by Peter Watts
The view pulls back. Trajan’s face recedes into an endless crowd of mourners as the tram starts up again. I barely knew the man. I met him a few times at Senate functions, where I’m sure I made no impression at all. But he made an impression on me. He made an impression on everyone. His conviction filled the room. The moment I met him, I thought: Here is a man untroubled by doubt.
There was a time when I had doubts.
Never about God’s might or goodness, of course. Only, sometimes, whether we were truly doing His will. I would confront the enemy, and see not blasphemers but people. Not traitors-in-waiting, but children. I would recite the words of our savior: Did not the Christ Himself say I come not bringing peace, but a sword? Did not Holy Constantine baptize his troops with their sword-arms raised? I knew the scriptures, I’d known them from the crèche—and yet sometimes, God help me, they seemed only words, and the enemy had faces.
None so blind as those who will not see.
Those days are past. The Spirit has burned brighter in me over the past month than ever before. And this morning—this morning it burned brighter still. In Trajan’s memory.
I get off the tram at my usual stop. The platform is empty but for a pair of constables. They do not board. They approach me, their feet clicking across the tiles with the telltale disciplined rhythm of those in authority. They wear the insignia of the priesthood.
I study their faces as they block my way. The memory of the Spirit fades just enough to leave room for a trickle of apprehension.
“Forgive the intrusion, Praetor,” one of them says, “but we must ask you to come with us.”
Yes, they are sure they have the right man. No, there is no mistake. No, it cannot wait. They are sorry, but they are simply following orders from the bishop. No, they do not know what this concerns.
In that, at least, they are lying. It isn’t difficult to tell; colleagues and prisoners are accorded very different treatment in this regime, and they are not treating me as a colleague. I am not shackled, at least. I am not under arrest, my presence is merely required at the temple. They have accused me of nothing.
That, perhaps, is the most frustrating thing of all: accused, I could at least deny the charges.
Their cart winds through Constantinople, coasting from rail to rail with a click and a hum. I stand at the prow, forward of the control column. My escorts stand behind. Another unspoken accusation, this arrangement; I have not been ordered to keep my eyes front, but if I faced them—if I asserted the right to look back—how long would it be before a firm hand came down on my shoulder and turned me forward again?
“This is not the way to the temple,” I say over my shoulder.
“Origen’s blocked to Augustine. Cleaning up after the funeral.”
Another lie. My own company guarded the procession down Augustine not two days ago. We left no obstructions. The constables probably know this. They are not trying to mislead me; they are showing me that they don’t care enough to bother with a convincing lie.
I turn to confront them, and am preempted before I can speak: “Praetor, I must ask you to remove your helmet.”
“You’re joking.”
“No sir. The bishop was quite explicit.”
Stupefied and disbelieving, I undo the chin strap and lift the instrument from my skull. I begin to tuck it under my arm, but the constable reaches out and takes it from me.
“This is insane,” I tell him. Without the helmet I’m as blind and deaf as any heathen. “I’ve done nothing wrong. What possible reason—”
The constable at the wheel turns us left onto a new track. The other puts his hand on my shoulder, and firmly turns me around.
Golgotha Plaza. Of course.
This is where the Godless come to die. The loss of my helmet is moot here; no one feels the presence of the Lord in this place. Our cart slides silently past the ranks of the heretics and the demon-possessed on their crosses, their eyes rolled back in their heads, bloody rivulets trickling from the spikes hammered through their wrists. Some have probably been here since before Trajan died; crucifixion could take days even in the days before anesthetics, and now we are a more civilized nation. We do not permit needless suffering even among our condemned.
It’s an old trick, and a transparent one; many prisoners, paraded past these ranks, have chosen to cooperate before interrogation even begins. Do these two think I don’t see through them? Do they think I haven’t done this myself, more times than I can count?
Some of the dying cry out as we pass—not with pain, but with the voices of the demons in their heads. Even now, they preach. Even now, they seek to convert others to their Godless ways. No wonder the Church damps this place—for what might a simple man think, feeling the Divine Presence while hearing sacrilege?
And yet, I almost can feel God’s presence. It should be impossible, even if the constables hadn’t confiscated my helmet. But there it is: a trickle of the Divine, like a thin, bright shaft of sunlight breaking through the roof of a storm. It doesn’t overpower; God’s presence does not flood through me as it did earlier. But there is comfort, nonetheless. He is everywhere. He is even here. We do not banish Him with damper fields, any more than we turn off the sun by closing a window.
God is telling me, Have strength. I am with you.
My fear recedes like an ebbing tide. I turn back to my escorts and smile; God is with them too, if they’d only realize it.
But I don’t believe they do. Something changes in their faces when they look at me. The last time I turned to face them, they were merely grim and uncooperative.
Now, for some reason, they almost look afraid.
They take me to the temple, but not to the bishop. They send me through the tunnel of light instead. They tell me it is entirely routine, although I went through the tunnel only four months ago and am not due again for another eight.
My armor is not returned to me afterwards. Instead, they escort me into the bishop’s sanctum, through an ornate doorway embellished with the likeness of a fiery cross and God’s commandment to Constantine: In hoc signo vinces. In this sign, conquer.
They leave me alone, but I know the procedure. There are guards outside.
The sanctum is dark and comforting, all cushions and velvet drapes and mahogany bones. There are no windows. A screen on one wall glows with a succession of volumetric images. Each lingers for a few moments before dissolving hypnotically into the next: the Sinai foothills; Prolinius leading the charge against the Hindus; the Holy Grotto itself, where God showed Moses the Burning Bush, where He showed all of us the way of the Spirit.
“Imagine that we had never found it.”
I turn to find the bishop standing behind me as if freshly materialized. He holds a large envelope the color of ivory. He watches me with the faintest trace of a smile on his lips.
“Teacher?” I say.
“Imagine that Constantine never had his vision, that Eusebius never sent his expedition into Sinai. Imagine that the Grotto had never been rediscovered after Moses. No thousand-year legacy, no technological renaissance. Just another unprovable legend about a prophet hallucinating in the mountains, and ten commandments handed down with no tools to enforce them. We’d be no better than the heathens.”
He gestures me towards a settee, a decadent thing, overstuffed and wine-colored. I do not wish to sit, but neither do I wish to give offense. I perch carefully on one edge.
The bishop remains standing. “I’ve been there, you know,” he continues. “In the very heart of the Grotto. Kneeling in the very place Moses Himself must have knelt.”
He’s waiting for a response. I clear my throat. “It must have been … indescribable.”
“Not really.” He shrugs. “You probably feel closer to God during your morning devotionals. It’s … unrefined, after all. Raw ore. Astounding enough that a natural formation could induce any kind of religious response, much less one consistent enough to base a culture on. Still, the effect is … weaker than you might e
xpect. Overrated.”
I swallow and hold my tongue.
“Of course, you could say the same thing about the religious experience in principal,” he continues, blandly sacrilegious. “Just an electrical hiccough in the temporal lobe, no more divine than the force that turns compass needles and draws iron filings to a magnet.”
I remember the first time I heard such words: with the rest of my crèche, just before our first Communion. It’s like a magic trick, they said. Like static interfering with a radio. It confuses the part of your brain that keeps track of your edges, of where you stop and everything else begins—and when that part gets confused, it thinks you go on forever, that you and creation are one. It tricks you into believing you’re in the very presence of God. They showed us a picture of the brain sitting like a great wrinkled prune within the shadowy outline of a human head, arrows and labels drawing our attention to the relevant parts. They opened up wands and prayer caps to reveal the tiny magnets and solenoids inside, all the subtle instrumentality that had subverted an entire race.
Not all of us got it at first. When you’re a child, electromagnet is just another word for miracle. But they were patient, repeating the essentials in words simple enough for young minds, until we’d all grasped the essential point: we were but soft machines, and God was a malfunction.
And then they put the prayer caps on our heads and opened us to the Spirit and we knew, beyond any doubting, that God was real. The experience transcended debate, transcended logic. There was no room for argument. We knew. Everything else was just words.
Remember, they said afterwards. When the heathens would tell you our God is a lie, remember this moment.
I cannot believe that the bishop is playing the same games with me now. If he is joking, it is in very bad taste. If he is testing my conviction he falls laughably short. Neither alternative explains my presence here.
But he won’t take silence for an answer: “Don’t you agree?” he presses.
I tread carefully. “I was taught that the Spirit lives within iron filings and compass needles as much as in our minds and our hearts. That makes it no less Divine.” I take a breath. “I mean no disrespect, Teacher, but why am I here?”
He glances at the envelope in his hand. “I wished to discuss your recent … exemplary performance.”
I wait, not taken in. My guards did not treat me as an exemplary performer.
“You,” he continues, “are why we prevail against the heathens. It’s not just the technology that the Spirit provides, it’s the certainty. We know our God. He is empirical, He can be tested and proven and experienced. We have no doubt. You have no doubt. That is why we have been unstoppable for a thousand years, that is why neither Backland spies nor heathen flying machines nor the very breadth of an ocean will keep us from victory.”
They are not words that need corroboration.
“Imagine what it must be like to have to believe.” The bishop shakes his head, almost sadly. “Imagine the doubt, the uncertainty, the discord and petty strife over which dreams are divine and which are blasphemous. Sometimes I almost pity the heathens. What a terrible thing it must be, to need faith. And yet they cling to it. They creep into our towns and they wear our clothes and they move among us, and they shield themselves from the very presence of God.” He sighs. “I confess I do not entirely understand them.”
“They ingest some sort of herb or fungus,” I tell him. “They claim it connects them with their own god.”
The bishop mmmms. Doubtless he knew this already. “I would like to see their fungus move a monorail. Or even turn a compass needle. And yet, surrounded by evidence of the Lord’s hand, they continue to cut themselves off from it. This is not widely known, but we’ve received reports that they can successfully scramble entire rooms. Whole villas, even.”
He runs one long fingernail along the envelope, slitting it lengthwise.
“Like the chapel you purged this morning, Praetor. It was scrambled. The Spirit could not manifest.”
I shake my head. “You are mistaken, Teacher. I’ve never felt the Spirit more strongly than—”
The grim-faced escorts. The detour through Golgotha. The shaft of inexplicable sunlight. Everything falls into place.
A yawning chasm opens in the pit of my stomach.
The bishop extracts a sheet of film from the envelope: a snapshot of my passage through the Tunnel of Light. “You are possessed,” he says.
No. There is some mistake.
He holds up the snapshot, a ghostly, translucent image of my head rendered in grays and greens. I can see the demon clearly. It festers within my skull, a malign little lump of darkness just above my right ear. A perfect spot from which to whisper lies and treachery.
I am unarmed. I am imprisoned: I will not leave this place a free man. There are guards beyond the door, and unseen priestholes hidden in the dark corners of the room. If I so much as raise a hand to the bishop I am dead.
I am dead anyway. I am possessed.
“No,” I whisper.
“I am the way, the truth, and the light,” the bishop intones. “None can come to the Father except through me.” He stabs at the lump on the plate with one accusing finger. “Is this of the Christ? Is it of His Church? How then can it be real?”
I shake my head, dumbly. I cannot believe this is happening. I cannot believe what I see. I felt the Spirit today. I felt it. I am as certain of that as I have been of anything.
Is it me thinking these thoughts? Is it the demon, whispering to me?
“It seems there are more of them every day,” the bishop remarks sadly. “And they are not content to corrupt the soul. They kill the body as well.”
They force the Church to kill the body, he means. The Church is going to kill me.
But the bishop shakes his head, as though reading my mind. “I speak literally, Praetor. The demon will take your life. Not immediately—it may seduce you with this false rapture for some time. But then you will feel pain, and your mind will go. You will change; not even your loved ones will recognize you by your acts. Perhaps, near the end, you will become a drooling infant, squalling and soiling yourself. Or perhaps the pain will simply grow unbearable. Either way, you will die.”
“How—how long?”
“A few days, a few weeks … I know of one poor soul who was ridden for nearly a year before she was saved.”
Saved. Like the heretics at Golgotha.
And yet, whispers a tiny inner voice, even a few days spent in that Presence would be easily worth a lifetime …
I bring my hand to my temple. The demon lurks in there, festering in wet darkness only a skull’s thickness away. I stare at the floor. “It can’t be.”
“It is. But it does not have to be.”
It takes me a moment to realize what he’s just said. I look up and meet his eyes.
He’s smiling. “There is another way,” he says. “Yes, usually the body must die that the soul can be saved—crucifixion is infinitely kinder than the fate that usually awaits the possessed. But there’s an alternative, for those with—potential. I will not mislead you, Praetor. There are risks. But there have been successes as well.”
“An … an alternative …?”
“We may be able to exorcise the demon. We may be able to remove it, physically, from your head. If it works we can both save your life and return you to the Lord’s presence.”
“If it works …”
“You are a soldier. You know that death is always a possibility. It is a risk here, as in all things.” He takes a deep, considered breath. “On the cross, death would be a certainty.”
The demon in my head does not argue. It whispers no blasphemies, makes no desperate plea against the prospect of its extraction. It merely opens the door to Heaven a crack, and bathes my soul in a sliver of the Divine.
It shows me the Truth.
I know, as I knew in the crèche, as I knew this morning. I am in the presence of God, and if the bishop cannot see it then
the bishop is a babbling charlatan, or worse.
I would gladly go to the cross for just such a moment as this.
I smile and shake my head. “Do you think me blind, Bishop? You would wrap your wretched plottings up in Scripture, that I would not see them for what they are?” And I do see them now, laid bare in the Spirit’s radiance. Of course these vile Pharisees would trap the Lord in trinkets and talismans if they could. They would ration God through a spigot to which only they have access—and those to whom He would speak without their consent, they would brand possessed.
And I am possessed, but not by any demon. I am possessed by Almighty God. And neither He nor His Sons are hermit crabs, driven to take up residence in the shells of idols and machinery.
“Tell me, Bishop,” I cry. “Was Saul wearing one of your prayer caps on the road to Damascus? Did Elisha summon his bears with one of your wands? Or were they possessed of demons as well?”
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.