by R. Lee Smith
“I guess.” Xaima gave his head a shake. “We spent the whole cold season there, the six of us wedged in with forty-two other people in a warehouse no bigger than this room, and no one died. He had them praying every morning, meditating every night, and preaching Sheul’s grace and Sheul’s justice and Sheul’s hammer and Sheul’s fires farting out Sheul’s ass until we almost had to tie Ichi up again.”
Ichazul snorted. “No crying. I was that close.”
“But no one let go. Not one of them raged. So suddenly, he’s Prophet Lashraq and we’re his holy oracles. And we’re not chasing after slit and free food any more, we’re preaching about Sheul’s burning hand and the caste of the Hammer or the Sword and the sacred number of creation.”
“And being handed slit and free food,” said Shev.
“Never got so much dipping in my life as I did after I turned holy,” added the Brunt in a reflective manner.
Still nothing from Meoraq.
“And it seems to work everywhere we go,” Xaima went on, “but what good does that do, really? The cloud will be around a hundred years at least. The virus will be in everyone’s fucking blood. We’ll all be dead, but the rage goes on, and already we’re finding people pretending to be priests of Sheul and adding their lies to our lies for their own unscrupulous purposes.”
“Like chasing slit and getting free food,” said the Brunt.
“So Zhan says we need a holy writ, something people can read, something that will last,” Xaima concluded. “We found a printing shop in what’s left of Pholcha and Ichi says he can get it running and bind us up some books. All we have to do is come up with some sufficiently holy-sounding way to keep people from letting go to rage. Zhan studied this piss for who knows how many years, so we’ll let him do all the wording, but for posterity’s sake, here’s what we’ve come up with so far. First, limit the fucking.”
“No,” said Zhan quietly. “First, Sheul’s word alone is law. There are no other gods and no men with authority to alter or interpret his word. His law is absolute as written. There is no other truth.”
“Whatever,” said Xaima, rolling his eyes. “Second is to limit the fucking. God’s Wrath doesn’t just make a man mad. It hits him in the part of his brain where all us civilized dumaqs keep our most basic impulses.”
Mkole raised his head, blinking as if he’d heard his name. “It attacks the hypothalamus, primarily, and through it, the adrenal system. Females have been, ah, depressed and males, stimulated. Rage is essentially an overdose of male sexual hormones, ah, which dominate our aggressive response and…and…hyper-sensitivity to female pheromones.”
“That’s what I said,” Xaima snapped, looking annoyed. “If he gets a whiff of a woman, he’ll fuck her. If he gets caught up fucking, he’ll eventually go into rage. The longer he’s in rage, the more he’ll want to fuck, and while his brain is burning up, he’s killing and fucking everything that moves. So lock up the women and limit the fucking.”
“Be very careful when you write that one up,” Shev added. “You’ll have them castrating themselves or killing their daughters.”
“Right. Sex is fine—”
“Sex is great,” said the Brunt, with feeling.
“But limit it. We’ve been saying no more than twice a dip—”
“Because three is the sacred number of creation,” agreed Shev and threw Zhan a grimace of admiration. “I honestly don’t know where he comes up with this stuff.”
“—because two seems to get a man past that first desperate stage, even if he hasn’t had a righteous poke in a year, but two doesn’t wear him down so much that the burn just takes over. But the challenge is going to be limiting the killing. If we did this right, you probably don’t have any idea what kind of killing is going on out here,” Xaima said in a low, suddenly somber tone. “You’d think, in a world where so many people have died so senselessly, that we would do anything to preserve another dumaq life, but let me tell you, it is not so. We are killing each other over water, food, medicine, women, blankets, shelters, books, boots, who won the fucking Cenuqa tournament in 3013, whether or not corrokis can look up—”
“They can not,” Shev interrupted, sending a black glare at the Brunt, who calmly replied, “Of course they can, they just choose not to.”
“Anything and everything,” Xaima concluded with a sigh, rubbing at his throat again. “Not because we’re sick, not because of the virus, but just…because. And we’re doing it more than ever before, because now there’s no one around to tell us not to.”
“Yet,” said Zhan.
“I don’t know how the hell he thinks he’s going to scare us so bad we stop fighting overnight, but if I have the broad strokes right, it comes down to three things: Take away the knives. If they don’t see or smell blood, apparently, they won’t think about it. Like there aren’t a hundred other ways to kill a man, Zhan.”
“Have to start somewhere.”
“Here’s an idea, start with the fucking guns!”
“I will. That kind of technology will be part of Gann’s corruption. We’ll make it a sin to work machines.”
“The piss you say!”
“You can’t mean it, Zhan. What are we supposed to do, live in caves and wear animal skins?”
“Who’s Gann?”
“We’ll destroy whatever we can, of course, but all we really have to do is convince them that the cities carry Gann’s taint and can corrupt anyone who enters.”
“But why?”
“Because they can,” Zhan said quietly. “They did.”
“That is shit and you know it,” spat Xaima. “Zhan, there have to be a thousand people, good people, trying to make lives in those cities, trying to build them up again and make them safe. They’re not going to leave just because you offer them a god! You give this ridiculous fucking cult of yours ten years and your Sheulists will kill those people for no reason! For God!”
“I know.”
“And you don’t care!”
“I can’t, Xaima. I have to care about what else they were making when they dropped God’s Wrath and who might be looking for it. There may be a thousand good people in those cities, but there have to be ten thousand weapons and they’re all just lying around. There’s no way we can pick everything up ourselves. We have to make them all want to just…not look.”
“What are we supposed to do without cities?” Shev demanded.
“Build new ones.” Zhan looked up as a faint rumble heralded a particularly vicious peal of thunder in whatever storm beat on their walls in the past. “Stronger ones. The old cities aren’t safe anyway. Not anymore. Even this place will fall down if we don’t protect it.”
“Right, so let me see if I have your plan. We herd everyone out of their shelters, tell them technology is bad and give them a pointed stick and a fucking spoon to build a new home with, and then we take the most violent people we can find, the ones with the absolute least resistance to the virus, and, instead of just killing them—”
“We can’t just kill them, Xaima,” Zhan said patiently. “If we turn it into a fight, they’ll win it. They’ll rage first, they’ll rage longer, and they’ll rip us apart.”
“Whatever. We tell them the reason they’re so violent is because God has blessed them, have I got that right?”
“Yes.”
“We make them members of the highest caste instead. We give them the knives no one else gets to play with and we tell them they’re holy warriors instead of the psychotic murder machines they really are.”
Amber looked at Meoraq again. His spines were flat and shivering slightly against his skull, but other than that, he looked only very mildly interested.
“When they believe it, they’ll pray,” said Zhan. “When they pray, they’ll calm down.”
“We give them all the women they want—”
“Provided they respect the sacred number of creation—”
“He said it with a straight face,” murmured the Brunt.
; “—and raise any children they make as members of their caste.”
“What the hell good does that do?” Xaima burst out. The patches along his throat began to pale ominously. “Why the fuck would you go out of your way to find the worst fucking strain of the virus and breed more carriers?”
“Calm down, Xaima.”
“It makes no sense!”
“Xaima. Breathe.”
Xaima clapped both hands to his snout and bent himself in half, choking in air and hissing it out while the others watched warily. Gradually, very gradually, his scales faded back to black.
“The idea,” said Zhan, “is not to breed carriers, but to isolate them. We start them praying as soon as they can talk and keep them at it all their lives. We let them fight each other away from the public eye and we make them kill each other when they do. We give them women so they don’t have an excuse to riot through people’s homes and take them. We take the children away and start them praying and on it goes. If we do this long enough, with any luck, we’ll breed whatever quality it is that makes some of us so predisposed to the virus into the smallest percent of the population, which will then kill itself off.”
“Never work,” said Shev.
“Probably not, or at least not for a long time. But it will keep them under control. Look,” said Zhan, his own scales lightening although his tone never changed, “if you throw a man in a cage, he will spend the rest of his life fighting to escape. But if you tell him no one else in the world gets the cage but him, dress it up and throw in a few pillows, then he’ll walk in on his own.”
One breath. That was all Meoraq did. Just took one breath a little harder than the rest. Amber took his hand impulsively. He looked at it, then at her, and then up at the screen again, all without expression.
“What a shining flood of ghet-shit!” Xaima was exclaiming.
“They’ll believe me,” said Zhan, not looking up from his boots. His scales were already returning to their normal color. “They want desperately to believe in something, anything, and there is nothing else left. Yes, it’s a lie. But the lie will be glorious. If it’s the one lamp left burning in the whole world…everyone will come to see it.”
The doors clicked. The androgynous lizardly voice informed them that the timeout had ended, the locks were released.
Meoraq turned around.
Amber started after him, but he stopped her with the cut of one upraised hand.
“Stay,” he said in a hoarse voice that strove for calm. “Stay and hear them. I need to…I need to think.”
He walked away. Amber watched the doors groan open and shut as Zhan kept talking, outlining the principles of a gospel Meoraq could probably recite in its polished form from the first invocation to the final amen. His glorious lie.
10
It couldn’t have been much more than an hour before the recording finally finished, but if someone had told her that it had been three hours or even six, Amber would have believed it. She felt older, right down to her bones.
She didn’t want to move, but she didn’t linger. The lights were already fading, the room powering down, and she did not want to be trapped in here when the doors died. Human voices weren’t the same as a dumaq’s. She wasn’t at all sure ‘Nuu Sukaga was going to work for her.
But the lockplate took her tap and the doors hissed open and there was Meoraq, sitting just outside, his knees drawn up and his chin resting on his arms, staring at the mark of the Prophet on the wall. He’d lit some of the candles. He’d stomped on a few too, but at the moment, he was just sitting there.
“Hey,” she said.
He did not reply, not even to look at her.
“Do you want to hear any of it?” she asked, because she felt she’d ought to offer, even though she knew damned well he didn’t.
No response.
She went over and stood next to him, fidgeting unhappily with the front of her tunic. She felt awful, too awful to cry, too awful to even throw up. She touched his shoulder—it was stone wrapped in leather—and then petted at the top of his head. His flat spines flicked hard, throwing off her hand. She took it back and kept it to herself, clutching at her girdle. “Please talk to me,” she said.
Silence.
“Can I talk to you?”
His faceless stare wavered and finally shifted up at her. He still didn’t answer, not even to grunt, but he watched as she moved around and sat down in front of him.
“There’s this saying I used to hear a lot,” said Amber. “It goes, ‘The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.’ I used to think it was total horseshit, to tell you the truth. I mean, intentions matter, so if someone tries to do something good, I mean really tries, that ought to count for something.”
Meoraq remained immobile, silent.
“I can only imagine what you’re feeling,” she said. “And I don’t think I can imagine it very well. But…he had good intentions, Meoraq. People were killing each other. The last people on the whole planet, the very last ones, were still killing each other. He stopped it the only way he knew how.”
“He lied.”
The words were wounds in Meoraq’s throat. She could hear them bleeding.
“Why?” he asked suddenly. “Why did he have to leave a message? Why couldn’t he just do it and let us have the lie if we needed it so much?”
“Maybe because…he wanted to believe you wouldn’t always need it. He was a teacher once. He knew the value of preserving the past for the future. And he—Listen to me, Meoraq!” She caught his arm and refused to be shaken off. “He thought he was doing the right thing. And maybe he was. If people could change on their own, don’t you think they would have in the seventeen years before this guy Lashraq came to Xi’Matezh?”
“Don’t call it that,” Meoraq said harshly. “This is no shrine.”
“Yes, it is. It may not be the one you thought it was, but it is a shrine. When it would have been so easy to make sure no one ever heard any of that, Lashraq wanted it heard. He wanted people to know what he did and why he did it. Meoraq—” Amber moved her hand from his shoulder to touch the heaving plates over his heart. “He wanted people to know the truth.”
“Truth? What is the truth, eh? Yesterday, I was the Sword in His hand! Today, I am sick! Today, God’s hand on my heart is a poison in my fucking brain! Today, I have murdered hundreds of people!” He slapped a hand hard over his snout and shut his eyes, taking several deep breaths before he spoke again. “Stop trying to comfort me. I have been well-trained by their lies. A Sheulek is always calm.”
“You told me once that truth isn’t always just what someone says,” said Amber after a moment. “But what something is. What it means.”
“This place means nothing. Sheul’s Word means nothing.”
“So God didn’t open up the door and shake their hands and say things out loud while Lashraq wrote it all down, but so what? When God talks to you, do you hear it with your ears? It’s…hard to believe in God, but if there is one, I can believe He brought them here. I saw that whole tape and I can believe it because I believe it was the only thing that could have helped your people save themselves and maybe God knew it too.”
“There is no God!” hissed Meoraq. The stripes along his throat brightened visibly in surges, throbbing with his pulse. “There’s nothing here! He lied! They all lied and I can live with that, but right now, damn it, just shut up! There is no God and you knew it all along, so just let me be!”
She did, but she kept looking at him, watching the yellow bloom and die on his scales, and eventually, he looked back at her. “Can I tell you something?” she asked quietly. “Something I really have known all along. Something that is one hundred percent true. Something…Something I could have built my own shrine on.”
He didn’t answer, but he didn’t say no.
“You’re an alien,” she told him. “Or I am. One of us is, at any rate.”
He sighed and rubbed at his brow-ridges.
“Our worlds a
re billions of miles apart. We come from two entirely different evolutionary trees. You have scales, I have hair. We have different skeletons, different organs, different everything, right down to the number of fingers and toes. We are one hundred percent incompatible. The only thing we have in common is a carbon base.”
“So?” he said wearily.
“So I’m pregnant,” said Amber, and was amazed at how matter-of-fact she sounded, saying it for the first time. “What the hell do you call that if it isn’t God?”
He raised his head from his hand and stared at her.
“You told me once that I was good at seeing evidence and, boy, did it piss me off because this is something that I really did not want to see. But men can only push themselves so far, Meoraq, and men with faith can only push so much further. All the evidence is telling me…there’s something else out there, pulling from the other side. I don’t like it,” said Amber bluntly. “I’m not at peace with it. I sure as hell don’t take comfort in it…but I’m glad you do.”
He frowned, tried to look away, but Amber caught his snout and turned him back.
“Because all the things God isn’t for me,” she said, “you are. Because of you, I see Him every day. So start talking, lizardman, but I warn you, you’ve got a hard talk ahead of you if you’re going to convince me there’s no God after He gave you to me.”
She waited, but he didn’t say anything. He took a few deep breaths, then reached up and brushed the back of his hand along her cheek. His eyes closed. He bent and let her guide his head to rest on her shoulder. He put his arms around her. He did not rage.
He wept.
* * *
He cried off and on for a long time. Even after he was done, he held on to her, so heavy and so quiet that she thought he’d fallen asleep. Amber stroked his back and stared into space and after an eternity of this, was startled when he thickly said, “What are you thinking?”
“Huh?”
He lifted his head off her shoulder and shifted around until he was sitting at her side, facing the same blank stretch of wall. “You were very quiet.”