The Race for God

by Brian Herbert

  But McMurtrey recalled the St. Charles Beach ships that were designed to fly, and those that did not seem to be so designed. He had wondered before takeoff about this very question, about physical and nonphysical paths to God. He realized that there had been suggestions of alternate pathways all along, from McMurtrey’s “visitation” by God in which He suggested that religion might not be the way to God . . . to the nonflying ships in God’s fleet . . . even to Appy’s remarks about the similarities of religious practice and the failings of organized religion.

  Differences melded into similarities. Alternate paths became one path. . . .

  In McMurtrey’s vision the Nandu smiled and said, “Snake charmers are entertainers, no more. Essentially they hypnotize cobras with body movements. Many Nandu snake charmers claim to possess occult or supernatural powers, but to my knowledge this is not so. They are magicians, not so different from the Krassian variety. Don’t try to paint Nanduism with a broad brush. We are a diverse group, encompassing beliefs that range from atheism to monotheism and polytheism. There are ranges of belief within any religion.”

  McMurtrey’s field of vision expanded and once again he saw Makanji in Shusher’s main passenger compartment.

  “What do you think about that, Ev?” It was Corona’s voice.

  “Huh?”

  “About what Appy just described, the Eurosornian system of criminal justice that he thinks we ought to use. I like it myself.”

  The other council members were nodding in agreement.

  “Okay,” McMurtrey said. “Let’s set it up.”

  The Nandu smiled at McMurtrey.

  Chapter 10

  “Mnemo” has many parts, and it is necessary to understand every part and the interrelationship that part has with every other part It is, however, a puzzle that must be approached simultaneously from multiple directions: If you focus too long on one segment or upon the interrelationships of a part with other parts, you risk becoming irretrievably lost in the complexities of over-analysis, losing sight of the greater picture, the chemical path and residue of genetic memory.

  Mnemo’s core pumps a stream of loaded electrical impulses in a constant rhythm across the surface of the refurbished cortex. This galvanizes the ancient memory-bearing nerve cells of the brain, exciting them to the point where they can be resurrected and analyzed through sensory deprivation and stimulation.

  —Notes of Professor Nathan Pelter,

  League Penitentiary System Archives

  Kelly Corona was selected to announce the trial procedures to Gutan and the pilgrims, since her link to Appy’s data banks provided her with pertinent details in an organized and readily communicable form.

  She moved forward to address the ship’s company, and McMurtrey hurried to her side.

  “I need to talk with you alone, Kelly,” he said. “Not this second, but first chance.”

  “Sure,” she said, without looking at him.

  “I mean really alone. Can you dump that biocomputer program somewhere for a while?”

  She looked up at him. “I don’t know how to do that. Maybe if Shusher’s damage is repaired and we get the ship going again, the damage to Appy will also be repaired, and this program I’m carrying will revert.”

  McMurtrey thought he heard the distant, crazed laughter of Appy, but saw no indication of this in Corona’s features. Her mouth did not move.

  “We will employ an essentially Eurosornian courtroom style,” Corona announced, raising her voice to be heard above several talkers. “It is a derivation and modification of the Maginot action civile, in which criminal prosecution and redress for harm to the victim are combined. I will be presiding judge, with powers I will employ and, as necessary, describe. Since we have no police or state’s attorney, it shall also be my duty to conduct an investigation, within the confines of time and circumstance.

  “The other six council members are associate judges, with powers nearly equal to mine; A majority vote among us determines each issue, and will ultimately determine the fate of Mr. Gutan. We are beyond any D’Urth jurisdiction here, so it is the duty of this honorable council to develop a just system for the trial of Mr. Gutan. It must be spectacularly efficient, for we have only a few hours.”

  “We must be flexible as well,” the black-skinned Afsornian council member said. “We must be flexible enough to make no assumptions about what is right and what is wrong.” This man went by the name of Feek, and wore a turban with an emerald on it, a long robe threaded in silver and gold, and a viridescent cape.

  “What do you mean?” Corona queried.

  “Morality is a social condition,” came the response, with regal haughtiness. “What is moral to one group may be entirely immoral to another. There is no such thing as a universal wrong.”

  “I assume you’re referring to thievery,” Corona said. “To the suggestion that it is not wrong for a starving man to steal a loaf of bread. Mr. Gutan here has confessed to thievery, to the taking of valuables from corpses. But because of the time, we needn’t consider that matter. We must prioritize, deciding that his alleged necrophilic crimes—sexual intercourse with the dead—are worse than thievery, and in turn that murder is worse even than necrophilia. We must try Gutan for the worse crime only, for murder.”

  McMurtrey, Zatima, Makanji and Orbust voiced concurrence.

  The Hoddhist, who had given his name as Taam, stared at the Afsornian.

  “I am from a remote Gerian tribe,” Feek said, looking at Corona. “And among my people it is only murder to kill kin. Killing nonkin is not murder. Don’t you have information on that in Appy’s program?”

  “It wasn’t entered,” Corona said. “Perhaps Appy wasn’t expected to visit the wilds of Geria.”

  Feek smiled.

  Corona faced the onlookers, said, “We are in effect seven presiding judges on this council. If we disagree on priorities or anything else, as it seems we may, this will be resolved by council vote. If one or more of us abstains and a tie vote results, a voice vote among all of you decides, analyzed by Appy. If that is inconclusive, a roll call vote will be taken. The first issue is upon us, and it is an essential one. Are we to judge Gutan on every possible issue or are we to focus the trial only upon the worst, after agreeing upon what is the worst?”

  McMurtrey watched as Gutan was set upon the only chair, against the wall to one side of the judges. Without its bolts, the chair rested on four stout, ugly feet.

  Gutan stared into the crowd dispassionately.

  The seven judges sat on the deck, and Corona asked the rest of the assemblage to do the same.

  This was done, and in the courtroom that took shape the little man Gutan sat higher than anyone else. It struck McMurtrey that this was the opposite of the way it should have been, for by rights the defendant should have been confined to a pit, a cage or some other ignominious position. What a despicable man!

  He was innocent despite what he had said, until proven guilty. But wasn’t that an artificial, socialized code? Why not guilty until proven innocent?

  Corona was speaking about the “priority of crimes” issue again, requesting a vote by the judges. “Shall we try Gutan for murder only?” she asked.

  “Which murder?” Makanji asked.

  “Why, for the girl he brought. You mean for the others too, the dispatchees? But he was just doing his job, killing the ones the prison system told him to eliminate. If you’re talking about all the crimes in his ancestry he confessed to, that’s either ludicrous or beyond anything we can deal with. We’d all have to go on trial with him, and we’d need access to the mnemonic machine to gather evidence.”

  “Inevitably an investigation on that scale would get into karmic law,” Makanji said, “although I have never heard of a genetic, physical link to karma. I will set that aside for the moment. We have been told to deal with the matter of Gutan, presumably in this plane of existence. So I do wish to consider the dispatchees that he eliminated. He performed his job for the wrong reasons, for p
ersonal reasons. He defiled corpses.”

  “So what?” Corona said. “That’s not murder. That’s rape or the necro thing—that’s violating remains of the dead.”

  “But what if Gutan encountered evidence that a particular dispatchee was innocent, and subsequently he dispatched the person anyway to obtain a fresh corpse for himself?”

  “Oh, come on,” Orbust said. “What kind of evidence could an executioner encounter? Those people all had trials before they ended up on Death Row.”

  “Several points,” Makanji said. “First, some of the dispatchees were war criminals sentenced to death by BOL tribunals without trial. Those tribunals are political, notoriously corrupt, and the prisoners didn’t deserve death by any stretch of the imagination. Just because Mr. Gutan followed orders doesn’t relieve him of moral responsibility.”

  “You can’t be serious!” Orbust exclaimed.

  “We are here to deal with ‘the matter of Gutan,’” Makanji said. “In a court beyond the BOL, beyond D’Urth’s laws. This is a trial assigned by God, a very high court. And in that court, the defendant should be held to different standards.”

  “God didn’t specify a trial,” Corona said. “We decided upon it.”

  “In effect, God decided,” Makanji insisted. “He established the ground rules, narrowed the choices available.”

  “And a waste of time this will be if a trial isn’t one of the right choices,” McMurtrey said, his brows furrowing intensely. “If we’re going to have a trial, we can’t quibble over every detail.”

  “This is not quibbling,” Corona rasped. “We’re talking about a man’s life!”

  “But how do we know what criteria we should use in judging Gutan?” McMurtrey said. “With so many choices, so many possible refinements, how do we know . . . ” He shook his head.

  “We vote and hope for the best,” she said.

  “What if Gutan were told to dispatch a murderer,” Makanji asked, “and encountered evidence through the operation of Mnemo that the dispatchee committed no murder? From what he told us about the machine, it had a screen that showed the life experiences of a person connected to it. What if Gutan saw in that bioelectronic chronicle irrefutable evidence of innocence?”

  “But the machine would have been on at that point,” Orbust said, “programmed for execution.”

  “And early in the programming,” Makanji pointed out, “since the alleged act of murder would have occurred during the first life in a long genetic sequence of lives. Maybe early enough for Gutan to hit a switch and save the subject. We don’t know enough about Mnemo yet. There are questions to ask.”

  Whisperings carried around the room.

  “Is murder even the worst crime here?” Makanji asked. “Couldn’t violating the dead be just as bad or even worse? Aren’t the dead sacred?”

  “What about Gutan’s confessions?” McMurtrey asked. “What if he’s lying about them? What if he did none of that? Maybe everything he said was a lie and his solitary crime was the murder of the girl. What if he’s insane?”

  “It would be handy to have Mnemo here right now,” Orbust said. “Man, I’d like to get my hands on that device!”

  “Gutan could be innocent by reason of insanity,” Corona said, with a great, heaving sigh.

  “Big fun,” Zatima said. “Well, let’s wade into it. I say we deal with Gutan as a whole; we deal with his entire story, making no artificial attempt to segregate and prioritize his acts. We look at Gutan as a whole and we sentence him as a whole.”

  “How say the judges?” Corona asked.

  A brief discussion ensued, and ultimately everyone agreed with Zatima. It was further agreed that Gutan would retell his story, and questions would be entertained along the way.

  “We have fourteen hours, nine minutes,” Corona said. “Mr. Gutan, please begin.”

  Sitting crosslegged, McMurtrey stared at Harley Gutan.

  The bearded little apeman was nervous, and his voice trailed off so badly at times during his account that Corona repeatedly ordered him to speak up.

  He’s guilty of something, McMurtrey thought as this went on, or at least he thinks he is.

  Gutan went into more detail than before, addressing some of the points raised by Makanji.

  “I never considered morality,” Gutan said, “whether a particular dispatchee should actually have been dispatched or not. This doesn’t reflect on my guilt or innocence before the court and before God, I suppose, because maybe I should have thought about things that never occurred to me. Maybe each of us has a set of moral obligations when we’re brought into existence.”

  Krassos! McMurtrey thought. How does this little pervert come off making an observation like that?

  “I was on opium some of the time,” Gutan admitted. “Not during every dispatching, at least not during the first ones. The opium came later. With what happened to me in Mnemo, with everything that occurred to bring me here, I’ve been forced to think about larger issues. I could probably even decide my own fate, and I think I’d do it fairly. I just wish I had a chance—something I could actually do. . . . Saying I’m sorry isn’t enough, for those are mere words and words die in the wind. Actions are more important than words. This isn’t a cliché; it’s the purest form of moral truth. And what good are actions if they can’t correct what has been done?”

  “Don’t digress,” Corona said. “No time.”

  “Pardon me. The war criminals . . . I dispatched them without thinking of their crimes, and the same with the others. Truthfully, I never checked to see if a murderer really was a murderer. That didn’t seem like my position, I guess, and any of their lifetime events that appeared on the screen just went by in a blur, a blur from one dispatchee to another. Sometimes I did fifty in a single day. I only thought about doing things with some of the women. . . . There was no pattern to the type of women I liked, but they had to be women—except for one dark night in Central Eassornia. . . . “

  Gutan’s voice trailed away, and he cleared his throat before continuing.

  “I fantasized while they were alive, went through the motions of dispatching them. It was when they were alive that I selected my bed partner for each day.”

  “One bed partner per day?” Corona asked.

  “Less. I made love maybe three times a week, kind of like a normal person.”

  Several onlookers snickered.

  “Somewhere along the line I began to suspect—I don’t remember when—that it was all a secret government experiment. They had me use all kinds of different settings on the machine, and with that government computer hooked to Mnemo I assumed all the data was being recorded and transmitted to Prison HQ, maybe even higher than that.”

  “Maybe we should put the Inner Planet League, the BOL or the prison system on trial, since some combination of them provided Gutan with Mnemo,” McMurtrey said. “Maybe blame falls on the whole human race that culminated in this bloated, obscene wart called Gutan.”

  “There is precedent for that,” Corona said. “According to Appy’s data banks, since early times there have been causal attribution doctrines in society. If a man carelessly left a loaded gun on a table and another man accidentally bumped the gun, causing it to discharge, the owner of the gun was held at least partially liable for resulting injuries. This led to the doctrines of contributory and comparative negligence. On a broader scale, judges and juries long have tussled with the effects of society and circumstance upon the crimes of individuals.”

  “I have an odd feeling that ‘the matter of Gutan’ is more than ‘the matter of Gutan,’” McMurtrey said, looking at Corona. “Anything in data storage on that?”

  “No.”

  “I . . . want to tell everything,” Gutan said. “Since arriving here, I’ve felt compelled to tell the truth. . . .This is my last opportunity to clear things up.”

  “This guy’s a Krassian or wants to be!” Yakkai shouted. “KothoLu absolution, is that what it’s all about? Confess to murder and rape, say you
accept Krassos and you get a ticket to Heaven. What a sick, e-vile religion! Evildoers don’t need to perform restitution or anything.”

  The KothoLu archbishop, Perrier, rose and requested permission to speak. It was granted by Corona, and he said, “It is not so simple as our atheist friend asserts. It is not merely the utterance of words. Consider the analogy of a person applying for a job. The sinner is the applicant; God is the employer. The job: an everlasting position in Heaven. God can see through lies. If the sinner lies about accepting Krassos, lies about seeking true forgiveness from the Lord, God will see that and will reject the applicant.”

  “Where did you get that interpretation?” Yakkai asked.

  Singh looked ready to explode, was held in check by a gesture from Zatima.

  “It is our belief,” Perrier said.

  “I’ve always wondered myself,” McMurtrey said, “how is it that Reeshna, Hoddha, Mother Beverly and a whole host of others who led lovely, exemplary lives are said to mire in Hell simply because they did not accept Krassos? I don’t see the logic of that.”

  “It’s a matter of faith,” Perrier said, “a matter of believing.”

  “You’re floundering,” Yakkai rasped. “If you can’t defend your faith rationally, it isn’t a sensible faith and should be scorned by decent people.”

  “Faith is by definition precisely that: faith. It is not a reasoned set of concepts. It is from the heart. It is love.”

  “This court is being very patient,” Corona said.

  Archbishop Perrier resumed his seat.

  “Suddenly my entire life seems like it belongs to another entity,” Gutan said, “and some of my words don’t seem to be my own, like I have no right to them, like I have no right to think pure and decent things. It’s not that I’m trying to phony up my testimony, just the opposite. I’m revealing everything I can, everything I know. I feel like a person looking in a mirror, and the person looking back is not me. I describe the person I see; I am separate from that person but inevitably connected.”