The Book of Philip Jose Farmer

by Philip José Farmer

  He was riding a horse, the only one he had seen alive since he and his party had landed near the submerged city of Tunis. There were many bones of horses and other animals, killed in the quakes or by tidal waves or bombings or gunfights or by disease or by starving men, for food. Bones of men also lay everywhere. The crows and ravens and kites were, however, numerous, though swiftly losing their fat now. Kelvin knew the taste of their stringy carrion-smelling flesh very well.

  The party had traveled on foot from the California mountains across the continent, had built from wreckage a small sailing ship with an auxiliary engine, sailed across the Atlantic to England and from there down along the newly created coasts of France and Portugal, through the straits of Gibraltar (past the great tumbled rock), and then had been wrecked by a storm on the shore of what was left of Tunisia.

  Three days ago, Anna Silvich had shot a scrawny goat; that had kept them from collapsing with hunger. Then Kelvin had found the white stallion, which was amazingly sleek and healthy. Its presence, so well-fed, in these bleak and deserted environs, seemed a miracle. Some of the party said that it was a miracle. Perhaps this was the very horse on which the rider called Faithful and True had led the hosts of Heaven to victory over the Beast and the Antichrist.

  But Kelvin said that he did not think that was likely, though it could be one of the horses ridden by one of the hosts that had followed the Faithful and True into the final battle. However, if a miracle were to be performed, it would be just as easy to transport them, teleport them rather, in the closing of an eye, the scratching of a nose, instead of letting them slog along by boat and foot. But this was not to be; they were alone. He hastened to add as the others frowned, that he meant that the party would never be alone, of course, in the sense that He was always with them. What he had meant was that they could not just sit down and expect some sort of celestial welfare.

  That morning, Kelvin had taken a rifle and thirty bullets, all he had for a .32 caliber gun, a goatskin waterbag containing distilled water (which became red- colored two hours afterward), and a leather sling and some stones, and had ridden into the hills. The countryside here had been stripped by the cataclysms, but, in the past three years, some plants had re-established themselves. There were still hares and rodents and lizards and the little desert foxes in this area. He hoped to get some of these with his sling. The .32 was for protection only or in case he should, by some chance, find larger game.

  He had tied the horse to a bush and had gone on foot into the tumbled and deeply fissured hills. He smashed a lizard with a stone from his sling and dropped it into the bag hanging from his belt. A few minutes later, he killed a raven with a stone. And then, under a deep shelf of rock, he found the ashes of a recent fire and some thoroughly scraped sheep and rat bones. There were no tracks in this rocky wilderness for him to follow, but he went down three long fissures searching for signs of the fire- builder. Reluctantly, he gave up looking and returned to the place where he had tied the horse. His tightening belly and his weakness told him that he would have to give permission for the horse to be butchered. It would hurt him to kill such a fine animal, but the party would then have plenty of meat for a few days.

  The ringing of iron shoes on rocks warned him before he left the mouth of the fissure. Crouching, he looked around a boulder. A woman with short curly auburn hair, dressed in a ragged and dirty green coverall, was riding his horse away.

  He did not want to shoot her or to make the horse bolt because of the shot. He put the rifle down and ran out after her while he took a stone from the bag at his belt and fitted it into the sling. She turned her head to look behind her just as the stone gave her a glancing blow on her back, near the spine. She screamed and fell forward off the horse; it reared and then galloped off.

  Kelvin approached her with the rifle pointed at her. She seemed to be armed with only a knife, but he had learned long ago not to trust to appearances. At the moment, she did not look as if she could use a hidden weapon, even if she had one. She was sitting up, leaning on one arm, and groaning. The skin on her arms and legs and on one side of her face was torn.

  "Any broken bones?" he said.

  She shook her head and moaned, "Oh, no! But I think you almost broke my back. It really hurts."

  "I'm sorry," he said, "but you were stealing my horse. Now, take out your knife slowly and throw it over to one side. Gently."

  She obeyed and then slowly got to her feet. At his orders, she stripped and turned around twice so that he could make sure that she had no weapons taped to her. After he inspected the coverall, he threw it back to her, and she put it back on. "Have you got anything to eat?" she said.

  "The dinner ran away," he said. "What's your name and what are you doing here? And are you a Christian?"

  There had been a time when he would not have asked that last question. He had assumed that all those who had bowed to the Beast and allowed it to put its mark on them had been killed either during the series of cataclysms that had almost wrecked the Earth or during the war afterward. But it had long been evident that he had misread the Revelation of John.

  "I'm Dana Webster of Beverly, Yorkshire, and I was in a party which was going to the beloved city. But they're all dead now, mostly of starvation, though some were killed by heathens. I found the horse, and I took it because I wanted to get away from whomever owned it, far away, where I could eat the horse without worrying about being tracked down."

  She did have a slight English accent, he noted. And her remark about the heathens implied that she was Christian. But she could retract the statement, or rationalize it, if it turned out that she had given the wrong answer. After all, she had no way of knowing that he was really a Christian.

  He handed her his canteen, and she drank deeply before giving it back. "It tastes wonderful, even if it does look like blood," she said. "Do you suppose it'll ever get its natural color back? I mean, its lack of color."

  "I don't know," he said.

  "There's a lot we don't know, isn't there?"

  "We'll know when we get to the beloved city," he said. "Let's go."

  She turned and walked ahead of him. He carried the rifle in the crook of his elbow, but he was ready to use it at any time. They trudged along silently while the sun dropped through its pool of red. Once, he thought he saw the east begin to lighten, and he stopped, giving a soft cry. She halted and then turned slowly so that he would not misinterpret her movement.

  "What is it?" she said.

  "I thought... I hoped... no... I was mistaken. I thought that the east was beginning to light up with His glory and that He was surely coming. But my nerves were playing tricks on me. Nerves plus hunger."

  "Even if you saw a glory wrapping the world," she said, "how do you know that it would be Him? How could you be certain that it was He and not the Antichrist?"

  He goggled at her for a moment and then said, "The Antichrist and the Beast went into the flaming lake!"

  "What Beast? I thought the Beast was the world government? You surely don't mean that mythical monster that Gurets was supposed to have locked up in a room in his palace? As for the flaming lake, has anyone ever seen it? I know no one who has. Do you? Actually, all we know is what we've heard by word of mouth or the very little that comes over our radio receivers, supposedly from the beloved city. And where is the beloved city? Well, actually, there isn't any, as the broadcaster admits. There is a site somewhere in what used to be mountainous Israel where the faithful will gather and where the beloved city will be built by the faithful under the supervision of, I presume, angels.

  "But how do you know that all this is true or why we're being led, somewhat like sheep into a chute, toward the beloved city? And if there is a flaming lake, and God knows there are plenty all over the world now, how do you know that the Antichrist went into it? Wouldn't the Antichrist, or whoever is supposed to be the Antichrist, have spread this tale about to make the faithful think it was safe to come to Israel?"

  "You must be a h
eathen!" Kelvin said. "Telling a lie like that!"

  "Do you see any numbers on my hand?" she said. "And if you looked at my forehead with a polarizer, you wouldn't see any numbers there, either. And if you care to, you can look at my scalp. You won't see any scars there because my head wasn't opened and there's no transceiver there for the Beast to activate any time it wants to press a button."

  "We'll see about that when we get to camp," he said.

  "I'm not telling lies," she said. "I'm just speculating, as any Christian should. Remember, the Serpent is very cunning and full of guile. What better way to fight those who believe in God than to pose as Christ returned?"

  Kelvin did not like the path down which his mind was walking. There should be no more uncertainties; all should be hard and final. Things were not what he had thought they would be. Not that he was reproaching God even in his thoughts. But things just had not worked out as he had assumed they would. And his assumptions had been based on a lifetime of reading the Scriptures.

  "Were you one of those martyred by the Beast?" he said. Dana Webster had started walking again. She did not stop to reply but slowed down so that he was only a step behind and a step to one side of her.

  "Do you mean, was I one of those whose heads were rayed off and who was then resurrected? No, I wasn't, though I could easily claim to be one and no one could prove that I was lying. Most of my brothers and sisters were killed, but I was lucky. I got away to a hideout up on Mount Skiddaw, in Cumberland. The Beast's search parties were getting close to my cave when the meteorites fell and the quakes started and everything was literally torn to shreds."

  "God's intervention," he said. "Without His help, we would all have perished."

  "Somebody's intervention."

  "What do you mean by somebody?"

  "Extraterrestrials," she said. "Beings from a planet of some far-off star. Beings far advanced beyond man -- in science, at least."

  The ideas from her were coming too fast. "Could Extraterrestrials resurrect the dead?" he said.

  "I don't know why not," she said. "Scientists have said that we would be able to do it in a hundred years or so, maybe sooner. Of course, that would require some means of recording the total molecular makeup and electromagnetic radiation patterns of an individual. That would someday be possible, according to the scientists. And then, using the recordings, the dead person could be duplicated with an energy-matter converter. This was also theoretically possible."

  "But the person would be duplicated, not resurrected," he said. "He would not be the same person!"

  "No, but he would think he was."

  "What good would that do?"

  "How do I know what superbeings have in their superminds? Do you know what's being planned for you by God?"

  He was becoming very angry, and he did not wish to be so. He said, "I think we'd better stop talking and save our strength."

  "For that matter," she said, "what sense is there in two resurrections or in having a millennium? Why lock up Satan for a thousand years and then release him to lead the heathens against the Christians again, only to lock him up again and then hold the final judgment?"

  He did not answer, and she said nothing more for a long time. After an hour, they came down out of the jumbled and shattered hills, and Kelvin saw the white horse eating some long brown grass growing from between tiny cracks in the rocks. They approached slowly while Kelvin called out softly to him. The animal trotted off, however, when Kelvin was only forty feet away from him. He aimed his rifle at it; he could not let this much meat get away now on the slim chance that he might catch it later on.

  Dana Webster said, "Don't shoot it! I'll get him!" She called out loudly. The horse wheeled, snorting, and ran up to her and nuzzled her. She patted it and smiled at Kelvin. "I have a feeling for animals," she said. "Rather, there's a good feeling between me and them. An ESP of some sort, sympathetic vibrations, call it what you will."

  "Beauty and the beast."

  She quit smiling. "The Beast?"

  "I didn't mean that. But your power over animals..."

  "Don't tell me you believe in witchcraft? Good God! And I'm not swearing when I say that. Don't you believe in love? He feels it. And I feel such a traitor getting him back, because he'll probably be eaten."

  An hour later, they led the horse, worn-out from carrying the two humans, into camp near the sea. The sentinels had challenged them, and Kelvin had given the proper countersigns. They passed them and entered a depression on a jagged but low hill. All around them was the mouth-watering odor of frying fish. The four men who had put out into the red-tinged waters, in the small, lightweight, collapsible boat had been fortunate. Or blessed by God. They had not expected to catch anything at all, because the fish life had been frighteningly depleted. When St. John had predicted that a third of the seas would be destroyed, he had underestimated. Rather, underpredicted.

  Dana Webster pointed at the thirteen large fish frying in the dural pans over the fires. She said, "Does that mean we won't have to slaughter the horse?"

  "Not now, anyway," he said.

  "I'm so glad."

  Kelvin was glad, too, but he was not impressed by her love for it. He had known too many butchers of children who were very much concerned about humane treatment for dogs and cats.

  The men and women waiting for them were lean and dark with the sun and wind and were ridged, as if they were pieces of mahogany carved by windblown sand. They shone with something of a great strength derived from certainty. They had been through the persecutions and the cataclysms and the battles against the slaves of the Beast after the Beast's power had been broken by the cataclysms. "Blessed and holy is he who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ and they shall reign with him a thousand years."

  However, Kelvin thought, the statement that the second death will have no power over them apparently meant that those who had resisted the Beast for love of God would not be judged again. But they could die, and those who died would not return to the Earth until the thousand years had passed. And then they would rise with the other dead in their new bodies and witness the final judgment. It was then that those faithful who had died before the time of the Beast would be given new bodies and the others would go to whatever fate awaited them. The Alpha and Omega, the final kingdom, would come.

  All this had gone into the shaping of their bodies and the expression of face and eye. They were saints now, and nothing could ever change that. But saints could be hungry and thirsty and get very tired and become discouraged. And they would kill if they must.

  There were no children here nor had any of the party seen anyone under seven during their journey across the continent and the seas. Their time would come at the end of the millennium.

  "What do we have here?" Anna Silvich said.

  Anna was a tall gray-eyed blonde who would have been beautiful under softer conditions. Now her flesh was pared away so that the bones seemed very near and the white skin was dark and cracked. Despite this, Kelvin had felt very attracted to her. He intended to ask her to be his wife after they reached the beloved city. He could have married her before this, if she would have him, since any of the party could conduct the ceremony. They were all priests now. But he did not want to do anything that would take his mind off the most important object: getting to the beloved city.

  "We have here one who claims she is a Christian," Kelvin said.

  Anna took a pencil-shaped plastic object from her shirt-pocket, pointed it at Dana Webster's forehead, and slid a section of the object forward.

  "See?" Webster said. "I don't have the mark of the Beast."

  Anna stepped forward and seized the woman's hair and pulled her head down. Kelvin started to protest against the unnecessary roughness, but he decided not to. He would see how Webster reacted; perhaps she might get angry enough to trip herself up. Anna released the woman's hair and said, "No scars there. But that doesn't mean a
nything. If I had a microscope or even a magnifying glass..."

  Dana Webster said nothing but looked scornful. If she were upset or angry about her treatment, however, she did not allow it to interfere with her appetite. She ate the fish and the biscuits and canned peaches. The latter two items had been found in the ruins of a house by Sherborn, a little man who had a nose for buried or concealed food.

  Kelvin had given the prayer of thankfulness before they ate, but he felt he should say more afterward. "God has been good and given us enough today to restore our strength. We can face tomorrow with the certain knowledge that He will provide more. It's evident from today's catch that there are still fish in the Mediterranean. There must be enough to keep us fed until we get to the beloved city."

  Dana Webster, he noticed, said amen to that just as the others did. That could mean nothing except that she was playing her role of Christian, if she was indeed playing. She could be sincere. On the other hand, there were her remarks while they were traveling campward. He asked her what she had meant by Extraterrestrials.

  She looked around at the dark faces with their protruding cheekbones and hollow cheeks and the darkly rimmed but fire-bright eyes. "I should have kept these doubts -- or, rather, speculations -- to myself," she said. "I should've waited until we got to the beloved city. Then everything would be straightened out. One way or another. Of course, by then it might be too late for us. I hate to say anything about this because you'll think I'm a heathen. But I have a mind, and I must speak it. Isn't that the Christian way?"

  "We're not slaves of the Beast, if that's what you mean," Anna said. "We won't kill somebody because they differ somewhat from us on certain theological matters. Of course, we won't listen to blasphemy. But then you won't blaspheme if you're a Christian."