“So what am I supposed to do? Go along meekly to the execution? Hand it over! Now!”
Mudge let loose of his shoulder, which pumped blood, felt in the pocket of his splendid coat, and held out a disc-star attached to a long chain. Ohm took it and said, “This had better be the right one.”
He had to act swiftly but was unable to do so because the two men could not carry Snick for him. He rejected the idea of transporting her himself at the same time that he went with the men. Though wounded badly—Horvath was becoming gray—they could still be dangerous. He would have to leave Snick here while he took care of the men.
As it was, he had to drag the now near-unconscious Horvath into the elevator cage and then support Mudge into it. When the two were lying on the floor, Ohm took the cage up to the top level. The star admitted him into the end of the apartment opposite that which he had entered that morning. Fortunately, the stoner room was close to this end. There were only two cylinders, which forced him to prop Horvath, the closest to dying, into one first. He turned the power on at the switchboard behind a panel, reluctantly revealed by Mudge. Then he shoved Mudge into the other one. The man had enough blood and spirit left to spit in his face before Ohm could close the door. A few seconds later, Ohm dragged Mudge’s stiff and heavy form out. He returned to the elevator and, in three minutes, had Snick into the apartment. After he had put her into a cylinder, he turned the power on. He opened the cylinder door and dragged her out onto the floor. After laying her down, he felt for her pulse. It was fluttering weakly, but it was there.
He stripped her and looked for wounds. Though he could find none, he knew that that did not mean that she might not be dying. She could have been injected with a slow poison as insurance that, if she were found, she would die shortly after being destoned. Or she might have been given an overdose of an anesthetic. Whatever had been done to her, she should go to a hospital immediately. He could not get her to one without putting himself in danger, and he did not want to call in. He had to have plenty of time to get away from the Tower.
He put her back into the cylinder and stoned her. After looking through the apartment, he found a compacter and jammed her clothes into that. Then he dragged her to the elevator and went down with her to the level that exhibited ancient sea creatures. One of these was a gigantic carnivorous whale which was frozen in the act of shooting out of the sea. Its enormous and open toothed mouth was a few feet below the level of the fence by the spiraling escalator.
Puffing, Ohm hauled her to the railing and balanced her stiff body on it, her head pointing-inward toward the now quiet sea.
“In a way, Snick,” he said, “you’ve been my Jonah.”
He laughed hysterically, the echoes bouncing back from the far walls of the Tower. When he had managed to get control of himself, he said, gasping, “I’m doing this because you’re a human being and because I just won’t murder. To hell with the greater good!”
He tilted her and then shoved. She slid over the railing and fell into the mouth of the whale and into its belly.
“They’ll find you someday,” he said, sobbing. “By then…by then…”
No matter what happened to him by then, he would not regret having saved her. He would pay whatever price was required.
Sunday-World
VARIETY, Second Month of the Year
D6-W1 (Day-Six, Week-One)
27.
Thomas Tu Zurvan, “Father Tom,” priest unlicensed by the government, licensed by God, awoke. He did not curse, though most men would have done so. He, who never drank liquor, had a hell of a hangover. (How else describe a hangover than as a “hell”?) Saturday’s sinner had escaped punishment by passing on his headache to Sunday’s saint. Father Tom did not mind. He gloried in the pain perhaps too much. His shoulders were big enough to bear the bad karma of others, and so was his head.
Nevertheless, when he got up and passed the cylinder from which Saturday stared, Father Tom omitted the sign of blessing that he made to the other five occupants.
What Father Tom did not know was that Charlie Ohm did not elude the consequences of his guzzling. Ohm always awoke with a hangover because he thought he should have one. By the time that he realized that someone else had taken it over for him, he was rid of his hangover or had submerged it with the hair of the dog that bit him. Thus, in this strictly economic, budget-keeping universe there was one extra hangover not down in the books.
After his sojourn to the bathroom, Zurvan ate a light breakfast. Then, naked, he got down on his knees by the bed and prayed aloud for every creature in the cosmos. Rising, he set swiftly to the things that needed doing, the changing of the bedclothes, the picking up of items left by Saturday’s slob (bless him!), and the washing and putting away of things that needed such. After that, he went to his personal possessions closet, removed the items he used in his battle against evil, and arranged them as required. That two of them were a wig and a long thick beard did not cause him to wonder why. At this time of day, he accepted everything as always having been ordained, no reason to ask for reasons. He had forgotten that he had deflated the dummy that looked so much like him. He was, by the time he awoke, one man only. That is, except for the rare times when he had to pass on a message to the immer council. That period of knowing that he was not quite Father Tom quickly evaporated. In the evening, ah, that was different. Then voices and visions and thoughts that he did not know while the sun shone strongly crept in like shadows.
He dressed and went into the bathroom to paint and dye. Ten minutes later, he was striding toward the door to the hall, a long oaken shaft that curled at the upper end in his right hand. It was seldom that he remembered that he was born left-handed but had grown right-handedness into the Zurvan persona.
His wig was auburn and wild and fell to the back of his waist. The end of his nose was painted blue; his lips, green. The waist-long beard was decorated with many small butterfly-shaped cutouts of various dazzling designs. Broad red circles enclosing blue six-pointed stars decorated his white ankle-length robe. His ID disc-star bore a flattened figure eight lying on its side and slightly open at the end.
A big orange S was painted on his forehead.
His feet were, as every prophet’s and holy man’s should be, bare.
He carried no shoulderbag, an omission that made Manhattanites stare at him.
The door opened and gushed a light that very few other than he ever saw.
“God’s good morning!” he shouted at the five adults in the hail. “Bless you, brothers and sisters! May your selves strive to overcome your selves! May you respect your mortal bodies and your immortal souls and each day take one more step upward to genuine humanhood and to Godhood!”
Holding the staff with three fingers, he made a flattened oval of the thumb and first finger. With the other hand, he passed his long finger three times through the oval. The oval was for eternity and immortality, hence, for God. The finger sliding three times through the oval represented the act of spiritual intercourse of humankind with The Eternal. The thumb and the two fingers stood for God, the human body, and the human soul. They also symbolized God, all creatures, and Mother Nature, God’s consort. Thrice symbolic, they also stood for love, empathy, and knowledge of self and the universe.
Some of the loungers said, “God bless you, too, Father Tom!” Others grinned broadly or also made the sign of blessing, though not in the sense he intended.
He strode by them, his nose wrinkling, in spite of himself, at the odor of tobacco smoke, booze, and unwashed bodies. “Let them discover, God, what they are doing to themselves. Show these children the light so that they may follow it if they would!”
“Give it to them, Father!” a man shouted. “Scorch them with hellfire and brimstone!” He laughed uproariously.
Father Tom stopped, turned, and said, “I don’t preach hellfire, my son. I preach love, peace, and harmony.”
The man got to his knees and stretched out his arms in mock-repentance. “Forgive me,
Father! I know not what I do!”
“A prophet is not without honor save in his own block building,” Zurvan said. “I don’t have the power to forgive you. You forgive yourself, and then God will forgive you.”
He stepped out into Shinbone Alley under a cloudless sky and a steadily warming sun. The light of day was not as bright as that which came from everywhere in the world, from the distant stars invisible even to radio astronomers, from the trees and the grass, from the rocks in the garden, and from the center of the Earth. Brightest of all, though, was that which shone from the center of Father Tom Zurvan.
Thus the day passed with Father Tom standing on the street corners and preaching to whomever would listen or standing outside the doors of block buildings or private residences and shouting that he had The Word and the tenants should come out and listen to It. At 1:00 P.M., he went to the door of a restaurant and rapped on the window until a waiter came. He gave his order for a light lunch and passed his ID disc-star to the waiter. Presently, the waiter came with the star, which he had used to register the purchase, and he handed the platter of food and glass of water to the priest.
The organics watched him closely, ready to arrest him if he went into a restaurant with bare feet. Father Tom, grinning, usually went to them and asked if they cared to share his meal. They always refused. To accept would have made them open to a charge of bribe-taking. The priest could also have been arrested for offering a bribe, but the organics had orders just to observe and record. The only act so far that had upset them during the past subyear was his conversion of an organic who had been shadowing him. That had been entirely unexpected, had been done without coercion by Zurvan, and was not illegal. However, the convert had been discharged from the force on grounds of religiousness and adherence to superstition.
At 3:00 P.M., Father Tom was standing on a box in Washington Square. Around him were two hundred members of the Cosmic Church of Confession, about a hundred of the curious, and a hundred who had nothing better to do. There were other soapboxers scattered through the park, but they did not draw such large crowds.
Here Father Tom began preaching. His voice blared out deeply and richly. His timing and phraseology were suited to his message and appreciated by most of the hearers, even those who rejected The Word. Father Tom, having studied the great black preachers of the past who had also been on fire with The Word, knew how to deliver it.
“Bless you, citizens of Sunday. Whether or not you are here to hear a voice of God—not the voice, a voice—bless you. May your virtues swell and your weaknesses shrink. Bless you, my children, sons and daughters of God all!”
“Amen, Father!”
“You’re telling the truth, Father!”
“God bless you and us, Father!”
“The hound of heaven is baying at your heels, Father!”
“Yes, brothers and sisters!” Zurvan cried. “The hound of heaven is barking! Ba-a-arking, I say!”
“Yeah, Father, barking!”
“It has been sent out by the great hunter to bring you in, my children!”
“Bring us in! Yeah, bring us in! You speak the truth, Father!”
Eyes wide and seeming to flash, his shepherd’s staff held high, Father Tom thundered, “Barking, I say!”
“Barking, Father! We hear him!”
“But!”
Father Tom paused and glared at the crowd. “But…is the hound of heaven barking up the wrong tree?”
“What tree, Father?”
“The wrong tree, I say! Is the hound barking up the wrong tree?”
“Never!” a woman screamed out. “Never!”
“You said it, sister!” Father Tom said. “Never! God never makes mistakes, and His hound wouldn’t ever lose the quarry! His hound…and our hound…is us.”
“Us, Father!”
“When the hound of heaven has treed its quarry…who is that creature up in the tree?”
“It’s us, Father!”
“And them, too!” Zurvan cried, waving his staff to indicate the nonbelievers. “Everybody!”
“Everybody, Father!”
He was improvising, yet he spoke as if he had long rehearsed his speech and his disciples responded as if they knew the exact timing and phrasing expected from him. He praised the government for all the many benefits it had ensured for the people, and he listed the great ills that had plagued the world and had made so many suffer in the past. These, he said, were gone. This was indeed the best government the world had ever had.
“Now children…children, I say, who will someday be adults in God…”
“How about adulterers in God!” a man on the fringe of the crowd shouted.
“Bless you, brother, and bless your big mouth and hard heart, too! Saint Francis of Assisi, a true saint, greeted whatever donkey he met on the road as Brother Ass! May I call you Brother Ass? May I address you as a fellow Assisian?”
Zurvan paused, smiled, and looked around until the crowd’s laughter had ceased. He shouted, “Yet the government is not perfect, my children! It could change many things for the betterment of its citizens. But has it changed now for, lo, five generations? Has it not ceased to seek change for the better because it claims that there is no need for change? Did it not cease? I ask you, did it not cease!”
“Yes, Father! It has ceased!”
“Thus! Thus! Thus! Thus, my children! The hound of heaven does not bark up the wrong tree! But, thus, my children, the hound of the government barks up the wrong tree! O, how it barks! Day and night, from every side, it barks! We hear that it is perfect! The millennium has come, and all is right in this world! The government discourages any talk of change for the better! ‘We are perfect!’ the government says!”
“Is it perfect? Is the government, like God, perfect?”
“No, no, no, Father!”
Zurvan stepped down from the box then. Shouting, continuing to speak, his disciples trooping after him, moaning, crying, and yelling, he walked to a place one hundred and sixty feet away. The other speakers were also moving. Zurvan occupied a spot just vacated, and he mounted the box again. The law had been observed, and the place of meeting had been moved within the legal time to a legal distance away.
“The government permits the practice of religion! Yet…the government allows no believer in God to hold a government office! Is that the truth?”
“That’s the truth, Father!”
“Who says that only those who believe in fact, in reality, in the truth…T…R…U…T…H…are fit to hold government office?”
“The government, Father!”
“And who defines fact, reality, and truth?”
“The government, Father!”
“Who defines religion as superstition?”
“The government, Father!”
“Who says there is no need for change, for betterment?”
“The government, Father!”
“Do not we deny that? Do not we know that there is a great, a crying, need for betterment?”
“Yes, Father!”
“Does not the government say that it has a contract with the people, a social contract?”
“It does, Father.”
“Then tell me, children, what good is a contract if, of the two parties who agree to the contract, only one can enforce it?”
“None, Father!”
That was as far as he dared to go today on that subject. He was not yet ready for martyrdom. He now switched to his “cooling-off” stage. He asked for a few questions from non-members of the church, and, as always, he was asked why he daubed his nose, what the S on his forehead stood for, and what the butterfly shapes on his beard symbolized.
Zurvan said that he and his disciples had been reviled and mocked as “bluenoses” because of their high moral standards. So, he had adopted the pejorative literally to show his pride in his belief and his indifference to the revilers and mockers. When he preached, he showed his “bluenose” to all who would see.
As for the butterflie
s, they represented the last stage of becoming a believer. Just as butterflies, once ugly caterpillars, wrapped themselves in a cocoon and burst forth in the metamorphosis of lovely creatures, just so the souls of himself and his followers had burst forth.
“The big S on my forehead,” he thundered, “does not represent Saint or Sinner! Nor does it stand for Simpleton, as our enemies claim! It stands for Symbol! It is not a symbol, but the symbol! The S absorbs all symbols, all symbols of good, that is! Someday, so we hope, do we not, children, this S will be as instantly recognizable, and far more respected and valued, than the cross, hexagram, and crescent I spoke of earlier. Is that not our hope and trust, children?”
“Amen to that, Father!”
Zurvan then began the slow-paced approach to the calling for public confession. As the minutes went by, he sped up his delivery, his gestures, his intensity, his passion. Before five o’clock, when all lecturers and preachers had to stop, he had heard the detailed confessions of twenty, one of them an on-the-spot convert. That this part of the program attracted many more from the park than his preaching did not dim his joy. He knew that nonmembers loved to hear the confessions because of the sometimes sordid, humiliating, and salacious details. Never mind. Sometimes, some who came to be titillated were overcome—imploded with the light of God—and they converted and confessed.
The organics were taking all this in and might use the confessions against the confessors if they found reason to. Martyrdom, however, was the price paid for faith.
At five, Zurvan went home, tired but exuberant and exultant. He was riding high on the saddle of God’s light. After a low-calorie supper, he prayed. Later, he listened in the privacy of his apartment to people who had not had time to finish their confessions. At nine, he held a short service for those who crowded into his apartment. It was against the law for people to stand in the hall and watch the ceremonies on the hall strips. But organics were not usually around at that time, and the other tenants did not object. Some of them liked to watch, too, though not to share in the light.