by R. Lee Smith
“What do you mean?” asked Meoraq, and immediately cut his hand across those words, severing them. “There is no time for this nonsense. Gather your things.”
“Do you know what happened?”
That was Amber. Meoraq hesitated, looking down at her. “The Ancients turned from Sheul. They gave themselves over to Gann and were punished for their sins.”
“Right,” she said, still frowning. “But what killed them all?”
“Sheul’s wrath.”
“Was it a war?”
Meoraq sighed and rubbed at his brow-ridges. “It was Sheul’s wrath.”
“That doesn’t mean anything to us,” Amber said, but before he could reply, she added, “Will you tell me about it?”
Meoraq shot her a black glance, but there was no trace of the sarcasm with which she so often responded to his mention of Sheul. Instead, she seemed almost over-serious. Perhaps even apprehensive. Did she fear that Sheul’s wrath would fall again, simply for that they’d stayed one night within these crumbling walls? His arm twitched—a comforting tap, quickly suppressed. He said, “Mastery is more than the need of the moment. So long as we do not take the machines out of the city or seek to remake them, we do not threaten the Second Law.”
“It’s not that. I’m more worried about what happened here…and what happened in that pit outside. How did…How did everybody die? And are they…” Her troubled gaze broke from his as she looked back at her people. None of them spoke. It took several false starts before she could finish. “And are they still dying?”
The memory of a dream slipped like a phantom hand across his brow, chilling him. It is still among us…
He threw it off with a flick of his spines and smiled at her. “No, Soft-Skin. It was a long time ago. If you wish to hear the story of the Fall, I’ll tell you, but you needn’t fear it. The Hour of Wrath is ended.”
“Tell us all,” ordered Scott, gesturing to his people, all of whom gathered close in a broad ring around him.
Meoraq felt his spines flatten, but now it seemed he had been penned in. It would no longer be possible to extricate himself from their company without shoving one or more of them bodily out of his way.
And Amber was waiting, a kind of apology in her eyes for trapping him in the role of storyteller, but still listening, still wanting to hear. And he found he wanted to tell her, even if it wasn’t just the two of them anymore.
“Sit then, all of you,” said Meoraq, defeated. He hunkered down among them as they obeyed. “I will tell you a child’s lesson, in the manner that I was first taught, which is to say that if I am interrupted, I will slap you across the snout,” he finished with a glare at Scott.
Scott showed him empty hands. “We’re all listening.”
And they all proved it by agreeing and murmuring assent and generally raising the kind of noise that would have sent every one of them to the ground with their hands clapped to their stinging faces if he were a true training master. Meoraq rubbed at his brow-ridges some more and gradually, they quieted. When he looked up again, he looked only at Amber.
“We are all born of two fathers,” he told her. “The father of our mortal bodies, who joined with our mothers and set the features of our clay. And our true Father, great Sheul, who gives us life forever through the forging of our eternal souls.”
“Great,” said Crandall, crawling up to sit with Scott. “I fly clear across the galaxy to get stuck in bible camp again.”
Meoraq swung, the flat of his palm landing lightly but with a satisfying clap of sound across the human’s soft face. Crandall fell into Scott, who fell on the floor, and Meoraq waited, disguising the deep pleasure it gave him to watch the two of them untangle themselves. Judging from the faint curl at the corner of Amber’s mouth when he met her eyes again, it wasn’t as much of a disguise as he’d hoped for.
“These are the two natures of all men,” said Meoraq, continuing on as Crandall righted himself and rubbed his blunt human snout. “One part the clay of Gann and one part the fire of Sheul. And so we are meant to be in balance. You do not seem surprised to hear this,” he added.
Amber rolled her shoulders. “I’ve heard it before. Sort of.”
“Good. So then. The Ancients grew to believe themselves greater than God. They gave themselves to the comforts of their clay and then to its pleasures and finally to its excesses. They grew in greed and lust and violence until all the world groaned under the weight of their sin. These were the Ancients,” said Meoraq, glancing around the ruined room, “and Sheul’s wrath fell upon them.”
Amber lifted one hand and just held it there, in the air. Meoraq stopped and studied it for a moment, puzzled, then flared his spines at her. “Eh?”
She let her arm drop. “What were their sins, specifically? Do you know?”
“Now hit her,” said Crandall.
Scott leaned out of the way a spare instant before Meoraq slapped his servant down a second time. Then he also raised his hand in the air.
It must be a human thing.
“You may speak when I am finished,” Meoraq told him. And to Amber: “The exact deeds of the Ancients are not recorded. It is said only that they corrupted Gann, that they poisoned the world and their own bodies, and that they made trade of flesh.”
Amber frowned. “Made…? You mean they…they were selling people or—oh, I’m sorry,” she said, sitting up a little straighter. She indicated her face. “Go ahead.”
Inviting a blow, he realized after a confused moment. For interrupting him.
He snorted and slapped her, just a tap really, hardly enough to turn her head and they both knew it. “They made trade in every way that profit could be had,” he said while she rubbed at her cheek. “They engaged in sexual depravities for coin. They made wars just to sell weapons. They built machines to do all their labor, so that every man could have the pleasure of possessing slaves to his will. Sheul made them stewards of His House,” he said, “and they destroyed it.”
The humans looked at one another, every one of them showing some degree of discomfort.
“Sheul’s wrath fell over them,” said Meoraq. “The land they had poisoned became blighted, and a curse of barrenness fell over every womb. The waters turned to bile and the heavens to storms. In the first days, the fires that burned for the dead so filled the skies that it was impossible to know whether it was day or night, and blood ran so thick over the land that the trees put forth red-stained leaves and bled red sap when cut. War covered the land as skin covers a man, and for many years that followed, there was only death and rot and sickness. Then came the Prophet. But you don’t want to hear that,” he said. “You asked for the story of the Fall. So. You have heard it.”
“Who was he?” asked Amber. “The…whatever that word was. The holy man.”
“Was his name Jesus?” someone asked, and someone else laughed and said, “Wouldn’t that be hilarious if it was?”
“His name was Lashraq. He and his oracles served Sheul after the Fall, performing acts of penance for the sake of the dead and the dying.”
“He and his what?” asked Amber.
“Apostles, I think,” Scott answered with a crooked smile. “This is kind of funny, isn’t it? Where there twelve of them?”
“They were six altogether,” said Meoraq, knowing he was being baited in some way but unable to understand exactly how. “Prophet Lashraq and his brunt, and the four first oracles: Thaliszr, Oyan, Mykrm and Uyane.”
The furry stripes over Amber’s eyes rose. “Isn’t that your name?”
He smiled, his spines flaring with pride. “Yes. My House is the House Oracle Uyane founded in Xeqor, where my fathers have stood ever since as champions to all Yroq. There are names and Houses as great,” he admitted, “but none greater.”
“Wow.”
“But this is not my story. It is the tale of the Prophet in the first hour of the Fall. Such was his faith and humility that Sheul at last called the Six to Him.”
“What, he k
illed them?” Amber asked, and smacked herself in the forehead. “I did it again. I’m sorry.” She thrust her chin out for him.
“I forgive you this once. Sit quietly. And no. When I say Sheul called him, I mean only that. Lashraq heard the voice of God, which no man then living had heard, and it called him to the holy shrine of Xi’Matezh.”
“Fucking lizard’s pet,” muttered Crandall.
Meoraq looked at him.
“Dude, you just do not learn,” Eric remarked.
Meoraq pulled his arm back, but Amber caught it.
“Forget him. Please, I really want to hear this. Xi’Matezh…I know I’m saying that wrong, but that’s where you’re taking us, isn’t it?”
Meoraq looked at her hand. She let go of him at once, but he completely ruined the severity of the moment by reaching out to tap at the back of her hand in forgiveness. “Xi’Matezh,” he agreed. “The shrine that stands at the ruined reaches of Gedai, at the very edge of Gann. When all the world fell, Xi’Matezh stood and stands yet. Lashraq brought his oracles across the wildlands, just as I am bringing you, until he arrived at the shrine. There, the doors opened and Sheul Himself received them.”
Her furry brows rose again into arches. “For real?”
“Yes.”
“They actually met him?”
“Manifest as flesh,” said Meoraq.
“No way.”
“Truth. They heard His words and, at His command, wrote them into laws that could be carried to all men. These are the written teachings known as the Word.”
“Oh,” said Amber. Her brows lowered. “I get it. Okay.”
“Xi’Matezh is the holiest of the surviving shrines from the Age of the Ancients.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Because all who enter,” said Meoraq calmly, “hear the voice of Sheul.”
That made her look at him in a whole new way. Meoraq smiled.
“You mean that metaphorically, right?”
“I don’t know that word. I mean precisely what I say.”
“Everyone hears God?”
“All who enter. The doors of Xi’Matezh do not open for everyone.”
That knowing look came over her again. “Ah.”
“But they do open. They will open for me,” he added.
Her eyes narrowed. She leaned forward slightly. “Have you ever personally met anyone who’d been inside?”
Meoraq snorted and leaned forward to meet her. “Yes.”
Her brows rose yet again. Their pliancy was truly astounding to behold. “You have not!”
He took her chin in his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Do not question the word of a Sheulek. We are truth incarnate.”
“You really have?”
“Yes. One of my training masters.”
“What did God tell him?”
“That, he would not speak of.” Meoraq flexed his spines, then lowered them. “But he was changed by it. Changed to the very heart of him.”
Amber frowned, searching his eyes while her own remained troubled. Her flesh in his hand was very soft…very warm…
“I can’t believe that,” she said at last. It seemed to take her some effort. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”
Meoraq smiled and released her.
“Now he’s going to hit her,” Crandall remarked, and quite a few humans leaned away from her.
“I don’t think you’re lying to me,” Amber went on, unafraid of him or his punishing hand. “And I don’t think your teacher was lying to you, exactly. I’m just saying—”
“That you do not believe in Sheul. And therefore, He cannot be truth because all the truth in the world is known to you.”
Amber cut her eyes away in a wince, but did not protest that. Instead, after several false starts to gather her nerve, she said, “I’m just saying that there’s a lot things your teacher could have seen or heard that maybe…you know…he didn’t understand.”
Meoraq’s spines twitched. Smiling, he gestured for her to continue.
She winced again, seeing his amusement but perhaps not knowing how to read it. Yet she did resume her argument, however uncomfortable it clearly made her. “People tend to find what they look for, Meoraq. That’s my point. And if your teacher went looking for God, he might have been willing to…to see God. In a lot of things. Especially things…” Her gaze wandered restlessly behind her, tapping at this device or that one as they sat surrounded by the trappings of the Ancients. “…that were unfamiliar to him.”
He waited, and when he was certain that she had no more to say, Meoraq leaned forward and gently said, “Do I really strike you as so superstitious a man?”
She started to protest, but this time, he interrupted.
“Do you see me cowering in fear beneath these ‘magical glowing crystals’ or cringing away from the ‘metal creatures’ that litter these ruins?”
Amber’s soft brow creased. She looked up at the lights and then away, at the door, and finally back at him.
“I know what machines are,” he said. “I know how they were used. And I know many of them yet function in some small, dying manner. I have seen the moving images left by the Ancients and heard the echoes of their words and never once been tempted to mistake it for the voice of my eternal Father. The idea is absurd.”
He could see that argument at war with the thoughts inside her and he saw the exact moment that it was defeated.
“Maybe it was someone else,” said Amber.
Meoraq huffed out a breath of exasperation. “A man, you mean.”
“Pretending to be God.”
“So you acknowledge I would not be fooled by a disembodied voice, but instead fall down in worship of a mere man. Your lack of faith in Sheul does not disturb me half as much as your lack of faith in me.”
Again, she failed to read his teasing tone. Dismay filled her ugly face and all the humans around them drew back to give him room to swing. He reached out to give her a playful tap—just the tip of his fingers to her forehead—and said, “Sheul does not require me to prove His existence. You and I will stand together in Xi’Matezh. You will hear His voice when He speaks to me. Perhaps He will even speak to you.”
She continued to gaze at him in the same searching way. “What if the doors don’t open?”
“They will.”
“What if…” A small crease appeared between her troubled brows. “What will you do if he’s not there?”
“A far better question is this.” He leaned forward very close. “What will you do if He is?”
She drew back, frowning.
Meoraq spared Scott a glance and his smile slipped. “Speak now, if you must.”
Scott leaned in at once, intent, to ask the most incongruous question Meoraq had heard out of him yet: “What does the temple look like?”
“Eh?”
“Is there a tower, maybe?”
Meoraq looked at Amber, only to see her looking at Scott, her human face puckered in confusion. “I’ve never seen the temple,” he admitted. “I don’t know.”
“But it’s old, right? Like this place. It’s from before your big war.”
“Dude,” said Dag. “What difference does it make if there’s a tower or not?”
“It makes a big difference, depending on whether it’s a bell tower, say…” Scott paused to eye his people with thinly restrained and completely inexplicable excitement. “Or a transmission tower.”
The words meant nothing to Meoraq, but the effect they had on the humans was clear enough to see. Most merely continued to show puzzlement, but some immediately captured and reflected Scott’s own excitement while others, like Amber, seemed stunned.
“Think about it,” Scott was saying. “The doors don’t open for everyone—there’s some sort of security system. People hear voices—a communications relay. Their Jesus guy called it God because that’s what he wanted to think, maybe what he needed to think after most of the world gets wiped out, but what if their temple is really a skyport?”
“Didn’t you see the picture?” Scott demanded. He climbed to his feet, standing over his people as color began to come into his face. “They had ships! Maybe starships!”
“What does it matter what they had a hundred or two hundred…” Amber trailed off, looking around the room with a strange, despairing sort of look. “…or a thousand years ago? It doesn’t mean anything to us now.”
“If this place he’s taking us to is a skyport, then they don’t just have any old transmission tower out there, it could be a deep-space relay! We could be saved!”
And then all the humans were talking at once, it seemed. Some to each other, some catching at Scott’s sleeve, but all together, louder and louder, using human words that could not be fathomed and making arguments that only grew more violent.
“Enough!” Meoraq shouted, and most of them drew back and quieted at once.
Most of them.
“You don’t know what’s out there!” Scott insisted. “They had the technology! They built all this, they had to have had some kind of global media system!”
“That’s not the goddamn point!” Amber shouted.
Meoraq got a hold on her and one on him and thrust them both back. “I said, enough!”
Amber leaned out around him to stab eyes at Scott, undaunted. “What are you doing? Why are you working people up like this? You wouldn’t know how to use anything we found anyway!”
“Don’t tell me what I know!”
Meoraq hissed and gave them each a crisp shake.
“It all makes perfect sense!” Scott insisted. “They hear voices, Bierce! From people who aren’t there! That’s a transmission tower and if it’s still working, we can use it! We can—”
“We can what? Phone home? We don’t know where we are!”
“It’s still a chance!”
“No it isn’t, God damn it! This is our chance, right here!” Amber shouted. “This is where we are and this is where we have to live!”
“Not necessarily!”
Meoraq surrendered the effort to quiet them, released his holds, and slapped them both—first Scott, then Amber, and then Scott again, because he was the most irritating. He hissed, “Are you children?”