The Last Hour of Gann (165 page)

“Oh fuck me, my secret is out,” said Ichazul dryly.

“—then it’s still at ninety-six, seventeen fucking years after the Fall. The shit is in everything now. The air, the ground, the water…everything. So I guess it’s safe to assume that everyone has it. Why isn’t everyone dead?” He paused. “I have it. I woke up alone in the streets of South Thuure covered in blood. Caked in it. And I don’t know what I’d been fucking, but I’d scraped half the scales off my dick doing it and what was left was also caked in blood. I found a—” He stopped himself there, rubbing restlessly at his throat, which was still safely black. At last, he tipped his head slightly and went on.

“So. God’s Wrath is finite. Eventually, no matter how deep in you are, you run out of things to kill and things to fuck. You calm down. Of course, you’re ready to rage again the instant Mkole starts talking or, hell, even if you get a little too deep into a nice, tight woman, but if you feel it coming on, you can sometimes get clear of it. It’s not like being crazy, at least not all the time. You’re aware when you start to burn. You can stop it if you try. The problem is what the problem’s been with us dumaqs all along: Trying is hard and we don’t want to do it.”

“Burning is easy,” added Shev. “Especially when we can all tell each other that it’s the virus and how impossible it is to stop once you’ve let go. We’re not in control. It’s all the virus.”

“But there is a scale,” Ichazul put in. “Some of us let go slow and come out of it fairly quick. And some of us go completely fucking out of their scaly skin and stay there for days. So far, we haven’t found anyone who’s actually immune, but there’s obviously some kind of resistance
. And since we’re starting to see the first generation after the Fall coming into their maturity, it seems like it might be genetic.”

“
Right,” said Xaima, flaring his spines with irritation, although the interruption itself hadn’t appeared to have bothered him. “Now I’m going to talk about a place called Nishi, which used to be some holy site two or three thousand years ago—I guess it still was—but for the most part, it was a city like pretty much every other city except for the eastern edge of town, which was occupied by the Sheulists.”

Amber glanced at Meoraq. He seemed calm enough, but only if one didn’t look at his eyes.

“When the cloud hit Nishi, it went down exactly like every other city we’ve visited…except along the eastern edge. There were over a thousand people living there after the Fall, and just in case you don’t understand how significant that is, I don’t think we’ve come across a thousand more people anywhere else in the world, even if we lumped them all together. When we first found them, we didn’t know what to think except that maybe they were somehow immune or maybe they’d all been underground or maybe they’d been transmitting their location to survivors and most of them were refugees, but no. The only difference between eastern Nishi and the rest of the world was the Sheulists, and the biggest thing about the Sheulists is not just that they believe in their god, but they believe that their god is in control. These people work, and I mean
work
, for hours every day, systematically reinforcing the idea that nothing a man does has any lasting effect and any perception to the contrary is only part of God’s plan.”

“We’re not in control,” said Shev, in exactly the same tone he’d used before and with only the slightest arch twist to his expression. “It’s all God’s will.”

“That shit is maddening,” Xaima commented, glancing that way. “I had to be tied down for eight days because of the rage those fools put in me with that.”

“I didn’t handle it too well at first either,”
Shev admitted. “But it was hard to ignore a thousand people in one place where everywhere else, you couldn’t count fifty. I’m sure Mkole can fill up a few hours talking about the altered mind states of meditation or how it suppresses this chemical or excites that gland or what the fuck ever it does. It worked, that’s the important thing.”

“Right up until their high priest decided they should all go to Sheul’s Halls together,” Ichazul said with a snort. “C
razy fucking zealots drank deathweed. Brewed it up with honey, lined up and drank it. Like they were drinking tea.”

“Yes, but they were calm when they did it,” said
the Brunt. “And when we moved on from there to Maiaq, Zhan told the leader of those refugees that if he gave himself to Sheul, the Wrath couldn’t take him. Maybe it helped that none of them had ever been a Sheulist themselves or knew much more than whatever you pick up listening to some idiot pray up a transport dock. Zhan told them—correct me if I exaggerate, noble leader—the most outrageous packet of lies ever emitted by the mouth of a man.”

Zhan didn’
t correct him. He just stood there, arms folded, brooding on his boots.

“And they bought it,” Xaima said, flinging out his arms.
“They bought every fucking word. In a single day, this man reinvented both a caste system and a working model of a fucking theocracy and hammered them together, and by the very next morning, forty-two people were out in the fucking rain, praying. These were people who would have laughed at the very idea of god-worship just seventeen short years ago.”

“Gets harder to laugh at the idea of a vengeful god after the world comes to a burning end,” Zhan remarked.

“I guess.” Xaima gave his head a shake. “We spent the whole cold season there, the six of us wedged in with forty-two other people in a warehouse no bigger than this room, and no one died. He had them praying every morning, meditating every night, and preaching Sheul’s grace and Sheul’s justice and Sheul’s hammer and Sheul’s fires farting out Sheul’s ass until we almost had to tie Ichi up again.”

Ichazul snorted. “No crying. I was that close.”

“But no one let go. Not one of them raged. So suddenly, he’s Prophet Lashraq and we’re his holy oracles. And we’re not chasing after slit and free food any more, we’re preaching about Sheul’s burning hand and the caste of the Hammer or the Sword and the sacred number of creation.”

“And
being handed slit and free food,” said Shev.

“Never got so much dipping in my life as I did after I turned holy,” added the Brunt in a reflective manner.

Still nothing from Meoraq.

“And it seems to work everywhere we go,” Xaima went on, “but what good does that do, really? The cloud will be around a hundred years at least.
The virus will be in everyone’s fucking
blood
. We’ll all be dead, but the rage goes on, and already we’re finding people pretending to be priests of Sheul and adding their lies to our lies for their own unscrupulous purposes.”

“Like chasing slit and getting free food,” said the Brunt.

“So Zhan says we need a holy writ, something people can read, something that will last,” Xaima concluded. “We found a printing shop in what’s left of Pholcha and Ichi says he can get it running and bind us up some books. All we have to do is come up with some sufficiently holy-sounding way to keep people from letting go to rage. Zhan studied this piss for who knows how many years, so we’ll let him do all the wording, but for posterity’s sake, here’s what we’ve come up with so far. First, limit the fucking.”

“No,” said Zhan quietly. “First, Sheul’s word alone is law. There are no other gods and no men with authority to alter or interpret his word. His law is absolute as written.
There is no other truth.”

“W
hatever,” said Xaima, rolling his eyes. “Second is to limit the fucking. God’s Wrath doesn’t just make a man mad. It hits him in the part of his brain where all us civilized dumaqs keep our most basic impulses.”

Mkole raised his head, blinking as if he’d heard his name. “It attacks the hypothalamus, primarily, and through it, the adrenal system.
Females have been, ah, depressed and males, stimulated. Rage is essentially an overdose of male sexual hormones, ah, which dominate our aggressive response and…and…hyper-sensitivity to female pheromones.”

“That’s what I said,” Xaima snapped, looking annoyed. “I
f he gets a whiff of a woman, he’ll fuck her. If he gets caught up fucking, he’ll eventually go into rage. The longer he’s in rage, the more he’ll want to fuck, and while his brain is burning up, he’s killing and fucking everything that moves. So lock up the women and limit the fucking.”

“Be very careful when you write that one up,” Shev added. “You’ll have them castrating themselves
or killing their daughters.”

“Right.
Sex is fine—”

“Sex
is great,” said the Brunt, with feeling.

“But limit it. We’ve been say
ing no more than twice a dip—”

“Because three is the sacred number of creation,” agreed Shev and threw Zhan a grimace of admiration. “I honestly don’t know where he comes up with this stuf
f.”

“—because two seems to get a man past that first desperate stage, even if he hasn’t had a righteous poke in a year, but two doesn’t wear him down so much that the burn just takes over. But the challenge is going to be limiting the killing. If we did this right, you probably don’t have any idea what kind of killing is going on out here,” Xaima said in a low, suddenly somber tone. “You’d think, in a world where so many people have died so senselessly, that we would do anything to preserve another dumaq life, but let me tell you, it is not so. We are killing each other over water, food, medicine, women, blankets, shelters, books,
boots, who won the fucking Cenuqa tournament in 3013, whether or not corrokis can look up—”

“They can
not
,” Shev interrupted, sending a black glare at the Brunt, who calmly replied, “Of course they can, they just choose not to.”

“Anything and everything,” Xaima concluded with a sigh, rubbing at his throat again. “Not because we’re sick, not because of the virus, but just…because. And we’re doing it more than ever before, because now there’s no one around to tell us not to.”

“Yet,” said Zhan.

“I don’t know how the hell he thinks he’s going to scare us so bad we stop fighting overnight, but if I have the broad strokes right, it comes down to three things: Take away the knives. If they don’t
see or smell blood, apparently, they won’t think about it. Like there aren’t a hundred other ways to kill a man, Zhan.”

“Have to start somewhere.”

“Here’s an idea, start with the fucking
guns
!”

“I will. That kind of technology will be part of Gann’s corruption.
We’ll make it a sin to work machines.”

“The piss you say!”

“You can’t mean it, Zhan. What are we supposed to do, live in caves and wear animal skins?”

“Who’s Gann?”

“We’ll destroy whatever we can, of course, but all we really have to do is convince them that the cities carry Gann’s taint and can corrupt anyone who enters.”

“But why?”

“Because they can,” Zhan said quietly. “They did.”

“That is shit and you know it,” spat Xaima. “Zhan, there have to be a thousand people,
good
people, trying to make lives in those cities, trying to build them up again and make them safe. They’re not going to leave just because you offer them a god! You give this ridiculous fucking cult of yours ten years and your Sheulists will kill those people for no reason! For
God
!”

“I know.”

“And you don’t care!”

“I can’t, Xaima. I have
to care about what else they were making when they dropped God’s Wrath and who might be looking for it. There may be a thousand good people in those cities, but there have to be ten thousand weapons and they’re all just lying around. There’s no way we can pick everything up ourselves. We have to make them all
want
to just…not look.”

“What are we supposed to do without cities?” Shev demanded.

“Build new ones.” Zhan looked up as a faint rumble heralded a particularly vicious peal of thunder in whatever storm beat on their walls in the past. “Stronger ones. The old cities aren’t safe anyway. Not anymore. Even this place will fall down if we don’t protect it.”

“Right, so let me see if I have your plan. We herd everyone out of their shelters, tell them technology is bad and give them a pointed stick and a fucking spoon to build a new home with, and then we take the most violent people we can find, the ones with the absolute least resistance to the virus, and, instead of
just killing them—”

“We can’t
just kill them, Xaima,” Zhan said patiently. “If we turn it into a fight, they’ll win it. They’ll rage first, they’ll rage longer, and they’ll rip us apart.”

“Whatever. We tell them the reason they’re so violent is because God has blessed them, have I got that right?”

“Yes.”

“We make them members of the highest caste instead. We give them the knives no one else gets to play with and we tell them they’re holy warriors instead of the psychotic murder machines they really are.”

Amber looked at Meoraq again. His spines were flat and shivering slightly against his skull, but other than that, he looked only very mildly interested.

“When they believe it, they’ll pray,” said Zhan. “When they pray, they’ll calm down.”