by Mick Farren
Cynthia raised an eyebrow. The Fifteen Questions, as laid out in the Second Amendment to the Mandatory Articles of Faith, were invariably the prelude to an indictment for capital heresy. She looked down at the roaring crowd and wondered: Did Booth and the others really think they could do that to Proverb without his millions of followers going violently bananas?
She saw that Longstreet was coming toward her. He had a wry look on his face.
He moved close to her and whispered. "I fear that my superiors are planning to make even bigger fools of themselves than they already are. They seriously believe that they can arrest Proverb, and his followers will just roll over. Do you want some more champagne? You seem to have been a good girl so far."
He signaled to a waiter. Longstreet apparently had not been a good boy. His breath smelled of brandy, and his eyes were unnaturally bright.
Cynthia accepted the glass. "You seem to have broken your drinking rule."
"Who wouldn't, at an affair like this? I feel the cold wind from the camps when I'm in the same room as Booth."
Cynthia quickly swallowed her champagne. If Longstreet was afraid, what hope did she have?
"What do you think would happen if they did try Proverb for heresy?" she asked.
"Civil war, if this crowd's anything to go by."
"Oh, come on."
"First-degree ghetto burning, at a very minimum."
"You shouldn't joke about all this. Not in public."
"I don't really – " He was suddenly staring across the room at a group of late arrivals. "What the hell is this? The Night of the Long Knives?"
Matthew Dreisler was in the center of the group.
"Dreisler the headhunted."
"The head of the DIA?"
"The very same, and he never socializes unless there's a purpose to it. He's no butterfly."
Cynthia could feel the ripple of fear go through the room.
Longstreet seemed transfixed. "God, he's always immaculate."
A black leather coat was thrown casually over the perfect shoulders of Dreisler's silk, double-breasted evening jacket. A black velour trilby was tilted over one eye, and, of course, there were the inevitable old-fashioned sunglasses. He was flanked by two large men who were clearly his bodyguards, and slightly behind him were two less strapping young men who had to be aides or assistants. The party was completed by a tall spindly figure wrapped in an all-enveloping cowled overcoat. It was hard to guess exactly what his function was, but he had the look of a personal spiritual advisor – and a strange one at that.
Advancing through the VIP lounge, they seemed to be very much aware of the effect they were having on the rest of the guests. They did not swagger like stormtroopers – Dreisler was too sophisticated for that. The air of menace – and the relish that he clearly took in that menace – was subtle, almost understated. It was also quite unmistakable. It became plain that they were going for Booth.
Longstreet propelled Cynthia forward. "Let's move a little nearer. I don't want to miss any of this."
Cynthia resisted. "I don't want to be anywhere near those people. I'm not drunk, and they scare me to death."
The pressure on her arm was insistent. "We don't have anything to worry about. Dreisler fries bigger fish than us."
Cynthia let herself be pushed toward the other end of the room, hoping that Longstreet had not found his deathwish. To her relief, he stopped at what would be a safe distance from the confrontation between Dreisler and Booth.
Dreisler was affable and smiling, although his eyes were still hidden behind the black glasses. "How are you, Deacon Booth?"
Even Booth's florid cheeks seemed to have paled a little. "I'm well, thank you, Deacon Dreisler."
"I didn't know you were a follower of the Reverend Proverb."
It looked as if only an accustomed fear was keeping Booth from exploding. "Indeed I am not."
Dreisler was still smiling pleasantly. "Indeed?"
"I came here to see for myself how far the man would go."
"And how far has he gone so far?"
"Sadly, I have to tell you that serious questions are being raised regarding the loyalty of the Reverend Proverb."
Dreisler regarded Booth from over the top of his glasses. "But you haven't told me how for he's gone. Isn't that what you came here for?"
The pallor had gone from Booth's face. He was turning purple. "For a start, he's as good as – "
Dreisler waved a autocratic hand, summarily cutting Booth off. "I'll see for myself."
He stepped up to the window and looked down at the stage. He could not have picked a better time. Proverb was on a full tilt roll. The fire of damnation was all around him.
"Prophets of doom in the pulpit, and the money changers grow fat on the humble offerings of the poor. The chatter of commerce and the clash of the register drown the Word. The Light grows dim in the midnight of deception."
Dreisler looked back at nobody in particular. "He really is a little radical."
"John, chapter two, verse thirteen." Proverb gave the quote as if it was the ultimate authority. For many there, it was.
"And Jesus went up to Jerusalem, and found in the temple those who sold oxen and sheep and doves, and the changers of money sitting: and when he had made a scourge out of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers' money, and overthrew the tables; and said unto them that sold doves, take these things hence; make not my Father's house a house of merchandise."
Dreisler glanced back at Booth. "He seems to be quoting holy scripture."
"The Devil can quote scripture."
Dreisler turned back to the window. "Of course."
Proverb had put down his Bible.
"Now I don't think there are too many sheep and oxen around the temples of our land today – " Proverb suddenly grinned, " – although there are times when I ain't so sure." He paused for the explosion of laughter and then became serious. "One thing I do know for sure is that there are plenty of money changers and the like hanging around, getting fat while the rest of us get poorer."
There were some militant shouts. Everybody seemed to have overlooked the fact that the very last thing that Alien Proverb ever got was poorer.
"Fat cats in Washington and fat cats in Los Angeles talking the name of Jesus but walking this country, this land of the free, into harder times than we've ever seen."
Booth flashed Dreisler a look of triumph. "He's directly referring to the administration and the hierarchy."
Proverb had his arms outstretched. "But let me promise you one thing, friends and neighbors. The fat cats' days are numbered."
There was a blaze of light in the auditorium.
"There will be a cleansing of the temple. Believe me, friends and neighbors…" Again the voice came from the mountain-top. "There will be a cleansing of the temple!"
Dreisler turned away from the window. Cynthia was looking directly at him. For a fleeting instant, she saw a smile of intense and pure delight, that of a small boy who was seeing an elaborate practical joke coming together. Then it was gone. In shock she glanced at Longstreet, but he appeared not to have noticed anything.
Winters
All around him, people were shouting and cheering. It was like a battle cry.
"There will be a cleansing of the temple!"
Winters was lost. He did not know what to think. There was open sedition and heresy right there in Madison Square Garden and then, at the height of Proverb's headlong flight into blasphemy, out came that phrase, trumpeted in that terrible amplified voice. It was that same phrase that had so mysteriously appeared on his primary computer screen a few days earlier and, from that moment on, had caused him so much soul-nagging unease. He looked about for another of the deacons from his team. No one was in sight. All around him was a chaos of jumping, waving people, bumping and jostling him as they allowed themselves to become obscenely carried away by Proverb's cheap tricks. They were out of their seat
s and out of control, surging toward the stage like mindless lemmings. The security did nothing to stop them. It was a pagan hysteria that verged on violence. All order and control was deliberately being broken down, and if that was not criminal, Winters did not know what was. He was being carried forward by the bovine stampede. He pushed back, hunching his shoulders and letting them flow around him. They had to be insane, the staring eyes, the outstretched hands. Wordless noise came from the gaping mouths. There was something terribly perverted in the way that Proverb was able to take hold of those people's minds. He had to be more than just a cynical hustler. Was he a real agent of the Antichrist?
The crowd had closed in around him, and he was being carried forward again. In that instant, he hated those people. He hated them with a cold, unforgiving venom. They were ugly, stupid, and dangerous, and there was no place for them in the world that they were trying to create. Why did they not just move the army in and clean out the whole bunch of them? It would have to come one day. He was repulsed by the physical intensity of the whole thing. It was the complete and extreme opposite of the clean, cold godliness that was the core of his beliefs. A big burly man with triangular sideburns and greasy hair, and smelling of beer and cheap aftershave was thumping him on the back and yelling into his face. The man had to be an Elvi. There was sweat running down his cheeks and flecks of spittle on his chin.
"Praise the Lord, brother. The day is coming. There will be a cleansing of the temple."
Winters was eaten up with a blind fury. He loathed being touched by strangers. He wanted to strike out at the man, but the offender was already gone.
"You stupid hillbilly bastard!"
He wanted to go on screaming at the crowd that they were sick, that they were abandoning themselves to an unnatural evil. His hatred and outrage were, however, tempered by a deep-seated fear. Those very same words had appeared on his primary screen, and he did not know what they meant. Could he somehow be a part of all this?
He spotted Rogers through the mass of people. Rogers, too, was pushing his way backward, struggling against the tick. Winters cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled. "Hey, Rogers! Over here!"
Rogers did not respond.
Winters yelled again. "Rogers! Over here!"
Rogers was looking around. He spotted Winters and began moving toward him. "This is getting to be a mess."
"He ought to be arrested right now."
"There'd be a riot."
They kept moving back. Now that there were two of them, it was a great deal easier. The identical dark suits immediately labeled them as deacons, and people stepped out of their way. Finally they were behind the main milling body of the audience. They stopped for breath.
Winters, feeling dizzy from the A-waves, shook his head. "This should never have been permitted."
Rogers nodded. He looked around the floor of the Garden with bleak, narrowed eyes. "This is going to be the last one. He's gone too far this time. If this cleansing the temple stuff isn't stamped on hard, we're going to see it scrawled on every wall in the city. It'll be a rallying cry for every hell-spawned subversive."
Winters experienced a sudden flash of guilt. He was on the verge of telling Rogers about the way that the slogan had appeared on his terminal, but at the last minute he stopped himself. An instinct told him that it was something he had to hide, but in that instant of holding back, he also felt that he had become a part of whatever it meant. The words had appeared on his terminal and, as far as he knew, no one else's. It was as if the Antichrist already had a hold on him.
Speedboat
The woman was down on her knees, speaking in tongues; her eyes rolled, and her body jerked and spasmed. Speedboat watched in horrified fascination. All round her, male Elvi swayed in unison through their knee-snapping, hip-swaying, ritual dance. A second woman, young and quite pretty by the archaic standards of the Elvi, dropped into a glazed, unsteady duck-walk, arms thrashing and face contorting from vacant bliss to teeth-clenching paroxysm. She teetered precariously on tiptoe and toppled over on to her side. Her legs started kicking. Some of the male Elvi whooped and hollered as her skirt flew up to reveal pink stockings and garters, white thighs, and black lace panties. Speedboat wondered what really happened to them when they had those fits. What went on in their minds? Did they simply blank out, or did they really go to some other place. The wordless raving of both women was lost in the general din, but that did not seem to bother any of those, Elvi and non-Elvi alike, who had gathered around. As far as they were concerned, the Lord was manifesting himself right there on the floor of Madison Square Garden, and that was what they had paid their money to see. It was the direct intervention of God, and maybe a look at a girl's underwear into the bargain.
"Praise the Lord!"
"Amen!"
All over the auditorium, similar groups had gathered around other individuals who had dropped into their own random mystic states. Up on the stage, Proverb was milking it to the maximum.
"Total communion, brothers and sisters! Let's take it to total communion! Jesus is among us! He has arrived!"
The bursts of A-waves were coming like hammer blows, and the lights were strobing close to the epileptic frequencies. The music was deafening. Speedboat had never realized that the Christians allowed themselves to become so radically crazed. If the doombeams had known about this, they would have joined in droves: It was not too different from dropping doomers. Either way, the person fell over.
Speedboat had had the foresight to swallow a couple of ten-milligram icebergs as the show started; otherwise some of the excesses of Proverb's special effects, coupled with the antics of the crowd, might have panicked him out of the place. They also helped prevent him being bent out of alignment by the subliminal hypnotics. The damn place was awash with audiovisual moodifiers, and he preferred to maintain a certain chemical distance from so much religion. After all, he could not afford to lose sight of the reason he was there.
Through with the total communion bit, Proverb had backed off again, and soaring electronics were playing 'Love Me Tender'. It was the Elvi's moment. They were moving up to the front of the stage. The lights were going down, and a velvet darkness was settling over the arena. Tiny blue stars floated high in the roof, orbiting each other with slow dignity as the music soared. The crowd fell silent. It was the hush of expectancy. Suddenly there were more blue lights in among the audience. At first Speedboat thought that it was another special effect, but then he saw that it was the Elvi themselves. Men and women alike were taking out small spheres, each about the size of a softball, which they appeared to warm in their hands. The spheres started to glow, the same soft blue as the stars above. When an Elvi right next to him took out a sphere and activated it, Speedboat had a chance to look at one close up. The glow was not the simple diffused light of a regular bulb. It was as if there was a tiny pinpoint of intensely bright light at the center of a solid globe of blue glass. Speedboat could not figure out exactly how it worked. It was probably nothing more than some new knicknack from one of the home shopping outfits, but a thousand or more of them, all softly shining in the darkness, had an eerie beauty. Those who did not have the spheres began striking matches, or flipping lighters and holding them up. The music fell away. Proverb's voice came over the top of it.
"Love me tender, love me true. All my dreams fulfill."
Speedboat knew that it was nothing but crafty manipulation, but despite himself, he found that a lump was forming in his throat. Half-ashamed that such a tear-jerk setup could even start to get to him, he focused hard on his own business at hand. The only dream he wanted fulfilled was to be out of this insane country.
1346408 Stone
The screen had abruptly blanked out, as if someone had jerked the plug on the program feed. The prisoners in D block glanced at each other. Nobody wanted to be the first to venture an explanation as to why the Alien Proverb show had so abruptly gone off the air – they never knew when their conversations were being monitored.
>
It was Sunday night and the end of a bad week. There were few good weeks in the Joshua Redemption Center, but this one had been particularly awful. Early in the week, a gray, polluted overcast had descended on the camp and the swampland that surrounded it, accentuating the ever-present atmosphere of depression and hopelessness. Midweek, there had been the punishment. The grapevine said that the two women prisoners were already dead when they had been brought to the infirmary. They had died while still secured to the whipping post, maybe even before the flogging had run its course. A full-blown, ceremonial punishment, whether a flogging or a hanging, always left a lasting impression not unlike a grim emotional hangover on both inmates and guards. The prisoners adopted a hunched, glassy-eyed shuffle as if weighted down by a heightened awareness of their own fragile mortality. The hope that they might one day leave Joshua, other than in a blue plastic bodybag, diminished until it was all but invisible. The guards went to the opposite extreme, becoming viciously buoyant. Trivial infractions of the rules that they normally blind-eyed were penalized with considerable relish. The bosses seemed dedicated to making the prisoners' lives even more miserable than they already were. Kicks and blows were freely given, and the abuse was nonstop during the waking hours and salted with constant references to the two women who had been publicly beaten to death.
Sunday had arrived with a certain measure of relief. The inmates had been marched to the compulsory three hours of remedial prayer and Bible study. Once that was over they were, by camp tradition, returned to their cell blocks and their own devices. Even heretics were permitted a God-given day of rest. But this Sunday, in keeping with the rest of the week, proved to be the exception to the general rule. A tour party of Young Crusaders and their parents had come through to look at sinners and observe their fate. It seemed a thoroughly sick way to spend the weekend, but the prisoners had no say over who came to inspect them. "In this hell, Dante comes in a tour bus with his whole damned family," 1346597 Ravel had muttered to Stone as they had been paraded for an extra two hours of special religious services staged for the visitors.