Читать книгу Gerun, the Heretic - William Maltese - Страница 6

CHAPTER TWO

“Had the choice been mine, I would have incinerated the man before the book. Preferably incinerated them both.”

“It would have forced a power play, my dear Maulaus. One we could ill afford, I might add, after Geulin was named co-conspirator in the assassination attempt. Maxlima II is not alone in thinking more in the Religio College than Geulin had fingers in that dirty pie.”

“Still—”

“Besides, the man is a half-wit, obviously a victim of the Xeon brain-blank.”

“A brain-blank victim who remembers his name?”

“Who’s to say Jon Missionary is his real name? Who’s to say his other babblings make sense, even to himself?”

“And if he remembers?”

“Perhaps we should cross that bridge when we come to it. Until then, the book is out of the way, isn’t it?”

—Recording 6-2-4IV. Conversation between Panrun-Ru and Maulaus Kif. Date: 6-04-3-2. Time: 6:6:6. Security Clearance: For No One’s Eyes But Mine!

They’d both been startled by the whir of the seg-unit, paranoid as they were by the organization out to squash them.

“Obviously not a ferret for us, this time,” Kalvin said, relief in his voice, “or, we would have been earmarked. There was no broadcast sounded.”

“No,” Gerun agreed. “Another poor foxlic’s hound. The one on us, for the minute, hunting elsewhere.”

“Well,” Kalvin said with a loud intake of breath, “nothing like a false alarm to hint we may have lingered overly long. I did feel, though, it was important you be made aware of our dire situation. I’ve felt the noose tightening as of late, and I wondered if there’d be much other opportunity to get to you.”

“My thanks, grandfather.”

“It would be nice if one of us survived, wouldn’t it?” Kalvin said. “The one of us young enough to multiply and pass on the gene bank Jon Missionary gave us.”

“You’re not too old,” Gerun insisted, wondering just how old Kalvin really was. Not old enough to remember Jon Missionary, but many terns beyond Gerun’s present count.

“Children are of better issue when spawned from the young,” Kalvin said. “Remember that whenever you start to get careless. If we’re lucky, my children and yours will both arise to greet beneath the moons at Chisan-Time. If not.…” He shrugged.

“So, then—” Gerun felt very sad; their parting didn’t bode any quick reunions, even if they and their issue did survive. “—we part as relatives, We of the Missionary, friends, Meeters at the Future Bend. Yes?”

“Be healthy, Gerun Missionary,” Kalvin said, pulling the boy to him. “Be safe. Be alive. Be fruitful.” He kissed Gerun lightly on the forehead, the boy noting the sparkle of tears in the old man’s pale blue eyes.

“Where will you go?” Gerun asked. Likewise, he was asking where he, himself, would go. Certainly not back to the City where they could more easily tap him. Now, out of their sensor perception, he was better staying put.

“Best you not know my plans or my whereabouts,” Kalvin said. “Warluck is clever. Fiss poisoning is uncanny in its distortion of the mentat as it destroys it.”

Making mind-reads possible. Making tracers possible. This meant Kalvin would be endangered if Gerun knew and was the first of them caught. Likewise, it was obvious that Kalvin had no desire to know Gerun’s plans—what plans? The two were safer, separated. The Missionary gene bank was safer, separated.

“Go with God!” Gerun told him.

“Share the ritual before we part?” Kalvin asked. “Although I’ve sampled the Jursimms’s corruption which makes me less than pure.”

“It would be my pleasure to share the ritual, grandfather,” Gerun said.

The two dropped to their knees in the darkness, tenting their hands beneath their chins and shutting their eyes. It was a mimicking of Jon Missionary passed down from generation to generation, its meaning unknown. Except it had a magical way of calming a speeding heart, of draining apprehension, of soothing a wearied mind. When Jon Missionary had once been asked why he did it, he’d surprised by saying something almost equivalent to the Kanranian word for god. So, his descendants looked upon the ritual as a meeting of god and man on a common plain. Although a meeting with which of the many Kanran-9 gods, no one really knew. For Jon Missionary had never been that specific. In fact, if there hadn’t been a resulting feeling of “religiousness” found to emanate from the simple ritual, Jon’s utterance might long ago have been cast aside as one more haphazard word with no relevance to the original question.

Gerun felt the immediate sense of peace the ritual brought with it, especially when shared with another who was as aware of its magic. As he’d often done in the past, he wondered which of the Kanran-9 deities—if any—had come to Jon Missionary and presented him with this particular mode of silent contact. Jursimms, The Fulfillers? No, this was too tame for the rumored rituals of the Labyrinth. Kalvin would have known if this god, in residence, was the same called upon by Jursimmic Priests. Was it Wan Wan-See, The Sick, whose shudders could shake the ground and whose pustules could squirt acid to eat the unlucky? Or Zinlac, Xisl, Persif? Or Jab, Jal, Los? Or, was it none of those? Was it a god once known to Jon Missionary and the Book, and then known to Panrun-Ru who thought to destroy the god with the pages, incinerating both? A god revealed to Warluck in the book fragment saved? Was that why the Religio-College whispered heresy in the same breath they whispered purge?

“Yes, He has forgiven me,” Kalvin said with a sigh, his voice a mere whisper into the silence.

“Who?” Gerun asked, young and wanting all the answers. If Kalvin didn’t have them all, it was obvious the old man had more of them than Gerun did.

“Didn’t you feel His presence?” Kalvin asked. “Here with us. Called by the ritual.”

“Who?” Gerun repeated. He wanted a name.

“Who indeed!” Kalvin replied, getting to his feet and brushing gravel balls from the leatahrer swathing his knees. “Would the incinerated Book have told us? Would Panrun-Ru have told us? Could Warluck tell us even now? The god is there, whoever He might be. Someone, something, powerful enough to set the Religio-College trembling.”

“But not nearly strong enough to save us,” Gerun said; more a statement than a question.

“Ah, my boy!” Kalvin said, helping Gerun to his feet. “You resent the prospect of dying only because you are so young.”

“And you don’t resent it?” Gerun challenged.

Of course, of course,” Kalvin admitted. “But I’m closer to death by natural causes than you are, brought there not by Warluck and his machinations but by the mere passing of time. We all die. If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then some other time. If not from fiss poisoning, then from a dew dart shot by a gimlian sprouted unaware in the darkness as we trip on it. Hundreds, thousands, millions of ways to die.

“Yet, Warluck thrives! Protected from death by his gods, while the god of Jon Missionary deserts that man’s kin.”

“If there is a god of Jon Missionary,” Kalvin reminded.

“But you insinuated.…”

Kalvin raised his hand in interruption. “We must be very careful that we don’t read into this more than there is to be read,” he warned. “What was Jon Missionary, anyway, but a man without all his faculties? Maybe he wasn’t mumbling of God but pretty sounds to entertain his tortured mind, and we—Melina-Lu, Panrun-Ru, you, me, Warluck—all misinterpret it wrongly. What then?

“Do you believe he was nothing more or less than an imbecile?” Gerun challenged. It confused him the way Kalvin could go from Jursimmic ritual to Missionary ritual, from belief in Jon Missionary’s god, to a denial of Him.

“It’s of little importance—except to me—what I believe is it?” Kalvin answered. “What’s important to you is what you believe. And I would suggest, at the moment, that you’re more apt to label Jon Missionary a half-wit than I am.”

Gerun flushed with anger and embarrassment, furious that the old man had so easily accessed his mentat, while Kalvin’s mentat blocked Gerun’s entrance like a wall of grinlind against tansic barbs.

“If He’s there, He would help us, is how you reason it,” Kalvin said, his voice offering no argument.

“Wouldn’t He?” Gerun insisted.

“How am I to say?” Kalvin asked with a voice sounding more and more tired. “How very little we know of Him, Gerun. If, in fact, He is even there. Our link between Him and us was a deranged one. Perhaps all we need to rally His support is the right password, the right key, the proper format for making our request. Every god in the Religio-College has its own format for conversing with humans, doesn’t it? Why not this one?

“But this god should know his linkage to us was faulty, shouldn’t He?” Gerun persisted.

“And maybe He knows it wasn’t faulty at all,” Kalvin argued, playing Delvin’s-Advocate. “Maybe we perceive it as faulty only because we are too stupid to follow whatever directions have been correctly given.”

“You’re talking in circles!” Gerun accused.

“I talk as a man who was a gyrolist in his lifetime, not a thelogan,” Kalvin reminded. “I know plants, not gods. I can only wish you better luck. There’s yet time for you to figure out the clues and unravel the puzzles. Granted, not as much time as you might have liked, but.…”

He shrugged again, finally looking very much the very old man he was.

“Here, sit with me a minute more,” he said, moving to a rough nature-hewn stone and leaning, rather than sitting, against it. He patted a place on the white-veined surface beside him. Gerun joined him.

“There was a plague before you were born,” Kalvin said.

“The Bendu Plague,” Gerun confirmed.

“In which millions of people died,” Kalvin said. “The Religio-College soothsayers pegged the culprit right off. Sillona-Xi, angry because She’d been short-changed the year before when the drought at Kistol made for a poor harvest.”

“I don’t worship Sillona-Xi!” Gerun snapped.

Kalvin breathed his long sign and tried again.

“There was a landslide in the Bytamax Province of Rhinic many terns ago. Six-thousand people dead as a result. Three-thousand injured. A mountain leveled, three valleys filled to the brim. Why? Because Raglistim was angered by the slowness with which workers were clearing His grotto at Hypernum.”

“I don’t worship Raglistin!” Gerun informed, angry because he was finally getting the point.

“Yes,” Kalvin agreed, his mentat having accepted the admission the boy was unprepared to make verbally. “The gods are often as vengeful as they are merciful. Who’s to say Jon Missionary’s god is any the less vengeful? He did, after all, allow His prophet to endure Xeon brain-blank, didn’t He? Not a very pleasant occurrence for any man, from what I’ve heard. Although it’s more merciful to the outer shell than Warluck’s sloppier-devised mind-erase.”

“But his memory wasn’t completely gone,” Gerun insisted, referring to Jon Missionary’s remembrance of his name and melodious words.

“So, we have always wanted to believe,” Kalvin said. “Why? Because it’s far more flattering to our egos to think that we’ve descended from a prophet than from a half-wit, isn’t it, my boy?”

If looks could kill, Kalvin would have been a dead man. He knew Gerun, though, and he loved him more than he’d loved any of his other grandchildren. It had always been the boy’s passions which had excited Kalvin, which excited him now.

“Which of the Religio-College’s pantheon of gods do you believe in, Gerun?” Kalvin asked, knowing the answer.

“I believe in no god!” Gerun said too quickly, too loudly.

“So easily you deny Him with one breath while expecting Him to succor you with the breath just preceding.”

“I meant, I don’t know His name,” Gerun corrected, feeling like a fool. The old man had led him into the trap like a goosen could lead a flock of gysins to slaughter. Gerun was prepared to admit no more.

“A nameless God, then?” Kalvin persisted. “One not of the Religio-College perhaps?”

Gerun could hide nothing from the old man. The mentat-linkage Kalvin shared with his grandchild was so strong that each feared what loss he would suffer if and when the other died.

“Jon Missionary’s god?” Kalvin prodded. Gerun was helpless to keep the answer from him. “I do believe in Jon Missionary’s god,” Kalvin admitted, marveling at the surprise in Gerun’s eyes. Did the boy really not know that, really not see that? Did Gerun really believe himself alone in suspecting Jon Missionary was a true messenger from on high? Did Gerun really believe he was the only one angry because the holy message and messenger had gotten so unbearably scrambled along the way?

“Listen to me, Gerun, for I have yet something more to say,” Kalvin said, “and we’ve already dangerously overextended our time in which to say it. It’s important that you learn to put Jon Missionary and his legacy in proper perspective, even though it will probably be as impossible for you to manage as it has been for me to do so, not to mention all of the others who have come before us as members of our clan. Will you listen?”

Gerun didn’t have to say, yes. His acceptance was conveyed via mentat.

“Only Jon Missionary knows—or once knew—if his arrival was as a messenger from his god, the message hopelessly garbled en route. Jon Missionary is dead. All Melina-Lu’s attempts failed that were made to reverse his brain-blank. And there were many attempts at reversal. Remember, too, that Melina-Lu was the first true believer. Would a woman merely interested in the physical perfection of a man be so anxious to record that man’s every word? On the other hand, maybe she needed something to rationalize the insatiable passion she, a princess of the royal blood, felt for a man who came to her damaged and with a slave brand marring his otherwise perfect body.”

“Why must you always take both sides?” Gerun criticized.

“Because I have seen both sides and still made my choice on the side of God,” Kalvin explained patiently. Really, Gerun was such a child. Was it too much to hope he would survive the careful planning of a skillful exterminator like Warluck? “You must see both sides,” Kalvin continued.

“Why?” Gerun asked helplessly, ashamed when his mentat, for one brief instant, penetrated through Kalvin’s defenses and read there just how much of a child Kalvin really thought Gerun was.

“Why?” Kalvin echoed, his defenses back up. The boy must act like a man. It did Gerun no good at all to see that others—his grandfather included—saw him as a mere boy. Kalvin cursed his slip that had allowed Gerun time to glimpse Kalvin’s true feelings. “Because from the moment I leave you, and that shall be soon, I shall be too busy saving myself to save you. You will be on your own. Alone. Warluck, the Religio-College, and all the considerable power that combination can bring against you: your enemy. Where will you be if you don’t have at least one god to whom to pray? Not a willowy phantom of a god that may or may not be there, either. What kind of help to you could that kind of god possibly be?

“Melina-Lu planted the suspicion of Jon Missionary’s god in all of us,” Kalvin hurried on. “Flattered by the idea that we were the chosen people, seeing what others hadn’t seen, we grew powerful, rich and secure. We became prideful and arrogant. We made enemies and antagonized old ones among the Religio-College. The College was kept at bay, by the way, more because of our connection to the royal house than by any of them truly believing our god could outsmart any of theirs. We grew careless, failing to see that what weakened the Religio-College in Jon Missionary’s time was its assumed involvement in an assassination attempt on the life of Maxlima II— And that assassination, my young man, was what saved Jon Missionary from the incinerator, not the lusting of a princess desirous of taking him to her bed. If Jon Missionary arrived today, he would be incinerated along with his Book, because Warluck is far more powerful than Panrun-Ru ever thought of being, and Ruellin VI is far weaker than Maxlima II.”

Kalvin’s long discourse had left him breathless and panting. Yet, he still had more to say, even through the pale cinolinis on the horizon hinted of the day’s first sunrise. “You need faith to survive your upcoming trials, Gerun,” Kalvin said. “Faith in God. If the god we’ve all worshipped in secret all of this time isn’t a real enough god for you, marred by your suspicions that He’s no more than a madman’s ramblings, a lusting woman’s rationalizations, an arrogant clan’s excuse for feeling better than their friends and neighbors, then cast Him out of your life and believe in Sillona-Xi, or Raglistim, or Gryphis, even in Jursimms. But do believe in some god, or you’ll die on your own. And that can be a pretty lonely business.”

“Warluck must fear our god if he’s so intent upon killing Him by killing us,” Gerun said.

“Who can truly know Warluck’s motivations but Warluck?” Kalvin argued. “They may have nothing to do with God. They may have everything to do with power and/or politics. Ruellin VI is a weak ruler. You and I both know it. By killing us in some holy vendetta, Warluck erodes Ruellin VI’s authority even farther by implicating the ruler’s Melina-Lu connection in heresy. Save yourself and, then, indulge in ponderings as to why the killer so urgently prowled your doorstep.”

Yes, I will save myself, Gerun promised himself. I’ll save me, and I’ll save Jon Missionary’s god with me. For what kind of god would He be with no worshipers?

“He found us, didn’t He?” Kalvin reminded, having once again read Gerun’s mentat. “And look how easily we were won over with just the merest suspicion of His existence. Don’t think He’ll need you or me when and if He should decide to win new converts. You, on the other hand, need Him to survive. Forget all the Missionary-clan arrogance and pride piled up over all of this time. We’ve been dropped so low that we’re liable never to crawl up out of this hole again. He’s not going to help you if you attempt blackmailing Him into giving you a helping hand.”

Gerun scanned the horizon, cinolinis-to-blinish hues signaling the increasing nearness of first-day.

“We mustn’t be out during the day,” Gerun warned. “We can both hole up here until another nightfall.”

“And wouldn’t Warluck just love to stumble upon the last two eggs in the same basket!” Kalvin said, his voice resuming its confidence, his body thrusting off the accumulation of age which had so stooped it just an instant ago. “We must be together only in God, until the safety of the Missionary gene bank is once again secure without us. Until then.…”

He took his grandson in one final embrace, his arms strong, his muscles—another legacy passed down to all Missionary men from Jon Missionary—hard against the hardness of Gerun’s youthful body.

“Go with God, grandson,” he said. Then, he was gone, slipped into the night so silently that Gerun’s mentat couldn’t pick up a trace of it or know the direction the old man had taken.

Gerun dropped to his knees, tented his hands beneath his chin, and shut his eyes. He prayed to his god, to Jon Missionary’s god, to Kalvin Missionary’s god, hoping—deep down in his heart of hearts—that he wasn’t asking help from a deity whom wasn’t there and, what’s more, never had been.