We’re entering a spectacular nebula,” Corona said, noting his line of vision. “Comparable to anything I’ve ever seen. I’m not sure where we are, maybe to one side of our galaxy’s center. We shouldn’t be too far out yet, but who knows?”
“You’re talking about being lost in space. Hell, I’m lost on this ship, really turned around. We went down to get here, which should place us in the rear or quote unquote ‘bottom’ of the ship as it flies in space. But from this view, we seem to be at the top, seeing where we’re headed.”
“It’s probably done with high-quality mirrors and prisms,” Corona said. “I don’t think we’re looking directly into space from this room. Where they do look directly out, and some of the portholes seem to, they must use shielded glass to protect us from X-rays and gamma rays. Short-wavelength radiation could be fatal out here.”
“Do the direct-view windows look adequate to you?”
“Well, the safest way is without windows, using remote televid cameras. I’ve seen tiny particles embedded in some of the window glass, and my guess is that those particles absorb the harmful stuff. No use worrying now. We’re a captive audience.”
“In God’s hands,” McMurtrey said.
Although assembly room seats were not assigned, Appy had an arcane method of keeping track of those present. Like a nagging parent, he kept listing the names of the tardy. Finally the list was short: Orbust, Zatima and Singh. He identified each by religion, and so McMurtrey learned that Singh was a ParKekh, not a Nandu.
The corridor door banged open, and Zatima stomped in. Behind her trailed Singh, and he let go of the door prematurely, causing it to swing against Orbust.
Orbust said something.
It must have been a caustic comment, for Zatima whirled and faced him.
The ParKekh drew his sword halfway out of the scabbard.
Then Zatima spoke to her bodyguard in a low tone, and he relaxed his grip on the sword. It slid back into its pocket.
Zatima pointed toward seats in the back row, near McMurtrey, and she and Singh made their way in that direction.
Orbust selected a seat in the front row by Tully.
McMurtrey presumed that Appy was calling the roll in the other assembly rooms as well, via a complex networking and surveillance arrangement. McMurtrey envisioned Appy as a mini-god, omnipresent and multifunctioning.
A multiple-armed Nandu god, Heeva the Mighty, came to mind, a god considered by its followers to be the source of good and evil, the creator of life and the destroyer of life. It was a fragment from McMurtrey’s studies.
“Interesting debate in the corridor,” Appy said.
Johnny Orbust smiled.
“Of course Mr. Orbust had help with the debate,” Appy said.
The corners of Orbust’s mouth turned downward.
Is Appy going to mention the Snapcard?
McMurtrey wondered.
“A gun on the hip has a rather intimidating effect,” Appy said. “And Zatima’s armed escort. I’m surprised the participants didn’t kill one another. How can either of you discuss scripture with weapons at the ready?”
“Mine is not for offensive purposes,” Orbust said, uneasily. “It’s purely defensive.”
“Is it?” Appy asked. “Is it true that ‘the meek shall inherit D’Urth?’ Or is it more accurate to say that the powerful shall control that domain? Hasn’t this always been true? Survival of the fittest?”
“How can you, a . . . computer of God . . . blaspheme scripture?” Orbust asked. “You’re twisting the holy word.”
“Is it blasphemy to ask questions?” Appy queried. “This is one of the matters we will address on this journey. What is holy and what is not? Who is to decide such matters? Oh, I could pose endless questions!”
McMurtrey heard whispered conversation, turned and saw Zatima saying something in a low tone to Nanak Singh.
“It is interesting to discuss interpretation of scriptural passages,” Appy said. “Assuming in the first place that scripture was taken down correctly, it must be asked who did the translations from one language to another . . . and it must be asked if all of the passages were included. In the Krassian books, for example, there is a body of testamentary literature that didn’t make it into the Babul, perhaps for political reasons. I refer to the Tignos Gospels.”
“Blasphemy!” Orbust shouted. With an angry slap of leather he drew his Babul from its shoulder holster. He flipped through the pages, muttered to himself.
Two nuns near McMurtrey, one in black and one in white, scowled and whispered to one another while looking around the room nervously, apparently trying to discern the location of the P.A. speakers. Appy’s voice seemed to come from everywhere.
“Interpretation,” Appy said. “What, for example, is the definition of the word ‘Beast’ as it appears in the Babul? I’ve heard it used by some religions to refer to political entities, such as the Outer Planet Confederacy. Reborn Krassees have used the term synonymously with the name of the Pope; KothoLus have in turn said that Blue Presbyism is the ‘Beast.’ I’ve even overheard pilgrims aboard ship suggesting that Mr. McMurtrey might be the ‘Beast,’ since he’s perceived as an atheist. He’s in Cabin Sixty-six, Level Six. Three sixes are the sign of Satan.”
“You’re the Beast, Appy!” one of the nuns shouted. “You assigned the cabin numbers!”
“Did I?” Appy countered. “Or did I only do what I had to do, what I was commanded to do?”
The nun appeared embarrassed at her outburst and slouched into her chair, as if wishing she could disappear from view.
The Beast?
McMurtrey thought.
Satan? What have I gotten into?
“And what is the definition of ‘the Krassos’?” Appy asked, undeterred. “There are those, for example, who believe that this term refers to more than a person, that it refers more importantly to one part of a collective interplanetary consciousness consisting of every human being. ‘Krassos consciousness,’ in this interpretation, is an emerging of consciousness based upon astrological cycles. It is tied in with the belief in a Nandubhaga-type avatar or divine teacher who will one day externalize in human form for all of mankind. To the Hoddhists, it is Hoddha or Eyamai; to the Isammedans, it is the Prophet Isammed; to the ParKekhs it is another entity, and so on.” Appy fell silent, leaving the room in agitated whispers.
Corona nudged McMurtrey.
“I saw you staring at my breasts this morning, you bad beast,” she whispered.
McMurtrey flushed, glanced around to see if anyone had heard her. He couldn’t look at Corona after that remark! But she hadn’t sounded angry.
McMurtrey shook his head in exasperation. How should he respond and how many variations of correctness were there? Time was ticking, and he hadn’t answered. Maybe it was a test of some kind, God seeing if McMurtrey would do the proper thing. Kelly Corona was Satan. She was a siren calling, tempting him toward the rocks.