The Race for God

by Brian Herbert

  “Sounds like an insanity defense to me,” Yakkai said.

  Corona looked at Yakkai sternly, and said, “Mr. Yakkai, I do not wish to have you removed, since everyone on this ship should be allowed to participate. I feel it is best that way. But you must yield to others, particularly to the judges and to the defendant, so that this proceeding can continue. Please have a seat.”

  Grudgingly, Yakkai did as he was told.

  “An insanity plea would mean nothing,” Gutan said. “There are no acceptable, consistent standards of sanity for any life form or society of life forms. All life, all existence, is in a constant state of flux.”

  “Please confine yourself to facts and events,” Corona said.

  “An important question should be addressed,” Appy said, spurting words across Corona’s lips almost before she finished. “Can a criminal, a murderer, find God? Is Harley Gutan in the Great Race himself, on a footing equal with the most pious?”

  Corona scowled, and the pulse in her throat throbbed wildly, as if the vocal chords were divided between host and intruder. Corona appeared unable to speak, and McMurtrey was deeply worried about her.

  McMurtrey heard Appy’s faint, insidious laugh, wondered about Appy’s sanity and life impetus. What exactly was a biocomputer? Did it learn from experience, as intelligent life forms did? Or was it a synthesized but restricted creation, programmed to behave only in certain ways? Had it been programmed to be insane? It had behaved strangely even before the collision.

  McMurtrey felt a solidly grounded definition of sanity, despite what Gutan said and despite the unpredictable, sometimes bizarre behavior of Appy. This grounding was associated with right and wrong, and had a direct bearing upon the matter McMurtrey had been called upon to judge. Sanity kept the individual from suicide or murder each day, prevented a headlong tumble into Hell.

  It was the same with society: an ethical basis, a code of right and wrong for individuals in that society kept the group sane and alive, prevented it from self-destructing or annihilating another society.

  The Afsornian’s words registered in McMurtrey’s brain: “We must be flexible enough to make no assumptions about what is right and what is wrong . . . morality is a social condition . . . no such thing as a universal wrong . . . ”

  McMurtrey realized his “grounding” was Wessornian-biased, and he tried to envision casting aside that bias entirely, looking at Gutan with totally different eyes.

  But how can I do that if my memories, my life experiences remain? I am the sum of my life, a human offshoot from the same tree as Harley Gutan.

  McMurtrey found his mind spinning in a slow circle, clicking into position at various points and then coming all the way around again to the place he had begun. It was at once confusing and exhilarating, for him an unprecedented mental exercise.

  Gutan tried to stay on Corona’s track, describing the events of his life. He skipped about, touching upon his early years as a mortician, then to the League Penitentiary System position and back again to events before that. Occasionally a judge, Appy or someone in the audience would ask Gutan a question and he would answer it, citing bits and pieces from his life to illustrate.

  Orbust asked some very good questions, it seemed to McMurtrey, while Appy asked some that were very bad and superfluous, often overriding Corona to do so. This inability of Corona to dominate Appy troubled McMurtrey to the point where he was beginning to grieve for her, as for one who had lapsed irrecoverably into illness.

  Nothing was as it should have been, for somewhere along the line Johnny Orbust had become rational, or seemingly so, while the computer, which should have been a rational entity, was demonstrating precisely the opposite. It was the matter of perceptions once more, correct or incorrect, the perceptions one person or life form had for another. It seemed to McMurtrey that the human mind was constantly taking perceptive readings, constantly evaluating and reevaluating, constantly trying to categorize everything into comfortable niches of personal experience. It was most unsettling when an individual, an event or a thing could not be labeled and stuffed away neatly.

  Orbust was categorized now as rational, and McMurtrey was not the only one to arrive at this conclusion: Orbust had been voted onto the council. But just as McMurtrey’s mind clicked slowly around, so too he realized it might be with Orbust. Under certain circumstances the old and obstreperous Orbust might return.

  Predictability . . . We are most comfortable when we can predict, when familiar patterns hold course.

  Most people were like clay. They conformed to pressures around them, became what they were expected to become.

  Did biocomputers operate within similar constraints? This unit called Appy had become a most unsettling thing to be near. With time a critical factor it kept overriding Corona, forcing the trial onto tangents, opening avenues of conversation that seemed totally unrelated to the fate of Gutan. What was Appy saying now? McMurtrey found it difficult to focus, heard the voice of his own thoughts above the voices of anyone participating in the proceedings. Just as Appy was digressing, so too was McMurtrey and so too it seemed were the others. It had become exceedingly loud in the courtroom, with a number of conversations going on simultaneously.

  Time was running out!

  McMurtrey shook his head to clear it, thought he detected something gelatinous inside his skull, as if his brains were thick gelatin.

  “What do you do when you see a man with a gimpy leg falling over?” Appy asked.

  When no one answered, Appy said, “Get a stick and push the gimp over. Why be nicer to him than God was?”

  Sister Mary was seated near the front, and when she heard this she spoke anxiously to the other nun.

  Corona’s lips moved, without sounds emanating, and her eyes were angry.

  “Appy’s defective,” McMurtrey said, “worse than ever since the collision. Kelly, you okay?”

  She shook her head. She closed her mouth tightly, and through the noise of conversation in the room McMurtrey again heard Appy’s distant, deranged laugh.

  Corona heaved a great sigh, shrugged her shoulders.

  Then a strange and perplexed expression came over Corona’s face, and her lips moved tentatively. “I can . . . speak . . . again,” she said, in her own voice. “I believe the difficulty has passed . . . data flow. . . . Apparently I was trying too hard, and the harder I tried, the more difficult it became to speak. When I relaxed and gave up the battle I felt clearly that there were no obstacles before me, that I could master the intruder within my body.”

  Appy’s voice: “You are not! I can . . . ”

  “You can and may speak only when I will it,” Corona interjected, with a stiff smile. “And for the moment I do not so will.”

  Corona’s throat pulsed briefly, but Appy said nothing.

  “Talk about nutso,” Yakkai said. “Maybe you should sit in Gutan’s chair.”

  McMurtrey glanced at Gutan, saw him sitting serenely and patiently, apparently awaiting a signal from someone in authority that he should continue.

  “New and important information is flowing into my consciousness,” Corona said. “We must understand suffering if we are to deal sufficiently with the matter of Gutan. With the path we have selected—a trial—it will be necessary to punish him. No just punishment can be ordered by judges ignorant of suffering.”

  “Beat each other up!” a man shouted. It sounded like Tully.

  “Suffering on what scale?” Zatima asked. “On the scale of an individual, of a persecuted people, or of all mankind?”

  “That is all I know at this time,” Corona answered. “When Appy’s program first entered my body I thought I had access to all of it. Maybe that wasn’t correct, or maybe this is new data fed by comlink from God to Appy. I can’t tell.”

  “How can we tell if the information Corona has provided us so far is complete or accurate?” Feek the Afsornian asked.

  “You must evaluate it for yourself with the brains that God gave you,” Corona said.
“Neither God nor Appy are on this judicial council. I am, and the information I have imparted seems reasonable and accurate to me.”

  “How do we know any information is complete or accurate?” Zatima asked.

  “The subject is suffering,” Yakkai said, “and I just want five more minutes, okay? I know something about the subject, and I’d like to toss out a few preliminaries.”

  Corona glanced at her Wriskron. “Five minutes and counting.”

  Yakkai cleared his throat. “God is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent, or so the tale goes. If so, why does He allow suffering? Now hear me out, this is important! It seems to me that your God must be weak if He can’t eliminate suffering. If He exists at all.”

  “What does this have to do with . . . ” Corona began.

  “There must be suffering for a time,” Orbust interjected. “Krassos said there would be wars and rumors of wars, famines, pestilences, false prophets and lawlessness, with the love of many growing cold. ‘But he who endures to the end shall be saved.’ The Lord God Almighty told Krassos to sit at His right hand, ruling D’Urth in the midst of His enemies.”

  “I don’t care about all that scripture crap,” Yakkai said. “I think suffering is wrong, it should end, and I want it to end right now! How long must people suffer?”

  “Krassianism is similar to Middism and other faiths,” McMurtrey said. “They believe there will be an end to suffering when the Messiah comes.”

  “Please don’t encourage this, Ev,” Corona said.

  “I’ve heard all that gobbledygook,” Yakkai said. “Don’t you see? With that kind of philosophy, there’s always an excuse for suffering. It’s always something in the future that will happen if humankind behaves as it’s supposed to, if people accede to church power structures, if they fill church coffers with money. These are old deceptions: the unfulfilled promise, the carrot in front of the donkey.”

  “There’s no use discussing this subject with you,” Orbust said. “We’ll tie everything up in an argument.” He looked at the other judges. “Do any of you . . . ”

  “Suffering is linked to the concept of miracles,” Yakkai said, “and this is essential to our discussion. If there are no provable miracles, much of religion is a farce. And if there are provable miracles it is still a monstrous farce, for no powerful God would need miracles. He would set everything up properly in the beginning, and by virtue of His omnipotence He would have no need for stage tricks.”

  “Utterly preposterous,” Orbust said.

  “Mr. Yakkai,” Corona said, “please stop using this courtroom as a platform for atheism. We all know you don’t believe in God.”

  “My five minutes isn’t up,” Yakkai said, seeming to bore right through Corona with his gaze. He looked at Orbust, asked, “Can God do anything?”

  Orbust, after hesitating: “Yes.”

  “Can He make a rock so heavy He can’t lift it?”

  “God can do anything.”

  “He can make a rock that He can’t lift?”

  “If He so chooses.”

  “But you said He could do anything. Why then can’t He lift the rock?”

  “By choice,” Orbust said.

  Yakkai smiled savagely, and in a sarcastic tone said, “Sure.” Then: “Could God make Himself young?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could God make Himself ignorant or foolish?”

  “If He wanted to. I can think of no reason, however, why He would want to. I grow tired of your little game, and do not see—”

  “What does this have to do with suffering?” Corona asked, impatiently.

  “If God can make Himself foolish, that explains a lot of things,” Yakkai said, “including the business about man being made in God’s image. I submit to you that the concept of God is ludicrous, that nothing happening to us has anything to do with God. Your mythical gods have been assigned comical attributes, the stuff of fertile human imagination. Suffering, Ms. Corona-yes, suffering. Why has Mr. Gutan here suffered, and why has he caused others to suffer? How is this council to make him suffer for what he has done?”

  Corona shook her head. “We’ve heard enough of this.”

  But Yakkai was on a roll: “Consider the atrocities in the name of religion. Charmag converting ‘barbarians’ to Krassianism at the point of a sword; Krassian missionaries zealously destroying native cultures in the Bluepac Seas; Isammedans massacring Krassians and Nandus; Nandus shooting and butchering Isammedans and ParKekhs; Hoddhists beheading Middists. Has organized religion—”

  “Mr. Singh,” Corona said, in her loudest voice, “please remove Yakkai from the room! We can’t have any more of this!”

  Singh lifted Yakkai rudely to his feet, dragged him toward the corridor door.

  “We are not without ties to history!” Yakkai yelled. “We are the culmination of the sins of organized religion over centuries, just as Gutan is the culmination of all that is vile in man. Who are you to judge Gutan? How can you pass judgment upon him when your sins are just as great? This proceeding is a farce!”

  Singh dragged the offender from the room, closing the door behind them.

  “We can’t go into all of that here,” Corona said, with a tight smile. “As for suffering, I’m sorry I was forced to bring it up. Haven’t we suffered enough for it?”

  Laughter roiled through the great room.

  Corona stopped, and her face flushed bright red. Capricious laughter came from her mouth, Appy’s laughter.

  “I don’t like this,” Corona said. “I’m suspecting now that Appy put us on the track of suffering as a demented joke, that I didn’t gain as much control over Appy as I thought I did, that he’s playing possum. Maybe I should step down.”

  “What about this trial?” McMurtrey asked.

  “We came up with it,” Orbust said. “Not Appy.”

  “But it was Corona who said we had to deal with the matter of Gutan before the ship would restart,” McMurtrey said, “and she got that data from Appy’s program.”

  McMurtrey caught Corona’s gaze. She appeared confused, not angry with him for his words.

  “I think the discussion of suffering was appropriate,” Feek the Afsornian said, “and that Gutan must be dealt with. Maybe the question should be: ‘How can we as human beings reduce the suffering of our fellow man?’ Can any of you call upon your God to bring an immediate end to suffering?”

  The room became silent.

  “I thought not. It is up to us, therefore, up to all of mankind. We should have no excuses for the pain we inflict upon other humans and other life forms. Suffering has become an eternal, senseless thing. Perhaps we have the opportunity now to reverse the tide. Perhaps—”

  “All right you bastards, I have a bomb!” It was Yakkai bursting back into the room, with Singh a distance behind him, sword drawn.

  “It’s in my pocket!” Yakkai screamed. “And I’ll blow all of you to Hell! That’ll end your suffering!” He ran to a side wall, held his hand in one bulging pocket.

  “He’s as crazy as Gutan, Corona and Appy!” a woman screeched. “May God have mercy upon our souls!”

  From all around, holy men jumped to their feet, drawing swords and guns.

  “No violence,” Corona yelled. “Yakkai doesn’t have a bomb. Appy scanned every boarder, made a computer record of every weapon. Yakkai is disturbed. He’s bluffing.”

  “I don’t have a lot of confidence in that information,” Orbust said, just loudly enough for nearby judges to hear him.

  “I made the bomb after I boarded,” Yakkai said. His gaze skittered around the room from face to face, locked onto Nanak Singh. “Keep him away from me! If I take my hand off the activator, it blows! Anyone tries to shoot me, it blows!”

  Zatima motioned for Singh to step back, and he did, keeping his sword drawn.

  “Assuming you have a bomb,” McMurtrey said, “why would you want to blow us up?”

  “Why not? What difference would it make? The explosion wouldn’t even be a b
lip on the screen of the universe.” Yakkai positioned himself apart from the others, defensively, with his back against a wall.

  “Maybe you’re right about a lot of things,” McMurtrey offered, “about God’s weakness, about meaningless suffering. But what if this journey of ours could make a difference? You’re obviously a sensitive man, Shalom ben Yakkai. I ask you, I ask everyone here, to give this venture a chance,”

  “What venture?” Gutan asked. “You haven’t decided what to do with me.”

  “We have eleven hours, twenty minutes,” Corona said, eyeing her Wriskron. “If everyone agrees, I’d like Mr. Gutan to finish his story.”

  Yakkai looked edgy.

  “I’m sure he’s bluffing,” Corona said to Zatima, her voice low.

  The trial continued, while Yakkai became silently alert, watching everyone he considered a threat.

  Gutan’s skin had a sickly, slimy sheen to it as he spoke nervously and haltingly for another hour, filling McMurtrey with the image of a life wasted, with hardly any socially acceptable deeds. It was damning information from a man testifying in the climactic event of his life, his own trial. Did Gutan want to die, didn’t he care, or was it as he said, a compulsion to tell the truth?

  He’s sweating Evil, McMurtrey decided. An Evil that oozes from his pores.

  Gutan finished with a graphic account of his tryst at Santa Quininas with the corpse of the massive, pendulous-breasted woman.

  All the while, McMurtrey’s brain spun with the punishments he might recommend. Surely such sinister acts could not go unpunished, by any stretch of imagination. He felt sick to his stomach, and his gaze flitted between the accused, Singh and Yakkai.

  For an instant, the gazes of McMurtrey and Yakkai locked, and Yakkai’s hand moved just a little out of his pocket, with nothing in the hand. No explosion occurred, and as Yakkai slipped his hand back into the pocket he winked.

  McMurtrey glanced around, didn’t see anyone else who had noticed. So Yakkai was bluffing! Yakkai had stolen precious time from the trial, for a purpose he probably couldn’t explain himself. Maybe he did it to get free of Singh, so he could return to the trial. At least he was quieter now.