The Race for God (22 page)

Yakkai touched a dark brown phylactery that was secured to his left arm, added: “Rabbi Teitelbaum didn’t want me to keep this, but I convinced him. I’ve got a little good luck parchment in here and a few other religious gadgets. Neat stuff that I’ve had for years. It’s a tradition among many devout Middists, and at first the good Rabbi didn’t feel I deserved the stuff. I told him I was still of the Middist nationality and that if I kept the pouch I might come around and practice the religion one day.”

“That really got to him, eh?” McMurtrey asked.

“I was lying through my teeth. I like the stuff for good luck, that’s all. Teitelbaum took about everything else. You saw the
tallis kotus
I had on?”

“The what?”

“The
tallis kotus,
a four-cornered undergarment with fringes showing, reminding the wearer of religious duties. I hear you’ve studied religion and thought you might have . . . ”

“Oh, yes, I’m slightly familiar with that, didn’t notice the fringe.” McMurtrey glanced down. “You don’t seem to be wearing it now.”

“Rabbi took it. He was adamant about it for some reason. You’d think I should keep it as a reminder, but he insisted I should accept Middism first, that I wasn’t one of the flock, so to speak. He cared more about the
tallis
than anything else.”

McMurtrey nodded. “Where’d you get the shirt and pants?”

“Middist tailors are fast. It’s my coat, reworked.”

“You don’t mean by Appy, do you?”

“Because Appy says he’s Middist, you mean? No. Actually, I don’t know. Teitelbaum arranged it, left me in my cabin and took the coat. Besides, the way Appy swears, I doubt if Teitelbaum would deal with him any more than necessary.”

“Maybe it was necessary.”

“Could be. The rabbi’s a tough guy. He might even try to reform Appy.”

“To do that he’d have to reprogram Appy, and that might not be so easy. I’ll bet the access codes are doozies. You heard about the imperfect programming Appy got?”

“No,” Yakkai said.

“Appy told me his initial programming was all he got, all he’d ever get, that he was on his own, kinda like a person with Free Will.”

“Cut loose in the wilds like the rest of us with faulty equipment, eh?”

“Yeah, I guess. We’re two frauds, you say. Wonder how many more are aboard.”

“Everyone, I’d say. It’s probably our common thread. Appy’s a phony, and God, too.”

McMurtrey chuckled. “An atheist remark if ever I’ve heard one.”

The men smiled at one another and parted, each going in an opposite direction.

On Level 6, Jin sat naked on the deck in apparent meditation, recalling those moments before when McMurtrey had passed him and spoken of the chemstrip. Concealed by the way Jin clasped his hands together, shiny blue bone blades flashed in and out from the tips of his thumbs.

Certainly McMurtrey couldn’t suspect Jin’s Bureau of Loyalty affiliation. If that interloper had seen anything, it could only be enough to suspect that Jin was not so antimaterialistic as he seemed to be. A breach of piety, no more, and no worse, than the infractions of others.

But Jin remained troubled. He had recognized the risk when he commandeered the chemstrip and Snapcard in a public place. But these were necessary acts, placing wanted, illegal technology into Bureau control for analysis. Such devices were considered dangerous to Inner Planet security, so Jin had the force of law with him if it came to a showdown.

But that law was far away, with little practical force in this distant place. This was not an Inner Planet ship, didn’t fall within the jurisdiction of the Bureau. Or did it? Jin didn’t know how arrangements had been made for his passage. Either a deal had been cut between the Bureau and God, or the Bureau, with its staggering technological capability, had worked a way to sneak Jin aboard.

Why had the Bureau permitted these ships to take off? Was it because the Bureau was incapable of stopping them, because they were controlled by a greater power? Was there a stronger power than the Bureau? Jin had trouble visualizing such a possibility, even with the information programmed into him about God. Jin felt that the final authority in any confrontation was the Inner Planet’s Bureau of Loyalty, his Bureau.

This could be a tremendous opportunity for Jin, an opportunity for him to be responsible for the extension of Bureau power. He had heard of cyberoos receiving more responsibility in reward for outstanding work, but he hesitated to proceed in this mysterious and untested place, far beyond communication range with his superiors. He was balanced on the edge of uncertainty, caught between what he had been programmed to do and the reality beyond those predictions that were inherent in programming.

Was he supposed to tip that balance, proceeding with decisions that seemed appropriate?

It wasn’t Jin’s assignment to analyze the chemstrip and Snapcard, so they would stay where he had placed them, reduced and tucked into his bellybutton compartment. No one could find them there or prove anything.

A shadow passed over him, blocking thought. He retracted the blue thumb blades.

With a glance at Jin, McMurtrey proceeded on, passing close to Corona’s closed roomette. Corona’s screen shot up, and with remarkable strength she hauled him inside. The screen snapped shut, and she threw him on the bed, feet toward the headboard. McMurtrey felt like a fat spider in the clutches of a smaller but more powerful foe. He was supine, looking up at her as she leaned over him like a victorious schoolyard fighter. She had that familiar schoolyard expression, too, with taunting eyes and truculent smile. But she wasn’t hitting him. She was working at the buckle of his belt.

She got the belt open, and her strong fingers pulled at the clasp of his trousers.

“I’m raping you,” she announced.

The alarm system on his pickpocket-proof trousers went off, a micro-police siren. Corona pulled back, startled.

McMurtrey laughed, touched his Wriskron to deactivate the alarm. He was feeling very excited.

“No easy task,” he said. “I’m wearing Grandma’s pickpocket-proof trousers. She made a bundle on the invention. Every pocket is triple-sealed, with overlays and sensor ziplocks set to the wearer’s precise body metabolism and temperature. Each body varies, you know, and these pockets recognize minute differences.”

“So?” she said. “What does that have to do with the clasp? How does the damn thing work?”

“When Grandma said pickpocket-proof, she went all the way. A thief can’t take the trousers, can’t cut through anything. The fabric is even .60 caliber bulletproof.”

“Rape-proof pants? Some kinda chastity set?”

“Yeah. Grandpa was an inventor, too. He came up with an anti-bitching spray, and he used to spray it on Grandma. It was like a seasick pill, he claimed—it had to be employed BEFORE the bitching started. It used to make Grandma madder than hell. But Grandpa insisted it worked. I never knew for sure, and he didn’t market it commercially.”

“I hate the bitchiness stereotype applied to women,” Corona snapped. “Why aren’t men described as bitchy?”

“Maybe because they aren’t that way.”

She pushed him playfully. “Know what else I hate?” she asked.

McMurtrey shrugged.

“A man who babbles when he’s supposed to be making love.”

McMurtrey touched the trousers clasp, and it opened.

She smiled, bent down and pressed her lips against his. Her mouth was warm and moist.

Clumsily, he pressed his hands against her breasts. Then, as if expecting rejection for his oafishness, he withdrew his hands.

She made him put them back, and this time McMurtrey tried to be more gentle.

But Corona didn’t seem to have gentleness in mind. Her dark eyes flashed ferally, and she stretched out on his body.

McMurtrey kissed her neck, teased at her ear lobes with his lips.

“You’re driving me crazy,” she said.

“I am?”

“Yes, silly!”

“What if Appy decided to raise your screen right now?” McMurtrey asked. “He’s kinda unpredictable and weird, might think it’s funny to expose us. Maybe there’s others fooling around too. Who knows? Sister Mary and Archbishop Perrier? Did you ever think about all the activity going on behind closed doors, behind screens, on planets like D’Urth all over the universe? It’s positively mind-boggling!”

“You’re doing it again. Hush!”

Her lips were hard on his, then suddenly soft and pliable. “Do whatever you want with me,” she said.

“Me? I thought you were doin’ the doin’ . . . .Wait—my ears just popped. . . . Did you hear that?” He pushed her face away. “On the comlink!”

“Not again! I don’t—”

“Bleep!” A distant sound in both of McMurtrey’s ears.

“There . . . that!” McMurtrey said.

“Yeah.”

Louder this time: “Bleep! Bleep-bleep-bleep!”

“Sounds like a horn,” she said. “Like the one we heard on the comlink this morning.”

“Like a damned car horn, like we’re on some kinda freeway out here.”

In one ear McMurtrey heard Appy screaming, in that flawed Middist accent: “A plague on you, Shusher. It won’t let you pass! Back off and let it go ahead!”

“Did you hear that?” McMurtrey asked.

“Yes!”

“This IS a freeway,” McMurtrey said. “Remember, Appy said the skins between universes are the shortest spaceways to God. Must be a lotta traffic out here.”

Corona rolled to one side, lay beside him on the bed.

As before, McMurtrey only heard Appy when he touched Corona’s skin. He held one hand to the side of her neck.

“Bleep! Waah!”

“O Krassos help us!” Appy wailed. “I can’t control this psycho! Override! T.O., respond to my override request!”

“Wahuwah . . . weeee . . . soooooo . . . fweeeee . . . ohhh . . . ommmm . . . ”

“No, Shusher,” Appy said. “That’s not even a ship! Don’t worry if it gets there first! We aren’t competing with it. If we were, we’d have been told. It’s the ships like us we’re supposed to beat—the ones behind us!”

In McMurtrey’s right ear: “Wahuwah . . . weeee . . . soooooo . . . fweeeee . . . ohhh . . . ommmm . . . ”

“You ignoramus! Every skinbeater isn’t a ship! You were there when T.O. said it: ‘Many entities traverse the whipping passageways between universes. Only one passes at a time. The way is narrow and fragile. Do not damage it.’”

Shusher’s tone became bassoon-deep. Then it soared into a frightening high-pitched squeal that made McMurtrey pull his hand from Corona’s skin.

“Ow!” McMurtrey exclaimed. He sat up.

So did Corona, and they faced one another on the bed.

She shook her head, rubbed her right ear. “That hurt,” she said.

“Has Shusher stopped?” he asked.

“Kind of. He’s making weird little sounds now, like maybe he’s building up for another big one.”

“Weird is right.”

“Yeah.”

McMurtrey touched her neck again.

“That’s it, Shusher,” Appy said. “Let the lines go. Let them go ahead.”

“The lines?” McMurtrey said. “Shusher and the white lines again?”

“I guess,” Corona said.

“What in the hell is going on out there?”

Corona let out a long breath. “Shit if I know.”

In his left ear, McMurtrey heard Appy grunt, followed by gurgling.

Then McMurtrey’s right ear filled with sound, painlessly this time. It was a harmonic of great intensity, carrying with it unidentifiable layers of contribution, building to a crescendo.

“No!” Appy screamed. “Don’t try it!”

Corona was shaking involuntarily against McMurtrey’s hand.

McMurtrey felt like a tuning fork, with an incredible harmonic tone coursing every pore, cell and muscle of his body, setting all into motion in a great undulating wave.

This ship is a skinbeater,
McMurtrey thought.
It ‘negotiates’
the fragile skins between universes, whatever that means. Is this sound an aspect of it?

Corona’s face was unidimensional and had gaps in it, with dark cells dancing near one another, not quite touching. She had a strange expression on her face, as if she were being killed and couldn’t figure out how. McMurtrey could see right through the dancing cells, and through his own hand held against the back of her neck, to the headboard wall beyond.

We’re both doing it,
he thought. He moved his hand in a dream-state, looked upon its looseness as if it were not of him. He wasn’t touching her now, but the visual and auditory sensations remained.

I
can still think and move,
he thought.

His hand felt numb and asleep, and he shook it. The particles comprising what once had been his skin moved faster, and he perceived only paper thinness to the hand—a frightening and incomplete singularity of dimension.

With sound filling his head he leaped to the floor, spun and looked back at Corona. She was a dot-matrix woman, with only a facsimile of the features she once possessed.

Next to her sat a wide expanse of dots in human form, in McMurtrey’s form.

The air filled with dots, and in an insect swarm the dots from the bed rejoined him, in delayed reaction. It made him afraid to move.

“Did you see that?” he asked. And his words were like the visual dots, with little gaps of nothingness between hard edges of sound.

She nodded.

McMurtrey felt the deck shudder, saw the compartment screen flex violently. Everything whirled and spun before him, grew dark. He seemed riveted in place, on a spinning carnival ride. But this carnival had no colors.

“Our ship entered a spinning knife-edge of parallel white lines,” Corona said calmly, from somewhere. McMurtrey couldn’t see her, couldn’t see or feel anything. He felt like a spinning, whirling, electronic receiver.

Corona again, her voice susurrant: “Ahead I saw a limitless plane of parallel lines against unbounded space. The stars were brilliant, blinding, with no rest for my eyes. Light burned through me. I died of pain and was reborn. Appy says the skins are damaged. Big trouble because of that. He’s angry with Shusher, says T.O. will never forgive this. Appy talked to Shusher like a schoolteacher scolding an errant student, said that when we were skinbeating we were pulling the compressed skins of two adjacent universes through Shusher’s drive system. He said Shusher didn’t understand how delicate an operation it was, that the skins had been compressed to microthin wires and we were in two universes at once—half in each—pulling the skins through somehow. Behind us it’s like a damaged bridge the other ships may not be able to pass. They may have to go back, try another way. Skins take a long time healing.”