Beyond the Rift (17 page)

He shakes his head, feigning sadness. “It is not the Praetor that speaks.”

He’s right. God speaks through me, as he spoke through the Prophets of old. I am God’s voice, and it doesn’t matter that I am unarmed
and unarmored, it doesn’t matter that I am deep in the devil’s sanctum. I need only raise my hand and God will strike this blasphemer down.

I raise my fist. I am fifty cubits high. The bishop stands before me, an insect unaware of its own insignificance. He has one of his ridiculous machines in one hand.

“Down, devil!” we both cry, and there is blackness.

I awaken into bondage. Broad straps hold me against the bed. The left side of my face is on fire. Smiling physicians lean into view and tell me all is well. Someone holds up a mirror. My head has been shaved on the right side; a bleeding crescent, inexplicably familiar, cuts across my temple. Crosses of black thread sew my flesh together as though I were some torn garment, clumsily repaired.

The exorcism was successful, they say. I will be back with my company within the month. The restraints are merely a precaution. I will be free of them soon, as I am free of the demon.

“Bring me to God,” I croak. My throat burns like a desert.

They hold a prayer wand to my head. I feel nothing.

I feel
nothing
.

The wand is in working order. The batteries are fully charged. It’s probably nothing, they say. A temporary aftereffect of the exorcism. Give it time. Probably best to leave the restraints for the moment, but there’s nothing to worry about.

Of course they are right. I have dwelt in the Spirit, I know the mind of the Almighty—after all, were not all of we chosen made in His image? God would never abandon even the least of his flock. I do not have to believe this, it is something I
know
. Father, you will not forsake me.

It will come back. It will come back.

They urge me to be patient. After three days they admit that they’ve seen this before. Not often, mind you; it was a rare procedure, and this is an even rarer consequence. But it’s possible that the demon may have injured the part of the mind that lets us truly know God. The physicians recite medical terms which mean nothing to me. I ask them about the others that preceded me down this path: How long before
they
were restored to God’s sight? But it seems there are no hard and fast rules, no overall patterns.

Trajan burns on the wall beside my bed. Trajan burns daily there and is never consumed, a little like the Burning Bush itself. My keepers have been replaying his cremation daily, a thin gruel of recorded images thrown against the wall; I suspect they are meant to be inspirational. It is always just past sundown in these replays. Trajan’s fiery passing returns a kind of daylight to the piazza, an orange glow reflecting in ten thousand upturned faces.

He is with God now, forever in His presence. Some say that was true even before he passed, that Trajan lived his whole life in the Spirit. I don’t know whether that’s true; maybe people just couldn’t explain his zeal and devotion any other way.

A whole lifetime in the presence of God. I’d give a lifetime now for even a minute.

We are in unexplored territory, they say. That is where they are, perhaps.

I
am in Hell.

Finally they admit it: none of the others have recovered. They have been lying to me all along. I have been cast into darkness, I am cut off from God. And they called this butchery a
success
.

“It will be a test of your faith,” they tell me. My
faith.
I gape like a fish at the word. It is a word for heathens, for people with made-up gods. The cross would have been infinitely preferable. I would kill these smug meat-cutters with my bare hands, if my bare hands were free.

“Kill me,” I beg. They refuse. The bishop himself has commanded that I be kept alive and in good health. “Then summon the bishop,” I tell them. “Let me talk to him. Please.”

They smile sadly and shake their heads. One does not
summon
the bishop.

More lies, perhaps. Maybe the bishop has forgotten that I even exist, maybe these people just enjoy watching the innocent suffer. Who else, after all, would dedicate their lives to potions and bloodletting?

The cut in my head keeps me awake at night, itches maddeningly as scar tissue builds and puckers along its curved edges. I still can’t remember where I’ve seen its like before.

I curse the bishop. He told me there would be risks, but he only mentioned death. Death is not a risk to me here. It is an aspiration.

I refuse food for four days. They force-feed me liquids through a tube in my nose.

It’s a strange paradox. There is no hope here; I will never again know God, I am denied even surcease. And yet these butchers, by the very act of refusing me a merciful death, have somehow awakened a tiny spark that wants to live. It is
their
sin I am suffering for, after all. This darkness is of
their
making. I did not turn away from God; they hacked God out of me like a gobbet of gangrenous flesh. It can’t be that they want me to live, for there is no living apart from God. It can only be that they want me to
suffer
.

And with this realization comes a sudden desire to deny them that satisfaction.

They will not let me die. Perhaps, soon, they will wish they had.

God damn them.

God
damn them. Of course.

I’ve been a fool. I’ve forgotten what really matters. I’ve been so obsessed by these petty torments that I’ve lost sight of one simple truth: God does not turn on his children. God does not abandon His own.

But
test
them—yes. God tests us all the time. Did He not strip Job of all his worldly goods and leave him picking his boils in the dust? Did He not tell Abraham to kill his own son? Did He not restore them to His sight, once they had proven worthy of it?

I believe that God rewards the righteous. I believe that the Christ said
Blesséd are those who believe even though they have
not
seen
. And now, at last, I believe that perhaps
faith
is not the obscenity I once thought, for it can give strength when one is cut off from the truth.

I am not abandoned. I am
tested
.

I send for the bishop. Somehow, this time I know he’ll come.

He does.

“They say I’ve lost the Spirit,” I tell him. “They’re wrong.”

He sees something in my face. Something changes in his.

“Moses was denied the Promised Land,” I continue. “Constantine saw the flaming cross but twice in his lifetime. God spoke to Saul of Tarsus only once. Did
they
lose faith?”

“They moved the world,” the bishop says.

I bare my teeth. My conviction fills the room. “So will I.”

He smiles gently. “I believe you.”

I stare at him, astonished by my own blindness. “You knew this would happen.”

He shakes his head. “I could only hope. But yes, there is a—strange truth we are only learning now. I’m still not sure I believe it myself. Sometimes it isn’t the
experience
of redemption that makes the greatest champions, but the
longing
for it.”

On the panel beside me, Trajan burns and is not consumed. I wonder briefly if my fall from grace was entirely accidental. But in the end it does not matter. I remember, at last, where I once saw a scar like mine.

Before today, the acts I committed in God’s name were pale, bloodless things. No longer. I will return to the Kingdom of Heaven. I will raise my sword-arm high and I will not lay it down until the last of the unbelievers has been slaughtered. I will build mountains of flesh in His name. Rivers will flow from the throats that I cut. I will not stop until I have earned my way back into His sight.

The bishop leans forward and loosens my straps. “I don’t think we need these any more.”

They couldn’t hold me anyway. I could tear them like paper.

I am the fist of God.

HOME

I
t has forgotten what it was. Not that that matters, down here. What good is a name when there’s nothing around to use it? This one doesn’t remember where it came from. It doesn’t remember the murky twilight of the North Pacific Drift, or the noise and gasoline aftertaste that drove it back below the thermocline. It doesn’t remember the gelatinous veneer of language and culture that once sat atop its spinal cord. It doesn’t even remember the long, slow dissolution of that overlord into dozens of autonomous, squabbling subroutines. Now, even those have fallen silent.

Not much comes down from the cortex any more. Low-level impulses flicker in from the parietal and occipital lobes. The motor strip hums in the background. Occasionally, Broca’s area mutters to itself. The rest is mostly dead and dark, worn smooth by a sluggish black ocean cold as antifreeze. All that’s left is pure reptile.

It pushes on, blind and unthinking, oblivious to the weight of four hundred liquid atmospheres. It eats whatever it can find. Desalinators and recyclers keep it hydrated. Sometimes, old mammalian skin grows sticky with secreted residues; newer skin, laid on top, opens pores to the ocean and washes everything clean with aliquots of distilled seawater.

The reptile never wonders about the signal in its head that keeps it pointing the right way. It doesn’t know where it’s headed, or why. It only knows, with pure brute instinct, how to get there.

It’s dying, of course, but slowly. It wouldn’t care much about that even if it knew.

Now something is tapping on its insides. Infinitesimal, precisely spaced shock waves are marching in from somewhere ahead and drumming against the machinery in its chest.

The reptile doesn’t recognize the sound. It’s not the intermittent grumble of conshelf and seabed pushing against each other. It’s not the low-frequency ATOC pulses that echo dimly past en route to the Bering. It’s a pinging noise—
metallic
, Broca’s area murmurs, although it doesn’t know what that means.

Abruptly, the sound intensifies.

The reptile is blinded by sudden starbursts. It tries to blink, a vestigial act from a time it doesn’t remember. The caps on its eyes darken automatically. The pupils beneath, hamstrung by the speed of reflex, squeeze to pinpoints a few seconds later.

A copper beacon glares out from the darkness ahead—too coarse, too steady, far brighter than the bioluminescent embers that sometimes light the way. Those, at least, are dim enough to see by; the reptile’s augmented eyes can boost even the faint twinkle of deepwater fish and turn it into something resembling twilight. But this new light turns the rest of the world stark black. Light is never this bright, not since—

From the cortex, a shiver of recognition.

It floats motionless, hesitating. It’s almost aware of faint urgent voices from somewhere nearby. But it’s been following the same course for as long it can remember, and that course points only one way.

It sinks to the bottom, stirring a muddy cloud as it touches down. It crawls forward along the ocean floor.

The beacon shines down from several meters above the seabed. At closer range it resolves into a string of smaller lights stretched in an arc, like photophores on the flank of some enormous fish.

Broca sends down more noise:
Sodium floods
. The reptile burrows on through the water, panning its face from side to side.

And freezes, suddenly fearful. Something huge looms behind the lights, bloating gray against black. It hangs above the seabed like a great smooth boulder, impossibly buoyant, encircled by lights at its equator. Striated filaments connect it to the bottom.

Something else, changes.

It takes a moment for the reptile to realize what’s happened: the drumming against its chest has stopped. It glances nervously from shadow to light, light to shadow.

“You are approaching Linke Station, Aleutian Geothermal Array. We’re glad you’ve come back.”

The reptile shoots back into the darkness, mud billowing behind it. It retreats a good twenty meters before a dim realization sinks in.

Broca’s area knows those sounds. It doesn’t understand them—Broca’s never much good at anything but mimicry—but it has heard something like them before. The reptile feels an unaccustomed twitch. It’s been a long time since curiosity was any use.

It turns and faces back from where it fled. Distance has smeared the lights into a diffuse, dull glow. A faint staccato rhythm vibrates in its chest.

The reptile edges back towards the beacon. One light divides again into many; that dim, ominous outline still lurks behind them.