by Eric Brown
The walkway ended and a short flight of steps led down to the ice and the first of the Acolytes. Hendrick stopped in his tracks and stared. Before him, the tourists negotiated the steps and moved circumspectly across the ice through the plantation of alien blooms.
Anika led the way, her bright orange one-piece another splash of colour amidst the transformed Acolytes.
Hedrick followed Miller down the steps, then moved off towards the first of the Acolytes, each one positioned perhaps four metres from the next and stretching left and right for hundreds of metres.
He stopped before the first transformed figure, Miller silent beside him.
At the base each rearing, splayed bloom was a silver column, two metres high and as wide as a human being. On the curving flank of each metal column was the hologram of a smiling man, woman, or child, and beneath each face an inscription.
Hendrick, some unnameable emotion making his chest tight, stepped forward and stared into the smiling face of a young, fair-haired woman, and read the words beneath the image: “Francesca Vullamy, 23, Italy, Earth.”
He stepped back and looked up at what Francesca Vullamy had become.
He didn’t know whether to be sickened by what the process had turned the Acolyte into or transfixed by its beauty. He realised, as he stared up at the complex arrangement of stems and petals spreading against the effulgent starscape, that he was both horrified intellectually at the waste of life and at the same time moved at the aesthetic splendour of the Sacrifice.
From the top of the silver column, a single bone-white stem twisted into the air then branched out into a dozen thinner stems, each one affixed to a single crimson petal—perhaps two metres across—that fanned out in an impossibly thin, veined membrane.
Stunned, he moved off further into the plantation of transformed human beings. He took in the silver columns, the images of the Acolytes, passing old and young alike, men and women and children whose smiling faces and visible vitality were at odds with the fate they had so willingly embraced.
He stared up at the forest of blooms, each one varying slightly in shape and hue. He felt like a trespasser on hallowed ground, a fascinated voyeur enjoying the undeniable beauty of the mass suicide. He was tempted to ask Anika how this effect had been achieved, but then he realised that he really didn’t want to know the details.
Anika’s voice startled him. “A flier transports Acolytes from the monastery to the Holy Declaration,” she said. “Dressed in their ceremonial gowns, the Acolytes have seconds only to make their way across the ice to their allotted Eternal Columns, shed their human raiment and undergo their blessed transformations. All succeed in making the final journey, despite the terrible cold, such is their desire to attain the next life. They are prepared, of course, anointed with oils and balm.”
Hendrick moved further into the Holy Declaration. Hundreds of spreading, frozen petals occluded his view of the ice beyond. He stepped towards a column displaying the image of a woman in her thirties. Her European features were animated with what might have been joy as she returned his stare.
A thought occurred to him and he spoke into the microphone. “The . . . blooms appear remarkably well preserved, but how do they survive the months of intense summer heat?”
Anika’s reply sounded in his ear. “When the thaw begins, in five years, the Holy Script is covered, insulated, to protect the Acolytes in their act of Ultimate Devotion. When winter approaches once again, the covering is removed so that the splendour of their Sacrifice might be appreciated.”
Someone else asked if the Acolytes suffered on their approach to the columns.
Hendrick could imagine Anika’s smile as she replied, “They are anaesthetised by their beliefs, sir. They feel only joy at the life everlasting which awaits them.”
Hendrick came to what looked like a family group: four columns which showed the images of a blond-haired father and mother and, between them, two small children, a boy and a girl of perhaps six and eight respectively. He approached the girl’s column with trepidation, paused, and looked into the image of her face. An expression almost of beatification illuminated her features. He thought of his daughter lying in her suspension pod, and his throat constricted with emotion.
These people had sacrificed themselves—committed suicide, he reminded himself—twenty years ago. Had they lived, the boy and girl would be adults now.
For a terrible second, he wondered if his ex-wife and her lover had brought Samantha and themselves to Kallithea to take part in this ludicrous self-annihilation—driven by despair at being unable to find a cure for Samantha’s condition, perhaps, and a desire to spite him after the events on Fomalhaut IV. The notion came and went. Maatje might have dallied with strange cults in her time, but he knew that she would never sacrifice herself and her daughter like this, for any reason.
“If you would return to the walkway,” Anika’s voice sounded in his ear, “I will conduct you further along the Holy Script.”
They climbed to the walkway and passed through the cone of light beamed out by the flier, Hendrick feeling like an actor on a spot-lit stage. Five minutes later, they came to the area where thousands of unadorned silver columns obtruded from the ice. To the left, the last of the transformed Acolytes could be seen: an array of venous membranes fanning out above the columns, each bloom turned towards the heavens.
“And here we have the intake of Acolytes from just five years ago,” Anika said. “If you pass amongst the vacant columns, you will observe that they bear the image and the name of the Acolyte allotted to each position.”
Hendrick followed the others down a short flight of steps and crossed the ice. He came to a column and made out, beneath the smiling face of a middle-aged man, the name: “Thierry Villiers, 33, Francois, Earth.” He moved on to the next column. He stared at the happy face of a young, dark-skinned woman then looked away and read, “Elizabeth Grainger, 25, New London province, Simion’s Landfall.”
He looked back at the flash-frozen bodily fluids of the sacrificed Acolytes, and then at the enfilade of columns yet to be filled, receding into the distance. The sight of the empty columns, each one bearing the image and name of the person still at this moment living, struck him as ineffably sad, poignant symbols of the ultimate futility of the mass sacrifice.
A few metres away, their guide stood beside a vacant column, her mittened hand outstretched to touch the inscription on its flank. Hendrick wondered if the same thought of wasted lives had occurred to her.
She saw him looking, raised a hand and gave a small wave, then said, “And now, if you would follow me back to the flier, we will move on to the Monastery of the Acolytes of the Ice.”
Hendrick climbed the steps and hurried along the walkway, glad at last to be leaving the desolate precincts of the Holy Declaration.
SIX
THE MONASTERY WAS SITUATED THREE KILOMETRES SOUTH of the Holy Declaration, a modern polymer building comprising a central A-frame with a low-lying dome on either side. Only when the flier came to rest before the monastery did the true size of the building become apparent. As Hendrick alighted, he glanced up at the apex fifty metres above the sliding glass entrance. Depicted on the apex, and looming over the tourists as they passed inside, was the stylised outline of a volan bloom held in the cupped hands of a human figure.
Once in the foyer, Miller peeled off his visor and asked, “What did you make of that?”
“You know what I think about religions, Ed. And ones that call for their adherents to have themselves liquidised and flash frozen . . .”
“This way, please!” their guide called out in her sing-song voice, as if she were conducting a party of schoolchildren on a day-trip to the zoo.
Dutifully, the tourists followed her through a second sliding door. Hendrick found himself in a small ante-room, a pair of pale-blue polymer doors closed before the group.
“We will now pass through into the meditation chamber. Please maintain a respectful silence at all times. The final
preparation of the first intake of Acolytes is taking place. Soon, the faithful will be flown to the Holy Declaration to take their place for all eternity. This way, please.”
Hendrick exchanged a glance with Miller and followed the others through the sliding door.
He should have known, from the height of the central A-frame, that the meditation chamber would be vast, but he was still amazed when he stepped through the door and took in its cavernous dimensions. The room fell away before them in a deep, shelving amphitheatre, obviously excavated from the ice. Below him, in a great semicircle, Acolytes in plain white smocks occupied descending tiers, their heads bowed in meditation. A profound silence filled the chamber.
Miming silence with a finger to her lips, Anika gestured her party to take a row of seats on the topmost tier. Hendrick edged in after Miller and sat down.
Far below, on a tiny circular stage, a tall man dressed in a white smock stood at a dais, his head bowed. Above him was a hologram of a leonine, grey-haired man: their guru, His Holiness Cavendish Sagar, Hendrick guessed, holding a volan flower in his cupped palms.
He felt a mounting sense of unease as he looked down on row after row of bowed heads. He made out Acolytes young and old, black and white and brown—individuals seated apart and families grouped together.
He noticed movement far below. From the front row back, row after row of congregants rose and moved off to the left. There, in the wings, individuals in pale-blue uniforms passed the Acolytes something which each one slipped into their mouth, bowing their heads in silent gratitude. Then they passed from the meditation chamber through a sliding door to the left of the stage.
Miller leaned towards him and murmured, “Anaesthetic, Matt. I bet.”
He nodded, numbed by the thought of the mass suicide about to take place.
He had quite forgotten about his earpiece until Anika’s hushed voice sounded, surprising him. “The Acolytes leave the meditation chamber for the last time, under the beneficent gaze His Holiness Cavendish Sagar. From here, they process to the Waiting Chamber beneath this auditorium. There they remain for fifteen minutes, contemplating their lives to date and the exalted existence in the hereafter which awaits each individual.”
Hendrick touched his microphone and whispered, “But . . . But why do they believe?” He was giving voice to his incredulity, and honestly did not expect that she could answer the impossible question.
“They believe because His Holiness Cavendish Sagar persuaded them, through his holy texts, that the life of the individual is a lie, an illusion—that the only true reality is that which awaits each Acolyte when they conjoin with every other Acolyte in an afterlife in which the idea of an individual is non-existent. The only truth is the unity of souls, the only destiny is oneness for eternity; all else is a delusion. The way of flesh is cruel, and absolution is only achieved in one’s abasement to the Almighty.”
Hendrick sat very still and gazed down at the departing Acolytes, his heartbeat pounding.
The sound started as a low vibration, a rumble on the threshold of audibility. It grew as he listened, became the thrum of what he recognised as a flier’s engines.
Anika spoke again. “We should now replace our visors and goggles and make our way outside.”
They passed through the sliding doors, into the foyer, and then outside. Anika led them on a walkway along the front of the monastery towards one of the flanking domes, where Hendrick saw a fleet of bulky fliers coming in to land.
He made out a line of figures passing through a clear umbilical passage leading from one of the domes to the closest flier: the Acolytes, embarking upon their final journey.
Anika led the way towards the flier and ushered the tourists up a flight of steps. He found himself in a small, sealed compartment with the other tourists, relieved that they were segregated from the Acolytes.
He took his seat next to Miller and strapped himself in, aware that everything he had seen to date—the transformed Acolytes on the ice plain, the adherents within the monastery preparing themselves for death—was but a prelude to what he was about to witness: the mass suicide of human beings in thrall to some twisted belief in a promised afterlife.
He was thrust back into his seat as the flier took off.
The journey lasted hardly a minute, and then they were landing with a diminuendo of engines and a flurry of disturbed ice particles beyond the viewscreen to his left.
A profound silence reigned when the engines cut out. Hendrick looked out across the ice. A flight of steps was trolleyed into position near the flank of the flier, and a minute later the Acolytes emerged from the vehicle and moved serenely down the steps, one by one.
Anika said, “If you would care to follow me out onto the ice.”
Numbed, as if he himself was expected to sacrifice himself to the ice plain, he rose and followed Miller down the steps. He felt a sudden icy blast as his suit battled to compensate for the wind-chill factor, and he wondered how the queue of Acolytes fifty metres away, naked but for thin white smocks, could bear the punishing temperature. They walked as if in a trance, many of them smiling, others staring glassily ahead, mothers and fathers holding the hands of boys and girls as they left the shadow of the flier and crossed to the forest of columns that bristled from the silver-grey plain of ice.
Anika led the way along a catwalk so that the group of tourists looked down on the Acolytes as they approached their allotted columns. Hendrick found himself gripped, wanting to turn away as the first of the Acolytes came to the silver columns, but unable to drag his gaze away from the horror that was about to take place.
He stared at a young man as he stepped towards his allotted column. Its flank slid open silently and the Acolyte, without the slightest hesitation, stepped inside. The column closed, and instantly—so suddenly that Hendrick was shocked breathless—a spray of what he knew to be atomised blood and bone fountained into the frozen air and held the shape of an ineffably beautiful bloom.
And then the other Acolytes gave themselves. Across the ice plain, in a great silent wave, a thousand crimson membranes flashed into existence in the winter darkness: it was like watching the time-lapsed film of a vast garden coming into simultaneous bloom.
As he stared across the transformed ice plain, Hendrick was overcome with the desire to object, to voice his horror. What was going on here was an outrage, and he was overwhelmed by the knowledge of his impotence to say or do anything that might save a single life.
That these people should give themselves willingly, forego their lives and sacrifice themselves to some absurd notion of afterlife, defied logic and his sense of what as right. And that they were transforming themselves into the meretricious volan flower seemed somehow to cheapen their sacrifice. What they had become was not the true alien bloom but some cheap analogue dreamed up in the sadistic mind of a nihilistic ideologue.
He found himself stepping forward towards Anika in her tangerine thermal suit.
“But what makes them believe such . . . such . . .” He gestured, futilely, at the Acolytes going willingly to their deaths.
“The Acolytes believe because what His Holiness Cavendish Sagar told us is true: life across the Expansion is an abomination. Humans are sinful creatures, prone to cruelty and fleshly vanity, and only in sub-jugation to He who rules will we find solace.”
“But that . . .” he began in disgust.
Their guide turned to the tourists beyond Hendrick. “I hope you have found much to contemplate in the hallowed precincts and our Holy Declaration, ladies and gentlemen. I hope you might even contemplate reading the teachings of His Holiness and perhaps one day . . .”
She reached up and pulled off her visor, smiling at Hendrick as she did so. She pulled at the zipper of her thermal suit, drawing it down her torso and stepping from the garment.
“No,” he said.
“I am a priestess of the Acolytes of the Ice, sir. For five years I have anticipated this moment.”
Smiling at him, somet
hing almost defiant in her ice-blue eyes, she reached up and pulled her blonde wig from her head and cast it aside, revealing her shaven skull with its occipital pigtail.
“I rejoice in my individual Sacrifice,” Anika intoned as, barefoot and naked but for a white smock like every other Acolyte, she held the gaze of the tourists now staring at her with incredulity and horror, turned and walked down the steps and out across the ice.
Hendrick watched, as if frozen himself, as she found her silver column, paused, then passed within.
Instantly, and in beautiful silence, a flower sprang into being above the column: a spreading red carnation that was all that remained of their erstwhile guide.
He felt someone grip his arm and turned to see Miller towering over him. “Come on, Matt,” he murmured, and led Hendrick back to the waiting flier.
SEVEN
THEY SAT IN THE HOTEL BAR, A ROTATING GLASS BAUBLE that was the highest point in New Stockholm. On all sides the view was identical: beyond the city streets a silver-grey plain of ice extended to the horizon, silent and motionless beneath the stars. Come springtime, apparently, with the resurgence of dormant vegetation, the view across the plain was a spectacular display of multi-coloured blooms and writhing vines. Now it was a deathly landscape, still and silent and entirely in keeping with the ritual they had witnessed earlier that evening.
“I’ll never understand what makes people do something like that,” Hendrick said.
Miller sipped his lager, regarding him. “A profound dissatisfaction with this life, Matt. And a just as profound belief in something better.”
Hendrick shook his head. “This Sagar character was obviously a charlatan.”
Miller shrugged. “He believed his own philosophy enough to sacrifice himself, after all.”
He thought of their guide, Anika. “She had everything to live for,” he murmured. He took a swallow of beer. “Life might be hell at times, but as the old saying goes, I prefer it to the alternative.”