Andromeda Gun (22 page)

Moreover, G-7 was beginning to share the doubts of its host. The law against bringing whiskey onto an Indian reservation seemed unequal to G-7 and therefore unjust, particularly after its own encounter with whiskey had been so pleasant. To deny spirits to a people because of skin color struck G-7 as a legal immorality which, in an oblique manner, illuminated a vaster moral problem confronting the being.

Conceivably all laws were immoral, the ground rules for one great, self-deceiving fraud.

Fluttering along the force lines of Earth, G-7 sought the easy gradients, the long glides, sacrificing speed for ease. Once it settled to the ground to cogitate.

All of its remnant honesty informed G-7 that it was justifying beforehand a course of action already committed to, but even its remnant honesty had grown suspect. Perhaps its honesty was a matter of indoctrination based on false, even if sincere, assumptions, and if the seed premise was false, all the fruits thereof would be false.

Yet it had to be true to itself, and the truth was, it was yielding to the bestiality of the planet, becoming a spendthrift of energy, and there were strong elements of personal desire prompting it to its ends. On the other hand, being true to oneself was playing checkers with a mirror image; whatever the left hand decided the right hand agreed to, and the game was foredoomed to a pointless draw.

The spirit tried to weigh these problems and resolve them before moving on, but the spirit was too weak. Morality lay heavily upon it like an unwilling sleep. Brushing aside all reservations, it rose to continue its journey, steeling itself for the final act of separation.

Whatever else, it could not permit other galactic scouts to come to this planet and assess the extent of its failure here. Other scouts, rich with unfissioned ions and driven by the indomitable spirit of their race, would attempt to rouse G-7 to further efforts: They would be urging it to conserve energy, exhorting it to reform the unreformable, and, no doubt, they would be playing around with G-7’s women.

Besides, G-7 admitted, the ethereal race might be taking its righteousness too much for granted. Perhaps it had been force-fed precepts of harmonics and energy conservation that were not beyond being questioned. Possibly it was best that these human beings seize their revelry, live madly and upon the hour, then die.

Of what value was immortality to humankind? Men were not Grecian urns, glass flowers, or any undying artifact; they were ephemera who needed palsied age and death to make their fleeting youth the sweeter. They needed flat D notes to teach them appreciation of harmonics. They needed pricks of pain to enhance the joys of pleasure, as Liza, its Liza, so artfully understood.

Looking on itself from the viewpoint of an Ian McCloud, it could see itself not as a message bearer but as a celestial meddler, flitting from one star group to another to invest more forcible hosts and impose on them the dull conformity of unrelieved goodness, the ethics of conservationism, interfering in the free movement of mobile organisms which loss of entropy was bound to get, anyway, sooner or later. Then what? A universe peopled only with angels flitting aimlessly through the cold of dead galaxies? Better this Resmonda’s Bowl than that darkness.

Seize the day, G-7 thought. Don’t conserve it. Time’s value lay in its transience. Burn time into the soul with fires of passion. Better time’s traces remain as a scar than that it be allowed to wane, unmarked and unremembered. Better twenty years of Shoshone Flats than a cycle of Doremia.

But it was exhorting itself needlessly. Already scarred, it had seized the moment and was determined to make Earth its private preserve as long as it had one circulating photon remaining.

G-7 had reached the building site of the McCloud Comfort Station. Hovering over the ground, it monitored close-in data.

O’Shea had been active in Ian’s absence. Foundation trenches had been excavated, stakes planted, cords stretched, and the cornerstone moved to its approximate location on the northeast corner of the building site. A measure of its indoctrination by Earth-thinking, G-7 realized, lay in the fact that it now regarded its starship, the apex achievement of a millennium-old technological culture, primarily as the cornerstone of a rather elaborate outhouse.

G-7 drifted over and into the spaceship, entered the compression chamber, and emerged from there into the communications room. Though now homogenized and condensed, G-7 was barely a halo of its former self, and it knew that the time for diplomatic language was done. Without wasting energy on rephrasing, it scanned a message directly into the scanner.

Emergency dispatch from G-7 to Galactic Central: Earth inhabitants hereby rejected for Brotherhood. Organisms are spiritual antimatter with capacity to transmute evil into something still damned but attractive. They find pleasure in sin, elevate vice to morality. G-3 was here! Empathetic proof that G-3 succumbed to entropy on this planet. G-7 is expiring.

Attention all scouts, here follows an edict:

QUARANTINE EARTH!

So, it was done. G-7 in Earth’s fellowship was one. But since the edict was a formal writ, never to be revoked or violated, the scout signed the transmission with the full official acronym of the Galactic Brotherhood’s Interplanetary Exploration Legions: GABRIEL.

The angel compressed the message into the scan chamber, set the transmitter to emergency power, and sent the super-microblip at tachyon speed toward Galactic Central. Then it actuated the “Destruct” photoelectric cell and drifted into the diffusion chamber, although its diffusion now was hardly more than a formality. Outside, it wavered from the ship to the nearest magnetic force line going its way. In a matter of minutes, the starship’s self-destruct mechanism would become operative and the boulder’s interior would change, become indistinguishable from the granite boulders surrounding it.

Or so G-7 assumed. It had not reckoned with its own weakness. When it pressed the “Destruct” button with its limber digit of light, it had not mustered enough lumens to actuate the photoelectric cell.

G-7 began its veering, fluttering progress back to Shoshone Flats, back to its home and perhaps its crypt in the skull of Ian McCloud. Sadly, it knew, there would be no Saint Ian the First to lead his species to the light. Ian McCloud was damned.

Yet, though mortally weakened, G-7 was held on course by eagerness and sustained aloft by a buoyant purpose. If it survived the two days in Pocatello, its remaining photons would be used to make Ian McCloud the best damned moonshiner west of the Wind River Range.

But, with its old remnant honesty, G-7 knew it was not particularly interested in the quality of whiskey Ian distilled. It wanted to assure itself that Ian was always welcomed on the reservation, particularly by the Shoshone squaws. Plan ahead, as Colonel Blicket always said.

And after the anima of Ian McCloud perished—after the gunfighter’s reflexes slowed and G-7’s skullhouse was blasted to Earth, a vacant shrine then if it had had any photons left—Earth’s second Gabriel might try again, this time with a more malleable host.

Travelers now within that valley use Highway 89, and, at 70 miles an hour, few motorists notice a cluster of buildings a mile off the highway to the east. Since the post office was moved to Alpine, Shoshone Flats is no longer listed on the map, but to Old West history buffs and to collectors of esoterica the locale is not unknown. A few hundred yards southwest of the almost deserted village stands a structure of native stone, its function long since rendered obsolete by technological progress, which is listed in the pages of
Strange Facts
as the smallest building in the world with flying buttresses.

In local legend, the building goes by another name, the Haunted Outhouse. The few children in the area avoid the building at night, for a strange sound, unaccounted for by the winds, disturbs the building. Those who have heard the sound, which emanates from a particular corner of the old comfort station, describe it as an eerie humming, with varied and distinct modulations of tone.

A woman, grown too old for the oldest profession in which she once held a premier position, who fancies herself a seer of sorts and who works as a swabber at the village tavern, occasionally sleeps on the floor of the building. She insists the sounds have meaning, that they are messages she can understand, and her sincerity lends piquancy to her story. For a shot of bar whiskey, she can be persuaded to provide translations of the messages.

For the most part, the communiqués, apparently from heaven since they are being sent by the Angel Gabriel, are unintelligible even in translation. “Vulvula off limits” is one of the messages; “Withdraw all forces from Mirfak” another. The one intelligible message which draws the widest grins is “Quarantine Earth.”

No one takes the old demimondaine seriously. Ina Black Cloud is three-quarters Shoshone, and she’s drunk most of the time.