“Go ahead. No one will lay a finger on you. No one will pursue.”
“I… can’t.”
“Of course you can’t. For the same reason, you’ll never tell anyone what you’ve learned today. And the cell you’ll occupy for the next few months will be a plush suite with no locks, no bars. You are programmed not to escape, not to talk. This has become part of your ‘will,’ which is no more free than any other mortal’s.”
“That’s brainwipe.” Specks of sweat broke out on his brow. “That is against the Charter.”
“If it were brainwipe, I could tell you to stick your finger in your eye and you would, all the way to the last knuckle. Will you do that, please?”
“It’s only teaching,” Otto said, “very efficient teaching. The way you’re teaching the S’kang about death and resurrection.”
“Play with words. You have machines, unholy machines.”
“If you had the machines, they would be holy, no? And you would have succeeded by now.” She nodded at the guard. “Take him away.”
Joshua didn’t want to give up the pistol. The guard pried it out of his hands and jostled him through the door. The other guard followed them out and the door buzzed shut.
“Good to work with you again, Otto.” He murmured something polite. “Getting close to retirement, aren’t you?”
“Close. Haven’t made up my mind.” Prime operators were allowed to retire at forty-five, with full benefits, though few enough actually lived that long.
“Wish I had the option.” She slid a large sealed envelope across the desk. “This is four-day ink, some twenty thousand words. Any problem?”
“Guess not.” Otto knew the details of his mission as instinctively as he knew how to act in the Father Joshua persona. But both would fade with time; eventually, he’d have to rely on his memory. “Read it before I go?”
“No, you have a private cabin all the way to Altair, on the Tsiolkovski. Give you something to do—no women, no booze.”
“Yeah, I know. This guy is… strange.”
“Should be rather dull, compared to your last one.” Otto’s last mission had almost been his last mission. It had ended with him lying in a fetid jungle, his left lung collapsed by a bone-splinter spear smeared with animal feces.
“Oh yeah.”
She leaned back and looked professional. “What’s bothering you, Otto? We thought we were doing you a favor with this one.”
“You haven’t been inside his head.”
“Actually, I have. I monitored your overlay, of course.”
“It’s not the same, Sara. You don’t get his intensity.” She nodded slightly. “He’s… I’ve had thirty-some overlays—”
“Thirty-four.”
“—but I’ve never had one come on this strongly. He wasn’t scared or confused or passive in the tank. He tried to absorb me!”
“It’s happened before; never succeeded. You’d have to reverse the polarity of the whole machine. A human brain doesn’t generate that kind of energy.”
“I know that and you know that. But he didn’t—and he was absolutely confident. Even as he lost control, step by step.”
“So he’s a fanatic.”
“That’s not it. He is, yes, in his own way—but I’ve been fanatics before—you know what it is?”
“Tell me.”
“I’ve never so thoroughly despised a man in my life. I’ve been scoundrels, murderers, assassins—this man has never broken a law in his life. And yet… ‘amoral’ doesn’t come close to describing him. He’s simply evil. Evil.”
“That’s a little strong. I know he’s a hypocrite—”
“He doesn’t have a molecule of religion in his body, no, but I should talk. He doesn’t have any ethics, either; nothing but ambition. Human beings, nonhuman intelligences, we’re nothing but pieces in a game to him.
“He’s even contemplated genocide—killing off the S’kang just to keep others from succeeding where he’s failed. To him the act would have no more moral weight than turning off a light. Being inside his head is like being part of an evil machine.”
“Well, you’re stuck with him. For eight weeks, anyhow.” She sat up. “Frog. Dagger-and-cloak. Elixir. Kiwi.” Otto’s eyelids drooped and he slumped into semiconsciousness.
“When you awaken, you will be about ten per cent Otto McGavin, and ninety per cent Joshua Immanuel. Your reaction to any normal situation will be consistent with Joshua’s personality and knowledge. Only in situations of extreme stress will you have access to your abilities as a prime operator. Kiwi, elixir. Cloak-and-dagger. Frog.”
Immanuel/Otto stared at Sara with a disturbing glitter in his eyes. He picked up the envelope and left without a word.
The humans who first explored Cinder happened to be there when Ember was cold, covered with soot. They found a planet with seas and rivers frozen to glass; ground covered with a frosting of dry ice; vegetation dormant in crystalline hibernation. The only large animals looked like beetles the size of washtubs, crawling across the land at less than a meter a day. For water, the beetles would find a certain kind of bush that had a taproot descending thousands of meters into fossilwater. They would gnaw a hole in the plant’s base and send a hollow tendril down for moisture. They ate the corpses of small insects, slowly.
Cinder was named and catalogued and forgotten for half a century. Then Ember flared and glowed again, and eventually another exploration team happened by.
Rivers flowed and the seas rocked gently under a small moon’s tides. The planet was covered with flowers that nodded in the sweet warm breeze; flowers laid out in precise geometric patterns, tended by creatures who were no longer beetles, who fit no known taxonomic pigeonhole.
They walked on four spidery legs and had three arms, one a simple tentacle, the other two terminating in complicated hands. Their carapaces (which the first explorers had found to be full of puzzling organs) were mostly hollow, and served as voice-boxes. They could make an amazing variety of sounds by scraping and thumping the inside of the shell, and by forcing air through a slitted membrane. They did an eery imitation of human speech—and learned to communicate in a matter of months.
They claimed to be over a million years old (their years were 231.47 Standard days long)—not just as a race, but as individual organisms. During hibernation, they claimed, their bodies were rebuilt, their memories wiped clean; when the sun was reborn, so were they. They could only die by accident, and they were very careful.
As a matter of fact, they could also die by murder or vivisection. A xeno-anatomist arranged a rather gruesome accident; none of the creatures objected to his dissecting the corpse. Their lives were full of ritual, but there was none concerning death.
He found nothing that could possibly serve as an organ of reproduction.
He asked them about that, and had to explain what reproduction was. They wouldn’t believe him. He showed them tapes of copulation, pregnancy, and birth. They thought it was amusing: humans wasted so much time and flesh making imperfect copies of themselves. It’s so much more efficient to just slow down every fifty years or so and let your body repair itself.
So which came first, the chicken or God?
They had a creation myth, but it was so complicated that it made Finnegans Wake look like a grocery list. One individual whose “hereditary” position seemed to be that of philosopher (it translated as “keeper of useful sarcasms”) said that he didn’t understand the myth either. What good would it be if you could understand it?
They asked him where he had learned the myth. Where did anybody learn a myth? You ask the rocks.
It was a decade before that made sense. Investigating the S’kang (their name was a sibilant followed by a hollow clang) was like opening Chinese boxes. They never really lied, but they never answered anything directly. “Asking the rocks” was their form of reading.
Their tentacle could hold on to things, but it was primarily an electrical organ. Outwardly, its main function seemed to
be killing insects for food. But it could also be used to record information inside the crystal structure of piezoelectric minerals, which were rather plentiful.
Their planet was one huge library. They could read and write by instinct, by racial memory. At least no one could remember having been taught.
The real mystery of Cinder, though, did not come from biology, nor philosophy, nor yet library science—but from astrophysics. The planet was not where it was supposed to be.
A planetary system has to fall into one of eleven well-de-fined morphologies—characterized by the sizes of the planets and how they’re arranged in the system—which are determined by the size and rate of spin of the primordial gas cloud that gave them birth. The seven planets that orbited Ember each fit one of these morphologies quite well—except for Cinder. It should have been twice as far away from its sun.
Was it a twelfth kind of system? Astrophysicists said no, impossible. Eventually someone mentioned it to the S’kang. They said it had gotten too cold. So they’d moved in closer.
The amount of energy required to move a Cinder-sized planet from where it was supposed to be to where it was came to about 1034 joules. That’s equivalent to the conversion into energy of a hundred million megatons of matter, with one-hundred-percent efficiency—enough energy to run all the planets of the Confederación for a Standard century.
Energy is power; power, money. A great many people would have given a lot to know how the S’kang had done it. Only two concerns had the wherewithal to actively pursue the question: the Confederacion and Energia General, the cartel that owned every basic patent on tachyon conversion (as well as a piece of every volt that was generated any other way).
The Confederacion had a complicated array of injunctions against E.G., keeping them away from Cinder on the basis of their interpretation of the Charter. The S’kang were very much an endangered species, with only 1,037 individuals and no ability to reproduce. The Confederacion was bound to do everything in its power to protect them from exploitation.
In the process of protecting the S’kang, they occasionally did ask how they’d managed to move the planet like that. The straightest answer they got was “Very carefully.”
The S’kang were not cosmic jokers, laughing up their seen sleeves at the poor Earthmen. In fact, they were rather naive creatures, straightforward in their own way. It’s true that you could ask the same question a hundred different times and get a hundred seemingly different answers. But the S’kang concept of “truth” was indirect, malleable, subtle. If you tried to convince them that the universe was run by law and logic, they would listen politely. But to them, cause and effect were evanescent fictions: things happened; explaining them was both interesting and futile; the only really important things were slowing down at the proper time, rebirth, and tending the flowers properly.
Consider the lilies of the field…
From human contact, they absorbed a quirky and usually harmless assortment of ideas and things. They wore junk and jewelry. Hated human music but collected recordings of city noises. Loved Hilbert, hated Euclid. Kept gerbils as pets; prized caterpillar hors d’oeuvres. Did crossword puzzles without looking at the definitions.
I am the Resurrection and the Life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live…
Were suckers for a resurrection myth.
2.
“Your Excellency.” A fat young priest helped Otto/Bishop Immanuel down the last steps of the shuttle ladder; then fell to one knee and kissed his ring. “Bless you, sire.”
Otto muttered a return blessing and looked around. They had landed on a runway of gravel. There were no buildings in sight—only brightly colored flowers from horizon to horizon.
He motioned for the man to get up. “No customs inspection—no forms to fill out? A refreshing change.”
“There are’ forms, Excellency, waiting for you at the monastery. But they’re mostly filled out, except for signatures.”
“Very well.” He was only half listening. The flowers weren’t random splashes of color, as they had first appeared to be. When the wind was still, they made an orderly progression of color, all the way out to where distance blued them to a monochrome. Ruffled by a breeze, the flowers would present different surfaces to the eye, and the orderliness would dissolve into a pleasant shifting chaos; perhaps an alien kind of order. He had seen tapes, but it was different standing here with the heavy perfume washing over you, the flowers whispering…
“Pardon?” The man was saying something.
“The first impression is always hypnotic, sire. The beauty becomes familiar, but never palls.”
“Now nature reflects the glory of God,” Joshua said automatically.
“Yes, Excellency. We… all of us feel particularly blessed to be allowed to follow our ministry here.”
“Quite so, indeed.” Joshua reminded himself: not all of them are in on it. Otto reminded himself: some of these people thought they were joining a legitimate order; have to sort them out. “Well. Shall we find the monsignor?”
“Right away, sire.” He put two fingers in his mouth and emitted a piercing, unpriestly whistle.
The flowers in front of them parted and three S’kang emerged. They walked sideways, stalked eyes bobbing up and down, and talked as they came, a soft chittering. Two of them were wearing saddles; the other, a king of load-carrier with elastic scraps. Their shells were glossy blue-black and their skin was of a pebbly texture, yellow streaked with brown.
They were about the ugliest creatures Otto had ever seen.
“You have the supplicants trained as beasts of burden?” Joshua asked. “We decided against that when I was here last.”
“Actually, no, sire. Only one of these is a supplicant, the one with the rosary—hello, Paul.”
The creature made a sound that was undeniably “hello.” With a cricket accent.
“And none of them is here against his will; none of them is paid. In fact, it was their idea—very strange; not a favor, not a duty. Just something to do.” He and Paul lifted Joshua’s luggage aboard the load-carrier.
Joshua regarded the unsettling beast he was supposed to ride. “You there, uh, can you speak?”
“Yes, of course,” it said.
“Do you have a name?”
“Not one that you can say.” It made a noise like a sneeze competing with a broken snare drum. “You may call me whatever you like.”
He thought. “Balaam—uh, Balaam’s. Is that all right?”
“Ay-firmative. The beast of burden that was given voice by your prime principle. Very appropriate.”
Joshua shook his head. “You—you know the First Testament?”
“Better than I do,” the other priest said.
“In one sense of the word ‘know,’ yes. No/yes.” Staccato thumping bass that was S’kang laughter. “Also the Second Testament. Also the Q’ran, Zend-Avesta, Agama, Tao Te Ching, Rig-Veda, Talmud, Analects, Eddas, Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures—”
“Wait!” To the young priest: “Who filled him with this… apostasy?”
“Not us, sire, I assure you.”
“Goddamn right,” Balaam’s said. “My archeologist friends.”
“He swears, too,” the priest said weakly.
“Why did they teach you these things?” Joshua asked.
“They didn’t teach me. They learned my function and allowed me to use their library.”
“Your… function?”
“ ‘Keeper of Useful Sarcasms.’ ”
Joshua nodded, his lips a thin prim line. He tested the saddle. “Shall we be going?”
“Ay-firmative. Get your ass on your ass.” Thump—thump.
3.
Monsignor Applegate was waiting for them at the monastery entrance, hands folded on his ample pot. He kissed Excellency’s ring and ushered him into the monastery office. Bolted the door.
Undid his collar. “Good to see you, Josh. Drink?”
“By all
means. It was a dusty ride.” He took a seat in the only soft chair in the room, the one behind the desk.
Applegate filled two brass cups with wine tapped from a wooden cask.
“Well,” he handed one to Joshua, “what news—”
“Things have changed, Henry.”
“Naturally. Four years… we’ve made improvements.”
“Outside, I mean, not here. Since when did the flowers go all the way down to the strip? Is that for our benefit, or—”
“No, it’s that way all over the planet. Past couple of years, they’ve been planting like crazy.”
“Because Ember’s going out soon?”
“Sometimes they say that. Sometimes they say other things.”
“As expected, I guess. How long have the S’kang been… helping out around here—and why unbelievers?”
“Just the past few months. The unbelievers, that is. The supplicants have been working for us since just after you left; they helped build the new wing and the, uh, weatherproof section.”
“That’s a nice mural.” It was an odd mural, actually, along one whole wall. Depicting the stations of the cross, the painter’s technique improved steadily from the first to the fourteenth: he had learned by doing.
“One of the S’kang did that. An unbeliever, as a matter of—”
“Has it occurred to you that the unbelievers might be spies?”
Henry lowered himself carefully into one of the hard chairs and set his goblet on the floor. “Spies? For whom?”
“I don’t know. For themselves; curiosity. If they find out—”
“None of them is allowed to observe any rituals or partake of any sacraments. You’re too suspicious, Josh. They hang around helping the archeologists, too. They’re just naturally curious and have time to spare.”
“How do you know they don’t observe the rituals? How can you tell the supplicants from the others?”
He smiled. “That’s easy; they took care of that themselves. You didn’t notice the ones you came in with? The supplicant Paul has his Christian name written on his forehead. Well, what passes for a forehead.”