“Don’t answer him for free,” Jaime Kreen said, from where he lounged against the door.
Rej Laithor glanced at him as if he were insane. “We looked up the original Moses story,” she said when she turned back to Tuf. “Once the plagues started coming, we wanted to know what to expect. Moses used the same plagues as the original, but he varied the order a bit. And we only got six of them, at which point the council gave in to the Altruistic demands, closed Port Faith, and evacuated the City of Hope.” She held up her hands. “Look at them—look at those blisters, look at that callus. He has us all scattered through these rotting Altruistic villages, living like primitives. Hungry, too. He’s mad.”
“First Moses turned the waters of the river into blood,” said Haviland Tuf.
“It was disgusting,” the younger woman said. “All the water in the arcology, the fountains, the swimming pools, the taps. You turned on the faucet or stepped into the shower and suddenly you were covered with blood. Even the toilets were full of blood.”
“It wasn’t real blood,” Jaime Kreen added. “We analyzed it. Some organic poison had been added to the city water supply. But whatever it was made the water thick and red and undrinkable. How did you do it, Tuf?”
Haviland Tuf ignored the question. “The second plague was a plague of frogs.”
“In our yeast tanks, and our whole hydroponics section,” said Kreen. “I was the supervising administrator. It ruined me. The frogs gummed up all the machinery with their bodies, and they died and rotted and spoiled the food. Laithor gave me a summary discharge when I couldn’t contain them—as if it was my fault!” He grimaced at his former superior. “Well, at least I didn’t wind up slaving for Moses. I left for K’theddion when it was still possible to leave.”
“Third,” said Haviland Tuf, “was the plague of lice.”
“Everywhere,” muttered the former fat man. “Everywhere. They couldn’t live inside the system, of course, so they died there, but that was bad enough. The system went down. The lice just moved on. Everybody had them. You couldn’t stay clean enough to avoid it.”
“Fourth was the plague of flies.”
The Charitans all looked glum. No one said anything.
“Fifth,” continued Haviland Tuf, “Moses set loose a murrain that killed all the cattle of his enemies.”
“He skipped the murrain,” said Rej Laithor. “We had our herds out on the prairies, but we put guards around them, and down in the cellars around the meatbeasts, too. We were expecting him. Nothing happened. He skipped the boils, too, thank goodness, and the hail. I would have liked to have seen him make it hail inside the arcology. He went straight to the locusts.”
“Indeed,” said Haviland Tuf. “The eighth plague. Did these locusts eat your fields clean?”
“The locusts didn’t touch our fields. They were inside the city, in the sealed grain storage compartments. Three years’ worth of surplus was gone overnight.”
“The ninth plague,” said Haviland Tuf, “was darkness itself.”
“I’m glad I missed that one,” volunteered Jaime Kreen.
“Every light in the city died,” said Rej Laithor. “Our repair crews had to fight through piles of dead flies and live locusts, scratching at their lice all the while. It was hopeless, and the people were already leaving by the thousands. I ordered the city abandoned once it became clear that even the secondary power stations were full of bugs. After that, everything went very fast. A week later I was living in an unheated cabin in the Hills of Honest Labor, and learning how to operate a spinning wheel.” Her tone was savage.
“Your fate is a sad one,” Haviland Tuf agreed in a placid voice. “Yet you should not despair. When I heard of your plight from Jaime Kreen, I resolved at once to help you. And here I am.”
Rej Laithor looked suspicious. “Help us?” she said.
“I will win back your City of Hope for you,” said Haviland Tuf. “I will smite Moses and his Holy Altruistic Restoration. I will free you from your spinning wheel and give you back your vocoder.”
The young woman and the former fat man were beaming. Rej Laithor continued to frown. “Why?”
“Rej Laithor asks me why,” Haviland Tuf said to Dax, stroking the cat softly. “My motives are always imputed. People have no trust in this hard modern age, Dax.” He looked at the top administrator. “I will help you because the situation on Charity moves me, because your people are obviously in pain. Moses is no true altruist, as we both know, but this does not mean the impulse to self-sacrifice and benevolence is dead in humanity. I deplore Moses and his tactics, his use of innocent insects and animals in an unnatural manner to impose his will on his fellow human beings. Are these motives sufficient for you, Rej Laithor? If not, say as much, and I will take my Ark and depart.”
“No,” she said. “No, don’t do that. We accept. I accept, on behalf of the City of Hope. If you succeed, we will build a statue to you, and set it atop the city to be seen for kilometers.”
“Passing birds would relieve themselves upon such a statue,” said Haviland Tuf. “The wind would abrade and erode it, and it would be placed too high for any to see its features clearly. Such a statue might tickle my vanity—I am a small man, for all my size, easily pleased by such things—but I would want it set in your largest public square, safe from all harm.”
“Of course,” Laithor said quickly. “Anything.”
“Anything,” said Haviland Tuf. It was not a question. “In addition to the statue, I will also require fifty thousand standards.”
Her face went pale and then red. “You said,” she began in a sort of a choked whisper. “You . . . benevolence . . . altruism . . . our need . . . the spinning wheel . . . ”
“I must meet my expenses,” said Haviland Tuf. “Certainly I am willing to donate my own time to this matter, but the resources of the Ark are too valuable to squander. I must eat. Surely the coffers of the City of Hope are sufficient to meet this small sum.”
Rej Laithor made a sputtering noise.
“I’ll handle this,” Jaime Kreen interjected. He turned to Tuf. “Ten thousand standards. No more. Nothing. Ten thousand.”
“Impossible,” said Haviland Tuf. “My costs will surely exceed forty thousand standards. Perhaps I can diet for a time, take only that sum, and content myself with a small loss. Your people do suffer.”
“Fifteen thousand,” Kreen said.
Haviland Tuf said nothing.
“Oh, hell,” said Jaime Kreen. “Forty thousand then, and I hope that damned cat dies of gout.”
It was the habit of the man called Moses to walk each evening along the rugged footpaths of the Hills of Honest Labor, to watch the beauty of the sunset and contemplate in solitude the problems of the day. He would stride along briskly at a pace few younger men could match, his long crooked staff in hand and a peaceful look on his face, his eyes fixed on far horizons. Often he would cover a dozen kilometers before turning back toward home and bed.
The pillar of fire first appeared to him on such a walk.
He had just topped a rise and there it was—a twisting, writhing funnel of orange flame, shot through with flickers of blue and yellow, tracing a path through the rocks and the dust straight toward him. It was easily thirty meters high, crowned by a small gray cloud that somehow paced it.
Moses rested on the crest of the hill, leaning on his staff, and watched it come.
The pillar of fire stopped five meters from him, on slightly lower ground. “Moses,” it said in a booming thunderous voice from above, “I am the Lord God, and you have sinned against me. Give my people back!”
Moses chuckled. “Very good,” he said in his rich tones. “Really, very good.”
The pillar of fire trembled and spun. “Release the people of the City of Hope from your cruel bondage,” it demanded, “lest in my wrath I bring down plagues upon you.”
Moses scowled and pointed his staff at the pillar of fire. “I am the one who brings down plagues around here, I would than
k you to remember.” There was a hint of irony in his voice.
“False plagues from a false prophet, as both you and I know full well,” boomed the pillar of fire. “All of your feeble tricks and travesties are known to me, the Lord God whose name you have profaned. Give my people back, or you shall look upon the terrible face of genuine pestilence!”
“Nonsense,” said Moses. He began walking downhill, toward the pillar of fire. “Who are you?”
“I am who I am,” the pillar of fire said, retreating hastily as Moses advanced. “I am the Lord God.”
“You are a holographic projection,” Moses said, “emanating from that silly cloud above us. I am a holy man, not a stupid one. Go now.”
The pillar of fire stood its ground and rumbled threateningly. Moses walked right through it, and continued smartly down the hill. The pillar remained, writhing and spinning, until long after Moses had vanished. “Indeed,” it boomed in its vast thunderous voice to the empty night. Then it shuddered and winked out.
The small grey cloud scuttled across the hills and caught up to Moses a kilometer down the road. The pillar of fire snaked down again, crackling with ominous energy. Moses walked around it. The pillar of fire began to follow him.
“You city-dwellers begin to try my patience,” Moses said as he walked. “You seduce my people with your sinful, slothful ways, and now you interrupt my evening reflections. I have had a hard day of holy toil. Be warned that you are near to provoking me. I have forbidden all this traffic with science. Take your aircar and your hologram and be gone with you, before I bring down a plague of boils upon your people.”
“Empty words, sir,” said the pillar of fire, trailing close on his heels. “Boils are well beyond your limited abilities. Do you think to deceive one such as I as easily as you deceived that pack of small-visioned bureaucrats?”
Moses hesitated, and cast a thoughtful look over his shoulder. “You doubt the powers of my God? I would think that my demonstrations had been ample enough.”
“Indeed,” said the pillar of fire. “Yet the things demonstrated were your own limitations, and those of your opponents. It is clear that you planned long ahead, and well, but your only powers were in that.”
“No doubt you believe the plagues that swept the City of Hope were coincidence, bad fortune?”
“You mistake me, sir. I know full well what they were, and there was nothing supernatural in any of them. For generations the young and the disaffected among the Altruists had been emigrating to the City. How simple and obvious to plant among their numbers your own spies, saboteurs, and agents. How cunning to wait a year or two or five until each among those had been fully accepted into the City of Hope, and given positions of responsibility. Frogs and insects can be bred, sir, and easily, whether in a cabin in the Hills of Honest Labor or in an apartment complex within the City itself. Release such creatures in the wild, and they will dissipate and die. The elements will slay them, natural enemies will hunt them down, they will perish for want of food; the complex merciless mechanism of the ecology will set them in their natural place. But how different within an arcology, the veritable architectural ecology that is truly no ecology at all, for it has a niche for no animal but humanity alone. The weather within is always fair and gentle, no competing species or predatory enemies exist, and it is an easy enough thing to find a proper source of food. Under such conditions, the result is inevitably a plague. Yet a false plague, looming large only within the confines of the City. Outside, your little plagues of frogs and lice and flies would be as nothing to the wind and the rain and the wild.”
“I turned their water into blood,” Moses insisted.
“Indeed, your agents placed organic chemicals in the City’s water supply.”
“I brought down a plague of darkness,” Moses said. His tone had grown quite defensive.
“Sir,” said the pillar of fire, “you insult my intelligence with the obvious. You turned out a light.”
Moses swung about to face the pillar, glaring up at it defiantly, his face red by reflected light. “I deny this. I deny all of it. I am a true prophet.”
“The true Moses brought down a grievous murrain upon his enemies,” the pillar of fire boomed in an even voice, as much as thunder can be even. “You brought none. The true Moses set upon his enemies a festering sweat of boils, so that none could stand before him. You did not. Your omissions give you away, sir. True pestilence is beyond your powers. The true Moses devastated the lands of his enemies with hail that rained down day and night. That plague too defeated your own limited capacities. Yet your enemies, beset by your tricks, surrendered the City of Hope before the tenth plague, the death of the first-born, and that was to your great good fortune, for by that time you were of a certainty plagued out.”
Moses smote the pillar of fire with his staff. There was no apparent effect on either staff or pillar. “Move off,” he shouted. “Whoever you are, you are no God of mine. I defy you. Do your worst! You have said it yourself: in nature, plagues are less simple things than inside an arcology. We are secure in the simple life we live in the Hills of Honest Labor, close to our God. We are full of grace. You cannot harm us.”
“Indeed,” boomed the pillar of fire. “You are wrong, Moses. Give my people back!”
Moses was not listening. He walked through the fire again and, furious, began to race back toward the village.
“When will you start?” Jaime Kreen asked eagerly after Haviland Tuf had returned to the Ark. He had remained aboard after taking the other Charitans back to the surface, since—as he had pointed out—the City of Hope was uninhabitable and there was no place for him in the villages and work camps of the Altruists. “Why aren’t you working? When will—”
“Sir,” said Haviland Tuf. He was sitting in his favorite chair, eating a bowl of creamed mushrooms and lemon-peas. A mug of ale sat on the table by his side. “Do not presume to give me orders, unless you chance to prefer the hospitality of Moses to my own.” He sipped at his ale. “Such work as needs be done has been done. My hands, unlike your own, were not entirely idle during our voyage from K’theddion.”
“But that was before . . . ”
“Details,” said Haviland Tuf. “Most of the basic cloning is done. The clones too have kept themselves occupied. The breeding tanks are full.” He blinked at Kreen. “Leave me to my dinner.”
“The plagues,” said Kreen. “When will they begin?”
“The first,” said Haviland Tuf, “began some hours ago.”
Down through the Hills of Honest Labor, past the six villages and the rocky fields of the Holy Altruists and the sprawling barren work camps where the refugees were quartered, ran the wide slow-flowing river that Altruists called God’s Grace and other Charitans the River of Sweat. When dawn broke on the distant horizon, those who had gone down to the riverside to fish or fill their jugs or wash their clothing returned to the villages and work camps with cries of horror. “Blood,” they shouted. “The river is blood, as the waters of the City were.” Moses was sent for, and he went to the river reluctantly, wrinkling his nose at the smell of dead and dying fish, and the stink of blood itself. “A trick of the sinners of the City of Hope,” he said, when he looked down on the sluggish scarlet stream. “The Lord God renews the natural world. I will pray, and in a day the river will be clean and fresh again.” He stood in the mud, at his feet a bloody shallow pool full of dead fish, stretched out his staff over the diseased waters, and began to pray. He prayed for a day and a night, but the waters did not clear.
When dawn came again, Moses retired to his cabin, and gave orders, and Rej Laithor and five other top administrators were taken from their families and questioned most intensely. The questioners learned nothing. Patrols of armed Altruists went upstream, searching for the conspirators who were dumping chemical pollutants into the river. They found nothing. They traveled for three days and three nights, as far as the great waterfall in the High Country, and even there the tumbling waters were blood, blood
, blood.
Moses prayed without surcease, both day and night, until he finally collapsed from exhaustion, and his lieutenants took him back to his simple cabin. The river remained red and murky.
“He is beaten,” Jaime Kreen said after a week, when Haviland Tuf had returned from scouting out the situation below in his airbarge. “Why does he wait?”
“He waits for the river to cleanse itself,” said Haviland Tuf. “It is one thing to contaminate the water supply of a closed system like your arcology, where only a finite amount of contaminant will be sufficient for the task. A river is an undertaking of a higher magnitude. Inject any amount of chemical you please into its waters, and sooner or later it will all flow past and the river will be clean again. Moses no doubt believes we shall soon run out of chemicals.”
“Then how are you doing it?”
“Microorganisms, unlike chemical substances, multiply and renew themselves,” said Haviland Tuf. “Even the waters of Old Earth were subject to such red tides, the ancient records of the EEC tell us. There is a world called Scarne where the corresponding lifeform is so virulent that even the oceans themselves are perpetually stained, and all other creatures must adapt or die. Those who built the Ark visited Scarne and took cloning material.”
That night the pillar of fire appeared outside of Moses’ cabin, and frightened away the guards. “Give my people back!” it roared.
Moses staggered to the door and threw it wide. “You are a delusion of Satan,” he screamed, “but I will not be tricked. Be gone. We will drink no more from the river, trickster. There are deep wells we can take our water from, and we can dig others.”
The pillar of fire writhed and crackled. “No doubt,” it commented, “yet you only delay the inevitable. Release the people from the City of Hope, or I will set the plagues of frogs upon you.”
“I will eat your frogs,” Moses yelled. “They will be fine and delicious.”
“These frogs will come from the river,” said the pillar of fire, “and they shall be more terrible than you can imagine.”