Prayers to Broken Stones

by Dan Simmons

  NO!!!

  Wind roared around them and threw sand a hundred feet in the air. The sky twisted, wrinkled like a tangled sheet on the line, changed from blue to lemon-yellow to gray. The sea rolled out in a giant slack tide and left dry, dead land where it receded. The earth pitched and shifted around them. Lightning flashed along the horizon.

  When the buckling stopped, Bremen ran to where Gail lay on the sand, lifted her with a few stern words.

  The dunes were gone, the cliffs were gone, the sea had disappeared. Where it had been now stretched a dull expanse of salt flat. The sky continued to shift colors down through darker and darker grays. The sun seemed to be rising again in the eastern desert. No. The light was moving. Something was crossing the wasteland. Something was coming to them.

  Gail started to break away, but Bremen held her tight. The light moved across the dead land. The radiance grew, shifted, sent out streamers that made both of them shield their eyes. The air smelled of ozone and the hair on their arms stood out.

  Bremen found himself clutching tightly to Gail and leaning toward the apparition as toward a strong wind. Their shadows leaped out behind them. The light struck at their bodies like the shock wave of a bomb blast. Through their fingers, they watched while the radiant figure approached. A double form became visible through the blaze of corona. It was a human figure astride a huge beast. If a god had truly come to Earth, this then was the form he would have chosen. The beast he rode was featureless, but besides light it gave off a sense of … warmth? Softness?

  Robby was before them, high on the back of his teddy bear.

  TOO STRONG CANNOT KEEP

  He was not used to language but was making the effort. The thoughts struck them like electrical surges to the brain. Gail dropped to her knees, but Bremen lifted her to her feet.

  Bremen tried to reach out with his mind. It was no use. Once at Haverford he had gone with a promising student to the coliseum, where they were setting up for a rock concert. He had been standing in front of a scaffolded bank of speakers when the amplifiers were tested. It was a bit like that.

  They were standing on a flat, reticulated plain. There were no horizons. White banks of curling fog were approaching from all directions. The only light came from the Apollo-like figure before them. Bremen turned his head to watch the fog advance. What it touched, it erased.

  “Jerry, what …” Gail’s voice was close to hysteria.

  Robby’s thoughts struck them again with physical force. He had given up any attempt at language, and the images cascaded over them. The visual images were vaguely distorted, miscolored, and tinged with an aura of wonder and newness. Bremen and his wife reeled from their impact.

  A WHITE ROOM WHITE

  THE HEARTBEAT OF A MACHINE

  SUNLIGHT ON SHEETS

  THE STING OF A NEEDLE

  VOICES WHITE SHAPES MOVING

  A GREAT WIND BLOWING

  A CURRENT PULLING, PULLING,

  PULLING

  With the images came the emotional overlay, almost unbearable in its knife-sharp intensity: discovery, loneliness, wonder, fatigue, love, sadness, sadness, sadness.

  Both Bremen and Gail were on their knees. Both were sobbing without being aware of it. In the sudden stillness after the onslaught, Gail’s thoughts came loudly. Why is he doing this? Why won’t he leave us alone?

  Bremen took her by the shoulders. Her face was so pale that her freckles stood out in bold relief.

  Don’t you understand, Gail? It’s not him doing it.

  Not??? Who…?????

  Gail’s thoughts rolled in confusion. Splintered images and fragmented questions leaped between them as she struggled to control herself.

  It’s me. Gail. Me. Bremen had meant to speak aloud, but there was no sound now, only the crystalline edges of their thoughts. He’s been fighting to keep us together all along. I’m the one. I don’t belong. He’s been hanging on for me, trying to help me to stay, but he can’t resist the pull any longer.

  Gail looked around in terror. The fog boiled and reached for them in tendrils. It was closing around the god figure on his mount. Even as they watched, his radiance dimmed.

  Touch him, thought Bremen.

  Gail closed her eyes. Bremen could feel the wings of her thought brushing by him. He heard her gasp.

  My God, Jerry. He’s just a baby. A frightened child!

  If I stay any longer, I’ll destroy us all. With that thought Bremen conveyed a range of emotions too complex for words. Gail saw what was in his mind and began to protest, but before she could pattern her thoughts, he had pulled her close and hugged her fiercely. His mindtouch amplified the embrace, added to it all the shades of feeling that neither language nor touch could communicate in full. Then he pushed her away from him, turned, and ran toward the wall of fog. Robby was visible as only a faint glow in the white mist, clutching the neck of his teddy bear. Bremen touched him as he passed. Five paces into the cold mist and he could see nothing, not even his own body. Three more paces and the ground disappeared. Then he was falling.

  The room was white, the bed was white, the windows were white. Tubes ran from the suspended bottles into his arm. His body was a vast ache. A green plastic bracelet on his wrist said BREMEN, JEREMY H. The doctors wore white. A cardiac monitor echoed his heartbeat.

  “You gave us all quite a scare,” said the woman in white.

  “It’s a miracle,” said the man to her left. There was a faint note of belligerence in his voice. “The EEG scans were flat for five days, but you came out of it. A miracle.”

  “We’ve never seen a case of simultaneous seizures like this,” said the woman. “Do you have a history of epilepsy?”

  “The school had no family information,” said the man. “Is there anyone we could contact for you?”

  Bremen groaned and closed his eyes. There was distant conversation, the cool touch of a needle, and the noises of leavetaking. Bremen said something, cleared his throat as they turned, tried again.

  “What room?”

  They stared, glanced at each other.

  “Robby,” said Bremen in a hoarse whisper. “What room is Robby in?”

  “Seven twenty-six,” said the woman. “The intensive care ward.”

  Bremen nodded and closed his eyes.

  He made his short voyage in the early hours of the morning when the halls were dark and silent except for the occasional swish of a nurse’s skirt or the low, fitful groans of the patients. He moved slowly down the hallway, sometimes clutching the wall for support. Twice he stepped into darkened rooms as the soft, rubber tread of quickly moving nurses came his way. On the stairway he had to stop repeatedly, hanging over the hard, metal railing to catch his breath, his heart pounding.

  Finally he entered the room. Robby was there in the far bed. A tiny light burned on the monitor panel above his head. The fat, faintly odorous body was curled up in a tight fetal position. Wrists and ankles were cocked at stiff angles. Fingers splayed out against the tousled sheets. Robby’s head was turned to the side, and his eyes were open, staring blindly. His lips fluttered slightly as he breathed, and a small circle of drool had moistened the sheets.

  He was dying.

  Bremen sat on the edge of the bed. The thickness of the night was palpable around him. A distant chime sounded once and someone moaned. Bremen reached his hand out and laid a palm gently on Robby’s cheek. He could feel the soft down there. The boy continued his labored, asthmatic snoring. Bremen touched the top of the misshapen head tenderly, almost reverently. The straight, black hair stuck up through his fingers.

  Bremen stood and left the room.

  The suspension on the borrowed Fiat rattled over the rough bricks as Bremen swerved to avoid the streetcars. It was quite early, and the eastbound lane on the Benjamin Franklin Bridge was almost empty. The double strip of highway across New Jersey was quiet. Bremen cautiously lowered his mindshield a bit and flinched as the surge of mindbabble pushed against his bruised mind. He quickly raised
his shield. Not yet. The pain throbbed behind his eyes as he concentrated on driving. There had not been the slightest hint of a familiar voice.

  Bremen glanced toward the glove compartment, thought of the rag-covered bundle there. Once, long ago, he had fantasized about the gun. He had half-convinced himself that it was some sort of magic wand—an instrument of release. Now he knew better. He recognized it for what it was—a killing instrument. It would never free him. It would not allow his consciousness to fly. It would only slam a projectile through his skull and end once and for all the mathematically perfect dance within.

  Bremen thought of the weakening, quiet figure he had left in the hospital that morning. He drove on.

  He parked near the lighthouse, packed the revolver in a brown bag, and locked the car. The sand was very hot when it lopped over the tops of his sandals. The beach was almost deserted as Bremen sat in the meager shade of a dune and looked out to sea. The morning glare made him squint.

  He took off his shirt, set it carefully on the sand behind him, and removed the bundle from the bag. The metal felt cool, and it was lighter than he remembered. It smelled faintly of oil.

  You’ll have to help me. If there’s another way, you’ll have to help me find it.

  Bremen dropped his mindshield. The pain of a million aimless thoughts stabbed at his brain like an icepick. His mindshield rose automatically to blunt the noise, but Bremen pushed down the barrier. For the first time in his life Bremen opened himself fully to the pain, to the world that inflicted it, to the million voices calling in their isolation and loneliness. He accepted it. He willed it. The great chorus struck at him like a giant wand. Bremen sought a single voice.

  Bremen’s hearing dimmed to nothing. The hot sand failed to register; the sunlight on his body became a distant, forgotten thing. He concentrated with enough force to move objects, to pulverize bricks, to halt birds in their flight. The gun fell unheeded to the sand.

  From down the beach came a young girl in a dark suit two seasons too small. Her attention was on the sea as it teased the land with its sliding strokes and then withdrew. She danced on the dark strips of wet sand. Her sunburned legs carried her to the very edge of the world’s ocean and then back again in a silent ballet. Suddenly she was distracted by the screaming of gulls. Startled, she halted her dance, and the waves broke over her ankles with a sound of triumph.

  The gulls dived, rose again, wheeled away to the north. Bremen walked to the top of the dune. Salt spray blew in from the waves. Sunlight glared on water.

  The girl resumed her waltz with the sea while behind her, squinting slightly in the clean, sharp light of morning, the three of them watched through Bremen’s eyes.

  Introduction to

  “Vanni Fucci Is Alive and Well

  and Living in Hell”

  In America as we enter the “discount decade” of the Twentieth Century ($19.90–$19.95, etc.), one is so used to thinking that progress equals improvement that it is almost heresy to be confronted with the absolute refutation of that premise.

  For instance, take current theology. Please.

  One can view Dante Alighieri’s Inferno section of his Comedy as a personal venting of spleen mixed with a liberal dose of S&M, but to do so would be to see it only from our current, somewhat obsessed point of view. Dante was also obsessed, but his objects of obsession—besides the lovely, lost Beatrice—centered around Virgil’s Aeneid and Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. Little wonder then that the Inferno is a staggeringly complex theology, at once an exploration of cosmic structure and of the all too personal fear of death—that fear “so bitter—death is hardly more severe” (Inferno, 1,7).

  Dante saw that fear of death as the one sure source of poetic and creative energy. In that respect, little has changed since the early 14th Century.

  But let’s turn on the TV and see what passes for theology these six and a half centuries later. In lieu of the poetry of the Aeneid, we have the south-baked howl of the sweating televangelist. In the stead of the intellectual cathedrals of the Summa Theologica, we have the entire cathode-ray-tubed, satellite-relayed, hair-sprayed and cosmetic-troweled message boiled down to two words: Send money.

  Agreed, televangelists aren’t the theologians of this century, and they are excessively easy targets after the revelations of the last few years—the Jimmy Swaggart vulgarities, the Rex Humbolt absurdities, and the Jimmy Bakker adulteries and breakdowns. If it’s any excuse, the following story was written before these sideshows.

  But the revelations were to be expected. As long as we live in a world where “theology” has become a mixture of P.T. Barnum and Johnny Carson, where we invite these parasites into our home via cable TV and satellite dish and radio … well, as the kid said in the classic New Yorker cartoon, “I say it’s spinach, and I say to hell with it.”

  Vanni Fucci Is

  Alive and Well

  and Living in Hell

  On his last day on earth, Brother Freddy rose early, showered, shaved his chins, sprayed his hair, put on his television make-up, dressed in his trademark three-piece white suit with white shoes, pink shirt, and black string tie, and went down to his office to have his pre-Hallelujah Breakfast Club breakfast with Sister Donna Lou, Sister Betty Jo, Brother Billy Bob, and George.

  The four munched on sweet rolls and sipped coffee as the slate-gray sky began to lighten beyond the thirty-foot wall of bulletproof, heavily tinted glass. Clusters of tall, brick buildings comprising the campus of Brother Freddy’s Hallelujah Bible College and Graduate School of Christian Economics seemed to solidify out of the predawn Alabama gloom. Far to the east, just visible above the pecan groves, rose the artificial mountain of the Mount Sinai Mad Mouse Ride in the Bible Land section of Brother Freddy’s Born Again Family Amusement Complex and Christian Convention Center. Much closer, the great dish of a Holy Beamer, one of six huge satellite dishes on the grounds of Brother Freddy’s Bible Broadcast Center, sliced a black arc from the cloud-laden sky. Brother Freddy glanced at the rain-sullen weather and smiled. It did not matter what the real world beyond his office window offered. The large “bay window” on the homey set of the Hallelujah Breakfast Club was actually a $38,000 rear-projection television screen which played the same fifty-two minute tape of a glorious May sunrise each morning. On Brother Freddy’s Hallelujah Breakfast Club, it was always spring.

  “What’s the line-up like?” asked Brother Freddy as he took a sip of his coffee, his little finger lifted delicately, the pinky ring gleaming in the light of the overhead spots. It was eight minutes until air time.

  “First half hour you got the usual lead-in from Brother Beau, your opening talk and Prayer Partner plea, six-and-a-half minutes of the Hallelujah Breakfast Club Choir doing “We’re On the Brink of a Miracle” and a medley of off-Broadway Christian hits, and then your Breakfast Guests come on,” said Brother Billy Bob Grimes, the floor director.

  “Who we got today?” asked Brother Freddy.

  Brother Billy Bob read from his clipboard. “You’ve got Matt, Mark, and Luke the Miracle Triplet Evangelists, Bubba Deeters who says he wants to tell the story again how the Lord told him to throw himself on a grenade in ‘Nam, Brother Frank Flinsey who’s pushing his new book After the Final Days, and Dale Evans.”

  Brother Freddy frowned slightly. “I thought we were going to have Pat Boone today,” he said softly. “I like Pat.”

  Brother Billy Bob blushed and made a notation on his thick sheath of forms. “Yessir,” he said. “Pat wanted to be here today but he did Swaggart’s show last night, he has a personal appearance with Paul and Jan at the Bakersfield Revival this afternoon, and he has to be up at tomorrow’s Senate hearing testifying about those Satanic messages you can hear on CDs when you aim the laser between the grooves.”

  Brother Freddy sighed. It was four minutes until air time. “All right,” he said. “But try to get him for next Monday. I like Pat. Donna Lou? How’re we doing with the Lord’s work these days, little lady?”

 
Sister Donna Lou Patterson adjusted her glasses. As comptroller of Brother Freddy’s vast conglomerate of tax-exempt religious organizations, corporations, ministries, colleges, missions, amusement parks and the chain of Brother Freddy’s Motels for the Born Again, Donna Lou was dressed appropriately in a beige business suit, the seriousness of which was lightened only by a rhinestone Hallelujah Breakfast Club pin which matched the rhinestones on her glasses. “Projected earnings for this fiscal year are just under $187 million, up three per cent from last year,” she said. “Ministry assets stand at $214 million with outstanding debts of $63 million, give or take .3 million depending upon Brother Carlisle’s decision on replacing the Gulfstream with a new Lear.”

  Brother Freddy nodded and turned toward Sister Betty Jo. There were three minutes left until air time. “How’d we do yesterday, Sister?”

  “Twenty-seven broadcast share Arbitron, twenty-five point five Nielsen,” said the thin woman dressed in white. “Three new cable outlets; two in Texas, one in Montana. Current cable reaches 3.37 million homes, up .6 per cent from last month. The mail room handled 17,385 pieces yesterday, making a total of 86,217 for the week. Ninety-six per cent of the envelopes yesterday included donations. Thirty-nine per cent requested your Intercession Prayer. Total envelope volume handled this year is 3,585,220, with an approximate 2.5 million additional pieces projected by the end of the fiscal year.”

  Brother Freddy smiled and turned his gaze on George Cohen, legal counsel for Brother Freddy’s Born Again Ministries. “George?” Two minutes remained until air time.

  The thin man in the dark suit unhurriedly cleared his throat. “The IRS continues to make threatening noises but they don’t have a leg to stand on. Since all of the ministry affiliates are under the Born Again Ministries exemption, you don’t have to file a thing. The Huntsville papers have reported that your daughter’s house has been assessed at one million five and they know that it and your son’s ranch were built with a three million dollar loan from the ministry, but they’re just guessing when it comes to salaries. Even if they found out … which they won’t … your official annual salary from the Board comes to only $92,300, a third of which you tithe back to the ministry. Of course, your wife, daughter, son-in-law, and seven other family members receive considerably more liberal incomes from the ministry but I don’t think …”